August 31, 2017

Browsing the Internet, came across a video of a Kiss-cam ranging across the crowd in a baseball stadium. It zeroed in on a handsome man and the beautiful woman beside him. But it had made a mistake. When the man noticed the camera, he turned to the bearded man beside him, and the two male lovers kissed in front of the crowd, which sent up a shaking roof of cheers. I burst into tears–of gratitude, finally– almost unable to believe that this has happened in my time. Blessed, blessed, blessed.

Began the Brahms Requiem at choir. Holy. The Depot afterwards last night. We met the three burly men at the next table –Amy knew one of them–and I must say it has been a while since I’ve had such a good time. We were drunk and silly and affectionate, and I wondered why every hour could not be that merry, or some portion of that merry. The bartenders gave me a sensational birthday present, of rare things bought at yard sales through the years. A plaster Siva I will especially prize.

Realized I have a vitamin D deficiency. That sound is my slapping my head at the stupidity and simplicity of it all.

August 30, 2017

My frogs leap into the pond when I come out onto the side porch, fifty feet away. I think this is arbitrary and ungenerous– as if I were a threat to them! As if I weren’t the one who created their world!

Good classes this far. Several are in two of the classes and there is overlap of subject matter and I’m at pains not to repeat myself too completely. Though I find if I ask a question of them from matter presented one hour earlier, they don’t know or have forgotten the answer.

Student Michael wants me to read MacDonald’s Phantasties with him. Doing so, remembering nothing from the time I read it with Lynda S back in high school. One sees there the root of all things Lewis.

Exhausted afternoons, a giant nap between the actions of morning and evening.

August 28, 2017

Watched the following thought creep through my mind: St. Julian Press is in Houston. The effect of all this hurricane, therefore, is to delay my book. . . .

A student from my last Humanities class, and a student who just signed in to creative writing visited me today, candid and joyful, both of them. I think they are meant by the gods to sweeten my day, and they do, when I allow them to break through the apprehensiveness and integuments of resentment and defense. The first boy studies “pure math” and revels (correctly) in the infinity of options before him. The second boy says that theater should be the center of his ambition, but that the real center of it is to be a great dad, as his own father is. If I have any power to bless, I aim them at their backs.

Made delicious chili. Even then not all the tomatoes were used.

August 26, 2017

Hurricane in Texas. Great cloudy calm in my garden, except for the tomatoes, which put forth red and yellow fruits in a frenzy. I recall Marquez’s “Cease cows!  Life is short!” Cannot look another tomato sandwich in the face.

Beautiful dream at morning: I was hired to oversee the planting of a vast terraced garden, attached to some kind of institute. The person who hired me turned into a goose in the middle of the dream, and I had to think of ways to communicate effectively with a goose. I wanted especially to plant a very tall flower with a vivid umbrel at the top– sort of like a mix between and ironweed and a touch-me-not. The name of the plant began with “G.” Maybe I will find it. The people in the dream knew what I was talking about. That is going to be my motto: “The people in the dream knew what I was talking about.”

Brief, rather joyful visit to the studio. Did a rose and a Kentucky warbler. Sometimes S loves me, like today. Wish I could control that a little better.

Cleaned the pond filter. A handsome young bullfrog rocketed free and curved his way back to the water like a race car.

August 25, 2017

Auditioned for a play at UNCA, opposite an accomplished young man, whom I think I frightened a little. My lines were those of a spent and despairing old man trying to explain to a sanguine young man his reasons for wanting to die. I had said every one of the lines in real life, to myself, in prayer, or to others when the subject came up, they probably thinking I was speaking in the abstract.

First Cantaria rehearsal of the new season. We somehow sound pretty good. Who knows how that happens? My nerves came away jangled. Too much explaining, maybe.

August 24, 2017

A few minutes at the studio– came home when the cleaning lady texted that the doorknob had fallen apart. So far, the fix achieved by tightening screws seems to be working. Rent at the studio being raised for the first time since I moved to the Phil Mechanic. Woke with agonizing leg cramps, which reached briefly the point of “unbearable.” Again, the problem of having to bear what cannot be borne.

August 23, 2017

I have been a poet for 51 years. Here is the thing to be grateful for: I still am, and better than ever.

August 22, 2017

Peaceful darkness, the bugs making their little chirps in the foliage.. Someone is learning both the harmonica and the recorder. Sound like they’re playing right outside my window. Perhaps they are. I haven’t looked.

