Saw myself in some Woolfian words this morning, then copied the entire bit by hand into my notebook as some kind of mirrored reminder to hold up any time I feel crazy for needing a pen before human help or medicinal gold amid the worst of circumstances. It’s a crazy thing to explain; much lighter in words—and perhaps most sensical in words not my own.
The shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that if I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together. From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock. —Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being
That page (p 72, A Sketch of the Past) serves as a gentle reminder that I’m not the only loon with this strangely wired brain. The shock is where my word assembly reaches its height, too. It’s where my pain requires sense-making and unraveling, and where pleasure in its purest form—a sentence—reverberates loudest.
For Woolf, the shocks are documented as three moments of paralysis. One, followed by news of Mr. Valpy’s suicide and the apple tree in connection; second, her understanding of flowers as whole only when part of the Earth and third, frozen in the middle of a fight with Thoby, when she wonders, “Why hurt another person?” as his arms continue their senseless rhythm, blow after blow.
The paralyses are endlessly defining. It can be exhausting to live this way, and one of the layered reasons I escaped roles in news-writing, a career that forces temporary numbness as a temporary guise for strongwoman.
Shocks are longer to me, they demand reason when there may never be reason kind enough to allow shock to decrescendo enough so that one shock can endlessly jolt another to death. Instead, the shocks pile up until there’s far too much to manage and limited ink to do all the explaining.
At this moment, I am thinking of Kurt Vonnegut and urging myself to please notice when you are happy and hoping that shocks of the more jolly variety are just as reverberating, defining.
Likely a false hope, if past literature is our teacher.
—fiza