Theory Mentor: Lars Kwakkenbos
August, 2022

This text, is a collection of pieces, a collection of other people's words, and a collection of moments in a verbal way. It is a collaborative process between my interests and my personal feeling and how other people articulate them.
It is a collection of thoughts that have squatted my mind and a collection of sentences that have seduced me, touched me, confused me, or inspired me in the last year, in this new, strange, scary melancholic and, exciting period.
Will they, by themselves, achieve a certain point, a conclusion, or a sense?
I do not know. And I am not actually searching for any specific point, I am just subtitling my whole year here.

I take into account my position as a reader of confessional materials. What specifically am I seeking in these materials? There is curiosity, but where does that curiosity come from?
For the majority of my life, My favorite writings have been the memoirs, letters, and diaries of artists. Some of them, like (The Book of Disquiet, of the modernist Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1955), which in this text I am bringing fragments from) was planned for publication, while others, like Sylvia Plath's diary, which her husband published after her death, were certainly not intended for public consumption. For me, reading personal material serves two purposes. On the one hand, there is always this curiosity about great artists to know about their daily lives, intimate relationships, how they act and react to small details in life, and who they are as people without the need to perform ideal gestures. Finding the parallels between their lives and my own character has had another purpose for me, though. In the case of Plath, Connie Ann Kirk uses the term "Plath Period" in the preface of the book Sylvia Plath: A Biography and describes it as a period when Sylvia Plath's internal conflict over competing desires for perfection in art and family life become dramatized in one's own life, and I would say perhaps even over-dramatized by those who, likely due to their age and state, think their lives at that particular time are the only ones worth considering.
The major reason I dug more into Plath and Pessoa’s writing style was because of the lasting impression they left on me.
The usage of the word "confession" by Pessoa at the beginning of The Book of Disquiet, where he takes an interesting stance as a writer and states that these are merely random confessions, and nothing more, served as the starting point for further investigation and thought.
The ultimate difficulty for me as an artist, though, is to always find the "why" behind what I am doing and why others should watch or read this piece which was the underlying point of this nothing more in his brilliant statement.
It's also crucial to note that, in my approach, what interests me is not the claimed truth of the confession but rather the (re)ordering of the personal experiences transformed by language. In my research, I learned about the term's many aspects, including how it has been used to describe personal writing and has been regarded as a valuable site for academic study in feminist autobiography, how confessional is school poetry, how confession in religious settings can be both an institutional requirement and a spiritual need, how desire mediates the relationship between confessor and confessant, and how confession is occasionally practiced voluntarily.
Perhaps the secretive essence and power of confessional texts located in the apparently private nature of them and the ways in which the details of those texts are believable to readers, even if they have little or no correspondence to the biographical realities of the writer’s life.
In this text collage, my primary goal is not to present fresh interpretations of Plath and Pessoa's works; rather, I am just providing those passages that I identify as their confessions and read as a new way of saying “I”.






1.
Confession (n,)
- English word confession comes from Latin origins ( I acknowledge, own… I confess, I admit… I show, indicate )
- The word traces to the Latin verb confessus, which is the past participle of confitēri, formed from the joining of the prefix “com-”, meaning "with or together," and the verb “fatēri”, "to confess." That Latin verb is related to “fari”, "to speak." The noun confession is used for the acknowledgment of sin or guilt in public.

Fateor + con- >>>>> confeteor >>>> confession >>>> confession
Fateor ( Latin ): I acknowledge, own.. I confess, admit… I show, indicate
Con- ( Latin ): used in compounds to indicate a being or bringing together of several objects.
Confiteor ( Latin ): I Praise, give thanks... I reveal, show… I acknowledge, I confess
Confession ( Latin ): creed or avowal of one’s faith. A confession, acknowledgment
Confession ( English ): (Christianity) The disclosure of one's sins to a priest for absolution.

2.
“A confession is a statement, made by a person or by a group of persons.
Acknowledging some personal fact that the person (or the group) would ostensibly prefer to keep hidden. The term presumes that the speaker is providing information that he believes the other party is not already aware of and is frequently associated with an admission of a moral or legal wrong.”

