Budapest 2

October 7, 2016

Ate included breakfast in the breakfast room. The American couple beside me was discussing when they were going to do laundry and how, if you fry it enough, cauliflower can become palatable. As I was breakfasting, just as the food began to settle, my stomach was stricken with extreme pain, such as I had never felt there before. I came upstairs either to vomit or to die. I did neither, but now I’m frightened and wary. I need this to happen 7000 miles from home.

Got Patti Smith’s much-talked-of M Train from the airport bookstore. It pisses me off. I could have written it in three days. Perhaps she did.

Roamed the streets of Budapest in the cold bright light. Tied together my old stomping grounds so they are frozen in memory. Decided that the gut-sickness was my body telling me I had taken enough iron pills. Sat in a park by the river and wrote. Sat in a café with a glass of beer and wrote.

My left leg is too swollen for me to wear the classy pants I bought for tonight’s opening.

The Kiscelli is at the butt end of town, far from any public transportation, and raises in me a perfect storm of anxiety. Will it be late night and me walking ten miles home through a strange city in the winter cold? Have decided there will be no taxis and no one will offer me a ride. Can’t even wear my warmest clothes, because I have to look nice for the opening. My comfort is that most of it, from there, is downhill. I am too old for this.

Budapest

October 6, 2016

K&K Opera Hotel, Budapest. It took 1000 forints to buy a Starbucks, 7000 forints to get here from the airport, which is about 25 euro; one adjusts to the astronomical numbers. Sat beside a sea captain now living in Marion, NC, who’s retired from actual captaining and now works a desk job in Denmark. The trip was almost suspiciously trauma-free. Will even paid his rent early (which is to say, on time) so I have a little cushion in the bank. As the taxi passed the history museum with the ratty park I wrote poems in, and the little avenue leading to the radio station I came to know intimately, I perked up, for this part of the city I know. My room on the 7th floor has no view, of course, except for the windows of the rooms opposite and a pretty red roof off in the distance. Walked in the thin rain to Saint Stephen’s, Szent Istvan, which I somehow managed to miss before. Walked its long front avenue to the Duna, had some Starbucks in a tent near where some politician was going on in incomprehensible Hungarian, returned to the hotel. Have a ticket for Kodaly’s The Spinning Room at the opera tonight. Never heard of it; certainly never heard it. I could spit and hit the opera house, which is what I planned. Stood for a good while at the ticket booth behind an Italian who would not be satisfied, and kept saying “Your BEST price. . . your BEST price. . .” as if he expected the clerk to be holding out on him. His great beauty, when he turned around, made me glad I hadn’t started something. Traviata is sold out, so I’d best enjoy tonight.

Home from the opera: Szekely fono, The Spinning Room by Kodaly. Let’s see. . . The music was lively and lush, the staging, as I remember from the Strauss festival two summers ago, beautiful and inventive. Many men with their shirts off. It was an alternating discussion, in music based on and using Transylvanian folk motives, of death and love. A young man dies. . . then a bunch of women discuss love while dancing. . . and a bunch of men discuss love while dancing. . . a guy named Laslo pines for a girl named Ilona. . . everyone wants to die and their mothers hold them back. . . there is a demon. . .there is snow. . .the man who died comes back and claims his true love, a chubby lady in a blue skirt. Maybe I should have bought a libretto, though it was in Hungarian. Before the opera came a folk cabaret with dancers, a girl singer, and several musicians in black suits. At the end of their set they played some opening notes, and the violinist pointed at the crowd with his bow and everybody began singing a sad, beautiful song that all the Hungarians knew. It was lovely. A German woman kept asking me questions in German, which I kept answering, mostly on the theme of I didn’t know what was going on either.

October 5, 2016

Yemassee Review takes “Bonhanno’s Death.” The editor wrote that there was “much discussion” among the staff about it. I wonder what? Deep, long dreams before rising. In the last I and a good friend were searching for a hole at the bottom of a pool (a pool the size of a lake) that I knew was there and which I knew must be found. But it was the quality of the friendship in the dream that mattered, deep, close, confiding, fulfilling. Whereas in life I have never had a friend to match the friend I was willing to be.  Maybe that’s what the dream was about. Packed and ready for class, then ready for the flight, where, for a time, all things are out of my hands.

October 4, 2016

Warmish autumn. We discussed the Comprehensives, and the marked quality people have–these days–of looking outside themselves for their failings. Parents of failures will phone, demanding to know what was wrong with the test. One student did not address the essay at all, but spent her time railing at us for expecting her to know things. Nor is that even an exaggeration. Watered the latest-into-the-ground, preparing to leap into the skies for Central Europe. Prepared. Untypically excited.

October 3, 2016

A watermelon vine twines about the front garden bearing one lush orange flower, evidence, probably, of my spitting seeds over the edge of the porch. It hasn’t time to make a watermelon, but I’m going to see to it that it has as much life as it can get between now and the freeze. The white rose blooms more heavily than ever.

October 2, 2016

The bishop’s installation was dignified, festive, and took its ample time. I like the new bishop. He looked young and fragile kneeling before the old bishops in their red and gold. Favorable premonition.

Asheville Pride was merry and brilliantly lit. We always have problems with the sound system, and the actual performance is always a disappointment, but there we were, steadfast, and it was good to see so many colorful people having a colorful good time.  We are always “top-heavy,” in that the tenors have an unerring instinct for how to get the mics into their mouths, and the basses do not.

Abundant and weird dreams. My dream self is heterosexual, I think, for several of the dreams–rather extended ones– were about making love to women. I critiqued this in the dream, thinking “this isn’t like me,” but I didn’t stop.

Fussing with my Budapest reservations. I am going First Class. Did I pay for that, or did it just happen? In any case, it is well with my soul.

Evening: We seated the bishop this morning in his cathedra, in his cathedral. It was an unexpectedly moving event. I cannot sing “Saint Patrick’s Breastplate,” for it is to me a more perfect credo, and I am moved to tears, and it takes a better man than I to sing through tears. 

October 1, 2016

Cool autumn morning before a day of harsh singing– that is to say, singing in mammoth numbers for the bishop’s installation, bellowing in the bright cold opening for Asheville Pride. We’ll know how it went when it is over.
   
Driving home from the theater the other night I found myself taking one route rather than the other because the Woodfin police are worse than the Asheville police, and more to be avoided at night on a deserted street. That’s sad.