A Certain heft of Stone
Brandon Lewis
That was all he could do, in spite of the size of the downs, the width of the sky, the far-off smoke of houses, and the romantic voice, now and then, of a steamer out at sea. What he could do he did.
—Virginia
Woolf, “The Moth”We expected more: swans floating in some pre-Raphaelite dappled light of weeping willows that sway along a milky river. Desperate for shade and the means to make something, anything out of this pilgrimage, I scan the riverbank for a spot to rest.
No, you absolutely can’t sit here, she insists. It’s endless, she says, waving her hand down the riverbank studded with giant cow pats goldening in the sun. She grabs my elbow and leads me to a redberried hawthorn. Hardly tall enough to call a tree, but it’s the only shade in sight.
This godforsaken land is where Virginia Woolf decided to stuff rocks in her pockets and depart this earthly realm? That’s not entirely fair. There is, in the distance, the South Downs with their massive chalk interiors split open and gleaming white to make space for a highway. That and the solitary red dot of a paraglider clinging on far above the downs. Virginia was hearing voices again, she told Leonard. Birds sang in Greek from the treetops. You have been, in every way, all that anyone could be, she wrote, then began her walk to the river.
Returning to the car, we pass the gift shop where not one book by Virginia Woolf is sold, only bookmarks and apples 25p each (how very British, to pretend the economic part away). We pass one last time Virginia’s house and its sun-bleached belongings: the writing desk curated to preserve her messiness, the unlit Bloomsbury lamps, the Dalloway tub—thanks to Mrs. Dalloway profits—stationed in the kitchen, the apples in her garden I ate to the dismay of an octogenarian Woolfite looking on.
Squinting because she’s forgotten her sunhat—the little straw one I’d found in the window of an antique shop—Tara looks vaguely foreign to me. Public, noon-sunned, dazed and dazzling. Is this a truer likeness? It is not a one-glimpse and done thing, this project of seeing the beloved stand vivid before you on their own terms, not merely enclosed in your ragged penumbra of needs and desires. It takes fits and starts, stolen glances and surprise visions to get anywhere near something you could call worthy of the one you sleep beside.
Mostly it demands time. After all, it took a torturously long minute and a half after the Big Bang for particles to cool enough to become anything at all, allowing protons and neutrons to hold together, to persist in space and time a few billion years until it could taste like a ripe apple, feel like the dance of eye contact.
What I said I would never do, I did. My request for sick leave was officially approved. Though I was supposed to stay in the city, I needed a garden far away, so here you find me: the guy splayed out to dry in another land. Waiting.
You’re in this beautiful place, but your body gets in the way. She named it on her first try as we lay on a blanket in the garden, pinpointing the crux of my problem. It’s heaven under the shade of the horse chestnut tree—or it would be if Rowan were not pouncing on me and biting my chest, pretending he’s a mangy lion. But that was the gentle part.
Test results come back positive this afternoon, the ones I had begged Yale researchers to share from their long-term study. Yes: my blood indeed swarms with micro-clots and rogue platelets. I double-click on the attached fluoroscope image. Where there should be a dark blanket of pure night, a state of high entropy reigns. Clusters of green neon stars—super giants, red giants, white dwarfs of every size—litter the heavens at a magnitude of 10x. The malady becomes less story and more material, knocking with particles and chemical reactions in place of doubt and fear.
Paradise was first paradeisos: an enclosed garden. Wildness encircled for someone’s pleasure. Xenophon described a royal hunting park in Persia, and since then—and the Garden of Eden that followed—everybody and their mother has sought their own walled paradise. At some point in the ancient Mediterranean, every head of a school had one. Socrates called his The Garden of the Dead.
We stretch out in the lawn a bit longer, allowing our limbs to stray over one another, over the wool blanket, touching the dewy grass. Soon we must go. Stand up, load the car, and drive her to the airport where she will fly to New York for work, leaving the kids with me. You could practically smell it already: a fortnight’s worth of half-bitten apples scattered about, pungent black tea rimming the drain, and a dozen variations on cheesy pasta wafting through the air.
Virginia typically walked a much lovelier path to the Ouse than the one we ventured down, one leading along the South Downs Way dotted with sheep. It would lead as the crow flies to a row of windswept abandoned buildings she once lovingly named ‘Mad Misery’. Here was the obvious spot to look for her body the next day. And Leonard did but found nothing.
