April 27, 2021
Finishing a new play filled me with professional zeal, and I have spent much of the morning sending scripts to theaters. I had sent nothing out (or at least failed to record sending anything out) since 2018. Some of the plays I had to download and read, having forgotten what they were about. Having read a pile of plays recently renews my enthusiasm for my own work.
April 26, 2021
Sweetboi was sitting on his limb when I came into, the kitchen, perfectly silent. Perhaps he didn’t want to wake me. We greeted each other; I tossed him his neck bone, and the day began.
Ann thinks the dance is ready for the stage. I have no expertise in judging that, so my confidence rests on hers. Danced with plantar fasciatus. It is possible not to think of it.
April 25, 2021
Finished Make Me a Willow Cabin at Your Gate. It felt good to be writing for the stage again.
Catbirds have joined the other birds at the suet. The catbirds always come as a pair.
A weekend of much ZOOMING. I pray to the gods of meetings that there could be one meeting one time that did not have preliminaries, introductions, sharing, explanations. Just start the meeting. One this morning didn’t touch the actual matter until 26 minutes in.
Got some of the annuals in after the freeze and before yesterday’s deep rain. Parts of the garden look like they’ve been exactly that way for 100 years– which is how I want it.
April 22, 2021
Exquisite dream: like the youngest son in a fairy tale, I’ve left home and wander through landscapes and townlands. I have a tent, but my only other resource is a pot of dry beans. People along the way seem eager to buy these beans. I think it’s for food, but it turns out that drums and instruments do not function properly unless they’re filled with these beans. I come to a building, like the Phil Mechanic, except in the middle of open fields, which is a sort of commune of artists and musicians. I decide I want to stay there, so I use the beans to help me make new kinds of instruments, and when the musicians have a concert, they invite me to join. I’m embarrassed at the first concert because I don’t have the right clothes, but otherwise everything goes well. I’m given a room in the commune, where I construct a giant instrument of wood and ivory and beans, like a great organ, which can be played from my room but reverberates through the whole complex. I invent a kind of oboe which, filled with the beans, can make any sound in the world. We become famous, and people journey to hear us. I’m very happy. I dig a plot on the grounds so I can plant the beans and assure the supply. A young man named Ping arrives to help with the garden. Ping is handsome, but I don’t think of him in that way until one night he climbs into my bed and embraces me. In the embrace I think “Is this well?” The answer is that it is well. In the dream I lie in Ping’s arms imagining the movement of a strange cut-out moon over the bean garden.
Sound of maple keys dinging the side of the house.
Sound of flashing ripped from the roof next door, like continuous thunder, like a bear digging in through the windows. I stopped hearing it once I realized what it was.
April 21, 2021
Note to self: do not drink a whole pot of tea before retiring.
A is satisfied with the dance, which I can do now from muscle memory, without having to think of every beat.
Temperature threatens to dip into the 20's tonight. I cover the elephant’s ears with ceramic pots. I get a leopard skin sheet (how did I come by that?) To cover the emerging blades of the scarlet cosmos. Pray that it suffice.
April 20, 2021
ZOOM Vestry meeting. What wisdom did I come away with? Most people are more patient with people’s hurt feelings than I. After things have been explained and what could be made right is, I expect them to get on with their lives. This doesn’t always happen.
Worked hard on Make Me a Willow Cabin, it being now full-formed in my head and needing only to be typed out.
Garden work, mostly re-digging and hoeing the beds that my mis-planting left vacant. Added to the cairn. Added to the back garden.
April 18, 2021
“Saint Patrick’s Breastplate” on Spotify.
ZOOM meeting about what plays to select for Magnetic’s next 10-minute festival. The burden of my life is to be told “Pick your five favorite,” then to pick my five favorite, then to sit through a meeting where everybody says, “Oh, I could only narrow it down to fourteen, so, in alphabetical order----”
ZOOM meeting with FA’s book club to discuss FW. Exhilarating and, I think, unique in my life. To be paid attention to rivals sex, and has fewer dangers.
Did a little gardening, mostly day 1 of the war against the bamboo. My experiment with sowing annuals in the fall was a failure. Must start over there.
April 17, 2021
A and I went to the Montford Amphitheater to rehearse the dance in situ. I arrived early, of course, and as I waited I realized that, though I had answered nature’s call earlier in the morning, I was about to be afflicted with immediate and unstoppable diarrhea. I’d already noted that the park restrooms were padlocked, and the Amphitheater was not open. I ran behind the costume trailers, as deep into the scrub as I could, in as much cover as I could find, removed my clothes lest they should be soiled, and let fly. As in an old story where just what the hero needs happens to be present, I was surrounded by shrubs (amazing that I had no idea what they were) with broad leaves, so I managed to clean up and meet Ann for the rehearsal, which went swimmingly. With her vertigo and my short breath we had a contest to see who would actually make it back up the hill. We both did.
