August 2, 2015

First read-through of The Weir, at my space in the industrial park. My accent was not the worst, and I was afraid it might be. It is a better play than I thought it was when I read it to myself.
   
The consequential grill that defeated me the other day was beaten into submission, and I grilled my first steak, and it was as miraculously different as people say. Harvested the next ripe eggplant before the ground hog got it. Harry and his friend came by on bikes, and the friend casually answered the question I had not thought to ask, the minor twiddling which was keeping me from firing up the grill. Providence.
  
Read Bridges’ The Testament of Beauty. Am I the last person in the world to have done so? The original owner of the book was one Katherine Gault, who had underlined inevitably the right and best passages. A fine reader. Even with lovely lines here and there, the work is awful. I wonder if I would have thought it so awful 100 years ago, when it was still possible to write lines like “the dignity of prayer” or “the God-kissed moment of loveliness” without anticipating scorn or doubt?  The good thoughts of a good man versified. What could be worse? As I read I wondered what it was for. My suspicion is this: Bridges watched his beloved friend G M Hopkins storm the bastions of Heaven in a way he could never– nor anyone else either. Bridges said to himself, “I am as good a Christian. I can affirm Beauty and Divinity in my way, too, by affirming the faith of our cradles and truisms passed down from Wordsworth with tearful solemnity. But he could not.
   
Each night since I have looked for the luna moth. Maybe this is a blessing that comes once only.

Amazing nap-dream. My sister and I were invited to a family reunion that consisted mainly of the family of my Aunt Marian. All of them except Aunt Marian herself were made up by the dream. Aunt Marian made an appearance as a ghost dressed like a Byzantine empress. She floated through the family house, which was colossal, empty, badly lit and had tilted dirt floors. All of her family were apparently trailer trash of some kind, but they had come into fortune and were dressed in gowns and tuxedos. In the dream I thought that terribly, terribly wrong, a kind of cosmic deceit. Some of them were handsome or beautiful, and this too I thought a kind of horror.