WORDS ARE NOT ENOUGH
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All things around us are asking for our apprehension,
working for our enlightenment.
—R.H. Blyth
I. “If It’s Fine Tomorrow”
Each of the boys had been given a leather-bound notebook in which to document his travels. So far, I had used mine to score a few games of Hearts on the train ride.
I spent much of that trip as I had spent much of the prior four years: silently hoping that I had inside me whatever quality made someone more than a journaler; more than a Hearts-player: a writer.
Now, naïve, sitting atop a hill in the Scottish highlands, surrounded by wind, my glance tripping along the horizon with the blind paranoia of a roach feeling for an exit, (now it recoils at the setting sun, now it briefly touches a distant hill, now it skulks into the shadows in the grass between my legs): I tried again.
But words, though I may claim to love them, have never done what I ask them. I have since concluded, and now postulate in this essay, that my mistake was to ask too much: I hoped that words, being indelible, could make the world indelible, fixed, and therefore something to which one could attend forever. A black veil had covered me; I felt increasingly unable to touch life directly, knew it was passing before me and grew more alarmed at the immensity that passed permanently from the world with each moment the veil obscured.
Too scared to entertain the thought: I lied. I have lied more than I have spoken truth. I have lied more than I have spoken. I have lied so many times that lies have replaced in me the thing that is true and present at the core of a person; that to which one points, gleefully or timidly, as the truest indication of one’s character has been replaced in me with yet more pointing fingers, pointing in all directions but inward. Signs signifying nothing. A house, deep in the woods, with windows blown out and walls covered in an unreal, detached scrawl that shocks not for the horror of its content but for its desolation, its absence. A symbol whose only tendency is to erase itself.
II. The Window
The characters in Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse yearn, finally, to arrive. They yearn, after years of talking around and around, looking around and around, to finally be there: at the lighthouse, away on the horizon, where the lighthouse keeper lives most of the year with his sick child, his child so in need of new socks and a new sweater.
III. The Script
Neanderthals may have been the first to paint on walls, anthropologists think. Knowledge from so long ago is necessarily contingent, qualified. Slowly, maybe, cave drawings became ordered pictographs, which became primitive scripts. A word gestures, half-heartedly, to an object; but a script gestures backwards to the ape who had visions and thought to make them indelible my scraping them in blood on cave walls. To him, meaning was self-evident.
In contrast, the words I put to page are written in a script of characters who lie in corners, curl inwards away from the evidence of their deceit, touch only themselves, are too conscious of themselves, refer only to themselves.
Hello, you, in the cave. My every thought, my very sense of self, is constituted of those dreams you are dreaming, right now.
IV. Time Passes
V. Interlude: Bird/Fog
Sun and wind forced me open
And song poured out of me.
Even when I wanted it to stop,
I purged.
But it is unrecountable now;
Maybe it will be fine tomorrow;
Maybe some light
Will open me back up
VI. Skin
VII. “For Our Penitence Deserves a Glimpse Only”
(I am standing in the street in Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois. It is night and bitterly cold but I am drunk and alone and I remove my coat. I don’t feel cold at all; I feel warm; but I am regrettably lucid. Familiar thoughts fill the vacuum: how childishly I have acted; how romance is lost on me; how void of feeling to be disappointed so by every corner I turn; how spoiled; how spinelessly I relent; how futile to resist; how I cannot possibly wake up tomorrow. And still something bubbles under the surface of things, like devils under the surface of the world, inviting me again, turning me away again. There are no cars; no people.)
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VIII: The Lighthouse
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Ten years have passed, and Lily Briscoe has returned to the house on Skye. Though accompanied by Mr. Ramsay, James, Cam, and Mr. Carmichael, Woolf centers Lily—her proxy—as the reader’s companion for the rest of the novel. From sentence one of this, the novel’s final part, Woolf emphasizes Lily’s determination to wrap her own story in a bow; perhaps, indeed, Lily wishes now to conclude the novel:
What does it mean then, what can it all mean? Lily Briscoe asked herself, wondering whether, since she had been left alone, it behooved her to go to the kitchen to fetch another cup of coffee or wait here. What does it mean?–a catchword that was, caught up from some book, fitting her thought loosely, for she could not, this first morning with the Ramsays, contract her feelings, could only make a phrase resound to cover the blankness of her mind until these vapours had shrunk. For really, what did she feel, come back after all these years and Mrs. Ramsay dead? Nothing, nothing–nothing that she could express at all.
We occasionally see artists’ priorities more clearly through their choice of brush than their choice of subject. Lily seeks resolution, yes, but she can only do so because Woolf does so. Lily’s thoughts are not italicized, not enclosed with quotation marks or parentheses, nor otherwise separated from the action of the novel; they are the action of the novel, and as such are given the same argumentative weight as any sentence directly conveying character-action or author-rumination.[1]
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Here, then, Woolf’s goal aligns with Lily’s goal and the reader’s goal: Can we make it make sense? Can we reduce it to a page? We have read “Time Passes”; we have confounded not only the straightforward transmission of meaning but the possibility of that meaning existing, uncomplicated, at its source. Together we ask ourselves, What can it all mean?[2]​
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Nothing, nothing–nothing that she could express at all.
