Just before she left for Ireland, Aine and I met for breakfast, and she reminded (told?) me of a passage in The Waves that she said my work evoked for her. It fit my work so well that I made it the epigraph for the final section of my dissertation:
“Had I been born,” said Bernard, “not knowing that one word follows another I might have been, who knows, perhaps anything. As it is, finding sequences everywhere, I cannot bear the pressure of solitude. When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke around me I am in darkness – I am nothing….I only come into existence when the plumber, or the horse-dealer, or whoever it maybe, says something which sets me alight.”
Of course, it's all about punctuation -- when you pull the frame back further, Bernard is actually lamenting this, feeling insubstantial. My work is about how being set alight by others' words is how we make ourselves. But the images... so perfect.
I found a book for a thank you for P last week in a rummage through a well-appointed, tidy used bookstore in seattle, a very tactile little collection of essays by jeanette winterson, Art [Objects]. Through one of those synchronous moments, she has a passage about the Waves that also thrust itself under my skin, concluding with Woolf's words:
"Lines and colours almost persuade me that I too can be heroic."
Waves of all kinds,
the sea, concurrence, ripples backward and forward. The right moment. Puffins spotted on the beach on the weekend.
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