February 25, 2012


Evening at KS’s “Opera Creations.” Fun. Proof that there’s nothing you can do to The Magic Flute to keep it from being magical. Zach gave me a carnation. Above all else, testimony that you can do what you want. If you want to sing opera you don’t have to audition for the established power in the area, you can put on your own, and people will come to soak up the enthusiasm. Jonathan Ross was the best Papageno I’ve ever seen, in a room with eighty people in it on the top floor of an old Masonic hall. I wanted to play too. They had left out Sarastro– I suppose because everyone is either a soprano or a boy or playing Papageno–and I wanted to cry “I can sing that!” I suppose someone’s crying “I can sing that” is the whole point.

Tamino was snatched from Bible Camp and set down in the magic forest.

Dream before morning. Jake and Ellen and I were sitting around at some conference, telling each other what we’d been doing lately. The dream was so close to the edge of waking that I told them what I really AM doing in the world of day.

Jake was in my mind because DJ and I stopped for drinks before returning from the opera, and Jake and Rob were commiserating at Avenue M over the manifold and seemingly inexhaustible deficiencies of their department. They torment Jake for the same reason they tormented Cody, because he is already beyond their level of expertise and that seems to them a kind of insolence. They do not use and absorb what is better than they, they discredit it, or hold it at arm’s length as though energy and insight were a kind of aggression. Rob’s father just died, and yet it falls to him to salvage Jake’s feelings, and the honor of his department.

Rob’s father, Cindy’s mother, Titus the cat in two days. The Reaper’s blade swings in the dark of night.

Dancing at Avenue M. You forget how awkward contemporary social dancing looks when you’re not doing it. The women looked good, but the space is really too small for men to dance in.

Logan and Alex and the glass blowing boys have moved from the studio. Jolene points out that they made all the noise and all the mess, but I miss them, and the second floor is like a funeral home without them. They reminded me of Titus, actually: he made almost all the mess, vomited all the vomit you had to be careful of barefoot in the morning, but I miss him, and the quiet in the house is unsettling.

February 24, 2012


Undistinguished dawn session at the Y. I thought I might spend the day napping with Palestrina in the background, but that didn’t satisfy as long as I thought it might. Entered one of the unanticipated spasms of housecleaning, coming across letters from agents–some three years old-- raving about this or that book, and from whom I probably never heard again, or else they were scammers and I researched them in time to avert disaster. Threw away hundreds of old photo negatives, but kept the prints gathered in a box, to look at later, or to ignore for another decade. Included photos I had completely forgotten of Marco and me in DC, of The Duck Variations at HART, of play readings in this house, of old paintings of mine, of the summer at Oxford, and many photos of cats, Theseus, Conrad, Jocasta, Titus in the days of their youth. I don’t know whether the photographs made me sad or happy. There are a thousand photographs of flowers, which do not squirm nor make wry faces.

A day of sunshine showers, a spring day in the midst of winter. A clump of pale daffodils are in flower, as are all the Lenten roses.

February 22, 2012

Ash Wednesday

Titus the Cat left me today. He was the best of cats, sweet and calm and affectionate, a big loving boy. When I balance his virtues and his deficits–most of those have to do with being a slob–he comes out better than most people. Certainly better than me. I am bereft of the buddy cat, and I can’t think of it very often or very long. Maud walks through the house crying. I think she misses him. I think she enjoyed hissing at him, and thought the game would go on forever. The vet was inept, and Tutus was frightened in his last moments. My prayer for the day is to get that out of my mind-- though anger did replace grief a little in the office, and I didn’t feel quite such a fool.

Evening. Dreadful quiet house. Have hardly gotten out of bed. I had forgotten that sadness can make you sick.

But the yard is purple with crocus.

Little spirit, at the end of all things, please find me.

Cytology

Cytology report comes back from the kind doctor. The growth is an aggressive sarcoma–I forget the name of it–which is rare in cats and even rarer where Titus has it. It has already metastasized. I hold Titus the cat as long as he’ll put up with it thanking him for being my cat.

February 20, 2012


Rick Santorum proves that there’s nothing a bigot and an idiot can say that will not elicit applause from somebody. Bigots and idiots, I suppose. He is going to be the first one to come out and admit he hates the President for being black, all other cited causes being, more or less, imaginary.

New owners at Mountain Java. A gay couple, I guess. Bears.

Weekend devoured (in a good way) by revisions. Took In the Country of the Young out of mothballs, realizing, in a bolt from the blue, what to do with it. Continued revisions on Davie Jax, also lately from the vaults. Some painting, but ultimate frustration in not being able to get a face right. I do not know how to achieve the smoothness of paintings I admire. I think I may be using my brushes too long. Or my impatience leads me to over-paint what is not dry enough.

February 17, 2012


Did a reading for HART’s Look Homeward Angel last night, then had the rest of the evening to chat with Steve and Casey, largely about Casey’s trip to Chicago to audition for the schools he wants for his MFA. But what a lot of local theater gossip to catch up on! NC Stage is about the only one for which they do not foresee either spiritual or material dissolution. Theaters do tend to give up their spirits, especially when they see that doing crap brings in easier money than doing masterpieces. A certain kind of mind associates success with ease and superfluity, and when those minds get control of an arts organization, the game is over. C’s mind is quick and makes cogent summaries. Of one local company he sneered, “They do TV,” and I realized he is exactly right, putting his finger on a quality I was myself unable to define. Theater grad school is a different world from what I know, competitive and potentially soul-destroying at every level; yet people love it enough to go through it, and we playwrights are grateful for all that energy and dedication. Our students are less well served by their training than others, so must rely on their innate qualities. Casey has those qualities, but even that does not predict his immediate road. Steve and Casey are far more specific about their ambitions than I ever was. They want this role; they want to produce that play. I wanted to surge forward in whatever way seemed opened to me. All my life was poetry, and then when another door opened, I entered that room as well, thinking to give destiny as many opportunities as possible to do right by me. I never thought it was betrayal, but rather enlargement, but who knows what the Muses thought? I’m not sure which choice was the right one. Steve seems to be doing exactly what he wants to do. Casey is on the brink of doing what he wants. If I look back with an objective eye, I make the astonishing deduction that I too have done pretty much what I wanted to do. . . though admitting a certain dissatisfaction with the outcome. If only I could get that non-attachment thing right. . . .

The production of King Lear by which I was shafted has collapsed. I was hoping it would go all the way and waste everybody’s time and be horrible, but this is the next best thing.

Cats eating out of the same bowl again, Titus apparently having been forgiven his mortality. He’s managing to go the bathroom, after a fashion, but one wishes these efforts were more localized.

The guy who’s fixing my Prius is a ski racer.

Post-op

Titus is home for a while. Dr. H did exploratory surgery (just as Dr R had done) and also concluded there is no chance of surgery. Unlike R, he took samples of the –growth (he thinks it’s no polyp) to send somewhere for analysis. He thinks it’s cancerous. When I went for him, Titus was so sick, drooling and collapsing, pressing his tired head against my chest. Later the drooling stopped, but he was groggy and unsuccessful in getting up on the couch. I was ashamed that I laughed. But the T-man is home for a while, and slept outside my door. I can’t explain the change his sickness makes. The other cats won’t come near him. Maud is downright hostile. I brushed him rigorously to get the medicine smell off, but maybe that wasn’t the problem. Dr H warned there would be bloodstains here and there where he lay, and there were. I am not good at this, even at the level at which it is now presented me. My sister had all my father’s sickroom duties, and I think that was a providence.