The discipline of Comparative Literature is based on the observation that the study of single texts and cultures is enriched by reflecting on the texts and cultures surrounding them. No text or work of art exists in a vacuum, and literature is not confined to a singular concept, language, or people. We hope to view literature from broad and inclusive perspectives, illuminating how philosophy, anthropology, history, language, poetry, literary theory, and other human expressions come together, and where the visual arts, theatre, and modern media offer crucial comparisons. This journal aspires to embody these ideas while remaining in a constant state of becoming something new with each issue, submission, contribution, translation, and reading.
brio. is a student-founded publication that combines literary criticism with imaginative works and visual art. In an effort to represent the wide spectrum of discourses that serve as the foundation of comparative study, the journal accepts submissions from any source and in any language.
A Letter to The Readers
You address yourself to me so that I may read you, but I am nothing to you except this address; in your eyes, I am the substitute for nothing, for no figure
The Pleasure of The Text (1973), Roland Barthes
In the reader we have preserved something of the non-virtual human subject. Cleave a book that intrigues you at a random seam–maybe a line will rise out of it and wash over you so you can forget about every angel and demon tapping at your window. That is what happens to me. When friends tell me that they haven’t found a book that speaks to their soul, though they read and read, I profess gibberishly and irrationally that one day, they will find the book(s) that shift(s) their entire world over one ginormous foot so that a gap will become visible, and then everything will appear possible and the self will be revealed to be as malleable as an unwritten idea. If not a book, then a person or a song or a rock or grief–the whole world has already appeared in literature, anyway, has been filtered through only to come back around.
It only takes one instance of a person reading to know a spiritual world is uncovered in the stillness that settles over mind and body when words begin to pour inwards. A welcoming house, ear after ear invisibly opens within the external hearing organ, and you begin to hear the stillness predating words.
The stillness is better—don’t say this aloud—than all the fast they are overstuffing us with now. You don’t respond with words—this isn’t a debate—but respond like a baby being lulled to sleep who wouldn’t sleep unless you were lulled to it. No one cares what a baby says because a baby cannot speak yet, but maybe someone cares. Sometimes you giggle from the magic of reading…but then shoot right up when the author shocks you with how well they knew none of us would pay attention. But unlike in other areas, we freeze meaningfully when the words in our reading catch us and say to ourselves, No, no, no! I, yes I, can pay attention!
Those of us who are so superfluous as to study literature—I can’t say it is “good” to look to literature for understanding as I, for instance, must think I do, like an oceanographer who only watches the crests of
waves in order to “understand” the eternal lives of beautiful crustaceans— imagine reader and writer as the only figures essential to the dance. One apparently makes decisions, but we don’t call the writer an authority because we understand what he imparts belongs to his weak power to understand us. The other, the reader, I, you, can easily become an authority, like a son with a father or a disciple with god. We were not yet manifest at the moment of creation–we were not an active part of the great, undifferentiated mess of Ideas because we had not yet emerged into differentiation we did not bleed the writer’s blood or get shouted at by his wife, nor did we taste whatever plain or expensive meal remained in his mouth while he wrote, though we may read his biographies and therefore “know” without knowing. They are all unreliable, and so we are. At the end of the day, we study codependent relationships, loops. We invented two unreal identities when we were afraid to merely call them ‘human.’ In literary studies, we can get close to human, skirting along the horizon. If we allow ourselves.
Hearing all our human chattering about machines, we begin to think we never had mouths, each round as the universe itself, to begin with. Is this world ours or theirs? What a funny, endangering question that does not belong in the same room with these soul-shaking books that allow invisible ears to be grand, chandeliered entrances to the rituals and dances of the past that is forever present. Nonetheless, I will continue for now to die on the hill of readers and writers that stands tall in the imaginary battle for the human, where obnoxious and profound conversations runneth over and where you and I are meeting now, because that is where I find my profoundly sick pleasure.
Between reading and what takes place within you there is that training area experience dug into the earth to try you on. Like a machine reading everything that comes to the surface so that surface becomes no more.
THANK YOU FOR READING ME.
till we meet again, megan finkel (she/they) brio. journal’s editor-in-chief
BLUES FOR BREAKFAST
By Amaya Jones
see bullets become broken steeps of women on pavement. easy rider making rounds round them kids. see that red blue with no white the sun don’t show here. the sky another reason to get higher ground trembling low at shoeless feet i’m sayin where the light go? tell us when you find out and do it loud cause the old men singin stevie
our stomachs the bass when we get into them tunes sippin sweet sweet lemonade leave with more than what you knew then she said swing me round till I can’t see straight head been spinnin for what feels a decade call it the lifetime headache cause I eat the blues for breakfast.
floral drapes for the streets filled with dirty eyes and no sense of livin nothin but hardened stares for the empty souls covered in cotton and linen you better go on and be with it.
see this life of last things turn statistic on spreadsheets. no time to grieve when the black blood stay remindin us of the trouble brewin and strange days when you finally come to it singin dont take my life away this that new gospel for the cool kids they say watchin old folks shake their fists but i just lay low and wait for new skin yeah
I eat the blues for breakfast
By Selina Ma
[00:00:00:01]
…it’s not that I’m afraid of writing. However, it’s true that I’m afraid of lying. Meandering lines on an endless page, a perpetual escape from its palace on a pedestal. The medium exaggerates the aesthetic––I’m afraid.
(What if someone had already said it before? What if this thought is not worth my time? What if it comes out incomprehensive, or worse, comprehensively different from how I intended?)
Initially it rises in a seizing simultaneity, drowning in a transient fire in some quickly dwindling place, fragmentary, divulging, yet wholly comprehensible. For just an instant, “within and without”––
…my idea. I’ve slaughtered countless of its cousins; so, is it overly cruel to allow this one to live and propagate?
(Rhetorical questions will make you sound either self-satisfied, condescending, or sarcastic. Be more sincere!)
…then let me ruin this one [idea] for you, too: purely for my own sadistic pleasure. The story that had just formed in my head ends exactly how it started, and continues in a way where I search with uncertainty for its end––skipping along the path––skipping along the path.
Skipping along the past. Skipping alone. Skip, ! and Land in the unrealistic present.
(Tsk, it’s way better to go off a concrete form and topic. Laziness and irresponsibility is unbecoming to a writer. It’s really just bad manners.)
[00:10:25:32]
It’s not that I am afraid of writing. It is true, however, that I am afraid of lying. Barren lines on an endless page, twice removed from my mind. The medium, my words, exaggerates the aesthetic, a quality not inherent to my simple thought.
I am afraid––I had dismissed countless other similar ideas. It seems overly cruel, allowing this one to become a story.
