Showing posts with label memoir. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memoir. Show all posts

14.2.12

Reflecting On Despair According to Søren Kierkegaard (and Others)

“Infinitude’s despair, therefore, is the fantastic, the unlimited for the self is healthy and free from despair only when, precisely by having despaired, it rests transparently in God.” — (Søren Kiekegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, pg. 30)

Must we despair in order that we don’t despair? 

     Must we suffer, so as not to suffer? We find ourselves in a paradox, stuck between finitude and infinitude, wanting to die and not wanting to die. Life can be artificial oftentimes — death has already struck us a blow, a death that is more internal and threatens the infinite more than any physical death could. Every day we face ourselves; we face our possibilities, sometimes cringing and other times barely aware that we are sad.
    Søren Kierkegaard experienced despair. The words he writes on the subject reek of subjectivity; you can almost taste-smell-touch Kierkegaard’s despair as you read a work like the Sickness Unto Death.
    Kierkegaard never claims to be someone whose been “transparent before God”; he probably never was “healthy and free” from despair — for he says all of us whether we are Christian or not, have despaired or continue to despair.
    There are probably many events in Kierkegaard’s life that disrupted his own synthesis of infinitude and infinitude.

Kierkegaard's Failed Romance with Regina Olsen
    Kierkegaard fell in love with a young woman named Regina Olsen. There is no doubt that many of the works produced by Kierkegaard were a result of the relationship he had with her.
    They were planning marriage until Kierkegaard decided to end the relationship. It seems when great happiness is evident, or the possibility of happiness is on the horizon, despair settles in deepest. In the Moviegoer Walker Percy’s character Binx Bolling makes that clear in the Moviegoer when he says, “whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise” (121).
    Kierkegaard had straddled that possibility and it made him afraid; he didn’t fall out of love with Regina Olsen (he loved her dearly — till his death). When he broke off the engagement with her he made sure she did not suffer embarrassment. In Kierkegaard's time, if a man breaks off an engagement with a woman, the woman is stigmatized. Kierkegaard prevented that stigma so he forced her to break off the engagement with him. He made sure friends and family saw him as the villain and Regina as the victim. He quit seeing her; he quit sending flowers; he quit courting her.
    Why did he do this? Obviously they would have been happy. What caused him to end such a relationship? Kierkegaard was afraid that if he married Regina Olsen, he would be unable to continue writing — he considered himself unsuited for the married life (Coppleston, Vol. 7, p. 338) — he was a man with goals and ideas and sealing a marriage, he felt, would prevent him from achieving his philosophical goals.
    He alludes to the engagement in his writings; one gets the sense that he regretted his decision — that he gave up on a beautiful thing. He writes of the relationship, pseudonymously, in a wry, novel-like section of Either/Or or also called The Seducer’s Diary.
    A few years before his engagement to Regina Olsen, he seriously considered suicide. Kierkegaard grew up in a strict, religious family. His father was a melancholic, religious man who believed that God’s wrath was imminent. The father’s dire religious overtones hung over the family like a doomsday saying. Kierkegaard's father read to his son stories from the bible from an illustrated tome that depicted graphically the violence of the crucifixion. I think the young Kierkegaard was seared by those images of a brutally beaten Christ hanging on a cross.

The Theme of Despair in the book The Sickness Unto Death
    The central story of Sickness Unto Death is an interpretation of the rising of Lazarus by Christ recounted in Chapter 11 of John's Gospel. Lazarus, the brother of Martha and the Mary who anointed the body of Jesus with oil and dried his feet with her hair, is ill and near death. Kierkegaard reads the story as an explanation of despair. Christ says Lazarus's sickness is not unto death (John 11:4). The disciples misunderstand Jesus to mean physical death, but Jesus means spiritual death, the death caused by despair. Raising Lazarus from the dead is the greatest "sign" Christ performs in John's Gospel. In fact, it is the culmination event of many minor "signs" Jesus performs. Kierkegaard reads the story as an allegory on despair. Raising Lazarus from the dead is meant to serve a point: that death won't kill Lazarus. To raise him from the dead only for him to die, physically later on, is to suggest that Christ has saved him from the death caused by inner despair.
On a Recent Visit to Copenhagen I Visted Kierkegaard
    I wrote on Kierkegaard as an undergraduate philosophy major. I went to Copenhagen to visit his grave, which turned out to be a great pun for in Danish graveyard is "kierkegaard" so when I asked someone where was the grave of Kierkegaard they thought I was asking where was the churchyard. It is fitting that Kierkegaard's name means graveyard.
   On my way to Copenhagen I took a ferry from Germany to Denmark in a train. The train enters the ferry via built-in tracks. It was late at night. I was sitting next to a German girl who was going to Denmark for a summer job. Since we were talking to each other, when the train boarded the ferry, we both went on deck to look out into the sea. I remember looking down into the dark wine waters and feeling vertigo and this sudden desire to plunge into the vortex.
   Perhaps what Kierkegaard was trying to say is that we can die way before our actual deaths. Feeling the vertigo made me feel alive but at the same time hearkened a baleful note to my mortality. I recognized the horrific contingency of my being, that I won't last long. Kierkegaard's point was that we succumb to death long before we physically die in a kind of covering up of our selves. Famously Kierkegaard defines the self as a relation that is in relationship with its own self. Sometimes this relational structure becomes muddled, scratched over, hidden and we become lost to our self. We are unmoored from our relationship to our very self.
    The greatest form of despair is the despair that does not even know it is in despair.
    To know I am in despair is the first step to not be in despair. In other words, to know that I am born, introduced to this world without any instruction, or even with my permission, so I recognize that I am not at home in this world. To be in despair is to kid myself into thinking that I am at home in the world when really I am not.
  Heidegger was influenced by Kierkegaard. What Heidegger has to say about anxiety is closely mirrored to Kierkegaard's theory of the self. Dasein (Heidegger's neologism for the human being, which means literally being-there) is a being whose very being becomes an issue for it. This is very close to what Kierkegaard was trying to say. And I think it is what Walker Percy was trying to say in all of his novels: we are strangers in a strange land.
   That night on the ferry to Denmark I wanted to jump into the void for it promised an escape. Not that I had any external reason to be in despair. At that time in my life, I was feeling pretty good. But the recognition came to me that what defines the human being is despair.
The Mass of Men Leads Lives of Quiet Desperation
   I think it was Thoreau who said the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. I think he was onto something. And so was I at that moment. Since then I have forgotten. Only to find my notes on Kierkegaard in a notebook from my college days which I reconstructed to write this blog post. The me of 2000 when I was 20 is sending a message to me of 2012 at 32. I think that is how it works. There is no essential self. Just fragments. Thank god we can communicate.

12.11.11

A Few Favorites: Books, Instant Books, and Libraries

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”  -- Jorge Luis Borges

I had asked my sixth graders, whom I meet faithfully every Saturday to work on writing and reading comprehension, to write an essay about a favorite thing, a wished-for happening, and one place they would like to visit. My hopes? That they would tie the pieces together and craft a five-paragraph essay.

