The Eye Mote

By Sylvia Plath

(from the Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath)

Here the incarnation of the ego is like the painful cinder in the eye. The onset of ego consciousness recapulates the Fall, but instead of an innocent, unconscious fall, the "I" now witnesses and participates in the destruction of Eden. The poet knows that a single day or a single life may recapulate all of evolution and one event may contain many larger scale events within it. Each portion of time, like a hologram, contains all of eternity within it.

Also notice how the red cinder is similar to Joyce's "aginbite of inwit".

Blameless as daylight I stood looking

At a field of horses, necks bent, manes blown,
Tails streaming against the green
Backdrop of sycamores. Sun was striking
White chapel pinnacles over the roofs,
Holding the horses, the clouds, the leaves Steadily rooted though they were all flowing
Away to the left like reeds in a sea

Before the human is separated from nature, we experience the harmony of pre-ego consciousness.We experience an instinctive, clairvoyant vision that feels the world directly. Pain, pleasure, and sensation come and go, but we don't experience our own relationship to the experience nor our permanent relationship to the world. This unity of consciousness with the world is shattered by--

When the splinter flew in and stuck my eye,
Needling it dark. Then I was seeing
A melding of shapes in a hot rain:
Horses warped on the altering green,

Outlandish as double-humped camels or unicorns,
Grazing at the margins of a bad monochrome,
Beasts of oasis, a better time.

The splinter is the ego which blinds vision and alters perception. Innocent forms are burned and melted by the Ego's participation. Subject/object dichotonmy arises where the observer creates the forms.

That which permanently relates to ourselves is now experienced in the outer world.

Abrading my lid, the small grain burns:
Red cinder around which I myself,
Horses, planets and spires revolve.

Neither tears nor the easing flush
Of eyebaths can unseat the speck:
It sticks, and it has stuck a week:
I wear the present itch for flesh,
Blind to what will be and what was.
I dream that I am Oedipus.

What I want back is what I was
Before the bed, before the knife,
Before the brooch-pin and the salve
Fixed me in this parenthesis;
Horses fluent in the wind,
A place, a time gone out of mind.

Ego is now the center of our universe. Neither feeling nor sensation can lessen the impact of the incarnating "I". Our dark imperfections and limitation are now mirrored back to us causing fear. We feel that every experience is life or death. All thoughts become anxiety ridden.

7 days - the eon of creation. The ego now "sticks" to all past and future. Our present fleshy incarnation is but an "itch" of the ego. The evolution of the genetic stream and the development of the mind "fixes" our egos in this present unseeing state where we are ignorant of past and future.

Novalis on the Birth of the Ego

The German poet and philospher Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) observed how disembodied thought forms (spiritual beings) created ourselves and nature by a process of inner reflection and how we break back through this original reflection in an act of ego birth:

"To go back into oneself means for us to withdraw from the external world. Analogously, for the spirits earthly life means inward contemplation-going into oneself-immanent action. Thus earthly life springs from an original reflection-a primitive going inward, inner composure-which is as free as our reflection. Conversely spiritual life in this world springs from a breaking through of that primitive reflection. The spirit unfolds itself once more-the spirit goes out to itself again-it cancels that reflection in part--and at this moment it says for the first time--the word "I". One can see here how relative is the going in and out. What we call going in is actually going out--taking on the original form once again."(Novalis: Philosophical Writings. Translated and edited by Margaret Mahoney Stoljar.1977. State University Press of New York. Page 30.)

Home to Ego, Blood, and Spirit

NEWSylvia Plath, Bees, and Egyptian Initiation NEW

Ego birth in "The Eye Mote"

Durkheim and Anomy

The Violent Atavism of "Cut"

Tree Imagery and the Double

"Getting There" and "Ariel"

Dark and Terrible "Apprehensions"

The Double and the Guardian of the Threshold

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