Eucatastrophe Reader

"I Reckon So"

The Outlaw Josey Wales REVIEW

The other day, I was in my local library and found a recently published magazine, The American Rifleman. “The world’s oldest and largest firearm authority,” the banner reads. On the cover was a picture of Clint Eastwood in his role as “The Outlaw Josey Wales” in the movie of the same title (1975). Eastwood suggests that it was wildly popular because in 1975, the U.S. was dealing with the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the film depicts the messy psychological and social adjustments that had to be made as soldiers and the culture untangled their traumas and violent pasts. The film uses the aftermath of the Civil War to provide a cathartic tale of a psychologically damaged Vietnam vet 100 years before his time.  

The cover of the magazine provides a number of avenues for exploration. The image of Clint Eastwood brandishing his two large handguns is about as iconic as it comes. The title of the article is “’I Reckon So’ The Guns of the Outlaw Josey Wales.” The cover page includes reference to the fact that the magazine contains an official NRA Ballot inside. One article is entitled, “This Election Could Determine the Future of the Second Amendment.” An ad for a semi-automatic weapon contains the moniker, “50 Rounds of Functional Defensive Artistry” and another “The Easiest Way to Get a Silencer.” The annual meeting of the NRA will be held in Texas we are informed. Would anyone be surprised? The magazine is full of such articles and advertisements relating to the use of guns, and Josey Wales is portrayed as a sort of standard bearer for the NRA.  One is tempted to wonder why, of all the Westerns with overtly masculine gun-toting heroes, Eastwoods’ Josey Wales was the winning contestant.  

I decided to rent the film to learn more. The film introduces us to Josey Wales in the opening scenes. He is a hard-scrabble Missouri farmer just trying to plant crops and feed his lovely wife and young family when tragedy in the form of a band of marauding Union-sympathizing terrorists (i.e. rowdy abolitionists) from Kansas descends upon his home, sets it on fire, and kills his wife and child.  Bereft, Josey Wales gets out his guns and learns to shoot (we are thus given to understand that he was not a violent man before but that he has been forced into it by the brutality of Union soldiers). A band of Confederate sympathizers arrives and invites him to join their rabble of counterinsurgents and off they go to fight the Union. Flashbacks of all the violence parade across the screen for several minutes. One is not sure which side is right or wrong. It is just a lot of men shooting at one another.

Eventually, the War concludes, and Josey’s band of guerrilla fighters decides to surrender. They are promised amnesty and, without any hope of carrying on their personal wars of revenge (no one in the band seems to have any idea that they are fighting for slavery here) they head down to the Union camp where they turn in their weapons and begin to pledge their allegiance to the U.S. Government. Suddenly the dastardly Union men open fire on them from a covered wagon with a gatling gun. Josey Wales, the only Missourian fighter who refused to surrender, is spared, but not before he attacks the union camp to save his mates, commandeering the Gatling gun and decimating Union soldiers right and left before he escapes. The viewer is meant to breath a sigh of relief that he did not hand his guns over to the double crossing government.

By this time, we have established that Josey Wales is an honorable family man driven to fight a violent and corrupt Union army and government that not only slaughters women and children in cold blood but also deceives those who surrender, murdering them while they are in the act of surrendering. Clearly, according to the film, Josey Wales was correct in refusing to surrender his weapons for now that he is a hunted man, he will surely need them (you can see where the NRA bit is coming in). Over the next hour of the movie, Josey Wales is hunted by a posse of bounty hunters and Union soldiers while outdueling and killing a whole congregation of bad men – rapists, thieves, scoundrels, carpetbaggers, frauds, sex-traffickers, corrupt politicians, and hooligans. The whole while, he treats Native Americans, women (and Native American women in particular) honorably (I don’t think there are any Black characters in the film, but at one point, Josey insists that he does not have any interest in “owning any other human” thus establishing that while he despises Northerners generally, and abolitionist settlers from Kansas particularly, he did not fight in the Civil War to defend slavery – he was just protecting his family from violence subtext: as any honorable man would do).

