Paraphernalia | Issue 01 by Paraphernalia

ISSUE 01

paraphernalia noun

par路a路pher路na路lia [par-uh-fer-neyl-yuh]

a monthly multimedia event held at The Poetry Club. It will feature musical performances, film screenings, poetry recitals, light installations and dancing. It has been conceptualised as a petri dish for the sights and sounds of the next wave of young Scotland.

ISSUE 01

CONTENTS APRIL 2014

JIM COLQUHOUN JOHN GIORNO

Tophophilia Thanks For Nothing On My 70th Birthday

SARAH LOWNDES

A Refuge

AMBROSE YALLEY

p.10

VICKI HUSBAND JOANNA MAPHIN BARRY BURNS VIRGINIA HUTCHISON ADULLBOY & ANDREW ROBERTSON

Birds Even Poet in Residence Cut Word Lines Cut Music Lines (self portrait with Brion and Bill) Selfie with pinhole camera (I will wear a plastic guise / I will wear a fabric guise) p.18-19

JOHN WALTER

Hats For Marrows

JOANNA PEACE

Script For Umwelt*

ELARA CALUNA

Celia Woods

JIM FERGUSON & ANNE COLVIN

p.23 PHOTOGRAPHY BY: FELIX MCGILL EDITED BY: JASON MACPHAIL KARI STEWART DESIGNED BY: KARI STEWART

Jim Colquhoun

FTER BURNING down my grand parents semi I made my way, as usual, to the local woods. I bumped into a couple of friends on the way and we decided that today was the day we would put our plan into action. Johnny had purloined a pair of mummys fingerless fishnet gloves in neon pink and Dean had borrowed his sister’s CD of ‘Its Raining Men’ by The Weather Girls and a pot of Crabtree & Evelyn hand cream. I had my grandmothers well thumbed copy of A New Description of Merryland. Containing a Topographical, Geographical and Natural History of that Country by Thomas Stretzer (published in 1740) The Merryland series alluded to the erotic possibilities of the female form using predominantly agricultural terminology. We had decided to mimic this series by using our various tools as aids with which to transform ourselves into avatars of the local landscape in an attempt to contact the Genius Loci or Spirit of Place and transmogrify ourselves Into – the other.

JIM COLQUHOUN

TOPOPHILIA

We quickly set up our ritual tableaux, featuring not only our various talismans but also our clothes, which we stuffed with leaves and branches, placing them around the altar in a variety of sexual positions. Dean and Johnny began the appropriate ritual, making liberal use of the hand cream. For my part I daubed my body with a series of magickal sigils designed to activate the subconscious link to the imaginal realm and then I began intoning some choice passages from the aforementioned tome. A great silence descended, broken only by the grunts and cries of my friends as they forged a passage into the Land of Fairy. With a loud pop they both disappeared leaving only a dual arc of seminal fluid, which spattered prettily on to the altar. I looked down at my new breasts and admired the discreet new organ nestling between my thighs. I stifled the urge to visit a shoe shop and strode through the trees towards my new life as an omnisexual.

THANKS FOR NOTHING ON MY 70TH BIRTHDAY

JOHN GIORNO “I

WANT TO GIVE my thanks to everyone for everything,

and as a token of my appreciation,

I want to offer back to you all my good and bad habits as magnificent priceless jewels,

wish-fulfilling gems satisfying your every need and want, thank you, thank you, thank you, thanks.

May every drug I ever took

come back and get you high,

may every glass of wine and vodka I ever drank come back and make you feel really good, numbing your nerve ends

allowing the natural clarity of your mind to flow free, may all the suicides be songs of aspiration, thanks that bad news is always true,

