Everything I know about is just one big circle.

Listening to Wah Wah by James

(The producer and the mixer have something to do with it a well).

All those years ago when I started this blog, I wrote about Frida Kahlo. I was reading the Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera which was, I think, the first book I wrote about here. Well I only got a third of the way through it before I dumped it but this weekend we finally got the DVD of Frida and because I have a butterfly mind and have just finished Her Husband, I have started it again. Within a page of the bookmark, I found two nuggets of info that the film-makers just had to include because they were filmic. Maybe I will get around to completing the review. I did have some weird idea that finishing the review of Frida would mean the end of the Blog.

Back to Her Husband. Plath's suicide seemed to be reached almost without signpost. It is almost as if the biographer didn't want to dwell on it; rather she wanted to discuss the aftermath, Hughes' life after 1963. It did that well though it seemed, as is usual with these post-Plath time-lines, that the prose was rushed just to get the thing finished. I sometimes feel that the writers subconsciously dismiss Hughes' life after the suicide as not as important as that before it. This book is obviously different in that it is supposed to concentrate on Hughes though the author deliberately refers to Hughes' biographer meaning not her. (This must be Elaine Feinstein.) Having said this, there is a refreshing air of reality about these chapters. I think Middlebrook even says that some biographers see their task as being to show how much like the rest of us these geniuses, worthy of so much analysis, actually are. I cannot remember (or more likely work out) whether Middlebrook is trying to do the same. Whether she is trying to humanise them or not, she manages to do so quite well. The film Sylvia obviously tried to romanticise the lives of the poets; it had them living in terrible squalor, dirty walls, dark rooms etc when in reality Plath would never have put up with that sort of life for long. No photos of them show this 40-Watt lifestyle. The book finishes with some nice speculation as to the real time-line of events and as to the possible whereabouts of the Plath journals which Hughes famously "destroyed". Roll on 2023.

All this salacious, salivary speculation has left me empty and hungry. Appropriate alliteration will be permitted on the last Monday of every month as long as it is in good taste and doesn't hurt anybody. Somewhere, the light comes into a room full of papers, all colours and all sizes, lined up on a table, spilling over boxes. Here and there we see half-destroyed sheets, some singed from fires meant to hurt rather than annihilate. Some chanting catches the edge of hearing, maybe outside but more probably just quiet. And there is a ghost of someone here, crying blackly though he has not cried before for anyone but us here. Maybe we are twenty years into the future and this lost spirit aches at what it has promised.

It is past the end of the world, the end of our world, and something loud will come to us to take us back to the safety of the small wars we let happen to keep ourselves safe. Now we are beyond the events of hatred that we make ourselves, the little pressure of fingers on buttons that start off bombs on the other side of the world. There are broken things in here, small, dark things which will end us all. He cries more and we hear it close now. Those dusty shelves are more like some slick archive, a computerised removal of their charges' lives, kept shut away to keep them young and happy, watered and safe. Number 7 of Howls and Whispers, that heavy plate of engraving and some hand-written re-draft that says so much about what the author meant. Number 7, a weight left unread because everything in it is copied away, Number 7, a meaningless thing sold for gain and all its insides spewed across the world like the guts of some flat animal by the road, all life squashed into the air. Where do the thoughts go in that instant. I see mine just fading away but what if I end up the cannon fodder of some modern war, blown apart on the train, or vapourised in some accident. I will get through this and be there for the opening. We will watch on a high-numbered channel as they open that box. There will be no dust for such reminders of the squalid real world are banished in these clean-rooms. They could make electronics here except by then all machines will be made by machines and we will have nothing to do other than sit by the pool and read while the sun beams out through the CO2 and burns us.

Maybe this is a joke. They will find nothing in that box, a few worthless trinkets. He thinks of us like our colonial ancestors used to see the savages they landed amongst. Here have this beautiful mirror; you can see yourself in this glass diary, we are just you but more eloquent or believing of the things we need to believe in to become like this. Believe in all this rubbish and you too can be a poet, a writer. Or maybe you want to be a lover. We love you. That's why we're here.