Here's what I wrote as my students composed:
My favorite thing is a book; my wished-for happening is to have any book I ever want or hope to read at my immediate disposal; and my favorite place is a library, of course. It is a miracle of free association that my "three" cohere. I didn't begin it this way. Nor intended it. So, since this is a timed piece of writing, I may as well trust the process.
First, books. Books comfort me. I won't even mention content, for now. The form is important only to the extent that it helps me reach the content. Even a book nestled in the 01000100s of my iPad comforts me. Since purchasing an iPad several months ago, I still find it a delight to load up the Google Books app and add classics from the seemingly endless supply of out-of-copyright books. Lest I deceive you into thinking I only love digital books, let me remind you that I used to have a sizable library which I had to give up when I moved to space-deprived New York City. What is it in a book that is so great? It's the option I have to dip into words, without which, I would be lost in an already feeling-kinda-lost world.

To end the misery of finding an out-of-print gem is a great wished-for happening. Have you ever stumbled upon a book you would like to read but your local library does not have a copy and Amazon's used marketplace lists it at a price more than you are willing to spend? If I had a superpower it would be to summon at my fingertips any text I want to peruse at any time. Imagine Google Books if it were a realized reality.

I agree somewhat with Borges who said paradise is like a library filled with an endless array of books. I should qualify this wish, however. I do not envision a Borgesian library of books filled with every possible letter combination. To me, this would be hell. To search through endless mismarked copies of Hamlet in the hopes of finding the ur-text is a maddening enterprise, which is why Borges has a few of his library travelers sprawled on the floor dead  dead of exhaustion? Dead after searching aimlessly for an ur-text. No. Sir. Not that my paradisaical happy place must have the "great books". It must be replete with Barbara Cartland as well as Homer's lost epics. I prefer a bad book, a good book  even a book like Finnegan's Wake  which is bad and good at the same time.
I'm not sure such a reader exists, or will ever exist.

Certainly, the fantasy I have described here is long in coming. And to think that it could be foreshortened by a dystopian regime akin to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is a disastrous thought. I would like to think ideas and philosophy will be continued to be vouchsafed by man's pen -- whether it is n the guise of a keypad or a voice dictation service, doesn't matter. I shiver at the thought that ideas are written only to appease: this would be the Huxley imagined nightmare. The Orwellian nightmare is farcical -- for hasn't Big Brother been shown to be inept? If the Bradbury nightmare is the most plausible then I must add a fourth wish: to hope, beyond hope, that I can memorize, commit, vouchsafe, one book to memory. The problem is I am stuck in the choice. I wouldn't know which to choose; instead, Montag's firemen would find me like they found the madwoman who burned herself up with her cherished books. For me, though, they won't burn me up, instead, they will laugh.
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8.9.11

Story of a Vocation: There and Back Again

A Story from My Fifteen Year Old Self
I was fifteen years old: naive, mischievous and lonely, awkward with my body, my voice ~ and my words - my very being. The gash of Mom and Dad's divorce was still raw; I felt ripped apart inside, hurt and distanced, unsure how to appease the increasing emptiness in the pit of my middle. I read novels in a walk-in-closet. Nicholas, my little brother, would peek in on me and wonder what the hell I was doing! When I wasn't absorbing the back of a cereal box or a Vonnegut, I used my bicycle to broaden my geographical horizons. I befriended a beloved librarian, a resilient French survivor of the guerre mondiale, a cassocked conservative priest and an existential liberal Jew. Those were my comrades. Even, very briefly, a traveling antique salesperson who voyaged in a Volkswagen van became my friend. In between visits with all my friends I took refuge in the church, hugging the venerable wood pew, using my spiritual imagination to conjure some image of a future. I would ask my reluctant mother to bring me to Sunday Eucharist - at first she thought it was a phase, like my recent attempts to collect every matchbox car ever made, then she became more hostile when I told her I wanted to be confirmed. Then I told my family I wanted to be a priest!

A Warm Christmas Fire Was Burning
Maybe it was in those bike rides to confirmation class, or in those angry
battles with my parents about my life, about our life, about freedom. Or with my
great friends, the realization that someone outside your clan can love and accept
you for who you are - you grow to love and accept them, that I realized in a
process (that is still continuing) churning away inside of me like a warm Christmas
fire was the hearth of calling.

Now I teach philosophy and write about art. Is this my new religion?

Learning About Folk's Faith Journey I am interested in people's journey of faith. Where did it lead you? Are you the same "faith" as you were when you were younger? Why or why not?

27.8.11

The Calm Before the Storm is Lugubrious: So Says the Doleful Statue of Liberty

In this post, I write a "Journal & Rant" piece about superstorm Sandy — an Atlantic hurricane that hit the New York City region hard and caused massive amounts of damage to the city's infrastructure.
image source: nasa
A hurricane is a white circular atmospheric daub of cotton candy from the perspective of space. It looks as though the Northeast is about to get cotton swabbed. For us terrestrials, a hurricane is a force of nature that knows no equality or justice.

I cannot help but think of Irene in connection with all the other hurricanes I have known: kind of like bad relationships you sort of wished had never come into your life, but nevertheless, they sit there like a bad taste in your mouth.

All seems pleasant so far.
My Sunset Park apartment affords a view of New York's Upper Bay; I have a clear view of the Statue of Liberty. She looks slightly lugubrious in the dewey hours before a hurricane (or tropical storm, whichever forms she decides to take) hits the New York City region.

My roommates promptly filled every available empty gin bottle with water. I bought a token Infant of Prague votive candle to stave off the night in case of power loss.

I write this post in a sort of blasé anticipation. Come on Irene. I know: I could not resist.
Katrina in New Orleans: a sheer catastrophe. This one: who knows? Plenty of rain. Wind. Power outages. Normality will get a jolt to the left. Can we really afford a Katrina redux? Everyone knows New York City is certainly vulnerable to a head-on attack. We are crossing our fingers: denial is so much softer than reality.

The MTA shuts down public transit in the region at noon today: subway, bus, Metro North, and the Long Island Railroad. Mayor Bloomberg seems to be stalwart: hope for the best, prepare for the worst. His answer to a worst case scenario: people will die. Thanks for that reminder of mortality. Denial, remember!

People are uncharacteristically cheerful when awaiting a vengeful storm. A woman was skipping home yesterday in the breezy calm of pre-hurricane weather. Adults in Brooklyn do not usually skip. At the Safe-way the manager's mug creased an overly zealous grin as he watched the wads of cash unfold by people picking up loads of goods in the event of lockdown. Who isn't manic during an impending disaster?

We speak not of death but of anticipation. What will happen next? Are our lives so dull that a hurricane gets people talking about the end of the world as if they were talking about an upcoming birthday party?

What will I do?
I will do as I always do. Remain indecisive. Drink the last gin. Read Proust. I hope the Internet does not flicker out for long.

Last week an Earthquake: I barely felt it. This week: Irene (which means peace) rains (reigns).