Let me abandon it, then, not without some twisted sense of pleasure.
The inability to capture my own mind is disappointing. Devastating.
Yet, I will not tell you a story.
(…too dry?)
An Idea
It’s not that I am afraid of writing. It’s true, however, that I am afraid of lying. Immutable lines on an endless page, twice removed from its pedestal. The medium, I’m afraid, exaggerates its aesthetic.
Yet again––I’ve slaughtered countless of its cousins. Is it overly cruel to allow this one to live?
I had intended to tell a story. The story of a girl who seeks concreteness. The story of a girl who must decide. Her mind allowed her to know more than she should. What will she do?
I even had its beginning written out. Look!
The tides crash down onto the cliff, mocking me for my indecision.
If a death is lived twice, does it lose its meaning?
(But I really shouldn’t show unfinished work…)
[01:56:22:05]
I step past the imposing columns with rehearsed ease. I raise my hands in a supplicating motion, filling a silhouette in reversed time, readily epitomizing––to complete the fresco, to complement the statues, to realize––
––comprehension struck the moment my fingers closed around nothingness; then the dream undoes itself. All that remains is a crystal ball, a bubble––I see the vision, inverted, before succumbing in a thin mist.
A form exists somewhere between the two. I hear a whisper––maybe, at the end of the day, you can look into my eyes, and confide in me that you remember who I was. … Hesitation. Tear from feigned pain.
Amidst fear and love, the final act is violent.
It is not that I am afraid of writing. I am, however, always arrested by the flawlessness of the conceptual genesis. The first sentence is perfect. The second is excessive. The third is unoriginal. The fourth is futile, and the rest is repetitive.
(You are laughing. Good thing that was intended. So, what shall I write next? Tell me. Shall I add some realism? Some political commentary? Some historical anecdote? Some self-mockery to cover the insecurity, for the both of us?)
Kaat
By Vighnesh Mehrotra
Yehuda ke tat par le gaya mai usko karney tyaag
Khuda ki lein dein mai maanga unhone mera yeh tyaag
Bachpan se dil mai dard aur darr le ke aage badh raha
Kya ant aur kya arth iss zindagi may jismey basey tyaag
Samman ke liye ek chitra mai main dheet chupa raha
Us dabwav se bachne ke liye maine diye vey tyaag
Pita ek shishe se kam nahi dikhaye ek parchai
Jo sachai wo roop mai dikhi nahi wahi mere tyaag
Tuhi mere vighn ka nash karega tuhi mera vighn
Yeh na tum chahte na hi mai kya phir hum karengey tyaag?
I took him to the peak of the Yehuda for his sacrifice God in his give and take, asked me for this sacrifice
Ever since I was a child, I’ve carried fear and pain in my heart. Regardless, I kept moving forward. What end and what meaning does life possess that harbors in its roots sacrifice
To garner respect, I hid unmoving under a painting
To prevent being crushed by the weight, I too will make that sacrifice
A father is nothing less than mirror, he shows a shadow of yourself
The truth that is absent in that reflection That truth is my sacrifice
You are the destroyer of my problems, and you are my problem
This isn’t your desire, nor is it mine, so will we still sacrifice?
Forgetting Nature, Remembering Love
By Kyung Lee
The photograph gives us something we can’t deny. It makes us remember and gives us the extraordinary circumstance. The “absolute Particular,”1 as Barthes calls it, or, in other words, the “thing” that leads our subjective experience of seeing into an image. We meet the eyes of death in the photograph, the Real that paralyzes. Paradoxically, it is the very condition of the possibility for life — for movement.
Photography, Writing, and Walking — they give us impossible goals in which we conceive the entirety of time in rations, collecting particularities to make a whole. We forget that what links objects, words, and steps to each other is always what’s never there. The lack in successive links is what photography gives us. We haven’t captured the photograph. It has captured us.
In an attempt to fall into photography and let it catch me, I’ve traced my footsteps back to the sites of the photographs. Written like a conversation that never stops and eternally returns to the unconscious, the captions of the photographs salt the wound between words and sentences, signifier and concept.
The following story is about movement and time. It questions why we cry on planes, why we say, “think again,” or “on second thought,” and why Porthos died when he started thinking too hard about his next step. The movements of walking, flipping through pages, speaking, seeing, watching films, is what secures us like the spine of a book. when the rain hits the window panes and seeps into the telephone wires, the buffer on our screens is a traumatizing one that places us in the m(O)ther’s womb again, reminding us not quite about the death we are to face anew, after and on top of this life, but about another originary death—The groundless2 earth from which we were already once dust.
Writing this story, I imagined being back at the children’s library,
1 Barthes, “Camera Lucida,” 4.
2 Lacan, Seminar VII, Ethics, “To follow him onto this ground is to discover that he is missing something” (108), “the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire” (319).
sitting in front of kind librarians who would sing songs and tell tales about everything beautiful in the world. I’ve long forgotten these stories, but I remember the melodies of their voices — the music that reminded me of their gentle faces and wrinkles that marked the passing of time. This story is about the passing of time.
Although we may not see it alike, for me, there’s a rigorous truth in this collection of citations, the rhetorical edifice that is this essay. It fractures the ornament, or perhaps reveals the hidden cracks already within the self-proclaimed work of art. Truth is no longer sought in the absolute source of signs and symbols but in the journey of their evolutionary history. I hope to walk with you and stop with you as we revisit these sites of mourning.
Today, I write as if I’d forgotten to die yesterday. The compulsion to write always comes like a migraine. I’ll begin by confessing that I’m not a writer. And don’t ask me why I don’t write because I don’t think I’ll ever know. Writing makes concrete the words that evaporate when we speak— it’s an evidential force. It would be easy to think that because of this, writing has a referential alibi in a way that speaking lacks. Yet it’s a universal feeling to revisit something one has written to find that these words are no longer theirs. Have they ever been?
I understand that I’m not a writer when I’m alone with my words. They’re always fleeting, and they’re not mine. On the other hand, I imagine good writers to be on the verge of narcissism because, even if they wake up every morning with a different face, they still love to look in the mirror. I imagine they’ll obsess over their manuscripts bleeding like their fingernails.
Photographs are more reliable than words. The Photograph confronts me with my worst fear that I’ll never be able to recreate the Real no matter how quickly I jot down passing revelations. The Photograph “mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially,”3 ripping open the finality of an image, and it’s immobility says that there are some things that cannot be changed, such as the death of a mother who, in the image of a photograph, still exists in another time—who, if “things had been different,” still could have lived. The Photograph stops me in the present and brings me back to an originary trauma that didn’t actually happen but could have. Its possibility is what makes the impossibility of writing the future “possible” in the same way.
