Creation, Allegory and Violation

It's a funny business, this creation lark.

Apparently, one of the most popular questions asked of successful authors during promotional tours, on the lecture tour circuit, at soirées, ubiquitous dinner parties is: “Where do you get your ideas from?” I doubt that any sensible, rational answer ensues, or can ensue, from such a question; who knows all of the dark secrets of the inner workings of their own consciousness which would, perhaps, provide some semblance of an answer. Of course, post-hoc rationalisation is always possible: I read something which gave me an idea for a setting; something happened to me a couple of years ago that suggested a plot; I used to know somebody who was very similar to my main character, I merely embellished him or her; such statements trip easily from the tongue. However, these do not explain the real reasons; why ‘you’ thought to invest a good deal of effort in expanding the original idea into a time-consuming, fraught, problematic and possibly highly emotional narrative?

As a sometime painter, I have a stock of drawings, sketches from life, from photographs, or from my imagination; sketches that encapsulate a certain subject, a certain mood, a certain time or place.* As I cut the paper away from the board of my most recent painting and, during the time when I am waiting for the next sodden piece of Ingres paper, taped to the board, to dry**, I rummage through old sketches to see if anything, a possible painting, suggests itself to me; it is, I assure you, a case of the sketch suggesting the painting not a preconceived idea looking for an appropriate sketch. In some, perhaps most, cases, something grabs my attention and, while the finished painting may look little like the drawing, still it emanates from it; why that sketch? What is it about that particular drawing that, at that particular time, attracts me enough to want to spend 7 or 14 days, 15 hours per day, working it up into something which someone might consider ‘suitable for framing’? 

Whether you compose music, write verse or prose, whether you draw or paint or sculpt, you place the child of your often unconscious intent out there for the world to see and hope for a reaction. Most times, any reaction you get, unless you are a professional performer, is predominantly an appreciation of the skill involved in the “object’s” creation and any emotional or psychological reaction is likely to be of a second hand nature; it's a comment on this blog; it's an email saying how touched someone was by your gift; it's a letter saying how moving someone found the music. It is rare, I think, that one gets the opportunity to witness the reaction first hand in real time; to see your intent, such as it is, and the effect of that intent.

Back in May 2009, I blogged a story here. It was part allegory of someone’s life and part conjecture. The allegory had been suggested by a chance remark some months before and by my own propensity to write fairy stories; there is something that makes archaic, unnatural dialogue somehow sound in context, at least, to my ears and I like writing dialogue from a more formal, constrained age, however dismal I may be at writing it. However, allegory is not only difficult to write if it is not to be just another story founded upon some experience, the allegory must be tied inextricably to all the salient facts of the event or sequence of events if it is to remain allegory, but, more importantly, at least for the purpose of story, this particular allegory did not possess a conclusion, the sequence of events was not over.

One day, a nondescript day, overcast and blustery, a day for doing nothing else but retreat to the cosy, air-conditioned warmth of your office, I began to rehearse “Once upon a time, there lived a young princess.....”. Nothing seemed to follow naturally from that but, upon pausing to light a cigarette, some words inexplicably came into my mind: “To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows.”*** At that point, I somehow knew that I had a conclusion to my little allegory; the ending did not continue the allegory but might, in a few short years, become part of it. For the time being it could remain simple conjecture; a solitary avenue among many of the infinite ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ **** that is life.

After posting the tale on this blog, I had another thought, a bizarre one, no doubt, but one which had a strange attraction. Over the following months, I tidied it up, pruned a little and laid it out in a form which could be presented outside of the virtual world; a ‘book’, paperback size, bound with gold and black thread and complete with ‘reviews’ on the rear cover. Later in the year, I gave it as a birthday gift. (You should not think of this as too strange, at least for me, earlier presents had included: ‘home', and hand, made chocolate mousse; a “doll’s house” saucepan – ‘chanter comme une casserole’, to sing like a saucepan, means to sing badly;  some underwear with the legend in a heart, “J’aime Montcuq”, in the manner of “I love London” – “J’aime Montcuq”, a village in the Languedoc, sounds like “J’aime mon cul”, I love my arse.*****)

She flicked through the pages of my little gift and alighted on a paragraph which had been (purposefully) designed to tug at heartstrings, as much of the allegorical elements of the story were; not just her heartstrings but anyone's, I hoped. To watch the smiling realisation of what the prose was about and have that turn to silent and hidden tears was about as good a vindication of the intent as one should ever hope to achieve.

I should have been proud. To have moved someone with mere words should have made me feel happy. I write. If what I write moves people, should I not be proud of my creation? Should I not feel that I have added something to the world? That it now is a more interesting place than it was heretofore?

