a reflection on writing, inspiration and imagination
Burning Desire
Copyright © Carmel Bird 1996. All rights reserved.
Like Cinderella in her flight from the palace ball, the figure
in white flits across the staircase, her feet invisible, her veil
a cloud of ectoplasm in the midnight air. She is so small, so
elfin on the empty steps. She stands -- her billowing skirt is
troublesome in the wind -- and the groom in his traditional black
and white materialises from the shadows, like a servant, to assist
her. They dither, trying to control the white satin sail that is about
to engulf them. Or is the new husband going to take his young
bride there and then on the steps of Parliament House at midnight
on the first day of spring? But need I tell you? Swiftly from the shadows comes the man with
the light and the camera. The bride and the groom have had the
wedding ceremony; had the banquet; had it all recorded on video.
Now is the time for the midnight photographs on the steps of the
public building. A sleek black Lincoln Continental backs up towards
the bride and groom, its red tail lights the two eyes of a silent
reptile. And yes, the camera man gets the picture of the bridal
couple as they enter the back seat of the Lincoln Continental.
Will they drive away now? Is it done, over, in the can? No, they
are out on the steps again, and there is more direction, more
wind, more darkness, more light, more standing, moving, smiling,
kissing. This woman has been awake all night, and up at six this morning.
The man was up all night drinking with the chaps. By the time
they reach the bridal suite in the penthouse of a luxury hotel
they will be quite worn out. And still they pose and pause and
posture on the steps of the Parliament, leaning towards the camera,
fluttering in the breeze. Is somebody making a movie? No, this is just real life. Sort of.
The junction of the two street makes a T, with the neo-classical
grandeur of Parliament House across the top. Down in one corner
of the T is the brass and neon of the Hard Rock Cafe, and in the
centre of the road, in the middle of the tram lines, another wedding
party is assembled. Several men in dinner suits, a flower girl
in frills, yawning, her bouquet dangling onto the road. A large
bride in luminous, voluminous satin. And the centre piece here
consisits of two black and silver Harley Davidsons. And the photographer, also in dinner suit, with large moustache
and long hair, and his camera on a tripod in the middle of the
road. Now what I have described is what I saw. I don't know when
the Lincoln Continental drove off with the first couple, or when
the second couple roared off on the Harleys. But I wondered at
the meaning and the function of the time out from living for the
purpose of posing and recording in the middle of the night. I
needn't wonder, really, since photographs and videos are by now
part of the wedding day -- like the marriage ceremony, the banquet,
the honeymoon. In the case of these couples the honeymoon would
begin after the scenes at Parliament House and the Hard Rock Cafe.
I shouldn't worry about the postponement of desire for the sake
of theatre and posterity. The postponement is all part of the
build-up. On the first day of spring the brides will wake up after
a ritual de-flowering on the bed of the bridal suite (forget the
true de-flowering which took place too long ago to recall). And
the photographers and the Harleys and the Lincoln Continental
will be gone, spirited away in the darkness. You are left with two sets of two human beings. Each man and woman
is related, linked, by, we assume, desire. I want you; I need
you; I love you; you are my heart's desire. Many steps in this
mating ritual have been refined now to the moment of the fulfilment
of the desire; and the last public step was the display at the
T junction in the centre of the city at Cinderella's midnight
hour. It was the turning point, and the last seal on the agreement.
Do you take this woman; do you take this man? Do you stand on
the steps of Parliament House, on the tram line in front of the
Hard Rock Cafe? Do you do this at midnight? I do. The honeymoon -- oh what a piece of strange erotic poetry that
word is -- is the time for the fulfilment of desire. Marriage
counsellors will tell you lots of other things about honeymoons,
and, for that matter about the place of desire in the marriages
of today. But the deep-down-bare-bones-knickers-off original truth
about honeymoons was that they gave you a chance to attain your
heart's desire. If you had to pick a colour to illustrate desire, you would usually
pick red or purple. And sometimes brides advertise the desire
factor by carrying red flowers, or at least giving a red posy
to the flower girl. (The dangling posy ouside the Hard Rock was
red with a burgundy ribbon.) But the signals of the fires of passion,
the glowing coals of desire, are slight at weddings. (The abundance
of red roses on Valentine's Day bring to mind a massacre.) Our
traditional wedding colours are the absence of colour -- black
and white. The badge of desire, the heart on the sleeve -- this
is bad manners. The sight of blood, the sign of life exposed --
this doesn't come out at weddings - or at funerals either. The
ritual events of our days and nights are bleached and blackened
in order that we might bear them with strength and dignity. Blood
and fire, love and desire -- are so messy and wild, after all.
