Wish I had a

I'm re-reading The Bell Jar for a class.  I first read this in my second year of high school, and didn't like it very much.  I expected it to be something completely different and couldn't really grasp her subtleties.

I thought it would be some kind of handbook to young adulthood, a mystery map with dotted lines and arrows for the wary and different.  I assumed, like a lot of people dumbly do, that the suicide somehow indicated some kind of hard-edged sophistication and esoteric knowledge that others could find in her words, hidden like little easter eggs.  I assumed something similar about Colette and sex and was equally disappointed.

Well, scratch that, because I love The Bell Jar.  She is so crazily artfully brilliant with words, I am underlining and folding pages of this library copy only to find I'm turning page corners that have already been creased.  Too insanely, understatedly good.

It's been so long since I have been free to read prose of any enjoyable kind that I'm amazed by how good it is, and how fast the reading goes.  I've been blearily hovering over one miserable textbook page after another for a while now, always looking for any excuse to be released, that I was worried that I no longer liked to READ. 

In the book, Esther's first vaguely sexual encounter with her boyfriend is a perfect mirror to my first vague encounter.  Almost identical.  It hadn't yet occurred when I first read the book.

Brittany to ze (M) show details 9:28 PM (2 minutes ago)

holy shit. i just listened to ted hughes reciting the hawk in the rain - heavy! & good. even with a cadence similar to burns. i have, obviously, always paid attention only to plath, but i have a feeling that once i focus on him, i'm going to fall in love all over again with a dead guy. and he fine, too.

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I read The Bell Jar in high school and found a large book filled with black and white photos of Sylvia in a leotard, contorting amidst printed lines of poetry, I don't remember what poems exactly. I have been sort of transfixed with her ever since as a tragic yet incredibly real figure, and how she became the brightest star in 20th century poetry due in part to Ted's careful editing and promotion of all of the raw work she left behind.

I almost don't want to go there. It's a strange feeling. Sometimes I avoid things that I feel will become intense for me because it's so traumatic. People, books, etc. Inevitably I am rarely able to actually avoid something, which just sort of stains it all from the beginning with anticipatory dread, "I think this is going to hurt..." Haven't we all had relationships that we knew we should not, but could not resist? And they turn out exactly as predicted. I've sensed this potentiality physically, asked myself why I was holding back from something I wanted, only to realize afterward that it was probably some sort of evolutionary self-preservation attempt! Maybe in another several thousand years, that'll kick in.

--

I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up
Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth's mouth,
From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle
With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk

Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.
His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,
Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air.
While banging wind kills these stubborn hedges,

Thumbs my eyes, throws my breath, tackles my heart,
And rain hacks my head to the bone, the hawk hangs,
The diamond point of will that polestars
The sea drowner's endurance: And I,

Bloodily grabbed dazed last-moment-counting
Morsel in the earth's mouth, strain to the master-
Fulcrum of violence where the hawk hangs still.
That maybe in his own time meets the weather

Coming the wrong way, suffers the air, hurled upside-down,
Falls from his eye, the ponderous shires crash on him,
The horizon trap him; the round angelic eye
Smashed, mix his heart's blood with the mire of the land.

Ted Hughes, 1957