On Death and Writing about One's Self

Sylvia Plath killed herself. She died of carbon monoxide poisoning. She placed wet towels on the cracks of the kitchen doors so that her children wouldn't be affected. She then opened the oven door and stuck her head into it with the hopes of relief from her clinically overwhelming depression.

Depression is no game. I listened to a recent TED TALK about depression and its debilitating impact. Plath is one of many that suffered from the type of sadness that can only ever mean death.

I experience sadness. When my uncle Chatah died, or my paternal uncle Tom died, or when my family was directly threatened by the Assad regime, I felt sad at each of these instances and it lingered a little (the impact of loss always sorta stays with you) but it passed for the most part. With the twist of the wind my thoughts gradually turned away from their fear and sorrow and opened up towards the prospect of a future. Depression takes away that prospect and leaves the sorrow to be reckoned with.

Sylvia Plath killed herself. But before she left us, she left a great amount of poetry to relish and experience.

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distance.

God's Lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivotal of heels and knees!-- The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to 
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark 
Hooks--

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else

Hauls me through air--
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

White
Godiva, I unpeel--
Dead hands, dead stringencies 

And now I 
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow

The dew that flies 
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the Red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

The poem gracefully portrays suicide in parallel to early waking morning nature and its overwhelming weight. Sometimes the easiest things to write about is one's individual pain. More than often it's the hardest thing to portray. I have been through a lot last year and this year is still sluggish, but I find myself writing more and more about things distant from me: poverty, culture, society, food. Never do I write that in one year I lost more of my bearings than in any other year, that I grew strong but am weak with anticipation and waiting. There is so much to say and the words don't come. But here Sylvia Plath writes it all down and mesmerizes the public with her swift but ever so elegant "I want to die" poem. Simple but powerful and hurt. This poem makes me want to try writing about myself. 

Half of Life meets Meta (2)

After having written my last blog post I found this far more clear explanation of META MODERNISM in a discussion lead by four poets, one of whom is Meghan O'Rourke.

The basic thought that is dictating "emerging" artists is that sincerity and irony (irony being that which strongly represents postmodern expression) are no longer in clash with one another.

Of course there is a lot of convulsion and disagreement in this discussion. The general divide being those promoting irony and those promoting sincerity; but digging deeper one can clearly notice (especially in the above video) that the trend today is to exploit both for the aim of maximizing what Jericho Brown describes as PURPOSE. Even if the purpose is to state that there is no truth, poetry no longer is about the expression of nothing, but about being sincere and ironic about your sincerity at once.

Take this section of Plath's Poem "Daddy" as an example:

So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

Layer 1. "So I never could tell where you/Put your foot" insinuates the idea/image of putting one's foot in his mouth. This is clearly ironical when in fact the person who cannot speak is the persona of the poem, as is clear in "I never could talk to you".

Layer 2. "where you/Put your foot, your root" totally representing a layer of sincerity. The author is talking about her fathers position, place in the world as a German and as a Nazi.

Layer 3. "The tongue stuck in my jaw", representing the need to vocalize the atrocities of fascism. Sincerity again.

Layer 4. "Put your foot, your root" is finally warped at the end of the poem into an image of people dancing on her father's grave. This transforms the irony of what was said to a sincere act of freedom. The foots motion representing walking and freedom, a freedom her dead father does not have, for he is rooted.

The layering goes on and on, but this is an example of how irony and sincerity play.

You can watch the whole discussion panel on Youtube here. There is a really clear definition of irony in the beginning of the discussion panel but just a brief definition is provided below.

Irony: situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions.  

Ironic statements (verbal irony) are statements that imply a meaning in opposition to their literal meaning. A situation is often said to be ironic (situational irony) if the actions taken have an effect exactly opposite from what was intended. The discordance of verbal irony may be deliberately created as a means of communication (as in art or rhetoric). Descriptions or depictions of situational irony, whether in fiction or in non-fiction, serves the communicative function of sharpening or highlighting certain discordant features of reality. 

More on this in coming posts!