October 19, 2015

Arrived early in Waynesville and did some shopping. Bought a wooden sculpture of a warbler that had been misidentified as a kinglet. Sunday matinee was another without error on my part. It felt good. Left my script on my dressing table, but discovered the play on Kindle, so I don’t have to drive back through the beautiful exhausting mountains. The hand of some angel led me to get off 40 and drive through Candler. Looked back over my shoulder to see miles and miles of traffic stopped dead, the old I-26 congestion bollocksing everything.

October 18, 2015

Woke in the midst of a complicated dream. I was in a city filled with churches, and it was some holy day, Holy Saturday, I think. I was looking for a service to attend, but at the same time scorning church for some reason. I met a man–who in the course of the dream turned into a woman– who shared my skepticism, but also my odd faithfulness, which endures–in waking life–in the face of all the betrayals of God. The city was small and beautiful, with each block dominated by a handsome brick church. But on the steps of each church were guards in choir robes, keeping out those who did not belong. At last we chose a church, and went in, sitting in the back because we weren’t members. Food was served up front, but it never came to the back. The man was dressed in pale green, and looked a little derelict, like he’d been sleeping on the street, but he was the smartest person I’d ever met. Everything he said was a revelation. Then everything she said was a revelation.

Returned to the studio yesterday and I was happy, happy, happy. Worked productively. Part of my happiness is that SL has moved upstairs beside me. I liked him when I first met him years ago, and I liked him the better yesterday morning. It’s great to have company again. He whistled down in his studio as he worked. I still miss Jason, and he helped with that. People came in from the street, from New Orleans, Boston, etc, leaf-lookers, I suppose. One man was taken with my paintings, and stood interpreting them symbolically. He said he wished he could buy one, and I said why don’t you, and he said he could never afford it. He could. I would have given him one at whatever price he named, but he would have to ask, and he didn’t.

Thursday and Friday the lesson was Medea, and I felt myself recoiling from the awful splendor of the work. It is a masterpiece, shattering and resplendent. I never actually knew what the point was before, other than the satisfaction and horror of seeing Medea’s plan work out. It is an essay on the consequences of the energy we put into the world. Medea is the scale of cosmic justice. Jason cannot say he was ill-served, but only that the punishment exceeded all expectation. He lit a match and watched an empire burn. Grant remarks on a similar thing in his memoirs, saying that the seizure of Texas from the Mexicans was a cause of the Civil War, and if we consider the problems Texas causes to this day, we see that the repercussions are not yet stilled. That understanding helped me to understand much, fit many pieces of my experience together at last. What I wish is for a play that shows the radiation and expansion of a good deed. Maybe I am to write it.

The Weir was well last night, my second without an error, and I think my best performance so far. I enjoyed the time on stage, as I had not, because of anxiety, before. People praised my accent, which was the thing about which I was most uncertain.

I think all the flowers pulled through what was meant to be a bitter night. One more day is a victory for us all, and all we can expect. Mulched heartily in yesterday’s brilliant light. I could feel it in my back until I went on stage.

October 17, 2015

End of what has been, in terms of wretched things which actually happened, maybe the worst of the year.
   
Have entered the Season of the Freezing Study.

Woke with my voice hoarse and soft. Here’s hoping that departs by evening. Last night’s opening was not stellar (I blanked on a line that I had never missed before) but good enough, I think. People praised us at the reception, whether sincerely or not we may never know. I felt good, all in all. Got the major laugh of the evening on, “Jaysus, Jim, what a terrible story to be telling.” The long drives become darker, longer, more hateful, though after tomorrow we have a break for a few days. I am happy on stage. I am good at it. I wonder every now and then why I didn’t make that part of the theater my life. The answer must be, I didn’t really want to.

When I left the house yesterday morning I took time to look at a rose that had opened on the top of a tall stalk. It is white with a pinkish center. It seemed so huge and unexpectedly beautiful that I stood a while staring at it. When I came home from school and crashed onto the bed for a nap, a strange thing happened. I’ll just tell as it seemed to me. I was visited by two spirits. One was the spirit of my little cat Theseus, gone these many years. One was the spirit of the rose. They came and nestled against me, and I was overtaken, overshadowed by a powerful emotion, and I do not know exactly what it was, but I think it was my soul receiving some immense gift of forgiveness. I do not know for what I was being forgiven, or what required such an agony of forgiveness, but I lay on the bed between sleep and waking, convulsed with the most sweet and painful emotion. And then I slept, thinking it was Theseus beside me, and he and the rose were watching over.

