Woman Warrior: A Dialogue between Woolf and Kingston

Costumes of the Mind: A Dialog btw Orlando and the Woman Warrior

Ghost Ranch 2105

	ORLANDO	WOMAN WARRIOR
		“Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told us stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on.  She tested our strength to establish realities. . . (5)
1	He- for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it-- was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.  (6)	“Like a great saw, teeth strung with lights files of people walked zigzag across our land, tearing our /rice. … At first they threw rocks and mud at the house.  Then they threw eggs and began slaughtering our stock. . . One woman swung a chicken, whose throat she had slit, splattering blood in red arcs about her”  (3)
2	He was describing, as all young poets are for ever describing, nature, and in order to match the shade of green precisely he looked (and here he showed more audacity than most) at the thing itself, which happened to be a laurel bush growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another.  . . . The shade of green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme and split his metre. (14 )	29    I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes….. The dragon lives in the sky, ocean, marshes, and mountains; and the mountains are also its cranium. Its voice thunders and jingles like copper pans. It breathes fire and water; and sometimes the dragon is one, sometimes many.
3	Every single thing, once he tried to dislodge it from its place in his mind, he found thus encumbered with other matter like the lump of glass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown about with bones and dragon flies, and coins and the tresses of drowned woman. (74)	When I dream that I am wire without flesh, there is a letter on blue airmail paper that floats above the night ocean between here and China.  It must arrive safely or else my grandmother and I will lose each other.  (50)
4	“Haunted!. . . Haunted every since I was a child.  There flies the wild goose.  He flies past the window out to sea.  Up I jumped . .  and stretched after it.  But the goose flies too fast. . .  Always it flies fast out to sea and always I fling after it words like nets. . .  which shrivel as I’ve seen nets shrivel down on deck with only seaweed in them.  And sometimes there’s an inch of silver –six words – in the bottom of the net.  But never the great fish who lives in the coral groves. (229)	My father first brushed the words in ink, and they fluttered down my back row after row.  Then he began cutting; to make fine lines and points he used thin blades, for the stems, large blades. ..  .The list of grievances went on and on,  If an enemy should flay me, the light would shine through my skin like lace. (34)
5	Orlando curtseyed; she complied; she flattered the good man's humours as she would not have done had his neat breeches been a woman's skirts, and his braided coat a woman's satin bodice. Thus, there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.”	The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar.  …What we have in common are the words at our backs. … The reporting is the vengeance—not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words. And I have so many words—"chink" words and "gook" words too—that they do not fit on my skin. (53)
6	“No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.” (110)	Then – heaven help him – he tried to be charming, to appeal to me man to man.  “Oh come now. Everyone takes the girls when he can.  The families are glad to be rid of them. ‘girls are maggots in the rice.’ ‘It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.’” He quoted the sayings I hated. (43)
10	A man who can destroy illusions is both beast and flood. Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles scorch our feet. By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life (149)	165   My silence was thickest--total--during the three years that I covered my school paintings with black paint. I painted layers of black over houses and flowers and suns, and when I drew on the blackboard, I put a layer of chalk on top. I was making a stage curtain, and it was the moment before the curtain parted or rose.”
7	And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead.  Love, the poet has said, is woman’s whole existence.  And if we look for a moment at Orlando writing at her table, we must admit that never was there a woman more fitted for that calling.  Surely. . . she will soon give over this pretense of writing and thinking, and begin to think, at least of a gamekeeper (and as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). (198)	No husband of mine will say, “I could have been a drummer, but I had to think about the wife and kids.  You know how it is.”  Nobody supports me at the expense of his own adventure. Then I get bitter: I am not loved enough to be supported. That I am not a burden has to compensate for the sad envy when I look at women loved enough to be supported. Even now China wraps double binds around my feet.” (48)
8	The person, whatever the name or sex, was about middle height, very slenderly fashioned, and dressed entirely in oyster-coloured velvet. . ..  But these details were obscured by the extraordinary seductiveness which issued from the whole person. . . When the boy, for alas a boy it must be – no woman could skate with such speed and vigor – swept almost on tiptoe past him, Orlando was ready to tear his hair out that the person was of his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question. (28)	“She looked at a man because she liked the way the hair was tucked behind his ears, or she liked the question-mark line of a long torso curving at the shoulder and straight at the hip. (8)
9	The beautiful, glittering name fell out of the sky like a steel blue feather.  She watched it fall, turning and twisting like a slow falling arrow that cleaves the deep air beautifully.    … And as Shelmerdine, now grown a fine sea captain, hale, fresh-coloured, and alert, leapt to the ground, there sprung up over his head a single wild bird…”	I opened the tent flap.  And there in the sunlight stood my own husband with arms full of wildflowers for me, “you are beautiful” he said, and meant it truly.  “I have looked for you everywhere.  I’ve been looking for you since that day that bird flew away with you” (39)
10	Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.” (58)	“Long ago in China, knot-makers tied string into buttons and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker. Finally an emperor outlawed this cruel knot, and the nobles could not order it anymore. If I had lived in China, I would have been an outlaw knot-maker.”
11	For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not --Heaven help us – all having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit? . . .  these selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a /waiter’s hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and right of their own. . .  so that one will only come if it is raining, another in a room with green curtains . . . (225)	I could not understand “I.”  The Chinese “I” has seven strokes, intricacies.  How could the American “I,” assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese, have only three strokes, the middle so straight?  Was it out of politeness that this writer left off strokes the way a Chinese has to writer her own name small and crooked?  (166  )
12	But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. (72)	I saw two people made of gold dancing the earth's dances. They turned so perfectly that together they were the axis of the earth's turning. They were light; they were molten, changing gold – Chinese lion dancers. . . , Then the dancers danced the future – a machine future – in clothes I had never seen before.  I am watching the centuries pass in moments because suddenly I understand time, which is spinning and fixed like the north star. (27)
13	Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?. . . What could be more secret, she thought, slow, and like the intercourse of lovers, than the stammering answer she had made all these years to the old crooning song of the woods, and the farms and the brown horses standing at the gate neck to neck. . .  and the gardens blowing irises and fritillaries.  (238)	At last I saw that I too had been in the presence of/ great power, my mother talking-story.  After I grew up, I heard the chant of Fa Mu Lan, the girl who took her father’s place in battle.  Instantly I remembered that as a child I had followed my mother about the house, the two of us singing about how Fa Mu Lan fought gloriously and returned alive from war to settle in the village.  I had forgotten this chant that was once mine, given to me by my mother who may not have known its power to remind.  She said that I would grow up to be a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of the woman warrior, Fa Mu Lan. (19)