On being predictable

I like being unpredictable. A dark horse. A black sheep. A wildcard. By which I mean my opinions are sometimes an unusual shape, and that shape is well-formed and I like it that way. But when I ask you who you think my favourite poets are (which I know you ask yourself all the time, right), I am being rhetorical. Now my horse is a soft grey and my sheep a very dirty white. 

I want to couch these names in a paragraph so you don't inadvertently read them. But you did anyway, didn't you? I own both the single and complete editions of Sylvia Plath's poetry and her only novel The Bell Jar. And the only poems whose lines I know by heart (my memory is probably more woolly than my sheep) are Emily Dickinson's: "Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me / The carriage held but just ourselves / And immortality..."

I discovered Dickinson first, as a hardcover Christmas gift, the corners of the pages of which are now dirty with thumb prints. I opened the book (then probably smelled the pages) and fell into step with her poems. "Tell the Truth but tell it slant / Success in Circuit lies / Too bright for our infirm Delight / The Truth's superb surprise." 

Later, in Grade 11, we were assigned to collect different works (prose, poetry, biography, etc.) around a theme of our choice (copyright be damned). I decided to choose works and then find the theme that tied them together (which, yes, means I couldn't think of anything). So I did as asked and, upon reviewing the texts to try to find my theme, found that every piece I had chosen was written by a woman and most were about some aspect of the female experience.

And that was how I discovered Sylvia Plath. I can't remember the exact poem I chose, but her poem Stillborn describes my current frustration with my creative process: "These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis. / They grew their toes and fingers well enough, / Their little foreheads bulged in concentration."

Reeling, I tripped over Virginia Woolf and her essay A Room of One's Own. (Remember that I'm a dinosaur and this was before the ubiquity of the internet, so all this research was done, like, in a library and *gasp* by hand.) I lifted the opening paragraph of the text, without (I confess) reading the entire essay: "All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point -- a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved."

A few years later, I spent a few wintry afternoons reclining in the sun, lost in a paperback of The Waves (which smelled like all books should smell), which was up until then the greatest novel I had ever read. Dickinson mastered stream of consciousness, using it to erode boundaries without losing clarity -- I'm thinking of characters here, because characters were all I cared about back then; plot be damned! 

So, what's predictable about these writers, you ask, predictably? 

What's predictable is that these poets and writers have been adopted ad nauseum to illustrate the feminist cause. They've been held up as examples that women are worthy, as successful women in a 'man's world' -- which almost immediately became a women's world! (Writing poetry and novels was seen as a 'man's work' until the early twentieth century when women authors 'corrupted' the profession, feminising it.) 

We adopted them and their work until they became passe and ignoring them became an equally feminist action. Now, being a lover of the works of Dickinson, Woolf and Plath is a phase you go through, like dying your hair some outrageous colour or ... being a feminist. 

In this, I'm prepared to be predictable, my livestock (to stretch the metaphor to its breaking point like a frayed elastic band) the purest white. 

In defence of Mss Woolf and Plath

Where there's smoke there's fire, conventional wisdom tells me. At first I drafted a rampage about the fact that many other things release smoke and recommended changing the idiom to: Where there's smoke there's combustion. (I even looked up the relationship between the two, discovering that smoke is just a change in state that is a by-product of a chemical reaction. Huh. That's why I am not a scientist.)

Then I realised a logical error of deduction: Just because smoke is a necessary condition of fire doesn't mean fire is a necessary condition of smoke. Which, on second thought means the idiom still doesn't make sense, since you aren't guaranteed to find a fire if you see smoke - you could come upon a heap of smouldering phosphorous, for example.

If you are already bored, I apologise. But you know how I like to the circle the point, in the hopes of catching it (and you) unawares. Consider this added value: a science, philosophy and English lesson, for the price of wading through two paragraphs of in search of a point.

On to my heap of phosphorous: Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath are two of my favourite authors - and have been since I was in high school. Through their writing, I saw women who felt as I feel. Women who wrote in the 20s and 60s, when society was still (arguably) unaccepting of a woman's voice. I saw strong women, with force of wills, who dared.

I think I also saw a promise, that I could be a writer, even before I knew I could. (In my experience, being a writer is not a choice. It is a physical sense, an innate means of experiencing the world. But that doesn't mean using the sense doesn't take courage. Try it, just once, and I dare you not to tear up or delete the first draft in frustration.)

The Waves by Ms Woolf is my favourite of her novels, and one of my favourite novels of all. A group of college friends congregate at the funeral of one of their party. They haven't seen each other since college, about five years prior if I remember correctly. Buried hurts and loves surface, buried identities too. As if merely being together has the power to swallow time. Regression. Suspense. Suspicion. Ruined love. Alliance. Written as stream of consciousness.

