Sylvia Plath:

Toward a Supersensual Imagination of the Body

The Surgeon at 2 A.M.

Warning!

This page contains graphic images of various organs photographed during surgery.

We do not directly experience most of the processes of our physical bodies. A physician, despite years of training in the vast knowledge of the medical profession, cannot directly perceive the inner workings of her own bodily processes. Although unaware of these complex processes, we may imaginatively explore images of surgery and descriptions of the body. Such exploration allows us to see that the complexity of the physical body is mirrored in the ideal world of our thinking and the archetypes of the outer cosmos. The body reveals form, color, movement and rhythm which is a physical image of the highest spiritual archetypes. Self knowledge requires bodily knowledge; a bodily knowledge that goes beyond analytical dissection to encompass an aesthetic perception of the flowing and movement of the body through time. The body reveals higher concepts that transcend and unify our fragmentary experience.

Sylvia Plath, as poet-initiate, developed the capacity to remain conscious as her ego, thoughts, and feelings departed from her physical body as she went to sleep. She could view her body as a vast panorama of life forces and perceive how in-streaming cosmic forces worked into the life substance. She could retain this information and report it using poetic forms which mirrored the rhythms of the formative life forces. ^I

Plath's conscious viewing of her own physical processes meant that her various "doubles" became visible. In discussing "Mirror" I noted the the double:

"... corresponds to parts of the self that are unknown to "daylight consciousness". These parts form a psychic organism that feeds off the totality of the self. The double has a limited consciousness. It may become known to the daylight consciousness and a healthy assimilation may result. This double inhabits our bodies and may have the upper hand in affecting physiologica lprocesses because it is in the same unconsciousness realm as most of the body. Very little of our actual functioning bodily processes are in our daylight consciousness. We know little of that infinitely complex realm. Even physicians only specialize in one little part of it. Unassimilated parts of our psyche may incarnate in any of these unconscious parts, the blood circulation for example.(see "Cut")."

The Surgeon at 2A.M. begins with the dispersing of the invisible alien entities that inhabit her bodily processes by the pure white light of Plath's higher ego consciousness:

"The white light is artificial, and hygienic as heaven.
The microbes cannot survive it.
They are departing in their transparent garments, turned aside
From the scalpels and the rubber hands."

2AM-time of sleep

The poem begins in the darkness of deep night when the cosmic sun cannot directly illumintate the complex system of beings that make up our bodies. The poet has retained a portion of that great light and is thus consciously able to see the interaction between forces that constitute the bodily processes. This portion of the "white light" is artificial or human made because the poet through intentional will forces (scalpels and the rubber hands) has worked to achieve this heavenly pure vision. The parasitic beings, dependent upon the darkness, must flee the light of human consciousness. In normal waking consciousness these beings are cloaked in abstract thought systems but these garments have become "transparent" to the poet's heightened consciousness.

The scalded sheet is a snowfield, frozen and peaceful.
The body under it is in my hands.
As usual there is no face. A lump of Chinese ²white
With seven holes thumbed in.

Plath describes the experience of encountering her "white double". The physical body is inert as a plant. Its "whiteness" is the ego-less and "bloodless" state of the physical and life forces. The blood circulation has weakened. Plath encounters the material and plant-like life forces in the "white body", but the unbalanced interference of her sensations, emotions, and intellect are no longer present to disturb the body's workings. These "astral" forces have now joined her conscious ego outside of the body. Beings that live below conscious and seat themselves in the physiological processes may remain active in the physical during sleep and interfer with the cosmic forces that stream in to fill the absence left by the person'e ego, sensations, emotions and intellect.

Plath has detached her ego from the physical organism; hence the body has no face. Plath is able to perceive the 7 planetary influences³ that work into the formative forces that support the function of the organs. "Thumbed in" recalls the plasticity of form and the evolutionary life forces that give shape to the head.

"The soul is another light.
I have not seen it; it does not fly up.
Tonight it has receded like a ship's light."

The "I" does not perceive this other light because Plath's ego is that light. Her ego, sensations, feelings, and intellect comprise that soul light that shines its consciousness back into the human body.

"It is a garden I have to do with --- tubers and fruits
Oozing their jammy substances,
A mat of roots. My assistants hook them back.
Stenches and colors assail me."

