
Degas: Fan with Dancers 1879 .From the Tacoma Art Museum. Priv Collection.
Sylvia Plath’s return to the United States as a teacher at Smith College was dominated
by fear, its evident from her diaries and from her utter helplessness. I had thought to publish
this morning ,without comment two of her poems: Mary’s Song from Winter Trees and The Magi
from The Collected Plath.
It is Autumn here (despite the sunshine ),there is both a significant temperature drop
and a filigree of copper on pavements and grasses ,thus I got to thinking about winter
pallettes and warm clothing.
I read the Diaries in the last years and remember wondering at Plath’s connectedness
to her intimate objects, how bemused she was at the amelioration of her condition
of cold by the wearing of a pair of red silk stockings and how it alleviated her mood
of intense depression. She disliked abstract art and had told a painter friend that
she adored the “Thinginess of Things”.
In the last few days I had published a small piece on the Island women and
the Trousseau, in relation to both Mary Lavin and plays by Federico Garcia Lorca.
I also thought about the issues of women’s homelessness (abodelessness) as a
result of War; and those little knick-knacks and mementoes that are to many people
Valueless .
The amount of young women on the streets of Dublin in this condition of abodelessness
has increased significantly. Thus the value of small and intimate things has
decreased in the face of oncoming winter and the struggle for survival. I watched people
literally walk over a young girl and infant the other day in their own struggle and fear of
ending up like her and it worried me. And what would ameliorate her condition and
that of the infant?
In many statements against war and ecological destruction I have published words
on the value of objects and trinkets. How , on my bookshelf there is a small clay
snail painted in gold; and made by the hand of a small child who in learning about
colour had underpainted the snail in red and left the imprint of his small fingers upon it.
How, when he got older and copped onto the issue of preservation, he had lacquered
the little snail with PVA in order to preserve the red-gold and give the shell a glossy sheen.
To anyone else the process of creation from a simple pallete and the indented fingerprints
would suggest a simple child’s play and not a process of working out and creation that
progressed, it seemed, over many weeks.
I am happy that I have a shelf to put the troublesome snail onto.
Mary’s Song
“The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.
The fat
Sacrifices its opacity….
A window, holy gold
The fire makes it precious,
The same fire
Melting the tallow heretics,
Ousting the Jews.
Their thick palls float
Over the cicatrix of Poland, burn-out
Germany.
They do not die.
Grey Birds obsess my heart,
Mouth-ash, ash of eye.
They settle. On the high
Precipice.
That emptied one man into space
The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.
It is a heart,
This holocaust I walk in,
O golden child the world will kill and eat .”
From Winter Trees Faber and Faber, London, 1971.
In Europe, a member of the Far-Right Neo-Nazi Movement has died violently.
The revisionism amongst those who refuse to accept the Shoah as it was ( and as it
continuesto be) is indicated in Media coverage and Eulogising. The problems associated
with people who foment violence and incite against Migrancy is covered up in Europe.
The issue of camps, and of governments who wish to re-educate indigenous communities
through linguistic programmes are practically invisible due to non-funding of advocacy
groups in Civil Society Protest ;and the continuing media dominance of special interest
parliamentary groups. Particular incitements have gone unchallenged in Italy against the
Romani community, wherein frontline soft-security innovations have allowed political
representatives to label that community as a ‘wave of evil’ and to finger-print children.
Pogrom and violence has led to a wave of migration.
There is a shameless play on migrancy which sees political groupings use
hate-speech and incitement to brutalise peoples. This has garnered in the last two weeks
a 29% vote share amongst the fomenters of violence (in Austria) and their celebration in
places like Ireland as brave.
Cultural enrichment and multi-culturalism is sacrificed to a holocaust of media-dominance
and under the table political deals that receive minimal coverage. One independent
media-site in Ireland has just again censored a Romani advocacy group
The Everyone Group, the editorial attachment delineating the refusal to publish :
Serial Spammers ,
The report detailed the removal of coverings from Roma people who sleep rough and
was considered insufficent for an Irish Newswire.
That report is available on the Indymedia UK site which does not exhibit such
paternalistic delicacy regarding people’s ability to decide for themselves what constitutes
a news story.