Outside, garden tables have joined together, a neighbour hosts a banquet laughs that have brassed up as the sun brasses down. A light bowl holds a candle and flickers peach across my wall, in preparation for Earth Hour. Reports today moan that lights off does nothing for the environment, but what a limited definition of environment they must think within; the importance of your community all joining flames at the same time for the same purpose has endless benefits.
What a freedom that today I am not limited by how I feel. I felt like bed-blogging and Bed Red Room-ing from my bed and I am.
Today has been me in a joyously feral state. I had a Happy Birthday lunch with mother then spent hours travelling in and around pockets of my home. The Daddy Long legs are taking over the lounge room corners, so I violently thwacked my walls with tea towels until the spiders all fell down. My walls! I repeated to their length. I wonder if their insect eyes saw who their attacker was and, in revenge, will cobweb me as I sleep too soundly of a night in the near future?
Reversing the memory wheels to Thursday this week (voooo wheeeat!!), I was walking around the Quay water, to meet Annette, part of the exuberant team at The Sydney Writers’ Festival. (Still, a year later, no sign of my pearl, red coral, gold necklace the wind stole). Each time I chat with Annette she reveals a wonder; last talk it was her fluency in Sanskrit, this meet – her explanation for my feeling of peace I’d found walking by the water : Peace, Annette offered, because I am surrounded by water, embraced by a substance profound, endless, beautiful and waiting on and for me.
At the festival, Annette and I were scouting for a new installation space for Nightwriting. The one we’d hope on is riddled with Health and Safety issues. While I go wild with happiness at things which involve risk, un-certainity and possible failure, it seems councils support only safe, dependable and harmless projects; three qualities the antithesis of poetry, creativity. Lucky for Red Room, Annette mediates and moulds a space for us within the prison of local, social rules.
[Incidentally, we are looking for a set designer to work on this project].
Having found our space, in the Bangarra Studio, I had an hour to spare before meeting Mr and Ms Cassidy to discuss Pigeon Poetry and our media launch, planned for April 14th. So, I immersed into the surrealist sardine cans and Coca-Cola baby clothes, created by Fiona Hall.
Leaving but soon to return to the MCA I noticed an elegantly dressed woman in her seventies looking for a way to somewhere, but unable to find it. Instead the woman had forgotten how to reach the doors of the museum. As I guided her under the sticky sun, she claimed she was lost because she was old and being lost is a constant preoccupation with old people and because she’d drunk too much wine at a lunch with Australia’s Governor General.
