Upon first reading Virginia Woolf’s The Death of the Moth

Friends and readers,

Another profound poetic text I seem never to have read until three days ago is Virginia Woolf’s The Death of the Moth. Please to take out a few minutes to read it if you continue on to read the reverie it prompted from me:

Extraordinary. She enacts through the moth her perception that every moment of living is a fierce struggle and exaltation of the particular creature to experience what he or she is capable of feeling. We don’t live on for anything rational or any of the excuses we might give ourselves. The experience of being alive is a violent passionate response of our material selves — which includes in people the mind as part of a functioning brain, a set of neurons attached to spinal cord which fans out. The moth is fragile and its life so limited in comparison but there it is trying to get all it can.

A vehemence, an anger is in this moth because it is so fragile, it’s life so limited, it so near death continually: there it is trying to encompass all it can. And so human beings, fragile, limited. So the inference is an uncompromising understanding that life comes out of the nearness of death and in death’s wild moment we touch life’s electric essence. Woolf’s poetic image expresses this. Now that I’ve come as close as I was capable to death in having held Jim in my arms in his last moments of being, of being alive, and felt his heart gradually stop and that moment when his being suddenly let go, I know she’s caught it. Life is death too. We are ever watchful once we awaken until we let go to sleep again, in a state of self-protection, ever keeping ourselves going, drinking, eating, sleeping, keeping warm, cool.

Remember Shakespeare’s Cymbeline song:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages …

Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:

Fear no more the lightning flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone;

All follow this, and come to dust.

Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have ..

This brief meditation shows why Woolf wrote her later fictions the way she did — the envelope of consciousness was the thing itself, all else ephemeral — but not trivia for most of us at all.

Jim gave in to death, as of the first week of August 2013 saw it was coming soon, and when the misleading delusions those doctors persuaded us into his having an operation were over, he refused consciously to engage in any more heart- and body-rending false hope. Or to try to prolong the agony he felt partly as a result of this operation. He could not eat anything without nausea and pain.

But his body would not obey him — like this moth — and he couldn’t stop its ceaseless painful struggle against the painful devourer.

In September I too had the idea of euthanasia as the kindest act our human capacity could offer available I would have helped him to reach painless release. The morally imbecilic doctors turned away in self-interested rejection when I mentioned this — it’s against the law and they feared for their licenses. (May every single oncologist, every single physician I saw in the hospitals we found ourselves in during that time, most of the dense self-protecting hospice people, the hateful administrative people behind those desks, each and every one of them I saw know an awful death too. I can’t remember them all but I do that surgeon who is growing very rich, and both brutally oncologists.) I wanted him so to be alive I couldn’t make that thought any more active than inquiring to these deeply inhuman physicians.

I can face now that I would have made the same choice as Jim did, reach for release, for oblivion as I did during my first experience of full childbirth, when I said, just put me out, I don’t want to know this any more. And over my shoulder I heard this voice promising that and all went blank until I woke again having (I was told) “given birth.” (By someone else cutting open my abdomen, pressing down and pulling out the baby, called Caesarean section.)

But not Woolf’s moth. It would not make the Duke in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.

Be absolute for death; either death or life
Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,
Servile to all the skyey influences,
That dost this habitation, where thou keep’st,
Hourly afflict. Merely, thou art death’s fool;
For him thou labour’st by thy flight to shun,
And yet run’st toward him still. Thou art not noble:
For all th’ accommodations that thou bear’st
Are nurs’d by baseness. Thou art by no means valiant;
For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork
Of a poor worm. Thy best of rest is sleep,
And that thou oft provok’st; yet grossly fear’st
Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself;
For thou exist’st on many a thousand grains
That issue out of dust. Happy thou art not;
For what thou hast not, still thou striv’st to get,
And what thou hast, forget’st. Thou art not certain;
For thy complexion shifts to strange effects,
After the moon. If thou art rich, thou’rt poor;
… [and so on] Thou hast nor youth nor age;
But, as it were, an after-dinner’s sleep,
Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth
Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms
Of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich,
Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty,
To make thy riches pleasant. What ’s yet in this
That bears the name of life? Yet in this life
Lie hid more thousand deaths: yet death we fear,
That makes these odds all even.

As understood by Shakespeare, this takes great courage. But not Woolf’s moth. She says it cannot make this choice for death.

Burns’s “To a Mousie,” which I read two weeks ago now and printed on this blog (part of an online course) moves in this direction over the creature’s shelter that Burns has inadvertently destroyed. Burns is softer, with more seemingly humane feeling, kindly, rueful; he doesn’t go so far as to see the mouse’s death-in-life, only that in its struggle to carry on, it’s lost its shelter.

In her latest essay on her coming death, her grasp of death-in-life Jenny Diski says she’s “scared of dissolution, of casting my particles to the wind … of knowing nothing when knowing everything has been the taste of every day, little by little … and then I get to the nub of it? when great minds have gone to dust, what could it possibly matter what I know or don’t know … What will I not know when I’m not a knowing machine … ” (“Mother’s Prettiest Thing,” LRB, 4 Feb 2016). I think of how Jim has not known all that has happened since Oct 9, 2013 at 5 after 9 in the night. She’s been given yet another chance (more hope): another pill, part of a trial.

Jenny has had this much luck (we need not envy her) that her brain has remained alert, functioning; at first with the harsh strong medicine to kill the pain, and then the experience of this devouring cancer itself Jim lost his clear consciousness and his mental powers were only there flittingly. In the first weeks after the cancer metatasized he pretended to be much there than he was — this to maintain his privacy from me, maybe to keep his mind from himself as every time I ask, he would reply he didn’t want to die.

Moths don’t appear to have a consciousness — at least not one that is coherent and can express itself in any way we can reach. That’s what people so value and some use this to use badly other creatures who seem not to have as much mind — like cats or other mammals we come close to. But Woolf’s description suggests the moth has a consciousness if so unlike ours. A sense of living it wants to continue that it will burn itself out to live.

Cave to Canvas, Dancing Couple by Vanessa Bell (1914)

From this to bathos: one hot summer in New York City in a kitchen that had no air-conditioning so the fridge mounted huge amounts of ice quickly in its top icebox (no automatic de-frost that one), we agreed we needed to de-frost and clean. We peered in and Jim said look there, the little bodies turned upward, frozen waving antenna. He asked me if I had the heart to remove them. They had struggled to get out of that place and hadn’t made it. “Lost among the frozen wastes” he said.
At the time I reminded him of Burns’s “To a mousie.” Remember, dear reader, that he and I commemorated Burns’ night each year and had 4 volumes of Burns’s books (poetry, literary criticism, biography). Burns was part of our shared world.

Ian twisting round to look at me as I type this — he pulsing too, but seeming calm, absolute for life, for himself in me

Sylvia

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