September 4, 2010

Sleepless last night, because of the throbbing toe. Of all the asinine afflictions–and yet pettiness does not decrease the agony. No position is comfortable, or endurable; the nerves do not weary and go to sleep; no moment is free of pain as the central element of consciousness. Had to keep the cats out of the bedroom lest one of them touch me. Angry now, looking around for someone to give a piece of my mind. The toe does not respond, other than to burn and throb, burn and throb. An under-noted phenomenon of pain is that it can be both agonizing and boring. After six hours of writhing in the dark, one thinks, “all right, let’s get on to something else.”

Hobbled to MAHEC, where the adolescent freckly doctor loaded me up with drugs and sympathy. What impressed me was that I stagger in with some (I suppose) obscure ailment, and the intern knows everything about it and the treatment of it. Did he rush to the Internet and look it up before he came to the room, or do they really carry all that stuff around n their heads? He gave me vicodin for the pain. I never had vicodin before. It is like being emulsified, like being made into a marshmallow. Doesn’t really kill the pain, but makes it feel like it’s several rooms away and not really an issue.

Last night’s reading of The Double Falsehood last night was not, I think, much of a success, though there were laughs, some of them arising from the readers’ haste to get the lines out and be done. After reading it once and hearing it once, I couldn’t tell you the exact plot. At the end there is a blizzard of reconciliation, a veritable white-out of troth and repentance. John Russell think ours might be the American premiere. It has not rained in two weeks, and will not rain for two weeks after, but as we sat in the Montford amphitheater reading our play to twenty or thirty people, down came rain, briefly. I sat there in wonderment, growing slowly sodden, watching the script disintegrate before me.

Evening: Tonight’s reading of The Double Falsehood was disturbing to me, because it as worse than last night’s, and it shouldn’t have been. Leonora was so bad that I don’t see how anybody could recollect anything but her halting, floundering, figuring it out, going back and trying it again, meanwhile annihilating any sense that the passage might have had or any pleasure the audience might have been taking. Reminded me of that woman who single-handedly destroyed Night, Sleep, and the Dreams of Lovers for me in Valdez by fluffing every single line. The readers got giddy, chattering and laughing among themselves, camping the performance once they despaired of doing it straight. The message they broadcast was “this is ART and we’re just folks, and isn’t it cute that we’re making the effort, however half-assed, and wouldn’t it be a little suspicious, a little anti-democratic if we were actually trying to do well?” I was embarrassed to be there.

Theobald’s play, however, seemed better to me, as though it were successfully sending up antique heroics, rather than unsuccessfully aspiring to them.

Progress in the foot department was evidenced by the fact that, coming home from Montford Park, I could brake the car without whimpering in pain.

Dream: I’m riding my bike down a path in the forest, when I meet three women, also on bikes. The women attack me. I consider if I can fight them all, and decide I can’t, so I flee to the top of a tall tower. Still on my bike, I wait for them on the landing of the tower stair. When they attack me there, I pick them up one by one and throw them over the balustrade onto the floor many feet below. I had thrown their leader first, and I realize the other two will probably go away and leave me alone, but I throw them too.

Steve calls me “the librarian of the universe.”