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(from) On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 15, 2008 in Uncategorized

An essay in which Ms. Woolf argues for illness as a topic for literature and makes a case for creating a new language for illness 1926 I’d been looking for this essay, couldn’t find it in any of my libraries, and was just considering perhaps a purchase, when I came across the essay in a book on my very own bookshelf. The book is titled The Moment and Other Essays. It’s a posthumous collection, much easier to find than the single essay. This is how the essay begins: Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his “Rinse the mouth—rinse the mouth” with Heaven to welcome us—when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. And that’s just the first sentence. 171 words if anyone’s counting. I’m drawn in by the image of those ancient and obdurate oaks. Uprooted. I feel like I’ve seen illness do that. I’m also drawn in by Woolf’s humor—the dentist as heavenly being. But is this essay a bit dated now that so much has been written and so much is now being written about illness? Maybe. Maybe not. According to Judith Shulevitz, writing in the New York Times several years ago, this essay by Woolf came about when T.S. Eliot commissioned the piece for his literary review, The New Criterion. Eliot, apparently, ended up not liking it much. But here’s the interesting part. A few years before this essay, in 1925, T.S. Eliot’s wife had “gone mad”. And, again according to Ms. Shulevitz, Eliot had consulted Virginia Woolf’s husband on the matter, and he, Leonard, had advised Eliot to keep his wife from writing. Hmmm. Shulevitz argues that the subtext of this essay is an argument by Woolf for the act of writing in the face of illness—or, say, in the face of “madness”. She concludes her review: “Woolf didn’t want sympathy; she wanted not to be silenced, and to prove to Eliot, and to us, that vulnerability has its own kind of genius.” Now that I like—vulnerability with its own kind of genius. For me, this essay by Woolf does have a kernel of genius. And it comes on the third page of fifteen, a passage in which she laments the poverty of our illness language: Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for...

(from) The Spell by Marie Howe

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 8, 2008 in Uncategorized

Every day when I pick up my four-year-old daughter from preschool she climbs into her back booster seat and says, Mom–tell me your story. And almost every day I tell her: I dropped you off, I taught my class I ate a tuna fish sandwich, wrote e-mails, returned phone calls, talked with students and then I came to pick you up. And almost every day I think, My God, is that what I did? These lines are from the middle of Ms. Howe’s poem. They offer a certain intimacy, one that I find appealing. It strikes me that a poet can use language to hold a reader at a distance–can perform acrobatic feats with language—look—be amazed—or a poet can use language to invite a reader in a bit—into a particular moment, or, say, into the poem itself. And this inviting, it can be terribly deft and skillful. Achieving a kind of naturalness of tone—a sense of conversation—but, at the same time, it’s not literal conversation. It’s a distillation of conversation—an essence of conversation. Still, it has the sound of conversation, the cadence. Robert Frost does this. William Carlos Williams sometimes. Deft but not showy. Ordinary in the way a Shaker chair is ordinary? The poem doesn’t actually begin with the “I” in the car with the young child. The poem begins when the neighbor, Pablo, another four-year-old, has lost his wand and he’s trying to perform spells with his finger but that’s not working so well, and his mother tries to give him a chopstick to use, but—nope—that’s not going to do it. (A poet these days in Pablo’s predicament then? Trying to perform spells without a wand? Trying to weave magic with only the most ordinary language?) The poem continues with the daughter in the car. It locates itself in a particular day—yesterday. The daughter is not content with the mother’s account of her day–the sandwich and the e-mails. She wants to know “the whole thing.” And the mother answers. It’s one of the surprises of the poem, that turn.And I said, ok. I feel a little sad. And I said, ok. I feel a little sad. And she said, Tell me the whole thing Mom. And I said, ok Elise died Oh. The poem continues: Elise is dead and the world feels weary and brokenhearted. And she said, Tell me the whole thing Mom. And I said, in the dream last night I felt my life building up around me and when I stepped forward and away from it and turned around I saw a high and frozen crested wave. I love how this poem descends in layers. Goes beneath the ordinary. To a dream—this image of a frozen crested wave. The daughter continues to ask for more. New images are unearthed. A goose. A winged serpent. Still, the daughter is relentless. “Tell me the whole story.” And I said, Elise is dead, and all the frozen tears are mine of course and if that wave broke it might wash my life clear and I might begin again from now and from here. Ah. if that wave broke. . . An image, I think, worth going down through layers for. And one of the many things I like about this poem is the way it seems to...

