Wild Goose Chase
Integrity, Quakerism, and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
Dee starts the Quaker meeting with a query: “What is the relationship between the words integrate and integrity?” She first asked her friend, a college professor, and his answer was unsatisfactory. “Go figure, even he didn’t know!” On first impulse, I’m judgmental. The link seems rather trivial: Integrate (v): combine one thing with another so that they become a whole. Integrity (n): the state of being whole and undivided, or, the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.
But the more I sat with it, and the more others in the meeting got up to speak, I realized that the relationship was not simply a part of a speech problematic. The valence around the words, the circle of charge that defies Merriam Webster's definition, rendered the two distinctive of each other in certain crucial ways. A poignant example of a semantic shift: The way we’ve come to use the words has transplanted their meaning entirely.
The main distinction many congregants spoke on was the quality of “integrity” as an individual phenomenon and “integrate/integration” as a communal one. In a post-meeting debrief with my friend Nomi, we dug further into the heart of this division.
“Integrate feels so much more expansive, and integrity feels so possessed,” Nomi said with genuine curiosity, like an alchemist after the philosopher's stone. “I have integrity, and it's totally divided from the rest of the world. People are so fixated on integrity because we’re so individualistic.”
“Well, that goes back to what someone said in the meeting,” I responded expectantly to advance the train of thought. “When a congregant said that this meeting was integrated, as in communal. Everyone's so hyper fixated on finding my truth we forget to expand that individual truth into finding truth for our communities.”
“Yes. There is a pervasive ‘take what serves you’ mentality,” Nomi continues as we walk further west, “that it can bring you some sort of peace, but that's not the end of it. You take what serves you so you can return to the world.”
I pause briefly, letting the note play to completion, to inhale the biting January air. “You can’t verify your personal integrity until you've had confirmation that other people are also seeking the same thing. Integrity can't be experienced in isolation.”
Perhaps that’s why I’ve been recently drawn to attending Quaker meetings. The need to integrate the integrity I’m constantly toiling to achieve. The nature of the meeting facilitates that sort of interaction: often, one person’s quest for truth will propel another person to continue their line of thought. You sit in silence, waiting patiently for your thoughts to boil over. For the spirit to move you, so you can share the burning question with a larger circle of friends.
It took me ten meetings to finally let the spirit propel me to the microphone. It's true what they say. The spirit literally moves you. Blood pumping furiously in my ears, drowning out all other noise. A restlessness of the feet. A complete loss of control over my physical facilities. It took Dee’s inquiry on integrity to lift me off my feet. One second I sat, the next I was at the microphone. I didn’t even register how I got there.
Now the congregation calls me Orlando. Prone to prophecy at the microphone, I found myself delivering a summary of Virginia Woolf’s sixth novel. But before I share my public words, I’ll share the context I deemed excess on that occasion, a preamble of the book’s major moments.
Orlando, written in 1928, is a “biography” of, you guessed it, Orlando. But the question of who Orlando is, contrary to biographical convention, is somewhat fraught. More than a biography, it is a fantasy. Orlando’s life spans over three hundred years, but in that elapsed time, they only age to be thirty-six. Orlando’s journey starts in 1588 England, during his boyhood. From there, we follow Orlando through his adolescence, ascending to noble rank, experiencing first love’s treacheries and the respite of poetry. We follow him to Constantinople on the orders of King Charles II, where after a week-long trance, she emerges as a woman. She returns to Elizabethan England only momentarily before “a turbulent welter of cloud covered the city. All was dark; all was doubt; all was confusion. The Eighteenth century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun.”
Newly in Victorian Era England Orlando feels out of place and at odds with what Woolf refers to as “the spirit of the age,” which in this particular era, involves chastity, a division of the sexes, an enclosure of the woman, the social norm of marriage, and even a change in the environmental climate itself. At first Olando is reluctant to give herself over to the new times, “It was all very well for Orlando to mew herself in her house at Blackfriars and pretend that the climate was the same; that one could still say what one liked and wear knee breeches or skirts as the fancy took one.” But eventually, Woolf concedes that “even she, at length, was forced to acknowledge that times were changed.”
