passages:"Bang Bang"

“How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think than in all other time. I'd like to be an old man to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears...in...rain. Time to die.
- attrib. Rutger Hauer, Blade Runner

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

"Ariel: The Restored Edition" Sylvia Plath, HarperCollins, 2004, Foreword by Frieda Hughes...

"I appeared to me that my father's editing of Ariel was seen to 'interfere' with the sanctity of my mother's suicide, as if, like some deity, everything associated with her must be enshrined and preserved as miraculous....But my mother, inasmuch as she was an exceptional poet, was also a human being and I found comfort in restoring the balance; it made sense of her for me."  - Frieda Hughes (xviii)

Ariel contains 40 poems in its first section, a facsimile of the manuscript in the second, drafts of Ariel next and appendices with a restored version of "The Swarm" and the script for the BBC broadcast of 1962 (where you will find her introducing in a few clips circulating on youtube).

Here are some favored lines:
Morning Song - "And now you try your handful of notes; The clear vowels rise like balloons."
The Rabbit Catcher - "I felt a still busyness, an intent.  I felt hands round a tea mug, dull, blunt, Ringing the white china."
The Detective - "We walk on air, Watson.  There is only the moon, embalmed in phosphorous.  There is only a crow in a tree.  Make notes."
Daddy - "I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look, And a love of the rack and the screw."
Stopped Dead - "Is it a penny, a pearl - Your soul, your soul?  I'll carry it off like a rich pretty girl..."

"Ariel: The Restored Edition"

"Kiss me and you will see how important I am." - Sylvia Plath

"The Journals of Sylvia Plath" Foreward by Ted Hughes, 1982, Anchor Books

"A real self, as we know, is a rare thing....Most of us are never more than bundles of contradictory and complementary selves....When a real self finds language, and manages to speak, it is surely a dazzling event - as Ariel was."  - Ted Hughes

I held this in my hand at the bookstore.  It was my birthday and I buy a requisite tome each year, something I typically hold off on otherwise.  Even up to the queue I struggled with it.  It is a journal surely, but it is raw and unflinching.  I find myself needlessly embarrassed.  Plath and Hughes have passed on ages ago at this point.  With Hughes the most recent, in 1998.

Knowing of Plath's suicide and having seen the photograph as a clumsy, sad death in an oven.  Two children left behind.  A seemingly ignoble end.  However, Mr. Hughes exalts it with a terse, honest forward.   Plath had, in most respects, as he attests, allowed her true self out, which would become Ariel.  The outcome, in her death, can be either obvious or an awfully painful exercise of the human condition.  The journal is proof of an internal life, lived and relived.

So inspired by her energy, the crisp, knowing lines, I read a few excerpts before deciding on must having it.  I wanted to immediately fly to a corner of a library and spend the day poring over it.  Having read through most of it over the last few weeks, it is an easy book to recommend for anyone that is a fan of Plath, or of poetry, or of pain.

It is broken up into corresponding points of her adult life, although it does start with her life at Lookout Farm as an 18-year-old.  The naivete of this time is broken by the orchestration of an old pervert.  She captures each moment lucidly, acknowledging the people and critical points that led her down that unfortunate road.

The years generally fall from her maroon colored journals as: Smith College, 1950-55, Cambridge, 1955-57, Smith, 1957-58, Boston, 1958-59, and England, 1960-62.  Hughes leaves out the last weeks leading to her death, piquing interest of words spoken and words that he had to shield from the children.  There's heartbreak there and he admits that forgetfulness here is necessary.

Sylvia was born in 1932, attempted suicide in 1953, married Hughes in 1956, succeeded in her second attempt in 1963, while in England and her masterwork, Ariel, was published in 1965.  This title was released in 1982 and printed in paperback in '98.

There are pictures of the glowing young thing.  How I would have loved sitting with her for a few moments, with that electric smile.  She wore her hair short, she seemed a focused spirit in her writing, I bet she wore overly long sweater jackets.  I bet she smelled of light florals and light cigarettes.  She has slight cramps in her hand, as poets do, writing and rewriting, tapping typewriters and scribbling masturbatorily on long sheets.  Literary lights as she were uncommon.  I find myself staring at photographs of a facade, an unhonest image.  The words define, and there's exploration here in these pages.