The genius of the subterfuge is that he uses the Native Americans in the story as a stand-in for White Southerners – people who have been “abused” by the forces of the Federal government and had their “culture” “destroyed” for an inability to resist assimilation by force. Josey Wales has no intentions of demanding that proud indigenous cultures stop resisting the evils of Federal power.  Indeed, he celebrates their continual armed resistance.

The Outlaw Josey Wales is something of a morality story about the need for armed resistance in the face of a corrupt but powerful government and in a world of criminals, thieves, drunks, and scum-bags looking for opportunities to pillage and rape. “I reckon so,” Josey is wont to say. But he says other spectacularly defiant things as well:

A bounty hunter tells him that “a man’s got to make a livin somehow,” and Josey says to him, “Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’.” “Are you gonna pull those pistols or whistle ‘Dixie’?” he asks a group of Union soldiers about to draw their weapons on him. Josey Wales is full of spit and raw nobility. He dispenses with his own justice. He uses his handguns for courts.

What not many people may know is that the novel the film was based on was written by a former Klan member and the speech-writer for the segregationist Alabama governor, George Wallace.   The author, Forest Carter, was the adopted name of Asa Carter, formally of Alabama. The name “Forest” was adopted to honor the founder of the Klan, Confederate General, Nathan Bedford Forest. Asa Carter was the speech writer who came up with George Wallace’s famous line, “Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever.” You might say that like Josey Wales, he was a bad man in a former life.

You can learn about Asa (Forest) Carter’s double life from the documentary, “The Reconstruction of Asa Carter” a man who literally got two different gravestones for having successfully pulled off two different lives. One as a racist Klan leader and one as a writer of books celebrating law, order, and the humanization of American Indians.

It is interesting that at the end of the film, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Josey masquerades as “Mr. Wilson” while some of his supporters tell the law men in the saloon who have been sent to find Josey that Josey was shot down in Mexico, going so far as to sign an affidavit to that effect.  One law-man who knows Josey from his days as a Missouri Confederate decides to let Josey go though, telling  him in the films closing words, “I think I will go down to Mexico and try to find him [Josey Wales] . . . . I think I will try to tell him the war is over.” “I reckon so,” Josey replies, “I guess we all died a little in that damn war.”

Wounded, dripping blood on his boots, Josey returns to his small farm in Texas, we assume to either die in peace or carry on with a new life as “Mr. Wilson.” Just like Asa had become Forest when it became clear that the world was not safe for leaders of the Klan and segregationists any more, Josey holsters his guns and hopes that his past will leave him alone now.    

Question for Comment: Just today, I read about a man in Texas who changed his name to “Literally Anybody Else.” If you could pack up and be someone new – someone better situated to succeed in the world than you live in now, who would you become? Or are you the sort to go down fighting a changing world to the bitter end?

"Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”

Beloved REVIEW
(I wrote this in July of 2008. It had some formatting and spelling errors and a few typos and so I am reposting it now)

The last few days, in between exams and final papers, I have managed to read Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved. Needless to say, you won't get the final word on a Pulitzer Prize winning novel from me. But I mean to outline a few things that Morrison’s novel speaks to me.

One of the themes of the book has to do with how long it can take to process abuse and trauma. All of the characters in Beloved have been traumatized and physically and emotionally abused by slavery. In that sense, Beloved is a second Uncle Tom's Cabin, gnawing away at the lie in the National consciousness that slavery could be a humane institution. Morrison makes it clear that it destroyed lives, whites and blacks.