I found myself instantly attentive to this so-called “spirit of the age” that “batters down on anyone who tries to make a stand against it far more effectually than those who bend its own way.” Similar to Orlando, I feel intrinsically at odds with the spirit of our current age. I find myself slipping into luddite tendencies and techno-pessimism. I have no faith we will be able, especially in this administrative term, to weasel our way out of corporate greed and climate destruction. I relish moments of slowness, see tremendous merit in de-growth mindsets (starkly antagonistic to the present moment’s pervasive accelerationism), and admonish those who absolve themselves of guilt by believing technological revelations can cleanse us of our sins —reluctant to concede to arguments intent on baiting us out of our empathy.
But what’s the solution to this antagonism between the self and the spirit of the age? Is the solution complete rejection, isolation, and a total lack of social participation? Here, again, I query, must I integrate myself? Is the integration worth the costs incurred to my psyche?
Returning to the text, I hope for potential mimicry. How does Orlando reckon with the disjointed nature of her consciousness and that of the Victorian Era? The answer is surprisingly simple. Woolf likens the encounter to an examination, Orlando the student, and the spirit of the age a teacher:
“She had just managed, by some dexterous deference to the spirit of the age, by putting on a ring and finding a man on a moor, by loving nature and being no satirist, cynic, or psychologist – any one of which goods would have been discovered at once – to pass its examination successfully. And she heaved a deep sigh of relief, as, indeed, well she might, for the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon which a nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his work depend. Orlando had so ordered it that she was in an extremely happy position she need neither fight her age, nor submit to it; she was of it yet remained herself.”
While Orlando conceded to some of the age’s prescriptions, namely marriage, she retained her individuality because she wrote, “and so the spirit passed on.” The way to reconcile the internal and the external is, indeed, integration, but only so long as you maintain some measure of selfhood in that process. Orlando enacts herself through writing, ensuring its sacrosanctity. Yet, Orlando could not write in the first place were it not for a participatory stance to her society. For writers especially, but all people generally, a “successful life” is constantly aware of the “infinite delicacy” in the “nice arrangement” between the me and the them. To strike the balance between ourselves and our social environment, we must therefore recognize that “society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world, and society has no existence whatsoever.”
The main difference between our mortal relations to society and Orlando’s is that she lived across three hundred years worth of society, and from several different positionalities (a young boy in the 16th century is a radically different position compared to an unmarried woman in the Victorian Era.) Yet despite the discrepancies between subjectivity and environment, Woolf manages to gracefully craft continuity in Orlando’s character. The different versions of Orlando are woven together like the fine silk of a spider, trembling yet holding nevertheless.
What details does Woolf provide to help us suspend our disbelief, to get us to buy into the biographical discontinuities? The answer, I found to be quite philosophical, and topically well aligned with Dee’s query on integration. (My analysis of the answer, which I will provide to you now, is what I shared with the congregants at the meeting hall. A writer is, of course, permitted certain storytelling concessions, so know that my subsequent inclusion of direct quotes was omitted in the actual verbal speech during the Quaker gathering). After a short explanation of the book (an explanation I have already provided the reader), I proceeded to state the following (more or less accurately re-told):
“What did Orlando make of these many selves, all scattered across an immense span of time, age, gender, and social rank? What explanation does Woolf provide to satisfy our confusion? In classically metaphorical fashion, she lays out the answer:
‘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… For she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand…. The conscious self, which is the uppermost, and has the power to desire, wishes nothing but one self. This is what some people call the true self, and it is, they say, compact of all the selves we have it in us to be; commanded and locked up by the Captain self, the Key self, which amalgamates and controls them.’
In all humans, there are thousands of people, myriad in nature, that compose the mosaic we like to call the “self,” all stacked up like plates in a waiter's hand. But there is in reality, one “true self,” perhaps the plate closest to the waiter’s hand, the one that is familiar to their palm, and wishes for the stack of tableware to come tumbling down. But that wish, often, is in vain. So the best the true self can do is strive for integrity. Integrate itself into the pile of dishes it resides underneath. But how does Orlando, do we, attempt that delicate task, and when will we know it has finally, if ever, happened?
