Creative Flow with Virginia Woolf - Special Episode

Joana P. R. Neves: And now I leave you with the Joanna of the past. She's a good egg. Hello again, this is Joana of the future. Hi, Joanna from the future again. If you're watching, you can see that I even am wearing different clothes because this is a different day of recording. It is actually the following day of the whole recording of the two readings of the text. So I solved the mystery. I cracked it. I know what happened. after having recorded the previous section that you listened to when I discovered that there was a discrepancy between the text that I found online and the text that I was reading from, which belonged to me for many, many years. ⁓ I ⁓ realized ⁓ I. Okay, so now I am going to tell you something. I'm back. I just recorded this whole text. It's the beauty of editing. I have read the whole text from the book, Monday or Tuesday, discovered the reason why they're different. I know the solution to the mystery. will tell you after I've read the texts. So hold on tight. So if you remember when I was looking at the publishing house, I did say of Monday or Tuesday of the collection of non-fiction stories by Virginia Woolf that I've had for a very long time. I did say Virginia Woolf Estate 1921, but I did also say that the text was published in 1917. So what happened is that Monday or Tuesday, the collection that I have You will know the whole story at the end of the episode. Stick around. And I realized that reference that I make to the Angel in the house disappeared from that text. ⁓ had been preparing this episode with text that I found online. You know how it is, the mark on the wall, PDF, Google browser, schluck. You get to a page where you have the whole text and that's exactly what happened to me. ⁓ And I had been working on that version and I noticed that this book, Monday or Tuesday, is a version of the Mark on the Wall that was revised for the Posterior editions of a Monday or Tuesday, The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf. Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date, it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire, the steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book, the three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, must have been the winter time. which was published Virginia Woolf was alive and well ⁓ and prolifically ⁓ took out the whole paragraph that talks about the entity that I mentioned in the introduction. So I'm really interested in that disappearance because this Monday or Tuesday, so this whole collection of short texts by Virginia Woolf was published posthumously by Leonard Woolf in 1944. It says so in the introduction. There's a sort of a little note that I'm going to read you now and that I have never read in my life. ⁓ So it says, Monday or Tuesday was published by the Hogarth Press in 1921. ⁓ So this is the collection and not text, the mark on the wall. ⁓ Three of the stories in the collection been published previously. The mark on the wall. ⁓ And we had just finished our tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind. And I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock. in the Hogarth Press's first publication, two stories of 1917. So, and then there's other stories that are mentioned. ⁓ And then it goes on say, the Mark on the Wall ⁓ an unwritten novel were revised by Woolf for inclusion in Monday or Tuesday. So to be published in, to be republished in 1921. Rather to my relief, the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece. How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly and then leave it. The first edition of the collection was problematic, however, and included many printing, spelling and punctuation errors. Most of these were corrected in the first US edition, which has become the model for subsequent printings of the stories. So Virginia Woolf herself, because when it says Woolf, I presume it was Virginia and not Leonard, maybe both of them, they decided to take out that paragraph and If that mark was made by a nail, it can't have been for a picture. It must have been for a miniature. The miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, ⁓ powdered dusted cheeks and lips like red carnations. ⁓ A fraud of course, ⁓ for the people who had this house before would have chosen pictures in that way. An picture for an old That is the sort of people they were. Very interesting people. It is funny because I was told by a friend and I just wrote a about this 30 ago. I think long, long time ago that I and I think of them so often, in such queer places because one will never see them again, never know what happened next. She wore a flannel collar round her throat and he drew posters for an oatmeal company and they wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion, art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder. have a tendency to like ⁓ minor texts of revered authors. minor films of revered filmmakers, which might be true. Maybe I'm more keen on process rather than outcome. as one is torn from the old lady about to pour our tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train. But as for that mark, I'm not sure about it. I don't believe it was made by a nail after all. It's too big, too round for that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, 10 to 1, I shouldn't be able to say for certain. I don't care. I know what idea is and I love the rhythm. I love pace. It's a bit chaotic at as for Virginia Woolf, that's not the mistake at all in the text, but there is a real fresh aspect. And I love that mysterious little scene of that entity that is threatening, that is both domestic, but also interested in art, which is, I guess, the Victorian, ⁓ even before the Victorian time, you know, the well-educated woman. Because once a thing's done, one ever knows how it happened. ⁓ dear me, the mystery of life, the inaccuracy of thought, the