MOOP #5

MOOP #5 SEP/OCT 2021

Introductory Note Welcome to the fifth issue of Matter Out of Place: Traces

I never know what I’m thinking until I start writing it down. There is a sense of something I want to explore, but I find the distance between what I think I think and the finished article is usually about the width of the Grand Canyon. I always make sure to be prepared for a writing session by: A) Stocking up on tea bags B) Forgetting where I left the laptop charger C) Putting off chores so I can abandon writing for an hour or two while I clean out the oven D) Searching thesaurus.com for, uh... clever words (sorry, my internet is down today) What usually begins as floundering in the deep end develops into confident strokes as ideas begin bubbling to the surface from the same depths of the brain that casually remind me in Tesco that I was supposed to pick up lemons.

This resurfacing is what I love most about writing these articles: it encourages every book (even the unfinished ones), every film (even the dumb ones), every lecture (even the dull ones), every experience (even the forgettable ones) to reappear. It surprises me that so much can leave a trace behind, sometimes so deeply that I can recall the experience as vividly as it originally happened, or so lightly that I mistake a line from a long forgotten book as my own. Traces are written all across us, physically and mentally, but they are also etched across the world.

Recently, I assisted Bridport documentarian Rob Jayne to film the Portland Players' performance of ‘Heart of Stone’, an epic poem/love letter to Portland’s history and the master stonemasons who spent their life digging out the infamous rock. The rehearsals took place in the Old Engine Shed, built by prisoners of the peninsula, which contained stone slabs imprinted with the footprints of dinosaurs. It is quite something to see a momentary step of a creature from a timescale beyond comprehension while the words of stonemasons long since passed echo around you. Traces can be ephemeral, like a fast-fading image drawn in condensation on a window pane, imperceptible and seemingly lost until revealed by heated breath.

Our latest publication of MOOP explores the theme of traces and the multifaceted ways this can affect both our internal selves and the external world around us. In the non-fiction segment, we have several pieces so excellent I am unnerved to share magazine space with them. Fred Warren’s urgent piece details his experience at a rewilding project and the desperate need to bring back the ghosts of Britain’s decaying ecosystem. Grace Crabtree explores the fascinating intersection of place and memory by examining Ernest Hemingway’s idolisation of his youth in 1920s Paris. Tom Beed delivers a blistering article about the recent devastating usurpation of power in Afghanistan. And in my article, ‘Fingerprints’, I take a look at the enjoyable, tactile quality of imperfect art.

In our fiction section, we have my favourite story so far from Stefan Matthews titled ‘The Case of the Blind Venetian’, a hilarious parody of hard-boiled noir with all the usual suspects. Also featured are two wonderful new poems and an introduction to the visual world of artist Lucinda Purkis.

Thank you so much for picking up this publication – I hope you thoroughly enjoy it and I hope, most of all, we are able to impart a trace, even if you aren’t yet aware of it.

Jack Wightman

To support future issues of Matter Out of Place, and other Chasing Cow projects, please consider donating the price of a cup of coffee & go to chasingcow.co.uk/support to donate via PayPal Editors: Fred Warren, Grace Crabtree and Tom Beed Illustrations and Artwork: Grace Crabtree and Bryony Moores O’Sullivan Cover art: Grace Crabtree Design: Fred Warren and Grace Crabtree

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Printed by Oxford GreenPrint using a Risograph press, with veg-ink and low energy, on 100% post-consumer waste recycled paper.

Contents CURRENT AFFAIRS

CULTURE

ECOLOGY

CULTURE

POEM

POEM

The Old Times 14-15 Grace Crabtree

Autoempire 4-5 Tom Beed

Fingertips 16-17 Jack Wightman

Beasts of the Devon Wild 6-8 Fred Warren

The 9 metre wave 18 John G.G Adams

A Veterinary Suicide 9 Jon Lever

Back Page 19 Your letters, Object Lesson etc.

ARTIST FEATURE

Lucinda Purkis 10-11 SHORT FICTOIN

The Case of the Blind Venetian 12-13 Stefan Matthews

To view the current issue of Matter Out of Place online, plus online-only digital releases in between the quarterly issues, please visit chasingcow.co.uk/moop and follow us on Instagram @chasingcow If you would like a PDF of the zine please email chasing.cow.productions@gmail.com

ABOUT THE NAME ‘Matter out of place’ is one of the ways that anthropologist Mary Douglas defines her symbolic idea of ‘dirt’. As she says, “dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt.”

Whether it’s the condemnation of an adulterer or a pair of shoes on the kitchen table, ideas around ‘dirt’ and what is dirty are windows into how societies are ordered: what they value, what they find threatening, and what they wish to exclude.

As a name we think this helps convey Chasing Cow’s own non-adherence to established categories both in content – we like to let members pursue their own interests – and form – we view modes of artistic creation, whether that’s filmmaking, poetry or academic writing, as linked and encourage slippage between them. Finally, we think the name implies a level of critical thinking; if being clean means blindly accepting the values, behaviours, and hierarchies that shore up the current political order, then we have no choice but to be dirty.

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CURRENT AFFAIRS

AUTOEMPIRE TOM BEED

A lack haunts cultural memory today – the lack of history. All

the professional opinion-havers of legacy media have rejoiced in their cynical incredulity at the almost immediate collapse of Ashraf Ghani’s sham government. Did anyone seriously believe that it would persist past the foreign military occupation of Afghanistan? Surely this cannot be the case, given the blanket indifference the media has paid to the war over recent years.

Much has been made of the shocking nature at how quickly the Taliban retook the country. Military officials, politicians, and the assorted apparatchiks of Western imperialism have feigned surprise. Such reactions cannot simply be ascribed to plain stupidity, for they are far more likely a result of the extreme cynicism that characterises our time. Corruption and corporate looting abounded during the whole of the occupation, and Afghans obviously did not feel inspired by an American-educated academic who spent time at the World Bank. And so begins a new era in Afghanistan. As I write this, on the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the flag of the Taliban is raised above the presidential palace in Kabul.

