My Mind Is A Blank

I am approaching the second meeting of the course I am teaching for eight meetings.  It is an overview of the dramatic tragic productions put on at the Greater Dionysia in Athens during the course of the fifth century BCE.  These texts are commonly just labeled "ancient Greek tragedy," which is okay as far as it goes but not really specific enough.  Well, enough of that; the inner pedant is speaking.  Each meeting lasts one hour and twenty minutes, and I am trying to recover the technique I possessed in my heyday of talking for that length of time from a conception filled out with all the appropriate details without recourse to text or notes.  It derives from the years in which I played roles on the state requiring me to memorize long swatches of dialogue.  For forty years the technique served me well, and I could range back and forth across the front of a classroom talking eloquently on texts and adducing facts and theories relating to them without having to peer down and shuffle through notes.  The whole idea was in my head; indeed, when sometimes picking up the subject at any point  in a conversation outside of the classroom my mind quickly found the substance that was relevant to the moment.  I have spent the last weeks assembling the ideas, reading the texts, and Friday I will be talking about Sophocles' Oeidpus the King and to a lesser degree Oedipus at Colonus.  I woke today thinking I can't remember my lines.  Yes, I know the plays but the details, the specifics, the nuances that I had so carefully teased out two weeks ago from my reading of the Greek text are gone from my head.  Luckily I wrote them all down as a precaution.  But that special sense of readiness which made the years of my teaching such a wonderful experience just is not there.  After twenty years, it has all changed.  I am going to take a break from writing this blog to concentrate on thinking out my reactions to the text for the course.