Don't be put off by the opaque ramblings of James Joyce! Or by the echoes of navel-gazing, Woolf-inspired movies.

The Modernists gravitated to stream of consciousness - artists, writers, even psychologists. Few did it well; most attempts read like the experiments they were (a la Joyce). Ms Woolf actually uses punctuation and paragraphs; she restrains her liberties to the character voices. Her novels have a languid sensitivity that her non-fiction does not; they do not have the buried rage of Joyce's - although both carve out the inner landscapes of their characters with fine chisels.

This is not a plot-driven novel. There are no meet-cutes, murders or betrayals, except in the past tense, and definitely no car chases or explosions. It feels like The Secret History, except that here the dead guy is already dead. All of these reasons are why I would give body parts to have written The Waves.

This post's smouldering phosphorous is made of the associations of reading Ms Woolf and/or Plath. Of worshipping them. Both authors have become symbols (with or against their wills?), of feminism and liberalism. What does that say of me? Not of me as I am but of me as you see me. I am a feminist and a liberal (give me a chance!), but I hate those words. They make me cringe as much as you.

I believe that I have the right to navigate my own path. I also believe that chauvinism is institutionalised (I have evidence, my favourite of which is the exclamation that I am 'a smart cookie'). I believe that humanity is as good as it is bad, that people just want love and respect (again, I have evidence). I don't kill anything, even insects, because who am I to take life?

Mss Woolf and Plath are the smoke rising from this heap.

That irks me - that beliefs should be reduced to superficial revolts like bra-burning and chaining bunny-huggers to trees, diminishing their power. That I should be reduced by this association and so disregarded. Granted, we need to make snap judgements all the time because the world is flinging stimuli at us and we don't have enough hands to catch them.

Yet, we are prepared to take the time to read a novel like The Waves and understand the characters - even empathise with them. We are ready to open their boxes but I must huddle in the one I have been forced into. Not a chance. Instead, I rant and rave, because if you cannot walk in line, you must heckle from the sidelines.

A Suicide, a War and a Shipwreck

Just as a piece of writing is threaded with symbols and themes from the writer's subconscious - it being the real writer, I would argue, and us just fingers pounding a keyboard like the hypothetical monkey - so that same piece of writing adopts the symbols and themes of the reader's subconscious, and is kneaded into a slightly different, still recognisable shape. Nothing revolutionary here: the author never died; he just joined hands with the reader, the text itself, the larger context and so on. Like a nursery rhyme. (What this means for the higher power that Nietzsche pronounced dead, who knows. Maybe he was always just a pretty rhyme.)

Everything I read is forced into conversation with everything else, into saying things they perhaps didn't mean to or didn't know they were going to say.

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides references a scene from Mrs Dalloway and by extension, for me, The Waves both by Virginia Woolf and, of course, the movie The Hours. From postmodernism to modernism, from a novel in which the collective narrator points to us as fellow voyeurs, to a novel in which we are invited to watch. All of this ends in Ms Woolf walking into a river with a pocketful of rocks and nods to Sylvia Plath with her head in an oven. Giving the finger to a world that we are all forced to watch consume itself. By defiantly consuming one's self. Although Mr Eugenides might argue that this act is really desertion, leaving one's fellow soldiers to advance on the front-line alone.

Then there's A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, the structure of which mimics that of Mrs Dalloway, but with only brief moments of her sympathy, which is demoted to sentimentality, as if to protect one's self against the fire from the front-line. And briefer moments of shining transcendence, which are even more self-consciously sentimental and ultimately held underwater until they stop shining.

And where has this extended metaphor of war come from? From The Seizure of Power by Czeslaw Milosz, where political allegiance is a bit of flotsam being hurried along the world's oceans. From here to the desecrated naivety of Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance by Richard Powers (both of the characters and the author) and a leap to A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel, in which the French Revolution is a soup of naivety, childhood traumas and survival mechanisms.

I could swim my way into science fiction, psychology texts, African literary fiction and South American magic realism in a few strokes, but I suspect you're already swimming in another direction or colliding against one of those pieces of flotsam - or perhaps clinging to it together with Pi's tiger from Life of Pi by Martel Yann.

The world is just another text or a library (an underwater one if we want to continue the metaphor) - gosh and here we escape into the corridors of Jorges Louis Borge's infinite library and his lottery.

If you want to see my soul, here it is, laid bare. (Prometheus and his liver.) It's as good a map as you're ever going to get, although there is no key except that of your own subconscious. (And ricochet back to A Single Man and on to Michel de Certeau's 'Walking in the City' and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Marco Polo....)