MOOP #6

Introductory Note Welcome to the sixth issue of Matter Out of Place: Borders

In her book Gathering Moss, the bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer takes the reader through the behaviour of air

moving over a surface. High above is the fast-moving laminar flow, “flowing in a smooth sheet”. Beneath this “lies a zone of turbulence, where the air swirls and eddies as it encounters objects”. Going lower still, the air becomes even slower until, adjacent to the surface, whether that be of a rock, decaying log or forest floor, “the air is perfectly still, captured by the friction with the surface itself ”. This is known as the boundary layer, the small area of climatic stability where many mosses thrive; “being small enough to live within the boundary layer allows the mosses to experience a warm, moist habitat unknown by the larger plants”. The cover image of this issue depicts such a moss, Polytrichum, living in a boggy boundary layer at Lewesdon woods and introduces this issue’s theme of ‘borders’.

As Kimmerer’s description of moss habitat shows, borders can be strangely paradoxical places; on the one hand, they are fraught areas where competing forces meet – think of armed patrols, barbed wire fences, Checkpoint Charlie – but among this turbulence there can also be areas of immense stillness which can become sites of unexpected flourishing – think of the various species clinging on in the British hedgerow, or the Korean demilitarised zone, now an unplanned nature reserve.

The theme of this issue was inspired by Thomas Bachrach’s article, a superb blend of memoir, social history and archival research that finds the author tracing his great grandfather’s peripatetic life across national and cultural borders, set against the events of the early twentieth century. The article’s meditations on displacement and identity feel uncannily relevant in light of the immense and tragic displacement of people going on in our current moment of geopolitical instability.

Precarious times can often lead to people looking to the time-tested wisdom of older generations and you can’t get much older than the fables attributed to the ex-slave Aesop whose ‘The Hunter and the Tracks’ gets an original retelling by Stefan Matthews. Aesop’s fables rarely receive much scholarly attention and traditionally their fate has mainly been between the pages of Latin exercise books, no doubt often defaced with all manner of school-boy drawings and unscholarly annotations. Yet as Grace Crabtree’s article shows, such material should not be overlooked as she introduces us to the world of medieval manuscripts, exploring the elusive identities of their authors occasionally glimpsed in the margins of these beguiling historical objects.

While manuscript marginalia can provide an unexpected moment of identification between reader and author, Jack Wightman’s article artfully explores how Celine Sciamma’s film Portrait Of A Lady On Fire actively encourages such empathy, showing how what might begin as voyeurism for the viewer can turn into something more. There’s a striking scene in Sciamma’s film, set in eighteenth-century Brittany, where some mystic drug is applied to one of the characters' armpits.

It’s a strange moment where bodily boundaries are momentarily dissolved, and has a lot in common with the fabled Elizabethan courtship practice of offering ‘love apples’, which I explore, or, rather, attempt to explore.

Finally, in perhaps the clearest sign of the incomprehensibility of contemporary events, our regular political commentator Tom Beed has taken his cue from the absurdist OBERIU writers and delivered a piece about… well… you’ll have to read it. The OBERIU movement, referred to as “the last Soviet avant garde”, flourished briefly in the late 1920s in the boundary layer between the creation of the Soviet Union and the consolidation of Stalin’s repressive regime in the 30s. It’s an example that shows how art sometimes behaves in ways remarkably similar to mosses. Like many species of mosses, original art is notoriously resistant to cultivation; one need only look at the sterility of the Socialist Realism that the Soviet Union contrived to replace art like OBERIU’s. Instead, art can be found cropping up where it’s least expected – between wars, regimes, centuries – emerging in pockets of unexpected habitability where it is insulated from, yet influenced by, the turbulence around.

Fred Warren

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 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 CULTURE

SHORT FICTION

Life in the Margins 4-5 Grace Crabtree

The Hunter and the Tracks 14-15 Stefan Matthews

HISTORY

POEM

POEM

PROSE POEM

Citizen of Somewhere 6-8 Thomas Bachrach

Crystalline 16-17 Tom Beed

Line in the Sand 9 Gill Barr FICTIONALLY MEDIATED NON-FICTION

Love-Apple in Idleness 10-12 Fred Warren CULTURE

The Look of Love 13 Jack Wightman

It's Time 15 Bryony Moores O'Sullivan

CULTURE

Re-View 18 Jack Wightman Back Page 19 Classifieds, Object Lesson

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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CULTURE

Life in the Margins Grace Crabtree reviews Mary Wellesley's new book – Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers

The scribe sits back from the table, stretching stiffened fin-

gers. The work is complete: a copy of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, a history of Christianity in England in the Anglo-Saxon era, written by the Venerable Bede circa 731 CE. But with the final words copied out, there is precious parchment yet untouched, and so the scribe writes a series of chronological notes on events in Northumbria, where he is writing from. This is now known as the ‘Moore Memoranda’, and has helped scholars to date this manuscript, the ‘Moore Bede’, to around 737 CE, the earliest copy of the work.

In paler ink, alongside some scraps of translation quandaries from Bede’s Latin text, the scribe writes the following lines in his vernacular Old English: Nū scylun hergan hefaenrīcaes Uard, metudæs maecti end his mōdgidanc, uerc Uuldurfadur, suē hē uundra gihwaes, ēci dryctin ōr āstelidæ hē ærist scōp aelda barnum heben til hrōfe, hāleg scepen.

Thā middungeard moncynnæs Uard, eci Dryctin, æfter tīadæ fīrum foldu, Frēa allmectig.

Now we must honour the Guardian of heaven, the might of the creator and his purpose, the work of the Father of glory, as He the eternal lord, established the beginning of wonders He first created, for the children of men heaven as a roof, the holy creator then the Guardian of mankind, the eternal Lord, afterwards appointed the Middle-earth the lands for men, the Lord almighty.

This is ‘Caedmon’s hymn’. Caedmon was an illiterate herdsman who, as Bede recounts, heard these words in a vision. The poem, “a masterpiece of formal economy and musical alliteration”, has only been set down in a handful of manuscripts; this version, buried at the close of the Moore Bede in three cramped lines – later reformatted as above – is perhaps the first written record of Caedmon’s hymn. It is a modest setting for one of the oldest surviving examples of Old English verse.

Mary Wellesley’s new book Hidden Hands is replete with such examples, illuminating our understanding of different realms of medieval society through tales of unexpected authors, artists, and scribes, the latter two often unnamed or forgotten. The word manuscript comes from the Latin manus, meaning ‘hand’, and scribere, ‘to write’, and while often dealing with the anonymous makers of these handcrafted ‘objects’, or in her phrase, “cultural landmarks”, Wellesley shows how the maker’s identity can start to emerge via lingering traces on the parchment.

The hedows flawme of the fyr

(“The hideous flame of the fire”, The Book of Margery Kempe, c. 1430)

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Vast swathes of manuscripts have inevitably been lost or damaged over the centuries, through neglect or tragic accident. Some of these incidents are detailed by Wellesley, among them a huge fire at Ashburnham House, Westminster, in 1731.

At the time, Ashburnham was temporarily home to the Cotton library, a collection of manuscripts amassed by the antiquarian and bibliophile Sir Robert Bruce Cotton MP and, ironically, moved to Ashburnham House to be “safe from fire”. The fire saw 13 of Sir Cotton’s manuscripts lost to the flames, and over 200 damaged to varying degrees of destruction. One of these salvaged texts is the sole surviving manuscript of the Old English epic, Beowulf.