JOHN GIORNO

may all the chocolate I’ve ever eaten

come back rushing through your bloodstream and make you feel happy,

thanks for allowing me to be a poet

a noble effort, doomed, but the only choice. I want to thank you for your kindness and praise, thanks for celebrating me,

thanks for the resounding applause,

Thanks for taking everything for yourself and giving nothing back,

you were always only self-serving, thanks for exploiting my big ego

and making me a star for your own benefit, thanks that you never paid me, thanks for all the sleaze,

thanks for being mean and rude and smiling at my face,

I am happy that you robbed me, I am happy that you lied

I am happy that you helped me,

thanks, grazie, merci beaucoup. May you smoke a joint with William,

countless lovers of boundless fabulous sex

and spend some intimate time with his mind,

in the golden age

I give enormous thanks to all my lovers,

may they all come here,

Bob, Jasper, Ugo,

if you want,

and make love to you,

hold you in their arms

of totally great sex,

to your hearts

of boundless fabulous sex

balling to your hearts

more profound than any book he wrote, beautiful men with brilliant minds, may they come here

and may my many other lovers countless lovers

countless lovers of boundless fabulous sex

of promiscuity

and make love to you, may they balling

delight. delight

balling to

bits tossed back and forth

your hearts delight

in a game of catch between particles,

and going really fast, 40 million times a second,

balling to your hearts delight.

transmitting electromagnetic light

May all the people who are dead

where the pebble hits the water,

and I do not miss any of you

something without substance became something with substance,

no nostalgia,

because something substance less

Allen, Brion, Cookie, Jack, I don’t miss any of them,

this is where the trouble began, why did this happen?

it was wonderful that we loved each other

had a feeling of missing out on something,

now, if any of you

getting it

not

but I don’t want any of them back, are attracted to any of them,

may they come back from the dead,

not getting something

when there was nothing to have,

and do whatever is your pleasure,

from the primordially endless potential,

and be the slaves

twenty billion years later,

satisfying your every wish and desire,

and my stupid grasping mind,

may they multiply,

of whomever wants them,

to modern day reality, has produced me,

(but you won’t want them as masters,

has produced me and you and my grasping mind.

may Andy come here

May Rinpoche and all the great Tibetan teachers

and make each of you a superstar,

come back and love you more,

as they’re demons), fall in love with you

who loved me,

everyone can have

May they hold you in their wisdom hearts,

everyone can

give you pith instructions,

Andy.

bathe you in all-pervasive compassion,

have Andy.

and may you with the diligence of Olympic athletes

everyone can have an Andy.

and may you with great confidence

every friend became an enemy,

America, thanks for the neglect,

everyone can have Andy,

Huge hugs to my friends who betrayed me, sooner or later,

deep kisses to my loves that failed

do meditation practice,

realize the true nature of mind. I did it without you,

let us celebrate poetic justice, you and I never were,

I am delighted you are vacuum cleaners

never tried to do anything,

you are none other than a reflection of my mind.

thanks for introducing me to

Thanks for the depression problem

thanks for nothing.”

sucking everything into your dirt bag,

JOHN GIORNO

“Everyone can have Andy, everyone can have an Andy.”

and never succeeded,

the face of the naked mind,

and feeling like suicide everyday of my life,

and now that I’m seventy-six, I’m happily almost there.

Twenty billion years ago, in the primordial wisdom soup

beyond comprehension and indescribable,

something without substance moved slightly, and became something imperceptible, moved again and became invisible,

moved again and became a particle and particles, moved again and became a quark, and again and became quarks,

moved again and again and became protons and neutrons, and the twelve dimensions of space, tiny fire balls of primordial energy

JOHN GIORNO (born 1936) is an American poet and performance artist. He founded the not-for-profit production company Giorno Poetry Systems and organized a number of early multimedia poetry experiments and events, including Dial-A-Poem. He became prominent as the subject of Andy Warhol’s film Sleep (1963). He is also an AIDS activist and fundraiser, and a longtime practitioner of the Nyingma tradition

Tibetan

Buddhism.

- John Giorno at The Poetry Club on 14th June, 2013

A REFUGE O Sarah Lowndes

won 31% of the vote in Scotland at the 1979 general election that followed the referendum, Britain’s “first past the post” system meant that Scotland was forced to accept the electoral choice of the rest of the UK (Conservative), a situation that would be replicated in every election for the next seventeen years.

