A Study in Light and Longing

Erin Slaughter

 

The first love of Sylvia Plath’s life was Vincent Van Gogh, the impressionist painter. Though he lived and died half a century and a continent away, she spent her teen years believing they were soulmates, tragically separated by space and time. She gazed out between the white, frilled curtains of her bedroom window at the night sky, thankful that it was all so ancient—that she was seeing the same trembling starlight as he did, the same moonless swirls of wind that inspired him to paint. She wrote poems he would never read. She arranged the furniture in her bedroom to mirror his “Bedroom in Arles.” She imagined his shirt smelled of summer-warmed straw, his heartbeat at her ear resounding the ebb and crash of sea-tide.

She cried often for him, for the tragedy of his loneliness, though he had such kindness buried at his center, hidden like the ember of a jewel. She truly believed that, had they met, she would have loved him with all her being, brought a light brighter than sunflowers into his life—so brilliant even he wouldn’t be able to capture it with paint.

In college, Sylvia Plath skipped class one Tuesday afternoon to take the train to Boston, where she saw her first Van Gogh painting. She stood there for an hour, tears streaming down her face, memorizing the brush strokes. When the security guard wasn’t looking, she reached out and touched, just with her fingertips, the hard curve of his face. At last, a physical link between them, through space and time.

***

There are certain things that happen when you build a person into a metaphor. One of them is crying when you masturbate. Also, an ancient, specific kind of smiling—your eye sockets replaced with two brilliant green Christmas lights burning so bright and hot, no one sees them cracking. No one sees the smoke caught in your lashes.

***

Flannery O’Connor said that a writer has gathered all the experience she needs, by the age of twenty-one, in order to write something honest. Flannery O’Connor was never truly in love with anything but a holy sliver of tongue.

She died at age 39 from a flock of peacocks that rooted gorgeous inside her stomach until they outgrew her. Through the years she carried them, she began to feel the plastic tickle of feathers in her throat, sprouting painful through the borders of her intestines and pushing up through all else that made her human. The birds penetrated her from the inside out, muffled her speaking into choked squawks, and feathers crowded her vision until her hands would not allow her letters. Her prayers became all madness and blue-green flight. In a sterile Georgia hospital room, the white fog of humidity appeared as a gentle form of sunlight. Her last breath was metallic, a gasp of sapphire and emerald.

***

The Writer has an insatiable need to speak and be heard. The impulse to record an experience, or to tell a friend, is not a means to unburdening; it’s a way of solidifying the burden; to have proof outside of the self, the mind, that it happened. By speaking it to a witness or creating a record of it on paper, it’s made tangible. The Writer recognizes this compulsive sharing of self to be shameful and narcissistic; all Writers are narcissistic. To divulge pieces of a life requires truth and honesty. But which honesty? Whose truth?

***

. . . . . . . . . . one of the actual best nights of my life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . very intoxicated and the right . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  fireworks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . sang an . . . . . . . . . . anthem . . . . . . . . . . like a beautiful scene from a movie, . . . . I hope I get to . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . die. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I’ve never laughed as much in my life as I have . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .i on the floor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . what happened was . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the candlelight . . . . . . . . . . for a very long time

***

Renee Descartes wrote a book about light and called it The World. He wrote of fire and void, bodies and their holy celestial orbits. He wrote pages and pages only to discover what he had known before beginning: there is a difference between the things we perceive and the objects that produce those perceptions. There is a difference between the golden light we turn towards and the intentions of the sun that bathes us in it. Between illumination and illusion.

***

. . . . . . . . . . .  not sleeping . . . . . . . . . . . . not . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . untangling all the . . . . . . . .  ways . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  everyone who says they love me is wrong or lying or . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  a blur . . . . . I force myself into . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I’m trying to . . . . .  better . . . . . . . i myself . . . after . . . . . we ran though the fountain . . . . . . . .  in pure childlike . . . . . . . . wonder . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

 

I do better with less sleep. I do better with less . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ending . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  I told him tonight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I don’t remember how I phrased it exactly, but something . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I didn’t tell him was that . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  about me he opened a window . . . . . . . . . . . . .  its true I don’t even want . . . . . . . . . . . anymore . . . . . . . . . and I know . . . . . . want exceptionally . . . . . . .

