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To whom it may concern,
Salaam. Good afternoon if it is afternoon where you are in the world. Dumelang. Sanibonani. Molo, kunjani? Go fish. I hope you are well family. Gravity has sparked a kind of unnerving stimulus in the supreme banality of the life of the leaf, in my own modernity, my cognition that is still so badly in need of repair, my intellectualism that is in need of a little (both) Brenda Fassie and Joy Division and enabling. My life has became an event that is in need of a daily planner.
As Sylvia Plath put it once in a poem of ennervating honesty, bold substance and titillating beauty, “the day is making effortless botanical drawings” with (in my own words) “efficiency, consistency and thorough care.” I am a scriptwriter now (plotting storylines and planning the profiles of characters that have been two decades in the making ever since I left NFTS (Newtown Film and Television School) opposite the late and great Barney Simon’s Market Theatre in the now world famous district of Newtown in Jozi (beloved Johannesburg to you and me and Gauteng on Google Maps). I write with energy and variety in varying genres.
I have two films in production (the one currently looking for funding to be made is one on domestic violence) and I have written a play on the forced removals during apartheid in South Africa. I am also working with Gqeberha filmmaker Raymond Mateza of Truth Squad Productions on a documentary on my father’s (Dr Ambrose Cato George’s) life. A school has been named after him here in the Northern Areas of Gqeberha where he was a principal for most of his adult life in a sub-economic area before he became a school inspector. He attended meditation classes with my mother at a local branch of the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University. I remember watching Dadi Janki being interviewed by Noeleen (a well known South African talk show host) on television. So my evangelical training began interrupted by my studies.
The two sisters who saved me from taking my own life as a child were Sister Grace Grimsell (I don’t know much about her background or her own childhood only that both of these angels took me under their wing amd began to mentor me in earnest) and Sister Gita Loos from King Williams Town (the town where Black Consciousness Movement leader Stephen Bantu Biko hailed from). I wonder do they still remember me at all? Do they remember a mute, skinny-tall, awkward and gangly teenager who remembers not fitting in in high school, petrified-of-being-spoken-to interloper who is now a confident and mature Krotoa and Esther?
After lockdown, I realised I had to give a voice to mental health awareness and wellness in my writing. I also realised how much I wanted to talk and write and have enduring conversations about Africa and I wanted to use my own life experience to do that, that of my dysfunctional immediate family as a narrative as our stories have never been told yet. Let me explain. You have Chimamanda Adichie and Nadine Gordimer but not Abigail George who is a Coloured girl of mixed race origins from the Northern Areas of Gqeberha in the Eastern Cape, South Africa whose father was the principal of a high school in a sub-economic area and whose paternal great-grandfather was a stowaway on a Royal Mail Ship from St Helena where the Zulu King Cestswayo was imprisoned along with Napoleon. Both were forced into exile there. The Zulu King returned as the history books tell it to South Africa to continue the Royal bloodline and lineage of the Zulu Kingdom that stretches along the Natal coast to the border and some of the interior of Gauteng.
My latest book release is Letter To Petya Dubarova. It was released in August of this year in Australia and the districts of New Zealand. It was a Pick of the Week in The Sydney Morning Herald, Brisbane Times and The Age. The artist Phillipa Riddiford designed the striking cover for the book. I sure hope I can afford to buy her art one day. I have written a Special Report for Modern Diplomacy (“Scrapbook Of A Bipolar” detailing my mental break from reality due to stress, manic depression and burnout). I also contributed for an entire year to a symposium in Finland which is available for free download from the Ovi Bookstore as well as two e-books All About My Mother and Brother Wolf Sister Wren and other titles are available from Issuu. My first book was a slim poetry volume Africa Where Art Thou which questioned the eurocentric validity of the plunder of African soil followed by many other titles and one self-published collection of short stories Sleeping Under The Kitchen Tables In The Northern Areas. I have a blog African Renaissance found under Topics in moderndiplomacy.eu and another in the virtual space of Goodreads. I have also written columns for a national travel magazine and letters to the editor since I was a teenager.
