Sunday, April 12, 2009

RIP

I haven't been keeping up with the news as well as I might. So it wasn't until today, when I saw the article on the front of the New York Times, "A New Chapter of Grief in Plath-Hughes Legacy," that I learned of Nicholas Hughes's suicide.

He was an academic. He studied fish. Ecologies. He lived in Fairbanks, Alaska.

According to the article, he never talked about his parents, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. His life was quite apart from that legacy. He directed dissertations. He wrote proposals for internal grants. Like one for "Video analysis/editing workstation for graduate students and faculty of the UAF School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences (SFOS)." He gave talks for his department: "Developing the Theory Needed to Predict the Migratory Routes and Distribution of Salmon at Sea."

He was an academic. An ordinary academic. And one suffering from a malady not uncommon among academics: depression.

But I would never have learned of his death were it not for his parents. And the sadness from anyone's death seems magnified by the tragedy of his mother's death.

And since he never talked of his mother, who died when he was still a baby, it seems something less than appropriate to bring forth a poem from her. And yet it's what I can't get out of my head. And so here it is, a poem I've taught, in my own academic life. Students have commented that she put too much pressure on the little baby. I've always felt the turn toward the baby is one of the most moving tonal shifts I know of. "Nick and the Candlestick."

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb

Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish----
Christ! They are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses.
With soft rugs----

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.




9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Donna,

Thank you for posting this poem: I'd forgotten about it even after I read about Nick's death. When I've taught the poem in the past, I have students listen to Plath read it in that deadpan voice she has. It's here on Utube.

Donna said...

Thanks for the link, annieem!

Unknown said...

Dear Donna
I found this blog quite interesting. More because it is inspired from what Gibson grham had set the charting moment. It also matters how you go ahead with it. I am interested in reading through this blog in future too. My name is Levin and iam from India and now a Ph D candidate in Delhi. More later. Tell me a little bit about you also please.

Dennis G. Jerz said...

I was scheduled to teach Sylvia Plath in a lit survey, the day after the suicide of Nicholas.

Tidbits of Torah said...

Something that nonjews should think about:

Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah) 16:19-20"To You the nations will come from the distant parts of the land" and they will confess, 'Our ancestors inherited falsehood, futility that has no purpose. Can a man make a god? The man not being a god?'"... Read More

The Jewish nation that has kept Torah (G-d's commandments) throughout time are not the ones that will go to other nations to say we have inheirted falsehood. No friends, it is the nations that have inherited falsehood.

Yeshayahu (Isaiah) 40:18
"To whom can you liken God? Or what likeness can you compare to him?"

Yeshayahu (Isaiah) 42:8
"I am G-d; that is My Name. I will not grant My honor to anyone else or My glory to idols."

Yeshayahu (Isaiah) 43:10
"You are My witnesses," says G-d, "and My servant whom I chose," in order that you know and believe Me, and understand that I am He; before Me no god was formed and after Me none shall be."

Yeshayahu (Isaiah) 43:11" I am G-d, I alone. There is no Savior besides Me."

Yeshayahu (Isaiah) 45:5
"Thus says G-d, the King of Israel and its Redeemer, the L-rd of Hosts, "I am the first and I am the last, and there is no god besides Me."

Yeshayahu (Isaiah) 45:22
"Turn to Me and be saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am G-d, and there is no other."

Yeshayahu (Isaiah) 46:5
"To whom can you liken Me and whom can you declare My equal? To what can you compare Me that we should seem similar?"

Once again: those that have ears - hear. Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah) 16:19-20"To You the nations will come from the distant parts of the land" and they will confess, 'Our ancestors inherited falsehood, futility that has no purpose. Can a man make a god? The man not being a god?'"

The Jewish nation that has kept Torah (G-d's commandments) throughout time are not the ones that will go to other nations to say we have inheirted falsehood. No friends, it is the nations that have inherited falsehood. Please repent before the Holy One - Blessed be He - says your time on earth is over. Come learn from the nation that G-d said would be "the light to the nations."

Unknown said...

Donna, I just discovered your blog. And I just read about Nicholas Hughes here. I hadn't known. Lovely comments about a sad, sad event.

Melanie

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Anonymous said...

God rest their soul...

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