2013, it was announced that Leith-born author Irvine Welsh’s cult ‘vernacular spectacular’Trainspotting (1993) had been voted the best Scottish book of the last fifty years, garnering ten per cent of the 8,800 votes cast. One of the most quoted passages in Welsh’s book, and one previously used for party political purposes by the SNP, is the one in which the central protagonist, Renton complains of Scotland being a ‘a country ay failures’, but is at pains to point out ‘it’s nae good blaming it oan the English fur colonizing us.’ This sentiment had been prefigured in the work of the author who came in second on the list, Alasdair Gray (with Lanark (1981)). In his book 1982 Janine (1984) Gray had written, ‘Scotland has been fucked and I am one of the fuckers who fucked her.’ These two books reflect the way in which the political backdrop of Scotland in the 80s and 90s shaped and defined and ultimately, was defined by, the arts and culture that emerged in that period. The generation that has grown up in the intervening twenty-five years since the failed 1979 referendum on Scottish devolution now looks ahead, to the referendum on Scottish independence that will take place in September 2014. It is also a good moment to look back.

The night after Irvine Welsh’s win was announced, on 29th November, I was up late reading around on the internet about the work of Alasdair Gray and James Kelman. I came across an essay called “As it Never Was” (2001) that had been written by Peter Kravitz for the pages of Glasgow-based independent magazine Variant, in which he described how in 1995 The New Yorker had ‘sent Richard Avedon to Glasgow to capture Scotland’s best in a single posed team shot at the [East End pub] the Clutha Vaults.’ An image appeared in my mind of the Clutha Vaults, one of Glasgow’s oldest public houses, which along with the nearby Victoria Bar and the Scotia Bar formed ‘The Stockwell Triangle’ within which folk music and radical activism thrived during the 1980s and 90s, with input from, among others, Billy Connolly and the activist collective Worker’s City. Although I now had a clear image of the photograph and at least some of the people in it, I couldn’t find it online. I idly clicked on Twitter. I read, with complete incredulity, a tweet that had just been posted by Jean Cameron, Glasgow-based art producer: “ apparently helicopter has crashed thru roof of pub full of people.” Cameron’s tweet was the first of thousands that unscrolled through that night and all the next day, as details unfolded of how a police helicopter had fallen “like a stone” out of the sky, straight into the small, busy pub, killing ten and injuring dozens.

Peter Kravitz was the editor of The Edinburgh Review (1984-1990) and editor of Edinburgh-based publisher Polygon (1980-1990), during which time he brought the work of Scottish writers including James Kelman and Janice Galloway to wider attention. He recalled the sense of missed opportunity in the decade that followed the unsuccessful 1979 referendum: ‘In some circles it was known as the ‘deferendum’ due to the lack of nerve exhibited by the electorate.’ Although the Conservatives only

Amongst the dead was local poet John McGarrigle. One of his best-known poems, A Refuge, described how even in a litter-strewn Glasgow park, ‘there’s something, that defies this desecration / a sunset unsurpassed.’ His poem was first published in 1988, in a book called Workers City: The Real Glasgow Stands Up, one of a plethora of books and pamphlets published in Scotland in the late 80’s and early 90’s by leftwing independent presses like Clydeside Press, Clocktower Press and Rebel Inc. in Edinburgh. Clutha Vaults, it struck me, as I

SARAH LOWNDES

N THE 28th NOVEMBER

read the tributes to the people who had formed a human chain to evacuate the injured, was a good example of the tendencies I believe to be characteristic of the Scottish arts scene of the last generation, offering as it did, both what Michael Gardiner called, in his 2006 book From Trocchi to Trainspotting: Scottish Critical Theory Since 1960, ‘a return to an older geopolitics, an attempt to capture folk song in a living form’ and a refuge from official culture and Westminster politics.

SARAH LOWNDES

In the 1979 election that followed the failed referendum, the Conservatives only won 31% of the vote in Scotland, however owing to Britain’s “first past the post” system, Scotland was forced to accept the electoral choice of the rest of the UK (Conservative): a situation that would continue for the next seventeen years. However, several of the grassroots initiatives that formed in the 1980’s, specifically in Glasgow, such as artist-run gallery Transmission (est. 1983), Variant magazine (est. 1984), Women in Profile (est. 1987, in 1991 evolved into Glasgow Women’s Library), The Free University (est. 1987), Tower Studios (est. 1987) and Worker’s City (est. 1988), were galvanized into action by their opposition to the Thatcher government, and the desire for an arena in which political participation could be enacted through the medium of talk, which was conceptually distinct from the state. Artists began to consider self-organised public meetings as a necessity, and worked to establish places where some of the divisions and contradictions of communal, lived politics could be expressed.

