Virginia Woolf and war – an homage to Virginia Woolf and to #BreakTheBias

 

Virginia Woolf and war – an homage to Virginia Woolf and to #breakthebias

The writing of Virginia Woolf was bound to touch on the effects of war. She lived through both the first and second world war as well as the Boer war. As a pacifist, Woolf wrote against war and other violent situations, including, obviously, gender violence. In Mrs Dalloway, as I have written before, there is a basic duality established between Septimus Warren Smith and Clarissa Dalloway that reminds us of the suffering we’re currently seeing in world conflicts, not only in Ukraine. In the novel one protagonist is privileged, a person of means; the other, an ex-soldier who survives World War I, is unemployed, of penurious means. Poet and society matron. Male and female. Simplifying in this way is one way of coming to understandings of the ideas running through the book. And as always in Woolf there is highly careful planning behind the writing. But two other binary opposites, sane/insane, are of use here, especially as Woolf herself made use of them as she planned the book.

 Repetition of some of these words sets the novel to navigate around truth versus insane truth… At the same time the writing establishes doubt—the region of beauty, as Woolf terms it in the essay ‘Reading’—about the acuteness of Septimus Smith’s psychological trauma. Smith, the character, representative of so many people trapped in wars, may or may not be insane. But obviously the insanity of war makes up a great part of the writer’s societal indictment. But underlying the text is a fascinating use of suggestion woven in through the aforementioned series of key words or ideas as the personal perspectives of the book’s characters become clear through their thoughts and conversations. 

Given the world situation today, let us hope we can grow less violent and definitely break the bias!

Conflicts

 

Conflicts

The current headlining focus on Ukraine and Russia is perhaps the biggest link in what amounts to a chain of conflicts—turmoils in various situations in the Middle East, in Africa, and elsewhere. Some of these situations involve full scale wars, others are perhaps less dire but may still involve disastrous living conditions for the people caught up in them.

The situations that lead to violent conflicts vary. Causes include territory, natural resources, water. Very often colonialist or neo-colonialist interests are at the heart of the problem.

Both globally and locally the concept of freedom or liberty is involved in such struggles, and this relates to power. For freedom is not only an abstraction but “effective power to do specific things,” in the words of John Dewey.*

In “The problem of freedom” the philosopher encourages us to look at the matter in the context of culture, “a state of interaction of many factors.”

It was important to Dewey not to isolate any one notion in the conversation, and I bring this up here because in spite of the vast number of texts being published on the current crisis I believe his words still resonate: “The fundamental postulate of the discussion is that isolation of any one factor, no matter how strong its workings at a given time, is fatal to understanding and to intelligent action.” 

I offer this short comment in the belief that violent conflict is not the answer to the problem.

* Cited in Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, p. 435 (paperback).

Vote

 

The wires are alive with talk of unfair elections, not only in the United States this coming November but yes, pretty loudly about the United States this coming November. One of the problems is the fact that election rigging is surprise surprise not a recent practice.

 Gore Vidal spoke of it not only in his novels but also in his book Imperial America (New York, Nation Books, 2004). He brings in a comic note with the anecdote about Eleanor Roosevelt’s shock at seeing people buying votes. Her eventually presidential husband Franklin tells her not to worry, “the Republicans are buying them, too.”

Not so funny of course is the actual practice of election rigging and its current electronic extensions. Already on the eve of the 2004 presidential election, Gore was recommending the use of paper ballots as opposed to machine counts (p. 37). This however may not prove as easy as it sounds. As a recent article in The Atlantic Monthly notes, “Ballots for the fall presidential contest cannot be printed until every party certifies its candidates.” And that is only one hurdle in the mess the magazine predicts (link to article below). By all means, vote. We must vote.

 As to the history of vote rigging, a short summary may be found at

https://www.historyextra.com/period/modern/a-brief-history-of-election-rigging-in-the-united-states/

  The Atlantic Monthly article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/november-election-going-be-mess/614296/

Walks and ways

I’ve resumed my longer walks, now, daily or almost so. All of this in accordance with my interpretations of the official information in our area regarding the situation with the Covid-19 pandemic. In Barcelona, as in many other places, the quarantine restrictions are being relaxed with caution.

Meanwhile my account on Facebook is @WBainPoetry (with or without upper case). I’ll be linking accounts here soon but I should add that my Facebook posts primarily deal with more general information, especially things related to current events and the influence of social media. I’ve noticed that searches for the previously mentioned “@” tag brings up my FB page in a simple search on Google. The other search engines I’ve tried don’t do this, however.

In the context of conversations about social media usage this seems worth mentioning.

#staysafestayhome

Out on the street last Friday for the first time in nearly two months. The quarantine has been hard to deal with generally, but perhaps especially in tersms of creativity.

