life, London, this moment in June

I just got back last Wednesday from a two week trip to England and Paris to visit friends and family. While walking through the streets of London, through Trafalgar Sqaure and down Tottenham Court Road (how grandiose and epic and historical those names sound!), I loved reciting fragments from Mrs. Dalloway to myself, muttering these precious sounding phrases under my breath: what she loved, life, London, this moment in June. What a lark! What a plunge! Feeling as she did, that something awful was about to happen. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so. (3-4) I felt secretive and powerful, walking around and muttering these phrases absentmindedly to myself, as though I was one of those ancient pagan female magicians mentioned in the footnotes of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, casting a spell of protection, or maybe just chanting a mantra.

She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. (8)

This is such a beautifully written book that no matter how many times I reread it, it never fails to shock me that Virginia Woolf killed herself. This is the number one book that I think of when I think of joyful writing, of writing that hums and writhes and wriggles in ecstasy from sheer joy and lust for life. It seems so puzzling that someone who could have written this also simultaneously decided that life, this life, was not worth living.

This book reminds me of something Tori Amos said about her most recent album: she said that she wanted it to be like a snapshot of time of what it was like to be a woman in this day and age. In Amos' case, she's chronicling the economic recession; in Woolf's case, her focus is on Victorian society of post World War I. I'll never really "know" what it was like to be a woman in that time and age (let's stay away from the giant can of metaphysical worms). But Mrs. Dalloway is as engaging of a snapshot of a very specific historical period as they come. There's tons of stuff to unpack here about post World War I society trauma and repression--you can easily make a parallel to the Iraq War, too (that's another thing about this book that really got me: how easily you can apply it to life today, how contemporary it feels). "It was over; thank Heaven--over," (5) Mrs. Dalloway thinks of the War, but of course it's not (it never is), not for anybody.

No character better embodies the sense of the war not being over than the interestingly named Septimus Smith (his name is reminiscent of numbers, which feels important in a novel where the passage of time, the constant ebb and flow of "the hour, irrevocable" (117) and the ringing of the clocks is constantly emphasized). Septimus seems to suffer from such an excess of feeling that at times it sounds like an extremely bad acid trip: leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body; ... the spaces between them were as significant as the sounds. This problem of "over-feeling" seems to emerge as a reaction to his initial condition following the death of his friend Evans in the war, in which he "could not feel." And then, with such hyper awareness and overdose of sensory input, it's little wonder that Septimus found it difficult to get through the day.

Septimus' plight made me think of Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception,: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite." That seems to be Septimus' problem; the infinity and deeper meaning of everything appears as too glaringly apparent to him, to the point where he can't condense his experiences or make any sense of them anymore and they just become overwhelming. Upon viewing a motor car that contains someone in the Royal Family (perhaps the Queen? It's never made clear), for Septimus it appears to him as "this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had almost come to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames. It is I who am blocking the way, he thought." (15) He almost sees the centre, but not quite. At the moment when Septimus throws himself off the balcony, he cries out "I'll give it to you!" (149) Is he referring to this ungraspable center, always out of his reach?

In the end, death seems to be the only way of bringing it all together, as Peter Walsh muses while the ambulance carrying Septimus' dead body whirs by: "a moment in which things came together; this ambulance; and life and death." (152) Mrs. Dalloway discovers this for herself as well, upon hearing of Septimus' death of her party: "Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death." (184) In the end, Mrs. Dalloway "felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away... He made her feel the beauty, made her feel the fun."(186) With this sentence, I feel like Woolf herself is saying that she's glad that it is Smith who is doomed, the artist, madman and poet, as opposed to Mrs. Dalloway, the socialite everywoman, the woman of the earth. In Mrs. Dalloway, death emerges as a moment with a potential for understanding and knowledge, however brief. As Muriel Spark wrote, "Remember you must die," and as Ali Smith writes (in her Mrs. Dalloway rewrite of sorts Hotel World, a highly recommended book), "Remember you must live, remember you most leave, remainder you mist leaf."

This is a good book to read every other year or so, especially around the time when you grow a year older. (I just celebrated my birthday a few days ago.) There's a lot of juicy "what-have-you-done-with-your-life? times-a-passin'!" passages. "How remorseless life is! A little job at Court!" (74) Remorseless indeed. It's scary, overcoming so-called banality. I think that's Woolf's main point by making the titular character someone who could easily be mistaken for someone shallow and lacking depth: a housewife who likes to give parties, "the perfect hostess," who at the same time is capable of these most incredibly poetic reveries:

"a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew large and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, 'This is what I have made of it! This!' And what had she made of it? What, indeed?" (43)

What, indeed. How do you define what makes a meaningful or non-banal life? To whose judgement do you need to subject it to? How do you know that you're making the right decisions, that you're taking your life in the direction it needs to go in?