Woke again (after a couple times this week) in a dream about the theater. I had taken the lead in a light hearted romp, but on opening night realized I had memorized none of my lines. Was wondering how much I could ad-lib when waking freed me.
Cold day, rain early, cold brightness now.
Video released of a 13 year old boy running away from police. Running away from police, who ordered him to stop and show his hands, and when he did they shot him dead. He’d had a gun, they say, but when he turned to the cop with his hands up, he did not. Had he been pushing a howitzer the moment before, at the moment of his murder he was unarmed. Do not shoot people. If they run away from you, do not shoot them. If they fail to obey your orders, do not shoot them. If they have not shot at you, do not shoot them. How hard can this be? It could be a matter merely of conservation of energy: surely it is easier NOT to shoot than to shoot.
Working on the play, at the part now which I like best, when the matter is in place and the fortifying and ornamentation might begin.
Day ends with a journey to the Flood Gallery in Black Mountain for A and L’s show of monoprints. I buy one that I think is wistful. I think a mother son show is lovely. As I drove east the mountains were lit from behind me into the most beautiful and delicately graduated quilt of greens and gold-greens and pinkish greens and pale greens. Talked for a while with J. She calls the woodchuck “whistle-pig” after the way of countrymen.
April 15, 2021
Planted mullein and tickseed. Added to the stone cairn. Pulled out honeysuckle.
Walked enough at Lowe’s and in Biltmore and the River Arts District to get all my steps in. Inclined for half a minute to look for a studio, didn’t. For the first time in 13 months sat at the terrace of a café and drank cappuccino. First cappuccino since Dublin. Drank coffee in a space I realized used to be the Asheville Arts Council. Where has that gone? Does it still exist? Is it still irrelevant to Asheville arts?
Sweettboi perched on the kitchen limb with me standing right beneath him. He screamed for a long time. I think we were having a conversation. I posted the video on Facebook and somebody responded, “Boy, he has a story to tell you.”
SS sets the release of WP for May. FA sends me a list of questions from his book club for when we Zoom discuss FW on Sunday. Excellent and thoughtful questions, actually, and though they might not do so for others, they reflected to me one of the conditions of my life as an artist: absolute isolation. Everything I have written or published I have done so without an editor, without a circle of readers, without a single reader, without exterior agency of any kind, and this is not a brag but a lamentation. I’m sending smoke signals from the world’s weird rim. Editors accept and publish while scarcely making a comment. Can they actually have thought it was perfect? Material I send to people from time to time wondering what they think disappears invariably without comment. A couple of times former students or local colleagues and I have set up reading circles, for which I critique their work in detail and they say “I’ll get right back with my comments” and they never do. I have only my own critical faculties. Though I try to stand outside myself and read objectively, it doesn’t always work. Or ever work. How would I know? The one exception to this is when a play goes to production a certain degree of critical exchange must happen. I probably have terrible habits and nobody points them out to me. To go by actual comments made, maybe ten people in my circle of friends have ever read anything I’ve written. I’m sure it’s more, but a dome of reticence falls over everything. I’ll tell FA and his club, “That happened because I had not one to suggest it was problematic and I didn’t think of it myself.”
The thrashers tear out deep beakfulls of suet. It’s a pleasure to watch them.
April 13, 2021
Day divided three ways. The first of it initiated when I realized I had 170 one-act plays to read and evaluate by Friday. It was too discouraging to note how far I had gotten, but I made some inroads. Few really gripped the imagination. Many were competent. Many, in the spirit of the times, featured transitional characters or stereotypical lesbians. I meant to work on my own play, but I was so disgusted with the form in general that I couldn’t.
Quite strenuous gardening, re-digging ad replanting the back garden. My stamina is greater than it was, so the projects can be bigger. Bought several things to plant, and though quite a large section was liberated from overgrowing grasses, only phlox got into the ground. Moved the big border rocks into a cairn– I hope it looks spooky and ancient– and St. Francis under the lilacs, where he at least has afternoon shade. Each time I reach into a clump of grass I expect to encounter a snake, but I never do.
