£ife a puzzle ...

Moi heart keeps reminding me through a feeling: “stop looking for solutions, just look for the next piece of the puzzle in your journey of knowing yourself; keep deepening the connection with the truth, the infinite you.You are the character in your life, but you are also the observer in the awareness that life is NOT a game to be “won” through your circumstances, but a game to be played for fun, and for love.And this is when you reach a part of your journey where there are no pieces of the puzzle left to be learned, except one… you living what you know.But not the thinking, separate, limited side of you… the beingness, energy, infinite part of you: the authentic you.
There is only the ONE piece of the puzzle to realize that matters: who you truly are.
'Everything else really is an illusion"

Something immovable within you..

Life has many ways of testing a person's will,either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happen all at once.The question is,how do you respond to what life throws your way.Strengthen your will to be patient, connected with the space that's
immovable within u....

€ternal $ky

I let my head fall back, and I gazed into the Eternal Blue Sky. It was morning. Some of the sky was yellow, some the softest blue. One small cloud scuttled along. Strange how everything below can be such death and chaos and pain while above the sky is peace, sweet blue gentleness. I heard a shaman say once, the Ancestors want our souls to be like the blue sky.
"Shannon Hale, Book of a Thousand Days"

Family Reunion by Sylvia Plath

Outside in the street I hear
A car door slam; voices coming near;
Incoherent scraps of talk
And high heels clicking up the walk;
The doorbell rends the noonday heat
With copper claws;
A second's pause.
The dull drums of my pulses beat
Against a silence wearing thin.
The door now opens from within.
Oh, hear the clash of people meeting ---
The laughter and the screams of greeting :

Fat always, and out of breath,
A greasy smack on every cheek
From Aunt Elizabeth;
There, that's the pink, pleased squeak
Of Cousin Jane, out spinster with
The faded eyes
And hands like nervous butterflies;
While rough as splintered wood
Across them all
Rasps the jarring baritone of Uncle Paul;
The youngest nephew gives a fretful whine
And drools at the reception line.

Like a diver on a lofty spar of land
Atop the flight of stairs I stand.
A whirlpool leers at me,
I cast off my identity
And make the fatal plunge.

=========================
“Sylvia, almost seventeen, with her brother Warren and her mother Aurelia in September 1949”
==========================

Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Cantor, Nauset Beach, Cape Cod, 1952. Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College. © Cantor family.
==========================

The Babysitters by Sylvia Plath

It is ten years, now, since we rowed to Children's Island.
The sun flamed straight down that noon on the water off Marblehead.
That summer we wore black glasses to hide our eyes.
We were always crying, in our spare rooms, little put-upon sisters,
In the two, huge, white, handsome houses in Swampscott.
When the sweetheart from England appeared, with her cream skin and Yardley cosmetics,
I had to sleep in the same room with the baby on a too-short cot,
And the seven-year-old wouldn't go out unless his jersey stripes
Matched the stripes of his socks.

Or it was richness! --- eleven rooms and a yacht
With a polished mahogany stair to let into the water
And a cabin boy who could decorate cakes in six-colored frosting.
But I didn't know how to cook, and babies depressed me.
Nights, I wrote in my diary spitefully, my fingers red
With triangular scorch marks from ironing tiny ruchings and puffed sleeves.
When the sporty wife and her doctor husband went on one of their cruises
They left me a borrowed maid named Ellen, "for protection,"
And a small Dalmation.

In your house, the main house, you were better off.
You had a rose garden and a guest cottage and a model apothecary shop
And a cook and a maid, and knew about the key to the bourbon.
I remember you playing "Ja-Da" in a pink piqué dress
On the game-room piano, when the "big people" were out,
And the maid smoked and shot pool under a green shaded lamp.
The cook had one walleye and couldn't sleep, she was so nervous.
On trial, from Ireland, she burned batch after batch of cookies
Till she was fired.

O what has come over us, my sister!
On that day-off the two of us cried so hard to get
We lifted a sugared ham and a pineapple from the grownups' icebox
And rented an old green boat. I rowed. You read
Aloud, cross-legged on the stern seat, from the Generation of Vipers.
So we bobbed out to the island. It was deserted ---
A gallery of creaking porches and still interiors,
Stopped and awful as a photograph of somebody laughing
But ten years dead.

The bold gulls dove as if they owned it all.
We picked up sticks of driftwood and beat them off,
Then stepped down the steep beach shelf and into the water.
We kicked and talked. The thick salt kept us up.
I see us floating there yet, inseparable--two cork dolls.
What keyhole have we slipped through, what door has shut?
The shadows of the grasses inched round like hands of a clock,
And from our opposite continents we wave and call.
Everything has happened.

