26 January 2007

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.

You have a hole, it's a poultice.

You have an eye, it's an image.

My boy, it's your last resort.

Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.     

        Sylvia Plath, 'The Applicant'.

Oh the dictations I have been receiving of whole poems entirely dreamt up but unremembered upon waking. Unimaginable how frustrating it is for someone like me who's poetically unproductive to the point of near sterility. Yeats explained this too (in fact it's a common poetic experience but rarely complete poems as I have received recently, all in English). Perhaps Hughes had a similar experience coinciding with another experience of mine - Nurses saying "It's a boy" over and over again for hours on end while I lay unconscious in hospital, I think in 1988: 

He managed to hear, faint and far - 'It's a boy!'

Then everything went black

        Ted Hughes, 'A Kill'.

Last month I had a vision whilst seated at the computer which lasted a mere few seconds. I saw a sheet of paper on which was written in Arabic some text which I read. All I recalled afterwards was "Allahumma al-Rai".  The first line ending with Allahumma and the second line beginning with al-Rai: 

Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?

Once one has been seized up

     
          Sylvia Plath, 'Mystic'.

Similarly on 2^nd January I dreamt that someone sprinkled water on my face while I was asleep which actually woke me up because it felt so real. The time was for the Fajr [dawn] prayer:

Sugar can cure everything, so Kindness says.
Sugar is a necessary fluid,

             Sylvia Plath, 'Kindness'.

What Plath called elsewhere 'The refined snow'[1] of Tate & Lyle, together with 'Eggs and fish, the essentials’.[2]

I fainted on 24^th - Most likely because I hadn't eaten anything (or drank) in well over 12 hours - Not purposefully but I hadn't really thought to or felt the need.  For many months now I have been living for nothing but Poetic Possibilities.  My lungs like 2 grey-paper 'Dust bags in and out'[3] pumping themselves out 'Of the bitumen of blood and the smoke of tears’.[4]

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[1] Sylvia Plath.  ‘Wintering’.  Collected Poems.  Edited by Ted Hughes.  (Faber & Faber, 1981).
[2] Plath.  ‘Gigolo’.  Ibid.
[3] Plath.  'Paralytic' Ibid.
[4] Ted Hughes.  ‘A Green Mother’.  Collected Poems.  Edited by Paul Keegan.  (Faber & Faber, 2003).