Barthes, CL (4).
In the Korean Hanja (traditional characters), the character “辵,” (in Hangul, or the Korean alphabet: “갈 착,” and in English romanization: “gal chak”) means “to go, or to move.” Its extended meaning, “쉬엄쉬 엄 가다,” (swi-um swi-um gada) means to go (in a continuous movement) through a series of momentary stops or rests. “쉬엄쉬엄,” a repetition of rests or breaths, is made infinite by the “가다,” going, and inversely, “가 다,” going, is precisely defined by “쉬엄쉬엄.”
Casually spoken, “쉬엄쉬엄 가다,” (swi-um swi-um gada) means to “take it easy.” But when someone tells you to “take it easy,” isn’t there always another statement implied? — “...because you’re going too fast,” “you’re being too ambitious,” or “slow down.”
Associated with walking, the bottom half of the script, is also seen in the Chinese character for “foot,” “足” (zù). Although the character of “辵” (착, chak) is now antiquated, it has been replaced with the radical, “⻍” (책, chaek).4
Radicals in Chinese (traditional Korean) characters cannot stand alone but always come as a part of a character.5 The part always interrupts but is also what makes the whole. I can’t understand the whole without knowing the source of the radical. Characters evolve through a historical deconstruction and reconstruction. “⻍,” when situated in a character, sits at the left hand side, acting as a spine of sorts.
The composition of this character, “⻍,” tells us that we move forward only to stop again and again. And more importantly, it’s only by stopping that we can keep moving forward. But which is it? Is it enough to simply deconstruct the relationship between movement and immobility?
Reading a book for the second time, we search for the meaning that we’d perhaps lost when we put it down after the first time. We search again for pleasure in the text. We forget so that we can remember it all over again.
Stopping is an essential part of going. I capture the (essential, invisible)
4 https://namu.wiki/w/%E8%BE%B5
5 Traditional Korean characters, or hanja, derived from Chinese traditional script, before the invention of the Korean alphabet, hangul, by King Sejong in the 15th century.
thing in time and leave the past open so that I can come back to it when I’m lost. By moving from one city to another, changing my wardrobe for the next season, and stepping into a new scene, I’ll be able to mark my here and now in all its evanescence. Change: isn’t it so contradictory to nature? If we can define Nature in terms of “how things are,” then Nature doesn’t change. There’s a sacred law of nature, a sacred law of language; there’s going.
In anticipation of the winter, I’ll go shopping for coats, sweaters, gloves, scarves, and hats. I’ll soon lock away my sandals and pull out my snow boots.
[Just as love does — things have (already) decayed in the winter. I lock you away, too, and spend these gloomy, somber, and slow days that shortly morph into long nights, only thinking about the next time we’ll meet.]
Sacred Garden
My feet no longer fall onto static leaves that always contain the potential for an immediate gratification in the crushing sound of their fragile skeletons, reminding me I’m still alive and in nature. In the fall, these leaves decay so naturally. The very physical movement of my body is always reciprocated by the sounds and lyricists of the earth. Everything makes sense, in a strictly historical-materialistic fashion: “everything happens for a reason.” These words can be comforting or painful depending on the reader.
[Lovers ask each other “what do you want, what do you need?,” and they respond immediately (without mediation) because they know the answers by heart, in a purely physiological sense. They’ve not yet forgotten the lines to the script of their relationship, this play.]
Hidden hymnals
The winter looms, though. Gentle flakes fall, reenacting scenes of a past life, with a red violence hidden under white plains of innocence. Snow: it’s so apparent, the way they fall, these flakes of nothing. We all look up and wonder where they’ve come from. Unlike those savory palettes that(/of) fall, remaining within the scope of our landscape, the range of our seeing eyes,
(We know where fallen leaves have come from. They come from the trees, traversing the atmosphere on a brisk journey to a wonderland, seeking repose and finality in the Earth once again. There was once a leaf I had tagged, watching from a distance, checking up on it every now and then. I logged in my notebook its progression, its changing colors, and the various directions it swayed in the wind. When it fell so gracefully one afternoon, it finally reconciled with Mother. I knew where it had been and where it would stay. I observed as Godmothers do, not saying too much but observing in background, ready for any sudden movement that interests the historian. I was ready with my notebook which never missed a day of history. From the humble dust of the Earth it rose, and alas, succumbing to its first act of trauma, its own birth, the inanimate, it returned.)
Mysteries in Light and Shadow…
snow falls abruptly. It catches us, captures us — it sees us — with an amorous face. It calls fast and loud, scarring us with a piercing movement. Snow does not fall. It sings and dances. It writes its own script as it happens. Yesterday, I stepped out into a strange dance. I didn’t know what was happening — not rain, but… flurries? Indeed, moving from fall to winter, we don’t know precisely when it’ll officially start to Winter, but we anticipate it anyway. And when it comes, it’s abrupt, without warning. Where did it come from? Why?
When the fall withers away, when the change and move happens,
(Isn’t the fall precisely defined by its liminality? It’s never an actual State in which we can live and breathe, it’s a medium. In the fall, we are falling; we are beings defined by the verb: “to be,” and the active participle: “-ing”; Falling down; falling in and out of love; falling in and out of each other; Falling. We are in a some-(th)-“ing”; a process: becom-“ing.” Yet, it’s categorized as a definite State among the others. Its category doesn’t concern the state (static, stasis) of things, but the happen-“ing” and go-“ing”s. No, fall isn’t determined by the static of the leaves on the ground but by the ambiguous pleasure in us when we hear its satisfying crunch)
Winter is com-“ing.”
Winter is com-“ing”
Dialectics and the Father
Nothing about the winter is dialectical. Things happen so suddenly. It’s the season when lovers leave each other and ask each other “why?” When I stepped outside to the first snow of the cycle yesterday, I couldn’t see where it came from. I looked up with childlike wonder as if searching for the end of the rainbow. Where did it come from? Why? Surely it could not have come from the ground, for there’s no rational explanation for these types of absurdist speculations.
Lovers are now displaced from each other. They stand face to face, but it seems like when they look at each other, they’re only thinking about something else.6 Out of sync, a rift emerges. One moves far away to a foreign country. There was always potential for movement, future plans one had in mind since knowing each other, I suppose—but was one always consciously aware that today was the day it would have happened? Sure, it was perhaps in motion, but now it’s a movement, disconnected. It’s jarring, and it punctures. We no longer know the answers to the questions we pose to each other. Nothing’s by heart anymore. We’re already displaced. We’re already gone.]