Amazing day, in that I spent most of it in an extended fantasy, so sweet I didn’t want to leave, even when my daylight self began to be creeped out a little. Am I trying to change the narrative at this late date?

I realized what to do to destroy the Boy, how it would have the advantage of being both unanswerable and just. Oddly, even as the revelation came, the inclination departed. Once the weapon was in my hand I heard myself saying “Eh, why bother?” Most amazing. Because of my world view, I think of this as an admonition from the world of Spirit. Then I wonder why he received no admonition from the world of Spirit when he was about to wrong me. Perhaps he did, and simply ignored it. In any case, having the power at long last allowed me to shrug it off. It is a mistake, I know, for there is scarcely anything his fall wouldn’t benefit. But not me. Not this time. The fury is gone, and with it the energy. I still look for justice elsewhere.

Neither my students nor I will be prepared for class tomorrow.

August 21, 2017

Along with ten million others, took in the eclipse. Picked glasses up at the university, then came back and watched it with DJ at 62. Quite amazing, though we didn’t have totality here. The strangeness of the twilight, I realized at last, was because it came from everywhere at once, and didn’t merely flow from the darkening east. Memorable.

Heroic weeding Sunday, maybe too much, for I’m sore and back in muscle cramp mode, which I had left behind for long enough to be taken, this time, unaware.

First day of class. So far, good enough. Thought Sam might appear. My students gladdened my heart.

August 20, 2017

So for a week I have been immersed in imaginary worlds, doing important revisions or completions of Night Sleep, The One with the Beautiful Necklaces, and Sam-sam. The energy of writing and revision is the energy that goes into journaling, apparently. I’d rather be writing the novels. Steady, if slow rise in my spirits since the bottom, which came soon after the return from Ireland. Reason for ascent? Nothing–nothing actually changed except maybe that the writing has been going well. My damnable resilience, which, like hope, is the last affliction. Unexpected pleasure from making a vast pot of chili/stew from my own eggplant and my own whopping harvest of red and yellow tomatoes. Cleaned the pond filter and found a minnow that was flat out pink. Dredging up old manuscripts, which are by and large good, but the problem now was the problem then–what to do with them? How to bring them to conclusion? Pink hibiscus. White swamp hibiscus. Cosmos and cornflower.

           
August 14, 2017

Distant thunder.

Departmental retreat. Things change, and I let them flow through my hands, assuming I will not be there to be affected when the changes kick in.

The juggernaut of events rolls past the point where I feel I can have any useful thing to say, any complete understanding. Here’s a dilemma. I believe in Free Speech. I believe there is either Free Speech or there is not, and that cherry-picking– THIS free speech but not THAT free speech-- makes the light go out all at once. I do not believe Hate Speech is essentially different from Free Speech, however lamentable, however jaw-droppingly ignorant. I do not believe that hurt feelings, or even righteous outrage, is the red line that ends Free Speech. This is a conviction I barely have the courage to express, for there is dogma on the left as well as dogma on the right, and one treads carefully. When I reprehend an opinion I hear expressed publically, I assume the remedy is education– somehow to grab someone at the right time in their life and make them justify the things they believe in accordance with reason and Faith and whatever authority rules their hearts. Or, if they are lost, to save those around them by the twin powers of reason and example. I don’t think we can defeat racism– or any other ism– by telling it to shut up. Historical Nazism in Germany would not have been ended by the war, I think, if German citizens had not been dragged to the concentration camps and made to look at the end point of their leaders’ rhetoric, if they had not looked on their ruined cities and seen the outcome of racial delusion. I think our new brand of it has been dealt a blow by the baboons in Charlottesville showing off in front of the cameras and embarrassing everybody who is not lost in the morass of white supremacist rhetoric.  It could be that my leftist FaceBook feed deceives me, but it seems to me that there must be five hundred people outraged and heart-sore for every white supremacist carrying a torch in Virginia. Is this not, in its way, well? Is this not a kind of victory? I want racism to be talked and reasoned to death, to be outlived by generations untainted by it. I think for it to go underground, unheard and embittered, however satisfying to us personally in the moment, will engender something still filthier down the road.

Watched several hours of night rat shooting on You Tube. Satisfying in ways I dare not explain even to myself.

Went on line to discover what courses I am teaching this semester. Mildly disappointed.

I said in conversation about the teaching of writing that what I stand for in all my disciplines–teaching, writing, acting, painting– is CLARITY. One of my colleagues adds “but there are different kinds of clarity,” intending to excuse the opacity of academic-speak from the rigors of clarity.  Its not being the time nor the place stops me from saying, “No, there are not. Clarity is clarity, and what is obscure or muddled is in error, regardless of the excuses it want to make for itself”  I am such a Platonist. . . .

