The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

by Sylvia Plath

can go mad by ricocheting in between.

Blue-painted and metallic animal, Where on the amorphic tree of evolution Did you arise?

The mindless April leaves heave sighs And twirl in aimless sarabandes. My fingers curl and clutch the skies; Green blood flows in green-veined hands.

Syncopates in my purple throat. And the rigid rod of duty Crumbles in me like weak plaster.

The film of your days and nights is wound up tight in you, never to be re-run – and the occasional flashbacks are faint, blurred, unreal, as if seen through falling snow.

You have one; and somewhere along the thin, tenuous thread of your existence there is the black knot, the blood clot, the stopped heartbeat that spells the end of this particular individual which is spelled “I” and “You” and “Sylvia.”

As it is, what I have written here so far is rather poor, rather unsatisfactory. It is the product of an unimaginative girl, preoccupied with herself, and continually splashing about in the shallow waters of her own narrow psyche.

The wind has blown a warm yellow moon up over the sea; a bulbous moon, which sprouts in the soiled indigo sky, and spills bright winking petals of light on the quivering black water.

My purpose, which I mentioned quite nebulously a while back, is to draw certain attitudes, feelings and thoughts, into a psuedo-reality for the reader. (“Pseudo” of necessity.) Since my woman’s world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing – and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a

kaleidoscope of similes.

If he lives in my head or under my left ventricle, maybe he’s too uncomfortable to know much of anything.

Why am I obsessed with the idea I can justify myself by getting manuscripts published? Is it an escape – an excuse for any social failure – so I can say “No, I don’t go out for many extra-curricular activities, but I spend alot of time writing.” Or is it an excuse for wanting to be alone and meditate alone, not having to brave a group of women? (Women in numbers have

always disturbed me.) Do I like to write? Why? About what? Will I give up and say “living and feeding a man’s insatiable guts and begetting children occupies my whole life. Don’t have time to write?” Or will I stick to the damn stuff and practice? Read and think and practice? I am wor...

I am jealous of men – a dangerous and subtle envy which can corrode, I imagine, any relationship.

It is an envy born of the desire to be active and doing, not passive and listening. I envy the man his physical freedom to lead a double life – his career, and his sexual and family life. I can pretend to forget my envy; no matter, it is there, insidious, malignant, latent.

So I am led to one or two choices! Can I write? Will I write if I practice enough? How much should I sacrifice to writing anyway, before I find out if I’m any good? Above all, CAN A SELFISH EGOCENTRIC JEALOUS AND UNIMAGITIVE FEMALE WRITE A DAMN THING WORTH WHILE? Should I sublimate (my, how we throw words around!) my selfishness in serving other people – through social or other such work? Would I then become more sensitive to other people and their problems? Would I be able to write honestly, then, of other beings beside a tall, introspective adolescent girl?

Looking at myself, in the past years, I have come to the conclusion that I must, have a passionate physical relationship with someone – or combat the great sex urge in me by drastic means.

I am critical, particular, aristocratic in tastes.

Perhaps my desire to write could be simplified to a basic fear of non-admiration and non-esteem. Suddenly I wonder: am I afraid that the sensuous haze of marriage will kill the desire to write?

Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is most becoming?

It is only balance that I ask for. Not the continual subordination of one persons desires and interests to the continual advancement of another’s! That would be too grossly unfair

Why is he so afraid of my being strong and assertive? Why has he found it necessary to be himself so aggressive and positive in planning and directing actions and events?

to actually do and not just appreciate, (Is that a sign that he must compete and master me – symbolic, what?) he recently states that a poem “is so much inconsequential dust.” With that attitude, how can he be so hypocritical as to pretend he likes poetry? Even some kinds of poetry? The fact remains that writing is a way of life to me: And writing not just from a pragmatic, money-earning point of view either.

But at nineteen I will take the risk and hope that I will have another chance or two!

(perhaps because he knows the blur is still there behind her dark eyes and that her mouth wants very badly to be kissed.)

brief ecstatic world, drawing into himself a delicious and sweet sustenance.

So I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can. I am looking very healthy and flushed and bright eyed, having both a good tan and a rather excellent fever.

And then I began to understand the difference between death-or-sickness-in-life as versus Life.

When sick (both physically, as symptoms showed, and mentally, as I was trying to escape from something) I wanted to withdraw from all the painful reminders of vitality – to hide away alone in a peaceful stagnant pool, and not be like a crippled stick entangled near the bank of a jubilantly roaring river, torn at continually by the noisy current.

It goes by, and whatever dream you use to dope up the pains and hurts, it goes. Delude yourself about printed islands of permanence. You’ve only got so long to live. You’re getting your dream.

The kittens, the books all over, she has built and painted, the

Writing work.

I can understand because in me too the fire of destruction flares blood hot and as for all the ideals I had, they are broken, malleable now, for compromise

and rationalization. The ways to hell on earth are easy, and one can always cross out hell and scribble in heaven. So much sweeter that way.)

how he can deny matter and flesh as real when one can make such healthful beauty out of them

inconsistent and admire beauty of flesh, calling her cream and honey because of her skin and white bathing suit.

She must somehow cultivate and work through this which means so much to him. Because no matter what he labels the highest good in him, spirit or other...

yes, you my vulnerable flesh, and me your tearing rending young strange idealism which I would tender and nourish to keep from all the pretty sexy girls that will wear your sharpness to a dull, flat, bored edge.

while the water goes by, you so fleeting, the two of us so hopeless, and why do I love you so jealously?

And I, my throat thick and husky with awe and tenderness, loving terribly at once his young, dear, clean-cut idealistic faith: seeing in it the salvation of him from so much of the repetitive meaningless rot in the world –: I say: but you have done so much, Bobby, for me.

I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh

you, to me, are blindly denying, in your spiritual monism, the antithetic dualisms of the universe which I see as real. But we both have our dreams. And it is how we live here that matters – not the motivating force which varies so radically.)

and being once burned and twice shy

lyric lovely on the tongue.

listening to his wild idealistic ravings, wondering at the miraculous youngness of him as he tells me how beautiful, how intelligent he finds me, how I have changed him, how we will someday live on a ranch or a desert island, and he will want me to write and be happy, and raise a hockey team.

And if I have learned nothing else, it is to listen and to love: everyone. A humanitarian, faith in man’s potential for good. And a compassion for his weaknesses, his so-called original sins.

“This is the one! After all the whirl and excitement and gay passionate flames, this is the one I will choose to come home to! The proverbial boy next door!” Why? Why? Because he is a virgin? Because I want terribly to believe in pure idealism? Because I want, as all women do, to be loved devotedly, without fear of jealousy as I grow old, and the young pretty women continue to parade by?

with the groggy sleepless blood dragging through my veins, and the air thick and gray with

To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.

If I could build an ideal and creative life with him, or someone like him, I would feel I had lived a testimony of constructive faith in a hell of a world.