ignorance of humanity. To show how very little control of our possessions we have, what an accidental affair this living is after our civilization, let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime. Beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses, what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble, who knew how to play music, read a few texts, knew some poems by heart, and maybe even could play an instrument and sing. I love that introduction of that entity that then became something else and to know how there were little bits, little sparks of that entity that then kind of manifested later, I suppose. Or maybe it was already there in other texts. I am not a Virginia Woolf specialist. three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools. Then there were the birdcages, the iron hoops, the steel skates the Queen Anne coal scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ, all gone, and jewels too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping, pairing affair it is, to be sure. The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back that I sit surrounded by solid furniture. I get really hooked on a of them and then I read them obsessively. And that's my own way of ⁓ functioning. And I think it's really interesting to know who you are, know your process, ⁓ know you assimilate things and also how then ⁓ you ⁓ make them your own ⁓ whatever you do with them is your own making. ⁓ at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the tube at 50 miles an hour, landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair. Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked, tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office, with one's hair flying back like the tail of a racehorse. Here it is, mystery solved. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair, also casual, also haphazard. But after life, the slow pulling down of thick green stalks, so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there, as one is born here, helpless, speechless? unable to focus one's eyesight groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the giants. As for saying which are trees and which are men and women, or whether there are such things that one won't be in a condition to do for 50 years or so. There will be nothing at spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colour, dim pinks and blues, which will, as time goes on, become more definite, become, I don't know what. And yet, mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by some round black substance, such as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer, and I, not being a very vigilant housekeeper, look at the dust on the mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they say, buried Troy three times over, only fragments of pots. utterly refusing annihilation as one can believe. I know a housekeeper, a woman with a profile of a policeman, those little round buttons marked even upon the edge of her shadow, a woman with a broom in her hand, a thumb on picture frames, an eye on the beds, ⁓ and she talks always of art. is coming nearer and nearer and now, pointing to certain spots of yellow rust on the fender, She becomes so menacing that to oust her, I shall have to end her by taking action. I shall have to get up and see for myself what that mark, but no, I refuse to be beaten. I will not move. I will not recognize her. See, she fades already. very nearly of her and her insinuations, ⁓ which I can hear quite distinctly. Yet ⁓ she has about her the pathos of all people who wish to compromise. And why should I resent the fact that she has a few books in her house, a picture or two? But what I really resent is that she resents me, life being an affair of attack and defence after all. Another time I will have it out with her, not now. She must go now. The tree outside the window taps gently on the pane. I want to think quietly. calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes. Shakespeare. Well, he will do as well as another. A man who sat himself solidly in an armchair and looked into the fire. So a shower of ideas felt perpetually from some very high heaven down through his mind. He lent his forehead on his hand and people looking in through the open door for this scene is supposed to take place on a summer's evening. But how dull this is, this historical fiction. doesn't interest me at all. wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest of thoughts, ⁓ very frequent even, in the minds of modest mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises. They are not thoughts directly praising oneself, that is the beauty of them. There are thoughts like this. ⁓ then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. a flower growing on a dust heap on the site of old house in Kingsway. seed, I said, must have been sown in the reign of Charles I. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles I, I asked, but I don't remember the answer. Tall flowers with purple tassels to them, perhaps. ⁓ And so it goes on. All the time I'm dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind, lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I should catch myself out and stretch my hand at once for a book in self-protection. Indeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very curious after all? It is a matter of great importance. Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people. What an airless, shallow, bald prominent world it becomes. A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways, we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the expression of vagueness, the gleam of glassiness in our eyes. And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections. For of course, there is not one reflection, but an almost infinite number. Those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue. leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking in knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps, but these generalisations are very worthless. The military sound of the word is enough. It recalls leading articles, cabinet ministers, a whole class of things and deeds which as a child one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing. from which one could not depart save at the risk of nameless damnation. Generalisations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes and habits, like the habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain hour, although nobody liked it. this is Exhibitionistas, your art wonderment podcast, and I am your host, Joana P. R. Neves, art writer and curator. was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, If you receive the newsletter, you probably know that Exhibitionistas' program is on a hiatus, ⁓ but a very ⁓ one because we will still be dropping episodes, ⁓ only different kinds of episodes. These be special ⁓ curated little gems where I will read favourite texts that will be a nourishing pause for you and also for me. and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a The why we're a hiatus ⁓ in the background is that we're the show. ⁓ illegitimate freedom. now takes the place of those things, I those real standard things? Men, perhaps, should you be a woman, the masculine of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whittacker's table of to make it even more pleasurable for you and for us. So if you have not signed up for the newsletter, maybe you should, the link is always there in the show's notes, there's a poll going on ⁓ you what you like about the programme, why you keep listening to it, ⁓ also what are the segments that you enjoy, the ones that you don't, ⁓ whether the Exhibitionistas programme is clear to you or not, and if it isn't, precendency, which has become, I suppose, since the war half a phantom to many men and women, which soon, one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and land see a prince, gods and devils, hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom, if freedom exists. In certain lights, What are the questions you may have about it? You can also leave comments on whatever platform you listen to the podcasts that will be surely very, very helpful for us to narrow down the focus of Exhibitionista. So if you haven't signed up for the newsletter, do so because it is not your regular kind of email. always... that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow, suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the wall, it would at a certain point mount and descend a small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those barrels on the south downs, which are, they say, either tombs or camps. put some little gems in there, some links to things that might be useful as follow-up readings after the episodes and much more. ⁓ So what am I doing in these episodes? Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy as I said, I am reading favorite texts that have been substantial in creating my own relationship contemporary art, to writing, ⁓ reading. like most English people, and finding it natural, at the end of a walk, to think of the bones stretched beneath the turf. There must be some book about it, some antiquary must have dug up those bones and given them a name. What sort of man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired colonels for the most part, I dare say, leading parties of age labourers And I have to say the beauty of those texts is that because they speak about craft, about relationship to creativity and to art in general, they also intersect with life. And for me, you know, I will always say this, they are far better than any self-help book out there. And that is a hill I am absolutely ready to die on. the top here, examining clods of earth and stone and getting into correspondence with the neighbouring clergy, which, being opened at breakfast time, gives them a feeling of importance, and the comparison of arrowheads necessitates cross-country journeys to the county towns, an agreeable necessity both to them and to their elderly wives. He wished to make plum jam or to clean out the study. today. ⁓ I am reading a text by Virginia Woolf called The Mark on the Wall. ⁓ And it is a weird one because I have been it for decades. is a very short text, as you will see, ⁓ but across the years ⁓ I kept going back to it because, ⁓ well, didn't quite understand it. There is one passage that kept drawing in about what we now probably call ⁓ and have every reason for keeping that great question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension, while the Colonel himself feels agreeably philosophic in accumulating evidence on both sides of the question. the creative flow, where Woolf talks about wanting to be uninterrupted in her line of thought. It talks about a desire which most us, ⁓ even so ⁓ if were a young parent like myself. But even if you're not a parent, I'm pretty sure ⁓ that can relate to ⁓ deeply rooted desire of staying in the flow of attention, focus or creativity. The rest of the text is quite mysterious. It is full of references that are obsolete or words that it didn't quite get because my mastering of the English language also has evolved across time. But the whole piece was a pleasure to read usual for Woolf, at least as far as I'm concerned, ⁓ I kept ⁓ back to it. ⁓ by little, it became more familiar. Until recently, ⁓ felt that I had a good sense of what it was about because wrote several texts where Woolf's non-fiction and life ⁓ are ⁓ which will link in the show's notes if you're curious about them. It is true that he thus finally inclined to believe in the camp, and being opposed, casts all his arrowheads into one scale, and being still further opposed, indicts a pamphlet which he is about to read at the quarterly meeting of the local society, when a stroke lays him low, and his