Sticky, Colour-Ridden, Drawn-Out Ends

Do you ever have one of those days when the best self-expression you can come up with feels like a cheap microwaved version of something much better? I have them periodically - usually somewhere between a slow day at work and a hot, wakeful night, when all my former aspirations pop into my head and disappear like bubbles when I go to catch them. I guess an almost constant re-assessment of our goals and abilities in life is completely normal, really, given that we cannot control so many of our circumstances as we would like, and we are by nature adaptive creatures.

Today I found something I had written from this exact mood, with these exact feelings, and despite the fact that it was a bit of a first-year-at-uni essay-avoidance activity, it resonated strangely with today's malaise. Even more surprisingly, I actually felt better for having read it - I recognised that some degree of originality can spring from imitation.

Virginia Woolf has been one of my favourite writers for a few years, and while the convoluted sentence structures rival Dickens in places, and the characters are almost hopelessly introspective, I couldn't stay away... so here's my over-long, similarly convoluted, but hopefully entertaining and to some degree encouraging parody/homage.

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Amber said she would write the essay herself. For everyone else had so much work of their own to do – and really, when it was expected of her, she thought, how could she palm off a thing of such importance to another? Peering over the top of her laptop screen she was instantly and irrationally frustrated by the irregular angle at which the lurid-yellow jacketed workman, all rough hands and dark crusted boots and his earnest but absurd expression of intense concentration on the carrying of sandbags, had left it, in a hole in the ground outside her window. She had mistaken that clod of dirt for a dead bird, but a few moments ago, peering out over the defiled and soon-to-be-trampled patch of grass. That it was not, she felt relieved. She did not like dead things. She felt a pity for them which could not be relieved, was impotent, and probably (she mused to herself, in the case of animals only?) unimportant. What was important was this essay, and she, with an immense effort as of a bedraggled and exhausted sparrow hauling itself out of the leafy shelter of a tree to resume the arduous yet necessary flight home, (there was that dead bird again, its one glassy eye staring up at her – but no, it really was only a clump of earth), returned a determined gaze to the screen before her. She noted with satisfaction that the workman, with his younger colleague (the colleagues are always younger, aren’t they? she thought), was setting the stake straight in the ground. This satisfied her. Things were straight; good, she thought; she could get on with her work.

At the precise moment that she began marshalling her thoughts, arranging her books around her (she had only read two of the five; the introduction to that one was remarkably dense and confusing; was there no simple explanation of postmodernism to be found?); just at that moment her phone made a sound, a tinkling sound as of a child running a toy car up a glockenspiel, and try as she might she could not ignore it. A message! She was thought of, she was wanted for something, she was – faced with a tiny photograph of Stanley, wearing an oversized dinner suit and white socks; the caption ran thus: I look like a penguin. Yes, thought Amber, smiling a wry smile, yes you most certainly do, and the socks, I must say, she typed into the phone, make it so. And she felt a pang of pride (was it possible to feel such a thing, a pang? Was that the right word?) seeing him dressed so, knowing it was for her that he had borrowed it, for her and for the ball they would be going to. She wore the dress, the one he had brought up to replace the one she had chosen which was the wrong size – oh to be a 10 again! – and came out of the dressing room to show him, apprehensive, hoping to be admired. She was not disappointed; she remembered the open mouth, and roving eyes, and the insistence with which he had taken it from the rack on which she had hung it and said, you must have it, you cannot wait until you are paid, you have looked after me – and there it was, hanging in her wardrobe. Her sister’s party at the weekend; everyone had loved it, said she looked divine. Why did she value this praise so highly? Here she was, supposed to be improving her mind, supposed to be making an attempt on fathoming the depths of Virginia Woolf and her style and her subjectivity; the focus of her mind was so often in too many places to fathom anything, it was more geared to brush the surface and then peel away the layers gradually; there was no help for it, here everything was a rush, nothing was gradual. There are more important things! she cried internally, recalling hillside walks and painting and beaches, recalling late night talks over her cakes (she always made cake, it was therapeutic) with girls whose lives were confused, and knowing her own life to be confused at times she listened and talked and tried to be helpful; she remembered those recent events, dessert party and a brief film and an earnest speaker, and how her heart had resonated with all he had said and she wanted people to see it, to know it, to know what she knew, whom she knew. And not for myself, she added. For them. To come from that, and all its accompanying stresses – indeed it had been far more work than she had ever anticipated, and her books had been neglected though she had wanted desperately to read them – but also its joys, its wonders, its truths; she felt she was coming back down to something of far less significance.

