Who's Afraid? Fear Not!

A WRITER, ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONOUS
"Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully
in what is commonly thought big than
in what is commonly thought small. . . .
Down, down into the midst of ordinary things."

1902 & 1927


Rest in Peace Virginia Woolf:
25 January 1882 ~ 28 March 1941

"I am now galloping over Mrs. Dalloway. . . . The reviewers will say that it is disjointed because of the mad scenes not connecting with the Dalloway scenes. And I suppose there is some superficial glittery writing. But is it 'unreal'? Is it mere accomplishment? I think not. . . . it seems to leave me plunged deep in the richest strata of my mind. I can write and write and write now: the happiest feeling in the world." ~ Virginia Woolf, December 13, 1924

**********************

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Fear no more the frown o’ the great;
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The scepter, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.

Fear no more the lightning flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan:
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.

No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renownèd be thy grave!

Shakespeare
from Cymbeline (Act IV, Scene 2, 2656 - 2689)

The opening lines of this Shakespearean song are quoted
several times by Clarissa Dalloway in Woolf's novel:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages. (13)

"Fear no more," said Clarissa.
Fear no more the heat o' the sun. (44)

. . . the world seems to be saying "that is all" more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking.” (59)

. . . she repeated and the words came to her,
Fear no more the heat of the sun.
She must go back to them. But what an extraordinary night. (283)

Google Doodle on Woolf's 136th Birthday

**********************

Sometimes the connections are all about connections.

Armin van Buuren:
"Everyone’s connected but no one is connecting."
from the song: "Alone"

Joan Didion:
"In this light, all narrative was sentimental. In this light
all connections were equally meaningful and equally senseless."
from the essay: The White Album

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
"If there's the slightest connection,
it's worth thinking about."
from the novel Player Piano

Donna Tartt:
"What held me fast . . . was the element of chance:
random disasters . . . converging on the same unseen point . . .
You could study the connections for years and never work it out
-- it was all about things coming together, things falling apart,
time warp . . . a way of seeing things twice, or more than twice.
. . . a field awareness of unseen patterns . . . ."(305)

"To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint.
Maybe I only see a pattern because I've been staring too long. But then
again. . . maybe I see a pattern because it's there." (768)
from the novel The Goldfinch

Annie Barrows
"In books . . . things were connected; people did something
and then something else happened because of that.
I could understand them. But outside, here in the real world,
things seemed to happen for no reason that I could see.
Maybe there was no reason." (374)

"Did most girls my age feel the way I did, as if the people
I thought I knew had turned out to have a thousand little tunnels*
leading away from the face they showed the world? . . .
The buried parts, now, they were fascinating but ominous, too." (128)
from the novel The Truth According to Us

Virginia Woolf:
"I should say a good deal about The Hours [later entitled Mrs. Dalloway]
and my discovery: how I dig out beautiful caves* behind my characters:
I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humor, depth.
The idea is that the caves shall connect
and each come to daylight at the present moment."
from A Writer's Diary
~ Thursday, August 30, 1923 ~

*I'm also seeing a connection here between Woolf's "beautiful caves"
and Barrows' "thousand little tunnels . . . fascinating but ominous"!

**********************

The previous year, Woolf had written:

"Mrs. Dalloway has branched into a book;
and I adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide;
the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side
-- something like that. Septimus Smith? is that a good name?"
~ Saturday, October 14, 1922 ~

And in 1998, film critic Jack Kroll wrote:

Mrs.Dalloway's day is climaxed by her party, Smith's by his suicide. But these contrasting events are two parts of a symbolic whole, Virginia Woolf herself. Mrs. Dalloway is a Woolf without the genius, while Smith's fate prefigures the troubled Woolf's own suicide in 1941 [on March 28th]. In her notebook Woolf wrote, 'Mrs. D seeing the truth. SS seeing the insane truth.'"

from "Down in the Upper Crust:
Virginia Woolf's Landmark Novel Dazzles on Screen"
in Newsweek, March 2, 1998

**********************

In conclusion, only last month I was dismayed to find this trivializing assessment (an opinion I suppose shared by many) of Clarissa Dalloway's immersion into the details of one perhaps ordinary yet fateful day. In a book about teaching that I otherwise liked very much, Heather Kirn Lanier writes:

"In college, I'd spent my years studying the narrative stances of Virginia Woolf, appreciating the relative plotlessness of Mrs. Dalloway a book in which, let's face it, not much happens."