August 13, 2017

Should I really be sleeping this much?
           

August 12, 2017

Bestirred myself to go with DJ to a recital put on by the Hart brothers at All Souls. It was lovely, the presentation suave, the selections perfect for their voices and the space. Ives' “The Housatanic at Stockbridge” a shocking masterpiece. Constantly reminding myself that there is always something interesting to do. One doesn’t have to be in Dublin. Noticed how many artists think their art is a dying art– Lieder is a dying art, theater is dying, painting is dead. Yet we trundle on.  Refugees from Charlottesville at the studio.

August 11, 2017

The birthday of Johnny Secaur, the kid who lived across the street from me for a while on Goodview. I remember his birthday. I remember he tried to grow radishes in a box. It worked.  He made sculptures out of soap and glued them to rocks. He moved to 1117 Lower Drive in Kent. I thought we’d be friends forever.

Napped on the couch. Dreamed that I had driven a copy of Nimmo’s Quay to the Druid in Galway. I was the very first to arrive in an immense parking lot, that was sort of under water and sort of wasn’t. I delivered the script, but when I tried to find the truck I had driven, I couldn’t find it. Daunting, because I thought I’d parked it precisely where it could be found easily again. Plus, I had to find it before the sea rose and washed it away.

After Washington Place in Omaha, three directors asked to see it. Not one of them read it after it was sent. Some theater guy in Illinois begged to read the Lincoln trilogy, underlining I Promise to Read it.  He never did. JB in New York agreed– or asked, I forget which-- to read new plays, which I sent, and he has not read one of them. I do know this is the proximate cause of the Great and Everlasting Stall, but short of assassination or arson, I do not know how to hammer past it. Send periodic notes, “You promised to read. You will never regret reading”? Hold loved ones for ransom? Ignited by receiving today a rejection from a small press that took 13 months to respond to NSDL, and clearly had, in all that time, not opened the file.

Some time at the studio, mostly wasted. Flocks of people fleeing from the heat in Florida. Lost important keys.

Binchois on the CD

Half thought to audition for Montford’s Othello, till discovering it was a vanity project to show that a woman can play Othello. A woman can say the lines, of course, but beyond that, no. All the work that goes into an honest production pretty much wasted on a stunt. Do I think all gender-blind casting is a stunt? I pretty much do, but it’s because I tend to be evidence based in my thought, and I never saw such an experiment that came near working. I never saw such an experiment except that the ONLY thing you thought about was how well or ill the person was filling the part designed for someone else. Saw V Redgrave in The Tempest at the Globe, and she was a great actor but a mediocre Prospero– even ignoring the fact that she had to go to the back every now and then to have her lines whispered to her. OK, men can be a scream as Lady Bracknell, and I can imagine a killer Julia Caesar. But otherwise– Why don’t they let me play in the NBA? I can dribble; I can shoot a basket.

AG is to direct Uranium 235. Allowed to think of it as a choice, but the choice was actually that or cancel. It will be fine. I always liked AG and miss working with him.

A series of face-slaps recently. I should be used to it- and I AM, actually, but amazed, like Guildenstern at the opening of R&G Are Dead that the same damn thing can keep happening, the same wry tone be struck, with such unnatural and deadening consistency.

I look up, and it’s evening—

Binchois, like the calling of a seabird. . . .

August 10, 2017

Skin of my hand whitening and peeling off, like little bits of frost. It’s always something.

Finished Nimmo’s Quay, realizing it’s the third version of the play I pretty much always write in or coming home from Ireland– where the American meets and loses the love of his life in Ireland. Wonder where THAT comes from?

August 9, 2017

Cool morning. Turned down (by my count for the 26th time) for a state arts grant. Two girls from downstate got them . I can hear the conversation now: “Isn’t it time for some women’s voices?” That are bad, that we will never hear from again, but at least it’s better than giving one to him.

Letter from Daniel Rakov saying that The Great Comet, which gave every indication of running forever, will close before Labor Day, torpedoed by the controversy surrounding the naming of Mandy Patinkin to play Pierre. Patinkin did something to irritate someone, I forget what, and now the producers think that the controversy will not allow them to fill key cast openings. The letter reads a little like strategy to terrify troublemakers into line, but if it tells the truth, and unless things work in ways I don’t anticipate, what I thought would be a financial triumph for me will leave me with a loss of 3/4 of my investment. On a hit show, for a while the biggest on Broadway. It could be that I don’t understand the financial process and that everything will be well. Generally the universe makes me pay for each hopeful anticipation.

