The colossal profundity inhabiting the insignificance, explored by Virginia Woolf
“It was superb this last protest, and so frantic that he succeeded at last in righting himself.” – Virginia Woolf
One of the greatest achievements of important writers is to show us, through the most obvious things surrounding us, the richness and deepness that we can’t easily see without their literary efforts. In this category, Virginia Woolf wrote one of the most meticulous works based on almost nothing; to her a moth trapped in a window-pane was enough. That’s how she wrote “The death of the moth”, first published in 1942.
Describing the tiny existence of the insect, Woolf echoes what Camus makes explicit while talking about the Myth of Sisyphus, the possible insignificance of life and the tragic aspect that arises when we are conscious of it:
“The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous and so various that to have only a moth’s part in life, and a day moth’s at that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meagre opportunities to the full, pathetic. He flew vigorously to one corner of his compartment, and, after waiting there a second, flew across to the other. What remained for him but to fly to a third corner and then to a fourth? That was all he could do, in spite of the size of the downs, the width of the sky, the far-off smoke of houses, and the romantic voice, now and then, of a steamer out at sea. What he could do he did.”
Virginia humanizes, or even better, she made us sensible to the life of that small creature in a way that halfway through the essay it isn’t about the moth anymore, we facing something much bigger, a clash common to all living beings:
“After perhaps a seventh attempt he slipped from the wooden ledge and fell, fluttering his wings, on to his back on the window sill. The helplessness of his attitude roused me. It flashed upon me that he was in difficulties; he could no longer raise himself; his legs struggled vainly. But, as I stretched out a pencil, meaning to help him to right himself, it came over me that the failure and awkwardness were the approach of death. I laid the pencil down again.”
Einstein said that he would never get tired of contemplating the mystery of life, even if his efforts were not enough for the task. Likewise, Woolf communicate to us, if not an answer, at least a well developed form of seeing this fascinating aspect of life:
“Nevertheless after a pause of exhaustion the legs fluttered again. It was superb this last protest, and so frantic that he succeeded at last in righting himself. One’s sympathies, of course, were all on the side of life. Also, when there was nobody to care or to know, this gigantic effort on the part of an insignificant little moth, against a power of such magnitude, to retain what no one else valued or desired to keep, moved one strangely. Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead.”
Virginia Woolf did in just a few pages what many writers don’t achieve in a lifetime, The death of the moth is a small essay thatmust be read in it’s entirety, because as Hilda Hilst claimed, “facing death we are never really conformed” and the written word has an important rola in our lives.
With Virginie Despentes: Healing by writing, feminism and rape as a subject for men
“Rape, it’s like a dark place without language for men. It’s like night.” – Virginie Despentes
Virginie Despentes is a french writer and filmmaker we desperately need to pay attention. His book “King Kong theory” moves through theory, manifest and her memoirs where, just like his other movies and writings, she deals with feminism, gender violence, prostitution and stereotypes.
In an interview to the Broadly channel, Virginie Despentes talks about her career, feminism, and her own experiences with prostitution and the time she was raped:
“When I was raped more than 30 years ago, if you were raped, you couldn’t, you would find yourself pretty much on your own. Hearing kind of, “It’s a shame, you should have died. You will never be the same again, you will never recover” which is not really helpful. It would be difficult to find some tools to get out of the trauma and make something out of it.”
Virginie Despentes
In a speech resembling that of Hilda Hilst about being a writer and the importance of writiing, Despentes tells what his book became both for the readers and for her:
“I never thought that writing was something that helps you heal but I think I changed a lot after having published King Kong Theory. King Kong theory here in France was read by many women and I’ve connected to many, many women. So I suppose something about healing did work here.”
Chimamanda Agozie brings our attention to the problem of gender expectations and the behaviour taught to boys and girls in our society. But Virginie Despentes point to an important aspect, the fact of these expectations create such a distance between man and the debate about rape that there’s no vocabulary for men to deal with thoughts and behaviors around this subject:
“I want to see men, really, I want to see men gathering and please, try to understand what’s going on with you, how can you be a rapist? How can you prevent it? Because we can’t. Rape, it’s like a dark place without language for men. It’s like night. If you bring some light here, I think it could change things.”
Despentes summarize the problem of gender inequality in one question:
“But I’m generalizing, sometimes, about men. I don’t hate them, but I like to be able to treat men like we are treated most of the time. I feel comfortable with that. If we think rape is important and if you’re really taught that you’re entitled to kill a man if he wants to abuse you, I think it changes the whole thing. But do we think rape is that important that we can allow women to kill men? That’s an interesting question in my opinion.”
It’s in this dialogue immersed in comprehension, knowledge and pragmatism that Virginie Despentes teach something to all of us.