Writing saved me as did embracing Islam. I learned empathy from my fellow brothers and sisters. You see I was hurt in the church. I was hurt by paternal family members who prayed for the human stain of me in secret because I was “mentally ill” and could not look after myself. I was never spoken to, never invited to family gatherings. In other words I was invisible. My cries for help were ignored. It was my mother whose prayers were answered by the Redeemer and because of that I am a seeker now for truth and enlightenment.
Thanking you for the time it has taken you to read this article and your consideration.
Allahu Akbar. To God all the glory.
Kindest Regards,
Abigail George
The New World Order
Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominated shortlisted and longlisted poet Abigail George is a recipient of four writing grants from the National Arts Council, the Centre for Book and ECPACC. She briefly studied film, writes for The Poet, is an editor at MMAP and Contributing Writer at African Writer. She is a blogger, essayist, writer of several short stories, novellas and has ventured out to write for film with two projects in development . She was recently interviewed for Sentinel, and the BBC.
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Faith can move mountains or quite literally push you over the edge. Everyone’s brain function and cognition is tested at some point. When it comes to paranoia and schizophrenia, schizo affective disorder and delusional modes of thinking in this day and age delusions of grandeur seems to reign supreme. I needed to relearn all the basic steps of human understanding and my own instinct and capacity for the virtues of unadulterated love, tolerance, peace of mind and understanding.
My studies began the year before I entered high school through the Brahma Kumaris Centre in Malabar. I began with a positive thinking course. This was before the meta era of cyber bullying and digital technology. What is neither here nor there was that I was still a child. An old soul trapped in a child’s body longing to play. I had been a foot soldier in the world drama for aeons. I had been one of Shakespeare’s illustrious “strutting and fretting poor players” upon the glorious world stage for lifetimes. What the mystics call reincarnation.
What is mysticism? Shrouded in secrecy for millions of years the ancient Greeks knew it best and left behind a detailed history of fable and folklore. Stories in which tokenism of the gods of the heavens (Apollo) and Neptune (ruler of the leaugues of the sea) was expounded.
The scholar Homer, poet Virgil, philosophers Aristotle, Hippocrates, Socrates, Euclides, Plutarch, Pliny the Elder their truth holds both a moral compass and Olympic truth for both the Muslim and the Christian world. We are brothers. We are seekers searching for a conscious modality, a conscientiousness way of thinking. Our faith is a paramount enterprise. It is this enterprise that when centred will make the fibre of our core being whole again. It is paramount because the reconciliation between Christianity and Islam must be aligned intrinsically.
The wind blows. A seed is planted and germinates. A school of thought is envisioned by a philosopher. Adler, Jung, Freud, Nietzsche and Solzhenitsyn all left their mark from Thus Spoke Zarathrustra and the The Gulag Archpelago. The leaf falls between the boundary walls of the supernatural and nature. The American poet Walt Whitman saw or rather envisioned God in a single blade of grass. Poets know we’re in a hare versus the rabbit race for equanimity. It is easy to say, to think, to equalise race relations within the scope of police brutality as being out of sight out of mind and that in modern day America there is no other outlet for the white haves and have nots and those living in trailer parks (they are not ‘white trash’ they are just down on their luck or receiving welfare cheques) and people living in tenement buildings in the projects.
The meaning of melancholia is this. Tiredness in a broken world, journaling furiously, drinking too much, nicotine stained fingers and a feeling of empathy for both a modern world and the human race.
Look! Hark! Hark all the herald angels sing! Soon it will be that time of year again. Christmas. The season of cheer and goodwill. But families have lost children, husbands, sons and both sides have lost soldiers in the Russian-Ukraine War. It is singing to me. It can be found behaving exemplary in my bones. It hovers nearby in my dreams. It is exhilarating seaward. I would have been a bad mother. I know this in my bones. Same old Gail. Same old me. I am tired of this waiting game but there are days when it feels exquisite to me. I am floating on air when the man (the ex-soldier, ex-army captain stationed in the Congo is nearby). He left me well over a year ago and I have had to get used to the feeling of abject loneliness again.
