The Diving Bell and The Butterfly

Hi there.

I hope you're all having a pleasant weekend? I've been having a lovely Sunday just chilling out at home with Tom (we've not got many days off together now I'm back to working 5 days a week).

 As I may have mentioned previously one of my favourite books is The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et Le Papillon in the original French) by former Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby who suffered a stroke in 1995 which left him mentally intact, but entirely speechless and completely paralysed with the exception of his left eye. This is what is known as 'locked-in syndrome'. The entire memoir was composed one letter at a time by the blinking of Bauby's left eye to indicate which letter he wished to select as a partner or nurse slowly read them out to him. He died two days after the book was published in France in 1997. If you haven't read it before, I cannot recommend it enough.

The only thing I would say is please don't read it too quickly. It might not be very long superficially, but it took 10 months to write, with Bauby composing the sentences in his head and then 'dictating' them over a four hour period every day. On average one word took two minutes to dictate, so every one of them is precious.

Anyway, I had the thought about a week ago of drawing or painting something to do with the book, so having 'pinned' lots of images of diving bells and suits on my Pinterest page for inspiration, I went out and got some sketching pencils (bizarrely the only ones I had in the house were weird bendy ones which were no good for anything) and have spent the last couple of hours happily sketching away and getting my hands covered in graphite :)

I'm not an artist at all, parts of it are wobbly or not quite evenly sized, and I can't draw smooth circles to save my life (as you can see), but I'm relatively happy with how this first attempt turned out given that I probably haven't drawn anything properly since I was about 17 or 18. I know it'll take a lot of practice to get something that I'm genuinely happy with, but so far I'm having fun trying, which is what really matters.

The eventual plan is to try to create something a bit like the 'Livres d'artiste' that became popular in the early twentieth century, with perhaps a few different pieces with images inspired by the book either next to or overlaid by excerpts or quotes from the text. But like I said I want to practice a lot before getting to that point.

Bye for now.
xx