Fermentation

The difference in experience of wine and grape juice is like night and day. But they are made from the same fundamental ingredient. The essential difference, of course, is the fermentation. Yeasts and sugars confront each other and are changed irreparably in a slow, invisible drama.

I looked at my screenplay today. Signor Producer was due here in a couple of hours and I scrolled its pages while fretting over what to wear: look professional yet casual, smart yet artsy, and above all, like you aren't trying. I fretted over whether to have any food on hand: oh this sudden and glorious spread of nourishment? I just whipped something together. I fretted over whether to rush out and find a place to print my draft.

In the end, the experience was strangely off-hand. The man arrived with his girlfriend, packed a few things, made a bit of small talk and left. He invited me to a showing of his most recent film tonight at five. It is important that I go, I have a feeling.

He asked with interest about my screenplay. And I had the distinct feeling we were sussing each other out in a warm, curious way. Everyone kept their cards hidden, but it was a friendly game. I felt a little bereft after they'd gone, but only for the amount of build-up in my own mind.

And what I discovered when I looked into my screenplay this morning. It's not ripe yet. It's still green and bitter and stringy. Structurally, it's there. I have a well-formed, handsome skeleton of which I am proud. But you can't show a skeleton to a producer and you can't bring him home to mom.

The past several days of touristing have been essential to my creative work, I realize now. I'd been looking at them as some kind of labour or duty. I'm in Paris, so I should see the sights. The relentless, irrepressible sights.

But, like so many thing along this journey, elements of the past few days have clung to me like cobwebs. Sticking to my skin and looping around other strands I've picked up as I move from gallery to museum to cafe to conversation.

This has been a sensual week. The week of the senses. Music has figured importantly. As has visual art. And I've determined that the flesh that fills out my skeleton and breathes life into it is a language of the senses. I must create a world now. I must layer in the smells and textures and sounds of this place or that character. I have wandered through galleries, watching my emotions range from hollow isolation to elation and joy. What is the feeling of Charlie's world? Of Albert's?

Louise Bourgeois' work lingers. The sense of dramatic isolation she builds, locating memory in stark rooms of strange objects. Things like flashlights and glass globes, old wooden chairs, scraps of tapestry. I feel the hollowness of memory. The frightening removal of time. The receding horizon. This is the feeling before the choice. Before the choice to live or die, there is the wasteland of indecision.

My recent dinner with Maud – and the influence of Dana's work – also lingers. Talk of humour and how it can draw people closer while pushing them away. Talk of pushing out on form. A poet can be an artist just as a film can be a song. Push back on the boundaries and see how far they give. See where the holes punch through and what strange light shines in. The way you've experienced movies isn't the way they have to be.

The power of ugliness. Of repulsion. The shadow opposites of the things we long for. The whitewash we paint over our lives: happy, loving, fulfilled, productive. What are the sinister opposites and how do they inhabit us? At any given moment is a tug of war, a fight for balance. The pain of beauty. The beauty of pain.

I read Anais Nin's diary, edited to focus on her passion for Henry Miller and his wife June. One part of life, when distilled away from everything else, becomes an obsession. A dark, addictive tale, quite different from superficial thoughts of "love" and "passion." How much of each other do we see?

I feel the next draft building inside me. It is a pressure in my chest right now and it is pushing to come out. There is an integration happening, I can feel it. Creative fermentation as the yeasts and sugars boil together making sweet chemical love. I am uncomfortable in the pressure, pregnant with it. This great thing, growing ever larger, pushing out but not completely out. Not just yet.