Words, because they suggest too much, suggest nothing. The reader may be tempted to conclude that this problem affects Woolf only, that her characters are unbounded in their feeling and that Woolf limits only herself in her accounting.
But Woolf embodies her unresolved intuitions in her characters. Her innovation is that her characters defy archetype; not through the superficial subversion of tradition but because they, as we all must, defy resolution to the reader.
Actions, therefore, are suddenly complicated: Nancy the housekeeper asks, “What does one send to the Lighthouse?” (“[A]s if she were forcing herself to do what she despaired of ever being able to do.”). Woolf, in turn:
What does one send to the Lighthouse indeed! At any other time Lily could have suggested reasonably tea, tobacco, newspapers. But this morning everything seemed so extraordinarilty queer that a question like Nancy’s–What does one send to the Lighthouse?–opened doors in one’s mind that went banging and swinging to and fro and made one keep asking, in a stupefied gape, What does one send? What does one do? Why is one sitting here, after all?
A symbol and an image differ in degree rather than in kind: A vision, which is a feeling, becomes an image, image becomes symbol, symbol becomes letter.
And the progression moves not only forward, but backward:
How aimless it was, how chaotic, how unreal it was, she thought, looking at her empty coffee cup. Mrs. Ramsay dead; Andrew killed; Prue dead too–repeat it as she might, it roused no feeling in her. And we all get together in a house like this on a morning like this, she said, looking out of the window. It was a beautiful still day.
Woolf drapes Mrs. Ramsay’s absence over every page that remains. Lily struggles to reconcile her memory of the house, which is the same as her memory of Mrs. Ramsay, with the apparent reality that Mrs. Ramsay is gone but the house persists. Lily spends the rest of the novel laboring to finish the painting of the house she started ten years prior.
For the artist, a painting is not a painting. We witness, really, Lily’s effort to grasp and fix to canvas something like a memory; something which is unresolvable and which, by grasping, she destroys. The thing was already lost a decade prior, when it was conceived—but, like Mrs. Ramsay, its ghost continues haunting those who knew it. Lily hopes to revive that memory so that she, like the first embalmers, can enshrine it, worship it and so be in need of nothing else forevermore.[3]She may continue hoping, but her visit to Skye is a funeral and her painting, a eulogy.
[1] Indeed, Woolf only dispels a Realist naivete: Lily’s ruminations are Woolf’s ruminations; could it be any other way?
[2] We don’t refer, really, to the novel itself; we instead ask, What can any of it mean? When I put this novel down and walk out to engage with people and with creatures, with water and with air, in short, with life: Can it tell me nothing?
[3] An adolescent memory is not only, indeed not even primarily, a series of connected images, sounds, and sensations. Not even the most mundane memory is a videotape. The unresolvable cannot be placed, physical, into the world, for the same reason a video camera cannot film its own insides. Lily’s painting is not her own reduction of a memory to material form; it is the memory’s self-portrait.
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IX. Interlude: Julia
Julia,
I am reading some of our old emails as I write this, which I haven’t done since we wrote them, and which I should not have done now because it is destroying me, and which I should have done three years ago because it would have reminded me that you have never judged me and I shouldn’t be afraid to say something, if only just to reach you.
(I wasn’t sure I would send this until I opened the first message; saw your signature:
“love love love,
Julia”;
felt instantly again all the love and fear I have ever felt; am again hopelessly condemned; and now it is inevitable.)
Because, since I have known you, you have saved love for me when you could have put it all in your poems; because I am jealous of it; I will try to be honest now.
I remember a day five years ago: we sat in Oakland Cemetery, looking at the graves and scratching odes to the dead in black marker on thick, ragged paper. I wished to scrawl them on your skin instead; I wished to be closer, closer, closer to you.
I shouldn’t have let the time pass without saying that to you, without asking after you. I am sorry. It’s because (and I want to tell you the truth):
1) I am ashamed that instead of telling you I am in love with you, which is the truth, I told you something crass because I am crass and debased and brutal and
2) afraid, afraid, afraid of something you represent in my mind (although you never asked to represent anything): a life I am afraid to lead; a shame that wears me like a mask; a secret I clutch like an owl clutches a rat:
3) I have never felt honest for a moment in my life; have never written an honest word or sung an honest note; I sent you words on pages but they weren’t poems; they were something a brain does to pleasure itself, to keep itself awake, when it has no heart to talk to. Maybe I hoped I could talk to yours—but it is impossible, impossible, impossible—there is nothing here for you to be close to.
And now it has been three years. I live in Atlanta again; I have lived here for a year.
I hope you’re well. I think of you often, with love. Please tell me, again, what is on your mind.
Yours, as ever,
Matt
X. “The Great Revelation Perhaps Never Did Come”