Virginia Woolf never really came alive for me in my student days. Beneath a certain level of insularity, I disparaged tragic literary figures like her, or the equally notorious Sylvia Plath.
Plath, as a dead poet, I refuse to deal with, but Woolf is now a vibrant living voice, beating inside of my own shriveled half century, and I am not sure if I should be alarmed, or if it is merely the power of Michael Cunningham through the translation of the film. If the voice of James Joyce rouses rebellion against what that voice represents, Woolf is a consolation of minute interior motion and impression, despite the fact that I am not partial to Orlando (and yes, I still feel calling this satire a transgendered or bisexual experiment literalizes the text too easily, and no, I am not secretly tormented about the masochistic thrill of sucking my former supervisor's cherry, if that is blunt enough for you; when I turned to her and pulled on her to return to the center I was facing imminent disaster, and instead of attuning herself to this she treated me like a personal cyber toy), and I find solace in Woolf's social milieu, an ephemeral comfort perhaps, as I certainly would not relish the sensation of feeling my capillaries burst through water pressure after weighing down an overcoat.
We are losing that sense of social intelligence Woolf invariably emanates, still vestigially Victorian in many respects, vestigially Jamesian.
I stopped off in twitter last evening and noticed Ann Tran posted a link about judging people. It made me smile, though I did not follow the link, sitting here ripping my guts out, as I so often do, though I know such diets are in decline. Look, I want you to understand something: I understand the benefit of letting go, but I am surrounded by the casualties of my matriculated career ambitions on a daily basis here at Riverside Presbyterian. Former clients, aging and dying activists who I hate because if they can't work then they also don't seem to know what they want except to march in a kind of simulated protest of disobedience, while my ex-fiance lies in his bed below me and watches television, making an event out of it when he is lifted into his chair to go pay his bills once a month.
What kind of existence is this? If I make a serious attempt to return to full time employment again, and fail, again, it will kill me, but trying to be positive because I live in section 202 senior public housing that is a grade above an institutional environment, one that irrevocably scarred me as a young girl, as an adolescent, this is very difficult. Give me compassionate capitalism, an empathetic roommate or two, a more humane interior like the home with my family I used to have while I still have a mind to appreciate it. We need less adherence to regulated process, and more sense of interpersonal community conscience. I need a new milieu, less cruelty hiding behind the guise of case management methodology.
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