They look at me the same way they do the insane, whenever I profess my adoration for a woman like Sylvia Plath; a revolutionary poet who’s enveloping darkness created symphonies of peculiar thought. They hear of “The Bell Jar” (or what little they know of it) and assume in a matter of time I will reach the same inevitable fate, because how could anyone idolize a woman who willfully stuck her head in the oven?
What they don’t realize is her prolific success in actualizing the dichotomies of human emotions; how each possesses invincibility and tragedy; a sense of plus and minus, yes and no, friend and foe. When I read her work it is not with some desire to wallow (though if anyone makes nihilism look chic, it’s her) but because she’s the perfect candidate for my self-questioning urgency: “How much of my brain is willfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived?”
This passage in particular keeps me in emotional suspension:
“I seem to grow more acutely conscious of the swift passage of time as I grow older. When I was small, days and hours were long and spacious, and there was play and acres of leisure, and many children’s books to read. I remember that as I was writing a poem on “Snow” when I was eight. I said aloud, “I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have while I’m still little because when I grow up I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like.” And so it is that childlike sensitivity to new experiences and sensations seems to diminish in an inverse proportion to the growth of technical ability. As we become polished, so do we become hardened and guilty of accepting eating, sleeping, seeing, and hearing too easily and lazily without question. We become blunt and blissfully passive as each day adds another drop to the stagnant well of our years.”
And it’s true, the older I get the more I find myself fighting to keep the currencies of my youth; the more I find myself asking, “where do I begin?”
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