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The Dove’s Annihilation
Sylvia Plath and the Kingdom, the Power, the Glory
A Performance in Music – Poetry – Movement
Danaë Killian, PhD, Honorary Fellow, Centre for Ideas, Faculty of VCA and MCM,
University of Melbourne
The Dove’s Annihilation: Sylvia Plath and the Kingdom, the Power, the Glory is a performance in music, poetry
and movement, which bears witness to Plath’s conscience-searing vision of the contemporary world
order as a crucible made of darkness and fierce hope. At heart The Dove’s Annihilation is a piano recital,
with its generic boundaries opened to the involvement of intense spoken word poetry and the radically
expressive movement art of eurythmy. Its body of sound is made of music by Messiaen, Beethoven,
Schoenberg, Scriabin, Shanahan and Bach, incorporating poetry by Plath and from the Song of
Solomon.1 In this paper2 I trace the praxis-rooted epistemology involved in the artistic creation and
performance of The Dove’s Annihilation for the 2014 Melbourne Fringe Festival. Joined by Brisbane-based
eurythmist Jan Baker-Finch, I performed as pianist and spoken-word artist in eight Melbourne Fringe
showings of The Dove’s Annihilation across a four-day season from 19 to 22 September 2014 at the Bar of
Bengal, Kindred Studios, Yarraville.
*
The dove’s annihilation … this title, this image, makes me tremble. Let my hands tremble innocently, like a
white dove’s wings, over the white keys but also the raven black keys of my piano sounding glorious
Beethoven, Messiaen, Bach, like the harmony of all harmonies of the spheres. Let my hands move like
spirit-birds over white and black and over the face of the musical waters, disturbing the waters, which
tremble with joy, with love, with holy fear. I tremble. Plath with her vision of the dove’s annihilation
makes me tremble.
At the height of the Second World War, Olivier Messiaen split his vision of Jesus into twenty views,
twenty mystic light rays shining straight through the hearts of Mary and the shepherds, through angels
and through birds, with the radiance of a thousand suns3; all the way through to the inscrutable indigo
mind of Our Father in heaven. The Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus were given their first, luminous
performance by Yvonne Loriod in 1945, the year of the atom bomb.
1 The program is provided as an appendix to this paper.
2 This paper was presented at the Tenth Biennial Conference in Philosophy, Religion, and Culture: ‘Faith and the
Political,’ Sydney, 2014.
3 I allude to J. Robert Oppenheimer’s quoting of the Bhagavad-Gita to describe what he witnessed at Alamogordo, New
Mexico, when the first atomic bomb was test-detonated on 16 July 1945. See Robert Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns:
A Personal History of the Atomic Specialists (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958). The lines of the Bhagavad-Gita that
Oppenheimer recalled read: ‘If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the
splendor of the mighty one’ (201).

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The Vingt Regards begin with the gaze of the Father God, the Regard du Pére. My performance The
Dove’s Annihilation likewise begins with Messiaen’s Regard du Pére, with the ritual gazing toward God
gazing upon His Son. In parenthesis as a contemplative mantram above the first bars of music, Messiaen
has quoted from the Gospels: ‘Et Dieu dit: “Celui-ci est mon Fils bien-aimé en qui j’ai pris toutes mes
complaisances”…’4 In the Gospels, these words of divine pleasure flow from heaven following John’s
Baptism of Christ in the Jordan River; and they are preceded by the apparition of a dove5: ‘And the Holy
Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him’ (Luke 3:22).
What has engendered this image, the image of a dove descending, in the minds of the writers of the
Gospels? In the mystic spaces of the contemplative mind, how does the dove appear?6 Does the dove
appear as such, as the actual, mystically perceptible embodiment of the Holy Ghost; or is this dove an
after-the-fact figuration – a symbol, without inherent being? Luke carefully brings together both sides of
this question, describing the actual bodily immanence of the descending Ghost, before he reaches for the
dove as figure and likeness: ‘And the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him.’ 7
For Luke, the visible appearance of the Holy Ghost, as dove, is provisional and featherlight, while the
Holy Ghost’s real substance has weight – it descends in a body – but is not visible in itself.