So undialectical, this entanglement. Something’s missing.7
6 “To be with the one I love and to think of something else: this is how I have my best ideas, how I best invent what is necessary to my work. Likewise for the text: it produces, in me, the best pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly: if, reading it, I am led to look up often, to listen to something else.” (Barthes, “The Pleasure of the Text,” 24).
7 “[D]ialectics only links successive positivities” (Barthes, “The Pleasure of the Text,” 44).
Sun; Father, Earth; mother
I think today will be one of the last warm days in the year. It’s been so cold for the past few weeks that as the slightest tinge of warmth on my skin greeted me this morning, I suddenly remembered the face of my last lover. They’re the types of moments one has when slowly forgetting. Gradually, I’d remember someone’s face less each day, and memories evoked by certain scenarios, even irrelevant ones, would obtrude less frequently. As I walked along a pavement still damp from the night before, I witnessed piles of leaves that had been raked to the side. They were from a few weeks ago.
Body bags
We always move things aside in preparation for change. We’re always anticipating the future, making estimations from the books we read over and over again to gain knowledge. But what would happen if these leaves were left to rot on the surfaces that destiny had chosen for them? What would happen when the snow came and froze them into stasis, not quite decaying yet but momentarily just turning them into a living dead? What would happen when these worlds collided, the leaves decaying like compost as the ice shatters under the weight of a thousand feet? Would there be war? Would there be resistance? Would there only be corpse-like remnants of these objects? I have the urge to put these leaves back onto the pavement so the snow can suffocate them.
[People stay for a while, when necessary, then leave, when necessary. I want to stop them. Take their photographs and put them up against the wall. I wonder what it’ll be like once their faces, in a photograph that mirrors the platitude of a fallen leaf, dried up, are frozen in time. These photographs will layer their two-dimensional faces, which are already only enumerations of tiny pixels—insignificant particles, into a momentary stay against the real. I’ll be able to see them clearly this time when they’re not shaking their heads back and forth as they do through the angle of a human eye. With the clarity of ice and the camera lens, I’ll be able to puncture their image, reaching towards something beyond themselves, beyond their particles and particularities. I’ll see, I’ll read, their pictorial faces far removed from tangible parts.]
Interlude
“A specific photograph [...] requires a secondary act of knowledge or reflection. By nature, the Photograph ( [...] refers only to the tireless repetition of contingency [my emphasis]) has something tautological about it[.]”
— Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida8
8 Barthes, CL, 4.
Cutting, maiming, hurting, apart; a part
“Falling” snow that appears immediately (without mediation) points towards falling leaves that seem as though they have a beginning, end, and a certain medium. Snow is a punctual “sting, speck, cut, little hole,” and in the same way that the “punctum” in the Photograph “points a finger at [a] certain vis-a-vis.”9
I ask myself if the “falling” of leaves from heavy branches was ever really “natural,” either. When did it all begin, the first snow; the first birth; the first sound; the first word? My roots are grounded in history. Therefore, I too, am naturally a historian first. I account for every angle, every face of that falling leaf in order to locate the exact moment when the leaf started to fall.
Nothing can be made sense of in successive delineations anymore. I must turn back time, turn it onto its underside, so that I can peer down into the night sky and see where it came from. Curious men and serious scientists must stay consistent with their methods. I start to suspect, this time, the integrity of falling leaves. Reversing time in memory, I begin to wonder—when I witness one side of a leaf, each angle at a time, from a bird’s eye view to standing with the horizon—aren’t these all only halftruths? What’s ever on the other side? I can never see what’s beyond the face in front of me, and changing the position of my gaze, there’s still no reward because time betrays me from the start.
9 Barthes, CL 4, 26.
Two faces; the excess in waiting
This rift, this gap, this missive character to leaves and trees that fall over and die like supporting roles in a movie who always take their last breath just before they were about to say something important — are all unveiled when I’m confronted by the abrasive arrogance of ice, snow, its punctuation and yearning for recognition.
Missive Triangles and Jumping
I ask myself: am I a masochist? Suddenly, I only trust the violence and cruelty in parting, particles of snow that mock me in their unsolicited dance. What was once faithful to the laws of nature are rendered sinful under the moon’s rays that illuminate new, changing, revolutionary circumstances. Snow turned to hail; the lakes froze up. I’m frozen in time, scarred, and shattered, in my original state. I know too much, or too little, and God whispered to me his secret—he knows nothing. In this moment, we are suspended, he surrenders, killing himself so as to clear the path for the winter.
Puncture; punctuation; stopping
I’m numb and don’t know where to go. How can I walk with no fragile leaves to guide my steps? My ears grow deaf, and I can no longer rely on the sounds of the earth. Now, I follow the same script that the snow has taught me—written with each movement that I make, I’ll mutter whatever songs hum in my mind. Never lifting my pen to stop and organize the sequence of my words, my language writes itself into being. You’ve parted, and I’ll not follow you any longer. Instead, I’ll love whenever I want to, wherever I want to, scattering pieces of my heart everywhere. Planted in the Earth now, they’ll grow between the cracks of hard ice to mark another com-“ing.”
When I “parted with you,” I wrote you a final ode to us and pasted the last photograph I had taken of you. Something compelled me to leave the last few pages blank. Now I’ve started writing in a new book. We are eternally apart and with each other.
Citations:
Barthes Roland Richard Miller and Richard Howard. 1975. The Pleasure of the Text First American ed. New York: Hill and Wang.
Namuwiki. Last modified December 9, 2022. Accessed December 12, 2022.
https://namu.wiki/w/%E8%BE%B5.
Nancy Jean-Luc. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press.
M I N A
By Vivian Hunt
I’m going to tell you something. I was thrown into the sea immediately after being born. The waves were cold and the ocean was vast, and I was just a little baby in a little blanket, floating around the deep blue. I was in the sea for so long that water made little holes in my bones, little rooms. In those rooms there are little ghosts. Ghosts of what I could have been. Ghosts of my ancestors, haunted by what happened to their little ones. I have been here for years. I’ve been told I’m not supposed to be able to breathe underwater. But every time I reach the surface, I have to return to the deep. There are so many rooms in the body of my house that echo with the ghosts of the ocean and whenever I leave they scream at me, scream scream scream SCREAM.
So I stay.
I have everything I want. Everything I could possibly want. I love the firefly squid and the sifting of the sea floor. I just don’t have anyone to share it with.
Poem in the shape of my hairy heart
By Sabrina Kim
I was about to pour some beer for myself and you took the bottle to do it for me. You said you didn’t speak Japanese and then said anata wa kirei desu and told me to look it up later. Small things that delight me. When you made a circle of dead fish heads face each other like spikes of light. When you did the dishes.
I think we both feel the weight, it’s a garden of little pebbles.
