Sara's Introduction
Inspired by Edward Gorey’s strange and whimsical stories, I proposed to my friend David: “Let’s write a story together, each doing our own illustrations of the text, without seeing each other’s pictures. I’ll send you the first line. You send me the second. We alternate and illustrate as we go and adapt or change the process as needed. Eventually we’ll decide when and how to end it.”
I went to Paris with this project in the back of my mind and some art materials in hand. The writing began and
proceeded with weekly reports from David about how much he was enjoying doing the illustrations. However,
for whatever reason, I just couldn’t get started. Paris, perhaps, was too distracting. Nevertheless, we did write 8
or 9 lines discussing the process by email. I didn't tell David that I wasn’t making any pictures.
It wasn’t until late August and I was in Toronto expecting to meet David in a few days that I was able to make the first few pages of the book. The pressure of wanting something to show him finally helped me make those necessary decisions for the project to get underway. I do not remember my thoughts. Each image seemed to compose itself in my mind and then appear a short time later on paper. The process was immensely satisfying.
By the time of our meeting my illustrations were caught
up with the text and I could confess my recalcitrance without guilt. What a delight to see his version of the story! How wonderful to talk about our interpretations of the text and write a few more lines, make a few more pages.
The greatest thrill was how we each brought our own completely different creative impulses to the illustrations. Mine are more traditional in that they attached more
concretely to the text. David’s illustrations are more elemental, more primal. Cut circles, squares and rectangles, like windows and doors, pull me into
Mouffetard’s stream of consciousness as I read the narrative. In each picture my eye is led to a single powerful focus. The unity of structure and repetition of
forms become a kind of signature that identifies Mouffetard.
His mental world is playful, layered, non-linear, and yet ordered. It is bound by his desire to understand the forces at work in his emotional life. Recurrent images such as hands, bodies, mythological figures, religious icons, and everyday objects emerge from the measured space. Torn red, blue, yellow, and purple papers invite the viewer to enter the pictures spontaneously. When I look through them I feel as though I am being let in on a secret. Real
objects like petals, pencil sheds, and lint pull me out of the representational world of art into the physical tactile world of my own experience.
While I listen to the words I am reading, my eyes feast on
the unexpected associations in Moufftarde’s mind. Each illustration is a poem demanding my attention, asking me to imagine the world in a different way.
David’s Introduction
Leaving Santa Barbara for Paris, Sara's modest proposal: I'll send you words. Make a page to go with them, she said, then tell me what comes next. You won't see my pages. I won't see yours. The words we'll share in
common. At the end, we'll find ourselves in the bargain we've struck with each other. Great, I thought, an illustrator who can't draw for shit. Up to my monkey mind in unresolved grief--over my mother's death, over the collapse of my marriage to Sara's brother--I'm in, I said. Hit me. Sara threw me a line. It became thread through the labyrinth, clothesline enough to hang myself with, fragments shored against my ruin, an unfamiliar garden long seen but known for the first time.
Who wrestled with whose angel? I became Narcissus at his well; Icarus at take-off; Orpheus in the Underworld; shaman; fool; slut; Destroyer of Illusion; Brunhilde at the pyre; tyger in the forest.
Et quant a toi-- ma hypocrite lecteuse, ma semblable, m(a Muse)?
I first saw Sara’s book in progress what turned out to be a third of the way through. We hadn’t yet settled that ten exchanges would bring us home. Later on, our correspondence turned tug-of-war, at least for me, Sara’s
next line arriving from Paris or from back in California to skew my course, as I waded deeper and deeper into self-
absorbed allegory and psychodrama. Early on we agreed to pull the objects of our own choice from the glory hole. Near the end we'd begin to edit one another's initial drafts, neither the words nor the intentions behind them any longer wholly our own. Sitting side by side at my worktable on another visit, we finally found that a clothesline tied us together, tethered our end to our beginning. I lumbered toward a smoky coda. Sara, I saw when we shared our final pages, had tripped toward hers in full sunlight. Bruckner and Vivaldi collaborating on a fugue. I look at Sara’s pages now admiring their clarity, their whimsy and delicacy of touch. Her courage in simple design, her trust that the right shape is sufficient unto itself, her unshakeable conviction that if a little strong colour is good, a superabundance is nothing sort of fabulous. My unfamiliar garden is a single flower walled
off behind scissored Proust and trompe-l’oeuil; hers explodes like a coked-up botanist's fantasy, cheek by jowl
with the morning's laundry.
I forget now sometimes, until I do the math, whose words were originally whose. Reading Sara’s book will never tell me. Lines of text break up onto multiple pages; or run together; or dissolve into form; or fall away altogether. The scent of roasting chestnuts, the sound of water lapping at an ancient quay: she set them down in different worlds. Her "ah" at the edge of speech verges toward sheer colour. I highjacked Sara’s language; she highjacked mine. To one another’s intermittent perplexity; at the end to mutual delight.
How might I empty my mind entirely of my own book, reading hers? What does it say about me that I can't? But
then, we set out to surf the line where self curls into other. I look now at what I couldn't see at the time, a vision that sustained me though I was aware of only its merest trace, would see it whole only after the fact; her book the unconscious of my own, giving it life; a lightness and energy that bore me along the face of the wave that had
gone over me.
