Siamese Twins

Siamese Twins

With details of Sylvia Plath links

 

This is a much longer consideration than I have provided for the other lyrics, for which I make no apology. The Sylvia Plath links demonstrate both Robert Smith's erudition and the way in which the feel of the work is absorbed and expressed so powerfully in the raw emotion of the songs. It also gives a flavour of the background research required for each of the titles.

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With thanks to Simon Kitson for his helpful pointers.

 

At the outset it should be recognised that Robert Smith is a gifted poet and musician in his own right. Every poet can cite their own influences, but it does not make their poetry any less their own. He has helpfully provided many of his influences, but, whilst the detail can be divined in a few of The Cure’s songs, they are not conveyed verbatim.  Their sense is imbued in a new creation, including in the synaesthesia of music. The lyrics include poetry that is much more extensive than the few references quoted.

 

It was Lol Tolhurst who suggested in an interview that Pornography has Sylvia Plath connections and Siamese Twins in particular.

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A note on the title

For a modern audience the title itself might need an explanation.

The term Siamese twins was at the time the lay term for conjoined twins but is rarely used now.

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Thailand was previously known as Siam. The term specifically refers to the famous conjoined twins Eng and Chang Bunker, born in 1811 in Siam, who became huge celebrities in the 1830s, touring America as the ‘Siamese Twins’. They were conjoined at the chest by a five inch wide band of flesh and were thought (erroneously) to share a heart; hence the abiding association with people in very close, intense relationships.

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It is worth noting that Siam is referred to in the wonderful ‘Just One Kiss’ in the glorious lines ‘Remember the time that you reigned all night /The queen of Siam in my arms’. Robert Smith has suggested that this referred to a member of a band they used to perform with, but it is not clear who this might have been.

 

Sylvia Plath was a hugely gifted poet and author. She made several suicide attempts, described powerfully in her semiautobiographical novel The Bell Jar. She married the Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. His multiple infidelities led to her eventual death by suicide. 

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Ted Hughes published her journals and some of her poetry posthumously but omitted elements for his own personal reasons that were subsequently restored, but these were not published until after Pornography was written.

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There is a famous quote from Ted Hughes in his poem, 9, Willow Street (the address where they both lived in the USA) where he decribes them both as being ‘Siamese-twinned, each of us festering a unique soul-sepsis for the other. Each of us was the stake impaling the other’. However, this was not published until 1998, after Pornography was written.

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There is also a well known quote from a friend of Plath's Nancy Hunter, who said of Plath: "we were Siamese-twinned, joined at the ego".

For more on this:

Andrew Wilson Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted (Jan 2013) published by Simon and Schuster.

 

Sylvia Plath’s fascination with twins and doubles.

It is worth noting that Plath was fascinated by twins and doppelgangers (look alikes and doubles). Her undergraduate thesis explored doubles in literature, including in Dostoyevsky’s The Double and The Brothers Karamazov. In The Bell Jar, the main character, Esther, has two clear separate sides to her character, though she had come to terms with them. 

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See here for more by Kelly Coyne:

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/05/sylvia-plaths-undergraduate-thesis-the-bell-jar-doppelgangers-doubles/560540/

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Given the power of Plath’s poems and the exploration of dark themes in The Bell Jar and her journals, it is unsurprising that Plath is an influence, and she is only an influence. As with all Cure songs, it is not just a sum of elements of influence. Falling angels, voodoo smiles – so many haunting lyrics, which, along with the words of most of The Cure canon, are pure Smith poetry. 

 

Sources

The Bell Jar is an extremely powerful and disturbing read.

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Her journals had been published by the time Pornography was completed. They contain the clearest references to specific lyrics. They are not mere records and are as beautifully written, evocative and disturbing as the Bell Jar and her poetry.

