[insert movie montage of all the shit that's happened since last year and move on like me

Normally, I really only like to write about texts that I've read - I like to spend more time studying the way I interpret others' words, rather than perhaps how I pompously felt that they should have interpreted mine.

Tower of Babel, all over again, I get it - but I also believe to speak a universal language is to speak the language of God, and we can't do that, not in phonemes.

Anyway, this is a much much more confessional entry, but it includes a brief narrative anecdote, and any insight would be appreciated, if you feel you're equipped to workshop someone else's life.

I don't know how to have conversations, sometimes.  I don't mean, like over which medium, or I'll freeze up with clammy palms.

I mean, there are conversations I never conceived were even possible, that I have had in the past year.    The past I don't plan to mention, but the conversation occurred today: the one that made me realize that this is like the first time anyone's ever had to have this conversation, but at the same time, i hate knowing it's not.

I was talking to Julia's mother today.  I have spent all winter-spring nursing iris bulbs, as those were Julia's favorite flowers for her whole life; then I had to question the logistics.  These are the logistics of if you can plant someone's favorite plant somewhere near her grave. I had to ask shit like, if the headstone is flat to the ground, are you or are you not allowed to plant next to it?  

These are the things break my heart, because I never thought I'd have these conversations with Julia's mom.  Our reactions to death change as we age, I know this, now, but I'm just 31, and when Julia committed suicide, she was just 29.

This conversation, and these messed up details, should never have  been discussed in a perfect world.  At least her mother understands, and we are going to go next week and sneak bulbs down in the "common natural" landscape areas.

It drove me crazy, just to figure out how to ask her mom this question without her or me just spontaneously combusting in the process.  

God bless the weary hearted.

...

I have yet to forget about my promise to give the steamy details of my own experience of reading Edith Wharton's short stories.  I have loved every one I have read so far, the last being entitled, "Expiation."  It's the funniest shit in the world if you've ever worked in publishing, as I have, or if you have spent your life in a constant downward spiral of rejection letters, it might make you feel not so bad about it.  Anyway, this morning, I am only up because the plumber was at my house at 8:30 am, my dog was screaming at him the whole time, and now I get to run out, get my arm stuck with a big needle for blood work, and finally, I shall join my two faux-kids (the kids I stay with).  This isn't why I am writing, though.  I have compiled a rough draft of a summer reading list.  These are just books that I'd like to be able to say I didn't just read, but that I really absorbed the message behind the text.  So this is a tentative reading list, and also a topic list you may enjoy looking forward to as I sluggishly catch up on Edith, moving along to Jeanette.

1. Art and Lies - by Jeanette Winterson

2. Their Eyes Were Watching God - by Zora Neale Hurston

3. The House of Leaves - by Danielewski

3. The Financial Lives of Poets - by Jess Walter

4. Hamlet on the Holodeck - by Janet H. Murray.

So, there are the 4 books I've settled upon.  I may go ahead and make The Decent of Man: and other stories by Edith Wharton a fifth, and token short story collection, and then I wanted an awesome poetry collection, but I don't enjoy much of the newest.  I don't think famous poets always remember why it is they are doing exactly what they're doing, how, and also why they might do linguistic trapeze acts: it's pretty, nobody else did it (because, including you, no one has a reason).  Perhaps I'll reevaluate one of my favorite poets of all time, even though she's unsung by all of her contemporaries of her period, except for Charles Dickens, who wrote the forward to her first book.  That's Adelaide Anne Procter.  She's scrumptious.

