the goddess, sylvia

First + foremost, a cheerful welcome to my newly anointed blog. I've decided to change gears + devote this one solely to my rants, revelations + mostly, brain-rumblings, related to my life + research as a grad student - minion of the rankest cesspool! It's a lonely existence, I think... living inside of my mind all the time + struggling to retain that fragile distinction between dream + reality. I process ideas as I write them, so here's to hoping this blogging project will whip me back into mental shape. This also comes on the heels of my mournful habits of scribbling notes on napkins, post-its, the backs of hands, etc. never to be found again. It's all about efficient organization, while giving + receiving meaningful creative output. After all, 'tis the season to be...?...I forgot how the age-old adage goes, someone help me out here.

So.

Concurrently I've been reading Sylvia Plath's "lost" short stories..and James Steeves' Imaginary Bodies, which considers Merleau-Ponty's thoughts on the body's role in enacting imaginative scenarios in otherworldy realms. Most striking and I think, valuable, about MP is his definition of le corps virtuel, or the virtual body, since he argues that we are capable of embodying another's projected experience through the shared materiality of our own bodies. He writes, "[The virtual body allows] for a certain style of seeing, a new use of one's body; it is to enrich and recast the body schema," while also positing that the body has its own system of language through a standard set of silent gestures and movements. His exclusion, though, of disabled bodies makes me question to what extent it is possible to think of the body as a referential point of experience - or must the notion of having a fit, "normal" body precede the ability to imagine the post-WWII monstrous, deformed bodies (of veterans, a-bomb v ictims, radioactive mutants, aliens) that plague both literary and filmic "fallout"?

Now back to Plath: I want to think of her short stories, "The Shadow" (1959) and "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams" (1958), in light of MP's virtual body (and I'm sure Lacan and other psychoanalytic theorists on dreams will be able to ground my assumptions a bit more). In both of these stories, the narrator experiences personal revelations in dreamscapes, and abstract concepts are personified, given human bodies. In the former story, the "Shadow" possesses a "nasal, sardonic voice" that asks, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" and has a lesson to teach: "somewhere innocent victims were being turned into rats by a vicious, experimental drug, burned on their bare feet with candles, fed to an indoor pool of piranha fish." After seeing a Japanese prison-camp film at a girl's birthday party, the narrator experiences repeated nightmares: "Night after night, I saw the same scene come back, poisonous, sulphur-colored, the starving men in their cells..." Bodies here are made to suffer, and in some sense, the narrator inhabits (and awakens to) these experiences through her dreams.

In the latter story, "Johnny Panic" is really just that - sheer, raw panic itself. Plath writes, "I figure the world is run by one thing and this one thing only. Panic with a dog-face, devil-face, hag-face, whore-face, panic in capital letters with no face at all." Interestingly enough, the narrator calls herself a secretary to Johnny Panic, collecting patients' dreams which all somehow point back to the way panic (real or imagined) diseases the mind/body - almost as though in these dreams lurk certain elusive personal and collective historical truths. In her own dream, she sees a lake "swaming with snakes, dead bodies puffed as blowfish, human embryos bobbing around in laboratory bobbles like so many unfinished messages from the great I am." By the end, the narrator is revealed as a patient herself, as she's undergoes electroshock therapy + Johnny Panic comes upon her as the only viable God, "His Word" said to "charge and illumine the universe." Of course, this can be read w/Plath's own bio in mind, but I wonder how the imaginings of another, virtual body allow intersections of personal/historical experience to occur on the narrator's body. Or how the Shadow, Panic, and and these days, thanks to the Bush administration, so-called Terror, are given corporeal weight in its access through the body. It seems that the human body + imagination are inextricably linked, if shock therapy is intended to physically purge her of this strange obsession with dreams authored by Johnny Panic. These dreams or fanciful imaginings, I'm not quite sure how to call them, appear to derive their materiality through the bodies they inhabit, are made flesh through...