"The Journals of Sylvia Plath" on Amazon.

...Sylvia Plath at Yaddo 1959...

Yaddo: The Grand Manor (1959 - all poems that follow are also attributed to the same year):
"...The fir tree's thick with grackles.  Gold carp loom in the pools."

The Manor Garden:
"History Nourishes these broken flutings, These crowns of acanthus, And the crow settles her garments."

Selected excerpts: A Poem for a Birthday:
I. Who
"This shed's fusty as a mummy's stomach: Old tools, handles and rusty tusks.  I am at home here among the dead heads."
II. Dark House
"This is a dark house, very big.  I made it myself, Cell by cell from a quiet corner....It is warm and tolerable In the bowel of the root."
III. Maenad
"This month is fit for little.  The dead ripen in the grapeleaves.  A red tongue is among us.  Mother, keep out of my barnyard, I am becoming another."
IV. The Beast
"...Fido Littlesoul, the bowel's familiar.  A dustbin's enough for him.  The dark's his bone.  Call him any name, he'll come to it."
V. Flute Notes form a Reedy Pond
"This is not death, it is something safer."
VI. Witch Burning

 

A draft of  'Ariel'.

"It is easy to blame the dark: the mouth of a door, The cellar's belly...What large eyes the dead have!  I am intimate with a hairy spirit."
VII. The Stones
"Drunk as a foetus I suck at the paps of darkness."

The Colossus:
"Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.  The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.  My hours are married to shadow."

Sylvia Plath spent a fall in Yaddo from early September to before Thanksgiving of 1959.

Flora on the Yaddo Grounds

Dark Wood, Dark Water:
"This wood burns a dark Incense.  Pale moss drips In elbow-scarves, beards From the archaic Bones of the great trees."

Mushrooms:
"Overnight, very Whitely, discreetly, Very quietly Our toes, our noes Take hold on the loam, Acquire the air."

...a visit to Yaddo in Saratoga, NY State...24jul14...

Yaddo (yeah dough) is an artist colony that was bequeathed (through a trust) to future artists to use the grounds as a place of contemplation and collaboration, it is located near the Saratoga Race Track in Upstate New York.  The estate was given over by Spencer and Katrina Trask, he a venerable financier and she an author.

Walking the grounds does induce in the spirit of the artist a sense of contemplation.  It is far from overly showy, and instead is conducive to the temperament of those that are taking the inward journey necessary to create their art.  The grounds lack contradiction - with a wide open lawn, several fountains, marble benches and statuary that set a fixed gaze on order.

 

The natural font (the picture of the mound of rock below) allows for a gentle sound of falling water, proving the contemplative attributes of rain as it falls softly on the rounded stones below.  From it, it runs down a small rivulet.  The rounded cup of water hosting a small nymph playing lithely under the shadows of the thin trees. Overlooking this is a small plant of blue Harebell.

There are koi.  There is a small lake that does not allow fishing, so I could only imagine the creatures lurking in its muddy depths.

   




One could imagine the footfalls of so many authors as they walked alone around these gardens for months at a time.  It is thought that Poe worked on "The Raven" here.  Some 5,500 artists since its inception have used the grounds to help in their work.  The NY Public Library has archives of some of the material available to view.  There are even rolls by type of media the artist uses, like this roll of writers.

Having just read much of Sylvia Plath's poetry in Manhattan, I was pleasantly surprised by my Aunt Pam's insistence on visiting here.  Then, seeing that Edith Wharton spent time here as well, I was induced to purchase The Touchstone at Albany Airport.  I was captivated all the way home by the novella and finished it by the time I touched back down at John Wayne.

"Thin as ferns and fronds,
The woodland settles down,
Drowned in that still pool,
Where stars will stream and drown"
- The Lake, Edith Wharton (at Yaddo)