- Sylvia Plath, "Mirror"I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful ‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
Monday, May 2, 2016
Reality in the Mirror
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8 comments:
I beg to differ. What each individual sees in a mirror is merely a reflection of his dreams, fears, wishes, fantasies, and pre-c9nceived notions.
I dislike and reject Sylvia Plath –– not because she was insane, which she obviously was –– but because she rejected the challenges and great opportunities LIFE offers everyone, but especially people of talent and keen perception.
The way she thought –– or FAILED to think –– and the stupid WASTE she made of herself were reprehensible in the extreme.
He attitude –– or sickness, if we must call it that –– was one of the purest forms of selfishness and lack of consideration for others ever put on record.
In truth Sylvia Plath –– a very pretty young woman with a high IQ who had EVERYTHING going for her including a fine, handsome, high-achieving husband –– was a MONSTER.
If there is a Hell, I think she belongs there.
I suppose I'm not very familiar enough with her story to comment.
One June morning in the meadow going
Doris found a little daisy growing
Blooming there, white and fair
Nodding in the pleasant summer air.
"Tell me, Daisy, quickly, truly tell me,
Does my loved one love me well?
Will he be true till life is done?"
Then she plucked the petals one by one.
"He loves me.
He loves me not.
Beware, O little flower
Lest y ou break my heart.
He loves me.
He loves me not.
Why you lying little daisy!
He LOVES me.
~ I. Wishinu
Trip, trip over the grass
Merrily came a laughing lass,
The daisies peeped to see her pass
All on a summer's morning.
Her pitcher bore unto the well
Which lay in the lap of a mossy dell
And voice rang clear as a silver bell
The flowers were her rivals ...
~ I. Wishinu
Lest you think me a swine I have to admit Plath's poem "Mirror" is a very good poem.
Unfortunately, that gives me all the more reason to despise the way she threw away her life.
One of my cousins married a woman such as Plath. Her name was Sarah Anne. She was not so gifted as Plath, but highly intelligent, sensitive and physically attractive all the same. Nevertheless, her one burning ambition since childhood was to commit suicide.
Why she married my cousin we'll never know for sure. Raised as a "Good Catholic Girl" I believe she did it for no other reason than it was expected of her.
My cousin wanted to have a big family. Sarah Anne didn't want any children at all.
When her one and only child arrived, she kicked my cousin out of their bedroom, rejected the baby, and left him in his carriage out in the garage unattended for hours on end. His grandmother had no choice but to take over. If she hadn't, the baby would have died of neglect.
One day when the little fellow was a little more than two years old, Sarah Anne called her mother-in-law, and asked her please to take the child away for the afternoon.
Sarah Anne "has something to do."
Later that day, my cousin came home from work and found his wife's lifeless body in the garage. She had hooked a wide, flexible tube to the muffler, got into the car, tuned on the engine and neatly asphyxiated herself. She must have been planning it for weeks, because she knew exactly what to do to complete the sad task.
That was forty years ago. My cousin married again, had more children, and the little boy is now a successful practicing attorney with children of his own, but Sarah Anne's act of pure selfishness and desperation still casts long shadow.
Plath committed suicide as well... I suppose I "get it".
Suicide is hard to forgive, but post-partum depression (and other depressions and psychoses) are real things. Morality is no better a substitute for psychiatry than psychology is for morality.
Psychology is the means we have for dealing with" pathogenic" morality. "Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?" (Lacan's "ethics of psychoanalysis") To compromise that desire, means to feel "guilt".
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