Virginia Wolff’s Tumblr Account
Another empty weekend for an unconcerned 11-year-old. A whole house of one’s own, spent staring blankly out the kitchen window while I’d write my little poetry. I liked to write about important things: climate change, magic spells, and emotions I’d yet to feel. Coldplay, my Muse, I’d play Viva-la-Vida for an entire afternoon – that violin crescendo my creativity juice. My fanciful stories, and their grandiose romance, unfurling from an empty head. Those streaming visions in which I bath sometimes frustratingly tricky to type, and I itched to make my thoughts incarnate.
An internet kid, I found myself on Tumblr – trawling through kitschy cosmic blogs targeting my heart as a child-romantic. I innocently indulged in the imagery conjured by Hunter S. Thomspon, having never read a single paragraph of ‘Fear and Loathing’, pictured myself in only several years’ time with the freedom to “drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested”. My hours funnelled pasting quotes from web pages onto my bedroom wall. Above my bed, pictured beside a peaceful dinghy cut from the pages of mum’s Woman’s Weekly, Mark Twain reminded me to “throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” So uninhibited, so unconcerned with literary cliches, these words scratched an itch inside my precious baby brain.
An avid collector of quotes from classics I’d yet to read, I found some were without an owner – jettisoned to the waters of ‘by anon’. At first, I was in awe. This author, Anon, such breadth and depth, such quotable ability it seemed to span vast degrees of my Pinterest collection! Without missing a beat, I soon realise the author was instead unaccounted for.
Who wrote this? Why so coy? Was it another 12-year-old like myself? If I started sharing my little poems and sourcing ‘Anon’ – might my still undiscovered language wizardry capture the masses?
Puzzled, maybe this ‘Anon’ was a shy recluse. Potentially, a wise Buddhist monk hiding away in a forgotten woodland. Maybe they send little notes back into society via one loyal apostle who, somehow, publishes it on Tumblr. I was very impressed by these anonymous scholars, clearly too enlightened to seek acknowledgement or acclaim.
However, more recently, I’ve been thinking Virginia Wolff had a closer scent to the trail. I have invested some time in reading those classics, the books I would pinch de-contextualized wisdom from for my adolescent mood board. For example, A Room of One’s Own – feminist manifesto slash thickly buttered poetry. Indulging, I was transported back to being a spell-bound child, alone and giddy on gooey words that hit a cord – ringing like a colour I’d never felt. She suggests that maybe “Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” So potentially it’s not a learned hermit behind my blog posts.
Historically, women with flowing thoughts and a poetry tooth, “born with the gift of poetry” were damned to “mend stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers”, as “all the conditions of her life, all her own instincts, were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain”. The futility of social life is like a weighted blanket, worn as though a veil, perpetually drawing down her tempted will.
Virginia Woolf, if she were alive today and happened to have had an interest in blogging at age 12, would have followed me on Tumblr. I expect we may have had similar taste, so, provided the notification came through in time for me to notice, I’d have followed her back. I can imagine the countless anonymous quotes we would have shared, reblogged, pinned – our minds nibbling from the visionary.
Realistically, Virginia Woolf was likely a child genius by the time she was 12. Her blog would probably have blown up. If it were of interest to her, she would have gone viral. I wonder what she would think of feminist anger today, the concept of an androgynous mind, and the essence of what it means to be a woman. I think, today more than ever, our mainstream consciousness grapples both internally and externally with gender identity as a malleable descriptor in articulating one’s identity. In my own mind, I have no idea what makes me a female.
The only words I have to describe it are ‘she’ and ‘her’. But when I think of twelve-year-old me staring at clouds – I am genderless. I am a little human body who likes dragons and the colour green. I do not ‘feel’ like a woman, I just don’t feel like anything else. Reading Woolf, she regarded the essence of a woman as something we discover, rather than an identity that is built –
“Having rid herself of falsehoods, so we may put it, she has not only to be herself. But what is ‘herself’? I mean, what is woman? I assure you, I don’t know; I do not believe that you know; I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to all human skill. What a woman is, is a discovery which you here are in the process of making.”
I find it reassuring that destabilising the notion of gender, as a known and predictable category, goes back to the preoccupations of earlier feminism. Like all the prisms we use to understand ourselves, it’s a notion that can feel tricky to capture, like smoke, the more words we use the quicker it bleeds.
Finally, liberated: free to leave an open journal on my table. The risk: someone reading bad poetry – while embarrassing, not illegal! Write more bad poems! Make more lousy art! Be galvanised in memory of those never allowed, or who did so in secret, reminding us through what’s left: anonymous quotes and nursery rhymes originating from thin air.