Then (she had felt it only this monring) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one's parents giving it into one's hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear. (185)

I dunno. It may sound cliched and silly, but lately I'm really digging the mindset that it is REALLY not about the destination at all, it's gotta be about the path. It sounds so mundane and banal when you put it like that. What I mean is that we really don't get anywhere. We're just on the road. You can get some things, some goals, some destinations you'd like to arrive at in your life--but you will never get it all. There is no idealized plateau where everything is suddenly going to click into place for you, click, and all of a sudden everything makes sense and you wake up every morning feeling content and fufilled and satisfied and you never have to worry about feeling otherwise. I mean, c'mon--that is NEVER going to happen (as this excellent clip discusses). That is as utopian of a vision of humanity as you're going to get.

But I like what Richard Dalloway thinks about his days as an idealistic youth:

"He had been a Socialist, in some sense a failure--true. Still, the future of civlisation lies, he thought, in the hands of young men like that; of young men such as he was, thirty years ago; with their love of abstract principals; getting books sent out to them all the way from London to a peak in the Himalayas; reading science; reading philosophy. The future lies in the hands of young men like that, he thought." (50)

I couldn't agree with him more.

Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day. (64)

During this particular reread, another theme that stood out for me was the idea of simultaneous connection and isolation between people. I especially like the part where Richard Dalloway visualizes his connection to his wife as a "spider's thread of attachment." (115) It feels important when Richard buys Clarissa flowers instead of jewelry for a present and embarks on a grandiose mission, "walking across London to say to Clarissa in so many words that he loved her." (115) Richard confronts the problem of how difficult it is to say exactly what you mean: "The time comes when it can't be said; one's too sigh to say it." He thus comes to embody a very modern problem concerning language, that "it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels." (116) Or more specifically, to be unable as weel ignorant as to how to say what you feel. How do you give words to a feeling like "I love you" in face of a dilemma such as Richard's: "thousands of poor chaps, with all their lives before them, shovelled together, already half forgotten; it was a miracle. Here he walking across London to say to Clarissa in so many words that he loved her." Needless to say, when the moment comes, he fails at his mission. But it feels somewhat redemptive that on the last page, Richard becomes capable of telling his daughter that he is proud of her: "He had not meant to tell her, but he could not help telling her." (194) So there's some hope there, at the end, of being capable of speaking, of putting feelings into words.

Bowing, Not Knowing to What

I like thinking (and reading) about death. Maybe that makes me sound a little too much like Woody Allen. I've kind of been feeling like Woody Allen lately, specifically like the scenes in Annie Hall where he buys her all the books on death theory, and then at the end of the movie when she packs them all up to return to him. It used to scare me a lot: the idea of not existing anymore, of simply not-being. "What about me!" the little voice inside my brain squeaks out. "What about all the things I have built and constituted and gathered over the years? All the books I have read, the songs I have listened to?" There's something very freaky about all that just being wiped out—erased, vanished, like a poor dead computer. There's a really great part in David Lodge's Thinks...:

" 'So you think that when we die we just cease to exist?' she says, when the waitress has gone.
'Not in an absolute sense. The atoms of my body are indestructible.'
'But your self, your spirit, your soul...?'
'As far as I'm concerned those are just ways of talking about certain kinds of brain activity. When the brain ceases to function, they necessarrily cease too.'
'And that doesn't fill you with despair?'
'No,' he says cheerfully, twisting creamy ribbons of tagliatelle on his fork. 'Why should it?' He thrusts the steaming pasta into his mouth and munches vigorously.
'Well, it seems pointles to spend years and years acquiring knowledge, accumulating experience, trying to be good, struggling to make something of yourself, as the saying goes, if nothing of that self survives deat. It's like building a beautiful sandcastle below the tideline.'
'That's the only part of the beach you can build a sandcastle...'"

This is a pretty good representation of the internal dialogue in my head re: death (spaghetti-twirling and all). Mine is a little more hippy dippy, lately. I can't find the quote right now, but Tori Amos said something about her album from the choirgirl hotel once, written in the aftermath of several miscarriages, that it was her attempt to hold hands with death, to laugh and play with it a little. This is something I can relate to, in regards to trying to do concrete, day-to-day little changes and efforts in my everyday life... just hold hands with death a little, from time to time, not let it drag me around, but be aware. Not deny it, not run from it, not let it make me panicky and small-feeling and frenzied. Come to terms with it, that it's there. Death does not come from the outside, it comes from within.

