6 February 2018

I want to write an honest sentence about prayer. The man who gives my dog a treat pulls his phone out of a pouch. He gets up early to do devotional reading, then finds lessons to watch while walking his dog. His accent is from North Carolina (as are his gluten-free treats), but he's lived here since the 70s. I thought he worshiped the New England Patriots, what with the shirt and hat. My mother talked about Displaced Persons wandering Europe after the War. Here I worry about micro-aggressions (a soccer dad told my daughter she should breast feed because it's healthier) when people are ripped from their families by the ICE man that cometh. Mutter Courage is surrounded by disability: mute daughter, autistic son, priest with a cane. Her ability to talk and sing won't get her out of the play, no matter how displaced the playwright insists we are. Let's all be flat characters together, and do our pilgrimages on the solid stage. He says I suffer the world. To suffer is to feel pain, or to tolerate it in others. I suffer the little children; I suffer temptation. It's like the phrase, “I forget,” from which we gather in the many moments we remember. To forget is to desire forgetting, not to misplace the trauma of wandering away or toward. The baby's not to be cut in two, but torn limb from limb; only the woman who cannot pull is true. The other wants her child for his inheritance. Oh, friends, the playwright was Marxist! His priest was drunk, the marriage a sham. He likes the moments of anger that boil up like blood, turning the stage red. Peter O'Toole was so bad in Macbeth that the London paper gave it a “must see.” The blood was strawberry jam. Let jam be thicker than water, and water thicker than skin. I went instead to Krapp's Last Tape to watch bananas. If only he could have forgotten. Tape is thicker than memory, and none so kind.

--6 February 2018