I find it telling that throughout their life, Orlando carries with them their poem, “The Oak Tree,” which they started in the 16th century. It returns to them in the 20th century but does not remain in her possession for long, for Orlando buries the manuscript under an oak tree in a chanced forest to “return to the land of what the land has given me.’ How do we integrate the various selves, often at odds with each other, to find more integrity? The answer, it seems, is through art. We should look to our natural and social environments for inspiration. So that we may integrate that which lies around us into ourselves, to help us process our own internal landscape.”
That, dear readers, is when I returned to the pew from the microphone. My legs quaking, aware of the effort it takes for a body to tether a soul unbound. My corpus, much like Orlando’s at the end of the novel, “quivered and tingled as if suddenly stood naked in hard frost.” For the rest of the meeting, I sat in silence, content with my contribution, but as soon as I left the space, more thoughts piled on. The following is, therefore, privileged information to the reader, which was not disclosed to my Quaker friends.
Looking to personal creation as salvation appears one way to achieve integrity of self. Imaginative processes allow us to churn the world, a spin-cycle of external circumstances and stimuli that we wash and dry to help us clarify ourselves, our place, our moment. But why does one clean their clothes in the first place? To go back out into the world. We cannot stop when we find integrity within ourselves. We have an obligation as social animals to transpose and integrate that wholeness into our environment. To achieve integrity within herself, after three-hundred years of toil, Orlando must return her poem to the very dirt that inspired her years prior. The physical burial of her creation is a radical act of reintegration.
By burying that tattered paper, Orlando completed the loop: integration to integrity to reintegration. It is only after a revolution that one feels the magnitude of wholeness, a wholeness that transcends the individual. How did Orlando know, and how will we know, when this revolution is complete?
After “The [representational] Oak Tree” is returned to non-representational oak tree, Orlando was “darkened, stilled, and become, with the addition of this Orlando, what is called, rightly or wrongly, a single self, a real self. And she fell silent.” Silence is our signal for wholeness. To an exposed, raw, and integrated self, language fails to serve its purpose. We transcend the need for it entirely.
Here, I can’t help but draw another comparison to Quakerism. The craftful silence of the meeting hall. The stillness there is anticipatory, a pregnant pause, gestating the divine spirit we hope will move us. When language comes, Quakers acknowledge it is not the self speaking, but god (lowercase in my case, capital for old-guard Quakers). And after the fit of linguistic frenzy, you return to the pew, more silent than before, feeling whole. The meeting is, in that sense, also representative of the cycle: integrate yourself into the larger group, hope the spirit restores integrity to your many thoughts/selves, and then, in a fit of revelation, integrate that found wholeness back into the group at the microphone.
What follows silence? After returning her words to the earth which they came, Orlando shifted her gaze outward once more:
“Attaching itself to the innumerable sights she had been receiving, composed them into something tolerable, comprehensible. Yes, she thought, heaving a deep sigh of relief, as she turned from the carpenter's shop to climb a hill, I can begin to live again… And on this path… everything was partially something else, and each gained an odd moving power from this union of itself and something not itself so that with this mixture of truth and falsehood her mind became like a forest in which things moved; lights and shadows changed, and one thing became another.”
Stillness allows us to privilege the external as if we were children, still untethered to a self, endowed with the luxury of formlessness. In that state of exploration, we begin to string things back together again. A preverbal seeing of the multitude of contradictions and contrasting elements perpetually surrounding us. A world where everything is partially something else, where truth and falsehood mix, and one thing becomes another.
Reintegration is often stark and disorienting. Nowhere is this more evident than outside the doors of the 15th Street meeting house. Union Square Park. Where New Yorkers are thrown into confrontation like the various subway lines below them. Where the climate clock ticks ominously above the Whole Foods. Where women emerge from Sephora with hundreds worth of cosmetics and refuse to give the houseless veteran a look or a cent. With ten minutes to spare before getting on different trains, Nomi and I finished our conversation.