The Cotton collection had, in an Act of Parliament of 1701, been transferred to the nation “to be kept and preserved … for Publick Use and Advantage”. Two years after the fire, the remains of the Cotton library became part of the British Museum’s original literary collection, safely housed and freely accessible to the public – a silver lining among the ashes. The manuscripts have recently been digitised to prevent further damage from excessive handling, and to allow readers across the world to peruse their pages. While still beautiful objects, many are scarcely legible, though scholars have dutifully transcribed and translated what they can, with the assistance of ‘multispectral imaging’ for particularly degraded parchments. Of the surviving Ashburnham manuscripts, many pages are blackened, with singed edges obscuring letters and drawings in the margins, and the parchment – made from calf, goat or sheep skin, ordinarily durable and retaining iridescent colour – has long since contracted, buckled, and warped from fiery heat, or from water used to douse the flames.

Fortunately, however, some extraordinary texts have survived.

Wellesley takes the reader through an impressive array of texts, the creators of which are rarely named, but whose identities scholars can sometimes piece together via fragments of clues, and recognisable styles – like the anonymous thirteenth-century monk from Worcester Priory known as ‘The Tremulous Hand’, whose shaky glosses, or explanatory annotations, adorn several manuscript margins.

Alongside religious gospels, miraculous hymns, and epic poems, certain texts jump out in the book, those that reflect back at, or pierce into, our contemporary moment.

A chance discovery In 1934, the Butler-Bowdon family were playing a game of pingpong at their home near Chesterfield. Searching for a replacement ball, the father opened a cupboard, but struggled to find one among an “entirely undisciplined clutter of smallish leather books”.

Frustrated with the mess, he threatened to put the “whole — lot on the bonfire”.

Fortunately, a visitor to the household wished to take a further look, and saved the manuscripts from another fiery fate. One manuscript was formally identified later that year, by the American scholar Hope Emily Allen, as the lost Book of Margery Kempe.

The Book of Margery Kempe is considered the first autobiography written in the English language. Prior to its rediscovery, knowledge of Margery Kempe was limited to some extracts published

by Wynkyn de Worde in 1501. In de Worde’s pamphlet, Margery’s first-hand experience and voice is eradicated, appearing as a pious and passive receiver of Christ’s teachings, rather than a creature with a complex, internal life and authorial control over the narrative.

Kempe (née Brunham) was born around 1373 in Bishop’s Lynn, now known as King’s Lynn, in Norfolk, into a family of wealthy merchants. At the age of 20, she married John Kempe, and soon fell pregnant with her first child. In her mediated account, committed to parchment by a scribe some 30 years later, she recounts how shortly after the birth she fell into a state of torment. Today, we might understand the sudden onset of hallucinations, delusions, and manic mood changes that she suffered as postpartum psychosis, but in Margery’s day her symptoms, which involved visions of demons and devils telling her to harm herself and forsake her faith, ensured several months of terrifying misery, at times with her wrists and hands bound. Some eight months passed with Margery in this state until, as she recounts, she has a visitation from Christ (“mercyfulle Lord Cryst Jhesu”) who asks, "Daughter, why have you forsaken me, and I never forsook you?" His words break through and she comes back to herself. Thus restored, Margery’s first act, in a pleasingly down-to-earth detail, is to ask for the keys to the buttery, “to takyn hir mete and drynke” (to take her meat and drink).

She re-enters social life, undertaking two businesses, a brewery and a grain mill; these soon fail, however, which she interprets as a sign from God, and she resolves to live as a holy woman, which eventually involves striking a deal with her husband for a chaste marriage: in the Book, this is said to have happened one Midsummer Eve in 1413, with Margery formally requesting to be freed of their marital bonds. She makes a number of lengthy pilgrimages, across Europe and to Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

Closer to home, in around 1413, she seeks counsel from Julian of Norwich (c. 1343 – after 1416), a medieval mystic and anchoress, who confirms Kempe’s visions and dialogue with God as genuine. In Hidden Hands, Wellesley also devotes a section to Julian of Norwich who, from her secluded cell, wrote a great number of manuscripts, among them her ‘Long Text’, Revelations of Divine Love, the earliest work in English known to be authored by a woman.

By contrast, Margery Kempe is a more unlikely character: though a self-appointed mystic, she was a laywoman with little education. The Book was told to an amanuensis – a scribe – and with phrases such as “þe creatur of whom þis book is written”, the reader is reminded that the words are not verbatim from Kempe’s lips, but inevitably somewhat altered, embellished, or edited by her amanuensis. Kempe is often assumed therefore to be illiterate, but some scholars have questioned the extent to which this might be true. Kempe appears to portrays herself in Marginalia by Grace Crabtree

the manuscript as a simple “unlettered” woman, but this could have bolstered her image as a simple chosen recipient of Christ’s teaching, removing some of the agency that alarmed church officials and so perhaps protecting her from further heretical charges which mounted against her. She was not wholly uneducated, having had a number of religious texts read to her, and Lynn Staley, in Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (1994), argues that Kempe’s crafting of the text is inventive and deliberate, evincing her understanding of, and insertion into, the “conventions of female sacred biography”.

She works within these bounds to her advantage.

This manner of recording a life is not merely to memorialise, but to attempt to set a course or scheme for how one is to be remembered. Another of Wellesley’s characters is a queen whose name is not widely known despite her powerful place within Anglo-Saxon history. Emma of Normandy was “twice queen of England”. Her first marriage was to Æthelred the Unready, and her second was to King Cnut of Denmark who seized power, claiming the nation, and Emma, for his own. As Æthelred’s widow, Emma was still the Queen of the ruling family, so could legitimise Cnut’s rule.

Yet Emma was not merely a pawn in a bloody history of warring rulers, but influenced events, advising Cnut on his new territories, and holding considerable land and ecclesiastical sway herself. She also had some political power in her later position as mother to two jointly-ruling kings, the half-brothers Edward the Confessor, from her marriage with Æthelred, and her son

by Cnut, Harthacnut. Such actions are recorded, with some license, in the Encomium Emmae reginae – ‘Praise of Queen Emma’. It appears that she commissioned this biography-of-sorts, (re)framing her actions in a wholly positive light.

As Wellesley writes, manuscripts are “forms of communication and memorialisation” of human stories, and these auto/biographical examples have an intriguing degree of self-memorialisation, reminding us of the intriguingly faulty nature of subjective historical accounts. The Encomium more radically rewrites elements of history – for one, Æthelred is completely written out of the narrative – while Kempe fashions a self in a way that borders on the fictional. The impetus behind these texts is moving, coming in part from a desire to be remembered, and in a particular way. There are many of these examples in Hidden Hands, with slightly sensationalised epithets – Leoba of Tauberbischofsheim, “the first named female poet from England”; the Cuthbert Gospel, “the earliest intact European book”. We must remember, in assigning such titles, that only a tiny proportion of manuscripts have survived – as Wellesley notes, two-thirds of the surviving Old English poetry exists in a mere four books. Nonetheless, a sense of humanity bursts forth from these manuscripts, whether in the determination to set one’s life to words, or in the layers of history within the parchment, often adorned with small notes or drawings in the margins from scribes or from later annotators.