But then… all of this is global, which in many ways is something positive because we’ve known for some time that the world has to work together more than ever to confront the Coronavirus-19 pandemic and many other environmental threats.

Global warning has to be addressed. The destruction of Earth’s rainforests has to be addressed.

So while unable to go out for those refreshing walks and get togethers, telematics and informatics have become an even greater part of our lives.

Underlying the ways we look at the quarantine are ideas about the human biome, both macro and micro—especially micro just now, with regard to the virus that has sparked this global response.

It’s still a pretty big shock to see TV news broadcasts showing the streets of Barcelona empty of crowds of walkers.

There is the upside of course that atmospheric pollution has dropped by something like 70 per cent. But there is also the very sad occurrence of lost lives and suffering. As in so many places the world over, every evening we stand on our small balcony and along with our neighbors applaud the courage of our health workers and others who are directly confronting the pandemic.

Continuing to create is obviously harder just now. But part of the job of dealing with the challenge is precisely to find ways of going on in life positive ways.

At the moment we’re forced to teach by conference call, to samizdat using WhatsApp, to enjoy a Sunday chat with friends using Zoom or similar techno calls…..

#staysafestayhome

Earth Day 2020

Earth Day in times of emergency….. If not for the pandemic and the quarantine currently in force we might be out in the country somewhere celebrating the arrival of spring. Well…. perhaps if not for the rains. 

Instead of an Easter season trip this year what comes is a series of memories of walking a patch of land that alternates areas of flowering clover with balding places giving over to dandelions, chickweeds and some other wilds I can’t even guess the name of.

Then notes I made from a trip we took to Viladrau jog my memory back to flowers seen—dandelions (again) in seed and flowering; nipplewort, violets, something like coltsfoot. Some tiny white flowers. 

And then that beautiful scrubland with Spanish broom and what I think is gorse. Of the trees in Viladrau—holm oak, cork oak, innumerable firs, pines, birch, hazel. Animals? Not so many, aside from different birds like magpies, sparrows, blackbirds there were the insects—3 bee types, ants, spider…

As people have been saying (including Greta Thunberg and earth systems scientist Johann Rockström in today’s The Guardian), after this emergency we are/will be in a changed world owing to such things as global warming, the related loss of Earth’s polar ice caps, the destruction of the Amazon and other rainforests.

This crisis is surmountable but it will take work and patience and far better decision making to learn from our past errors. Below, two links I believe to be of interest.

https://www.nytimes.com/1971/11/14/archives/our-oceans-are-dying.html

https://notesfromgalilee.wordpress.com/tag/mediterranean-is-dying/

World Poetry Day

Whuck

Wind in a tarpaulin.

Clothes drying on the line.

A billowing sail.

Agave

Agave

Found one afternoon on Sitges beach,

you’ve grown on this balcony from a pup

through our thirty years of marriage.

Left there where we found you

would you have reached this size?

Perhaps the only useless question now.

But through droughts, through rainy years,

I’ve wondered about the differences made

by caressing those blue-green sawtoothed

leaves of yours, by giving you

the occasional word, especially while pruning.

Ouch! Come on, now, here’s water,

saved from this morning’s dish rinse.

So let’s go for it—stay well!

Related to Dalloway Day

I wrote, on or about 12 May, that I wanted to encourage people to participate in this year’s Dalloway Day by writing, drawing, making music, in order to promote the achievements of Virginia Woolf and her Bloomsbury colleagues.  Since that time I’ve found, through the writer Gretchen Gerzina, that Swann Auction Galleries, a company specializing in rare and antiquarian books, has a number of publications by Woolf, many of these first editions. So it seems to me good to mention this for the purpose not only of adding book collecting to my short list of activities related to Dalloway Day but also to call attention to ways in which adaptations of one kind of poetry—in the ample sense of the word—can spur work in other kinds. Woolf’s comment that “painting and writing have much to tell each other” has been cited so often that I almost hesitate to repeat it here. However, oft quoted and perhaps obvious as it may be, it serves as an indication of the way different disciplines influence each other. In this regard, and in the context of examining acculturation in general, I think people will be interested in looking at the Swann website. Once there, you’ll find the options of searching different catalogs or searching the site itself. To date I’ve only searched on “Woolf” (without the quotes) and a few other twentieth-century artists. But the site is obviously very full and I think the results are pretty interesting in a variety of ways.

The Swann website: / https://catalogue.swanngalleries.com/asp/fullCatalogue.asp?salelot=2511+++++145+&refno=++758511&saletype=

/

Gretchen Gerzina posted the address of the Swann Galleries website on the Listserv of the International Virginia Woolf Society. Her own website is at / https://www.gretchengerzina.com/about-gretchen-gerzina.html

  /

Reading notes

Re-reading Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf in preparation for a get together with friends to talk about Woolf’s work—and Lee’s, for all that, for the bio, Virginia Woolf, A Life, is an incredible achievement. Lee is tremendously thorough and she writes so well. But aside from that it is a true work of love, not only of the life of its subject but of the collective life of “dear Reader”. Philo-sophy in its widest sense.

