Sylvia Plath

[HERO]

Sylvia Plath’s life was no more difficult than that of millions of others. Presumably as a

result of her sensitivity, she suffered much more intensely than most people from the

frustrations of childhood, but she experienced joy more intensely also. Yet the reason for her

despair was not her suffering but the impossibility of communicating her suffering to another

person. In all her letters she assures her mother how well she is doing. The suspicion that her

mother did not release negative letters for publication overlooks the deep tragedy of Plath’s life.

This tragedy (and the explanation for her suicide as well) lies in the very fact that she could not

have written any other kind of letters, because her mother needed reassurance, or because

Sylvia at any rate believed that her mother would not have been able to live without this

reassurance. Had Sylvia been able to write aggressive and unhappy letters to her mother, she

would not have had to commit suicide. Had her mother been able to experience grief at her

inability to comprehend the abyss that was her daughter’s life, she never would have published

the letters, because the assurances they contained of how well things were going for her

daughter would have been too painful to bear. Aurelia Plath is unable to mourn over this

because she has guilt feelings, and the letters serve her as proof of her innocence.


-- Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of

Violence, pp. 255-256 [Sylvia Plath: An Example of Forbidden Suffering (Steps on the Path to

Reconciliation: Anxiety, Anger, and Sorrow—but No Guilt Feelings)]

[silke]

I'm going to suggest LII-Ne for her, some of her postures and expressions are very similar to those of other INTjs, ex:


plath vs wittgenstein

[Park]

LIIs are some evil cold-looking bitches.

[Amber]

IEI-Ni E4 sp/sx

[wacey]

I was in a bell-jar at certain times growing up. I related to that story, yet also hate it's implications.

[Amber]

I was in a bell-jar at certain times growing up. I related to that story, yet also hate it's implications.

I must admit I haven't read The Bell Jar ... confessional authors are not among my favorite and I'm only familiar with some of her poetry. I know it's supposed to be a huge metaphor for depression and it's tightly connected to her life. If you say you resonate with the feeling depicted and its implications, I'm almost convinced to grab it.

[wacey]

^Exactly.

[Aylen]

I read the Bell Jar while institutionalized (for bad behavior) in my early teens. I convinced myself that her story was my story. Somehow insanity seemed as good as reason as any for how I acted but are you insane if you are somewhat cognitive of your own insanity but can't get a handle on it... Ugh! I felt a strong connection to her on so many levels back then. I don't think I could ever put myself through reading it again. I had a similar reaction reading Nancy Spungen's story so I guess I kind of assume they are both IEI but have not analyzed either of them.

They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.

If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.

haha I am not religious at all but these quotes seem fitting.

[Amber]

Does anyone know what type her husband, Ted Hughes, was ? What intertype relationships ..perhaps Victim-Aggressor?

This is considered to be one of her most erotic poems written right after she met the dude and it strikes me as utterly Beta Victimy. I wonder if he could have been LSI or smth.

http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/02...ts-ted-hughes/

On first meeting, the attraction between Hughes — who had graduated from Cambridge in 1954 and had a job in London as a reader for the J. Arthur Rank film company — and Plath was instant. But Sylvia sensed something else too. “There is a panther stalks me down: / One day I’ll have my death of him,” she wrote in “Pursuit,” a poem that she composed two days later.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Hughes


http://www.neuroticpoets.com/plath/poem/pursuit/

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Neurotic Poets » Sylvia Plath » Pursuit
Pursuit

By Sylvia Plath

Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit.

RACINE

There is a panther stalks me down:
One day I'll have my death of him;
His greed has set the woods aflame,
He prowls more lordly than the sun.
Most soft, most suavely glides that step,
Advancing always at my back;
From gaunt hemlock, rooks croak havoc:
The hunt is on, and sprung the trap.
Flayed by thorns I trek the rocks,
Haggard through the hot white noon.
Along red network of his veins
What fires run, what craving wakes?

Insatiate, he ransacks the land
Condemned by our ancestral fault,
Crying: blood, let blood be spilt;
Meat must glut his mouth's raw wound.
Keen the rending teeth and sweet
The singeing fury of his fur;
His kisses parch, each paw's a briar,
Doom consummates that appetite.
In the wake of this fierce cat,
Kindled like torches for his joy,
Charred and ravened women lie,
Become his starving body's bait.

Now hills hatch menace, spawning shade;
Midnight cloaks the sultry grove;
The black marauder, hauled by love
On fluent haunches, keeps my speed.
Behind snarled thickets of my eyes
Lurks the lithe one; in dreams' ambush
Bright those claws that mar the flesh
And hungry, hungry, those taut thighs.
His ardor snares me, lights the trees,
And I run flaring in my skin;
What lull, what cool can lap me in
When burns and brands that yellow gaze?

I hurl my heart to halt his pace,
To quench his thirst I squander blood;
He eats, and still his need seeks food,
Compels a total sacrifice.
His voice waylays me, spells a trance,
The gutted forest falls to ash;
Appalled by secret want, I rush
From such assault of radiance.
Entering the tower of my fears,
I shut my doors on that dark guilt,
I bolt the door, each door I bolt.
Blood quickens, gonging in my ears:

The panther's tread is on the stairs,
Coming up and up the stairs.

[HERO]

- from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (The Coulson Translation) [includes Essays in Criticism]; p. 636-642 (“The Theme of the Double, Sylvia Plath, and Dostoevsky” by George Gibian):

The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset believed that Dostoevsky’s fiction had qualities which lifted it beyond the limitations of its nineteenth-century setting and caused it to remain fresh and meaningful for the twentieth-century reader. Andre Malraux in The Walnut Trees of Altenburg named Dostoevsky as one of three authors who speak the most directly to the alienated people in our age (the other two, oddly enough, being Cervantes and Defoe). Dostoevsky’s underground man begot various descendants in other countries and ages: Ralph Ellison’s invisible man, Albert Camus’ protagonist in The Fall, and many others. Psychologists and psychoanalysts have studied Dostoevsky’s characters: Freud saw in The Brothers Karamazov a key illustration of his theory of the Oedipus complex (“Dostoevsky and Parricide”); Theodore Reik in Thirty Years after Freud devoted a chapter to “The Study of Dostoevsky.” Philosophers and political thinkers (for example Erich Fromm in The Escape from Freedom) considered the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” crucial to an understanding of modern man’s dilemma of craving freedom while at the same time fearing it and wishing to flee from it. Penologists and sociologists have studied the effects of punishments on criminals with reference to Dostoevsky’s novel. These examples of direct, immediate Dostoevskian influences suggest that an intellectual history of our age cannot be written without reference to Dostoevsky the artist, the psychologist, the philosopher, the political and religious thinker.

But there is another, perhaps still more pervasive, even if more evanescent, vaguer kind of influence: one of discovery of kinship. Various people in our age have found that something very important to us in our outlook on life was already present or hinted at in Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky was not always necessary for our discovery; it was not he who put the idea in our head. But finding its kernels in Dostoevsky nevertheless has its effects: it reinforces and deepens the hold of the idea.

A curious and startling example is the close relationship between the poet Sylvia Plath and Dostoevsky’s concept of the Double. The Double occurs in Dostoevsky’s works in several guises. The first is a special relationship prevailing between two characters one of whom seems to be the alter ego (other self) of the other. In Crime and Punishment, such a link obtains between Raskolnikov and Svidrigaylov. Raskolnikov regards Svidrigaylov as someone similar to himself inasmuch as he too had “stepped across,” had transgressed, had committed a crime. He had put himself beyond the moral law and became the determinant of his own actions—a free individual. As such, he indicates to Raskolnikov in which direction he himself may develop. The relationship between the two men is special, almost magical. They feel a strange closeness; Raskolnikov is drawn to Svidrigaylov with a strength beyond what is rationally rexplainable. He sees in him his own potential future self.

A second use of the Double may again be illustrated by Raskolnikov: he is split within himself (his name means “divided, split”). There are two selves in him: one is the rational, self-willed man who feels entitled even to murder if he so decides and who rejects traditional morality and sentiments; the other Raskolnikov feels compassion, helps others, gives presents spontaneously, and is capable of love. The novel is to a large extent a struggle between these two selves within Raskolnikov.

The third kind of Double is that of a character who encounters (or imagines he does) someone who is his double. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan in his delirium sees and converses with a Devil, who repeats to him various arguments which he had advanced earlier in his life. Even in his illness Ivan realizes that the apparition of the Devil is a twisted version of his own past self. One important function of a double such as Ivan’s Devil is to facilitate the character’s self-knowledge. Hearing one’s own ideas out of the mouth of another figure provides a different point of view on them: they may now sound warped, wrong. Similarly in Crime and Punishment utilitarian ideas mouthed by Lebezyatnikov and Luzhin are similar to Raskolnikov’s, but, worded by another person, applied a little differently, pushed to somewhat different conclusions, they become very disturbing to Raskolnikov. When Raskolnikov hears the students discuss the lack of justification for the pawnbroker’s continued existence, their phrasing of ideas he himself had been mulling over now strikes him as extraordinarily significant and fateful. The effect is similar to an unexpected glimpse of oneself in a mirror. There is in fact a rich literature in anthropology dealing with the folklore of mirror images and shadows as a corollary to ideas connected with doubles. The story of Narcissus, and belief in persons possessed—whether they be succubi, incubi, or dybbuks—are related categories of doubles.


The American poet Sylvia Plath showed an unusually strong orientation towards Doubles, particularly Dostoevskian doubles, throughout her short life. The first significant sign of her interest came during her senior year in college, when, under the direction of the present writer, she wrote an undergraduate honors thesis (which remains unpublished) on this very subject: Dostoevsky’s use of the device of the double. At the very outset of her literary career, she wrote a sixty-page paper, astonishing in the brilliance of its intellectual analysis—and poignant, even shattering, personally and emotionally, in view of our hindsight knowledge of her later troubled life and suicide. There are passages in the thesis which refer to characters in Dostoevsky, but which, we now know, could, and did, apply to Sylvia Plath herself—then and later.

Sylvia Plath began her thesis with a brief survey of the anthropological and psychological literature on the subject of the double. She quoted and commented on Freud, Rank, and literature on twins, shadows, and mirrors. When she came to Dostoevsky, she concentrated on two examples: Ivan Karamazov, and Golyadkin, the hero of Dostoevsky’s story “The Double.” She wrote about Golyadkin: “The death wish (of Golyadkin) . . . is a severe intensification of his desire to hide in the dark and originates from an acute sense of persecution.”* She quoted Golyadkin’s proverb, “the bird flies itself to the hunter,” as an image of voluntary self-destruction: . . . “Who’s the hunter, who’s the bird?” and went on: “the paradoxical and perverse attraction of the bird for the hunter is in a sense the desire of the persecuted soul for peace, even though it be the peace of death” (p. 14). She also refers to “the seductiveness of suicide as a release from prolonged torment” (p. 14).

About Ivan Karamazov’s Devil, she said, “The objective realism of the normal world has given way to the terrible, subjective realism of hallucination” (p. 49), a statement which could be applied to her last poems—“Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” “Death & Co.” The earlier balanced, even descriptions of the external world in her poetry were replaced towards the end of her life by what can be described by the conventional epithet “confessional poetry,” or, in Sylvia Plath’s own phrase, “the terrible, subjective realism of hallucination.” She distinguished in her thesis between Golyadkin, with his inability to acknowledge his inner conflict, and Ivan, who is aware, and does acknowledge his predicament, but is still unable to cope with it: “[Golyadkin] never consciously suspects the psychic silver cord which binds him to this hallucination; he denies all responsibility for his Double’s bad behavior and does not realize that his deadly enemy is none other than himself . . . Ivan’s inability to reconcile his inner conflict . . . results in severe schizophrenia for both” (p. 59). Her conclusion to the essay shows why she considered the theme of the double very important: “Although the figure of the Double has become a harbinger of danger and destruction, taking form as it does from the darkest of human fears and repressions, Dostoevsky implies that recognition of our various mirror images and reconciliation with them will save us from disintegration. This reconciliation does not mean a simple or monolithic resolution of conflict, but rather a creative acknowledgment of the fundamental duality of man; it involves a constant courageous acceptance of the eternal paradoxes within the universe and within ourselves” (pp. 59-60).

Sylvia Plath’s major work of prose fiction, The Bell Jar, continued to manifest a preoccupation with doubles. It is a veritable showpiece of the various categories of doubles and mirror images. The book is a moving autobiographical story of a young woman’s progression from neurosis to psychosis, to a mental hospital, and, at the end, on to the threshold of recovery. Her neurosis has its basis in an uncertainty about her self. Sylvia Plath’s heroine, Esther Greenwood, casts about desperately for some model who will exemplify for her who she herself really is. The people around her are a vast sampler or display of potential doubles. Esther chooses now one, now another as the model of her real self, as her double. For instance, she thinks to herself about one girl: “Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.” Then, however, she says about another: “It was Betsy I resembled at heart” (p. 24). Still later: “Joan was the beaming double of my old best self, specially designed to follow and torment me” (p. 216-217). Joan continues to be a hostile double after Esther receives shock treatments: “Joan hung about me like a large and breathless fruitfly—as if the sweetness of recovery were something she could suck up by mere nearness.”

Esther also becomes split within herself. Talking on the phone she listens to her own voice as if it were another person’s: “My voice sounded strange and hollow in my ears” (p. 124). Her hand becomes an alien, detached, separate entity: “My hand advanced a few inches, then retreated and fell limp. I forced it towards the receiver again . . .” (p. 125). During a suicide attempt, as she tries to tighten the cord around her neck: “I saw that my body had all sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash. I would simply have to ambush it with whatever sense I had left, or it would trap me in its stupid cage for fifty years without any sense at all” (p. 168). The split, then, is between the “I” of Esther, and her body—as two separate, warring entities. There are numerous instances in the book of Esther’s looking into a mirror, of watching herself from remote vantage points. Esther is aware that her condition is pathological: “If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days” (p. 98). At first her state sounds like nothing more than the common indecisiveness of a graduating college student faced with the necessity of settling on one of the many possible ways of life after school. She also dreads becoming just a domestic housewife “under a man’s thumb” (p. 234) and “flattened out underneath his feet” (p. 89): “A man doesn’t have a worry in the world, while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line” (p. 234). But the splits within Esther widen more and more, she grows resentful and suspicious of her surroundings, tries to commit suicide, and the neurotic young woman becomes a clinical paranoiac. The novel is mercilessly masterful in showing the progressive deterioration of an intelligent woman driving into disintegration and madness. Doubleness is an integral part of the process.


Sylvia Plath’s poems also contain references to doubles, but not nearly so frequently, or so centrally, as the novel. She has a poem, “Plaster,” in which the cast on a woman converses with the patient—a very original situation. There are individual lines such as “I am terrified by this dark thing/That sleeps in me” (from “Elm”), and allusions to the classical Narcissus situation: “All the fall of water an eye/Over whose pool I tenderly/Lean and see me” (from “Gigolo”). We feel that we are meeting old acquaintances when we come to a poem about Sylvia Plath’s favorite subject, death, expressed in the terms of the double:


Two, of course there are two.
It seems perfectly natural now—
The one who never looks up, whose eyes are lidded,
and balled, like Blake’s,

The birthmarks that are his trademarks—
of the condor.
I am red meat. His beak
Claps sidewise: I am not his yet.

(“Death & Co”)


For Sylvia Plath even death comes split into two doubles.

The poems lean heavily on images of death, physical hurt, pain, darkness, violence, fire, destruction. But it is the novel, not the poems, which explicitly uses doubles as a central means of expression.


Sylvia Plath put extremely heavy stress on the recognition of inner conflict, and on its acceptance and reconciliation. Duality, she felt, could be creatively acknowledged; it need not necessarily be destructive. It is pathetic that she had such clear insight into the problem—was so aware of its various ramifications and implications early in her life—after her first serious suicide attempt and when she was about to graduate and enter adult life. The lucidity with which she wrote the essay on Dostoevsky’s Doubles, in beautifully transparent prose, with all thoughts expressed unobtrusively and simply, and the clarity of The Bell Jar’s presentation of mental disintegration of a woman are frightening.

In her poetry, during most of her eight years of writing, the subject is latent, with a few exceptions such as those we have just noted. But a change comes with the poems which have usually been called “confessional” and compared to Robert Lowell’s Life Situations. In the most powerful ones, such as “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy,” there is no longer any doubleness. The poet seems to have chosen—or the choice was made for her. She expresses her hate and rage unequivocally, without any diversion or qualification by an alter ego. There is no double here, no hesitation between alternatives, only an exultant yet ironic and highly controlled expression of unidirectional emotion. The poetry gains force by this elimination of what had been holding it back earlier. One side of the double is conquered. The greatness of those poems derives from the fact that the outpourings of unbalanced, unattenuated passion are under her artistic control—exercised by play on various speaking voices and tones; varied and sophisticated rhymes; and the use of wit and irony. A brief, incredibly productive period ensued, with a poem or two being written every day. This was terminated by Sylvia Plath’s third, and successful, suicide attempt.

Dostoevsky was like a guide to the Underworld to Sylvia Plath—he introduced her to the depths of human conflict and even showed her the way towards what she called “creative acknowledgement” of them; these same depths came to constitute the warp and woof of her prose and poetry; but neither he nor anyone else was able to keep her from becoming lost in them.

*Sylvia Plath, “The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky’s Novels,” submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of Special Honors in English, Smith College, 1955, p. 14.


- from Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and other prose writings by Sylvia Plath; p. 34-8 (“America! America!”):

I went to public schools—genuinely public. Everybody went: the spry, the shy, the podge, the gangler, the future electronic scientist, the future cop who would one night kick a diabetic to death under the mistaken impression he was a drunk and needed cooling off; the poor, smelling of sour wools and the urinous baby at home and polyglot stew; the richer, with ratty fur collars, opal birthstone rings and daddys with cars (‘Wot does your daddy do?’ ‘He don’t woik, he’s a bus droiver.’ Laughter). There it was—Education—laid on free of charge for the lot of us, a lovely slab of depressed American public. We weren’t depressed, of course. We left that to our parents, who eked out one child or two, and slumped dumbly after work and frugal suppers over their radios to listen to news of the ‘home country’ and a black-moustached man named Hitl*r.

Above all, we did feel ourselves American in the rowdy seaside town where I picked up, like lint, my first ten years of schooling—a great, loud cats’ bag of Irish Catholics, German Jews, Swedes, Negroes, Italians and that rare, pure Mayflower dropping, somebody English. On to this steerage of infant citizens the doctrines of Liberty and Equality were to be, through the free, communal schools, impressed. Although we could almost call ourselves Bostonian (the city airport with its beautiful hover of planes and silver blimps growled and gleamed across the bay), New York’s skyscrapers were the icons on our ‘home room’ walls, New York and the great green queen lifting a bedlamp that spelt out Freedom.

Every morning, hands on hearts, we pledged allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, a sort of aerial altarcloth over teacher’s desk. And sang songs full of powder-smoke and patriotics to impossible, wobbly, soprano tunes. One high, fine song ‘For purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain’ always made the scampisize poet in me weep. In those days I couldn’t have told a fruited plain from a mountain majesty and confused God with George Washington (whose lamblike granny-face shone down at us also from the schoolroom wall between neat blinders of white curls), yet warbled, nevertheless, with my small, snotty compatriots ‘America, America! God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.’