Female Author by Sylvia Plath

All day she plays at chess with the bones of the world:
Favored (while suddenly the rains begin
Beyond the window) she lies on cushions curled
And nibbles an occasional bonbon of sin.

Prim, pink-breasted, feminine, she nurses
Chocolate fancies in rose-papered rooms
Where polished higboys whisper creaking curses
And hothouse roses shed immortal blooms.

The garnets on her fingers twinkle quick
And blood reflects across the manuscript;
She muses on the odor, sweet and sick,
Of festering gardenias in a crypt,

And lost in subtle metaphor, retreats
From gray child faces crying in the streets.

Face Lift by Sylvia Plath

You bring me good news from the clinic,
Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight white
Mummy-cloths, smiling: I'm all right.
When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist
Fed me banana gas through a frog-mask. The nauseous vault
Boomed wild bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.
The mother swam up, holding a tin basin.
O I was sick.

They've changed all that. Traveling
Nude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,
Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous,
I roll to an anteroom where a kind man
Fists my fingers for me. He makes me feel something precious
Is leaking from the finger-vents. At the count of two
Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard...
I don't know a thing.

For five days I lie in secret,
Tapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow.
Even my best friend thinks I'm in the country.
Skin doesn't have roots, it peels away easy as paper.
When I grin, the stitches tauten. I grow backward. I'm twenty,
Broody and in long skirts on my first husband's sofa, my fingers
Buried in the lambswool of the dead poodle;
I hadn't a cat yet.

Now she's done for, the dewlapped lady
I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror ---
Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.
They've trapped her in some laboratory jar.
Let her die there, or whither incessantly for the next fifty years,
Nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair.
Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,
Pink and smooth as a baby

Burning the Letters by Sylvia Plath

[Sylvia Plath began writing the following journal during the summer of 1950 before leaving home for college in Northampton, Massachusetts. Some of the entries are excerpts from letters to friends. Plath matriculated with the class of 1954 at Smith College, but did not graduate until June 1955 because of the semester she missed during the fall of 1953.]

I made a fire; being tired
Of the white fists of old
Letters and their death rattle
When I came too close to the wastebasket
What did they know that I didn't?
Grain by grain, they unrolled
Sands where a dream of clear water
Grinned like a getaway car.
I am not subtle
Love, love, and well, I was tired
Of cardboard cartons the color of cement or a dog pack
Holding in it's hate
Dully, under a pack of men in red jackets,
And the eyes and times of the postmarks.

This fire may lick and fawn, but it is merciless:
A glass case
My fingers would enter although
They melt and sag, they are told
Do not touch.
And here is an end to the writing,
The spry hooks that bend and cringe and the smiles, the smiles
And at least it will be a good place now, the attic.
At least I won't be strung just under the surface,
Dumb fish
With one tin eye,
Watching for glints,
Riding my Arctic
Between this wish and that wish.

So, I poke at the carbon birds in my housedress.
They are more beautiful than my bodiless owl,
They console me--
Rising and flying, but blinded.
They would flutter off, black and glittering, they would be coal angels
Only they have nothing to say but anybody.
I have seen to that.
With the butt of a rake
I flake up papers that breathe like people,
I fan them out
Between the yellow lettuces and the German cabbage
Involved in it's weird blue dreams
Involved in a foetus.
And a name with black edges

Wilts at my foot,
Sinuous orchis
In a nest of root-hairs and boredom--
Pale eyes, patent-leather gutturals!
Warm rain greases my hair, extinguishes nothing.
My veins glow like trees.
The dogs are tearing a fox. This is what it is like
A read burst and a cry
That splits from it's ripped bag and does not stop
With that dead eye
And the stuffed expression, but goes on
Dyeing the air,
Telling the particles of the clouds, the leaves, the water
What immortality is. That it is immortal.

A Birthday Present by Sylvia Plath

What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?

I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want.
When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking

'Is this the one I am too appear for,
Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?

Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus,
Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.

Is this the one for the annunciation?
My god, what a laugh!'

But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.
I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button.

I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year.
After all I am alive only by accident.

I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.
Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains,

The diaphanous satins of a January window
White as babies' bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory!

It must be a tusk there, a ghost column.
Can you not see I do not mind what it is.

Can you not give it to me?
Do not be ashamed--I do not mind if it is small.

Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity.
Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam,

The glaze, the mirrory variety of it.
Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate.