***

Let the record show that by illumination the Writer means illusion; by illusion the Writer means a mirror you didn’t know was there; that perhaps the Writer will become embarrassed about the seriousness with which this record was written; that the Writer remains changed, and therefore, this record remains relevant—

***

Okay so . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . if he was disembodied energy . . . . . . . .  I would still want . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . him constantly. It’s addictive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Remember I said I was ready to open . . . . . . to . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . get . . . . . . . . . . . broken

***

Maggie Nelson says that trying to fall out of love with someone “can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart.” She lies in a sunken bed, strokes patterns of longing onto the back of a stranger who isn’t there. When she looks in the mirror, she sees a woman who is just trying her best with what she currently has: a pert nose and a glimmer of bittersweet madness behind her eyes. She has fallen deeply, impossibly in love with the color blue, and so many other things that are fundamentally incapable of loving her back. Maggie Nelson is just trying her best.

What an exorcism separating your heart from its boundless love can be. Like clawing your way out of the most gorgeous dream.

Maggie Nelson saw her lover, and probably always will, as blue, beautiful blue. As the quality of sunlight piercing through to the ocean floor. When he told her he saw himself as orange—blue’s opposite—she should have listened.

Maggie Nelson hates the word “lover”; it conveys something Hallmark and soap opera, its meaning not even grazing the hemorrhage of red-violet light that tears seismic ripples through a life. She maybe prefers “beloved,” as in, Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, or Beloved, do not believe every spirit, for many false prophets are in the world—although in general, she distrusts language found in the Bible.

Maggie Nelson spends all winter drinking cinnamon tea and burning sage, clawing her way out of the most gorgeous dream. She takes a serrated knife to her chest, pries open her rib cage, murders that beautiful bird. She wraps it gently in gold thread and buries it under a jacaranda tree. She finally belongs to herself again.

Beneath her fingernails are fossilized remnants of blood and azure feathers. In the space between waking and sleep, she still hears echoes of chirping.

***

Let the record show that the Writer had an obsession with the word light before the beginning of time; that perhaps now the metaphor is growing weary; that she hopes it will not die with this part of her; that the universe made a story of the Writer’s life without her consent or permission; that the Writer made a story of herself, and believes herself incapable of telling another until she purges this one—

***

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  every day. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . we died and descended into hallucinatory togetherness, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . unconditional . . . . . . . . . . . . .  we drank . . . . . . . . . . .  cherry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  summer. I started crying and . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . it was everything. We got high and watched . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . nature . . . . . . . . . . . . .  streaking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . naked in the . . . . . . dream—but ended up staring at the stars and . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . fell asleep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  beautiful . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  in a room surrounded by . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . mammoth . . . . .  I slipped in . . . . . I’m letting go . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

***

The ghost of Virginia Woolf goes, waterlogged and dripping, to bookstores to cry and touch the empty spaces in the shelves; the smell of riverbanks shadows her—gray, cold, faintly tinny; her heart a pile of smooth, heavy stones; she watches dust collect on spines branded with her name; like a piece surgically removed and lingering in the common world, a rotting thing; still, she cannot stuff the words back inside of her; trying to is like trying to slot a cardboard anvil into a cavern where guts belong. But this is not the point.

***

Let the record show that the Writer does not give a fuck about narrative; that self-contained moments organized to complement each other form a larger narrative, as do our lives; that if pieces are switched, omitted, censored, they form a different narrative completely, as do our lives; that the Writer’s obsession with language and the resulting disenchantment is partially to do with the Writer’s tendency to narrate the moment while living it; therefore never submitting fully to the experience of living; therefore life being made of moments that belong to writing and not to the Writer, the Writer always unintentionally distanced from the events of her own life; as Claude Monet’s admission that while watching someone he loved die, he spent much of the time analyzing the pigments of color in her eyelids, deciding how to paint them; that anyone who ascribes artistic significance to their own lives prevents themselves from seeing clearly—

***

I didn’t sleep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  because . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . his neck . . . . . . . .  his breathing while . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  in the morning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  peach syrup . . . . briefly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  dressed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the sky . . . . . . . . . . . . .