last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child, but of the camp and that arrowhead there. So I got closer to it and the feeling of being at the heart of a beloved author's writing is really, really special. which is now in the case at the local museum, together with the foot of a Chinese murderess a handful of Elizabethan nails, a great many Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and the wine glass that Nelson drank out of, proving I really don't know what. No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really, what shall we say? So who was Virginia Woolf? I mean, by now I'm pretty sure all of us know little bits of her biography here and there, but I think one of the things that is the most striking about her is that she seems to have been born right at the nervous center of British modernism, which is to say the Bloomsbury Group. The head of a gigantic old nail, driven in 200 years ago, which has now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white, walled, firelit room. What should I gain? Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up. at the turn of the 19th century and way into the 20th, the beginning of the 20th century. And it is called Bloomsbury simply because they lived in that borough of London, which is now the home of many important institutions such as universities, the British Museum, the Warburg Institute. And also you can find the very beautiful brutalist residential building, the Brunswick Centre. and what is knowledge? What are our learned men, save the descendants of witches and hermits, who crouched in caves and in woods, brewing herbs, interrogating shrew mice, and writing down the language of the stars? And the less we honor them as our superstitions dwindle, and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases, yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world, a quiet, and many more. So members of the Bloomsbury group were Lytton Stratchey, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Ottoline Morel, who was ⁓ of a ⁓ and the Salon Lady, Foster and others. spacious world, with a flower so red and blue in the open fields, a world without professors or specialists or housekeepers the profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice with one's thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water lilies, hanging suspended over nests of white sea eggs. How peaceful it is down here. rooted into the centre of the world and gazing up through the grey waters with a sudden gleam of light and the reflections, if it were not for So who was Virginia Woolf? Well, Virginia Woolf was born Virginia Stephen. Her father was an author, Leslie Stephen, who married Harriet Thackeray, who had two children with him and then died of eclampsia. He went on to marry a woman called Julia Duckworth, a philanthropist who had four children with him, amongst which Virginia in 1882. if it were not for the table of precedency I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall is. ⁓ A nail, a rose leaf, a crack in the wood. Here is nature once more at her old game of self-preservation. This train of thought she perceives is threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality. For who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whittaker's table of precedency? The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor. The Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York. Everybody follows somebody. Such is the philosophy of Whitaker. Woolf's mother died in 1895 when Virginia Woolf was 13, which was a terrible, terrible thing to have happened to her. And then years later, her father died in 1904. So ⁓ Stephen seems close to the father and philosopher, Mr. Ramsey of Woolf's novel, To the Lighthouse, ⁓ that published in 1927. And the great thing is to know who follows whom Whitaker knows and let that, so nature counsels, comfort you instead of enraging you. And if you can't be comforted, if you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark on the wall. I understand nature's game, her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action. He is a self-centered character, unconcerned by the struggles of housekeeping, experienced by Mrs. Ramsay, but he also feels unequipped to help her. His social priorities for the family are always tied to status and to the role of men. There is a female character who is a painter, and the descriptions of landscapes are certainly synesthetic. Men, we assume, who don't think. Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall. Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel I have grasped the plank in the sea. I feel a satisfying sense of reality, which at once turns the two archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite, something real. but are conveyed through the brushstrokes of Briscoe, the character who is a painter. This was my first contact with Virginia Woolf ⁓ while was on the shores of Portugal in my teenage years, south of Lisbon, very close to a lighthouse at the Cape Espichel. ⁓ It important to have such characters as Mrs. Ramsay and the young painter, at least for myself it was, Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world, which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of. Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree. because they were both women with an intense interiority. So Virginia Woolf always had an affinity with writing, from letters to personal diaries and a family newspaper. This activity seemed to run parallel to a string of sad events that occurred in her life, to say the very least, including sexual abuse by her half-brother Gerald Duckworth. And trees grow and we don't know how they grow. For years and years they grow without paying any attention to us in meadows, in forests and by the side of rivers, all things one likes to think about. The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons. They paint rivers so green that when a moorhen drives, one expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up again. She disclosed this abuse in a later text in 1939, if I'm not mistaken. And along with a hypothetical bipolar condition, this may have led to her constant mental health issues. Virginia Woolf's whole life seems to have been a constitution of barrages against death, war, loss, abuse through her writings, but also her husband, Leonard Woolf, with whom she created Hogarth Press, and also her close relationship with Vanessa Bell, her sister, and the mutual infatuation with Vita Sackville West and their life friendship. She wrote all her life and I like to think of the fish balanced against the stream like flags blown out and of water beetles slowly raising domes of mud upon the bed of the river. I like to think of the tree itself first the close dry sensation of being wood, then there is the grinding of the storm and the slow delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it too on winter's nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close feld published books that have become part of the constellation of beloved narratives from the point of view of a queer and liberated woman with a hypersensitive form of writing traversed by a painterly sensibility. Of course, Virginia Woolf came from a privileged background, which allowed her to have help around the house and to... Nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling all night long. The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June, and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it as they make laborious progresses up the creases of the bark or sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves. liberate women through this idea of property or at least space in one's home big enough for a room which she claimed was the right to any creative person, including women. and look straight in front of them with huge diamond-cut red eyes. One by one, the fibers snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth. Then the last storm comes and falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground again. Even so, life isn't done with. There are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world in bedrooms and ships. To our sensibilities now, this ⁓ reeks of privilege, this idea of having a space, so many of us don't have an office or a studio. on the pavement lining rooms where men and women sit after tea, smoking their cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts. Happy thoughts, this tree. like to take each one separately, but something is getting in the way. Where was What has it all been about? A tree? A river? downs Whithaker's almanac. The fields of Asphodel? I can't remember a thing. Everything's moving, falling, slipping, vanishing. There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying, "I'm going out to buy a newspaper." "Yes?" "Though it's no good buying newspapers, nothing ever happens. Curse this war God damn this war All the same. I don't see why we should have a snail on our wall." Huh. The mark on the wall. It was a snail. So of course, her father's family came from a family of intellectuals. And even if she was famously excluded from the Cambridge University and Library for being a woman, as she famously stated in her most well-known feminist writing, A Room of One's Own, she was part of a group that lived comfortably. alongside decision makers society and politics and culture of her time. ⁓ I once had a dinner companion who proudly told me that they that was in their family. and I asked to tell me some gossip that I might know about Virginia Woolf And they replied that they had none because she was somewhat unmentionable in the family because of her bohemian ways. So nuance, nuance. Woolf did succumb to her mental illness. She died by suicide. ⁓ filled her pockets with stones and walked a body of water. ⁓ I read the note she left Leonard, her husband, ⁓ not out morbidity, but because it talks about which is something that I'm keen to talk about in these ⁓ special episodes, but life ⁓ and love. So the note said, "dearest, I certain that I'm going again. I feel we can't go through another one of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices and I can't concentrate. So I'm doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way, all that anyone could be. think people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight it any longer. I know that I'm spoiling your life, ⁓ that without you could work. And you will, I know. You see, I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I ⁓ owe happiness my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me, it would have been you. Everything has gone from me, but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been." Signed V. This is an illuminating writing ⁓ to a man who is forgotten ⁓ and referred to as Virginia Woolf's caretaker ⁓ Leonard Woolf was suffered from himself and was also a writer. ⁓ he wrote prolifically during his lifetime. The Bloomsbury group is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but Leonard was indeed a dedicated creature. And he relentlessly also to publish many authors as Virginia Woolf did, ⁓ T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which Hogarth Press was the first one to publish. So in the letter, she is worried about his work. And what she values is their relationship, as she was probably worried about his feelings of despondency due to her own suicide. So their relationship seems to have had a freedom that the Victorian era frowned upon, and that the post-war reconstruction would also constrain. I don't know if Virginia Woolf was bisexual in her love for him, or if her love for him was as physical as it was spiritual. I mean, it seems to have been lustful for Vita Sackville-West if you read her diaries. But if this group proved anything, is that when material possessions are not a constant worry, you can