Virginia Woolf: What requires to be an artist
“A design is concealed below the cotton wool… There is no Shakespeare, Beethoven, or God; we are the words, the music, and the thing itself. The entire world is a work of art.”
In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, Saul Bellow stated that “Only art penetrates… the seeming facts of this world.” “We sometimes overlook the authentic reality, which is another reality. Without art, we are unable to receive the indications that this other reality is constantly offering us. Pablo Neruda’s brilliant metaphor for why we create art shed light on this idea from a different perspective, yet one of the biggest mysteries of the human experience is still how and why artists are driven to seek out that other reality.
Virginia Woolf is the only author to have tackled this unsolvable issue with such penetrating insight (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941). In one of the most moving passages ever written, Virginia Woolf analyses what inspired her to become a writer and looks inside the brain of the sense-making process we call art in Moments of Being (public library), the remarkable posthumous collection of Woolf’s sole autobiographical works.
Woolf claims:
My childhood days back then, like they are now, were mostly made up of this cotton wool, this non-being. At St. Ives, weeks went by without anything having an impact on me. Then, for no apparent cause, there was a sudden, powerful jolt; something happened so suddenly and brutally that I have never forgotten it. I’ll provide a few examples. First, on the lawn, Thoby [Wolf’s older brother] and I were fighting. We were punching each other in the face. Why would I want to hurt someone else? I thought as I raised my fist to strike him. I immediately let go of my hand and stood still, allowing him to pound me. I can still feel it. It was a depressing sense of hopelessness. It seemed as though I suddenly realised how helpless I was in the face of a dreadful situation. I slunk away by myself, feeling dreadfully depressed. The second incident likewise happened in St. Ives’ garden. “That is the whole,” I answered, glancing at the flower bed at the front door. It suddenly became obvious to me while I was studying a plant with a spread of leaves that the flower itself was a component of the soil, that a ring encircled what I assumed to be the flower, and that this was the true blossom—part earth, part flower. I filed that concept aside since I knew I would likely find it very helpful in the future. In St Ives, there was a third incident. At St. Ives, there were several persons staying who went by the name of Valpy. One evening while we were waiting for dinner, I overheard either my parents or my mother mention that Mr. Valpy had committed suicide. The next thing I can recall is strolling by the apple tree on the path in the garden at night. I had the impression that the horror of Mr. Valpy’s suicide had something to do with the apple tree. I was unable to succeed. It was a starry night, and I stood there in a state of utter fear as I observed the grey-green creases of the bark. I felt as though I was being pulled down, helplessly, into a pit of utter hopelessness from which I could not rise. My entire body seemed frozen.
These three events each represented a unique moment. I often bring things up, or better said, they suddenly surface. But now that I have finally put them in writing, I understand something I never understood before. Two of these incidents came to an unhappy conclusion. The other, on the other hand, came to a satisfying conclusion. I felt as though I had discovered something when I stated of the bloom, “That is the whole.” I had something in my head that I should go back to, think about, and investigate. Now that I think about it, this was a significant difference. In the beginning, it made the distinction between satisfaction and despondency. This distinction, in my opinion, resulted from the fact that I found it extremely difficult to cope with the sorrow of learning that people hurt one another and that a man I had witnessed had committed suicide. I was rendered helpless by my dread. However, I was able to deal with the sensation in the case of the flower since I was able to identify a cause. I didn’t feel helpless. I was aware that I should eventually explain it, even if just from a distance.
Emily Hughes created the illustration for Little Gardener. According to Woolf, the fundamental qualitative difference between the events that led to despair and those that led to satisfaction is the source of the creative impulse:
As one ages, they have a stronger capacity to explain things rationally, which lessens the impact of the blow’s sledgehammer-like force. I believe this to be true because, despite the fact that I still experience these unexpected shocks, they are now always welcomed and, after the initial shock, I always recognise their exceptional value. I continue to believe that my ability to take shock well is what makes me a writer.
Woolf would later turn this realisation into a lovely line from Mrs. Dalloway, which reads as follows: “The compensation of growing old [is] that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained — at last! — the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence, — the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it around, slowly, in the light.” But she here goes much further in search of the origin of this seismic soul activity:
In my case, I hazard that a shock is immediately followed by the impulse to explain it. I feel as though I have been struck, but it is not, as I once believed, merely a strike from an adversary concealed behind the cotton wool of daily life; rather, it is or will soon be a revelation of some order; it is a sign of something real behind appearances, and by putting it into words, I give it substance. I can only make something whole by verbalising it; once it is whole, it loses its ability to hurt me. Putting the broken pieces back together gives me a great deal of joy, possibly because doing so eliminates the pain. This might be the strongest pleasure I’ve ever experienced. It’s the elation I experience when writing when I appear to be figuring out what belongs to what, making a scene flow naturally, or bringing a character to life.
The sole direct expression of her personal philosophy in all of her writing, Woolf concludes with a beautiful summary:
From here, I arrive at what I might call a philosophy; at any rate, it is a recurring notion in my mind: that there is a pattern hidden behind the cotton wool, that we—by which I mean all humans—are connected to this, that the entire world is a work of art, and that we are components of the work of art. The truth about this enormous mass we refer to as the world can be found in Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet.
Shakespeare and Beethoven don’t exist, and there most definitely isn’t a God. Instead, we are the words and the music, and we are the thing itself. And after a shock, I see this.