 

. . . . . . drinking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the l. . . . . . . . .o nights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . blue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . enough to return to . . . . .  tomorrow . . . . . . .  beautiful . . . . .  I asked him about emptiness . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  so obviously I am in [ . . . . ] with him . . . . . . .  I didn’t think . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  about it.

***

Mary Shelley is a liar, a guilty, disgusting, ravenous creature. She does not know anything of love, is allegiant to nothing but her dumb animal hunger. When she comes to you with tears brimming inside her hollow face, do not trust her. Run.

***

Last night . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  colored . . . . . . . . . bodies with . . . . . . . .  becoming

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  just have fun with it without getting weird, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. Last night he told me . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  I was sunlight. Fuck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

***

Let the record show that there is a purity to being in love that is absent here; that the Writer barely, but still, can access it; that this realization makes the Writer feel both sad and relieved; that the Writer does not experience love as a choice, nor does she experience the impulse to write as a choice; that love of language, like loving anything else, is self-destructive; that is, unrequited; that is, incapable of loving us back.

***

And of course . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The city shining in the dark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . dancing around each other like fireflies . . . . no . . . . . . . . . . .  projected satellites . . . . . . .  in puddles of dirty rain water . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  in awe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I ran out of things to wish for

 

& -. . .- Why must I censor -. . . . . . . . .

from myself?

***

The second great love of Sylvia Plath’s life was a lanky-limbed boy with a bright, gushing heart, and eyes like pale lightning. She did not intend to fall in love. She didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late. His voice was like a heater switching on, sudden, warm and deep.

His hands were cathedrals. She became briefly convinced that he was a descendant of her beloved Vincent Van Gogh, though of course, she never told him that.

Suddenly, having words for things grew tired, missed the point. When the urge to write rose hopeful in her, she turned resentful against it. She stopped writing in the journal she had meticulously kept since age seventeen. She was sick to death of the obligation to record, to prove things had happened to her. Now, she found gladly, she had run out of things to wish for.

The words inside her cauterized the tissue of her heart. In an occasional moment of desperation and exceptional burning she would purge them in long, molten exhalations of manic language. Afterwards, she felt wobbly, a little satisfied. If she were given the choice between possession by this alphabet of flames and living freely, she thought, she would have chosen freedom.

She should have known there was never a choice. She should have known that nothing lovely can ever last long enough, that you can only run from who you are for so long.

The second great love of Sylvia Plath’s life is one that she will never write about. Once she could no longer sink into his arms, the metaphor she hardened him into was all that remained. Vincent Van Gogh was not related to the beautiful boy she fell in love with. No matter how wildly blue his windmill eyes were, the rambling grace behind them, or the slight crook in his nose. Oh, the stories we tell ourselves when we are desperate to dress our achings in costumes of divine purpose. The only point of pain is to get to the other side. The universe has promised us nothing, nothing but this.

***

Let the record show that the Writer heard the phrase: We want good for the people that we love, but we also want to own them and reluctantly found it to be true; that she read the phrase: I wanted to be turned into light, so I might fold over his skin with warmth and enter his eyes to see me through and found it to be true; that the same book warned: You should never let anyone see without looking; that the Writer did the goddamn work to move on, whatever that means; that at a wooden cabin outside of her life, a voice conjured the phrase: not a delicate glow, a blazing forest fire—and the Writer found it to be the most honest thing she had ever heard—