The peace deal agreed between the Taliban and the U.S. by the Trump administration has suited Biden very well. It has been mentioned frequently in the press that Biden was against Obama’s 2009 troop surge, yet events like the murder of ten people including seven children by drone strike on 29th August, prove that Biden’s defiance in the face of the war industry’s appetite for continued direct engagement in Afghanistan, does not extend to foregoing a perpetual drone war. We are witnessing an alteration in tactic and a change in target, not a rupture at the heart of the war machine, no matter the theatrical drum-beating by U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, or Tony Blair’s yelps about “strategy”. In broader terms, all this can be seen as furthering the pivot towards China that increasingly characterises Anglophone foreign policy. As Mohsin Hamid has pointed out, the contemporary relations fostered with the ethno-nationalist autocracy of Modi’s India in service of the attempt to tackle Chinese power, bears a certain worrying resemblance to the context of the 1979 proxy war between America and the Soviets. The U.S. continues as it ever has done, funding reactionary groups and hard-right governments to maintain their hegemony and to further the interests of big business.

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It is well known, yet bears constant repeating, that America and its allies vociferously supported the Mujahideen in their fight against the Soviets, paving the way for their fundamentalist interpretation of Islam to be translated into a political project.

The end of the longest war in U.S. history has given expression to what imperialism is at base – it is capitalism in decay, as this sardonic passage of Lenin’s illustrates: “Capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before; but this growth is not only becoming more and more uneven in general, its unevenness manifests itself, in particular, in the decay of the countries which are richest in capital (England).”

It transpires that ‘Global Britain’, the flagship foreign policy in the post-EU UK, is going extremely well, as the Biden administration ignored entirely the ineffectual pronouncements of the now “As the UK's ejected foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, at the need to secure global influence Western interests and to extend dwindles, its the evacuation deadline. The UK is descending into near-tohistoric failures tal irrelevancy in world affairs. It and contradictions has almost entirely isolated itself wash up on its from all major power blocs, and as global influence dwindles, shores.” its historic failures and contradictions wash up on its shores.

The Empire always comes home to the Metropole, as Aimé Césaire, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault have variously noted. In his 1976 lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault suggests that from the end of the 16th century, colonial “models” were brought back to the West, and began a process of “internal colonialism” – a thesis known as the “Imperial Boomerang”. Of this phenomenon there is no end of examples, yet to take some recent ones, one could point to the shambolic management of supply lines and global trade, the aggressive class warfare of the national insurance hike, the slow-death mechanisms directed at the 2.5 million users of foodbanks or perhaps the increasingly brutal, racist policing in a post 9/11 security-obsessed world. The callous, idiotic nature of colonial rule has made its full migration back home.

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“Many of the Taliban’s soldiers have adopted the distinctly American spec-ops gear loadout and aesthetic, reflecting how the war has only made the Taliban more disciplined, both as a military group and as a political actor.”

It is in this context that I find those suggesting that we ‘should not turn our back’ on Afghanistan, because of those that will be persecuted and killed by the Taliban, repellent in the extreme.

Every intervention that the imperial powers have made in Afghanistan has only served to distribute the pandemonium to the furthest corners of life there. The twisted alliance between liberal academics and war hawks immediately following the 9/11 attacks is a position that holds less and less sway, despite the best efforts of such writers. That the war on terror has ever aimed at improving the lot of ethnic and religious minorities, women, LGBTQI+ people, or whatever other identity the blood-soaked war ghouls have decided to use as a crutch in justifying their desire for destruction and the enrichment of military contractors, is a view peddled by those who would sacrifice the world to Moloch.

And yet keen media consumers, such as we are all increasingly becoming, will have noticed that the images of the Taliban have changed somewhat. Many of the Taliban’s soldiers have adopted the distinctly American spec-ops gear loadout and aesthetic, reflecting how the war has only made the Taliban more disciplined, both as a military group and as a political actor.

It remains to be seen how much truth there is to reports of internal struggles in the new government, yet they would not be out of the ordinary for such transitions of power. In a certain way, the stated aim of bringing ‘democracy and freedom’ (American culture and capitalism) to Afghanistan succeeded, despite the fact that it was never the point – extracting natural resources was.

In absorbing Western techniques of administration and military organisation, the Taliban have simultaneously made it quite clear that they care not for recognition by the West. But of course, all commentary on this is hopelessly shot through with the fact that most of us in the imperial core have only experienced any of the war through the widening gyre of media in the postmodern era.

Fragmentary and without sequence, clips of militants executing civilians, flags being raised over resistance strongholds, and promotions for new commodities, flow effortlessly through each terminal of the media system.

Tom Beed is a writer, actor and founding member of Chasing Cow Productions. He has a degree in International Relations and Politics from Oxford Brookes University.

Illustrations by Grace Crabtree

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ECOLOGY

Beasts of the Devon Wild Exploring the ghosts that haunt our landscape Fred Warren

In 1773, the writer Samuel Johnson embarked on an adventure with his companion James Boswell to that mythical land known as the Scottish Highlands. In Johnson’s account of their travels, there’s a moment when, near the southern end of Loch Ness, he turns his restless gaze to the surrounding hills, remarking: “They exhibit very little variety; being almost wholly covered with dark heath [...] What is not heath is nakedness [...] An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility.”

Johnson’s decidedly unimpressed reaction to the Scottish scenery can seem puzzling to modern readers who might view the same landscape as majestic, awe-inspiring, or even sublime. Yet maybe Johnson’s peculiar, pre-Romantic viewpoint isn’t as outdated as it first appears. Read in light of the growing field of rewilding, Johnson’s observations start to feel relevant again – where are the trees? Where is the variety? Where is the life? However, while Johnson remained convinced that this denuded landscape was simply the unfortunate “face of nature”, a rewilding perspective makes one view this state not as natural but shaped by human activity – trees felled, vegetation over-grazed, and species lost: not a natural landscape but a haunted one. A landscape haunted by the ghosts of animals like aurochs, wolves, boar, and beavers, all of which by 1773 had been driven to extinction in Britain; their absence felt not just in the loss of their physical presence, but in the loss of their life processes – their moving, feeding, shitting, decomposing – which would have helped shape the land into something very different to that “extent of hopeless sterility” that Johnson experienced in 1773.

Fast forward roughly 250 years, through increased enclosure, farming intensification, climate change, and a damning 2019 State of Nature Report, and I find myself lying in a damp tent in Devon. A sudden summer downpour has resulted in pools of rainwater amassing inside, which I try to avoid by curling myself into a smaller and smaller protective ball. As I lie, dampness encroaching, my attention shifts to the outside: something is clattering through the trees behind me; on a lower register are the grunts of snouts snuffling; if I were to move closer to the nearby stream, I might just hear the sound of wet wood being methodically chewed. Are these the ghosts coming back?

