August 29, 2023

Intermittent cloudburst. I stood in the garden ready to weed when the first one came, so don’t blame me for the weeds. 

One lady at the post office I try to avoid because she looks up the address I put on every one of my parcels, and there is inevitably a wrangle about “this doesn’t come up.” No one else does this. No other clerk at the PO ever challenged me about an address. I do not slap on addresses without looking them up. Today I had four parcels and she challenged three. My rage was barely containable. “Do you want me to send them anyway?” I managed to hiss from between clenched jaws, “yes.”

Repaired and repainted. 

 

August 28, 2023

JD seems to be happy with the beginnings of my libretto for The Green Cockatoo. I’ll work on that during the largamente at the beach. 

 

August 27, 2023

Saturday was full, but finished off with a vodka-enhanced Netflix orgy, so no report at the conclusion. Thought I’d finished with the Bartok play, but I hadn’t. Church in the AM. I was out of practice. Voice mucous-y, which I didn’t discover till I began to sing. Made an attempt to take my car to Folly, which would open up vast vistas of things apparently of interest only to me, and keep off the sense of being trapped between a bar and a beach that begins at about day 2-- but that proves unexpectedly problematic. The only situation in car-happy America where another car is, apparently, out of the question. One sighs and moves on. Binge-watched Eli Stone to its very end. It was fascinating to me even though not well written, chaotic, imagined fancifully rather than powerfully. Somehow the characters remained compelling. Or, I fancy myself prophetic in some useless way and saw a reflection of that in the main character. Or I just couldn’t pull myself up off the sofa. Powerful dreams. In the last one I was singing in a gigantic chorus. It was a concert, but our director (I think she was S) kept stopping us for petty things and making us start over. We rebelled, shouted her down, left the stage. We were bound together somehow, and could only leave the stage together, like a giant wave. 

Rain threatened but, as far as I can see from the study window, never coming. 

Rameau. Get up and march.

 

August 25, 2023

Hottest day of the decade succeeds hottest day of the decade. My study is uninhabitable without the fan aimed directly at my head. During a nap I had deeply purging dreams, as if some evil from years and years back had finally been drawn out and purged. When I woke I remembered enough to know that the evil was entirely imaginary, or, should I say, subterranean. Turkeys crowd into the shade of the silver maple. Their feathers look unimaginably hot. The garden looks like a medieval tapestry, or a page from a Book of Hours. 

Donald Trump is arrested in Atlanta, and allowed by his jailers to supply some of the vital information rather than have it taken on the spot. He asserts that his weight is 215, which is so ludicrous all the talk shows and all the social media cackle about it today. Truth cannot be honored even in the tiniest, the most publically verifiable scintilla. Yet people voted for him. People vow to do so again if, against all that is just and holy, he runs again. Trump is among the things that people in times to come will never credit. Police “Internal Investigations” are another; “non-binary” and “gender-fluid” are another

 

August 24, 2023

M writes from New York that he’s putting together a “somewhat racy” memoir, and I feature in it several times. Trying to imagine. He asks if I want to see it, and I tell him to trust his best judgment. 

Cathedral choir rehearsal last night. Beforehand S and I commiserate about the fall of UNCA, not epic but tawdry and absurd. Generations of administrators so bad, and bad in the same way, that it couldn’t be merely ill luck. They’re like the Republican party, willing to say and do the most ignorant things in order to titillate a particular audience– one that does not, in fact, wish them well, and cannot contribute to the their future. It is not a university: it is presently an institution where you can buy a diploma. S declares, “I still teach The Iliad in Humanities,” implying that nobody else does. She says, “Everything Western is an anathema.” I responded in my heart with a prayer of thanksgiving that I left at exactly the right moment– or maybe a smidgen after the right moment, as I caught a whiff of the stink as I departed. 

Nevertheless, a jogging class (or something) from the university sends 12 or 13 half-naked boys past my window early in the morning. No darkness is utterly dark. 

Sat by the river, watching dogs cavort and writing most of a play. I told my hand at the outset, “don’t bother; nothing will come of it.” But it kept writing.

Anniversary

 

August 23, 2023

On this night in 1966 I wrote my first poem. 

Painted a design for the Cathedral Christmas card. It’s probably too weird. 

 

August 22, 2023

Symphony chorus back at it. Bartok and Brahms. I was in good voice. New singers all around me. 

