afternoon

it's raining. i have the heater on. i painted a small candle for myself and a lawn of alices completely in silhouette, save for the whiteness of their blocky aprons. i began a portrait of Karen Hadaway. i drew until the muscle that connects my shoulder to my neck burned and then i sat back to look. i looked and looked and i picked up Angela Pneuman's book Home Remedies. i flipped it to the middle and read the story i found there- The Bell Ringer. On the 2nd page, i began reading out loud, all the way to the end. longing and heartbreak and confusion and all the fragments. the fragments. swept up in to a pile. a human.

i see sylvia plath and anne sexton in these pages. little flashes of them. but there are other ghosts in there too. other fragments. other inspirations. unknowable things that catch the light, a swift and sudden glint. as i read, my voice went low and slow. each word picking up more weight as it moved. each word becoming more and more laden with history, with all the fragments that make a person who they are. the heavy collection of individuality. of difference. of dark. of familiar places and memories and lost artifacts. the weight of a single life. sad and beautiful. an evidence room but warmer than that. and so much more complex. beauty twisting around flaws and helplessness. or maybe beauty because of these things. i was lost inside the skill of this story. nebulous like a spell.

and when i finished, i looked up at Karen's portrait. a baby. 9 years old. i saw my candle and i saw that it was still raining and i saw that, even here inside the dismal, there is such fertile land for hope and compassion. the possibility for a reckoning.

a conundrum, a take-back, and good art...

coffee in hand and a near notebook.
a sleeping rottweiler on the big red chair.
and flipping through Ariel this morning
with my two elsie's governing the whole house from the top of the big bookcase:

i notice the love she had for horse hooves and poppies and the color green... what do you do with such things? how to honor them? a dead hero...

and anne sexton was jealous over it which makes me cringe and pisses me off. why talk shit like that over a friend's suicide? why make it about YOU? when there are two babies without a mother and a man crying in his sleep...

maybe they weren't friends after all.

she wrote a horrible, spiteful essay about sylvia's life and work in a collection of literary criticism called 'The Art of Sylvia Plath" published in 1971, 8 years after sylvia's death. in it, she talks about herself and casts herself as sylvia... speaks of the suicide as if it were her own, like property, and infested with jealousy. tacky and rude and it makes me want to read anne's work less and less.

it is a loss.

i have loved her work but anne sexton seems like a mean person to me today. i don't know what to do with that. is it possible to go on admiring a person's artistic capabilities once they've offended your core morality?

must you like the artist in order to go on appreciating the art?

in the end,
anne killed herself too...

maybe her anger and sadness was aroused by sylvia's success in the matter. maybe it wasn't jealousy so much as a horrible wish? anne left behind children too. grown children but children nonetheless. there is an entire family that morns her and misses her... and i, on my high horse, wondering if she was a "good person" or not. maybe i am the one offending my morality here. i am not offering the compassion i claim to believe in. my heart twists and i realize i'm being a big dumb baby over the clash that may or may not have existed between two, now, dead women. is it even my business... is it any of ours?

but this is the power of words right here. they go on. infinitely. as long as the pages are being turned, the age of the page doesn't really matter. and it hasn't really been all that long since these tragedies occurred. not really. sylvia plath killed herself in 1963. anne sexton did it in 1974. 11 years between each other. and only a little more than 40 years ago.

maybe my anger is the same anger anyone would have? the anger that swishes out of confusion and tremendous sadness... a need to find a place to rest the blame. more than 40 years and my finger is eager to point. more than 40 years and the wrestling continues. the argument goes on. and all this happened before i was even born.

this is the power of good art.

and so i need a do-over-
i take it all back. about anne. i will keep turning those pages and remind myself to find a path of compassion. i think it is one of the points of finding poetry in the world anyway: establishing a vehicle of compassion. and hope.

everyone fails.
and everyone shines.
everyone
everyone
everyone

and hopefully, me too.



p.s. does anyone else have big thoughts like this first thing in the morning? ha!

p.p.s. i forgot to mention it yesterday- check out the two AMAZING artists i blurbed about over at ANTLER. good stuff. heart-felt work and so full of longing. scroll down to yesterday's post and you'll find them.