90s, not only in Glasgow, but throughout Scotland. In the decade that followed the introduction of the National Lottery in 1994, the Scottish Arts Council distributed over £219 million to the arts in Scotland. Since that second successful referendum, and under first Labour and then SNP governments, funding for the arts in Scotland has been protected. Since the late 90s, the art scene in Glasgow in particular has expanded and diversified in many ways, from galleries like The Modern Institute (1998-), Sorcha Dallas (2004-2011), Mary Mary (est. 2006), SWG3 (est. 2005, with addition of The Poetry Club in 2012), The Common Guild (est. 2006), The Duchy (est. 2009), David Dale Gallery (est. 2009) and Kendall Koppe (est. 2011), to record labels like Chemikal Underground (est. 1994), Rock Action (est.1996) and Optimo Music (est. 2009) and advocates of literature such as Aye Aye Books (est. 2006) and Good Press (est. 2011) and publishing imprints such as Freight (est. 2004) and Cargo (est. 2009). Discussions around the approaching referendum on Scottish independence have become increasingly divisive in recent months, as the rival ‘Yes’ and ‘Better Together’ groups have attempted to muster support. Richard Sennett observed in his recent book Together (2012) that ‘Today, the crossed effect of desire for reassuring solidarity and economic insecurity is to render social life brutally simple: us-against-them coupled with you-are-on-your-own. But I’d insist we dwell in the condition of ‘not yet.’’ The arts scene in Scotland remains distinctive owing to the foundations that were laid during the Thatcher years, and at its core the scene is not motivated by profit, but instead rooted in a desired social experience: one that rests upon people investing time in supporting one another. That legacy will continue to benefit Scottish artists of all stripes, for as long as we are able to maintain our predilection towards social co-operation, collectivism and conviviality.

The predominantly self-organised arts infrastructure that emerged during the long years of unwanted Conservative rule was an actualization of community organizer Saul Alinsky’s dictum from Rules for Radicals (1971): “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Following the 1997 General Election, when Tony Blair won with the party’s highest ever number of Parliamentary seats, Labour initiated parliamentary reform in Scotland and Wales, which led a few months later to a referendum on devolution for Scotland and Wales, which demonstrated public Sarah Lowndes support for devolved parliaments in both countries, SARAH LOWNDES is editor of Glasgow-based prose, poetry and which met in 1999. Increased public subsidy of the art magazine The Burning Sand. Volume 3 of The Burning Sand arts in Scotland from the late 90s onwards has helped launches at The Poetry Club on Friday 18th April at 9pm as part of to build upon the momentum of the 1980s and early the Open Glasgow strand of Glasgow International 2014.

Propeller Instructions

play tricks on tomorrow’s conversation and give staircase steps old names of memorabilia. Pleasantly expressed with a tint of backache. See the sights through intended product placement, only way to vacate and thank wishful thinking for new history. Pick any minute and dwell within sabotage, decorate it with newspaper headlines, recite back, frame, hang… 1 minute really grows. Prior users of words and former elders of sentences check-in to Hotel Seed once a month, circle their favourites moments of disappointment and give further meaning to pale blue shirts and striped dark blazers. IT STRAIGHT,

AMBROSE YALLEY

Medium Flight

ANY DAYS AGO his neck was made out of a mat-

tress, his chewed fingernails were the envy of all camouflages, his expressions did not know sadness, he held my wrists tight and whispered into my mouth, we travelled the four corners of this empty room where I now write this letter of recharge… by our proactive but outdated microwave, I shaved his unwanted stubble hair around his belly-button, we giggled and laughed as we played strangulation games, I did not know his last words would come at such a price, unexpected but relevant... when he’s not around, I hang his shoelaces out the window, tie knots in them and place between and around my toes, maybe I should have said, give revivement to stale sentiments… now these four corners have nothing exciting to see, hoisting shadows of various light… I’m posting this letter back to myself and if he indeed did exist, he would come back to me.