Imaginary readers, I'll be back sooner with some meat to mix with these potatoes.  'Til then, stay cool Imaginary Audience, you rock.

suburban pretension in poetry

In the nearest future, I probably will be reporting back to my imaginary blog audience (love you guys!) about Edith Wharton's short fiction.  Not like my philosophy on it, and not like I'm an expert, I'll probably just jot down some thoughts about "The Other Two" and "The Descent of Man" at least.  Anyway, in the meantime, I wrote a poem, because I'm pretentious. 

typhoon showers

button-eyed suddenly: 

black dots in the white 

and clear iris yolk and 

albino-white, they follow 

with shrieking blinks the 

hum,

hum frequency unseen, 

and it’s not spoken, never 

said with tongues, only 

hands shout, hearts bleed 

hieroglyphs at 

hot concrete, pale,

pale against blood 

and tires, beating brains 

that slingshot round the 

hurricane’s one clear eye.

by Angie T. Jeffreys 2012

Moonlit Clips

So, yeah, it's another poem I wrote.  Currently I've been reading a lot of Carolyn Myss, which you know is spiritual guidance.  What fun would it be to blog on that?!  I am feeling a short story phase coming on: reading, not necessarily writing, or maybe some more Edith Wharton, or I'm trying to bite the bullet and reread Jane Eyre in the near future, too.  I used to profess that as my favorite book of all time from like 5th-10th grade.

Here's that silly, silly poem.

MoonLit Clips

by Angie T. Jeffreys

I collect just all my fingernail

clippings: tiny bows, just like the moon

slivers small, smaller every day.  The

crescent moon: its obstructed by earth and

other planets that don't leave much 

light behind.  Punch holes in tin lids

lightning bugs of skin: add water add

twigs so they can grow full again: but it

doesn't matter what I harvest;

they never add up to flares

bright as guns in the sky or shooting

star minutes that don't follow the

intergalactic pendulum or Russian

guy, tapping his feet always to

that satellite beat, best station

                    in that Milky Way.

Nails in Flight

okay, so this is a poem that is more like I wrote in college, much more streamy of consciousness.  Just throwing it out there, like a sex tape.

Nails in Flight

Nail hammered half out wall; sprouts silver wings collapse to flight, no hole wounds the

sheetrock. Is it a winged dart: no the wings just look so slick piercing down by little sides.

I’ll tell them you’re drunk: nails can’t fly across the room alone. They will find a nail in the wall

that’s all there is, or moth dazed by mesmerized lights, a butterfly midnight. Your eyes possessed

by

the spirits and ice knocking against them before glass. Ice melts slow in streams, cold water

bleeds dyes the cups with invisible ink. New nails growing across the room in

numbers melted metal not mined from the earth where are we. They slope off from walls more

like spiders, not like flies. Pop the air above me with an open hand: I paint red my silver bullet

stash

like rose petaled darts wing it across toward targets. My silver bullets red rose petal nipples

flushed peach. Lead laced candies for the wolves who lick the back of their skulls for the cherry

juice

and the lunacy of growing a pelt in five minutes, hands like fanged oven mits, gleam swimming

below paintbrushed ocean reds: you’re waging a war with superstitions. Gleam lurks under

dumb of light, deaf of whistling zag crossed space, pegged walls.

Depends on the wind: direction directs how these maps project their objects: traject unknown:

watch your spit warble in gusts the wind, a pendulum of unlike mercury: it cries in nothing

puddles, prophetic ooze dries on the floor or the backwash at night’s end.

by Angie T. Jeffreys May 2012

Bell Jar Busted - last installment of Plath for a while

This, I pray, is the last I'll be solely focusing on Sylvia Plath, and more importantly, her novel, the Bell Jar, Plath for a while at least.  It's not because it's not a fascinating piece of literature (though most literary snobs, who I know personally, turn their noses up at the thought of taking it seriously).

Anyhow, as promised in a previous entry, today I will both foil the TB Sanatarium where Buddy did lots of pottery and got fat until he was released, versus Esther's "asylum."  The two tenures, while supposedly curing both parties, was a completely different experience for the two.  Buddy got fat: a sign of fat-and-happy OR overcompensation for feelings of inadequacy, but I don't think that theory came to light in psychological thought until well after the setting of this novel took place.  Either way, Buddy had plenty to eat and plenty of leisurely activities to keep him busy, AND his TB is in no way considered a character flaw, by Buddy, himself, or anyone else for that matter.  