The haunted forest I’m camping at Coombeshead farm in Devon, a rewilding project set up by conservationist Derek Gow on former pastureland.

Rewilding has many meanings; from passive rewilding where abandoned sites are spontaneously recolonised by wildlife, as has occurred in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and, less dramatically, at the Undercliff Reserve near Lyme Regis, to ambitious, human-directed projects such as Pleistocene Park in Siberia where there are aspirations to recreate an Ice Age Mammoth-Steppe ecosystem. Coombeshead lies somewhere between these polarities and stands as a small-scale example (currently 150 acres) of

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trophic rewilding, which, as biologist Jens-Christina Svenning says, “uses species introductions to restore top-down trophic interactions […] to promote self-regulating and biodiverse ecosystems”. Trophic rewilding counteracts what’s known as shifting baseline syndrome: where every new generation redefines what is ‘natural’ based on their own early experiences. In a world suffering continual losses of biodiversity, this shifting of baselines gradually causes, as ecologist Frans Vera says, “a degraded state of nature to be accepted and considered as the normal thing”.

To counteract this waning ecological expectation, trophic rewilding often looks to prehistoric reference points for biodiversity (circa. 11,700BP). A vision of what this prehistor“Without these ic habitat might have looked like in Western Europe was species an ecosystem put forward by Frans Vera in cannot restore its his controversial, yet paradigm-shifting, wood pasture former diversity; they model which challenged remain ‘haunted’ by the assumption that closed, their absence.” high-canopy forest was the dominant ecology. Vera’s hypothesis instead postulated that the grazing and disturbances caused by herds of now-extinct animals, such as the tarpan (wild horse), auroch (wild cow) and wisent (bison), would have helped to halt the succession of trees, creating a landscape closer to what is known as wood pasture, characterised by, “a spiny, thorny, shrubby transition between grazed grassland and trees and groves”. This ever-shifting mosaic of habitats would have hosted higher levels of biomass and species diversity than what has traditionally been thought of as ‘natural’ to Europe.

Though the Vera model remains contested, the broad thinking behind it is gaining acceptance and has become part of a wider shift in ecological thinking that has witnessed, as environmental geographer Jamie Lorimer says, “increased importance […] afforded top-down regulation” provided by “a strongly interactive group of keystone species”. Without these species, even if all detrimental human activity ceases, an ecosystem cannot restore its former diversity; they remain trophically downgraded or ‘haunted’ by these species’ absence.

Prehistory by proxy Yet, re-animating a prehistoric ecosystem in modern Western Europe is not particularly practical, especially when the composition of that past ecosystem remains contested.

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Consequently, trophic rewilding projects are often pragmatic operations, balancing the pursuit of functioning, autonomous ecosystems with practical constraints. The next morning at Coombeshead I’m seeing what this experimentation looks like as I watch five water buffalo serenely graze their way across one of the rewilded fields. They are examples of proxy animals – animals that are either domesticated versions of extinct animals, or animals that were never native, but are brought in to create some of the desired disturbance. Indeed, though water buffalo would not have been part of Britain’s prehistoric fauna, they should help at Coombeshead by dispersing seeds and helping to open out some of the young woodland on-site. It’s fascinating to watch this herd interact with the landscape, whether they’re rubbing against trees, grazing open fields, or lying neck deep in a wallowing hole. Beyond the buffalo, are more proxies – a small flock of mouflon (wild sheep) and a group of what look like wild boar at the margins of the field. These are iron age pigs – crosses between Tamworth pigs and wild boar which perform the same rootling (which exposes seeds) and wallowing (which creates small pools for aquatic life) as ‘pure’ boar would, but don’t come with the same licensing and security issues.

Just do it!

Although many of these animals are known to be beneficial to ecosystems, exactly how they all will interact with one another in this specific context is unknown. Coombeshead, like all trophic rewilding projects, is a novel ecosystem. Lorimer describes such projects as ‘wild experiments’ which, in contrast to standard scientific practice, favour a more hands-off, reactive approach, where knowledge is gained from in situ experimentation and improvisation, rather than the controlled testing of hypotheses. Such open-ended projects are “capable of generating surprises and putting accepted knowledge at risk”, which can include discovering novel behaviour as domestic animals interact with wilder surroundings, or in rare species unexpectedly moving into the project, as has recently happened with the appearance of otters at Coombeshead. This is not to say that measurements and rigour are abandoned; as project manager and ecologist Emma Hackinson tells me, at Coombeshead they are “currently collating a baseline database of species" to measure the changing biodiversity and are also in the midst of collecting data on what dormant seed banks might be lurking under the surface of their soils. Nonetheless, there is a distinct element of DIY ecology; of trying things and seeing what works.

literally wrote the book on it, chronicling the pan-European effort against bureaucratic inertia to return these rodents to Britain.

These collective actions have made possible the announcement on 25th August that the UK government plans to officially release beavers back into the wild in England, with a public consultation (which anyone can fill in) expiring on 17th November. Back at Coombeshead, it’s easy to see why Emma refers to them as “the most important species on the land”. They have created their own wet and woody wonderland, a semi-aquatic habitat beneficial to innumerable birds, insects, and amphibians. It’s an impressive sight, and hopefully one that will become increasingly common across England in the years to come.

Missing pieces However, despite the constant hum of activity, Coombeshead still seems to be exhibiting some signs of a haunted land: for instance, there’s talk that the water buffalo are grazing too much in the open fields, rather than venturing into the more covered areas; meanwhile, it’s mentioned that some of the introduced herbivores at Coombeshead are all deliberately single sex, limiting their population growth. These can both be seen as consequences of the absence of any large apex predators at Coombeshead. Apex predators – like wolves and lynx – help to control the numbers of large herbivores which, at high densities, can start to negatively impact the biodiversity of an ecosystem. Just as important as their direct predation, is how these predators can create what’s known as an ‘ecology of fear’, where their presence in the landscape changes the behaviour and grazing patterns of herbivores, for instance, by causing them to avoid open areas, allowing plant regeneration.

With such carnivores currently absent across Britain, conservation projects come up with novel ways to simulate their effects such as having single-sex herds of herbivores or through killing some animals for meat.

