I was having fun playing around with this photo, and I really like how this version turned out.
I don't really have all that much to say right now.
I haven't been sleeping well. I crawl into bed thinking I am so tired and am going to have an awesome sleep, and then, no matter how exhausted I have felt all day, no matter how long or busy my day was, I can't fall asleep. I've taken to listening to audio books - mostly children's stories: Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan, The Chronicles of Narnia - in an effort to help myself fall asleep. I need something for my mind to focus on so that it will stop thinking so loudly. When I told my mother this, she said, "It reminds me of when we used to play music for you to fall asleep as a kid." I'd forgotten this little biographical fact. I distinctly remember though, that a) I couldn't fall asleep without listening to something, and b) there were nights when the tape would finish before I fell asleep, and I really hated that. Apparently, insomnia, like perfectionism, has been plaguing me for most of my life.
Apparently, I had more to say than I thought.
Jean soon learned that at Ewa's parties there was always a project on. Huge rolls of brown paper were unfurled and everyone painted a mural; a sheet was tacked to the wall and a film projected while the Dogs played, sewing together a melody out of silence and the whirring of the projector. Actors gathered in the middle of the living room and, with nothing more than a spoon or a dishtowel, transformed reality - having a Sunday row on a pond or floating in a lifeboat on the North Sea; suddenly they were lovers on a picnic blanket, or thieves, or children on a swing. Jean knew these actors had worked together for a long time, a bodily history among them. She had seen Avery perform loaves and fishes with objects, with stones on the beach, with rulers and wooden blocks, creating bridges, castles, entire cities. But his magic was solitary and intellectual compared with the instantly complex communication between these bodies, the moment continually changing, deepening into humour or sorrow. And sometimes this pathos was intense, and a hole opened, and everyone watching from the edges of the room found their own sorrow pouring into it. Crack! the earth of the scene split open and down everyone tumbled together into the wreckage of memory. And then the actors melted back into the party, and the food and the bottles were passed around again.
-- Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault
Some day, I would love to host gatherings like the one that Michaels describes in this passage.
I was fortunate enough to spend quite a bit of time over the long weekend at low-key gatherings with dear friends. It was a pretty delightful way to celebrate the start of summer, if you ask me.
I am currently listening to the soundtrack from Smash and getting ready to meet up with a couple friends to sip beers on a patio in the sunshine. I think this long weekend is off to a rather excellent start.
Sometime around 7.30 the light outside became absolutely exquisite again, so I roused myself from my office and wandered around the block taking pictures. I really hope no one was looking out their windows at the time, because I probably looked like a crazy person (at one point I may or may not have crawled underneath a bush in front of the house next to mine...).
...I have to take a picture. Or two. Or ten.
I want to feel what my father felt, Avery repeated, sitting on the edge of the bed on the Nile, what the marmisti know, what the blind man knows when he's on Ramses' knee. What my mother calls 'flesh-knowledge.' It's not enough for your mind to believe in something, your body must believe it too. If I hadn't witnessed this particular pleasure in my father when I was a child perhaps I wouldn't feel the lack of it. But I do. I can imagine what a chemist feels when he looks in a microscope, how his mind can practically touch what he sees. Or a physicist who can feel an equation tearing molecules apart along the shear, like tearing a handful of bread from a loaf. Or the tension in a meniscus. The closest understanding I have of this is when I look at a building. I feel the consequences of each choice; how the volume works, how the building eats teh space it inhabits, even how it carries its ruins.-- Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault
I love it when authors articulate things for me in such an eloquent way. Because, honestly, despite being someone who adores language and has chosen it as her life's work, sometimes it refuses to do what I want it to or need it to. I love this description of the physicality of any sensation. It's something I know to be true for myself.
Lot 666, then. A chandelier in pieces. Some of you may recall the strange affair of the Phantom of the Opera, a mystery never fully explained. We're told, ladies and gentlemen, that this is the very chandelier which figures in the famous disaster. Our workshops have repaired it, and wired parts of it for the new electric light. Perhaps we can frighten away the ghost of so many years ago with a little illumination. Gentlemen...
I watched the 2004 Phantom of the Opera last Saturday with a friend, and was once again reminded just how much I adore the opening sequence to that movie. I get chills every single time I watch it.
Ps. No, that is not a picture of a chandelier, much less one in pieces. (Although, how cool would that be to photograph? Seriously, now I need to find a chandelier that is falling apart to take pictures of.) It's actually a close up of an old lighthouse signal light that is displayed in the Maritime Museum in Halifax. It's probably one of my favourite things in the museum.
Despite the fact that I'm drowning in secondary sources right now and am having regular existential crises (seriously, this comic is my life right now), I am actually profoundly excited for the next few months. If the last several weeks are any indication, this is going to be one awesome summer. And, honestly, I am totally okay with that.
I am drowning in a metaphorical sea of secondary sources right now. For every source I read, I find three more that I ought to read, so my "to read" list is growing rather than shrinking. And despite the fact that this list is ever-growing, I have read so many books and articles at this point that I can no longer remember who said what.
I'm hoping that the feeling of being completely overwhelmed and the regular occurrence of mental breakdowns means that I'm at least sort of on track to finish this thing around when I'm supposed to.
