Category Archives: Aesthetics

Virginia Woolf, Priya Gopal, and Thinking While a Woman in the University

George Steiner’s pining for a university without women should be a reminder of the rupture that women occasion by their very presence in the university. Here is Virginia Woolf’s evocative account of thinking while a woman and of a university that makes those thoughts fugitive:

Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please–it is not a matter of any importance) sitting on 
the banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought. That collar I have spoken of, women and fiction, the need of coming to some conclusion on a subject that raises all sorts of prejudices and passions, bowed my head to the ground. To the right and left bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been.
There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought–to call it by a prouder name than it deserved–had let its line down into 
the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until–you know the little tug–the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. I will not trouble you with that thought now, though if you look carefully you may find it for yourselves in the course of what I am going to say.

But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind–put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting,
and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help, he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the path the arms of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession they had sent my little fish into hiding.

What idea it had been that had sent me so audaciously trespassing I
 could not now remember. The spirit of peace descended like a cloud from heaven, for if the spirit of peace dwells anywhere, it is in the courts
and quadrangles of Oxbridge on a fine October morning. Strolling through those colleges past those ancient halls the roughness of the present seemed smoothed away; the body seemed contained in a miraculous glass cabinet through which no sound could penetrate, and the mind, freed from any contact with facts (unless one trespassed on the turf again), was at liberty to settle down upon whatever meditation was in harmony with the moment. As chance would have it, some stray memory of some old essay about revisiting Oxbridge in the long vacation brought Charles Lamb to mind–Saint Charles, said Thackeray, putting a letter of Lamb’s to his forehead. Indeed, among all the dead (I give you my thoughts as they
 came to me), Lamb is one of the most congenial; one to whom one would have liked to say, Tell me then how you wrote your essays? For his
 essays are superior even to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought, with all their perfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, that lightning
 crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry. Lamb then came to Oxbridge perhaps a hundred years ago. Certainly he wrote an essay–the name escapes me–about the manuscript of one of Milton’s poems which he saw here.
…
It then occurred to me that the very manuscript itself which Lamb had looked at was only a few hundred yards away, so that one could follow Lamb’s footsteps across the quadrangle to that famous library where the treasure is kept. Moreover, I recollected, as I
 put this plan into execution, it is in this famous library that the 
manuscript of Thackeray’s ESMOND is also preserved. … Here I was actually at
 the door which leads into the library itself. I must have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a
 flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery,
kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.

That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library. Venerable and calm, with all its
 treasures safe locked within its breast, it sleeps complacently and
 will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep forever. Never will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger.

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

That Beadle, gesticulating wildly in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, his face contorted in horror and indignation, is George Steiner. I think we mustn’t underestimate the trauma, the disorientation, the sheer terror that clutches at Steiner and the male structures that he deputizes for when he chances upon women in the seminar room, at faculty talks, at high table. That’s what it’s often about, the deep grammar in the yowls about “political correctness,” the mewls about “free speech,” the sanctimony about “rigor,” standards,” “clarity,” “merit,” “real disciplines,” in the end often amounts to a recoil at the sheer presence of women — now increasingly black and brown women — in the university.

Ecologies of the Mind

“The mind too can be imagined as a landscape, but only the minds of sages might resemble the short-grass prairie in which I played with getting lost and vanishing. The rest of us have caverns, glaciers, torrential rivers, heavy fogs, chasms that open up underfoot, even marauding wildlife bearing family names. It’s a landscape in which getting lost is easy and some regions are terrifying to visit.”
— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“The mind has mountains, to lift a phrase from Hopkins, even for people who have spent all their lives in the flatlands; and most of us would be dazzled if the mountains turned out to yield sacred texts rather than terrors or an empty, confused landscape.”
— Michael Wood, Yeats and Violence

“My head is full of pebbles and rubbish and broken matches and bits of glass picked up ‘most everywhere.”
— James Joyce

“I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way. But in this water there are countless objects at different depths; and certain influences will give certain kinds of those objects an upward influence which may be intense enough and continue long enough to bring them into the upper visible layer. After the impulse ceases they commence to sink downwards.”
— Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce

i am a dirty little room
with spiders in the corner of my skull
my mouth a dark pit
into which human droppings disappear
the speck of rust in my heart worries me
many people breathe in and out of me
i am at ease with the world
only the speck of rust worries me
— Wopko Jensma, “Lo Lull” (1973)

Thinking/Thought

Ghazals: Homage To Ghalib
Adrienne Rich
7/12/68

The clouds are electric in this university.
The lovers astride the tractor burn fissures through the hay.