I know why you will not give it to me,
You are terrified

The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it,
Bossed, brazen, an antique shield,

A marvel to your great-grandchildren.
Do not be afraid, it is not so.

I will only take it and go aside quietly.
You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle,

No falling ribbons, no scream at the end.
I do not think you credit me with this discretion.

If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.
To you they are only transparencies, clear air.

But my god, the clouds are like cotton.
Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.

Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,
Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million

Probable motes that tick the years off my life.
You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine-----

Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?
Must you stamp each piece purple,

Must you kill what you can?
There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me.

It stands at my window, big as the sky.
It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center

Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history.
Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger.

Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty
By the time the whole of it was delivered, and to numb to use it.

Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.
If it were death

I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.
I would know you were serious.

There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.
And the knife not carve, but enter

Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,
And the universe slide from my side

Mrs Dalloway

This is Virginia Woolf's most admired novel which dates from 1924. Originally called 'The Hours', it was published the following year as Mrs Dalloway. Woolf is acclaimed as an innovator of the English language. Here, in her own handwriting, we see her explore a new style of writing called 'stream of consciousness', in which the imprint of experience and emotion on the inner lives of characters is as important as the stories they act out.
=====================
Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in 1882 into a family with strong literary connections. Her mother, Julia, had previously been married to Herbert Duckworth, a barrister. (Their son, Gerald, went on to found the Duckworth publishing company.) Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, a literary critic, had also been married before. Eight siblings and half-siblings shared the family home in London.
Virginia was only 13 when her mother's death triggered a nervous breakdown - the first of her many bouts of mental illness. After their father died in 1904, Virginia moved to a house in Bloomsbury with her two brothers and her sister, Vanessa, who was a painter. The siblings and their friends became the hub of an exclusive community of writers and artists referred to by critics as ‘the Bloomsbury Group’.
At the end of that year, Virginia began writing reviews, initially for a clerical newspaper and then for the Times Literary Supplement. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was completed in 1913, but publication was delayed for two years by another of her mental breakdowns.
In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, a political theorist who had worked for the Ceylon Civil Service from 1904 to 1911. (Ceylon, a former British colony, is now called Sri Lanka.) They decided to earn their living by journalism and publishing. Five years later, Leonard set up a publishing business with a hand-printing press at Hogarth House in Richmond, where the couple now lived - a venture designed, in part, to provide a practical therapy for Virginia's fragile mental state.
The River Ouse ran close by the Woolfs' country home in Sussex . On 28 March 1941, Virginia filled her pockets with heavy stones, walked into the river and drowned herself. The note she left for her husband read: “I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it but cannot fight any longer. I owe all my happiness to you but cannot go on and spoil your life.”

¶What’s Mrs Dalloway about?¶

The character of Mrs Dalloway had already appeared in Woolf's first novel as the wife of a Member of Parliament. By 1923, Woolf had conceived the idea of writing a new story built around her. "I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity," Woolf enthused in her diary, "I want to criticise the social system, and show it at work, at its most intense."
To this end, Woolf parallels a single day in the lives of two people: the privileged, socially elite Clarissa Dalloway, and Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War. As the day begins Clarissa is buying flowers for a party she will give that night, while Septimus is in Regent's Park listening to the sparrows, who, he believes, sing to him in Greek.
By featuring their internal feelings, Woolf allows her characters' thoughts to travel back and forth in time, reflecting and refracting their emotional experiences. This device, often known as 'stream of consciousness’, creates complex portraits of the individuals and their relationships.
Woolf also uses the novel as a vehicle for criticism of the society of her day. The main characters, both aspects of Woolf herself, raise issues of deep personal concern: in Clarissa, the repressed social and economic position of women, and in Septimus, the treatment of those driven by depression to the borderlands of sanity.
=======================
[What does 'stream of consciousness’ mean?]
It's a style of writing evolved by authors at the beginning of the 20th century to express in words the flow of a character's thoughts and feelings. The technique aims to give readers the impression of being inside the mind of the character - an internal view that illuminates plot and motivation in the novel. Thoughts spoken aloud are not always the same as those "on the floor of the mind", as Woolf put it.
'Stream of consciousness' has its origins in the late 19th century with the birth of psychology. An American psychologist, William James (brother of novelist Henry), first used the phrase in his Principles of Psychology of 1890 to describe the flow of conscious experience in the brain.The term was first used in a literary sense by May Sinclair in her 1918 review of a novel by Dorothy Richardson. Other authors well known for this style include Katherine Mansfield, William Faulkner and, most notably, James Joyce
==================
===How It All Goes Down==
Mrs Dalloway is not your typical day-in-the-life story, but it is a day-in-the-life story – a revolutionary one at that. It covers one day for Clarissa Dalloway (with some other central characters, too) as she prepares for a big party that will take place that evening.