3.
Confession is a regularly used religious practice that could also take many different forms in many cultures and faiths all over the world. In the Catholic tradition, for example, confession is typically carried out via the agency of a priest who is thought to have the authority to forgive and remove the penitent's sins and therefore serve as a bridge to their reconciliation with God. However, confessing one's sins is typically done in front of the community in other religions, including Judaism, while in Islam, it is typically seen as a personal matter between the penitent and God. Confession also happens in eastern religions like Buddhism, where the practice entails repeating a series of sutras with the intention of purging any wrongdoing or negativity inside the self rather than overtly asking for forgiveness from a higher force (God).

4.
According to Foucault, the origins of the confession go back to the Ancient Greeks and the connection between their "care of the self" practices and the Delphic statement "know yourself.":
“During the Greco-Roman period, care of the self was a general philosophical principle. To care for the self was to make life an art object – a “tekhne.” To care for the self was about existence. Care of the soul was an art, but only in so far as it involved caring for the activity of the soul and not the soul as a substance. The aim was to develop good values in life (as opposed to values aimed at life after death, as occurred later in Christianity).
Writing became an important technique in this endeavor. Taking notes about oneself and the activities of the day, reviewing them, and keeping notebooks, was a way “to reactivate for oneself the truths one needed. Through this writing, the subject became the object of the writing activity. The writing was not about knowing oneself and searching for the truth about oneself as would later be the case in Christianity. Instead, writing was about finding the truths an individual needed in order to develop good values and turn life into the art of existence.” (Foucault 2003a, p.153).

5.
Confession often benefits the one who is confessing.
Paul Wilkes characterizes confession as "a pillar of mental health" because of its ability to relieve anxieties associated with keeping secrets.
People may undertake social confessions in order to relieve feelings of guilt or to seek forgiveness from a wronged party, but such confessions may also serve to create social bonds between the confessant and the confessor, and may prompt the listener to reply with confessions of their own. A person may therefore confess wrongdoing to another person as a means of creating such a social bond, or of extracting reciprocal information from the other person.
Also, a confession can be made in an identical manner, as a way for the confessant to take credit for wrongdoing for the purpose of evoking a reaction to that claim. Self-aggrandizing confessions can be made for the purpose of claiming credit for wrongdoing.
The catholic tradition's ritual of confession is a psychologically fascinating topic for a number of reasons. First of all, admitting a sin or sins implies that one has done something wrong in God's eyes, whether purposefully or unintentionally. Thus, doing wrong causes stress in the penitent because he feels that God is both aware of and dissatisfied with his actions on earth. Therefore, such tension can cause anxiety, which leads to the perception that if confession is not made, there is a permanent risk of being rejected by God. Therefore secondly, a whole range of psychological processes can be observed by this need to confess, and it also suggests that the act of confessing one's sins will bring them back to reconciliation with God and provides them a sense of inner peace.


6.
Freud would assert that since God is a reflection of our harking back to a primordial exalted father, a violent, domineering male who our ancestors, his own sons, killed in order to obtain their mother(s) (a process largely caused by the Oedipus complex), the consequent "guilt" and general ill feeling" that resulted from this crime influenced their need to seek his replacement through totemic symbols and rituals such as a totem feast – a ritual in which the totem was killed and soon after mourned over – in commemoration of the murdered father.
Therefore, according to Freud, confession is a form of neurotic obsessional behavior that originates from our secret wish to get rid of the father and possess the mother. Since guilt is a fundamental psychological reaction when one desires to confess their sins, guilt is actually a residual feeling that dates back to the murder of the father and possession of the mother, or repressed sexual desires within the totemic group. As a result, guilt and the subsequent development of religious do's and don'ts provided the foundation for the practice of confession.

7.
For Foucault, the nineteenth century marks a turning point in the development of confession as an act of power. The focus of confession during this time period expanded from what the confessant knew and kept secret to "what was hidden from himself, being incapable of coming to light except gradually and through the labor of a confession," as a result of the secularization of confession through medicine and psychoanalysis.
“For Foucault confession means the police, for Freud, confession means the talking cure. For Foucault, confession guarantees ideological control, for Freud confession overcomes psychological repression. Thus according to Foucault scheme, confession by any name at all, is still a form of subjugation. But in Freud’s account, the divulgence through psychoanalysis of traumatic memories, often of sexual transgression, spells psychic liberation.”
(Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian ... By Susan David Bernstein p: 15)

8.
Pessoa starts The Book of Disquiet with these words:

In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I narrate my factless autobiography,
my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it’s because I have nothing to say.