What is it, though, that engenders the weightless image of the dove in the mind turned
contemplatively to the event of Jesus Christ’s Baptism; and has the dove reality? Insofar as the dove is
thought of as a symbol for something, its sleek snow-white opacity makes a perfect, beautiful, sterile
mask over the face of real being. The dove as symbol for something, as the sign of the spirit, asks to be
annihilated, ‘digested,’ transformed; otherwise it is ‘intolerable, without mind,’ a plastic piece of
‘confectionery,’ like Plath’s perfect, beautiful, sterile ‘Munich mannequins.’8 The dove-image in the
4 [‘And God said: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”…’]. Olivier Messiaen, Vingt regards sur l’enfant-
Jésus (Paris: Durand, 1947), 1. Messiaen does not provide a biblical reference.
5 Each of the four Gospels describes the event slightly differently, though the dove and the voice from heaven are
common to all. In John, however, the relationship with the voice from heaven is more intimate – it constitutes John’s
core awareness of his mission to baptize the Son of God – so that the sequence dove-then-voice does not precisely hold
as it does for the other three Gospels.
6 Here I make an assumption about the mental state of the writers of the Gospels. Insofar as I recognize that the
Gospels are written by human beings, and insofar as I recognize these as profound metaphysical documents, I consider
the disposition of the minds of the Gospel writers crucial to what is written down in these Gospels. This is not to imply
that I attribute the Gospels, as if they were Romantic artworks, to the inner contemplative activity of a few individuals; I
am aware of the broad historical contexts and esoteric traditions structuring each of the Gospels so that they represent
the perspectives of various spiritual and popular movements, not just the results of individual contemplative enquiry.
However, to make an individually thoughtful connection with these texts, I myself need to engage with them through a
form of contemplative enquiry, and within this process of enquiry, I recognize the quality of thinking and the disposition
of mind that belong to the words and thoughts that form the text – and which I, logically, then attribute to the writer of
that text. Recognition of this kind is second-nature, I suppose, to musical performers and interpreters. In fact, the need
for a musical interpreter to establish an affinity with a composer’s mental disposition is a practical necessity, as well as an
experiential reality (not exactly an ‘assumption’ after all).
7 In my attention to the Gospels as texts, I am reliant upon translations, which may or may not be strictly accurate in the
very particular details that I focus on. In the absence of knowledge of Greek, I am placing my trust, as it were, in the
nuanced poetic and metaphysical beauty of the King James translation of Luke – trusting that its manifest artistry and
depth, within the domain of the English language, reflect a careful reading and profound understanding of the original
Greek. No doubt this is an imperfect foundation for a close-reading biblical exegesis, but it is the only way I can
reasonably bring my thinking to bear with any intensity on the texts of the Gospels as they are given to me in my own
language. After all, I am not seeking a fail-safe literal interpretation of the word of God.
8 Sylvia Plath, ‘Munich Mannequins,’ in Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London: Faber, 1981), 262-63.

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Gospels arises through a movement, a disturbance in the heavens above and the waters below; the
Baptismal dove is neither a something, nor a symbol for something, but a flying descent and a trembling
alighting on the shoulders of the Son of God. Movement engenders the image of the dove; the invisible
movement makes the invisible movement visible. If the moving dove is seen, fleetingly, as a ‘shape’ in
the mind that contemplates the Baptism – if, for a moment, the real, substantial, invisible spirit-body
appears, as if by way of a tangible sign, in its likeness as a dove – this substantial bodily likeness is
immediately subsumed, eaten, by the invisible voice of the Father saying: ‘This is my beloved Son, in
whom I am well pleased’ (Matt. 3:17). Sound annihilates image.
The invisible movement makes the invisible movement visible. A dove appears, voicelessly, like
Plath’s Munich snow.9 In the music of the Father’s voice, moving invisibly, the image is annihilated. But
the Spirit, according to the record borne by John, abides and remains (1:32-33) – it is not annihilated.
What does a concept do before its moment of embodiment in language? It moves, invisibly. It is
not a concept, though, until it is caught, taken hold of. Before it is caught, the concept (which is not yet a
concept) is – what? It is the essence of that which is to be grasped in thought: reality, substance – Spirit,
if you will … moving invisibly, moving freely, as if in an airy element; not yet caught. Before it is caught,
the concept is a dove invisibly flying. The strongest and truest human thinking moves freely in
conversational companionship with the reality it seeks to grasp, experiencing no gap between intuited
essences and their conceptual forms, which are integral ideas saturated with life and inner movement; we
rightly recognize such thinking – whether the Scholastic thinking of a Thomas Aquinas or the
Transcendentalist thinking of a Ralph Waldo Emerson – as genial and inspired. Rudolf Steiner, who in
the 1920s inaugurated the movement art of eurythmy, which weaves through The Dove’s Annihilation, calls
this kind of no-gaps essential thinking ‘body-free’ or ‘sense-free’ thinking. By this he means ‘pure
thinking, which acts like a living entity within the human being.’10 Steiner elaborates:
When we give ourselves up to sense-free thinking, we experience that something being-like is
flowing into our inner life, just as the characteristics of sense-perceptible things flow into us
through our physical organs when we observe by means of the senses.11
While the thinking Steiner is describing here is a contemplative thinking that intentionally liberates itself
from physical-sensory content – a self-sustainingly real, non-representational thinking indistinguishable,
perhaps, from music – Steiner is adamant that the essence of thinking, throughout all its ordinary and
sense-oriented forms, is body-free.12
The strongest and most beautiful poetry embodies the self-sufficient concepts of body-free
thinking, which are saturated with real life, in words that move with elemental, sensuous power like a
Spirit-Wind taking hold of the habitable world13 and filling it with extraordinary colours, lights, sounds.
