Sunday, May 7, 2017
note to self: don’t be haunted
Vanessa Redgrave plays Mrs. Dalloway well. She would.
(I streamed the movie last night.)
The soldier suffering delayed PTSD in Mrs. Dalloway suddenly, in front of his wife, lets himself fall out his apartment window and impales on the iron fence below, as if it was just an impulsive retort to a passerby on the street about the surreality of polite society after surviving Hell.
One can close the book (close the window on my computer), thinking: It’s dramatic art, allegorical of uncanny times—fodder for Michael Cunningham’s melodramatic The Hours, where “Richard,” dying of AIDS, lets his best friend, whom he sarcastically (and fondly) calls “Mrs. Dalloway,” watch him casually lean out his window to fall to his death.
A woman who actually looked like Virginia Woolf when she was young (whom I was supposed to marry, but didn’t, due to happenstance), who became an admired professor of English, stopped her car on the bridge over the Detroit River, in the middle of a winter night, left the keys in the ignition and jumped to her death. She knew Mrs. Dalloway. Was her act a tragic avowal that allegories become canonical because they’re not merely dramatic art?
Inestimable instances of PostSecret cards confess something slight that kept the card writer from suicide, as if suicide almost accidently didn’t happen—as if insignificance of life is affirmed anyway by whatever little happenstance made them happy to live.
A brilliant life is snuffed on the street because a careless driver isn’t choosey about what’s in front of his stupid look away. A thug intending to quickly rob a random person who was so attentive to his own tasks of the day that the person balks with incredulity when faced by the gun, shoots the person because the thug is insulted by disrespect, as if he wouldn’t actually pull the trigger.
I avoid snails inching along wet sidewalks. I don’t want to slap at a gnat drawn to the light of my computer screen.
My heart seems to skip a beat for some random reason, not to worry; maybe it was my diaphragm and a pang of indigestion.
Not nausea in the fingers. But I sometimes wake in the morning remembering that I’ve thought at times: If I died during the night, I’d never know it—not really having the thought again, but remembering that it’s part of me.
How could depression cause Virginia Woolf to so deliberately walk into a river and drown herself? How could my best friend of 25 years not tell anyone she would breath helium until she lost consciousness and died? She assured everyone in her departure note that she knows she’s loved by everyone, but must go (even though she was a well-established psychotherapist).
I wish I could avoid feeling I could have rescued “Virginia” with my love of life, if only I had the chance.
Yet, I’m like Mrs. Dalloway: grateful for my “sense of proportion” that makes me enjoy making more assemblages today again—“texting,” in grand senses—as if gardening is allegorical of the heart of ultimacy and eternity we share with varietal plants: just being varietal, as long and as well as I can, partly in memory of those who didn’t.