Every person that came out of slavery was a survivor and everyone would have to have pieces of them put back together. With any luck, they found people that could help them, some related, some not: “She is a friend of mine,” one of the characters says about someone he refers to as “30 Mile Woman,”

“She gather me. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.  It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.” (p. 273)

What is particularly interesting to me is that as a result of the way that Morrison writes, you have to put pieces together yourself. You, as a reader, have to do what the characters have to do: work out what happened and what it means. Sometimes, you are inside people's heads. Sometimes, you are watch what happens to them through the floorboards. Memory and "rememory" are incessantly present, as if the memories of these slaves are scabs that have to be peeled off to be healed, and peeled off again to be healed again, - all one can hope for is that in each round of the painful process, a little less gravel will be found in the wound. Morrison makes use of a set of characters that had lived on a "humane plantation" to make it clear that even there, abuse, psychological, emotional, sexual, and economic was rampant. As Baby Suggs puts it, “Not a house in the county ain't packed to its rafters with some Negro’s grief. . . .” 

In all of Baby's life, as well as Sethe’s own, men and women were moved around like checkers. There wasn’t anybody Suggs knew, let alone loved, “who hadn't run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized.”. .  . what she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that “nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.” (p.23)

And the emotional impact would take generations to work out, not just in the time it took to announce an Emancipation Proclamation. So many of the characters in this novel have scars - they have broken trusters and frozen passions. In so many ways, their ability to form bonds and to love was crippled. And clearly, as one of the characters so eloquently puts it, "Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”

Trauma taught slaves that they should put as many emotions into hibernation as possible:

"Sethe looked at her hands, her bottle-green sleeves, and thought how little color there was in the house and how strange that she had not missed it the way Baby did.  Deliberate, she thought, it must be deliberate, because the last color she remembered was the pink chips in the headstone of her baby girl. After that she became as color conscious as a hen. Every dawn she worked in fruit pies, potato dishes and vegetables while the cook did the soup, meat and all the rest.  And she could not remember remembering a molly apple or yellow squash. Every dawn she saw the dawn, but never acknowledged or remarked its color.  There was something wrong with that.  It was as though one day she saw red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it."

Slavery taught them to bond to nothing and no one:

“Risky, thought Paul D., very risky.  For a used-to-be slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love.  The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.” (p.45)

“So you protected yourself and loved small.  Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see a loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept.  Steal shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up.  Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, Beatles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn't do.  A woman, a child, a brother -- a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia.  He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose -- not to need permission for desire -- well now, that was freedom.” (p.162)

Clearly, everyone got disconnected by the institution of slavery and needed help getting put back together. Sethe needs Paul D to provide a sense of safety. Paul D needs Sethe to affirm his ability to create a place of safety - something he could never do for anyone before. It is because of him that she begins to see colors again:

" . . kneeling in the keeping room the morning after Paul D. came, she was distracted by the two orange squares that signaled how barren 124 really was.”

“He was responsible for that.  Emotions sped to the surface in his company.  Things became what they were: drabness looked drab; heat was hot.  Windows suddenly had view.  And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man.” (p.39)

It is because of her that Paul D begins to assemble his disconnected self, unpacking the emotions that he had for so long slammed shut in the tobacco can that sits where his heart used to be.

“He would keep the rest where it belongs: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be.  Its lid rusted shut.  He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of the contents that would shame him.  And it would hurt her to know that there was no red heart bright as Mister’s comb beating in him. . . . working dough.  Working, working dough.  Nothing better than that to start the day's serious work of beating back the past.” (p.73)

As I said, all of the main characters are having to suck out the venom of slavery from their veins and memories. Even the saintly, Baby Suggs, holy. “Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed,” she said, “and broke my heart strings too.” “There is no bad luck in the world but white folks” she says. . . . but . . .  "Bit by bit, at 124 and in the clearing, along with the others, she had claimed herself.  Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that free self was another.” (p.95)

Perhaps one of the most moving and powerful passages in the book is a sermon (Call'in) given by Baby Suggs, holy in the camp meeting, calling these former slaves to combat the abuse they experienced with love.

