December 14, 2012

Difficult to describe yesterday. “Injurious” might be the right word, because it came to me first, but maybe “jagged” is a better one, for though there was injury, there were also moments which would have been joyful in another context.

Received the first critique of The Sun in Splendor in the café, where, after an off-hand “did you like it?” I was told that the transitions were clumsy and though “it contained a whole lot of things” it as just not up to what was expected of me. Devastated, not because I too much feared that the analysis was right, or will be universal, but for that to be the first thing I hear seemed cruel and gratuitous. It will stick with me no matter what comes after. If it IS right, then things are much worse, for it would call my own critical faculties into question. Upon them I had built everything that remains.

In September I’d contracted for a landscape guy to clear off the front terrace, which had gotten away from me and was wild and thorny, a big tangle out of which sprayed random flowers. I did like it that way, but feared that the neighbors were annoyed by it, that it was bringing down property values, or something. Morning as I read the e-mail that the crew was finally to come, a pang of remorse shot through me. Where would the birds go? Where would they shelter against the winter if not in my thicket? I was looking out the window when the big machine took its first bite of the hillside. The fish and the cats heard me cry out. It was as if the blades had struck me. When I stood at the top of the slope when they were done, I was crying. My beautiful hill was gone. It does look very tidy now, very neat, smelling richly of mulch. I asked them to spare the roses, and they did, the thin whacked sticks poking out of the mulch like trees in Hiroshima.

My beautiful hill is gone.

Staggered to the Y and did a zumba class. The effort to concentrate on the liquid Latin moves did in fact take my mind off other things. I do not naturally move that way. Drove to the studio and painted. Received–in one day--a complaint about a grade. “I thought I had a A in that class for sure.” In my experience, without exception, the person who complains about a grade has ALWAYS been elevated out of pity from a grade still lower than that. That is an astronomical level of irony.

In the evening Russell and I had dinner at LAB (excellent) and took in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Abridged at NC Stage. At dinner Russell and I talked more than we ever have. I wonder why it is important to share the inner life? My impulse to keep it secret doesn’t work that well, after all. The play was remarkable in that it proved a conviction that I always had but found difficult to illustrate: that, to be fully entertaining, even idiocy has to be intelligent. The evening was idiotic, but sublimely so, intelligent actors sending the most intelligent of writers up in a fireburst of absurdity, which only genius can sustain and survive. Better acting cannot be imagined. Every joke hit. I believe it was the most I’ve laughed in public, ever, nor were there any pity laughs, for someone trying so hard you have to throw them something. Got to a point of exhaustion where you tried to fight the laughter off to save yourself, but just couldn’t. Bravi!

Got out of my car at the end of all of this, the car lights snapping off under a dome of pulsing, piercing blue-white stars interrupted by the tracery of trees. Being a theist is like being in love with the most beautiful woman in the world. However pissed off you are, however wounded or disgusted, there is a moment when she turns in the starlight or at an open widow, and the only response is awe-struck silence.