The sea we knew something about. Terminus of almost every street, it buckled and swashed and tossed, out of its grey formlessness, china plates, wooden monkeys, elegant shells and dead men’s shoes. Wet salt winds raked our playgrounds endlessly—those Gothic composites of gravel, macadam, granite and bald, flailed earth wickedly designed to bark and scour the tender knee. There we traded playing cards (for the patterns on the backs) and sordid stories, jumped clothes rope, shot marbles, and enacted the radio and comic book dramas of our day (‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows—nyah, nyah, nyah!’ or ‘Up in the sky, look! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Superman!’) If we were destined for any special end—grooved, doomed, limited, fated, we didn’t feel it. We beamed and sloshed from our desks to the dodge-ball dell, open and hopeful as the sea itself.

After all, we could be anybody. If we worked. If we studied hard enough. Our accents, our money, our parents didn’t matter. Did not lawyers rise from the loins of coalheavers, doctors from the bins of dustmen? Education was the answer, and heaven knows how it came to us. Invisibly, I think, in the early days—a mystical infra-red glow off the thumbed multiplication tables, ghastly poems extolling October’s bright blue weather, and a world of history that more or less began and ended with the Boston Tea Party—Pilgrims and Indians being, like the eohippus, prehistoric.

Later, the college obsession would seize us, a subtle, terrifying virus. Everybody had to go to some college or other. A business college, a junior college, a state college, a secretarial college, an Ivy League college, a pig farmers’ college. The book first, then the work. By the time we (future cop and electronic brain alike) exploded into our prosperous, post-war high school, full-time guidance counsellors jogged our elbows at ever-diminishing intervals to discuss motives, hopes, school subjects, jobs—and colleges. Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art teachers leading us through the slums of Boston, then back to the easel to hurl public school gouache with social awareness and fury. Eccentricities, the perils of being too special, were reasoned and cooed from us like sucked thumbs.

The girls’ guidance counsellor diagnosed my problem straight off. I was just too dangerously brainy. My high, pure string of straight A’s might, without proper extra-curricular tempering, snap me into the void. More and more, the colleges wanted All-Round Students. I had, by that time, studied Machiavelli in Current Events class. I grabbed my cue.

Now this guidance counsellor owned, unknown to me, a white-haired identical twin I kept meeting in supermarkets and at the dentist’s. To this twin, I confided my widening circle of activities—chewing orange sections at the quarters of girl’s basketball games (I had made the team), painting mammoth L’il Abners and Daisy Maes for class dances, pasting up dummies of the school newspaper at midnight while my already dissipated co-editor read out the jokes at the bottom of the columns of The New Yorker. The blank, oddly muffled expression of my guidance counsellor’s twin in the street did not deter me, nor did the apparent amnesia of her whitely efficient double in the school office. I became a rabid teenage pragmatist.

‘Usage is Truth, Truth, Usage,’ I might have muttered, levelling my bobby-socks to match those of my school mates. There was no uniform, but there was a uniform—the pageboy hairdo, squeaky clean, the skirt and sweater, the ‘loafers’, those scuffed copies of Indian moccasins. We even, in our democratic edifice, nursed two ancient relics of snobbism—two sororities: Subdeb and Sugar ‘n’ Spice. At the start of each school year, invitation cards went out from old members to new girls—the pretty, the popular, the in some way rivalrous. A week of initiation preceded our smug admittance to the cherished Norm. Teachers preached against Initiation Week, boys scoffed, but couldn’t stop it.

I was assigned, like each initiate, a Big Sister who systematically began to destroy my ego. For a whole week I could wear no make-up, could not wash, could not comb my hair, change clothes or speak to boys. By dawn I had walked to my Big Sister’s house and was making her bed and breakfast. Then, lugging her intolerably heavy books, as well as my own, I followed her, at a dog’s distance, to school. On the way she might order me to climb a tree and hang from a branch till I dropped, ask a passerby a rude question or stalk about the shops begging for rotten grapes and mouldy rice. If I smiled—showed, that is, any sense of irony at my slavishness, I had to kneel on the public pavement and wipe the smile off my face. The minute the bell rang to end school, Big Sister took over. By nightfall I ached and stank; my homework buzzed in a dulled and muzzy brain. I was being tailored to an Okay Image.

Somehow it didn’t take—this initiation into the nihil of belonging. Maybe I was just too weird to begin with. What did these picked buds of American womanhood do at their sorority meetings? They ate cake; ate cake and catted about the Saturday night date. The privilege of being anybody was turning its other face—to the pressure of being everybody; ergo, no one.

Lately I peered through the plate-glass side of an American primary school: child-size desks and chairs in clean, light wood, toy stoves and minuscule drinking fountains. Sunlight everywhere. All the anarchism, discomfort and grit I so tenderly remembered had been, in a quarter century, gentled away. One class had spent the morning on a bus learning how to pay fares and ask for the proper stop. Reading (my lot did it by age four off soapbox tops) had become such a traumatic and stormy art one felt lucky to weather it by ten. But the children were smiling in their little ring. Did I glimpse, in the First Aid cabinet, a sparkle of bottles—soothers and smootheners for the embryo rebel, the artist, the odd?


- p. 48-55 (“The Wishing Box”):

Agnes Higgins realized only too well the cause of her husband Harold’s beatific, absent-minded expression over his morning orange juice and scrambled eggs.

‘Well,’ Agnes sniffed, smearing beach-plum jelly on her toast with vindictive strokes of the butter-knife, ‘what did you dream last night?’

‘I was just remembering’, Harold said, still staring with a blissful, blurred look right through the very attractive and tangible form of his wife (pink-cheeked and fluffily blond as always that early September morning, in her rose-sprigged peignoir), ‘those manuscripts I was discussing with William Blake.’

‘But,’ Agnes objected, trying with difficulty to conceal her irritation, ‘how did you know it was William Blake?’

Harold seemed surprised. ‘Why, from his pictures, of course.’

And what could Agnes say to that? She smoldered in silence over her coffee, wrestling with the strange jealousy which had been growing on her like some dark, malignant cancer ever since their wedding night only three months before when she had discovered about Harold’s dreams. On that first night of their honeymoon, in the small hours of the morning, Harold startled Agnes out of a sound, dreamless sleep by a violent, convulsive twitch of his whole right arm. Momentarily frightened, Agnes had shaken Harold awake to ask in tender, maternal tones what the matter was; she thought he might be struggling in the throes of a nightmare. Not Harold.

‘I was just beginning to play the Emperor Concerto,’ he explained sleepily. ‘I must have been lifting my arm for the first chord when you woke me up.’

Now at the outset of their marriage, Harold’s vivid dreams amused Agnes. Every morning she asked Harold what he had dreamed during the night, and he told her in as rich detail as if he were describing some significant, actual event.

‘I was being introduced to a gathering of American poets in the Library of Congress,’ he would report with relish. ‘William Carlos Williams was there in a great, rough coat, and that one who writes about Nantucket, and Robinson Jeffers looking like an American Indian, the way he does in the anthology photograph; and then Robert Frost came driving up in a saloon car and said something witty that made me laugh.’ Or, ‘I saw a beautiful desert, all reds and purples, with each grain of sand like a ruby or sapphire shooting light. A white leopard with gold spots was standing over this bright blue stream, its hind legs on one bank, its forelegs on the other, and a little trail of red ants was crossing the stream over the leopard, up its tail, along its back, between its eyes, and down on the other side.’

Harold’s dreams were nothing if not meticulous works of art. Undeniably, for a certified accountant with pronounced literary leanings (he reads E. T. A. Hoffman, Kafka, and the astrological monthlies instead of the daily paper on the commuters’ special), Harold possessed an astonishingly quick, colorful imagination. But, gradually, Harold’s peculiar habit of accepting his dreams as if they were really an integral part of his waking experience began to infuriate Agnes. She felt left out. It was as if Harold were spending one third of his life among celebrities and fabulous legendary creatures in an exhilarating world from which Agnes found herself perpetually exiled, except by hearsay.

As the weeks passed, Agnes began to brood. Although she refused to mention it to Harold, her own dreams, when she had them (and that, alas, was infrequently enough), appalled her: dark, glowering landscapes peopled with ominous unrecognizable figures. She never could remember these nightmares in detail, but lost their shapes even as she struggled to awaken, retaining only the keen sense of their stifling, storm-charged atmosphere which, oppressive, would haunt her throughout the following day. Agnes felt ashamed to mention these fragmentary scenes of horror to Harold for fear they reflected too unflatteringly upon her own powers of imagination. Her dreams—few and far between as they were—sounded so prosaic, so tedious, in comparison with the royal baroque splendour of Harold’s. How could she tell him simply, for example: ‘I was falling’: or, ‘Mother died and I was so sad’: or, ‘Something was chasing me and I couldn’t run’? The plain truth was, Agnes realized, with a pang of envy, that her dream-life would cause the most assiduous psychoanalyst to repress a yawn.

Where, Agnes mused wistfully, were those fertile childhood days when she believed in fairies? Then, at least, her sleep had never been dreamless nor her dreams dull and ugly. She had in her seventh year, she recalled wistfully, dreamed of a wishing box land above the clouds where wishing boxes grew on trees, looking very much like coffee-grinders; you picked a box, turned the handle around nine times while whispering your wish in this little hole in the side, and the wish came true. Another time, she had dreamed of finding three magic grass-blades growing by the mail-box at the end of her street: the grass-blades shone like tinsel Christmas ribbon, one red, one blue, and one silver. In yet another dream, she and her young brother Michael stood in front of Dody Nelson’s white-shingled house in snowsuits, knotty maple tree roots snaked across the hard, brown ground; she was wearing red-and-white striped wool mittens; and, all at once, as she held out one cupped hand, it began to snow turquoise-blue sulfa gum. But that was just about the extent of the dreams Agnes remembered from her infinitely more creative childhood days. At what age had those benevolent painted dream worlds ousted her? And for what cause?


Meanwhile, indefatigably, Harold continued to recount his dreams over breakfast. Once, at a depressing and badly-aspected time of Harold’s life before he met Agnes, Harold dreamed that a red fox ran through his kitchen, grievously burnt, its fur charred black, bleeding from several wounds. Later, Harold confided, at a more auspicious time shortly after his marriage to Agnes, the red fox had appeared again, miraculously healed, with flourishing fur, to present Harold with a bottle of permanent black Quink. Harold was particularly fond of his fox dreams; they recurred often. So, notably, did his dream of the giant pike. ‘There was this pond,’ Harold informed Agnes one sultry August morning, ‘where my cousin Albert and I used to fish; it was chock full of pike. Well, last night I was fishing there, and I caught the most enormous pike you could imagine—it must have been the great-great-grandfather of all the rest; I pulled and pulled and pulled, and still he kept coming out of that pond.’

‘Once,’ Agnes countered, morosely stirring sugar into her black coffee, ‘when I was little, I had a dream about Superman, all in technicolor. He was dressed in blue, with a red cape and black hair, handsome as a prince, and I went flying right along with him through the air—I could feel the wind whistling, and the tears blowing out of my eyes. We flew over Alabama; I could tell it was Alabama because the land looked like a map, with “Alabama” lettered in script across these big green mountains.’

Harold was visibly impressed. ‘What,’ he asked Agnes then, ‘did you dream last night?’ Harold’s tone was almost contrite: to tell the truth, his own dream-life preoccupied him so much that he’d honestly never thought of playing listener and investigating his wife’s. He looked at her pretty, troubled countenance with new interest: Agnes was, Harold paused to observe for perhaps the first time since their early married days, an extraordinarily attractive sight across the breakfast table.

For the moment, Agnes was confounded by Harold’s well-meant question; she had long ago passed the stage where she seriously considered hiding a copy of Freud’s writings on dreams in her closet and fortifying herself with a vicarious dream tale by which to hold Harold’s interest each morning. Now, throwing reticence to the wind, she decided in desperation to confess her problem.

‘I don’t dream anything,’ Agnes admitted in low, tragic tones. ‘Not anymore.’

Harold was obviously concerned. ‘Perhaps,’ he consoled her, ‘you just don’t use your powers of imagination enough. You should practise. Try shutting your eyes.’

Agnes shut her eyes.

‘Now,’ Harold asked hopefully, ‘what do you see?’

Agnes panicked. She saw nothing. ‘Nothing,’ she quavered. ‘Nothing except a sort of blur.’

‘Well,’ said Harold briskly, adopting the manner of a doctor dealing with a malady that was, although distressing, not necessarily fatal, ‘imagine a goblet.’

‘What kind of goblet?’ Agnes pleaded.

‘That’s up to you,’ Harold said. ‘You describe it to me.’

Eyes still shut, Agnes dragged wildly into the depths of her head. She managed with great effort to conjure up a vague, shimmery silver goblet that hovered somewhere in the nebulous regions of the back of her mind, flickering as if at any moment it might black out like a candle.

‘It’s silver,’ she said, almost defiantly. ‘And it’s got two handles.’

‘Fine. Now imagine a scene engraved on it.’

Agnes forced a reindeer on the goblet, scrolled about by grape leaves, scratched in bare outlines on the silver. ‘It’s a reindeer in a wreath of grape leaves.’

‘What color is the scene?’ Harold was, Agnes thought, merciless.

‘Green,’ Agnes lied, as she hastily enameled the grape leaves. ‘The grape leaves are green. And the sky is black’—she was almost proud of this original stroke. ‘And the reindeer’s russet flecked with white.’

‘All right. Now polish the goblet all over into a high gloss.’

Agnes polished the imaginary goblet, feeling like a fraud. ‘But it’s in the back of my head,’ she said dubiously, opening her eyes. ‘I see everything way in the back of my head. Is that where you see your dreams?’

‘Why no,’ Harold said, puzzled. ‘I see my dreams on the front of my eyelids, like on a movie-screen. They just come; I don’t have anything to do with them. Like right now,’ he closed his eyes, ‘I can see these shiny crowns coming and going, hung in this big willow tree.’

Agnes fell grimly silent.

‘You’ll be all right,’ Harold tried, jocosely, to buck her up. ‘Every day, just practise imagining different things like I’ve taught you.’

Agnes let the subject drop. While Harold was away at work, she began, suddenly, to read a great deal; reading kept her mind full of pictures. Seized by a kind of ravenous hysteria, she raced through novels, women’s magazines, newspapers, and even the anecdotes in her Joy of Cooking; she read travel brochures, home appliance circulars, the Sears Roebuck Catalogue, the instructions on soap-flake boxes, the blurbs on the back of record-jackets—anything to keep from facing the gaping void in her own head of which Harold had made her so painfully conscious. But as soon as she lifted her eyes from the printed matter at hand, it was as if a protecting world had been extinguished.

The utterly self-sufficient, unchanging reality of the things surrounding her began to depress Agnes. With a jealous awe, her frightened, almost paralysed stare took in the Oriental rug, the Williamsburg-blue wallpaper, the gilded dragons on the Chinese vase on the mantel, the blue-and-gold medallion design of the upholstered sofa on which she was sitting. She felt choked, smothered by these objects whose bulky pragmatic existence somehow threatened the deepest, most secret roots of her own ephemeral being. Harold, she knew only too well, would tolerate no such vainglorious nonsense from tables and chairs; if he didn’t like the scene at hand, if it bored him, he would change it to suit his fancy. If, Agnes mourned, in some sweet hallucination an octopus came slithering towards her across the floor, paisley-patterned in purple and orange, she would bless it. Anything to prove that her shaping imaginative powers were not irretrievably lost; that her eye was not merely an open camera lens which recorded surrounding phenomena and left it at that. ‘A rose’, she found herself repeating hollowly, like a funeral dirge, ‘is a rose is a rose. . . .’

One morning when Agnes was reading a novel, she suddenly realized to her terror that her eyes had scanned five pages without taking in the meaning of a single word. She tried again, but the letters separated, writhing like malevolent little black snakes across the page in a kind of hissing, untranslatable jargon. It was then that Agnes began attending the movies around the corner regularly each afternoon. It did not matter if she had seen the feature several times previously; the fluid kaleidoscope of forms before her eyes lulled her into a rhythmic trance; the voices, speaking some soothing, unintelligible code, exorcised the dead silence in her head. Eventually, by dint of much cajolery, Agnes persuaded Harold to buy a television set on the installment plan. That was much better than the movies; she could drink sherry while watching TV during the long afternoons. These latter days, when Agnes greeted Harold on his return home each evening, she found, with a certain malicious satisfaction, that his face blurred before her gaze, so she could change his features at will. Sometimes she gave him a pea-green complexion, sometimes lavender; sometimes a Grecian nose, sometimes an eagle beak.

‘But I like sherry,’ Agnes told Harold stubbornly when, her afternoons of private drinking becoming apparent even to his indulgent eyes, he begged her to cut down. ‘It relaxes me.’

The sherry, however, didn’t relax Agnes enough to put her to sleep. Cruelly sober, the visionary sherry-haze worn off, she would lie stiff, twisting her fingers like nervous talons in the sheets, long after Harold was breathing peacefully, evenly, in the midst of some rare, wonderful adventure. With an icy, increasing panic, Agnes lay stark awake night after night. Worse, she didn’t get tired any more. Finally, a bleak, clear awareness of what was happening broke upon her: the curtains of sleep, of refreshing, forgetful darkness dividing each day from the day before it, and the day after it, were lifted for Agnes eternally, irrevocably. She saw an intolerable prospect of wakeful, visionless days and nights stretching unbroken ahead of her, her mind condemned to perfect vacancy, without a single image of its own to ward off the crushing assault of smug, autonomous tables and chairs. She might, Agnes reflected sickly, live to be a hundred: the women in her family were all long-lived.

Dr Marcus, the Higgins’ family physician, attempted, in his jovial way, to reassure Agnes about her complaints of insomnia: ‘Just a bit of nervous strain, that’s all. Take one of these capsules at night for a while and see how you sleep.’

Agnes did not ask Dr Marcus if the pills would give her dreams; she put the box of fifty pills in her handbag and took the bus home.

Two days later, on the last Friday of September, when Harold returned from work (he had shut his eyes all during the hour’s train trip home, counterfeiting sleep but in reality voyaging on a cerise-sailed dhow up a luminous river where white elephants bulked and rambled across the crystal surface of the water in the shadow of Moorish turrets fabricated completely of multicolored glass), he found Agnes lying on the sofa in the livingroom, dressed in her favourite princess-style emerald taffeta evening gown, pale and lovely as a blown lily, eyes shut, an empty pillbox and an overturned water tumbler on the rug at her side. Her tranquil features were set in a slight, secret smile of triumph, as if, in some far country unattainable to mortal men, she were, at last, waltzing with the dark, red-caped prince of her early dreams.











- from The Bell Jar; Ch. 7 (p. 82-7):

Of course, Constantin was much too short, but in his own way he was handsome, with light brown hair and dark blue eyes and a lively, challenging expression. He could almost have been an American, he was so tan and had such good teeth, but I could tell straight away that he wasn’t. He had what no American man I’ve ever met has had, and that’s intuition.

From the start Constantin guessed I wasn’t any protégé of Mrs. Willard’s. I raised an eyebrow here and dropped a dry little laugh there, and pretty soon we were both openly raking Mrs. Willard over the coals and I thought, “This Constantin won’t mind if I’m too tall and don’t know enough languages and haven’t been to Europe, he’ll see through all that stuff to what I really am.”

Constantin drove me to the UN in his old green convertible with cracked, comfortable brown leather seats and the top down. He told me his tan came from playing tennis, and when we were sitting there side by side flying down the streets in the open sun he took my hand and squeezed it, and I felt happier than I had been since I was about nine and running along the hot white beaches with my father the summer before he died.