“Here in this here place, we flesh; Flesh that weeps, laughs; Flesh that dances on bare feet in grass.  Love it.  Love it hard.  Yonder they do not love your flesh.  They despise it.  They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick them out.  No more do they love the skin on your back.  Yonder they flay it.  And all my people, they do not love your hands.  Those they only use, Tie, bind, chop off and leave empty.  Love your hands!  Love them.  Raise them up and kiss them.  Touch others with them, add them together, stroke them on your face as they don't love that either.  You got to love it, You!  And no, they ain't in love with your mouth.  Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again.  What you say out of it they will not heed.  What you scream from it they do not hear.  What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give the leavins instead.  No, they don't love your mouth.  You got to love it.  This is flesh I'm talking about here.  Flesh that needs to be loved.  Feed the need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong-arms I'm telling you.  No, my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight.  So, love your neck; Put a hand on it and grace it, stroke it and hold it up.  And all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them.  The dark, dark liver -- love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too.  More than eyes or feet.  More than lungs that have yet to draw free air.  More than your life-holding womb or your life giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart.  This is the prize.” (p.88-89)

One of the greatest traumas that slavery inflicted on people caught in its web, as Morrison portrays it, was the ways in which it drove slaves to inhumanity themselves. In Beloved, Sethe kills one of her own children to keep that child from being taken back into slavery. Forgiving whites was one thing but how did one forgive themselves for the many ways that slaves had to compromise themselves?

“You got two feet, Sethe, not four,” Paul D says to Sethe when he learns of what she did, “and right then a forest sprang up between them; trackless and quiet.” (p.165)

Can one forgive a person for doing something like that? Can one forgive themselves? Baby Suggs, holy is left in a moral paralysis over it.

". . . she could not prove or condemn Sethe’s rough choice.  One or the other might have saved her, but beaten up by the claims of both, she went to bed.  The white folks had tired her out at last.” (p.180)

Paul D puts his finger right on the heart of the dilemma when he says that “just beyond his knowing is the glare of an outside thing that embraces while it accuses.” (p.271) I can only assume that he is referring to God who, if the Gospels say anything, knows exactly what it is like to “kill a child to save a child."

I close this review of what I got out of this book with a passage that expresses ever so clearly how we eventually create in reality what we project in imagination:

"White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle.  Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood.  In a way, he thought, they were right.  The more colored people spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled jungle grew inside.  But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other livable place.  It was the jungle white folks planted in them.  And it grew.  It spread.  And, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it.  Touched them everyone.  Changed and altered them.  Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made.  The screaming baboons lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.”
(p.199)

The world owes a debt to Toni Morrison, holy for helping us all work through our traumas.

Incidentally, the house number in which the story takes place is 124. Sethe has four kids and the third one is dead which is why the three is missing I suspect. It has been "disremembered" 

Question for Comment: In the novel, Beloved, Baby Suggs, holy insists that the work of reclaiming our sense of dignity and self-worth must come from within us. We cannot wait for someone to affirm our worth to us. And yet, it seems, that no one in this novel recovers without the love and affection and support of others. When you look at the distance between where you are and where you would like to be in terms of loving yourself, do you see a need for more internal initiative or external help in the process?

“I felt dull and flat and full of shattered visions.”

The Bell Jar REVIEW

Some years ago, I had to test out of 2-3 courses and take the PRAXIS in order to acquire my Language Arts teaching endorsement in Vermont.  One of those tests was about American Literature and I remember I missed one question on the exam, and it was a question about Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar. Having found a copy of it on the free shelf of a local library lately, I decided to remedy that deficiency once and for all.

I confess, I was prepared for the book to be rather depressing (I had been warned that it would be) and it would make sense that it would be so regarded given its contents. It is an autobiographical story about a young woman with many gifts and many prospects who winds up trying to take her life, being committed to an asylum where she undergoes electroshock therapy and, eventually, does commit suicide leaving a husband and two small children behind. “The heartbreaking story of a talented young woman who descends into madness,” the subtitle reads.

Sylvia Plath, as it turns out, was born just 2-3 years before my own mother and they would have both found themselves in New York City in 1952. My mother was just heading off to college (at a theological seminary in Brooklyn) and Sylvia, while still a student at Smith College, had just won a scholarship from Mademoiselle Magazine where she was starting her career as a writer. Both Sylvia and my mom liked to write, and both left some letters and autobiographical stories about their lives in the years between 1952 and 1963 when Sylvia Plath took her life (two months after I was born, the third of four children).

Unlike Sylvia Plath, my mom spent the next 60 years going to college, working with children all over the state of Vermont, parenting, teaching, and writing. Unlike my mom, Sylvia Plath became famous. I found it interesting to be working on a writing project of my own using my mom’s letters from 1952-1958 while reading Sylvia’s novel, The Bell Jar, an account that narrates the events of that year that my mom and Sylvia Plath contemplated what they would do with their lives.

Plath begins by telling us something about herself.

“I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations,” Plath writes.

“If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it. I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick, I never let on, but pretended that's the way I knew things were all the time.”

One might argue that the first skill a good writer needs to learn is the skill of observation. And that skill Plath has in spades. Listen to the way that Plath describes her world.

“Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.”

“There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.”

Plath is not just an observer of her external world. She also has a fairly acute eye for internal observations as well.

“I felt very low. I had been unmasked only that morning by Jay Cee herself, and I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true. After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.”

“After Doreen left, I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should anymore. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.”

“I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old. After that – in spite of the Girl Scouts and the piano lessons and the water-color lessons and the dancing lessons and the sailing camp, all of which my mother scrimped to give me, and college, with crewing in the mist before breakfast and blackbottom pies and the new little firecrackers of ideas going off every day – I had never been really happy again.”

“Of all the blind dates I'd had that year not one called me up again for a second date. I just didn't have any luck. I hated coming downstairs sweaty-handed and curious every Saturday night and having some senior introduce me to her aunt's best friend's son and finding some pale, mushroomy fellow with protruding ears or buck teeth or a bad leg. I didn't think I deserved it. After all, I wasn't crippled in any way, I just studied too hard, I didn't know when to stop.”

Unfortunately, Plath begins to look at the world and herself through some rather dark lenses. Things look bleak to her (in comparison, my mom saw the world and herself through the lens of her faith?). “I felt dull and flat and full of shattered visions,” Plath says after being rejected by a young love interest, Buddy Willard.

Her estimates of her own ability to have any influence on the world also plummets.

“I started adding up all the things I couldn't do. I began with cooking. I didn't do shorthand either. This meant I couldn't get a good job after college. My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand was something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men, and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter. The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters. The one good thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.”

We see her confidence in herself and her sense of agency evaporating in spite of her many gifts:

“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

I would note that my mom at this same point also saw many possibilities for her life. Her journals record just how many possibilities she saw in front of her. Perhaps the key difference between her and Sylvia had to do with that faith that she had that God would direct her to wherever she could be most useful. Her faith and her executive function worked together in that enterprise.

Sylvia Plath records in her novel that she began to lose her sense of herself as an attractive person.

“I thought if only I had a keen, shapely bone structure to my face or could discuss politics shrewdly or was a famous writer Constantin might find me interesting enough to sleep with.”

She also loses direction. ““What do you have in mind after you graduate?" one of her advisors at college asked her. Plath recalls:

“What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate
school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue.

"’I don't really know,’ I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.”

We see her giving up on the hope of ever finding a relationship worthy of the sacrifice relationships would require.

“And then I wondered if as soon as he [Constantin] came to like me, he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me, I would find fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him. The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer, I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all. That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married.”

Unlike Plath, my mom and dad met at a Christian camp the summer after they graduated from high school and over the next five years until they married, it does not appear that she thought of anyone else. I still have the letter that my mom wrote my dad the day of their wedding. She would give it back to him on anniversaries for years after.

Back to The Bell Jar.

Plath tells us that she seemed to have given up on the whole idea of relational happiness altogether. She writes:

“The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”

Here is how she has begun to think of marriage and motherhood:

“I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband. It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he’d left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he’d expect a big dinner, and I’d spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted."

“This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s, but I knew that’s what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard’s mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.”

“And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard’s kitchen mat.”

“I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems anymore. So, I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.”

In spite of her disillusionment with men and marriage, she still wants them both, if only for a short-term roll in the hay. And so, she goes looking for a man in a bar where she is not likely to find a long-term prospect (she has given up on them).  “I could tell Marco was a woman-hater,” she says of the man she casts her eye on:

“Because in spite of all the models and TV starlets in the room that night he paid attention to nobody but me. Not out of kindness or even curiosity, but because I'd happened to be dealt to him, like a playing card in a pack of identical cards.”

Her story is basically a retelling of Ecclesiastes. In battling with her ennui, she is going to try everything that the author of Ecclesiastes had tried centuries before. The writer of that odd book asserts that he determined to look at life “under the sun” – life as it is without the lens of faith clouding it – and he concluded that the whole damn thing was just “chasing after the wind.” “I couldn’t see the point of getting up,” Plath writes eventually, mirroring the message of Ecclesiastes,

“I had nothing to look forward to. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?”

Perhaps this is a difference between Plath and my mother that mattered (and mind you, I am not discounting the obvious possibility that Plath had a mental illness and my mom did not). Plath seems to pursue experiences while my mom pursued service and the experiences came as a side effect.

Lacking a central purpose (to my mom “seeking first the Kingdom of God” would have been that purpose) Plath seems untethered. She is full of potential but without direction. “Neurotic, ha!” she laughs scornfully to a comment labelling her a neurotic,

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”

Eventually, Sylvia Plath finds something that she believes can help her to focus her energy, a novel about herself. "My heroine would be myself, only in disguise,” she says. But the glue that attaches her to specific goals like this refuses to hold: “I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover,’ she writes.

“Then I thought I might put off college for a year and apprentice myself to a pottery maker. Or work my way to Germany and be a waitress, until I was bilingual. Then plan after plan started leaping through my head, like a family of scatty rabbits. I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles, threaded together by the wires. I counted one, two, three.... nineteen telephone poles dangled in space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.”

At the same time in life that my mom signs up to work teaching the Bible to children all over the State of Vermont, Plath is floundering in a morass of indecision. As so many people afflicted with her particular malady, she has traded executive function for IQ points.

“I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next day had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.”

Life has literally become a pointless, destiny-lacking, “chasing after the wind.”

Mind you, like Plath, my mom had days of discouragement as well (admittedly, not quite so bleak). At one point in her letters, my mom takes to calling her hope chest her “despair barrel.” Nevertheless, I get the sense that my mom would turn to her higher power and ask for divine help on these days and in these moments. Plath eventually reaches out to therapy for help. She speaks of her meeting with her psychologist, a man she refers to as “Dr. Gordon.” Of her doctor, she writes,

“I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and saying ‘Ah!’ in an encouraging way, as if he could see something I couldn't and then I would find words to tell him how I was so scared, as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out. Then he would lean back in his chair and match the tips of his fingers together in a little steeple and tell me why I couldn't sleep and why I couldn't read and why I couldn't eat and why everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end. And then, I thought, he would help me, step by step, to be myself again.”

Sylvia Plath lost her father when she was nine years old. My mother lost her mother when she was about eleven. That loss was profound for both. It could be that the answer to why their lives went in different directions could be found in the ways that they were or were not allowed to grieve. Plath writes:

“At the foot of the stone I arranged the rainy armful of azaleas I had picked from a bush at the gateway of the graveyard. Then my legs folded under me, and I sat down in the sopping grass. I couldn’t understand why I was crying so hard. Then I remembered that I had never cried for my father’s death. My mother hadn’t cried either. She had just smiled and said what a merciful thing it was for him he had died, because if he had lived he would have been crippled and an invalid for life, and he couldn’t have stood that, he would rather have died than had that happen. I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain.”

One has to ask the question eventually: “Was the difference between Plath and my mom rooted in their neurology, in their trauma, in their grieving processes, or in their belief systems?” Or can these things ever be untangled?

After Plath’s attempted suicide and her being committed to an asylum and subjected to electroshock therapy, she writes of a scene in the car on the way home from the hospital. She lets us in on a conversation between herself and her mother. Plath asserts that she never wants to go back to the hospital again.  And then . . .

“My mother smiled. ‘I know my baby wasn't like that.’
I looked at her. ‘Like what?’
‘Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital.’
She paused. ‘I knew you'd decide to be all right again.’”

To Plath’s mother, her daughter’s condition is not the result of her brain chemistry or her traumas or her life experiences or her spirituality. It is simply a matter of volition. To her mother, any person who does not want to fall into depression or madness can simply decide not to.

Briefly, Plath considers whether religion could provide her any solace or protection from herself. “I had considered going into the Catholic Church myself,” she writes,

“I knew that Catholics thought killing yourself was an awful sin. But perhaps, if this was so, they might have a good way to persuade me out of it. Of course, I didn’t believe in life after death or the virgin birth or the Inquisition or the infallibility of that little monkey-faced Pope or anything, but I didn’t have to let the priest see this, I could just concentrate on my sin, and he would help me repent.”

One might argue that Plath is not open to considering the sort of spirituality that my mother would have experienced life with – the sort of thing that involved an actual ongoing relationship with a personal God who cares. All Plath can imagine is a certain religiously-based exoskeleton that could restrain her from her self-destructive tendencies without putting a dent in the neuro-chemical realities or cognitive beliefs that may have been the source of her despair.

Sylvia Plath is on a nihilistic train to self-harm and she cannot find the brakes.  She begins to use her formidable gifts for observation to create, collect, and store away different mechanisms for killing herself, several of which she tried to use. “Then I saw that my body had all sorts of little tricks,” she writes of these failed attempts,

“Such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash. I would simply have to ambush it with whatever sense I had left, or it would trap me in its stupid cage for fifty years without any sense at all. And when people found out my mind had gone, as they would have to, sooner or later, in spite of my mother’s guarded tongue, they would persuade her to put me into an asylum where I could be cured.”

“Only my case was incurable.”

“The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you,” she says of the way that hospitals and asylums worked. The only solution that society offered her involved even more of the isolation that was killing her. Plath’s condition devolves into an absolute sense of anhedonia (the psychological state that renders one incapable of being happy).

“I knew I should be grateful to Mrs. Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing. If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat — on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok — I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air. . . . To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”

To Plath, there was no way to live outside of the “bell jar” of her depression. From her room in the asylum, she contemplates whether it matters if she is in a psychiatric hospital or out in the world at college or travelling in Europe. She has come to believe that her bell jar will travel with her wherever she goes and whatever she does. There is no escaping it. “What was there about us, in Belsize [her psychiatric hospital], so different from the girls playing bridge and gossiping and studying in the college to which I would return?” she writes,

“Those girls, too, sat under bell jars of a sort.” 

And then some pages later, “How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?” 

“I felt the nurse had been instructed to show me my alternatives,” she writes,

“Either I got better, or I fell, down, down, like a burning, then burnt-out star.”

Plath dreams of some way to literally get herself “reborn” as that seems to be the only solution [I suspect that my mom would have agreed with that conclusion]. Plath writes in conclusion,

“There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice—patched, retreaded and approved for the road, I was trying to think of an appropriate one when Doctor Nolan appeared from nowhere and touched me on the shoulder. “All right, Esther.”

Question for Comment: What do you think might have saved Sylvia Plath?