Loss

I happened to be observing a lesson today which had at its centre Sylvia Plath's poem Balloons. This brought to a head a number of the conflicted feelings I've experienced since learning of the death in March, by suicide, of Nicholas Hughes, Plath's son, the child with the red / Shred in his fist at the end of the poem.

For me, he's somehow frozen with his sister in that terrible winter of 1963, and I feel like some kind of voyeur, rubber-necking the wreck on the highway - safely distanced from real pain, real despair. A trespasser.

To what degree are we entitled to delve into the lives of those strangely memorialised in what we term literature? We know the answer is zero, not at all, but that won't stop us intruding. I suppose we think it can all be held in somehow, within the classroom walls. But it leaks and it can poison. It can reduce as much as ennoble.

I suppose it can be used for good. But at this moment I don't know how.

We are left darkling.