+ I was about to pour some small things that delight me. You said you didn’t drink beer and told me to fuck myself in English. On the plate, you made fish heads dead. When you did the dishes, I couldn’t help it, I forgave you.
Feel pebbles
+ NO ONE likes clams but Kate does. I once saw her make a mountain of empty clam shells.
+ Fucked myself in Korean, forgave myself in English.
+
Remembering Korea is remembering the color grey: dark grey (almost black) pavement from monsoon rain, light grey sidewalk on a dry day. I remember what my body looked like walking fast from one side of the neighborhood to the other with a dozen eggs from the convenience store. I remember waiting for the traffic lights thinking about all the viral sicknesses that lived in my body that year. Made me feel a bit like a wind instrument. “Lute.” That’s an instrument that lives in my mind like a hollowed out stick of wood. But it’s actually a string instrument.
+
You’re a mountain. You empty like a clam shell.
Capturing Loving
By Kyung Lee
In a classic scene, a woman says “I love you” to her beloved, and he’s unable to respond because he doesn’t know what she means by it. He avoids the question, the question of whether he loves her back. He can’t possibly risk saying what he doesn’t know, let alone what he doesn’t mean, and he especially can’t risk being unfaithful to her. He runs away in fear because she suddenly appears to him as God: she is all knowing at the moment she proclaims her “Love” for him. Yet, little does he know, there is no hidden secret to this proclamation. Indeed, neither does she know what she means by it, but it is precisely this oblivion that compels her to utter these words.
Herein lies a problem of truth; the problem of knowing each other. A rupture in the conversation is born from the words, “I love you.” They do not relate to their speakers, but, on the contrary, they exist outside of language. Suddenly, all reason has left the room. All objectivity and historicization that once made sense of the two lovers’ relationship now evaporated. All knowledge is lost.
Art and poetry are forms of love; they stand outside of us and taunt us as we are confronted by their absurdities; they reveal to us everything that we are unable to know. Readers encounter poetic prose with hesitancy. Half ambitious and half anxious to figure out what the poet intended we see in his words; we pray that we won’t over- or underestimate their truths. We worry we might be wrong, afraid of being dishonest and scared to contradict ourselves. Either positing one analysis as absolute truth or denying its significance completely, we try to oppose and resist this unsettling feeling that obtrudes with poetry. Here, the poet confesses his love for us, and we are afraid of his daunting truth: what does he mean? How should I interpret his text? But we foolishly assume the position of the beloved; we think the poet possesses the key to a certain hidden truth. Such is a wrong position: the poet himself was hoping you would find the truth in these words for him.
The crux of our desire lies at the intersection of a “desire” to know and the impossibility of language, the craving for truth and the anguish
it causes us when we realize we cannot have it. Then could it be that the presence of love is only afforded by its absence? That there is no truth to a love mundane and a love insane?
Love has many definitions, many forms, but because of its elusiveness, we can only grasp it in its shy, half concealed appearances. Nevertheless, I have paradoxically set out on a journey to find the meaning of love. The language I have constructed this project in is one of delirium and indeterminacy. Of course, I don’t precisely know that these texts have roused in me the obscure relations I give them or what has conjured up the phantoms I see in my photographs. The relationship between the footnotes and the dominant text, as you will notice, is akin to that of the latent and manifest content which Breton refers to in Freudian terms through the “mental theatre.”1 Perhaps, you will see the pleasure, the cutting and pasting, the dissemination and delirium in this text.
Love at Second Sight
Let’s start where we always do, at the moment of encounter. The accidental run in. The meet-cute. The chance encounter. Unlike running into the same strangers in mundanity, we come together by a different command. There’s something else that compels us even further than just a useless repetition: Convulsive beauty in your eyes — how they often stare into the distance, always searching. They tell me that there’s something I don’t know. Like an art object,2 you are my “trouvaille,”3 my found object; that which has no exchange-value but nevertheless incites a violence in me. This convulsion — I am unaware of its reason — insists that you have a certain truth that I don’t.
1 “Boys of harsh discipline, nameless actors, […] from the grand musical that will always occupy the mental theatre, […] [T]heir role being to unveil, with a certain cynicism, the motives for the action.” Breton, André. Mad Love. Translated by Mary Ann Caws. (N.p.: University of Nebraska Press, 1987) 5.
2 “Art object or object in nature, these two combine, in surrealism, in another form of the dialectic, by passing and resuming all antinomies[.]” Breton, André. Mad Love, 124. 3 Breton, André. Mad Love, 13.
Rencontrer: A retroactive past; a contingent present; life before you does not exist; the past was always only in anticipation of you;
“[J]e n’ai pas encore trouvé,”4 hints not only that we haven’t found it yet, but that what we are yet to find has already occurred to us once or was already there. Something has been determined, but not figured out yet. Something has been outlined, yet not filled in. A seat has been reserved, in a manner of speaking. The etymology of “encounter” not only reveals a connotation of a bad or malicious encounter or physical combat,5 echoing the violence in our encounter,6 but it also means to meet someone and to be in their presence without having known it, without having looked for them. Yet, how can something we have only accidentally encountered for the first time, oblivious of its presence, simultaneously be assigned a predetermined character?
We can only posit that this newly found truth is contingent on its relationship to the past. The present moment of a chance encounter retroactively determines its past, and our rational conception of the past as complete is only a misrecognition of its place in time. In a strange contradiction, the past is present in its own absence, lingering and waiting for your arrival.7 The past has ‘cease[d]’ to exist, but its finality is not determined in this truth.8
4 Breton, André. Nadja. Éditions Gallimard, 1964. PDF e-book.
5 Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales. Last modified 1986. Accessed October 23, 2022. https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/rencontre.
6 Derived from the Latin “incontra,” to be in front of; facing, where “contra,” is to be against. With the same preposition, “contradiction” is related to “encounter.” The encounter is a contradiction. Online Etymology Dictionary, last modified April 17, 2018, accessed October 25, 2022, https://www.etymonline.com/word/encounter.
7 Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. 10th ed. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul. Read by W. Scott Palmer. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2021. Originally published as Matière et Mémoire (n.p.: Presses Universitaires de France, n.d.), 141.
