Orlando & the Magic of M.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… Or I’ll do one better… Every unhappy family blah blah. Great opener. My most loathed book. How about my personal favourite, to steal from Snoopy… It was a dark and stormy night. No. There were no bad times. And we made for the happiest, albeit short lived, of newly forged families, and so what if Tolstoy was right and we were just like any other happy family. And the year stretched out, forever fixed, as one glorious endless summer.

No worst of anything. No unhappiness. And not a single cloud.

Not that year.

It was simply the best year of my life.

It was my honours year at university, an all girl class, and the best of it, the blooming year of a close mentorship, and later friendship, with a woman I had until then admired greatly and feared senselessly in equal measure.

M. Wayward.

Where can one even begin with the magnitude of M. Wayward?

She struck to the quick instantly as the lecturer I found most sharp witted, and razor blading that tongue against all injustices of convention, and well, quite frankly so bloody brilliant it burned to sit too close. And from the very first encounter, before even opening her mouth, just waiting, and assessing, and revelling in our fresh blood, right away she had my rapt attention as a pioneer, a prophet, a god.

There was a magic to her. If you only believed in magic.

Quick footed in the assured confidence of the compact and small. (For tiny she is.)

None of the gangly awkwardness afflicting the tall.

Not the slightest of glut.

Light blue eighties jeans.

A white vest. And a pair of plain Converse sneakers.

A grey bun hanging in the balance atop her head, obedient for all its reckless construction.

You knew. You had to know. She’d take no prisoners.

With narrative fiction, in first year, she made sure to shock the shit out of any comfortable, or at worst, revoltingly arrogant young student. School was out. Time for a kick up the backside. Assigned readings of dizzying heights were to be read before each class. And even an avid reader like me wasn’t guaranteed immunity from the vertigo. Best you be prepared to be called out at random in the lecture for your thoughts on said homework. Terrified I come across a fool, I armed myself with neon highlighters and a pencil sharpened for streams of marginalia in preparation. Just in case.

In my idolising eyes, she was a woman beyond reproach.

She epitomised the personal as political, living a code of conduct ruthlessly adherent to her teachings. The written word wasn’t just another toy thing to flex with, to parade, to scrutinise for sheer intellectual showboating.

No, not with her.

With her, it was etched into her very bones so deep it must have fed on her marrow. Scrimshaw.

So very inflamed by her uncompromising passion, in this, she became the only lecturer I longed to please. And for all I am admittedly a bit of a helpless people pleaser, and working on it, this wasn’t that. This was something other. Entirely alien this time. I swear my oath to any deity you deem fit and without any exaggeration or artistic perversion of the facts or my feelings, truly, if anything, I was as miserably smitten in the beginning as any humble disciple who longs to pledge their wretched heart and soul and life’s entire to that crazed madman who awakens in them the noblest of virtues. No reluctant weakness in my character, not with her, but so, so, so much more, in this aching desire to be the chosen one.

Please! I pleaded in the wee hours, still toiling away essay after essay, sacrificing, with everything I had, and submitting like a faithful supplicant into her little pigeon hole. Choose me!

And yes, she had some worthy colleagues, some of the brightest and shiniest of the lot, and yes, I was awed of course by many lecturers over the years, and naturally inspired by their breadth of knowledge, the sagacity of their insights, even, and often, the profundity of their teachings. Sure. And again, but of course.

All the same, I did not yearn for them to like me. Really and truly like me. But when it came to her, I had never wanted anything more. And those wee hours grew lighter and lighter yet, the mauve of dawn ever encroaching, hanging on by the thread of bottomless cups of green tea, as I sacrificed myself to that unforgiving slot of her pigeon hole.

Did she even know me by name? I wondered time and time again as my papers disappeared into that dark void. Paper to paper. Just another paper of many that had come before me, and many that would follow. A reality of which I was only too painstakingly aware.

Afterwards the mere mortal’s return home, edgy and sleep deprived and feeling my efforts so futile before her magnificence. A distinction, handed back, and the distinction only ever just, just, in red ink, zero comment, and I breathed then the mere mortal’s relief that I had appeased my god, at least until called upon for the next sacrificial offering.

God, why didn’t I have a first born son?!

But you grow mistrustful, surely? Such adoration? Why? And I can’t say altogether.

Beyond that elusive sway she commanded, in the end I guess she defended my most beloved, all those books, all those wonderful books, and their makers the written word. Strung together, with an artful touch. Sublime. And lecture after lecture, all those words wielded just right and the books of their making were revealed, by her equally artful illumination, or maybe a special brand of alchemy.

Yeah, that’s it.

A goddamn magic show.