***

IN THE BEGINNING SHE WROTE HERSELF INTO EXISTENCE. & SAW THAT IT WAS GOOD TO BE. FROM CLAY SHE FORMED FLESH & CALLED IT BODY. SHE UPROOTED RIBS, FASTENED THEM INTO A CAGE & CALLED IT EMPTY. WIND PULLED HER BY THE HAIR, AND LO, SHE SPOKE IT INTO BREATH & NAMED IT HOLY. ATE FIRE & CALLED IT NEED. CAST LIONS & ROARED WITH PLEASURE. ROLLED OUT CARPETS OF GREEN DESIRE. SHE WROTE COMMANDMENTS & BROKE THEM LIKE PLATES. SHE CREATED MAN & MAN DEMANDED HER KNEES. SHE DUG FINGERNAILS INTO THE LEATHERY SKY & RIPPED FORTH, BEARING STARLIGHT. AND LO, STARLIGHT BURNED BLUE UPON HER. SHE CALLED IT LONGING AND LO, IT WAS. SHE SPRUNG OCEANS & TOLD THEM TO BE SALTED. SMOKED VOWELS & TOLD THEM TO LINGER. SHE HOWLED INTO MOUNTAINS & SUMMER TUMBLED FORTH, NAMED HER SUNLIGHT & SHE BECAME IT. AS IF IT WAS AWAITING HER ALL ALONG. & SHE SAW THAT IT WAS GOOD TO BE.

***

This time I am Delia Bacon—trying on her skin—slippery skin fits nicely, if only whitehot jolts of madness—strand-like sentences slobbering from her—mouth full of white-hot scarves, tumbling—madness only another name for truth nobody wants—Delia romps through the woods in a long ochre dress—Delia falls in white-hot love with a man who never loves her—though he acts as if he could—we are mirrors cracking all the time, my Alexander and I—Alexander in the woods, hot white fingers on Delia’s neck, her pulse—my neck-pulse—scent like his makes us woozy with ambition—he tells us together we will build a cabin and never return—from our lips, a dark flowering yespleasemoreanything—he says I will birth daughters named for wildflowers—we believe him, sigh luminous—turn flown, eat ash—his eyes bluebeautifulblue, agape with drowning—deep with the mirror-light of being known and seen—how could I not believe in him?—But this is not his story. This is the story of an opening—both doorway and wound—

***

This is what I remember about that night, what I could never forget:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  the dark trees. . . . . . . . . . a random leaf from a low branch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . flannel shirt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . and I wanted to touch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . and danced to no music and felt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . total freedom while . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . strange voices . . . skipped rocks into t. . . . . . Starlight . . . . . . . . . . . bright and watching us . . . . . . . . . . glows and shadows . . . . . . . . . . . how . . . . to cross the street with . . . eyes closed.

***

Let the record show that the Writer does not know whether metaphor is a kind of hiding, or a way of expressing something more true than fact; that the Writer is not sure how it benefits anyone to know that once, on a rooftop, two otherwise insignificant people watched impossible stars burn up and fall from the sky, until amazed laughter merged into joyful weeping; that he kissed fingers and wrists and ankles and foreheads and cheeks with annihilating tenderness; that there was guilt involved, but not enough to change the fact that when they were in a room together, they gravitated towards each other, embarking on unavoidable adventures; that not all of the things the Writer has told you are true, or at least, not entirely honest; that somewhere in time and space, the Writer is getting off a plane in Philadelphia remembering him and in Dallas remembering him and in Atlanta bleeding into cotton underwear in a chrome bathroom stall—and even this reminds the Writer of him, and the Writer is in Portland wandering lost streets in the cold on New Years Eve, remembering him though she didn’t know him yet—

***

I felt a familiar ache . . . . . . in the hallways . . . . . . .  of yearning I was so stupid . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I will always adore him in a very confusing way . . . . . . . . . . . it’s no one’s fault . . . . . . . . . . . . .  but there were parts of the night I felt closer to . . . . . . . . . . . . my hunger . . . . . . . . . . . . he held me and traced his fingers across my arm . . . . . . . . . . . my entire . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  lungs raw and . . . . . . . . .

***

Everything written here is either honest or the truth; let the record show that when the Writer could no longer tell the truth, she chose, instead, to be honest.

***

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  I told him I am thinking of writing a book about light. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

 

 

 

 

© 2019 Erin Slaughter

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Erin Slaughter is editor and co-founder of The Hunger, and the author of I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun (forthcoming from New Rivers Press in 2019). Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Prairie Sch. . ner, Split Lip Magazine, New South, Passages North, TYPO, and elsewhere. Originally from north Texas, she is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at Florida State University. You can find her at erin-slaughter.com.