The fence is a riot of blue and white. It’s mostly “weeds,” but this summer I’ll let it go. 

 

August 21, 2023

As I left the country club in Kent, the thinnest crescent moon hung in a dull red and gold sky. A flock of geese, honking and beating the air, passed over, between the moon and me. I thought of it as a blessing from my home country. The whole trip was portentous with hawks. 

Everyone had horror stories abut poor L. Mike blocked her after she called praying the rosary a Satanic practice. 

The garden I weeded out bare in spring is overgrown again. 

Elegy

 

August 20, 2023

Sitting in my studio with the fan blasting at my head. Returned through eight hours from my natal north, only one piss stop the whole way. I handled the long drive much better than I intended to. Glory upon the mountains, constant poking of the radio to find a new station, most of them, in West Virginia southward, all about Jesus. 

Saturday I went to Twinsburg to Crown Hill to visit mother and her parents, spread out far from each other in that vast space. Kim, the office girl, drew a map for me and tried to sell me a burial plot. I told her I thought the family had an extra one somewhere, and she observed with real horror that if we didn’t use it, it will remain vacant for all eternity. The geese nibble the grass above your head, and the sky arches clear above. There would be worse places. Standing at mother’s grave did what it does to me each time: sends me into a passion, an ecstasy of grief practically unknown to the rest of my life. I was glad no one was within shouting distance. I wept for what I see as the unfairness of her life. Perhaps, God willing, she saw it otherwise. I wept for the paths I have taken, which I think she might not have recognized, or approved. Though each step seemed straight ahead, somehow I wandered into the wilderness nevertheless. There is no getting out now, no turning around; there is only trying to find some way deeper in, someplace to stand at last and say “here.” Drove to the other entrances of Maytree, walked to Alder Pond, which I had almost to myself, with a cool glacial breeze blowing over it, as there must have been at the very beginning. 

The reunion itself was the most fun, I think, of any of them. Sad, too. C estimates that 90 of the people we started school with are dead, 25 of them since the last reunion. K rolled her wheelchair up and said, “This debt relief Biden wants, I don’t agree with it. I paid my student debts. It isn’t right.” MD walked up and said, “Hi. I’m MD. I was in a terrible accident and lost half my brain. The doctors said I would never speak again.” I commended her on her speech and how good she looked (she really did look terrific), but realized none of that was getting through. She went on to the next person and repeated her little speech. W grabbed me by the shoulder and said “Can we talk? Can I buy you a drink?” He bought me another club soda and then revealed that he’d been troubled since the last reunion by something he said to me, worried that it might have hurt my feelings. I did remember it, but I assured him it was nothing. He checked in every few moments for the rest of the night, and took my number so he could call the next time he comes to Asheville. Everybody comes to Asheville, apparently. I was something of the beau of the ball, remembered as being unusually accomplished. A few even quoted my books at me. That is the best thing ever. Our name tags had our senior pictures on them, which may have been a mistake. For most of us (not me, actually) that was the moment of our greatest beauty. And there we were above the gleaming photos, relics of ourselves, bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. I was secretly in love with you, and you, and you. . .  and now we’re all come to the same foul rag and bone shop. Not, not foul, sweet and sad and elegiac. A sip of sherry by the gold window at sunset. Should I have gone from one to the other and said, “But I remember when you were beautiful” ? The banquet chicken was the worst I’ve ever had. 

Ohio 2

 

August 18, 2023

Rose late, called D, went to Hiram and spent the day largely with him, having lunch, visiting the Bio Station, talking about the betrayals and decay that plagues both our lives. I’m slightly less weighed down by it all than he. Watched the trumpeter swans napping on the shore of the pond. I think often–and especially today– of the time when I thought remaining in Hiram for all my life was my one desire. I think it would have been a catastrophic choice, though I have not completely left it behind. The bucolic “what if” lingers. Left Hiram and drove to Maytree, penetrating a little before twilight. I’ll return tomorrow. I called on the spirit of the place and asked if she remembers me. I didn’t wait long enough for the answer; thus I must return tomorrow.  Managed finally to identify a plant I noticed in my earliest youth in the forests of Ohio: American jump berry. The name is exactly right. Skipped Ellet night at Dave Haasz’s bar and went to the movies again, this time seeing The Meg 2. It was marginally less stupid than the first one. The motel fridge froze the food I bought yesterday, but not the wine.