Like mother, like mother. I am tired of this disease. This all-encompassing need to please. All my life I have played the role of social outcast. In film school, in high school and at the Salvation Army. Then there was the shelter in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. Perhaps storms have sheltered me but I am growing old now and getting used to picking my brain. How I taught myself not to cry. You wouldn’t believe just how tired I am of fakeness and fake personas and I do not have the energy for that blue jazz. It inhabits the aorta of my index finger, the scarlet thread of every magical ventricle, visionary corpuscle and invented vein.
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The Invasion is over. Russia will display its power and its might in a victory parade in Mariupol on 9 May which will take place on the same day of Moscow’s Victory Parade Day, which celebrates its victory over Nazi Germany as if to remind the world of genocide and its high cost.
The cost of life, of the innocence of young children, of livelihood, food shortages and resources. The resistance fought bravely under the leadership of a man who came into office with no military experience but a law degree and a first lady who models for the fashion pages.
What did the United Nations Secretary General and Putin discuss behind closed doors? We do know that a finality has been reached and that we have God to thank for that.
Zelensky and the Ukrainian resistance can now breathe a sigh of relief but for how long and what are the long-term repercussions of this war. We need to look at the end of the Second World War when the spoils were divided amongst Great Britain, the United States of America and the Soviet Union.
Mariupol is a city that is situated in the south-east of Ukraine. This is where the centre of the celebrations will take place. As we speak the bodies of the dead are being removed. In Bosnia we saw mass graves. In the Ukraine we saw mass graves, but nobody has spoken of the Igbo genocide, the Rwandan genocide and the South African genocide where millions of people disappeared without a trace. It is as if the world is saying that a European’s life matters more to humanity than a Non-European’s to God.
If I had to pen a letter to the authorities, it would read as follows. President Zelensky, you care about your people but now they are refugees. Is it safe for them to come home? African students studying abroad in your country were not given a safe passage to return home. To return to safety and out of harm’s way.
I feel that everything in Zelensky’s life had been leading him up to this moment. The moment where he did not surrender to Putin’s conditions
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but with the West. Zelensky has been principled, patient and prepared but then again so has Putin and both have stuck to their ideology of winning the war at all costs. It mattered to neither side how many lives would be lost. They only wanted to win. Putin came to the negotiation table. Zelensky approached the negotiation table but was enamoured by the West and Biden. But Biden has his own personal struggles. He has suffered much grief and personal loss in his own life. All these men have been living on the edge since the beginning of this year.
A woman calls standing up for her rights a war on feminism. A man is quick to pick up a gun, throw down his moral compass and pump bullets, shrapnel and limpet mines where children play, couples walk hand in hand discussing their future or gazing into their eyes.
What is left now for the world to do? We looked on in horror as there were executions but that is what happened during the apartheid regime and even then, the world turned their head away as unspeakable acts of horror and terror were the order of the day.
I suggest if you want to know the history of Russia from the USSR to the Soviet Union (and if you want to understand the legalities of the Cold War and that this is just a case of history repeating itself) you must begin to educate yourself by reading and I suggest you start with the Russian poets before you start with War and Peace.
The mug seemed to have taken on a mysterious illness. Something which she could not fathom. She thought of her lonely and homesick sister in Rilke’s Prague. She thought of Rilke at the Military Academy also lonely and homesick. Now she was lonely and homesick for something that she could not begin to imagine. She began to think of the man. He had not become an illusion to her yet. She had been beautiful and desired in his arms. Wondered if that would happen to her now. Had she been rejected because she was plain she would have understood. Sometimes illness just had these magical repercussions.
A kiss is something that is very personal. You give someone your soul with a kiss and in return you take theirs. It has been two years of un-joy and unhappiness for her. Whatever that means. All she knew of sadness returned to her in the man’s absence. She became eccentric in her longing for him. The woman no longer had any rights or ownership over the man. Your lady, she thought to herself. Who is she? She wondered if the man was David in his planting season. She thought of the invasion. The woman in the pharmacy her mother had happened upon whose nieces had left for Angola and the Congo.
