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2001-03-14
Although I grew up in New England, I have never been on skis except for once, while trying out the Hanukkah booty of a childhood friend, when upon my feet being strapped in I immediately fell over. That basement had a concrete floor; I was lucky to escape injury, I knew it at the time. And then, within two years, three�if it�s possible to be too young for a book then almost certainly too few�my ski-less fate was sealed by my exposure to the flashy fiction-veiled memoir of one of modern literature�s most (of many) personally objectionable fine writers, a woman who had passed a stormy, sulky adolescence in Winthrop, Massachusetts, the same small island town where I was poised to do the same until a move to the southern suburbs which left me almost�but not quite�as horrifically shattered as the narrator of The Bell Jar�s leg at the conclusion of her first downhill run.
Within a relatively brief life-span, Sylvia Plath managed to exhibit so many vile traits that it is difficult to see how they can be enumerated with any cogency. She disliked women. She hated lesbians. She entered writing contests. She was vain. She was mean to her mother. She married for status. She complained every single day. Her suicide left her children motherless and the gas nearly killed her downstairs neighbor too. At this very moment other people in the underworld are probably crossing the street to avoid her�but the fact remains that she left behind some writing that gets into you so deep it never goes away. It can keep brave people (well, fairly brave) from ever skiing. It can keep nervous breakdowns coming, for the prose.
In his great book The Western Canon (which served as the basis of my most erotic literary study�here�s the fourth installment, by the way), Harold Bloom quotes Nietzsche to the effect that, �We only have words for what is already dead in our hearts.� Although this is a tough concept to love, I have chosen to embrace it. For instance, I see myself go on and on about Martha Stewart�well, let me be the first to admit that I�m only circling the unspoken here, in fact I�m just exploring its circumference. And I have nothing, at this time�NOTHING�to say about Angelina Jolie. In other words, if something�s on diaryland it�s past, done and discarded�whether it feels that way or not�every pain transcribed here is artificial pain�which doesn�t mean it wasn�t real, or isn't renewable. But consider: Not only is this is artifice, all of it�but none of it is private, at least in any genuine sense.
And so I say (and so would Nietzsche) that anyone who�s been concealing her diary from Others, should presently, for the sake of everybody's long-term safety and enjoyment, practice saying, �This is not my FEELINGS. This is my CREATION,� and then start sharing the address.