The Talking Pt

I’ll update with a full/planned list but I’ve already read two of them and I wanted to make some notes. 

So, Wide Sargasso Sea has been on my “must read” list since probably I read Madwoman in the Attic? Maybe before. I find literary theory always adds a ton to my tbr pile. Anyway, it was exactly what I wanted to be and yet had nothing to do with what I had expected it to? To start with: the majority of the novel takes place before the events of Jane Eyre so we don’t have to deal so much with a they say/I say thing. I think probably this was a great choice? I was struck by how powerful the racism in WSS is. Everyone’s racism. The text has a great courage to not explain or tie up things, something that the Bronte’s can’t avoid/resist. I think what is striking in this book is how much of the narrative is not plot, but the book still covers a lot of ground very rapidly? 

As a lot of my friends know I attended not one but two Catholic philosophy camps in high school because my parents were worried about my moral development. What did I do to create this concern? It's hard to say exactly but asking not to get confirmed probably didn't help. Should I have told them I was an atheist? Should I have insisted on it when they put up a fight? I had an obsession with truth and justice like a lot of middle-schoolers.

My parents were never really concerned about how I left the Catholic church in the vague and stereotypical ways you'd expect in liberal/middle-class families. They didn't express the kind of ornament around atheism and agnosticism that can obscure the real issue: “I just want you to be happy”, “are you sure?”, “did you think about this?" They’re worried you’re different and they’re afraid you won’t be handled kindly by their gods, but they mostly talk about your friends and career options. My parents were super clear they worried about God and my behavior.  

 Maybe it’s helpful that my parents articulated this so clearly.  Driving home, my mother explained she was worried about my soul. Maybe there is an acceptable reason for telling someone this—in this way— but I was left with this feeling that I was bad and wrong. I was fourteen and somehow already everything was rotted inside of me?  My mother was "worried" about my "moral development." So she told me. Maybe it was helpful. (I’m pretty sure it wasn't.) So, I spent most of my teenage and early 20s convinced I was a bad person and had been for a while. I didn’t need to maintain my moral development; I needed to build it from the ground up.

 It’s funny what you can reject and what you can absorb while rejecting an entire conversation. I didn't go back to Church. (Though I did go physically for another five years.) Instead, I became certain from that time onward (and probably from a little before) that something was wrong with how I looked, talked, thought and in general existed. I lumped these concerns under this “moral development" umbrella. It’s not a coincidence that my two trips to philosophy camp book-ended my most intense periods of disordered eating. If you're worried about everything you say and do food in some ways is the easiest thing to fix. Triage your paralyzing self-judgment, and lunch is the easiest thing to deal with.

 When I got to these camps (where I was supposed to work on myself) I was immediately adopted by whatever hard-ass Jesuit English professor was there. They focused on my intellectual development, not my moral development. So I cannot, to this day, this of them as distinct things.

I don't think this was my parent's plan. It totally severed my habits of reading from our communal pool. For example,  I continue to read Middlemarch and Dorothea Brooke specifically without irony while the rest of my family mocks the Dorothea storyline and finds her insufferable. I'm pretty sure my reading of my childhood lectures about my moral development did not land the way they were intended to. I’m not sure that this is a good defense for either my parents or myself. I'm also not sure what I was supposed to think. I had been told to work on this thing I didn't want to work on with God so when someone gave me Coleridge or Faulkner why wouldn't I work on it with them instead? I believed morality could exist without Church, without confirmation. This session at summer camp was supposed to confront me with the errors in my philosophy, but it just presented me with intense academic rigor.

 And I'm good at academic work. My work was, in fact, "superlative".

Superlative work.

 So This was the answer to my moral development; I needed to become superlative.

 There are two parts to this. One is that this creates a drive to be “good” and the other is that it creates a drive to be the best. And, of course, you cannot really be “good” unless you’ve fulfilled the category of being best. It’s tricky because to be honest competition isn’t great for fostering relationships. I was placing myself in competition with the writers I was reading. I was racing myself against the ideas I ran into. Did I even have time for the other people in the room?

And yet you must be a “good” person and if you’re a competitive asshole obsessed with close readings you are not going to feel like a good person, you are not going to feel like St. Francis. You’re gonna feel like Augustine after he gave up alcohol and prostitutes.

 I couldn’t figure out why I didn't like people (even though I did like people), or why I didn’t intellectually enjoy living people, or why I was bad at it until I realized that the only way I was getting to heaven (in my tiny teenage brain) was if I were the superlative one. Companionship was failing.

