(He) lived a Yeatsian dream life where peace came dropping slow.
— Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
Notes:
277 consecutive mornings. My daybreak walk at Cove Island Park.
Ted tells Sylvia’s mother: “I try to keep her writing and drawing—the more she does, the more she can do, and the better she feels.”
—the more she does, the more she can do, and the better she feels.
Yes. Ted. Yes.
It’s a passage 463 pages into Heather Clark’s “Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath.” I’m not sure why Kiki, but I persist. I keep turning the pages. Soot, and all.
Hughes continues…
And the sky
Was vast gulfs of blue, and the air
Lifted us like alcohol
Not blue today Ted. Not blue.
But vast gulfs of sherbets, pinks, mauves, oranges, and everything but, Blue.
And lift it did…
Notes:
In a May 1952 paper for her religion class, “Religion as I See It,” Plath laid out her “basic tenets”: man was “born without purpose in a neutral universe,” without inherent morals, and was responsible for his own destiny. There was no afterlife. “His mind may live on, as it were, in books, his flesh may continue in his children. That is all.” God was not to blame for man’s evils or triumphs. Plath claimed that she could “never find my faith through the avenue of manmade institutions,” and called herself an “agnostic humanist.” She happily admitted she was a pantheist at heart: “For my security, I resort not to the church, but to the earth. The impersonal world of sun, rocks, sea and sky gives me a strange courage.” For her, the vital world was earthly and present.
— Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (Knopf; October 27, 2020)
Notes:
This was also the month (January 1949) Mr. Crockett famously rounded up his charges to watch the sun rise over Babson Park and recite poetry. Sylvia wrote, “The early hour was so that everyone could hear ‘dawn take her first breath’ and thereby reach a higher ‘kinship with infinity.’
— Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (Knopf; October 27, 2020)
Notes:
Live & Learn 