9.
In one sense it is the acknowledgment of having done something wrong, whether on purpose or not, thus confessional texts usually provide information of a private nature previously unavailable. What a sinner tells a priest in the confessional, the documents criminals sign acknowledging what they have done, an autobiography in which the author acknowledges mistakes, and so on, are all examples of confessional texts.
In literature, confessional writing is a first-person style that is often presented as an ongoing diary or letters, distinguished by revelations of a person's deeper or darker motivations.

10.
Pessoa is known for inventing several authorial personae and creative personalities which he referred to as "heteronyms."
That is why the complexity of his writing is not just because of the size and disorder of his archive, it is, in a sense, the work of many writers.

I have a world of friends inside me, with their own real, individual, imperfect lives. (p92)

Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surrounding is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways
(p396)

These heteronyms created philosophical articles, poetry, and also poetic prose. Pessoa constantly switched between his different artistic versions and even had them correspond with one another.
He believed that the time he was in his most creative phase of his life, he experienced depression and that his tendency toward depersonalization and simulation was a type of hysteria. Also, he became quite interested in astrology and the four astral elements, being air, fire, water, and earth served as inspiration for the principal heteronyms' characteristics. It implies that Pessoa and his heteronyms collectively comprised all of the fundamental ideas of ancient wisdom.
Pessoa developed a notable attitude toward his own plurality by letting his heteronyms and their works naturally arise from his own experiences.

11.
(Pessoa)
I am nothing,
I shall never be anything.
I cannot even wish to be anything.
Apart from this, I have within me all the dreams of the world.
I am beginning to know myself. I don’t exist. I am the gap between what I would like to be and what others have made of me… that is me. Period.


12.
(Pessoa)
In these languid and empty hours, a sadness felt by my entire being rises from my soul to my mind – a bitter awareness that everything is a sensation of mine and at the same time something external, something not in my power to change.

13.
Confessional poetry is a personality manifestation and the poetry of the personal. This style of writing emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s immediately following the second world war. The main subjects of this genre of poetry are the poet's private life under the tension of a psychiatric crisis, sex, family life, private sorrow, and psychological state of mind and these subjects were addressed often in an autobiographical manner Confessional poetry has been said to be characterized by the expression of personal suffering. Using a novel rhythm and style of articulation, it primarily addresses personal experiences, trauma, despair, psychiatric breakdown, and relationships. Psychoanalysis serves as a tool for literacy as well as for self-analysis. It makes it possible to think about the poet in terms of their poetic language and creative process, as well as the straightforward account of their life.
This style of writing basically was a reaction to the radical depersonalized, academic poetry of writers like T.S Eliot and W, H Auden, who wrote in the 1920s, and their belief of poetry as a detached form of art from its creator, and that there was no room for the self in poetry. The confessional poets instead write from a deeply personal perspective and fill their work with intimate details from their private lives.
The distinction between the conscious and unconscious is blurred in confessional poetry. It is based on the connection between objective experience and previously suppressed elements. That is why it is frequently referred to as "the poetry of suffering" (Rosenthal, 1985, p. 130). The poet becomes the victim in this process and the poetic self serves as the main figure throughout this poetry.

14.
(Plath)
July 1950 –
I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. Now I know how people can live without books, without college. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more...

15.
(Plath)
There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surface of my understanding, waiting for me to grasp it. It is the same tantalizing sensation when you almost remember a name, but don't quite reach it. I can feel it when I think of human beings, of the hints of evolution suggested by the removal of wisdom teeth, the narrowing of the jaw no longer needed to chew such roughage as it was accustomed to; the gradual disappearance of hair from the human body; the adjustment of the human eye to the fine print, the swift, colored motion of the twentieth century. The feeling comes, vague and nebulous, when I consider the prolonged adolescence of our species; the rites of birth, marriage and death; all the primitive, barbaric ceremonies streamlined to modern times. Almost, I think, the unreasoning, bestial purity was best. Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.

