I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat – on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok – I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
– Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Posted in Sylvia Plath
‘And then it came back, when some time had passed, the voice that told me, You made yourself ill, you let yourself go. I’ve let myself go, I said, you’re right. You don’t know the half of it, it said. You let yourself go and you paid for it and now you have to climb back and you don’t know how to start without my telling you. And you won’t listen.’
Posted in Writing
In a sunlit corner of that city
Where I was and was not
I came upon someone fallen quiet
Who was myself and not myself.Lifting his eyes he addressed me.
‘I am beside you now
Riding the breath but not staying.
What you need is this distraction.When you wake the mirror clouds
With bloom of my exile breath.
You trace your name
And smile into my absence.’
— John Welch, from ‘Imagination and Dream’
Posted in John Welch
The stones lay lumpish and cold under my bare feet. I thought longingly of the black shoes on the beach. A wave drew back, like a hand, then advanced and touched my foot.
The drench seemed to come off the sea floor itself, where blind white fish ferried themselves by their own light through the great polar cold. I saw shark’s teeth and whale’s earbones littered about down there like gravestones.
I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me.
A second wave collapsed over my feet, lipped with white froth, and the chill gripped my ankles with a mortal ache.
My flesh winced, in cowardice, from such a death.
I picked up my pocket-book and started back over the cold stones to where my shoes kept their vigil in the violet light.*
But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenceless that I couldn’t do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Posted in Sylvia Plath
‘It was the first thought I woke up to at night. It seemed perfect and logical. Almost comforting. I narrowed it down to a train or truck, though I disliked the idea of implicating others. In any case I was a coward, and I often pictured myself holding back at the last moment, my life as a hesitation before death.’
Posted in Writing
‘In the days that followed I felt as if I were floating above the hole, suspended in air. The ground had disappeared, only the hole remained below me, ready for me to drop back down at the least disturbance. My words meant next to nothing. They were themselves part of the air, a congregation of vapours.’
Posted in Writing
I’m forty-one, the moon is full,
you make love very well.
You touch me like I touch myself,
I like you, Mademoiselle.
You’re so fresh and you’re so new,
I do enjoy you, Miss.
There’s nothing I would rather do
than move around just like this.
— Leonard Cohen, ‘Do I Have To Dance All Night?’
Posted in Leonard Cohen
‘It was as if something in me took all that was new and made it old. Or as if God lowered his lids on all I saw and withdrew. Things died before they grew. No one could live like that, so flat for so long. But here and there I saw new things.’
Posted in Writing
Here comes your bride with her veil on
Approach her, you wretch, if you dare
Approach her, you ape with your tail on
— Leonard Cohen, from ‘Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On’
Posted in Leonard Cohen
Notes from a Room 