October 26, 2023

Decent SC rehearsal, much headway with Central European languages. Music is my fourth art, and yet I spend a whole lot more public time on it than the others. I suppose by its nature it’s performance and therefore more public. Sometimes I think I’m good enough at it for it to have been a central part of my life since the seventh grade; other times, not. 

Not getting over rage about attendance at the play. I walk into meetings, scan the room, think, “Why should I be here? You couldn’t even be bothered to come to my play.” M notes that no one is going to see the play at NCS, either. That gives me intellectual comfort, but not emotional. At the Arts Commission meeting I could barely think of anything else. How can you pretend to be interested in the arts? Time will wear this down. I expect.

Early at the river yesterday, pumping out what I recall as two excellent poems. We’ll see for sure when I transcribe them from the notebook. This is a renewal of the times in Syracuse when I wandered the Clark Reservation, stopping, near-ecstatic, to scribble in my notebooks the poems that would become The Glacier’s Daughters. I drive to riverside, sip nasty coffee, and write what had not occurred to me even a second before. Now I am hugely less confident that anybody will care. But, I go on. Glory upon the mountain on the far side of the river.

Planted and mulched daffodils, advertized as “super-giant.” Was able to fertilize them with a surprising abundance of bear scat.