Esther on the other hand appears to be fighting a war against flanks of herself, and her time in the asylum is not peppered with witty, endearing anecdotes about healing.  But it seems the mid-20th century audience was much more interested in the complete de-natomization of human life and human psyches than it was in lovable, heart wrenching, dramatic comedies.  I think Sylvia Plath just spit at me from her grave for even suggesting her book could have ended like that.  *sorry Sylvia!*

I'll begin with most obvious parallels between Buddy's R&R amongst the sick, and Esther's mental tossing and turning, as she struggles to follow the rules, follow everyone else, figure out what normal is, etc...these feelings are not unique to Esther, but going to a hospital, yeah, that sort of still is.  At Buddy's Sanitarium, Esther turns down his marriage proposal when she visits.  She tells him she'll never get married, she's too disjointed, too indecisive, etc, but Buddy still wants her.  

Spin that clock clockwise a few times, though, and we find Buddy visiting Esther at her asylum, they're no longer discussing marriage, except when Buddy poses the question to Esther, out loud: "Who will you marry now?"  An alternate meaning to that question posed would be "Who would want you now?"  And this was even after she knew that she would be released in the near future.  This is all because she had a rather grisly magnitude of a break from reality.  So do people who take LSD.  

Doesn't change the fact that unless you want a government job these days, no one truly judges you for taking, not to mention surviving, one solid Acid trip.  But if you trip your balls off sans illegal drugs in any way, whatsoever, you are not to be trusted, and it could happen again, at any time.  In the asylum, the nurses look for signs of progress, though Esther believes that they are looking for reasons to keep her inside.  But then again, PCP causes much more intense paranoia from what I've read than what Esther suffers through during her painful and unnecessarily long downward spiral.

Another foil, which I don't personally know how to interpret it perfectly, or at all I guess is something that I found really interesting and like it had to be significant, somehow.  Somehow.  Someday I'll figure that out, but here is another observation of mine that parallels the two sterile institutions somehow perfectly.  Esther visits Buddy in the TB Sanitarium, and he shows her a poem that he's written and published.  Esther is the writer of the couple, and while she didn't care much for the poem, it was a small slap to have her budding doctor fiancé-ish to be doing his rounds at med school, contracting TB, being sequestered in a sanitarium, and still having the time to shit a poem out that while it sucked, it also had more publication merit than anything she had ever produced.  She is not running around with a defibrillator doing his job when she goes to the hospital.

Here's the foil, though: when Esther is in the asylum, during one of those moments aching for endearing comedic relief and girl bonding (Sylvia just threw up at me from her grave), a page in a magazine is discovered in which Esther is modeling with fancy clothes, as though Esther's life is glamorous and a glossy NYC image of life as it is.  Instead of directing her fellow-patients to a caption where her name is printed on the page, Esther denies it's her the whole time, despite her name, found by another at the bottom of the page.  

So while Buddy can't wait to show Esther his name at the bottom of his magazine page, though poetry is a fairly anonymous sport, That's Esther's face, her countenance, her body: it's undeniably her body at least, as we can't read her mind backwards to see what was going on inside of her head when the photo shoot occurred originally.

About the ending of the book, two main points I'd like to make:

1.  The ending isn't that hopeful all by itself.  It ends in an interview room, in which Esther will hopefully be granted an exit interview as a rehabilitated loose screw, not after it's over, and there is no epilogue

2.  Esther once makes the comment in her narration that she couldn't fall any further down than she already had, and that was well before the worst of the worst, in my opinion, had even happened to her.  I personally believe that Joan's entire role in the book is simply to say, "oh yes you could have".  

Perhaps Esther is the lucky one: she was caught before a lethal overdose, or before finding a suitable light fixture to which she could affix her noose, or before punching a guy in the nose to prevent him from raping her.  All of these things are so awful: and the truth is, today, no one would expect anyone to just bite her lip and move on like a proper lady.

I do pray, that in FictionLand, Esther stops comparing herself to a pickled, dead baby surrendered to science after its premature death.  That can't add a spring to anyone's step, I'd imagine.