9 Ibid., 263: ‘The snow has no voice.’
10 Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Esoteric Science, trans. Catherine E. Creeger (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1997),
324.
11 Ibid., 322.
12 See Rudolf Steiner, ‘Epilogue [1918]’ in How to Know Higher Worlds, trans. Christopher Bamford (Hudson, NY:
Anthroposophic Press, 1994), 208: ‘In our ordinary soul lives, thinking is almost always mixed with other activities, such
as perceiving, feeling, willing, and so on. These activities originate in the body. But thinking plays into them. And, to the
extent that it plays into them, something occurs in and through us in which the body plays no part.’
13 I allude to Virginia Woolf’s diary entry for 11 October 1929, when she was conceiving The Waves. Woolf makes a
metaphysical, apparently mystical, distinction between the ‘real world’ and the ‘habitable world’: ‘If I could catch the

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That which moves – like a dove – invisibly, freely, as essential substance-to-be-thought, is in the poetic
process caught and embodied and released again into living movement. As image, the dove is annihilated
as it is released into movement, as the poetic word pours its creative life into the world. Thus great
poetry, like Plath’s, makes us tremble with holy fear.
Plath’s drafting process is like Beethoven’s,14 annihilating all excess background information,
foreground explication; what remains and abides, monistically, is one spiritual-material essence – a
sublimely ‘holy gold’ fire-word, to be eaten like the ‘Sunday lamb’ of Plath’s Mary’s Song15 (so pungent, so
concrete, are the flavours and textures of Plath’s language in the mouth).
Plath’s first holograph draft of Brasilia contains lines explaining how the maternal speaker of the
poem experiences herself as an ‘old coelacanth, … / out of date & bad luck to the fisherman,’ while her
son is ‘one of the new people / motherless, fatherless.’16 The coelacanth is an evolutionary throwback, a
hairy prehistoric fish thought to have been extinct for 80 million years, until it was rediscovered, alive, in
1938.17 These original lines indicate Plath’s imaginative concern with the prospect of a eugenically
engineered super-race arising in the near future, prophesied in the inorganically conceived capital city of
Brazil and its eery, super-sized modernist sculptures of ‘people with torsos of steel.’18 Plath ruthlessly
eliminates these details from her subsequent drafts, until what remains and abides of their caught and
released meaning is the terse ‘and I, nearly extinct.’19
The poetic process of catching, embodying, and releasing is not the province solely of language. I
do not want to write all the concepts that unify this performance down; some of these concepts live in
media other than English words; they live in the in-between spaces and times of live performance, and
this where I think them and voicelessly voice them, in the in-between. Paradoxically, essential no-gaps
thinking lives and moves in the gaps – in the in-betweens, in the chasms and abysses of non-sense.
My concepts are not less present and real and clear for being unuttered in sense-making sentences.
They move and speak the language of doves. When I perform, I want to be able to hold a concept within
the medium of silence as a substantial reality, as if the silence had the bodily weight of the not-yet-
appearing dove descending. I want to be able to immerse myself listeningly in each concentrated
moment of performance, and within each moment of concentrated immersion to be able to touch and
illuminate both the alpha and the omega of the program’s syntactical development, drawing connections
and making resonances, articulating differences, weaving metamorphoses, between and throughout every
feeling I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable
world’ (A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf [London: Hogarth, 1975], 148).
14 For a detailed account of Beethoven’s drafting process, see Douglas Johnson, Alan Tyson, and Robert Winter, The
Beethoven Sketchbooks: History, Reconstruction, Inventory, ed. Douglas Johnson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1985). Paradoxically, while much of Beethoven’s drafted musical material did not make its way into
final compositional versions, Beethoven was loathe to discard his sketches, retaining them in his possession whenever he
moved house – for ‘the labor of thorough sketching had for [Beethoven] a significance that was ethical as well as
musical’ (Johnson et al., 4).
