January 30, 2025
One coincidence that has not nearly been noted enough is that Sylvia Plath died the same day that the Beatles recorded the bulk of their first album. When I mention this to students, as I did this very morning in a lecture on Plath, I point out that had Plath not died that day, she most likely would have been headlining the bill at the poetry festival at Royal Albert Hall a couple of years later. Having gotten home and heard the news reports of the death of Marianne Faithful, I am moved to pay her tribute by saying that Faithful was a kind of “Lady Lazarus” herself, an artist who took great risks. In particular, I am thinking of her album “Broken English” and the exquisite, haunting title track.
It’s a grim day, though, on an even larger scale for the sport of figure skating. This is the second time in my life I have heard of a group loss in this sport. In fact, the plane crash that killed so many members of the U.S. skating team on February 14, 1961 may have been the first time I was really made aware of the risk involved in aviation. I was 13 years old when I heard that 18 skaters and six coaches, as well as team officials and family members, had been killed in a crash near the Brussels, Belgium airport. Just two weeks earlier, the U.S. Figure Skating Championships had been held in Colorado Springs, an event broadcast on national television.
Not a grim day. A harrowing day, especially when one pauses and ponders the fact that one out of every 50 people who were alive in Gaza sixteen months ago has been killed by this point. I doubt that even one of the 18,000 children killed would have grown up to be a figure skater, but can we not imagine how much pleasure many of them would have gotten out of playing soccer with each other. Now that’s a field of dreams obliterated beyond the recuperative possibility of any redemption. I suppose W.H. Auden was right: “Those to whom evil is done./ do evil in return.” Indeed, a harrowing day.
Will it be any different in 2030? 2036? 2040? 2050?
How can it be different when the government of Saudi Arabia executes a legal American resident and dismembers him because it objects to his criticism? And one can hardly forget the Charlie Hebdo murders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting
Or the breaking news of the murder of a man in Sweden who protested the abuse of Christians in countries dominated by the Islamic religion.
Or the repeated attacks on Salman Rushdie!
Or the recent terrorist attack in New Orleans, done in the name of ISIS.
Not to mention what is happening in Sudan…..
Surely my warm meal and my warm bed are illusions, to be enjoyed for their very frailty.
About Bill Mohr