8 Bergson, 141.
Awaiting your arrival; phantom presence; present absence
Eyes: that which sparkle… in a blinding light; snow on a mountain top9; fair haired, blonde women; springtime; divine eyes; ma trouvaille; mirror; hiding; stolen gaze
“What was it they reflected—some obscure distress and at the same time some luminous pride?”10 Even down to the atomic qualities of sight, the initial “attentive” perception (again, emphasizing convulsive beauty, something that catches our eyes as opposed to something we remain indifferent to, a mechanistic motion11) of an object is not merely an initial finding, but…
truly involves a reflection […] outside ourselves, of an actively created image, identical with, or similar to, the object which it comes to mold itself. […] [M]ust we not suppose that this image existed already while we were looking at it? […] [B]ehind these images, which are identical with the object, there are others, stored in memory, which merely resemble it.12
Thus, what unexpectedly catches our eyes exists in this lukewarm space between strangers and old friends.
We all search for some object and the “event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning.”13 But the object we are in search of is not only an absent object but a lost object. We act as if it had existed already.
9 “[I]n this paradoxical region where the fusion of two beings who have really chosen each other[…] loneliness rages also, […] around the Alaskan craters, demands that under the ashes there remain snow,” Breton, Mad Love, 8.
10 Breton, André. Nadja. 8th ed. Translated by Richard Howard. (NYC: Grove Press, 1960), 65.
11 Bergson, 9
12 Bergson, 102-103.
13 Breton, Nadja, (1960), 60.
Mystery is what drives the spirit
Anticipating You Again
I’m at the corner, waiting for our rendez-vous. There’s too much time, too much space between now and then, and I can’t be seen just yet. So, I go window shopping. No strings attached; I pick things up only to let them go. The scarf on that mannequin rests, melancholic, its burgundy and orange letting out a harmonious cry. Its aloof yet somber fleece resembles an old widower with dementia who’s lost something forgotten and often finds himself in an unknown place, wavering between a left turn and a right.
We entertain each other, exchanging empty enunciations, never saying anything.
“We did not speak. What do two hearts that love each other say? Nothing. But our eyes expressed everything.”14
As careful schoolboys pass on notes to each other in class, wary of the teacher’s watch, we, too, pass on poetry, remaining cautious of the other. These notes correspond for us, in place of us, containing within them our truths. It’s their scent and sound that linger on after we have spoken:
14 Ducasse, 87.
“Man there passes through [remains enclosed in] forests of symbols”15
15 Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du Mal. 9th ed. Translated by Richard Howard. (New Hampshire: David R. Godine, 1982), 15.
This certain ambiguity grows stronger along with the distance we create, the more we wait. And your phantasmagorical figure makes this ambiguity evermore apparent.16 This ambiguity of words uttered, enunciated, explicated, is what allows us to embellish them further, to recreate the other again, into the future. As we part, I survive you within that image of us captured, our conversation on repeat in the theater of my mind. In this way, you aren’t really gone, nor complete — you, your body an image, are always in a state of (universal) “becoming,” for me.17
Getting out; love me forever, I’ll live you forever; I’ll be you forever; there is no other; I am you; call me by your name, Nadja.
“[T]he world which was Nadja’s, where everything so rapidly assumed the appearance of a rise, a fall.”18
Nadja is institutionalized, and it is revealed to us that she is mad. What a reader may see in this newfound revelation is that their entire previous reading of Nadja’s story was wrong; all her gestures, romantic and somber, were only symptoms of her real madness. But Breton insists this difference is “all the same,” whether she’s put in a sanitarium or not.19 To this hasty reader, Nadja’s gestures in the uncovering of this love story were already final, she was already mad, and they had only failed to see this “objective truth.” Does this mean that what Breton loved before, in Nadja, was only madness? Or that he was perhaps confronted with a jarring reality that he could not have possibly loved? What’s problematic in this view is precisely our ill-conceived notion of truth, to again refer to our analysis of perception and time. Nadja is forever, not mad once and free again. The
16 “I was impatient at not being able to concretely imagine this object, over whose substance there hangs on top of everything else, the phonic ambiguity of the word ‘glassy.’” Breton, Mad Love, 33. 17 Bergson, 151. 18 Nadja, (1960), 135. 19 Nadja (1960), 136.
past is infinite. There has been love, and there is always love.
It’s always possible that two people fall out of love. But what remains is the same as how you leave me in your ambiguities. Those ambiguities locate the very precipice of our desire, as does affect with love. Just as it would be wrong to assume that we occupy space, that instead space occupies us,20 it would be wrong to assume that we sometimes love. Instead, love occupies us, just as currents making a wave in the sea. The energy within is always a potential one, and thus love, too, is always in the water, wading. To reverse this situation, we should not wait for love, in anticipation of either a positive or negative outcome based on rationality, but we should instead know that (mad) love waits.
20 “Concrete extensity, that is to say, the diversity of sensible qualities, is not within space; rather is it space that we thrust into extensity.” Bergson, 217.
Contra/st; recurring flame
Falling into the Abyss of Love
Caught red handed; the leading hand; holding your hand, our contradicting fingers; good and evil; the devil in woman’s dress21; decay and dust
We are all afraid to confront the divine calling. God looks at us, his gaze piercing through our spirit awaiting his judgment in terror. God; Love; Beauty; Art; Poetry; to throw our gaze back at him in an indifferent fearlessness is perhaps something of a miracle. Fear alone has foreclosed our destiny, and there’s only sin. Indeed, “man no longer unites with nature except in crime,”22 and just as law creates crime, there is no difference between good and evil; “fire and water are the same thing,”23 and thus love delivers hate.24 In these absurdist claims lies a kernel of truth, and this is precisely what Breton attempts to reconcile in Nadja and in Mad Love. The spontaneity in Nadja, with a timeline that seems to cut corners and thematic resonances that gain symmetry in text and image alike, shatters and confuses our common sensical experience of literature. There are always random things that provoke Nadja: “Do you see that window up there? It’s black, like all the rest. In a minute it will light up. It will be red. […] The blue and the wind.”25 And they come up again in a different context: “why is that hand flaming over the water?”26 We can’t help but think we’ve seen something like this: “red,” “fire,” “flaming,” “hand,” “wrist.” Following directly is Nadja’s interpretation of the fountain’s movement: “But Nadja, how strange! Where did you get such an image—it’s expressed in almost the same form in a work you can’t have seen and which I’ve just finished reading?”27 In this synthesizing move, Breton brings together disconnected ideas, also implicating the reader’s inner dialogue into the narrative form. He may as well have been speaking to us—reading us.
21 Breton, Nadja, (1960), 122.
22 Breton, Mad Love, 94.
23 Breton, Nadja, (1960), 85.
24 “Here experience, artistic as well as scientific, comes to the rescue, proving that everything that is built and remains has first required this abandon just in order to be.” Breton, Mad Love, 93.
