March 23, 2011

Irish music on the CD long before dawn. The petals of the bloodroot snow on the little patch of dirt beneath them. That is over. The crown imperial opens golden.

I’m in one of those phases where one little duty succeeds another, one day after another is lost in not-unpleasant trivialities, and the best one can do is keep everything in order and proceed. Ignoring the phone and e-mail helps some.

Read and discussed my poetry in SS’s class yesterday. Surprised myself by barely being able to get through the poems without weeping. Sooner or later, everyone you wrote poetry about is dead, every moment passed, and it all begins to sound like an extended lamentation. It begins to BE an extended lamentation. My work has always been dedicated to the awful necessity of remembrance. I went around saying that long before I actually realized what it meant.

Watching the film Bright Star in my seminar. It’s better than I remember it, or perhaps one gets used to its longueurs. Or perhaps my feelings are closer to Keats since I went to his room on the Spanish Steps. Moved by Brown’s dedication–however irritating–to him, one wondering why someone couldn’t have loved one for one’s words, if that’s what one had to offer. Indeed, spending a great deal of time wondering why things weren’t other than they were, often actually figuring it out, which is a kind of comfort, even when–which is almost always–nothing can be done about it.

Actors will often spend as much effort on mediocre work as they will on sublime. I suppose this is a way of keeping the faith. I know I have done so, thinking that if one art isn’t quite up to par, another can be. I’m wild to see a play of mine on stage again. What Sunnyspot is up to I don’t know, but, contrary to our agreement, it isn’t me. When I went to pick up my tax return, I ran into EP, and I couldn’t tell him who my producers were, I couldn’t think of the name “Sunnyspot.” Whatever that means I’m going to leave for the sunrise.

Shakespeare acting class is revealing, exhausting. My little soliloquy from King Lear was on last night. It was a work-out. I know how to do the exercise now, but when I ask myself the question “do I know how to deliver these lines better?” I don’t know. I’m not sure one thing has much to do with the other– whether interesting rehearsal techniques really lead to a better performance. I think that the possibility that they may is overbalanced by the danger that their proponents become fanatics and bores. I feel similarly among musicians, who think that singing on a different syllable or counting the beats or holding your arms like Hiawatha make the singing better. You learn to do those things, but are you better at the central task? Perhaps it’s to make you mindful, to encourage you to think of difference approaches, in which case, all are valuable. A further consideration is the awful concentration which descends at a certain point in life. I used to love to do readings and workshops and seminars, to produce plays and to be asked here and there to do this and that. Now I am obsessed by the need to create text. Speaking Lear I am thinking of sitting where I sit now, behind the keyboard, creating Lear anew, or answering him. Text. Text. I’m not yet at the place where everything but the creation of text is a a luxury, but I see it like a dark cloud approaching. Or a bright cloud, maybe.