December 17, 2007

Pavel Cerny wants to give Edward the King a reading and perhaps a production in LA. He wonders why I’m not better known, yet. I tell him I was slow to realize how anyone must sell himself. I don’t tell him what I think, which is that there is no “reason”, but that the Lord lengthened my road for reasons of his own. I hope no one reading these lines imagines that I am resigned to it.

Listening to medieval Scandinavian music. Titus sleeps on one corner of the desk, Jocasta on the other. Circe and Maud carry on in some space in the house, tussling, or asleep, and there seems to be no middle ground. The half moon floated pure white above Biltmore when I raised my head to look. There was snow on my windshield and nowhere else.


I think that if I were a child again, and if I came upon the holiday lights running down Patton Avenue, pooling into a tossing lake of whiteness at Pack Square, I would believe that I had come upon not so much a new season as a new world. It would not be automatically evident that the atmosphere was redolent of commercialism. What would a kid know of that? The redolence of pine in all the houses, of candles and tempting things to eat in the stores would present themselves first. An innocent person, a child, or perhaps an alien from some Christmas-less planet, may not notice that anything has been ruined through too much advertising or too much hope of profit, but rather that something impended, something so wonderful that people made mistakes anticipating it, hit wrong notes, fell over heaped-up abundance in their effort to speed its approach. You’d sense a great secret, and nobody sure whether to keep it or give it away.
You would hear tell, and you would believe, that somewhere in a deep gouge on the slopes of Mount Pisgah, roses were blooming in the snow at midnight, the snow-colored, snow-covered Christmas roses. Some people might dismiss this out of hand, but you wouldn’t. You’d seen the sparkles on the dresses, the curling smiles on the faces, the different tones in familiar voices, and it would seem to you that anything might happen, and the likelihood that it had not happened before would mean nothing at all. I think, if I were a child now, that I would assume not that the seasons had turned, but the world had, and it was darker, cooler, starker, so that the lights the people hung were the more beautiful, the warmth the people brought with them the more radiant; the magic harder to get at, full of mistakes and excesses and misdirections, and the more unspeakably wonderful.
I was born for Christmas. I turn away from it sometimes, like a prince who cannot endure the burden of his birthright.

The Christmas cactus is a flurry of white.