And while Constantin and I sat in one of those hushed plush auditoriums in the UN, next to a stern muscular Russian girl with no makeup who was a simultaneous interpreter like Constantin, I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

After that—in spite of the Girl Scouts and the piano lessons and the water-color lessons and the dancing lessons and the sailing camp, all of which my mother scrimped to give me, and college, with crewing in the mist before breakfast and blackbottom pies and the little new firecrackers of ideas going off every day—I had never been really happy again.

I stared through the Russian girl in her double-breasted gray suit, rattling off idiom after idiom in her own unknowable tongue — which Constantin said was the most difficult part, because the Russians didn’t have the same idioms as our idioms — and I wished with all my heart I could crawl into her and spend the rest of my life barking out one idiom after another. It mightn’t make me any happier, but it would be one more little pebble of efficiency among all the other pebbles.

Then Constantin and the Russian girl interpreter and the whole bunch of black and white and yellow men arguing down there behind their labeled microphones seemed to move off at a distance. I saw their mouths going up and down without a sound, as if they were sitting on the deck of a departing ship, stranding me in the middle of a huge silence.

I started adding up all the things I couldn’t do.

I began with cooking.

My grandmother and my mother were such good cooks that I left everything to them. They were always trying to teach me one dish or another, but I would just look on and say, “Yes, yes, I see,” while the instructions slid through my head like water, and then I’d always spoil what I did so nobody would ask me to do it again.

I remember Jody, my best and only girlfriend at college in my freshman year, making me scrambled eggs at her house one morning. They tasted unusual, and when I asked her if she had put in anything extra, she said cheese and garlic salt. I asked who told her to do that, and she said nobody, she just thought it up. But then, she was practical and a sociology major.

I didn’t know shorthand either.

This meant I couldn’t get a good job after college. My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand was something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter.

The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters. Besides, those little shorthand symbols in the book my mother showed me seemed just as bad as let t equal time and let s equal the total distance.

My list grew longer.

I was a terrible dancer. I couldn’t carry a tune. I had no sense of balance, and when we had to walk down a narrow board with our hands out and a book on our heads in gym class I always fell over. I couldn’t ride a horse or ski, the two things I wanted to do most, because they cost too much money. I couldn’t speak German or read Hebrew or write Chinese. I didn’t even know where most of the old out-of-the-way countries the UN men in front of me represented fitted in on the map.

For the first time in my life, sitting there in the sound-proof heart of the UN building between Constantin who could play tennis as well as simultaneously interpret and the Russian girl who knew so many idioms, I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.

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.

Constantin’s restaurant smelt of herbs and spices and sour cream. All the time I had been in New York I had never found such a restaurant. I only found those Heavenly Hamburger places, where they serve giant hamburgers and soup-of-the-day and four kinds of fancy cake at a very clean counter facing a long glarey mirror.

To reach this restaurant we had to climb down seven dimly lit steps into a sort of cellar.

Travel posters plastered the smoke-dark walls, like so many picture windows overlooking Swiss lakes and Japanese mountains and African velds, and thick, dusty bottle-candles, that seemed for centuries to have wept their colored waxes red over blue over green in a fine, three-dimensional lace, cast a circle of light round each table where the faces floated, flushed and flamelike themselves.

I don’t know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.

Constantin kept refilling our glasses with a sweet Greek wine that tasted of pine bark, and I found myself telling him how I was going to learn German and go to Europe and be a war correspondent like Maggie Higgins.

I felt so fine by the time we came to the yogurt and strawberry jam that I decided I would let Constantin seduce me.


- From The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath by Ronald Hayman; p. 108-13 (Ch. 9: Boston):

At least partially aware of how hard it was for her to live without clear-cut tasks and incentives, Ted Hughes did his best to fill the empty space in her routine. He didn’t find it difficult to be didactic and encouraging. He suggested subjects for poems and exerted a strong influence on her reading, edging her into anthropology. Without him she might never have become interested in Aztec civilisation, or astrology. He had various semi-meditational disciplines, and before starting to write he concentrated for ten minutes on the base of the spine and several points along it. He initiated her into some of these practices, and he nannied her with questions. ‘What are you thinking? What are you going to do now?’ He even tried to timetable her day, jostling her into an hour of reading ballads, an hour of studying Shakespeare, an hour of reading history. But it was impossible to help in these ways without making her feel threatened by the encroachment on her new independence, and, like a rebellious pupil, she seized on moments when he contradicted himself or laid himself open to charges of fanaticism. Why was his neck stiff? It must mean the exercises he did were too strenuous. She also started to enjoy his absences.

They both believed in spirits, but she may have been more ambivalent than he was. When they conducted seances together, using a home-made Ouija board and an inverted brandy glass, she was half sceptical, knowing their manipulative fingertips were liable to spell out semi-conscious desires and intentions, but she went on hoping and half-believing that she could make contact with her dead father. Spirits would regularly want to pass on instructions from Prince Otto, who sounded like a great power in the underworld. When she wanted to communicate with him directly, she was told he was unavailable because he was under orders from the Colossus. She’d then ask for contact with the Colossus and be refused. But she was to honour Colossus in 1960 by using his name as the title for her collection.

The spirit they called up most was named Pan. He was capable – so they believed – of helping them to fill in coupons for the football pools, but usually his communications were gloomy or macabre, though not humourless. They never ran out of questions, and she found their semi-serious game more exciting than the cinema. Pan said he was happy in America, where he’d been using his freedom to write poems, and he recited one called ‘Moist’. They’d have two sons before they had a girl, he predicted, and her first collection would be published by Knopf. His favourite poem of hers was ‘Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbour’. ‘Colossus likes it,’ they were told.

By-products of their seances, some of her poems incorporate words taken from the spirits they conjured. An example is the posthumously published ‘Dialogue over an Ouija Board’, which was written in 1957 or 1958. When the woman in the poem asks the spirit how her father is, his answer is ‘INPLUMAGEOFRAWWORMS’. But is the spirit, Pan, more than a puppet of their intuitions? Asked where he lives, he answers ‘INGODPIE’, changes this to ‘INGODHEAD’ and later to ‘INCOREOFNERVE’, but when he calls them ‘APES’, she smashes the glass.

Prompted to suggest subjects for poems, Pan gave her the idea of writing about the Lorelei, the sirens in German legend who lure boatmen to their death. The Lorelei, he said, were her own kin. They featured, as she now remembered, in a German song her mother used to sing, but in spite of their associations with the sea and the death wish, she’d never thought of using them as a theme. Her poem ‘Lorelei’, which she began the next day, links them with the underwater world Jacques Cousteau had described in a book she’d been reading. She borrows his phrase ‘drunkenness of the great depths’ for the acute oxygen shortage that causes visionary euphoria in deep-sea divers, making them forget the need for caution.

‘It is no night to drown in’, she begins, going on to describe the river’s blackness underneath the bland mirror sheen, with mists dropping scrims like fishnets. Reflections of castle turrets hint at an alternative world, fuller and clearer than is possible. The sirens’ harmonious singing is like an attack on the ordinary world. Lodging on the ‘pitched reefs of nightmare’, they promise safety. The goddesses of peace inhabit the river, and the speaker asks at the end of the poem to be ferried down there.

Sylvia knew the contrast between her manic and her depressive moods was extreme, as if her life were controlled magically by two electric currents. When the poetry editor of the New Yorker, Howard Moss, who’d rejected all her previous submissions, accepted both ‘Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbour’, calling it a ‘marvellous’ poem, and ‘Nocturne’, which he rated ‘extremely fine’, she ran upstairs to tell Ted, shouting ‘Yippee,’ and jumping about ‘like a Mexican bean’. The fee, she calculated, would cover the rent for nearly three months. Her next ambition, she decided, was to get a story into the New Yorker, even if it cost her ten years of work.

But the old pattern seemed inescapable. When they were living in the flat at Willow Street, which is near Beacon Hill, overexcitement led to sleeplessness, exhaustion, anxiety, deep depression. She felt no less suffocated, no less hysterical than she had when she was teaching. Once again her nerves were ‘razor-shaved’. Instead of starting the novel, she was paralysed with teror. Ideas offered themselves, but how could she structure them? She should be able, she told herself, to stockpile poems at the rate of one a day for her first collection, and she was furious when a day’s work ended in twelve bad lines. She felt intermittently nauseous. She was distracted by noises from the street or workmen hammering in the house opposite. She knew she was making tyrannous demands on herself, but cool reasonableness was out of reach. Time was invaluable and she was wasting it.

Nothing if not ambitious and competitive, she still had objectives, but they were less specific than the ones that had previously motivated her – win a scholarship to Smith, get a degree, win a Fulbright, travel to Europe, find a husband. Again and again she succumbed to panic, without knowing what was frightening her. Sometimes she talked hysterically; sometimes she thought she’d explode. Life was full of opportunities, but she was caught in a vicious circle, doing nothing but roaming around, staring at other people who seemed enviable only because they were other people. Somewhere on the far side of the terror was the inaccessible existence in which she was steadily in control of her day-to-day thinking, mature enough to distance herself from nightmares and setbacks. She pictured herself happily writing, reading, playing with her children, chatting with friends. None of this should be unattainable. She must take control of her life, recognise her terrors as figments. She felt all right when she was working: activity dissipated the rage that paralysed her, but the anxiety always came back, gripping her like poison lodged in her gullet. The greatest danger was the stubborn belief that she could allay her fears only by plummeting to the bottom of non-existence. If she could afterwards rise to the top again, she’d have proved she could survive.

In the morning she woke up exhausted, as if coming out of a coma, or as if hostile electricity in her bloodstream were drying her out. Later in the day she still felt drugged. Objects were slipping out of reach, and when she sat down at her typewriter, she wasn’t in charge of what she typed. Good lines presented themselves, but stopped dead before she could develop them. She looked back nostalgically on the teaching, which had given her week a structure and forced her to be articulate. Stultified by the sedentary life, she thought of applying to Harvard or Yale to see whether she could do a Ph.D. or a master’s degree. Anything. Hughes produced a word – doldrums – as a name for her malaise. This temporarily made her feel better. Perhaps she could reorganise her life. Perhaps she should begin the novel with a girl’s search for her dead father, for an outside authority she could develop from inside. Perhaps she should become a Catholic. This notion occurred abruptly at the beginning of August, but she knew much of the dogma would be unpalatable.

For nearly a week their routine was disrupted by a baby bird which had fallen out of its nest. Her yearning for maternity and their decision to postpone it had set up such powerful tensions that Hughes was swept into uncharacteristic behaviour. The man who’d killed hundreds of healthy birds and animals sacrificed a week’s work in a hopeless effort to save an injured fledgling. They found it in the street, apparently dying. It was on its back next to a tree, scrawny wings outstretched. Its pain made Sylvia feel sick. Hughes picked it up and carried it home, cradled in his hand. After making a nest by putting scraps of soft paper and a dish towel into a cardboard box, they tried to feed it on morsels of bread soaked in milk, holding them on a toothpick. When it refused to swallow, they bought fresh ground steak, and when it accepted the worm-shaped bits of meat, she fed it at two-hour intervals. Sometimes they went out, searching for worms. It looked like a young starling, with furry eyebrows. She stayed awake at night, listening for the sound of feeble claws and wings against the cardboard. The bird survived for three days, but when it tried to run, it collapsed: one of its legs had started to stiffen, and it became feebler, choking and chirping pathetically. On the third day, when they went out for a walk, they were reluctant to go back indoors, nervous of having to confront the dying creature. Hughes finished it off by gassing it. He attached the rubber bath hose to the jet off the hob, taping the other end into the artificial nest. But the bird was still alive when he picked it out of the box. It lay in his hand, feebly opening and shutting its beak, waving its upturned claws. Five minutes later it was dead. They took it to the park, and buried it under one of the druid stones, leaving ferns and a green firefly on its grave. Ten days later Sylvia was still thinking about obsessionally. She tried to cure the obsession by writing a story. A dying bird becomes a tormenting spirit, twisting the lives of the couple who take care of it.

In addition to all her other work, Sylvia was trying to teach herself German, studying a grammar lesson each day in a text book. She widened her vocabulary by reading the Grimms’ fairy tales in the edition Aurelia had given her, and listing all the unfamiliar words. But this wasn’t enough, and, urgently wanting to make contact with other people, she thought of learning Stenotype, a form of speedwriting, to qualify herself for a part-time job. If she could work as a courtroom reporter, she’d pick up material she could use in her fiction.

At the beginning of October she went out to three agencies, and was interviewed the next day for a secretarial job in the psychiatric clinic of the Massachusetts General Hospital. The pay was low and she’d have to work more hours than she’d intended, but she agreed to start at the beginning of the following week. She had to answer the telephone, typing records and making arrangements for a staff of over twenty-five doctors and their patients. But she gained unexpected insights into the private anxieties of Bostonians. On the second day she met a fat woman who had nightmares about her own funeral; she was lying in a coffin but also weeping among the mourners. There was a lesbian cloakroom attendant who modelled in the nude for a photographer; there was a man who believed he’d called up a hurricane and was responsible for the programmes he watched on television – he’d created them like dreams. One woman had nightmares about her amputated head, which was hanging on by the skin; another dreamed of finding her mother’s head in a laundry bag, together with the heads of four children. There were so many kinds of fear, so many sources of terror. Snakebite, loneliness, the snapping of a lift cable. Fear was the chief god. During attacks of panic over the last two years, Sylvia had sometimes thought she ought to get herself psychoanalysed, but by the middle of October this impulse was evaporating. Daily contact with other neuroses seemed to be doing her good, making her more objective.

Her story ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ centres on the idea of fear as a god. Typing reports on patients’ complaints about their anxieties, the narrator regards herself as Johnny Panic’s secretary, and in the context of patients’ dreams she records her own dream about being suspended over a vast, semi-transparent lake with dragons at its bottom. Developing the imagery she’d used in ‘Lorelei’, Sylvia transposes it. This time the lake represents the collective unconscious, a public reservoir of nightmares. When the narrator stays in her office overnight to copy out notes on nightmares, she’s caught and punished with electro-convulsive therapy. Before the switch is pressed to operate the machine, the false priests in surgical masks and gowns sing a devotional chant in praise of fear. Nothing else deserves to be loved.

The hospital experience – ever since her affair with Dick Norton she’d had some of her scariest experiences in hospitals – also provided her with material for another story, ‘The Daughters of Blossom Street’, which prefigures her own posthumous fame by featuring a messenger boy who’s awarded a gold medal for breaking his neck while doing his job. He’s lucky, says the narrator’s cheerful friend, Dotty. It had been his only chance to become a hero.







http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/bo...lath.html?_r=0

Son of Sylvia Plath Commits Suicide

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR

Published: March 23, 2009

Nicholas Hughes, the son of the poet and novelist Sylvia Plath and the British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, killed himself at his home in Alaska, nearly a half-century after his mother and stepmother took their own lives, according to a statement from his sister.

Mr. Hughes, 47, was a fisheries biologist who studied stream fish and spent much of his time trekking across Alaska on field studies. Shielded from stories about his mother’s suicide until he was a teenager, Mr. Hughes had lived an academic life largely outside the public eye. But friends and family said he had long struggled with depression.

Last Monday, he hanged himself at his home in Alaska, his sister, Frieda Hughes, said over the weekend.

“It is with profound sorrow that I must announce the death of my brother, Nicholas Hughes, who died by his own hand on Monday 16th March 2009 at his home in Alaska,” she said in a statement to the Times of London. “He had been battling depression for some time.”

Mr. Hughes’s early life was darkened by shadows of depression and suicide. Ms. Plath explored the themes in her 1963 novel “The Bell Jar,” which follows an ambitious college student who tries to kill herself after suffering a nervous breakdown while interning at a New York City magazine. The novel reflected Ms. Plath’s own experiences, including her early struggles with depression and her attempt at suicide while working at Mademoiselle in New York as a college student.

After a stay at a mental institution, Ms. Plath went on to study poetry at Cambridge University, where she met Ted Hughes, who was on his way to world fame as a poet. The two were married in 1956, and had two children — Nicholas and Frieda — but separated in 1962 after Mr. Hughes began an affair with another woman, Assia Wevill. Ms. Plath killed herself at the age of 30 by sticking her head in an oven in her London home on Feb. 11, 1963, as Nicholas and Frieda slept nearby.

Six years later, Ms. Wevill, who had helped raise Nicholas and Frieda after Ms. Plath’s death, killed herself and her 4-year-old daughter, Shura. Ms. Wevill styled the murder-suicide in the same manner, using a gas stove.

Mr. Hughes, who became Poet Laureate in 1984 and was widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of his generation, resisted speaking openly about the deaths for many years. But in his last poetic work, “Birthday Letters,” published in 1998, he finally broke his silence and explored the theme. He died the same year, as the book — in some ways considered a quest for redemption — was climbing best-seller lists.

Mr. Hughes was said to have protected his children from details about their mother’s suicide for many years. But in at least one poem he seemed to indicate that Nicholas, who was only 1 at the time of her death, was pained even as a small child, recalling in one stanza how Nicholas’s eyes “Became wet jewels/ The hardest substance of the purest pain/ As I fed him in his high white chair.”

Nicholas had a passion for wildlife, particularly fish. As a young adult he studied at the University of Oxford, where he obtained a bachelor of science degree in 1984 and a master of arts degree in 1990. Afterward, he traveled to the United States, earning a doctoral degree from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he became an assistant professor at the School of Fisheries and Ocean Science. According to the University, Mr. Hughes was an expert in “stream salmonid ecology” and carried out his research in Alaska and New Zealand. He resigned from the faculty in 2006 but continued his research, the school said.

One graduate student there, Lauren Tuori, recalled a peculiar habit of Mr. Hughes’s, saying he would often “seek out a larch tree in a forest of spruce.”

She added, “Alaska could use more biologists like Nick who still display wonder at the small things around them.”



https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...-kills-himself

Nicholas Hughes, the son of the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, has hanged himself at the age of 47. The former fisheries scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks had carved out a successful scientific career in one of the remotest parts of the western world, but ultimately he could not escape the legacy of being the offspring of one of the most famous and tragic literary relationships of the 20th century.

Those who know little else about his mother know that she was the American-born poet who gassed herself in the kitchen of her north London home in February 1963 while her one-year-old son and his two-year-old sister, Frieda, slept in their cots in a nearby room. Plath had placed towels around the kitchen door to make sure the fumes did not reach her children. She had been distraught at the break-up of her relationship with Hughes, following her discovery of his infidelity. Six years after their mother's death, in 1969, their father's then partner, Assia Wevill, also killed herself, killing her four-year-old daughter Shura in the process.

Plath's relationship with the future poet laureate has been the subject of numerous literary and personal memoirs and biographies, and even a film, as well as long-running attacks on her husband's reputation and behaviour by some feminists. She addressed one of her last poems, Nick and the Candlestick, to her baby son: "O love, how did you get here? O embryo … In you, ruby/ The pain you wake to is not yours … You are the one." Although Nicholas Hughes's father maintained an anguished public silence about the tragedy, poems written at the time, published in the last year of his life, also spoke of his relationship with his son.

In a statement issued late on Sunday evening, Frieda Hughes reported: "It is with profound sorrow that I must announce the death of my brother Nicholas Hughes, who died by his own hand on Monday 16 March 2009 at his home in Alaska. He had been battling depression for some time.