Holy Clover Patches, Toads in Flight

sorry just vomiting up some more poetry before Poetry month ends.  I have actually finished the Bell Jar, and I'm trying to work out my next entry.  In the mean time, food for thought.  ew.

Holy Clover Patches, Toads in Flight

Knock me down, face in grass: it’s a game that you win when I

chew up clover, a cow or a stupid child too close to the ground,

eating with eyes phantom fourth leaves through the patches.

Face full of half eaten beds, ants swarm like moths from closets 

of evening gowns, tear through, clip wings green hearts to fold:

paper eyelets creases unfold to unveil banks: green construction

paper snowflakes dangled from stems like windsocks, the inaudible 

slaps of streamers whistling like a lute played by a musician

in another field with reeds and things that whistle at all:

maybe a field blowing through it’s reed like Pan for his audience

but he plays a lute we cannot hear, not from here.  It’s just

a game you win you exclaim.  But you make me eat these

species endangered til they’re extinct.  No two snowflakes are

the same.  You remind me that it’s just a game you win when we

play.  But blades wheel through to de-cauterize the stems like

cutting open veins, bleeding snowflakes green in through the

green grass accumulating quickly around the ground.  It covers

the roads last, like it almost always does down South.  Leaves

cut like paper-damsels in distress strapped to the railroad 

tracks, slaughtered by dozens by lawnmower teeth or my own.

Knock me down again: I bob for dirt like apples, hands behind

my back, anything but the clovers, no more clovers.  I bite

down bumps and slime.  I got this.  The bulge heaved and shrunk

behind my wrenched lips: you don’t see the green slime rolling

down my chin.  I quietly roll toad around in my mouth, like a 

jaw breaker or even a spearmint TicTac.  Toad did not grow into

prince, charming or not.  Always the vaguest metamorphosis for

the prince who might just have a great personality.  In other

words.  He’s fat.  Now chewing at you, my mouth open wide, I

gargle, why don’t you have a shot?

Hock my toad up at you like paintball from a gun.  You’re out! 

I say that I beat you, after scraping my tongue across a muddy sleeve.

by Angie T. Jeffreys, April 2012

To Darwinism or Fowl Death

One of these days I will write in paragraphs again.  I have so much to say about the Bell Jar, whether or not anyone cares to read it, or this, but I don't want you to think I'm totally shirking on the intent of this blog.  Between moving into my own actual home, dealing with multiple deaths in the family, severing ties with most other family members and finally the suicide of my childhood best friend, it's all I can do these days to just write a poem a day, if that, which I have not been doing as religiously as I'd have liked.  So, here's another poetry month poem - quick and dirty, just how I wrote it.

To Darwinism or Fowl Death

an April showering of poetry by Angie. T. Jeffreys 2012

     Winter fingers gnarled green

vines blue feel like frozen lamp

     posts: I know better than to

swipe it with my tongue these weird

days, the winter fingers entwine with

      spring’s hot and gusty clasp:

     today, the cold hands cup

humid sweat like an ice sculpture

freezing in stone winter’s palm

lines and fingerprints into a red

               and dusty bird feeder

or when the temperature rises

     about another month or so.  Spring

waits for the sun bubble, floating beneath

the glassy window to bounce up like

 a basketball through the frozen water, 

rust so the birds can bathe and drink.

         The metal more brittle than ice spread

across the bird bath dish.  The brown

          birds are only wearing rust like

dried blood to hide their iron silhouettes. 

The cardinals all

fly straight into the window of

metallic ice, bleeding rouge now

or whichever color a bird’s

small brain turns as it bleeds out.  

They spank their heads to smithereens 

just because a cold wind blew today 

in April.  The shallow pool

freezing in swirls of pink like

old fashioned lollypops.  Still,

don’t lick the ice: you might get

stuck: the bird brain laughs like an

Rorschach Test skimming the top ice.  