As the novel begins, Clarissa strolls through Westminster, her neighborhood in London, on her way to a flower shop. Along the way, a few big things go down: she runs into an old friend named Hugh Whitbread, an explosion comes from a diplomatic car on its way to Buckingham Palace, and an "aeroplane" does a little skywriting. (Wow, that’s way more than what typically happens to us on the way to get flowers.)When she gets back from her errand, an old friend and former suitor, Peter Walsh, shows up unexpectedly. They’re happy to see each other, but there’s still some tension. Peter is clearly still in love with Clarissa, and she feels like he judges her for the decisions she’s made – among them marrying the conservative but loyal Richard Dalloway (instead of him). Numerous flashbacks – including one of Clarissa's kiss with a girl named Sally – fill in the story as it happened years ago at her family’s country home, Bourton. Feeling desperate over his own unfulfilling life, Peter gets weepy and asks Clarissa if she really loves Richard. Before she can answer, Elizabeth (her daughter) interrupts, and Peter heads out to Regent's Park.We then move to the perspective of Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked World War I veteran who saw Evans, his friend and officer, killed in war. Septimus' wife, Lucrezia, is trying to distract him as they wait for an appointment with Sir William Bradshaw, a mean old psychiatrist.
The third person omniscient narrator takes us back to Septimus’ life before the war: he was an aspiring poet, read Shakespeare, and loved Miss Isabel Pole. After the war and Evans' death, Septimus becomes emotionally numb – he can't feel anything. On a total whim, he becomes engaged to Lucrezia, whose home he’s staying at in Milan, Italy. Back in the present day, Septimus is driven deeper into madness, including some crazy hallucinations. Lucrezia is also miserable, homesick for Italy, and tired of taking her husband to various soulless doctors. Whereas Dr Holmes thinks Septimus is just "in a funk," Dr Bradshaw diagnoses that he "lacks Proportion." Neither acknowledges the fact that the war has impacted Septimus (which seems pretty obvious to us).
While Clarissa rests and prepares for the party, Richard has lunch with the impressively rich and British upper crust Lady Bruton. After lunch, Richard wants to go home and tell Clarissa he loves her, but he cops out and just gives her flowers instead. Clarissa actually cherishes the independence she has in her marriage, knowing that she could never have that with Peter. In the meantime, Clarissa’s daughter goes off shopping with her friend Miss Kilman, whom Mrs Dalloway hates. And by hates, we mean despises, loathes, and absolutely cannot stand.

Meanwhile, Septimus and Lucrezia wait at their apartment for Sir William Bradshaw, who is coming to take Septimus to a psychiatric home. The couple shares a rare moment of joy, but before Bradshaw enters the apartment, Septimus throws himself out the window and is impaled on the fence outside. He would rather die than have the doctor steal his soul. Yikes.
When Clarissa’s party begins, she circulates, making sure to pay attention to every guest – especially the prime minister (um, yeah, we’d do the same). Peter and Sally patiently await some attention from Clarissa as they talk about their memories of Bourton. A late arrival, Sir William Bradshaw, shows up with his wife, who announces that Septimus has killed himself. Clarissa is annoyed that Lady Bradshaw mentioned death at her party, but she is envious of Septimus’ ability to embrace the moment. Finally, she returns to the party and her appearance fills Peter’s heart with joy.

==========================
It was also interesting to watch The Hours after reading it. The Hours is
Directed by Stephen Daldry based on the novel The Hours by Michael Cunningham
==========================

There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined.
— from the novel The Hours by Michael Cunningham

In the stunning opening scene of this inventive and mesmerizing film, Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) is penning a farewell letter to her husband. Her poignant words accompany her as she leaves their house, walks to the river, fills her pockets with stones, and wades into the rushing current, allowing it to consume her. We immediately recognize this is not an ordinary movie. The Hours is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michael Cunningham with a screenplay by David Hare. The multi-layered structure of the story is laid out beautifully in the opening seven-minute sequence that unfolds without dialogue and is carried into our emotions with the enchanting piano and strings music of Philip Glass.

We are introduced to three women on three different days in the twentieth century. In 1923, in the London suburb of Richmond, Virginia Woolf writes the first sentences in her new novel Mrs. Dalloway about a woman giving a party. In Los Angeles in 1951, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) has decided to bake a cake for her husband's birthday. In her spare moments, she is reading Mrs. Dalloway. For Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), it is a momentous day in contemporary New York as she prepares to host a party in honor of a poet friend who has just won a prestigious award.