Will probably finish Nimmo’s Quay today, based on notes I took for two concluding scenes while in the Racquet Club café. Each time a little bell of joy goes off at a really good line or a really profound shade of meaning, I remind myself that quality has been, by and large, irrelevant to my career as a writer, and perhaps to the art of literature as now practiced in America. Having done the best work means practically nothing. The odd thing is that when I gather the courage to say this publicly, people nod as if to say everybody but me knew this all along.

August 7, 2017

The natural fall of these summer days is: bed late, sometimes after midnight; up early, often before 5, off to the gym, writing, errands, studio; heavy nap around noon. Up again at 3 PM, write until I can’t anymore, then some TV, then bed around midnight. Today it was the Racquet Club and then getting both cars inspected, then the making of eggplant chili. Stalled in the second act of Nimmo’s Quay.  General frustration, like a kind of heavy lace collar, chaffing and ridiculous.

August 6, 2017

Day of the atom bomb.

Spent some time in the studio, getting rid of the bad feeling that haunted me there yesterday.

If one door had been left open, if one gate–even one–had been left unlocked, one bar of the cage loosened, I would ne'er have striven as thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

August 5, 2017

Calm morning outside (after tempestuous rains) though something was going on within, for I woke breathless, agitated, and disoriented. Whatever struggle I had in dreams did not follow me out. I think the illness still affects me in ways I am failing to interpret coherently.

Harvested quantities of eggplant, began to think of ways to cook them all. Is there eggplant fudge?

Theater at the Magnetic last night. It made an odd juxtaposition with the theater I saw in Galway and Dublin, and the effort to define the differences is filling up the dark of the morning. All the theater in Ireland was excellent even when the plays were not themselves very good. The works that were not very good were still Of A Piece, everywhere the same quality, everywhere informed by the same recognizable imaginative energy-- their second-rateness an overall second-rateness, a statement achieved, a gesture fluid and complete if not transcendent. In the excellent pieces, the gesture was transcendent. “Wholeness” seemed to be the basic quality from the worst to the best. The play I saw last night– called Six Knots– was not bad, but neither was it whole. Sometimes it sailed ahead, sometimes it jerked and wobbled like a kid on training wheels. Once I lit upon this truth, I realized that was what ails most original work that does not quite succeed in Asheville, at the Magnetic and elsewhere. The limbs are not pulled together into a single body. The play was likeable–the end twist was especially satisfying– but it rambled across the stage like a hedgehog, all bristles and protuberances, sometimes flashing with wit, sometimes going a page or so without a single line that needed to be kept. Some of this may be the fact that it was still in previews. Some of it may be that the Magnetic’s generous custom is to allow works on stage when the playwright thinks they’re ready, not when they actually are. Most of it was uncertainty in the writing. Why? Is playwriting taught in some significantly different way in Ireland than it is here? I realized that if the playwright came to me for help, I would go through the piece with him, marking the lines that sag or fail to contribute, the implication being that a lovely design is just marred here and there by accidents his ear did not catch. But would that be the truth? Are lines almost automatically impeccable when the inspiration is impeccable? I will probably teach playwriting at the university one more time. I have one more time to get it right. In addition, I seem to hit shows, invariably, on the night of the Cackling Showboat, the one in the first row who shrieks piercingly, indiscriminately, often prematurely at EVERYTHING, thus commandeering the experience of the entire audience, and making it little more than a referendum on–for or against–her own. I heard her conversation afterwards, and apparently it’s quite conscious. She noted with indignation that she was getting corrective glances from her neighbors. ANYWAY, the local theater experience is especially challenging, partially because one feels responsible, in a way; partially because it is not always possible to tell what people meant, and, if they fail, whether their available resources failed or they simply meant the wrong thing. Perhaps I should have stopped the playwright last night and said, “At three or four moments, this is masterful.,” hoping he might get the full point.

Here I’ve worked myself into a lather and the cafés aren’t even open.

On this date in 1998, Ellen and I and David Wingate and a Honey whose name I have forgotten opened Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the green door. Oh, our ambitions then! The energy I seemed to have!

The day has become supremely bright and cool and clear. One wants simply to sit in a chair and stare.

August 4, 2017

Awoke from a dream in which I had gone downtown to apply for a grant for $2500 to start an arts magazine. “Downtown” in this case was a diaphanous, crystalline web high in the air, where people had offices like starts scattered in a silvery sky. I was aware I didn’t really need the grant, but I had not been downtown in a long while. . .

