July 20, 2017

Blast of light in the window at waking deceived about the nature of this mottled, agate day.

Walking to An Taibhdhearc last night I heard myself praying, “Thank you, God, for returning me to this place I love.” I was on my way to see Dun naBan Tri Thine, my first play in Gaelic (with English subtitles projected on the wall.). Of course it was well done, but the play suffered from being a couple of brilliant ideas never quite realized by the playwright. Are the Sidhe assisting this woman or terrorizing her? If both, why and to what degree? Is liberation the elimination or the harmonization of supernatural forces? Is to reject the identity taken on, willingly, one supposes, by a wife and mother in some way to be fulfilled? As with Pumpgirl, men are seen by a female playwright as brutal obstacles to a woman’s self-fulfillment, but (perhaps I’m saying this because I’m a man) the desired fulfillment seems unearned, ill-defined, irrational, infantile. Acknowledgment of all these negative qualities does not modify the demand for fulfillment, but makes it the more urgent, based on a woman’s appetite, or self-image, rather than upon palpable truth. The man in “The Fairy Fort” is the blameless victim of his wife’s delusion; in Pumpgirl, he’s a slob who’s not allowed reformation, as that would interfere with the wife’s conviction of persecution. Female artists think of objectivity as male subjectivity. This will keep them in the second rank forever

On one side of me was a ginger lad here on an expedition from Carleton College. On the other was an elderly woman from Connemara, who has studied Yeats and more particularly Ted Hughes. She told me that Hughes had to escape to Ireland to shake off Sylvia and do his best work. Also that Assia Wevill, the woman in his life after Plath, killed herself, and their baby as well, with gas, just as Plath had done.  It amazes us both that Feminist criticism scorns whoever does not blame Ted for this. Her belief was that it was his tragedy to be attracted to gifted, unstable women, not that he caused their instability. Maybe you have to live in Connemara to have the freedom to say all that. Actually it reminds me of the last two plays, masculinity at fault because it does not (cannot) yield at every point to the feminine vision, which demands to be allowed to shimmer and backtrack and transform outside of a man’s ability to follow.

Bought my 7th or 8th copy of The Crock of Gold.

Had the best grilled cheese sandwich of my life in the Bier House. Mother’s is second.