15 Sylvia Plath, ‘Mary’s Song’ in Collected Poems, op. cit., 257.
16 Sylvia Plath, ‘Brasilia’ [1962] item 1, photocopy of holograph, n.d. 1 page, numbered 1 in SP’s hand, Sylvia Plath
Collection, Mortimer Rare Books Room, Smith College [hereafter cited as Plath MSS].
17 See Mark McGrouther, ‘Coelacanth, Latimeria chalumnae Smith, 1939,’ Australian Museum,
http://www.australianmuseum.net.au/coelacanth-latimeria-chalumnae-smith-1939 (accessed October 12, 2014).
18 Sylvia Plath, ‘Brasilia’ [1962] item 1, Plath MSS; and Sylvia Plath, ‘Brasilia’ in Collected Poems, op.cit., 258.
19 Ibid.

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expressive element of the performance. I want to be able to hold the full stretch of the program in my
consciousness, as in my pianist-hands, as a fluid whole in which I musically move, with my listening at
once free and given-over to the invisibly mobile substance of that which is to be heard. My performative
will and my listening activity are of the same nature and kind as essential thinking, without any gap.
It is my hands that are poets. It is my hands that catch, embody, and creatively release all that they
think and hear into the vigorous world of sense. My hands move, making the invisible substance of
listening (united with silence) appear as well as resound; turning invisible movement into a form like a
dove trembling and alighting on the face of the musical waters. I have always been enchanted by the
birdsong elicited from the urban periphery during my Messiaen practice. The city birds respond to
Messiaen’s idiosyncratic, overtone-rich harmonies as to an imminent sunrise. Practising, I feel like St
Francis, with my hands held out to the birds. Once I realized that my hands themselves might appear like
feathered nothings that are caught then released, I went looking through the streets of the whole musical
program for these doves, and I found them everywhere, in Beethoven and in Bach, in Shanahan and in
Schoenberg, proliferating in the pianistic gestures as in the musical thoughts.
But it is Jan Baker-Finch, the eurythmist with whom I have collaborated richly on the creation of
this performance, who truly moves like a dove descending. Eurythmy is an exquisitely expressive
movement art, which seeks to render visible in the light of day the inwardly experienceable, suprasensory
dimensions of poetic speech and music – the real, invisibly moving substances of the poetic and musical
elements before they are caught in concepts, embodied in sounds. Eurythmy is not symbolic; it is not
illustrative; its mode of appearance is transparent, not opaque, to the face of real musical and poetic
being. Eurythmy’s choreographic method employs imaginative insight won through rigorous
phenomenological investigation of actual poetic and musical elements. Holistically, eurythmy draws out
that which lives both audibly and inaudibly as spiritual-material substance in a poem or composition, to
create an inspired weave of essentially eloquent movements, gestures, and luminous forms; which forms
move freely – no two eurythmists’ rendering of a poem will be the same – yet without arbitrariness, in
no-gaps harmony with the essential substance to be moved.20
Rudolf Steiner began developing the art of eurythmy in 1911, shortly before he made plans to erect
a double-domed building, a Johannesbau, in Munich to house the summer theatre events of the
Anthroposophical Society. For legal and economic reasons, the site was changed to Dornach,
Switzerland, where work began on the building – ultimately called the Goetheanum – in 1913 and
continued throughout World War One. This Goetheanum was a utopian Gesamtkunstwerk of
extraordinary originality and organic beauty. It was a theatre, research institute, and a modern temple
combined, hand-built by Steiner’s students, who came from all over warring Europe to collaborate
peacefully on the construction during the daytime, while in the evenings they listened to Steiner’s lectures
on anthroposophy and spiritual science. Sculpted and hand-carved out of wood on concrete, this
20 Here I am articulating my individual understanding of eurythmy, according to how this understanding has developed
over several years’ artistic collaboration with eurythmists in Europe and Australia. I myself have never practised
eurythmy. For insight into the genesis of eurythmy, see Rudolf Steiner, Eurythmy as Visible Singing, trans. and ed. Alan
Stott (Stourbridge, UK: Anderida, 1996), and An Introduction to Eurythmy: Talks Given Before Sixteen Eurythmy Performances
(Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1984); as well as Magdalene Siegloch, How the New Art of Eurythmy Began: Lory
Maier-Smits, the First Eurythmist (London: Temple Lodge, 1997).