Thinking about death has been my strategy as of late to put things in perspective. Over sushi last night with Corey, he asked what I thought of the first 2 months-ish of Barry O's presidency, specifically regarding his escalation of the conflict in Afghanistan. Maybe it was the terrible ginger cocktail, but my response was "well, we're all going to die anyway, aren't we?" He said my comment wasn't particularly helpful, and kind of a terrible perspective to live with. Agreed. I guess what would have been a better answer was that politicians will be politicians, you know, and in the end, we're all just going to have to live our lives...

Faust writes a very interesting, readable history on the Civil War, using death as a jumping-off point in order to discuss the Confederate defeat and the Reconstruction in a new way. The emphasis in this review ought to be on "readable"; man, they sure teach them at Harvard to write those topic sentences! It's so easy to follow Faust's arguments in this book. I especially like the one-word gimmick for the chapter titles, making it easier to remember what they're about: Dying. Killing. Burying. Naming. Accounting. Good stuff.

Basically, Faust discusses how the kind of death produced by the Civil War--specfically death on a massive, unprecedented scale, caused by technologies whose effect on battle strategies was not foreseen--affected a lot of different things: the desire for the Civil War to end and the formation of a strong federal state post-war, to give the two most-discussed examples.

My favorite parts of the book were Faust's discussion of citizens' understanding of waht constituted "a good death": the proper way to die. Home, on your bed, surrounded by family and friends, able to give your last words in a clear and understandable fashion, make it clear that you're happy about going off to hang with God, etc. The Civil War made this form of the hors mori a tad difficult. You could get blown to pieces on the battlefield, making the issue of resurrection on Judgement Day a very iffy question, if you had no body to be buried (and thus raised). You could get shot randomly by snipers while drinking your morning coffee. You could be one of so many dead that it was very unlikely that you would get a proper burial and would instead have to settle for a mass grave (probably after rotting for a while on the battlefield first). Faust's chapter on bodies and burying is one of the most interesting of the book; she mentiones how Gettysburg citizens walked around for months afterwards pressing perfumed handkerchiefs to their faces because the smell of rot and decay just overwhelmed the town. The little mentioned facts of history.

Over that same sushi meal, I asked Corey what he wanted to do before he died. Mine are:
1- Go to India and Nepal
2- Write and publish a book
3- Travel through the rest of South America
4- Hold my child in my arms
If I can do these things, I think I will be a pretty happy camper come my own hors mori. Here's to doing what little we can to prepare for the inevitable.

FOR THE ANNIVERSARY OF MY DEATH by W.S. Merwin
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one women
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

Thank god I checked my e-mail to see that my next thesis meeting is scheduled for TUESDAY at 9:30, as opposed to forty-five minutes from now. Thank god, thank god.

It's not that I need to work harder on my thesis; it's just that I need to work on it more. Probably faster would be more accurate. I am consistently underestimating the amount of time it takes me to complete sections.

My biggest accomplishment yesterday was making two CDs for my sister. One is a surprise, the other is Senior Year!-themed (it's called "I'm Going To Make It Through This Year If It Kills Me"). There's something about making themed CDs for people that makes me feel very accomplished. It's like trying to tell a story through songs. I know it would be faster and more efficent to just e-mail mp3s, but where's the beauty and and joy of creation in that?

It was also a very weird and sad day yesterday. I heard the news that a professor I had lost her baby. As with the case of the freshman heroin overdose death, I was more upset than I expected to be. Someone sent out an e-mail to the rest of the class, suggesting that we compile different pieces of paper, letters, drawings, poetry, and so on, and send it to her. Part of me thinks this is a great way to show how much we care about and are thinking of her; another part of me feels that anything we have to say could only be trite, or worse, upsetting. I feel like that's an inevitable consequence of the situation, that nothing anyone can say or do will provide significant comfort or respite from the terrible grief.

I flipped through my poetry anthologies, trying to find something that could possibly be comforting. I (re)found some poems I really liked, the kind that I've muttered under my breath and have quoted to friends without knowing I'm doing so. I'm not going to use them for this particular situation because I don't consider them appropriate, but I will post them here to share. Er, hopefully posting them here isn't a violation of copyright. I'll even cite my source (always incorrectly--never learned proper MLA format. Literature major what?): Staying Alive. ed. Neil Astley. Bloodaxe Books : New York, 2003. pg. 375, 382, 396.

