Dublin 3

March 9, 2020

            Late, late, just coming back from the bars I stopped at after the theater. One guy was singing his heart out with Billy Joel. Beggars are more numerous and strident than in times past, and more clearly bogus. Rain all day. It looked thicker in the lamplight than it felt. Walked to the National Gallery. In the Jack Yeats room I burst into tears. For the Road and The Singing Horseman in particular remind me of the high and great times here when I believed I could be an Irishman loved by an Irishman. As close as it came, it was never quite real. I wept for that. I wept for the decades when I thought I would be a painter and stand in a company with Jack Yeats. That too did never come to pass. The pain was sharper, deeper at that moment than it is now. Blessings on that. Visited Loretto at the Trinity Gallery, gave her a copy of FW and made a date for lunch on Wednesday. The play at the Abbey was The Fall of the Second Republic, and though it ended on the wrong foot, it was funny and clever and well done. The actor Andrew Bennett, whom I’ve seen in every visit to Dublin, played the rotten Teaschocg. Can never cross over to America, because of its concentration on the Irish parliamentary system – a mystery to Americans--and its luxurious use of the word “cunt.” Walking home from the theater reminded me why I love Dublin so much, young and alive and grubby, unwholesome, elemental, eternal.