An online magazine of poetry and short fiction www.harkmagazine.org Info – harkeditor@outlook.com EDITORS Matthew Apperley and Owen Vince All rights reserved. Work published remains under the ownership of its respective author. Hark reserves all reproduction rights. 2014
Contents Editorial Harkview with Cynan Jones
Poetry Zelda Chappel
Butter Knife
James Field
Robin Hood in Venice 51: mestre
Luciana Francis Arrow and Confetti Gregory Hoare
Céret
Steve Klepetar
Fish for your Supper
Fred Pollack
Anubis
Richard Skinner
Three Poems
Flash Fiction Jennifer Brough The Farmhouse Alan Beard
Thought he was God
Frances Gapper
Society of lost souls
Stephen Ramey
Something else
Short Fiction Barun Bajracharya Time to say Goodbye Stuart Snelson Afterword Contributors
Erosions
Editorial When we founded HARK, it was because we wanted to access and promote great writing that didn’t just mimic reality, but manipulated it. Mimicry within such an aesthetic can, and does exist, but it is not fixed entirely within the realms of the real, but in the beyond that exists within the real, within a humming bird’s shattered perception at meeting its mothy double. In this issue you will find the painful, the beautiful, and the obscure. You will read writing from writers who perceive the strange, who lengthen perception to a cliff edge and, yet, take it further. This to us is the foundation of great writing. It stems from the notion of observing the world so closely, so intimately, that it is impossible simply to be a “realist”. The “strange” is not extra to life, but intimately woven into our perceptions of it. Any aesthetic vision that focuses on the unfamiliar within the familiar cannot fail to acknowledge the importance of Victor Shklovsky’s theory of “defamiliarisation”. For Shklovsky, art, and writing in particular, was the perfect platform to decondition mundane human understanding of the real by placing the real in a strange light or form and by doing so, making it “strange”. However, as our contributors have shown, the process of “making strange” does not rigidly adhere to strict theoretical boundaries. Theory by its very nature demands convention from its adherents, even if it purports to do the opposite. Individual perception, which is the basis of all true art, is also the basis of how we make the real unreal. It is not necessary or desirable, however, to force the creation of the strange so as to perceive strangeness, but to extend our perception towards what is already there. Since we started Hark some two months ago, we have been focussed on creating something that flows, will be sustainable and most importantly will be enjoyable to read. For these reasons we have tried to keep the magazine as “clean” as possible. We have no plans to move into the review market nor partake in any other art form: this magazine is first and foremost about our contributor’s writing. Having said that, every issue will feature an interview (Harkview) with an author that we feel emphasises our aesthetic in some way. We are thrilled to announce Cynan Jones, author of The Dig, The Long Dry and Everything I found on the Beach, as our first interviewee. He was extremely playful with our questions and gave great insight into the workings of, not only his own work, but of art in general.
We hope to grow our interview series into a valuable collection, featuring some of the best new and established writers around. We will also be including an “afterword” essay in each issue, focusing on some subject that – in life, art, and whatever comes between them – has particularly struck us. In this issue, Owen talks about surrealism and order after visiting Barcelona. All that’s left to say is a huge thank you to our readers and contributors, without whom, this magazine would not exist.
Matthew Apperley
HARKVIEW Cynan Jones Interview by Owen Vince
I read Cynan Jones' recent novel, The Dig, in a state of transfixed anxiety. It is a novel of bluntly beautiful language and a tensely intimate portrayal of rural life. The story concerns two men; a farmer coming to terms with the death of his wife, and a gruff badger baiter – one man who brings fragile life into the world, doing the patient, physical work of lambing, and another, who with indifferent violence digs out burrows, mangles corpses, lurking from the police who would arrest him for what he does. The story is of how their relationships to the land both connect and set them apart. Jones specialises in the short novel form, his other books including The Long Dry and Everything I found on the Beach. We asked him about his novels and the craft of writing.
Owen: Hello Cynan, and thanks for agreeing to answer some questions for HARK. Firstly, January saw the release of your new novel, The Dig. In it, there is a powerful and compelling sense of place and landscape. How important is this sense of place in your writing?
Cynan: Place can add allegorical strength perhaps, but a good story should be able to play out anywhere. The focus has to be on characters and events. To start with, the place, the things around them are secondary. If you choose to write characters and events into a place you know intimately though, they can securely belong. A story can really come alive then.