'DEATH DOES NOT COME FROM OUTSIDE...'
Death does not come from outside. Death is within.
Born-grows together with us.
Goes with us to kindergarten and school.
Learns with us to read and count.
Goes sledging with us, and to the pictures.
Seeks with us the menaing of life.
Tries to make sense with us of Einstein and Wiener.
Makes with us our first sexual contacts.
Marries, bears children, quarrels, makes up.
Separates, or perhaps not, with us.
Goes to work, goes to the doctor, goes camping,
ot the convalescent home and the sanatorium. Grows old,
sees children married, retired,
looks after grandchildren, grows ill, dies
with us. Let us not fear, then. Our death
will not outlive us.
Jann Kaplinski
translated from the Estonian by Hildi Hawkins

DEATH'S SECRET
It is not true
that death begins after life.
When life stops
death also stops.
Gosta Agren
translated from the Finland Swedish by David McDuff

INSCRIPTION
When I die I will return to seek
The moments I did not live by the sea
Sophia de mello Breyner
translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith

Oh, so many good poems! I had to force myself to put the book down before I pulled a "Limited Inc" (oh snap, Derrida in-joke! LOL ACADEMIA).

Faces of Life and Death

“In the course of the nineteenth-century bourgeois society has, by means of hygienic and social, private and public institutions, realized a secondary effect which may have been its subconscious main purpose: to make it possible for people to avoid the sight of the dying. Dying was once a public process in the life of the individual and a most exemplary one… In the course of modern times dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living… Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death, dry dwellers of eternity, and when their end approaches they are stowed away in a sanatoria or hospitals by their heirs.” (Benjamin)

I'm afraid of death. I don't think my brain can fully comprehend it. I have never had to fully confront or face it. There are people close to me who've had people close to them die. My grandfather died a few years ago and I saw the profound affect it had on my mother. The closest I've been to death, I guess, is when my nanny died of a heart attack at a bus station. It still upsets me to this day, thinking about that.

There seem to be two ways of understanding death: death as the simple end of life, in a biological return to nature; and death as a disappearance that is also a step towards of gaining something new. This latter concept of death can be seen in Christianity and many other religions, where the idea of death is seen as a step towards ‘direct contact’ with the truth, or death as a means to achieve a closer approximation to truth.

Even if we may not think about death every day, our whole existence is marked and characterized by our relation to death. This connection with death, therefore, determines the existence and the essence of knowledge. If we do not make sense of the time that is given to us as one limited by our own death, if we assume that we're immortal and that our actions have no meaning, then we are existing in a meaningless coming and going of day after day, where our life cannot form itself into one whole and meaningful existence.

According to Hegel (ooh, philsophy so exciting!) human beings are defined by their ability to make choices; it's what differs them from stones. ‘Being’ vs. ‘being able to’. Our choices for action always have something to do with knowledge. To choose to take action thus calls for an examination of your knowledge of your own life. And yet, I can never look at my life as a whole, since it has not yet come to an end, and is therefore still incomplete.

Therefore one can only ‘know’ the meaning of one’s life after death. It is a knowledge that remains completely unavailable and unattainable to me throughout my lifetime, since when it does become available, I will be dead. My life as a whole and its meaning will exist in the eyes of those that survive me. Only they will be able to judge whether my life has been truly worth living or not. Consequently, as long as I am alive, I cannot know myself, and when I am dead, I will not know myself either. Bummer. Instead, we have to settle for understanding our life from the viewpoint of others, and it is for this reason that we understand death as well as something that happens to others, which is to say to ‘everybody else, but not me.’ It is for this reason that we become habituated to mistake death for an abstract fact of life, rather than a concrete part of our existence. How often do you really think to yourself, "I could be dead right now. What if?"

In regards to using knowledge in order make choices which eventually lead to action: how does my life become something that I choose, rather than something that others choose for me? How do I live an authentic, individual life (and thus die an authentic, rather than mechanical, death?)? The whole of my life is still not a given; its meaning stretches out before me like an empty meadow. The way that this meadow will be filled is only in my control up to a certain point, because I have no way of knowing when and where and how I will die. Such thoughts brings all of us anguish and insecurity in us all (not just Woody Allen), the basic concept of not knowing what the future has in store. Ironically enough, only thing that any of us can know as a 100% given in our future, out of all the different possibilities and paths our lives may take, is that we will die. It sounds self-evident and kind of "duh" to say so… but in order to exist authentically, I must understand first that I am a temporal being. Easy say--hard do!! The meaning of my existence cannot be granted in terms of looking at it in terms of minutes, seconds, days, or years, but rather that the ‘meaning of my life’ can only be understood as a whole, as a concrete temporal span, as opposed to a series of moments.