Plath sees the relationship between plants and the pure life forces that form and maintain our organs.When we are asleep, our consciousness, sensations, feelings, and thinking become separated from our physical organs and life forces. In "I Am Vertical" Plath related a similiar vision:

Plath continues to use plant imagery to metaphorically explore her internal organs. Impressions of outer nature are used to explore the life forces deep within:

"This is the lung-tree.
These orchids are splendid. They spot and coil like snakes.
The heart is a red-bell-bloom, in distress.
I am so small
In comparison to these organs!
I worm and hack in a purple wilderness."

Ita Wegman in, The Way of Initiation in the Ancient Mysteries and the Way of Knowledge in Modern Times, points to the relationship between our bodily concepts and the pictures we observe in outer nature: "At the first stage the candidate for Initiation learnt to observe his own organism and the whole earth, not as they appear to sense-perception but as they appear to the human being as he descends to earth from the cosmos and through conception and birth enters into a physical organism to live an earthly existence. What is thus presented to the eye of soul is not mineral, plant, animal, man, but one magnificent picture-transformation of the sense-world including all the kingdoms of nature. The lungs do not then appear as bodily organs. When those who are endowed with faculties of supersensible sight observe the lungs, they know that these organs are only a last, shrunken product of a mighty cosmic Imagination. The lungs take on a bird-like form; the archetypal form (Urbild) of the bird hovers about it. But as the bird-form rises upwards and out into the heights, shimmering in brightness of light and beauty of colour, it becomes clear to occult observation that every ascent can only be at the cost of a corresponding descent in development."

"The blood is a sunset. I admire it.
I am up to my elbows in it, red and squeaking.
Still it seeps me up, it is not exhausted.
So magical! A hot spring
I must seal off and let fill
The intricate, blue piping under this pale marble.
How I admire the Romans ---
Aqueducts, the Baths of Caracella, the eagle nose!
The body is a Roman thing.
It has shut its mouth on the stone pill of repose. "

Plath conjures the traditional occult equivalence between macrocosm and microcosm. The Sun traditionally mirrors the human heart. Sunset is an excellent metaphor for the blood. When we see blood, the archetype of the heart affects our perception even though the actual concept "heart" has sunk into the unconscious. The blood contains the heart's or sun's essence.(see discussion of Plath's "Cut" for more about the significance of the blood)

Plath begins by observing the blood as an outer object, but she soon is absorbed into the blood and becomes united with it. Her "I am" or ego is pulled into the blood like a body in quicksand. The power of blood pulls her in and she recognizes the magical power that resides within. She must guide her ego vitality into the dull whiteness of her dead double:

"I admire it.
I am up to my elbows in it, red and squeaking.
Still it seeps me up, it is not exhausted.
So magical! A hot spring
I must seal off and let fill
The intricate, blue piping under this pale marble."

Rudolf Steiner continually spoke of the blood as the seat of the human ego. For example in his lecture "The Invisible Man Within Us" he stated:

"The other stream, which in the invisible man goes through the astral, etheric, and physical bodies, can be traced in the human being by following the blood pathways up to the senses. Thus when we examine the human being as we encounter him here on earth, we can say that the ego flows in the blood. But the ego flows in such a way that it first ensouls its forces through the astral organization and through the etheric and physical organizations. After first taking along the astral and etheric organizations, the ego streams through the physical organization in the blood from below upward. Thus the entire invisible man flows in the blood as a constructive process, as a growth process, as the process that constantly renews the human being by working through his food. This stream flows in the human being from below upward (speaking schematically), pours itself into the senses, and therefore also into the skin, and encounters the other stream which, from the ego, takes hold of the physical organization directly."

"How I admire the Romans ---
Aqueducts, the Baths of Caracella, the eagle nose!
The body is a Roman thing.
It has shut its mouth on the stone pill of repose. "

Plath compares the architectural structure of the unanimated "white double" to the infrastructure of ancient Rome, a metaphor of "marble ruins" that stresses the historical precedents of Plath's double. This double "reposes" lifelessly and weighs down the human spirit. It is the repository of the limiting and atavistic God archetype that Plath intended to murder in "Daddy":

"Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time---
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal..."