Owen: Your writing has a strong connection with Wales. How important to you is the Welsh literary tradition, and how do you position yourself with it?
Cynan: Ultimately it’s about working as strongly as you can without being drawn into any debate as to whether you are or are not something. That’s for others to decide.
In pure writing terms, the Welsh literary tradition is no more important to me than any other literary tradition. Welsh writers weren’t taught in schools, and, other than Dylan Thomas, I had no real knowledge of them until quite late on. Even if I’d heard of titles, they weren’t available. That’s changed now with The Library of Wales series committed to keeping important works by past Welsh authors in print. Start with So Long Hector Bebb.
Owen: The Dig is an extremely muscular and physical book. There is a great deal of very raw, intimate detail about things and physicality. Was this something you'd consciously chosen to do with language in the book, or had it emerged from the story?
Cynan: The story sets the rules. If you choose to tell a story about farming and brutal acts it has to be muscular and physical. You can’t back out. The visceral nature of the two key processes – say lambing and ‘capturing’ – demanded a language with the same immediacy and sometimes exaggeration of experience as those processes themselves.
Owen: While The Dig is such a realistic book in many senses, it also felt like it was probing something more ancient, even mythological. You've written previous works inspired by Welsh mythology. Can you explain the role of this mythology in terms of how you write?
Cynan: Lambing time is very physical – not least the requirement to rhythmically check the animals throughout the day and night. A few weeks in, you’re tired, fundamentally, and somewhat robotic. Which turns everything a little spacey. That, the sense you’re part of an ancient and very deep-seated process, the fact you’re alone in a shed at four in the morning – these things all combine to create a sense of strangeness. The mythological, sometimes semi-Biblical shade of the language represents that. (Again, the story set that rule). But also, vital to creating a resounding story, there has to be more than what’s on the page. The reader should instinctively feel a sense of biggerness. That, I would say, is the territory of myth.
Owen: The Dig really pares down language to utterances – there doesn't seem to be any superfluous dialogue. How difficult was it to position the book largely within the interior spaces of its characters – to really get under their skin?
Cynan: Both the key characters in The Dig are alone. There’s little requirement to talk. It’s ultimately a book about the spaces we inhabit (lambing shed, badger sett, grief). Things therefore had to stay largely within.
Owen: How do you write? Do you have the book mapped out before you begin to write, or do you let it unfold as you go? Cynan: In most cases I don’t write until I can see the story. I do the thinking first, any research that might be needed (and often isn’t), then – when it feels ready – I sit down. First off, I try to write like I’m remembering. Once the main narrative is down, the really hard work starts. Structure, balance, pace, soundtrack.
Owen: HARK is hoping to encourage new and emerging writers in the UK. What advice do you have for young and emerging writers today?
Cynan: Read. Owen: What is in the pipeline for you at the moment? Are you working on any new material?
Cynan: Granta have just read a first draft of what may or may not be the next book. As per my response above, now the hard work starts.
You can follow him on Twitter @Cynan1975
“Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!” Vladimir Nabokov
Butter Knife Zelda Chappel
In the corner, a boy peels my skin with a butter knife while I watch from the door. He wants it to spiral like orange peel. It falls like scales, instead. He rarely talks. He chooses instead to stab the air slow and deliberately. This way he can be sure it registers. I am meticulous with accounts. I know the bottom line. He fingers my skin like a typewriter whose keys are jammed, writes letters that lack true eloquence. I cannot feel a thing.
Robin Hood in Venice 51: Mestre James Field
when rent got too much Robin took to the mainland but never settled, never slept
in the cinderblock spread of Mestre everything untied remained unstirred
not like there wasn’t romance to the concrete canyons life coursed down them like a wave between rocks a wash of fur coats, antique markets, fly posters yet Robin longed to unmoor something an Astra, a parked bus, a wheelie bin & watch it drift away with coke bottles condoms, dead animals, shoes
Arrow and Confetti Luciana Francis
He shoots ahead, arrow-like Fiery and red-aimed Towards the bull's eye.
I scatter like confetti On a parade, half way Across the sky
We meet. Released by Tribal battles and pagan Celebrations.
Our flight will forever be Celebrated, consummated In mid-air.
CĂŠret Gregory Hoare
Cigarette smoke drops with the thumping double-bass, hangs mellow around us.