Still around the problems faced by women, it’s always important to remind what Lygia Fagundes Telles has to say about the beginning of her career.
You can watch the full interview, in english, with Virginie Despentes below:
5 quotes to make you read: The invention of Morel by Bioy Casares
It was the seventh book published by Bioy Casares, but for him only after “The invention of Morel” his literary career started. In this book a fugitive hide himself in a deserted island where there’s an old museum until the day when the island receive unexpected guests. It’s from this simple premise that Casares create constant distortions between sanity and folly, real a imaginary.
1
"I examined the shelves in vain, hoping to find some books that would be useful for a research project I began before the trial. (I believe we lose immortality because we have not conquered our opposition to death; we keep insisting on the primary, rudimentary idea: that the whole body should be kept alive. We should seek to preserve only the part that has to do with consciousness.)"
2
"Perhaps my “no hope” therapy is a little ridiculous; never hope, to avoid disappointment; consider myself dead, to keep from dying. Suddenly I see this feeling as a frightening, disconcerting apathy. I must overcome it."
3
"I am in a bad state of mind. It seems that for a long time I have known that everything I do is wrong, and yet I have kept on the same way, stupidly, obstinately. I might have acted this way in a dream, or if I were insane— When I slept this afternoon, I had this dream, like a symbolic and premature commentary on my life: as I was playing a game of croquet, I learned that my part in the game was killing a man. Then, suddenly, I knew I was that man."
4
"The habits of our lives make us presume that things will happen in a certain foreseeable way, that there will be a vague coherence in the world. Now reality appears to be changed, unreal. When a man awakens, or dies, he is slow to free himself from the terrors of the dream, from the worries and manias of life."
5
"A recluse can make machines or invest his visions with reality only imperfectly, by writing about them or depicting them to others who are more fortunate than he."
Reference: The Invention of Morel. Adolfo Bioy Casares. Translation: Ruth L. C. Simms. New York Review of books.
Simulation in modernist architecture and it’s fiction, according to Peter Eisenman
“For what made function any more <<real>> a source of imagery than elements chosen from antiquity?” – Peter Eisenman
Best known by projecting the Holocaust Memorial, Peter Eisenman is also an important deconstructivist theorist. In his article “The end of the classical” published in 1984, he makes a profound and sharp analysis of the modernism to think what would replace it. In his analysis he identifies three great architectonic fictions perpetuated by the modernists and this text is about the first of them, the fiction of representation.
Eisenman begin with the renaissance’s architecture which, inspired in classic models, used them as base in a way that their meaning in the present was derived from the buildings of the past. For this reason Eisenman claims that the first fiction, even if involuntary, comes from the renaissance, because their works we simulations of previous projects, therefore, fictions of a meaningful architecture.
“Modern architecture claimed to rectify and liberate itself from the Renaissance fiction of representation by asserting that it was not necessary for architecture to represent another architecture; architecture was solely to embody its own function. With the deductive conclusion that form follows function, modern architecture introduced the idea that a building should express– that is, look like– its function, or like and idea of function.”
However, an essential question:
“For what made function any more <<real>> a source of imagery than elements chosen from antiquity?”
The attempt of using function to transmit the message of utility would be the same fiction of the renaissance using the classical to give meaning to their works, says Eisenman. The modernist architecture would be then, and yet, still a simulation, even if using a new vocabulary, because its meaning came from outside, the building being only a representation of the meaning.
“Functionalism turned out to be yet another stylistic conclusion, this one based on a scientific and technical positivism, a simulation of efficiency. From this perspective the modern movement can be seen to be continuous with the architecture that preceded it.
For in trying to reduce architectural form to tis essence, to a pure reality, the moderns assumed they were transforming the field of referential figuration to that of non-referential <<objectivity.>> In reality, however, their <<objective>> form never left the classical tradition. They were simply stripped down classical forms, or forms referring to a new set of givens (function, technology). Thus, Le Corbusier’s houses that look like modern steamships or biplanes exhibit the same referential attitude toward representation as a Renaissance or <<classical>> building. The points of reference are different, but the implications for the object are the same.”
Thus the modernist choice trapped them in the very place they wanted to leave, history:
“The commitment to return modernist abstraction to history seems to sum up, for out time, the problem of representation. It was given its << Post-Modern>> inversion in Robert Venturi’s distinction between the <<duck>> and the <<decorated shed.>> […] In this sense the stripped-down <<abstractions>> of modernism are still referential objects: technological rather than typological ducks.”
By subverting one the most popular adages of architecture, Peter Eisenman make it clear that there’s no obligatory connection between form and function as the modernism made us believe. At light of the deconstructivist critic, it’s interesting to go back to another areas of knowledge, like the minimalist movement, and analyze the use and the objective of the forms.