Soliloquy of the Solipsist

I?
I walk alone;
The midnight street
Spins itself from under my feet;
When my eyes shut
These dreaming houses all snuff out;
Through a whim of mine
Over gables the moon’s celestial onion
Hangs high.

I
Make houses shrink
And trees diminish
By going far; my look’s leash
Dangles the puppet-people
Who, unaware how they dwindle,
Laugh, kiss, get drunk,
Nor guess that if I choose to blink
They die.

I
When in good humor,
Give grass its green
Blazon sky blue, and endow the sun
With gold;
Yet, in my wintriest moods, I hold
Absolute power
To boycott any color and forbid any flower
To be.

I
Know you appear
Vivid at my side,
Denying you sprang out of my head,
Claiming you feel
Love fiery enough to prove flesh real,
Though it’s quite clear
All your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear,
From me.

Soliloquy of the Solipsist, Sylvia Plath

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.

Sylvia Plath (via oliveoilandhoney)

I had been staring at the light. It quivered, shook, broke into little pieces. The whole constellation of little iridescent fragments started to swing in a rhythmic arc, slow at first, then faster, faster. I didn’t have to try hard to breathe now; something was pumping at my lungs, giving forth an odd, breathy wheeze as I exhaled. I felt my mouth cracked into a smile.

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of— (via idlekid)

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful-
The eye of the little god, four cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

“Mirror” -Sylvia Plath

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. To learn and think: to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.

Sylvia Plath

I actually learned my penchant for provocation by studying postmodern poetry. There’s a clear trajectory from confessional poems to personal essays to the memoir genre. The stark, painful, inappropriate confession is the most essential part, the meat and potatoes, the soul and the sound bite, the raison d’être.

Make Me Worry You’re Not O.K.

By SUSAN SHAPIRO
NYTIMES: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/make-me-worry-youre-not-o-k/?ref=opinion

catcomicsandfeminism:

Judith Butler uses the term, “gender performativity” to describe the discursive production of an inner “true” gendered subject. Gender is characterized by a stylized repetition of acts that give the illusion of natural legibility, while obscuring the contradictions of any single person’s gender act. Nonetheless, the cultural fiction that is gender is hard to expose as long as the credibility of other gender performances and identities is undermined and threatened with punishment.

Calvin and Hobbes

The struggle for recognition is the nexus of human identity and national identity, where much of the most important of work of politics occurs.

Melissa Harris-Perry

Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.

Carl Jung (via noturnes)

(Source: onlinecounsellingcollege, via normal-ization)

Dear Taylor Swift,

When your entire self-cultivated, public identity is that of a naive, boy-crazy, over-grown adolescent in constant search of validation and self-worth from the boys you date and pine for, and when every song you write and every interview you give only functions to reenforce this identity, and when YOU as a young, conventionally attractive, wealthy, white woman, are a part of the demographic of women who have most benefited from the Women’s Movement, generations before you, and when YOU, as a privileged, white woman who has also found professional success, have been afforded a platform that allows you to help shape the hearts and minds of millions of young women who look up to you, and YOU choose to cultivate and reenforce the aforementioned identity and image—then heffer, YOU calling Tina Fey sexist for jokingly advising you to take a break from boy-chasing and childish pining and whining, and ‘find yourself’, is preposterous. And you are an insult to the women who have come before you. And your entire self-created image is sexist.

And your stupidity angers me enough to write a letter. You should consider a career in politics.

Bam.

K-Thanks.

Best,

Fatma

My Open Letter to Taylor Swift (via raceclassandgender)

Preach!

(via samsanator)

We gotta start teaching our daughters to be somebodies instead of somebody’s.

Kifah Shah (via chubby-bunnies)

(Source: ear2ear, via samsanator)

Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (via itsfromabook)

Roxane Gay is Spelled With One "N": Gentle Reminders About Writing

roxanegay:

1. There is no shame in writing slow. Your writing takes as long to develop as it takes. Writing is not a race. There is something very seductive about slow writing, about the care being given to the words when the writing happens at a more languorous pace. This is not to say fast writers don’t…