Call it whatever you like, magician or prophet or madman, they all at some point draw the crowd with a jolly good show. And I relented eventually, and gave up on being the chosen one, simply readying myself to be amazed. Popcorn, anyone?

And I wasn’t to be disappointed.

M. Wayward was a born natural when it came to the phantasmagoric Victorian spectacle. And some of my classmates trembled at the slightest of her disarming provocations.

But me?

I couldn’t have cared less if she made the lot of us tremble in our boots and check for the nearest exits. I was electrified, toes tingling. The air fraught with the kind of unnerving static that assaulted the senses of even the most rational of cynics in the room. And with each and every blot of ink unleashed amongst us, wreaking mayhem to my squeals of devilish delight, oh the word, the word! So much more than mere escapism. And by her voodoo, praise be that strong black magic, those words, those sublime sentences so cutting, those books, books, wonderful books, I almost clapped my hands in applause as they grew bolder in phantasmagoric splendour. Conjured. Bolder beyond my wildest dreams.

Those monstrous conjurings yielding only to her.

And I watched on and on and on.

Oh, try! Try!

All efforts futile, the weakest of stomach amongst us making that frenzied dash for that nearest exit…

There’d be no escaping them. And no escape in them.

Just a book? Just a hobby? Just another wasteful pastime of the dreamer? Dream on.

No. No more. Oh that voodoo that you do…

And I swooned, time and time again, faint with giddy glee.

Finally, and at long last I rejoiced, as the fearsome spectres turned vital, and powerful, and pulsating. Mary Shelley eat your heart out. The last act before curtain call. But this was no act. I knew better. And Mary West was the real thing. That much I did know. And I no longer had any doubts. This, this was no ordinary magic show. This was the stuff of legend. No, no one would ever trust a bloody word of it. And I’d never be the same again. Without a single doubt, and to my very core, I could believe. Say what they will of disciples and mad men or in this case, the maddest but most formidable woman the English department would ever have the honour to call staff. But for all her madness, madder was the one who denied her magic.

At least in this, by the gospel of M. Wayward that one true thing I could take to my grave…

Something that meant something. At last!

One true thing I could count on in this uncertain and honestly, pretty heartbreaking world.

There, and for ever after, that one true thing the written word.

However meek, and however monstrous.

In all its many guises that one true thing to believe in.

And slap me sideways, was it ever bold and alive and fraught with meaning.

Even at its meekest.

And I beheld it.

And I believed.

M. Wayward had taken me to the river and made of me once and for all a true believer.

I could unashamedly believe what I had always suspected, again I promise you gospel, for who could argue with magic, real magic, no trickery or sleight of hand, and literature so very magical it could change you, shape you, live in you.

Only a tragic cynic could laugh in the face of such earnestness.

Such faith.

And I pity the savage.

It lived in her.

Vital, and powerful, and pulsating.

The glory of the written word.

And like a fine young cannibal and every good Catholic I craved a pound of her word made flesh.

Even a table scrap.

That would do just fine.

And it wouldn’t hurt…

Just a pound of flesh not so much she’d bleed out.

Just a small pound of flesh so that one day I might be even half as unassailably fucking cool.

That’s the truth of it.

And I reckon it can be said that we are all, at least in some way, and whether we like it or not, in some way, products of the family that imprint on us growing up. And as my mom’s mate, Gaza, likes to remind her, all parents fuck up their kids.

An inescapable truth.

Admittedly, he also likes to fuck with people. My gullible mum especially.

But still, the good, the bad, our inheritance.

And thereafter, others here and there…

That first innocent crush when feelings still have no name. That best friend at 15, both painfully misunderstood but intensely loyal to each other, oddball finding haven, in the greatest I think of all our platonic loves while together you laugh at all the shit in life that actually kills you inside with the latest Garbage album your mutual anthem for an age of reckoning. Next, the miscreant who rolled you your first joint…?

Beyond that, who can say?

Mostly, as we grow older and emerge from adolescence, it seems our relationships so often become transitional. Of this or that stage of our lives. And we may remember times spent together fondly, but we move on. And life keeps happening. What it means to be an adult, I guess, it has forced me to be more introspective, and less likely to easily form the infatuations of my youth.

I think it’s pretty universal.

But maybe I am alone in this.

Or of a certain temperament shared by some, but certainly not all.

I can’t really say. I’m just saying… Maybe? Or maybe I know nothing.

But in spite of my own growing introspection, it stood no chance against M. Wayward.

She imprinted. Scrimshaw.

And you just can’t deny that kinda magic.

