A mind of none’s own.
Virginia Woolf, now the better part of a century ago, penned an extended essay, A Room of One’s Own. Woolf’s prose has a tendency to become distracted, absorbed in some effulgent beauty that it grapples to resolve with the utmost fidelity, and I love her for that. There’s an audacity of mind that bleeds onto her sentences and rocks her readers with firm prods though cathartically pure sensations and emotions. Reading, then, an essay that she tries to focus on the role of gender in writing and what it takes to be a woman writer, was a bit of an anxiety inducing prospect. There’s an exaggeration of being that we bestow upon people whose lives influence us tremendously — Virginia Woolf is one of those people for me — and a scuffing to their deified weight tends to produce tremendous and unpleasant percussions through one’s existence; a shattering of the foolish, naïve hope that somewhere, someplace in life someone has impossibly usurped their humanness — a hope, that when broken, falls with the same mortal weight one feels upon an intimate reminder of their own humanness.
Thankfully, it does not tarnish that projection of her. Woolf, instead, manages to create something of a Feminist Manifesto railing lucidly and without hint of accusatorial tone through the intellectually disabling history of women. She provides a marvelous account of the circumstances that created the void of women in academia while implicitly suggesting the solution.
However, it is not the egalitarianism that interests me most about her essay, though I do find it endearing and resonant. I, instead, am enticed by her rather poorly developed (she dedicated only a few pages at most to it) idea that a writer’s mind must be in balance; that two engendered sides — one masculine and one feminine — of each person’s brain must dethrone each other of identity and blend to androgyny. Then, once sexless, the mind must attune itself to the flow of the world. In essence, the mind must merge to the whole of existence, feeling the delicate shifts in reality as moments pass, punctuated by events, soaking in the sensations and subtleties found in them and translating them into words. Writing, in short, must be real; it must focus on conveying and describing those realities of mind in the purest fashion. Being a bit of a sucker for abstraction, I can’t help but apply her philosophy to a greater, more basic existence of life beyond the writer.
We have, as a world, made tremendous progress in the degenderization of our minds. Doubtless, more work needs to be done, but progress has been and continues to be made nonetheless. Sadly, on the second account, which requires a severance from individualism, no progress has been made. Describing the severance eludes clear and prosaic language, as such, please bear with this attempt. There is a sense of peace most of us have felt, perhaps at times when we see the sunset in brilliant shafts of color after a long day of obscure activity; or the sense one might feel on a chilly spring morning upon seeing the sun slowly pulling itself upwards, casting a gentle and warming light over the earth, a light that reflects off freshly sprouted and dewed plants in such a way that the past evaporates to a lightly rolling cloud, a cloud that slowly billows in the bluing sky to countless shapes of possibilities and futures. A feeling, whatever its source, that comfortably suffuses across your chest before shooting off, fusing you with the world, with the flowing of time and the rhythm of events. It is that feeling, whatever it is, which I press myself to properly describe, where a power of unity exists; a shift that once started will press humanity forward less as masters of the universe, and more as members — bent not on domination and divisiveness, but integration and harmony.