"His lifelong fascination with fish and fishing was a strong and shared bond with our father (many of whose poems were about the natural world). He was a loving brother, a loyal friend to those who knew him and despite the vagaries that life threw at him, he maintained an almost childlike innocence for the next project or plan."

A report in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner today by its columnist Dermot Cole understandably celebrates Hughes's academic and personal qualities rather than his literary associations. Noting that his initial scientific training had been at Oxford, Cole says he earned a doctorate at the University of Alaska in 1991: "He made lasting friendships in Fairbanks with those who shared his inventive interests in such varied pursuits as stream ecology, pottery, woodworking, boating, bicycling, gardening and cooking the perfect pecan pie … He spent countless summer hours in his research of grayling and salmon in the Chena river, exhibiting all the patience and wonder that defines a great fisherman. One of his innovations was rigging underwater cameras to get a three-dimensional view of the fish feeding in the passing current."

That interest may seem to pop psychologists an altogether more positive inherited legacy, of Ted Hughes's passionate interest in fishing, and indeed his father made several visits to Alaska before his death in 1998. Nicholas's particular academic specialism was in the behaviour of fish in currents. A 2004 paper explored why larger fish swim upstream in the turbulence of midstream rather than in the quieter waters near the banks: "Large fish swim further from the bank to avoid wave drag, the resistance associated with the generation of surface waves when swimming close to the surface," he wrote.

Hughes gave up his professorship two years ago to concentrate on pottery, although the paper said he continued his research with his partner, Christine Hunter, also a biologist.

Cole wrote: "A few times I called to let him know I would like to write about his life and his family connections whenever a news story about his parents appeared, but he did not think it was a good idea, so it never happened. He deserved his privacy. By and large, people in Fairbanks respected that, which is a good comment on our part of the world. In Alaska he had the freedom and the opportunity to live on his own terms and be recognised for his own accomplishments. Here he was not a literary figure forever defined by the lives of his parents."

In Plath's poems, he was her saviour

The shock and sadness of the news of Nicholas Hughes's death is almost unbearable. In his mother's poetry, he was saviour and life force - at his birth, she wrote, "this great bluish, glistening boy shot out onto the bed in a wave of tidal water that drenched all four of us to the skin, howling lustily", and he was for her the baby in the barn, "the one solid the spaces lean on". She loved her children, but not even loving them could save her, or, it now seems, him. Her son tried to survive her, escaping to Alaska, pursuing the wild fish through the icy rivers, but in the end he swam back up stream to the terrible birth and death place. Plath was heroic, in her struggles to create light and art from darkness, and so, I must and need to feel, was he.


http://www.internal.org/Sylvia_Plath/Death_Co_

“Death & Co.”by Sylvia Plath

Two, of course there are two.
It seems perfectly natural now —
The one who never looks up, whose eyes are lidded
And balled? like Blake's.
Who exhibits

The birthmarks that are his trademark—
The scald scar of water,
The nude
Verdigris of the condor.
I am red meat. His beak

Claps sidewise: I am not his yet.
He tells me how badly I photograph.
He tells me how sweet
The babies look in their hospital
Icebox, a simple

Frill at the neck
Then the flutings of their Ionian
Death-gowns.
Then two little feet.
He does not smile or smoke.

The other does that
His hair long and plausive
Bastard
Masturbating a glitter
He wants to be loved.

I do not stir.
The frost makes a flower,
The dew makes a star,
The dead bell,
The dead bell.

Somebody's done for.



http://genius.com/Sylvia-plath-elm-annotated

“Elm” by Sylvia Plath

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.


Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.


Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.


I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.


Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.


The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.


I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.


I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.


I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.


Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?


I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?——


Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.




In this poem Sylvia Plath assumes a persona, that of a personified tree. It is, of course, herself, and she uses the device as an extended metaphor, describing the roots reaching into dark underground depths rather than the usual exposed trunk and branches. This signifies the person, herself, who seems ordinary from the outside but has complex deep, dark depths within. Sylvia Plath struggled with depression and mental illness throughout her life.

Sylvia Plath uses three pronouns—“she,” “I,” and “you”—which can be read as the divided selves of one identity as well as three separate roles.

“She” not only signifies the elm tree but also the artistic detachment of the poet from both “I” and “you.” Plath distances herself from the tree and merges with it. She therefore creates the multiple voices of the poet’s psyche.

Structure

The poem comprises fourteen stanzas of three non-rhyming lines each; a structure characteristic of Plath. This, like many of her other poems, is a first person monologue in free verse, with terse lines of unequal length reflecting the meaning and emotions of the poet.

Language and Imagery

Sylvia Plath’s poetry is usually dense and often obscure. She uses vivid and imaginative imagery that can be interpreted in multiple ways. Here, she conveys meaning through complex, wide-ranging and disparate ideas, rather like flashing camera shots — elm, a horse, poison, dreams etc. Random as they may seem, the images overlap and repeat themselves cleverly so, for example, the violence of the broken tree in stanza 7 is echoed by the murderous face in stanza 13; the horse in stanza 4 is repeated in stanza 5; the bird in stanza 10 reappears in stanza eleven. There are many others. They serve to draw the poem together so that Plath paints a terrifying picture of depression, despair and rage, digging deep into emotional depths.

[HERO]

- from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (The Coulson Translation) [includes Essays in Criticism]; p. 636-642 (“The Theme of the Double, Sylvia Plath, and Dostoevsky” by George Gibian):

The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset believed that Dostoevsky’s fiction had qualities which lifted it beyond the limitations of its nineteenth-century setting and caused it to remain fresh and meaningful for the twentieth-century reader. Andre Malraux in The Walnut Trees of Altenburg named Dostoevsky as one of three authors who speak the most directly to the alienated people in our age (the other two, oddly enough, being Cervantes and Defoe). Dostoevsky’s underground man begot various descendants in other countries and ages: Ralph Ellison’s invisible man, Albert Camus’ protagonist in The Fall, and many others. Psychologists and psychoanalysts have studied Dostoevsky’s characters: Freud saw in The Brothers Karamazov a key illustration of his theory of the Oedipus complex (“Dostoevsky and Parricide”); Theodore Reik in Thirty Years after Freud devoted a chapter to “The Study of Dostoevsky.” Philosophers and political thinkers (for example Erich Fromm in The Escape from Freedom) considered the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” crucial to an understanding of modern man’s dilemma of craving freedom while at the same time fearing it and wishing to flee from it. Penologists and sociologists have studied the effects of punishments on criminals with reference to Dostoevsky’s novel. These examples of direct, immediate Dostoevskian influences suggest that an intellectual history of our age cannot be written without reference to Dostoevsky the artist, the psychologist, the philosopher, the political and religious thinker.

But there is another, perhaps still more pervasive, even if more evanescent, vaguer kind of influence: one of discovery of kinship. Various people in our age have found that something very important to us in our outlook on life was already present or hinted at in Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky was not always necessary for our discovery; it was not he who put the idea in our head. But finding its kernels in Dostoevsky nevertheless has its effects: it reinforces and deepens the hold of the idea.

A curious and startling example is the close relationship between the poet Sylvia Plath and Dostoevsky’s concept of the Double. The Double occurs in Dostoevsky’s works in several guises. The first is a special relationship prevailing between two characters one of whom seems to be the alter ego (other self) of the other. In Crime and Punishment, such a link obtains between Raskolnikov and Svidrigaylov. Raskolnikov regards Svidrigaylov as someone similar to himself inasmuch as he too had “stepped across,” had transgressed, had committed a crime. He had put himself beyond the moral law and became the determinant of his own actions—a free individual. As such, he indicates to Raskolnikov in which direction he himself may develop. The relationship between the two men is special, almost magical. They feel a strange closeness; Raskolnikov is drawn to Svidrigaylov with a strength beyond what is rationally rexplainable. He sees in him his own potential future self.

A second use of the Double may again be illustrated by Raskolnikov: he is split within himself (his name means “divided, split”). There are two selves in him: one is the rational, self-willed man who feels entitled even to murder if he so decides and who rejects traditional morality and sentiments; the other Raskolnikov feels compassion, helps others, gives presents spontaneously, and is capable of love. The novel is to a large extent a struggle between these two selves within Raskolnikov.

The third kind of Double is that of a character who encounters (or imagines he does) someone who is his double. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan in his delirium sees and converses with a Devil, who repeats to him various arguments which he had advanced earlier in his life. Even in his illness Ivan realizes that the apparition of the Devil is a twisted version of his own past self. One important function of a double such as Ivan’s Devil is to facilitate the character’s self-knowledge. Hearing one’s own ideas out of the mouth of another figure provides a different point of view on them: they may now sound warped, wrong. Similarly in Crime and Punishment utilitarian ideas mouthed by Lebezyatnikov and Luzhin are similar to Raskolnikov’s, but, worded by another person, applied a little differently, pushed to somewhat different conclusions, they become very disturbing to Raskolnikov. When Raskolnikov hears the students discuss the lack of justification for the pawnbroker’s continued existence, their phrasing of ideas he himself had been mulling over now strikes him as extraordinarily significant and fateful. The effect is similar to an unexpected glimpse of oneself in a mirror. There is in fact a rich literature in anthropology dealing with the folklore of mirror images and shadows as a corollary to ideas connected with doubles. The story of Narcissus, and belief in persons possessed—whether they be succubi, incubi, or dybbuks—are related categories of doubles.


The American poet Sylvia Plath showed an unusually strong orientation towards Doubles, particularly Dostoevskian doubles, throughout her short life. The first significant sign of her interest came during her senior year in college, when, under the direction of the present writer, she wrote an undergraduate honors thesis (which remains unpublished) on this very subject: Dostoevsky’s use of the device of the double. At the very outset of her literary career, she wrote a sixty-page paper, astonishing in the brilliance of its intellectual analysis—and poignant, even shattering, personally and emotionally, in view of our hindsight knowledge of her later troubled life and suicide. There are passages in the thesis which refer to characters in Dostoevsky, but which, we now know, could, and did, apply to Sylvia Plath herself—then and later.

Sylvia Plath began her thesis with a brief survey of the anthropological and psychological literature on the subject of the double. She quoted and commented on Freud, Rank, and literature on twins, shadows, and mirrors. When she came to Dostoevsky, she concentrated on two examples: Ivan Karamazov, and Golyadkin, the hero of Dostoevsky’s story “The Double.” She wrote about Golyadkin: “The death wish (of Golyadkin) . . . is a severe intensification of his desire to hide in the dark and originates from an acute sense of persecution.”* She quoted Golyadkin’s proverb, “the bird flies itself to the hunter,” as an image of voluntary self-destruction: . . . “Who’s the hunter, who’s the bird?” and went on: “the paradoxical and perverse attraction of the bird for the hunter is in a sense the desire of the persecuted soul for peace, even though it be the peace of death” (p. 14). She also refers to “the seductiveness of suicide as a release from prolonged torment” (p. 14).

About Ivan Karamazov’s Devil, she said, “The objective realism of the normal world has given way to the terrible, subjective realism of hallucination” (p. 49), a statement which could be applied to her last poems—“Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” “Death & Co.” The earlier balanced, even descriptions of the external world in her poetry were replaced towards the end of her life by what can be described by the conventional epithet “confessional poetry,” or, in Sylvia Plath’s own phrase, “the terrible, subjective realism of hallucination.” She distinguished in her thesis between Golyadkin, with his inability to acknowledge his inner conflict, and Ivan, who is aware, and does acknowledge his predicament, but is still unable to cope with it: “[Golyadkin] never consciously suspects the psychic silver cord which binds him to this hallucination; he denies all responsibility for his Double’s bad behavior and does not realize that his deadly enemy is none other than himself . . . Ivan’s inability to reconcile his inner conflict . . . results in severe schizophrenia for both” (p. 59). Her conclusion to the essay shows why she considered the theme of the double very important: “Although the figure of the Double has become a harbinger of danger and destruction, taking form as it does from the darkest of human fears and repressions, Dostoevsky implies that recognition of our various mirror images and reconciliation with them will save us from disintegration. This reconciliation does not mean a simple or monolithic resolution of conflict, but rather a creative acknowledgment of the fundamental duality of man; it involves a constant courageous acceptance of the eternal paradoxes within the universe and within ourselves” (pp. 59-60).

Sylvia Plath’s major work of prose fiction, The Bell Jar, continued to manifest a preoccupation with doubles. It is a veritable showpiece of the various categories of doubles and mirror images. The book is a moving autobiographical story of a young woman’s progression from neurosis to psychosis, to a mental hospital, and, at the end, on to the threshold of recovery. Her neurosis has its basis in an uncertainty about her self. Sylvia Plath’s heroine, Esther Greenwood, casts about desperately for some model who will exemplify for her who she herself really is. The people around her are a vast sampler or display of potential doubles. Esther chooses now one, now another as the model of her real self, as her double. For instance, she thinks to herself about one girl: “Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.” Then, however, she says about another: “It was Betsy I resembled at heart” (p. 24). Still later: “Joan was the beaming double of my old best self, specially designed to follow and torment me” (p. 216-217). Joan continues to be a hostile double after Esther receives shock treatments: “Joan hung about me like a large and breathless fruitfly—as if the sweetness of recovery were something she could suck up by mere nearness.”

Esther also becomes split within herself. Talking on the phone she listens to her own voice as if it were another person’s: “My voice sounded strange and hollow in my ears” (p. 124). Her hand becomes an alien, detached, separate entity: “My hand advanced a few inches, then retreated and fell limp. I forced it towards the receiver again . . .” (p. 125). During a suicide attempt, as she tries to tighten the cord around her neck: “I saw that my body had all sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash. I would simply have to ambush it with whatever sense I had left, or it would trap me in its stupid cage for fifty years without any sense at all” (p. 168). The split, then, is between the “I” of Esther, and her body—as two separate, warring entities. There are numerous instances in the book of Esther’s looking into a mirror, of watching herself from remote vantage points. Esther is aware that her condition is pathological: “If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days” (p. 98). At first her state sounds like nothing more than the common indecisiveness of a graduating college student faced with the necessity of settling on one of the many possible ways of life after school. She also dreads becoming just a domestic housewife “under a man’s thumb” (p. 234) and “flattened out underneath his feet” (p. 89): “A man doesn’t have a worry in the world, while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line” (p. 234). But the splits within Esther widen more and more, she grows resentful and suspicious of her surroundings, tries to commit suicide, and the neurotic young woman becomes a clinical paranoiac. The novel is mercilessly masterful in showing the progressive deterioration of an intelligent woman driving into disintegration and madness. Doubleness is an integral part of the process.


Sylvia Plath’s poems also contain references to doubles, but not nearly so frequently, or so centrally, as the novel. She has a poem, “Plaster,” in which the cast on a woman converses with the patient—a very original situation. There are individual lines such as “I am terrified by this dark thing/That sleeps in me” (from “Elm”), and allusions to the classical Narcissus situation: “All the fall of water an eye/Over whose pool I tenderly/Lean and see me” (from “Gigolo”). We feel that we are meeting old acquaintances when we come to a poem about Sylvia Plath’s favorite subject, death, expressed in the terms of the double:


Two, of course there are two.
It seems perfectly natural now—
The one who never looks up, whose eyes are lidded,
and balled, like Blake’s,

The birthmarks that are his trademarks—
of the condor.
I am red meat. His beak
Claps sidewise: I am not his yet.

(“Death & Co”)


For Sylvia Plath even death comes split into two doubles.

The poems lean heavily on images of death, physical hurt, pain, darkness, violence, fire, destruction. But it is the novel, not the poems, which explicitly uses doubles as a central means of expression.


Sylvia Plath put extremely heavy stress on the recognition of inner conflict, and on its acceptance and reconciliation. Duality, she felt, could be creatively acknowledged; it need not necessarily be destructive. It is pathetic that she had such clear insight into the problem—was so aware of its various ramifications and implications early in her life—after her first serious suicide attempt and when she was about to graduate and enter adult life. The lucidity with which she wrote the essay on Dostoevsky’s Doubles, in beautifully transparent prose, with all thoughts expressed unobtrusively and simply, and the clarity of The Bell Jar’s presentation of mental disintegration of a woman are frightening.

In her poetry, during most of her eight years of writing, the subject is latent, with a few exceptions such as those we have just noted. But a change comes with the poems which have usually been called “confessional” and compared to Robert Lowell’s Life Situations. In the most powerful ones, such as “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy,” there is no longer any doubleness. The poet seems to have chosen—or the choice was made for her. She expresses her hate and rage unequivocally, without any diversion or qualification by an alter ego. There is no double here, no hesitation between alternatives, only an exultant yet ironic and highly controlled expression of unidirectional emotion. The poetry gains force by this elimination of what had been holding it back earlier. One side of the double is conquered. The greatness of those poems derives from the fact that the outpourings of unbalanced, unattenuated passion are under her artistic control—exercised by play on various speaking voices and tones; varied and sophisticated rhymes; and the use of wit and irony. A brief, incredibly productive period ensued, with a poem or two being written every day. This was terminated by Sylvia Plath’s third, and successful, suicide attempt.

Dostoevsky was like a guide to the Underworld to Sylvia Plath—he introduced her to the depths of human conflict and even showed her the way towards what she called “creative acknowledgement” of them; these same depths came to constitute the warp and woof of her prose and poetry; but neither he nor anyone else was able to keep her from becoming lost in them.

*Sylvia Plath, “The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky’s Novels,” submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of Special Honors in English, Smith College, 1955, p. 14.


- from Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and other prose writings by Sylvia Plath; p. 34-8 (“America! America!”):

I went to public schools—genuinely public. Everybody went: the spry, the shy, the podge, the gangler, the future electronic scientist, the future cop who would one night kick a diabetic to death under the mistaken impression he was a drunk and needed cooling off; the poor, smelling of sour wools and the urinous baby at home and polyglot stew; the richer, with ratty fur collars, opal birthstone rings and daddys with cars (‘Wot does your daddy do?’ ‘He don’t woik, he’s a bus droiver.’ Laughter). There it was—Education—laid on free of charge for the lot of us, a lovely slab of depressed American public. We weren’t depressed, of course. We left that to our parents, who eked out one child or two, and slumped dumbly after work and frugal suppers over their radios to listen to news of the ‘home country’ and a black-moustached man named Hitl*r.

Above all, we did feel ourselves American in the rowdy seaside town where I picked up, like lint, my first ten years of schooling—a great, loud cats’ bag of Irish Catholics, German Jews, Swedes, Negroes, Italians and that rare, pure Mayflower dropping, somebody English. On to this steerage of infant citizens the doctrines of Liberty and Equality were to be, through the free, communal schools, impressed. Although we could almost call ourselves Bostonian (the city airport with its beautiful hover of planes and silver blimps growled and gleamed across the bay), New York’s skyscrapers were the icons on our ‘home room’ walls, New York and the great green queen lifting a bedlamp that spelt out Freedom.

Every morning, hands on hearts, we pledged allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, a sort of aerial altarcloth over teacher’s desk. And sang songs full of powder-smoke and patriotics to impossible, wobbly, soprano tunes. One high, fine song ‘For purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain’ always made the scampisize poet in me weep. In those days I couldn’t have told a fruited plain from a mountain majesty and confused God with George Washington (whose lamblike granny-face shone down at us also from the schoolroom wall between neat blinders of white curls), yet warbled, nevertheless, with my small, snotty compatriots ‘America, America! God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.’