16.
Sylvia Plath, born on 27 October 1932 in Boston, began keeping diaries and journals at the age of eleven and continued this practice until her death at the age of thirty.
She has often been referred to as a "difficult" poet because of the very individualistic style in which she wrote, and combining themes and imagery in ways that are not always immediately obvious to the reader. It is true that on some level, Plath was a highly autobiographical writer and many studies of her writing attempt to draw links with events in her life. She did not, however, consider poetry as primarily a medium for her own sentiments, Instead, she saw poetry as a conscious creating process that allowed experience and emotion to change into something new. Her poetry is about the search for one's own identity and in her hard and long search, she tried out different writing styles to find her own voice as a poet.

17.
(Plath)
I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, and every bit of conversation is the raw material for me. My love’s not impersonal, yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions as that person.

18.
Only a small circle of insiders acknowledged Plath's unique lyrical skill while she was still alive. The Colossus in 1960 and The Bell Jar in 1963, the two books she personally saw published in print, were well-received but not particularly noteworthy. During the final months of her life, the majority of the poetry she submitted to newspapers and publications was turned down and she never received the fame she dreamed for.
Sylvia Plath committed suicide in February 1963, at the age of thirty, while divorced and despondent. She left behind two young children as well as a book of poems that was ready for publication.
Ariel earned her a global reputation after being published two years later. She became a hero and a legend in several reading circles. There has always been a strong interest in Plath's life. She is the perfect subject for a biography because of her brief life and violent death, the lack of long periods and the debates surrounding her legacy, the added drama surrounding her famous husband (Ted Hughes) and their marriage, and the archive she left behind, both personal and professional.
Her confessional poetry is regarded for being incredibly original in its intensity, its bright colors, and its portrayal of energy and life in contrast to the temptation of hopelessness, emptiness, and darkness. The private events of her life are depicted in her poetry. Plath suffered an everlasting betrayal when she lost her father, Otto Plath, when she was just eight years old. It appears that she began writing to satisfy her empty ego at the very moment her father passed away. It turned into her desire and obsession.

You ask me why I spend my life writing?
Do I find entertainment?
Is it worthwhile?
Above all does it pay?
If not, then, is there a reason? . . .
I write only because
There is a voice within me
That will not be still.
(Letters Home 34-5)

19.
(Plath)
Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion. I am back in my room at Haven House after the Thanksgiving Holidays. Homesick is the name they give to that sick feeling which dominates me now.



Now that I am writing these words, It has been 180 days that I have left Tehran and have been away from “home”, the place I had lived for 25 years.
It was not just about leaving, it was about starting a new chapter of living alone, without the physical presence of people who care about you.
I have lost my observers. By this, I mean those who do the act of observing you gently. Those who care about observing you, or even, those who just randomly observe you but understand you easily. They know your language, maybe your patterns, your habits.
I have lost my observers and I started to think loudly and write my thought, as a way of expression, as a way of running away.


20.
(Pessoa)
I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me – this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we’re mean-hearted but because we don’t feel like unbuttoning our coat.

21.
In “The Book of Disquiet”, a collage of reflections written in the form of a fictional diary, which Pessoa worked on for years but never finished, he and his heteronymous narrator Bernardo Soares, provide us a profoundly personal work, and the testimony of a life full of experiences without making reference to any specific occasions, dates, or people who might contradict or support his statements. This characteristic process of an autobiographical work has influenced many to consider the blurred lines between fiction and reality and the demand for sincerity from the reader in autobiographical and testimonial literature.
Structured as a diary, the whole text is frequently repetitive and obsessed with topics like failure, dreams, sensations, boredom, visions, loss, and unconsciousness. Pessoa has directly made use of his personal experience and the desire to reflect and write about his emotions. Also, in contrast to other works, where he has written about the life surrounding rather than reflecting on the past and historical events or individuals.