IMAGES FROM TOP: Girl Mountain - Portals, Video Still; Pyramid Pyramid - Salome, Video Still

VICKI HUSBAND

VICKI HUSBAND, Birds Even 11

S UMMER IN

PEEBLES

I tried for surprise, but you were rigged from the start nature stacked the deck and you were toppled with a breath pursued by fantasy daughters and friend-foes all alive and waiting in your walls

JOANNA MAPHIN

...you never knew a quiet night out in the hills where we made natural excursions and found each other without enthusiasm graceless rituals in the wooded valley and not like a boy, you grudged me your loss your lofty phrase and fine-fingered devotion an orphan of the Eastern problem brain-starved and wanting, a changeling with two American mothers I heard it in a pub last night that not long ago you finished it by your hand

FOUND THE GROUND

I found the ground in sitting, I found some light on the road, in the black recess I look to my right and see a diamond at the wheel since the trouble last week I lost my appetite for sitting, I forgot that it’s a warm little packet you can wrap your head around in times like these we arrived there at eight like the night I found mania alive and well on my doorstep soaked through with maimed face I swore at the mirror but kept a steady hand and under a few coats we intently stayed the night watched it like a terrier lay close to the square ground 12

SHRINE The last day birthed a slow lizard a wretched bedside shanty and a sideboard shrine the waxy virgin and some plastic flowers arguments in the hallway a family too vulgar for death till shame do us part

C HEMISTRY With receptors receiving I‘m unusually receptive to mundanity, children the pink hour before dark axons extending adhering to being each difference an interest a chewy blue day I got licitly buzzy inhibiting the uptake to feel less inhibited and take off the edge a static on aspect attention in boredom a nice slice of nothing but what else instead? reversing the flow though reverses the puzzle a dust-shrinking sunbeam that burns out at dawn and adenosine antagonists just £2.80 with soya for antagonising delays and premature starts JOANNA MAPHIN is a Scottish poet and will be The Poetry Club’s first Poet In Residence beginning April 2014

POET IN RESIDENCE

JOANNA MAPHIN

Cut Word Lines Cut Music Lines (self portrait with Brion and Bill) BARRY BURNS

Barry Burns

Composed from taking the first line of the twenty third page from various books, magazines, comics and texts on my bookshelf. A related audio work can be heard at: http://thepoetryclub.net/blog/2014/04/02/barry_burns/

OOK, SIMPLE.

It was 3am in the morning September 17. Light as air is an expression often heard...but few of us realize I was caught yes! But I wouldn’t have been if that other bookkeeper Harding hadn’t walked in while I was cooking the books in my research for ideas. I went to the local museum down the long eventful history of mankind. The idea of utopia persists. Utopia –much of the early effort of the Museum of Modern Art was given over to trying to make order out of the seemingly confused, and at times baffling, nature of this art. Whole spy story with its sexual puns and innuendo, non sequiturs, nonsense and purposely awful song lyrics, hardly makes any sense in the logical frame of things. Quite rightly there’s a debate going on at the moment about the legal age for drinking in pubs, passages and bomb proof rooms where the soldiers garrisoned. Part of some group – there was no group, there was no hippy commune – it was an office, completely removed for British release. Vomited. In fact everyone seemed quite exhilarated. 1 Rue Magellan above the Tangier Inn in

a shabby white dead land known as Decadent Berlin because of the material of the time. I was 14 when I first saw it. I remember being unsure. To be compelling, in spite of, or rather because of, calculatedly dull diversions into filler testimony and mundane business. What would HG Wells think? A desert island, naked men prancing about like apes. That he’s had to replace doors and curtains damaged by unruly crowds. That must have left a lasting impression on you. The Dragon Ladies formed number compatibility games with my name scrawled under her bed. For burning beneath bed-sheets a masturbatory bible for a different fetish. He wouldn’t have to explain himself as he would to a new model. The morbid and the curious hygiene meets hokum as the educational and dramatic genres merge so she’s more than just a single handful of woman. Every two months it is Christmas Eve and he has sad eyes. Have my glasses on and I get really frustrated when someone just (snaps fingers) walks right by me. Tend to condemn pornography as a matter of routine. Influence of men and sweetheart deals. Mad or bad and one misshapen feature in the middle. They were accused in the press of having overactive imaginations. It came complete with one film which he endlessly projected. Been bent over, restricted and curtailed in his dance in confederacy with the Guardian Spirits of the Earth. You will notice that trickster is always referred to in the masculine. Of the couple, it is clearly unacceptable, and universally rejected by those connected. Tone Float’s weird noises and percussive breaks are used while Peter takes photographs of the windows. Or made their eyes stand out on stalks. The transformation process is painless, the greatest danger is severe mental reaction. Never mind that, just beat it will you? That jolt! Ship must be doing a good job. No not telepathics. This is the real thing. Safe in the jungle if you can consider any jungle safe. Long ago the sweet dream of mankind that the first contact with life beyond farewell . I’ll step on them...kill them! The chill of the night wind whipped around the hunter. This is impossible, the test has never failed. Come in....we’ve been waiting for you. This is a night when strange shadows lurk about and foul deeds will be done. Great Scot it turned into flame! He falls through a bottomless hole of star-shot pain. It is nothing, I shall not die of a cough. Terrifying, horrible sounds I at least can save myself by