The sea we knew something about. Terminus of almost every street, it buckled and swashed and tossed, out of its grey formlessness, china plates, wooden monkeys, elegant shells and dead men’s shoes. Wet salt winds raked our playgrounds endlessly—those Gothic composites of gravel, macadam, granite and bald, flailed earth wickedly designed to bark and scour the tender knee. There we traded playing cards (for the patterns on the backs) and sordid stories, jumped clothes rope, shot marbles, and enacted the radio and comic book dramas of our day (‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows—nyah, nyah, nyah!’ or ‘Up in the sky, look! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Superman!’) If we were destined for any special end—grooved, doomed, limited, fated, we didn’t feel it. We beamed and sloshed from our desks to the dodge-ball dell, open and hopeful as the sea itself.

After all, we could be anybody. If we worked. If we studied hard enough. Our accents, our money, our parents didn’t matter. Did not lawyers rise from the loins of coalheavers, doctors from the bins of dustmen? Education was the answer, and heaven knows how it came to us. Invisibly, I think, in the early days—a mystical infra-red glow off the thumbed multiplication tables, ghastly poems extolling October’s bright blue weather, and a world of history that more or less began and ended with the Boston Tea Party—Pilgrims and Indians being, like the eohippus, prehistoric.

Later, the college obsession would seize us, a subtle, terrifying virus. Everybody had to go to some college or other. A business college, a junior college, a state college, a secretarial college, an Ivy League college, a pig farmers’ college. The book first, then the work. By the time we (future cop and electronic brain alike) exploded into our prosperous, post-war high school, full-time guidance counsellors jogged our elbows at ever-diminishing intervals to discuss motives, hopes, school subjects, jobs—and colleges. Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art teachers leading us through the slums of Boston, then back to the easel to hurl public school gouache with social awareness and fury. Eccentricities, the perils of being too special, were reasoned and cooed from us like sucked thumbs.

The girls’ guidance counsellor diagnosed my problem straight off. I was just too dangerously brainy. My high, pure string of straight A’s might, without proper extra-curricular tempering, snap me into the void. More and more, the colleges wanted All-Round Students. I had, by that time, studied Machiavelli in Current Events class. I grabbed my cue.

Now this guidance counsellor owned, unknown to me, a white-haired identical twin I kept meeting in supermarkets and at the dentist’s. To this twin, I confided my widening circle of activities—chewing orange sections at the quarters of girl’s basketball games (I had made the team), painting mammoth L’il Abners and Daisy Maes for class dances, pasting up dummies of the school newspaper at midnight while my already dissipated co-editor read out the jokes at the bottom of the columns of The New Yorker. The blank, oddly muffled expression of my guidance counsellor’s twin in the street did not deter me, nor did the apparent amnesia of her whitely efficient double in the school office. I became a rabid teenage pragmatist.

‘Usage is Truth, Truth, Usage,’ I might have muttered, levelling my bobby-socks to match those of my school mates. There was no uniform, but there was a uniform—the pageboy hairdo, squeaky clean, the skirt and sweater, the ‘loafers’, those scuffed copies of Indian moccasins. We even, in our democratic edifice, nursed two ancient relics of snobbism—two sororities: Subdeb and Sugar ‘n’ Spice. At the start of each school year, invitation cards went out from old members to new girls—the pretty, the popular, the in some way rivalrous. A week of initiation preceded our smug admittance to the cherished Norm. Teachers preached against Initiation Week, boys scoffed, but couldn’t stop it.

I was assigned, like each initiate, a Big Sister who systematically began to destroy my ego. For a whole week I could wear no make-up, could not wash, could not comb my hair, change clothes or speak to boys. By dawn I had walked to my Big Sister’s house and was making her bed and breakfast. Then, lugging her intolerably heavy books, as well as my own, I followed her, at a dog’s distance, to school. On the way she might order me to climb a tree and hang from a branch till I dropped, ask a passerby a rude question or stalk about the shops begging for rotten grapes and mouldy rice. If I smiled—showed, that is, any sense of irony at my slavishness, I had to kneel on the public pavement and wipe the smile off my face. The minute the bell rang to end school, Big Sister took over. By nightfall I ached and stank; my homework buzzed in a dulled and muzzy brain. I was being tailored to an Okay Image.

Somehow it didn’t take—this initiation into the nihil of belonging. Maybe I was just too weird to begin with. What did these picked buds of American womanhood do at their sorority meetings? They ate cake; ate cake and catted about the Saturday night date. The privilege of being anybody was turning its other face—to the pressure of being everybody; ergo, no one.

Lately I peered through the plate-glass side of an American primary school: child-size desks and chairs in clean, light wood, toy stoves and minuscule drinking fountains. Sunlight everywhere. All the anarchism, discomfort and grit I so tenderly remembered had been, in a quarter century, gentled away. One class had spent the morning on a bus learning how to pay fares and ask for the proper stop. Reading (my lot did it by age four off soapbox tops) had become such a traumatic and stormy art one felt lucky to weather it by ten. But the children were smiling in their little ring. Did I glimpse, in the First Aid cabinet, a sparkle of bottles—soothers and smootheners for the embryo rebel, the artist, the odd?


- p. 48-55 (“The Wishing Box”):

Agnes Higgins realized only too well the cause of her husband Harold’s beatific, absent-minded expression over his morning orange juice and scrambled eggs.

‘Well,’ Agnes sniffed, smearing beach-plum jelly on her toast with vindictive strokes of the butter-knife, ‘what did you dream last night?’

‘I was just remembering’, Harold said, still staring with a blissful, blurred look right through the very attractive and tangible form of his wife (pink-cheeked and fluffily blond as always that early September morning, in her rose-sprigged peignoir), ‘those manuscripts I was discussing with William Blake.’

‘But,’ Agnes objected, trying with difficulty to conceal her irritation, ‘how did you know it was William Blake?’

Harold seemed surprised. ‘Why, from his pictures, of course.’

And what could Agnes say to that? She smoldered in silence over her coffee, wrestling with the strange jealousy which had been growing on her like some dark, malignant cancer ever since their wedding night only three months before when she had discovered about Harold’s dreams. On that first night of their honeymoon, in the small hours of the morning, Harold startled Agnes out of a sound, dreamless sleep by a violent, convulsive twitch of his whole right arm. Momentarily frightened, Agnes had shaken Harold awake to ask in tender, maternal tones what the matter was; she thought he might be struggling in the throes of a nightmare. Not Harold.

‘I was just beginning to play the Emperor Concerto,’ he explained sleepily. ‘I must have been lifting my arm for the first chord when you woke me up.’

Now at the outset of their marriage, Harold’s vivid dreams amused Agnes. Every morning she asked Harold what he had dreamed during the night, and he told her in as rich detail as if he were describing some significant, actual event.

‘I was being introduced to a gathering of American poets in the Library of Congress,’ he would report with relish. ‘William Carlos Williams was there in a great, rough coat, and that one who writes about Nantucket, and Robinson Jeffers looking like an American Indian, the way he does in the anthology photograph; and then Robert Frost came driving up in a saloon car and said something witty that made me laugh.’ Or, ‘I saw a beautiful desert, all reds and purples, with each grain of sand like a ruby or sapphire shooting light. A white leopard with gold spots was standing over this bright blue stream, its hind legs on one bank, its forelegs on the other, and a little trail of red ants was crossing the stream over the leopard, up its tail, along its back, between its eyes, and down on the other side.’

Harold’s dreams were nothing if not meticulous works of art. Undeniably, for a certified accountant with pronounced literary leanings (he reads E. T. A. Hoffman, Kafka, and the astrological monthlies instead of the daily paper on the commuters’ special), Harold possessed an astonishingly quick, colorful imagination. But, gradually, Harold’s peculiar habit of accepting his dreams as if they were really an integral part of his waking experience began to infuriate Agnes. She felt left out. It was as if Harold were spending one third of his life among celebrities and fabulous legendary creatures in an exhilarating world from which Agnes found herself perpetually exiled, except by hearsay.

As the weeks passed, Agnes began to brood. Although she refused to mention it to Harold, her own dreams, when she had them (and that, alas, was infrequently enough), appalled her: dark, glowering landscapes peopled with ominous unrecognizable figures. She never could remember these nightmares in detail, but lost their shapes even as she struggled to awaken, retaining only the keen sense of their stifling, storm-charged atmosphere which, oppressive, would haunt her throughout the following day. Agnes felt ashamed to mention these fragmentary scenes of horror to Harold for fear they reflected too unflatteringly upon her own powers of imagination. Her dreams—few and far between as they were—sounded so prosaic, so tedious, in comparison with the royal baroque splendour of Harold’s. How could she tell him simply, for example: ‘I was falling’: or, ‘Mother died and I was so sad’: or, ‘Something was chasing me and I couldn’t run’? The plain truth was, Agnes realized, with a pang of envy, that her dream-life would cause the most assiduous psychoanalyst to repress a yawn.

Where, Agnes mused wistfully, were those fertile childhood days when she believed in fairies? Then, at least, her sleep had never been dreamless nor her dreams dull and ugly. She had in her seventh year, she recalled wistfully, dreamed of a wishing box land above the clouds where wishing boxes grew on trees, looking very much like coffee-grinders; you picked a box, turned the handle around nine times while whispering your wish in this little hole in the side, and the wish came true. Another time, she had dreamed of finding three magic grass-blades growing by the mail-box at the end of her street: the grass-blades shone like tinsel Christmas ribbon, one red, one blue, and one silver. In yet another dream, she and her young brother Michael stood in front of Dody Nelson’s white-shingled house in snowsuits, knotty maple tree roots snaked across the hard, brown ground; she was wearing red-and-white striped wool mittens; and, all at once, as she held out one cupped hand, it began to snow turquoise-blue sulfa gum. But that was just about the extent of the dreams Agnes remembered from her infinitely more creative childhood days. At what age had those benevolent painted dream worlds ousted her? And for what cause?


Meanwhile, indefatigably, Harold continued to recount his dreams over breakfast. Once, at a depressing and badly-aspected time of Harold’s life before he met Agnes, Harold dreamed that a red fox ran through his kitchen, grievously burnt, its fur charred black, bleeding from several wounds. Later, Harold confided, at a more auspicious time shortly after his marriage to Agnes, the red fox had appeared again, miraculously healed, with flourishing fur, to present Harold with a bottle of permanent black Quink. Harold was particularly fond of his fox dreams; they recurred often. So, notably, did his dream of the giant pike. ‘There was this pond,’ Harold informed Agnes one sultry August morning, ‘where my cousin Albert and I used to fish; it was chock full of pike. Well, last night I was fishing there, and I caught the most enormous pike you could imagine—it must have been the great-great-grandfather of all the rest; I pulled and pulled and pulled, and still he kept coming out of that pond.’

‘Once,’ Agnes countered, morosely stirring sugar into her black coffee, ‘when I was little, I had a dream about Superman, all in technicolor. He was dressed in blue, with a red cape and black hair, handsome as a prince, and I went flying right along with him through the air—I could feel the wind whistling, and the tears blowing out of my eyes. We flew over Alabama; I could tell it was Alabama because the land looked like a map, with “Alabama” lettered in script across these big green mountains.’

Harold was visibly impressed. ‘What,’ he asked Agnes then, ‘did you dream last night?’ Harold’s tone was almost contrite: to tell the truth, his own dream-life preoccupied him so much that he’d honestly never thought of playing listener and investigating his wife’s. He looked at her pretty, troubled countenance with new interest: Agnes was, Harold paused to observe for perhaps the first time since their early married days, an extraordinarily attractive sight across the breakfast table.

For the moment, Agnes was confounded by Harold’s well-meant question; she had long ago passed the stage where she seriously considered hiding a copy of Freud’s writings on dreams in her closet and fortifying herself with a vicarious dream tale by which to hold Harold’s interest each morning. Now, throwing reticence to the wind, she decided in desperation to confess her problem.

‘I don’t dream anything,’ Agnes admitted in low, tragic tones. ‘Not anymore.’

Harold was obviously concerned. ‘Perhaps,’ he consoled her, ‘you just don’t use your powers of imagination enough. You should practise. Try shutting your eyes.’

Agnes shut her eyes.

‘Now,’ Harold asked hopefully, ‘what do you see?’

Agnes panicked. She saw nothing. ‘Nothing,’ she quavered. ‘Nothing except a sort of blur.’

‘Well,’ said Harold briskly, adopting the manner of a doctor dealing with a malady that was, although distressing, not necessarily fatal, ‘imagine a goblet.’

‘What kind of goblet?’ Agnes pleaded.

‘That’s up to you,’ Harold said. ‘You describe it to me.’

Eyes still shut, Agnes dragged wildly into the depths of her head. She managed with great effort to conjure up a vague, shimmery silver goblet that hovered somewhere in the nebulous regions of the back of her mind, flickering as if at any moment it might black out like a candle.

‘It’s silver,’ she said, almost defiantly. ‘And it’s got two handles.’

‘Fine. Now imagine a scene engraved on it.’

Agnes forced a reindeer on the goblet, scrolled about by grape leaves, scratched in bare outlines on the silver. ‘It’s a reindeer in a wreath of grape leaves.’

‘What color is the scene?’ Harold was, Agnes thought, merciless.

‘Green,’ Agnes lied, as she hastily enameled the grape leaves. ‘The grape leaves are green. And the sky is black’—she was almost proud of this original stroke. ‘And the reindeer’s russet flecked with white.’

‘All right. Now polish the goblet all over into a high gloss.’

Agnes polished the imaginary goblet, feeling like a fraud. ‘But it’s in the back of my head,’ she said dubiously, opening her eyes. ‘I see everything way in the back of my head. Is that where you see your dreams?’

‘Why no,’ Harold said, puzzled. ‘I see my dreams on the front of my eyelids, like on a movie-screen. They just come; I don’t have anything to do with them. Like right now,’ he closed his eyes, ‘I can see these shiny crowns coming and going, hung in this big willow tree.’

Agnes fell grimly silent.

‘You’ll be all right,’ Harold tried, jocosely, to buck her up. ‘Every day, just practise imagining different things like I’ve taught you.’

Agnes let the subject drop. While Harold was away at work, she began, suddenly, to read a great deal; reading kept her mind full of pictures. Seized by a kind of ravenous hysteria, she raced through novels, women’s magazines, newspapers, and even the anecdotes in her Joy of Cooking; she read travel brochures, home appliance circulars, the Sears Roebuck Catalogue, the instructions on soap-flake boxes, the blurbs on the back of record-jackets—anything to keep from facing the gaping void in her own head of which Harold had made her so painfully conscious. But as soon as she lifted her eyes from the printed matter at hand, it was as if a protecting world had been extinguished.

The utterly self-sufficient, unchanging reality of the things surrounding her began to depress Agnes. With a jealous awe, her frightened, almost paralysed stare took in the Oriental rug, the Williamsburg-blue wallpaper, the gilded dragons on the Chinese vase on the mantel, the blue-and-gold medallion design of the upholstered sofa on which she was sitting. She felt choked, smothered by these objects whose bulky pragmatic existence somehow threatened the deepest, most secret roots of her own ephemeral being. Harold, she knew only too well, would tolerate no such vainglorious nonsense from tables and chairs; if he didn’t like the scene at hand, if it bored him, he would change it to suit his fancy. If, Agnes mourned, in some sweet hallucination an octopus came slithering towards her across the floor, paisley-patterned in purple and orange, she would bless it. Anything to prove that her shaping imaginative powers were not irretrievably lost; that her eye was not merely an open camera lens which recorded surrounding phenomena and left it at that. ‘A rose’, she found herself repeating hollowly, like a funeral dirge, ‘is a rose is a rose. . . .’

One morning when Agnes was reading a novel, she suddenly realized to her terror that her eyes had scanned five pages without taking in the meaning of a single word. She tried again, but the letters separated, writhing like malevolent little black snakes across the page in a kind of hissing, untranslatable jargon. It was then that Agnes began attending the movies around the corner regularly each afternoon. It did not matter if she had seen the feature several times previously; the fluid kaleidoscope of forms before her eyes lulled her into a rhythmic trance; the voices, speaking some soothing, unintelligible code, exorcised the dead silence in her head. Eventually, by dint of much cajolery, Agnes persuaded Harold to buy a television set on the installment plan. That was much better than the movies; she could drink sherry while watching TV during the long afternoons. These latter days, when Agnes greeted Harold on his return home each evening, she found, with a certain malicious satisfaction, that his face blurred before her gaze, so she could change his features at will. Sometimes she gave him a pea-green complexion, sometimes lavender; sometimes a Grecian nose, sometimes an eagle beak.

‘But I like sherry,’ Agnes told Harold stubbornly when, her afternoons of private drinking becoming apparent even to his indulgent eyes, he begged her to cut down. ‘It relaxes me.’

The sherry, however, didn’t relax Agnes enough to put her to sleep. Cruelly sober, the visionary sherry-haze worn off, she would lie stiff, twisting her fingers like nervous talons in the sheets, long after Harold was breathing peacefully, evenly, in the midst of some rare, wonderful adventure. With an icy, increasing panic, Agnes lay stark awake night after night. Worse, she didn’t get tired any more. Finally, a bleak, clear awareness of what was happening broke upon her: the curtains of sleep, of refreshing, forgetful darkness dividing each day from the day before it, and the day after it, were lifted for Agnes eternally, irrevocably. She saw an intolerable prospect of wakeful, visionless days and nights stretching unbroken ahead of her, her mind condemned to perfect vacancy, without a single image of its own to ward off the crushing assault of smug, autonomous tables and chairs. She might, Agnes reflected sickly, live to be a hundred: the women in her family were all long-lived.

Dr Marcus, the Higgins’ family physician, attempted, in his jovial way, to reassure Agnes about her complaints of insomnia: ‘Just a bit of nervous strain, that’s all. Take one of these capsules at night for a while and see how you sleep.’

Agnes did not ask Dr Marcus if the pills would give her dreams; she put the box of fifty pills in her handbag and took the bus home.

Two days later, on the last Friday of September, when Harold returned from work (he had shut his eyes all during the hour’s train trip home, counterfeiting sleep but in reality voyaging on a cerise-sailed dhow up a luminous river where white elephants bulked and rambled across the crystal surface of the water in the shadow of Moorish turrets fabricated completely of multicolored glass), he found Agnes lying on the sofa in the livingroom, dressed in her favourite princess-style emerald taffeta evening gown, pale and lovely as a blown lily, eyes shut, an empty pillbox and an overturned water tumbler on the rug at her side. Her tranquil features were set in a slight, secret smile of triumph, as if, in some far country unattainable to mortal men, she were, at last, waltzing with the dark, red-caped prince of her early dreams.











- from The Bell Jar; Ch. 7 (p. 82-7):

Of course, Constantin was much too short, but in his own way he was handsome, with light brown hair and dark blue eyes and a lively, challenging expression. He could almost have been an American, he was so tan and had such good teeth, but I could tell straight away that he wasn’t. He had what no American man I’ve ever met has had, and that’s intuition.

From the start Constantin guessed I wasn’t any protégé of Mrs. Willard’s. I raised an eyebrow here and dropped a dry little laugh there, and pretty soon we were both openly raking Mrs. Willard over the coals and I thought, “This Constantin won’t mind if I’m too tall and don’t know enough languages and haven’t been to Europe, he’ll see through all that stuff to what I really am.”

Constantin drove me to the UN in his old green convertible with cracked, comfortable brown leather seats and the top down. He told me his tan came from playing tennis, and when we were sitting there side by side flying down the streets in the open sun he took my hand and squeezed it, and I felt happier than I had been since I was about nine and running along the hot white beaches with my father the summer before he died.