To prepare for the end of her role as Virginia Woolf in The Hours, Nicole Kidman would pick up rocks that littered the movie set and put them in her pockets, hefting around their weight. It’s a catchy image. Search “Virginia Woolf drown” and you’ll get rows that vary only slightly. Taken together, each variation strives to resolve this elusive moment by a poetic leap.
She put heavy stones in her pockets . . .
She places a large stone in her pocket . . .
She loaded her pockets with stones . . .
She lined her pockets with stones, or one heavy stone . . .
She weighed her pockets with stones . . .
She weighed down her coat pockets with rocks . . .
The rock entrances a certain type among us. One writer named Benjamin Drysdale Price wades into a dangerous fetish. “She can’t help but notice the stone’s cold chalkiness and its color,” he writes in a fan fiction rendering of her end. “A milky brown with spots of green.” I linger on that line, afraid for him and how near he approaches the stone’s cold chalkiness. The prettiness of the writing cracks like the sheer cliff of an iceberg ready to plunge, and I stop reading. I click on “About Me” and it all makes sense: though his writing remains online as the Floating Library (how
many of these are floating about?), he took his life one autumn day in 2013. He was 27 years old.
I wager it was a miserable stone, large and dusty and homely. Good for heft, part of the Earth like her, nothing more. Not the codex or coup de grâce of an immense life. It is much too private, too impossible, too damning to let the romance of the rock win. We leave the world of imagined-story vision and find ourselves, face in the wind, submitting to the authority of on-the-ground vision.
What is verifiably true: a child was first to spot Virginia’s body float swiftly down the Ouse.
She’s not here to stop me. To say, Take a blanket and lie on the grass. Don’t waste what puny energy you have hacking at moss with that hand-spade. And here is the dilemma of my malady in this world: if you don’t exert yourself, your clotty blood slowly furthers into swampy lethargy; if you exercise too mightily, you exhaust yourself into a malaise.
But it feels good, so I swing the blade again and again. And with every swing the house becomes a little less entombed, a little less devoured by the forest. Chip enough at white flagstone or black Welsh slate, and the rough mineral face reappears. Tomorrow the rain or sun will clean it. Time: I have sloughed off time for the stones in return for their shelter.
Daddy bath-time wouldn’t be complete without the game
Does it Float? It takes many experiments, but you learn at some
point the strange powers of air and weight. To be honest, the ratio of air to weight eludes me so I simply repeat: The air wants out. It wants out very badly. And my little boy repeats: Why? a staggering number of times until I no longer have the energy to answer, and we lay ourselves back into the warm water. But the most trouble by far is the pumice stone. Riddled with air pockets after having been spewed from a volcano, cooled as rough glass, smashed into ashes, then reassembled in a factory as a smooth surface fit for rubbing out corns and dead skin, its buoyance vexes us. It’s not a real rock, I say out of exhaustion (That does sound a bit elementally bigoted.)
You see, it’s been too long and I get so used to a variety of loneliness that I no longer recognize it as such. A fortnight of tired daddy, of stilted writing, of no sex . . . Genuinely confused, I ask Tara, How can anyone create art with kids around?
You can’t.
And Woolf didn’t and wrote as much. But some things you are accidentally charged with disproving. *
Somehow they kissed, but she warned him, I felt no more than a rock. And so when Leonard Woolf proposed marriage, she made sure he knew her feelings toward men. There were other obstacles besides: grief, abuse, depression, visions, brilliance. Though a writer himself, he knew the only way ahead would be to step back, keep vigil, remain in awe, and protect her immense flame. At least she had Vita and he had Trekkie to partially sate their longing. Leonard’s life was the more sexless of the two, or so it seems. And that might help explain the hot-house nature of his letters and
especially his choice in plants: the hot and dry ones, the romantic and foreign ones were always his: sweet agave, prickly cacti, hairy quince.
Like Leonard, Tara is of rare soulful Oxbridge variety, but that’s about where comparisons end. Neither did the two of us remotely encounter the need to forge a suicide pact should Hitler invade England—a very real possibility at the time she weighed herself down with stones. In fact, Leonard had to strike back at accusations in the press that she was simply a national coward in the face of yet another war.