This is Indian Winter, or the White 

Man’s Winter: swearing on mothers’ 

souls it can’t get worse than it keeps 

getting.  April’s birds  that dive from 

skies like pelicans, a free fall into

not what this bird bath felt like 

this time last year; warm and bodies

their brains in tact.  Statistically, the 

      survival rate’s only thing changed, 

numerically.  I could stop and take a

     photograph of cadavers splattered 

against smooth ice rock.  My masterpiece’d 

be titled: To Darwinism or Fowl Deaths.

and another poem

Mementos You've Kept of Me

Lift up squares of peaches 

fuzz peach cream skin like 

plots of land rescued by airlift 

or sodded grass laid down by 

the help resurrected by your 

naked hands  Take away just 

one dimension take your pick 

and this cube it’s still a part of me  

The circle its missing piece in 

reflective surfaces I see my face 

the hole collapsed withdrawn 

from feasts of light until you brought 

me through science fiction-ish 

laboratories  You look at me 

as though I am a dream-sickle

petit-fore under the bell jar 

on display the deafening dome 

that mutes me like a horn  I sound 

like ghosts of land lines, time-zones 

like long distance telephone calls

by Angie T. Jeffreys

April 2012

yep, it's another poem, because I didn't have time to write an actual blog entry today.

Fulcrums stitched out of clocks

It’s time to begin to sew winter quilts,

select the fabric, quenches racing thoughts that

frictionally warm our panicked brains, just 

but only for the winters.  Stitch the

wounds the doctors say, swallow these pills to stunt

a heart beat slow.  Buy buy a security blanket:

put it on a wish list, or build yourself a quilt, April

is the time to snatch fabric in case you wish to

give it away in December again. In spring children

lose and win the losses of baseball fields of virginity,

on blankets or just read books about it across lawn

chairs in a bright sun.  But the days still slowly stub

away like cigarettes in a heavy glass ashtray.  A quilt

for comfort, it needs to grow the way perennials

and annuals do.  Begin your own quilt when

the frosts end, not as it begins.  But the materials

stand flabbergasted in the fabric stores.  Silk will

rot if this quilt outlives me, cotton shrinks and

warps my seams.  Fascinated I read about a

quilt made of fulcrums for patches, fulcrums

for down, liquified into gold colored threads to

put it all together again.  I hunt and gather through

Craigslist, my great Uncle Edgar’s clicking

clock collection, silent for at least 50 years.

There’s always E-bay in a pinch.  I’m not

positive that fulcrums ever move, alone.

I am not afraid of fulcrum piles on top of me:

They begin as cold, but then like clockwork,

they cradle my heart that shadow boxes nightly

like a pendulum off kilter in the dark.

by Angie T. Jeffreys

April, 2012

the blog isn't dead

I feel like such a poetry month, and blogging failure, right at this second.  I was so pumped about moving and having this place of my own to write tons, but moving, itself, nesting, even decorating becomes like a full time job.  I mean this isn't just a temporary abode, for now, it's home.

I am still plowing through the Bell Jar, well, puttering through, and I imagine in my next post, I'll be sharing something along the lines of what I would have wanted to write a paper about if I were reading this book in high school or college: foiling/paralleling the TB clinic with the electroshock clinic, and other fun musings.

For now, not because I think it's any good, but I'm posting a poem I wrote yesterday while at work, just to show that my brain still resides outside of its box, even when I'm "on the clock" with the kids.

days to dust


Days of days I dust minutes for
new fingerprints, the labyrinths


that only decode in forensic
violence or to the reader of not


just the palms, but she counts
your tips like planets orbiting


round you like moons, inescapable
they cling, drumming fingernails


across the knee tops, impatient
they wind round bones and some


ligaments, muscle dreams and
strings.  Magnets and gravity,


powerless to reverse their
attachments to you - all of


their fields cannot grow any cure
for this disease.  My fingers


bleed off my hands like wind
chimes float on lifeless days hot


strung up pink skinned to my
shoulders again.  Everyday I dust:
they only change directions.

by Angie T. Jeffreys 2012

what bell jar?

