Inspiration

Beltane                                                                 Emergence Moon

The Inferno Ballet and the courage it took to tackle the project has inspired me. I have an Ovid/Metamorphoses novel in me, one that excites me. I’m not ready to write it and won’t be soon, too much translating and reading yet to do, but I’ve decided that unless or until Missing gets representation and sells, I’m going to work on the Ovid novel.  Who knows how much time any of us has as we move toward what friend Tom Byfield calls the Great Perhaps.  Once the little Medicare card goes in the wallet you know the sand will run out. Not might. But will. So, I don’t want to die not having tried to tackle a big, the big, project I have in me. And that’s how Ovid feels.

(Turner, Ovid Banished From Rome)

I’m still going to work on the short stories, revising and submitting, and I’m still going to go back and revisit other novels, revising those that seem worth it and submitting them, too, but from now on my primary creative energy has a Roman stamp on it. This will create synergy between my Latin work and my writing, a synergy I wanted way back four years ago when I started learning Latin. Now I’m able to make it hum.

 

 

To Hell and Back

Beltane                                                              Emergence

Dancers. Kinesthetic wonders. The James Sewell ballet troupe are lithe, strong, fluid. Many of the things they did with their bodies revealed possibilities I had not kenned. Several a male dancer with take a female dancer on his back, then they would move, him bent over slightly, her resting on his back with no holds on either part, just weight and angle keeping her in place. Or, deadlifts of a prone woman on the floor to hip height. The Inferno was 70  minutes long and the number of calories expended by the troupe would keep me thin for a couple of months, maybe longer.

Then there was the audacity of it. The level of creative challenge in taking a solid, 800 year old literary masterpiece and interpreting it in an essentially silent, physical medium is immense. This was a brave work. The score and the dancers took on us on a journey through the Inferno, going lower and lower, down the New York Subway into the infernal regions. The Sewell inferno is set, loosely, in New York City.

This story of damnation and mid-life crisis is timeless and the Sewell Ballet has done it well. Worth seeing.

 

Calming

Beltane                                                              Emergence Moon

The first wave of emotions has passed. I feel present now. Those onions and leeks which I did not plant yesterday will go in on Monday and Tuesday instead, along with some fertilizer for the daffodils. Big life decisions take a while to incorporate and this one is not done with me, I know. But for today, it is.

Kate and I are going into the Cowles Center to see the Inferno danced by the James Sewell Ballet. Several years ago, when the writing stalled, I spent a year reading the classics, among them Dante’s Divine Comedy. This is one of the masterworks of western civilization, especially its depiction of Dante and Virgil’s journey through the Inferno. I did read on, finishing the trilogy with the Purgatorio and the Paradiso. It’s ironic, and I’m hardly original in observing this, that the Inferno is what has held reader’s attentions the most over the years. Damnation interests us more than redemption.