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idealistic building of the future was all but annihilated by a fire lit by arsons on New Year’s Eve,
December 31, 1922.21
Meanwhile, in Australia, Canberra was being built to plans by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion
Mahony Griffin, whose idealism was akin to Steiner’s, although they would not encounter and engage
strongly with Steiner’s anthroposophy until the 1930s. The Dove’s Annihilation: Sylvia Plath and the Kingdom,
the Power, the Glory was conceived in response to Canberra’s 100-year anniversary celebrations in 2013.22
The task of a utopia is to realize, within this world, the ideal of a kingdom that is not of this world –
to establish on earth, now, the kingdom to come. As Walter Burley Griffin remarked of his winning
design for Australia’s capital city:
I have planned a city that is not like any other in the world. I have planned it not in a way that I
expected any government authorities in the world would accept. I have planned an ideal city – a city
that meets my ideal of the city of the future.23
In the way the Griffins conceived the city, Canberra would embody Emersonian ideals of democracy and
cultural life; it would be the organic manifestation of intertwined spiritual, political and aesthetic ideals,
which revolved around the Griffins’ reverence for the transcendental harmony of the imaginatively,
intuitively, self-reliant human individual with Nature.24
Despite its background inspiration in 19th Century American philosophy, the Griffins’ Canberra
was, like Brasilia, a modernist utopian project. The development of the Griffins’ vision for Canberra
coincided with the early modernist, utopian reconfigurations of the musical landscape undertaken by
European composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Alexander Skryabin,25 whose dense, difficult,
raven-voiced textures form a ganglion of intellectually challenging nerve fibres round the core of The
Dove’s Annihilation.
The Griffins’ dove-like ideal of the city of the future was charred in the outbreak of the First World
War. For the sake of the war, government funds were diverted from the Canberra project. The Griffins
were pressured to alter their design. Bureaucratic disputes ensued. In 1920, Walter Burley Griffin
resigned entirely from the Canberra design project, with his ideal radically compromised if not absolutely
in ashes.
On the other side of a second World War, in the 1950s, the futuristic ‘kingdom’ of Brasilia was
conceived architecturally by Oscar Niemeyer. Plath’s poem Brasilia, which in The Dove’s Annihilation is
performed between Messiaen’s mantric Regard du Pére and his metallic, crucifix-cutting Regard de l’Etoile,
responds to Niemeyer’s monumental Dovecote (1961) located in the Plaza of the Three Powers.26
21 See Assya Turgenev, Reminiscences of Rudolf Steiner and Work on the First Goetheanum, trans. John and Marguerite Wood
(Forest Row, UK: Temple Lodge, 2003).
22 A pilot performance of The Dove’s Annihilation was given in Canberra on October 5, 2013 at the Annual Conference of
the Anthroposophical Society in Australia: ‘Spiritual Ideals for Culture and Democracy.’
23 Reported in ‘American Designs Splendid New Capital for Australia,’ in The New York Times, Sunday, June 2, 1912.
http://urbanplanning.library.cornell.edu/DOCS/nytimes.htm (accessed October 12, 2014).
24 See David Headon, Beyond the Boundaries: Canberra’s Extraordinary International Design Competition, 1911-12, (Canberra:
ACT Government, 2013), 28-30.
25 In fact, Scriabin’s Ninth Piano Sonata, Op.68, was composed in 1912-13, precisely coinciding with Canberra’s
inception.
26 See Georg Nöffke, ‘These Super People: The Superimposition of Ted Hughes’s “Brasilia” on Sylvia Plath’s “Brasilia,”’
paper presented at the ‘Sylvia Plath Symposium 2012: The October Poems,’ Indiana University, 2012.

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Culminating in the words ‘unredeemed // By the dove’s annihilation, / the glory / the power, the
glory,’27 the poem shapes its futuristic concerns through Christological references to the Madonna and
Child, the Baptism, and the Lord’s Prayer.
