March 8, 2026
Gentle rain. Hacked bamboo yesterday, planted lupines, hit Mountain Madre with friends from the North Side. At table many remembrances with the details gone awry, or at least disputed. My restaurant bills are less now that meals do not include alcohol. Watched Netflix’s The Dinosaurs with anticipation and delight. Watched the film Hamnet. What do I think? I’ll know in a little while. The last scene, where hands reach from the Pit to comfort Hamlet dying on stage, seemed to me the epitome of the power of theater, the moment that all else leads to and recedes from. Wept alone in my own house without understanding that could be put into words.
Howells this morning, “Like as the hart.” When I was singing at Second English Lutheran in Baltimore and impatient with anything after the Renaissance, that seemed to me the one modern work I would have called of a piece with the ancients. Still would, though it is no longer alone. Today we did it meager justice. Tried to speak to T as we left church, but his face was red with fury, complaining to his wife about K’s correcting his own personal missed note. “I KNEW I had the wrong note! He didn’t have to stop everybody and–” I have been him, my rage banked by having no wife to share it with. K has not learned how to deal with mistakes, addressing them as one would a character flaw rather than an incident. One’s misbehavior is publicized and laboriously exorcized.
Slept too big, woke out of the mood to fill the rest of the day with deeds.
SS has cast Purification, asserting it was agony to do so. Not going to ask why it was so hard. The first thing you expect is that nobody liked the script.
Strange, pervasive change in perception, the greatest one I remember, greater even than the change from childhood into adolescence or adolescence into adulthood, though perhaps I don’t remember them as sharp as they were. The image laid before me to describe is of a vast dome filled with space and clarity, and that is my mind. Like clear water under morning sun. Still. White and golden. I think of Yeats’s smiling sages sitting on their height in “Lapis Lazuli.” In times gone by I have known compassion as a correct behavioral choice, but I had not known it as a living thing, a plenum through which the soul moves and by which it must be pervaded. I wear perception like a coat, pulling it around me. I did nothing to bring this on; it just is. You hunt the quarry for a hundred years and come home to find it standing at your front door. Rage still comes, but it is like the throwing of a stone into a river, whatever effect it has passing in a moment, the flow continuing. I compare my spirit to my actual age, and the comparison is ludicrous. I am a boy. This is a boy’s white morning. Through my security cameras I watch me hobbling up the front steps, grasping the pillars to make it to the top,
