April 1, 1956 - The Journals of Sylvia Plath
Be stoic when necessary & write - you have seen a lot, felt deeply & your problems are universal enough to be made meaningful - WRITE -
June 16, 2023
I grow weary of myself. I suspect everyone does, and maybe it happens to everyone this way, but for me, a mild aversion to the sound of my own voice turns to loathing very quickly, and then my little projects, my various simmering pots, get abandoned, go cold and gloopy. That’s what happened in May, when I didn’t send out a newsletter, NOT THAT ANYONE NOTICED. It’s also the time of year when I tend to give up. When summer becomes undeniable. Several of my diaries fall silent at this time of year, after the feverish enthusiasm of the young year has passed. Reading those diaries now, the sudden blank page always stings. Why give up, I ask my younger self, why not write on and on for no reason other than some day you will be dead, why stop now? You are so young. Some of these half-diaries take up again in the autumn, others not.
I grow weary of reading books that are in conversation with social media. Often, it’s not obvious when I’m beginning to read that this is an ‘internet book’, but then the author might mention something they Tweeted, and the responses to that Tweet, and they become swept up in recounting these exchanges and it is clear that these exchanges are the book’s reason for being. Or the book is published a year after its author had a Tweet go viral, even if that viral Tweet is never mentioned. Or none of these things happen, but the author simply has a Twitter presence. The hollowness in the text becomes apparent as you read, and sometimes you don’t notice it until you begin to wonder why you feel so empty. It’s not entirely dissimilar to reading an essay authored by Chat GPT. I don’t blame the authors for writing and publishing these books - if I had a Tweet go viral and was asked to write a book by an agent, editor, or publisher, I’d obviously be thrilled, and I’d do it. This is just the way publishing works now, this is not a new or interesting observation. But as readers, I think maybe we should choose to reject this flattening of art. Anyway, I’m not going to give examples, I’m not trying to be mean. This is all just to say that I’ve recently been trying to read away from the internet as much as possible.
I got The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962 for Christmas when I was 18, the same age Plath was in 1950, when the journals begin. I couldn’t tell you if I’d ever read one of her poems by then, maybe in school? Do they teach Sylvia Plath’s poems in secondary school in Ireland? I’m certain it was the mythos of the poet, and not her work, that compelled me to ask for this book as a Christmas gift, a 750 page block that’s almost impossible to hold comfortably, and I almost certainly didn’t read it from beginning to end, but at some point in the years that followed I did mark some passages with a pen and dog-ear some pages. The passage above was marked with an asterisk and its page dog-eared, and I can’t imagine what age I might have been when I did this, when I might have thought that it was relevant to me. You have seen a lot, felt deeply. I might only now, approaching 40, begin to feel that this statement could be true of me.
I’m still so juvenile in my engagement with art, though - reading Sylvia Plath’s journals makes me feel so sad that she died! And she was so smart and brilliant! She was absolutely dedicated to recording her experience of the world on paper, and she never questioned whether writing her thoughts in her diaries was worth her time. It just was. There’s a section near the end where she undertook a project of recording in enormous detail her interactions with and observations of her neighbors in the village of North Tawton, Devon, to the point where it all becomes a bit tedious to read. What enlivens this writing, though, is its promise - she was recording these observations to be used, at some point in the future, in her poetry or prose. The writing remains there, in 1962, brimming with potential.
The other book that has felt most alive to me recently is also diary-adjacent. Kathryn Scanlan’s Aug 9 - Fog is a tiny book compiled from the lines of a diary the author found at an estate sale in Illinois 15 years before. The diary belonged to an 86 year old woman who recorded one line per day over five years in the 1970s, and after Scanlan acquired the diary, she found herself continually drawn back to the diarist’s voice: “A grand rain, it come so nice.” “Hiller’s house burned. We went out to see what fire had done. Sure clean sweep.” I love this project, this concept, the effect of its collaged lines, and the fact that the diarist, long dead, is so very alive inside it.
Lately, I’ve been waiting. For tests, results, for the other shoe to drop. I have felt that I will write in the future, when I know more. The knowing doesn’t come, and I grow weary of waiting.