21.
“Aurelia Plath, Sylvia’s mom, describes her daughter’s creative process as a kind of alchemy in reverse. Making use of everything, she ‘often transmuted gold into lead. Persons were caricatured, characters fused, and experiences manipulated for artistic purposes. In a note for one of her Mademoiselle stories, Sylvia Plath writes that those she met through summer jobs tended ‘to turn up dismembered, or otherwise, in stories. Mrs. Plath believed this point ought to be remembered in connection with much of her daughter’s work.” (Claiming Sylvia Plath, p 22)
“Yet according to her mother, Sylvia went through a ‘tragic transformation’ after the shock treatment in 1953, it seemed to them that ‘Sylvia became her “own double”. When troubled, she sought release by writing out her fury and frustration. Returning once more to her daughter’s habit of blending persons and manipulating events, Aurelia Plath borrows an expression from Richard Wilbur and calls her daughter’s writing process a ‘violation of actual circumstances. Nowhere was this ‘violation’ more evident than in The Bell Jar, where ‘she transformed personalities into cruel and false caricatures’ Mrs. Plath describes it as a virtual need for her daughter to violate actual circumstances, rearranging truth for the sake of art. Since she herself recognized ‘the real-life character or event’, Aurelia Plath claims that this phenomenon also dominates autobiographical essays like ‘Ocean 1212-W’. In ‘The Disquieting Muses’, a poem that addresses an ambitious mother whom Aurelia Plath assumed to be modeled on herself, Sylvia Plath not only distorts her own experience to make the mother appear in a negative light, but she also appropriates and defaces scenes from Aurelia’s own childhood.”

22.
(Plath)
So mother never had a husband she loved. She had a sick, mean-because he-was-sick, poor louse, bearded-near-death "Man I knew once". She killed him (The Father) by marrying him too old, by marrying him sick to death and dying, by burying him every day since in her heart, mind and words.
So what does she know about love? Nothing. You should have it. You should get it. It's nice. But what is it?



Returning to Ghent after 3 days, In the Flixbus,
Collect/grab/take all my emotions and carry them with me everywhere; Iran to Belgium, Ghent to Saarbrucken, Munich to Linz, Linz to Ghent.
There are moments that I really don't know what am I gonna do with all these emotions. It's too much.
From the music listening to:

شرح این هجران و این خون جگر، این زمان بگذار تا وقت دگر


After this family seated next to me and that young couple, it’s my turn to stand up, go and sit at one of these kiosks at City Hall, talk about my situation, show them all my signed documents, and convince them that I can financially survive for six months here. They don’t care about my survival, though. Would they accept me? And why am I acting like I have no problem fighting for that in this stupid civilized way?
And I sit there without an identity, faceless. That's exactly how I felt all these times here.


23.
(Pessoa)
What is there to confess that’s worthwhile or useful? What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only to us; if to everyone, then it’s no novelty, and if only to us, then it won’t be understood. If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling.
What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant. I make landscapes out of what I feel. I make holidays of my sensations. I can easily understand women who embroider out of sorrow or who crochet because life exists. My elderly aunt would play solitaire throughout the endless evening. These confessions of what I feel are my solitaire.

24.
(Pessoa)
Perhaps it’s finally time for me to make this one effort: to take a good look at my life. I see myself in the midst of a vast desert. I tell what I literarily was yesterday, and I try to explain to myself how I got here.

25.
(Plath)
And there is the fallacy of existence: the idea that one would be happy forever and aye with a given situation or series of accomplishments. Why did Virginia Woolf commit suicide? Or Sara Teasdale - or the other brilliant women - neurotic? Was their writing sublimation (oh horrible word) of deep, basic desires? If only I knew. If only I knew how high I could set my goals, my requirements for my life! I am in the position of a blind girl playing with a slide-ruler of values. I am now at the nadir of my calculating powers.
The future? God - will it get worse & worse? Will I never travel, never integrate my life, never have purpose, meaning? Never have time – long stretches, to investigate ideas, philosophy - to articulate the vague seething desires in me? Will I be a secretary - a self-rationalizing, uninspired housewife, secretly jealous of my husband's ability to grow intellectually & professionally while I am impeded - will I submerge my embarrassing desires & aspirations, refuse to face myself, and go either mad or become neurotic?

Some people have the power to name things,
Some people should just repeat what other people say.
Some people have the power to make decisions,
Some people should be creative to MAKE possibilities.
Some people have the agency to produce “meanings”,
Some people should fit the “meanings” into their lives.

Playing with the limits of being a foreigner in a foreign land, I can make lots of excuses(?) for not living my normal life, I should exercise and go to hiking but I don’t, since I am unfamiliar with parks and relevant places. Running away from the responsibilities, and no one can blame me for that. I don’t belong here. Isn’t that an excuse for everything?


