NECESSARY SELECTIONS

I’m not at all sure why, but I am tearing through the Sylvia Plath bio, Mad Girl’s Love Song. In a way, it is like Marmee and Louisa, as it closely chronicles the mother-daughter relationship, and the struggles Louisa and Sylvia experienced becoming women and writers. There is much to reference from Mad Girl’s Love Song, most particularly a long W.H. Auden poem, Kairos and Logos, but more on that later. Just to start, though, this line jumped out at me,

“We are at loggerheads with our own lives.”

Helloooo!? You talkin’ to me?

Wilson (author of Plath biography) also takes a resonant quote from Jane Davidson's The Fall of A Doll's House: Three Generations of American Women and The Houses They Lived In. 

"We might read Virginia Woolf, discourse on her, but we didn't absorb her counsel: we didn't, as she advised, try to 'think poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with fact.' 

Yeah ... that keeping in touch with fact is damn tricky.

"We alternated instead of integrating, and someone should have insisted on our sorting out priorities with ruthlessness, with realism. But we weren't even aware that selection was necessary."

If you have read my last few posts, I do believe you will well understand the reverberations for me. Ah, yes, priorities, choices, selections. And to that end, I need to go back to culling.

Now on Thursday.

Back to muggy, dog's-mouth weather.

Ups and downs, but not staying down. First part of moving out accomplished. Lots of strife and anguish and angst as closing day nears. (Another month.)

I made some painful choices in donating items that were dear to me: my vintage enamel kitchen table, a boudoir chair I had had for twenty years, the rug I had found in Maine, and other things. S and I made it up to CT to get into storage, and, after two years, I am ready to go and reduce my belonging footprint yet again in the coming weeks.

I've been a bit out of it since, but I am not on a huge deadline to get out of here, other than not wanting to engage in the things the family needs to do. 

So, back to more packing, and a nap. On Monday, as I was packing and having anxiety moment, I would stop and sit under the grape arbor to read and calm down.