     As I've continued on my second read through The Bell Jar, probably against the keen advice of my therapist, I have been trying to do what I've always done when I feel close to a subject matter, like some of the experiences Esther is beginning to have in the latter half of the novel: linguistic scrutiny.  I try and challenge or fit in my own brain the word choices and orderings of the narrator.  I ask myself things like, would I have tossed so many metaphorical corpses and pickled fetuses into a "fictional" novel if I, as the narrator, or even more so, the author, weren't already so preoccupied with the subject of death outside of my writing?  Would I think the time my character saw full grown cadavers, and then the dead babies in a lab of all different sizes, the most significant illustration of what I want to communicate to my reader?  Would I foil that with the immediate transition to watching a baby being born?   And, when she talks about the babies in "bottles," who is she identifying with?  The parent who lost a child who is now on display?  Or, because I can't see my own future anymore, am I the dead baby?
     This could be a dangerous narrative, for the untrained eye, or the very experienced untrained eye, or the officially untrained eye: Plath does what every great writer of fiction does, shows you a scribbled illustration of a place you can't actually see.  We can't question Plath's authority on depression, or mental illness, because no one actually lives to tell about it, or maybe they didn't back then.  And while a lot of people find her prose narrative style to be a bit sour or alarming, I find that with nothing else to weigh up against the story, it would have to be true.  All I have to work with (to disregard the author's biography) is the story, and then the words used to make it up.  And I have to remind myself, that Sylvia Plath probably expected things to get better: this book wasn't her suicide note.  She was after something when she wrote it, but all I can decipher is (theoretically) counting the number of times she references death, and under what circumstances does it occur to her narrator's train of thought.
     It actually took me 133 pages to find my proof that she is baiting us with such a creatively articulate narrator in Esther, and then proving herself to be unreliable in the process, Esther, that is.  First of all, it is in the midst of a scene where Esther has taken on a fake alias, "Elly Higginbottom," for no apparent reason, besides her own paranoia.  Then it's not in the dialogue, it's in the narrator's thoughts and assumptions, as they are reported, that the fallacy is brought to light.  In one moment, she is relentlessly flirting with a sailor in Boston, and then she flips out, because she is afraid that her boyfriend's mother is walking close-by.  The sentence states, "From the distance, I couldn't make out any features on the dime-sized face, but I knew it was Mrs. Willard."  I have to confess, I felt a little betrayed by Plath, here, as 9 times out of 10, when someone uses the past tense when confirming a hunch, it's because he/she knew he/she was already right.  And thus far, Esther hasn't said or done anything too crazy, at least, on page.
     So here is Elly, and the reader, hearts racing together as Mrs. Willard approaches, and suddenly, after this spectacle, Plath just writes, "The woman approached and passed by without a look or a nod, and of course it wasn't Mrs. Willard."
     WTF?!  That's a setup, right?  So for the past day or so, I've been going Back through the Bell Jar, looking for more instances like this, where she linguistically creates a "confessional" narrative that is actually just as finely crafted as the most rigid and constipated fictional narrative that we normally encounter, but no, up to this point, everything else, I can buy, except the morbid imagery that prevails through mundane descriptions.  Plath is fucking with us.  This really isn't confessional at all: she's set a trap for the voyeuristic reader who would approach her novel from the get-go.
     That is called proof of intent.  Unless that was Ted's editing, posthumously.  Then I guess he did it, but I bet it was her.  It wasn't a simple typo, she drew that out for a whole conversation.
     And then, I did start to ask myself, what can a poet bring to her own picture of what a novel is and does?  Implications.  Subliminal messages.  
     Throughout the book, Esther's life is getting messier and messier, and those in the novel who we would expect to swoop in and rescue her, help her bandage only the paper-cuts, while some other invisible part of herself is bleeding out for good.  Do they choose not to see the signs?  Or did Plath pre-write our current DSM manual for symptoms to check for over time with depression?: insomnia, being messy, inability to picture your future, or at least pursue one thing whole-heartedly, cessation of bathing and most other signs of personal hygiene, thoughts of death or suicide, physical recklessness, and general disregard for one's own personal safety or livelihood.
     I guess, I am sitting here screaming from the outside of my copy of The Bell Jar, 'Doreen! Don't just help her shove the clothes under the bed!  Ask her why she feels she can't just pack a bag like a normal person!"
     And that, reader, is where I am right now in my rereading of The Bell Jar, with the excess of deaths around me, here in the real world.