In "The Colossus" Plaths ego experiences a supersensible visions where she explores the Roman ruins of her Father's body from an ant like perspective. It's these Ahrimanic aspects of her father that she absorbed into her own being and reexperienced in her motionless physical body at night:

The Colossus by Sylvia Plath (From The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. HarperPerennial Edition. Page129)

"I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.
Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
Proceed from your great lips.
It's worse than a barnyard.
Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or
other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.

Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails
of lysol
I crawl like an ant in mourning
Over the weedy acres of your brow
To mend the immense skull plates and clear
The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.

A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us. O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the Roman
Forum.
I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are
littered

In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
It would take more than a lightning-stroke
To create such a ruin.
Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-
color.
The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.
My hours are married to shadow.
No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing."

"It is a statue the orderlies are wheeling off.
I have perfected it.
I am left with an arm or a leg,
A set of teeth, or stones
To rattle in a bottle and take home,
And tissues in slices--a pathological salami.
Tonight the parts are entombed in an icebox.
Tomorrow they will swim
In vinegar like saints' relics.
Tomorrow the patient will have a clean, pink plastic limb."

Plath consciousness now enters a death like realm. When her body is left behind, Plath feels like a great sculptor who has put the finishing touches on a master work. There's a similar feeling of perfection in "Edge":

"The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over."

The perfection of what is living occurs only when it achieves death. Plath's ego, emotions, and intellect have not reached the same level of perfection as the physical body. As long as her intellect and emotions live in the body, the perfectly evolved body deteriorates because of the less evolved inner being. Once her incarnation ceases, something is given back once again to perfect the body in the archetypal realms. Plath will take the archetypes of her body parts back to her spiritual "home" to work on a physical body that will serve a future humanity. We will take on new limbs to serve a higher will.

"Over one bed in the ward, a small blue light
Announces a new soul. The bed is blue.
Tonight, for this person, blue is a beautiful color.
The angels of morphia have borne him up.
He floats an inch from the ceiling,
Smelling the dawn drafts.
I walk among sleepers in gauze sarcophagi.
The red night lights are flat moons. They are dull with blood.
I am the sun, in my white coat,
Grey faces, shuttered by drugs, follow me like flowers"

Plath invokes the starry wisdom of the three Magi who follow the star from the East. The color blue, not perceived by humanity until 3000 years ago⁴, indicates the abstraction of the blood-red star wisdom into our present day intellectualism. The death forces are beautiful. The oxygen deprived blood checks the power of the life force and increases the self consciousness of the poet-prophet. The death forces of earthly life will work into a new human will after death.

Plath experiences the Christ, the holy "I Am". Christ, the Sun God, unites with the ego of the poet and purifies the poet's sensations, emotions and intellect creating the "white coat" which leads the gray, thin people to new life.

The Heart (Our "Interior" Sun)

Human heart during repair of an atrial septal defect (hole in heart). The forceps holds the right atrium and the heart has been decompressed for repair.The tape on left will close off superior vena cava so no blood flows to atrium.

Tube on right diverts the blood from the upper half of the body to the heart lung machine so atrium may be opened up. Here the atrium is collapsed and heart function is shut down by drugs. The surgeon will then use scissors to cut open the right atrium and reveal the defect:

The forceps are opening the hole in heart. The hole allows blood to flow across the upper chambers of the heart which is contrary to correct circulation.. The hole is normal for fetal respiration but should close for an independent human.

 Ita Wegman, in The Way of Initiation in the Ancient Mysteries and the Way of Knowledge in Modern Times discusses the initiate's "meeting with Hermes":

"In the ancient Mysteries, however, the great cosmological truths were revealed to the pupil. He was given concrete instruction on the subject of the path of inner unfoldment and illumination was shed upon that life of which abstract thought is but the corpse. Through such preparation a transformation was effected in the inner being of man which enabled him to come under the direct guidance of the Gods. This was expressed in the Mysteries as the meeting with Hermes, the Guider of Souls. In speaking of Hermes we approach the threshold of the true Mysteries. By a series of stages the pupil penetrated into the depths of his own nature, learnt to behold the Gods and the Temple of the Gods in his own being and lifted up his soul to cosmic spaces."

