August 24, 2008

The forecasts promise rain for tomorrow, but I’m so dispirited and angry with it that all I could respond was "Why not today?" It has been an unconscionable drought, and any delay is the deepening of a crime. I trusted the forecasts enough, though, that I took none of the Sunday afternoon to water the gardens, but slept, heavily, and woke myself in such a thirst that I downed a 750 ml lemon Perrier without pausing to breathe.

This morning, between waking and going to church, I wrote for the first time since dad died. That drought also had become deeply disturbing. I wrote like a fury while he was dying, but when it ended at last, energy and inspiration scattered. I won’t say they died, for they rather went elsewhere, toward learning how to control and husband an estate, which is a far more creative and engaging enterprise than I allowed myself to think when there was no hint that I would ever do so. I was not doing nothing; I was learning new skills and adding something permanent to my intellectual life. But I was not writing. It is good to be back. I restored Four for the Gospel Makers with a revision that replaced several false–and ruinous-- starts from the past. I began a new play sprung from all the discussion of fire in Faustus. I didn’t feel especially electric in the morning, but I must have been ready, for forth it came. At one point I did ask myself what if the writer in me was gone, replaced by another man with other (and more immediately profitable) interests. The answer to the question never came, and now it need not at all. I think I’d almost decided I could endure it. That must have shocked my system back.

Weary unto death of AYLI. Weary of some, but by no means all, of my fellow thespians. I sometimes hesitate to accept supporting roles, not because of pride but because I am a bad backstager. I hate the idleness, the need to find something to do without losing focus while waiting for a cue. It’s like a bad family vacation, boring and frenzied by turns. While I’m performing, I can’t do anything but the play. Can’t read, can’t run lines, can’t chit-chat in the green room. I don’t pick up quickly on the tone and direction of backstage gossip. I don’t understand the subtleties and undercurrents, but still clomp in sometimes like a lummox, leaving bitter silence around me. The life I lead–balanced between the mundane and the empyreal, between livelihood and poetry, with the necessary darkness and solitude of creativity looming huge in the center–is not conducive to any sort of casualness. Twice in two days people invited me to dine THAT DAY. I couldn’t. How do people make room in a day for what is not already there? How do people find the gaps? I need at least a day’s warning to have a convivial cup of tea. Conservation of energy is a huge issue in my life now, and I know it must look like unsociability or snottiness from outside, but I can think of no explanation that does not itself drain energy. I can’t imagine going to a cast party after a show, unless it is right across the street, which, thanks to D, it sometimes is. There are people who have one pursuit and concentrate on that, and I admire them, but way back once upon a time I took another route. I decided not to say no to anything that said yes to me. I’m not sure it was the best idea, but it was what happened, and now I have to do whatever I have to do to keep at it. This is all to say I’m probably an unsatisfying after-the-scene companion, stepping into my own world almost the same instant that I step out of Shakespeare’s. Oh, of course I want everybody to love me. I don’t make it easy, I know, but I want to wear a T-shirt that says, "I’m making it as easy as I can."

Friend groundhog is back in the front yard, grinding down grass and clover in a paradise just his size. I am suddenly joyful.