Virginia Woolf has battled mental illness, depression, and mood swings for years and has attempted suicide several times. She carries on for the sake of her art and the life it brings to others. Her patient husband, Leonard (Stephen Dillane), has brought her to a quiet suburb so she will experience less stress than their former life in London. But Virginia is restless and irritable. She has a little squabble with a maid and then greets her sister, Vanessa (Miranda Richardson), who has come for tea with her three children. Virginia joins her niece in laying to rest a small dead bird the children have found. She asks Vanessa why she is never invited to her parties in the city. Then just before she leaves, Virginia kisses her sister on the lips, a gesture that startles both of them. Later Virginia takes a walk with the idea of taking a train back to London. Leonard finds her at the station, and they have an argument over her unhappiness. She agrees to return home and realizes that her discontent will find an outlet in the character of Clarissa Dalloway.

Clarissa Vaughan lives in New York City where she works as an editor and lives with Sally (Allison Janney), her lover for ten years. Yet the real joy and sustaining relationship in her life is Richard (Ed Harris), who is dying of AIDS. She has been looking after him and is terrified of losing him. He doesn't want to attend the party in his honor, feeling that he has failed as a writer. While Clarissa is cooking that afternoon, Louis (Jeff Daniels), Richard's ex-lover, shows up early having just flown in from San Francisco. They reminisce briefly about the past, and he tells her of the liberation he felt after leaving Richard. In contrast, the most magic moment in Clarissa's life was when Richard kissed her on the beach when they were both young and filled with dreams about all the wild possibilities. At his apartment, just before the party, Richard tells Clarissa, whom he fondly calls "Mrs. Dalloway," that he has only been staying alive for her and that she must let him go. Later that night, Clarissa confesses to her daughter, Julia (Claire Danes), that she didn't recognize happiness when she experienced it.

Laura Brown has a young son, Richie (Jack Rovello), and is expecting another child. Her conventional husband, Dan (John C. Reilly), treats her like a queen in their suburban home but vaguely senses that she is not very happy. He is right. She just doesn't seem to be able to do the housewife things very well. It's Dan's birthday but he's the one who buys flowers. And the cake she makes with Richie is a flop. One of her socially popular neighbors, Kitty (Toni Collette), shows up and announces that she is going to the hospital to have a growth in her uterus checked out. Kitty has the suburban scene down to perfection but she considers Laura to be the lucky one because she can have children. Feeling very sorry for what Kitty has to go through, Laura kisses her on the lips with an emotional intensity that far exceeds the etiquette of suburbia. It expresses the other life that Laura is yearning for. Her son Richie senses his mother's aloneness. When she drops him off with a babysitter, he screams out and runs after her car. That afternoon in a hotel room, Laura intends to end her life by taking pills. But after reading more of Mrs. Dalloway, she decides not to do it.

Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliott) directs The Hours with a skillful sense of pace and a high regard for the acting talents of the actresses who carry this film into our hearts with so many inimitable scenes of tenderness, loss, discontent, and yearning. The film explores the many spiritual connections that link our lives to others, living and dead. It also reveals the desperate yearning for happiness that propels so many people into a new day with high hopes. The drama also will speak to all those who at one time or another have felt closed off or alienated from the lives they've chosen or been forced to bear due to circumstances beyond their control.

In the evening, Leonard Woolf asks Virginia why someone has to die in her novel Mrs. Dalloway. She replies: "Someone has to die so the rest of us will value life more in contrast." This could be said of the film as well. For finally, The Hours deals in imaginative and substantive ways with the disappointments that can accumulate and lead to suicide, and the small moment-by-moment realizations that can bring someone back from the brink.

W●R£D was hers for Reading...

From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.
[Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn]

P●W€R ●F MIND

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
[Aldous Huxley]

B£iss of being $oltiary

I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.
[Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre]
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
[Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales]
+++++++++++++++++++++++

A£●n€………

I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.
[Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World]

$●£itud€………

Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them

*IT*...???

£ost in the COSMO$, i'm $olitary as grass,What is *IT* I miss? Shall I ever find *IT*,Whatever *IT* is??

We should meet in another life. We should meet in air. Me and you.

http://youtu.be/plU5FLiiXYQ

Dying is an art.

Like everything else,

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I have a call.