The woman was reading her journal in the bath. The bathwater was crinkling up the pages in the corners. Her fingers were turning into prunes. Everything seemed mismanaged. A woman is capable of many things. Managing the personal intrigue of the affairs of the heart. This woman wasn’t aligned to the celestial navigation of her mother and grandmothers and tribe of wilderness aunts. She was shy. People did not really know this about her really because boy could she write frankly and talk about the sexual transaction frankly in her stories. Getting up on the stage and talking in front of people was an ordeal.
It filled her with an intense anxiety. She began to write a poem balancing her notebook on her knees. She called it “Breathing Space”. Don’t allow me room to breathe. Don’t. Don’t love me or placate me. Call me docile or pet. Read my lips. Mark my words. Just let the river come Virgil and flow into your narrative and my back story because I value you. Will always remember you and value the opinions you shared with me. This I promise you. Privacy is just an interruption. I do not know anything about Paris in the Springtime. I do not know your deliberate interaction with the world anymore.
I called my own ability a limitation. And when I speak of you now to the hours, to the silence I speak of desire and memory. Moonlight falls. Leaf fades. Dishes pile up in the sink and I have errands to run but you’re still magical to me Virgil. Still muse. Still inspiration. Lockdown was something else. It was not magical. I carry you in my soul. In the palimpsest. Your heart goes on. And I find myself in another city’s paradigm shift. Oh, to not live vicariously through Anne Sexton’s poetry religiously you know. I had to confess when I greeted you at the door. You took your seat and I took mine.
Everything had been said by a look, a glance. Now you’re as alive to me in this room as a branch in springtime. I imagine the flowers bloom in your eyes. I think of yours hands and your nature and your instinct. I miss you you know. More than I really want to. It feeds and nurtures my malnourished veins. It keeps me alive. It keeps me stronger than death. You are the craft of leadership and workmanship Virgil. The bathwater was becoming cold. She lifted the pen to her lips and began to play with it in her mouth before setting down her thoughts furiously on the page in front of her again.
I need love. I need love. I need love but you’ve gone away. I must go on living this life without you. Without you binary star. Without your auxiliary map. Without your infinite grace. Without your castle. Without your song in my head and currency in my hands I am nomad now. The dune has a kind of consistency this morning. I am efficient deal-closer. I move efficiently in tune with birdsong as I listen to the radio. Combined they make a symphony. You’re beach and I’m disappearing underground needing wave to validate my era. I don’t go out anymore. That sun is a bully. Dang it! Be you.
That’s all I can be when I look at my introspective face now that you’re gone. I don’t want to think about you but I do. Perhaps the man had come into her life to remind her that she was still a woman. She remembered as he turned his head away from her, how he made her laugh. It had been a joy to be in his presence. I remember our romance, she would recount to her second oldest nephew’s teenage son. You could have married, they all said that. But I would not have married the one. The sadness remained. Sadness from childhood, sadness from romantic entanglements enveloped her in her eighties. Be kind but don’t forget to love.
“Why are you here? I mean why are you here?”
“I have come to see you.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I am thinking of us. When we were still together.”
“Stop staring at my reflection.”
“All I have is this pool of water to keep me sane.”
“Ah, so you are going insane again.”
“Come back to me.”
“I live in another country now with my wife and child.”
“Something which I could not give to you.” The woman said sadly.
She began to disrobe then. Having made the decision to drown herself in the pool of water. The man in the water began to grow excited. His mindset had become enthusiastic.
“What are you doing?”
“Death. Death to self. Death to ego. Death to the man.”
“That’s impossible. In your world I no longer exist.”
“You exist inside my head.”
“You won’t find me in hell or heaven since I am very much still alive.”
“That’s impossible.”
“How is that impossible? You were too plain for me. I needed a beauty in my life.”