has got damaged during the trip. Nevertheless I turned far from any other form of translation and they would close their minds when the intellectual going got tough. Experiments and self-expression communities from somewhere else, geographically, psychologically and culturally, with itself –in three pieces inextricably linked as one. At once nuanced, shimmering and restrained then unannounced, launching into incandescence suddenly from one city to the next without leaving a trace. His curious name change. It was just as it had been before. Crackling softly, the fire burns low, as night intrudes into the empty house. So this is the trap you’ve devised for me, eh bedlam? This may cause some slight damage but it will save lives. This was the trap I was preparing before I soured on the wager. It wasn’t easy. Frightened oh no that must have been somebody else. We symbolic old men tend to look very much alike. Oh my god you’re the woman I tried to interview. Eagerly I read what my father had given me. In time he changed his name and became a radio star. This is no time for making jokes. Be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack. Even without a mouth, or the working class as a whole. He is not afraid to die. And felt his presence to be an interruption of their pleasure. A MOD funded experiment goes awry and temporarily disrupts the trouble in her brain. She was given a choice of having an operation and it was clear that he had been advised. The landscape it passed through I never failed to be appalled. Beyond the door to the apartment the telephone started ringing in a knockoff of a burlesque comedy skit. They walked to the far end of the long room and stopped before an enormous and brightly-coloured mural. Ground writhing and moaning and blubbering and putting his bloody hand to his mouth. Dreams of happiness, confirmed by that example, demanded as fortunate, suffered a great trauma when his voice betrayed him. Supposed to be here now under a killing umbrella. An umbrella of death! It had been sixty years. He increased the magnification on the viewing screen. Commence exuding the opaque vapour! Barry Burns

BARRY BURNS

animating the crystals in the concert hall. What had been a sleek, silver part of ultimate technology was now a scorching inferno, lashing out with fiery fingers in deadly combat. A rock-like fist smashes home with the force of a runaway hurricane. Well I remember that first day and the first film that I accompanied on the Wurlitzer organ. An artist who uses the gallery as a studio. Performances bring the audience into play, such as by inviting audience members to Power of art, perhaps a reaffirmation of the importance of a single brush stroke on linen, and a development from automatic drawings. The sound score mixes the artist’s vocals inserted in a political paradigm. What is it we see? What path has the image walked? Centres and boating lakes, at weddings or remote village halls. Polystyrene. The bomber jacket is associated with youth culture and street fashion and paradox that is most obvious in the “live” aesthetics of broadcast media. These early colonies were inspired by a need to escape the increasingly industrial life. Hurriedly, hearing the noises of outside while we watch each photograph burn, we hear the Brother is not only looking at you, but ordering you about as the viewers. Bruce employs bastardised 16mm projectors, screwed about with pattern which our intellects have impressed on reality to serve our purposes. Maybe the internal creaks of lifts in Paris, or of the most common natural Universe is composed and to make cuts across it, inserting artificial stops or gaps. Many of these techniques have been shared with participants in the award winning animations. Synthesized into an unforeseen shape, a life story. It was like culturing its purest form: spatially, its so much bolder than most films we’ve seen. My word dentistry totally changed compared to the developments in some of the arts. Disparate electro-acoustic sounds that mirror, feed from, and inspire the dreamlike from the very nature of our origins? Our fascination, our fetishism is deferred, up there on stage with him? Did it matter that they had gone to see him because they knew who caused them to swivel in their sticky sockets until they lined up with mine? A liability form will automatically drop down, react with modern utopian ideals of cultural freedom. All colour effects in a picture are relative. Real life always intrudes. Parallels with the unkempt and unruly and the comparison to the highly rational Spirit he attempted to bring to music. Not some hidden beauty but the direct and poetic beauty that