Wellesley’s study sets the mind alight with human stories, however fragmentary or unreliable.

Grace Crabtree is an artist and a founding member of Chasing Cow Productions. You can view her artwork at gracecrabtree.co.uk 5

HISTORY

Citizen of Somewhere Thomas Bachrach

It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny. With Debray we might say, “Yes, it is quite accidental that I am born French; but after all, France is eternal.”

- Benedict Anderson

prayer book dating back to 1860s Vienna that I still have today.

But I have also heard rumours of a tallit prayer shawl and various other items.

To those who knew him, my great grandfather was someone

who was never quite able to fit in. One relative described him as a bit ‘confused’. From my position of detachment – he died years before I was born – I cannot think of a demonym that would accurately describe Roland Bachrach. He was someone to which nowhere ever seemed to be home. Sehnsucht, mono no aware, hiraeth, are all terms in German, Japanese, and Welsh respectively that have linguistically danced around the emotions felt by people in his position, but the closest our language has appeared in the 1950s. The term Third Culture Kid (TCK), coined by sociologist Ruth Useem, is a rather coarse way of describing someone who grows up in a place that is not their parents’ homeland – the ‘third’ culture being a mixture of the ‘first’ (parents') and ‘second’ (host country). TCKs are notoriously troubled; the stereotypical individual struggling with identity issues, considering themselves culturally homeless. Indeed, trying to explore, understand, and solve unanswered questions about Roland and his family quickly became a study where the subject’s “ Oral history is a identity was constantly surprisingly effective shifting and open to interpretation. way to pass on

information, but if snuffed out, it can never be recovered. ”

But what does this mean for the modern era? It is impossible to read about TCKs without bringing to mind the huge increase in migration around the world, both voluntary and forced. It seems inevitable that these questions of identity that I stumbled upon whilst rifling through family files are being repeated today, hundreds of thousands of times, in families across the world. Is a generation arising who, too, will be struck by this indefinable affliction? Should we do something about it? These are not questions I can answer, but in exploring the issues of the past, we can begin to have a conversation about those of today.

The end of Roland’s journey was in 1980. My grandfather, his only son, came to clear out his house – a strange, emotionally confusing experience that nobody ever wants to do, especially when processing grief. He sorted through the relics of a life welllived and well-travelled; Chinese wall-hangings and paintings from the family’s time in Shanghai, bits and pieces from his career as an analytical chemist, photographs from across Europe, endless letters, trophies and medals from rifle competitions. But amongst all this, they also discovered Jewish paraphernalia in Roland’s house. I don’t know exactly what it was that my grandfather found. There are several documents in Hebrew, and a

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Roland in the British army, on Bere Island, Ireland, c.1920

Roland was certainly not an average resident of the rural English community in Somerset where he spent his retirement. He spoke with a strange accent, a sort of French, from a childhood spent in Lyon, mixed with his father’s Viennese German. He and his wife, Helen, would talk in French to each other around the house and when they didn’t want other people to know what they were saying. His religion was described as ‘episcopalian’ although I don’t know if this was a reference to his participation in the Church of England, or a more specific description of his church (his wife belonged to the Protestant 'Disciples of Christ').

When a new Chinese takeaway appeared in town (a novelty in the 1960s), Roland frightened the staff by walking in and ordering in fluent Cantonese. I don’t know if he ever really identified as British. He was a British citizen, and for the latter half of his life, Britain was his home, but I think he would have lived elsewhere if he could.

And yet despite this cosmopolitan background, it seemed strange for Jewish objects to be amongst his possessions. He had travelled across Europe, but nobody ever spoke of a Jewish connection. How much his son (my grandfather) himself knew or understood why these objects were there is hard to tell, but I find it hard to believe he was completely ignorant. Once, on a ship transporting troops during the war, he was innocuously eating a

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pork pie when he was suddenly asked by a fellow soldier, “What would the rabbi think of that?” Evidently the soldier had picked up on my grandfather’s surname, or perhaps how he looked; he had a decidedly non-Anglo-Saxon appearance – olive skinned, dark haired. And during the war, he also befriended his cousin, Roland’s niece, who had fled her home in Vienna and come to the UK to escape the Nazis. But Roland never really talked about any Jewish connection to his son.

To be fair, he did have a rather asiatic appearance in some photographs. And all the Chinese furniture, combined with Roland's tendency to speak in languages she didn’t understand, probably didn’t help the young girl drawing her own conclusions. But even only a few years ago, this rumour had never really gone away. “Obviously we’re not part Chinese,” said one relative to me when I first enquired about this. “At least… I don’t think so.”

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Living in the era we do, it is easy to judge my grandfather for being uncertain. We are, after all, saturated in information to an extent our ancestors would find nauseating. I can immediately access records spanning hundreds of years from my home. In the space of a few hours or even minutes I can search newspaper archives to find where someone has been mentioned, piecing together a narrative from tiny snippets of information across decades. But silence in an era before the internet was a powerful force. Oral history is a surprisingly effective way to pass on information, but if snuffed out, it can never be recovered. Even this year, a relative of mine approached me and confided that he believed Roland had been gifted those Jewish objects by a friend.

Where oral history fades in a family, rumours and speculation fill the vacuum. As well as being secretly Jewish, Roland, the rumour went, was the illegitimate offspring of his father and an anonymous Chinese woman. Perhaps they had met whilst he was out in China on business? When his niece visited, she – having only ever seen Chinese people in books – sincerely believed Roland was himself, as she put it, “a Chinaman”.

Roland's wife Helen in China, c.1924

Bachrach Map and Family tree 1821-2022 Thomas Bachrach

1914 MAP

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“ I think the place Roland found the closest to any sort of home was Shanghai. The International Settlement there was full of people like him, united only in their common homelessness. ”

So who was Roland Bachrach really? Did he ever have a home?

There are stacks of documents that have remained in archives for years, some legally prohibited from being released until recently.

There are many red herrings, unhelpful rumours, and dead-end paths. As it turns out Roland had been born in Lyon, France, but he wasn’t legally French – rather, his citizenship was Austrian.

His father, Emil Ludwig, was a merchant who sold tea from the East. There are no portraits of his father that we know of, but it’s possible he appears in one photograph of my great great aunt.

His daughter has stopped to pose for the picture with a friend, holding onto a railing, roller skates on her feet.

So was Roland secretly a Jew? I don’t know. I don’t think so. But it wouldn’t surprise me if it was something he considered. His niece – who I speak to regularly, now in her 90s – grew up a Catholic in Vienna, but having ended up in America now ponders her religious affiliation. Despite his decision to keep the Jewish connection silent, I do not blame him considering the background of when he lived. What of his nationality? Bohemian, Austrian, French, Chinese, British? I don’t know either.

Personally, I think the place Roland found the closest to any sort of home was Shanghai. The International Settlement there was full of people like him, denied any solid cultural identity, united only in their common homelessness. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the original TCKs that Useem studied were the offspring of colonial administrators and businesspeople in India. In Shanghai, Roland met his wife Helen and, despite their poverty, they thrived there as members of an international community.

Photo possibly showing Emil Bachrach, c.1910

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It was only the constant war that forced them to move to Britain, never to return. Whereas the journey of many TCKs begins with war, Roland’s ended with it.

