watch your feet, watch your head

Two dreams in one week about disturbing a ground nest of hornets and being stung. Once at my parents' house, once here at home. Apart from the literal, what should I be worried about? Where am I in danger of kicking up trouble?

This week turned out to be a small personal arts festival, beginning with the opera dress rehearsal on Tuesday night -- my ticket bestowed by argus_in_tights. This occasional opera attendance has become a sweet tradition in my year. Idomeneo was excellent, and I will review it, only -- well -- I have to see the last act first. argus_in_tights, your gift was great, but my weariness and worry were greater, and I went home at second intermission to work on my paper. I know it's dreadful, but seemed like a compromise I could live with.

Thursday came, and it was finally October 11th, which meant Robert Bringhurst speaking on the West Coast Renaissance. It was arranged as a Lansdowne Lecture and a part of the Skelton/Malahat review retrospective. Fanboys everywhere, or at least here, rejoiced. He seemed a bit bemused that we wanted typography books signed rather than poetry. And o his voice. I have never heard such finely modulated tones (bari-, bass) sustaining such well-constructed phrases. The question period was interesting, and challenging on the subject of cultural usage, which I was glad for.

Then last night, on the spur of the moment, inlandsea and I decided to attempt (if not too artistically priced) the Art Gallery's contribution to the retrospective -- a reading by Skelton's students and contemporaries of their work and his. Brignhurst read last and best, incanting Skelton's long night poem as though the sea itself spoke, rolling and grinding the stone of each word, dragging it back and forth until its shape was perfect in the ear and the mind.

All of these rich moments, deserving of detail and attention, but I am going to market before it closes. If spoken words are round beach-stones, sometimes lately it seems like lifting granite blocks to write them down, to formulate the chronologies of things, even events I know I'll want to have a record of. I suppose it's having done all those bloody drafts of that bloody essay. I seem to remember that only five years ago this school/work proposition was much less taxing.

I feel flickering, moments of brightness and a fatigue not exactly physical or mental, though affecting both. Something like overtaxing the ligaments that join body and mind.

Anyway. Poetry later. Shallots now.

{rf}