The Dresden Codex

How do you write words which describe the weird lispy noise that a vocoder makes? Better not think about it too much.

Did you write a poem yesterday. I wrote lots. No you can't read them yet. I also started reading Ariel's Gift seeing as I have managed to finish Birthday Letters. I read some real bombshells though many of them are from books I should have read already - The Savage God: A Study of Suicide by Al Alvarez being one of them. I do not have the book here to paraphrase anything but I can remember Alvarez's analysis of the use of occult stuff - OuiJa etc - by Hughes and Plath. He said that Hughes had the emotional stability to handle the possible demons which might be released but that Plath, while intellectually stronger, was at huge risk of being deeply affected emotionally by her own revelations. This dabbling released a flood of issues - often related to the death of her father - which basically destroyed both her marriage and ultimately her life. Not sure I believe this totally but Alvarez knew them both and I did not. Not sure I would have wanted to know either of them to be honest. I have my own issues behind my interest in Plath and I am grateful that a side affect of this is further interest in Hughes. While you can appreciate Plath's poetry on a deep intellectual level, they rarely create what I could call emotional moments. Birthday Letters was so poignant and so tied up with both Plath's poetry and her life, that the emotional element becomes somehow personal and necessary.

Something I was going to look up regarding the photos on the cover of Ariel's Gift. They were taken by David Bailey, he of the Birth of the Cool. I was surprised that he was taking photographs of the great and the good in 1962 or even before. While looking for them, I came across this page of Plath's paintings.

This is called Dresden Codex because I once did a collage of the picture of Sylvia Plath on the front of Collected Poems (itself a drawing based on the photograph on Letters Home) stuck onto a page of the Dresden Codex cut out of Scientific American (Stopped buying that years ago - once cried desperately while in a pub in Chester reading in it about the effects on mines on children - Support the ICBL). I hope I have recovered.