I lay about and write and bathe the kids and feed them easily made starches while she shuttles between the countryside and London, the countryside and New York, winning us bread by fixing the bodies of singers and dancers and actors. I asked to tag along on her visit to a family of rock’n roll royalty in Richmond, but she rightly sensed I would awkwardly stare at their family photos and art, breathe it in like I own the place, and curl up on the sofa. Maybe steal a book.
What she can’t manage to give: the words I know you’ll get better and spontaneous embraces. What I can’t manage to give: an overall deduction of grief to her life and overall addition of financial riches. What she loves about me: hard to say, but I embrace life and embrace death and that puts her at ease. What I love about her: She found me a slice of dungless shade. That, and she hung a block-print in the house of a wild boar with the words, WILDNESS IS NECESSARY
Break it down and wilderness reveals itself as wild-deer-ness. Even forest begins as a human enclosure, like paradise. When
you trace forestare—Latin for ‘to keep out, to place off limits, to exclude,’ you circle around a deep and dark unknown, a danger, a royal domain off-limits to you and me. A place not only far from, but purified of, the human realm. But there is no purity. Everything is jostled and mixed.
This is why there is no need to make excuses for attraction. Or madness. *
The dark half of the year arrives in the garden and the horsechestnut shade is no longer so inviting. That we have this angled light, this summer-winter cycle leads us right back to an accident. Long ago, the minor mythological figure of Theia collided with Earth. Beside the moon being born from that collision-dust, we still feel that touch as a wobble. Far from feeling odd, a cycle of dark and light seems more natural than anything. Given no choice, the rhythm of its gyres was never not lodged in us.
The good news: here you can pick the bright red hawthorn berries as late as November. Just don’t expect run-of-the-mill sweetness.
The thing about November is it has a lousy name. Ninth doesn’t tell much of a story, other than the fact that Roman parents got lazy after five children and any child born thereafter was named by number. Blood moon—now that’s a better month. Its old name reminded farmers to kill their sheep and cows and goats that would likely not survive the winter. For us too, death by starvation was a grim possibility, one to be warded off with songs and fires, dancing and kissing. One of the first non-religious
English songs ever written down, dated from 1261, knows the desperation we harbor for our safe little garden, our paradise that must never die. A necklace we loop around summer so it will stay.
Summer has come in
Sing loudly cuckoo
The seed grows and the meadow blooms
The wood springs now
Sing cuckoo
The yew cries out to her lamb
The bullock prances, the buck farts
Sing merrily cuckoo, don’t ever stop
Summer then simply meant the warm half of the year. The vital and kicking half that gave and did not kill. Here it’s not the cuckoo but the buck who is the hero of this song to me. Do you, buck! Do it not just in summer, do it for us in autumn too when you’re being chased with guns, and do it in the winter when the forest is too quiet and the plants have shriveled and we need a laugh.
It took half a year for the researchers to share the image of my blood. And there in the top-right corner, what I hadn’t thought much of before is a clot floating by too fast for the camera to catch. What we see is only a streak, a wondrous shooting star. Only unlike micro-clots, we know what meteoroids are composed of ice, dust and we can trust they will burn away violently, but easily as they fall.
*
After bath time, I tuck Rowan in bed. He grips something— a stone, cool in his fist. Not pumice but a hard stone pressed and
tumbled for ages, one he must have pocketed from our forest walk earlier in the day. His face is open and unabashed as any fouryear-old’s, his dreams nearly legible purely from slight winces and smirks. He falls deeper and deeper to the bottom of his sleep. And the stone, it’s held so tight now that it cannot possibly drop.
The house quiet, I write to Tara in New York. I ask her to listen to this song called “The Waves: Tuesday,” by Max Richter. Someone else, anyone, should feel it. But mostly she should. The instrumentals alone are almost unbearably beautiful, and on top of that a voice reads from Woolf’s suicide note to Leonard. The note is terribly generous—generous as a suicide can rightly be. Is it an accident, how the track’s 21 minutes is the same time it takes to walk down to the river? And yet, the atmosphere of the music is of a romantic River Ouse that she and I both know does not exist in this world.
She flies back to us late autumn and there’s another walk I’ve found for us, this one a spot by the sea where no famous writer has lived or died. On the shelf are two local stouts and a wine from the Douro that I will try not to open for myself. And in the garden if she comes soon enough I can point her to the beds where tufts valiantly hold onto the earth.