Au contraire! For Woolf's characters, it is a day filled with grief, intropsection, tension; and enlarged understanding. Oh dear. One does not throw a party -- nor encounter death in the midst of that party -- everyday. Still, though, I was touched to read that Kirn Lanier's students mistook her black and white postcard of Virginia Woolf to be "some great - grandmother of mine" (47, 77).

Virginia ~ Woolfpack
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Saturday, April 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading ~ "Makin' a list, checking' it twice . . ."
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

There on the Edge of Autumn

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"I am a leaf!"
All of today's connections are drawn from the writing and photography of my friend Jan Donley. References to her work have appeared several times on this blog (and The Quotidian Kit) right from the very beginning.* It was Jan who said, "September always smelled different from August. It just did." Likewise, October smells different from September; and November from October. As my son Sam said earlier today, "It smells good out here; it smells cold!" Yes -- it smells like November!

Excerpts from Jan's Journal

Gray / 21 November 2010
The bare trees covered the hillside, and from a distance, it looked as if the hill was covered in fur. Funny that way—how hard branches soften. . . .

The sun shone down from the western sky and pieces of light through the branches made stripes along the shaded ground.

[Out for a walk with her dog Gray] She could see her breath and Gray’s too as he panted along. They stopped at the edge of a drop, too steep to walk down. The sun disappeared behind a cloud, and the air turned colder. She grabbed Gray up into her arms and took in the warmth of his coat against her bare face. He squirmed to be set free. So she put him back down and squatted next to him—there on the edge of autumn looking out toward winter.

Alone / 21 October 2010
Opal looked out the window. A gray overcast filled the sky. Leaves hung on trees—orange, yellow, red. She watched one fall. It twirled and almost seemed to shine against the dark day.

She put on her red jacket and her brown shoes.

“I’m going outside!” she called, knowing that Aunt Frances may or may not hear her. Aunt Frances had her own worries, and sometimes Opal felt alone.

She opened the front door and ventured down the stoop steps and onto the grass, covered with leaves that rattled under her feet.

She made her way onto the sidewalk—also leaf-covered. She shuffled through the leaves and watched as their colors tumbled over her shoes. They crackled and popped. The sound made Opal laugh.

Some leaves fell from limbs and other swirled up from the ground.

It was just a fall day. Opal knew that. Days come and go, Opal thought.

But something in the swirling and the falling made her stop.

She twirled herself one, two, three times.

“I am a leaf,” she called to the sky, to the trees, to the day.

She ran along the sidewalk, her red coat glimmering on that gray day.

She chanted, “I am a leaf” down the block and across the wide street to the park with the pond and the ducks and the caw cawing crows.

It was enough for the moment, to be one of many swirling through the day.

(Look closely! See the bench?)
And now some excerpts from Jan's short story "Blind"
Not necessarily an autumnal story,
but a back - to - school story,
so it must be Fall!
Sometimes you look up at the sun and you get blinded. You put your hand up as a shield, and you have sight again, but it’s kind of awkward to keep your hand there like that. And sometimes, you meet someone who blinds you, and even when you try to really see that person, it’s awkward. So you put your head down or look the other way. That’s how it was with Caroline.

She blinded me. . . .

The narrator here is Franny, trying to understand the complicated feelings she has for her classmate Caroline. One of my favorite elements of the story is their homework session:

“You really get these poems, don’t you?” And the truth was, I did. I could read a poem and figure out the puzzle of it faster than my mom could do the Daily Jumble in the Gazette.

For homework, we had to read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot. Mr. Zellner, our English teacher, got all teary-eyed when he talked to us about it. He carried the book around the classroom and read parts aloud:

“For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.”
I looked around and most everyone, including Caroline, was yawning or staring out the window. Me, I was listening.

Mr. Zellner asked, “What do you think Eliot is trying to convey when he writes the line, ‘It is impossible to say just what I mean?’”

I raised my hand. . . .

“Well.” I looked down at the words in the poem. “He has all these memories bottled up. He wants them to mean something, but he’s not sure they mean anything at all.”
“You got all of that out of one line?” Caroline asked.

“It’s poetry,” Mr. Zellner said, as if that answered everything. He read some more of the poem:

“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.”
"Mermaids . . . .” Caroline stared at the page, and then she looked up at me. “Why mermaids?”

“It’s a metaphor,” I said.

Mr. Zellner smiled really big. “Yes! Yes! That’s right. Did everyone hear Frances?”

I wished he would call me Franny; but for some reason, teachers liked to use full names.

