It was one evening a few months before my Rosemary died, both of us were reading in bed when I told her,”Rosemary I have just noticed something curiously interesting. On my bed table I have four books. The authors are Alejandra Pizarnik, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf and Alfonsina Storni. All four committed suicide!” Then I told her the story how photographer Diane Arbus has a gallery opening on a Friday. She woke up on Saturday and the world had not changed. She swallowed some barbiturates, slit her wrists and got into a hot tub.
Suicide has been in my thoughts recently because I had a good photographer friend who communicated to me two Mondays ago to tell me that dying was not an easy thing. He thanked me for having been his friend. Later that day he was put to sleep and died in a MAID program.
All the above is to write here that yesterday I went to my nearby Tanglewood Books to buy Sylvia Plath’s poetry book Ariel (with foreword by Robert Lowell). I thought that reading some poetry might just get me from staring at the ceiling when I am in bed with my two cats. It was not to be.
I found her poetry difficult and depressing, in particular her poem Daddy. It would seem she did not like him much.
But here I want to state that I am a lucky man. I called my friend George McWhirter (Vancouver’s first Poet Laureate) and with a luxury of detail he explained that I was not far from wrong in finding Plath’s poetry impenetrable.
Because I read her The Bell Jar I remember her lovely rendering on how pleasant it is to take a tub bath. I wrote about it here in link below.
The shapes and sized of faucets - The Bell Jar
Rosemary and I loved our tub baths and I must add her that often both of us took tub baths together. Toes were important items in this procedure.
So no, I am not suicidal but I do think about it. I could not off myself as there would be nobody to take care of my cats Niño and Niña.
My copy of Virginia Woolf The Years was my mother's.It was one of her favourite books. Every chapter begins wonderfully with a description of the day's weather.
