Plath’s preoccupation with the mirror as a metaphor in the struggle between the true and false self emerges also in her academic work. In her thesis, The Magic Mirror, which incorporates the image in its title, Plath also discusses the conflict between the true and false self, but she uses the terms “real” and “counterfeit”. She describes the conflict between the selves as an “inner duality [which] becomes a duel to the death”. This conflict is, in Plath’s critical evaluation, a fundamental search for identity in which the two selves must necessarily coexist in a balanced form in order for their host to survive; it is a “reconciliation of [man’s] various mirror images [which] involves a constant courageous acceptance of the eternal paradoxes within the universe and within ourselves”

—Mind Over Myth? The Divid Self In The Poetry of Sylvia Plath

Apri le narici.
Annusa la neve.
Lascia che la vita accada.

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath
In Plaster

I shall never get out of this!  There are two of me now:
This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one,
And the white person is certainly the superior one.
She doesn’t need food, she is one of the real saints.
At the beginning I hated her, she had no personality –
She lay in bed with me like a dead body
And I was scared, because she was shaped just the way I was

Only much whiter and unbreakable and with no complaints.
I couldn’t sleep for a week, she was so cold.
I blamed her for everything, but she didn’t answer.
I couldn’t understand her stupid behavior!
When I hit her she held still, like a true pacifist.
Then I realized what she wanted was for me to love her:
She began to warm up, and I saw her advantages.

Without me, she wouldn’t exist, so of course she was grateful.
I gave her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose
Blooms out of a vase of not very valuable porcelain
And it was I who attracted everybody’s attention,
Not her whiteness and beauty, as I had at first supposed

[…]

I used to think we might make a go of it together –
After all, it was a kind of marriage, being so close.
Now I see it must be one or the other of us.

[…]

Toglietemi tutto, ma lasciatemi l’attesa;

di qualcuno o di qualcosa che mi tenga in pugno, che mi metta sul ring col desiderio, oppure col bisogno, e che possa infiacchirli, scemarli o tacitarli definitivamente.

S. Plath

“I don’t believe in God as a kind father in the sky. I don’t believe that the meek will inherit the earth: The meek get ignored and trampled. They decompose in the bloody soil of war, of business, of art, and they rot in the warm ground under the spring rains. It is the bold, the loud-mouthed, the cruel, the vital, the revolutionaries, the mighty in arms and will, who march over the soft patient flesh that lies beneath their cleated boots.”

- Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

we’re all made up of each other

// The Bell Jar- Sylvia Plath // ANNOINT YOURSELF from Somatic Poetry- C.A. Conrad // The Couple- Louise Bourgeois // Jessica gives me a chill pill- Angie Sinjun Lou // What I could Have Been- Tracey Emin // Beg- Franny Choi // When you have forgotten Sunday- Gwendolyn Brooks // The Kiss- Edvard Munch // I was reading a scientific article- Margaret Atwood // A Hat Full of Sky- Terry Pratchett //

⭑ to learn that money makes life smooth in some ways, and to feel how tight and threadbare life is if you have too little. ⭑ to despise money, which is a farce, mere paper, and to hate what you have to do for it, and yet to long to have it in order to be free from slaving for it.

—Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

‘My trouble, doctor, is: I see a tree,
And that damn scrupulous tree won’t practice wiles
   To beguile sight:
   E.g., by cant of light
   Concoct a Daphne;
   My tree stays tree.

—Sylvia Plath, from On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad

Angels weeping over dull natures, but didn’t convince me. Those tears froze.

© Sylvia Plath

I read somewhere that ted hudges burned some of Sylvia Plath’s journals ( the most recent ones, of her final years) and I can’t help but wonder what exactly did he wanted to hide so much that he had to burn them…

“What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don’t know and I’m afraid.”

- Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

if there’s anything which my heart longs for right now is to board an aeroplane straight to Norway and watch those mysterious, heavenly, bewitching, alluring aurora borealis and I really want to stop this life for a while, just for a little time.

Read, If You Like: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Read, If You Like: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Welcome back to my occasional book recommendation series! I don’t like to overtly review books, because what I disliked about a novel might be what someone else liked about it, so it feels unfair to the author to write a post moaning about a novel I didn’t like. I also personally try to avoid reading too many reviews before reading a book, in case it doesn’t live up to the hype or I feel obliged…

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You kiss. He takes your hand, pulls it along. You touch soft, writhing flesh. You scream in a quick indrawn breath. So this is what it’s like to have a boy want you to masturbate him. You pull away, disgusted, yet not disgusted. Lightening hasn’t struck you. It’s only…but you say “No no no no no no no.”

- Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

What a pathetic blighting of the beauty and reality of childhood. Not to be sentimental, as I sound, but why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry and cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?

—Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

A bit of January 14th history…

1129 - Formal approval of the Order of the Templars at the Council of Troyes

1761 - Third Battle of Panipat; in one of the largest battles of the century the mostly Muslim Afghani Dyrrani Empire defeats the mostly Hindu Maratha Empire in northern India; an estimated 60,000 0 70,000 were killed in fighting and about 40,000 Maratha prisoners were massacred afterward

1788 - US Revolutionary War ends with the US  Congress of Confederation ratifying the Treaty of Paris

1963 - “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath id published; she commits suicide 1 month later

1983 - “Aloha from Hawaii”, and Elvis Presley concert, becomes the most watched broadcast by an individual entertainer (pictured)