[The Colossus] on the Life & Subsequent Death of Sylvia Plath

[The Colossus] On the Life & Subsequent Death of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath suffered from the most exquisite depression to ever reach a woman's heart. Poetry, in her words, in her eyes, possessed by the demons of unsatisfying conception, revitalized itself, born from the fusion of the embryo within the womb of the aesthetic. If we owe anything to this woman, it is to, everyday of our lives along the palate of art, to praise her tragic brilliance.

In Plath's poetry, there are eras born that have only existed in her stanzas and died once her poetry ended. It was a pain that bore the mirror image of itself, dropped anchor in a deep metaphysical self-exile and detached itself from this Euclidean limitation given to humanity by humanity.

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want to 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 life. And I am horribly limited."

The lives Plath wishes to live is not due to envy, her limitations are not due to a literary one; they were all imposed on her from a dubious and skeptical environment. Her marriage to the poet Ted Hughes, a self-loathing, insecure philandering artist, whom Plath propped up out of full  means of belief, caused her retreat into a blantant madness, an immobility that threatened to petrify her. But even in seeing lives lived on a more blissful plane, a chronic infidelity that could hinder the creativity of most; it was sadness, the flicker impulse of depression itself that caused flight in her poetry and flightlessness in her life.

The average human facing diversity will abandon themselves in haste, misdirect anguish, lose equilibrium in their upright walk upon this earth; Plath fled inward, charted her sadness, composed sonnets that echoed pass her suicide  in 1963. Her true sadness had no origin, its redoubtable advance upon her mind induced the abstraction that in turn, induced the abstract language she has become well known for. It is in her very words;

"If you expect nothing from anybody, you're never disappointed."

that we see the hallmarks of a woman competent of her own true condition, shattered beauty that proposes its own terminal splendor. She has taken the ineffectual actions of poets pen-to-paper and reunited us with our own sensibility, as the giver, reunited us with our humanist torture, the flaws of personal character that can reverberate brilliantly as an echo in a cathedral.

We've lost something, we are not free, adrift in a phantom tirade, separated from the human history of dismemberment and immurement. If we are well to beware of anything, if we are to risk anything, it is the leap from the precipice of our own concocted dreams, phantasmas, torrential miasma in an age where disassociation
frees us. We chart the earth, the depths of the sea yet we've forgotten the algorithm in which everything has been set forth upon that is the autonomous pulsation of the individual or the dream of individuality. We are born individually but we are not meant to live individually if we are to disregard the malformation that insanity brings.

The day man arrived on this earth, the very next day, he had made slaves of his own, driven himself into doldrum by his own blatant captivity, become infernal slaves to woman and sought escape from his actuality, his self-imposed misery. It is from poetry anthropos truly finds an equilibrium, a sense of revitalization. Plath's lost of equilibrium was also her friction upon the earth, a reciprocal disaster that begets catastrophe. And if there is anything confessed of her soul, it is a composed character in its own ruins. The Sylvia Plath we've come to know is the Sylvia Plath who was, who could not be saved despite her will or the Karma-driven will of an indescribable, incomprehensible universe to rescue her from a perennial turmoil.

Very few possess transcendence, or ever access such metaphysical and psychic measure. Plath's mind, mutinous against her own shattered heart, itself was a dampened, quintessential vortex that devoured all pestilence, spun it out into a mathematical drama, an abomination of the becoming having become, a double helix strand forfeited its genome rights.

What has been left in the aftermath of Plath's suicide is the seemingly inane sense of poetic prose that has failed to find its way to the very ideal of dazzle, of charm, of seduction, of satisfying our instinct for sadomasochism. It is clear that the carousel never ceases its evolution, as it is also clear that the world may never again be removed from its very axis by language once all great voices, imminent, relevant, malevolent forces, tragedians, have fallen into the abyss created for the entire earth to be suction into as a whirlpool. It may also be clear that the art forms originated to distort the human figure too may not take their rightful throne. The only thing that remains unclear, unpredictable, is when will the next hatch from egg into a fully formed woman to attest what misery truly is, what it truly can become, an endearment to all of history itself.

-Dontrell Lovet't