My feelings on Sylvia Plath

I have made some references in my online diary to Sylvia Plath. In my opinion, she is without a doubt one of the greatest American poets who ever lived, if not the greatest. I write this entry, because of a private entry to my guestbook regarding Sylvia Plath. It read: "yeah i just wanted to say that this was supposed to do with sylvia plath well i didn't think it was funny i thought you were making fun of her for killing herself so i wouldn't do that that is really disrepectful". It was a private entry, so I won't reveal the writer, but, it has prompted me to clarify my feelings on Sylvia Plath. I also would like to suggest to the writer of the guestbook entry the need for punctuation. Thoughts don't run together endlessly and randomly. James Joyce made this an art form, using punctuation (or lack of) to convey very powerful images:

The monologue at the conclusion of Ulysses - James Joyce
(In) Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain
yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used
or shall I wear a red yes
and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall
and I thought, well as well, him as another
and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes
and then he asked me, would I yes to say yes, my mountain flower
and first I put my arms around him, yes
and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfumed, yes
and his heart was going like mad and yes I said, yes I will, Yes.

Now, about Sylvia Plath...
One of the most remarkable things about Plath was, as precisely as her anger was directed at men, she could still mourn this silence and note its catastrophic effects. Silence speaks louder than inaction. Silence is worse than apathy. Silence is the real cancer. Silence is the absence of a response. As one of the groups for AIDS activism put it, "SILENCE = DEATH!". She could make so finely focused a connection between men's silence and nations gathering or regathering the worst of their strengths:

Now similar clouds
Are spreading their vacuous sheets.
Do you say nothing?
I am lame in the memory.

The quandary for Plath's poetry is: what does it mean for the woman poet to claim to defy the history of man's making when defiance at its most self-blinding is the problem? Too many men, with too much power, do this to themselves. People focus on the dramatic act of her suicide in 1963. Sadly, that has overshadowed much of the study of her poetry. It's too easy to say "she was crazy". Actually, she was absolutely brilliant. I have read many of her poems coming away in tears from the power of her anger and despair and absolute hopelessness. And, toward the time of her death, a reconciliation that death was an absolute, that there was nothing left worth staying for in this terrible world.

Don't for one second assume that is insanity just because of our society's issues with death. My feeling is, Sylvia, as an artist, was acutely in tune with the reality of the situation. In our lives, we compensate for unfortunate situations. When someone dies close to us, we say things to one another to make it somehow "ok" and that "life must go on". It's all crap. The way I have tried to deal with having friends die of AIDS is only my example. They died, I cried and cried and cried, and went on. The worse was the silence. For the entire eight-year term of President Reagan, he never once uttered the word "AIDS" in public. That was during the 1980's when the disease was killing off much of the gay community. Our government and President didn't give a damn because we were after all a fringe and undesirable group that was being exterminated, or is the term genocide? It was even open season for comics to make jokes about AIDS. One sticks in my mind like a knife slicing through flesh: "AIDS is a miracle - it can turn fruits into vegetables", and the very popular "thank God for AIDS". I have looked at the search results of this site and still have people coming to my site to search for "AIDS jokes". This is the world we live in. I have told myself time and time again, that I will make my own family of friends and surround myself with people I love, as a mote surrounds a castle. Have I been successful? You tell me. I have been treated for depression more than I can count. I won't go into the darker details of my past life in trying to deal with this cruel and hopeless world we live in, driven by fools with no compassion for the world. I take pills to help me deal with reality - lots and lots of pills. It effects my life in negative ways, but I live. Sometimes I shake with tremors uncontrollably, I have "drug fever" a lot, and the worst part is the pixelation of my memory that comes and goes and the inability at times to focus with my eyes. I joke about it with friends when they are feeling down... need some Prozac... need some Zoloft.... need some Vicodin? These are my tools. I see what Sylvia saw, a world absolutely void of redemption. If I were God, all of this would be gone because it would have no merit.

Sylvia and I are alike in many ways. We are both artists. We see reality for what it is. She chose to confront it head on with the power or words. She was brave. She was brilliant. She killed herself. I chose a different path. I chose to try to live and be happy with the help of chemicals. I'm not as brave as Sylvia Plath, and because I deliberately take drugs to suppress the feelings of depression, will I ever be expressing my true self? Are any of these words actually mine, or are they the result of chemicals that have altered my thinking? Today, I'm sure we would want to medicate Sylvia out of some sense of helping her to be "happy". The issue is, it wasn't her who needed help.

I have great respect for people like Sylvia Plath, who were able to confront their demons. Most of the time, they lose. There are many like her. The anguish that their art subjects them to is the very thing we put on a pedestal whenever that anguish allows brilliance to shine through. It makes us weep and for a second, we think we feel what the artist must be feeling. We leave. We go back to our homes, our worlds. We escape it. It is still with the artist - they live it - it is their reality. That's just the ugly truth of it.