As more and more TCKs are created, so too do we learn more about what it means to be one. From Madeleine Thien’s writings on the Asian diaspora in Canada, to Sumayya Lee’s stories of being an Indian-African, it is no longer as lonely a path as it once was. But this does not mean the challenges and conflicts created by the TCK experience will go away, especially when so many are not the product of voluntary migrations but rather of forced displacement created by war or disaster. I wonder how many other grandchildren will be left to piece together their family’s history and identity a hundred years later.

Family history forces us to consider our position in the world and how we got here. I am not a TCK, neither are my parents.

But in families there are things that get silently passed on, from the superficial habits (my mother’s insistence on flinging open the windows all the time itself inherited from her mother, who was taught to during her wartime service as a nurse, an application of lessons learnt from the Spanish influenza), to the objects and heirlooms (Roland’s pocket watch keeps ticking today), to the deeper philosophies and ways of looking at the world. What of the latter did I inherit from Roland? I don’t know yet.

Thomas Bachrach has recently completed a Masters in History at the University of Exeter.

POEM

Line in the Sand Gill Barr

Leaning on a rail looking out at the high waves rushing in, fury in those waves - love their force against the rocks, the pow and plosion, giant spray throwing its head forward like any sea monster, shattering into pieces and gone.

All sea-myths live in the deep imagination. All mariners fear the protean sea while the islanders hug the coast, hug themselves tight against high tide in the inlets, the rias, the soft bays. Some resist the inevitable, shunt the problem up the coast.

Others live with the edges, knowing there are no divisions, only words dividing the one from the other, no sea, no shore, only gradations of life attuned to the changing.

In the mingle they all live at one with the now of the downpour, the landslip, inundations, coast-paths vanished, lost souls, but in the calm after the storm, in the dread of the next storm, as the harbour-lights come on, go off, as the boats go out, come in, with a catch or no catch, as day arrives, then night, when voices cry out for certainty, some hoist a flag, name themselves and the other, draw a line in the sand, control their waters, while fish continue indiscriminate travel across boundaries, refugees

Illustration by Bryony Moores O'Sullivan

take their chances, viruses slip in, unstoppable exchange between wave and shore, between spray and sand.

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L O V E - A P P L E in I D L E N E S S Or Comfort me with Apples

A Much Augmented, Altered and Improued tale of Pippens, Pestilence and Pursuite of a most prodigious and diabolic Woozle

by F.W. Prologue

It was during the final quarter of last year that my partner

broke the regrettable news that she had contracted the plague of our times. After briefly considering fleeing the house or, perhaps, banishing the infectious party to the garden shed, I soon saw the merits of isolating alongside her and happily set about cancelling all engagements, obligations, and commitments – it was my duty, after all. Little did I know that this pause in the rhythms of daily life would prove the backdrop of a mighty quest; a quest down winding paths of footnotes and up gnarled trees of knowledge; a quest, dear reader, for truth.

Act I Tasting probes – the giant peacock of the night – the game is afoot!

But first, in a tale of many quotations, a quotation of a quotation of a quotation. In a review last September of the book Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England by Elizabeth Swann, the reviewer repeats one of the book’s more disturbing anecdotes: around 1680 some members of the Royal Society learned of the newly exposed grave of the theologian John Colet (died in 1519) and upon visiting it, “did thrust a probe or little stick into a chink of the coffin” and then tasted it.

I remember my partner and myself having a brief scholarly debate about this article to the effect of: “Did you read that thing in the TLS about the stick in the coffin?”

“Oh yeah, that was horrifying.”

Fast forward a few months and we are now a few days into our isolation, my partner still groggily infectious, myself healthy and in a holiday humour. I am merrily washing up, listening to the book Sentient by Jackie Higgins when, in a chapter about the moth known as the giant peacock of the night, I hear an intriguing passage: "Elizabethan ladies allegedly peeled apples to put beneath their armpits, removing them when saturated with sweat and gifting these 'love apples' to their sweethearts. "

Upon hearing this, I throw down the ruddy pan and frantically ascend the stairs to my partner resting in bed: Partner: “There you are, did you bring the paracet...”

Myself: “Not now. Do you remember that stick in the coffin thing; well I’ve just heard something weirder!” [I repeat the information with some dramatic license] Partner: “Eww that’s gross, how would that even work, but please, I’d really like some paracetamol.”

Now, in normal times this tale may have ended there; I would have likely never brought up love apples again, apart from,

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c.2022

perhaps, at some soiree where, feeling the conversation drift to some boorish topic like cars or travel insurance, I might interject with a well-timed, “Did you know…”.

But this was plague-time and, as I later lay in bed trying not to think about the viral particles that may or may not be migrating across from my partner’s cells and then entering, replicating, and exploding out of my own, my mind began circling around that love apple practice – how peculiar it was!

Of course, fruits are a common metaphor for love and sexuality from papayas in Kate Bush’s ‘Eat the Music’, to peaches in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name. Plus, the early modern era (the period roughly between the late fifteenth and late eighteenth centuries) was a very different time and considering that the social order included witch trials, bear baiting, and understanding the plot of Cymbeline, it’s reasonable to expect that the perception of many smells and tastes – the sensory order – was also somewhat different.

And yet, why had I never come across these love apples before? Indeed, I consider myself something of an aficionado on the early modern period, having once taken a module on the topic and, to this day, resting on my shelf are editions of Marlowe, Behn, Webster, Machiavelli kept in such immaculate condition you’d swear they’d never been opened! Anyway, how interesting, I mused, it would be to actually look upon one of the primary sources describing this practice. My head soon swelled with strange visions of all manner of historic documents – diary entries from 1592, medical records from 1632, a pomologist’s spreadsheet from 1676 – all making reference to these love apples.

With the goal in mind, I leapt from the bed. My partner asked where I was going, I told her the scent of the love apple was calling!

ACT II The scholar returns – the infinitely complicated dome – how now Woozle?

And so, I put £27,000 of academic training into action and opened Google.

Initial research revealed that “love apple” had some botanical meanings at the time and seemed to be linked to both tomatoes and mandrakes (more on this later). Interesting, but irrelevant.

The addition of words like ‘sweat’ and ‘armpit’ improved things and soon I was finding the practice mentioned in all manner of sources: anthropologist turned Chief Science Advisor to Match.com Helen Fisher talks about the practice in Anatomy of Love (1992); US author Diane Ackerman mentions it in her A Natural History of the Senses (1990); as does zoologist and biomorph enthusiast Desmond Morris in The Naked Woman (2004) who specified that it was “a whole, peeled apple” that was “placed in the young woman's armpit”. And yet, despite trawling these books’ footnotes, references and further reading, I couldn’t find any original source describing the practice.

>>

Worse still, there appeared a vast superstructure of blogs, webpages, and Tweets built upon these books, meaning I was constantly being referred back to them.

This was proving frustrating: what I had envisaged as a pleasant ten-minute diversion was now entering its third day. Plus, I had now tested positive for the virus, simultaneously shattering my view of my immune system, and pushing my Googling to a more frenzied state. Finally, having read all of ‘5 Old-Timey Courtship Rituals That Will Make You Cringe’ and finding no source except another link back to Desmond Morris, I flew into a fit of Othello-esque rage, yelling, “VILLAIN, GIVE ME THE OCULAR PROOF!” After reassuring my partner that I wasn’t ‘cracking up’ I decided to take my predicament to my historian friend: “Hmm, sounds like a Woozle.”