Virginia Woolf. What could one say, what write? That she knew and portrayed something of man’s inner state, demonstrating the individual isolation from corporate humanity which we at once need, desire and lament? That her characters, from Mr and Mrs Ramsay to Hugh, ‘the admirable Hugh!’, to Peter Walsh, Mrs Dalloway, Sally Seton, Septimus Warren Smith… they are all afraid of and drawn to darkness, they feel a sense of failure, they are unhappy, they push against the limits of their mental capacity, they fail to know themselves, they are constantly in a state of conflict? We all know people like this, Amber thought, her eye flickering over her dense and disordered notes and the photograph on the front of one book of a pale, gaunt old woman, ink-stained fingers grasping her pen, sharp features outlined in and yet softened by the black and white, old and gaunt yes, but retaining an air of underlying vivacity, tenacity, vision – she knew not what.

Virginia Woolf, she wrote. Well, was it about the woman or the works? Surely both, she reasoned; but an essay is not to be a biography, even one referring heavily to the works. ‘The works’ – I’ve read only two, she reflected, I know little. Ah yes, came in that other, less gloomy side of her, but ‘little’ or ‘a little’? It is all in one’s perspective. Oh! She grasped it. Perspective. Subjectivity, perspective, the outside in, the inside out, the shaping of narrative by means of introspection and projection, the author’s thoughts in the unconsciousness (or consciousness) of the characters, the things which are implied but not named, the pervasive sense of feelings, states of being, thoughts, which cannot be pinned down, what else…? Conrad, she recalled, it reminded her of Conrad; Mrs Ramsay’s talk (or was it thought?) about a ‘core of darkness’, a ‘wedge of darkness’, to which one is reduced when out of company and entirely alone, and yet one even then attaches oneself to the light, to inanimate but constant things; one desires constancy, unity, perhaps above all. Well, she could talk about all that, she could write that. It was the critics that bothered her; if only her own readings and opinions had been needed, Amber thought, glancing at that postmodernist book and thinking what humbug it had all been last night when she got in, tired, and tried fruitlessly to glean something from it; if only it was her own feelings and thoughts, it would have been enough. Egotistic? She thought not. It’s not, she said to herself, as if I value my own opinions above those of others, especially on a subject with which I am not at all familiar, but, and she pursed her lips and frowned slightly, under the circumstances it would simply be easier. Was that what it had come down to? The aspirations, the desire for learning, the resonance of thoughts she read with awakening ones in her head; had it come to this, ‘it would simply be easier’? No! I don’t do things because they are easy, I do things because they are good, for me, for others, for my mind, because they enlarge me, change me, challenge me, inform me – I want to write an essay that means something to me!

