FOUL RAG AND BONE SHOP OF THE HEART

SEEKING THE SPARK OF INSPIRATION IN  2019

The Circus Animals’ Desertion

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,

I sought it daily for six weeks or so.

Maybe at last being but a broken man

I must be satisfied with my heart, although

Winter and summer till old age began

My circus animals were all on show,

Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,

Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes,

First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose

Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,

Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,

Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,

That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;

But what cared I that set him on to ride,

I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,

`The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it,

She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away

But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.

I thought my dear must her own soul destroy

So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,

And this brought forth a dream and soon enough

This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread

Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;

Heart mysteries there, and yet when all is said

It was the dream itself enchanted me:

Character isolated by a deed

To engross the present and dominate memory.

Players and painted stage took all my love

And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

WHERE ALL THE LADDERS START--

Everything for me started in Pawtucket so geographically that is my starting gate. Now I have returned  to that place when I am so near to the finish line. Why did I feel compelled to do that?  Certainly the claims of love and kinship and the desire to care for my two  Aunts, Grace Jenckes  and Anna Coleman, in their last years.  And to some extent I succeeded in doing that.

Recently, and for the first time I have tried to write about  my Aunt Anna's  actual death  bed moments.  Since I have turned back to writing dramatic pieces for the stage having  completed my first ten-minute play and submitted it to a  contest, I also tried the monologue form.  In a sense I write a monologue every time I complete a blog entry;  so I am in practice for that form.

Years ago, when I was teaching play writing at the University of Cincinnati, I  completed  several  full length plays and  two one act plays, and they were produced. Since that time, new trends have emerged and  the  way to get started in play writing  is  to write a ten minute play for which theaters have generated a huge demand  though their 10 minute play evenings. 

 The group that I became  associated with here in RI is called THE BLUE COW GROUP and it was formed after  some playwrights  met at  workshop they attended for several weeks at the GAMM THEATRE that was then in Pawtucket. They have been writing and  finding some success with ten minute plays.  Writing a ten minute play is a kind of gentle entree to writing a full length play. Sort of like getting ready to write a novel  by writing short stories.

 What surprised me in the completion of my play and monologues  was the subjects I was now  choosing or that were choosing me-- to be more accurate. They are so different from the stories I told in my earlier plays.  I was  amazed  that when I went to write a ten minute play, it turned out to be a dramatization of some bad treatment  I witnessed when I was in rehab. I did not have that subject in my repertoire when I was writing plays in the 80's and 90's.  It was not in my repertoire because it was not in my experience.
Do I sound  naive? 
When I say that when I sat down to write, the subject that forced its way to my  attention was something I  am sorry I witnessed and  that I wish were not true.  I called that play  SKILLED NURSING.

So experience changes us, and aging and illness are huge experiences. They must be told, but who wants  to hear about them? Who could find delight in what I  now have to say?

I fear that my subject matter now is too dour. No romance,  no sex, no  happy endings.  I have  found myself  looking  for stories  right where Yeats found himself: 
in the foul rag and bone shop of the  heart.