Savage and primitive. I watched the tail end of the rituals of the two weddings, the
last public appearances before the actual sex scenes, and my attention,
clearly, was arrested. The city had a hellish feel to it; the
brides and grooms were seekers after paradise somewhere in or
above the seething murky darkness of the rat-infested, cockroach-breeding
streets. The response of the photographer is to take a photograph.
My response is to write. To try to understand what it was I saw
by writing down what I saw. This, this writing, is, believe it
or not, my passion; it is my burning desire. The longing to examine and expose my ideas in words is something
emotional and physical. Ask me where I get my ideas from and I
can tell you I don't really know; but ask me how I feel when I
have an idea for a story, and I can tell you that I have a fabulous
burning sensation behind the eyes. The cartoonist who drew the
idea as a light bulb lighting up in the head got it right, as
far as I'm concerned. For me it's as if something hot is melting
in and around my eyeballs, and my hands can't wait to get to the
keyboard, to set in motion the statement, the dramatisation of
the thoughts that have ignited somehow in my imagination. I seek
to perform a kind of balancing act between impulse and reason,
to establish a picture and a statement of the awe and reverence
I feel for life and for words and for the ability that words have
to describe, in part, the way the world is, or seems to be. I
have described my own writing as something that occurs in heartfelt
brainwaves, and the process I am now describing is that of transposing
those heartfelt brainwaves into my prose, on paper. I write fiction,
and the simple reason I give for doing that is that I believe
writing fiction is the thing I do best. From writing fiction I
derive a deep sense of personal fulfilment, and hope for a connection
with people who read what I write. I spoke of the longing to examine and expose my ideas in words,
and this is a longing that I have known since I was a young child.
I had then a sense that the world was full of inspiration of many
different kinds, and that events, images, ideas that inspired
me were in some way gifts to me for my own use. It sounds too
simple and too grand, really, to say that I have had a lifetime
interest in the matters of sex and death and good and evil, but
since there is no point in lying about it, that is the truth.
And being conscious of my own interest in these things, I was
also aware that I was taking up a position of a potter with clay
-- the events, the ideas, the images, the stories -- these were
my clay. The only thing I could do with life, I reckoned, was
write it up. It has taken me a lifetime to begin to work out how
to do this; it seems to me that the only way to find out how is
to do it. And for a very, very long time I have understood that the
thing that can rob me of my enterprise is my own death. What if
I died before I found out how to use the materials of my craft?
So I am always writing against death. I write about death; I write
against death. My earliest memory of death is that of the sudden death of my
grandmother on Christmas eve, when I was three years old. My mother
was particularly close to my grandmother, and I now understand
and believe that the depth of my mother's grief was conveyed and
transferred to me, the youngest child. I lived as a child in a
place which was, on the face of it, a bleak, dreary and meaningless
backwater of Australian society. But to a child, anywhere is the
anteroom of the imagination, and I had more than enough inspiration,
a glut of grist to my mill. That was in life, with the suicides
and murders and attempted murders of the neighbours; and the fatal
car accidents (one night the local pharmacist and his wife were
wiped out on the highway); and the births and adoptions and diseases
(a girl three doors down died of polio); and the feuds -- great
feuds. And romance. I used to go hysterical at weddings. Yes,
that was in life. But there were also stories told and read; there
was the radio -- the war didn't end until I was five, and I drew
many, many portraits of Japs and Germans, portraits invested with
all the hatred I could feel. And there were the movies. Nobody
cared what children saw at the movies, and I was very young indeed
when I saw The Spiral Staircase in which the villain stalks and murders crippled girls. My memory
ofThe Spiral Staircase is still very vivid. And I was particularly devoted to the sex
scenes (such as they were) in the movies. For a very long time I worked at the clay of this, discovering
how to make use of the gifts of the material. I wrote and thought
about writing and read. I wrote novels and burnt them. I had a
few stories published. It took a shock to get me really going.