THE BELL JAR: "I had fallen and could fall no further"

     Today, I am going to begin my blogging about a less-old book, but a no less frequently forgotten one, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar.  I have a personal theory about why this book is so often overlooked, while Girl, Interrupted went straight to the silver scene, as did The Virgin Suicides.  It's not the outcome of the characters in the plot, but of the author's biography.

     Why was it that Girl, Interrupted was such an instant success?  Because it was short?  Because Winona Rider was still a hot item when she was cast as the lead?  Maybe since it was just an "interruption," it was considered a heart-warming story of success and emotional triumph.

     Or, The Virgin Suicides, in its film adaptation had Kirsten Dundst to lure us into at least a briefer version of what happens when you absolutely don't go to a hospital, but perhaps really you should have.

     So here are two books turned blockbusters; the film adaptations are far more famous than the original printed counterparts.  Then there's The Bell Jar.  Why wasn't this one made into a movie?  That question is entirely rhetorical.  This is the second time I've read this book.  Well, truthfully, I'm on exactly page 50 of my second read.  I was also bred as a poet with the works of the confessional poets.  

     Most of those poets killed themselves: Sylvia Plath, author of The Bell Jar, a thinly veiled "success story" memoir of her own, still stuck her head into a gas oven, nearly killing her own two children, accidentally, in the process.   

     Did The Bell Jar get bumped from critical reading lists because she told readers to "do as I say, not as I do?"  Why is it that this book is never studied in schools I've been to or where I've worked, but Plath's poetry, all too literal in its fire, are all so esteemed?  She's writing about the same damn thing in her poems and her prose.  Did teachers and publicists fear a contagion?  

     No book, much less word on this earth spoken from another's lips, can make a completely sane person up and commit suicide.  It's not quick, and it's not clean.  In fact, from the get-go Plath points out that this isn't going to be a scenic view of loosing your marbles, then regathering them, finally.  I won't lie, I read this book for the first time, maybe a year after spending a few nights in a hospital.  I didn't ever have to go back. 

     When I left, I felt like a cross between Hawthorne and Kafka, with a scarlet C[razy] scabbing like a tattoo on my chest and bleeding through my shirts.  I also never could figure out what I'd done wrong, why I felt so alone, and I didn't even attempt suicide, I just, well, lost it for a minute. 

     I read this book, in part to see what "it used to be like," and also to read about the difference between the mental vacay I went on versus the extended stay at a hospital, and a continuing war with one's own inner demons.  I wanted to know how the real thing felt different from the neuro-chemical phenomenon I'd been through.  

     I wanted to know what after you survive so much misplaced shame and judgment was like, even if this book ends like a fairy-tale where the author's life diverged from the original plot.  I won't lie, and I certainly can't deny, that upon a first read, I did find The Bell Jar to be if nothing else, a larger than life/fiction wake-up call.  Plath, already, in this book, begins with the ugly.  There isn't anywhere to go but up, from our crash landing into this college intern's life.

     So, I'm reading this book again for two reasons.  One is that I recently sold over half my books to a used bookshop, and for some reason, I couldn't allow myself to part with this one.  It meant to much to me, on that unspeakable level, but I couldn't remember what that level was, so I've been meaning to re-open it for some time now.  The other is that I recently lost a friend, who sadly spent more of her life trying to kill her inner demons than she spent just living and smiling.  In the end, the demons won.  

