September 16, 2007

Late night. It was dark when I left Waynesville, and the crescent moon rested on the tip of a great pine, Venus shining buttery in the black sky opposite.

I think I’ve had too much church in the past few days.

I remember distinctly when my parents decided I needed a spiritual component in my life. Though I was quite young, they asked me if I wanted to go to Sunday School and if I had any preference as to where I went. The kitchen was very yellow when these questions were being asked. Their approach to this issue was casual, indistinguishable from those times when they asked me if I wanted to be in Boy Scouts or take swimming lessons. I believe that casual, rational approach was exactly right. At the outset it protected me from the fanaticism which is probably in my nature. The church they chose–the UC of C-- was probably the least fanatical option available, and since then I have thought that religion should never be loath to set up housekeeping with reason. Nor have I though being a mystic any contradiction to any of that.

Drove to Waynesville to audition for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. The auditions were grueling, with a whole lot of community theater actors reading for parts beyond their abilities. I was expecting Lloyd Kay to direct, but his health must be bad, and there were a man and a woman sharing the responsibilities. The woman was. . . I don’t know. . . like a woman playing the role of the director in a movie about a community theater production, full of explanations and warnings about her stringency and spontaneity as a director. The man was burly and attractively grisled, and said almost nothing. I think I did OK. It’s hard to know what is wanted at such an occasion. I both desire the part and don’t, as those things go, so I am prepared to rejoice at either outcome.

I’d played the role once before, with Black Swan at the green door, and it was strange to me how few of my lines I remembered. I did remember Martha’s lines, though, and Ellen saying them, and through the long and moonlit drive back home I wondered, mostly, how Ellen and I became estranged.

Frightening dreams last night, still vivid now as I recall them. I was living in a town plagued by monsters that came up out of the ground, out of the entrances of what seemed to be a shopping mall, long buried under the earth and become a place of horrors. I don’t think I fully believed in the monsters, but when I passed one of the buried mall entrances by night, my knees gave under me and I was petrified with horror. It doesn’t take much wisdom to interpret the meaning of monsters buried in the ground out of sight, though not out of mind. But it presently surpasses my wisdom to know what, exactly, those monsters are.