I am proud but I am also deeply ashamed. A part of me wants to take back that which was made, the thing that was written, wants to forget the things that I know, the things that shaped a narrative, the things that allowed me a few brief minutes inside somebody else's head. It is hard to disengage from the thought that I had, in some way, abused a position, taken advantage of a trust; that, in seeking to make something beautiful from such pain, I had overstepped a critical line.

In the end, I did not, do not, know.

I had to wait a full 24 hours before I could garner the response to the complete story. In those hours, I fretted, I worried, I had dreams of feeling the sting of an outstretched right hand squarely on my cheek. The following day, she was late. As the minutes dragged by, I fretted and worried some more; what had I done? She eventually arrived; she was not wearing her customary smile. She hugged me, planted a kiss on my cheek and told me it was beautiful; no-one had ever written a story about her before. Vindication!

However, then as now, somehow, it still feels somewhat akin to rape.

Strange to say but this post has all the trappings of going through my sketch book wondering what to paint next. Yesterday, I was cleaning out some old drafts of material that I had written for this blog but which I never posted; blogspot has a separate folder for all that remains ‘unpublished’. I came across a short post written almost immediately after the events above which now forms the basis of this post. Why should I choose to publish something now, rewritten it is true with the benefit of a little more hindsight than before, when I surmise that I was reluctant to ‘publish’ it before? 

Who knows?


* Throughout this blog, and elsewhere, I have a tendency to write that construction, lists of three descriptions, without adding ‘and’ before the final descriptor despite the fact that it is notionally grammatically incorrect; it feels intuitively, instinctively, ‘more right’ somehow.  I do not why but perhaps it is related to how I would say, declaim, it from a stage, as if it were a line in a play; perhaps it reminds me of ‘triplets’ in music, you seldom get just one triplet in a measure; perhaps I instinctively remind myself that the three descriptions are seldom the only three descriptions that exist, a way of implying an infinity by using the finite. I do not know but it interests me nonetheless.

** How you stretch paper to avoid it ‘buckling’ when you apply water-based paint; soak it, flatten it down and then tape it to a board with ‘water based’ adhesive tape, the type that used to be used to tape cardboard packing boxes. You wait for it all to dry; no buckling, no matter how much you may ‘flood’ the paper with watercolour.

*** A quote from the English translation of ‘Antigone’ (by Lewis Galantière) written by Jean Anouilh. It forms part of a long justification to Antigone by Creon of Polynice’s lack of burial.

**** ‘El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan’, a tale by Jorge Luis Borges; who else? It is to be found in English in the collection ‘Labyrinths’ which book is drawn from a number of published anthologies in Spanish.

***** Until recently, residents of Montcuq (Mount of the cuckoo) spoke Occitan, the language of the Cathars, that 'heretical' sect wiped out by the 'crusade' of Pope Innocent III, and the pronounciation was Montcuk.

Finally, a little jest, for your amusement (with thanks to that 'old man' of comedy scriptwriting, Barry Cryer).

«A man walks into a bordello in Montmartre for the first time and looks a little lost, gazing around him distractedly as if searching for something. The maquerelle, 'the madam', approaches him and says:

"Can I 'elp you, Monsieur?"

"Yes, I'd like to spend some time with Natalie, if I may," the man replies.

"Bien sûr," the old madam says. "However, I must warn you, Monsieur, that Natalie is our most expensive attraction; she costs €2,000 per hour, although she is worth every cent."

The man merely shrugs his shoulders and hands the madam four crisp €500 notes. The madam leads him to Natalie's bedchamber and he enters. 

The next day, the man reappears in the 'salon' at the same time and again asks the madam if he can spend some time with Natalie.

"Certainement," replies the madam. "It is rare that you should return to sample the delights of our Natalie so soon and at such cost; it seldom if ever happens."

The man merely shrugs his shoulders once more and hands the madam a further four crisp €500 notes. He makes his own way to the upper floor and Natalie's bedchamber. 

On the third day, the madam waits expectantly in the salon for the mystery stranger and his €2,000. She is not disappointed.

At the end of his allotted hour spent in Natalie's bedchamber, the man after an hour of passionate love-making, the like of which he had never experienced before, is getting dressed to leave when Natalie asks:

"You are not from Paris; where are you from, Monsieur?"

"London," replies the man.

"Londres?" exclaims Natalie. "I have a sister who lives in London, in Kensington."

"Yes, I know," replies the man. "She asked me, as I was visiting Paris on business, to give you the €6,000 she borrowed from you last month."»

Men, ay? (And this is slightly differnet to Cryer's version; I added the 'French colour' which is lacking in the original. Outright plagiarism is something I try to avoid.)