KNOWING
concerning a piece entitled 'eden', or, mercy and morality at the kings cross hotel
I spent about a year - from roughly June of 2023 to May of 2024, attempting and failing to seriously work on a piece called Eden, subtitled An Experiment in Autobiography. Eden puported to be a history of my romantic and interpersonal exploits and failures over the span of - what is, as of writing in January 2025 - the previous decade of my life. The ‘experimental’ aspect was that each reminisence was to be framed as a review of one of my (then) 67 perfumes, ranked from least to most beloved.
I had then been stung, and quite bitterly, by another passing fancy; having once more taken a lover, becoming far too invested far too quickly, and, upon making the inevitable discovery that my affections were not reciprocated, swiftly, and with the display of righteous indignation that is customary in the confrontation of such bitter truths, hermetically sealing myself within deep-seated bitterness, wherein I drank too much, spoke only to the same five people, rarely left the house, and hoped that some higher power would furnish me with the tools to mount some vaguely-defined yet assuredly glorious revenge.
Eden emerged and began to take form during the long, lonely summer that followed. My initial intention was, I still like to believe, partially noble (meaning motivated by a pure love for the form), but one of the biggest issues with the work from its very conception was that I still then suffered from the notion that there were scores within my romantic career desperately in need of settling; that my personal grievances would meet their just retribution, thus enabling me (at least as soon as the piece was published and began to recieve the rapturous praise that I felt it deserved) to adopt a certain air of victory I could then wield against my multifarious and shadowed enemies, as though I could successfully exorcise my demons and vanquish those who had wronged me with a single langorous and delicately composed sentence.
Life, however, moved along at its sprightly pace, as it so often tends to. By the end of 2024 I found myself hopelessly in love, and married to boot, and the piece I had lavished so much time on had begun to feel more like an albatross around my neck. The anniversary of the inglorious ending of the frisson that had inspired Eden came and went without my even noticing for a week, and by that time I had scarcely even written anything for the piece for about a month. By the time I began to progress with still more half-hearted attempts to finish it, I was far too busy wrangling documents for my wedding to even remember how it had ballooned into a 31-page-behemoth.
By the time the wedding rung around the pressure had grown too great. I floated the idea of putting the snuff on Eden a few times to some of my friends, but they all steadfastly pushed against my doing so, reasoning that I’d spent far too much time fine-tuning it to give up now. If they asked me why, I’d pause and cast my inquisitor a pensive look for a few seconds before muttering something about how there were some things I simply found too painful to write about, or that it was such an intensely personal piece that I had reached a point, now I was in a committed relationship, where I no longer felt the desire to be sharing all that with people who were no better to me than strangers.
There was truth in both answers. Love had made me langorous and decadent. Bitterness was now to be reserved for petty little domestic squabbles like over who would make dinner that night or take the garbage out. To open my laptop every day and write, to finish that damn piece: the act of doing so seemed like the first step in a performance, whereby I would have to prime myself to exhume the state of mind I had been in when Eden had first manifested itself - a bitter, angry person, lashing out at the world and fuming at loves that had time and again been squandered, from which I felt some cruel governance of the universe had disinherited me.
I am proud of a lot of what I wrote in Eden, would even consider stretches of it amongst my best work. Yet too often for comfort, vast swathes of it also seem oppressively bitter, unpleasant and juvenile. There are denunciations in it that still make me grin from ear to ear, of course - just because I am a happier, more stable person does not mean I have necessarily forgiven every wrong ever done to me - but the process of writing dragged on for so very, very long, that it seems now more like a disjointed mess. In the span of its genesis, I put one novel to bed, embarked on three new screenplays, began and then gave up journalling, and wrote no poetry whatsoever.
Doubtless there will be swathes of it that will, one day, appear in new and refined forms in other works and other projects. One of the reasons that abandoned, unfinished, otherwise lost projects seem to hold so much allure is, I think, because of the image they project - the conscientious artist who has reached such a level of obsessive perfectionism that only a minuscule amount of what they create is suitable for public consumption. It is also not unheard of for artists to self-edit and excise from their bodies of work to the level where an artistic career seems only to begin with the first truly good achievement, rather than the notable clunkers that inevitably paved its way.
It was a piece that began with apathy and detachment, blossomed into anger, into destructive and apocalyptic fury, and died with abject resignation - like in Herzog’s 1979 version of Nosferatu, how the titular force of nature does not evaporate alongside the morning dew as in Murnau’s version, but instead shrieks and curls up to die in the corner of the room, alone. What spent so long as a new, exciting piece that promised to live up to its own colossal ambition, now abandoned and being stripped for parts. A big question mark right at the beginning of a bibliography, just a great big hole where a work once was.
A very large, very simple reason as to why Eden was discarded as ballast is simply because by the time I put the kibosh on it, I really didn’t care very much about it anymore, certainly not enough to put myself into the mental state I needed to be in so as to finish it. This, however, was coupled with a stirling awarenesss that really, nobody else cared either. I don’t mean this in an artistic sort of, woe is me, nobody pays attention to my genius way: It had been so long in the making, so dedicated to those specific scores, that it would hold no surprises. The people shamed in it were never literary lovers, and would certainly never be induced to read even a paragraph of the damned thing. What kind of point is there in mounting a revenge that will never impact those it is directed against?
