With a foetus eye

A new record - I managed to get coffee, icing (from delicious danish) and blood (from surprisingly deep paper cut) onto my white shirt this morning, all before 9 am. A friend told me that 'coffee, icing and blood' sounded like something Plath would write about. He then sent me this -

Sylvia Plath tells the story of Goldilocks - Sebastian Faulks, Pistache
	I am the doctor who takes The temperature of each bowl. Daddy Bear, your gruel, Grey as the Feldgrau, Pungent as a jackboot, Rises under an ailing moon. I have been sleeping In your bed, Daddy. Mother's oats are blebbed With ruby stains of fruit preserve Beside the glass fire Of her blood-orange juice. The baby's porridge bubbles With a foetus eye. I swallow the sins it is not His to shrive. I devour The cancerous pallor With spoons of handled bone. I plough the winding-sheets Of each bear bed with my Surgical breathing, as I die and rise Three times before dawn. My golden hair is electric With the light of Borrowed stars, spread out On my pillow of skulls.

Now I really like Sylvia Plath's work - Bell Jar is hysterically funny - and I'm not so keen on sex scenes being described by using key and lock terminology, but this was a Very Good way to start the day. Thanks, M. xx

"I was supposed to be having the time of my life"

I have mixed feeling about The Bell Jar. But parts are incredibly funny.












Esther has just been moved to a new psychiatric hospital.

After Doctor Nolan had gone I found a box of matches on the window-sill. It wasn't an ordinary-size box, but an extremely tiny box. I opened it and exposed a row of little white sticks with pink tips. I couldn't think why Doctor Nolan would have left me such a stupid thing. Carefully I stored the toy matches in the hem of my new wool bathrobe. If Doctor Nolan asked me for the matches, I would say I'd thought they were made of candy and had eaten them.



And I remember being extremely tickled by this bit, when I read it for the first time aged about 15. I think I was going through a difficult phase where getting out of bed, showered and dressed in the morning would feel completely beyond me.


'Lie down,' the nurse said. 'I'm going to give you another injection.' I rolled over on my stomach and hitched up my skirt. Then I pulled down the trousers of my silk pyjamas. 'My word, what all have you got under there?' 'Pyjamas. So I won't have to bother getting in and out of them all the time.'

Daylight with her hatful of trivial repititions

The title of this Plath poem caught my eye. I've been re-reading it all evening.

Insomniac

The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole --
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments--the mizzling days
Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,
Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,
A garden of buggy rose that made him cry.
His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.
Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue --
How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!
Those sugary planets whose influence won for him
A life baptized in no-life for a while,
And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.
Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.
Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

His head is a little interior of grey mirrors.
Each gesture flees immediately down an alley
Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance
Drains like water out the hole at the far end.
He lives without privacy in a lidless room,
The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open
On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.
Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,
Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.
The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.