26.
“ Doubt and hesitation are the absurd twin energies that powered Pessoa’s inner universe and informed The Book of Disquiet, which was its piecemeal map. He explained his trouble and that of his book to a poet friend, Armando Cortes-Rodrigues, in a letter dated 19 November 1914: ‘ My state of mind compels me to work hard, against my will, on the book of disquiet. But it’s all fragments, fragments, fragments.’ And in a letter written the previous month to the same friend, he spoke of a ‘deep and calm depression’ that allowed him to write only ‘little things’ and ‘broken, disconnected pieces of the book of disquiet’ . in this respect, that of perpetual fragmentation, the author and his Book were forever faithful to their principles. If Pessoa split himself into dozens of literary characters who contradicted each other and even themselves, the Book of Disquiet likewise multiplied without ceasing, being first one book and then another, told by this voice then that voice, then another, still others, all swirling and uncertain, like the cigarette smoke through which Pessoa, sitting in a café or next to his window, watched life go by.” (from introduction of the book)
- I see, and that’s quite enough. Who can understand anything?
- I’m riding on a tram and, as usual, am closely observing all the details of the people around me. For me these details are like things, voices, phrases




27.
(Pessoa)
…to say is to renew.…Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary.… To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life.


I am sitting in a room full of people, a workshop at school, as always it starts with some introducing exercise.
I think I know pretty well what I like and dislike ( I mean at the moment, generally I am never sure about my interests ) but please don’t ask me who I am. Should I start with my name or my pronoun or nationality? Or abilities and disabilities? I just know I’ve been passionate enough to be here right know. And always, this is the hardest question they ask: why are you here? Immediately my mind gets empty, I feel dumb and stupid, why I am here?
- I just like to explore.
This is never a good answer. Its not enough, it doesn’t reveal the creativity and brilliant ideas in you… maybe because you don’t have them.


I get through this year, I am losing and can't see if I’m achieving anything. But no matter how badly, it will be the strangest thing I’ve ever done. I am trying to express myself, but I’m super confused.



28.
(Pessoa)
Not knowing how to believe in God and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I, along with other people on the fringe, kept a distance from things, a distance commonly called Decadence. Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

29.
(Plath)
God, who am I? I sit in the library tonight, the lights glaring overhead, the fan whirring loudly. Girls, girls everywhere, reading books. Intent faces, flesh pink, white, yellow. And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches. There is history to read centuries to comprehend before I sleep, millions of lives to assimilate before breakfast tomorrow. Yet I know that back at the house there is my room, full of my presence. There is my date this weekend: someone believes I am a human being, not a name merely. And these are the only indications that I am a whole person, not merely a knot of nerves, without identity.

30.
“In these pages there is no hope or even desire for remission or salvation. There is also no self-pity, and no attempt to aestheticize the narrator’s irremediably human condition. Bernardo Soares doesn’t confess except in the sense of ‘recognize’, and the object of that recognition is of no great consequence. He describes his own self because it is the landscape that is closest and most real, the one he can describe best. And what was flesh became a word.” (the introduction of the book)
I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write… I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads. Whatever I feel is felt (against my will) so that I can write that I felt it. Whatever I think is promptly put into words, mixed with images that undo it, cast into rhythms that are something else altogether. From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I. I plumbed myself and dropped the plumb; I spend my life wondering if I’m deep or not, with no remaining plumb except my gaze that shows me – blackly vivid in the mirror at the bottom of the well – my own face that observes me observing it.

31.
(Pessoa)
Vasques – the boss. At times I’m inexplicably hypnotized by Senhor Vasques. What is this man to me besides an occasional obstacle, as the owner of my time, in the daylight hours of my life? He treats me well and is polite when he talks to me, except on his grumpy days, when he’s fretting about something and isn’t polite to anyone. But why does he occupy my thoughts? Is he a symbol? A cause? What is he?
Ah, I understand! Vasques, my boss, is Life, monotonous and necessary, imperious and inscrutable Life. This banal man represents the banality of Life. For me he is everything, externally speaking, because for me Life is whatever is external.


I was talking about “obsession” with her, the obsession with thinking about ending things and She wrote: “how do you finish an end” and the rest of the conversation was silence.
Videocalls are the strangest visual communication I can ever experience.


The romantic notion of losing.
I am thinking of the sentimental aspect of losing, craving compassion, crying, feeling helpless, feeling loved, feeling important, or at least, feeling singular in your misery. (I get attached to sentimentality behind all these concepts and then they are meaningless.)