 

From The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962

First published in Great Britain 2000 by Faber and Faber Ltd

Copyright The Estate of Sylvia Plath 2000

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P212

Red, Screamed

Flesh and blood and the first kiss

I don’t need you any more

 

“then it came to the fact that I was all there, wasn’t I, and I stamped and screamed yes, and he had obligations in the next room, and he was working in London, earning £10 a week so he could later earn £12 a week, and I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off, my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never again find, and my favourite silver earrings: Huh, I shall keep he barked. And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room blood was pouring down his face. His poem “I did it, I”. And I screamed in myself thinking oh to give myself crashing, fighting, to you….

I shall never see him, he will never look for me.

 

P104,5

Writhe, Legs around me, first kiss

“feel the inevitable magnetic polar forces in us, and the tidal blood beat loud, Loud, roaring in my ears, slowing and rhythmic. He paused, then, I behind him, arms locked around the powerful ribs, fingers caressing him…, thighs ground together, shuddering, mouth-to-mouth, breast to breast, legs enmeshed, then lying full length, with a good heavy weight of body upon body, arching, undulating, blind, growing together, force fighting force: to kill

…

Once there is the first kiss, and the cycle becomes inevitable. Training, conditioning, make a hunger burn in  breasts and secrete fluid into the vagina, driving blindly for destruction.

 

P23

Always like this

Kiss

 

He thought was still hope. In the car he said, after I had let him kiss me for a while, “It always has to end, doesn’t it? We always have to separate." “Yes,” I said. He was insistent, “but it doesn’t always have to be that way. We could be together someday for always.” “Oh, no,” I told him wondering if he knew it was all over “we keep running till you die. We separate get further apart until we are all dead”

 

P501

In the morning I cried

I see no middleman. Lovely clear morning. I cried and cried. Last night, today…. And I, come to the time, the great good time love where children are the crowning glory . Sit here, chewing my nails. I simply don’t know what to do. All joy and hope is gone.

 

93

Scream

‘Suddenly, I stopped dead… In a second, I saw that I had unwittingly completed the last day of August. Tomorrow will be September 4. God! All the quick futility of my days cascaded upon me, and I want to scream out in helpless fury is inevitable going on seconds, days and years.

 

Note this also includes the words ‘stopped dead’, the title of another Cure song is 'Stop Dead'.

 

P118

‘It is like lifting a bell jar off a securely clockwork-like functioning community, and seeing all the busy people stop, gasp, blow up and float in the inrush, (or rather outrush,) of the rarefied scheduled atmosphere – poor little frightened people, flailing impotent arms in the aimless air. That’s what it feels like: getting shed of a routine.

 

Also Bell jar:

Pp 104-5

Writhe

Flesh and blood and the first kiss

 

Marco set his teeth to the strap at my shoulder and tore my sheath to the waist. I saw the glimmer of bare skin, like a pale veil separating two bloody-minded adversaries.

‘Slut!’

The word hissed by my ear.

‘Slut!’

The dust cleared and I had a full view of the battle.

I began to writhe and bite.

…

 

I gouged at his leg with the sharp heel of my shoe… I fisted my fingers together and smashed then at his nose… I began to cry.

… Marco sprang to his feet and blocked my path. Then, deliberately, he wiped his finger under his bloodied nose and with two strokes stained my cheeks.

 

Blade into my hand

Pp 142 - 143

The Bell Jar also includes reference to a blade in her hand as Esther toys with the idea of suicide:

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I had locked myself in the bathroom, and run a tub full of warm water, and taken out a Gillette blade… But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenceless that I couldn’t do it… my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.

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​It would take two motions. One wrist, then the other wrist. Three motions, if you counted changing the razor from hand to hand. Then I would step into the tub and lie down.

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Then I lifted my right hand with the razor and let it drop of its own weight, like a guillotine, on to the calf of my leg. I felt nothing. I thought of getting into the tub then, but I realized my dallying had used up the better part of the morning… So I bandaged the cut, packed up my Gillette blades and caught the eleven-thirty bus to Boston.

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Leave me to die

You won't remember my voice

pp 160-163

Esther attempts suicide by taking an overdose and crawling into a space under her house in the hope that she is left to die. This section is autobiographical - an account of one of her own attempts.​

Before this she remembers  that she had not grieved for her father.