And while Constantin and I sat in one of those hushed plush auditoriums in the UN, next to a stern muscular Russian girl with no makeup who was a simultaneous interpreter like Constantin, I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

After that—in spite of the Girl Scouts and the piano lessons and the water-color lessons and the dancing lessons and the sailing camp, all of which my mother scrimped to give me, and college, with crewing in the mist before breakfast and blackbottom pies and the little new firecrackers of ideas going off every day—I had never been really happy again.

I stared through the Russian girl in her double-breasted gray suit, rattling off idiom after idiom in her own unknowable tongue — which Constantin said was the most difficult part, because the Russians didn’t have the same idioms as our idioms — and I wished with all my heart I could crawl into her and spend the rest of my life barking out one idiom after another. It mightn’t make me any happier, but it would be one more little pebble of efficiency among all the other pebbles.

Then Constantin and the Russian girl interpreter and the whole bunch of black and white and yellow men arguing down there behind their labeled microphones seemed to move off at a distance. I saw their mouths going up and down without a sound, as if they were sitting on the deck of a departing ship, stranding me in the middle of a huge silence.

I started adding up all the things I couldn’t do.

I began with cooking.

My grandmother and my mother were such good cooks that I left everything to them. They were always trying to teach me one dish or another, but I would just look on and say, “Yes, yes, I see,” while the instructions slid through my head like water, and then I’d always spoil what I did so nobody would ask me to do it again.

I remember Jody, my best and only girlfriend at college in my freshman year, making me scrambled eggs at her house one morning. They tasted unusual, and when I asked her if she had put in anything extra, she said cheese and garlic salt. I asked who told her to do that, and she said nobody, she just thought it up. But then, she was practical and a sociology major.

I didn’t know shorthand either.

This meant I couldn’t get a good job after college. My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand was something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter.

The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters. Besides, those little shorthand symbols in the book my mother showed me seemed just as bad as let t equal time and let s equal the total distance.

My list grew longer.

I was a terrible dancer. I couldn’t carry a tune. I had no sense of balance, and when we had to walk down a narrow board with our hands out and a book on our heads in gym class I always fell over. I couldn’t ride a horse or ski, the two things I wanted to do most, because they cost too much money. I couldn’t speak German or read Hebrew or write Chinese. I didn’t even know where most of the old out-of-the-way countries the UN men in front of me represented fitted in on the map.

For the first time in my life, sitting there in the sound-proof heart of the UN building between Constantin who could play tennis as well as simultaneously interpret and the Russian girl who knew so many idioms, I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.

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.

Constantin’s restaurant smelt of herbs and spices and sour cream. All the time I had been in New York I had never found such a restaurant. I only found those Heavenly Hamburger places, where they serve giant hamburgers and soup-of-the-day and four kinds of fancy cake at a very clean counter facing a long glarey mirror.

To reach this restaurant we had to climb down seven dimly lit steps into a sort of cellar.

Travel posters plastered the smoke-dark walls, like so many picture windows overlooking Swiss lakes and Japanese mountains and African velds, and thick, dusty bottle-candles, that seemed for centuries to have wept their colored waxes red over blue over green in a fine, three-dimensional lace, cast a circle of light round each table where the faces floated, flushed and flamelike themselves.

I don’t know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.

Constantin kept refilling our glasses with a sweet Greek wine that tasted of pine bark, and I found myself telling him how I was going to learn German and go to Europe and be a war correspondent like Maggie Higgins.

I felt so fine by the time we came to the yogurt and strawberry jam that I decided I would let Constantin seduce me.


- From The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath by Ronald Hayman; p. 108-13 (Ch. 9: Boston):

At least partially aware of how hard it was for her to live without clear-cut tasks and incentives, Ted Hughes did his best to fill the empty space in her routine. He didn’t find it difficult to be didactic and encouraging. He suggested subjects for poems and exerted a strong influence on her reading, edging her into anthropology. Without him she might never have become interested in Aztec civilisation, or astrology. He had various semi-meditational disciplines, and before starting to write he concentrated for ten minutes on the base of the spine and several points along it. He initiated her into some of these practices, and he nannied her with questions. ‘What are you thinking? What are you going to do now?’ He even tried to timetable her day, jostling her into an hour of reading ballads, an hour of studying Shakespeare, an hour of reading history. But it was impossible to help in these ways without making her feel threatened by the encroachment on her new independence, and, like a rebellious pupil, she seized on moments when he contradicted himself or laid himself open to charges of fanaticism. Why was his neck stiff? It must mean the exercises he did were too strenuous. She also started to enjoy his absences.

They both believed in spirits, but she may have been more ambivalent than he was. When they conducted seances together, using a home-made Ouija board and an inverted brandy glass, she was half sceptical, knowing their manipulative fingertips were liable to spell out semi-conscious desires and intentions, but she went on hoping and half-believing that she could make contact with her dead father. Spirits would regularly want to pass on instructions from Prince Otto, who sounded like a great power in the underworld. When she wanted to communicate with him directly, she was told he was unavailable because he was under orders from the Colossus. She’d then ask for contact with the Colossus and be refused. But she was to honour Colossus in 1960 by using his name as the title for her collection.

The spirit they called up most was named Pan. He was capable – so they believed – of helping them to fill in coupons for the football pools, but usually his communications were gloomy or macabre, though not humourless. They never ran out of questions, and she found their semi-serious game more exciting than the cinema. Pan said he was happy in America, where he’d been using his freedom to write poems, and he recited one called ‘Moist’. They’d have two sons before they had a girl, he predicted, and her first collection would be published by Knopf. His favourite poem of hers was ‘Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbour’. ‘Colossus likes it,’ they were told.

By-products of their seances, some of her poems incorporate words taken from the spirits they conjured. An example is the posthumously published ‘Dialogue over an Ouija Board’, which was written in 1957 or 1958. When the woman in the poem asks the spirit how her father is, his answer is ‘INPLUMAGEOFRAWWORMS’. But is the spirit, Pan, more than a puppet of their intuitions? Asked where he lives, he answers ‘INGODPIE’, changes this to ‘INGODHEAD’ and later to ‘INCOREOFNERVE’, but when he calls them ‘APES’, she smashes the glass.

Prompted to suggest subjects for poems, Pan gave her the idea of writing about the Lorelei, the sirens in German legend who lure boatmen to their death. The Lorelei, he said, were her own kin. They featured, as she now remembered, in a German song her mother used to sing, but in spite of their associations with the sea and the death wish, she’d never thought of using them as a theme. Her poem ‘Lorelei’, which she began the next day, links them with the underwater world Jacques Cousteau had described in a book she’d been reading. She borrows his phrase ‘drunkenness of the great depths’ for the acute oxygen shortage that causes visionary euphoria in deep-sea divers, making them forget the need for caution.

‘It is no night to drown in’, she begins, going on to describe the river’s blackness underneath the bland mirror sheen, with mists dropping scrims like fishnets. Reflections of castle turrets hint at an alternative world, fuller and clearer than is possible. The sirens’ harmonious singing is like an attack on the ordinary world. Lodging on the ‘pitched reefs of nightmare’, they promise safety. The goddesses of peace inhabit the river, and the speaker asks at the end of the poem to be ferried down there.

Sylvia knew the contrast between her manic and her depressive moods was extreme, as if her life were controlled magically by two electric currents. When the poetry editor of the New Yorker, Howard Moss, who’d rejected all her previous submissions, accepted both ‘Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbour’, calling it a ‘marvellous’ poem, and ‘Nocturne’, which he rated ‘extremely fine’, she ran upstairs to tell Ted, shouting ‘Yippee,’ and jumping about ‘like a Mexican bean’. The fee, she calculated, would cover the rent for nearly three months. Her next ambition, she decided, was to get a story into the New Yorker, even if it cost her ten years of work.

But the old pattern seemed inescapable. When they were living in the flat at Willow Street, which is near Beacon Hill, overexcitement led to sleeplessness, exhaustion, anxiety, deep depression. She felt no less suffocated, no less hysterical than she had when she was teaching. Once again her nerves were ‘razor-shaved’. Instead of starting the novel, she was paralysed with teror. Ideas offered themselves, but how could she structure them? She should be able, she told herself, to stockpile poems at the rate of one a day for her first collection, and she was furious when a day’s work ended in twelve bad lines. She felt intermittently nauseous. She was distracted by noises from the street or workmen hammering in the house opposite. She knew she was making tyrannous demands on herself, but cool reasonableness was out of reach. Time was invaluable and she was wasting it.

Nothing if not ambitious and competitive, she still had objectives, but they were less specific than the ones that had previously motivated her – win a scholarship to Smith, get a degree, win a Fulbright, travel to Europe, find a husband. Again and again she succumbed to panic, without knowing what was frightening her. Sometimes she talked hysterically; sometimes she thought she’d explode. Life was full of opportunities, but she was caught in a vicious circle, doing nothing but roaming around, staring at other people who seemed enviable only because they were other people. Somewhere on the far side of the terror was the inaccessible existence in which she was steadily in control of her day-to-day thinking, mature enough to distance herself from nightmares and setbacks. She pictured herself happily writing, reading, playing with her children, chatting with friends. None of this should be unattainable. She must take control of her life, recognise her terrors as figments. She felt all right when she was working: activity dissipated the rage that paralysed her, but the anxiety always came back, gripping her like poison lodged in her gullet. The greatest danger was the stubborn belief that she could allay her fears only by plummeting to the bottom of non-existence. If she could afterwards rise to the top again, she’d have proved she could survive.

In the morning she woke up exhausted, as if coming out of a coma, or as if hostile electricity in her bloodstream were drying her out. Later in the day she still felt drugged. Objects were slipping out of reach, and when she sat down at her typewriter, she wasn’t in charge of what she typed. Good lines presented themselves, but stopped dead before she could develop them. She looked back nostalgically on the teaching, which had given her week a structure and forced her to be articulate. Stultified by the sedentary life, she thought of applying to Harvard or Yale to see whether she could do a Ph.D. or a master’s degree. Anything. Hughes produced a word – doldrums – as a name for her malaise. This temporarily made her feel better. Perhaps she could reorganise her life. Perhaps she should begin the novel with a girl’s search for her dead father, for an outside authority she could develop from inside. Perhaps she should become a Catholic. This notion occurred abruptly at the beginning of August, but she knew much of the dogma would be unpalatable.

For nearly a week their routine was disrupted by a baby bird which had fallen out of its nest. Her yearning for maternity and their decision to postpone it had set up such powerful tensions that Hughes was swept into uncharacteristic behaviour. The man who’d killed hundreds of healthy birds and animals sacrificed a week’s work in a hopeless effort to save an injured fledgling. They found it in the street, apparently dying. It was on its back next to a tree, scrawny wings outstretched. Its pain made Sylvia feel sick. Hughes picked it up and carried it home, cradled in his hand. After making a nest by putting scraps of soft paper and a dish towel into a cardboard box, they tried to feed it on morsels of bread soaked in milk, holding them on a toothpick. When it refused to swallow, they bought fresh ground steak, and when it accepted the worm-shaped bits of meat, she fed it at two-hour intervals. Sometimes they went out, searching for worms. It looked like a young starling, with furry eyebrows. She stayed awake at night, listening for the sound of feeble claws and wings against the cardboard. The bird survived for three days, but when it tried to run, it collapsed: one of its legs had started to stiffen, and it became feebler, choking and chirping pathetically. On the third day, when they went out for a walk, they were reluctant to go back indoors, nervous of having to confront the dying creature. Hughes finished it off by gassing it. He attached the rubber bath hose to the jet off the hob, taping the other end into the artificial nest. But the bird was still alive when he picked it out of the box. It lay in his hand, feebly opening and shutting its beak, waving its upturned claws. Five minutes later it was dead. They took it to the park, and buried it under one of the druid stones, leaving ferns and a green firefly on its grave. Ten days later Sylvia was still thinking about obsessionally. She tried to cure the obsession by writing a story. A dying bird becomes a tormenting spirit, twisting the lives of the couple who take care of it.

In addition to all her other work, Sylvia was trying to teach herself German, studying a grammar lesson each day in a text book. She widened her vocabulary by reading the Grimms’ fairy tales in the edition Aurelia had given her, and listing all the unfamiliar words. But this wasn’t enough, and, urgently wanting to make contact with other people, she thought of learning Stenotype, a form of speedwriting, to qualify herself for a part-time job. If she could work as a courtroom reporter, she’d pick up material she could use in her fiction.

At the beginning of October she went out to three agencies, and was interviewed the next day for a secretarial job in the psychiatric clinic of the Massachusetts General Hospital. The pay was low and she’d have to work more hours than she’d intended, but she agreed to start at the beginning of the following week. She had to answer the telephone, typing records and making arrangements for a staff of over twenty-five doctors and their patients. But she gained unexpected insights into the private anxieties of Bostonians. On the second day she met a fat woman who had nightmares about her own funeral; she was lying in a coffin but also weeping among the mourners. There was a lesbian cloakroom attendant who modelled in the nude for a photographer; there was a man who believed he’d called up a hurricane and was responsible for the programmes he watched on television – he’d created them like dreams. One woman had nightmares about her amputated head, which was hanging on by the skin; another dreamed of finding her mother’s head in a laundry bag, together with the heads of four children. There were so many kinds of fear, so many sources of terror. Snakebite, loneliness, the snapping of a lift cable. Fear was the chief god. During attacks of panic over the last two years, Sylvia had sometimes thought she ought to get herself psychoanalysed, but by the middle of October this impulse was evaporating. Daily contact with other neuroses seemed to be doing her good, making her more objective.

Her story ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ centres on the idea of fear as a god. Typing reports on patients’ complaints about their anxieties, the narrator regards herself as Johnny Panic’s secretary, and in the context of patients’ dreams she records her own dream about being suspended over a vast, semi-transparent lake with dragons at its bottom. Developing the imagery she’d used in ‘Lorelei’, Sylvia transposes it. This time the lake represents the collective unconscious, a public reservoir of nightmares. When the narrator stays in her office overnight to copy out notes on nightmares, she’s caught and punished with electro-convulsive therapy. Before the switch is pressed to operate the machine, the false priests in surgical masks and gowns sing a devotional chant in praise of fear. Nothing else deserves to be loved.

The hospital experience – ever since her affair with Dick Norton she’d had some of her scariest experiences in hospitals – also provided her with material for another story, ‘The Daughters of Blossom Street’, which prefigures her own posthumous fame by featuring a messenger boy who’s awarded a gold medal for breaking his neck while doing his job. He’s lucky, says the narrator’s cheerful friend, Dotty. It had been his only chance to become a hero.







http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/bo...lath.html?_r=0

Son of Sylvia Plath Commits Suicide

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR

Published: March 23, 2009

Nicholas Hughes, the son of the poet and novelist Sylvia Plath and the British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, killed himself at his home in Alaska, nearly a half-century after his mother and stepmother took their own lives, according to a statement from his sister.

Mr. Hughes, 47, was a fisheries biologist who studied stream fish and spent much of his time trekking across Alaska on field studies. Shielded from stories about his mother’s suicide until he was a teenager, Mr. Hughes had lived an academic life largely outside the public eye. But friends and family said he had long struggled with depression.

Last Monday, he hanged himself at his home in Alaska, his sister, Frieda Hughes, said over the weekend.

“It is with profound sorrow that I must announce the death of my brother, Nicholas Hughes, who died by his own hand on Monday 16th March 2009 at his home in Alaska,” she said in a statement to the Times of London. “He had been battling depression for some time.”

Mr. Hughes’s early life was darkened by shadows of depression and suicide. Ms. Plath explored the themes in her 1963 novel “The Bell Jar,” which follows an ambitious college student who tries to kill herself after suffering a nervous breakdown while interning at a New York City magazine. The novel reflected Ms. Plath’s own experiences, including her early struggles with depression and her attempt at suicide while working at Mademoiselle in New York as a college student.

After a stay at a mental institution, Ms. Plath went on to study poetry at Cambridge University, where she met Ted Hughes, who was on his way to world fame as a poet. The two were married in 1956, and had two children — Nicholas and Frieda — but separated in 1962 after Mr. Hughes began an affair with another woman, Assia Wevill. Ms. Plath killed herself at the age of 30 by sticking her head in an oven in her London home on Feb. 11, 1963, as Nicholas and Frieda slept nearby.

Six years later, Ms. Wevill, who had helped raise Nicholas and Frieda after Ms. Plath’s death, killed herself and her 4-year-old daughter, Shura. Ms. Wevill styled the murder-suicide in the same manner, using a gas stove.

Mr. Hughes, who became Poet Laureate in 1984 and was widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of his generation, resisted speaking openly about the deaths for many years. But in his last poetic work, “Birthday Letters,” published in 1998, he finally broke his silence and explored the theme. He died the same year, as the book — in some ways considered a quest for redemption — was climbing best-seller lists.

Mr. Hughes was said to have protected his children from details about their mother’s suicide for many years. But in at least one poem he seemed to indicate that Nicholas, who was only 1 at the time of her death, was pained even as a small child, recalling in one stanza how Nicholas’s eyes “Became wet jewels/ The hardest substance of the purest pain/ As I fed him in his high white chair.”

Nicholas had a passion for wildlife, particularly fish. As a young adult he studied at the University of Oxford, where he obtained a bachelor of science degree in 1984 and a master of arts degree in 1990. Afterward, he traveled to the United States, earning a doctoral degree from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he became an assistant professor at the School of Fisheries and Ocean Science. According to the University, Mr. Hughes was an expert in “stream salmonid ecology” and carried out his research in Alaska and New Zealand. He resigned from the faculty in 2006 but continued his research, the school said.

One graduate student there, Lauren Tuori, recalled a peculiar habit of Mr. Hughes’s, saying he would often “seek out a larch tree in a forest of spruce.”

She added, “Alaska could use more biologists like Nick who still display wonder at the small things around them.”



https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...-kills-himself

Nicholas Hughes, the son of the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, has hanged himself at the age of 47. The former fisheries scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks had carved out a successful scientific career in one of the remotest parts of the western world, but ultimately he could not escape the legacy of being the offspring of one of the most famous and tragic literary relationships of the 20th century.

Those who know little else about his mother know that she was the American-born poet who gassed herself in the kitchen of her north London home in February 1963 while her one-year-old son and his two-year-old sister, Frieda, slept in their cots in a nearby room. Plath had placed towels around the kitchen door to make sure the fumes did not reach her children. She had been distraught at the break-up of her relationship with Hughes, following her discovery of his infidelity. Six years after their mother's death, in 1969, their father's then partner, Assia Wevill, also killed herself, killing her four-year-old daughter Shura in the process.

Plath's relationship with the future poet laureate has been the subject of numerous literary and personal memoirs and biographies, and even a film, as well as long-running attacks on her husband's reputation and behaviour by some feminists. She addressed one of her last poems, Nick and the Candlestick, to her baby son: "O love, how did you get here? O embryo … In you, ruby/ The pain you wake to is not yours … You are the one." Although Nicholas Hughes's father maintained an anguished public silence about the tragedy, poems written at the time, published in the last year of his life, also spoke of his relationship with his son.

In a statement issued late on Sunday evening, Frieda Hughes reported: "It is with profound sorrow that I must announce the death of my brother Nicholas Hughes, who died by his own hand on Monday 16 March 2009 at his home in Alaska. He had been battling depression for some time.