“Ahh of course, I knew it! Wait, what’s a Woozle?”

ACT III A cry for holp – the degrees of Francis Bacon – a fateful blow Named after the phantom character in Winnie the Pooh, the Woozle effect, according to Wikipedia, is “when frequent citation of publications lacking evidence misleads individuals […] and nonfacts become urban myths”. The term was popularised

by Galles and Strauss in 1988 – or was it? To be honest, I’m just repeating conjecture on the Wikipedia page but presenting it as fact – a sure-fire way of creating a Woozle, or, in this case, a Woozle about Woozles…

So now the question was: was this love apple thing a Woozle – a mere tissue of citations, a perfect example of Nietzsche’s conception of knowledge as an “infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation” – or a genuine practice from history which had just assumed a Woozley aspect?

I was stuck, so I did what any good student would do: I asked my tutor. The only problem was he hadn’t been my tutor for five years, and I hadn’t actually been a student for three, but no matter – I still had his email address. I had fond memories of this tutor’s renaissance seminars and remembered him introducing

our class to a website about early modern social networks called the ‘Six Degrees of Francis Bacon’.

Side note: I’ve had some trouble communicating the merits of this website over the years, with conversations going something like: Me: It’s really cool, it shows you how interrelated and connected everyone was in the early modern period, hence the six degrees of Francis Bacon.

Them: Who? Me: You know… the famous essayist and founder of the scientific method… Ugh, don’t worry, it’s just a clever riff on the game about Kevin Bacon.

Them: Who?

I received a speedy response from my former tutor; he hadn’t heard of the practice but would pass on the query to his colleagues and I was soon forwarded a response from none other than Dr Elizabeth Swann, the academic whose coffin-stick anecdote had set off this whole chain of events – the fates were colliding! Alas, Dr Swann hadn’t heard of the practice either, conceding that it “sounds fairly implausible to me – for a start, keeping an apple under one’s armpit for any length of time doesn’t strike me as easy or comfortable […] BUT I’d be delighted to be proved wrong”.

I took this as an invitation to press on, but then disaster struck: I stopped being able to smell. I can’t recall what it was that alerted me to my changed sensorium, but I was soon running round the house smelling lemons, sun cream, the dog’s ear, their formerly distinct odours now yielding nought but emptiness!

“How can I go on,” I bewailed, “researching an article into a sense I no longer possess!?”

“Are you really basing a whole article around that apple thing?”

“Well, not anymore!”

In a fit of melancholy, I took to my chamber.

Act IV Recoverie – fieldwork – a chicken without a bone Fortunately, the sense of smell did return, as did, in time, my resolve to continue. Indeed, I’d since heard from another early modern academic (they were intrigued but also doubted the claim) and had contacted one more. While I was waiting, I decided it was high time for some field work: “You’re going to do what?”

“Try peeling an apple and putting it in my armpit.”

“But why? What will that achieve?!”

“Well, a lot of people have questioned the logistics of the practice, so I should investigate this.”

“Isn’t this just like those pointless fillers in TV history documentaries, like when they put an Olympic athlete in chainmail and make them run round a 400m track?”

“A little bit, yes.”

So, reader, I tied the apple to my armpit. I’ll spare the reader further details but suffice to say, yes, it is possible (with the aid of an apple corer and a piece of string) and, yes, it is uncomfortable, but not excessively. Indeed, if people can get used to wearing high heels, corsets, or Spanx Shapewear, they could probably also get used to love apples. In conclusion, the fieldwork was inconclusive.

“I thought you would be happy, dear – you said it wouldn’t achieve anything and you were right!”

>> 11

“I’m not happy with what you just did.”

“Why not?”

“Because it was weird – I think you should stop this.”

‘love apple’ legend are in this poem – just not connected, or in the right order.

Alas, I was inclined to agree: by this point, the final academic I was waiting on conceded that she had no source for the practice; meanwhile, I was going down blind alleys looking at apple-based folk songs, including one recorded in Sherbourne in 1907 that went:

4) Lastly, there are numerous mentions of a similar practice occurring in rural Austria in the nineteenth century, albeit with a slice of apple, and many of my initial love apple books included this fact alongside. Finding an original source for this was something of a side project and there may be something in these tales but, reader, I’m afraid you will have to wait for the website version of this article for that.

“I gave my love an apple without e’er a core; I will give my love a house without e’er a door […]

My head is the apple without e'er a core”.

Its words rang with that immortal truth that only time-worn lyrics can; my head did feel like an apple without e’er a core.

I was spent.

Act V Search for something achieved – lessons learned – some reflection on the sensory hierarchy and the utility of knowledge So it seemed I had been on a Woozle hunt all along. That being said, my quest did yield a number of pieces of knowledge which I think may show how this Woozle could have got going in the first place. Because we’re running out of space and patience, I have enumerated this evidence as follows.

1) ‘Love-apple’ was a term in early modern England: The Ladies Dictionary of 1694 refers to it as a “Spanish root of a Colour near Violet”, while a humorous book (or at least I think it’s humorous) from 1682 called The Ten Pleasures of Marriage talks of a doctor who is so sick with love that he is only concerned with looking for a “Love-apple, or Nightshadow, for the cure of his own burning distemper”. Both these pieces of evidence seem to point to love apples being another word for mandrakes (a member of the nightshade family) and the latter source hints at the plant being some kind of love drug, or at least associated with love. Indeed, the historic use of mandrakes as an aphrodisiac is mentioned in other secondary literature.

2) There existed in the medieval and early modern periods small portable balls of perfume worn by people, called pomanders, which could refer either to the ball itself or to its container. In addition to the etymological link, many of the containers were designed to look like apples. They seemed to have had both plague-preventing and romantic connotations and, as noted by Holly Dugan in The Ephemeral History of Perfume, in a poem by Robert Herrick (b. 1591) he appears to talk favourably of his beloved’s own natural scent that “did perfume the pomander.”

So, I think these cumulatively show how the love apple myth might have arisen. However, they do not answer the question of why it has, and continues to, spread. As the social scientist Bruno Latour says, “an idea […] never moves of its own accord.

It requires a force to fetch it, seize upon it for its own motives”.

So what exactly about this particular story has meant that it has been seized upon and passed on by our own culture? Perhaps it’s because the story is so effective at shocking us into rethinking our own sensory order, where smell is often relegated to the bottom of the sense hierarchy. Indeed, our sense of smell seems more likely to be a source of anxiety and shame than something from which we can derive pleasure and knowledge.

Our culture's narrow view of smell can be seen particularly well in a Guardian article from January about post-Covid chronic smell loss where, rather than discussing how smell is one of the key ways we might recognise friends and family, or how olfactory memories are arguably the most emotionally vivid, the article instead mostly dwells on how having an impaired sense of smell might lead to one putting on weight. Moreover, the idea that Elizabethans amorously exchanged apples soaked in their own body odour stands as a clear challenge against such a hyper-visual culture where we're constantly encouraged to scrub our bodies of anything that might remind us that we're living biological entities; it opposes those forces that seem to be pushing our bodies towards becoming those flat, odourless representations that we scroll through every day.

