Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Diary, edited by Leonard Woolf.

03/11/2003
Reading Virginia Woolf’s diary. I’m interested in her writing in her diary about writing in her diary. Particularly this entry:

Easter Sunday, April 20th, 1919… "I got out this diary and read, as one always does read one’s own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity. I confess that the rough and random style of it, often so ungrammatical, and crying for a word altered, afflicted me somewhat. I am trying to tell whichever self it is that reads this hereafter that I can write very much better; and take no time over this; and forbid her to let the eye of man behold it. And now I may add my little compliment to the effect that it has a slapdash and vigour and sometimes hits an unexpected bull’s eye. But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, and thus have to lay hands on words, choose them and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink.... What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think on re-reading my old columns, is not to play the part of censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time…"

So, here I go. Try not to be self-conscious this time. Try to just write whatever comes out. Yeah, even though I am watched at all hours of the day and night. By whom? It doesn’t matter. They are there watching and I am on stage. I have written about this before, in “What I Know About Being Seen.” Well, I will write for a while, anyway.

Virginia was a voracious reader. Why? It seems as if reading is as much a part of the work as writing. That is also reassuring, since I spend so much time “taking in” (reading, seeing movies, etc.) It’s the “putting out” that I’ve had trouble with. How to add to the huge accumulation of material already in the world? Not be a mere consumer. Although writers need readers. Artists need people to appreciate their work. But how to be both? And how to let what I take in inform and enrich what I put out? And how to begin putting out in the first place? (I’ve never been so prudish in my life!)

I’m sitting on the BART train (Well, not at this moment. Right now I’m sitting in my studio at my computer typing up what I wrote by hand on the BART train yesterday.) 8:31pm. Tuesday, 3/11/03. Going home to Berkeley. Going to meet Michael at the gym (24-Hr Fitness) where I’ll use the elliptical trainer machine and try to avoid looking at the TV screen showing CNN – details of Bush’s impending war against Iraq. Let endorphins flood my brain. Wash away (temporarily) this anxiety. What will become of us? That’s one reason it’s hard to create. Because it’s hard to think about the future. Hard to imagine that my efforts will matter. That there will actually still be people here 20 years from now. At 37, Virginia Woolf wrote to her future 50-year old self. I’m 38. 50 is only 12 years away. I, of course, may not still be alive in 12 years. But will the world? Will there still be people on earth 12 years from now? I guess I have to act as if there will be. I would hate to get to age 50 and regret all the time I wasted worrying about the future. (OK, just think about that last sentence for a minute.)

This is the thing about the future: I’d like to get there having spent a lot of time paying attention to each moment of the present. I’d like to get there with a store of experiences and memories. This means I have to make my wish for the future and then somehow let it go. Let it be in the background, so that it doesn’t interfere with my work – which is now.

03/12/2003
Virginia Woolf: “And with it all how happy I am – if it weren’t for my feeling that it’s a strip of pavement over an abyss.”

And that pretty much sums up everything, doesn’t it? Everything I strive for. Everything I do to take my mind off the pain or essential boredom. All my little efforts: a strip of pavement over an abyss. Maybe I’ll make that the new name of my web site.

03/13/2003
V. Woolf is a woman desperately trying to convince herself that she writes for herself, her own satisfaction, and yet she is at the same time consumed with worries about what others will think. Extremely critical of others’ writing and therefore equally hard on herself.

On 4/24/1925 she writes:

"But L. and I were too too happy, as they say; if it were now to die etc. Nobody shall say of me that I have not known perfect happiness…"

Perhaps someone who has known perfect happiness can die. Perhaps it is those of us who have not, who wait for that happiness, who cannot die. Yet. When do we finally give up? How long will I go on before I have finally had enough?

03/17/2003
Written Saturday, 2/27/1926:

"Mrs. Webb's book has made me think a little what I could say of my own life.... But there were causes in her life: prayer; principle. None in mine. Great excitability and search after something.... I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say "This is it"? My depression is a harassed feeling. I'm looking: but that's not it -- that's not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it? Then (as I was walking through Russell Square last night) I see the mountains in the sky: the great clouds; and the moon which is risen over Persia; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is "it." It is not exactly beauty that I mean. It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory; achieved. A sense of my own strangeness, walking on the earth is there too: of the infinite oddity of the human position; trotting along Russell Square with the moon up there and those mountain clouds. Who am I, what am I, and so on: these questions are always floating about in me: and then I bump against some exact fact -- a letter, a person, and come to them again with a great sense of freshness. And do it goes on. But on this showing, which is true, I think, I do fairly frequently come upon this "it"; and then feel quite at rest."

