May 27, 2014

Bountiful Memorial Day, in which I did set aside time to contemplate the heroic dead. In addition, wrote hugely. Worked on the revision of Wyona. Began a play at the neighborhood café, and worked productively at it until the crappy loud music came on. They must have forgotten for a while the imperative of distraction. The play is, at this point, a conversation between Yeats and Oscar Wilde, it having occurred to me the most people, including myself, would rather go to a play about something they have heard of or know a little about. We observe that Shakespeare wasn’t one for original ideas, and the reason was not that he couldn’t think of any, but that he knew what sells. Playwrights sometimes have the notion of an absolute theater parallel to absolute music, in which there is no reference to anything but the inner world of the work itself. We should not be too proud to think of theater at least in part as an interpretation of history.

Because we were told it was going to rain (it did not), I put down the pen for a while and transplanted some more things from 62, including a native swamp hibiscus, a red rose with a golden center, green dragons. I have not checked this morning to see who made it, but my guess is that only the rose is having trouble. When I drained the water gardens I set aside a big pot of waterlilies, thinking it was spent, but I found it full of rainwater and all the plants growing, so I brought it over and dropped it into Lawrence’s pond.  I was happy all the day until the evening, when I began thinking, for no particular reason, that a sinkhole was about to open under my property. Must have been something on TV.