Even to this day, honours and after that my masters almost a decade ago in the making, and my days of academia long vanquished, to this very day, and even right now, as I grapple and flail with a fitting tribute, oh to this very day, in my fiction, and in my personal musings on my blog, and in all I write really, there are only two critics in my head as I agonise over a completed chunk of writing.

First, there is always the slow and methodical and deliberate voice of my maternal grandfather, a man of few words, but a wise man, asking if it is simple and well written.

To the point he liked it, and without garish flourish.

And after him, there will always be M. Wayward, just M. to me now after the bonds of enduring friendship came to bind us. She grins at me Cheshire in my mind’s eye, taunting me, begging if it’s to the point, sure, but more importantly, what is the point?!

And I can assure you, as a writer you hope to hell there is a point!

In reality, by the end of a long day, mostly, I really regard almost all attempts wrestling with the written word with wavering confidence, shrivelling even, and pray to have a bottle of gin spare for the most dreaded of brooding nights of existential dread that follow, but lighting a candle to be safe before I touch so much as a drop. For there are wolves in the walls. And you wait on the sun to shine. And with each new dawn they return to me, these, my conjured critics, persistent, and I pick up my pen afresh, trying to please them. The two of them most days the only critics I make damn sure to try my very damnedest to please the older I get.

But back, before it all, a total novice to conjuring spells, before I wrestled so with the written word out here in the harsh real world, oh that year, oh its sweetness, like the sweetest split fruit, as my honours year loomed, before I had to really think about growing up, that sweetest of fruits the year to beat of all the best years in my life, that sweet, sweet year of an endless summer when I was promised closer quarters to this enigmatic creature, almost mythical to me.

For you see, by then I knew for sure, all those years in worship from afar, readying myself, and all the more assured that there was no artifice, none, to her magic. And I’d recall, if you can, you’d been warned in my early disclaimer that there was total magnitude to her. And the seven wonders of the world can send even the most confident of poets to question, begging, pleading, his very vocation failing him pitifully.

How do we the scribes immortalise such magnitude?

Maybe you’ll believe me, maybe I’ve convinced you yet, that there was a magnitude to her magic. And if no, and if not, well you’ll never convince me otherwise.

Cynical reader.

Savage reader.

Oh what sad sorrow.

But I’d stood at the foot of her death defying magnitude often enough.

Remembering now, that long awaited year, and so very vividly as her magnitude came even nearer into focus… Fuck me, I was nervous.

And that first honours class faster approaching.

It was like I’d been granted permission to ride the last unicorn bareback.

Or if you wanna reach for my Catholic roots, Mary mother of God in all her radiant majesty promoting me of all the lowly lowlifes as her plus one beyond the Pearly Gates.

No tickets needed in heaven’s VIP, I guess, but afraid for all it is heaven after all, oh have mercy and spare me the abject embarrassment that my human stench would only stink up that holy cocktail lounge.

Unicorn.

The Madonna…

Grecian goddess even if you like the classics…

Whatever brand of magic you subscribe to.

Let’s just say that I was so paralysed with fear at the thought of it but so madly in love I was willing to risk it all. Fuck the consequences.

And so it was that the bravest or just plain masochistic of us became a small group of young women embarking on gender studies in a circle, with the mighty M. Wayward seated in the circle at just another small and wooden desk, as uniform and unimpressive a desk as all of us, as if one of us.

A sight… just… unsettling.

And yet, as I sat, barely daring to make eye contact, the atmosphere in the room sighed with relief as something had changed in her. You couldn’t deny it. It was strangely palpable.

Even stranger still, it was inviting.

And I lifted my gaze a little more.

And then gaze lifted all the more, so that I might bear witness to her greatest trick of them all.

Fools! We thought we’d near seen it all!

And now?!

I was growing delirious.

Calm.

Steady.

No sudden moves.

But deep down delirious.

And we could all sense her hallowed descent.

And just like that.

My unicorn, my Madonna, my mother excelsior of some heavy fucking voodoo.

Just like that, she’d come down to earth.

For us.

Her merry band of mere mortals.

For all that we stunk up the joint.

So very mortal.

And we were humbled.

And the room having sighed, growing cosier.

And we smiled at each other as we felt it. Her once famous fervour to strike hard and with unflinching intent, merciless almost, well, simply gone.

And we soaked it in like the sunbeam that pierces the coldest of winters as she smiled right back at us.

And I pinched myself.

But the room was smiles all round.

Unbelievable.

But there it is. Gospel.

And in our years later, I never really asked her why, close as we had become. So I can’t say with any authority. But from that very first class in honours, she was just well, softer.

And beyond being suddenly kind and warm and fuzzier, she struck anew as reassuringly benevolent.