12.8.11

On Whiskey Bottles, Trail Mix and Walker Percy

In this post, I recount a story of when I found a bottle with a message tucked inside of it.
Shaking Off a Feeling of Emptiness
   Do you ever get this empty feeling you just can’t shake?  It’s like the person who pulls up to their house, sits in their car and lets the engine run when they get home from work, to breathe again, before easily letting go of the ignition, sighing as the car dies.  Not that the person hates his life.  He just needs to breathe.  Again.
This reminds me of Walker Percy, a writer who searched out answers to the odd questions of everyday life – like, “what do I do with myself?” He won the National Book Award for The Moviegoer in 1961, about Binx Bolling, a disconsolate everyman in New Orleans who ostensibly has a good life, a girlfriend, a steady well-paying job, but nevertheless feels this emptiness inside the pit of his gut that he just can’t shake. One day it occurs to Binx to embark on a “search,” to discover what is missing in his life.  
As A Monk I Would Walk in the Woods
The summer of my first year in the monastery, I was twenty-two years old. I was on a search.  I escaped the monastic schedule to hike with a fellow monk who had joined the community at the same time as me. Our plan was to climb the fence along the cemetery to reach a tiny creek, full of white sand, like an ocean's front, that meanders to the Bogue Falaya River. I think we did this once or twice: took off our shoes and socks and donned a bathing suit, crinkling our toes gingerly over rough patches of pine needles and dried up Water Oak leaves until we reached the banks of the creek. A soda for each and a bag of trail mix from the house – one for each – drank 'em and nibbled on fleshy banana bits and salted cashews on the banks, on a Sunday afternoon, when the everydayness gets heavy. We knocked back a few dried apricots into your mouth; take a swig of Orangina, to reduce the despair of the early twenty-first century. The water was cool, even in the summer, and the sand was supple, sinking a few feet past our ankles, making it difficult to walk, careful to avoid the odd shard of glass or roping water snake that patrols the shallow waters. When the bag of trail mix emptied and the sodas had gurgled in our bellies, we hurried back to the monastery to attend evening prayer. To enter back into the rhythm of monastic life. On days like this, as a friend of mine told me once, you feel on par with existence.
Walker Percy's Empty Bottle 
Coming out of the woods, I spotted an empty bottle next to Walker Percy’s grave. He is buried in our cemetery. Usually, there is a flowerpot on the edge of his grave: WALKER PERCY 1916 - 1990. So not to see the usual flowerpot, but an empty bottle struck me as peculiar. At first, I thought that it could have been leftover by rowdy teenagers from the neighborhood, but on closer inspection, I saw that it was an Early Times whiskey bottle, Percy’s favorite brand; an admirer had left behind a note stuffed inside. This intrigued me. 
Why would someone come to a Benedictine monastery to leave behind “a message in a bottle”?  What search were they on?  Did they find themselves at a difficult time in life, seeking answers? Or was it an inside joke, a jocund sentiment left for a friend? Or a prayer left unanswered? Coming out of the river and finding someone else’s message situated me at a crossroads, a place of tension where the monk meets the world – a place where my disconsolation and anxiety struggled with a sense of place and meaning – for I was very much not at ease all the time, in my skin, in my monastic habit, in this place I called home – and the questioning of another seeker confirmed for me that we are both searchers on this planet, seeking and groping for answers.  For aren’t we all searchers? Aren’t we all castaways on an island? For Percy, “to be a castaway is to search for news from across the seas.”
The Self as a Castaway
I think this is the self in any generation: a castaway on an island, searching for news from across the seas, salt in his face and hair, thirsty and desirous. But at every juncture, we are not at ease in our skin, with our station in life. We do not know how to sift through the avalanche of information that bombards us, not knowing the difference between the Good News and the Daily News. Coming out of the woods is a messy business. We emerge as castaways, hoping to decipher a message in a bottle.

29.7.11

Why I Write Better When I am Homeless

Writing is probably good for you.
Even with a due date.
When homeless I am uprooted. But I have money in my pocket.
Why do I write better? Because it is something to do to fill in the emptiness. When Maslow's needs are met I think we are less prone to be creative. It is the pang of hunger and thirst that spurs us on to aesthetic heights.

The hungry artist is the short-lived artist but his art is intense. I think Arthur Rimbaud was such an artist. He wrote until he exhausted himself. He wrote first then ate later. Even then it was not so much as a need but visceral. A part of creativity. His eating became his aesthetic.

I cannot be an Arthur Rimbaud. I enjoy creature comforts. Take-out. Lunch on a subway bench. A gin and tonic after work.
They do not make me more creative. I could say something pretentious like the life of the middle class intellectual deadens my creative sense. But that sounds wrong. I am a creator because I am a middle class intellectual. And I am not even sure if that label fits me. A lost boy is perhaps a better descriptor. A stranger in a strange land. A man who happens to have a degree who happens to teach Plato, Aristotle, Virginia Woolf and Camus to community college students in Brooklyn, New York.

I am a man who loves the color of apples. But I like stiletto heels as well. I like the religious ritual of going to the movie theater on a Thursday evening after work. I eat lightly buttered popcorn with the same laconic motivation of receiving the holy eucharist on my tongue. The darkened theater and the womb-like cavity of stadium seating  where there is always less people and more space feels like an experience of daily Mass.

23.7.11

Who Are Your Reading Mentors?


Bonnie Bess Wood and Frank Levy, Innovators in Reading
I take it for granted that I am a life-long reader. Yet I must stop and consider the people who inspired me to be a reader for life. Yes, the public library played its part, but also individual persons as well. One was indeed a librarian, but the other was her husband. Here is my story about Frank and Bonnie: 

