{"id":43,"date":"1999-02-13T16:45:27","date_gmt":"1999-02-13T20:45:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/1999\/02\/13\/keeping-and-holding-the-rapture\/"},"modified":"2023-02-13T21:28:09","modified_gmt":"2023-02-14T01:28:09","slug":"keeping-and-holding-the-rapture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/History\/?p=43","title":{"rendered":"Keeping and Holding the Rapture"},"content":{"rendered":"
February 13, 1999
\nSaturday<\/strong><\/div>\n

As of today I have decided to keep a diary again, just a place where I can write my thoughts and opinions when I have a moment. Somehow I have to keep and hold the rapture of being seventeen.
\n<\/em>— Sylvia Plath, 1932-1963
\nAmerican poet<\/p>\n

And of course we all know what happened to Sylvia.<\/p>\n

In her introduction to The Journals of Sylvia Plath<\/em>, Frances McCullough reports that the poet’s diaries had “the usual function of such documents — to chart a life, to pique a memory, to confirm inner life and perhaps to dispel the doubt that one exists at all. . . . ” Plath herself called her journal “a litany of dreams, directives and imperatives, . . . her ‘Sargasso.'”<\/p>\n

I found the quotation in Margaret D. Smith’s Journal Keeper<\/em>, a book of short meditations and writing prompts whose CIP classification assigns it to works on the spiritual life and the religious aspects of diary authorship.<\/p>\n

I keep a pen-and-paper journal, more or less regularly, about four days a week. That’s not what this is. When I write in my private journal, I write for myself, and the only audience I hope to be aware of is the future me who will read it again in a month or a year (“Where is that stuff I wrote about my grandmother’s bread bowl?”<\/em>). What I write here is a public journal, with an immediate and largely anonymous audience.<\/p>\n

That doesn’t mean it isn’t authentic. Just shaped.<\/p>\n

So why do I write, this journal or the other or anything at all? For all the reasons McCullough suggests. I especially like the one about dispelling the doubt that one exists at all. I want to keep and hold the rapture and (sometimes) the torture of being almost 52, a suburban wife and mother, a writer in search of recognition.<\/p>\n

On October 16, 1962, four months before the torture drove out all the rapture, Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother, “I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name . . .”<\/p>\n

Come along, while I make my name.<\/p>\n

To be included on the notify list, e-mail me:
\nmargaretdeangelis [at] gmail [dot] com (replace the brackets with @ and a period)<\/em><\/p>\n


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