Yes, we all felt it.

Though we never spoke it.

That most sacred refrains from the need to quantify it or dare speak of it at all. Unless called upon as I feel now, called to testimony. But no.

Back then we didn’t need to speak of it to each other.

It was bestowed upon each and every one of us. This benevolence.

For she was benevolent most of all. And she was generous too in opening up the floor to us fully and often, as if peers. Not that we were inflated in the least by her generosity.

We remained humbled. And honestly, I was still too stunned to take it all in at first.

The source of her total transformation, I could’ve asked her.

Perhaps, if I had to say, enrolling in an honours class, and reaching beyond the bare requirements of a three year degree, with no real glory to be had in it…

There’s a devoutness to it, and it made of us a gathering of the true believers. And thus, we’d reached her inner circle and she could trust in our devoutness, truly the last of the true believers, and that we the gathered remaining loved a badass turn of phrase almost as much. She could relax, finally.

She could finally shrug off all her showmanship. Her own badassery. But all the more badass.

And with that, and just like that, she let us strive for the realm of gods in our own eager, often clumsy, attempts at magic. Never discouraging, and only too glad when we got it right. And only a little. With a small miracle here. Another small miracle there.

Guiding us only when we needed her most.

That is, and only, postulation if I had to say. But who knows.

There it is, and for whatever reason, that the most intimidating woman I’d ever known was really super goddamn nice. Without a hint of phony. Or bullshit.

Just plain ol’ nice.

And I had matured in my years, and came to love her human form, flesh just like mine, and admiring her all the more.

Closer now, I almost wished she were an aunt I could claim all to myself for ever after, one mad caper of a holiday after the next, for all the good years we had left together.

A kooky but still unassailably fucking cool aunt maybe even better than a unicorn.

Or the Madonna. (Forgive me, Father.)

And even as she walked among us as entirely mortal that honours year, she never convinced me.

Never.

Not once.

Her fierce force as much a fact as any documented earth shattering event in history.

I’d lived to tell the tale.

And I was just grateful to walk alongside as long as it lasted until her inevitable ascension.

And as if that year couldn’t get any better, as luck would have it, beyond our gender classes, she was also the critical mentor assigned to my long essay for year end, on a novel of my own nomination, namely The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving.

M. and I were both suckers for Irving, and on this, we made a seamless team, and began to grow even closer. And I wondered when she would make her ascent one day and leave me behind as I counted each shared moment, flesh like my flesh, honoured by this, a friendship that had to end.

One day.

Just another special memory, faultless, of this faultless year.

All us walking alongside her for as long as it lasted, savouring, honouring, every moment.

And isn’t it always so?

As the last years before we really have to grow up so often are, those endless summers of days still flirting with youthful promise...

When it just couldn’t get any better and you couldn’t be more than the luckiest. This was my last year. My last endless summer. For even when we don’t like the odds, I guess we all have to grow up. Life makes sure of it, ready or not.

At least I can say, through it all, of all life’s tenderer joys but also crushing defeats, that one true thing remains, and the written word is yet to desert me.

And in this, in the steadfast word, M.’s magic had cast its protective spell.

Little did I know then, that in years to come, and after years and events leading up to a complete and total psychotic break, that I would be diagnosed bipolar. And no longer my lecturer, but more, becoming a friend, a real friend, M. did not forsake me when I needed her more than I could ever have foreseen. When my soul needed magic most of all. Word travelling of my state enforced stay at a psychiatric hospital, she would dutifully visit often, and in the unwavering spirit of compassion, benevolence, even though years had passed since those sun soaked honours classes. Still, I was one of hers. And she was still my M.

After that, she would assume the role of supervisor to revive back from the dead my dead-end of a masters upon my release into everyday society again. A hopeless case, not a word of it written yet, and buried under mountains of research, only M. was mad enough.

And for all my depression wore heavy that year, the worst of years up until her intervention, and for all it bore its full weight down on me with crippling self doubt, M. held the darker forces at bay, and bore us both aloft as if it were nothing.

And this, this was the most powerful magic I’d ever seen her perform.

All for me.

She did it.

Banishing darkness, and making light of the heaviest of burdens, as long as she could hold it off and hold it up high in our days together. And it let just enough light in each time, and with this light, and a newfound lightness in my soul, a persevering hope.

Not even the worst of our years cannot keep the light out. Nor cripple us.

Not if you haven’t given up on magic.

Not yet.

And I found refuge, our gatherings in her welcoming home.

A home of nooks and crannies and books and shells and dogs and weathered window seats and an old brass bell at the little front door. A hobbit house on the edge of the sea.