     I'm having a lot of trouble coping with this, I won't lie.  It definitely forces me to recall, when I wake up every morning, that life is so transient, and even more importantly, so are friendships, and relationships in general.  Sometimes friendships and couples just break up for no good reason, and both parties find themselves later in just as great, just as satisfactory lives, and they give no thought to past relationships that soured years ago.

     Sometimes, life just ends.  Traffic accident, or worse, doing something that you can't take back after the deed's been done.  After the pills, or after the knife, or after the jump off the bridge, do you try to empty the rocks from your pocket so you can safely float?  This is a question that I cannot answer, nor can my dear friend: I just hope the battle's ended for her now.

     So anyhow, morbidly, I am reading  The Bell Jar on the advent of my best friend's death.  Like I said, I'm 50 pages in on this read, but I had trouble putting it down just to pause and ramble thoughts out on my computer.

     As I mentioned earlier, I described this book's opening as what I like to call (maybe others do, too?) a crash-landing.  Suddenly we're just there.  And to set the mood, there is a murder, a decapitated head in lieu of an entire cadaver, and the murderers were to be electrocuted.  Esther, the main character, spends too much time obsessing about this, and with these thoughts in mind, she begins her tenure as a fashion magazine intern.  

     I would hardly call it a leap to guess that at some point Esther is going to get some electro-shock therapy, otherwise, she probably wouldn't fixate on what it feels like, "being burned alive all along your nerves."  I don't know about you, but in the first paragraph of an already nearly lethal plot, I don't even want to rub a balloon.  In fact, this really probably scares me out of ever doing anything people get the death sentence for, AND doing my very best to avoid shock therapy at all costs.  

     So far, paragraph one of this book sobers and scares the lunacy out of me, but maybe it's just me.  Her imagination-fueled memory of the severed head, and the feeling of death by electricity which she has no first hand knowledge of to begin with, both she hides behind her face, like Jesus, carrying his cross with a stupid grin on his face.  That's what it's like.

     Also, from the get-go, Esther acknowledges that she is stagnating, while life around her has drastically and suddenly sped up, with commentary like Esther could be, "steering New York like her own private car."  She lets on to her unquenchable apathy.

     And, upon a second read, years later, I really find this one observation peculiar, and it sounds like something straight out of a DSM manual, or the psych profiling questions doctors run through to check for your crazies: "Doreen had intuition.  Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones."  

     I guess, I raise my eyebrows here, because I think this metaphorical powerhouse would work in verse, but in prose, if there really was a simile to which a "normal" person could relate, it is lost on me.  My bones don't talk, especially from someone else's mouth.  I like this, though, because I absolutely, positively can't identify with the narrator.  This is where her world, in my opinion, departs from regular portrayals of it.  She also over-shops, a bit manically.

     But I feel like a lot of this "off-colour" behavior could've been avoided if Esther hadn't only labeled herself as an "Observer."  She watches, privately acknowledges, scrutinizes others' taste professionally and personally.  A writer's job is in part, to observe.  Is that was Esther couldn't grip?  Is that what Sylvia Plath couldn't grasp, even when she finished the book, herself?  

     In my opinion, I have to actually do with my hands far more than what I just watch, record and report.  Hobbies, husbands, anything.  I have the coolest dog ever, and I grow bonsai trees.  I also have my own garden!  Exercise is awesome.  And while I don't really have too many real life friends, it's not because I suck, it's because I chose not to prove that I ever just landed on my feet, quite honestly.

   Nearing the end of this first excerpt, I guess what I'm not really articulating very well, is that in all these cases, it seems like Chance, not Fate, dictates the outcome.  A stranger sees something's wrong, drives you to get help, a lover sees something wrong, and he bolts with his tail between his legs for eternity.  I know what other people did and do since I survived, but I'm clueless as to what I do now, myself.  As a homage to my dear friend, I plan to solve this mystery.

By page 46, Esther believes waking up in her own vomit after food poisoning is as bad as life can get, and she writes, "The floor seemed wonderfully solid.  It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no further."  Wouldn't that be sweet?