Sylvia Plath

[Mirror]
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful-
The eye of the little god, four cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
—written 23 October in 1961, Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

==========================
[Apprehensions]
There is this white wall, above which the sky creates itself—-
Infinite, green, utterly untouchable.
Angels swim in it, and the stars, in indifference also.
They are my medium.
The sun dissolves on this wall, bleeding its lights.

A gray wall now, clawed and bloody.
Is there no way out of the mind?
Steps at my back spiral into a well.
There are no trees or birds in this world,
There is only sourness.

This red wall winces continually :
A red fist, opening and closing,
Two gray, papery bags—-
This is what I am made of , this and a terror
Of being wheeled off under crosses and a rain of pietas.

On a black wall, unidentifiable birds
Swivel thier heads and cry.
There is no talk of immortality among these!
Cold blanks approach us :
They move in a hurry.
—written 28 May 1962
==========================

[Lesbos]

Viciousness in the kitchen!
The potatoes hiss.
It is all Hollywood, windowless,
The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine,
Coy paper strips for doors
Stage curtains, a widow’s frizz.
And I, love, am a pathological liar,
And my child look at her, face down on the floor,
Little unstrung puppet, kicking to disappear
Why she is schizophrenic,
Her face is red and white, a panic,
You have stuck her kittens outside your window
In a sort of cement well
Where they crap and puke and cry and she can’t hear.
You say you can’t stand her,
The bastard’s a girl.
You who have blown your tubes like a bad radio
Clear of voices and history, the staticky
Noise of the new.
You say I should drown the kittens. Their smell!
You say I should drown my girl.
She’ll cut her throat at ten if she’s mad at two.
The baby smiles, fat snail,
From the polished lozenges of orange linoleum.
You could eat him. He’s a boy.
You say your husband is just no good to you.
His Jew-Mama guards his sweet sex like a pearl.
You have one baby, I have two.
I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair.
I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.
We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,
Me and you.

Meanwhile there’s a stink of fat and baby crap.
I’m doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.
The smog of cooking, the smog of hell
Floats our heads, two venemous opposites,
Our bones, our hair.
I call you Orphan, orphan. You are ill.
The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B.
Once you were beautiful.
In New York, in Hollywood, the men said: “Through?
Gee baby, you are rare.”
You acted, acted for the thrill.
The impotent husband slumps out for a coffee.
I try to keep him in,
An old pole for the lightning,
The acid baths, the skyfuls off of you.
He lumps it down the plastic cobbled hill,
Flogged trolley. The sparks are blue.
The blue sparks spill,
Splitting like quartz into a million bits.

O jewel! O valuable!
That night the moon
Dragged its blood bag, sick
Animal
Up over the harbor lights.
And then grew normal,
Hard and apart and white.
The scale-sheen on the sand scared me to death.
We kept picking up handfuls, loving it,
Working it like dough, a mulatto body,
The silk grits.
A dog picked up your doggy husband. He went on.

Now I am silent, hate
Up to my neck,
Thick, thick.
I do not speak.
I am packing the hard potatoes like good clothes,
I am packing the babies,
I am packing the sick cats.
O vase of acid,
It is love you are full of. You know who you hate.
He is hugging his ball and chain down by the gate
That opens to the sea
Where it drives in, white and black,
Then spews it back.
Every day you fill him with soul-stuff, like a pitcher.
You are so exhausted.
Your voice my ear-ring,
Flapping and sucking, blood-loving bat.
That is that. That is that.
You peer from the door,
Sad hag. “Every woman’s a whore.
I can’t communicate.”

I see your cute decor
Close on you like the fist of a baby
Or an anemone, that sea
Sweetheart, that kleptomaniac.
I am still raw.
I say I may be back.
You know what lies are for.

Even in your Zen heaven we shan’t meet.
—written October 18, 1962

==========================

queen-0f-moons:
New pointillism tattoo inspired by Sylvia Plath!
"The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.
I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.”
—From Elm, written 19 April 1962
=========================
The Night Dances

A smile fell in the grass.
Irretrievable!

And how will your night dances
Lose themselves. In mathematics?

Such pure leaps and spirals ——
Surely they travel

The world forever, I shall not entirely
Sit emptied of beauties, the gift

Of your small breath, the drenched grass
Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies.

Their flesh bears no relation.
Cold folds of ego, the calla,

And the tiger, embellishing itself ——
Spots, and a spread of hot petals.

The comets
Have such a space to cross,

Such coldness, forgetfulness.
So your gestures flake off ——

Warm and human, then their pink light
Bleeding and peeling

Through the black amnesias of heaven.
Why am I given

These lamps, these planets
Falling like blessings, like flakes

Six sided, white
On my eyes, my lips, my hair

Touching and melting.
Nowhere.