 Well, I received “superlative work” back today at the end of the semester and looking at the comments I realized that I am tired of striving to create superlative work. I did so much this semester to learn how to work better. Better, not best. What is the point if I learn everything on a piece of paper? What if there is more than the paper to the experience? As someone who really still wants to be a teacher, how could I teach that way? How could I teach a girl, like I was, to work smart, to work kind and well?

Taking the summer off research, looking at my reading critically...  

At the library where I work we are embarking on a program to reward and encourage adult summer reading and this led me to think about my own. I’m trying to avoid making this a things I should read like (Goethe, Hardy, Kafka) and instead focus on this I need to read. Meaning: women.

 1.     Flannery O’Connor: Wiseblood and Collected Short stories

2.     Roxane Gay: finish Bad Feminist (started last summer vacation) read Difficult Women

3.     William Faulkner: The Hamlet

4.     Katherine Mansfield: Complete Short Fiction

5.     Ingeborg Bachmann: Three Paths to the Lake, Malina

6.     Mary W Shelley: The Last Man

7.     Mary Wollstonecraft: Letters Sweden, Denmark, and Norway

8.     Zitkala Sa:  American Indian Stories

9.     Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye

10.   Simone Weil: An Anthology 

4.3.

 The man in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is  a little deaf and he isn’t paid attention to or heard. His actions, drinking and suicide, are his language of communication. Of course, the story takes place in a consumer market, this is how ostracized alienated characters enter the stage, on the market. (from my notes)

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The men in the room (my classroom) worry about how the man would be heard. The poor old man. How would they treat him today? They would be understanding, no?

But,  Modernism, Naturalism and Romanticism are all about the average man’s access to language. The average man must be able to be a “great man”.  They talk about empathy for a deaf man, they talked about who knows sign language and access, but to Hemingway the man’s hearing is an expression of his alienation not his status. The man’s physical trouble toil for the emotional concern of men in modernism, who worry they won’t hear the women talking in the other room, who worry if they do the women will be talking about other men, about their hair growing thin, about Michelangelo, or laughing—laughing at them.

 The deafness is about the fear the speaking is futile. Which makes it more sad, to me now, that even then his body is being thrown around and used without him. And yet, he is not unproblematic. 

--

 But the women in a clean well-llighted place aren’t even present, they don’t speak, so they can’t be heard.

--

It’s not exactly surprising that a classic Hemingway short story wouldn’t pass the Bechdel test, but it does seem hilariously obvious and ironic that the man can’t hear but the women can’t even speak.

 The fear of men in modernism is that they will not be heard; but the knowledge that women go into modernism with is that they will not be allowed to speak, they have already gone through the processes of Cassandra and Philomela.

 Literary movements often have foundational myths that disallow women voice. Romantic poetry defined by Wordsworth “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility” and his image:

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils;

 Represents the classic male Romantic poet, alone in nature. Well, women are not alone in nature just as they are not alone in café’s after one in the morning. The instant Hemingway adds a female character to this scene: customer or waiter, the entire story changes.

I stayed up till 2 am last night proofing a paper which is something I haven’t done in a long time. Part of what has been great about research is re-learning your own rhythms and mostly by taking this class and still working two jobs, by having a small house fire and other personal moments of crisis, I’ve kept myself in the suspended state of momentum where deadline follows deadline and I can’t afford to be late because if I’m late I’ll fall off the horse. 

I think that was a pretty bad mixed metaphor. Anyway. 

I had a vague idea when I started this tumblr, which was a long time, that the name meant something somewhat important, something maybe outsize of whatever actual project I was looking to work on with it. Maybe that’s why I’ve moved so many projects in draft form to “talking part” only to never really finish them. 

It was one thing to think in the back of my head that the talking part of life was the hard part. What did talking mean exactly? Having a voice, being in public, being present, speaking words instead of being silent, voicing instead of avoiding. I’ve always identified the hardest part of memoir (a form I was desperately trying to work on when I started this account) as the talking part: admitting things happened, turning memory into speech, allowing story allowing voice. allowing as if I was the one silencing myself in the first place.

But talking as an issue overlaps with a variety of problems facing not just the writer or the female writer or the memoir writer... but perhaps women all over society. 

I’ve wondering as i’ve worked in #musing if it is the perfect time for this project or if it has always been the perfect time for the project. While I was doing this book I integrated first by accident and then as the work progressed, on purpose, contemporary books that had relevance. Sex Object by Jessica Valenti, A House Full of Females by Louise Ulrich, Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit,Blue Pastures by Mary Oliver. All these books dealt with a woman’s voice, a woman’s place on record/ in the record, women writing-- but do all women who open a blank page inevitably face a version of T.S. Eliot’s “eternal footman” holding their hat and coat and asking them to leave? 

