January 16, 2011

Woke from an intricate and profound dream. Five or six of us were part of a “life circle,” which means we had been friends all our lives and probably would be all our lives. I had a wife, and she and her sister were part of it. The others are now unclear. One seems to have been a woman I cheated on my wife with once. In part of the dream we lived our lives; in part of it we came together in a circle and learned how our lives had changed because our attitudes toward one another had changed. We had real effect on one another’s beings, and though that seems horrifying, we always understood and accepted the changes as part of an evolving and corporate reality. My wife had cancer. I don’t suppose we “gave” it to her, but the first time she knew she had it was when we revealed it as a next step. Once it was presented, she had to decide how to deal with it. There were sparring and conflicts and very hard blows, but somehow we never thought of them as being unfair, merely, at worst, unforeseen. In the last scene I woke, rose out of bed, and saw that the bed had been shitten from head to foot, a mass of putrid corruption. I peeled off the shitty layers, and for a while it got worse, and then it started to get better. And then I woke. Believe me, I lifted the actual comforter and looked. I thought, in the last second of the dream, “they have kept this from me.”

First classes on Thursday. I enjoyed them, especially the Shelley seminar, where the students are smart enough to be the class you dreamed all classes might be when you first entered the business.

Budget cuts have severely narrowed options, so you have students clamoring for entry into closed classes. I don’t care about class size, and almost always approve the override. But it’s amusing to hear the pleading and excuse-making. One lad writes about how badly he wants in to Romantic to Modern, ending the plaint by apologizing for his bad performance in the last class we had together. Though I remember the student, I have no recollection of the bad performance whatever. I hope God is like me in that regard.

Saw A Life in the Theater at HART. Places like that, actors like that, is where theater lives. It is not a question of quality, but of heart.

Bruce Harris I-mailed me (by accident, it turns out), the upshot of which conversation was that I bought a share in the London production of My Trip Down the Pink Carpet. Part of the moment was internalizing the difference between five thousand dollars and five thousand pounds. It was worth it for the embarrassment it gave JB at not having responded to my heartfelt New Years missive concerning The Loves of Mr Lincoln. Who knows how all this will turn out? All I know is that everything takes altogether too long.

Got to the studio and prepared the show for Avenue M, which I am going to call, in my heart anyway, “The Emerald City.” Talked with David Mc. The progress of our friendship keeps getting interrupted, but I felt it was on track yesterday, during a discussion of whether a shape in one of my paintings needed a shadow, or didn’t. It did. Marco phoned while I was there with a whole plateful of bad news. He got fired from his job; his mortgage and his new business are in peril, and could we get together and discuss it all? I don’t suppose either of us was blind to the fact that I haven’t seen him socially in three years, that we never get together but that he is hurrying the moment along so he can get back to things that matter. It was certainly rumbling like a tank over the landscape of my mind. But I also know what friendship is, so I said simply, “yes.” I love him. I wondered why. He never gives back, or if he does it’s with an abject apology for ignoring one, which one takes to be sincere the first fifteen or sixteen times, but not, until now, a gesture to end the exile from his affections. I never doubted that work was important to him, but now the dynamic between work and friendship has come out exactly the way one expected it would and, if I were less steadfast, or perhaps less pathetic, he would be doubly undone. I wanted to lament that I don’t have anyone like that in my life, anyone who stands by me in disaster despite the flaws in my character, but maybe it’s because I don’t put anyone to the test. My disasters have been as secret as I could make them.

Learning to live my life after the great St Stephen’s Day secularization. It is well, actually. Circumstances have not changed, but the disgust of mismanagement is easier to endure than the sorrow of betrayal.

Look out over the interrupted plain of snow that is my yard, longing for spring, so I can see the flower of all my planting.

Went to Beaucatcher to see Tron last night. When I went into the men’s room, a man was making a drug deal on his cell phone. He shrugged and put on an expression that said, “I’m sorry you have to hear this.” The man who sold me popcorn was in such a state of emotional upheaval that he could barely say the words “butter on that?” or “anything to drink?”

Stories that the snow tells: Someone came through the yard from Carolyn’s side, and walked to my back door. Then they walked away from the door, and poured something onto the snow that caused it to melt, and left a few splash marks down the sides of the terrace. Several feet away, the one place where the snow is cleared is the space that’s shaded and protected by the boughs of the spruce. That is counter-intuitive, unless the tree generates heat of its own.