Plath’s Christological vision in Brasilia is conscience-searing, because it maintains its lyric confession
on a knife-edge of ambiguity. The confession is intense, emphatic, as though definitive. Yet the reader is
not quite permitted to determine whether the poem hates or loves Christ or Anti-Christ, whether it
makes distinction between them, or whether it sees them as one and the same – and whether, if there is a
merger between them, between Christ and Anti-Christ, this confluence of identity is an ‘outer’ one, that
is, a fault in society, which corrupts religion with political interest; or an ‘inner’ and authentic one,
whereby there is only an Anti-Christ, which human beings have worshipped as the Christ within
institutions of power, to the devastation of genuine social and creative values. In this latter case, the
political sphere’s white-dove-symbolized ideal of international peace would be corrupted by religious
interest; or rather, Picasso’s famous white dove would have been flying from the outset as the signal
manifestation of a corrupt and war-mongering power, as the sign of an Anti-Christ. Because Plath’s
poem refuses to determine the relationship between Christ and Anti-Christ, and between religious and
political ideals, the conscience of the reader is seared with the challenge to take possession of the
problem and to solve it in individual freedom, or not at all. In this direct challenge to her readers to take
up their ethical freedom and dance, or die, Plath is a Nietzschean. In her copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra,
which Plath read and studied as a teenager in 1949, she has underlined: ‘He, however, hath discovered
himself who saith: This is my good and evil: therewith hath he silenced the mole and the dwarf, who say:
“Good for all, evil for all.” ’28
It was while studying Brasilia’s drafts that I discerned just how fine a knife-edge Plath is showing us.
Without help of the drafts, I might have read Brasilia primarily as revisionist feminist Christology, its
motherly speaker pleading with a terrible, human-devouring God (‘O You who eat // People like light
rays’) to ‘leave’ her little child ‘safe’ from glorification, as of Christ or as of a sacrificial dove, in death.29
In this reading, Plath might be heard to denounce both the militarized masculine American culture,
which blasphemously sends boys out to war in nominal defence of its kingdom of white-dove spiritual
values such as freedom and peace, and the Christian religious promotion of the killing of an innocent
young man – an earthly woman’s beloved son – as a sign for the redemption of humanity. Whether Plath
is understood through this reading to be repudiating Christianity itself, or rather insisting that
Christianity’s essence lies somewhere else than in death and destruction, probably depends on one’s own
religious views and flexibility with the same; but this contingency is not yet the moral knife-edge I mean;
it is only the flat of the blade, the background world-picture.
The most concise holograph indication of the ethical ambiguity pervading Brasilia lies in Plath’s
working and reworking of the words ‘by the dove’s annihilation,’ with which she struggled, making nine
attempts to master the image. It was only while extracting these attempts from under Plath’s crossings-
out and writings-over in the archive at Smith College that I noticed the potential for the dove to be
interpreted grammatically as the active annihilator rather than as the sufferer of annihilation, the latter of
27 Sylvia Plath, ‘Brasilia’ in Collected Poems, op. cit., 259.
28 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common (New York: The Modern Library,
[n.d.]), 215.
29 Sylvia Plath, ‘Brasilia’ in Collected Poems, op. cit.

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which my conventional understanding – connecting the dove easily with the burnt offerings of Leviticus
– had assumed to correspond to Plath’s intended meaning. In the draft process Plath tried out a number
of attributive adjectives for the dove – ‘white,’ ‘blind,’ ‘awful’; for example, ‘by the apparition of the blind
dove.’ ‘Blind’ and ‘white’ also occur in these draft phrases as attributes of ‘annihilation’ – for example,
‘by the blind annihilation of the dove’ – suggesting that the activity of annihilation belongs, together with
blindness, to the dove.30 In this light, the dove itself appears sinister, as an annihilating threat to
humanity; but the other side of the interpretation, the idea of the innocent sacrificial dove, continues to
hold conceptually. The double-meaning of the dove’s annihilation, as the dove’s action as well as its
passion, appears to be intentional.
With further help of the drafts, I find myself disturbed by the discovery that the speaker’s beloved
son is not her biological baby, that he is of the ‘new’ race of ‘fatherless’ and ‘motherless’31 ‘super-people’32
made of resilient, unfeeling, lifeless metal – ready for battle, like Bruno Giorgi’s sculpture Two Warriors
(1961) that stands opposite Niemeyer’s Dovecote in the Plaza of the Three Powers. The baby seems to
be the receptacle of Plath’s fiercely expressed hope for humanity’s safety in the face of annihilating world
powers – yet in how far is this new human being, within the cellular substance of his cold, hard,
bloodlessly engineered body, already and irrevocably one of the annihilators? In the arms of the
anxiously praying Madonna, is this the Christ-Child or the Anti-Christ?
He appears to be both, just as the dove of the poem seems to be both an offering and a destroyer.