25 Breton, Nadja, (1960), 83-84.
26 Breton, Nadja, (1960), 85.
27 Breton, Nadja, (1960), 86.
(Dew drops hung on a spiderweb) (Sounds resonating)
Certainty in ambiguity; the paranoiac’s language; echoes; contra-diction; fingers mingle
“Such [compulsive] beauty cannot appear except from the poignant feeling of the thing revealed, the integral certainty produced by the emergence of a solution, which, by its very nature, could not come to us along ordinary logical paths.”28
These seemingly odd associations that, at first glance, do not seem to retain any correlation whatsoever are presented in a rational, successive direction. But when we traverse throughout the story in an undirected sequence, jumping from one chapter to the next, we discover that these signs, symbols, and words have evoked in us familiar ideas that had been presented in previous pages. We begin to remember the traces of the “red” in the curtain when we read about the “flame” in the wrist which “disappears in the twinkling of an eye,”29 symbolizing the “rise” and “fall”30 of Nadja’s recurring love. Desire in the text repeats.
Nadja insists Breton choose a just name for her when he writes her novel. It must represent the nature of their eccentric love which never ceases to only start again. Indeed, we are reminded of the early anecdote shared in Breton and Nadja’s first encounter where she shares the story of the student she had previously loved. During all that time they had spent loving each other, she had still failed to notice the deformities in his two hands.31 When introducing herself at the moment of encounter, she tells him that her name is one that she had chosen for herself: “Nadja, because in Russian it’s the beginning of the word hope, and because it’s only the beginning.”32 Isn’t this the same aforementioned name which the two are to later discuss, the name that Breton would give her? “Nadja,” then, is the hope that starts over again, like the fire in the hand that never ceases. Love, then, never ceases. The identities of the two characters confuse themselves in this superimposition of the two conversations. Nadja is Breton; Breton is Nadja; I am you; you are me.
28 Breton, Mad Love, 13. My emphasis.
29 Breton, Nadja, (1960), 101.
30 “ [T]he world which was Nadja’s, where everything so rapidly assumed the appearance of a rise, a fall.” Breton, Nadja, (1960), 135.
31 Breton, Nadja, (1960), 66.
32 Breton, Nadja, (1960), 66.
And when I am near you, I am near things that are near you.33 The illusion that we oppose each other untangles itself.
Love is embedded in these repetitions, where the contradictions in opposing ideas reconcile in a universal becoming. Love does not decay, but it is survived through a language emerging between the lines of structure, boundaries of time, territories, and histories as they are presented to us in a closed manner.
I need just to touch you for the quicksilver of the sensitive plant to bend its harp upon the horizon. But provided we stop a moment, the grass will turn green again, will be born again, after which my new steps will have no other goal than to reinvent you. I shall reinvent you for me, since I desire to see poetry and life recreated perpetually. From one branch to another of the sensitive plant […] All that matters is the universal, eternal effect: I exist only insofar as it is reversible in my direction.34
I love to stop and reinvent you again, embracing these ambiguities in an attitude of fearless certainty.
33 Breton, Nadja, (1960), 90.
34 Breton, Mad Love, 84.
In an ever-growing bricolage, you continue on, each branch, each leaf containing another totality of you in a universal becoming
History; facts; loving you, for you are me; I, eternally already you; calling you mine; calling me by your name; rationalizing the real; temptations of synthesis
The present miracle, in what history35 has deemed impossible for us36 (love as an impossible gesture, an exception, a “sophism,” as Breton would have it37), is found in choosing each other again. It is only the social error that inscribes a law of love as fact, implicating hate into a crime. Should we ever learn to love in this way, we shall only regard it as finite:
“That which is commonly called a fact is not reality as it appears to immediate intuition, but an adaptation of the real to the interests of practice and to the exigencies of social life. Pure intuition, external or internal, is that of an undivided continuity.”38
That we regard love as a “declining phenomenon” is but a moral error, refusing to see the emancipation that the eternal truth of love can bring.39 The truth of love is really only that it is ever becoming, and its wear is “like the diamond [suspended] in its own dust.”40 Yet, the loving “being, [...] because of the absolute gift of himself, he is tempted to incriminate love in a case [of suffering] when it is only life that is at fault.”41
35 “As we go back into history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry.” Emerson, “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 22.
36 Breton refers to the impossibility of love in a capitalist society, under constraints of social life created by underlying modes of production, as “social obstacles,” Breton, Mad Love, 8.
37 “There is no sophism more deadly… [that] love would lay itself open to ruin, to the very extent to which it pursued its own realization.” Breton, Mad Love, 89-92.
38 Bergson, 183.
39 Breton, Mad Love, 93.
40 Breton, Mad Love, 100.
41 Breton, Mad Love, 100.
We are always in love. Or rather, love is always already in us. If, as I have said, we are able to constantly recreate the past by way of reminiscence and reflection, whether through remembrance or the other, then nothing in our present is ever truly determined.42 This leaves us open to the future. Resisting the temptation to rationalize the real in poetry and in love to “so-called exaggerations,”43 the spirit will always ‘rectify’44 that sensuous indetermination lost in rhythm and in chance, binding freedom to necessity. What seems like madness in love is raw and true love itself, what seems like incoherent rhythm in poetry is the spirit’s melody, and what seems like hopelessness in the present can open the future by way of interpreting the past in its eternal becoming.
42 “[Recollections] become materialized only by chance, either when an accidentally precise determination of our bodily attitude attracts them or when the very indetermination of that attitude leaves a clear field to the caprices of their manifestation.” Bergson, 106.
43 All rationalist systems will prove one day to be indefensible to the extent that they try, if not to reduce it to the extreme, at least not to consider it in its so-called exaggerations,” Breton, Mad Love, 83. 44 Hegel.
I’ve dreamt of becoming you
Bibliography
Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du Mal. 9th ed. Translated by Richard Howard. New Hampshire: David R. Godine, 1982.
Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. 10th ed. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul. Read by W. Scott Palmer. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2021. Originally published as Matière et Mémoire (n.p.: Presses Universitaires de France, n.d.).
Breton, André. L’amour Fou. Éditions Gallimard, 1937. PDF e-book.
Breton, André. Mad Love. Translated by Mary Ann Caws. N.p.: University of Nebraska Press, 1987.
Breton, André. Nadja. Éditions Gallimard, 1964. PDF e-book.
Breton, André. Nadja. 8th ed. Translated by Richard Howard. NYC: Grove Press, 1960.
Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales. Last modified 1986. Accessed October 23, 2022. https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/rencontre. Ducasse, Isidore Lucien. Lautréamont’s Maldoror. Translated by Alexis Lykiard. London: Allison and Busby, 1970.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures. 16th ed. NYC: Penguin Random House, 1983.
Hegel, G.W.F. Marxists.org. Accessed October 24, 2022. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/part3-section3-chapter3.htm.