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On a guided tour of the rewilding area that morning, we see the impacts of perhaps the most significant wild experiment at Coombeshead. We’re being led through the area of woodland, dense with scrubby vegetation. It’s getting increasingly damp underfoot. It feels a little like entering ‘the zone’ of Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) or ‘the shimmer’ of Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018), a sense only heightened when our tour leader can’t remember the right way, so quickly do the paths change in this mutable mosaic. Soon, however, we reach our desired location – a clearing of gnawed tree stumps and a patchwork of deep pools held back by seemingly impossible constructions of dead wood, mud, and leaves. This is the work of beavers who, after an absence of some 400 years, are back in the Devonshire countryside. Indeed, Coombeshead owner Derek Gow is a man so entwined with the story of returning beavers to Britain that he

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“The praxis of rewilding – of ceding control to unruly non-humans and the need for corridors and connectivity between habitats – would seem to challenge the easy enclosure of areas into marketable assets.”

Project Wolf in Scotland, meanwhile, is exploring how humans might mimic the ‘landscape of fear’, by having volunteers noisily patrol the forest at night to scare deer and change their browsing behavior. At Coombeshead I’m told that there aren't currently any such interventions planned. That said, about 400 yards outside the Coombeshead rewilding area, in a tightly fenced enclosure, do exist three lynxes, which, were regulation to change, one day could once again roam free in Britain. Re-introduced lynx would help manage deer numbers and at Coombeshead could even, Emma informs me, influence the grazing of larger animals like the water buffalo. For now, however, these lynxes are not functioning in Coombeshead’s ecosystem, instead serving more as an imaginative prompt to visitors of what could be.

Visiting Coombeshead has been a revelation; to see a rewilding project in action, even at this small scale, and witness charismatic animals and blooming biodiversity has been something quite special. Yet, returning to Samuel Johnson’s disappointment with Scotland’s scenery in 1773: though he was not conscious of the effects lost species were having on the landscape, there was one ghost he was acutely aware of – the growing absence of people.

Writing at the beginning of what became known as the Highland Clearances, Johnson lamented the “epidemic of emigrations” as the old clan system broke down and people were forced to move out of the Highlands. With Johnson’s concerns in mind, though contemporary rewilding projects are often popular with visitors, there remains a danger that this becomes narrowed to a particular type of visitor. Indeed, many new rewilding sites are set up by private landowning estates and gain revenue by charging for exclusive access to their biodiversity through activities like camping, glamping and safaris. Coombeshead itself is not free and charges for tours that give access to their rewilding area.

There is of course nothing wrong with this as a way to fund new, experimental projects. However, as rewilding projects in Britain continue to grow, it’s essential that they become more widely accessible. This is particularly imperative given the current political climate where an estimated 92% of England remains inaccessible to the public. Meanwhile, new trespass laws proposed in the government’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, if passed, will criminalise trespassing activities (currently only civil offences), particularly affecting Gypsy, Roma and travelling communities. There is a need to ensure that rewilding efforts are not complicit with this culture of exclusion, and, moreover, that the novel forms of value created by rewilding – ecosystem services, nature-connectedness, wildlife encounters – do not simply become, in Lorimer’s words, “a new frontier for wealth accumulation”.

Fortunately, the very praxis of rewilding – of ceding control to unruly non-humans and the need for corridors and connectivity between habitats – would seem to challenge the easy enclosure of areas into marketable assets. Emma at Coombeshead, for instance, has no desire for Coombeshead to remain an isolated bubble and is working on ways to get access to land outside the

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project to allow the migration of Coombeshead’s species into other habitats.

There will always remain a need to think critically about rewilding, especially on the global scale where fears remain about the links between increased opportunities for rewilding in Europe and North America and the continued de-wilding of (sub)tropical regions for global food production and resource extraction.

Such concerns help to highlight the limits of rewilding if it is decoupled from linked problems like global warming, intensive farming, and global habitat destruction. That said, by resetting people’s ecological expectations and involving publics first-hand in the excitement and surprises of ecosystem recovery, rewilding projects might just have the power to cultivate in people that more-than-human sensibility that will be needed to address these broader problems of the Anthropocene. Such a sensibility can help us alter lifestyles and inspire us to demand broader political action so that rewilding becomes not just another elite leisure activity but part of a genuine global resurgence for wildlife.

Back at Coombeshead, it’s my last night and I’m awake again in my damp tent. Clearly, I’m in no pristine wilderness; there are proxy animals, fences, and a compost toilet 200 yards away, yet soon that night-time symphony starts again – the crashing, the rootling, the hooting – and I fall asleep to these discordant, yet oddly comforting, sounds. The sounds of a landscape, alive again.

Many thanks to Emma and the Coombeshead team.

A version of this article with references and photographs will be available online at chasingcow.co.uk/moop If you’re interested in reading about and adding your views to the government’s beaver consultation the website is: consult.defra.gov.uk/natural-environment-policy/beaver-reintroduction-and-management/ Or scan

Fred Warren is a writer and filmmaker. He spent university immersed in the new field of post-humanities, though some think he should have spent more time thinking about post-uni life than post-human life.

Illustrations by Bryony Moores O'Sullivan

POETRY

A Veterinary Suicide Jon Lever You died like a sick animal for reasons which the average heart will barely understand How often before had you hooked up a drip feed similar to this, or pushed a hypodermic through a thicker skin than yours to give unknown relief to feral pain?

Did you think yourself unsuited, and with human contact down, have only lethal hope to hand, to take the conscious step that marks us out as otherwise?

As much as I know, I know of this through the grief of mutual friends, and can but wonder, and regret, where some distinction touches me, your death in a chosen captivity A coursed hare heart that ran too rare and fast for what you thought could cure, to break itself in fall and twist and leave you with no way between the stretch of yearning for the wild, the ruthless logic of despair, the calculated choice So death, which in us makes the animal apparent, defines in you the human and intervenes as paradox: the magical and obvious, the instinctive and the planned; and the aching disappointment of the shadows in between

Léon Spilliaert, The Absinthe Drinker, 1907.

In this dazzle of vicarious bereavement I lose myself, not knowing what to say, but shedding skins of difference hope that in oblivion or bliss your animal heart and human mind rest in equilibrium, lie undisturbed, and free Jon Lever is a billionaire philanthropist, Nobel laureate, and wildly implausible liar. He publishes at the-electric-dark-age-hymnal.com

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ARTIST FEATURE

Lucinda Purkis Lucinda Purkis is a multidisciplinary artist who creates visual compositions where she channels irreverent and humorous everyday moments as well as mapping out a dream world of her invention.