So perhaps the Elizabethan love apple practice has cultural value today, even if it never really happened back then – although, who knows, someone more qualified out there may yet find some evidence. For now, though, I can take comfort in knowing with complete certainty that the practice has been performed at least once in history, even if my sweetheart did not appreciate it.

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.

3) ‘The Song of Solomon’. This is a lyrical and, at times, rather steamy section of the Bible about two lovers pining for one another. As we’re dealing with the early modern period, I’m looking at the 1611 King James Bible, though there were other translations of the song circulating before then. There are many fruit/body metaphors in this poem but the one about “the apple tree” whose “fruit was sweet to eat” stands out, as do the olfactory details about the “smell of thine ointments” and “the smell of thy garments”. Finally, even mandrakes “give a smell” in this poem, though in this version they’re called ‘mandrakes’ not ‘love apples’. In other words, just about all the parts of the

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Illustrations by Grace Crabtree

CULTURE

The Look o Love f

Voyeurism in Portrait Of A Lady On Fire Jack Wightman

In Hitchcock/Truffaut (1966), the Master of Suspense remarked,

“Nine out of ten people, if they see a woman across the courtyard undressing for bed, or even a man puttering around in his room, will stay and look; no one turns away”. Voyeurism is the backbone of Hitchcock’s filmography, tapping into the universal human need to pull back the curtain of curiosity, and punishing us with what we discover. A vast retinue of films follow in Hitchcock’s wake, from Michelangelo Antonioni’s enigmatic Blow-Up (1966) and Brian De Palma’s homage Blow Out (1981), to Michael Powell’s career-ending Peeping Tom (1960), and Francis Ford Coppola’s audio sleuth in The Conversation (1974), all of which present voyeurism as a nefarious act. Céline Sciamma sees things differently.

In Portrait Of A Lady On Fire (2019), Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) is introduced in a POV shot focused on the unkempt swirls on the back of her head, intentionally echoing the maddening swirls of Madeline’s (Kim Novak) hair from Vertigo (1958), Hitchcock’s urtext of obsessional voyeurism. Like Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) watching the platinum blonde as he winds through the streets of 1950s San Francisco, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) in Sciamma’s film is tasked with covertly observing her subject as she attempts to complete a portrait from fleeting glances, sketches made rapidly on a windswept beach, and a body double.

In both films, the voyeur’s distance from the subject leads to representations without depth: Scottie recreates an idealised woman who never existed, while Marianne’s portrait is shallow and constrained by male society’s conventions of female portraiture. For Hitchcock, observation can only lead us so far, and in the case of Vertigo, it leads Scottie down the wrong path until it is too late. For Sciamma’s Portrait, observation is only the beginning.

A camera can imitate a voyeur, lingering in the distance, obscuring detail and information, but it is more like an omnipotent eye, able to investigate private places where characters reveal themselves and secret meanings, like a hand bookmarking page twenty-eight. The first sequence of Sciamma’s Portrait replicates Hitchcock’s voyeur cinema, while the second sequence, as Marianne sets to work on a second portrait, is a true representation of cinema’s infinite possibility of observing in order to reveal character, and in doing so, removing the line between characters.

This is a common structure in voyeurism films like Vertigo, beginning with a watcher and then slowly reversing this position.

This often leads to a moment of horror, like Scottie believing Illustration by Bryony Moores O'Sullivan

himself an invisible observer only to learn that he is the observed, manipulated as part of a fiendish plot. Sciamma replicates this moment too. While Héloïse sits patiently for her second portrait, Marianne’s eyes flicking between the canvas and the subject, the observed subject asks, ‘‘If you look at me, who do I look at?’’. Sciamma answers with a reverse shot of Marianne.

This moment is not terror, but intimacy, and also one of conversation; and this last is also an increasing feature of expression in an internet age between audience and artist. While Vertigo’s audience was very much at a distance, with only published critics having their say, the internet has opened the conversation to anyone with internet access. And while it may be a horror for a represented filmmaker like Hitchcock to be ‘seen’, to have attention drawn to the ‘invisible hand’ behind the strings of cinematic illusion, it is absolutely necessary to notice twenty-first-century filmmakers telling under-represented stories like Portrait.

Sciamma encourages this kind of audience awareness by breaking the fourth wall. In Héloïse’s introductory image, she stops short of the cliffside and turns to transfix us with piercing blue eyes.

As audiences in the dark, whether it be the floating head of Scottie swirling in colour, a madman’s stare in Jonathan Demme’s exquisite close-ups, or an accusatory look in the closing moments of Bong Joon-ho’s Memories Of Murder (2003), it is startling to be seen. But we are always observed. Filmmakers create films to be seen, consistently factoring in an audience presence. Sciamma reminds us of this early on so we become aware that, while cinema begins initially as voyeurism, it develops to become absorption and even empathy.

This is most evident in the closing image. While Hitchcock chooses to end Vertigo with a shot pulling away from Scottie as he looks at his deceased lover off-screen, Sciamma decides to do the very opposite. Sciamma’s final image is of Héloïse watching a performance of Vivaldi which stirs private emotions projected behind her eyes. While Marianne is missing physically from this shot, she is fully present. We are watching with and through Marianne. In the course of two hours, we begin by observing behind a line until this observation makes strangers familiar, absorbing us into their world and emotions until, finally, we take the same position as a heartbroken lover. We become absorbed until the line can no longer be seen.

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. 13

The Hunter and the Tracks

SHORT FICTION

Stefan Matthews

A young hunter, armed with a machete, walked fiercely

through the overgrowth, cutting aside prickly brambles and looping vines alike. The hunter kept a keen eye on the animal tracks that punctured the loamy jungle soil. The tracks made by the huge beast that had been terrorising the village since anyone could remember, stealing sheep and making a great big nuisance of itself.

These tracks were newer, at least a foot and half wide, with three deep claw marks at the front and a large pad at the back. It had been raining for an hour or so, but the canopy kept it at bay and the tracks stayed fresh. The tracks that were to be kept in sight at all times.

A howl tore through the jungle. This one was closer, probably less than a hundred feet northwest. The noise vibrated in the hunter’s spine as he steeled himself. He was yet to see the beast in its entirety, still only rumours of it circulated the village. Monstrous teeth, hideous eyes, the works.

Before the hunter had left, the village elder – a former hunter herself – had informed the young man he must, under all circumstances, remain within the boundary of the animal’s prints. To hunt, one must track. That was the key. The hunter may use any tool at their disposal, but they must stick to the tracks. All the hunters that had gone before our young hero had veered from the beast’s tracks, becoming lost for hours, days, even a lifetime.

The young hunter’s best friend had been found upside down in a log during a recent expedition.

A second howl rattled the jungle, followed by a yelp, the beast’s former deep resonance replaced with a higher pitch. A pitch that indicated a pain so great it could only have come from something as painful as stubbing its toe. Time to strike.

Follow the tracks and the beast will be slain.

The young man’s grip tightened on the machete. There had been murmurs and side-eyes when the hunter chose the weapon, but he preferred it to the spear or the bow and arrow. It was faster, agile. It suited him, and anyone who chose the spear was obviously overcompensating.

The great beast’s tracks darted left then right as the hunter followed them deeper into the jungle. A stagnant pool of water exploded in a swarm of bugs as the hunter surged through it, wiping the insects from his face. After a few more seconds of breathlessness, the prints led past a pinkish rock and into a small clearing.