Consistent with the futuristic gaze of Brasilia, the moral being of this child of humanity is virtual not
actual – he is a potential, equally evil and good. His actualization as one or the other is to be decided on
the knife-edge of humanity’s large-scale ethical decisions (Plath was writing Brasilia at the height of the
Cold War, just after the Cuban Missile Crisis)33; but also, the nature of the child’s actualization is to be
determined within the realm of each individual reader’s ethical freedom. Plath calls us awake in the
conscience, but she does not instruct us how to judge. How can she, if Christ and Anti-Christ are yet to
be born, out of our own ethical selves, in the future? There is everything to decide but nothing to judge.
Plath’s is a Christology of the future, a virtual Christology, an ego-dizzying difficult Christology of
absolute individual freedom.
Beethoven’s idealism embodies the free dove’s spirit in blissful wise. Beethoven’s Sechs Bagatellen, Opus
126, which in the performance The Dove’s Annihilation follow the opening triptych of Messiaen–Brasilia–
Messiaen, unfold through the glorious freedom of their thought-forms an organic, Goethean philosophy
in music. Being bagatelles they are small – they are feathered nothings, a series of archetypal leaves; but
in these leaves my listening beholds a whole tree of essentially flowing, interconnected thought-beings.34
Beethoven asks from me as a pianist that I sing from out of the resonance of my whole, heavy,
suffering physical body; and in the resonance singing I become light. The resonance persists all around
30 See Sylvia Plath, ‘Brasilia’ [1962] item 2, photocopy of holograph, n.d. 2 pages, numbered 2-3 in SP’s hand, Plath MSS;
and Plath, ‘Brasilia’ [1962] item 3, photocopy of typescript, revised, n.d. 1 page, numbered 4 in SP’s hand, Plath MSS.
31 Sylvia Plath, ‘Brasilia’ [1962] item 1, Plath MSS.
32 Sylvia Plath, ‘Brasilia’ in Collected Poems, op. cit., 258.
33 For an detailed material study of Plath’s relationship with the major political events of the day and their discourses, see
Robin Peel, Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2002).
34 For an elegantly imaginative introduction to Goethean organic phenomenology and the idea of the archetypal plant,
see David Seamon and Arthur Zajonc, Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998).

9. 9
me after practising, throughout my day—making a great golden heart-halo in which I walk and live (and
long for my ferne Geliebte; even as my beloved is inside the halo of sun-gold in which I walk, singing
Beethoven35). While I am walking thus, the conviction fills me that we are all of us, all humanity, the
universe, of one heart. There is only one heart. And that one heart is of a body with the sun. The one
heart is the sun. We are, all of us together, the sun. Beethoven knew this. He lived and breathed this.
Beethoven’s late music36 is like a Bodhi Tree branching round the whole earth, round the sun and
moon and stars, embracing the true utopian37 and global kingdom in hands of compassion, hands of
peace, hands like the wings of doves. Beethoven’s song is the Song of Songs.
When Sylvia Plath was fourteen, and the Second World War had just ended, she began
corresponding with a German pen pal, Hans-Joachim Neupert.38 Plath’s themes throughout the
correspondence are overwhelmingly pacifist, and it is clear that she takes up the task of writing to a
German boy seriously as an opportunity to develop mutual understanding between cultures and nations
post-war. Writing about her piano practice, Plath remarks that she ‘enjoys all of your German musician’s
works … [I]n America we think of Beethoven, Handel, Mozart, and the rest, as old friends in music. I
like the power of Beethoven.’39
In the German political regime of the early 20th Century, Beethoven’s ideals were flown out over the
masses like ‘blind’ annihilating doves, ‘white’ and ‘awful,’40 in the service of political power and racial
glory. Sylvia Plath’s father was a German. She puts him in a poem, Daddy, where she calls him a
‘swastika’ and imagines a ‘stake’ through his ‘fat, black heart,’41 although Otto Plath was not actually a
Nazi. In this ethically treacherous poem, Plath tests the trembling ground between empathy and
transgression as she tries to ‘talk like a Jew.’42 Plath’s association of her personal biographical sufferings
with those of Jewish victims of genocide has been called ‘monstrous’ and ‘utterly disproportionate,’43 and
is problematic at the very least.44 Yet at the heart of Daddy is the longing for the ferne Geliebte, for the dead
father whom the speaker ‘pray[s] to recover,’45 as well as the longing for reconciliation of German with
35 I allude to Beethoven’s song-cycle An die ferne Geliebte [To the Distant Beloved], Op. 98. At the same time, I am
thinking of some lines in Solomon’s Song, which I speak at the sweetly-molten, tenderest point within The Dove’s
Annihilation: ‘By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not. I will rise now,
and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth. I sought him, but I
found him not’ (3:1-2).