       I met Bonnie and Frank the Summer I was thirteen years old. Bonnie was the interim library director at the local branch public library near my home. I would spend afternoons at the library as a volunteer page. Bonnie noticed me reading in between the stacks and instead of chastising me for not shelving books, began a relationship of reading with me that has lasted into my adult years. She chose for me to read Chronicles of Narnia, Dante's InfernoCount of Monte Cristo, and John Steinbeck's Acts of King Arthur when I was reading only Stephen King novels. "If you like bologna, it is good, but it's still bologna," Bonnie told me. "You're only on this earth for a finite amount of time, so you can choose to eat either bologna sandwiches or filet mignon. The choice is yours." I kept on reading Stephen King and John Grishman, but I would also read from the list of Pulitzer Prize novels or National Book Award winners that Bonnie introduced me to as a librarian. Bonnie's rationale reflected a commitment to literature that privileged quality over fluff, but also gave the reader the freedom of choice.
    At the time I met Bonnie and Frank, they were building their nascent Children's Summer Theater company, Stories in Motion and were experimenting with various methods of presenting literature and film as a living narrative. Frank had been hired by the public library as a professional storyteller and lecturer. In one story, Flutterby the Butterfly, Bonnie performed the part of Flutterby, dancing through the audience dressed in a costume she herself had designed and created, while Frank told the story with physical expression and inclusion of the child audience. I played the lepidopterist who is unable to catch Flutterby in his net. Bonnie created costumes and masks which Frank used to bring to life living "stories in motion."
    Reading was promoted for its own sake in the novel presentation of the narrative as a performance for the love of the story. The simple idea was to perform and involve young people in the telling of a story as a way to encourage interest in literature. After a performance of Flutterby, children would approach the librarian for books on butterflies. Or, after a performance at a public school where Frank performed the role of the pianist Chopin in full costume and in character, librarians and teachers could more easily encourage their students to read about Chopin or about classical music. Stories in Motion encouraged reading by performing literature in public places to elicit from the audience a response to read in turn, as a pleasurable aesthetic, and not merely for the satisfaction of a mark or an obligation.
    I think the success of Stories in Motion lies in the collaborative efforts of its creators. As a librarian, Bonnie brings to the project years of experience working in school and university libraries. Also, she is a researcher. She researches possible stories, mines their literary history, and works with Frank to create the story from an existing database of World Literature, whether it be a story about Purim, or background information on Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. Frank takes Bonnie's raw research and finds in a story the essential plot points and presents the story theatrically and totally committed to the essence of the literature in its purest form. Like Odysseus telling the story of his ten-year journey home from Troy, Frank marks the importance of literature in its ability to be told.
    Stories in Motion stories are told from the rich treasure trove of out-of-copyright literature, namely the classics, which belong to the common trust. This means, for example, they do not produce the Disney version of Little Mermaid, but Hans Christian Andersen's original. Ariel, not obedient to the rules of the spell that has transformed her into a human, loses her prince and turns into sea foam at the story's fatal end. Children are indoctrinated by Disney's version which casts Ariel as a comic character who wins her prince and lives happily ever after. Stories in Motion takes a risk by telling the original tale; a risk that involves convincing parents and children that Little Mermaid is a tragic tale where all is not resolved nicely in the end. The risk is losing the interest of the children who prefer the Disneyfication of the tale, and may not be willing, at least at first, to be exposed to the original telling. At the end of the day, the risk of upsetting a child who wishes to play the part of Ariel, so she can wed a fictional prince, is overcome by giving this same child access to a piece of literature that is true to its literary history. The child in a Stories in Motion production learns organically that a story can either be tragic or comic, that a story has a narrative history of its own as well as constitutive of a cultural literacy that the child would otherwise be bereft of if she had only been fed the commercialization of literature that privileges what is marketable over a commitment to literature itself, for its own sake.
    The vision of Stories in Motion is creative and opposed to the mainstream commodification of storytelling. The plays are scaled down to the bare essentials of theater aesthetics. A Stories in Motion stage is bare. No unnecessary props or elaborate eye-candy adorn the proscenium, save for a simple background suggestive of the theme. Also, when Frank adapts a classic piece of literature for performance by a group of young people, he scales down the script to preserve the muscle of the story. By re-imaging classic stories, such as Wizard of Oz, the Arthurian legend, Pinocchio, or Wind in the Willows, to name a few recent productions, Stories in Motion remains a completely kid-driven production. A child controls lights, sound, and works backstage. Young people work with choreographers and assist in directing. The cast is composed of 100-150 children. Every actor in the cast has at least one speaking role and very seldom is only one child the star of the show. The muscle of the show is in the purity of the narrative but also the individual actors and stage workers who learn collaborative learning skills in putting a play together in one to three weeks for public performance. The vision of Stories in Motion includes both the preservation of literature and the instilling in young people the necessary life skill of teamwork.
    I had the privilege as a high school drama teacher to produce a Stories in Motion adaptation for myself. With my group of thirty high school students, we produced Sword in the Stone, an adaptation from Sir Thomas Mallory's book Le Morte D'Arthur. Directing a Stories in Motion play gave me the opportunity to produce a novel way to present literature. The metaphor of generativity is not lost on me. Having bestowed on me as a child a love of literature for its own sake, and a commitment to literature in general, it was with pathos that I directed the Stories of Motion adaptation of the Arthurian legend. I took what was given to me as a child by Bonnie and Frank and was able in turn to present it to my own students. By doing Sword in the Stone, I wanted to introduce my students to the Arthurian legend in a way that was theatrical but at the same time expose them to an important cultural and literary tale. At first, my students were not interested in Arthur as a play to perform, but once we read through the Stories in Motion script, I could see that my students saw the play as an opportunity for self-expression. They learned the legend of Arthur intuitively and theatrically, asking me questions about Uther Pendragon and the Mist People, the May Party, Morgan La Fay, and the importance of the sword in the stone as a metaphor for coming-of-age. In the end, through a unique presentation of literature, my students found themselves not only as drama students but purveyors of literature, without recourse to the traditional methods of teaching literature in American high schools.
    It is with this exposition that I recommend Ms. Bonnie Bess Wood and Mr. Frank Levy, co-creators of Stories in Motion, as verifiable innovators in reading. 

Thank you, Bonnie and Frank.

16.9.10

Childhood Sexual Abuse and the Binary of Body/Mind in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

In this post by Greig Roselli, Virginia Woolf's fiction is looked at through the lens of childhood sexual abuse.

A photographic portrait of Virginia Woolf as a Child
Virginia Woolf, Childhood Portrait
There rushes at once through my flesh tingling fire,
My eyes are deprived of all power of vision,
My ears hear nothing but sounds of winds roaring,
And all is blackness.
-- Sappho
Thick of waist, large of limb, and, save for her hair, fashionable in the tight modern way, she never looked like Sappho, or one of the beautiful young men whose photographs adorned the weekly papers. She looked what she was ...
-- Virginia Woolf in Between the Acts
But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing -- nothing at all.
           -- Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf and Violet Dickinson
Virginia Woolf and Violet Dickinson (Top); Virginia Woolf

    Louise DeSalvo’s book on childhood sexual abuse and Virginia Woolf describes how as a young girl, Virginia Stephen was abused by her half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth (children from her mother’s first marriage)—the extent of which we do not know much. Although much contested and controversial, we do know that something happened to Woolf that deeply marked her as an adolescent, a young woman, and throughout her adult years, influencing her subsequent body of writings, essays, and novels, especially.[1] While not the whole story, the account of abuse by George and Gerald Duckworth is a reliable source we have concerning Virginia Woolf as a sexually abused child and adolescent. George and Gerald, as recounted in biographical sketches 22 Hyde Park Gate and A Sketch of the Past, abused Virginia until she was in her twenties.[2] In A Sketch of the Past, she writes that as a child (she was about five years old), Gerald Duckworth, the youngest of the Duckworth boys, lifted her up on a high ledge when she was sick with flu and explored her body, even her private parts (Moments of Being, 69). Woolf would write, reflecting on this incident, how this tarnished her view of her own body and her distaste for mirrors. In 22 Hyde Park Gate, Woolf disturbingly describes (she was a young woman at this time) how George Duckworth crept into her room one night after an evening dinner party and crawled into bed with her; the disturbing part of her retelling is not the actual incident itself, but Woolf’s coy attitude about it, because she knows the scandal it would bring if the society ladies knew she was her half-brother’s lover (Moments of Being)![3]

There is a definite shift in mood from Hyde Park Gate, written at the height of Woolf’s career, and A Sketch of the Past written at the end of her life. The former is separated from the events—as if they were another story, not really happening to her, Virginia—her body being violated—but the latter piece is in touch with the incest that happened, bitterly cognizant of how it disconnected her from her own body, her own freedom to feel and live spontaneously. This was due in part to the oppressive patriarchy she felt under the ruling monarchy of her father, Leslie Stephen. The most explicit image of Woolf and the effects of the abused body can be seen in contrasting images of her. Consider the more beautiful images of Woolf one sees in biographies or in film. Nicole Kidman’s Woolf in The Hours, even with the prosthetic nose, is plainly beautiful, but when you notice one photograph (figure 1, top) from 1902 of Woolf in biographies, it seems her soul has been dug out of her body; she looks hollow and alone and profoundly insecure, clinging to Violet Dickinson for protection, radically contrasted to this photograph from the same year (figure 1, bottom), a profile shot that is highly publicized in books, websites, and magazines about Woolf.[4]

Of course, it is dangerous and misguided to pinpoint one event as the source for Woolf’s most revealing writings about abuse and the body, for one could point out that the subjugation she felt as a woman—not able to procure a degree from the University like her brothers—embittered her, as well as the role her mother and father played in her life (for better or worse)—her mother’s illness, her subsequent absences, her father’s patriarchy and then, of course, their deaths, her move to Bloomsbury, and her marriage to Leonard Woolf.