Follow Lucinda's work on Instagram @kingkingstringball442

SHORT FICTION

The Case of the Blind Venetian Stefan Matthews

B efore the leggy blonde appeared, the Venetian’s vanishing had been considered a missing person’s case. Hadn’t come home in three days, wasn’t answering his phone, hadn’t been seen at work.

The usual.

I’d hedged my bets on the Venetian running off with an ex-lover.

My snooping had revealed he was a sneak, and my intuition suspected he’d found himself a string of lovers and ended up tying himself in a knot or two. He had a few too many direct debits in a few too many jewellers and shoemakers, set up for mistresses and misters alike. Owed a lotta people a lotta money.

The case was a formality. Let the wife know he ain’t coming home, that he’s probably run off with another man or woman, and away from his debts.

But then the leggy blonde showed up at my office, saying she suspected the Venetian of being in danger.

She’d wandered in all meek-like, sporting a pink crepe dress, a maroon hat, and a pair of emerald eyes that’d make a bishop blush. Bad news travels fast and she was lightning.

The leggy blonde claimed she used to know the Venetian intimately, but that she’d since split with him hotter than pea soup.

Apparently her new man – a fella by the name of Tommy Gunn – was a jealous piece o’ work. Gunn hadn’t been keen on hers and the Venetian’s former relationship. She’d suggested, through a little encouragement, that Gunn wanted rid of her old lover.

Then the day after she showed, the Venetian’s body was found washed up on the riverbank— “Remember that theory you had about how the Venetian was dragged here after bein’ killed?”

Gah damn. Jack always had a knack for interrupting my train of thought.

Jack was an ‘himself ’ of all trades, part Investigator, part PI, and all dick. He was the right side of six foot, and the wrong side of forty. Especially given he was thirty-eight.

Still, Jack was mostly useful as a partner, even if he treated the bonnet of my cream Triumph 2000 as his executive suite.

“Well, turns out it wasn’t quite like that,” Jack continued, eyes glistening with smugness, “Lieutenant’s managed to get a full confession outta Gunn – he threatened him with bringing in that blonde for questioning if he didn’t cooperate. He has him dead to rights, claims he did it all by himself—” “Lemme guess,” I interrupted, “Lieutenant’s lowdown is that Gunn socked the Venetian on the noggin’ with that shoehorn we found down Fifth and Hillview, then dumped his body into the river off that bridge there. Only, the breezeblocks he tied to the Venetian’s feet were more breeze than hurricane and didn’t manage to keep the body underwater. So, when it resurfaced, Gunn rushed here to finish the job properly, and when he was spotted trying to drag the corpse back into the water he booked it like a librarian.”

Jack’s silence echoed. My turn being smug. I’d had a lotta practice.

I dragged out the last of my cigarette and inspected the Venetian’s body. Blunt force trauma to the skull, courtesy of a shoehorn. First tick. The mixture of dried blood and dirt on the ill-fitting suit surely meant he had been in the process of being dragged down to the river when he was abandoned. Second tick.

Gunn’s confession about killing the Venetian was almost airtight.

But ‘almost airtight’ ain’t gonna stop a submariner from drowning, now is it?

“Only problem is these eight footprints that surround the dead man,” I said to Jack, pointing to the muddy bank. They were faint, but there were most definitely four sets of footprints surrounding the body.

Jack clicked his teeth in response.

Tommy’s shoe size matched one of the sets of prints, sure, but what about the other three?

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“So,” I grinned to Jack, “my question is: who is Gunn protecting in all of this? Who were the other three people that helped Gunn and why is he claiming he worked alone? Last I checked, three and one ain’t quite the same.”

Jack hoisted all six feet of himself upright from my bonnet at the promise of whiskey—

Jack thought about standing up from the car bonnet but figured it wasn’t worth the trouble. My thoughts floated back to the leggy blonde.

All six feet.

Ya see, after she first showed up at my office, Jack and I decided to head out and have a chat with Gunn. At that point, the Venetian was still classed as missing, not dead.

Gunn owned a shoe store on Fifth and Hillview and when we examined his accounts, we found the Venetian had recently made a sizeable down-payment on three identical pairs of eye-wateringly expensive shoes. Apparently, the Venetian’s order didn’t match his wife’s shoe size. Three pairs of shoes for another lover, it seemed.

Still, nothing seemed that unusual. Adultery might be immoral, but it ain’t illegal. So why was the leggy blonde so worried Gunn might hurt the Venetian, especially after the latter had paid him a large sum of money for a few shoes and then dipped faster than a wing into hot sauce?

Next day the Venetian showed up dead and we went back and searched the shoe store. Found ourselves a bloody shoehorn buried in the bin out back. Seemed as though the leggy blonde was right to be worried about Gunn. I mean, who kills a man with a shoehorn?

Lieutenant thought the modus-operandi fit nicer than a jigsaw.

Gunn killed the Venetian, planning to keep both the down-payment and the shoes. Nice at double the price. Everyone else’d think the Venetian just disappeared with his new lover and had forgotten about the shoes in his haste to skip town.

The story was cleaner than a nun’s habit.

All except for the extra sets of footprints at the crime scene. Lieutenant didn’t seem to think it was important. I did.

Who did the footprints belong to? Who helped Gunn bump off the Venetian, and why? Sure, Gunn was meaner than a Monday morning, but why would he go to all the trouble of killing a man just to keep a few extra pairs of shoes and a down-payment?

Plus, how coincidental that the leggy blonde showed up the day before we found the body, a woman who despite her timidity just so happened to be intimate with both Gunn and the Venetian.

She had to be involved in this somehow.

Like a freefalling abacus, none of it added up.

“Gah, I need a drink,” I complained.

The ideas rattling in my head made it feel like a street carnival.

Shit. All six feet of Jack.

“Shit,” I exclaimed, this time letting Jack in on my internal monologue as I re-examined the footprints in the mud. One pair were Gunn’s, but the other three… They were all identical.

The six extra footprints weren’t three other people at all. They all belonged to one person.

The leggy blonde!

“Jack, how many legs does the gal – the blonde gal – have?” I asked.

“Uhh, one, two…” Jack started counting on his fingers.

“It was rhetorical Jack,” I interrupted, “she has six. Six legs, with three sets o’ footprints.”

“Damn, would ya fancy that,” replied Jack, “ya know, I always thought there was something off ‘bout having 3 pairs of legs.

Can’t trust no-one with that many limbs. Wait, no, legs ain’t limbs. Appendages.”

