Omaha 7

May 28, 2015

Clouds again after a day of shine. My heel was a little better, and I was frantic with cabin fever, so I set out on foot a little way from campus. Came to the Sonic drive-in you can see from here, and sat down and had me a diet cherry limeade– surprisingly refreshing– and contemplated how comfortable I was in the redneck drive-in beside the highway roaring with semis.

Made a friend of Chicago playwright E, and went to see her play, and it bothered me, and is perhaps partially responsible for my restlessness through the night. A rape victim becomes a homeless harpy who relates all matters in her life to the rape. She abandons husband and daughter. There is never a rapeless moment in her life, no relationship not measured by whether a person is fully on board with her fury or not. She has slaughtered children in Iraq, but that doesn’t haunt her dreams; the wrong done to her does. She had insured that there was nothing in her life but rape. When someone in the play suggested “try to get past it,” the audience hissed audibly. When she commits a brutality intentionally equal to that done to her, the audience suggests that it’s “not enough.” I didn’t get it. I kept my mouth shut because I didn’t get it, obviously. If the Restoring Angel came to her and said, “All things can be restored to you if you leave off rage and vengeance,” she would have kept her rage and vengeance and gone on living in her Chevy, self-exiled, and the audience seemed to be with her. Unless they were just jollying the clearly excitable playwright.

I wonder why my life isn’t better than it is, since I seize every ghostly promise of redemption. Or maybe that’s why it’s not worse.

I’m a little tired of people trying to win arguments, or rule discussions, with the phrase, “You just don’t get it,” as if they were privy to special wisdom lying outside the parameters of normal scrutiny which makes their prejudices somehow sacred. Four people said of the male character in the play that he avoided monstrous culpability only because “he didn’t fully comprehend his male privilege.” The very unverifiability of that–in all directions-- makes it irresistible to people who want to win without increasing understanding.

Sat home last night working on my new Nighthawks play. Hobbled too far.