Outside under the dull white sky a man in a grey jumper walked to and fro, talking on his phone, before the navy blue of a big metal box – what was that for? – and somewhere off to the right, out of view, Amber heard the irregular echo and thud of someone, some people, hammering stakes into the ground. At least, that was what she supposed it was. Right now she had not the curiosity to find out, though most times she would be fascinated by life outside her window; fireworks, for example, all those months ago when she had climbed onto her desk and, laughing and shooing Stanley from around her knees, pulled open the window to let in the chill breeze and the bang and the crackle and the vibrant sprays of glorious colour and light pouring over the tower block like cascades of molten metal. Or when the fire engine had come (it had been dark, she was sure) right between her and that tree, that majestic and enduring tree whose leaves she loved to watch, and Stanley had pulled her away from the window as they were so close they might crash – Stanley was always there, wasn’t he? Perhaps, if he had been now…but no, he would have distracted her. She had to write this essay. What was she thinking about again? The thud and echo continued, closer this time she felt, and a small yellow and green digger sat across the mud-spattered stone surface with its scattered bricks, right by a heap of mud, as if to say, look! Look what I have created, this heap of mud, this mound, this pile, fresh and eternally replenished earth which I have mown, and shovelled, and heaped – look! Amber looked; the mound was where a building had been, perhaps where another soon would be, the orange mesh fence told her that, and she allowed her eyes to travel up and to the right, taking in the tower block beyond the mound. The mound suddenly seemed rather insignificant – keep digging, little digger, she wanted to say. You have a way to go yet. How absurd, she thought, catching herself, to talk to a digger! I am not a child. And what good is a mound beside a building, tell me that? You too have a way to go, returned the digger – your mound needs to be a tower block. My what? Oh, my essay.

Amber withdrew further into the room and blocked out the digger with its mound and its aspirations and the towering block of rooms, showers, kitchens, people, in and out, in and out, life going on with creation and destruction, the repetitive insistence of that thudding, hammering, harsh striking coming closer and closer…

Essay! Why had she not the tenacity, the dedication, vision, whatever it was she could see in that picture? Poor Mr Ramsay, she thought; his fear made it impossible to move on:

‘In that flash of darkness he heard people saying – he was a failure – that R was beyond him. He would never reach R. On to R, once more. R---’

Do I have an R to reach? Amber ponders the question, thinks of Mr Ramsay’s life, how ‘the father of eight children has no choice’, how his family has disrupted his career however little he may want to admit it, how he needs constant reassurance that what he has given the world already is of some value, how he is determined and yet unable to attain the next letter. She already has G, and L; I have an F, she thinks, if only I can do this essay and then the next one and the next one and so on at a good enough standard… and I probably almost have an M, she thinks next (if things must be sequential, but in reality she would rather have the M though it isn’t meant to come first) as Stanley in his oversized tuxedo once more comes into her mind and she smiles, smiles and plays with her ring. Oh, and then I suppose C, the big C which all women are supposed to be after these days, and B, what most of us instinctively want even thought it disrupts C, and goodness knows what else – must I have it all in mind now? Can’t I let G, which after all came first, determine the rest? And right now – right now, she ponders, as the room grows steadily darker though it’s only 3 in the afternoon (and the essay due at 11 tomorrow!); right now, she puts her little finger in her mouth, turns her head and reads, ‘vanity and self-sacrifice’, ‘marriage pressure’, ‘unity, absorption’; right now, this is what I need. I need E. I need E! On to E, once more. E…

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One paragraph, and several more pages of notes. Outside the thudding had ended and been replaced by a steady buzz, as of a lawnmower traversing grounds in the heat of a summer day, when the haze picks up and carries, thick and tremulous, all sounds and sights, depositing them heavy, delightful, almost overwhelming on the wanderer out-of-doors. Amber felt that nagging in her back, just between the shoulder blades slightly to the right; she’d slept awkwardly, again, despite piling up the cushions underneath her, keeping straight – why must we be so easily put out, she asked, why, with only nineteen years to her name, must she feel she was creaking about like an old woman? Youth would pass in the majestic swell and sway of a hot summer month, and its days with sticky, colour-ridden, drawn-out ends. She looked out; the sky was pale. It was not summer yet. The little digger was sitting complacent and still upon its heap; moments before the buzzing had ceased, and the truck containing part of that mound had slowly and quietly lumbered out of the yard. One paragraph. It was past four o’ clock. Three blue-attired, squinting middle-aged men, one with close-cut receding hair, one tall and ungainly, one small and spectacled, surveyed the ground, peering up at Amber’s tree – for it was hers, in a way; she had written about it, she had gazed at it. They surveyed the land. How many more truck loads would finish that pile? She returned to the essay.