Virginia Woolf and Our Souls

TACKING THIS WAY AND THAT

We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. In this unknowing state, we each have our virgin forests, our snowfields where no birds’ feet have walked. Here we are alone, unaccompanied. No effort to communicate, to civilize, to share, to cultivate the desert, to educate the native, takes place. It is better that this is so. For in this aloneness we can come to learn of our own soul. -Ron Price with thanks to Virginia Woolf in The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depresive Illness, Thomas C. Caramagno, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1992, p. 305.

The problem of identity is always unfinished. Thinking is a confederation of narratives, a work of art. The ego sees only one facet of experience at a time and creates the illusion of unity and coherence only by filtering out dissonance. -Ron Price with thanks to Virginia Woolf, ibid. :flare: :flare:

Such porous vessels afloat
on these ocean waves,
sensitive plates exposed
to invisible rays,
taking our breath into our sails
we tack this way and that
running after our tails.
So much tumultuous thought
in a chaos of form, transformed into meaning
within some kind of norm; fragmented perception,
wildly askew, coupled acutely in cool morning dew. :idea:

The moods of the hour, the thoughts of the year,
absorbed so intensely, sometimes amidst fear.
The feeling’s exquisite, the shuddering’s cold,
inconsistencies rub me and often take hold.
With stability established, conflict still bites
in the warm rooms of home on very cold nights. :angel:

Ron Price
22 April 1997