start telling other stories and build a life according to your own development across the different phases of your life and even mental illness. the text that I'm about to read, the Mark on the Wall, was published in 1917. ⁓ Woolf was 35 when she ⁓ not wrote it, but at least when she published it. ⁓ really enjoyed going back to this ⁓ text recently and also, as you know, across the years. ⁓ didn't go back to it ⁓ frequently. It was a sort of a crisis. text, if I may say so. I went back to it whenever I felt a sort of an empty but intense urge create something. And brilliantly, the mark on the wall never says anything. It shows you both the boundaries and the promises of creative wondering. ⁓ because ⁓ is your wonderment podcast or your art wonderment podcast, ⁓ seemed appropriate to start with this text. The text speaks specifically to and perhaps about people who identify as women. It whispers tacit anxieties and ferocious disciplines, invisible from the outside and even difficult to talk about. So the mark is the only visible thing. It's a hole or the appearance of one on the domestic screen. What is unseen the work of the mind that so fascinates Woolf and is the bedrock of her writing, the flow of consciousness. ⁓ of the things that I ⁓ understood more recently about it ⁓ a part where she talks about a sort of a force or a presence or person who wonders about books, but also domestic life. And at a certain point in the text, this entity urges Virginia Woolf to get up and inspect the mark on the wall. So this is clearly the famous Angel in the House, which ⁓ Virginia Woolf alludes to and takes from a poem of the time by the writer Coventry Patmore. And I will read a short excerpt of this poem. "Man must be but him to please is woman's pleasure. Down the gulf of his condoled necessities, she casts her she flings herself. And if he wants, by shame oppressed, comfortable word confers, she leans and weeps against his breast and seems to think the sin was hers". As you can see, this is a description of the female role in domestic settings. ⁓ Woolf diligently talked about this personal creature ⁓ her lecture at the National Society for Women's Service on the 21st of January of 1931, ⁓ she having to kill this Angel the House in order to work. ⁓ The ⁓ would her away from creativity, from her own power. She even describes how it's made her diminish herself whenever she was writing a review about a male publication, a text or a book. But once she finally killed her, once Woolf was finally on her own, she noted something unnerving. She was finally with herself ⁓ knowing. who she was. And she urges future writers to explore something that she feels unequipped to explore, which is sex and the specificities of the female body and the female actions in the body and with or through the body. And this made me think of a book that I have here called Parade by Rachel Cusk. So the ones who are watching can see the book in my hand. ⁓ Rachel Cusk is a contemporary writer. And in the book, talks about a figure that for me is a sort of reflection of the Angel in the House, ⁓ she calls the stuntman. ⁓ stuntman is an entity who one of her characters, a character, ⁓ thinks of as performing all the feminine duties in her own life. However, in the book, she at a certain point, and you know why if you read it, She becomes the stuntman ⁓ and is forced to socially represent it. Perhaps, ⁓ I think finally not annihilate it as Virginia Woolf did, but to speak ⁓ of the female condition, perhaps without having to kill it. Who knows? I think Rachel Cusk's Parade is an amazing read and I'm going back to it a little bit like I kept going back to The Mark on the Wall for so many years. So now let's proceed to reading with me or listening to the text through my reading. book I have is Monday or Tuesday. So Virginia Woolf's Monday or Tuesday, which is a collection of short texts published by, I didn't prepare this one, let me check. So it is published by, what is this publisher? Hesperus Press Limited. So that's my edition of it. and the year is 2003 and the copyright is The Estate of Virginia Woolf 1921. So there it is, mark on the wall. There's a lot of references, as I said before, that are somewhat obsolete, But it doesn't really What matters to me is that this wandering of the mind is so similar to our daydreams, to this desire we have of controlling and letting go of the same time. And if there is a text that defines so clearly that moment where we're getting at something because our mind is free to roam about, but also has that desire to grab onto something, this incredible balance between a masterful reign over a craft and also the art of letting go enough for the materials, be it words or wood or paint or any other material that artists work with to respond and to have their own agency within what we're doing is... what makes that moment of creativity so strong and what actually, eventually produces an outcome. I hope you enjoyed reading The Mark on the Wall with me. I surely enjoyed reading it. I love reading out loud. So let me know if this was pleasurable, if there's any books that you would like me to read for you during this hiatus. Take care of yourself ⁓ and don't forget, sign up to the newsletter, donate if can. We are working on ⁓ a crowdfunding campaign as well ⁓ because this is, as know, work, it is research, is preparation, it is editing, ⁓ and it is a pleasure. ⁓ So... Please, if you have some time to spare and if you are in front of a screen or will be later on, do find our sub stack and our donation page. There's lots of links and lots of possibilities for you to donate to exhibitionistas. And if you can't, if you're not in a position to do so, leave a comment, like, follow, subscribe, create a community of exhibitionists with me. and let's build the next phase of exhibitionist together. Thank you so much for listening or watching and until next time, take care of yourself. Bye bye.