“You needed a wife. I could have become a wife. Your wife.”
“My wife. You were too old to have a child.”
“Are you happy?”
“I am generally unhappy with my life.”
“All men need beauty but what does the woman need or want or even desire?”
“You have to answer that for yourself.”
“I wish you were still here.”
“So do I. There are days that I miss you.”
“That is just the illusory self talking.”
“My psyche is fractured because of you.”
“My identity is fragmented because of you.”
“Dance with the moon. Let it guide you. Be your spotlight.”
“We are no longer together. I am not going to do that for you anymore.”
“Dance in the moonlight. Go on. For me.”
“Nothing but wishful thinking.”
“You still love me. After all this time when you could have had another.”
“Why would I have stopped loving you? For a woman matters of the heart are never that easy to explain.”
“You were as plain as paper.”
“You were a soldier another life.”
“I was.”
“I think of the conversations we could have had.”
“Why?”
“I could have been your Eve and yet you rejected me.”
“That is neither here nor there now.”
“I will eat now.”
“Alone?”
“Yes.”
“Why? You don’t have to eat alone.”
“You don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“I still love you.”
“I’m sorry. Has it come too late?”
“No. It is alright. I understand now. We were never meant to be together.”
“Perhaps we both weren’t ready for love.”
“So the tide turns.”
“It has turned cold out. Put your clothes back on.”
“Talk to me about your son. The child we would have had together if I had not been too old to have children.”
“He has your eyes.”
“That’s enough for me. Thank you.”
“You were the first man to tell me that I was beautiful.”
“I know. We were so innocent.”
“There are days when I feel like such a failure.”
“Because you lost me?”
“Because I lost you. I can’t blame anyone else but myself. What are you doing?”
“I am crying.”
“Tears mean nothing to me now.”
“I know.”
“I have to stop thinking about you but I can’t bring myself to let go of you just yet.”
“You come to this pool of water everyday to look at my reflection, to sunbathe and to swim.”
“If I don’t I overthink.”
“Fall in love again.”
“I can’t. You were the one.”
“Make love to another.”
“That’s impossible. I can’t.”
“You have to let go of me. I am not coming back to you.”
“I know this. I know this but I can’t let go of you.”
“You’re only hurting yourself.”
“Is it because I hurt you?”
“I’ve been hurt before.”
“You told me this. You promised we’d remain friends.”
“It’s going to rain.”
“It would be so easy not to wake up tomorrow morning.”
“I am trying to be happy.”
“Yes, you did say that.”
“I found spiritual comfort in church.”
“You asked me to come with you and I was afraid.”
“Why were you afraid? Why are you telling me this now?”
“I want things to be alright between us before I go home.”
“You sound brighter.”
“I have to leave soon. Rainclouds are gathering overhead.”
“If we had met at some other time we would have made it.”
“Yes, I know.”
“If there had been no interference by your father, mother and brother we would have made it.”
“Yes, I know.”
“My answer to you is this. That you are the world’s hope as a writer.”
“I write novels now. You’re just not around to see it.”
“There’s a river in my soul now that you’re no longer in my life.”
“There’s a pale river that runs through the narrative of my next book. I am outlining it in thick Croxley notebooks. You have made me so happy Virgil. My inspiration. My muse.”
“Find another. When you find another you will plant another season.”
“I’ll be alright.”
“You can’t live in the past.”
“Don’t lecture me. This is what makes me happy.”
“To live with a man who does not love you anymore. You need help.”
“Well therapy has not worked.”
“Continue to write then. You need to work me out of your system.”
“I have really never felt loved. Never abandoned myself completely to it. So all the men who have loved me in return I hold onto them as if they are gold.”
“Remain authentic. Be the best version of yourself.” the man yelled as she turned her back on the illusion of him.
“Always.” she shouted and started running as the droplets hit the grass marking muddy puddles where the ground wasn’t level.
