Dying is an Art

Just finished watching Sylvia, the movie. Made me think – do all great writers necessarily have to have such tragic lives? Is this tragedy that feeds creativity into their works? Is sadness the greatest catalyst for passionate ruthless outpourings? Is loneliness, infidelity, heart breaks, insomnia, nightmares the driving force behind great writings? Pained verses are touching, strong ranting prose effective? So to be able to produce such works, does a personal failure prove to be a necessity to be a writer?
Woolf? Plath? – the two icons of their times – my Goddesses, my idols, my inspirations – both women with tragic lives – both women with mental tortures – both women clamped personally – both women dead early – for they could not carry the burden of their genius in this unfair world?
What is reason and what is passion? Poetry is passion. The power to be able to manifest your entire self in a few “not-rhyming” verses is poetry – heart rendering lines from the self is poetry.

Tragedy and sorrow – the food for poetry? Joy too – but mostly the former.
I look back at my tiny collection of insignificant work – I look at the words, the feelings, the thoughts behind it – I pour over them slowly, I think about them – I recall the context, the subject, the time in which I wrote – and sadly, it shows too – sorrow had brought out the best in me – through words I could manifest my anger, my fear, my anxiety, my hatred. In joy, I could not ever do it so well. Joyous poetry has always been flimsy – so is my happiness shallow and is my sorrow deep? I wonder…I think about myself and in my fancy, compare myself to those two – I relate to them…strangely so. Surely many others too – but I do strongly.

Genius requires certain madness – an insanity that is not visible to the world. A slow machine whirring in the head – with all kind of thoughts – real and surreal – dreams and nightmares – subconscious and conscious thoughts – all intermingling and running furiously through my head – like a storm that is brewing – that shall only ebb once I die.
When does this storm get deafening? When does it block out other noises? When does the world become an enemy? When do you become alone – you and these voices in you head – sense that is nonsense to others – logic that is senility to the world, a philosophy that is not yet been recorded in great thick books of Russell and Decartes, a passion that Rousseau hasn’t yet talked about? Is that when you leave some thoughts behind – on paper and in parchments for the world to read and recognise later? Is that when you decide to not live in the make believe social world anymore? Is that when you die? Like a legacy, leave behind your words and perish? And influence and inspire, amateurs like me, readers and dreamers – who are a little different from the rest –slightly mad, slightly sane, slightly alive, slightly dead – who wish to think, and write – to be read, to tell others the beauty of a poem, of words, of art, of verses…of an experience that is called life itself? And then dying would not be an end in itself, but a beginning of another story – more words, more poems, more genius, more insanity, more drowning, more pills – and yet in Plath’s words:

Dying is an art,
like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.