In the hospital when Elliott was born, on the day we were finally able to go home, one of his nurses handed me a small, red stethoscope and said, You can keep that. She’d been using it to check his tiny heart rate. Oh, I said, why? Should I be checking his heart? As if I didn’t already have enough to be worrying about. No, as a toy, the nurse said, laughing. I remember thinking, okay, he’s 5 days old, why would he need a toy? The idea of toys seemed absurd to me, we would not need them for so, so long yet. I hadn’t included any toys on our registry, not even a baby play mat, for the same reason - I couldn’t see myself as a mom of a person who would exist separately from me. All my preparations throughout pregnancy had focused exclusively on the newborn phase, which I had been told so adamantly to dread, and my strategy was going to be that my baby would stay physically on my person at all times, either feeding or sleeping, which would obviate the need for crying and of course toys. Ha-ha, you might be thinking, as I am, about my foolishness.
We sort of continued with the ‘he doesn’t need toys’ thing for quite a long time, until he was around 18 months old I think, and then we very quickly went from ‘hardly any toys’ to ‘we need a bigger house for all these toys.’ Obviously. We might have created a bit of an obsession with our sudden turnaround, to the point where Elliott now asks if we can go to the toy store nearly every day. But anyway. He plays all sorts of games now, including doctor, where I or Adam have to lie on the couch and be examined with the stethoscope and various other ‘instruments’ which he tries to forcefully stick in our mouths and ears, probably as payback for all those COVID tests.
One Saturday in April, Elliott used his little red stethoscope to check Adam’s heartbeat, and then it was my turn. Lying there on the couch, flat on my back and at something like rest, I realized that my heart had been faintly juddering in my chest for most of the day, a sensation I had been aware of but expected to pass without any further thought. And actually, it had been happening for a few days now, on and off, now that I thought about it, and I convinced Elliott to let me listen. I heard my heart thumping (I am, I am, I am), and then it sounded like two beats occurred very quickly followed by a long-ish pause (IamIam,,,,,,,,,I am), after which it would resume its usual rhythm. This happened every ten beats or so, and sometimes it happened many times in a row, and the overall effect was pretty chaotic. But the game moved on. Now we were firefighters or dragons or herons.
Long story short, I wore a Holter monitor for 24 hours and it showed that a high percentage of my heartbeats are premature ventricular contractions, PVCs, and according to the cardiologist they’re technically harmless but I still shouldn’t be having so many of them for seemingly no reason, and they’re not coming from the usual place where PVCs originate in the heart, so I’m waiting now for the next test, which is an MRI.
I’m waiting, too, for answers about the health of a loved one, which is far, far more important than my harmless skipped beats, but I can’t write about what I don’t know. For a while there, I didn’t write, because I was waiting, and now I’m writing any old thing just to say something. - your problems are universal enough to be made meaningful - WRITE -
Yours,
Helen.
P.S. Elliott and I joined the Y(MCA) and we are very enthusiastic about it. It is one of the most wholesomely community-focused spaces I have encountered since I moved to the US. It’s cheap and extremely child-friendly, and as a result, the people who go to this gym are many and various in age, size, and fitness level. The people who work there are so nice, and there’s a wonderful cafe inside that exclusively employs people with cognitive disabilities. Elliott loves the family pool, which is open for swimming all the time, and so we go a couple of times a week just to splash about. When he’s in school, I sometimes go to Bodypump and lift weights to music, which is ridiculous, and I love it. That’s it. I just wanted to end this entry on a positive note.
How I wish I’d told you about the charms of the Y ages ago. Bodypump has become a weekly ritual around here too.
I am also waiting—a test result that requires further testing with nary an available appointment for a month—so in the meantime...
What I love about these Sylvia Plath excerpts, in my own sad juvenile response, is how she is both trying to self-improve and be better (win friends, influence people) and yet it’s her sense of entitlement about writing (just do it, in all its tedious neighborly minutiae!) that I admire and take to heart—that her insights and deep feelings were just right, as they are, right then. (It seems related to say I saw a photograph of myself from six years ago when I thought I was “fat” and was gobsmacked by what I saw, looking back, and how sad that made me.)
Btw, Helen, the very beauty of your prose is uplifting. I felt the absence and am so grateful for your return. ❤️