Part three was the ZOOM evaluation of the parish questionnaire by Holy Cow consultants. Reflexively I loathe and scorn such things, but this turned out to be sobering and informative. Our view of ourselves is that we are unfriendly, unaccommodating, the centers of power isolated from the people. We look to the clergy for everything, leadership, comfort, problem-solving, and do not support them to that same degree. There are good things, too, but they are to be cherished rather than to be worked on. I did in fact recognize myself and my attitudes in many of the things revealed. I came to the Vestry at an interesting time– the tribulations balanced at least partially by the fact that there cannot be actual meetings, and I can be sipping cold tea at my own desk.
April 11, 2021
Delivery man brought my black lace elderberry, and I planted that outside the street fence. I had energy left to uproot more wild honeysuckle vine than I had uprooted in my life. Replanted petunias that were not taking to their pots. A man walking his dog offered to come by and spray poison the whole strip of land where I was pulling the vines. Politely I declined.
Much work on the nature book. I felt a coolness on the top of my head, and wondered where the sudden draft had come from. I waved my hand up there, and dislodged a wasp whose wings had made the little wind. Two days ago when I was hiking I stopped for a strange sound. After a few seconds I realized it was the sound of hair on my knuckle rubbing against a leaf.
April 10, 2021
Drizzly rain, excellent for the garden. What I’d planned for the garden is pretty much put in, though I may still go shopping at the local nurseries.
I feel less flattened today. Normal. Do I want things to be normal, or do I want them to change utterly, irreversibly, because of the blade of my rage? Asked at different times, I will give different answers.
Hard work on the new nature book. Sometimes my eyes bother me and sometimes they do not.
Day declining into evening under the most stupendous rain. TV interrupted by warnings to people in South Carolina to take cover from tornados.
April 9, 2021
Something in atmosphere last night opened the heavens up, and God and I had our most titanic quarrel in a long time. Of course, it was completely one-sided, and that but added to the fury.
. . .
Ann canceled rehearsal, so I rose and drove to Bad Fork, where the Parkway crosses the Hard Times Road at a graffitied and reverberating bridge. I’d been there many times, and nearly always turned south from the bridge. This time turned north, and found the MTS trail a few yards beyond, a piece of it I don’t remember walking before. Mature stands of trees, and the most shapely hemlocks imaginable. I saw no bird but a pileated, only once so much as raised the binoculars to my face, but the bird symphony coursed all around me. I stood in a rhododendron grove and listened to a thrush claim it as his own. The hill was covered in mountain laurel and rhododendron, and must be all a pink and orange flame at blooming time. The psychomachia of the night before colored the journey. I felt drained, colorless, flattened– not unhappy, but without the vertical dimension I discover most of my thoughts have. I’d driven God away. Who could blame him? What a barrage! I savored it, wondering if atheists or wholly secular people feel that way all the time. A small trail led off westward, leading to a smooth spot where someone had built a cairn of stones. I added a piece of lichened bark to the cairn, and explored my thoughts. Was I sorry? I was not. I had said exactly what I meant, exactly what seems to me, lacking testimony from the other side, true. What had been said had been said.
That hike was the first this year to be achieved without meeting a single person– though the cairn and shoe prints in the mud attested that the world was not unpeopled. When I got back to the bridge I heard voices, two hikers edging the hill southward, talking in the loud voices visitors to the wild cannot seem to contain. I waited for them on my side of the road. Turns out they were a couple from Maine, and were hiking through to the Outer Banks. This amazed me. I was tired going a little way down MTS and coming back again. They knew Exeter, and we reminisced about the Loaf and Ladle, now, alas, departed. They were cheerful, and happy to be in each other’s company.
Wrote an essay featuring Sweetboi and Denise.
April 8, 2021
Denied the Guggenheim. I thought my project was pretty interesting. My brain is thinking it’s no matter, but my stomach feels the way it does when you’ve cried a long time.
Sweetboi trying to screech over the sound of Tony’s mower.
Center stage at the bird feeder now is my pair of brown thrashers, returning from last year, sleek and confident and, apparently, very hungry for suet.
Three days of planting finally finished today. Watered thoroughly, though the forecasts tease about rain.
Zach finds deep scratches on my back, I try to reach the place with my fingers and cannot. We decide I was attacked by a succubus in my sleep.
Ann and my dance gets more precise as she explains why I’m doing certain things. When just waving your hands in the air becomes, “honoring three point on the horizon,” it gets exponentially better.
Finished watching Ken Burns’ Hemingway last night. Did he know when he was a handsome, eager kid that he was going to bitch nearly everything he touched? I remember, in my Hemingway phase, admiring his style, but the excerpts read in the film sounded almost like parody. I wrote a paragraph. The words were fine. Honest. True. It was a good paragraph. Would his fame have been possible without the sentimental, boyish masculinity pervading between the wars? The ungracious, un-shareable thought I was thinking when I got up to make a cocktail was “I am a better writer than he, and have done infinitely less harm.” My Hemingway is at the river office. I need to pick it up and read, see what still coheres.