I ignored the rest of Jack’s rambling.

The leggy blonde had it all set up from the start. Like sweet and sour, it suddenly fit together.

The Venetian had been dead the whole time, there was no missing person’s case. The blonde had convinced Gunn to kill him out of jealousy. Then, realising her gig was in danger of capsizing, she came to me and threw Gunn under the bus. A day later, the Venetian was officially found dead.

Of course! And the down-payment on the three identical pairs of shoes at the store – the Venetian was buying them for her. She must’ve persuaded Gunn to kill him because of it. She even planted the shoehorn there too after murdering the poor Venetian, all ready for us to find.

Wouldn’t surprise me if she loosened the breezeblocks on the body too, just to make sure we’d discover it. Only problem was, she left a few too many footprints.

She’d played all of us like a fiddle and now the Venetian was dead, Gunn was in custody and so infatuated with her he was keeping her name outta it, and she had the shoes AND the cash.

I laughed to myself and lit another cigarette.

Stefan Matthews is a screenwriter and currently doing a Masters in creative writing at Bournemouth University. He is a dream-smith, an illusion-weaver, a forger of fantasia. Well, that’s what he claims.

Illustrations by Bryony Moores O'Sullivan

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CULTURE

The Old Things Grace Crabtree

Moveable: unfixed in time or place; a form mutating and metamorphosing; or moving in relation to or alongside something.

A moveable feast is, in its religious sense, a feast day which oc-

curs on the same day of the week each year, but which changes its date from year to year. In Christianity, for instance, there are many temporal feasts relating to Easter – Good Friday, Ash Wednesday, and so on, as opposed to fixed feast dates, like 25th December. These feasts of varying dates often relate to one another, so that each temporal, mutable day relates to another temporal, mutable day.

Across religions, feast days of celebration and exultation demarcate the year and serve to elevate quotidian life. A sense of scientific structure emerges through the calendrically-fixed dates, whereas the feast days occurring on a particular day of the week convey more of a sense of ritual; a social understanding of an underlying structure attached to them.

Moving beyond the liturgical meaning, a ‘moveable feast’ in Ernest Hemingway’s use of the term can be used to think about memory and place. The phrase is taken from the author’s avowal that: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." A memoir of his years in Paris as a young man, A Moveable Feast was published posthumously in 1964, after Hemingway’s death in 1961. Ever since, the idiomatic meaning of the phrase has been fittingly fugitive. Here, though, we’ll use it to describe that which shifts in form but not in essence, the moveable feast being a metaphor for a time or place that exists in memory and is carried with you. In a foreword to a restored edition in 2009, Ernest’s son Patrick suggests that a moveable feast is the idea of “a memory or even a state of being that [has] become a part of you”; “an experience first fixed in time and space or a condition like happiness or love could be afterward moved or carried with you wherever you went in space and time.”

Hemingway, born in 1899 in Illinois, was a novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, author of novels including A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and the short novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952), and winner of Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway recreates and mythicises not one specific view or location, but an entire city. His years as an expatriate American in Paris, from 1921 to 1926, constitute a time and a lost part of himself that is ‘carried with him’ through his life.

Hemingway was a great traveller, and lived most of his life outside the United States – in France, Cuba, and England – or on its periphery, living in Key West, Florida for 13 years with his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer. Andrew Lytle writes that Hemingway

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lived in a form of self-exile: “he had doomed himself to the life of the perpetual tourist, forever in foreign parts, wandering to and through the wonders advertised”. Hemingway of days past strides up avenues, reciting the route like a proud tourist who feels like a local: “I walked down past Lycée Henri Quatre and the ancient church of St.-Etienne-du-Mont and the windswept Place du Panthéon and cut in for shelter to the right and finally came out on the lee side of the Boulevard St.-Michel and worked on down it past the Cluny and the Boulevard St.-Germain until I came to a good cafe that I knew on the Place St.-Michel.”

The memoir of a novelist will naturally have an artful crafting to its form and content. As a man troubled by a life full of the violence of war, grief over the suicide of his father and estrangement from his mother, and the fire of his later partnerships, Hemingway’s years in Paris are understandably mythologised into a carefully moulded series of events and encounters. In recounting this life in his memoir, the reader is often aware of the novelisation of the man’s formative years; so resolutely clutched to, portioned “In the process of out into neat accounts of retrieving memories fine habits and glamourthat have altered over ous friends, that it cannot help but feel like a fiction. time we pace back Indeed, the reissued memover these tracks of oir ends with fragments of “false starts” of an introknowledge, perhaps duction in which Hemingtaking diversions, or way begins, over and over, else muddying the with the assertion: “This book is fiction”. He tries way.” to explain the necessity of having “left out much and changed and eliminated”, for it may “throw some light on what has been written as fact”.

Beyond the aestheticisation and the editing, though, is a more sombre truth. In one of Hemingway’s last pieces of writing, he says that his memory “has been tampered with”, alluding to the electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) he underwent in 1961, to treat his severe state of depression, which had provoked a suicide attempt. The rounds of ECT greatly damaged Hemingway, exacerbating the memory loss that had begun to plague him. Hemingway died by his own hand later that year, in July 1961. In those final years, as his memory failed him, he sought out what had been preserved, re-kindling and re-imagining it through writing. The Parisian years were what made Hemingway. His first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), was published during his time there. For six years he lived in harmony with his first wife Hadley Richardson and their son, until his ‘new beginning’ with Pauline.

Over the course of A Moveable Feast, we (for the reader is addressed familiarly as “you”) are swept along the Seine to take tea with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, on country drives with

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F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and into cafés and studios with James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Ford Maddox Ford.

So how does a ‘memorable feast’, as place or as experience, shift and mutate; and how does it remain, or retain? While a city or landscape may change, the memory of it and oneself within it remain an integral part of one’s own myth-making. We are made of the landscapes where we have been. Gerard Manley Hopkins coined the term ‘inscape’ – inner landscape – which folds in the expansive sense conjured by ‘landscape’ to connote the inner nature of a person or object. Place inhabits our bodies and minds as much as we do it.

