songs of experience

I just checked Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being out of the library. I can’t believe I made it to age 44 … nearly 25 years of my life as a reader … never having been assigned this book. By “assigned,” I don’t just mean a reading assignment for class (I have a BA and an MA in English, along with a certification to teach hich school English); I mean when the universe insists you must read a certain book. I remember finding Sherwood Anderson this way, and Willa Cather, William Saroyan and Edgar Lee Masters … all canonical American writers, but somehow never covered in school.

My ex, a Shakespeare professor, blames it on the disitegration of traditional literature studies (in the name of political correctness) at university. Relativism opens the English department barn door to all sorts of critters. This can be a good thing (i.e. studying album lyrics as poetry. I’ll never forget hearing/reading Bob Dylan’s Tangled Up in Blue my sophomore year in college) or it can be a waste of time. The great writers of great books should be taught year in and year out. And don’t give me this crap about point of view determining greatness. A story is a story. Dostoevsky was a brilliant storyteller, Keats a perfect poet, Virginia Woolf the master of capturing a moment of consciousness.

A moment of being …

She draws a distinction between moments of being and non-being that I find particularly interesting. Frank Shorter (and others) once descibed two, opposite states of consciousness while running: associative and disassociative. Associative running occurs in a hard work-out or race, where all of your psychic energy is focused on the physical act of running (your breath, your legs, arms, the clock, that person’s back, the side stitch you might have - it’s all being closely monitored in this associative state). Disassociative running is when you’re NOT paying attention to the act of running … you might be thinking of work, the kids, Aunt Martha’s funeral, a hair appointment, the oniony smell of grass clippings, any and all things NOT physical.

Now, it takes both kinds of running to create a balanced training program … and, I suspect, it takes both kinds of living (being and non-being) to create a balanced life.

an excerpt from A Sketch of the Past

“This leads to a digression, which perhaps may explain a little of my own psychology; even of other people’s. Often when I have been writing one of my so-called novels I have been baffled by this same problem; that is, how to describe what I call in my private shorthand – ‘non-being’. Every day includes much more non-being than being. Yesterday, for example, Tuesday the 18th of April, was as it happened a good day; above the average in ‘being.’ It was fine; I enjoyed writing these first pages … I walked along the river and, save that the tide was out, the country, which I notice very closely always, was coloured and shaded as I like – there were the willows, I remember, all plumy and soft green and purple against the blue. I also read Chaucer with pleasure and began a book – the memoirs of Madame de la Fayette – which interested me. These separate moments of being were however embedded in many moments of non-being. I have already forgotten what Leonard and I talked about at lunch; and at tea; although it was a good day the goodness was embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool.

This is always so. A great part of every day is not lived consciously. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner, writing orders to Mabel; washing; cooking; book-binding. When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger. I had a slight temperature last week and the whole day was non-being. The real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being.

As a child then, my days, just as they do now, contained a large proportion of this cotton wool, this non-being. Week after week passed at St. Ives and nothing made any dint upon me. Then for no reason that I know about, there was a sudden violent shock; something happened so violently that I remembered it all my life.

…I still have the peculiarity that I receive these sudden shocks, they are now always welcome; after the first surprise, I always feel instantly that they are particularly valuable. And so I go on to suppose that 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.”

-Virginia Woolf