There, in the centre, was the beast.

The hideous thing was lying prone on its side, yet it was still at least a foot taller than the young hunter. The animal had trapped itself, its front-right leg jammed under a fallen tree that had rolled onto its thigh. Its toes looked awfully stubbed.

The beast spotted the hunter and snarled; yellowed fangs bared in a mixture of intimidation and self-preservation. The hunter’s posture tensed, his grip on the machete slick with sweat. He kept his eyes locked to the beast, feeling the animal’s tracks with his toes as he circled it, the beast occasionally yelping as it clawed

14

Illustrations by Bryony Moores O'Sullivan

at the fallen tree, forcing it off its leg inch by inch as the hunter continued to circle the beast until he realised— He was back at the pinkish rock. The hunter cursed his luck as he broke eye contact.. He scanned the tracks surrounding the beast, realising they formed a loop under the cover of the jungle. The tracks in the clearing that should have led to the animal had been washed away by the rain.

The young hunter cursed himself for not overcompensating with a spear. The beast was trapped and here he was, just watching it as it wriggled closer to freedom.

What was he to do? To approach the beast was to veer from the tracks, like all unsuccessful hunters before him.

He had followed the tracks religiously and they had led him here. He just needed to trust the process. Plus, as he looked at the beast, he realised just how huge its claws were.

And each tooth was the size of the young hunter’s machete.

Perhaps it was for the best that the tracks had been washed away, after all— The beast interrupted the hunter’s thoughts with an almighty roar as it tore itself free from the trunk and thundered into the distance.

“Phew.”

The young hunter crept back into the village under twilight.

His friend was snoring, neck still covered in bark, as the hunter crawled into his tent.

“Young hunter.”

The hunter jumped at the voice outside of the tent.

“Uh, ahem. Me?” “Yes, you, young hunter. Come outside, please.”

The young hunter gulped, shuffling out of the tent and coming face to face with the village elder in her ancient glory, wrapped in worn sheepskin leather. The hunter bowed his head in respect.

“I am sorry, O’ great leader,” said the hunter. “I have failed both you and the tribe.”

The elder smiled, her teeth pale in the moonlight.

“Nonsense my child. You have—” The elder was cut off by a giant roar and a distant crunching of bone.

“It seems as though the beast has gotten into the pen again, child.”

“I was close to slaying the beast, O’ great elder, but its tracks did not lead directly to it. I circled and circled the beast, but alas I was unable to get any closer with my damned machete.”

The village elder raised a weathered finger, shushing the young hunter.

“What is the village wisdom?” said the Elder.

“Follow the tracks and the beast will be slain,” replied the young hunter.

“Indeed. Now, go and rest my champion, for you have followed the tracks. The first to do so in centuries. We need not worry about the beast any longer.”

>>

“But, uh. Well, I don’t wish to overstep my mark but, um, the beast isn’t actually dead, O’ wonderful elder. It’s eating the flock again, you said it yourself.”

“Did you follow the tracks?”

“Well, yes.”

“Then, by the wisdom of the village, the beast is slain.”

The elder waved goodbye and retired to her tent. A frayed slither of sheepskin leather fell from her shoulder as she ducked under the canvas. The young hunter stood bemused for a moment, before another great roar frightened him back to bed too.

Stefan Matthews is a dream-smith, an illusion-weaver, a forger of fantasia. Well, that’s what he claims. When he isn’t busy being self-absorbed he is studying for his MA in Creative Writing and Publishing.

It's Time We prickle with the promise of an uninvited storm She’s come across north easterly and has the rivers torn The tension draws my insides and my wanting further out The Heavy drums are hanging Stale breath between two mouths as you baton down the hatches of your Body, brain and soul The water comes a-knocking Come to take its toll For I was never yours love Belonging to the sky The singing water Hot wet beat The thunderstorm and I So I scramble up the rushing steps And out into the night Where every inch of me is kissed She sets my skin alight My bare feet pound the spoiled earth Taking us to town I throw my arms open wide and hail my lover down Poem and Illustration by Bryony Moores O'Sullivan

15

PROSE POEM

nI yna esac ynam t h ere asid t g vah t sih eb e nemeer fI .cipo noc e n st w ulc raf oot recnoc n yrt e w nois ivorp o e n w i s ded pus h gn er ot eht a dluo .elp w a hc lba eb si sisab rofeB e e e vah c s e t o ,o dnu noc ew tuo yna redisno a dn eunit ts ita , t no idna od i gn isnoc o t e m fo s eB ?red M c esua TO

n

e e i l l a t s y r

C

In any case there have been far too many disagreements con-

cerning this topic. If we try now to reach a conclusion we should be able to, provided the basis is sound and supple. Before we continue, do we have any outstanding items of consideration to consider? Because if there are let us make note of them first of all, so that upon a new occasion we can make sense of them, an exercise that will, I think we are all in agreement in saying, provide the sought-after foundations for our reaching conclusions beneficial.

Magnificent. We are almost ready to begin. It has been going on now for some time. In another amount of time we will have resolved. And after such a resolute pronouncement of the principles upon which we agree or are about to, there will be more. The rule presently in effect is as follows;

BE

ED

You and I have already agreed upon the nature of certain things.

Nonetheless endlessly does it become necessary to check in with each other and reaffirm our mutual commitments. If we can’t reach a solution now then tomorrow we will have to really put our knuckles to the ground and have a proper good think about what’s under discussion. Now that I think about it we really must consider that before anything else. We mustn't allow any aberrative non-conclusions to obscure our view of the future.

Such a thing is far too important to leave to others.

The following discourse requires that both parties agree upon the following – the rule is to tell the truth.

That there is out of the way. We can return now to what I was telling you.

An anaemic sky disappears under the lamentations of innumerable portents gradually. Tunnelled-out and birthed was red brush and primordial talons suspended the whole under the cupola. The shattered face breathed grins as it could no longer dissimulate, to the dismay of the bones. But really the rattling skull was secretly pleased and it barked with the foxes in the night and cultivated humorous excuses to give to itself. A crimson stage reveals the orphaned truth while the heart of the father languishes. This new memory you have is a fresh instance of the old type –

Let’s pause there just momentarily and not get too impatient with each other.

Perhaps a polemical note here will suffice to illustrate the problem. The most dedicated to being deceived are those to whom everything is obvious – “well obviously” – people for whom reality is justified after it passes through them. The refrain “of course” is to be banned hereafter from the present discussion. We are not inside the house. We are on a terrible promontory recklessly.

In the antechamber is awaited the final sentence. Blistering voices console infants as to the inevitable success of life. But here comes a soldier. From the conscripted regiments. You understand how he looks. He wears aching grey boots, ash-bitten, that limp onwardly with the whole lot in tow. He wears his helmet low and his stripes face to the north where the rolling mists are highlighted by the setting sun. Undone is he by being backlit which makes him indescribable.

Propositions: To tell a lie is to not tell the truth.

To tell a truth is to not tell a lie.

Assertion: there are as many truths as lies plus one.

We’ve got to the bottom of that one haven't we. Time for some exercise.

>> 16

Test one – which one of the days in the sequence did the starved man write that he had betrayed his own pen?

