LINGUAE issue 1 FLASHING COLOUR
Contributors in alphabetical order Lily Bunney clasticartistic Paul H Charlie Jiminez Conor McConville Charlie Mitchell Olivia Neilson Alice Papadacci Ulyses Razo Cameron Wilson
A Series of Bright and Sunny Days Lily Bunney
Their little bodies lined the window sill, the poor little bugs had all died. On the window sill where I keep my plants - I got an infestation of fruit flies earlier in the year and hadn’t managed to get rid of them, so the area was always full of small black dots that only flew up into the air when I tried to water my peace lily - they’d all died overnight, and my housemates were happy to see them dead. Everywhere I looked that day I saw them. In the little bits of space where buildings join walkways, on the cig bin. Dead butterflies and regular flies and maggots and mosquitoes. It was an unusually sunny day, so at lunch I sat on the grass outside the school and stroked the ground. I ran my hand over the earth and I thought about all the dead ants that I couldn’t see. Probably a lot of dead bugs in the ground. I tried to get them out, and I started digging at the earth with the folk I’d used to eat my pasta, but very quickly a security guard came up and told me I couldn’t be doing that. After lunch one of my afternoon students was very sad. I asked what was up, taking them aside as all the other students got into their line and moved to their next lesson, and the sad looking student said they were sad because both of their pet cats were very sick and had to go to the vets. They said it was very sudden, they were barely grown up cats, they said, they’re kittens, we’re kittens together they said, but now they’re both sick all of a sudden, and they said they were worried because the other week they’d let one of the cats lick the top of their can of fanta fruit twist and it had a bit of fanta pooled in the divot at the top of the can, so when the kitten went to lick the lid they definitely drank the fanta, and they made this face as they did and looked a bit distressed, and what if the fanta had poisoned them. I said I didn’t think it had and if it was going to poison them it would have happened straight away. I said it wasn’t their fault, and I said that change happens in life and sometimes its good change and sometimes it's bad change, and it’s not any one in particulars fault when things change for the worse. I didn’t want to tell them it was going to be okay. You can’t promise that. And they didn’t seem all that inspired by anything I said but I hadn’t thought they would be when I’d delivered my monologue. So I gave them a sticker. The next day I woke up and all the birds were sick. They’d looked a bit peaky the night before but I guess their health had deteriorated in the night, I can’t describe it, what sick birds look like and I’m not sure what part of their body language was indicating unwellness. It wasn’t in their face like it would be with people. And there was lots of bird shit everywhere like every bird in the whole of London had got diarrhoea. This concerned me, but I wasn’t sure if it was something I was imagining or something
everyone had noticed and was pranging out about in private or in a public arena I didn’t participate in, like the radio. It was spring and I’d started to notice the birds singing in previous weeks. They’d sung very loudly, which was actually a thing; like a science thing, my friend told me about it. She said “birds in the city sing louder to compete with noise pollution and it’s actually really bad for them, for their voices”. But anyway on the day after all the bugs had died they had stopped singing. As I was waiting for the bus I stared at the ground. It was a bright day, sunny, intense. More light in the air, maybe too much light, and a lot of people seemed to be looking down. It was a small bus stop with lots of people at it, and the bus was always 15 minutes late and there was always someone very angry, sometimes it was me but not today. I stared at my feet and found myself running the tips of my shoes over an actual fucking layer, thick layer, of bird shit. I knew it was gross to paw through the shit but my shoes already were a bit messed up, as were everyone else's. And it was something I wanted to explore. A way of uncovering something about the ground. Honestly I was a bit tempted to touch it, just to see, see what was below and what it was, and try to understand what was happening by feeling out the world with my finger tips. The bus arrived and I walked up the isle, which was also a bit fucked with all the animal shit. People's faces ranged from neutral to angry. The older women who’d ride the bus to Lewisham mostly seemed quite aware of the ground and also quite disgusted, the wheels of their little trolleys in bright floral patterns dragging chaotic tracks through the sludge. But, yeah, generally people seemed to not take much notice. I tried to listen to the conversations around me, and it was mainly the kids who rode the bus into school with a parent or guardian who seemed to be discussing the situation. “Why is there bird shit everywhere”, “Don’t use that kind of language” “sorry mum… why is there bird poo everywhere” “I don’t know.” “Is there something wrong” “I don’t know”. The next day I woke up, and all the birds seemed to have died. And I could see it in the sky, the colours were changing. The sky was too full, much much too saturated with light - which didn’t even seem to come from the sun, it came from the west, from the horizon. The pavements had dried and cracked and reformed, the animal shit on them had undergone some transition, and it seemed to glitter. Bird bodies lay every few metres on the ground. I hadn’t thought they many birds existed. Some were parakeets, their beautiful radiant vibrant luminous green shining from the dirt covered ground. They radiated like the world. I tried to walk to the bus stop but had to turn around, my eyes had began to white out, I think I was experiencing snow blindness without the snow. Something poured down, the atmosphere filled with a new colour, a pounding colour. And I sat by the windowsill with my back to the outside, curtains almost all the way drawn closed. I phoned work to say I wasn’t coming in today. No one at work answered. I checked my emails. The girl, the crying girl with the kittens, she had emailed to say
that the kittens had died. She said she hadn’t stopped crying, she had missed school yesterday, could she have the homework. I imagined her crying over these two beautiful kittens. One ginger and one brown, I imagined, solid colours, no markings, big orange eyes. Light was shining through a window behind her, blues and red and greens, a bit like stained glass generated from the sheer intensity of the light, the way its strength bounced off green leaves and red flowers. More and more light flooded in, breaking in through other windows; through the windows on the opposite side of the room first, through upstairs windows, then through the chimney. The light tore through the house, forcing, contracting, expanding the door, coming in through the gap between the door and the frame. It opened the letter box, coming through like a pressure hose, spraying vortexes of white into the greying carpet. It found its way through the air bubbles in the bricks and mortar, and once it had found a way in it wore the stone down, it tunnelled from the outside to the inside. The girl and her cats were now entombed in light. Their skin was so luminous details couldn’t be made out, they existed as beings of energy. The tears had evaporated, the fur burnt off. And still the light came in. Now colours came back to the world, oranges and reds, heat, so much heat and light it made a sound, a buzzing metallic clenching which built and built to a roar. The house was burnt away, and so were the neighbours’ houses, the street, the cars parked on the road and the trees parked in the ground. The dead birds on the street were gone, all lost to the light. All lost up until my house, which was also gone. The curtains ripped away. Now it was sky and colour and sound, and nothing separate us anymore. The air screamed.