She’d crack us each a beer in the height of summer. Nigh on noon.

Then, first letting me grow easier, letting the light in to warm me, only then she’d ask me to read my next mere mortal attempt at magic again. Coaxing out of me that ashamed mere mortal attempt to conjure the vital, the powerful, the pulsating word of my bone.

My scrimshaw.

No longer as easy to conjure as it had once been.

And mournfully, I’d do as she asked, and she always asked nicely of course.

Waiting until.

Never rushing.

And she’d sit, nodding enthusiastically each and every time.

And then.

Each and every time, and somehow just plausible enough.

‘Okay, it might need some work still, but it’s good. Really good.’

So it was that this, this other year, of the worst of my days and much unhappiness and mostly gloomy and stormy nights, I churned out a masters dissertation by its end, with the steadfast love and patience of M., my guide, my saviour.

And I’ll never, not ever, give up on magic.

Trust me.

She’s out there.

I guess, even when I feel my own magic at its feeblest, when I hear her voice these days, and all these years gone by, that voice still asking me sure, but what’s the point?!

That voice is never mocking, no.

Never mocking.

Only gently prodding.

And as I remember it best, and at its best, benevolent.

The most powerful magic of all.

And it usually consoles me after that I do almost always have a point worth making, however small, and no matter how feeble, and blessed are the meek and the mild, as she is ever present forging me on in spirit, and it is mostly because of her that I keep entering my voice into the fray.

And easy on the gin, Cheshire grin returned as she chides.

But best you light that candle for there are wolves in the walls, she is quick to cast always one protective spell after the next, each and every night, that voodoo still so strong with her, so strong I marvel all the more as it has been a long time, a very, very long time since we last spoke. In the flesh that is.

But we have our scrimshaw.

And what of Orlando, you should rightly be asking by now?

And yes, you’re right, it is about bloody time.

It’s only the most ambitious and just honest to god fucking magnificent of arguably all Woolf's timeless masterpieces.

And make no mistake.

Woolf is an author I’d take with me to the very depths of Hades if I had to choose.

Another powerful practitioner of magic.

She’d be handy in Hades.

But I don't know.

I look upon it in my now rather modest and carefully curated glass encased bookshelf, and all I remember is that great, great year to beat all years with M., up close at long last, and so very benevolent, and the presentation I gave on the dogs that kept vigilance by its protagonist’s bedside during the metamorphosis of sex.

Yeah I know, I know.

Some buff I am.

A sex change as miraculous as the immaculate conception.

And I was more interested in the mystic potential of the dogs.

But M. really liked dogs too.

More than most I’d say, the better I came to know her.

So she smiled. Benevolent.

And maybe she thought then too, that indeed, not to fret, young heart.

Even with the dogs, I had a point.

Even with the dogs. I reckon Virginia Woolf must have loved dogs too.

It makes me like her even more.

Truthfully, and more and more, I cannot read any Woolf now, without missing M. for all she is a rather elusive rogue as I write this.

The ivory tower wasn’t built for such magic forever.

And she is returned to the wild and at large, pausing only from one post to the next to quietly embroider quotes of feminist fury decorated by lovingly stitched seashells.

A fitting retirement and escape from the shackles of the institution and I’d expect no less.

She’s a part of me forever at least.

And I had known better, to treasure our moments.

And treasured, her enduring scrimshaw writ deep within me, upon each and every bone in my body.

But still these bones ache for her on the coldest of stormy nights.

And still, there are days I would give anything to return and I long for a kick back with her where sea meets hobbit house and the brass bell could do with a polish and an ice cold beer and her mischievous expression on her happiest of days. With her dogs at her feet.

Those dogs better at sniffing out real magic than even the most discerning among us.

Always at her feet.

Dogs just know.

Just read Orlando.

Who knows if I will ever come back to read it once more, a decade and more the distance between the book and I, and as I greet its spine now and again, and now that my endless summers are behind me and who knows what I might find within its pages...

Books can be mercurial like that.

Yet, it gladdens my heart to keep this tatty old book from our very first introduction to gender studies in my diminishing but all the more treasured collection over the years.

It serves a higher purpose, and has a soul imprinted on it, for M. imprinted like no other, and I believe in it, in this tatty book.

Yet another talisman.

Read again one day or not.

Its presence is enough.

Enough to be there, to see that Virginia Woolf’s grand feat sits snugly amidst its fellows, at home in my home, and to remember always that one great year to beat all years.

My last endless summer. Before I had to grow up once and for all.

Woolf’s dazzling Orlando and the miracle of Mary. Inseparable now.

Oh, my Mary, Mary, quite contrary.

Magic it was.