It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.
quote by Stephen Fry
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Blazin' Love
Sylvia Plath said; 'I will be
the very best me that I
always want to be with you.'
That says it all about love, right?
To be with that someone who makes
one want to be a better person.
A Jack Nicholson character said,
'You make me want to be a better man.'
You made me want to be a better me.
Virginia Woolf said, 'If you do not
tell the truth about yourself
you cannot tell it about other people.'
That goes to the heart of what
I have always said about love;
you have to love yourself,
which inlcudes bein' honest with yourself,
before you can love another.
I like to think, at long last,
that I am honest with myself.
Not sure about the lovin' part.
Plath also said, 'I deserve that, don't I,
some sort of blazing love that I can live with.
Deserve? Well sure everyone deserves
a blazin' love they can live with.
Is that not the highest form
of human achievement;
to find ones blazin' love?
In another context,
a Clint Eastwood character said,
'Deserves got nuthin' to do with it.'
I know I was not your blazin' love.
But you were mine.
And I do not quite know
how to live with that.
poem by MacGregor Tagliaferro
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Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it and the imagination to improvise.
Sylvia Plath in The Journals of Sylvia Plath
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Sylvia Plath
I wish I had a sylvia plath
Busted tooth and a smile
And cigarette ashes in her drink
The kind that goes out and then sleeps for a week
The kind that goes out on her
To give me a reason, for well, I dunno
And maybe shed take me to france
Or maybe to spain and shed ask me to dance
In a mansion on the top of a hill
Shed ash on the carpets
And slip me a pill
Then shed get pretty loaded on gin
And maybe shed give me a bath
How I wish I had a sylvia plath
And she and I would sleep on a boat
And swim in the sea without clothes
With rain falling fast on the sea
While she was swimming away, shed be winking at me
Telling me it would all be okay
Out on the horizon and fading away
And Id swim to the boat and Id laugh
I gotta get me a sylvia plath
And maybe shed take me to france
Or maybe to spain and shed ask me to dance
In a mansion on the top of a hill
Shed ash on the carpets
And slip me a pill
Then shed get pretty loaded on gin
And maybe shed give me a bath
How I wish I had a sylvia plath
I wish I had a sylvia plath
song performed by by Ryan Adams
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You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?
quote by Toni Morrison
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Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
quote by Virginia Woolf
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The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
quote by Virginia Woolf
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That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
quote by Virginia Woolf
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Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.
quote by Virginia Woolf
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Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
quote by Virginia Woolf
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If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?
quote by Virginia Woolf
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Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size.
quote by Virginia Woolf
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The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
quote by Virginia Woolf
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Creativity Can't Make Up For Depression
Creativity cannot make up for depression
which it attempts to cure,
it can’t replace it with the kind of supersession
that made spurious lure
of Christianity when it induced some Jews
to make up for their loss
of their identity, condemned, they thought, to lose
unless they chose the cross.
No, creativity provides a transient high,
and then becomes a wraith,
for those who’re so depressed they find they cannot fly,
because they’ve lost their faith
in their ability to reproduce success,
which if it is not con-
stantly repeated is a letter whose address
appears to be, “Dear John.”
Inspired by an article (“In Praise of the Crack-U: A novelist peers through darkness to find glittering gems in writing and art”) , by the South African-born novelist Jeanette Winterson, lesbian lover of Julian Barnes’s widow, Pat Kavanagh, in the October 17,2009 WSJ (A report about her lesbian relations includes the information: Blessed with good looks that led many to compare her to Katharine Hepburn, she secured a nonspeaking part in Under Milk Wood. “I never got paid, but I did get to snog Richard Burton, ” she said) . Winterson writes:
The stories are well known; Vincent Van Gogh cut off his ear and went mad. Sylvia Plath gassed herself. Anne Sexton committed suicide. Emily Dickinson was manic-depressive. Virginia Woolf worked through alternating bouts of madness and depression for most of her life. The mad, bad and dangerous wild boys of high art and popular culture make great copy—whether it's Caravaggio on the run for murder after one of his rages, or Allen Ginsberg, naked and drunk, howling through Manhattan. The women—Plath, Frida Kahlo, Maria Callas, Janis Joplin—imploding like dark stars, are the stuff of obsession…. Longing is painful. Every work of art is an attempt to bring into being the object of loss. The pictures, the music, the poems and the performances are an intense engagement with loss. While one is in the act of making, one is not in loss, and one has meaning. The fierce crashes that happen to many creative people when a piece of work is done (read Hemingway on this) come out of the sense that however good the work, it has not answered the loss. The strange thing about creative work is that it can have enormous value for others while its maker is left ravaged. The ancient Greeks understood this as the price of an encounter with a god—the divine forces enter the human and use him or her as an instrument, only to be ultimately destroyed. But I do not believe that creativity is destructive or divine. I believe it is the part of us that gives shape and voice to our innermost reality. This is frightening. Encounters with the real, in particular what we really feel, are something we generally try to avoid. Art mediates the encounter, allowing us to get nearer to our longing and our loss, to risk more, to dare more. Yet for the maker, the exposure is not mediated; it is total and terrifying. That is why so many creative people cut themselves off from their own experience, using drugs or drink or sex or shipwreck to avoid absolute exposure to the pain of creativity. When Whitman turned to face his dark angel, to wrestle with himself, he was acknowledging his own loss, his own longing, his own unstaunched wound.
10/18/09
poem by Gershon Hepner
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The Fog on the Hillocks Melts Away
The fog on the hillocks melts away,
it’s another bright sunny day
and people do not really know me
the beings beyond the stars
look down at me and cannot properly
make up their minds
if I am living like a saint, or sinner
or is a little bit of both,
the smell of smoke from the train,
and the nearby black township
is on the air
but the light wind blows it away
and the flowers in the garden
all smile up at me, as if delighted
to have my company
and nothing really threatens,
the heaven is blue above me
and at night the stars sparkle invitingly
are drawing me to a world,
a place in the beyond
where my dear father waits
and everything is clear, lovely and sunny
without pain or regret
and nothing bad besets anyone.
(In Answer to Sylvia Plath/Reference: Sheep in Fog by Sylvia Plath.)
poem by Gert Strydom
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Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development - an insight came from that book.
quote by Robert Reed
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Anne Sexton, Slyvia Plath and Virginia Wolf
Great women poets that had an impact
all Light Workers that ended up sad.
All had depression, but didn't know why
possible biopolarism symptoms turned the tide.
Most Light Workers feel all alone
they wish they were back at home.
They all were on Earth misunderstood
not really knowing they were here for greater good.
They all committed suicide and ended their life.
I felt like that for sometime…
having a medical condition that was in disguise.
Mysterious that Virginia was found on my birthday
Virginia is in heaven very safe and o.k.
So read their novels, poems, short stories and rhymes
they really did their best while here in human life.
Written by Suzae Chevalier on September 9,2012
www.suzae.com www.suzaria.com
poem by Suzae Chevalier
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This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.
quote by Virginia Woolf
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Is there no way out of the mind?
quote by Sylvia Plath
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I am too pure for you or anyone.
quote by Sylvia Plath
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I talk to God but the sky is empty.
quote by Sylvia Plath
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