I woke up on Wednesday night at 3am, unable to sleep, and proceeded to write the introduction to the artist’s book, the project I’m working on with KRS, Caelli and Aunty Pam. KRS is doing the illustrations, Caelli is the designer and Aunty Pam the bookbinder. My story is a re-telling of the 1001 nights. Why I chose to link it to this famous tale is a story in itself. In a previous post, I mentioned keeping a private diary and its connection to a vague interest in someday writing erotic literature (probably inspired in part by Nikki Gemmell’s barn storming sequences in The Bride Stripped Bare, a lingering fascination for Lady Chatterley’s Lover and art student memories of The Story of O).
I knew that I wanted to use my diaries as reference material, and as I started keeping a diary when my marriage went (sound of plane crashing) perhaps link the Scheherazade narrative to a very modern tale of marital breakdown. I felt that 1001 nights would allow for a slightly fragmented, diary style narrative, written from the perspective of the female main character, with this constant atmosphere of anxiety pervading her stories and giving them intensity. I also liked the idea of people in times of stress taking refuge in fantasy, albeit in this case, erotic fantasy.
When I told her about using the Scheherazade character, KS made the excellent point that 1001 nights is art about art: the seductive powers of literature, the role of the author and their relationship with the reader etc. I liked these ideas too, and thought that they’d blend well with a slightly self-conscious, literary narrator.
Anyway, it didn’t happen. Maybe because it’s all too close to home, or perhaps just because I knew it wouldn’t make good literature, I ended up abandoning that idea. Instead I decided to write a version of 1001 nights that retained the Scheherzade character and setting (a vague somewhere on the Arabian Peninsula a long time ago) but which foregrounded the erotic potential of the story. Which is not entirely without precedent: in the original tale, by the end of the 1001 nights of ‘story-telling’, Scheherazade and the Sultan had three sons, and some versions apparently contain erotica.
And it’s going ok (well, it’s going well actually, I just don’t want to jinx it). I’m at 10,000 words and I think that in the end it will be somewhere in the range of 15-20,000. Other than the general stuff you need to do to function and care for a kid, I’ve done very little this week except write. Like all pieces of writing, it only started to flow once I had the first sentence. I’m currently following the narrative as it unravels, like the myth of Ariadne’s lover, obsessively chasing her ball of red wool in the minotaur’s maze.
Sometimes, often when I’m driving or half asleep, I’ll think of the perfect sentence for a piece of writing. Then it’s a struggle to either find something to write with, memorise it, or just think bugger it, and go back to sleep. I’ve lost a lot of good stuff (or at least I remember it as being good: a bit like the fish that got away) by choosing to snooze. It was the middle of the night when the first sentence for 1001 nights arrived: ‘Soon the night will come, and to save my life, I must tell another story’. I sat up in bed, grabbed my trusty laptop, and wrote the first five pages. I was surprised at how easily the writing flowed in the middle of the night. I often think that writing when you’re half conscious is a good idea as it effectively suspends the critical mind.
The next morning, still dazed from my broken sleep, Sophie came rushing into my room to announce that she had wet her pull up: pool of urine on the floor, off comes the pull up. Then she dashed off to get some grapes out of the fridge, and brought them back into my bed for a snack and a cuddle. Being a kind toddler, she offered to share her grapes, and I politely took one. By the time I got up and was in the car, I was still in this half-crazed dream state.
Twenty minutes later I was stuck in traffic, musing about the illustrations for 1001 nights: how many we needed, the etiquette of asking a friend to illustrate a book for you, whether I’d piss the friend off by being overly prescriptive with my suggestions for imagery, the sort of style that would work with the text. I was thinking about butterflies (yesterday Sophie was given her first butterfly net) and musing that as a metaphorical image, butterflies tied in nicely with ideas about female eroticism. Both species being difficult to define, hard to capture, glorious, uplifting, beauty destroyed by any attempt to preserve, exotic and fleeting. If I was being cynical, I’d say that they’re both something that animate life, but don’t stay around very long.
I was musing on the sad fact that women rarely trust their partners with the full extent of their erotic imagination, considering the reasons for, who responsible, strategies to negate, historical and cultural antecedents, impact of religious thinking upon, whether widespread phenomenon or fairly narrow, and if there was a great deal of difference in the degrees of erotic imagination amongst individuals (I mean, you’d expect there to be, but how can you tell?) Bang. Had to slam on the brakes as realized that I was about to rear end a four wheel drive with, wait for it, blue butterflies plastered across its spare wheel cover. Apologised to Sophie and made a mental note to email KRS with the butterfly suggestion.
Another funny little co-incidence: in the draft of 1001 nights, I’ve used a nightingale to signify a portal to another world. It marks the line between the everyday mind and the erotic imagination, conscious and unconscious. I’ve been daydreaming about how, once we’ve finished this book, I’d like to have it professionally published with a cover illustration by Del Kathryn Barton. Yes, I can dream. Anyway, I was flicking through a magazine in the hairdressers today, two things I rarely do, and I found an article about DKB. Apparantely she is busily illustrating Oscar Wilde’s fairytale The Nightingale and the Rose, with the book published later this year. Gosh! I almost dropped my cup of you-paid-too-much-for-this-haircut mule urine herbal tea that fashionable saloons feel compelled to serve, and which suckers like me feel compelled to drink.
It’s funny, and I know other people feel this too, but it’s amazing how much more life makes sense if you just do what you want to do and let things take their own shape. Versus doing what you think you should be doing. It’s the blessing of following some kind of instinctive guidance or understanding. Or perhaps just bloody mindedness paying dividends.
This week’s cute toddler moment: Sophie dragging her clickety clack wooden crocodile toy across the floor yelling, with Lleyton Hewitt style fervour, ‘C’mon!’
Helen Hopcroft: an artist's life 
