Since I was very little I have known that I wanted to be an artist of some kind. Maybe a painter or a singer or a writer, something in the arts. And I have known something else. Being the daughter of a hugely talented artist, Robert, I have wanted more than anything else to be great myself.
Much as I tried, my sketches and drawings at school just didn't live up to my expectations, so I turned to composing music and words for music. I felt much more at home and a teacher at school told me that I had a real talent, but that I needed to find ways of breaking through the ordinary barriers that hold great artists back. He told me that I should read about the great artists and writers and what lay beneath the surface.
Later, when I was doing a summer arts class, the eccentric lady teacher took me aside and recommended I read two or three 'special' books which dealt with the life and power or artists. I couldn't find then anywhere. And I had almost given up hope when one day I visited a bookshop for the esoteric arts and was really happy when I saw two of the books on a dusty old shelf. In case you're wondering, they are called 'The Secret Power of the Artist' by V. Schell and 'Secret Art' by C. Buzinski. They had been written in the 1960's and both authors had devoted their lives to the search for artistic power.
So I read. They were both very poetic and dramatic and looked at the lives of many great artists and what gave them the power to paint or sing or write. Great I thought, but what about me? Then at the end of each book, as if by coincidence, was a chapter on how to acquire the power. But there was a warning. Acquiring such power was potentially dangerous and taboo.
But I read on anyway. I read those chapters maybe twenty times over. I couldn't really believe what I was reading. Perhaps I didn't want to face the truth. Could it really be so? The common factor for all those for wanted to aspire to greatness was one simple thing - semen. The life force within all men had a powerful effect on their children, but even more so, could be used like a medicine or tonic to build up the force in another person. And the closer the bloodlines, the more potent the effect. Essentially, the argument ran that if you wanted to attain to the power of a talented artist, then you needed to have sexual union with them. The biggest taboo though was that the effect was greatest and longest lasting when union occurred with a close relative.
For months I thought about how I might go about getting this power. I desperately wanted to become good at writing, I was 19 now and about to enter a critical phase in my life. I was thinking about the unthinkable every day...how did I get the semen and from whom?
The answer was staring me in the face really. I had always thought of Robert as a mentor or older friend rather than my dad. He hadn't been around very much and those times we were together, he really was the great artist in my life, not a parent.
Even before, when I was 16 and just starting to have sex, there had been a kind of funny attraction. I remember at deep rock pool down on the south coast when we had all skinny dipped and a friend of mine was admiring Robert's body as he stood on a rock. I felt jealous.
Later on we had a laugh about the way his cock hung to one side and my friend (Kate) joked about how we might tease him to get 'it' moving.
Months passed with lots and lots of uninspired song writing and prose- nothing seemed to be working for me. I re-read the books, wondering if there might be an easier way. I had a new boyfriend who was pretty creative but our sex life (good as it was) was having little effect on my creative output.