"The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it.
Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually."
Virginia Woolf
Riding the Waves
Excerpted from The Waves, an experimental tapestry of soliloquies woven in word by British novelist Virginia Woolf in 1931, this scene opening the book paints a picture both poetic and poignantly reminiscent of a world beset by perpetual waves of unfolding tragedy.
The Waves documents the turbulence of Woolf's life, charting its valleys and crests, affectionately called a "play poem" by Woolf herself. Its structure takes the shape of a wave-like arc, stretching from sunrise to sunset along the coast, a simultaneously literal and metaphorical setting. Its churning currents and contents consist of the internal monologues of six characters, flowing into and out of each other, mixing poetry with prose like sea water. Each of their voices bleed and blend together in harmony.
Given its relevance to times like our own, characterized by relentless waves of disease, death, desperation, perhaps even depression, distance, desolation, we here let The Waves wash over us as we join Woolf in riding them out.
Churning Currents
The churning currents of existence occupy much of the oceanic expanse encompassed by The Waves. Throughout the text, Woolf frequently weaves in references to her struggles with solitude and society, alone and alienated. In the voice of an imaginative child, she writes:
"...my ships may ride the waves. Some will flounder. Some will dash themselves against the cliffs. One sails alone. That is my ship. It sails into icy caverns where the sea-bear barks and stalactites swing green chains. The waves rise; their crests curl; look at the lights on the mastheads. They have scattered, they have foundered, all except my ship, which mounts the wave and sweeps before the gale and reaches the islands where the parrots chatter..."
Woolf proceeds to share her visceral sense of numbness in a world alien to her. As if perched precariously on a cliff's edge, she risks plummeting into the void of solitude, cut off from embodied modes of being. Immersed in imagination, nothing can snap her out of her stupor, a world of ruminative ideation.
"I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness."
Continuing with the seaside imagery, Woolf further pours her alienation onto the page, like hot water gushing forth from a vessel, escaping the spout, spilling everywhere at once, scalding children at a tea party. Yet her emotions are muted, her heart desolate, burning but without heat. She envisions being but a strand of seaweed or lump of seafoam tossed about without care or concern. Worthless to others, she is swept asunder by the waves.
"The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping."
Painted here is a scene so delicate yet powerful. As Woolf describes the coming and going of waves, almost as if from a distance, the immersed reader is consumed by them. These waves, figments of our own imaginations, gallop like a stampede across the mind's rugged terrain, like choppy currents dancing across the sea.
"I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me."
Woolf later encounters the waves, making contact as they crash upon her. Her life, our lives, are like these churning currents, rising and falling with the stirring of conditions. She appears to put up no resistance to being swept under by them, perhaps even finding relief in her own dissolution, as if finally being cleansed of her own mind's torment.
"And in me too the wave rises."
Indeed, Woolf's entire arc in The Waves is but a mirror image of her inner world. In times of isolation and stress, many in the present pandemic may be feeling quite similarly. Woolf retreated inward yet found little to no solace in the confines of her own mind. How would each of us respond to the waves inside us rising as if to devour us whole?
Riding the Waves
Virginia Woolf lived a morbid existence, her mother dying when Woolf was 13 years old, inducing the first of her various mental breakdowns, followed shortly by the untimely death of her half-sister and close friend. Institutionalized multiple times, she suffered severely from mental illness throughout her life. Woolf attempted suicide at least twice and finally succeeded at drowning herself at 59 in the River Ouse at its juncture with the town of Lewes in England.
The waves broke on the shore.
Riding the waves of her own life, yet unable to surface from them, Woolf succumbed to their onslaught. In times like ours, there are simultaneously more stressors and more resources offering relief. Given our present conditions, how shall we go about navigating these vicious waves so as not to be drowned by them? What can Virginia Woolf's reflections teach us about riding the waves? Is there anything further to be done or undone in order to not endure the same fate? To be continued.
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