A very close friend died of cancer at the age of thirty-three,
and the effect this had on me was to send me to my typewriter
where I wrote a novel at white heat in one month. That I see as
the turning point and the breakthrough in my work. I gained thereby
a freedom which I had been lacking, a freedom which allowed me
to write in my own way about my own subjects for my own purposes.
The novel was only the beginning; it wasn't much good as a novel;
but that is not the point. It was the liberating factor; it marked
the moment when I really began to work. It is now about twelve
years since that happened, and I am still discovering how to do
the thing I so desire to do, to give in to the heat behind the
eyes and to get down the heartfelt brainwaves and write it all
up. Of course I still sometimes falter in my resolve, still sometimes
feel constrained by what I imagine to be the climates of -- say
-- publishing and reviewing. But when I keep my eye (my hot eye)
on the beauty of the complexity and contradictions of the enterprise,
I can't contain my enthusiasm for the work in hand. I am at the moment writing a novel with great pleasure, even glee.
And one of the reasons for my emotions is the fact that I have
given in to one of my oldest and weirdest desires. When I was
a child I had a deep and serious wish to be an angel; I carried
this wish with me, and I recall revealing it, as one does, to
a boy when I was seventeen. The boy was very scathing. Besides
this, I liked to wear red shoes. And to another boy I said my
red shoes were magic. This boy said: 'Oh yeah? In what way, magic?'
(The angel boy became a poet, and the red shoe boy became an historian
-- these are probably meaningless facts, and I daresay the poet
and the historian don't recall the incidents about angels and
shoes.) However I bring the incidents up here as illustrations
of the slender moments which can become material for a writer.
To return to my weird desire and to the novel I am writing --
the narrator of the novel is an angel. And the title of the novel
is Red Shoes. It is possible that I would not be writing exactly this book
if those boys had not been so dismissive, so very long ago. Fiction has given me the licence to become an angel, and to write
about red shoes or anything I like. In fiction you can have or
do anything you want anything you wish, anything you desire, anything
you dare. I believe I have to be brave to be a writer, and if
I am not brave, the writing will almost certainly be timid, and
full of useless lies and imitations. But I have to remember that
it has taken me a very long time to discover how to fulfil my
angelic desire; it has been a process of living and writing, writing
and living. A process of discovering what I can do, how I can do it. Another
of the great pleasures in the writing of Red Shoes is that I am developing it in two forms, as printed text and
as hypertext. Writing is also a process of discovering what I
want to do, of discovering, actually, who I am. The stories that
interest you, as a reader, tell you something about yourself;
and the stories you write tell you even more -- much, much more.
That is, if you are writing your own truth. By writing your own truth, I mean developing a way of examining
your own thoughts and feelings and experience so that you can
express in language, image, argument and in the music of language
and the structure of narrative, the meaning of those thoughts,
feelings and experience. In my own case, the medium for this is
fiction or reflective essay. It is difficult to know what is the
true and original genesis of creative work, but at the moment
of apparent inspiration, there is a jolt, a spark, and the writer
then has the opportunity, even the responsibility, to carry it
forward into a finished work. We love to tell stories and to hear
stories; we do it all the time in our daily lives -- listening
and telling stories. I believe that when we do this we are working
on trying to make sense of our lives -- and by 'story' I mean
the personal accounts of the day at the office; the news stories
we see and hear and read; the gossip of the neighbourhood; jokes
and anecdotes; and all the stories you can find in a library -fact,
fiction, fantasy. All stories, I think, in some way, are attempts
to push back chaos and darkness, to clarify something about ourselves and our meaning. It is my desire to work in this way, my burning wish to take up
the challenge of inspiration and run with it, to get the stories
and write them up. Inspiration, the breath of life of the imagination,
is curious, strange. The promise of passion that I ran into with
the two brides at midnight in the city was a very potent source
of inspiration for me, something I will not forget, something
that will inform a piece of fiction that I plan to write. The
sights I saw, the sights I have described here, may never appear
again in my work, but some element of what I felt and sensed will
surface somehow in a story. And letting the material which inhabits
the imagination roll out in words and stories is, as far as I'm
concerned, a joyful and a very hot thing to do. 
Return to homepage