A Room of One's Own: Virginia and Me

Spent all morning reading Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. The less I say about her brilliant work, the better; to describe it in my tepid words would be more sacrilege than praise. I will be as precise as a headline: to summarise, in 1928, author Virginia woolf said that all a woman needs, in order to write, is money and a room of one's own. In another hundred years, she'd predicted, and hoped, this would be a possibility for every woman - to earn her own money, to afford her own privacy, and to write herself in her own tongue.


Finding myself in the vicinity of Virginia's predicted date, without money or a room of my own, I am forced to wonder, I'm still writing, am I not? And there was a time when I was with money and a room of my own, and wailing about Writer's Block endlessly. So what is this currency, this space, that lets women write? Was Virginia speaking of merely the 'five hundred a year', and a 'bed-sitting-room'? Or was she speaking of a virtual freedom, a virtual space? Or maybe, the charge in that space of absence between these two --- the yawning gap, the chasm between desire and desire-fulfilled?



I like to think that Virginia speaks to me in parenthesis. Couched in her overall argument - in the practical bits of the money and the room and the heritage of writing by and about women - are several little digressions, little chinks and detours and hairline by-the-ways that address me, my fears, my anxieties, my discoveries as a woman, as a writer. And so I was surprised and corroded and reassured, all in the course of reading this essay today. Somewhere an irony, so complete in itself that it could only belong to fiction, struck me --- It was as if this essay found me today, I thought, tickled. Why did I never read all of it before, despite having it in my web-favourites, in my university curriculum, in my labrynthine to-do list of must reads? Virginia didn't just write an essay. She sent a piece of writing out into the universe, with a picture of me and a secret one-word mission: 'Save'. I feel like a miracle today. Like a Word file restored and backed up, a split-second before a surge of electricicty makes the hard disk convulse and zap-die-crash.



Virginia is telling me, sometimes sweetly, sometimes wittily, sometimes in a way that's a bit like thwacking someone on the head, that the currency and the space she wrote about 82 years ago, is, like all writing, more metaphorical than physical, more ephemeral than concrete. Many of the things she wished for women at that time are a given for me. And yet, I don't have some of the basics --- maybe because I am a woman. But I must write, because what I need and do not have yet, will make me hungry, restless, desirous --- it'll send me thrashing my feet around, flailing my arms about, going to bed every night a very desirious woman, longing for things I cannot have. Somewhere, I need to find the relish in this desire, even as I work towards extinguishing it. The writing will happen along the way. I cannot commit the folly of laying it all out and then waiting for the writing to happen. There couldn't be a moment more lonely than that --- sitting on a perfect couch in a perfect writers' room with a blank, thoughtless, passionless mind; knowing very well that there's enough change in the purse to buy me a zillion coffees, but that I have wasted all the swirly, angsty, potent writerly moments in inching towards a day as barren as this.



Virginia, you don't solve my problem. You don't show me the way. But you make me feel a lot less tired. I'm still going to thrash my brains about all day, writing a little intermittently, while I fuss over a zillion other pointless practicalities: Should I chase a thought and pin it, or let it go and return willingly? Should I bang it out on the keyboard, chew upon it, and tracelessly edit it until it has a neutrality that is so dispassionate, it must be a shade of the universal: font, sentence shape and punctuation uniform and lacking in particularity, and the force of its moment of expression? Or should I expunge it with force in a notebook, scribbling and scratching out, choosing to ignore (despite my proofaholism) the crossing of the t's and the dotting of the i's in the mad rush of transferring thought to paper? I know I will never be able to decide between the two. I will read the typed words and wonder whose they are - so neat, and so dead. I will read the animated scrawl in the notebook and cringe at its naivete, cutting up pages into strips and rearranging the words and sentences until it all begins to resemble a blackmailer's letter. Somewhere in the middle of all this, I will write a Facebook note about writing, about Virginia, and her advice that I love-hate so much. Somwhere in the middle of all this, I would have lived a little, written a little. For the moment, perhaps, this is enough.

OCD Me (and Everybody Else)

There are days when I live with a song on loop and one hand on Colin's Spray. My head spins; my back aches. I feel like a detailed epiphany-less copy of all the romantic qualities I would like to possess. I mutter under my breath all day (even as one part of brain offers, wise and impatient, 'why are you whispering to yourself, idiot!'). On days like these, it strikes me, how my longstanding lament about my missing faculty of Passion has been made doubly poignant by my fresh discovery of its warped copy, which I do possess in whale-like proportions: Obsessiveness.


I like ticking off my OCDs silently, secretly, and (pliz excuse rather imaginative choice of adjective), obsessively. The warped thing about Obsessive Compulsive Disorders is that they make you feel rather special. Something to do with the Dysfunctional becoming some kind of cocky, dirty-gleeful functional mode of being in my world (I mean, just the way those three words look in title case - there's a small pleasure even in that). An OCD tag is capable of making my most mundane actions into quirks deserving of a fictional character. Like (okay, I confess), I am this obsessive kitchen-slab-cleaner. I watch my hand doing rapid, mathematically precise, rhythmic actions of damp-cloth-on-granite-slab, and think, 'ooh I feel a Facebook note coming up'. What I should be thinking instead, is 'whaddafuck IT'S CLEAN, why am I still at it?'.


I remember when I'd heard about OCDs for the first time. Sometime in my late teens (I was quite certain then that it was invented to describe my mother). But soon enough, I realised that it had a fashionable alt life as well; people were using it as keystones in detective thrillers, as evidence in property scams, as :O-inducing moments while discussing Things That Happen to Other People, and as the final proof of the advent of Kalyug. Alas, now OCDs have none of that delicious shock value. I like to think they have become exercises in doing what is now the Ultimate Mundane Act: finding meaning in life. Looking for Meaning in Life has become something of an OCD by itself. An OCD is now, I realise as I type this note, something to confess, like a secret. Or to hide, like "a little-known fact". Something to note; to observe; and to pat back for doing so. There was a time when recognising an OCD made me feel a horrible shudder; like a ripping tear on my shiny-new-dress picture of myself. Now it feels like the opposite, something solid though ugly - a little object that allows me to stand apart from myself and look at myself, which is kinda thrilling and pathetic all at once.


I obsess; oh yes I do. And I love-hate it (I do it so often, I have begun using the phrase as a verb). It’s threatening to become the exalted Sisyphean boredom of my life; it’s mixing up all the genres, so my life doesn’t fit into any. I like Romance; all I get is Absurd. I want to be High Melodrama; alas, I am Neo-Realism. Like a hero on a quest, I want to will things into being; I want to feel that elusive thing called Passion and chase it and love it and suffuse my life with it in some kind of perpetual love dance. Instead, I constantly feel like I'm being put on a helpless, whooshing, auto-pilot mode; I obsess about too many singular things and cannot stop doing them, like they're chasing me instead.


I want to be fiction; I am repeatedly, life in all its weirdness. I want to experience a mad joy outside the space-time fabric, but I am hooked to the little squirts of satisfied joy I keep getting from doing tiny obsessive things. And so I live in the maddeningly infinite no man's land between life and meta-life. The great thing about this place is that I can indulge in converting an illness like OCD into hyperbole, confess to the crime, and get away with it :P