Losing (and finding) my religion with Sylvia Plath
“If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression of something beautiful, but annihilating.”
A friend and colleague sent me a quote from Sylvia Plath during one of our animated discussions over email.
Even as I typed out an immediate response from the cold, steely grey keyboard, I couldn’t believe how much I have changed from the me of 10 years ago. The me of 10 years ago, would have let those words take flight in my heart and allow it to conjure an emotion of something beautiful and mysterious. It would have made me curious about the story behind the muse — what made her capable of weave words of such poetry, yet preciseness?
I once had the ability to lose myself in the words I read, the songs which played, the pictures I saw. Yet, I found myself typing: “Her words are beautiful! But, I am cynical of anything she says because she put her head in the oven and killed herself”.
SP killed herself at 30, sealing herself in a room filled with carbon monoxide. She left behind two little children. They found her with her head in the oven, the story goes.
The fact that she killed herself — it made me doubt the beauty of her work.
Did our caveman ancestors first begin to draw on walls to entertain themselves perhaps after a particularly satisfying hunting expedition? Or did they do so borne out of a desperate need for expression, to share their misgivings and sorrows in the daily struggle to survive?
Which leads me to the question — does suffering deepen our creativity?
American journalist Christopher Zara wrote a book ‘Tortured Artists’ about this real-life stereotype of individuals whose art was inspired by pain and suffering. A few common names spring to mind - Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway. Frida Kahlo. Vincent Van Gogh, the classic tortured artist. Amy Whinehouse. Kurt Cobain. And more.
Is it possible that people who create great works of art and beauty are so deeply (and sometimes, irrevocably) in touch with their thoughts and feelings, that this could overwhelm them to destruction?
I would imagine that a heady mix of (individual)talent, passion, desire, privilege, fame and fortune probably made them more narcissistic and self-referential then the rest of us. I would imagine that everyday life for these people would be a disappointment - such is the cleanse experienced by their souls while immersed in the activity of expression.
So any other reality may feel inadequate, empty. This is often followed by a (misplaced or purposeful) affinity towards mind-altering substances, which could mess with their minds and nibble at their selves as they walk down individual paths of torment. Yet, the art they made, affected people. It made them think, and dream. And feel things. Their work shaped people and changed them forever.
Life, these days, does tend to become an endless cycle of waking, working, meals and sleep, and all the other things in between. In its defense, it is stable, productive, and happy. Yet, these absorbing days pass by fully and quickly, and there is no time to stop and be still. There is no time to pay attention. No time to reflect deeply about thoughts and feelings, however meager or plentiful these may be.
Following a routine, disciplines, controls, and makes the everyday a carefully orchestrated affair, albeit the occasional or frequent overthrowing human plans now and then.
When I observe myself going about the routine, I find it hard to be creative. When I don’t pay attention to my feelings or emotion, there is no stirring in my soul. There is no spontaneity, no need to purge, no desperate need to connect with another human, no urgent need for self-expression. There is no art. It blocks access to the place where anything and everything is possible. Maybe this is the burden of the ‘comfortable’.
Like the ‘troubled artist’ (but far from them in every sense), I seek to write when in distress. I long to put down my thoughts and feelings in a safely guarded place. I find that the words flow more easily when troubled. There is so much content to work with. It is therapeutic, and it feels natural.
SP may have been miserable all her life, but maybe she existed to introduce us to beauty, her ‘truth’, and to cause us to pay attention to ours — however brief.
I must always remind myself to throwaway these real-life spectacles of constraint and appreciate art for art’s sake. However close I may lean towards forgetting the need, losing the drive, or simply lacking in earnestness to create, I must find it again.
This is where my greatest pleasure lies. I must not forget.