August 3, 2017

Towhee interrogating in the morning dark.

Starting through the mass of accumulated mail, ½ of which can be tossed at the outset. Duke Energy says I used half the energy this summer as I did last. Who knows?
I sit brooding in the dark—

People ask “Did you have a wonderful time in Ireland?” and I say “YES!” But did I? I was sick, clearly or underneath, mildly or fiercely, the whole time. I did have two moments in Dublin when I wept with the old joy, danced with the old exultation. But the rest– I feel like an old bear at riverside, dipping his paw into the stream of experience, hoping as often as possible to haul in a fat memorable salmon. Maybe I’m too close to it still. Let it unbundle and spread out.

I'm treating my present almost ludicrous exhaustion as a reaction to yesterday’s immunization.

This day, weather-wise and in appearance, has been perfect for my nature. Bright but dappled, coolish-warmish. I visited Zach, did a little shopping, went to the butcher’s and bought meat which disgusted me when I got it home, lay down on the couch for a moment to absorb the perfection of the day. Hours later, after many fitful but charming dreams, I began a vast dream which stands to my waking eye now in vibrant clarity. I was dressed as I remember from my youth, white t-shirt, cut-off jeans shorts. A companion and I were high on a mountain road, the mountains very high indeed, but still covered in forest. We had stopped for a moment, after having, apparently, been riding our skateboards along the mountain road. Here and there in the distant forests were glimmers of paleness, gigantic works of art set up in almost inaccessible places.  I began telling my companion of my friend Nick, how I had followed him as had done the paintings from inspiration and almost inconceivable labor high up on the edges of the world. My companion began to grin. I said, “What?”
“We all know the story. We all know YOUR story, how you made that incredible art, crawling from crag to crag with a paintbrush in your teeth–“ as he went on, “Nick” began to vanish from memory, as if I had in fact made him up, and I began to wonder if it all had been me from the first, and I had invented Nick to shield me from the immensity of the thing I had done.

August 2, 2017

Woke feeling myself, and even better than myself, as though a great cleansing had happened in the night.

Spent yesterday morning arguing with the Obstacle Nurse at MAYHEC, who snippily informed me that I could have none of the things (such as a prescription refill) that I had by the end of the day. I want to call her back and say, “I was right all down the line, wasn’t I? You just wasted our time.” I do turn into kind of a prick pretty quick in situations like that. I start to investigate, but then I think, “Your patience in other matters earns you this.”

I knew I was sick when, on the plane watching Beauty and the Beast with no sound, I wept uncontrollably at the Prince’s restoration scene. I thought of my mother. Why couldn’t magic winds have come out and lifted her up?

First thing in the morning, the washing machine blew a gasket, or whatever caused a flood on the kitchen floor. I put my recovery and my back-homeness to the test by driving to Lowe’s to get a new one before the floor was even dry. The walk from the front door to Major Appliances was almost not doable. Bought it from a man named Nureyev. A UNCA colleague was standing by to counsel in favor of the stainless steel hoses.

Visit with the doctor, got pneumonia vaccine and a blood test. Considered the possibility that what I’ve been calling cellulities is something else, since the leg is never red or hot–though it usually was back when this round of attacks began. Dr guessed bronchitis. I didn’t think so– but who am I?

Supper with DJ. I ate about 1/4 of it.

August 1, 2017

I don’t sleep well on the first night home, and I didn’t sleep well last night; A kind of Irish advertising film keep playing in my head, I think related to the cellulitis which I still fight, and which often, if it gets bad enough, has a hallucination phase. In some ways it’s the worse part: looped vivid hell without escape.

Of course, when my plane arrived the limo had not shown up. Even when I PAY people to take care of me it’s a fail. If I could just have slipped into a car. . . if I could just have gotten home without incident, feeling crap-like as I did. . . .Derek the redneck taxi driver rescued me for a neat $60. Texted the limo driver this AM; he had forgotten to write it down.

When the light came up I saw that the pond filter was clogged. Went out and cleaned it, and that much normal activity made me feel better.  My cosmos are seven feet tall. Something yellow is blooming behind the cosmos. That’s what I could see by the first light of morning. Pulled out some walnut saplings, by the end of which action I was exhausted and slept all afternoon. Still quite sick. Circe’s welcoming-home love is almost unendurable.

The painting I bought from Trinity Gallery is by Paul Proud and called Distant Light.