The Play Was Performed

 

I will be driving down to Newburgh today.  The lizard is ill.  He’s been ill before.  I don’t wish him ill.  Stolid lizard, always staring off. This will be the third time we have escorted the basilisk down to the Newburgh Veterinary Hospital.  The first time, he wasn’t eating.  We gave got shots to give him in the abdomen and a medicine he was supposed to consume.   A few week’s later we brought him down for a check-up and they agreed he was doing better.  But then he wasn’t.  And so today we’re to drive him back down again.  All the visits and medications add up and we’ve easily spent two-hundred the times the actual cost of a painted gecko, creating a habitat for him, feeding him and tending to his medical bills.

 

One would have been ambitious.  But both courses looked remarkable.  One is on the history of Freudianism.  The other is an examination of genocide.  I got the texts and have been reading along with my older one in her Sophomore year course at Reed College.  Primo Levi was a name I recognized.  I’d read a collection of Philip Roth essays called “Shop Talk” where he interviewed different authors and Levi was one of them.  Indeed, the same essay is in this edition of “Survival in Auschwitz.”  When I was done, I immediately picked up “The Investigation” by Peter Weiss which is her other assignment.

 

I felt as though the Levi was so unfathomably deadening, and miserable, it is only with the greatest reluctance that one embraces the fact, upon considering the banal drudgery of abattoir attendants that Levi was of course, ultimately, “lucky.”  He managed to cling to life in a lesser ring of hell.  Most people were, of course, immediately murdered and disposed of.

 

Weiss it seems, had also written Maurat Sade.  I can recall that the play was performed at my undergraduate university.  A number of people I knew well, were associated with the performance.  I believe was last spring that my younger one was reading about Jacque-Louis David and mind was humming about the death of Marat.  Impulsively I ordered the play, right away and it is on its way now.  Was it really already a year since she was working on the French Revolution? 

 

 

 

Sunday, 02/21/21