—written 6 November 1962, Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems
==========================
(Sylvia Plath by Emma F.)

Sylvia's suicide followed the breakdown of her marriage to the poet Ted Hughes in the summer of 1962, largely due to his adultery. Plath had a history of mental illness and depression since childhood, and had been treated by Electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), an experience she recounts in her novel 'The Bell Jar'. She had also attempted suicide twice previously.

On August 24th 1953, aged 20, Plath took the sleeping pills she'd been prescribed, from the safe where her Mother stored them. Then she retreated to the basement of her family home. She took a large quantity and fell into a coma, having left a note suggesting she'd gone for a long walk. After frantic neighbourhood searches, a groan was heard from the basement and she was discovered, many of the pills having been vomited up, and was rushed to hospital, where she recovered.

Additionally, following Plath and Hughes's temporary separation, Plath ran her car off the road in a deserted airfield, she referred to it as an 'aborted suicide', though the danger of this manoeuvre is questionable, as the road is flat and safe and not particularly dangerous anyway.

After the separation, Plath and her two children, Frieda aged 2 and Nicholas aged 8 months took up a flat on Fitzroy Road , London, the site of Plath's eventual demise.  Their flat was at number 23.  Here is the front door, with mailbox built in, of course.

Against the backdrop of Plath's suicide, January had the worst winter in Britain for 60 years (which has got to be baaad) and Plath's flat was without a phone, unfortunately one was never connected in time. The children and Plath contracted flu and Plath struggled to cope alone. She took on a German au pair (nanny), but she later left and Plath struggled alone again, whilst 'the launch of the Bell Jar 'on January 14th had unfavourable American reviews.

Late in January Plath informed her Doctor - Dr. Horder - that she feared a breakdown and was severely depressed. She was prescribed anti-depressants and he sought a psychiatrist and a hospital place for her. On Feb 7th Plath stayed with her friend Jillian Becker and was reliant upon her pills and feared being alone, and ranted about hating Ted for his infidelity.

On Sunday 10th Feb she chose to return to her home, claiming she felt better. Dr Horder had ordered her a nurse for 9 o'clock the next morning and Plath had a publisher's lunch organised. She cried the whole way home, but wouldn't accept Gerry Becker's offer of returning to the Becker household.

At midnight on Sunday, Plath visited her downstairs neighbour, Professor Thomas to buy stamps and he heard her pacing upstairs later in the night

On Monday 11th Feb the nurse arrived at 9ish but received no answer. A builder let her in, and they broke in to Plath's flat. Plath was found in the kitchen, lying with her head on a cloth in the gas oven, all the gas taps on full. She was given artificial respiration but it was too late, she was dead. Plath's two children were upstairs crying, but she had made provisions for them, leaving bread and milk, opening their window fully, taping and stuffing towels into the cracks in both their bedroom and the kitchen doors.

It was following Plath and Hughes separation and Plath's suicide that she wrote over 40 of the 'Ariel' poems, argued to be her best work. Poems such as 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazurus' amongst others contain unsettling references to Plath's emotional state

=========================

She was buried on February 16th 1963 in Heptonstall Cemetery, West Yorkshire, UK, under the name Sylvia Plath Hughes. The 'Hughes' has subsequently been hacked off several times. Her inscription reads: *Even amidst fierce flames - the golden lotus can be planted*

Leonard Nimoy....The remarkable Human being n artist

Sharing this  piece for the thousands of women who are living the life of Perpetual Death because of Body Image Issues.....£eonard Nimoy ....saw the  soul of women....women whom the world ceases to even give a second look....who are dying each minute with their souls because their existence is reduced to being ridiculed ....if at all they are seen...what £eonard Nimoy has done...is that he has dared to open the very souls of the women with body image issues...he has made them abandon the worlds view of them....he has made n created awareness of making the world see women with different body types with a new perspective...
==========================
Artist Statement

The Full Body Project
Leonard Nimoy
Who are these women? Why are they in these pictures? What are their lives about? How do they feel about themselves? These are some of the questions I wanted to raise through the images in this collection.

