Flower?

“Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty 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 like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one’s hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard....” (The Mark on the Wall, p. 3)

Although this paragraph does not fit precisely into my general examination, I find it a fitting introduction and foil to the portrait of the afterlife Ms. Woolf will show us. We are the train hurtling through a dark tunnel, we find ourselves turned into brown paper parcels in a post office shoot. As our hair flies back we lose all our hairpins (and I suppose everything else) until we are shot out at the feet of God stark naked. Perhaps the understanding of life we glean here is so modern, so full of post offices and public transport–even the horse’s tail our hair mimics is the tail of a racehorse–because we see the rapidity, waste and repair, of the last line most easily in society. Not only are the Tube and the post office bastions of modernity, they are also hubs of communication, connections both made and missed, travel and coordination. Woolf points not just examples of technical modernity but to the specific parts of modernity which make us hurry, move around, reach out to others, leave our homes, spread ourselves thin. She paints herself as the train, the package being sent. She is stripped that way of the protection of a body and an individual point of view. All this is so haphazard that when we reach the end of it, we are “shot out at the feet of God entirely naked!”

“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 fifty years or so. There will be nothing but 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....” (p. 4)

Shot out from the last paragraph we arrive here, not at the feet of God, but among Godly huge flowers. Most notable to me in this paragraph is the size of everything. Woolf says we may be newborn in the afterlife, but it seems to me we are even smaller than babies, like we have been reduced to the size of insects crawling amongst flowers that drown us in color. The use of the word deluge here indicates a flood. Our living confusion is perhaps not lessened in the afterlife, but it changes forms. Where before we were flying too fast to hold onto anything, even ourselves, here we lost not in speed but in ambiguity. We have lost our hairpins and letters that we decorated ourselves with while living, and also lost, perhaps by losing those little tokens, our daily memory of objects, our associations and understandings of what flowers are, what trees are, what is a man and what is a woman. Instead, we have only a visual capacity, and we are lost in colors and shapes. Being only able to distinguish color and form seems infantile, and it seems pure. In the afterlife it seems we are stripped of our conceptions and big ideas of what things are, what they mean, our associations and mental structures. We crawl around in this enormous flower bed, surrounded by nature blown up to a home for Giants.

“ ‘And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said how I’d seen a flower growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house in Kingsway. The seed, I said, must have been sown in the reign of Charles the First. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First?’ 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.” (p. 7)

The flowers reappear in a different form here. Instead of being the backdrop (and foreground) of an afterlife, they are rooted (just as timelessly) in history or memory. This flower’s lifespan is suspiciously long, or maybe it is not really that long, and by embellishing it Woolf is doing some of that very subtle self-worship she describes here. Part of the “dress-up,” I think, has to do with being very clever and beautiful in conversation, remembering oneself as participating in a conversation that was enjoyed by all parties (especially, I think, because she remembers her question, but not her partner’s answer), but perhaps another part of it is in reference to what we already discussed about the afterlife. The flowers bear a physical resemblance to those above, both tall and purple. Still, I’m confused by the timeline here; it seems we change from seeing the flower first in the present, then imagining its beginning. Then, by asking what flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First, the semi-permanence of the flower is drawn further into question, because it seems like different flowers might have grown then. So she is in a perfectly different relationship to it than before. In the afterlife, the flowers seemed eternal and she may after fifty years, be able to tell that they are flowers. In this memory or fantasy, the flower’s lifespan is intersecting with her own momentarily, and she guesses more about it than she could possibly know. Is this a part of the dressing-up? I was thinking of dress up as beautifying, but perhaps it also means simply adding on things like hairpins, little objects that make her less and less like the baby in the afterlife. That is, she is constructing a little picture of herself in her own mind, adding beautiful conversations about flowers which she may speculate about, to her own memory and image. Maybe the flower becomes one more little hairpin.

“Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with 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 to drown here, rooted in the centre of the world and gazing up through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light, and their reflections—if it were not for Whitaker’s Almanack—if it were not for the Table of Precedency!” (p. 9)

Here are some images of “real life,” the professors and specialists and house-keepers with profiles of policemen who act violently against the peaceful world we can imagine. The description of the “very pleasant world” is again so reminiscent of the afterlife description. She calls us to the image of the flowers once again (red and blue this time, hmmm) but also points out the spaciousness of the world, and the openness of the fields, connotatively similar (though not the same) as the tall flower in the last section, and the enormous tree-like flowers in the afterlife. And like the afterlife, and her precious self-adoring fantasy, this image is not haunted by professors, specialists, and housekeepers with the profiles of policemen. However, by so expressly excluding them, she necessarily impresses them into the image and gives them a positive, qualitative absence. This, combined with the drowning in the last line, leads me to wonder if she longs for a kind of afterlife, and nevertheless cannot reach it. It is interesting, because the tone of this paragraph is so very different from the description of afterlife. Here we see her desire to slice the world with her thoughts. Certainly her thoughts were not cutting fish in the flower garden. It must be a different kind of thinking than either that presented in the first paragraph (the rapidity and waste of modern life) or that presented in the second. Here thought retains a form, a body (in the form of a fish), and it cuts through a world it is at home in, interacts with familiar forms easily and gently, even bears children… Yet the next sentence is something of a death wish. “How peaceful it is to drown here.”

What are we to make of all this? Nature holds the narrator of this story. The flowers reappear in various guises throughout her daydream, always with a little moment of peace for her, making her newborn in the first paragraph, giving her means to paint a pretty little portrait of herself in the second, as an ornament to her most peaceful imagined world in the last. I wonder then, if that drowning in the last paragraph, or the discussion of afterlife, if the specter of death that seems to haunt this story, is not a terrible thing, but a way of becoming “rooted in the centre of the world” again, like the flower. The flower is beautiful, varyingly permanent or outside of time, and, without resisting interpretation, retains its color scheme (red, blue, and purple) throughout Ms. Woolf’s changing metaphor. I’m not sure what to make of all this. I noticed the flower’s presence and wanted to point it out, and ask if perhaps it is a sign that Ms. Woolf does not fear death so much as the ever-present specter of the Almanack.

-Sarah Dettmer