“Finding integrity takes so much time, and we don’t seem to have that luxury. In Orlando, it took three hundred years to find integrity through poetry, and even then, the questioning wasn’t over. All the while, when they are writing, society changed so monumentally they stopped recognizing themselves in it. How do we find both societal and self-integrity when it takes forever—but we don’t have forever?” I look up to the building above me, bold orange numbers flipping ominously. “The climate clock is literally counting down—we have 4 years, 176 days, 22 hours, 23 minutes, and 8 seconds to save ourselves.”
Following my eyes to the countdown, Nomi responds. “What’s so frustrating is that people don’t even want to fix things. There’s this illusion that the way we’re living is working—maybe not ideal, but acceptable. But it’s not okay. We’re so individualistic, and it’s like people don’t feel the consequences until they hit.”
“Exactly, it’s like what you were saying about morality and faith—nothing is binding us to anything. There’s no collective accountability anymore. Back in Victorian England, for example, there was at least a set of social mores, a shared belief system – not that I want to go back to that time, don’t get me wrong – but now, with globalization, there’s no coherent “spirit of the age” beyond capital and greed. And can you even call that a spirit? It’s like it’s been sucked out entirely.”
“Right. And when there’s no clear structure to either conform to or push against, how do you find a sense of self? A sense of community?”
“I keep coming back to the idea that you can’t separate yourself from the system and expect to change it. You have to recognize that you're in it and engage with it from within.”
“Exactly. It’s easy to act like you're outside of it, but that doesn’t solve anything. The solution isn’t to escape; it’s to acknowledge your place and move forward with integrity. If you're in it, you have the power to unite it. But people don’t even feel like they’re part of anything anymore.”
Our conversation on urgency is urgently closed. Nomi hops on the L to Williamsburg, and I take the 2 back uptown. I sit silently on the ride, trying to tie up the loose strings of our conversation in my head.
Poetry and art are a way to unify ourselves and in turn, unify the communities we share our creation with. But this process cannot be rushed, and it can often take extensive and arduously long periods to achieve (and, unlike Orlando, we don’t have centuries to live). Add to that, the “spirit of our age” is predicated on accelerationism and a resulting sense of urgency: an urgency to save our planet, an urgency to save our communities, an urgency, in many cases, to save ourselves.
We’re sold new selves by the minute, too. New avatars, new profiles, new likes and dislikes. How do we find integrity between disparate parts when late-stage capitalism targets and amplifies our fractured nature? Accelerationist principles make that aforementioned dish of plates almost too tall to pass through the swinging kitchen doors. The load is so heavy for some that artistic expression and generative conversations feel entirely inaccessible. So how do we create and integrate when there's this overwhelming sense of urgency? Can we speed up this cycle? Hasten the revolution?
To this, I have no answer. My best attempt at closing this written loop is to leave it where Woolf leaves it:
“She looked anxiously into the sky. It was dark with clouds now. The wind roared in her ears. But in the roar of the wind she hears the roar of an aeroplane coming nearer and nearer. ‘Here! Shel, here!’ she cried, baring her breast to the moon (which now showed bright) so that their pearls glowed like the eggs of some vast moon-spider. The aeroplane rushed over the clouds and stood over her head. It hovered above her. Her pearls burnt like a phosphorescent flare in the darkness. And as Shelmerdine, now a grown sea captain, hale, fresh-coloured, and alert, leapt to the ground, there sprang up over his head a single wild bird. ‘It is the goose! Orlando cried. “The wild goose… and the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-eight.”
Integrity and integration exist in a cycle, and just as quickly as it ends, it must also begin again. It doesn’t take long for Orlando to lose her quested stillness and understanding. As a plane flies over her head, roaring with modernist fury, Orlando rejects the changing times and prefers to attribute the commotion not to the aeroplane but the wild goose it scares out of a bush.
Even if we manage to set our sights far beyond ourselves, we will be humbled, no doubt, by the ever-changing times. The revolution will always begin again, and we must rejoice in that. Orlando’s shortsightedness will no doubt be generative for future poetic inquiry. It appears, at the end of the day, that no matter how much we strive, we will always mistake the plane for the wild goose. The most beautiful, impossible, and human chase of them all.