NEEDLEWRITER

Woolf is one of the modernists who always, after reading her work holds us firmly in her grip and won’t let go, like many modernists of the twentieth century do. Modernism seems therefore like a labyrinth from which we need to find a way out and become firmly ourselfs or we lose ourselves in the confusion of their genius works.
I’ve read many of modernist in my early twenties, and they poped up back to me only ten years later. Only. Then I started rereading them with the firm belief they are completly and utterly genius, and there is no mistake calling postmodernism a crisis of modernism, a manirism of it. Because we haven’t found a way out yet.
Then it crossed my mind that Orlando which I call the most sought after character in female modernism and literature in general could practically be a way out by means of identifying with him/her. And may I call it for the purpose of my short essay an “it” too. that is him/she/it.
What I want to emphasise is that in my analisis of the novel I could not ignore the scene in the begining when Orlando is on the attic and gazing through the window, and Woolfs amazing manipulation and usage of language describes it as an possible episode of dissociation where Orlando as he gazes through the window “pops up” on both hemispheres of his brain and embarks on a journey of imagination as if it could be said, like Kant never left his hometown, he never left his attic. That is that the whole rest of the novel could be pinpointed to that scene as the main one and the rest of it is purely Orlandos imagination and daydreaming while dissociated and playing on the attic with his swords and other hidden playthings. The most amazing dissociation experiments can be done with Orlando, mostly based on todays gender studies. Because I firmly believe we have gone too far with identities which are not yet integrated firmly in our bodies, souls ( if you will ) and minds and spirits. We have gone to the idea that a gender is hidden in the mind, which means it is not yet bodily integrated and therefore it is a hindrance that is a possible cause of mental illness, because genders as their nature is are fluid and need to, so to speak christalise. And we could do that by means of reduction therapies (whether psychotherapeutic or psychoanalitic). Why I say that, I mean reduction, because a mind is a brain thing and we need to reduce gender by reduction to the point of sex to integrate our genders ( whatever our gender is ) into the structure of the body, as to lead a normal life whatever our identity in that way is. I firmly believe after the reduction that we need to set in harmony the trio of sex/gender, heart/soul, and the brain/mind to have ourselves as fully functioning beings. Because that way we can sublimate normaly our libidinal excess that we call sexuality into far more things that we persue than sexual intercourse like art and science and god knows what other persuits of ours, and not always feel the tension that the excess brings with it.