Enneagram

 

April 14, 2022

We read 900 little plays for the Magnetic festival. Now I’ve read the ones the other readers liked, and maybe 4 or 5 were as good as mine, none better, and my little piece represents and hour out of a day amid easily sixty of its own kind. I do believe I can read with a reasonably impartial eye, and unless I’m deceived in that, I have opened a new door (or reopened an old one) in the theater, complex, limpid, unique, uniquely eloquent and adventurous, the dialog in most places perfect. So when I consider my relative obscurity, I must first rail at God for making everything so difficult, then at myself for letting that difficulty detain me. I have not sacrificed very much to sell my work, whatever I sacrificed actually to make it. Somehow I didn’t expect to have to make and sell both. My time as a painter should have corrected that, but didn’t, quite. I found a theater in DC which might be interested in my lengthening list of American history plays, but each time I sit down to write the query letter, despair like lead weighs down my spirit, turns my fingers to You Tube videos. 

Took an Enneagram Test on line. I’m type 4, the Artist. As if that were a surprise.

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The report reports: 

Generally, Fours are intuitive, sensitive, impressionable, quite, introspective, passionate, romantic,elegant, witty, imaginative, and self-expressive.

Fours get into conflicts by being moody, emotionally demanding, self-absorbed, withholding, temperamental, dramatic, pretentious, and self-indulgent.

At their best, Fours are creative, inspired, honest with themselves, emotionally strong, humane, selfaware, discreet, and self-renewing.

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I see all that, except I THINK that the only one of the conflict markers I have is “withholding.” Maybe pretentious, but would I see that myself? 

Glittering spring evening. I’m not at Maundy Thursday service because of an onslaught of diarrhea that I think might have been brought on by a glass of grape juice. Can’t take things like I used to. 

Tore out vines and planted mint to beat a storm which never came. There will be no end to the tearing out of vines.