A friend told me a couple of days ago the story of Virginia Woolf's suicide: she was losing her mind; one day she put in her pockets a ballast and walked into the sea, and died drowned. She did it, I was told, because she loved her husband immensely (that was the word my friend used), and wanted to spare him the pain of watching her become insane.
And I thought, arrested by a sudden weariness: good Lord, there is no end to this... Here is, again, someone taking a decision that does not belong to her, here is someone deciding for someone else what is good for him, assuming that she knows, assuming she can control life and death, as if she had the whole picture; here is a perfect self-sufficient pride born of self-loathing enacted...
Later, trying to find sleep, I thought that what Virginia Woolf was dealing with by her suicide was her own inability to bear the thought of another person loving her so unconditionally as to accept her insanity; so fully as to value her life and presence, however disrupted, however incomplete and diminished, more than his own happiness... You cannot bear this if deep down you feel you wouldn't be able to love in the same way -- so you conclude that others cannot either. And this is a logical conclusion if you live with the idea and feeling of alienation, of our existence being only and desperately individual, fragmented, disconnected from the whole and thus ultimately insignificant. But not all of us live with this idea and feeling; or not all the time.
But of course, my understanding is as partial and one-sided as anyone's, and I am as good at projecting my feelings as anyone... so perhaps, Mr Woolf was, after all, relieved to be rid of his crazy wife, and we may be totally mistaken about her real motives, and I may have no clue to what it means, losing your mind. I can see a grandeur in her decision too -- the irresistible impulse to "lay down your life for your friends", to put the well-being of another person, however misunderstood this well-being may be, before your own. I do not know, and she is not there to explain. All I know is that for a short while that night rage and grief of a loving heart left onshore became mine. Nay -- they are mine each time a person assumes he or she knows what is good for me or how I feel about this or that, each time a unilateral decision is taken to spare me something I do not want to be spared. And to the joking question "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?", I find myself answering with Martha, in Edward Albee's play, shivering on a cold morning just as the curtain is about to go down:
- I am, George. I am.
It is the fear that strikes me in this - her 'saving' of another's feelings seems to me to be fear masquerading as self-sacrifice for a personal or a wider general good. But here autonomy, which is seen by psychologists as an essential characteristic if we are to be fully and authentically human, draws final and irrevocable boundaries around the individual that does not permit of the possibility of a shared existence. If the Christ event is to be taken as the template then each life is part of a shared tapestry, each human thread interwoven with the threads of others in such a way that to univocally unravel our own from the picture is to cause its partial disintegration. Perhaps a definition of madness could be that of a person who retreats so far inside themselves that they simply cannot see this interwoven nature of all things.
ReplyDeleteThat was indeed my point, Richard, thanks for making it so much more explicit. No man is an island... Interesting: the suicide I was talking about is often presented as a kind of "last sensible act", the last manifestation of a declining spirit; but given what you are saying about madness, it looks like the first (and final) manifestation of the disintegration of the said spirit...
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