Bacchus #63 recreates Elaine De Kooning's series of paintings on the Roman god of wine as a collage of lightly obscured photos of Jackie Kennedy reacting to her husband's assassination - of whom De Kooning painted another series of portraits. Cameron Wilson.
After Mary
Green sadness is the sadness of the leaves of the peace lily I gave you, which draped your walls when I visited in December. It’s the sadness of the scissors I use to cut my poems, which are less and less about you. It is the sadness of the lettuce of my neighbors, their vines, which the magpies are often making use of.
White sadness is the sadness of that May day in Seattle, in the attic, the sadness of the sky and my window and our bodies. It’s the sadness of the pages of the notebook you gave me, which I am halfway through.
Purple sadness is the sadness of the sky on acid. It’s the sadness of the smoothies my friend makes me every time I visit. The blended berries, pastries.
Black sadness is the sadness of the bottle you gave me——I use it every day. It’s my phone asleep, waiting to be turned on by some message.
Red sadness is the sadness of your new sweater. It is the sadness of your lipstick, it is the sadness of your lipstick. The napkins and glasses it touches. The faces.
Ulyses Razo
U. F. O. RIA
An air of powdered paint We floated down the field like it was Holi festival all the soft pinks suffusing the air illuminating t-shirts the colour of candy floss. "Is it as nice to look at my face as it is to look at yours?” You nodded and smiled like in a far away dream. I had the sensation of levitating like I was on a magic carpet ride I heard fits of laughter resounding from my mouth someone was leading the group I had no idea where we were going like walking in a thick crowd at an ecstatic parade I would have kept drifting forward endlessly floating through the crowd of colour not needing to be anywhere or see anyone but hold you and bathe in your beautiful face.
An electric billboard seizes the whole street, arresting ambulance blue Café Chic battles to out-glow Perfect Chicken kids running with unbridled joy from a dark alley dropping cans as they go jittering KEYS CUT peeping its way through the shutters Caribbean flavours from the brightly lit late night spot and cigarette smoke and that man finishing a Magnum by the bin. I mistake a street light for the moon and gaze up at it in momentary awe.
Olivia Neilson
ENSEMBLE PARADE
CHARLIE JIMENEZ These pictures reflect a period of infancy in my creativity which I was trying to explore the range of colour in my language. At the period of shooting ‘Ensemble Parade’ and ‘Wedded’ I had just been suspended from my studies of animation, with no money, a DSLR camera, and a desperation to make imagery. Photography became a therapeutic alternative form for me to visually explore the realm of carnival dreamscapes.
WEDDED ‘Ensemble Parade’ is one of many landscape ensemble images which were taken in the hayfields of Osmington Drove in Dorchester, the skies were vividly blue until late, and my costumes aroused many insects. In the case of ‘Wedded’, my presence aroused many wild horses which are vaguely seen as little dots in the middle of the picture. Both pictures explore a playful sense of visual release the first has a melancholic undertone due to the middle screaming figure, and the second is absurdist, I took great pleasure in throwing all of those dolls into the sky, a toy box was inside each doll, and let out a mangled mechanical screech as they hit the ground. These pictures were all taken on a self-timer, I would run into frame and throw a baby up into the sky while quickly posing into one of the many symmetrical figures.
Scale ‘n’ Polish by Conor McConville
Foudre D’attente Quick silver-white darts sleeking below the surface in an eye-switch ‘bodies stacked high with mouths full of cotton’ young Grandfather chirped from the banyan tree met with no expression, day to day, do you do this often? every day, or there so I grab the rope and the root of the tree then place my foot in mud-holds eyes closed, eyes closed mouth open my mouth is wilder than its country, glanced at reluctantly by Ocatwo. Do not pity! I am proud of this mouth, see this darkness is mines the oysters do not send their spies to fill up my lungs instead they sing that black dots the undergreen as seen through cracks electric three thousand a year will sleep in your bed (my sincerest apologies) but the threads will never bare. Grandfather hoots, comb slicking back his hair ‘burn the bodies, eat the flies burn the bodies, eat the flies’
Charlie Mitchell
This is an extract from Thunder and Lightning by Camille Flammarion. It’s a tad silly but also pretty cool and you can read it for free on Archive, linked here, worth flicking through, every page you land on has something fun written on it!