The woman began to shiver and put her articles of clothing back on again as if the interlude had never happened. The man watched her but by now he was in disguise. Rain began to pour down from the sky and the woman had a bus to catch to town. She started to run through the park. Her hair damp at the nape of her neck leaving the memory and desire of the man far behind her. She could see the Eiffel Tower from where she stood and what she badly was in need of was a coffee and sandwich at one of those cafes because whenever Paris became a feast in July it became a feast for the senses. Tears burned behind her eyes.
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And so I come to the lady in the water, the sinner (but in the end aren’t we all sinners). Virginia Woolf in the flesh, that death of the drowning visitor. Her brain cells turned into the cemented atonement of dead moths. Deaths that can be accounted for. Physical bodies that can’t be spirited away, mended only souls torn from the material. Absolutely nothing escaped Virginia. The glory of love (she had that white wedding, the gift of love, she knew it, she knew of it, defended it graciously, she was no failure. I am that failure). Nothing escaped her passionate seeing eyes, her liberty, her meditations on nature, her platelets, mitochondria and bilateral symmetry no more. Only the grit, the brick walls, the mysterious interiors of the mansions of her work remained. Left behind. Granite. Diaries left behind for apprentices. Her intuition, breath and vitality has left this damned for an eternity to hell corpse. What does she have to do with the parenting skills of my distant manic depressive father and my elegant and cold mother, my cool mental illness that needed a room of its own to coexist with my brother’s cigarette smoke, his fatherhood, and his triumph where I had failed and then I voyaged inwards. River Ouse captivated me. I am a woman who writes. Virginia Woolf was a woman who was a wife, a lover and woman who wrote. My ordinary madness became a thing of beauty to me. Me an empty vessel who found bright stars in women, in their husbands and children, in flowers in a vase, in the fabric of the universe at night. I am Orlando. I am Lady Lazarus. I have lived vicariously through Hiroshima, Jean Rhys the demimonde and artist’s model and the feminist Sylvia Plath’s cutting-edged authentic words signalling warning, communicating threads of wisdom, and protest poetry. I needed to understand the London scene, Ted Hughes, Assia Wevill, and the child from that union, Shura. I’m afraid of modernism because it’s not modernism that is taking over the world. It’s writing. The interpretations of an inner life, innerness, marriage, creativity and madness.
Vita and Virginia sitting in a tree. K-i-s-s-i-n-g. Don’t ‘look’ at me. Look at ‘me’. Our intimacy is something special. Your skin is a fabric I could drown in. I can do without religion but I cannot do without you. You have given me the highest form of art, and that is inspiration. How can I ever repay you? Come to me you elegant creature with all of the hopes that you have for yourself. Your goals have become mine. Your dreams my own. Beautiful, elegant Vita. My Orlando. When I read your work I am filled with a clarity of vision, astute perfection, and I feel as if I am your sole possession to have, to have, to have. Can I borrow some of your inhibitory nature, your anticipatory nostalgia, your poetic descriptions, your sky, and the sky in your eyes, your flowers, the flowers that you meditate upon in your garden, your compass that navigates you across the passages of London and Europe? And I want to share something else with you if you will let me. I have come to care very deeply about you. Understand this. Understand that I don’t want to own you, claim you for my own as I am sure others have wanted to do in the past, and I do not want to possess you, and enter your world as a lover and leave as an interloper. When we are together like this, you reading my words (because there are parts of me that want to be completely honest with you about how safe I feel with the charming and seductive you). When we sit together there is still a veil of privacy, an idea of privacy on my part. I am sure the same goes for you too.
You’ve become my obsession and I can think of no one else’s company that I want to be in. When I’m with you I can feel electricity.
I find your poetry, your humility, your abandonment, your inhibitory current stunning, Vita. You are the second love of my life. You are all the dimensions of my world. I find you clever, so artistic, your work is electric, so imaginative and dear Vita.
I’ve always been curious of married life. I thought I would be surround by the walls of a prison and then I married, became a wife but did not have those children and I discovered how far from the truth that was. Marriage frees you in a sense in so many wonderful and illuminating ways. I wanted Leonard. I wanted love but not necessarily a husband because I didn’t think that love came with having a husband. Love comes with having a likeminded companion. You, Vita, are that likeminded companion. You come with love, with passion.
