Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Sylvia, it was really nothing.

Recently, I watched the entire film Sylvia, in installments, on Youtube. You can do the same, if you wish, starting here. The film, for those who have not heard of it, is about the relationship between the two poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. (Incidentally, I once met Ted Hughes, but that's another story.) I'm not going to give a review of the film. Briefly, I thought it was very thin. I suppose it's a 'slice of life', but I feel like the slice could be a little thicker. Maybe this impression was also something to do with the fact that I was watching it in a tiny frame on a computer screen. (In case you're wondering, my new prescription sunglasses seemd to be helping greatly with my use of computer.) Also, I don't like Gwyneth Paltrow. I believe that her mask of winsomeness hides a howling and voracious ambition. But let's put that to one side. The film was at least good enough to make me watch the whole thing on Youtube, which can't be bad. What's more, the ending had quite an effect on me, even though I knew what was coming, and it has helped me to define or reaffirm some of my basic feelings about life.

I first encountered Sylvia Plath as a teenager. If I haven't mentioned her much, for instance on this blog, that is probably for two reasons. First of all, she really is the kind of poet you 'encounter as a teenager', who embodies all the kind of teenage angst that is the reason so many people become interested in poetry in their adolescent (and why so many people later forget about poetry altogether when they've settled down in a good job with a steady partner). Secondly, I think I did not quite get her poetry. I knew there was something there, but it wasn't straightforward, kitchen sink kind of angst. There was something a little bit surreal about it, and surreal in a way that I found opaque rather than translucent. All the colours in her landscape were somehow wrong. Philip Larkin once reviewed her poetry, and, though impressed, found her world a little too horrific. He wondered whether she were representing life as she actually experienced it every day, or whether she somehow had to work herself up into the right mood to write this kind of thing. If it was the former, he concluded, "then the reader and Ms Plath must sadly part company." (I'm afraid I don't have all my books with me now, so this is from memory and probably inaccurate.) He also noted somewhere that when Plath describes, in one of her poems, how her piano teacher had found her touch, though technically good, "strangely wooden", that he felt he knew what the teacher meant. And so do I.



I don't want to give the wrong impression. Plath has certainly meant something to me (and I have read a considerable amount of her work, including The Bell Jar and the collection of short stories, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams), but I'm hard-pressed to say exactly what. I feel as if I connect with her partly because she spent some time in the part of the world where I grew up, which is to say, in North Devon. Thinking about this simple fact makes me feel strangely close to Plath, almost as if I could have met her. She once wrote a poem called 'Blackberrying', and the moment I saw the title, I knew she had written it about an experience of being in North Devon. I feel I should also mention that the name of the band I was in for five years - The Dead Bell - came from a poem (two poems, in fact), by Sylvia Plath. Myself and Pete Black were trawling through the pages of poetry collections to find a random, inspiring phrase, and we eventually fixed on 'the dead bell, from the poem 'Berck-Plage', although the phrase also appears in 'Death and Co.'.

I don't intend to recapitulate here the entire story of Sylvia Plath. What I want to talk about specifically is the effect that the film had on me. For those who do not know, Sylvia Plath committed suicide at the age of thirty by gassing herself. She had made at least two previous attempts at suicide. Plath's poetry is generally considered dark and haunting, but I had never really related the poetry to the chronology of her life. It had always existed out of time for me - dark poems by the famous poet Sylvia Plath. Of course, they were written in time, in the specific context of an unfolding life, and Plath could not ever have thought of herself in quite the way she was known to me - as the timeless, famous, canonical poet. Her life was a struggle to become that thing, and it seems that she did not truly become 'Sylvia Plath', as the world knows her, until after her death.

I did not find the film especially dark, however, until somewhere past the halfway point. When I thought about it, it did not take me long to realise that there was a certain scene after which the whole thing had become almost unbearable. The scene in question is one in which Al Alvarez is concerned about Plath's mental welfare, and tries to persuade her not to commit suicide (presumably he suspects this is on her mind). He says the following: "Look, one thing I do know about death is it is not a reunion or a homecoming. There's no... Your life doesn't flash before you and the missing piece of you clicks into place. It's just... there's just fuck all. There's nothing." His is the stoical, pragmatic, English approach (as Burroughs said of someone else, "one of those very English types who takes a dim view of existence: 'Life after death? I'm afraid not.'") that when your life "just keeps getting worse", you "just keep going".

It was from this point that it seemed to me that Plath's suicide was inevitable.

