October 11, 2015

L’s birthday party, then home to amazing dreams. I crossed the border of some dream country and was greeted by Saddam Hussein. Yes. He was garrulous and loud, but quite friendly, and seemed to hover in the air. He took me on a personal tour of the music hall in which the revolution had begun, and then a few other buildings. I had knowledge in the dream that he is dead, but took that in stride.The country was quite tiny. I crossed into another country. I was wearing a uniform, and was apparently an American soldier. I couldn’t get the ATM machines to work, and attendants would open the panel above them and hand me cakes and toys, but only occasionally the money I thought I needed. I’d was driving my father’s car, and damaged it somehow, and left it in an alley of a bazaar with a note on it asking somebody to fix it. The next day I stood there and watched mysterious doors opening, and my car was coming of it, good as new. The person responsible was a young man in uniform who, I discovered, was the son of the local dictator and who had been assigned to me in some way. He kept appearing and smoothing the way throughout the dream, both kind and unpredictable. This country seemed to be underground, in intersecting, vast tunnels, spacious and well lit, but edged with stone and darker tunnels radiating out who knows where. Perhaps the carrot cake did that to me.
   
The morning-night seems half way between rain and not rain.

October 10, 2015

The sky let me make a furniture run to the river space, and then opened into rain that has not abated since. Constant sound from the roof, like a radio not quite tuned to a station.
   
T phoned as I was headed to the studio, so I went to Starbucks instead. It teams of a Saturday morning. We talked of the usual things, his endless screenplay, his always off-the-mark country songs, the shapeliness of the girls at the bar, and I was disappointed, except that I noted that a knot in the front of my chest, which had been building for a couple of days, had gone away, and I credited simply being with somebody friendly for a while, whatever the conversation. He studiously copies country songs he hears on the air, and then marvels that his aren’t sung by the stars as well. I do see the point, but I am the wrong person to ask about that sort of thing, having turned my back on fashion since the first days of my life as an artist. That is not a boast. It is sort of a lamentation. Anyway, he says, “I have behaved as a proper artist all my life,” and I agreed that he had, in the purest way, far purer about it than I have been, and with less to show. We talked about the unfairness, nay, the ruinous folly, of the gods. We talked about the narrowness of our desires, how back when we were telling God what we wanted– well, he didn’t say exactly what he’d asked for, but I gathered that he’d gotten it, in a way, but that it was not sustaining. I asked to be a great writer. Whether I got that or not is for others to judge. What I should have asked was to be a successful one. Oh, I have been very pure. I have gone the righteous way. I can’t say that it availed nothing, but it didn’t avail in the way I’d thought.
  
 Anyway . . .
   
The rain seems to have changed a bit, maybe even taken a breather.

October 9, 2015

Last night’s rehearsal was almost good. We open in a week, so it wasn’t THAT good.
  
Enlarged, spaded, fertilized, re-soiled the front garden. One white peony is planted in the new space, but there’s room for more.
  
H came to visit. He made me smile, even when he began talking about the “fact” that no airplanes were involved in 9/11, and about how the jewels in the crowns of various kings controlled their behavior. I wasn’t there to witness either, so who knows?

October 8, 2015

E is back, revealing that she was gone because her sister had been kidnapped and drugged, and came to enough to flee from the motel where she was being held, to call E, who whirled down to set things to rights. Like a TV show.
   
Despite these heroics, very ragged rehearsals. Investigating the phenomenon of blanking on stage to those things which I knew perfectly well an hour before. An old story, but still an irritating one.,
   
Agony of light-blindness, driving nightly west into the setting sun.
   
Applied for Medicare. Jesus
   
Planted paeonia, iris. Mulched.
   
Asking questions about the Iliad and receiving no answers. Only a few have read it, is my conclusion., One girl raises her hand and says, “I tried to read it, but I’m lost. I just don’t understand what’s going on.”
   
“Is your translation in English?”
   
“Yes,” she says, without a change of expression.
  
The correct response is, “Then you have no business being in college.” But I betray my public trust, shrug, and begin telling them the story.

October 7, 2015

The Iliad today. Amid the glazed eyes, five were with me. I suppose that’s a lot.

October 6, 2015

Terrible dream sometime last night. There was a big political rally on a green hill, some righteous cause. But I said something that turned everybody off, and spent the rest of the dream trying to explain myself, and even though I knew I was right, I watched my friends depart from me, one by one, even one who was supposed to be my lover. Deepening the distress was the fact that I had acquired a beautiful green table, and when I was left alone, there was nobody to help me carry it home.
   
I keep looking around for the cappuccino I already finished.

As dawn broke I was enlarging the back garden to plant two kinds of lilies, toad flax, trillium. Transplanted a tulip tree out of the garden to a place in the lawn where it may work out its destiny for the next two hundred years.
   
We have gone from judging art on the qualities of the work to judging it according the identity of the artist. On one level, I don’t know how to dispute this. I learned one way; that doesn’t make the other way depraved. And yet, I wonder how long we will be satisfied with bad poems coming from good people, wrong plays written from the right perspective? I remember a colleague’s insistence last year that the Arch Brown Foundation only consider the work of women. She almost said in so many words, “in case a man’s work is better and we have to give the prize to him.” A woman won on her own merits that year, so the issue subsided for the moment.
   
Bought two enormous pumpkins for my front porch. Couldn’t have lifted them had they been any bigger. Happy as a kid.

October 5, 2015

Gym, email, coffee, and it’s still dark. I do love the dark of the morning!

Read-through of Washington Place last night at the Magnetic. In my court are the almost unbelievable number of typos, sometimes whole missing words and phrases. I wanted to blame S’s printer, but they’re the same on my file. Add “proofread play” to the list of accomplishments above. This is the first stolen day of my “spring break,” and I might actually go to the studio, if I think I can sustain Lupe’s redecorating and the almost certain flooding.

Planted blue parrot tulips, crown imperial, and what I took to be wood hyacinths.

Dinner at a new Chinese fusion with DJ. I ordered what the waitress said was their mildest dish, and it was still too hot. I did notice, however, that the ache in my joints abated– one pain distracted by another, or is spice a real remedy for the bones? Staggering to bed too early--