If it were not for the presence of death, we would remain in the illusion that things could go on as they are and therefore we would not have to do anything about our lives. It is our knowledge of our deaths, then, that makes us make the choices to act. Death, while limiting the possibilities of what I can do with my life, is also simultaneously the source of all the possibilities of what I may or may not do with my life. It's a negative that is also a positive. Moreover, it is only in death that I am truly unique. In everything else that I am, I can be substituted by another—Reed student, Corey’s girlfriend, etc. (not for biological sister though...hmm).

Where does this leave me? I've never been able to live according to the creed "Live each day as though it were your last." Obviously if we all really lived by that creed, people would be rolling around in fields and jumping into oceans as opposed to going to class or work, I think the sentiment behind that expression is more in terms of "Make the most of your time each day, because it's limited; be constantly asking yourself, 'is my behavior right now truly getting me what I want?'"

I remember at my nanny's funeral, somebody in her family gave me the candy and hair barettes she'd been carrying in her pockets, little gifts she often got for me and my sister. I remember how my sister and I just looked at each other wordlessly: I wouldn't know how to explain in words even if I knew what it was, but we were definitely feeling the same thing. I also remember, at the wake, my mother asking me if I wanted to see the body in the coffin. I shook my 'no.' I remember feeling that very strongly, of emphatically not wanting to see the body (even typing "the body" feels strange... as though it wasn't Angela, my nanny, who was dead and in the coffin, but rather "it", the body, something separate, something different, a horrible mistake, a mix-up of the universe). I guess I felt like "it" would ruin my memories of HER as alive; I didn't want them stamped out by the face of a gray corpse instead. The funny thing though, is I still try to picture and imagine what she would have looked like, anyway. That's what I kept thinking about, looking at the link in the first sentence. The way everyone's lips are droopy, the way the skin of everyone's faces seems to be close to sliding off. I feel unnerved and disoriented right now, sitting in the living room with my computer warming my lap, a lukewarm espresso at my side. I don't really know what to do next.

"The words outlive me, because in a certain sense I am irrelevant to them." (Blanchot)

"Es bleibt wie etwas Unerforschliches und Geheimnisreiches in der Dunkelheit zurück"

A freshman at my school passed away last night, and everyone has been in a weird mood about it all day. I keep getting e-mails in my inbox from the president, dean of faculty, student body president. There are suggestions to have a book where people can write about their memories about the student in question or how they were affected by the experience. All throughout the day, I am disconcertingly and consistently thinking about how appropriately this all relates to the theme in my thesis about death as an appropriate moment to try to make "sense" of an experience, to find out the meaning of something, to make an effort to try to understand.

My entire thesis is essentially based on the implications of the final passage from Onetti's "Un Sueño Realizado" (A Dream Come True). The story is essentially a subtle retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale-- I'm too tired to explain why right now in a proper or coherent manner that does the story justice, but here's some bare bones plot summary, in order to provide some context for the final passage: a woman comes to a retired theatre director (the story's narrator) and asks him to stage a production a dream she once had. The dream is simple: a car goes by, a man crosses a street and drinks a beer poured by a girl with a pitcher, recrosses the street and pats the woman on the head, who has been lying on the sidewalk this entire time, as if she were a little girl. Her explanation for why she wants to stage the dream, as explained by Blanes (the actor) to the director, is not because the dream possesses some kind of deeper meaning for her, but simply "because while she was sleeping and dreaming about all of that, she was happy--but happy isn't the word, something else. So she wants to see it over again." The dream is reproduced onstage successfully; however, the moment in which Blanes pats the woman on the head is when they discover the woman is dead. Punched in the ribs by a raging Blanes, the director closes the story with the following 'realization':

"I was left by myself, doubled over by the blow, and while Blanes went back and forth on the stage, drunk, half-crazy, and the girl with the pitcher of beer and the man with the car bent over the dead woman, I understood what it was all about, what the woman had been searching for, what Blanes had drunkenly been trying to find out the night before on stage and seemed to be searching for even now, walking back and forth with the haste of a madman: I understood it all clearly, as if it were one of those things that one learns once and for all as a child, something that words can never explain."

That's my thesis, right there. Fairy tales. Stories. Death. Truth. Understanding. Ritual. Meaning. Knowledge. And at the end of it all, what Wilhelm Grimm called the Unerforschtes, the unexplorable that is at the origin and center of every story, significantly and emphatically different from the unexplored: "like something unexplored and mysterious that remained hidden in the darkness."