“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath
Today I was driving to my children's school. No music. Just me. I began to daydream, as I often do, of words forming on pages. I thought of the words that could come if only I allowed them the breath they deserve. I experienced the choked sickness of word death, too. Why not write what is writable?
Then I thought of Sylvia Plath and the gas that consumed her.
Dear Sylvia, with her brilliant head full of words still swimming in that brain of hers, in an oven.
You can't cook words. You have to spit them out fast, unabashedly.
Oh to be a brave like Sylvia who found a way to impress us with poems and journals and Bell Jars and the courage to cook her brain when she decided to close shop on that word making machine.
This was not bravery, this was the ultimate way of personally cheating her kids and the rest of the world from knowing her. her daughter penned the following on hearing of "Sylvia" being filmed:
ReplyDeleteNow they want to make a film
For anyone lacking the ability
To imagine the body, head in oven,
Orphaning children
they think
I should give them my mother's words
To fill the mouth of their monster,
Their Sylvia Suicide Doll
Bravery is finding the will to write through the choked sickness of word death.
I understand how you are interpreting the intent of my use of "bravery" and associating it with her literal suicide. I named Sylvia "a brave" for writing her words and putting them out there in poems and journals and the Bell Jar.
DeleteMaybe I was a bit irresponsible in also saying it was courageous to "cook her brain". I was limiting the assessment to the act of deciding when to stop writing... not to the suicide itself and all of the devastation such an act would so obviously fall on her family.
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ReplyDeletethank you for the reassuring words.... I understand it better now, but it wasn't irresponsibility on your part for your choice of phrases. I'm in the dark (on so many levels) and I may jump to conclusions
ReplyDelete