Irish Wake

additional sketches

Lincoln:
That's the problem, that the conversation gets hemmed in by what people are willing to talk about.  They talk about the usual matters.  They see things conventionally.  The same old terms, of comfort and  discomfort.  That's the overwhelming barometer of normalcy for them, to ask, am I happy, am I sad, am I comfortable, am I uncomfortable, thus how do I figure out how to be comfortable most of the time…
The conversation can never get to the deeper part, to the real issues, because people simply have to use those terms, good bad happy sad hot cold smart dumb… and they can't break out of that into something deeper, limited to a binary argument.  Well, life ain't like that, I tell you.  To move forward you have to back up sometimes, and even that's too complicated to explain, I'm afraid.  Because for people it's simply happy or sad, one way or the other, my way or the way of my enemy.  How pathetically limited must any conversation be…  Unless you're a real clever bastard who can do some kind of weird complex calculus based on factors no one can really see…  And try to explain that to the voting masses and the whole lot.  That's why I was glad you were there when things on that island got sticky.  No one knew what was going on.  Everyone turned into ants, thinking they had some mission to do…

Kennedy:
And what we all needed was time, an open mind… backing off.

Lincoln:

Whitman… he helped all those poor boys, all shot to hell…  And he still was kind enough to salute my old frame.  I could see it in his eyes, bright as they were.   Tender fellow.  Some being beyond us and our normal ways…

I'd 'a quit if I could.  Gone and helped take care of them…  But the train was moving, on to its ending point, and I knew I had to stand and do the work of Reconstruction, repatriating, convincing them all, letting them know, they had a place still, the rebels.  I wasn't going to hang them all, far from it.  That too was the work I wanted to do, the greater work…  I figured that was my place on Earth, to do all that…

Then suddenly, as if there was no time even in life, but only a great rush, from one thing to another, never a chance to stop, then suddenly I'm walking up that little part of Tenth Street in front of the theater, finding myself going in.

And for some reason, maybe that dream I had, I felt weird about tit.  I might have said to myself, well, it's just plays that make me feel strange, drumming up all those emotions in you, making you attached to the figures on the stage…  When they're not even real…  Kinda sickening if you think about it sometimes.

So I sat down in that rocking chair, Mrs. Lincoln to my side, and I followed along with it…

Some people are of the kind to get you all riled up, ain't they.  Never stop at it.  I hope I'm remembered as one of the calm ones, and maybe that's why it all happened.  I wasn't some obnoxious SOB insisting on a phalanx of guards and all the trappings…  I was left with that one dullard idiot, guarding the President of the United States of America as he sat with his wife, turned toward the stage.

Shakespeare would have been a more calming thing to watch anyway...


Kennedy: Yes, we can never stop.  We get pulled along, have no time to take a look around, always something.  A blur.  One minute you're eating breakfast with Jackie one cold morning up in Oregon, next, you're landing in...  I..  we had a few times when we tried to step back, like during the Missile Crisis...

Lincoln:  Bullet's the only damn thing that can catch up with you.  Words can't.  Poetry could, because poetry knows its terms are imprecise, like catching a sunbeam, Whitman, and that guy Sandburg.  And once he started...  Ha ha.  He was smart.  He simply took all those stories, what people simply remembered from my life, like how I liked to lay out on the couch and try not to think, except they didn't know, it was just the story, then leave it to the imagination...  Like I pulled that pig out of the mud... Who knows why, I just did it.

As you see, all life blends together from up here.

And maybe only poor bastards like us, you with your pains and me with mine, kinda get that when we're down in the thick of the world's drama.

But getting laid all the time...  did that help?  (chuckle)

Kennedy:  Yes, I'd say it would, ah, take one's mind away from the pain for a little while, yes, for a time...

Lincoln:  (looking depressed)  Well, I can't say I blame you...  But don't quote

Kennedy:  Yes, don't quote me on that.

Lincoln:  You always had quite a talent at it.  Braver than I, I guess.  For me, never was easy.  What monsters they can be sometimes.