"Masquerading as a man with a reason"

Here we see Sylvia Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes, poet laureate of England and marital cheater .... that should say something, should it not ?? The fact that Hughes was made up of equal parts poet and worm might have hastened Plath's suicide, but she seems to me to have been the type of individual who would have kept thirsting for death until she found it. I think booze, boys and confused ambitions/aspirations fed her depression and .... well, enough speculation for now.

 A rifle, a watch & a book

(still waiting to be read)

I am where you often can find me .... lost in thought, drifting, dreaming, wondering, thinking about yesterday, today and tomorrow.

I have been living in the same location –- physically, if not mentally -- for four years, two months and twenty-five days. (But, who is counting ??) I need a change, I need a reason, I am overdue to make a decision or two or three or ....

So .... anyway .... I have been on the road for a couple of days. I bought another rifle. It is identical to the second rifle I ever bought. I was sixteen. I sold it when I was eighteen. Now, that rifle is back with me, in a manner of speaking .... or, as I usually say .... sort of .... whatever .... symbolism often reigns for me.

I bought another Rolex, too. A Sea-Dweller. I can now have accurate time to a depth of 12,800 feet below the surface of any "wine-dark sea." Do you suppose I will ever find myself there? Toys/trinkets/trifles, whether they serve a purpose or not. What can I say ??

In the meanwhile, here are a song from Black Sabbath to fit my mood and a few more thoughts about Sylvia Plath:

I have not picked up Plath's novel, "The Bell Jar," for days now, and I barely am into it. I decided, after reading a biography and additional material about her life, that I really do not like her as a person. That makes it difficult to read her work because this novel is very autobiographical in nature.

I have been amazed to learn of her apparent intelligence and talent, but also about the opportunities handed to her thanks to that intelligence and talent. As a college student, she worked hard and seemingly spent her summers playing tennis, sunbathing and dating, while she held some typical student jobs such as waitressing. She was nineteen when she spent the month of June as one of twenty student "guest editors" working for the magazine Mademoiselle in New York City.

She does not come off as a sympathetic character to me. More like a spoiled kid. In fact, life seems to me to have been pretty much of a promiscuous, protected picnic for her until she married, and the pressures she experienced to that point largely were self-induced/self-imposed.

Then, she has a break-down, attempts suicide, undergoes electric shock treatment, and goes off for further study at Cambridge University in England.

A marriage to a man who cheats on her, a novel, some success with poetry and two children later, she kills herself at age thirty.

The man Plath married, Ted Hughes, was more-or-less an established poet who went on to be poet laureate of England. I have not read any of his work, either, that I can remember, nor can I recall even hearing of him. My interest in poetry seldom reaches into the contemporary (that since 1950) and, in some ways, ends with T.S. Eliot and a bit of Dylan Thomas.

Back on point: I will finish Plath's novel and, maybe, that will change my mind about her and, maybe, lead me on to write a few follow-up paragraphs in a later post. I need to read some of her poetry, too, and, hopefully, will gain some insight from it. At this point, however, I do not understand why/how she became a role model for young women .... but, I never have claimed to understand women of any age. If anyone can explain the logic of Plath's mythology, I would appreciate it.

Neither do I understand why I get curious about things such as this or about individuals such as Plath and go off on apparently inconsequential, pointless tangents away from my own life and living.

Perhaps, as Sir Richard Francis Burton, a British writer with whose work I am more in tune, often said: "The devil drives."