Mr. Zellner continued, “Our poet, Mr. Eliot, is using the mermaid’s song as a metaphor for missed opportunities, for loss, for—” Mr. Zellner stopped. He looked around the room— “what we wish we had done. Haven’t you all had moments when you wished you had done something different? The poem is about regret.”

“Yeah,” Caroline said. “I think I get it. Thanks to Franny.”

*****************
I love the way Jan has incorporated literary analysis right into the body of the story. Everything she says here about "Prufrock" is exactly what I've tried to tell my students in the past and what I told Ben & Sam when (luckily!) they were each assigned to read this poem in high school. [Click to hear T. S. Eliot himself recite.]

I also like the way that when it comes to poetry, Franny just knows. I earned a similar credential when discussing Jane Hamilton's novel A Map of the World in one of my long ago book groups. There is a sad, sad scene in the book when Alice's family kind of accidentally (not maliciously but simply because they don't understand what it is or how important) throw away her map of the world. When I asked my fellow readers if they had reached that scene yet, they weren't sure, so I pointed it out to them, since to me it was such a crucial turning point, not to mention that it totally illuminates the title of the book. Upon a second reading, I had to admit that no where is it specifically stated: "No! Wait! Stop! The family is throwing her map away!" Yet, when the group asked me, how I knew -- well, I just know!

Playing on the theme of "Blind," Jan writes that even Mr. Zellner "squinted a little" not to mention that he gets "all teary-eyed" when reading "Prufrock!" Franny at first averts her eyes out of shyness but later "nodded into the bright sun" of Caroline; and Caroline takes a moment just to look at the sky, nothing more, nothing less. The story concludes with the two young women sitting on a park bench in the late afternoon autumn sun, discussing the difficulty of making direct eye contact, the varying degrees of vegetarianism, and their upcoming Emily Dickinson assignment. Then, as Emily would surely have it:

"We stayed on the bench till the sun dropped.

In the dark it was so much easier to see."

View from the Bench
A few more Connections:

1. Jan enjoyed it awhile back when I told her that Franny's literary expertise reminded me -- in a good way of course! -- of Velma in Scooby-Doo. You know, that episode in which Daphne asks her, "Velma, do you have a book for every occasion?" And Velma replies, "Actually, yes." Which, in turn, brings to mind the question I was asked in college when I worked on the literary magazine: "Do you have a poem for every poem?" And, like Velma, I just had to say, "Actually, yes." Jan wrote back to me: "I am especially happy about your Scooby-Doo Reference. Diane loves her Scooby-Doo, and it's so much fun to have that allusion in the midst of Eliot and Hamilton, etc."

Scooby and the Gang
2. In other popular culture, Jan's description of Franny and Caroline sitting at the park reminds me of the leafy, sunny scene in the movie Harriet the Spy when the best friends all roll down the hill in the park:

Harriet and Friends
3. Franny puzzles over a comment that Caroline makes about various boys in their class -- "He wants me" -- and asks her to explain, “What does that feel like?”
“What does what feel like?” Caroline asked.
“Being wanted. What does it feel like to be wanted?”
“You’re kidding me, right?” . . .
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m kidding.” But I wasn’t.

This exchange made me think of a "fun fact" about the casting of The Graduate: Robert Redford was considered for the role of Benjamin before Dustin Hoffman. But Redford disqualified himself when the directors told him that the character had to portray a sense of defeat -- like being turned down for a date on a Friday night. And Redford said something like, "Huh? What do you mean?"

Similarly in the musical Jersey Boys the three macho Seasons don't want to sing the song "Walk Like a Man," written by the fourth, more "emo" Season (Bob Gaudio, in real life). The three dudes are complaining that it makes no sense -- "What do you mean, like a man instead of a woman? Walk like a girl?" Gaudio says, "No, like a man instead of boy. It's about growing up, standing up for yourself, not being twisted around someone else's little finger." The others just gawk at him uncomprehending. What? Apparently they're just not the type to ever have been twisted around anyone's little finger. What does that feel like?

4. Additional Favorite Journal Entries that I would recommend:
House
Washington Street (see text below, in "Comments")
The rain fell on yellow leaves

* 5. Previous Jan Donley Posts on my blogs:
Lucky Rock
Lost & Found
9 / 11 Retrospective [also on Quotidian Kit]
Dagmar's Birthday [also on Quotidian Kit]
Everyone Loves Stories

Scales
Sleight of Hand
The Little Door
Savor September!
Happy Birthday Coyote!

6. A bit more "Prufrock"

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Wednesday, November 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com