BEg2: Adoration of the Facists, Sylvia Plath, Bees

[Allen Ruch]

There's also this quote from "Against the Day":

"Women could protest from now till piss flowed uphill, but the truth was, there wasn’t one didn’t secretly love a killer."

And of course, the ending of "Vineland" comes to mind...

Regarding Sylvia Plath, she's one of my favorite poets. And while she's not "jolly" by any means, I think she gets a bad rep because of a handful of her most dramatic poems, the ones goth chicks know by heart because they scrawled them on their Trapper-Keepers. But here's my two favorites: 

THE ARRIVAL OF THE BEE BOX

I ordered this, clean wood box 
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift. 
I would say it was the coffin of a midget 
Or a square baby 
Were there not such a din in it. 

The box is locked, it is dangerous. 
I have to live with it overnight 
And I can't keep away from it. 
There are no windows, so I can't see what is in there. 
There is only a little grid, no exit. 

I put my eye to the grid. 
It is dark, dark, 
With the swarmy feeling of African hands 
Minute and shrunk for export, 
Black on black, angrily clambering. 

How can I let them out? 
It is the noise that appalls me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables. 
It is like a Roman mob, 
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together! 

I lay my ear to furious Latin. 
I am not a Caesar. 
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs. 
They can be sent back. 
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner. 

I wonder how hungry they are. 
I wonder if they would forget me 
If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree. 
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades, 
And the petticoats of the cherry. 

They might ignore me immediately 
In my moon suit and funeral veil. 
I am no source of honey 
So why should they turn on me? 
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free. 

The box is only temporary.

* * * * * * 

THE SURGEON AT 2 A.M.

The white light is artificial, and hygienic as heaven.
The microbes cannot survive it.
They are departing in their transparent garments, turned aside
From the scalpels and the rubber hands.
The scalded sheet is a snowfield, frozen and peaceful.
The body under it is in my hands.
As usual there is no face. A lump of Chinese white
With seven holes thumbed in. The soul is another light.
I have not seen it; it does not fly up.
Tonight it has receded like a ship's light.

It is a garden I have to do with—tubers and fruit
Oozing their jammy substances,
A mat of roots. My assistants hook them back.
Stenches and colors assail me.
This is the lung-tree.
These orchids are splendid. They spot and coil like snakes.
The heart is a red bell-bloom, in distress.
I am so small
In comparison to these organs!
I worm and hack in a purple wilderness.

The blood is a sunset. I admire it.
I am up to my elbows in it, red and squeaking.
Still is seeps me up, it is not exhausted.
So magical! A hot spring
I must seal off and let fill
The intricate, blue piping under this pale marble.
How I admire the Romans —-
Aqueducts, the Baths of Caracalla, the eagle nose!
The body is a Roman thing.
It has shut its mouth on the stone pill of repose.

It is a statue the orderlies are wheeling off.
I have perfected it.
I am left with and arm or a leg,
A set of teeth, or stones
To rattle in a bottle and take home,
And tissues in slices—a pathological salami.
Tonight the parts are entombed in an icebox.
Tomorrow they will swim
In vinegar like saints' relics.
Tomorrow the patient will have a clean, pink plastic limb.

Over one bed in the ward, a small blue light
Announces a new soul. The bed is blue.
Tonight, for this person, blue is a beautiful color.
The angels of morphia have borne him up.
He floats an inch from the ceiling,
Smelling the dawn drafts.
I walk among sleepers in gauze sarcophagi.
The red night lights are flat moons. They are dull with blood.
I am the sun, in my white coat,
Grey faces, shuttered by drugs, follow me like flowers.

On 12/2/21, 10:34 PM, "Pynchon-l on behalf of Michael Bailey" <pynchon-l-bounces at waste.org on behalf of michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:

    Sylvia Plath? Hadn’t run across that poem before. I know, I know, where
    have I been? So sue me for Pollyannatude, I’d rather read jollier stuff
    most of the time! But I did stumble into a poetry reading a few years ago
    where a young woman was expressing similar sentiments towards her own
    father at greater length and with great vehemence. So that’s another data
    point.

    I hadn’t remembered Maxine getting involved with Slagiatt either workwise
    or lovewise. Just saw the unraveling of the anagram somewhere (“seemed like
    a good idea at the time”) and that’s what chose to stick, memorywise.


    Mark Kohut wrote:

    Pynchon has this 'insight' into certain kinds of women or else this 'slur'
    against women in general:

    They like, often against themselves, 'strong', tough, insensitive (to
    almost be euphemistic) men, who might
    also be described as arrogant, authoritarian men generalized with that
    infamous line from Sylvia Plath: Every woman
    loves a fascist.
    --
    Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l