Here, for example, is an aspect of Woolf through Lee,

Painting overlaps with remembering in To the Lighthouse, and Virginia Woolf—like Lily Briscoe redoing her painting in the Ramsays’ house and garden—spent a lifetime making her own ‘views’ of St Ives [Wales] [….] When [Woolf] comes to [inventing] Mrs Ramsay […] she has given herself plenty of practice:

For the great plateful of blue water was before her, the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men.

When Virginia Woolf describes Talland House [in St Ives] in her memoirs she does it like a picture: she says it looked ‘like a child’s drawing of a house, remarkable only for its flat roof, and the crisscrossed railing that ran round the roof, again, like something that a child draws’.

Lee’s comments, I should add, come from the second chapter of her book, titled ‘Houses.’ The main theme at that point is to look into ways in which Woolf remembered her rich and very active childhood and ways in which she wrote about those experiences. An interesting reading, I think, for those in search of green sand dunes and platefuls of blue water.

Note on "Conferential"

As a note to what I wrote yesterday, let me add that Sebeok’s article is still available online. It should come up easily by searching on “Semiotics and the biological sciences initial conditions Thomas A Sebeok” without the quotation marks. If not, I note the link below. Sebeok’s mention of Lotman goes:

The Russian master, Yuri Lotman, has […] taken the boldly original step of doing away with the concept of a “bridge” altogether, replacing it by the semiotically sensitie manoeuvre of transcoding. A main principle of his research method was the elimination of the opposition between the exact sciences and the humanities by treating the fabrics of these complementary domains as if they were readily transmutable from one semiotic system to another (Lotman 1990:271).

Lotman 1990 etc. is the 1990 publication Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Study of Culture.

One of the links to the Sebeok article:

 http://livingbooksaboutlife.org/pdfs/sebeok.pdf

Vilanova i la Geltrú

Closing out the month of January......

Dance

Ten dance axioms.

 

The world is all that is the case.

Colors dance, like form.

Form dances, like color.

Dance is a waveparticle.

Dance, well, uh, dances.

A wise ol’ critter, is ol’ Dance.

Dance is a styrofoam cup blown along the street while eating its breakfast.

Dance is differAnt readings to tease re-de-constructionists with.

Dance is the right to choose a channel.

Dance?

Postscript: The penultimate axiom restates Sean Snyder’s “Freedom is the freedom to choose a channel,” read in the video Schema (at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, till January 2008). Wittgenstein would, I think, agree. Thanks to Georg Pedersen and Round Online for the theme. More information on Snyder's work is available at the Stedelijk website and the website of the Israeli Center for Digital Art, which also includes outtakes from different videos.

"New and future literatures"

The "new and future literatures" Alan Sondheim speaks of in “Introduction: Codework” in the September/October 2001 issue of  American Book Review variously impact e-poetry. It is a truism that e-poetry can be defined as poetry written in (programming) code. But poetry first circulated on paper and later published on electronic supports can also be termed e-poetry. When we define e-poetry in the first manner, we are using the word code “in a narrower sense [to mean] a translation from natural language to an artificial, strictly defined one” (Sondheim, ABR, 1). But a quick example of the second kind of e-poetry is Julio Cortázar’s “The Lines of the Hand” (as well as myriad other texts). Sondheim uses a tree metaphor as a rough classification for codework. Thus, there are “multi-media and hypertextual works” rather like leaves or flowers, he notes, and these “may playfully utilize programming terminology” without “refer[ring] to specific programs” (ABR, 1). However, work where “the language becomes increasingly unreadable at times” are analogous to “tendrils and branchings of the tree, half surface and half root” (ABR, 1). The works in this category, then, are “works in which submerged code has modified the surface language—with the possible representation of the code as well” (ABR, 1). It is obviously slippery ground we are on, for if natural language is also code, it would seem that even on a level of expertise that goes as deep as Sondheim’s, terms like code and codework are sometimes interchangeable. However, his third classification, the roots of the tree, involves “works in which the submerged code is emergent contents [and] both a deconstruction of the surface and of the dichotomy between the surface and the depth” (ABR, 1). In this third category, the programming language may actually run a program. So it’s important to distinguish between imperative programming (Sondheim’s first classification) and object-oriented programming (Sondheim’s third and, sometimes, second classifications). I think it’s good to return to Sondheim’s article today and to share his enthusiasm for codework’s movements around “vast uncharted domains [of] new and future literatures—domains that recognize the vast changes that have occurred in human/machine interaction—changes that affect the very notions of community and communality” (ABR, 2). The article, abbreviated here as ABR, is available online.