32.
(Plath)
Fear: access after seeing people at Harvard: feeling I've put myself out of the running. Why can't I throw myself into writing? Because I am afraid of failure before I begin.
Old need of giving mother accomplishments, getting reward of love.
Read Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" this morning after Ted left for the library. An almost exact description of my feelings and reasons for suicide: a transferred murderous impulse from my mother onto myself: the "vampire" metaphor Freud uses, "draining the ego": that is exactly the feeling I have getting in the way of my writing: mother's clutch. I mask my self-abasement (a transferred hate of her) and weave it with my own real dissatisfactions in myself until it becomes very difficult to distinguish what is really bogus criticism from what is really a changeable liability. How can I get rid of this depression: by refusing to believe she has any power over me, like the old witches for whom one sets out plates of milk and honey.
This is not easily done. How is it done? Talking and becoming aware of what is what and studying it is a help.

When you do not know the language, you do not have access to many layers of understanding and easily get lost in the manufactured process of translating. Sometimes you just find alternatives, it consists of imagination. But the thing is that these are all mentally: you are thinking and trying to realize what is going on out there but all of these are happening just in your head. So, you do not speak that much for sure because the whole time you have all these struggles in your head.
They ask: - Are you a shy person?
- (the voice in my head) Am I ? (loudly) umm I did not use to be…


33.
With the ideas of confession and verbalization in mind, we can see how there are many modern practices in which we are encouraged to speak about ourselves, exposing, for example, our hopes, wishes, aspirations, fears, and flaws to ourselves and others. This includes, but is not limited to, the media, reality TV programs, as well as online social networks like Facebook and Twitter. But also in the realm of education, through the mobilization of examination activities or reflective practices, where students are challenged to examine themselves and make this apparent to themselves, as well as to their peers and teachers.

34.
(Pessoa)
But the horror that’s destroying me today is less noble and more corrosive. It’s a longing to be free of wanting to have thoughts, a desire to never have been anything, a conscious despair in every cell of my body and soul. It’s the sudden feeling of being imprisoned in an infinite cell. Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything?
Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other’s presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.


I am trying to translate this experience of disability or disorder or whatever it is, which comes from the language barriers. I could write pages about how everything around me loses meaning because I am disconnected from its context, and then all the realities reveal themselves because they have nothing to do with me, the moment of disconnection and never-ending misunderstanding.


35.
(Plath)
want to enjoy this as much as I can. Which means I must work for preparation & not procrastinate in fear, and teach in sick fear. Confidence. It begins at home. In keeping Ted from knowing the worst. Then I won't know it myself. I'll be living with it. Rest, calm. Nothing will help if I get nervous & miserable & worry. It salves guilt to feel "at least I'm sick & miserable", that's payment for being a bad teacher. No. I'll try to brazen it out. To keep my outside contacts. Letters to Krook, Wendy. My being a bad teacher this year will only prove I can earn board & keep and not quit. I quit my waitress job; I wanted to quit my first babysitting job. I will not quit on this.
I need somebody to slap me. It won't be Mr. Hill. It will be myself. Don't be spoiled, in dry accents. I contracted for this. I'll work to do my best, however bad, and not lose face.


36.
(Plath)
I have a good self, that loves skies, hills, ideas, tasty meals, bright colors. My demon would murder this self by demanding it be a paragon, and saying it should run away if it is being anything less. I shall doggedly do my best and know it for that, no matter what other people say. I can learn to be a better teacher. But only by painful trial and error. Life is painful trial and error. I instinctively gave myself this job because I knew I needed the confidence it would give me as I needed food: it would be my first active facing of life & responsibility: something thousands of people face every day, with groans, maybe, or with dogged determination, or with joy. But they face it. I have this demon who wants me to run away screaming if I am going to be flawed, fallible. It wants me to think I'm so good I must be perfect. Or nothing. I am, on the contrary, something: a being who gets tired, has shyness to fight, has more trouble than most facing people easily. If I get through this year, kicking my demon down when it comes up, realizing I'll be tired after a day’s work, and tired after correcting papers, and it's natural tiredness, not something to be ranted about in horror, I'll be able, piece by piece, to face the field of life, instead of running from it the minute it hurts.