Ohio 1

 

August 17, 2023

Hampton Inn, Rt 43, Kent, Ohio. Of course I left unnecessarily early, and arrived earlier than I need to have.  Grueling drive, though much of it through some of the most beautiful landscape in the world. Red sunrise over Virginia. The room is dank, dingy, and smells like, though not necessarily of, urine. It’s festival week in this part of the world (who knows why?), and all the motels are booked, so, glad I planned ahead. The pool and the exercise room have something wrong with them. The WiFi is useless. Sharp emotion crossing the Ohio river, difficult to define. One returns to the birthplace missing those whom one once knew, wondering if all those years and all that effort came to anything in particular. Was it worth it? Not fully answerable until the last moment, but at the moment of crossing the Marietta bridge into my home state the answer was “not really.” TK is dead. PS is dead. I've known PS since I was six. I passed PS love notes in the 4th grade, not because I loved her, but because I thought I should have a girlfriend and her desk was nearest mine. 

Later: Took a ride, saw a cinema, stopped and watched the Barbie movie. Clever, if less clever than it’s reputed to be. I left the cinema in a cloudburst. Oddly, it never occurred to me to prepare for rain. 

 

August 16, 2023

Vestry dramatic but, miraculously, short of its allotted two hours. I made a daring “call the question” that flummoxed some of our chatterboxes, who were not yet finished subdividing the minutiae regarding our Vestry Covenant. I had written it, so the idea that it was imperfect somehow made me impatient. . . . Fine summer day. The garden continues to be curiously bird-heavy. 

 August 15, 2023

The half&half that I bought yesterday was opened today already spoiled. Decided to use it anyway, this time, because the bitterness of the coffee cuts the bite of souring. 

Made $35 from my latest role on stage. 

 

August 14, 2023

Constantly fighting these expensive, badly-made glasses. After a day of writing I’m nearly blind. But, write I do. 

Found a wren loose in the living room. She bashed into glassware and other objects without disturbing them the least bit. Opened all possible doors and she found her way out. 

Trying to comfort F because his book isn’t selling as fast as he expected it to. I’m the last person who should attempt comfort there. 

Hour of Wrens

 

August 12, 2023

Evening, just before dark, has become the Hour of Wrens. They gather in the garden in surprising numbers. Several resort to the lintels of my front porch pillars, where they congregate like friends at a bar, fluffing and chattering. 

I read in an article in The New York Review of Books the word “biophilia,” which probably describes my state. I welcome creatures into my sphere with great joy, take pains not to disturb or startle them. I can walk through a flock of wild turkeys without much more than an increased level of clucking. Wrens gossip on my porch. Last night more catbirds than I had ever seen at one time leapt about in the roses. My rabbit watches me at the sink in the morning. 

Morning spent at Deerfield, where the rich go to die, discussing our Enneagrams. I am not a believer, but several things rang true and I would not call the morning a loss. But, almost. Arrived at Deerfield in deep morning mist. Rabbits played on a huge lawn. Anyone attending a church meeting would conclude that genetics itself dictates that women talk more than men, by levels of magnitude. Eleven women and three men. . . it was grueling. One huge aspect of my nature did find clarity, though. Enneagram 4s when faced with conflict tend to withdraw, to disappear, to try to regroup away from the immediate field of battle. This explains the several times, which still haunt me, when I did not fight a necessary battle. Inside me I’ve called it cowardice– though of a puzzling kind-- but the enneagram allows me to think of it as a sort of default that would take more time than what’s available to me in the moment to overcome. In fight, flight, or hide, I am hide. Unless I am fight, which happens when I’ve had time to consider. 

Huge, wind-driven rain. 

 August 11, 2023

A and I were triumphant last night. Actors in the other shows tell me how wonderful I am on stage, and I wonder if I am, or it’s a pleasantry that is meant to go around and I have not been keeping up my end. Audience members, before I managed to launch out the door and into the night, stopped me to say how talented I was and how we were the best of the festival. One woman said she doesn’t like watching theater and has no attention span, but came back to see me twice. In any event, it was fun on stage last night, as much fun as anything but sex, though the preparation (for both) can be grueling. 