This current body of work is a departure for me. For a number of years, I have been producing images using the female figure. I have worked with numerous models who were professional people earning their living by posing, acting, dancing, or any combination thereof. But, as has been pointed out to me in discussions at exhibitions of my work, the people in these pictures always fell under the umbrella of a certain body type. I’ll call it a "classic" look. Always within range of the current social consensus of what is "beautiful." In fact, that was the adjective I most often heard when my work was exhibited. The women as they appeared in my images were allotted no individual identity. They were hired and directed to help me express an idea—sometimes about sexuality, sometimes about spirituality—and usually about feminine power. But the pictures were not about them. They were illustrating a theme, a story I hoped to convey.

These women are interested in "fat liberation." They hold jobs in the theater, the film industry and in business—and together they perform in a burlesque presentation called "Fat Bottom Revue." The nature and degree of costuming and nudity in their performances is determined by the venue and the audience, which can range from children’s birthday parties, to stag parties. I wanted these pictures to be more about them. These women are projecting an image that is their own. And one that also stems fro m their own story rather than mine. Their self-esteem is strong. One of them has a degree in anthropology and will tell you that ideas of beauty and sexuality are "culture bound"—that these ideas are not universal or fixed, and that they vary and fluctuate depending on place and time. They will tell you that too many people suffer because the body they live in is not the body you find in the fashion magazines.

My process was simple, yet different than how I had worked in the past. I was initially interested in revisiting two works of female subjects by Herb Ritts and Helmut Newton: specifically Ritts' image of a group of supermodels, who were posed nude and clustered together on the floor, and a Newton diptych wherein the two images are identical in pose, except one image showed the models clothed, and the other showed them unclothed. The models were shown the images by Herb Ritts and Helmut Newton and they were quite prepared to present themselves in response to the poses that those images suggested. I asked them to be proud, which was a condition they took to easily, quite naturally. Having completed the compositions that were initially planned, I then asked them to play some music that they had brought with them, and they quickly responded to the rhythms, dancing in a free-form circular movement with in the space. It was clear that they were comfortable with the situation, with each other, and were enjoying themselves.

With these new images, I am now hearing different words. Sometimes "beautiful," but with a different sub-text. I hear comments, which lead to questions. The questions lead to discussions—about beauty, social acceptability, plastic surgery, our culture and health. In these pictures these women are proudly wearing their own skin. They respect themselves and I hope that my images convey that to others

[Content and photo courtesy The Full Body Project]

Sylvia Plath ....

[Ted Hughes inherited Plath’s manuscripts and copyrights when she died. He published Plath’s poetry (1965, 1981) and prose (1977) and a selection of her private journals (1982). While Aurelia Plath may have manipulated her daughter’s words to tell the story of a “good girl” in Letters Home, Hughes has been criticized for selectively editing his wife’s journals to create a dark, equally unbalanced and inaccurate record of her life.The unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962 were published in London in April 2000 with the full support of the Plath estate. They are a complete and faithful transcription of the manuscript journals owned by Smith College. They represent the first time that Plath has been allowed to speak for herself since her death in 1963. While over a hundred biographies and critical works have been written about Sylvia Plath, no scholar has been given free license by the Plath estate to interpret and liberally quote from her unpublished manuscripts.]

As a scholarly community, if we have the foresight to collect important documents about women’s lives and if we properly preserve these original manuscripts, the extraordinary story that they hold will one day be told. Copyrights protecting unpublished manuscripts currently lapse seventy years after the author's death.

(Typewriter owned by Sylvia Plath and Sylvia Plath with her typewriter)

(Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Annotated by Marcia Brown Stern. Note the underlined reference to Jody’s cheeks and the annotation in the margin. The character of Jody was based on Marcia)

Many of the women Plath met at college became her friends for life. This letter to her college roommate, Marcia Brown, was written a week before her death. Plath and Ted Hughes had separated the previous October. They were living at Court Green, a thatched manor house in Devonshire. Plath writes about her plans to make a life of her own in London with her two children, Frieda and Nicholas Hughes. Plath committed suicide in her London apartment on February 11, 1963

Sylvia Plath. Letter to Marcia Brown Plumer,
February 4, 1963

Photograph of Marcia Brown and Sylvia Plath, Marblehead, Mass,
July 24, 1951

Fever 103° BY SYLVIA PLATH 1932–1963

Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple

Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean

The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
The indelible smell

Of a snuffed candle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright

One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel,
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,

But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak

Hothouse baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,

Devilish leopard!
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour.

Greasing the bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.

Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.

Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.

I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern——

My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.

Does not my heat astound you! And my light!
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.

I think I am going up,
I think I may rise——
The beads of hot metal fly, and I love, I

Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,

By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean!
Not you, nor him

Nor him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)——
To Paradise.
Sylvia Plath, “Fever 103°” from The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes.