Ghosts in my photograph

From Sylvia Plath: “Years”

They enter as animals from the outer

Space of holly where spikes

Are not the thoughts I turn on, like a Yogi,

But greenness, darkness so pure

They freeze and are.

O God, I am not like you

In your vacuous black,

Stars struck all over, bright stupid confetti.

Eternity bores me,

I never wanted it.

What I love is

The piston in motion –

My soul dies before it.

And the hooves of the horses,

Their merciless churn.

And you, great Stasis –

What is so great in that!

Is it a tiger this year, this roar at the door?

Is it a Christus,

The awful

God-bit in him

Dying to fly and be done with it?

The blood berries are themselves, they are very still.

The hooves will not have it,

In blue distance the pistons hiss.

16 November 1962

_______________

I am a huge Sylvia Plath fan.  This poem strikes me in an odd way.  First of all, I am so completely out of it today.  I found a couple of older pictures of me and just stared at them until I didn’t recognize myself anymore.  I remember nights when I was in high school and college that I would do that too – find a picture and not see “me” in it – then I’d become consumed by a wash of all kinds of feelings, none of which I could latch onto, and just be left numb.  So, I was looking at a picture of me from 4 or 5 years ago.  I was cute and smiley and dressed up.  Yet, knowing that even then, I was medicated, faking a grin, and forced into going out by friends who had not yet given up on me.  I don’t recognize much in that photo…probably because the picture just captured me navigating another role in the up and down swing of things.

When I’m up – I’m way up.  I see photos from the obsessive, hypomanic, driven, energized me and can’t relate because those times are so out of control – behind-the-scenes.  Then most of the really down times aren’t even on photos because I’ve isolated myself right out of photo-type moments and don’t want to remember that stuff anyway.  Thus, as I look at photos, I come to appreciate that these historical pics of my past as all phony…how very Salinger of me.  But really, I can’t see many of those snapshots for anything real.  They are the highlight only samples of a person that I am so rarely walking on this earth as.  My standing on a ledge with Macchu Pichu sprawling below me is a snippet, and not the face I wear each day.  Posing on a rock that juts into the Pacific Ocean from Point Lobos is highly romanticized from the doldrums of my required and monotonus hum-drum, suburban existence.  So those faces become strangers in my mind’s eye.  I feel as if I am experiencing my own ghosts.

I am haunted.  I feel the ghostly presence of all the poorly attended choices I’ve made.  Lazy, frightened, angst-based reactions that did not testify to a spirit I pretend to posses.  I claim I am a fighter, that I am brave, and that I am strong.  Reality is, I am not…and if I’ve brushed those qualities, it was but for a moment and never sustained to the point of claiming any ownership.  I am in a shell, encased by the consequences of negativity.  There are no photos to capture that image.  Who would want to anyway?

So that guy called.  It was not the same…less snap and zing.  No outward flirting and certainly no professing any sort of “feelings” on anything.  Whatever.  I was still a stupid teenager and acting like an idiot.  I don’t know what to think about anything because the down time of vacation has rotted my managerial parts, and now I’m just operating with my reptile brain and limbic system: meager existence.  So the Plath poem…..”eternity bores me, I never wanted it.”  This is in fact what I mean…I get a dose of free time and I am bored, bored, bored!!!

My birthday is coming up.  I can’t reconcile myself to the idea of that number.  I still have so many unresolved youthful me’s in strife that there is no way I even feel the least bit like that number I am supposed to identify with.  Hell no, I won’t go!  I’m still so young in so many ways.  Just in how I act with guys – god, I’m an idiot!  I think that a 7th grader would out-class me in flirting.  I’m lousy with responsibilities like fish and houseplants.  They never make it with me as a caretaker…I’m more of an undertaker in those regards.  So whoopdee-friggin-dooo…happy birthday!

I finally tackled the disgusting chore of cleaning the gunk from my stovetop.  I like clean, but being a clean-freak is exhausting.  So that gunk had become quite the visual metaphor of my life, greeting me each day…caked-on, gross, dirty crap that needed attention.  I had to drop my house-cleaning service a little more than a year ago.  They were half-assed cleaners at best.  This meant that I was no the cleaning lady of my abode.  I tend to treat my house like I treat my health – I let it go because I am too busy for regular upkeep…then, when things get really bad, I’ll have to stop everything and devote 100% of my energy to fixing something overwhelming.  Overwhelming is how I roll, baby!

So here I am picking away at this grime using my finger nails, softscrub with bleach, and 401 spray.  It took me an hour and I am still not completely there yet.  I mention this as it is so symbolic.  Also, because if I was actually acting hypomanic, I’d still be cleaning now and not typing about cleaning.  I think that things have settled down a little bit – but is that a good thing?  Sometimes, I don’t think so.  I haven’t had any Kodak moments of late.

I’m wrapping this up even though I’d like to rant on and on about things.  Since I lack the energy, this will have to suffice.  More later of something that flew through my mind a moment ago but is gone.  Just like when you wake up and can partially remember a great dream…twenty minutes later it is gone forever, unless it happens to be a re-occuring dream…but how many people actually have re-occuring dreams of the “great” type?

I’m “dying to fly and be done with it.”

~ by the10sdoc on April 10, 2009.