April 19, 2014

Tea heating downstairs. Troubled dreams, that I was traveling through Ireland (in a deep winter freeze, white on all sides) and all the B&B’s where I thought I had made friends were turning me away because I was gay, and though they liked ME well enough, there had recently been an incident. . . etc. One B&B, way out on a frozen peninsula, was having a birthday party for little girls, all dressed as purple witches. There were no cars but mine, and I assumed they had flown cross the water on broomsticks. It was very cold in my room. Maybe that accounted for the wintery Irish landscape.

Secured my tickets and my hotel rooms for Vienna and Budapest. Even to type the sentence is thrilling.

Daniel is thrilled with his acoustic guitar, which I didn’t know was buying him when I sent him graduation money.

Something wonderful happened at Maundy Thursday service. The church had been stripped and the bishop was washing the altar with bucket and rag. Something in the bareness and simplicity of the scene moved me, and suddenly I a soul adrift in a great void– not horrifying, but new and curious, as though I had just been born. I was drifting toward a golden light. The golden light was God, and he too had just been born. He embraced me, and there was no history between us at all. All had started new and pure. I must have slipped from the pureness in half an hour, but I keep that image in mind, wanting to feel as new as I can before the Lord, and He before me.

Good Friday at noon yesterday. K said our chanting was wonderful, and I hope that was true. The very long St. John’s passion was read by one of our deacons, who does most of the Gospel readings. She is a saintly woman, and sets the place on fire when she preaches. But her readings are halting and incompetent. Yesterday a sponge of bitter wine was lifted to Jesus on the end of a stalk of hibiscus. And that was just the most nearly amusing of a horde of errors. I could not help myself from complaining about her lack of preparation. I was told it was not that, but that fact that she is dyslexic and tries very hard and those are the best possible outcomes. My next question concerned why her colleagues didn’t assign her a different ministry, for unless she wears a sign around her next saying “dyslexic,” she sounds merely stupid or careless. Whatever the cause, she potentially ruins the experience of communicants who come to hear the lessons and not, necessarily, to honor a disability. I think it is cruel of the church to put her through that. I think it is cruel even if she desires it. And I think it is at least willful to put the congregation through it. I do some things quite well and some things very badly. I do not expect anyone to honor me for publicly doing things badly, however hard I may be trying.

Theater last night, Julian Vorus’ short play The Bog. The first thing to say is that it was delightful to be downtown with nothing to do but wander around for a while. Went to Isa’s quite elegant bar for the first time, liking it, liking it in part because it reminds me of the bar I love so much at the mouth of the Waterloo Bridge in London. The streets were alive and happy. The electric sign outside the parking deck informed me I’d gotten one of the last three spaces available. Was that not a portent? The play in the BeBe was intense and intimate, and I sat smiling because it reminded me so much of the theater I loved at the beginning, the theater which drew me in and which I first desired to emulate. I felt like I was looking at a photo of myself some years back, and wondering if I had advanced since then, or gone astray. New York changed me as a playwright. I do think of what will “sell,” but I also think that is helpful rather than compromising, for it gets me a little out of my own head. I don’t think I could write The Bog now, and that makes me nostalgic. Steve and Julian had the total commitment of their actors, which was beautiful, and a bit of a contrast to the off-hand attitude of those in the production I just finished. It’s wonderful for concentration if everybody’s on stage the whole time. The skill of the playwright was more in evidence than the finish and significance of this particular play, but I would go to see another Vorus piece in a minute. It was probing, passionate, proportionate, and probably funnier than it came off last night. A playwright’s ear listens for any rhetorical misstep in the work of a rival playwright, any violation of his own established aesthetic, and there were none. Every passage was part of an imaginative harmony.  I’m not sure this play has a future (an audience admires it, but does not, I think, enjoy it), but the playwright does. I’m sitting here thinking that a theater which alternates Vorus and me and maybe someone with a lighter touch than either of us would be a sensation.

Birds have begin singing in my flowery trees.