I too have moments of that "it," but they are not enough. I have to start meditatng again. I know what my parents would say. Come back to the Church and you will find it. But I find no absolute truth there. And I wonder if the only thing that is really absolute is change. Such a precarious world. People in and out, and things. The next computer upgrade. The next president. Apartment. Meal. The next shower. Haircut. Pair of shoes. Nothing lasts -- not cleanliness nor clouds nor even concrete. Just look what they did to the building across the street. (Picture on my home page.)

It does help to see myself as a traveller, an explorer. To constantly say to myself, "So this is what it's like" buying a BART ticket. "So this is what it's like" waiting in the sun for the bus to San Rafael. "So this is what it's like" to be stitched through tight with pain. "So this is what it's like" to stay up for 48 hours and still not be tired. "So this is what it's like" to feel so heavy I can't move, to get a tattoo, to pierce my own ear, to eat until my sides ache and still not be full, to be lonely and afraid and jealous, to be oh so very very tired.

In 1926 also is a brilliant description of a "nervous breakdown in miniature," which is the closest anyone has ever come to writing out my own experience of depression and recovery.

03/18/2003

And by implication, during depression, the power to make images, to create is greatly diminished. In my case, it is completely gone. I can do accounting. I can play card games. I can wash the dishes. But anything that requires the least bit of creativity or decision-making leaves. Last fall I couldn't even organize the books on my bookshelf. I suppose, if I had wanted to line them up in strictly alphabetical order or some other such black and white system, I could have done it. But the system I wanted to create had to do with theme, subject, how much I liked the books. The task was simply overwhelming.

She writes 12/20/1927 on having children:

"...And yet oddly enough I scarcely want children of my own now. This insatiable desire to write something before I die, this ravaging sense of the shortness and feverishness of life, make me cling, like a man on a rock, to my own anchor. I don't like the physicalness of having children of one's own."

I feel like I never have to explain myself again. She is doing it nicely for me.

03/19/2003
On 06/23/1929 she writes:

"Directly I stop working I feel I am sinking down, down. And as usual I feel that if I sink further I shall reach the truth. That is the only mitigation; a kind of nobility. Solemnity. I shall make myself face the fact that there is nothing -- nothing for any of us. Work, reading, writing are all disguises; and relations with people. Yes, even having children would be useless."

03/27/2003
Woolf writes 04/15/1939 as her country contemplates entering the war.

"...What's odd...is the severance that war seems to bring: everything becomes meaningless: can't plan: then there comes too the community feeling: all England thinking the same thing -- this horror of war -- at the same moment. Never felt it so strong before. Then the lull and one lapses again into private separation."

Our war has already begun. A week ago. Pictures on CNN for days. What else is there to do? We are all soft targets.

04/01/2003
Wow! Woolf is describing her experiences during the war. She describes bombs exploding outside her house, while I listen to the bombing of Baghdad on the radio. She writes on 05/20/1940:

"The war is like a desperate illness. For a day, it entirely obsesses: then the feeling faculty gives out; next day one is disembodied, in the air."

On first reading this passage, I thought, "Yes, that's how I feel." Then I remembered. She was actually worried about being killed. How can my own horror possibly compare?

This next passage on 10/02/1940 is chilling:

"Should I think of death? Last night a great heavy plunge of bomb under the window.... I said to L.: I don't want to die yet. The chances are against it. But they're aiming at the railway and the power works. They get closer every time.... Oh I try to remember how one's killed by a bomb. I've got it fairly vivid -- the sensation: but can't see anything but suffocating nonentity following after. I shall think -- oh I wanted another 10 years -- not this -- and I shan't, for once, be able to describe it. It -- I mean death; no, the scrunching and scrambling, the crushing of my bone shade in on my very active eye and brain: the process of putting out the light -- painful? Yes. Terrifying. I suppose so. Then a swoon; a drain; two or three gulps attempting consciousness -- and then dot dot dot."

"Oh I wanted another 10 years." But next year she will drown herself. This is what it's like isn't it? The dark and light. The up and down of it. Desperately wanting to survive while under attack; then, the ultimate futility of it all washes over in the stillness. And not to be able to write what it's like in those final moments. To give up so completely that you no longer want or need to describe the final end. Because none of us will be able to, will we?

The final paragraph of this diary. I suppose what Leonard Woolf thought was appropriate to end with. Does the diary continue after this? Anyway, on 03/18/1941 she writes:

"Occupation is essential. And now with pleasure, I find that it's seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down."

It's a good ending. Neat. But real life isn't. I want to know what was left out. I'm going to read some more Virginia Woolf. But first I'm going to break her up with someone else. Someone more modern I think, to give my brain a short break.