In The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Robert Macfarlane explores the root of our verb ‘to learn’. Stretching back to its Proto-Indo European root, lois-, meaning furrow or track, we get Proto-Germanic lisnojanan, to follow or find the track. So, to learn is to follow a track, and the touch of the foot onto the ground is the meandering root to knowledge; an earthy trail of knowledge and memory, its traces lie in the learner’s wake. In the process of retrieving memories that have altered over time we pace back over these tracks of knowledge, perhaps taking diversions, or else muddying the way.

came from the shelves of Shakespeare and Company, a bookshop founded by Sylvia Beach, Hemingway’s friend and champion of his work. But Hemingway’s Paris isn’t quite real: it is one recreated at the end of a life.

In a letter to his friend William D. Horne, 24-year old Hemingway, living in Paris, writes: “We can’t ever go back to old things or try and get the “old kick” out of something or find things the way we remembered them. We have them as we remember them and they are fine and wonderful and we have to go on and have other things because the old things are nowhere except in our minds now.”

To the young Hemingway, memory is a constant depository of inconstant moments. Yet Paris migrates with him through the years: a talisman to keep close by; a place to which he could return, in person or in reminiscence, throughout his itinerant life; and a refuge for his troubled mind in later years. Writing the memoir is a re-tracing of the paths he walked, rewriting until something true emerges from within the fictive lines.

Grace Crabtree is an artist and a founding member of Chasing Cow Productions. You can view her artwork at gracecrabtree.co.uk

In the physical realm, concrete changes complicate the route: the felling of trees or development of once-open land; high-risers blocking out the horizon; a steady stream of corporate takeovers of buildings once housing libraries, community centres, and other public spaces. Yet while landscapes are always shifting, they retain a trace sense of their prior state, whether that is through what remains, or the ghost of what is lost. “Places call up the places they were”, writes Tim Dee. Many of the places mentioned in Hemingway’s Paris do still exist; my copy of A Moveable Feast

15

CULTURE

Fingertips Jack Wightman

Whoever said "A master craftsman leaves no trace" unfor-

tunately took their own advice and left no claim to the quote.

I stumbled across the idea in an introduction to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, in which translator Thomas Cleary explained that the maxim expressed the artistic ideal of Chinese Zen Buddhists.

While I haven’t meditated under a Bhodi tree on this idea, it instinctively clashes with a quality I am drawn to: the tactile, passionate, messy expression of art, the kind of art that leaves the trace of being a representation, and where the craftsman is not only found by the signature in the corner, but by the fingerprints on the canvas.

What I mean by fingerprints are stylistic intentions that make us aware of the filmmaker: Terry Gilliam’s styrofoam sets, Scorsese’s sweltering Raging Bull cinematography, and Godard’s violent jump cuts, bombastic devices that can simply serve the story or actively topple the mainstream pillars. But even a hundred miles in the other direction, towards the cold, hard, objective films of Stanley Kubrick, an idiosyncratic style, thematically and technically, is visible even across multiple genres.

Within the Zen ideal is an implicit perfectionism, as if to leave no trace was to discover a piece of art fully formed, but perfection, even the idea of it, is elusive. In Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry (1979), he suggests that the Scottish poet William Topaz McGonagall, acknowledged as the worst poet of all time, gives us a clearer idea of perfection than lauded poetry can by being so removed from it. Bad “Bad movies can movies can illuminate illuminate our half-glimour half-glimmering mering idea of perfection, idea of perfection, and the fingerprint but imperfection doesn’t quality is in abunhave to be synonymous dance as every poorly composed shot, illwith inferiority.” placed edit, or flimsy set shows us a ‘making-of ’ in action, (bad magicians show the cards up their sleeves); but imperfection doesn’t have to be synonymous with inferiority. Instead, there is a Japanese Zen Buddhist axiom I do agree with, wabi-sabi, the acceptance that nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect. I think this is what is so attractive about the scrapes, burns and missing reels of film deterioration added as aesthetic; it makes the film negatives more human, conjuring the ghostly hands the film has passed through over years.

An intended ‘imperfection’ was part of the Navajo rug weavers practice, adding a ch’ihónít’i, or spirit line, so the weaver’s spirit could safely exit the rug. Imperfections allow the spirit to escape, but also let us in, something author Richard Flanagan touches upon in Gould’s Book of Fish (2001): “Rough work with a soul will always be open to all, including condemnation and reviling, while fine work housing emptiness is closed to all insults and is easily ivied over with paid praises”.

These traces of the filmmaker don’t necessarily work every time, but even the attempt to strike out in a new direction is admirable because it is the qualifying difference between Art and Function.

As Oscar Wilde wrote (and probably quipped many times at many parties): “All art is quite useless”. A functional item (a car, a microwave, a chair) need not have a trace of a craftsman because it ultimately has to operate. A table can take a thousand different designs, but it can only be redesigned so far until you can’t balance your breakfast on it. Art isn’t constrained in the same way, a film can be as well plotted and straight as Die Hard (1988) or an audio-sensory experience like Jarman’s Blue (1993).

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Ask a film geek for a top ten list and they will clarify, “The Top Ten ever or my top ten?”. The Godfather makes it on The Top Ten list, but putting it on your list is like edging out Coke for water on a list of your favourite drinks. The quality Gilliam, Scorsese and Godard bring to their work is a feeling of ‘made-ness’, evoking pure joy in the creative act. The art closest to us is the art where we feel closest to the artist. Isn’t this why we love Wes Anderson’s tracking shots, the feedback of the Rolling Stones’ amps, Old Bull Lee’s cut-up novels, Van Gogh’s The Starry Night and Bill Sienkiewicz’s scrawling comics?

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“Inside is a courageously messy affair. The ‘stage’ is always cleared for the show, but in the light of day Bo lives amongst the wreckage of camera equipment.”

Perhaps the urge for tactility has always been inherent, since humans painted on cave walls. Before photography, mirrors, and the written signature, handprints, like the ones found adorning the cave walls of Lascaux, were an individual's identity. Our ancestors’ landscape was explored and made sense of through this tactile interaction. It is fitting that the 21st century landscape is named after a similar tactile exploration: ‘Digital’ derives from the Latin digitus meaning finger. While this landscape should be an ideal place to put our handprint, we instead see it filled daily with advertisement, vitriol, and individuals chasing fame for fifteen seconds (Andy Warhol greatly overestimated our attention span).

Howard Hawks once said "there are about thirty plots in all of drama. They’ve all been done by very good people. If you can think of a new way to tell that plot, you’re pretty good. But if you can do characters, you can forget about the plot". The internet has shown that the artist can, in many ways, be the art, as evidenced by my favourite piece to come out of the cyber age. Bo Burnham began as a YouTuber who wrote and performed comedy songs from his bedroom, generated millions of views and then transitioned to live stand-up. Due to increasingly frequent onstage panic attacks, Bo retreated from performance. After several years, Bo prepared to return to the stage when, in an ironic twist, Covid-19 shut him away.