April 6, 2021
Since it was a flawless day, drove to the Hard Times trail head. On the water were Canadas and a grebe and two hooded mergansers. The blessing was that in the rose tangle along the trail I spotted a little blue bird that turned out to be a parula warbler, my first unambiguous sighting. The forest was full of people walking their dogs or cycling, the lake studded with fishermen. One will have to go deeper and deeper for solitude, when one wants solitude. When I came home I addressed myself to the long overdue shipment of plants from Plant Delights, from whom I will not order again. Most of the plants were rootbound and had to be pounded and dug from their boxes. Planted lily of the Nile and elephant’s ear and acanthus. Exhaustion came upon me. Still more to plant tomorrow. Sweetboi perched in the maple and watched me, not even screaming the way he usually does, patiently waiting for me to go inside and fetch him his meat. Work goes well on the play. Plays and novels require completely different kinds of attention, and it’s hard to work on both at one time. My mind is a procession of strange, re-evaluating memories. It’s a kind of Purgatory, for moments I thought were settled or inconsequential reappear in ways that others might have experienced them, in which I was mean or foolish. Luckily I’m able to shrug them off and go on, the general (and true) explanation being that I didn’t know better and therefore could hardly have done better.
April 4, 2021
Blinding bright, sharply cool Easter Day. Begin by feeding the birds. The thrush pair perched on the rim of the feeder, waiting for me to bring something to their liking. Eastertide has been rich and meaningful for me. Perhaps singing the Good Friday canticles put me in the mood. I’ve been engaged in a new way with the particulars of life. Getting the vaccine has filled me with hope. I rise in the morning conflicted about whether I want to write or garden or hike, happy that I want to do many thing and there is too little time rather than none and there is too much time. Began my first play in more than a year. Almost unbearably desirous to get back to painting. That is the one ambition that offers actual, material difficulties.
Late afternoon: Chant on Pandora. Dug and planted: filled a barrel with paper and dirt and planted lavender. Planted white lilies; transplanted meadow rue which lay in the way of the lilies. Feeling of well-being. Cristo e’ ristorto.
April 3, 2021
Holy Saturday
Looking for damage done by the deep cold. The magnolia, which suffers at such times, had already finished blooming. I’d begun distributing purple pansies among planters. In most planters they survived fine; in one, they withered and died. There is either a magical or a scientific explanation, but I know neither one. Watched The Ten Commandments, the highest Camp film imaginable. Each scene, each passage of acting, is campier than the last. Even the extraordinary beauty of the male actors in their bible costumes is a kind of camp. The actors, except You Brynner, are dying to look directly at the camera. Still, when Moses says, “The Lord of Hosts will do battle for us,” chills go down my spine.
April 2, 2021
Good Friday. I remember standing in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, down low in the ground, with the rock split and the place shown where the blood of God poured onto the skull of Adam, redeeming all forever. I hunkered back in the shadows so I could weep my fill. I do so now.
Ann calls off rehearsal, being drained by a horrible faculty senate meeting. That is far from my experience now. Good riddance and good riddance.
Listened to the Good Friday service we recorded previously. We were seven men of the choir and we sounded– divine. I’d sung this service twenty years without ever hearing it. Not one voice can be picked out of the fabric of the chants. The motet rests on me as a church upon a slab of stone. I was happier with an action of mine than I have been in a long time.
April 1, 2021
Damaging wind through the night. I had to go looking for my empty aluminum barrel.
Sweetboi and Denise came separately today, he just after dawn, she at about noon; he on the fence, close enough that I could touch him if I dared; she very high up so, if I were she, I would be dizzy looking down. Double-dipping. Maybe they have chicks already and not a moment to lose.
Thursdays are problematic because I have to find something to do while the cleaning lady is here. No one said I couldn’t be here while they work, but I remember being a house cleaner myself back in New York, and how nobody was ever there. That seemed the way to do it. Today I went to the river office, took up old poems– by old I mean 1974, 1978– and reworked them. It was fun picking those old strands out of the weave. They were still alive, still workable, still issues. To some degree, purity was the reason my early poems weren’t better than they were. I was satisfied with setting down exactly what the vision of the moment revealed, without the luxurious sidesteps and detours that bring a little width to the work. I left the reader only one or two gates by which to enter. I heard only the one strong voice and wasted the echoes.
