Other Bail-Outs

December 11, 2008

I was wondering why arts organizations, museums and symphonies and ballet companies, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy don’t go to the Federal government for a bail-out the way the banks and auto makers do. Jobs lost to the closing of a theater company are just as lost as those to the closing of a factory; arts organizations are incontestably more integral to the general tone of a society than any particular industry, and their financial difficulties are less likely to be exacerbated (or caused) by satanic greed in the chairman’s office. Nor have they glutted themselves at the expense of the people who now must bail them out. I would rather my money go to the New York Opera or the San Francisco Symphony than to AIG. The cellist’s kids get just as hungry as the auto worker’s.

Lorena acclaimed chairman of the department. I hadn’t thought that was the way it would turn out, but once the nomination was made it seemed right and inevitable. Lorena seemed genuinely to want to do it. This amazes me.

Unseasonably warm rain; unreasonably deep, even violent nap early in the afternoon, with the rain falling around. I’m still a little shaken from it, as though it had been a fever rather than a sleep.

Walked out the front door to get the mail, and the full moon had risen snow white in a sky of indescribable turquoise, with a border of white and gray cloud over the greenish dark of the mountains. One must cry out. I remember when I believed crying out over the beautiful things of this world was going to be my only occupation. I left that path consciously, and I do not regret it, but sometimes I think that when I left it I left wildness and happiness at once, and if I could find it again, I would be the wild soul I remember, wounded by the things that wound the wild, and not by these perpetual ruinous subtleties and considerations. I did truly run at the borders of the deep wood at moonrise, singing, and I was happy. I do not know if the wood will let me back.