Psychologists will point out that children who suffer from sexual abuse often express their inchoate feelings and fears in art—painting and writing. Controversial even today, research on sexual abuse and children relies on the Rorschach test, the artwork of children, the TAT test, children’s own stories and other measures designed to assess whether or not a child has been sexually abused. There is no universal sorter to determine sexual abuse of a child, but most mental health professionals will agree that a child abused “speaks out about the abuse” in ways not always decipherable by language. It oozes out of them from every corner of their creative side, in their language and their very bodies. And probably, in this way, as a girl, Virginia Stephen learned to suppress her feelings and memories, possibly not feeling she had a safe space to express her feelings openly—except, save, for her art. In her writings, perhaps, she explores dimensions of her own coded body—unconsciously or consciously (it doesn’t make a difference)—in a way that was safe for her to express what was going on inside of her.[5]

We do not need to know the details of Woolf’s traumatic childhood experiences to find in her novels examples of abused, neglected children and wounded individuals. Nor do we need evidence that she was actually sexually abused. The text deconstructs itself, laying bare the unprivileged body in the mess and midst of mind. DeSalvo mentions that every one of her novels describes a child abandoned, a child ignored, a child at risk, a child abused, a child betrayed (see DeSalvo, p. 14).[6] In Woolf, there is a pervasive feeling that the very self has been invaded from all sides—the woman questioning her position in society in A Room of One’s Own or a boy bitterly confused by his father’s sharp disavowal of his wishes in To the Lighthouse or a woman’s wish to eradicate her own body for another in Mrs. Dalloway or the androgynous awareness of body that metamorphoses in Orlando. For fear of being too ambitious, this paper will only focus on one of Woolf’s works, Mrs. Dalloway—not precluding the possibility of applying this thesis to her other works as well.

II

The body in Woolf’s work considerably bespeaks of an abused individual, broken off, as it were, from an image of the body that is apparently whole and complete. Many abuse victims speak of being frozen at the time of their abuse, unable to release themselves (or unaware that they are caught) from their past. Their very image of the body, then, becomes frozen, stunted. If writing is symptomatic of the soul—if it gives us a glimpse into fractured humanity—then it is true that the novel, even more so, details the human person even to the point of what it means to be a body in space—perhaps a body broken in space, but a body with a mind—a soul—nonetheless.

But we must ask at this point, “so what?” So what that Virginia Woolf was sexually abused as a child. There is nothing we can do about that now. Everyone who could now speak first-hand about it is dead. “So what?” that she expresses her abuse in her life-work and novels—she had to find some way to exorcise these demons, so it is only natural that she would use her work to do so. The question we must ask is, how is this important for Woolf studies? What contribution—if any—did Woolf make for literature, writing about Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus Smith’s body (for instance) as an abused individual? How did she reconceptualize the often-discussed binary of body/mind so prevalent in Western thought into an often overlooked emphasis on body abused and fractured, peeking out from within a text privileged by mind?

When one thinks of Woolf, one often thinks of the Modernist project at the beginning of the twentieth century that articulated consciousness. We think of Joyce and Mansfield, literature between the two great wars. We think of stream of consciousness and wordplay so often talked about in conversations about Woolf and Joyce and others like them. We tend to think of them as lost in their heads, not really concerned with the trappings of the body but more concerned with words and the colorful display of language.

But we must take a second look to see how the text writes the body, as brought forth by the pain and loss Woolf’s characters feel (and by Woolf’s own pain and loss, as well), although it does, in fact, seem with Woolf (and the other Moderns) that she emphasizes mind over body to a degree that sometimes nears solipsism. “How am I ever going to get out of the mind of Mrs. Dalloway?” you may wonder. It may take a violent explosion. And it does. When teaching Woolf, it is often pointed out to students that reading Woolf is hard because you have to follow the thought patterns of various other minds.[7] All too often, Woolf is interpreted as being lost in the clouds—a dainty walk in London completely adrift in her own world—an interpretation used to caution students not to get lost themselves in trying to maneuver their way through the text. But we forget the violent explosions in Woolf, the often visceral, shake-you-up episodes where the body is exposed raw. The exposed, raw body, the abused body, is present in Woolf, just subtler than the trippings of mind. In Mrs. Dalloway, I argue, the characters of Septimus Smith and Clarissa Dalloway are images of abuse—sexual or physical, although the text does not explicitly reveal what kind of abuse—abuse is there—shaken and raw, speaking their voices from within the text.

III

In Mrs. Dalloway a violent explosion from outside on Bond Street jerks Clarissa out of her mind and into her body and by a parallel of events, Septimus Smith as well. Clarissa is choosing sweet peas for her party later that evening—her mind is in a whirl—then, like a “pistol shot” there is a violent explosion from outside (175). Septimus is walking on the other side of the street with his wife Lucrezia and when he hears the explosion there is the line: “The throb of the motor engines sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through an entire body.” (176).

We forget the visceral side of Woolf in this scene, often thought of in popular discussions of the novel to be more concerned with how consciousness is involved—how the texts switch between Clarissa’s perception of events and Septimus’s. But what happens to the body here? When the text is deconstructed, we can see the playful interplay between mind and body at work. Clarissa, moments before the car crash, allows the soft words of Miss Pym, the florist, to wash over her like a wave to surmount a monster of hatred inside of herself—and then the violent explosion; she goes to the street, her “lips pursed with curiosity”—as if keeping the monster inside her body (Woolf 174-176). The monster is the abused, unprivileged body. Clarissa is able to “escape,” keeping the monster at bay, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, something from the outside, something external and loud violates her, shaking her consciousness to a mere image of the body.

