Sylvia Plath

On this day 81 years ago, Sylvia Plath was born in Boston; she would go on to become, as Joyce Carol Oates put it, "one of the most celebrated and controversial of postwar poets writing in English." It's a pity, therefore, that when people remember Plath they first think of her suicide and not her poems, which trap her anguish and imagination in strict-tempoed lines, unveiling them to each new reader.

Plath's poems have taught me to rhyme deftly and repeat with subtlety; among her poems, Daddy, Lady Lazarus, A Mad Girl's Love Song, A Life, April Aubade remain as some of my favourites. Her poems carry a feminine grace yet maintain the temperament of a woman who, as Ted Hughes declared, "saw her world in the flame of the ultimate substance and the ultimate depth."

May her poems be ever-treasured and read.

Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor.

I finished reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being! There were moments when I found it unbearable (ha...ha ha) and also times when I was blown away by it.

Something you should know about this book - Deep, deep, deep.
This is the recurring question throughout:

The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”

All the characters are either light/heavy or torn between both. It's interesting.

So be prepared to come across the words 'unbearable,' 'weight,' and 'lightness,' MANY times.

Overall, I didn't really 'get' this book - I didn't love it, did not have the spirit to delve into it, but it definitely DOES express very profound ideas (perhaps if I reread in a couple year times I'll see it in another light). The conciseness with which Kundera expresses these ideas through his book is one of its most noticeable traits; personally, I prefer it when writers churn out/explore ideas a tad more clearly in their books.

Nonetheless, there was this SWELL CHAPTER on kitsch -

"kitsch is the absolute denial of shit both in the literal and figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence."

I generally have issues with profanity in literature (it's a besmirching of the English language; see quote 3 paragraphs below that rejects this, though) but then again there have been time when it is used so appropriately/perfectly (e.g. Of Mice and Men, Fraction of the Whole, etc.) so when shit popped up I thought I'd read on... and it was absolutely worth it!

 Kitsch (I understand that there are more connotations now, though) is the act of not accepting that life sucks... Sabina lives with the old couple, listens to beautiful music, and in that moment, is undergoing Kitsch, but as Kundera explains, this is inevitable as kitsch is an "integral part of the human condition."

Then, he started talking about TOTALITARIAN KITSCH which is a lot more complicated but basically the communist sense of it - individualism, doubt and irony banished.

You can't claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don't lock yourself in the bathroom!) or we are created in an unacceptable manner.

In conclusion: Didn't particularly connect with this novel but it is written fluidly and has a brilliant chapter on Kitsch.

Currently: Listening to the Return of the King soundtrack (I'VE MISSED IT) and re-reading Sylvia Plath (despite my 3 month no-intense-Plath rule, because her depression is a tad contagious). This is the 2nd time this anthology has sat in my home but I'm reading it in a different light... I'm noticing new rhyme schemes (and being mind-blown, yes)... so many soft constants and "liquid vowels" as Ted Hughes eloquently put it.

Rediscovering my old favorites, like Daddy and Lady Lazarus (more recent, yes), but
http://allpoetry.com/poem/8498383-Trio_Of_Love_Songs-by-Sylvia_Plath
IS INCREDIBLE; I DIDN'T LOVE IT THIS MUCH BEFORE! Perfect puns everywhere, so delicate (yet strong, esp. the 1st one); love it.

Hearing a white saint rave
About a quintessential beauty
Visible only to the pargon heart,
I tried my sight on an apple-tree
That for eccentric knob and wart
Had all my love.

Embellished by the chameleon mind

I finally finished (albeit power-skimming last 150 pages) The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, and I definitely think I would have been content with the heavily abridged version...
Nonetheless, when is it not enlightening to be exposed to the ramblings of a poet, especially Plath, with her bipolar disorder and sensitivity to the world?

It was greatly gratifying to be able to draw huge correlations between her journal entries and her famous poems (ESPECIALLY DADDY - it makes a ton more sense now; incredible how she was led to believe she killed him, due to a dream she had and the influence of her mother, whom she despised...).

For example, she wrote briefly on the death of the Rosenbergs, and the first line of The Bell Jar is "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

Quotes are below.
 

Writing is a religious act: it is an ordering, a reforming, a relearning and reloving of people and the world as they are and as they might be. A shaping which does not pass away like a day of typing or a day of teaching. The writing lasts: it goes about on its own in the world. People read it: react to it as to a person, a philosophy, a religion, a flower: they like it, or do not. It helps them, or it does not. It feels to intensify living: you give more, probe, ask, look, learn, and shape this: you get more: monsters, answers, color and form, knowledge. You do it for itself first. If it brings in money, how nice. You do not do it first for money. Money isn’t why you sit down at the typewriter. Not that you don’t want it. It is only too lovely when a profession pays for your bread and butter. With writing, it is maybe, maybe-not. How to live with such insecurity? With what is worst, the occasional lack or loss of faith in the writing itself? How to live with these things? The worst thing, worse than all of them, would be to live with not writing.

“I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.”

Ah, the two consider-taping-on-wall quotes for writers (feminist or not)...

“I hated men because they didn’t stay around and love me like a father: I could prick holes in them & show they were no father-material. I made them propose and then showed them they hadn’t a chance. I hated men because they didn’t have to suffer like a woman did. They could die or go to Spain. They could have fun while a woman had birth pangs. They could gamble while a woman skimped on the butter on the bread. Men, nasty lousy men.”

All girls feel like this at least one point in their lives, maybe.

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.”

“I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”

“I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time...”

 Classic Plath quotes about being "horribly limited."

“With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand... hopeless from the start. ”

Love the 3 below.

“Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.”

“Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those."

“Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.”

SO - this is definitely a recommended read, although bear in mind that the most worthwhile sections to read are: the beginning (to get hooked on her fluid style), the bits with Ted (fascinating), and her rambles on her mother/father. The rest - inclusive of her botany-ranting, and extremely recurrent tales of two-timing - are informative, but not as meaningful to delve int (unless you're a Plath scholar, then that's a different story).

5 pages in and she will grow on you, I promise (warning: don't read if depressed, it won't alleviate the situation).

As if the rain were electric, had grounded circuits that the electric might be

Quotes from All The Pretty Horses, continued:

Firstly, I love this quote, for an obvious reasons.

The comparison - mice and humans. Experiments and reality. Clever point made beautifully. He is right, of course: there is no "might have been" and reality is the only absolute. Knowing is scrap because "green and foolishness and a love of blood" cannot escape a man and has never escaped a man.

When I was in school I studied biology. I learned that in making their experiments scientists will take some group--bacteria, mice, people--and subject that group to certain conditions. They compare the results with a second group which has not been disturbed. This second group is called the control group. It is the control group which enables the scientist gauge the effect of his experiment. To judge the significance of what has occurred. In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God--who knows all that can be known--seems powerless to change.

Sort of sad to acknowledge the quote below but I've seen it to be true.

The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.

The two quotes below speaks to me, it is what has been expected of me, and why? I used think so too, yet I think empathy can never reach out to somehow who attempts to create a bond of grief as compensation.

I'd of thought maybe the disappointments of your own life might of made you more sympathetic to other people.

You would have thought wrongly. I guess so. It is not my experience that life's difficulties make people more charitable. I guess it depends on the people.

True: death cures all.

Those whom life does not cure death will . . . In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments.

 This is beautiful... all the trouble of the world to produce a flower? All unity?

He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

And last but not least... this is witty:

The trouble with a liar is he cant remember what he said.

Mad Girl's Love Song

Nearly done with The Crossing. Lots of quotes already, yes. In the meantime:

I fancied you’d return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

Sylvia Plath!