When I
worked backstage at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, I think
of that as a really important time because I was what--sixteen--very
impressionable. Hearing soundings of
King Lear
night after night and Macbeth night after
night I was infected with that particular cadence. Some of the actors were
brilliant, some were weak, but it was the efficacy and power of the language
that always carried. When you die you don't want to lie there for three days.
You want someone to read Blake or Gertrude Stein or the Tibetan Book of the Dead to you. This is what Lewis Warsh and I spoke of the
other day. He said he was leaving his house to go to the hospital to visit
Bernadette Mayer who is in a kind of twilight-state coma after a cerebral
hemorrhage. I was saying read
to her, read
to her! He grabbed Shakespeare's Sonnets
off the shelf and went to the hospital and was reading. It was my old college
edition of the Sonnets with all my notes in it. This was meaningful to me
because it's a book she loves. It's a book we used to read together, she and I.
We don't know where she is, what state she's in, what she might hear or not
hear, but from the Buddhist perspective, hearing is one of the last faculties to
dissolve.