Marx, Karl. Capital. 39th ed. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Edited by Ernest Mandel. Vol. 1. London: Penguin Books, 1990.
Online Etymology Dictionary. Last modified April 17, 2018. Accessed October 25, 2022. https://www.etymonline.com/word/encounter.
[BLUES FOR BREAKFAST]
[By Amaya Jones]
see bullets become broken steeps of women on pavement. easy rider making rounds round them kids. see that red blue with no white sunlight off runnin again the sky nothing but another reason to get higher ground trembling below shoeless feet i’m sayin where the light go? tell us when you find out and do it loud cause the old men already singin spirituals our stomachs the bass when we get into them tunes whole block sippin lemonade leave with more than what you knew then she said swing me round till i can’t see straight head been spinnin for what feels a decade call it the lifetime headache cause I eat the blues for breakfast.
floral drapes to dress the streets filled with dirty eyes no sense of livin those hardened stares that driftin soul still wrapped in cotton and linen said you better go on and be with it see this life of last things turn statistic on spreadsheets. no time to grieve when the black blood stay remindin us of the trouble brewin and strange days when you finally come to it singin don’t take my life away
this that new gospel for the cool kids they say watchin old folks shake their fists, but i just lay low and wait for new skin yeah I eat the blues for breakfast.
Poem written earnestly on the tag of your sweater
By Sabrina Kim
You give me a letter folded into a crane
Alone, I unfold and fold and unfold and fold and unfold and fold and unfold
Notes on Medium
Neither self-righteous nor self-pitying
Word for mode or form; body
Between life and divinity
Sometimes I write or as ore
In Kissena Park Park of love Park of kisses
How can people be so good at 제기차기.
I am talking to you, love, because I think we forgot to pack some History. I am talking to you, stranger, because I think we forgot to pack some History. I am going to you because I want you to remember yourself when you see me.
There’s a picture of something I never had so never lost. When I look at it, I feel like the lowest note of a clarinet or a birdie in the air.
No one’s telling you to love or hate
I think I’m a good kisser
Pulling out our same notebooks on the train
Notebooks are no good until they’re at least halfway filled
I think I look a bit like a cucumber
You had ducks like these, wooden ones, in your old house. Are they in your new house? And bitter candy Unnie and I spat out. And a piano that could play Für Elise on its own. I wish a lot of things, but I’m not mad they didn’t happen. Not mad, just sad for us. Worried for us.
All love you encounter Seems to rewrite the book of Love
I feel winged
People I love, people I value with all my heart, want to see me make shadow puppets on the wall. Notice how small my fingers are without a word. Turn the lamp on without a word. Get a snack with me without a word. Look at me without a word. Look away from me without a word.
Painstakingly and lovingly
It’s not hard to cross the ocean
It’s not hard to be far
It’s hard to be close
Why do some humans stomp the birds away?
A dog runs to a woman who says 누구야아아아아아…! 누구야아아아아
It’s selfish to feel so sorry for myself
I’m going to stop right now
Is it selfish to think I am getting more beautiful?
Truth turns over a round object. Truth warms, thickens, sweetens.
Truth gets ready for Winter.
Soon, time will be up. We’ll have nothing to do with it.
I remember holding my hands to your cheeks to make sure you looked at me.
Trust takes a long time
I clear my throat like clearing brushes from the path to walk through it
I thrust everything toward you, and you just hold it
이건 뭐냐?
이건 뭐냐?
Trust is like your mulled wine,
or the finger skin you pick at You set out to make a film, one to put me to sleep
I love you so much I could run 10 miles right now
[00:00:00:00]
II, ii
“More matter with less art.”
The truth: perfection is unattainable.
(It’s not that of which I am afraid!)
Cracked eggshells on an empty stage––yet one still makes an effort to avoid stepping on them.
contributors
Selina (Muyao) is a rising senior studying Global Public Health/History and French. She enjoys drawing (badly) and filmmaking (hopefully less badly). Although she has published in NYU’s history journal The Historian, this is her first time publishing a creative piece, and she would like to thank you for taking the time to consider her fanciful thoughts!
Vivian Hunt is an actress, writer, and loyal fan of all things fantasy. She was editor for her high school’s literary magazine The Gleaner in Buffalo, NY, and is now a double English and Drama major at NYU. In her free time she can be found playing seers and villains in student works at Playwrights Horizons Downtown or crafting her whimsy into digital collage art @vivivignettes on Instagram!
Sabrina is a gyopo born and raised in Ohlone land currently known as the SF Bay Area and majors in Comparative Literature at Princeton University.
Vighnesh Mehrotra (He/Him/His) has just graduated from the Department of Dramatic Writing and the Politics department. He focuses on playwriting, and his work explores themes of apathy, masculinity, and nationalism.
Amaya Jones (she/her) is currently a junior at CAS, majoring in English with a concentration in creative writing. With Brio. Journal being her first publication, she hopes to continue publishing poetry in the near future and begin a career within the publishing industry.
Kyung Eun Lee (she/her) is a student of Comparative Literature in the class of 2025 at Princeton University. Her studies broadly lie in psychoanalytic theory, post-structuralist thought and literature, and continental philosophy. She is interested in looking at a variety of problems ranging from narrative theory and the aesthetics of reading to theories of epistemology and ethics. Kyung Eun can be reached at Kl4617@princeton.edu
Lana Marshania is a senior in Comparative Literature with concentrations in Russian Literature and Media Studies. For her senior thesis, she is exploring the formation of nationalism of post-Napoleonic Europe and its spreading to the marginalia of the imaginary geography. Lana is very interested in modernized play of cultural images, experimental second language writing and translation of collage into various media.
Polina Belova is a rising junior at CAS double majoring in Computer Science and Comparative Literature. She dreams of speaking French and Japanese fluently so that she could become the fastest source of flawlessly translated mangas and French animated shorts.
SAB, 22 year old student in the Rita and Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing, is in their third gap year, second in a row. They enjoy writing, editing, and playing with their cats in their spare time and plan to return to their studies in Fall 2024. They encourage pursuing work, life, school balance at all costs and prioritizing your mental health and well-being above much else. Their work can be found in luphyr magazine and copious open tabs on their laptop.
megan finkel is a writer and reader from houston. they just graduated from NYU with majors in Russian and Slavic Studies and Comparative Literature. she wrote her honors thesis within the R&SS department on the literary continuity between Socialist Realist literature and science fiction. megan’s favorite “genre” is science fiction because she believes we are, especially now, incapable of “rational” “depictions” of the “world” and plans to spend the unforeseeable present writing SF. megan is thankful to every aspect of brio. journal!
