{"id":5314,"date":"2020-07-13T08:00:56","date_gmt":"2020-07-13T08:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/floridareview.cah.ucf.edu\/?post_type=article&p=5314"},"modified":"2020-07-13T08:00:56","modified_gmt":"2020-07-13T08:00:56","slug":"logos","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/logos\/","title":{"rendered":"Logos"},"content":{"rendered":"

The beginning of Virginia happened . . . when? That moment is lost in time. Early on, she was at the edge of my consciousness but still a writer whom, even as an English major, I had never read. Woolf wasn\u2019t on the syllabus in any of my classes\u2014not required reading in those days just before there were courses in feminist literature. After my graduation, I read Woolf with a vengeance. I liked the experimental novels well enough\u2014Jacob\u2019s Room, To the Lighthouse, The Waves<\/em>\u2014but what intrigued me most was the gradual publication of her letters and diaries.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

That wealth of material gave me a window on a life radically different from my own. For a period of years, I felt as if her friends were also my friends, and that the conversations she participated in were as important to me as they were for her. It was easy to achieve this intimacy. The diaries and letters are filled with minutiae, nuanced insights, deeply personal impressions, and remembered conversations. They offer more information than most people ever reveal about their lives. The details are so extensive. It would probably be possible to chronicle Woolf\u2019s daily life for decades.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I learned about her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, and about Virginia\u2019s marriage to Leonard Woolf, a Jewish writer, editor, liberal politician, and the man with whom she founded the revolutionary Hogarth Press. I was fascinated as her relationship with Vita Sackville-West unfolded, a love affair between two married women, flirtatious and communicative\u2014resulting in the high humor and euphoria of Woolf\u2019s novel Orlando<\/em>\u2014only to find a quieter resolution as they drifted apart.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What attracted me to Woolf? My life was completely unlike hers. I was not born into the London literati. I had my origins in a small town in northern Wisconsin. I had no famous father and no brothers at Cambridge. We definitely did not spend idyllic summers in Cornwall in a large house on the English seacoast waited on by servants, walking the beach, and playing games of cricket in the garden. My family took car trips across the American West, slogging along the interstates to see our country, camping out to save money, and eating macaroni and cheese out of a box.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I came from people whom Woolf might have dismissed or even despised and ridiculed\u2014from farmers, mill workers, and civil servants, from those who were uneducated, at least by Woolf\u2019s criteria. My people did not read books as a means of understanding the self, defining feelings, or interpreting the world. They worked. They were mostly just trying to survive and get by. I came from them, and yet I still wanted to be like Woolf. I wanted to write. Virginia became, at least for a decade, my higher power.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2014<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It\u2019s 2006. My friend Nancy and I are touring London. I am here partly in pursuit of my mentor\u2014Virginia Woolf. At this point, I\u2019ve read everything she\u2019s written. I\u2019ve waltzed through that embarrassment of riches\u2014the printed pages she left behind\u2014her novels, letters, diaries, essays, and articles. Now I\u2019m walking the streets she walked.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It\u2019s dusk when we board the London Eye for a bird\u2019s-eye view of the city beginning to turn on its lights. In our glass car, we rise and fall while feasting on this unparalleled view of London. Although it undoubtedly looked different in her time, this is Woolf\u2019s city\u2014a place she inhabited in all ways. After the ride, we choose to dine at the caf\u00e9 in the crypt below St. Martin\u2019s in the Fields. I order mushroom stroganoff with delicate new potatoes and a fennel salad. Nancy has a dish with steamed broccoli, cauliflower, and Savoy cabbage. Our globed glasses of white wine fracture light into the vaulted space.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It\u2019s wonderful, yes, and isn\u2019t this a moment Woolf might have chosen to memorialize? It seems to me I should write about it. What are we saying to one another? What are my thoughts and impressions of this day? If I don\u2019t get this down somehow, won\u2019t it be lost forever? I wonder. Does that really matter? Isn\u2019t it enough that Nancy and I are here sharing this moment?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Later, I lie awake with jet lag thinking about Woolf\u2019s second novel, Jacob\u2019s Room<\/em>. After a galloping romp through a young man\u2019s life at Cambridge, we learn that Jacob, the protagonist, has died as a soldier in World War I. The final scene of the novel has Jacob\u2019s mother and one of his friends cleaning out his rooms. They find Jacob\u2019s papers strewn across his desk as though he had left for a stroll in the park.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There\u2019s a horror in this vision, a sense of futility and emptiness. A person\u2014vital and rich with life\u2014is suddenly gone. The novel poses the ultimate question. What is left of all that sensation, what remains of so much rich lived experience once the person has passed? It occurs to me that, in her novels, Woolf is almost always writing toward the same end game. Yes, this is happening\u2014this vivid and incredibly complex life tapestry. Yet, it\u2019s also disappearing. Suddenly, because of either time or death, a chunk of it is gone, lost forever.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Woolf\u2019s most autobiographical novel, To the Lighthouse,<\/em> chronicles a family\u2019s summer in Cornwall. But those moments are also lost. When they return to the house on the shore years later, the whole emotional tenor and tempo of their lives has changed. The mother has died, leaving them to struggle. The long-awaited trip to the lighthouse takes on a completely different meaning than it did on a day in the distant past when it was impossible to go because of bad weather.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At the novel\u2019s end, Lily Briscoe, a peripheral character, takes center stage. She is a spinster and a Sunday painter, a woman not taken seriously by the male-dominated art world. Yet, she perseveres. Lily is at work painting the Cornwall scene when the family returns. Finally, almost giving up in frustration, unable to express the whole as she sees it, Lily declares a truce. The painting must be finished. There\u2019s nothing more to be done. \u201cI have had my vision,\u201d she announces. And this seems the best we can hope for\u2014to have that vision and attempt to record something about it even as the moment is passing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Woolf tries to preserve those moments that don\u2019t last, the globes of being and experience that simply disappear. She seems to be saying it\u2019s important to celebrate the freshness, newness, and immediacy that make the world overflow. But the other side of this promise is the tragedy of time passing, the heartbreak of death and loss. I can clearly see this is Woolf\u2019s vision. But is it mine?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

