Two Little Boxes of Love and Evil

two little pots of ...

Well, this is the first morning where I am actually dedicating my time to progressing the book.  I am still at the stage where I have to re-read what I've got down so far so that I keep consistency.  In the back of my mind I have the prompts and inspirational cues that I will be exploring. I am also very aware of the conversation I will need to have with the internal supervisor as the fatal chapter approaches. I am sure it is going to be crucial as I have never actually murdered a child before - the feelings I have had so far have been around revealing deeper anxieties about being aroused or excited about the inflicted trauma. This, I feel is crucial so that I can somehow honour the being that is being coldy removed from his world. I have been inspired by Patrick Gale's Notes from an Exhibition and how each chapter is recounted from the frame of each character as opposed to a universal narrator. If my blog readers could be mindful of the fact that when I mention other writers or artists I am not in any way comparing myself to their skillful work - I feel very small in comparison.

Back to the crime then - I already have a blueprint for the scene which is based on the child looking down on his soul as that one expires as that one looks down on the whole. I feel it will have to be this surreal to protect the integrity of the whole book. I remember when I was at college and we were on the street researching stuff and we came upon a bombsite which had miraculously escaped redevelopment - in one of the blasted out houses was a tiny kitten that had been dumped there - it looked so peaceful in its fatal setting. I am still attuned to that 'found object' surreal mentality, where the artist's purity is saved by the relentless objects that they encounter. I am also fuelled by that Artaudian idea that each of us have residing in us an unexploded, therefore unexplored set of violent actions and their counterparts - it's just society's rules and our adopted codes of morality that keep the simmering love and evil within us. I also hope not to be overly judgemental about the perpetrators because for one thing that would be so easy - being bereft of a birth child, I am fully aware of the powerful preciousness a child brings to the world. No, to condemn the perpetrators would free the reader from being aware of the responsibility to children that we all must shoulder if this fragile world has any possible chance of survival. So, as you can imagine, I will be expecting a torrent of comments about that.
On the one hand we have a seriously defined code around sexual abuse and how abhorrent it is and yet we do all we can to somehow keep the victims in a state of perpetual guilt and trauma. When cases are brought to trial, the process does all that it can to perpetuate the restigmatisation of the trauma and very few cases are found in favour of the victim - I find this more shocking than the terrible acts that are committed. On the other, I shall be exploring that in some cases, a child can be choiceful about entering into a serious relationship with an adult - this is really contentious, I know and, if readers are overwhelmingly shocked by my assertions, then we need to look at laws as they stand. Here in Spain, we have a low age of consent, to protect predatory males, one assumes. That does not always mean that a young girl of 12 or 13, say, could not fall in love with an elder. On the same-sex front I remember having difficulty appreciating the film of the book For a Lost Soldier - a young Dutch boy falls for a Canadan soldier during the German occupation in WWII. Here we have a new concept to appreciate; the child is fully in control at all stages - the environment is cold and brutal and the child merely wants to be close to his hero. The troops move on and the child is devastated and spends his life trying to find his 'lost soldier'. The film ends with the adult child creating a ballet about the relationship. There are many avenues to explore here and our attitudes to the adultification of children is the first to come to mind.
To some extent, one of my characters that makes in-roads in to having relationships with older men is similar and yet, the moral compass has to change the direction of his life. My doomed child is not as lucky or as determined as the Dutch boy in the film/book I mentioned before, so the reader can grasp something of my moral code with regards this topic.