Thursday, March 26, 2009

Edge

How close have you been to the edge?

I became familiar with the works of Elizabeth Bishop during my senior year in high school with influences from Mr. James and Mr. Fox, two of the best English teachers I’ve ever had (although Mr. Fox was more of a Whitman fan). Around the same time I started to read Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Erica Jung. I collected their books mostly from Brownbag bookshop on Monroe Ave, my favorite used bookstore and displayed them on the same shelf together everywhere I moved to. Couple months ago John Dearman took a glace at the shelf and asked with a chuckle “Are you ok?” It was amusing and refreshing that someone finally made an appropriate comment about the books after all these years. I’m not a writer, not a poet and not suicidal.

Last week I read about a play called “Edge” portraying the final hour of the life of Sylvia Plath at the MuCCC on Atlantic Ave. I’ve been meaning to see it but never made the time to do so. Few days later I caught on CNN that Nicholas Hughes, son of Sylvia and Ted Hughes, hanged himself in Alaska. So tonight, I made a point to go see the play.

It was a 2-hour one woman show with a chair and a small table. Marcy Savastano, who played as Sylvia, spoke in a “tight, clipped, vaguely aristocratic accent” which reminded me of the Lilith on Frasier. It’s not exactly what I imagine Sylvia to be but it’s not entirely impossible or unlikable. I for some reason have always preferred Gwyneth Paltrow’s image of Sylvia in the movie of the same title. Not everything in the play was factual, such as the address of her last residence, 23 Fitzroy Road which was few blocks away from where Yeats once lived, not where he actually lived. Some of the monologues were clearly based on sentiments from her poems and journals but many were elaborated from controversies involving her husband Ted Hughes, who some suspected was abusive and ultimately responsible for her death. In the play Sylvia laughed and said he was a “killer of a husband” pointing not only to her death but a copied suicide carried out years by the woman he left Sylvia for, Assia Wevill.

I’ve always found Sylvia to be a quite ordinary, witty and likeable person with great talent, passion and pride for her works. I flip through her journal from time to time and I find myself thinking and writing some of the same things. Again, I’m not a writer or a poet and I’m not suicidal. There is a common misconception that people who are suicidal are somehow an entirely different breed with insanity but in fact they are rather normal people with eccentricities just like the rest of us. I feel weird saying all this because we always say it takes one to know one. A coward will always be a coward. It takes great courage, conviction and bravery to leave this worldly place. Love and hate are strong emotions on two sides of the same coin and in a parallel way so can be the passion and desire for life and death. Perhaps people who choose to leave us don’t see it as a deficiency or unwillingness to live but rather a strong, unfaltering will for ultimate solitude.

I understood and could relate to every word in the play. The part about her authoritative unyielding father who managed them as objects in his life rather than kids that needs to be loved. He taught her to strive for nothing but perfection. The part about her demanding mother who loved her unconditionally and instructed Sylvia to live life exactly the way she wanted her to live. And the part about Ted Hughes; especially the part about Ted Hughes. It was an abusive relationship I knew all too well. I understood it when she said, when I looked into his eyes “I knew he could kill me.” I understood every syllable in that sentence because I too have uttered those words. It didn’t mean he was going to or intent to pierce her heart with a knife. Certain people, mismatched souls, have a way of pushing others over the edge. It’s a mentally abusive and dangerous game. It’s like meeting that man or woman who could make you do anything but multiple by a thousand times more intensity to a level of utter mutilation, sick and twisted.
No man could ever come close to understand the unique and indescribable pain and helplessness of a woman being restraint on the bed or followed in the car or being put under close surveillance by an unreasonable, jealous and insecure man who acts out of irrational madness. I’m embarrassed to even talk about the kind of bullshit I went through in the last eight months of the dysfunctional relationship. I’ve had two police reports, the first one told me “the writings are on the wall, people don’t change.” The second pair just asked why I haven’t moved out as if it was solely my fault that I’m stuck in an abusive relationship. Yes, abusive, when someone forces to you live with them against your will it’s abusive. I knew I was responsible for my life but not everything was easy. The frustration was imaginable. More than once have I shouted on the top of my lungs while throwing coffee mugs across the room with fury, “I’d rather die than to be with you!” And all he would respond is “that’s a mean thing to say.” You see, only a coward and self-centered bastard would say that because they can’t imagine such strong emotions and not to mention actions. Any warm blooded person could hear those words came out extreme desperation but not him. He stayed and pushed me and pushed me closer to the edge until I can no longer breathe. Even now he still tries to make his way back into my life. Over my dead body. I have every right to decide who I want or don’t want to be with. And if it ever comes down to those two choices, there no doubt in my mind which one I would choose.

Sylvia didn’t have a blog. Ted Hughes destroyed the last few months of her journals entries before her death. We may never know what her thoughts where at those last hours. We will never know if she really meant to die or it was just another one of her acts to cheat death like an escape artist. To wear it proudly like a battle scar. Some people needs to be close to the edge to feel alive.

The way I see it is that if I can’t live the life I want to live, there is no point to live at all. I’m not a writer or a poet and I’m not suicidal. Certain unmatched souls just have a way of pushing me over the edge. I must flee from them as one would from a deadly virus. I’d rather be alone for the rest of my life then to risk being with another psycho ever again. But a girl on roller skate told me for every woman there is a future asshole waiting.

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