you know not, you omniscient nullity

Captain, laughs the audience, we have been allowed to know who is suffering in this scene and it is not you -- thinking like that as they hear the Captain complain to the badgered, haunted Woyeck, “You keep stabbing at me with those eyes of yours.” Woyzeck has been stabbed too; the Doctor pays him to eat nothing but peas and then he assaults him with scientific attention. “It walks upright. Wears coats and pants.”

Doctor examines a cat through his magnifying glass and spots a rabbit louse. Rare new species, he says. I go back to Woolf again, whose self won't stop passing judgment. “And further, there was another prick of the pin: one was wasting one’s chance.” Once she decided in a letter, that “To a person of imagination, Land's End is as impressive as the Equator” (1st of October, 1905, writing to Violet Dickinson, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume 1, 1888 - 1912), which, if you wanted, you could connect to Ruskin in his private correspondence with himself (The Diaries of John Ruskin, Vol. 2: 1848 - 1873), writing, “that all forms are thus either indicative of lines of energy or pressure, or motion, variously impressed or resisted,” with Land's End as the form and the measuring, weighing imagination as energy, pressure, or motion.

Then I turn to Knut Hamsun, whose narrator, in Hunger, is trying to find the source of judgment; and who tries to evict it from its stronghold with his transgressions. Accusing God of hating him, he shouts --

I tell you, you have used force against me, and you know not, you omniscient nullity, that I never bend in opposition! I tell you, all my life, every cell in my body, every power of my soul, gasps to mock you -- you Gracious Monster on High. I tell you, I would, if I could, breathe it into every human soul, every flower, every leaf, every dewdrop in the garden! I tell you, I would scoff you on the day of doom, and curse the teeth out of my mouth for the sake of your Deity's boundless miserableness! I tell you from this hour I renounce all thy works and all thy pomps! I will execrate my thought if it dwell on you again, and tear out my lips if they ever utter your name!

(translated by George Egerton)

Nothing responds to the blasphemy and soon he's saying “God” casually again without shame, as if that speech had never existed. “I was, God be praised, all right in my senses as any man.” Judgment isn't always very perpetual, though in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals it seems to be, and if she loves her brother today then she will love him again tomorrow; and the sheep will be beautiful no matter when they appear in the landscape -- next week, next month, whenever -- she seems to have a steady source of appreciation on which she naively draws; like a fictional character she seems guileless, whereas the narrator of Hunger is volatile, like a person.

(n.b., I began reading Hamsun after I saw this post at Wuthering Expectations.)

beauty extravagantly greater than one could expect

I clicked on a link to Berfrois' reprint of Evening Over Sussex by Virginia Woolf from Death of a Moth (1942), and found her approaching a similar experience, different solution; her method is unphysical: she will push ideas outwards by writing an essay, and she does not need to touch the countryside of Sussex. Her imagination observes itself creating compartments so that it can share help between them. The self in her is not monolithic, it is social. “[I]t is well known how in circumstances like these the self splits up and one self is eager and dissatisfied and the other stern and philosophical,” she says. (This is a clearly-drawn picture in contrast to Lawrence's dusky lily-innard. Woolf looks around and witnesses democracy. Lawrence sees it too, and hates it. He hates that promising scientific clarity. No wonder his solutions are so whimsical and useless. "If the men wore scarlet trousers as I said, they wouldn't think so much of money" (Lady Chatterley's)).

Woolf:

But, I thought, there is always some sediment of irritation when the moment is as beautiful as it is now. The psychologists must explain; one looks up, one is overcome by beauty extravagantly greater than one could expect — there are now pink clouds over Battle; the fields are mottled, marbled — one’s perceptions blow out rapidly like air balls expanded by some rush of air, and then, when all seems blown to its fullest and tautest, with beauty and beauty and beauty, a pin pricks; it collapses. But what is the pin? So far as I could tell, the pin had something to do with one’s own impotency. I cannot hold this — I cannot express this — I am overcome by it — I am mastered. Somewhere in that region one’s discontent lay; and it was allied with the idea that one’s nature demands mastery over all that it receives; and mastery here meant the power to convey what one saw now over Sussex so that another person could share it. And further, there was another prick of the pin: one was wasting one’s chance; for beauty spread at one’s right hand, at one’s left; at one’s back too; it was escaping all the time; one could only offer a thimble to a torrent that could fill baths, lakes.

If her self did not prick her air balls then maybe she could continue to watch the pink clouds forever or until the sun goes down, but the brain flooded by products of the senses (“beauty and beauty and beauty” -- the best description, in her opinion, is this repetition, which I read as closer to an uttered groan or sigh than to Mrs Morel's dumb swoon) has reasserted itself in the form of a duty, “one was wasting one's chance” comes the warning; the essay itself is the cyst that has come from an “irritation.” The self is not only mastering the landscape, it is mastering her.

Or interrupting her: this thing you are doing so easily, you may not do it.

None of that answers the question, “Why an essay?' when she could have used interpretive dance or any other method. Writing is not being explained. Reading Carl Richard Mueller's translation of Georg Büchner's Complete Plays and Prose I thought of Woolf's words, “escaping all the time,” in light of the Captain's conversation in the opening scene of Woyzeck.

Captain: Not so fast, Woyzeck, not so fast! One thing at a time! You're making me dizzy. What am I to do with the ten extra minutes that you'll finish early today? [etc]

The Captain is flooded with world and he doesn't have any way out; he has not found a solution, as Woolf has done -- her mind's eyes rotating from one phrase to another as they search for an intellectual hook. So she rescues herself.