Dublin

January 3, 2008

Troubled dreams last night, concerning Crown of Shadows, which, waking, seem propitious on several levels. It shows my mind is back across the waters, making ready. We had played the shows in the auditorium of Ellet High School, and they were a disaster. The actors were making things up as they went. I was trying to remember the places to hide.

Snow fell on Dublin today, not much, but enough to give it an air of a dark European capitol in the dead of winter.

A woman stopped me on O’Connell Street and asked where such-and-such a hospital was, and what bus to take to get there. I told her I was a visitor and didn’t know. She said, “I looked at you and thought, ‘now there’s a native Dubliner.’” It’s an honor with which to start the new year.

I am not ready to return home tomorrow, but that is what I must do. I feel that when I leave Ireland this time, I will leave my youth. Someone looking at me might laugh at that comment, but what is in my heart is different from what is on my face. I had an extremely extended boyhood, when the arts and imaginings of boys seemed the whole world to me. If I say that boyhood ended with the arrival of sex, and the reign of sex was the mark of youth, then I had a youth which lasted thirty years. Therefore it is difficult to phrase what I feel tonight as a complaint. I’ve had a long run, in some ways uniquely successful, in other ways quite pointless, tragic. I don’t know what I’ll do now or what I’ll do when I return to familiarity. Perhaps things will go on just as they did for a while. The dawn of the idea that the sovereignty of flesh is over and the sovereignty of responsibility has begun is a surprisingly slight disruption, as though it were a step all my faculties were ready for. Ireland has been the country of my youth, symbolically, often literally, and I fear that when I leave tomorrow it is an end to all that. If I could change it, reverse it, I would. Knowing I can’t is a surprisingly small grief. I began my responsibilities long ago. I must now let them slip into the Center.

As far as leaving the carnival still alone, as I entered it, that was not my plan, not my fault, and it cannot be forgiven.