Selfie with pinhole camera (I will wear a plastic guise / I will wear a fabric guise)

VIRGINIA HUTCHISON

Virginia Hutchison

OU SAID that you couldn’t see me, that your eyes had been cancelled; that to recapture this portrait you were creating a memory, a supplement of words to recall what was never really there. The blind see their blindness. At night now I feel the saccade of my eyes behind the surface of the lids as if in some permanent state of disbelief. By day they’re like mashed potatoes. I circulate from one building to another, each rooted permanently to the ground and abstaining from any visible movement. We cannot stop moving and this static animation makes it hard to focus. I become a somnambulist in the aura of these monuments, a passive participator in the facade. A selfie. I concentrate around the edges replacing one kind of seeing with another. At night do buildings dream of their own bodies; does architecture have nightmares? If I write directly about love I write about nothing, you said. If I write about nothing you become more visible (more or less). A memory that, I too, am absent from. You’re not supposed to be here, but do you remember? The cold touch of the black slate tabletop, running your fingers along the spine of the kitchen stools rescued from the skip at the sculpture studios? And so we may as well insert ourselves into the pages of each other’s fiction because it’s all a kind of ruin anyway. And if you could see it, this selfie, you would see yourself; all the individuals I ever was, all I will become, all I am now.

VIRGINIA HUTCHISON

A G R E AT N I G H T O U T adullboy

he pub has a toilet has a cubicle has a shelf or suitable cistern or an appropriately shaped toilet roll dispenser No purveyor of male scents to disrupt proceedings This place should be noted and recalled and shared A Great Night Out

aÂ poem by adullboy

SUMMER adullboy

still can remember That one perfect summer It lasted forever And we finished Zelda

aÂ poem by adullboy

IMAGE: ANDREW ROBERTSON 19

JOHN WALTER

Script for Umwelt* 1.

I fold myself into a foetal position on the floor. The bony part of my right shoulder is up near my ear, while my right hand warms itself in the dark space between the tops of my thighs. In the ceremony of clothing I took on a visible sign of my commitment to seek with my whole being: lips closed shut against a wayward tongue. But our bodies speak for us the loudest, and my left hand tugs and rubs the shag wool rug between its fingers. I rest my head on a soft corduroy pillow and watch the grey clouds behind the high thin windows. A square of light brushes my face, and I shift into it and let it warm me. The hum of the building softens the silence, as peach light sinks into shadow-filled corners. It is suddenly cold in the air where you are not, and I pull the dark blue tartan rug over me. I fix my gaze on a bunch of red tulips someone has placed in the window opposite and try not to return to sleep. With joy and awe we need only say ‘Yes’.

For those that stay there is no charge and no wage. I have laid a thin veneer of domesticity over these unwanted spaces that I find myself in. In one cell, large, white flowers pattern blue wallpaper, and in another a line of ducks edge along the tops of the walls. I have cut pictures from magazines to cover spots where the green paint is peeling away to reveal fleshy walls. Cheap blue cheap wipable cheap chairs. Every night for seven years I have swept, and still I cannot rid myself of the layers of others’ dust. It hides itself in the scratches and scars of the old stone floor, and in the gaps under the doors. Many unwanted sounds filter down through the ceiling while I’m working. Sighs, shuffles, rubbings... at that hour it’s hard to tell if they’re echoes from before or from now.

JOANNA PEACE

I remember visiting. I run my hands along the rough surface of the stone. There are dimples in some parts of the high wall that the tips of my fingers just fit into, and over others the white remains of lichen spread to pattern the grey stone. Tenacious plants grow out of the gaps. In the early days, just after the war, I could only talk to her through a small hatch, in a wall that separated outside and inside. Our words passed from lips to ear in the small gaps of air between bars. Today though, we meet in one of the low buildings open to visitors, and share a pot of tea brought to us by one of the young Sisters. We sit on hardback chairs upholstered in mustard yellow and talk of everyday things. The hands that peek out from the wide black sleeves are still soft despite the outdoor work. Her skin has aged better than mine, though I can’t help but notice her breasts are dropping faster to her waistband. I don’t stay long. The quietness that I should find calming unnerves me, and I long to stretch out into the Spring evening. There is a vase of red tulips in the window.

