Talking, kisses, warm hands and talk of breasts, soft and tender and hard strongness. Creative play and light laughter and warm richness, ineffable richness flooding where from? Not just sex, not just familiarity, but partly. Because there has been cold, sterile, desperate devouring, and not this warm, full, flowing over in loving laughter. Food and nourishment, replenishing the beaten blue and black mind and bodies, desiring more, yet somehow satisfying even without fulfilling. Each an outlet for the other. For him, a lighthouse sending out an intermittent flash—centering desire on an attainable goal. For me—a growing cultivation of my body and the vague unobjectified hungers, aroused for instance this afternoon in the boat with a boy two years younger than I, blue-eyed, crewcut, lean, tan, beautifully built, muscles firm and neat and body so tender young and lovely I must cares the neck unwisely, kiss the lips once or twice. But one could not pull head to breast and keep the dream. Always the dream. Loving two boys in one day differently for different times. Kissing both and loving both. Honest, true, yet at least one would become cynical, a little bitter, seeing me with the other. Not understanding how a girl could be honest at one hour with one and at another place later with another. But so it is for her. And so it will be.
Sylvia Plath ·The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000)
“I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.“
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath,Sylvia Plath
anna akhmatova (via@propertiesofjoy) \ mary oliver mindful(via@lilllium) \ leila chatti tea(via@propertiesofjoy) \ mary oliver blue horses: “i’m feeling fabulous, possibly too much so. but i love it” (via@liriostigre) \ sylvia plath the unabridged journals of sylvia plath (via@metamorphesque) \ warsan shire what we own
—L.M. Montgomery, Anne of The Island/ Louisa May Alcott, Little Women/ Unknown/ John Keats, To The Ladies Who Saw Me Crowned/ Anne Sexton, Suicide Note: The Complete Poems/ Irish Murdoch, The Italian Girls/ Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath/ Anne Sexton, The Truth the Dead Know/ Virginia Woolf, The Waves/ Pablo Neruda, One Hundred Sonnets
Today marks the 59th anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death! RIP!
27 October 1932 Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts, USA - 11 February 1963, Primrose Hill, London, England, United Kingdom
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“I can’t deceive myself out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide. But the cold reasoning mass of gray entrail in my cranium which parrots “I think, therefore I am,” whispers that there is always the turning, the upgrade, the new slant. And so I wait.”
Sylvia Plath commited suicide on Monday, 11 February 1963 at approximately 4:30 a.m. in her appartment at 23 Fitzroy Road, near Primrose Hill, London, where she moved in with her two children in December 1962 after separating from Ted Hughes; a house William Butler Yeats used to live in from 1867 till 1873.
She was 30 years, 3 months, 2 weeks and 1 day old. Her death certificate states that the cause of her death was “Carbon Monoxide Poisoning (domestic gas) whilst suffering from depression. Did kill herself”.
She left some bread and milk in her children’s (Frieda, almost 3 and Nicholas, 1 year old) room, opened their window and sealed their door off with tape to prevent the gas from entering. She also sealed the kitchen door with wet towels.Sylvia Plath’s dead body was discovered less than five hours later. Her children were unharmed.
Jillian Becker wrote in her memoir Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plaththat “According to Mr. Goodchild, a police officer attached to the coroner’s office … [Plath] had thrust her head far into the gas oven… [and] had really meant to die.”Sylvia Plath is buried in Heptonstall’s parish churchyard of St Thomas the Apostle, the new St Thomas á Becket’s churchyard; near Ted Hughes’ birthplace Mytholmroyd in West Yorkshire, England.
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Photo info: Studio portrait of Sylvia Plath holding with a glass ball, 1945-55
