Street Post 3
Origin. Starting place. Point of departure. A beginning.
Clarissa Dalloway’s walk begins with a single step outside of her Dean’s Yard townhouse. But we, a group of college students attempting to physically encounter Virginia Woolf’s London, seventy some years later, must actually walk to a starting point. The beginning of the Dalloway walk is not a given; we cannot simply step off of a bus and begin to work our way to the flower shop. For us, even the starting point is a place we must reach. I leap off of the second step of our coach, land awkwardly (and sandal-less) upon the scorching Westminster pavement. As I relieve my pain from the pavement induced burns by hopping quickly back into my sandals, I find myself discovering the infinite possibilities of a day; the immeasurable differences between a stroll in (or outside of) my own shoes and a morning in Clarissa’s.
After standing outside the bus for fifteen or so minutes, organizing our group and nominating Sara as our faithful trailblazer (as always), we begin our trek to the beginning of Clarissa’s journey. We walk in three different directions, incessantly backtracking and overshooting before we find ourselves in Dean’s Yard, where it is suspected Clarissa Dalloway lived. I stood in the middle of the street and spun myself around until I reached a point of dizziness, looked directly at one door and decided that that door was Mrs. Dalloway’s. Even though Mrs. Dalloway is a fictional character, and even though she could have lived in any one of those houses (not just the one I selected) if she actually were real, for my own purposes, I needed a an exact starting place, a predetermined Clarissa began her journey HERE in order to enjoy my own walk. Having traversed unsuccessfully for so long before actually finding Dean’s Yard, and knowing that randomness and chance encounter would be huge determining factors of my own walk, I desired an exact origin.
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway accounts for the happenings to various interrelated people on single day. The day, the people, the events, the thoughts are exceedingly ordinary. Random sightings and encounters recall (un)certain memories and thoughts. Like Clarissa, I would not have been able to predict my near-tragic incidents with busses, my meeting of someone who is perhaps the nicest little old man to have ever existed, and the minutes spent digging through my wallet to find enough change to purchase a bottle of water. Even as Big Ben marked away the hours, randomness and chance pervaded these neatly measured units of time. My walk and Woolf’s novel both have definite beginnings, certainties that surround and contrast the ensuing variables as I stuggle to retrace Clarissa’s journey with my mind and footsteps.
posted by PatrickMcKelvey @ 2:37 PM
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