Current Favorite Song

Within Sufjan Stevens' Album, Come on Feel the Illinoise!, Sufjan adds an interesting twist, writing all of the songs about Illinois, and events that took place there. Interestingly enough, the song that I have chosen to write about is stirringly beautiful and carries a deep story within it. Sufjan sings about his childhood and attending a summer camp at the Illinois Mississippi Palisades State Park where his brother and best friend discovered a giant wasp with which they constantly teased each other. Reminiscing about this time he recalls "There on the wall in the bedroom creeping I see a wasp with her wings outstretched".

I can recall in my childhood one very unfortunate series of events involving a number of wasps and a swingset. I was swinging alone in the back yard and a wasp nest had developed on the upper corner of the swing. In the act of swinging I shook and rattled the wasps into a frenzied rage. Before I knew what was happening I had already been stung half a dozen of times. The pain that was inflicted by those little menaces remains a vivid memory within my childhood.

Perhaps it is this kinship that I share with Sufjan regarding sheer horror of wasps and their "terrible sting" as he puts it. The size of a wasp is nothing that an adult would bother to worry about but I know from my unfortunately painful experience that I never want to face a swarming hive of wasps ever again.

This song acts as a strong device to remind me of the fear that I held for wasps for a long time. Their small black and yellow bodies stand as a sharp reminder that though they are small, they are marked as dangerous. The buzzing that accompanies flight serves furthermore to alert someone that their presence is drawing closer. It is strange to think that such a small insect can cause such great distress. The line that Sufjan uses to illustrate the response to a sting from the wasp shows exactly the same response that the seven year old version of myself elicited, "He runs washing his face in his hands".