The Journals of Sylvia Plath

117 August 30-1:45 p.m. Right about now I should start getting lyrical and extremely elated. I am just that, as a matter-of-fact, but my glorying in physical well-being is tempered by a touch of nostalgia of the "Sweet-Thames-Run-Softly-till-I-End-My-Song" variety. Only this time I will punctuate with my old "Never Again" refrain.

On the last day before the family comes home from their week's cruise, I sit in careless freedom on my large sunporch outside the guest room. In aqua haltar and blue shorts, wet hair drying, bleaching to streaked blond in the sun, sun tan oil splashed freshly on deepening brown flesh, my poetry books beside me. Ever since they went away, leaving Helen and me with the house and Pinny and Joanne I have felt the intangible steel cord of subservience loosened from my intestines. Never again will I linger in pure gastronomic liberty over a dinner of fresh corn and lambchops, or steak with fresh iced peaches and vanilla icecream for dessert. Never again will I dry myself after an invigorating swim in the blue salt ocean visible from this house on the hill, put on a clean cotton dress over a vivid, electric, cooly tingling body, and bike jauntily to market to buy "anything I want" to eat. Never again will I sit on the porch of this mansion, become so firmly and temporarily mine these past days, hearing the hoarse waves heaving, seeing the blue green water over the lawn, between the great pensive sighing trees. I could play my piano, if I wanted, or read, or sleep, or merely sit here, feet scalded by the burning gray-slatted floor, sun frying willing flesh, writing.

Today I got a post card - adorably and laboriously printed by my favorite Freddie. Pinny and Joey sleep dociley - beautiful lovable, spoiled babies - my children. Complete physical well-being, exalted environment, a sense of capability and self-integrality never before felt. God, for the sun, beating, beating, melting my body to gleaming warm bronze, bronze-thighed, bronze-breasted, ripe and full, glowing. And oh, for the thin copper threads of my hair, incandescent in the sun drenched wind. For the screams and squeals of children and gulls over the continuous splash of the waves. Blue, flashing white, space, heat, salt, bird twitters and chirps in the grieving, sighing trees, and at night, the dark, indigo sky, often the fog, and lights hanging in suspended blurred globes. Even wet laundry flapping in the grass-flavored wind. Even a childs' freshly-bathed body under my finger tips.

God, how I love it all. And who am I, God-whom-I-don't-believe-in? God-who-is-my-alter-ego? Suddenly the turn table switches to a higher speed, and in the whizzing that ensues I loose track of my identity. I act and react, and suddenly I wonder "Where is the girl that I was last year?. Two years ago? . What would she think of me now?" And I remember vaguely tolstoi's argument about fate and inevitability and free will. As an act recedes into the past and becomes imbedded in the network of one's individuality it seems more and more a product of fate - - inevitable. However, an act in the immediate present seems to be more a product of free will.

Is it not that a particular act becomes inevitable, while obviously so, since completed. Take the Smith business. I still can't remember just what put the idea of a double college application into my head, but apply I did. And a year ago last May, after having been accepted and even having gotten $850 scholarship from the college, I still didn't know whether or not I could go - because of complete lack of funds. Teetering then, as I did, I could not imagine myself in coming years - because I could not picture my environment - Wellesley, the old homestead - or Smith, the new untried independent field? Smith it became, and with it my horizons popped open - New Haven, New Jersey, New York - Dick, Marcia - and Mrs. Koffka - all the rest. Seems impossible now that anything else could have happened to me - such is the poverty of my imagination. This summer - aided by the agency of the Smith vocational office and Marcia, would hardly have come into being were it not for SMITH . Yet had I gone to Wellesley, I could only hazard about what might have appeared inevitable.

After incoherent rambling, I will say that I amuse my leisure hours by cultivating that stubborn unimaginative state of mind which refuses to dream, imagine or conjecture about any situation's reality except the present. Events, as one grows older, first stand out in relief, and then start whizzing by like a deck of cards. Spoken words, felt emotions, actual situations - all lapse almost immediately into a dry, theoretical vacuum. For instance: Dick. All that occurred last spring - - - all that I thought and felt and said - and recorded as reality, has lapsed into that wooden mechanical world which can be wound up and set going in day dreams, ticking over like somebody else's movie film. But who is Dick? Who am I? My stubborn unimaginative self cannot conceive of him as a flesh-and-blood being any more, because in the last two-and-a-half months of my life he has only been a reality twice briefly and peculiarly. All tensions - mental and emotional, wound in those two encounters. Yet, not having had time to get used to the boy, I awoke after the real hours were gone - to find myself believing in him only in theory. Odd is the human complexity when examined and questioned. I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost. but won't. It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me.

Dick is real only in that time was (which time is vaguely and dreamily recalled in dreams and in thoughtful seconds .) and in that time will be (a similiar vague and faceless conception of what will happen and where and with whom.) Time present is Non-Dick. And if I maintain that stubborn state where time present - made up only of temporary physical reality, sensual perceptions and spasmodic streams-of-consciousness - is the only reality, why then Dick is naught but an unsigned picture, a handful of letters and two carved wooden objects - a pickle fork & knife. But this state of mind is born of a renunciation of complexities. It is a negation of sorts. A return to the womb, Freud might have it. Overwhelmed by lack of time, race of time, speed of time, I retreat into non-thought - merely into Epicurean sensual observations and desires - momentary ephemeral flashes of well-being and ill-being. Do I think? After a fashion. Do I put myself in other people's minds and viscera? No. Not half enough. Do I listen? Yes. Tonight I listened for three solid hours to Ann Huntn review her life, her background, and her vocations. Do I create? No, I reproduce. I have no imagination. I am submerged in circling ego. I listen, God knows why. I say I am interested in people. Am I rationalizing? God knows. Maybe he doesn't. 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 worried about thinking. Mentally I have led a vegetable existence this summer.

However. After getting up at 6 am this morning, I am hardly in a lucid state at I am the next morning. Adieu.

118 Suddenly, I stopped dead. I had opened my calendar to the month of August as usual, to write in the neat white box labeled with day and date, a scant summary of the activities completed in the last 12 hours. Sickened, I saw that I had unwittingly completed the last day of August. Tomorrow would be September. God! All the quick futility of my days cascaded upon me, and I wanted to scream out in helpless fury at the hopeless inevitable going on of seconds, days and years. By the time I fill in this page, said I, I will have finished my job, gone home, spent four days at the Cape and either added to or detracted from my relationship with the one man-in-my-life at present, passed or failed my driving test, given my speech at the Smith Club tea, packed my things, and embarked on a merry-go-round among much jingling of bells and harnesses and neighing of horses, to whiz through another year of my life - becoming nineteen (where do they hide the young, tender years?) and beating out some sort of life at Smith ... crisping into woollen autumn and into the darkening iron of November . and Christmas . vacation - grinding through an icy, mud-grimy January-February-March, and tentatively, unbelievingly, unfolding into another spring, when the damn world makes us think we are as young as we ever were and deceives us by pale lucid skies and the sudden opening of little leaves.

All this is a quick sketch of the scared naked fear and grief that congealed in me when I saw the vivid young living of my days boxed off and numbered in faceless white squares. Good bye, Freddie, Pinny, Joey - (my sweet, my love, who glanced in fragrant tilted-black lashed tenderness at me, cooing over supper cereal. God, how straight your two-year old back under the ankle-length white flannel night...