For Septimus, at the same moment, the “world has raised its whip; where will it descend?” (176). The raised whip is the abuse. Septimus, paranoid, a veteran of the First World War, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, erroneously thinks traffic has stopped because of him. “It is I who am blocking the way, he thought” (176). For Septimus, the violent explosion from the motorcar is like the world’s whip ready to strike him dead, like the tail of Dante’s Minos coiling around the damned bodies in hell. And then again there is that line: “The throb of the motor engines sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through an entire body.” (176). For both Septimus and Clarissa, the violence of the car crash has assaulted consciousness and manifested itself in their very own bodies; as well as the body of the text, the repressed body of coded language and abuse in Woolf. For the abused body, a sound or a touch retroactively brings the body back to the moment of abuse (very similar to post-traumatic stress disorder, as well); like an awful smell that really isn’t there but the memory of it makes it appear as if it really is; that is the stranglehold of abuse and its hold on the body.[8]

In a more subtle way, this explosion of body occurs a few scenes before the previous one in which Clarissa is window shopping on Bond Street; here again is an explosion, a rush of visceral awareness that shakes the text slightly, attempts to speak from its unprivileged position as body (170). Mind is privileged in this novel but body claws its way through the floorboards, lurking in the language and sentence structure, the otherwise words and sentences in the book we would call aporia, unsolvable instances irreconcilable with mind. Clarissa is shaken out of consciousness, out of her own head into an awareness of body when she has an intimation of her own mortality, her own transient existence—can she survive the “ebb and flow of things” (171)? She feels her body is contingent and once she dies her body will be gone forever except for the hope that her mind will live on, preserve her memories of Peter Walsh, of Richard—but body attempts to speak over mind, asserting itself in the language as aporia, the missing, abused body that seeks to be recovered (171). Death is incomprehensible to Clarissa; she is terrified to reconcile this body she wears with a final finitude. This observation of death only drives Clarissa to further insecurity, not a religious hope in a life after death.

What prompts Clarissa into an examination of her own finite, insecure body here is that she realizes that she speaks and acts only to please other people, not thinking for herself, but rather playing a part, unlike, she feels, Richard or Lady Bexborough. Clarissa realizes that “no one was ever for a second taken in” by her charms and ladylike manners; she intuits that people see beneath her class-conscious poise (171). Clarissa wants to be free, to be different—not just on the order of mind, but of the body as well—from the life she has been consigned; this is why death frightens her. Characteristic of abuse, she wishes to be someone (or something) she is not, which creates a tremor in the text, a tension between who she is, in essence, to whom we would rather be. She does not wish to have the body she wears, her own body, but rather wishes to wear another body. This is a form of despair. The text jumps from lingering in the realm of mind to actually leaping into the alterity of Lady Bexborough, whom Clarissa would rather be, a body she would rather possess. What is the cause of this radical desire to eradicate your own body? Is there a trauma that would precipitate such a claim?

Woolf herself felt that the greatest catastrophe for a woman was to be married; marriage is the great trauma. Clarissa may have been a different woman if she had not been married. This is a rational claim. Many of us often wonder what our lives would have been like if we had chosen a different path in life. For Clarissa, maybe her desire to be like Lady Bexborough or to be different and independent as Richard is an inverse reflection of the memory of the happiest moment of her life, passionately kissing Sally Seton? Though she still wears the same body, Clarissa believes she can wish body away by fantasizing being somebody else; the spasms continue to haunt her, the explosions still course through her body as when she places the brooch down on her bedroom table; Clarissa feels she can suppress this feeling, as if she can stave off the icy claws (196). Yes, it is true, Clarissa is not happy in her marriage, and possibly wished for a happier life—maybe fantasized a life with Sally Seton—but it is must be said that not only the marriage itself churns disgust about her own body. There is something else.

Still wearing the same body, she may have been a different woman but not a different body; there is something else at stake, besides marriage as the great catastrophe. Something irrational. It is not only a failed marriage that causes Clarissa to wish for Lady Bexborough’s skin of “crumpled leather and beautiful eyes” (172). This wish or desire to be another body is a form of the coded body Woolf employed in her writing, an encryption in the body of the text, abused and broken. In Clarissa’s own eyes, her body is narrow and pea-stick shaped “with a ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird’s” (172). Ironically, Clarissa’s body is the favored figure of today’s beauty magazines; the models in the slick pages of popular magazines portray the slim, skeletal body as desirable instead of the fuller, fleshed out body of a Lady Bexborough. Something about Clarissa’s culture—or her own life experience—has informed how her own body should be, adding to her anxiety to want another body just as today’s glossy magazines convince woman to lose even more weight; the slimmer the models in beauty magazines, the slimmer the body-image emblazoned on women’s brains, especially abused women who already have an insecure image of body. Even Clarissa’s internalized positive image of body is an informed construct; her observation that she holds herself well and that she has nice hands and feet, that she dresses well and so on are just as much informed by the outline traced over her own body as the wish to be a completely “other” body.[9]

When Clarissa stops to look in the window on Bond Street, she stops to look at a Dutch picture probably propped up in a display window. In one sentence: “But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all.” Woolf sums up the abused body, both unhappy with body and transfixed by body—even in her loathing diatribe about the ‘body she wears” she is able to stop and see beauty in a shop window despite the fact that the beauty Clarissa notices is outside of herself. Woolf does not describe the Dutch picture in the window; the text parenthetically mentions—in passing, barely noticeable in the text if one is racing through the book—but it is there, this Dutch picture placed in contraposition to Clarissa’s own body, another extension of the fantasy to not only be someone else’s body but to attach onto an image this same irrational wish! For the abused body, for Woolf herself, spontaneous appreciation of beauty is not difficult, but made difficult by abuse—like James in To the Lighthouse, a disavowal by her father, the smothering patrimony she experienced in the Stephen household prevented her from fully expressing beauty in the open; like Clarissa, Woolf expresses beauty in parenthesis—the image of beauty for the abused is couched by a feeling of having no capacity for anything, nothing at all. While the text does not reveal the root of Clarissa Dalloway’s abuse, whether it is marriage itself, or something deeper in her past, after Bourton, when she felt free with Sally Seton, we can assume that something in Clarissa’s past marred her body, smeared her own conception of body to make her feel as if she is nothing, nothing at all. Like Woolf, traced by her half-brother’s hand, Clarissa’s body has been traced, etched upon, manipulated to the extent that Clarissa no longer feels free to be in her own body.

And Septimus is the same, unable to feel and sense beauty, despite his wife’s exclamation, “Beautiful!” (243). Septimus is not able to see beauty behind a pane of glass, etched by war to loathe his own body. “Where he had once seen mountains, where he had seen faces, where he had seen beauty, there was a screen” (296). Where he once had felt love with a fellow soldier during the war, now there is only his abused body without a friend, “macerated until only the nerve fibers were left; it was spread like a veil on a rock” (225).

This is despair Septimus and Clarissa feel, except Septimus goes one step further: his despair is not just a wish to have another body but actually to extinguish his own body; his body no longer has the capacity to sustain him any longer.[10] While Clarissa merely laments that her body is nothing, nothing at all, Septimus goes one step further into despair. Septimus Smith is an abused body; war-scarred and torn up emotionally to such an extreme extent that his friendship, his love for Evans, a fellow soldier during the war, nor the love of his wife or child can release him from the pain he feels. And when he cries out Evan’s name there is no answer, only the sound of mice squeaking and a rustled curtain, the voices of the dead (296). Throughout the novel, Septimus has discourse with the dead: with the dead Evans, with dead bodies dressed in grey; Septimus can’t stand the voices of the dead in his head, crying, “It was awful, awful!” (226). It is no wonder that Septimus is reading Dante’s Inferno, literally septic as his name implies; the Inferno, death, is his only consolation, that which helps him not to be afraid (243). This body they both wear, Clarissa and Septimus, are what they both share in common. While Clarissa, the upper-class British society woman, lives, the middle-class soldier with a wife and child dies. The poet dies so Clarissa can live. Clarissa is able to maintain her body (even though she doesn’t do the best job at it) while Septimus is unable to continue wearing this body.