"His lifelong fascination with fish and fishing was a strong and shared bond with our father (many of whose poems were about the natural world). He was a loving brother, a loyal friend to those who knew him and despite the vagaries that life threw at him, he maintained an almost childlike innocence for the next project or plan."

A report in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner today by its columnist Dermot Cole understandably celebrates Hughes's academic and personal qualities rather than his literary associations. Noting that his initial scientific training had been at Oxford, Cole says he earned a doctorate at the University of Alaska in 1991: "He made lasting friendships in Fairbanks with those who shared his inventive interests in such varied pursuits as stream ecology, pottery, woodworking, boating, bicycling, gardening and cooking the perfect pecan pie … He spent countless summer hours in his research of grayling and salmon in the Chena river, exhibiting all the patience and wonder that defines a great fisherman. One of his innovations was rigging underwater cameras to get a three-dimensional view of the fish feeding in the passing current."

That interest may seem to pop psychologists an altogether more positive inherited legacy, of Ted Hughes's passionate interest in fishing, and indeed his father made several visits to Alaska before his death in 1998. Nicholas's particular academic specialism was in the behaviour of fish in currents. A 2004 paper explored why larger fish swim upstream in the turbulence of midstream rather than in the quieter waters near the banks: "Large fish swim further from the bank to avoid wave drag, the resistance associated with the generation of surface waves when swimming close to the surface," he wrote.

Hughes gave up his professorship two years ago to concentrate on pottery, although the paper said he continued his research with his partner, Christine Hunter, also a biologist.

Cole wrote: "A few times I called to let him know I would like to write about his life and his family connections whenever a news story about his parents appeared, but he did not think it was a good idea, so it never happened. He deserved his privacy. By and large, people in Fairbanks respected that, which is a good comment on our part of the world. In Alaska he had the freedom and the opportunity to live on his own terms and be recognised for his own accomplishments. Here he was not a literary figure forever defined by the lives of his parents."

In Plath's poems, he was her saviour

The shock and sadness of the news of Nicholas Hughes's death is almost unbearable. In his mother's poetry, he was saviour and life force - at his birth, she wrote, "this great bluish, glistening boy shot out onto the bed in a wave of tidal water that drenched all four of us to the skin, howling lustily", and he was for her the baby in the barn, "the one solid the spaces lean on". She loved her children, but not even loving them could save her, or, it now seems, him. Her son tried to survive her, escaping to Alaska, pursuing the wild fish through the icy rivers, but in the end he swam back up stream to the terrible birth and death place. Plath was heroic, in her struggles to create light and art from darkness, and so, I must and need to feel, was he.


http://www.internal.org/Sylvia_Plath/Death_Co_

“Death & Co.”by Sylvia Plath

Two, of course there are two.
It seems perfectly natural now —
The one who never looks up, whose eyes are lidded
And balled? like Blake's.
Who exhibits

The birthmarks that are his trademark—
The scald scar of water,
The nude
Verdigris of the condor.
I am red meat. His beak

Claps sidewise: I am not his yet.
He tells me how badly I photograph.
He tells me how sweet
The babies look in their hospital
Icebox, a simple

Frill at the neck
Then the flutings of their Ionian
Death-gowns.
Then two little feet.
He does not smile or smoke.

The other does that
His hair long and plausive
Bastard
Masturbating a glitter
He wants to be loved.

I do not stir.
The frost makes a flower,
The dew makes a star,
The dead bell,
The dead bell.

Somebody's done for.



http://genius.com/Sylvia-plath-elm-annotated

“Elm” by Sylvia Plath

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.


Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.


Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.


I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.


Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.


The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.


I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.


I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.


I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.


Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?


I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?——


Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.




In this poem Sylvia Plath assumes a persona, that of a personified tree. It is, of course, herself, and she uses the device as an extended metaphor, describing the roots reaching into dark underground depths rather than the usual exposed trunk and branches. This signifies the person, herself, who seems ordinary from the outside but has complex deep, dark depths within. Sylvia Plath struggled with depression and mental illness throughout her life.

Sylvia Plath uses three pronouns—“she,” “I,” and “you”—which can be read as the divided selves of one identity as well as three separate roles.

“She” not only signifies the elm tree but also the artistic detachment of the poet from both “I” and “you.” Plath distances herself from the tree and merges with it. She therefore creates the multiple voices of the poet’s psyche.

Structure

The poem comprises fourteen stanzas of three non-rhyming lines each; a structure characteristic of Plath. This, like many of her other poems, is a first person monologue in free verse, with terse lines of unequal length reflecting the meaning and emotions of the poet.

Language and Imagery

Sylvia Plath’s poetry is usually dense and often obscure. She uses vivid and imaginative imagery that can be interpreted in multiple ways. Here, she conveys meaning through complex, wide-ranging and disparate ideas, rather like flashing camera shots — elm, a horse, poison, dreams etc. Random as they may seem, the images overlap and repeat themselves cleverly so, for example, the violence of the broken tree in stanza 7 is echoed by the murderous face in stanza 13; the horse in stanza 4 is repeated in stanza 5; the bird in stanza 10 reappears in stanza eleven. There are many others. They serve to draw the poem together so that Plath paints a terrifying picture of depression, despair and rage, digging deep into emotional depths.

[velveteen]

Bringing this thread back. Plath was an EIE.

[HERO]

I think Sylvia Plath was ISFp. Maybe SEI-Fe (Dominant? subtype). I've never really tried to type Ted Hughes. He may have been Alpha NT (ENTp / INTj) or Beta NF (INFp / ENFj). I think he was the Intuitive type and she was a Sensor. I'm not sure if they were duals or not.

Alternative typing: ISFj



Around 11:00 —

Interviewer: “Would you have it any other way?”

Sylvia Plath: “I wouldn’t, no, not at all. Even being a very practical and domestic housewife as I am, I think the advantages are too great to want to change.”

….

Around 14:40—

Interviewer: “Is that how you would’ve put it?”

Sylvia Plath: “Me, well—I think perhaps I’m a little more practical about it, not quite so abstract.”


….

Around 17:46—

Sylvia Plath: “I know my own distaste for a certain kind of slack lyrical quality or floweriness . . . .”

[Dauphin]

Based on her writings, I'd say SEI, a lot of imagery and Fe confessionalism with little substance and no art.
The reason she's still so popular is because she's the personification of the worst aspects of adolescent femininity. Stupid young girls and stupid women identify with her stupidity.
Ted was more interesting. I think he's an xIE, while heavy leaning toward EIE.

[thistle]

This seems like introverted intuition's monologue that she has found words for:

Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self - like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion. I am back in my room at Haven House after the Thanksgiving holidays. Homesick is the name they give to that sick feeling which dominates me now. I am alone in my room, between two worlds. Downstairs are the few girls who have come in - no freshmen, no one I really know. I could go down with a letter paper as an excuse for my presence, but I won't yet - not yet. No, I won't try to escape myself by losing myself in artificial chatter: "Did you have a nice vacation?" "Oh yes, and you?" I'll stay here and try to pin that loneliness down.

SEI seems unlikely to me because Sylvia describes her sensations in a scornful, repulsed way. It's uncomfortable to read.

[Marep]

SEI

[Aster]

Beta NF. Maybe EIE-Ni imo.

She does have a lot of imagery in her writing. But it’s all very symbolic & personal to her. It’s not based on a Si good feeling thing. A lot of things she talks about is dark deep and disturbing things using symobolism, beautiful symbolism which isn’t as dark.

“The poem is about resurrection – but implicit within its title, and Sylvia Plath’s reference to the man whom Jesus brought back from the dead, is the idea of annihilation or extinction, a theme that is never far away from us with a Plath poem. Another important aspect of ‘Lady Lazarus’ – which is alluded to in Plath’s reference to the ‘peanut-crunching crowd’ – is the idea of suffering as spectacle, a theatre of cruelty to which people might pay to see: what the novelist J. G. Ballard, less than a decade later, would call the ‘atrocity exhibition’.”

-
https://www.google.com/amp/s/interes...ould-read/amp/

lol how Beta NF is that

[youfloweryourfeast]

Intuition strong maybe IEE I say why soon

[qaz00]

I don't see much of a true, skilled intuition (but quite a lot of learned, obsessed over, surface level kind of Ni, similar to Braingel), HC-ESE-Fe.

[youfloweryourfeast]

Idk if any of Braingel writing so I can’t correlate anything in this case, but I have made observations that Fixating is actually apart of having high intuition in aspects along with High Ni, and well most people cannot imagine very well, or more so write vividly in a way that makes me interpret it to be intuition, but with Sylvia there is something metaphorical, and unique to her writing, which is why I speculate she was likely intuitive. Maybe she uses si in some corners of it but seems more expanding why I think Ne is more fitting to begin.
But types like SEE and ESE have 1d Ni so quite frankly they are gonna be more in touch with reality and not care for these things, not that they can’t write or anything, any type is capable of it but being able to go in depth of ideas Ne/ni. “Not inclined to give herself up to dreams and fantasies, she finds it difficult to create an internal world that is not connected with reality – her attention is always concentrated on the exterior of things. Therefore she often doesn’t realize the deeper essence of a person or event, but makes judgments based on what she sees, (aspect of Ni polr).
Find it difficult to look into the deeper, concealed possibilities of events. There can also be some aspects of Ne polr u should look into descriptions on intuition ect. Thus most sensing types are gonna be living in reality, seeing concrete thing, they are not really gonna be off in their head in daydreams such., this why am leaning to IEE for her and ne is collective unconscious or metaphysical awareness and I think she was trapped in her extraverted intuition gonna write more on.

[Braingel]

I don't see much of a true, skilled intuition (but quite a lot of learned, obsessed over, surface level kind of Ni, similar to Braingel), HC-ESE-Fe.

Can you seriously stop this shit. My intuition isn’t “learnt” or “obsessed on”. When the fuck will you learn about autism spectrum disorder and how you confuse my condition with my cognition. And if anything, my sensory functions are “obsessed on”. You don’t even know me or how I developed, you pretentious, vapid, assuming, ignorant man.

You are a horrible judge of character. You don’t even have any business studying typology, when all your “typings” stem from your own shitty, false sensory impressions of people that aren’t even accurate and are 100% on your own “experience”.

You and Juan Sandoval are the worst typists I’ve ever seen. Juan hasn’t even typed me anything, but you type the same way as him. And you both are Si leads. This is why Si doms often make shit typists. Not always, but often.

[Braingel]

I don't see much of a true, skilled intuition (but quite a lot of learned, obsessed over, surface level kind of Ni, similar to Braingel), HC-ESE-Fe.

Until you learn about autism spectrum disorder and get me out of your shit ass “experience” algorithm that isn’t even accurate, you can shut the fuck up and keep me out of your fucking mouth. FUCk YOU, you bastard. You’re a shit stain to the community. No one needs your shitty inputs on anything. They are completely invalid. You don’t have any place or business typing others. You’re the second worst typist I’ve ever seen.

You are so fucking stupid, you don’t even see how you trigger my complex ptsd or care, and don’t even understand how my reactions to you are ptsd to begin with. You are so fucking stupid, you confuse complex ptsd and autism symptoms YOU don’t even interpret correctly to begin with in the face of functions, as related to functions. You can’t get me out of your stupid ass experience algorithm. I wish you never fucking encountered me, get me out of your fucking head and shut the fuck up on anything coming to me, you stupid ass brain rot.

You are so fucking stupid and brain dead. You can’t even get that FIXATION IS A LITETAL DEFINING SYMPTOM OF AUTISM. To even put that on cognitive functions is not only inaccurate, but fucking offensive. You are literally dehumanizing my autism, and are acting like it doesn’t exist and just is on “functions”.

[Braingel]

I don't see much of a true, skilled intuition (but quite a lot of learned, obsessed over, surface level kind of Ni, similar to Braingel), HC-ESE-Fe.

https://theplaceforchildrenwithautis...order%20(OCD).

Fixation, or hyper-focusing on a specific interest, is a recognized feature of autism. Fixations, along with other features or symptoms of autism like repetitive behaviors and cognitive inflexibility, may appear from the outside to be symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)

You stupid ass bastard. Stop dehumanizing me with my autism, and also stop triggering my cptsd when you damn well know what you’re doing, seeing me react like this now numerous times, you fucker. You’re so stupid, you won’t even be able to see this is a ptsd reaction. You’ll think this is “extroversion” “Se”, because you’re so stupid and ignorant with psychology and you are the one who has no intuition, that you can’t even see how people develop overtime and how trauma impacts brain impulse and emotional control.

Seriously. You shut the fuck up on me, until you actually study autism and complex ptsd. Since you rely on your shitty “experience algorithm”, this also means find autistic people with cptsd as fucked up as me of every type.

You are a fucking MORON.

https://aztrauma.org/childhood-traum...ceived-threat/

[Braingel]

Do I seriously need to post another fucking video… To make a fucking point, of my life.. With how I am treated still to this fucking day.

[Braingel]

I don't see much of a true, skilled intuition (but quite a lot of learned, obsessed over, surface level kind of Ni, similar to Braingel), HC-ESE-Fe.

You abusive and ignorant piece of crap.

Look you idiot. This happened a few days ago: https://youtube.com/shorts/MRCzumvDl...UwfUyoO6eqm5xn

that’s how I am treated weekly, you ignorant fucker. What do you think it would do to my nervous system overtime, to have my autism triggers ignored. Did you know as a little girl I had my father repeatedly speed and threaten to crash the car to kill us, in response to my autism stimming? Did you know he mauled me by my hair and nearly broke my neck? Did you know he called me names like a “worthless piece of shit”: https://youtube.com/shorts/uW_UM6eos...bcGe8ORvfPGQzh

Did you know I’ve been choked. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...ff00728903144&
Had a bully plot kill me and get expelled, that I’ve been whipped with a belt and had a beetle put in my ear in a facility.. Had my backpack taken at recess and wet at the drinking fountain.. Did you know I’ve been molested. Do you know I’ve faced sexual stuff in family.. Did you know my sister was trained up to abuse and harass me until she got mature enough to break out a few years ago, just like she’s doing here as an 11 year old child, telling me to “shut the fuck up” as my mother hits me with her back brace for my autism stimming, my chants: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/482c6khl5...ExCf-bgma?dl=0

Did you know my uncle is a lifelong felon in prison diagnosed with ASPD: https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/losangel...ctims-husband/


Did you fucking know? Or did you think it’s fake and dramatic and I exaggerate this shit. Like some “4D Fe type”.. Because that’s how you see me in your fucked Ip, stupid ass head. Because you lack the intuition to see how things develop and root, and that’s why you can’t even tell MY REACTIVITY and sensory shit is maladaptive. Because you’re so shit at telling. I was not even that reactive. I literally got forced to be this way by 500 people. My family, school bullies, facility staff, online trolls.

Do you know what that will do to make me reactive? Like how I am now? Did you see how my father called me a “liar”, did you fucking see that, you ignorant fucker? I get invalidated EVERYDAY.

You are causing me pain. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...da5c3d91cf57c&

You have made me cry not only, but triggered a deep emotional flashback. My body is shaking uncontrollably. I feel like a 5 year old child right now.

And you don’t fucking care. You don’t care enough to bother to see how I actually developed and assume my reactivity is inherent to me, when I’ve been abused endlessly for more than a decade and a half.

Do you realize for you to not even see why I became reactivity like this and to assume it’s my personality is an insult? Do you not fucking fathom that your disregard to the autism fixation and putting it on a type reminds me of my family acting like my autism is invalid, like my dad did to my sensory antidotes just the other day? Did you know you are making me feel worthless and shittt. Did you know you are so fucking wrong about me and you are enabling the people who have traumatized me, by assuming this beaten down self of me is my true self. Fuck you Qaz.

You perpetuate my pain and trauma with your ignorance and disregard, and this all shows you could never understand what it takes for me to have gotten to where I am today.. And you don’t even fucking know that the intuition has always been there. Even from infancy, my autism fixation and noticing patterns with words, and learning how to read as a baby and fluent to by two and a half… Anyone would tell you my intuition has always been with me, since I’ve grown up. If anything, my fixation on aromatherapy and shit is maladaptive.

[Braingel]

Do you even know how it fucking feels to be thrown into the trash.. Like you don’t matter, you’ve been made feel you’re worthless your entire life; even have been called a worthless piece of shit.. No friends in person.. And for this reaction developing to this all and the abuse, is to just.. stab a knife in to a whole other level, and bleed out what little blood you’ve left emotionally, and it’s frantic and intense, trying desperately to have loving blood put back in..

You don’t even have a right to type me. You’re just stabbing another knife in, you don’t see. You get it all wrong, you just stabbed in an artery, when you were supposed to go for the spot that is how I am actually, and you just spilt out more.. You just take out things from me more, rather than put into place.

[Braingel]

You’ve to have the emotional flashback of someone from years worth of trauma, to tell you that you’re a shitty person. Playing with emotions, making ignorant statements, enabling dynamics that result in more being unseen and traumatized. Half-assing with people and invalidating how someone is, and you’ve even called it before “a delusion”. There is nothing more delusional than of you. @qaz00

Someone can call this “bpd splitting”, but no, I believe this is warranted, even if it is “extreme” from my emotional flashback I had… You have done enough. And you can keep to yourself and fuck off. What you’ve say is a waste of time, invalid, and I only invested time because I was so triggered and stabbed in a wound of many years I’ve had, and I bled and reacted amid that.

You are too hubristic, stupid, ignorant, and a jerk, to even bother to know about sensitive matters like cptsd and autism, and try and type things related to this as “functions”. You are too heartless and stupid to know the impact of these things and how you assume, taunt, jab, and shit. And you will go crying about my blood stained you or you’ll just laugh it off and roll your eyes, which is more likely with your belittling personality.

It is very likely that you studied typology in first place to escape deep analysis of people and have a cheap cop out with your “VI” experience methods to half ass and scan a person and have shallow impressions about them, to compensate for your own deficits with people and their essence and their traumas and motives.

You are such a thick skull, that even if you feel sorry and reconsider of your doing and assumptions, you will clutch unto these rather than inform yourself on cptsd and autism, and to gather a broader database than of myself, when I can’t represent any normal or typical person you’ve “typed”, but it’s unlikely most your typings have validity to begin with.

[Braingel]

And you also are so stupid too, that you don’t know jack about shadows, reversals, loops, and this sort. Intuitive types can literally reverse into sensory functions amid stress or loop them, and sensors can intuitive.. irrational leads can become opposing thinking and feeling looped.

[Braingel]

I made this unlisted video, talking about the impact of @qaz00 and of other things in general with my autism and cptsd https://youtu.be/FrB5k5KxTMU?si=Gvth3T-8sbR7ZsTO

[Braingel]

And of why this is a trigger in general, and how some of the things Qaz said of being literal, literally has been trained into me in 9 years of speech and language aba influenced therapy https://youtu.be/vLjC6uyWncY?si=6-jAosONEY47AjwQ

[Braingel]

For @qaz00 to even have a valid opinion on my type with what he is thinking, he’d have to not only study autism and cptsd, but also aba tberapy, that literally trains out a person’s essence and natural personality, and replaces them with neurotypical style things. I literally got my advanced use of words and metaphorical communicative style trained out of me in normal social situations, overtime for 9 years. This by the way, is PTSD-inducing itself. The therapy is abusive and is also linked to ptsd itself, which also has role in my reactions, not just parental invalidation and dismissal.

https://www.researchgate.net/publica...ed%20to%20ABA.

https://therapistndc.org/aba-therapy-and-ptsd/

I was called “unethical” by a professional colleague today.