There’s another line in J Alfred Prufrock that haunts me. (It does haunt me, this is not an exaggeration) 

“Would it have been worth while If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, And turning toward the window, should say:               “That is not it at all,               That is not what I meant, at all.” “

Clearly the “one” settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl is a woman. Women move through Eliot’s poem. Women “ women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.” women are synecdochized down to arms, covered with hair 

“And I have known the arms already, known them all— Arms that are braceleted and white and bare (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!) Is it perfume from a dress That makes me so digress? Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.               And should I then presume?               And how should I begin? “ 

Reading foundational texts as a woman is like stepping back and having to look in a mirror, not just to disagree with a reflection but to realize you must adapt and preform to the reflection the man looking at your face over your shoulder, he as an artist doesn’t see you he sees art but you but adapt and code your face to match his vision. You have been matched already, perhaps. Reading The Waste Land as a woman is a long with of reading and not reading about oneself, about becoming and not becoming, about being and not being-- having a voice but only within someone else’s quotation marks. 

So  how should I presume? 

When I considered how to cap this project I immediately gravitated towards the word “archive” but what does that word really mean? Recently listening to a fabulous interview Kara Swisher did with Brewster Kahle I was startled by how immediately I agreed with him that libraries, archives, having an immediate and complete copy of everything was important. But I was also struck by the fact that the defitnion of “everything” for me is different. Having a copy of every single book seems OK YES important, but having just read “A House Full of Females” I know that women don’t always write in books, that books written by women won’t always look like books that women’s sources and texts remain absent from most archives or unrecognized in them. The foundation myth of an archive is the Library of Alexandria, the impetus that archives chase up against is the mythic burning of Alexandria the loss of all the knowledge in the world but women voices were being lost before Alexandria and they’ve continued to be lost after. If there’s one thing that #musing has made clear to me its that aggression against women’s voices and opinions (Men Explain things to me) connects greatly to the violence against their bodies (Men Explain Things to Me) and that this violence finds an expression of anxiety in women’s voices and readings of western canon (Sex Object) that the mythic structure of the Artist (presumed: male) and the artistic “work week” (Blue Pastures) pulls roots from wester canon’s embrace of an Orpheus/Philomena contrast: that women create beauty (like animals can) but not art. The male voice doesn’t grow or steal from the female, the male voice prevents the female voice. 

Let’s admit it, taking breaks isn’t something I’m good at. I’m not excellent at stopping or at starting but if you don’t practice de-acceleration you tend to crash into something.  

Clearly that’s not the goal here so I’m observing what I think people call spring break. I’m even taking a three day weekend (Sunday, Monday, Tuesday) going out of town and watching ridiculous Tv with people I love. 

I only need to write 1,000 words. Lets admit, keeping the first pass to 1,000 words is actually going to be really hard. This is definitely an instance where it’s going to be hard to keep the ideas boiled down and consistent. It’s like making caramel, I want exactly the right consistency. 

When I met with Dr. B on Monday she said the writing was excellent but I had not faced the central problem of the subject: which was Vita. 

So I’ve never really approached Vita as a scholar if I’m being honest. I’ve read the Edwardians and I think The Edwardians is an excellent novel but I’m a Woolf-scholar first and last right? Well, this is basically as unfair as saying Dante is the only Rossetti you are studying and I feel called out in a really useful way. 

There’s a multitude of ways to read the partnership between Vita and Virginia. I think in the context of muse/subject and author/viewer, Virginia either pinned Vita with her pen and mastered her--into the history books as it turns out-- or Virginia and Vita mastered one another in a variety of medias, tumbling through novel and letter, reading and re-reading and exchanging power in ways similar to the dynamics of “Lifting Belly.” 

I *want* this to be true but it probably ISNT because if there’s one thing the last 5 weeks has taught me its this: you can’t see art when you look at a woman without feeling/creating violence. You can’t author a subject without object-ing them. Anyway. It’s a conundrum. 

I’m tired/exhausted/moody/nervous but I need to take my hands out of the pot and let it go on without me. Who knows what may happen in the silence? 

Learn how to work, learn how to start, how to stop, start, start again. I have become more and more certain that I want to continue this project as I go on, that I will (probably) begin by working through the diaries and working up notes on them every other week and posting quotes and reading articles and dredging my notes from this semester that ended up nowhere (like anne carson notes) 

“it was without any importance in Orlando’s life. She skipped it, to get on with the text”