Review from Asheville Stages: Neighborly — John Connon’s offering is a deliciously slow burn of tension between adjoining homeowners, played by David Hopes and Aina Rapoza. Hopes gets the lion’s share of the dialogue and makes the most of it, peeling off layers of civility and grief at the death of his beloved dog to reveal something much, much darker. While Rapoza’s part is more limited, he does an excellent job filling his side of the stage with evolving body language through the play’s denouement.

Hours later: the decimation of COVID has caused the weekend of one-acts at the Magnetic to be cancelled. A and I had one more show– plus probably the “best of”– to go. I’m usually happy over a cancellation, but not this time. I was rolling sevens. Plus, my bucket and garden trowel–props-- are trapped in the building. 

My turkey flock rolled in while my feral brindle cat was chilling in the back yard. Cat didn’t run, but flattened herself on her stomach, which the turkeys read, I guess, as a gesture of inoffensiveness. The big tom gave her quite an inspection before moving on. I can’t imagine either inflicting much damage on the other. 

Preparing for the trip to Ohio, I thought “I can leave the return open-ended, because I don’t have to hurry back to see to a cat.” And then I overran with grief. 

 

August 10, 2023

Editing of paintings continues.  

The last and longest (possibly the worst) of the one-acts had been dropped from the schedule for tonight. Maybe Covid. Maybe just awfulness. 

Sunflowers topple again in last night’s rain. Time to say farewell. 

Baba ganoush

 

August 9, 2023

Toppled sunflowers seem to revive. This is a great victory. 

Made baba ganoush. Labor-intensive but satisfying. Failed at making it long ago, and realized during this go that someone had left out the drain-the-baked-eggplant step. 

 

August 8, 2023

Some cast members of the one-act festival have evidently tested positive for Covid. Should be an interesting week ahead. . . .

Painting today– retouching a few works, beginning another. All paintings now wet and nothing more can be done. 

Shored up the toppled Mexican sunflowers from yesterday’s squall. Don’t know if they’ll live. 

Happened to look up The Birth of Color. I, the librettist, am not mentioned. Maybe somewhere in the depths. 

Crushed and exiled by those who had no intention of doing so. There is no redress.

 

August 7, 2023

Listening to Follia.

Went early to the river. I wanted to have sex with the redneck boys emptying the trash. Petted such dogs as would allow it. Wrote an exceptional poem, whereas I’d gone there expecting nothing. 

Sweetboi

 

August 6, 2023

Blew a line at matinee. Got it back, but it left a hole big enough for people to notice. Left the theater after our show at 7 PM, which is when the house is meant to open for the evening performance, and there was still one playlet to go. I asked someone on the selection committee why they chose so many plays, and she said the wisdom was “They’ll go faster as they go on.” Still, twelve plays at a throw. . .  none of them (except maybe ours) actually ten minutes long. Attendance has been good, though. My Frankenstein is in the B series and appears for rehearsal. I think of him as a grand physical specimen, and try not to stare.

Church. Stewardship Meeting. Sweetboi made a kill in my garden, sat on the grass calmly pulling it apart, ignoring the screeching of the upset songbirds. He flew into a tree and watched the door where I stood. Did he remember me? I threw sausage into the yard, but I didn’t see him take it. Sausage is probably beneath him. In full bloom he is almost unendurably beautiful. 

Opening Night

 

August 5, 2023

Opening night sold out. The long wait between arrival and going on stage is annihilating to concentration, but, still, I think O and I came off well. Best of the evening, if chatter be trusted. As for the wait, I told the stage manager from now on I’ll appear when I need to, and she seemed to accept it. She is actually so efficient I assumed she would approve anything that increased efficiency. Sat for one of those hours with three young women I did not previously know, all of them very engaged or recently graduated drama students. They got onto the subject of acting, and I was treated to a three-handed discourse on teachers, methods, great moments and figures, that was the most learned and probing conversation I’ve heard since I retired. I literally had nothing to add. Not only were they hugely well informed, but their rhetoric was elegant and courteous, acknowledging the truth of what her colleague said before going on to add her next point. It was amazing and, for a teacher, gratifying. Somebody had been paying attention. 