1 Blue Day Red Day White Day We only know for certain what the correct answer is because of the evidence presented as such in favour of the conclusion. Yet it has become harder for us, you see, to agree as a community on things like this as self-evidencing and not worthy of suspicion.

What methodology was used here? What are the vested interests of those that have designed the test? Such concerns are paralysing. It has been, so far, the aim of this article to not only address these questions and draw our attention to them, but also to interrogate them and allow us to think about them. It would be easier to surmount these concerning troubles of ours were the priests not burnishing the throne in secret, raising vertiginous spears above the heads of the proud serfs, who, stridently, have been continuing onwards. Images present themselves. The mind washes them and they become another. Wagons roll forward and are randomly accessed by some. Entirely without pause does the tearing wheel go. Supposedly unsuspect but circumvented. At another point which we haven't reached, the eyes do dart and the knees do slacken. Presently we have all been unconsciously pondering if it is the case or not that the syllogism tells a lie. You did well with that last sequence – let's try another:

2

cnI a n L s ed ranu c e i tn n o ro s n

At the centre is the apex. The impossible citadel leans and creaks and the scientists bend over the beakers and jars that fill with smoke and give life a living once again as a facsimile and an occupation. The sin-eaters crouch in the hamlets to receive their damnation in a morsel and goblet on a shining tray and the messenger falls down the steps of the palace and empties his satchel over the marbled floor at the entrance to the city. Blindingly illuminated and brilliant are the faces while the emperor watches from the throne room and the bow moves across the strings without an agent yet more agency for it. But the satchel has gathered itself up once more and it advances forth on legs moving faster and one day it will knock on the door and you will answer and the message will not reach your senses, however all will become clear, if we give this just a moment's pause.

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.

2 Iron. Son. Lunar. Incandescent. Incandescent.

No, it’s inscrutable isn’t it. Maybe we really have reached the end, or are at least tumbling towards it with a heavy desperation without precedent. Singularly, we have allied unspokenly on some things yet significant difficulties remain. I think now that I was incorrect to say above that we aren’t too tired of all this.

Illustrations by Grace Crabtree

17

CULTURE

Re-View

Three Films About Borders Jack Wightman

The recently departed Peter Bogdanovich was

one of the great filmmakers of his generation, but while New Hollywood was out making rock ’n’ roll movies, Bogdanovich took his cue from classical Hollywood where storytelling was straight, dialogue was flamboyant, and romance ended with a pan to the window. He was also one of the most thoughtful and dedicated cinephiles to fall in love with the art-form, once stating, “There are no old movies really – only movies you have already seen and ones you haven’t.” With this in mind, let’s take a look at three movies that may have slipped by you when they were bright, shiny, and new.

Since this issue of MOOP is all about barriers and borders, we have to start with a classic image of the border: Mexico. It’s a cliche of the Wild West that no matter how many dollars are stolen or bodies stacked up, Mexico is a haven where outlaws can grow old in the sun. A terrific novel that turns this idea on its head is Jim Thompson’s The Getaway (1958), a classic heist and head-forthe-border story that ends in an obscure land that is a kind of hell. While this was cut from the Peckinpah adaptation in 1972, it must have been firmly in the mind of Thompson fan Quentin Tarantino when penning From Dusk Till Dawn (1996).

Directed by Robert Rodriguez, From Dusk Till Dawn is a single film acting as its own double bill, a full grindhouse experience, before the earnest homage Tarantino and Rodriguez would attempt a decade later. The film follows the Gecko brothers on the run as they take a family hostage and head for Mexico, but what they find there is a lot farther south of heaven. Like the opening track of Pulp Fiction (1994) abruptly channel-hopping from Dick Dale to Kool & the Gang, the tonal switch of From Dusk Till Dawn is unexpected and thrilling, going from a crime flick with whip-smart QT dialogue (that even he half manages to deliver), to a grotesque horror flick full of Tom Savini’s practical effects wizardry. It’s mad, but a hell of a lot of fun.

While borders are often between countries, Berlin’s historical divide has served as a fascinating backdrop for filmmakers, including Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Dario Argento’s cornea-scorching ‘giallo’, Suspiria (2018), and Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1965), both exploring fractured identities. While more commonly used as a backdrop for serious exploration, the divided city has also been a source for comedy, including the brilliant Goodbye Lenin (2003), following a young man post-fall of the wall desperate to maintain the illusion of a communist East Berlin so as not to shock his mother back into a coma.

as Some Like It Hot (1958) or The Apartment (1960), but is every bit as sharply written and a thousand times faster. It follows West Berlin’s Coca-Cola executive McNamara (James Cagney) tasked with looking after his boss’s socialite daughter who, of course, falls for a passionate communist East Berliner, leaving the exec to clear up the mess before the boss flies in. Cagney fizzes with the energy of a shaken Coke can, firing off joke after joke that will leave you breathless either from laughter or the relentless pace. This is the very definition of ‘they don’t make 'em like they used to’.

“ Cagney fizzes with the energy of a shaken Coke can. This is the very definition of ‘they don’t make 'em like they used to’. ” While physical walls and fences hold sway in our imaginations, sometimes it’s the invisible boundaries of language that can be the hardest to overcome. Miscommunication can be the backbone of comedy, or provoke immense frustration and a unique kind of terror in audiences. Brazil (1985) is a frustrating vision of bureaucratic doublespeak worthy of Kafka, while being unable to convince anyone of a desperate situation in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is the stuff of nightmares. Communication is one of humankind’s greatest tools in triumphant movies like Lumet’s 12 Angry Men (1957), but sometimes clear communication and common sense simply fail, as is the case in the exemplary Paths Of Glory (1957).

This World War I drama directed by Stanley Kubrick follows Col. Dax (Kirk Douglas) who is to serve as defence for three soldiers on trial to be executed as a warning against cowardice after a failed attempt to storm a strategic point. While often described as a cold and emotionally distant filmmaker, Kubrick's Paths of Glory burns with a passion for communication and understanding as our best course to overcome barriers, and the disaster inherent in failing to do either. The film closes with one of his most emotive scenes, that of a young German girl singing in her native tongue to French soldiers who don’t understand a word, but feel every word of the song.

My favourite comedy of this kind is Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three (1961), a picture that may not be as instantly recognisable

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Illustrations by Grace Crabtree

Illustr

Object Lesson Skyler Herzog

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The object of this lesson steps away from previous

lessons in that this object is purely theoretical: the Dyson Sphere. These enormous megastructures were conceived by Freeman J. Dyson and would be built around a star, covering a large percentage of the orbit it resides in.

The purpose of such a construction would be to harness the immense amount of energy the star gives off. Dyson Spheres have been the talk of scientists and writers alike due to the massive implications such a construction would have.

Dyson Spheres are far beyond the engineering capabilities of our species at present; however if a civilisation were to acquire the necessary resources, and the knowhow to build one, they could supply free energy for billions of years in quantities hitherto undreamt. If we refer ourselves to the Kardashev scale, a civilisation with the capabilities of constructing a Dyson Sphere would be classed as a Type-2 civilisation. What about us, I hear you ask? Our present state of technological and societal advancement puts us at just over 0.6. We’re not even a Type-1 civilisation where we could harness all the power that reaches our planet from the Sun. For now, the realisation of a Dyson Sphere is in our minds and on our pages.

Illustration by Grace Crabtree 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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