   
October 16, 2015

Sleeping quite late for me, after evenings that end in exhaustion and then a long ride home. Last night’s dress-with-audience (a quite small audience) suffered from two giant gaps opening when the wrong cue was uttered, each of them redeemed in good time, I think. I made, for the first time, no mistakes, and feel the evening as my confidence run. That doesn’t mean I won’t be studying the script like mad this afternoon.  I have no idea how the play “plays.” Is it interesting?  Can we be understood? The people who stayed after last night were Board members, so they could hardly say, “This sucks.”  Had a meltdown over the body mic, which, like the security searches at the airport, is at once both useless and annoying.
   
Maud cuddling my feet in the bathroom as though we had not seen each other in weeks.

October 15, 2015

Invigorated from planting in the autumn garden: a rose, some peonies, a fern. I keep thinking everything is in, but cartons keep arriving. I must have gone through a great hunger for plants. It is well, for it would have been a moody afternoon if nothing had arisen to distract me. Have given up on Humanities. Brief cry in my office, moved on. Taught Medea in class. Compared my situation to Medea’s, and though the comparison isn’t totally ridiculous, it serves mostly to illustrate the fact that I lack ruthlessness. Even the most deserving retribution exhausts me after a couple of hours. I have a comic temperament, which gets on with things in a timely manner, whereas Medea is tragic, and capable of being stuck, however majestically, upon one point. We heard the Jeffers translation. What an incomparably great play!
   
The three times I have quarreled with people at the university in thirty years– Ileana, Arnold, now the Boy, each time has been a shock and an ambush. I did not sense the animus, nor did I share it until forced by underhanded deeds to do so. My every stance has been, by necessity, defensive. This tells me something about my character, and I would like to be more precise about what. Too trusting? Not sufficiently observant? Capable of running over peoples’ toes without sensing it? Liable to inspire envy? I don’t think I’m really generally very irritating, because opposite testimony seems more widespread. Certain sorts of people, though– viperish, forked-tongued, jealous of status and prerogative, moving in shadow, talking to everyone but me. . .  I can’t prevent it because I don’t see it coming. And I have no one to counsel me. I have to wait, try to clear the air, decide what my heart is truly advising.
   
Last night was near calamity on stage, featuring huge gaps that we tried to bluff our way through. The reviewer was there, alas, but knew it was a rehearsal and we weren’t ready. Tonight, final dress, we have an audience, and it begins to count. I never know what mistake I’m going to make– in every case one I’ve never made before– so adventure lies before.

October 13, 2015

My playwrights and I had a great time sitting at the table reading plays last night.

Reading Grant’s Memoirs that I got at the antique store. He was very much an Ohio boy. Loved speed and travel. Read with wonder that his father operated a tannery in Ravenna for a while.

Stopped by the APD. I saw two cruisers approaching the traffic circle at the end of the university drive, and I thought, “If I don’t merge briskly they’re going to think I don’t know how to use a traffic circle.” A block or so later they stopped me for failing to yield right of way in a traffic circle. Sigh. They also wanted to cite me for an expired registration, but the registration does not expire until October 15, so I don’t know what that was about. He said, “Someone made a mistaken stroke of the pencil.” But, I didn’t KNOW it expired on October 15, so the unexpected benefit is that I’m off to the DMV before I really am illegal.
   
A dark star has reigned over the last few days. I don’t know whether to feel alacrity that the stream of ill fortune must by now have ended, or fear that there’s more yet to come.

October 12, 2015

Fired from Humanities, after 32 years, for being “disruptive.” I don’t get credit for my forbearance, which I think of as my signal trait. I did not present the fact that I was being fired because I kept in the light the ways in which things are going awry, because the one who set them awry doesn’t want to hear it. I suppose that could count as being “disruptive.” though, I would argue, virtuously so. What a mousy, sniveling, deceitful self-aggrandizing little maneen. I want to say, “Who wants to work for him, anyhow?” but in fact I’m heartbroken, for this tiny moment. I loved teaching that stuff. I felt nostalgia in class today, thinking of all the things I would never speak of again, professionally. I did more good doing it than he will in a dozen careers laid end to end. I think he knows that, weighed it in the balance, and found his vanity, nevertheless, rising to the heavens. I hate a quarrel more than people think I do, and have never in my life clung to a quarrel when I even suspected to the least degree I might be wrong. I do not do so now. Tom Paine and Mahatma Gandhi were disruptive, weren’t they? I think I’m more worried than they were about hurting peoples’ feelings. And shame on me for that. Anyway, a brilliant afternoon to fill before my playwrights come for chili.