White-Eyed Bird with Red Beak at Cosmonauts Avenue
‘White-Eyed Bird with Red Beak’ is an unusual story and I am absolutely delighted that the woniderful people of Cosmonauts Avenue have published it. Many thanks to them.
It has been published on the same day as another story ‘Five Parts’, which is now live on the Storgy website. Amazing and surprising; I’ll write another post on ‘Five Parts’ soon (simply for my records, as this one is). But this simultaneous publication is interesting and serendipitous because Bardot, the main character in ‘Five Parts’, is mentioned in ‘White-Eyed Bird with Red Beak’. I find it very strange that they should both be published on the same day. And wonderful and funny.
‘White-Eyed Bird with Red Beak’ (the lovely image above accompanies the story on the website) originated from a range of unassociated connections. I’d been to The National Museum of Wales in Cardiff where they have a brilliant collection of surreal art that includes several paintings by Max Ernst. I often find that surreal paintings set ideas pinging in random directions. Ernst is really good for this. And at some point, it could have been in Cardiff but it might have been at Tate Britain, I saw his painting Forest and Dove. Although I knew the painting from books, I’d never seen it in the flesh. I have since discovered that the dove in the picture represents Ernst and the forest represents a terrifying forest near Ernst’s childhood home. I didn’t know this at the time, nor did I realise it was a forest – it looked like the bird was in some craggy mountains and rocks to me. Knowing what I now know, I can see the forest. I had no idea that it was a dove. Ignorance is often a useful tool, I find, when writing a story. Hah!
I read a lot of experimental fiction and surreal fiction in print and online – poetry, stories, novels – they are what I find most satisfying to read – it is the way the imagination works as one reads that appeals to me. Erik Satie’s Gnossienne make for atmospheric listening too; his interest in dadism and surrealism is well-documented. Surrealism is also, for me, a great way of writing about something whilst simultaneously writing about something else, and about something else again, and possibly something else too, which is interesting I find. Anyway, I’d been doing a bit of drawing, not something I do very often, and I decided to use one of my images as another starting point. I have a series of drawings that I’m using to varying degrees in stories, along with various other associations and ideas. Reading back, that all sounds rather self-important and pretentious, but it isn’t, it’s just a way of going about things that works for me. None of my drawings have people in them, at least they didn’t in their first drafts, and I prefer them empty. It’s interesting to write about an empty setting, and then to populate it. It’s the image in the bottom left corner that relates to this story.
The story presents someone (unnamed and gender neutral) at work and is about how he/she experiences several lives at once while still working. The narrator follows instructions and performs tasks. How they fit into any bigger scheme is irrelevant. What is crucial, though, to the narrator, is that the tasks are fulfilled. The tasks, while apparently unimportant and irrelevant – although curious and interesting, must be performed to the very highest standard every time, even though they will be repeated into infinity – any variation is in the detail and predictable. The work is lonely and often physically painful, there are regulations on which authorities are keeping watch and to which the worker has a love/hate relationship – enjoying their rigour but despising their pointlessness and relentlessness. However, the other lives of the narrator carry on simultaneously; he/she has other people (Bardot is one of them) and problems on his/her mind (one of which appears to be child care another is housing), and they too are never likely to be resolved. The curious and interesting are extraneous, out of context, irrelevant. There is no resolution. There is no solution. There is only repetition.
I hope you find time to read the story and enjoy it. Thank you to Cosmonauts Avenue. I love that picture of the bird.