“Fear no more, says the heart in the body; fear no more,” thinks Septimus (290). The pain and the abuse come to a head, despite his own self-consoling, Septimus flings himself onto “Mrs. Filmer’s area railings” (299).[11] But Septimus is not afraid. The stranglehold of abuse may have gotten the best of him, driven him to suicide, but he is not afraid of death like Clarissa. The last image we have of Clarissa is holding onto the banister at the top of the stairs, finally able to give her party. The final image of Septimus is a mangled body. Clarissa is able to stave off the monsters inside of her, for a time. Or is she? Just because Clarissa lives and Septimus dies does not exonerate Clarissa. Septimus’s death releases Lucrezia; she sighs relief when he dies. His death exonerates his pain. Clarissa has to face her problems. Clarissa still is not free. Clarissa is not yet able to say to the heart in the body, fear no more, fear no more. Yet both Clarissa and Septimus are both heroes in this story, because they speak to victims of abuse, at whatever stage in life, not in the saccharine words of “have hope” or “get over it” but in the visceral, raw ways abuse manifests itself in a body.

IV

In this way, Mrs. Dalloway is a deceptive novel, especially on a second or third reading because what we expect the novel to be in fact turns out to be much more than a feminine version of Joyce’s Ulysses. When I first read the novel I read it as a discourse on mind, not paying attention at all to body. It was only on a second reading that I saw body peeking out from hidden corners and I wondered if there was something to the claim that this book is more about abused bodies than just about a troubled woman organizing a party. Then reading about Woolf’s own sexual abuse as a child informed my reading again of Mrs. Dalloway and I noticed the voice of not only body, but a body abused and fragmented. The sentence in the novel that struck me as filled with images of an abused person is the sentence I quote at the top of this article: Clarissa stopping to look at a Dutch picture. The other image is the pervasive trembling of body that courses through the entire novel. From the explosion, the Dutch picture, the aeroplane coursing through the sky, the monsters and spasms that haunt Clarissa and Septimus alike. This led me to a deeper reading of Septimus, a character unthought of in the novel by readers despite his really important presence, as a figure very much akin to Clarissa and also in contraposition to her. After linking these images in my head, the novel stuck out for me as the image of body, sneaking behind the text, trying to get an upper hand on mind that I had been unconsciously looking for in the text. The novel is so richly woven and so well planned out that that first reading skips over the subtler images in the text. This is not a univocal novel with one story to tell; it is multifaceted and rich in texture and depth. The tension in the text between body and mind is rich and multi-layered in ways that this small essay cannot completely mine fully, but even this small examination could show that Virginia Woolf is definitely not a simple walk in the park. She is a fierce thinker whom I think displays passionately and compassionately the pain and loss of humanity, not just for those who have suffered from sexual abuse or any kind of physical or mental abuse, but for all of us who are looking for an articulation of the pain we feel in our bodies, like Mrs. Dalloway, “buying the flowers herself” or Septimus, finding the courage not to be afraid anymore.

Notes

[1] Interestingly, DeSalvo, on page one, asserts that Woolf was a sexually abused child and an incest survivor. She then proceeds to give her two intentions for writing the book: first, to use Woolf’s work to form a portrait of the world of the child and adolescent as she understood it. Second, to form a portrait of how Woolf perceived and described herself and her experiences as a child and adolescent by using both works that she wrote during these time periods, and works that she wrote in her maturity describing them (xiii).

[2] These sketches can be found in the book Moments of Being, a collection of Woolf’s autobiographical writings. “A Sketch of the Past,” “Old Bloomsbury,” and “22 Hyde Park Gate” all contain primary source concerning Woolf abused by her half-brothers. Other sources that can be consulted are a letter that she wrote to Ethyl Smith and a letter she wrote to Janet Case.

[3] George was fourteen years older and Gerald was twelve years older than Virginia.

[4] In James King’s biography, Virginia Woolf, he places the aforementioned photographs of Woolf alongside one another.

[5] Diana L. Swanson has an article in this book: Creating Safe Space: Women and Violence. “hence Woolf developed writing strategies of coding, self-censorship, and splitting of event and affect (pg. 85).

[6] These children appear on the page for a moment—as the baby in the carriage of the nanny who sits next to Peter Walsh in Mrs. Dalloway, as the children that Daisy, Peter Walsh’s lover, will lose if she divorces.

[7] In Mrs. Dalloway there are many romps into the mind of another person: Clarissa Dalloway, Septimus Smith, Lucrezia Smith, Mrs. Dempster, Mr. Bentley, Peter Walsh, Richard Dalloway, among others.

[8] It should also be mentioned that sexual abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder carry with them similar symptomatic behavior of abuse. For example, persons suffering from both sexual abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder often have a visceral reaction to touch and acute sounds.

[9] See Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble for a fuller understanding how an outline is traced upon the body by performance and repetition, especially by society. Our identity as gendered people, even our biological sex, according to Butler, has been traced upon our bodies.

[10] The Sickness Unto Death by Søren Kierkegaard has a detailed section about how wishing to want a body not your own is one of the root causes of despair.

[11] As is common in Woolf, death happens suddenly. There is no prelude to Septimus’s death. He undramatically jumps from the railing.

Annotated Bibliography

Bass, Ellen, and Laura Davis. The Courage to Heal: A Guide to Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse. New York: Harper, 1988. This book serves as a general reference for women; it is a good text to use to debunk common misconceptions about abuse and women.

Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. 2 vols. in 1. New York: Harcourt, 1972. The official biography by Woolf’s nephew can’t be left out in a works cited page because it is the biography that started all the other biographies on Woolf. It does mention her childhood sexual abuse but not with the vigor of DeSalvo—he mentions it, but correlates it to her same-sex attraction for women.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble.

Colman, Andrew, editor. Companion Encyclopedia of Psychology. Volume 2. John Wiley and Sons. 2004. This resource gives clinical definitions of psychological terms and explanation of theory and application; helpful in gleaning data about body image and women.

DeSalvo, Louise A. Virginia Woolf, The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse On Her Life and Work. Beacon Press, c1989. According to the author, Woolf was a sexually abused child and an incest survivor that deeply impacted her life and work.

Ender, Evelyne. “Speculating Carnality, Some Reflections on the Modernist Body.” Yale Journal of Criticism. 1999. 12.1. 113-130. This article convinced me that I could write a paper connecting Woolf’s sexual abuse to her conception of a fractured body in space because Ender here does a similar thing with illness and the modern conception of body in Woolf and Proust.

Gordon, Mary. “Bodies of Knowledge” in The Mrs. Dalloway Reader. Harcourt. 2003. 97 - 100. This very short article is included in the Mrs. Dalloway Reader. It is a helpful interpretation of the Waves as a brilliant first-person narrative in league with Notes from Underground and Remembrance of Things Past.

Hilsenroth, Mark J. and Segal, Daniel L. Comprehensive Handbook of Psychological Assessment. Volume 2: Personality Assessment. “Detection of Child Sexual Abuse.” John Wiley and Sons. (2003?) 459-461. Gives background on various methods and analysis of psychological testing and evaluation, i.e., how does one conclude that a child has been sexually abused?