Plath experienced an atavistic relic of that Hermes experience. Wegman describes some particulars of the picture experience that arise from the encounter with the physical body:

"At the first stage the candidate for Initiation learnt to observe his own organism and the whole earth, not as they appear to sense-perception but as they appear to the human being as he descends to earth from the cosmos and through conception and birth enters into a physical organism to live an earthly existence. What is thus presented to the eye of soul is not mineral, plant, animal, man, but one magnificent picture-transformation of the sense-world including all the kingdoms of nature. The lungs do not then appear as bodily organs. When those who are endowed with faculties of supersensible sight observe the lungs, they know that these organs are only a last, shrunken product of a mighty cosmic Imagination. The lungs take on a bird-like form; the archetypal form (Urbild) of the bird hovers about it. But as the bird-form rises upwards and out into the heights, shimmering in brightness of light and beauty of colour, it becomes clear to occult observation that every ascent can only be at the cost of a corresponding descent in development."

2 See Plath's use of "whiteness" in "In Plaster" where she also encounters the "white double":

"There are two of me now:
This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one,
And the white person is certainly the superior one.
She doesn't need food, she is one of the real saints.
At the beginning I hated her, she had no personality --"

3 Rudolf Steiner in his lecture The Being of Man and His Future Evolution connects the planets with the formative forces of organs:

"There is for instance a certain relationship between a man's heart and his brain which can be described in a somewhat pictorial way by saying that this mutual relationship of the heart and the brain corresponds to the relationship of the sun and the moon — the heart being the sun and the brain the moon. So we have to know, if a disturbance occurs in the heart for instance, that in so far as this is rooted in the etheric body it is bound to have an effect on the brain. Just as when something happens on the sun, an eclipse for instance, the moon is bound to be affected. It is no different, for these things have a direct connection.

In occult medicine these things are also described by applying the images of the planets to the constellation of man's organs. Thus the heart is the sun, the brain the moon, the spleen saturn, the liver jupiter, the gall mars, the kidneys venus and the lungs mercury. If you study the mutual relationships of the planets you have an image of the mutual relationships of man's organs in so far as they are in the etheric body. The gall could not possibly ail — and this would show spiritually in the etheric body — without the illness having its effect on the other organs mentioned, in fact if the gall is described as mars, its effect would be similar to the effect of mars in our planetary system. You have to know the interconnections of the organs when there is an etheric illness, and yet these are principally those illnesses — and from this you will see that any form of one-sidedness must be avoided in the field of occultism — for which specific remedies are to be used. This is the place to use the remedies you find in the plants and minerals. For everything belonging to the plants and minerals has a profound importance for everything to do with the human etheric body. So when we know an illness has arisen in the etheric body, and it appears in a certain way in the glandular system, we must find the remedy that can correctly repair the complex of interconnections. Particularly with those illnesses where the first thing you have to look for is obviously whether they originate in the etheric body, and secondly whether they are connected with the national character, and all the organs are interconnected in a regular way, these illnesses are the first ones for which specific remedies can be used."

4 Steiner, in The Search for the New Isis , observed:

"We must not think that the faculties of knowledge in olden times were similar to ours. A little while ago I spoke to you about a stage of knowledge which, although it was not so very different from our own, is nevertheless difficult for many people today to picture. I said that the Greeks, in the earliest period of their culture, did not see the colour blue, that the heavens were not blue to them. They perceived the colours that lie more towards the active side, towards the side of red-yellow. Nor did they paint in the shades of blue known to us. Blue came only later into the range of human perception.

Think of all shades of blue being absent from the world, and therefore of green looking different from what it does today, and you will realise that the world around the Greek did not appear to him as it appears to humanity today. For the men of much earlier times the surrounding world differed still more. And then from the world seen by men of old, the spiritual withdrew — withdrew from the worlds of stars, of minerals, of plants. The vivid active colours became duller and out of the depths there appeared what is experienced as blue. As the faculty for the perception of blue, of the darker colours arose, what the men of old experienced in the astrology which spoke to them in a living language, active and full of colour, changed into the grey, colourless geometry and mechanics which, drawing it as we do from our inner being, no longer enables us to read from the environment the secrets of the starry worlds. The ancient astrology was transformed into the world we picture today in the sense of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, into the world of celestial mechanics, of mathematics."

Blood bit-SP directly observes the special connection between our blood and our ego.

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