Observe the adjustments in my personality carefully whenever I am with you, study, and evaluate my dying in your arms. Learn my half-truths and white lies as I do yours Vita. I only have to hear your voice and I thrive. I achieve a new intelligence, a new acting, a new materialism, and a new language in that dry season. It should be as obvious to you now as it is to me that I am utterly besotted, smitten by you. I am in love with you. Let’s set up house together. Get away together if that’s impossible. And when I am without you I am a winter guest in a cold storm. I want to tell you that there is something luxurious and soothing about your skin. My Vita.
I am at your mercy. Your perfume fills my head. And when I begin to live vicariously through you, self-consciously or consciously my sadness has a complex wavelength. Brutal accomplishments threading my humanity. I have longed for them my whole life. The gratitude I have for you being a part of my life has become educational.
And they did not think of the extraordinary consequences of the gift of their relationship. They did not think. Period. They lived for love like other women did for being regarded as sex objects, parties, men, the London scene and flowers. Instead they are transformed.
The lovers whisper to themselves. They don’t want to part. The grass was a dream. And they were both brides rushing to the end of adolescence, the English summer weather, its immediacy of sustaining both women’s ideas of silence in the complexity of detachment. Here in the countryside, shielded by multitudes of simplistic chores, sharing the routine of waking up to their literary work, neither woman could untangle herself from their ‘marriage’. These elegant English heroines, English novelists whose writings were hypnotic were oblivious to reality, the outside world, and men were rendered insignificant, invisible. Men became others and humanity, the female of the species existed in a time and space that became known as the unknown future.
After the dust, the sexual disclosure, the impulsivity of the lesbian love affair between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West no sentence could shame the both of them, their writing process, their divine prowess. Woolf gave Sackville-West authority over her physical body, and in return Sackville-West did the same. Gaps, flashbacks, embarrassing regret should come with the territory of an affair that comes to an end. The silence is textured with what is not being said, the acute longing, and the despair of loneliness, of a seductive theory identifying the beginning of this lifelong romance, the mutual admiration committee between these two gifted English women.
I know what it is to suffer. To live with the face of enduring love shining upon my frozen countenance, love realigning my psychological frame, my sexual pace. Your power stifles me, a thing. And a woman alone.
At first it’s a glance framing reality, a sensual anticipation and so the landscape’s feast becomes symbolic of what will come after this inconvenient love.
Photographs survive. Historical events, knowledge, actors but not manic depressives, the mentally ill, people who have an absence of order in their lives. The living do not survive.
In our world morals are made of shrinking ice. Our love is fingered apocalyptic bliss. The detailed built foundations of the sublime. To hurt someone else is an inconvenience. To be hurt in return embroiders negative patterns in your thoughts for an unseen lifetime, it cheapens secrets, weaving, slaughtering the golden, the sensual image of the physical body.
There is nothing that can be a replacement for the latter.
Virginia Woolf. Was she still that molested child? Hurt, confused, yet her mind still cool and pure, cleansed of any illness, elements of fantasy, climate change, global warning, world poverty, trafficking did not coexist in her field of vision yet. She delayed the information. The bridges to the onslaught of mental illness. All she wanted was freedom. And this she found with Vita Sackville-West.
And as an adult did she not want children, a whole screaming tribe of them of her own, a child so that she could mend all the wrongs of the past.
Already she had a plan while writing in her diary Virginia, ‘I know I’ll never love this way again.’ And then the River Ouse was upon her like a lake. And there it was. She wanted to die. She wanted to waste away. Find a wilderness of her own making. She wanted to beg to the gods. The unwritten freedom which had been her church, and like a religion to her had left her angelic perspective. The dead end the shortcut to a hellish parade, the seducer. The hook of injustice was in her heart. She lived (it was but a pale gesture) but in death she lives extraordinarily.
Short fiction by Abigail George
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