Born out of isolation is a 90 minute film, set in one room, written, directed, edited and performed by Burnham and titled Inside.

The film is unclassifiable, but undeniably shaped by the internet, consisting of sketches, fourth wall breaks and video commentary.

It was made without commission, worked on quietly for over a year, and free of any expectation or rules. Inside is by turns extremely funny, achingly melancholic, and uncomfortably naked because the creator is the focus. He shares his concerns about interconnectivity and isolation, being an entertainer and background noise while we eat dinner, hopeful that art is salvation while knowing it is inadequate.

What I loved most about the movie, or stand up special, or YouTube episode, or whatever magnificent thing Burnham has created, is that it is a courageously messy affair. The ‘stage’ is always cleared for the show, but in the light of day Bo lives amongst the wreckage of camera equipment. When performing, the light show and execution is slick, but he also leaves in outtakes of these recordings. And while Bo is strong minded in the beginning, engaging in a project as a productive pastime, he suffers an ongoing decline and clutches at the work as a lifeline. While the internet strives for a sterile, photoshopped, super-edited perfectionism, Burnham embraces a wabi-sabi; he’s a mess because the world is. Bo isn’t chasing trends for views, or signing deals for monetisation, or spewing vitriol in an echo chamber, he’s expressing himself honestly and directly: he's putting his handprint on the cave wall without the need to erase everybody else’s. I hope it inspires others to think differently about the opportunity the internet poses as a venue to be messy and expressive, rather than disappear without a trace behind a photoshopped facade. I could go on and on about why it means so much to me, but like all great pieces of art, the exact reason is elusive. I can’t quite put my finger on it.

Jack Wightman occasionally leaves his home either for coffee, the cinema or to browse a bookshop. If you don’t happen to find him there, please send for help – he will most likely be trapped under his book collection.

You can read more of his writing at justonemansopinion.org.uk Illustrations by Bryony Moores O'Sullivan

Bryony Moores O'Sullivan is a founding member of Chasing Cow Productions and a Theatre Practice graduate from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, who specialises in puppetry, poetry and illustration.

17

POEM

The 9 metre wave John G.G Adams Have you seen the landslide Trees sticking out the sea Biggest one I ever seen It’s even on TV Too many tons to quantify There’s fossils everywhere The water’s dirty murky brown Drones whizz past through the air Pixels, Pac a Macs, power tools Coaches block the lanes A tide of tourists flood on down The car park counts the gains For a couple of weeks we dreamed of a summer With a brand new secret beach Hidden past the bobbing trees One only few could reach But before the end of the story We best go back to 1968 It’s a wild night in Portland Dark and cold and late Storms batter at the beaches Then stillness for just a second A wave so big the moon is lost Such carnage never reckoned 65 were lost that night The streets became the shore The flooded homes and ruined lives Shipwrecked forever more

* Well back to the present Another wild night Another wave is swelling Growing in its might Roaring to Seatown Drowning the bay It swallows it all And at dawn that day This beautiful power Has shown its face The biggest landslide I ever saw It’s gone without a trace Illustrations by Grace Crabtree

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Dear MOOP: I’ve really enjoyed MOOP #3 and have found Fred Warren’s introduction to ‘skeuomorphs’ provoking thoughts in various directions. […] For music, it might be said that any traditional taxonomy of utility and aesthetics breaks down entirely. The sound quality of a recorded instrument might be said to be “good", but all the practical activities involved in achieving this (tuning, practising, good mics, the accumulation of technical knowhow) can be seen as serving a goal, the success or failure of which is determined by a calculation of symbolic values. [...] On my work computer I have a lot of ‘plug-ins’ [...] to affect the sound (reverb, distortion, compression etc) or even to produce sound (virtual synths and samplers). […] The distortion itself might be more readily considered as a skeuomorph, but if we pare away all such from the sound, if we try to denude the sound of all associative value, what we might find is that we have removed all its usefulness as a musical sound, and aesthetic judgement has remained, albeit to condemn the sound as rubbish and dead (unless you like that kind of thing).

I wonder if I can say that music is a stop further down the road than film in this? In music a skeuomorph isn’t just something that you add to the product (like a vinyl crackle) – here also, the entirety of the production is indivisibly skeuomorphic from the outset. […] One thing’s clear to me, film is a long way yet from Baudrillard’s dystopia, although music might on certain days be said to have a good claim to be the most Baudrillardian art-form, as a cloud of free-floating, self-relating, signifiers.

Yours with a pinch of salt, Robert Lee (letter abridged by the editors)

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Object Lesson Skyler Herzog

What would you think is related between animal fat, beeswax

and paraffin? That they all come from living things, one way or another; however, I wish us to focus on their ancient and modern related uses: the compact and luminous device called a candle. As early as the tenth century BC historians have found reference to candles: small wicks surrounded by a fuel that burns longer over time compared to conventional wood and oil. These viscous and sticky substances gradually overtook one another until they were outmatched by electric bulbs. Ancient samples of candles from the year 200 BC in China, as well as records from Rome, show how they used animal fat reduced into a substance called tallow.

This thick substance would be wrapped around a wick most commonly made from cotton and could burn for several hours, illuminating interiors for centuries to come. And how these people suffered. Because the candles were made from animal fat, they gave off the most horrific smell. It wouldn’t be till some two thousand years later that an alternative would arise: beeswax. Similar in longevity compared to the burning of animal fat, beeswax offered a most sought-after difference in that it did not smell rancid when burned. This quality quickly dominated candle production right up until the advent of… fossil fuels. The refinement of oils allowing for a multitude of burning capabilities led to the

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creation of paraffin wax. With a better burn and greater ease of production, paraffin wax candles in the 1800s quickly became the dominant form of candle making the world over. However, this is not where the story ends. Such a rich history of candle making has survived, helping ancient practices, artistic and ritualistic, to continue, preserving the cultures of candle making.

Along with the preservation of the old, new markets have arisen allowing for a plethora of new candles to be made in all shapes, sizes, and even unique scents. It's nearing the holiday season – can anyone smell cinnamon?

Skyler Herzog is studying creative writing and game design at Brunel University. He is a founding member of Chasing Cow Productions.

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