I would make a greater attempt at writing about the way I live now, but I find that trying to talk about someone, or something, you love is like attempting to objectively appraise your own genitals. Eden ended with a kind of joke at the expense of somebody I knew who moved to Melbourne, but also with an attempt at appraising my life at the time it began. The perfume whose entry and appraisal it accompanied was Clinique’s Aromatics Elixir, and it ran something like this:
As I write this it’s about two days from the fourth Saturday of January 2024. The heat today will reach 38 degrees celsius. (As I write this it’s two days after the fourth Saturday of January 2025.) I will wear Aromatics to clear myself of so much dead grass, for the secret to its striking cold heart of chamomile, jammy rose, oakmoss, is that it is redolent of night in late summer; of the baroque visuals in Drowning by Numbers, baroque and bewitching death pyres erected on the podium of darkness, all the more beautiful because they are to be burned. Wear the jazzy one that smells like pagan occult rituals and burning effigies, darling, something like that to be cooed into the ear of a lover in a post-coital embrace. (I still find a great witchiness in the scent of Aromatics, though unfortunately I have hardly worn it in a very long time.)
I was sentimental in a way, then. I pictured a future for us - I had no idea what was in it or what it looked like, I could never, for example, imagine you enjoying The Draughtsman’s Contract or a trip to Genoa, but I clung onto the belief that if I loved you enough, if i loved you Correctly, you could start. (I have somehow ceased to care quite so much about these matters, in a way that is not ‘settling’ so much as it is ‘accepting’. Being in a relationship with someone who had exactly the same opinions and manners of thinking as myself would get frightfully boring after a while.) I picture all of the men I’ve taken as lovers as impatient travellers in line at a busy railway station, furiously jostling and pushing against one another as I exasperatedly man the ticket booth and listen to their exhortations and pleas of how they have to have the last ticket for the 6:15 to Tlön, or the 8:00 to Macondo, or the fucking midnight train to anywhere. (I don’t like this line very much, and I didn’t even when I wrote it, but a better way to finish articulating the sentiment eludes me.) I want to believe that at the end of this line there is the one person whom I have created as my ideal partner, but I am enough, at least, of a realist to know that person does not exist, and never will. (There is a certain beauty and calm I find in knowing that I found somebody who I love desperately at the figurative end of the preceding line.) This is not a fact that upsets me; I know that if I find love they will be as painfully human as I, with as many flaws as they have virtues. I merely take umbrage with the fact that getting to this flawed and vulnerable beauty is a frustratingly long-winded and difficult. (I obviously had no idea how swiftly life would move after I penned these words.)
I think of all the battles, fought, lost or won, or dragging on interminably. Each man has multiple times within his life where he shall die and be born anew, but there is a sick thrill of masochistic loneliness I feel each and every time I remember that someday soon, I shall wake up and find a stranger in the mirror before me. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? (I think that final paragraph is one of the finer sentiments I’ve put into language, but I’ve grown farther and farther from understanding what I myself was trying to say, which, I think, is one of the reasons Eden became so nigh-on impossible to finish in the first place.)
So in fact, I needed instead to write this piece, which came about eight months into the writing of Eden and was intended to serve as an explanatory note to its allusions and why it took me so long in the first place. Yet this piece kept growing because I continued to feel a need to explain away why I would rather write anything than the main project I was to be working on. I think there is a kind of beauty that what was meant to be a kind of afterword for a piece now instead serves as its epitaph. Eden became my life and threatened to subsume me. I needed to kill it in order to move on, and though I wonder already what else might have been, I cannot indulge in sitting around and dwelling upon it.
Obviously, I am still working on many other things. Chief amongst my projects are a certain novel which I would describe as a technicolour Cronenbergian gothic horror jaunt, and the screenplay for a biopic of Dmitri Shostakovich which the oncoming approach of another separate Shostakovich biopic - which apparently has rather a miscast August Diehl as the lead - has failed to slacken. I try to write poems with metre and a rhyme scheme, but they bore me as they appear, so I never publish them.
I still mostly talk to the same five people, although now there is a new one, and I live with one of the others. I also do not leave the new place where I live as much as I would like, although as it has a pool, a gym, and a shopping centre I have less need to. I drink substantially less, although I remain fond of excess as many other Australians do, something which often meets the chagrin of my husband. As far as revenge and bitterness go, he and I had a terse conversation last evening because we watched Blue Velvet and he didn’t think much of it. I did not fix my eyes immediately on a goal of revenge because I saw no need for any.
As I write this, a thunderstorm is raging. We currently live in the middle of the city, quite high up, which affords a magnificent view of the whole city. On clear days you can see all the way out to the mountains, but the days that are struck with rain are just as impressive, fog so thick that all you can see is the light of the sun shining delicately through, as though all else outside the apartment has been lifted and moved somewhere else. On those days you can’t even see the harbour, can’t even make out the building directly across from you, or the lights of the cars on the ANZAC bridge. Often, in the evenings, all you can see are the flashes of lightning, before the world drops out again.