The Kingdom of Ordinary Time by Marie Howe

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 31, 2008 in Uncategorized

I carried this collection in my purse for whole weeks this summer. Read it in the mornings with coffee. Lived with the poems for a while. Let them spill a bit into my life. Prior to this, and for a while lately, I’ve been reading poetry, when I did read it, mostly online. And it was refreshing for a change to have the whole book. To be able to turn pages. To be able to turn the pages back to a particular poem. To feel the way the poems echo off one another. I like this collection a lot. I anticipated liking it because her previous collection, What the Living Do, was such a knockout. There, Marie Howe wrote about family, about the dying of a brother with AIDS, and about the time after—the book leading up to a kind of epiphany as to what the living do after. This book is after that. After the epiphany. Ordinary time. It begins with a prologue: The rules, once again, applied One loaf = one loaf. One fish = one fish. The so-called kings were dead.And the woman who had been healed grew tired of telling her story, and sometimes asked her daughter to tell it. People generally worshipped where their parents had worshipped— the men who’d hijacked the airplane prayed where the dead pilots had been sitting, and the passengers prayed from their seats —so many songs went up and out into the thinning air . . . People, listening and watching, nodded and wept, and, leaving the theater, one turned to the other and said, What do you want to do now? And the other one said, I don’t know. What do you want to do? It was the Coming of Ordinary Time. First Sunday, second Sunday. And then (for who knows how long) it was here. This prologue, when I first read it, stopped me in my tracks. Like a gate at an entrance to a garden. An arched gateway perhaps. Lovely. Haunting. Both arresting, and beckoning. Both. You want to go forward but at the same time you want to just stop first and look at the gate—soak it in—that experience of being at the gate. The rules, once again, applied One loaf = one loaf. One fish = one fish. The so-called kings were dead.It was the Coming of Ordinary Time. What I remember about ordinary time as a child (I attended a Catholic grade school) is that it was the time when the holidays were over—and when the priests changed the color of their vestments. After the purple of advent and lent, and after the white of holidays—the green of ordinary time. The time after. Or perhaps the time between. Marie Howe writes here about going to the market, and the movies. She writes about limbo (Ah, she too must have been raised Catholic. Indeed. Wikipedia tells me she attended Sacred Heart Convent School.) She writes a series of poems in the middle of the book, “Poems from the Life of Mary,” including one about the moon in the well at night. She writes about marriage and prayer and reading novels. She writes about a mother’s body. She writes about loss and about raising a daughter. My favorite poem right now in...

Expressive Letter-Writing and a Better Night’s Sleep?

Posted by Diane Morrow on May 15, 2007 in Uncategorized

Last December (2006) a study, “Health Effects of Expressive Letter Writing,” by Catherine Mosher and Sharon Danoff-Burg, was published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. The study looked at what can happen when healthy college students write a letter to someone of significance in their life. 108 students were randomly divided into three groups: • Experimental group 1—students were asked to write an expressive letter to a person of significance in their life who had helped them • Experimental group 2—students were asked to write an expressive letter to a person of significance in their life who had hurt them • The control group—students were asked to write a letter to a school official on an impersonal topic At one-month follow-up two significant differences were discovered between the experimental groups and the control group. 1. As a group, those who had written to a person of significance in their life slept longer—they slept a mean of 7.1 hours compared to 6.4 hours 2. They also reported significantly fewer days in the previous month when physical or mental health symptoms prevented them from engaging in routine activities. Interestingly, no significant difference was reported between those who had written to someone who had helped them and those who had written to someone who had hurt them. Both kinds of expression—conveying thoughts and feelings to someone who had helped and to someone who had hurt—seemed of value when it came to health. And they slept longer. It’s an intriguing finding. I can’t say that I know quite what it means. But I can say that for a whole host of conditions—from depression to fibroymyalgia to treatment for cancer to the stresses and strains of ordinary life—it has been my observation, over and over, that sleep can be enormously healing. Something seems to happen when we sleep—a kind of deep restoration—that does not happen at any other time. So if a single letter like this could enhance sleep duration—well, that would seem to be of significance. [Thank you to Susan Bernard for sending me the link for this study.]...

The Handless Maiden: What Happens Next?

Posted by Diane Morrow on April 19, 2007 in Uncategorized

I finished up with appointments this afternoon to find two e-mails in response to the piece of The Handless Maiden story that I posted yesterday. “I can’t bear it if this is the end of the story.” And, “So what happens next?” The responses (as always) were welcome. And they led me back to Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run with the Wolves to pick up the story where I left off: at that moment when the king’s mother instructs the queen to flee for her life. So what happens next? The queen does flee, and then wanders into a large, wild forest. There, a spirit in white guides her to an inn run by kindly woodspeople. She stays there seven years and finds happiness there with her child. Her hands grow back. Meanwhile, the king returns home from the war, believing what his mother first tells him in her anger–that she has killed the queen and his child as instructed. (At this point, she doesn’t know how twisted the messages have become. She believes at this point that murder, in fact, was her son’s instruction.) The king weeps and staggers in his grief before the old women relents and tells him in fact what has happened–the queen and the child are gone. Estes writes what happens next: The king vowed to go without eating or drinking and to travel as far as the sky is blue in order to find them. He searched for seven years. His hands became black, his beard moldy brown like moss, his eyes red-rimmed and parched. During this time he neither ate nor drank, but a force greater than he helped him live. Finally, he comes to the inn. He is exceedingly tired, and he lies down to sleep. He wakes to find a lovely woman and a beautiful child looking down at him. The king and queen embrace. They feast. They return to the king’s mother, celebrate a second wedding, and go on to have many more children, all of whom, Estes writes, “told this story to a hundred others, who told this story to a hundred others, just as you are one of the hundred others I am telling it to.” Ah, the happy ending. I do like happy endings. But I also can’t help noticing that, in this story at least, it takes seven years or more to get there. And it involves more wandering, that deep dark forest, hunger, thirst, extreme grief, black hands, a moldy brown beard, and those eyes red-rimmed and parched. I’m reminded of a book title that is on my reading/to buy list but that I haven’t gotten to yet: The Impossible Will Take a Little...

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