Hussey, Mark. Virginia Woolf A to Z: A Comprehensive Reference for Students, Teachers, and Common Readers to Her Life, Work and Critical Reception. Facts on File. 1995. This book is very handy for quick Woolf facts that one needs on the fly.

Johnson, Manly. Virginia Woolf. Frederick Ungar Publishing. 1973. Published a year after Bell’s biography, this book is a very short introduction to Woolf’s life and some criticism on her work that was helpful as a contrast to later biographies.

Pipher, Mary, Ph.D. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. Ballantine Books. 1994. Popular book that addresses problems facing young adolescent girls today and what adults can do to help girls survive in a male oriented society. These kinds of books have been popular recently; even spawning boy counterparts like Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Lives of Boys.

Swanson, Diana. "Safe Space or Danger Zone?: Incest and the Paradox of Writing in Woolf's Life." in Creating Safe Space: Violence and Women’s Writing. Ed. Tomoko Kuribayashi and Julie Tharp. Albany: State U of New York P, 1997. 79–99. Writes about how when victims of sexual abuse speak “out” about their experiences it may at times have oppressive rather than liberatory consequences.

Ward Jouve, Nicole. "Virginia Woolf and Psychoanalysis" in The Cambridge companion to Virginia Woolf edited by Sue Roe and Susan Sellers. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 246-252. This is an extract from pages in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf that provided a psychological reading, especially, of Woolf’s own biographical work.

Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being: unpublished autobiographical writings, 1882-1941. Provides invaluable insight into Woolf’s conception of her own body as she herself viewed it from different stages in her career.

----------------------. Edited by Francine Prose. Mrs. Dalloway Reader. Harcourt. 2003. This critical edition not only provides the complete text of the novel but also includes invaluable selections from her journals, letters and early prose works like Mrs. Dalloway’s Party and a delicious map of Mrs. Dalloway’s walk. The article by Mary Gordon (see cit.) was very helpful in my paper’s evolution.

----------------------. To the Lighthouse. Harcourt Brace. 1955. Probably Woolf’s most taught book in schools, it is a family drama on a rocky beach in Scotland divided into three parts. In this essay, I focus on James and his relationship to his father and how his father disavows his wishes to go see the Lighthouse.

----------------------. Orlando. Harcourt Brace. Woolf’s most playful piece on the body in space; the body in this novel metamorphoses from man to woman—Orlando is not ashamed of her body, not afraid of standing in front of the mirror in awe.

----------------------. The Waves. Harcourt Brace. Considered one of Woolf’s most difficult books, it is probably the chef d’oeuvre of her life’s work, especially the portrayal it gives of abuse; the novel is the disembodied voice of six narrators replete with metaphysical images of the sea and waves.

Young, Barbara. "Virginia Woolf: Her Cries of Joy and Longing” The Yale Journal for Humanities and Medicine. http://info.med.yale.edu/intmed/hummed/yjhm/archives/byoung1.htm. This online article is fairly accessible and easy to read psychological account of Woolf’s life.

14.9.10

"Are you a Dad?" and other Stories from Summer Camp

image credit: remarkk
    While working at a summer camp in Louisiana when I was a Benedictine Brother, I got stuck with the task of dealing with children who suffered from homesickness. We called them the homesick kids; it was easy to spot them right away: either they feigned a fall on the first day to get a ticket back home or they showed up at the cabin with a look in their eye of sheer sadness. These were the kids who figured out they were duped. Mom and dad were not coming back. It was not too hard to find these kids for they usually found you! It didn't matter to any of the forlorn boys who made it out to the homesick bay, if I said, "it's only one week." A week could be a month or a million years. They wanted to go home. One night I was in the infirmary and the youngest cabins were about to finish their night swim and I was helping the nurse administer the last rounds of Paxil, Sudofed, insulin shots, band aids and Calamine lotion.

30.8.10

Memento: When I Was a Benedictine Postulant

A page from my scrapbook that dates from circa 2002
My Life Circa 2002
Taken from a page of my scrapbook dated circa 2002 — I had just entered the monastery of Saint Joseph Abbey as a postulant. I was about twenty-two years old (freshly graduated from college). I had started my scrapbook as a seminary college student. The page in this scrapbook marks a special time in my life. It was a time where I had an enormous amount of free time (ironically, since I was living in a monastery). A postulant is someone who has requested to be a novice in a monastery. It is the waiting period between "moving in" and being officially sworn in as a new member of the community.
In the Summer I Joined the Novitiate
After a few weeks of postulancy, the novitiate begins. That lasts for a year, after which the novice petitions the community to take the first set of monastic vows. During this time, the community of monks which I belonged to had voted on a new Abbot. His name was Justin.
An Explanation of the Pages Of My Scrapbook
On the left side of the book is the card that I had saved from Abbot Justin's installation as abbot of the community. I had written in the space below the holy card, "Justin Gerald Brown's Abbatial Blessing". On the facing page is a card that I had kept when I was a postulant. My name (as it is now) was "Greig". On the top is a postcard of a boy sitting amongst a hilly field accompanied by two pigs. My memory is hazy but I think I had picked up this postcard when I had been a student at the American College of Louvain in Belgium  I guess I placed it in the scrapbook as a memento.

24.8.10

Essay: How to be Generative Without Having Kids

Learn how my Uncle gave me his set of matchbox cars to me when I was young and how this influenced my understanding of passing something down from one generation to the next.
image credit: Tilt-Shift Photography
   When I was a boy my uncle gave me his complete set of diecast matchbox cars.
   There is a photograph of me as a toddler hanging on to our family coffee table, grinning in the flashlight of the camera’s aim, illuminated – darkening the background where you can see strewn on the carpet a multitudinous display of diecast cars. Not only did my uncle give me his entire set of matchbox cars but he and my aunt would take me on Saturdays to the flea market to scout out hidden diecast cars buried underneath piles and piles of junk. I was especially in love with the Matchbox brand, which started out in England as the Lesney company in the 1940s as a cheap way to sell toys to children during the war. I had Hot Wheels too. And I liked Corgi's models. But, my heart, in the end, was stuck on Matchbox.
    Visiting the flea market was a big deal. My aunt sold fashion for porcelain dolls. When she and my uncle frequented the flea market stalls, they were looking for deals on doll fashions. My aunt instructed me on the first day I tagged along to help them pick out fabrics. "Don't touch anything," she told me. She put her arms behind her back and turned around to show me, saying, "this is how you walk. Hold on to your arm so you can catch it if it tries to grab something on the shelf." She was right. The flea market stalls were filled with items that screamed "tangible!" The musty smelling curtains and chain-smoking clerks, ogling collectors handling precious prints of Andy Warhol Marilyn Monroe's and 1950s Hugh Hefner Playboys were for me, a boy's wonderland. I obeyed my aunt, though, and tried not to touch. Besides, I had no interest in handling thin veined china or opaque Depression-era glass. I wanted the toys. While my aunt and uncle felt and measured lacy fabrics, I would look for cigar boxes and glass cases filled with diecast cars, hoping to find the prized Matchbox models that would add to my collection.