I don't know how things really were in Plath's life, or even how Paltrow was intending to play the role, but I could feel the psychology of the situation inside myself. At first, to some people, the idea that after death there is just 'fuck all', might seem like the ulitmate reason not to kill yourself. Who would prefer nothing to something, however bad the something? And Alvarez must have known something of the psychology of suicide, to have attempted it. And yet, he did not know enough. He did not save Plath. There is a certain kind of psychology, which I understand intimately, that he was unable to address. If there really is 'fuck all', then that nothingness feeds backwards into life itself, and life itself becomes 'fuck all'. And when life itself is fuck all, there seems to be nothing left to do except say, "Fuck all of you" and fuck off. Which is what Plath did, in effect. Alvarez had unwittingly, with his statement of 'fuck all', narrowed Plath's vision down to a tunnel vision fixed on the vanishing point of 'fuck all', which was all that was left. And that tunnel leading to fuck all was exactly how the rest of the film felt to me.

Alvarez was no doubt right to sense that Plath was seeking some kind of reassurance in the idea of death, but he was clearly wrong if he thought that taking away that reassurance would prevent her from killing herself. This is something hard to explain to someone who has never been in such a place, there's there's a flipping over that happens when a person contemplating suicide is put off by the thought of mere nothingness. That mere nothingness, after all, comes from the world outside, from strangers who insist that they know this or that thing about the universe, in complete contradiction to one's own inner experience. That nothingness is an attempt to cancel the person's interior experience. Now a rebellion of the utterly abject takes place, a complete rejection of the exterior for completely rejecting the interior. And this is suicide. In his novel No Longer Human, the writer Dazai explains this with striking simplicity:

I decided as a last resort, my last hope of escaping the inferno, to write a long letter to my father in which I confessed my circumstances fully and accurately (with the exception, of course, of my relations with women). If it failed I had no choice but to hang myself, a resolve which was tantamount to a bet on the existence of God.

Here we see suicide as a version of Pascal's wager: In this case, if life is 'fuck all' (and if we apply the maxim that 'all's well that ends well' in reverse, to arrive at 'all's ill that ends ill', or simply, 'all's ill that ends', then this is certainly true of an existence in which there is fuck all waiting after death), then we lose nothing by disposing of it, but if there is something waiting after death, then we have not only had our revenge on the hated faux-nothingness of life, but we have made the gains that we longed for all the sooner. We can see the same feelings expressed in other places, for instance, the song Asleep, by The Smiths, which seems to be a kind of suicide note from someone who has just taken an overdose, ends with the lines: "There is another world/There is a better world/Well, there must be." Why "must be"? The answer is simple; This world is so unspeakably vile that it is impossible for there not to be another world. This is precisely the 'flipping over' that I have attempted to describe, the complete rebellion against an external world that claims to be all there is and therefore cancels out your internal world entirely.

But I'm getting ahead of myself just a little. I was struck by the way that Alvarez claimed to know what death was like. It is this 'knowing' that gives the entire power and momentum to the horror with which the film, and Plath's life, closes. The knowing is ex nihilo. Like God, who had no previous God to create him, this knowledge is based on nothing whatsoever, no prior knowledge has given birth to it. And yet it seems to say, "This alone cannot be questioned." It is a powerful rune of forbidding. Without that rune, the tunnel into which Plath is forced would fall apart. Let me at least ask here, exactly how does Alvarez know the things he knows about death? Is his knowledge supernatural, permeating the boundary between life and death? If so, then he has already contradicted himself. I am especially intrigued because I have never known anything, EVER. And yet I am surrounded by human beings who claim to know things all the time. I wonder what it must feel like, or how they know these things. It's a mystery to me. These days, whenever I hear someone who claims to know something, I immediately feel resentement. "Here's another self-styled sensible adult," I think, "trying to exercise authority over me by laying claim to knowledge." I have a fundamental loathing of authority, but have never been able really to express my anger. I believe that Sylvia Plath was the same. Alvarez told her, in effect, that her life was meaningless, and she felt unable to challenge him. What she could do, however, even if she couldn't speak her anger at the assumptions of authority, was to kill herself. (Again, I'm not saying that this was how things really happened, but talking in terms of the psychology of the story presented in the film.)

I myself have lived in that black tunnel leading to death, which is what the end of the film depicts. Throughout my entire third decade, there was not a moment of my waking existence that was not taken up with thoughts of death. No one seemed to notice. In fact, one of the upsetting things about the film was that fact that it reaffirmed to me how alone we all are. No one stopped Plath from killing herself. No one. Apparently there were people who cared about her. There were people who knew she was talented. She had two children. Weren't there people who thought she was worth saving? Presumably there were such people. But not a single one of them did anything to stope her killing herself. And I think this is fundamentally how human life is. For some reason, people rarely even notice the existence of other people, except as a presence that either gives pain or pleasure. And even if they do notice another person, it seems basically impossible for a person to step out of their own life and into the life of another and thereby save them. I realised in my twenties that talking with people would never solve anything, that no one could help me. I would have to go it alone in all fundamental emotional, spiritual ways, though I'm grateful for the material help that I have received and for people who have given me their time. In simple terms, I know very well that, if it came to it, no one would or could stop me from killing myself. That's what it comes down to. And that's what the film reminded me of. And if I must be alone in this way, then I'd certainly appreciate it if people who can't and don't want to step out of their life into mine would at least stop fucking around by imposing their own 'knowing' on my inner experience.