Or from another place altogether. *The anthropologist Tim Ingold uses the term ‘Umwelt’ in his essay Culture and the Perception of the Environment from 1992: “We tend to envisage the environment as a vast container filled with objects, living and non-living, mobile and stationary, like a room or stage-set cluttered with furniture and decorations. From this analogy comes the classic ecological concept of the niche, a little corner of the world an organism occupies, and to which it has fitted itself through a process of adaptation. If a vase be removed from an alcove, a niche remains for a small object that might appropriately fill the vacant space; by analogy it implies that the ecological niche of an organism is independently specified by the essential properties of the environment, which impose the conditions of functioning to which any occupant must conform. Thus, the very notion of adaptation entails that niches exist in the environment prior to the organisms that fill them. The environment sets the problem, in the form of a challenge; the organism embodies the solution, in the form of its adaptive response. However, this analogy ignores the most fundamental property of all animals: unlike vases, they both perceive and act in their environments.” (Ingold, 1992, p.40 - 41) **“The simplicity of my surroundings, with plain décor and few images also supports this inner spaciousness. There is none of the noise and clutter that strikes me so forcibly on the rare occasions that I go out. I don’t have to deal constantly with gratuitous novelty and so can engage in a more focussed way with life in the present moment. The regular repetition in weekly and seasonal cycles might sound like a recipe for boredom but I find the growing familiarity allows different parts to bounce off each other in creative ways as they float around in my mind.” (Novice, 2012)

ELARA CALUNA are Glasgow based duo Benedict Salter and Kitty Hall. Hear them live at Paraphernalia at The Poetry Club on Sat 5th April 2014 or at: https://soundcloud.com/elaracaluna

JIM FERGUSON

t witchin thi day thi postman bit thi dug unnir thi tree where an important historical event hud occurrd thi curtins twitched aw alang oor road n furra while folk tokt tae each othir who hudny tokt afore

lullaby ah wahnti sleep in at thi wa wher its safe away frae aw thi cynicism n madniss me n ma dreams in at thi wa smilin izza faw asleep thinkin that common humanity huzti cum through nthi end ah dont know whut that means by thi way mibby luv wioot power mibby power wioot lies corruption n hate mibby aw kinds uv things aw possibilities luvin n luvliss but tryin even nthi worst times ti haud oan ti ma common humanity n go ti sleep smilin in at thi wa

a nonymous laffn dead loud at thi dead dour film sittn dead still nfeelin dead embarrasst nthi dead quiet black uv thi pictures

chuck bukowski auld chuck bukowskis deid stane cawld gone finished through thi whole thing done nae wine nae wummin nae sexist novels nae poems nae horses nae nuthin aw bets ir aff chuck

crossin points 1. wonderful n depressin we walk oantae thi bridj staop feel thi snow n wind seep through thi guts jump fly swim droon ir run ti othir side n laff aboot thi progress wuv made crossin anythin ataw 2. thi rivir a flow uv sadness mournin whuts loast n missin but glad whin a shift nthi weathir letsuz float n swim upti thi hot sun 3. sumthin frae thi past creeps at wur back iz wi get ready ti move n whin wi arrive thi opposite bank looks exactly thi same iz thi wan wi left as if times swimmin moovn roon wonderful wi walk alwiz oanti thi bridj alwiz oanti thi othir side alwiz no known if wi kin get ther

cherr y trees s aint mirrn cathedral thirs cherry trees aw owre thi toon in bloom a burst uv light upoan thi senses n aw yi kin dae is wundir aboot thi nature uv thi gemm whuts thi score whuts thi prognosis aboot whut happins internal/external mind n mattir n aw that shite dualist n solipsistic wurlds in a city fuhll uv cherry trees in bloom

thi wey thi cherry trees hing oor thi fence uv thi cathedral saint mirrn wayiz wean in a buggy huztae duck unnir thi branch ur itll crack um nthi heid

IMAGE: ANNE COLVIN 23

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