Weird and nasty things, writers

- but only if you confuse the work with the creator.

 I catch myself doing this from time to time myself - confusing fiction with the writer's own conscious thoughts and desires.

For example I woke up in the middle of the night last week seriously freaked out by something a certain young writer/performer I know had written on a flyer for a gig he was playing.  It was silly and scatological and shocking, which was the whole point - It really isn't likely that it reflects his social self, even if it does titillate and/or gross out his imagination. 

And as soon as I had woken up enough to brew up a pot of coffee I knew that.  What a relief.

It's like me and my tattoo thing.  Quite independently three of the pieces I've written - including two I have been paid for - have featured protagonists who acquire tattoos as part of their journey. 

 Now, clearly I must be interested in the tattoos, in their visual impact, the way the record moments in time, the way their permanence contrasts with the impermanence of the of the human body.  But that doesn't mean I have - or mean to get - a tattoo myself. 

In short - what we write may come from our unconscious desires, but should never be confused with what we are or want.

Anyway - here is a snippet from one of those tattoo stories:

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"I wrote to you, every day.  I had such stories to tell – about the sea of ice at the cape, and the lightening strike, and the albatross that followed us for 17 days, and exactly why the Otahitians made the Barber’s pigtail into a belt for their king, and what the stars look like in New Holland, and why, when everyone else was deciding whether to go in the boat with the Captain or stay on the ship, why George and I stayed behind.  About George.  I think I wanted to tell you about my friend George.  And about how scared I’ve been all this time. 

"There was one afternoon, when I was lying in the house we shared on Otahiti, face down in the leaves, and my Tayo –Tayo means Friend, Godfather – My Tayo was tattooing the feathers on my shoulder.  The needles felt like fire.  Going in and out, hammer, hammer, hammer without rest, and I was not going cry out. George held my hand, and the needles burned away, driving the soot into the skin.  I didn't cry out, but somehow tears kept running down, and into the leaves until I could taste the salt - and suddenly I thought – “At last, now, something is changing me.  All those maps and letters and journals and drawings I made – now they are making me.  It will all be on me, in me, for ever."   

"No one will listen to this now.  My Uncle Pasley and Mr. Const do not wish to hear of it.  They tell me I must never speak of why, and how, and what I was thinking or feeling.  They tell me I’ve to be discreet, mute, or else they’ll not have the power to save me. Because I stayed behind on the ship, and now I’m the only officer they have, and they cannot but hang me for all the rest.  I’m sure they’ll hang me. 

"The letters I wrote to you, the dictionary, the maps - they all floated away in the wreck. I couldn't hold them.

"The Barber could not break the chain we sank, and he drowned  there in the cage.

"George swam with me, but a staved plank struck him.  I turned, and he was gone. 

"We swam on, through a slick of paper and wood and bread, two hours, to reach a tiny strip of sand and coral. 

"And when we got to the cay, pickled in salt water, and naked under the sun, like lobsters on a fire, our skin came off in strips, great handfuls of it.  Hanging off our backs and snagging on the coral, leaving little scraps behind, with ships, and names and dates and feathers still black on them."