The Write Thing

There are different ways of meeting people, and different ways of connecting. Life itself is a swimming pool where you can choose to swim in the shallow or the deep side…or both. She is happening to me, and I let her flow around, inside and out. I can afford it now, enjoy the process.

I think of you fondly, I have grown fond of you. It feels calm, good and right. So perhaps, in a few hours, I’ll be just staring into your blue eyes and feeling the emotions transpire as you unfold, a familiar and yet foreign being, because now words have been spoken between us. The door is open, now it is time to go out and play.

Plath. There is Plath hovering around me these days. I have come from a long journey, and my body feels the fatigue of life in a vacuum with wings that takes people places. But there is Plath… and the world, in its slow-pacing death and inevitable pulse of being, takes on a new dimension. On reading her, words heave with full resonance and flailing dissonance. Her tempo, her prose so in tune with the wholeness of life as the protagonist disembodies herself that the text becomes palpable, a skin with thousands of layers that fall down in slow motion. She is nude before New York, a world in itself.

A stiff breeze lifted the hair from my head. At my feet, the city doused its lights in sleep, its buildings blackened, as if for a funeral.
It was my last night.
I grasped the bundle I carried and pulled at the pale tail. A strapless elasticized slip which, in the course of wear, had lost its elasticity, slumped into my hand. I waved it, like a flat of truce, once, twice…The breeze caught it, and I let it go.
A white flake floated out into the night, and began its slow descent. I wondered on what street and rooftop it would come to rest.
I tugged at the bundle again.
The wind made an effort, but failed, and a batlike shadow sank toward the roof garden of the penthouse opposite.
Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray sraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar

I am my own funeral, and the author of my own rebirth. I have fed my soul to the places where I have loved and been loved.

I am my own woman. The next step is life.

In a previous posting, I referred to my feelings about poetry. I have been doing a lot of thinking about that in recent days, and have been very prone to reading challenging verses in my explorations around town. It struck me that there seem to be some associations we could make between writers, even when they may have never met, or may not even come from the same countries. By this I do not mean “influential writing”, the kind Borges is known to inflict upon incautious readers. I am speaking about connections, similarities in the ways of seeing the world, or suffering it, for that matter.

The case that comes to mind today is that of Sylvia Plath and Alejandra Pizarnik. Plath (1932-1963) was born in Massachusetts, and Pizarnik (1936-1972) in Buenos Aires. I remember reading Pizarnik’s Sala de Psicopatología almost a year ago on a Saturday afternoon in Buenos Aires, as I was sitting in my balcony. Many years before, I had read Plath’s The Bell Jar and, later, one of the best poems ever written: Lady Lazarus*.

It is at some point striking (at least it was to me) how both writers approach the subject of death and suffering as worn-out souls in a world of less sensitive beings. The harshness of Pizarnik’s taboo Spanish, the sharp and cutting sounds of Plath’s monosyllables in her own inverted eulogy to everything and nothing are the meeting points of their synergy, which is particular to each of them and common to both in nature. I have read lengthy discussions on the authors’ death techniques, the repeated suicide attempts and other alleged similarities, but I do not really think those are interesting themselves. Their writing and the distinct communion of chance it holds are far more important to me in drawing a common line. I see these more as Double Vie de Véronique traits than as a mirroring reflection of mutual admiration. I ignore Plath’s or Pizarnik’s actual knowledge of one another, and it is far from relevant. The key element seems to be parallelism instead of imitation, art that emerges unique in the form of two different but resembling realities.

*If you click on the link you will be able to access the BBC website, where Plath’s own reading of the poem is posted. A “must do” if you want to enjoy a blissful moment of perfection.