August 30, 2014

Voices on the street woke me before 3 AM. I thought they were closer than they were. I had been dreaming of travel. I had to ride my bike to an office to get a certain document, and somehow I forgot it there, and my dilemma was whether to go back and retrieve the bike or to go on to Scotland, which was my destination. Awake in the now-silent darkness, I wandered about some. I took the last night light from 62, which somehow in the tangle of undergrowth I had over looked. It gleamed starlike, and to it moth-like I went. My back yard under the dim smear of the Pleiades. It seemed sacred.

Woke with a hangover from having eaten nothing yesterday and finishing the evening with a bottle of grapey Italian white. Now that water and walking have dissipated the hangover, I feel terrific, cleansed and light. The swelling in my leg is down, and the pain in my knee gone, though that may have been Zach as well as the fast. I’ll fast again today if I can. I have typically been sloppy in my war on God, thinking a few threats and a rattling of spears would do it.

Sylvia Plath in Gary’s class yesterday. We noted how, almost alone of all literary figures, she cannot be discussed without discussion of her illness. That must be a kind of hell, if she knows about it. This class was inclined to pity, telling each other that suicide is not selfish nor–as I suggested in this case–passive-aggressive, but rather universally pitiable. Maybe. They certainly had the psycho-jargon to back up their arguments. When I read “Lady Lazarus” aloud, though, the hair stood up on the back of my neck. If we knew nothing about her, we would think her a greater poet than we do now with full morbid knowledge.

Adapted Tom’s book for the stage. It’s not very stagey, but it is poetic, so maybe that will float it.  Woke today thinking of the ways I had left it wrong last night. Moments from now come the revisions.

Conviction that I am traveling somewhere very soon– though I am not, unless my nerves know something I don’t.