I want to describe the scenery I’m seeing right now from the window of this train from Munich to Linz, and write words like, grey low clouds blurred the landscape, but I think I hate descriptive words.
Maybe I don’t like it because I’m so bad and wordless in it, both in Persian and English (that I’m trying to write in it to feel more “real” here ). I just have a limited amount of words and wrong structures to express what is going on in my mind and even in doing it I constantly fail.
I should face it, I’ve missed so much to be understood with my own unconscious words, without going through the process of articulating my emotions and thoughts and choosing words and thinking about how they would be read and heard from outside, and thinking about if these words even make any sense here.
But, the fact is that, at the end, I would not remember none of these long disconnected sentences and broken letters.


What I miss in Gent from Tehran is watching real faces, tired and drowned in thoughts. Here everyone is laughing and I don’t get why.
What I won’t miss in Tehran from Gent is not understanding the voices on the public transport. When I don’t have any clue of what’s going on in my surrounding, I am not responsible for anything. If they say the train is going to explode at the next station, I won’t be responsible for my life. It is the kind of freedom I need right now. Not to be responsible for anything.


37.
(Pessoa)
The most abject of all needs is to confide, to confess. It’s the soul’s need to externalize. Go ahead and confess, but confess what you don’t feel. Go ahead and tell your secrets to get their weight off your soul, but let the secrets you tell be secrets you’ve never had. Lie to yourself before you tell that truth. Expressing yourself is always a mistake. Be resolutely conscious: let expression, for you, be synonymous with lying.

38.
(Pessoa)
Nothing is more oppressive than the affection of others – not even the hatred of others, since hatred is at least more intermittent than affection; being an unpleasant emotion, it naturally tends to be less frequent in those who feel it. But hatred as well as love is oppressive; both seek us, pursue us, won’t leave us alone.
Only what we dream is what we truly are, because all the rest, having been realized, belongs to the world and to everyone. If I were to realize a dream, I’d be jealous, for it would have betrayed me by allowing itself to be realized. ‘I’ve achieved everything I wanted,’ says the feeble man, and it’s a lie; the truth is that he prophetically dreamed all that life achieved through him. We achieve nothing. Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying, ‘Look at me move.’

39.
(Pessoa)
Lying is simply the soul’s ideal language. Just as we make use of words, which are sounds articulated in an absurd way, to translate into real language the most private and subtle shifts of our thoughts and emotions (which words on their own would never be able to translate), so we make use of lies and fiction to promote understanding among ourselves, something that the truth— personal and incommunicable—could never accomplish.


“Strategies to forgetting and remembering,”
I think I am looking for strategies the whole time, for a formula to make everything clear and bearable. I am inventing stupid rules for myself that tell me I am allowed to think about specific things and not allowed to do so. It is my practice, my strategy, to encounter real life and control (?) the attack of the past (which makes the real-time experience completely meaningless)

I am not suicidal at all, even if I’m finding the current moment unbearable. But I’m thinking about the privileges I don’t have, and I think being able to commit suicide ( or at least think of it, which always gives a sense of power and control in your current situation) is a privilege that I don’t have here.
I don’t let myself even think about it, mainly because of all of its consequences for my family and friends. is it good or bad?


I am alone in my room, between two worlds. My flesh is the thin border between my visions, the melancholic world in my mind, and the real world. Don’t know the language of any of the worlds.
She said: “they want us to believe that pain is an accident, something that we can avoid by having insurance”




Bibliography:

- Pessoa, Fernando, The Book of Disquiet, edited and translated by Zenith, Richard, London, England, Penguin Group, 2001

- Plath, Sylvia, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Kukil, Karen V. , New York, Anchor Books, 2000

- Aranguren, Mikel Iriondo, Aesthetics and Autobiography: Emotion and Style in The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa / Bernardo Soars , Spain, University of the Basque Country, 2016

- Egeland, Marianne, Claiming Sylvia Plath: The Poet as Exemplary Figure, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013

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- Taylor, Chloe, The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault: A Genealogy of the “Confessing Animal”, New York, Routledge, 2009

- Uroff, M. D. Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry: A Reconsideration. The Iowa Review 8, no. 1 (1977): 104–15. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20158710.

- Edited by Richardson, Mark, The Cambridge Companion to American Poets, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2015

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- Nacci, Roberto, Freud and Jung on the religious practice of confession in the catholic tradition, https://perspectivemeditations.wordpress.com, 2013

- Guo, Xiaolu, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, London, Penguin Random House

Another Way of Saying "I"