We just finished
The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, and
the day after we read the final chapter we were handed a packet of some of her
poems. I read them and easily saw how they had come from the same mind that put
Esther Greenwood on paper. They even sounded—possibly because the suggestion
was made in class—like poems that Esther herself might have written a few years
down the line, after the bell jar had descended and ascended again. I enjoyed
her poems a lot—I like the dark but almost childish rhymes she uses, and the
way the rhythm doesn’t ever settle into a comfortable meter. They reminded me a
bit of falling down the stairs in the dark, and I love it when a piece of
writing can evoke a feeling of close to physical discomfort. “Lady Lazarus” was
on the top of the stack, so I was glancing at it out of the corner of my eye
all evening. I started to play with it in my mind’s eye, sometimes looking at
each three-line stanza as an individual poem, sometimes every sentence. I was
thrown by the line- and stanza-breaks every time I tried to read it in an
unbroken stream, so eventually I typed it out in paragraph form and was
rewarded by chills of new meaning. I was reading it as a collection of images
and phrases, roughly referencing the Biblical phoenix-story that is the parable
of Lazarus. When I typed it as a paragraph, I saw it for an account of a woman
who continually dies and is resurrected, and who makes a profit on people who
want to see this “walking miracle.” It struck me as an allusion to continual
attempted suicides, which brought me back to The Bell Jar in a way I hadn’t expected. I hadn’t expected the poem
to be as moving as it was, either, or to be so changed by the change of
formatting. I’ve copied out the paragraph below, but a warning first: it works
better if you’ve struggled with the original line breaks and taken all the
meaning you can from them. Once you read it like this, there’s no going back.
I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it—A sort of walking miracle, my skin bright as a Nazi lampshade, my right foot a paperweight, my face a featureless, fine Jew linen. Peel off the napkin, o mine enemy. Do I terrify?—the nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? The sour breath will vanish in a day. Soon, soon the flesh the grave cave ate will be at home on me, and I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die. This is Number Three. What a trash to annihilate each decade. What a million filaments. The peanut-crunching crowd shoves in to see them unwrap me hand and foot—the big strip tease. Gentlemen, ladies: these are my hands, my knees. I may be skin and bone; nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman. The first time it happened I was ten. It was an accident. The second time I meant to last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut as a seashell. They had to call and call and pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I’ve a call. It’s easy enough to do it in a cell. It’s easy enough to do it and stay put. It’s the theatrical comeback in broad day to the same place, the same face, the same brute amused shout: ‘A miracle!’ That knocks me out. There is a charge for the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge for the hearing of my heart—it really goes. And there is a charge, a very large charge for a word or a touch or a bit of blood or a piece of my hair or my clothes. So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy. I am your opus. I am your valuable, the pure gold baby that melts to a shriek. I turn and burn. Do not think I underestimate your great concern. Ash, ash—you poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—a cake of soap, a wedding ring, a gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer beware, beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air.