After my trip to London, sick of the insistent need to turn every experience into copy, I stopped writing for five or six years. I told myself it was enough to have my experiences without constantly formulating words to describe them. It was an immense relief.\u00a0 My mind felt free. And yet, there must have been something of a warring voice within me because I saved my notes\u2014notes about that day in the city and the meal I shared with Nancy. I must have believed that, one day, I would need or want them, and I did.\u00a0 But when I finally began to write again, it was with a different attitude. I knew I could live without writing, even without Virginia.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2014<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Buddhists say that, to become enlightened, you must actually kill the Buddha, meaning you must destroy your idols. This comes from an old Zen koan attributed to the Zen Master Linji, a Chinese Zen Buddhist monk who founded the Rinzai sect of Zen Buddhism and who died in 866.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The saying says: If you meet a Buddha, kill the Buddha.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I guess I did this to Woolf after my trip to London. Not that I actually killed Virginia, but I doubted her. I saw her as a person, brilliant but limited, part of her own time, her class, and her culture. Woolf gave me a window on her world but not a passage into it. She had been my teacher, but perhaps I had learned what I needed to learn from her. She taught me to pay attention, to notice details, to hear my environment, and to listen to my own thoughts.\u00a0 At this realization, there was disappointment and a sense of loss. It felt a bit like losing an old friend either to death or indifference. It\u2019s all well and good to have idols, but suddenly, I knew I would never be this person who spent three weeks touring Greece with the painter and art critic Roger Fry.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Woolf\u2019s festival of words took me somewhere. She got me to London and enriched my time there. But in the end, I returned home, leaving England for my own geographical and personal world. My physical and spiritual home for most of my life has been the northern boreal forest of North America. It\u2019s a place where I walk on footpaths between towering trees, a place where I count my breaths while listening for the air rush of bird wings. This is where I belong.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This winter has been a hard one. Nearby, just off the footpath, several crows feed on the remains of unidentifiable dead animal. Busily tearing toward the center of the carcass for red meat, the two companionable black birds ignore this approaching human. Likewise, a soaring red-tailed hawk offers me no greeting as it flies overhead and beyond my field of vision. As I tread my forest path, I experience the spaciousness that exists outside and beyond words.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong. I love words for their capacity to partially tame the world\u2019s wildness. I adore them as they lean into metaphor and traverse distances. But I see their limitations. Words are temporary containment fields. I believe that, although words were her medium, Woolf understood this. She was always writing into the void, always using language to push toward the no-word zone.<\/em> In novels that exist on the margins of human experience\u2014Jacob\u2019s Room, To the Lighthouse, The Waves<\/em>\u2014Virginia has taken me to regions where there is simply nothing more to say.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What can we know of poor Jacob after he has passed? Lives and loves succumb to time. Individuals exist for a while and then they are gone. The waves roll toward the shore, relentlessly washing away all footsteps on the beach. Eventually, through her suicide, Woolf crossed the ultimate barrier. No one could follow her into that beyond. Still, during her lifetime, Virginia returned to the place of making again and again. She tried to hold her ground even as that ground was slipping out from underneath her. She had a faith I sometimes lose. When I tire of carefully wrought language, I leave my writing desk and head into the woods seeking the place of no-words.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Entering this wordless zone is another way of killing the Buddha. But I know he isn\u2019t really dead. I\u2019ll be back at my computer soon enough. Tall pine trees creak in the wind. It seems that, though it is incomprehensible to me, they speak in a language all their own. And suddenly I get it. Virginia is the hawk flying away from me. She was here but she\u2019s moved beyond my field of vision. I can\u2019t say where she is now or what she is like. I\u2019m not even sure what I am like, but I am resolved. I turn back on the path that will take me home. My house isn\u2019t far away, really no distance at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The beginning of Virginia happened . . . when? 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