Let's say, however, that Alvarez is right, and that there is fuck all waiting for us after death. After all, since I actually know nothing, I certainly don't know this to be false. Not only is this an idea I have lived with (really live with) for many years, it's an idea I take on again and again, and took on from the very moment that Alvarez claimed to 'know' it, in the film. Therefore, for me, Plath's death in the film was not sad. It could not be sad, as that suggests some kind of comforting catharsis. It was simply horrifying. Her last moments were, in effect, her whole life (all's well that ends well, remember?), and no amount of poetry and posthumous fame can sublimate away that horror. In fact, that horror is, in the end, all that there is. Larkin was wrong. The reader cannot part company with Ms. Plath. We are all already living in the same world of horror with her, in a landscape where all the colours are wrong.

A while back, in an earlier blog entry, I spoke about Ligotti's latest work, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. I made some comments about that work on Ligotti Online. I described the work, humourously, as "a long philosophical treatise on why human life is inexcusably horrible". I suppose my humour here was a way of distancing myself from the content of the essay. Although Ligotti's position is not (and could not be) mine one hundred percent, since reading that essay, I have become confirmed, however, in certain feelings about human existence. While it's true that no one really knows whether there is fuck all after death or not, no one really knows whether there is something more life-affirming waiting there, either. I think, for me, life really has come down to a very simple question. Do we know that there is some satisfactory mode of existence after death? At the moment the answer is no. Therefore, we must cease to procreate. If we do not, then all we are doing is spreading the horror that was embodied in the end of Plath's life.

I haven't quite finished this post, however. I suppose I want to say a few words on how I have managed to stay alive, or something like that. I'm aware that my position might seem contradictory in a way, but, I'm just in the middle of the mess known as life, and trying to make sense of it. I don't even pretend to have settled anything. The 'contradiction' might appear in the fact that I am proposing that it would be better if the human race were to gently wind itself down into non-existence, but that I am also suggesting that I am not an atheist, and... I suppose suggesting that there might be something like a meaning to life.

Alvarez's 'knowing' is the basis of atheism. Yes, atheism is strangely gnostic. This knowing seems almost a moral imperative (from where?), and constitutes an ultimate injunction never to think outside of the box of materialism. This is, I believe, the box that Burroughs refers to when he says that scientists are "cowering in the toilet of eternity". I never chose not to be atheist. I simply came to realise by degrees that my thoughts were, of themselves, straying from that box, into all sorts of forbidden regions. As a result, the walls of the tunnel which leads to death (an extended form of the box), have disappeared, and I find myself able to breathe a little easier. Not so very much easier, but a little easier, anyway. This, I am afraid, never happened for Plath. At the end of the film, as Plath is gassing herself, some lines from her poem, 'The Arrival of the Bee Box' are quoted:

The box is locked, it is dangerous...
There are no windows, so I can't see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.

Interestingly, just before she kills herself, there's a moment where she's lingering on the landing, and her neighbour sees her and asks if something's wrong. She is confused, but replies, "I just had the most beautiful dream." It's hardly surprising that, in the face of impending 'fuck all', she would have a beautiful dream, hardly surprising at all. Try to push it down, and the dream comes back somewhere else. The materialists try to destroy it, but how, exactly, do you destroy a dream?



I wonder what I would have said to Sylvia, if, somehow, I had been able to meet her blackberrying in the lanes of North Devon, ten years or more before I was born, and knew that she was thinking of killing herself. I don't think there's anything wrong, once you are born, with thinking outside of the box, with finding meaning in your own dreams, with trusting your inner experience over the 'knowing' of strangers. I don't know what I could have said to her, really. I hope that I would have been able to say something, although now, of course, her death and the horror of her death is irrecoverable, beyond anyone's reach. I certainly would not have told her what Alvarez did. Maybe I would have said that there was no reason to value external things over the internal. But I'm groping a bit, and I don't know if that would have helped. "You will have a beautiful dream. That is enough. Others will not understand. They will try to destroy it. They will even think they are helping you by doing so. They cannot destroy it." Something like that? "And you know that thing that Alvarez said about it all ending in 'nothing'? That thing he said - that too, was really nothing."

Labels: Sylvia Plath