The reason may surprise you—I said “ABA is abuse”. My peer was naturally taken aback because they are an SLP-BCBA and “would never dream of abusing a child.” I always find this rebuttal interesting because we usually don’t hear about people walking around admitting to abusing people; even overt predators somehow convince themselves that they are helping their victim. The sanctimonious SLP-BCBA told me that it was the “old ABA” and not “new ABA” that was harmful, and then only a small fraction of the time.

Humans have an amazing innate response to survive when they are faced with a threat or danger, fight, flight, or freeze. This is an automatic nervous system response. The fight and flight responses are triggered by the sympathetic nervous system, and the freeze response is triggered by the parasympathetic nervous system. Both of these systems combined make up the autonomic nervous system (ANS). When one of the responses is dispatched the human body simultaneously releases adrenaline and cortisol. If the ANA is only triggered once, for example maybe you almost rear-end someone while driving, your body would typically return to a calm state in 20-30 minutes. But, when the ANS is repeatedly triggered without time to regulate and return cortisol levels to a manageable level, what results is trauma-induced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). (Cleveland Clinic, 2019)

The BCBA ignores the child’s visibly growing state of overwhelm, in pursuit of behavior modification. Because the student is not permitted to self-regulate by walking away for a minute or taking a break, a meltdown ensues.
Now, let’s about talk Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD):
Depersonalization disorder (DPD), a dissociative subtype of PTSD was identified secondary to neuroimaging evidence linking it to an early life history of adversity and a combination of frontal activation and limbic inhibition. (Spiegel, et al., 2013) DPD often occurs after the individual is deprived of sensory stimulation. Common triggers of depersonalization include severe stress, particularly from emotional abuse and/or neglect during childhood. (Mayo Clinic, 2017)
Probably the most severe type of PTSD is Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD). In contemporary research, CPTSD is becoming more understood and is identified in individuals that have repeated exposure to trauma happening primarily in childhood and at the hands of a caregiver. Commonly, emotional outbursts are symptoms of CPTSD. (Wilson, 2004)
Now that you have had a crash course in PTSD, let’s apply this information:
As a trauma-informed therapist, it is heartbreaking to see how proud ABA therapists are of their ABA goals, brazenly showing them off on the internet. A quick Google search yields a goldmine of examples to prove my point. Here are behavior goals for a hypothetical student named Keoni:
(Amanda N. Kelly, 2017)
Looking at Keoni’s behavior plan written by a “Ph.D., BCBA-D, LBA” who self proclaims to be an “Ethical Advocate for Accurate Application & Dissemination of Behavior” I notice the obvious goal of complying with a command from an authority figure. Let’s (set aside the grooming for future abuse part of this goal, for a moment) and highlight the following;

• Hovering over the child, letting that child know that the “therapist” is always watching and waiting for them to not comply.
• Instruction to the authority figure to “be firm” with their verbal demands for compliance.
• Direction to the authority figure to “avoid repeating” the demand.
• In order to cease “elopement,” the authority figure is instructed to “redirect Keoni back to the task.”

Now let’s take all of the above and apply it to a common occurrence for an Autistic child in the sensory overwhelming environment of a school classroom.

When an Autistic child’s sensory system becomes overwhelmed, the child may first naturally attempt to self-regulate. Perhaps, in an effort to self-regulate, the Autistic child will attempt to pace back and forth in a pre-calculated pathway in the classroom. The BCBA interprets the behavior of the child seen getting up from their assigned seat and failing to follow the command of “stop” or “come back,” not as a communicative attempt (in self-advocacy) for the need of self-regulation, but rather as a function of her behavior, in this case, “escape” and non-compliance. The BCBA then determines that intervention is necessary.This decision will significantly escalate the situation, and the result is that the ANS system kicks in, triggering the child’s fight, flight, freeze response. But, the BCBA ignores that child’s nervous system’s response because their job is to force compliance of following the commands of “stop,” “wait,” or “come back” in order to extinguish the behavior function of “escape.” The authority figure actively stands in the way of the child’s self-regulation attempts and reignites the child’s fight, flight, freeze response, again, and again, and again. Meanwhile, the child’s body releases adrenaline and cortisol over, and over, and over, until their little body can’t handle anymore and then they go into meltdown.

[Braingel]

For @qaz00 to even have a valid opinion on my type with what he is thinking, he’d have to not only study autism and cptsd, but also aba tberapy, that literally trains out a person’s essence and natural personality, and replaces them with neurotypical style things. I literally got my advanced use of words and metaphorical communicative style trained out of me in normal social situations, overtime for 9 years. This by the way, is PTSD-inducing itself. The therapy is abusive and is also linked to ptsd itself, which also has role in my reactions, not just parental invalidation and dismissal.

https://www.researchgate.net/publica...ed%20to%20ABA.

https://therapistndc.org/aba-therapy-and-ptsd/

What hardly anyone on this forum sees about me (or people in general really)— beneath the surface of my behavior, is the development of this, and what it took for me to become as this. I equate this to a lack of Ni. Inability to perceive a below surface’s development, its erosion and dynamics..

What people don’t understand about me, is that my nervous system was literally programmed by my family, by ABA, by my school peers, by online trolls, by facility staff, by other trauma I’ve had, to be this way. I had a highly sensitive temperament and an autistic brain is also naturally sensitive, and this didn’t help of me. I believe this has a role in my becoming of a double reactive enneagram type, my response to it all..

Every single time my parents have penalized and/or abused me for my autistic behavior— stimming, fixation, disorganization, sensory overload, it has resulted in further emotional escalation of my already dysregulated system. Every single time a speech and language therapist made me look in the eye or got in my face or snapped finger in my face or forced me to do X via repetition— against my own autistic neurology, it created tension to my autistic nervous system that isn’t able to adapt in the way of a neurotypical..

Add all my other trauma and abuses, and imagine how unhinged it would make my reactivity, how easy it would be to assume me as an “EIE”, or even some “4D Se” type.. Because people are seeing the surface, the illusion, and not the deep developments or my inherent qualities and their potentiality— because they lack Ne and Ni.

So they give assumptions and false attributions about me and think me the insane one, because they can’t delve the surface psychologically, penetrate it under, they’ve no view, they’ve no sight of who really, I am.

[Braingel]

What hardly anyone on this forum sees about me (or people in general really)— beneath the surface of my behavior, is the development of this, and what it took for me to become as this. I equate this to a lack of Ni. Inability to perceive a below surface’s development, its erosion and dynamics..

What people don’t understand about me, is that my nervous system was literally programmed by my family, by ABA, by my school peers, by online trolls, by facility staff, by other trauma I’ve had, to be this way. I had a highly sensitive temperament and an autistic brain is also naturally sensitive, and this didn’t help of me. I believe this has a role in my becoming of a double reactive enneagram type, my response to it all..

Every single time my parents have penalized and/or abused me for my autistic behavior— stimming, fixation, disorganization, sensory overload, it has resulted in further emotional escalation of my already dysregulated system. Every single time a speech and language therapist made me look in the eye or got in my face or snapped finger in my face or forced me to do X via repetition— against my own autistic neurology, it created tension to my autistic nervous system that isn’t able to adapt in the way of a neurotypical..

Add all my other trauma and abuses, and imagine how unhinged it would make my reactivity, how easy it would be to assume me as an “EIE”, or even some “4D Se” type.. Because people are seeing the surface, the illusion, and not the deep developments or my inherent qualities and their potentiality— because they lack Ne and Ni.

So they give assumptions and false attributions about me and think me the insane one, because they can’t delve the surface psychologically, penetrate it under, they’ve no view, they’ve no sight of who really, I am.

People can’t grasp that this doesn’t = extroversion. Reactivity. one reason Qaz types me an extrovert is because he thinks I’m reactive. It’s not so much I am reactive, he needs be looking at enneagram, not socionics for this. I had a highly sensitive brain and autistic nervous system, which already causes executive dysfunction in regulating emotions.. This genetic mean I had, and his my environment received turnt me into a 4 with a 6 fix. This isn’t about me having bold Se (2D or 4D), this is my sensitivity and autistic brain. An autistic brain that was sensitive and had all these environmental assaults would become this way, irregardless of Se or Fe placement.

And as far as my intuition being something fixated on, no, my Si is:https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...712d7fec05d56&

Any function in me will look obsessive, because I’m literally autistic with ocd features, but my Si is the maladaptive function that is really focused on.. This is what I’d meant when I had said mental Si can for me in scs, but I believe this has do with trauma and that scs and other socio schools cannot encapture that process and development.

[Braingel]

It frustrates me to no end that I can’t make others see this, but at the end of the day if they can’t, it’s because they’ve shit Ni and Ne like Qaz, and can’t grasp potentialities of a person’s inner, inherent qualities that entourage, or of how things develop overtime. Qaz literally cannot grasp that my reactivity was something that developed overtime from endless assaults to my neervous system with a highly abusive therapy for 9 years, an abusive family, school peers, and more.. That made it go haywire. I had all the skin of my inherently private nature but right off, and all I can do is bleed and be seen now.

He cannot cogitate possibilities of what’s happened to me and my nervous system, which shows poor Ne. He cannot see how my traits developed overtime and impacted who I am today.. Which is poor Ni, and he can’t perceive my inner boundary (bad Ni). Instead, he compensates with his shitty Si experience to tell and “inform” him that I am not “like X” he has talked to, therefore “I am not X”— assuming I can even be compared to those people to begin with, once more showing such trash and shit Ne and Fi., Fi individual characteristics, and Ne underlying potentials and traits of a person’s own essence.

Of course, an issue that isn’t related to typology is that he seriously lacks psychoeducation on autism and complex ptsd, and likely a lot of things. And instead, uses his shitty Si sensory impressions and physical details of a person and his experience of these things and of peoples’ behavior that results in his views of others.

Doesn't even once consider their pathology, if other things can make them seem X, or about any psychological switch system with functions, like the shadow, the grip, the loop.

Instead, he compensates with Gulenko’s shitty DCNH system, and tries type me “SEE-H”, because he knows damn well that’s the only way to force the type on me. This is why dcnh is absolute trash for the most part, because it can get used like this to justify absurd typings.

[Braingel]

All I can say is this kind of behavior is prevalent in modern society and enables abuse. A person who has an outburst at their abuser is seen as the aggressor, if they are past a certain age.. The blame goes unto them, no one can imagine past what they saw…. Qaz putting this to functions and not a deeper dynamic that isn’t even really related to functions, is demonstrative of this very same dynamic— going only by “what he can see”. For him to believe otherwise, he’d have to have seen me before I became traumatized, or would have seen me years from now when I’ve a lesser disgruntled nervous system. It is sad to say, but that’s how thick skull and dumb your average person is. Qaz is just the average Joe, it’s most people.

[Braingel]

What hardly anyone on this forum sees about me (or people in general really)— beneath the surface of my behavior, is the development of this, and what it took for me to become as this. I equate this to a lack of Ni. Inability to perceive a below surface’s development, its erosion and dynamics..

What people don’t understand about me, is that my nervous system was literally programmed by my family, by ABA, by my school peers, by online trolls, by facility staff, by other trauma I’ve had, to be this way. I had a highly sensitive temperament and an autistic brain is also naturally sensitive, and this didn’t help of me. I believe this has a role in my becoming of a double reactive enneagram type, my response to it all..

Every single time my parents have penalized and/or abused me for my autistic behavior— stimming, fixation, disorganization, sensory overload, it has resulted in further emotional escalation of my already dysregulated system. Every single time a speech and language therapist made me look in the eye or got in my face or snapped finger in my face or forced me to do X via repetition— against my own autistic neurology, it created tension to my autistic nervous system that isn’t able to adapt in the way of a neurotypical..

Add all my other trauma and abuses, and imagine how unhinged it would make my reactivity, how easy it would be to assume me as an “EIE”, or even some “4D Se” type.. Because people are seeing the surface, the illusion, and not the deep developments or my inherent qualities and their potentiality— because they lack Ne and Ni.

So they give assumptions and false attributions about me and think me the insane one, because they can’t delve the surface psychologically, penetrate it under, they’ve no view, they’ve no sight of who really, I am.

HECK I’ve even had these episodes with reacting bossy to my parents in front of my bf on call, and my boyfriend is taken aback and says he hates it, because he knows I’m a naturally gentle person and am soft, and I told him I had to develop like this to survive. I have had my boundaries pushed from very young, I’ve been physically abused and I didn’t ever react back to that, even to bullies I never reacted back.. And I had to develop this fight response. This “bossy”, reactive Kara is completely maladaptive. I am naturally a calm person who is composed, but my environments beat this ability into me, and beat these reactions into me.

Every person with complex ptsd can go on all of the 4 phases of it, and I’ve been in every 4, but what this is called is the fight response. It causes a lot of argumentative behavior, and can get confused with sociopathy, narcissism, bpd, and other things:

[IMG]https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1204/0*GNYSem5n4sqnARVW[/IMG]O


That whole paperwork I showed when I started having icepick suicide headaches and muscle spasms when I was 15, is when this ability became emergent, and it wasn’t full-blown. It was only budding. This has never been inherent to me, and this is something I’d to develop, or I would’ve been killed. There are times I have had to boss my parents back literally and control them, to survive life or death situations with them. Other times, I’ve had to submit to them to survive, like comfort my father as he was speeding and threatening crash the car to kill us and “make my mother a widow and my sister fatherless”.. And calm him down. That would’ve been probably my flight/freeze.

Even cptsd itself causes fixation… My fixation is going to show up on my base function a lot obviously, as it is my lead.. And autism will magnify this fixation.

[Braingel]

Idk if any of Braingel writing so I can’t correlate anything in this case, but I have made observations that Fixating is actually apart of having high intuition in aspects along with High Ni, and well most people cannot imagine very well, or more so write vividly in a way that makes me interpret it to be intuition, but with Sylvia there is something metaphorical, and unique to her writing, which is why I speculate she was likely intuitive. Maybe she uses si in some corners of it but seems more expanding why I think Ne is more fitting to begin.
But types like SEE and ESE have 1d Ni so quite frankly they are gonna be more in touch with reality and not care for these things, not that they can’t write or anything, any type is capable of it but being able to go in depth of ideas Ne/ni. “Not inclined to give herself up to dreams and fantasies, she finds it difficult to create an internal world that is not connected with reality – her attention is always concentrated on the exterior of things. Therefore she often doesn’t realize the deeper essence of a person or event, but makes judgments based on what she sees, (aspect of Ni polr).
Find it difficult to look into the deeper, concealed possibilities of events. There can also be some aspects of Ne polr u should look into descriptions on intuition ect. Thus most sensing types are gonna be living in reality, seeing concrete thing, they are not really gonna be off in their head in daydreams such., this why am leaning to IEE for her and ne is collective unconscious or metaphysical awareness and I think she was trapped in her extraverted intuition gonna write more on.

One thing I’ll say quickly to you, flower/E, is that his typing of her as “ESE-HC” may as well be intuitive. It’s literally typing double intuitive-boosted dcnh’s back to back. Whilst I am not averse to subtypes, I don’t care much dcnh, because you can tack on just about anything with this. Even if it is slightly real, it gets used too much to justify absurd typings

[Braingel]

https://www.complextrauma.org/glossary/fight/
To put this:

In the ongoing life and development of the trauma survivor, the fight response can continue to emerge in response to the perception of threat, and often appears as an aggressive reaction to the perception of harm, rejection, or betrayal. For example, an individual might demonstrate a pattern of immediately verbally lashing out when faced with threatening/potentially threatening situations. Fight can also turn inward in self-destructive patterns. Generally occurs in the survivor in response to a trigger that is reminiscent of past traumatic experiences. Therapeutically, it can be useful to assist clients in recognizing the protective nature of these behaviors, while simultaneously working to slow down reactivity and develop more regulated responses.(related terms: Sympathetic Nervous System and Parasympathetic Nervous System, defense cascade)


← Defense CascadeTonic

[COLOR=#000000 !important]Sympathetic Nervous System
A branch of the autonomic nervous system responsible for rapid activation of the fight-flight components of the body's emergency survival response in the face of actual or perceived threat, emotional or physiological overwhelm, or traumatic memories, reminders and conditioned reactions. Triggers accelerated heart rate, rapid breathing, muscle contraction and release of adrenaline, epinephrine and other stress hormones used to fuel the body's survival response. Research suggests that approximately three-quarters of humans demonstrate an SNS-dominant response to trauma characterized by ph

on cognitive functions is dehumanizing as fuck.

https://www.shortform.com/blog/four-fs-of-trauma/

Fight: The person tries to directly confront and overcome the danger.Someone trapped in a fight response will often try to control everything around them through bullying or manipulation. They may seem overly aggressive and are prone to emotional outbursts when they don’t get their way.

Response Type	Definition	May present as…	Mislabeled as…
Fight	posturing against or confronting the perceived threat.	explosive outbursts, anger, defiance, or demanding.	Narcissistic
Flight	fleeing or symbolically fleeing the perceived threat by way of a “hyperactive” response.	anxiety, fidgeting, over-worrying, workaholic tendencies, or fidgeting.

https://neuroclastic.com/the-6fs-of-...responses/?amp

You don’t just have one trauma response. What kind of trauma you have has a huge role, I would say. I have experienced all of the 4 kinds. The freeze is my predominant response.

[Braingel]

I want people to realize the gravity of this all. Imagine labeling an autistic female in her early twenties with complex ptsd as a certain type, because of reactivity.. When a brain isn’t even formed fully until mid to late twenties, and in an autistic person, this would actually come later than then, because of slower brain development https://kids.frontiersin.org/article...ym.2022.644822
, so emotions will be even more visceral. And then throw in cptsd in that and autism executive dysfunction from brain delays and deficit regions.

I want people to actually realize how absurd that is. It isn’t even looking at my cognition replacements of things. Pure surface traits. Traits that aren’t even directly related to functions. Some may be slightly, but this is outside of typological scope.

Then in addition to this, an idiot compare this autistic female with the trauma history that’s extensive, to other examples of people… In the community.. When they don’t have the trauma history to this extent, an active trauma origin living situation, or a slower brain development where emotional and impulse parts of brain mature even slower than of normalcy. Imagine this, then telling the autistic female they’re delusional to view their own self the way they do. This is what Qaz has done to me, in addition to jab, and just be an idiot and jack ass.

[Braingel]

From all this crap last night, I developed an additional set of bags I’ve never had, a little wrinkly under my eye: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...5373e2af20fdf&


I didn’t have this the other day.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...d047efba4cf49&


My body has had enough. I literally already have fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis (diagnosed) from my cptsd. From a constantly inflamed nervous system. I don’t need more of this stupid shit. I need people who treat me with compassion and who don’t make assumptions about me (now I’m crying again god damn it), and I am sick and tired of how this world has made me and continues to.

none of this is inherent to me. This is the byproduct of a far too overstimulated and pushed nervous system. The fact I’ve rheumatoid arthritis in only my early twenties should say this all.

ive a beaten down body and mind. I need nothing other than compassion, because all the maltreatment and non compassion has beaten me down, and is aging me and killing me more and more.

Both fibro and rheumatoid are linked directly to ptsd. https://www.healthline.com/health-ne...20of%20trauma.

https://www.ptsduk.org/trauma-and-fi...r%20condition.

I have been mistaken as homeless 5 times in the last month, because of how badly deteriorated I have become from this all, and how it’s harder to keep up with myself because of.