Not to refute, but to suggest what I might have said had I not been so gloriously outgunned, I believe all of that is actually irrelevant to the art of acting, though it may make an actor feel equipped and confident. I’d seen these young women on stage before meeting them. One did quite well (the one, predictably, who’d had the least to say) Two were bad, doing too much, calling attention to their doing, not presenting the play but themselves as players. You want to believe wide knowledge leads to deep practice, but it doesn’t. Theories of acting are like theories of painting, almost never employed by those who are best at the actual endeavor. I’ve had plenty of experience, but no training, and its coming instinctually to me makes me believe that it must be instinctual to all, if they’re doing it right. This might be an error. I ran into the same issue in writing, unable to give satisfying recipes and outlines to my students because I never used them myself. What is my theory of acting? Understand the text and deliver it with the greatest clarity possible. That is the first and great commandment. Like unto it: fully inhabit the moment; pay attention to what else is being said on stage; find your light; speak up. 

One of the learned young ladies mentioned that she’s in Montford’s The Tempest.

“Whom do you play?” says I.

“Sebastian.”

The one word saves me from seeing that production. Montford has always been short of men and filled in with women. My advice: recruit or do a different play. They do not ask my opinion.

Driving to the theater, I had to ease past my flock (2 adults, 7 chicks) of turkeys who were using the driveway at the same time. I went dead slow. They regarded my car with alarm, but not enough of it to change routes. 

Phillipe Sly is my current musical obsession. 

Finished deep revision of Tub. Will likely change the title.

Matinee late this afternoon. The show runs over three hours, so we leaving the matinee will have to dance around those arriving for the evening performance. The last playlet in our group is so bad–and so long–it could be lopped as a gangrenous limb. So many directors are needed for an endeavor like this that there is little vetting. An eager hand waving “I’ll do it!” is enough. But, of course, it is not enough. 

 

August 4, 2023

Dress rehearsal last night. I’d forgotten how much fun it is to be on stage. I’d forgotten in what ways acting is, in fact, creative. The evening is too long (12 plays would be too many even if they were actually 10 minutes long. Most of them aren’t) and far too uneven. A few of them make you wonder about the selection process. I admire our playwright because his idea is the right size for the time allotted. Most of the playlets take far too big an idea and try to condense it down. The ten minute play is a repellent concept, anyway, though currently a playwright’s main path to production. It encourages the audience in bad habits. 

K wrote me a note about my performance and said, “You were tremendous.” Compared to my own expectations, I believe I was. 

Ae Fond Kiss

 

August 3, 2023

Rose light, taking in the deep music of the rain. Russell and DJ and I saw Oppenheimer last night. Ungainly as art, necessary as chronicle. 

Sometimes trying to think of the perfect work of art I hit upon something close, or on the mark:

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever

Ae fareweel, and then forever!

Had we never lov'd sae kindly,

Had we never lov'd sae blindly,

Never met—or never parted—

We had ne'er been broken-hearted.

Fare thee weel, thou first and fairest!

Fare thee weel, thou best and dearest!

Thine be ilka joy and treasure,

Peace. enjoyment, love, and pleasure!

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;

Ae fareweel, alas, forever!

Don’t know if this is the whole poem, but it’s what came into my ear, and made me glad.

First bit of Messiah that I ever sung: “And the glory of the Lord,” in high school, for some forgotten reason. I assumed the teachers had a list of masterpieces that could finally be brought out when the students reached a certain age. Never got to Bach until college. 

 

August 2, 2023

Our tech rehearsal took exactly five minutes, there being two cues. Five minutes after four hours. Easy is good. A homeless guy played a broken ukelele on the street under moonlight as I left the theater. 

Centenary

 

August 1, 2023

Rose determined to renew my driver’s license; made it to the DMV and did so with less hassle than anticipated. I suppose I was the hassle, for they called my number very quickly with six or seven people in the waiting room ahead of me. They grumbled. They’ll have a tale to tell of this jerk at the DMV who got in a head of them. One person is available to serve all those who arrive for license or ID issues. My photo makes me look like Methuselah. 

You can renew online every second time– which means I may never have to set foot in a DMV again. Benefits of the end times--

Note arrives from the tax assessor informing me, among other things, that my house was built in 1923. I was a year off. Will plan her a grand party. Poor thing had to go 90 years without me. 

Mis-identified a goldfinch as a blossom of errant color on the Mexican sunflower. 

 

July 30, 2023

Post cards for Ben & Angela arrive, imperfect but serviceable. 

Still bothered by having watched a turkey eat a snake in my yard. So much for the Peaceable Kingdom where the red slayer does not slay.