When I look at that wall I shall think of you
and of what you did not paint there.

Only the truth makes the pain of lifting a hand worthwhile:
the prism staggering under the blows of the raga.

The vanishing-point where he appears.
Two parallel tracks converge, yet there has been no wreck.

To mutilate privacy with a single foolish syllable
is to throw away the search for the one necessary word.

When you read these lines, think of me
and of what I have not written here.

Bad News for The Consolation of Philosophy

You see the great indifference of the gods
to these things that have happened,
who begat us and are called our fathers,
and look on such sufferings.
What is to come no one can see,
but what is here now is pitiable for us
and shameful for them,
but of all men hardest for him
on whom this disaster has fallen.
Maiden, do not stay in this house:
you have seen death and many agonies,
fresh and strange
and there is nothing here that is not Zeus.
— Sophocles, Trachiniae 1266-78

In a post I found as deeply moving as it is clarifying, Liam Kofi Bright writes of four approaches to tragedy: a “social” approach, which seeks to provide “social structures and valorised practices that will allow the individual to come to terms where that is appropriate, and make changes to avoid future instances of the loss where that is appropriate”; an approach that seeks to “dissipate” tragedy, insofar as it holds that “there is something we could teach people, which if fully and properly internalised (perhaps accompanied by appropriate changes in attitude), will allow people to see apparent tragedies as no-real-tragedy at all”; a “compensatory” approach, wherein “we recognise that the tragedy is indeed a tragedy, but can be convinced that it shall be compensated by (indeed may actively help bring about) some great good in the long run, and we overcome our loss by focusing instead on that great good”; and a “heroizing” approach, which recognizes that “tragedies are, or at least can be, indeed gratuitous and utterly unjustified, shall not be compensated (and even if it were this could never really be enough), but counsels that there is none the less dignity in the struggle against this inevitability.”

As Bright points out, his post does not seek to offer a comprehensive account of various approaches. It nevertheless led me to wonder about modes of response to tragedy that — from the perspective of canonical philosophical texts — have often been ruled as lacking or deficient in philosophical temperament. In particular, I’m wondering about those approaches to tragedy that are neither contained nor containable.

Here I have in mind diverse but related modes of response such as wrathful grief (as in Euripides’s Medea or Renato Rosaldo’s anthropological rendering of the Ilongot headhunters in the Philippines); or uncontainable, inconsolable, and seemingly endless lamentation (such as Eliza’s wailing in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave); or the type of response to tragedy dramatized in Sophocles’s Trachiniae, which wants nothing to do with theodicean, stoic, or heroic responses. These forms of grieving, then, gesture to experiences of suffering, agony, and loss that defy our abilities to come to terms with the trauma (pace “socialization”); that insist on the losses suffered as unteachable (pace “dissipation”); that refuse the possibility of compensation (pace “compensation”); that reject dignified approaches to tragedy, or even, the very notion that “struggles” with grief can be dignifying (pace “heroizing”); that give witness to how tragedy may often unravel the very fabric of the social and the self.

What could be at stake in paying greater attention to this a-philosophical, post-philosophical or even anti-philosophical forms of grieving? Bernard Williams’s remarkable and brilliant essay, “The Women of Trachis” may offer some pointers. Williams’s essay contests institutional philosophy’s attachment to dispensing “good news” – that is, the notion, as exemplified in the theodicies of Leibniz and Hegel, that ultimately horrendous suffering will be redeemed. But it may also be read as an uncompromising critique of the philosophic self, at least as has been imagined by its most celebrated practitioners from Plato to Parfit.

Against these blandishments of philosophy, Williams recommends what he calls stark fictions, by which he means accounts that carve out in the bleakest relief possible “extreme, undeserved, and uncompensated suffering.” By so doing, William continues, they offer a devastating “limitation to the tireless aim of moral philosophy to make the world safe for well-disposed people.”