36 The Bagatellen, Op. 126, composed in 1825, are Beethoven’s last completed piano work.
37 Etymologically, ‘utopia’ means ‘not a place’ (Gk. ou = not + topos = place). When we expand our purview imaginatively
to think and feel and act globally, our consciousness is literally utopian, transcendent of any particular place. Yet this
whole-world utopia of the imagination is not make-believe; it is a reality, now, which organically holds the creative
picture of a potential future world.
38 See Sylvia Plath, ‘18 letters, [1947-1952] to Hans-Joachim Neupert,’ photocopied, Plath MSS.
39 Ibid., autograph letter (signed), [1949] Apr 14.
40 Sylvia Plath, ‘Brasilia’ [1962] items 2 and 3, op. cit., Plath MSS.
41 Sylvia Plath, ‘Daddy’ in Collected Poems, op. cit., 222-24.
42 Ibid., 223.
43 Irving Howe, ‘The Plath Celebration: A Partial Dissent,’ in Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work, ed. Edward Butscher
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977), 233.
44 For sympathetic, responsible, and ethically rich treatments of the Holocaust-identification ‘problem’ in Plath, see: Al
Strangeways, ‘“The Boot in the Face”: The Problem of the Holocaust in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath’ in Contemporary
Literature 37.3 (1996), 370–90; and Jacqueline Rose, ‘Daddy’ in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (London: Virago, 1991), 205-38.
45 Sylvia Plath, ‘Daddy,’ op cit., 222.

10. 10
Jew; and – insofar as Plath places herself as an American woman personally, imaginatively, within the
European site of the World War Two and Holocaust horrors – at the heart of Daddy is a longing for
empathetic knowledge of humanity perceived as a whole. Especially in the light of Plath’s teenage
correspondence with a German boy, it seems to me possible to conceive that at the heart of Daddy is
Plath’s love for the whole of humanity, though the way to comprehending that heart burn with hatred.
In creating the performance The Dove’s Annihilation, therefore, it seemed possible and even important for
me to follow Daddy, full as it is of murder, with the uttering of the Lord’s Prayer, which makes its various
ethical addresses to our common human-being-ness: ‘Our Father … ’ (Luke 11:2).
Of ‘the kingdom, the power, and the glory’ (Luke 11:4) Plath wrote in her own, beautiful, dovelike-
idealistic way to her German friend Hans-Joachim in the late 1940s; and it is with these simple youthful
words that I will finish. They are tenderly unlike those for which Plath is famous; yet, I believe, their
transcendentalism forms the foundation of Daddy’s moral and theological topography:
I came away even more determined that there is a magnificent power above us all – call it nature, or
call it God – which is responsible for the vast beauty of heaven and earth. The view of land and sky
is open to us all – no matter where we live or what we do.46 47
For we are, all of us – all humanity, the universe – of one heart. There is only one heart.
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11. 11
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APPENDIX
The Dove’s Annihilation
Sylvia Plath and the Kingdom, the Power, the Glory
A Performance in Music – Poetry – Movement
Danaë Killian, piano and spoken word
Jan Baker-Finch, eurythmy
Conceived by Danaë Killian
Choreography and costume design by Jan Baker-Finch
Program
Regard du Père [Gaze of the Father] from Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus [Twenty Gazes upon the Jesus
Child] (1944) – OLIVIER MESSIAEN
Brasilia (1962) – SYLVIA PLATH
Regard de l'étoile [Gaze of the Star] from Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus – MESSIAEN
Sechs Bagatellen [Six Bagatelles] (1824), Op. 126 – LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
The Munich Mannequins (1963) – PLATH
Fünf Klavierstücke [Five Piano Pieces] (1923), Op. 23 – ARNOLD SCHOENBERG
Daddy (1962) – PLATH
‘Our Father’ (LUKE 11:2–4)
Sonata, Opus 68 (1913) – ALEXANDER SCRIABIN
A lotus-weave of images from The Song of Solomon
Je dors, mais mon cour veille [I sleep, but my heart awakens] from Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus –
MESSIAEN
Mary’s Song (1962) – PLATH irradiated by Arc of Light (1993) – IAN SHANAHAN
Präludium und Fuge in C-Dur [Prelude and Fugue in C] from Das Wohltemperierte Klavier I [TheWell-
Tempered Clavier, Book I] – JS BACH
2014 Melbourne Fringe Festival
Bar of Bengal