Old couples sway beneath window-shutters, shaking Mediterranean hair to the tapping snare drum.
An accordion growls Gaelic rhythms and dark mouths chew in time, heads nodding slower in the hot southern night.
Fish for your Supper Steve Klepetar
Ok now, fish for your supper the line is taut water swirls around your boat faces bend time into funhouse shapes and all the gulls blasted by light and rendered blind.
What’ll you do, my blue-eyed son now that the cave mouth is blocked and the others have gone home? What will you fry in the speckled pan tonight?
As if bushes remembered the cold, as if sunshine could be aware of its glint
on snow, as if your memory could bear a sight like that a girl slumped against a wall, one shoe broken and blood dripping from her nose
as if your tenderness was not an empty cup, as if a thousand coins would jingle like the coming of a sleigh, a harlequin, a gang of guests arriving in the hallway dressed for hunger and for joy a thousand dancers swirling on your polished floor.
Anubis Fred Pollack Prayer for us secular types goes sideways, to remembered friends or those we imagine or read about. It walks the difficult night land that belongs clearly neither to compassion nor self-pity. And as the prayer of others in its flight is hobbled by hypocrisy and guilt, and by the vulgar fact we know but which they won’t admit about God, so too is ours. In this comfortable chair and room, am I thinking of one who might now own that springless scratchy couch and rent that dark apartment in a slum, or only of myself when I sat there? Certainly not of the old former tenant who left on a wall that cheap gravure of Christ in the wilderness, brooding upon his coming pain.
We want some of the same responses as they for whom cathedrals are the phone they whisper into: forgiveness, reassurance. And despite emails and calls that may arrive a lifetime late we likewise don’t receive them. “I’m alright,” the voice would say. “My work turned out as well as it deserved, like yours. You may have helped; if not, you’d know. And had I truly suffered I would be part of the greater silence that no one, you included, cares to hear. Each night beside my bed a being with the snout of a jackal weighs my heart against the feather of the good; each night I turn away. Yet I think he’s benign: he is like all of us in exile, a god with no myth, a myth without a theme.”
Nefertiti For J Richard Skinner From the opened gates of Ophir, owls, cuckoos, asses and dogs tumble. Apes clamber over sands, peacocks screech and fly into acacias. Later, Nebuchadnezzar exited with all the gold, sandalwood and ivory in the world, razed Jerusalem, went mad and ate grass. Then Samson left, his hair shorn, and ended up eyeless in Gaza. ‘Once I moved about like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all.’ Watching all this is Nefertiti, her bronze brow at odds with the sun. She basks in the warmth to stir the sangue dormido in her veins. In her eyes, flecks of mica sparkle. They have the look of possession, like in the eyes of women for their men and children.
She smells of neroli, of orris butter, the roots of Iris—floral, obscenely fleshy, like the odour beneath a breast or between buttocks. She attracts civet cats, which sit at her feet. She pays no mind. She is a sphinx without a secret, a colossal ennui who, like an elephant, has an appointment with the end of the world.
Parma Violets Richard Skinner Among the colonnades, Count Pierre stalks and surveys the blooms. He must select the best-sized to abscond to Genoa, where a boat awaits for England. The tiny petals bugle their lilac time. Blurry, tribal. They say they are sterile. He has heard it said that love can grow inside one, no matter how rough the ground, just as a twig thrown into a salt mine will, after many years, come out crystalline. Karen Philpott and I would meet behind her estate on the wasteland. Her bloodless face, her hair straggly, unkempt. She gave me a Parma Violet and I placed it on my tongue. It tasted of iron. She said it was OK because she used them like the pill. They say the yews here can ‘walk’ by dropping branches, which then take root and become a trunk. Diving into the ground head-first, the cemetery is never still. They say a yew can walk an acre a year.
Scent of Magnolia Richard Skinner In this bored park, green has turned yellow, all night nacreous petals of magnolia have dropped. Tired old sparks that refuse to ignite; the faulty machines have finally stopped. You are further away, on an aphasic shore, a figure locked in the pattern of a wall. The metallic surface, sulphur-like in the sun, renders the paper ineffectual. Children play, dogs chase, the ball is always thrown out of reach. On and on they run, stirring the petals from the sleepy floor, reciting old speeches in arcades and halls.
The Farmhouse Jennifer Brough Eyes to the dirt. Wind sweeps through Tom’s thin white hair and makes the tall corn dance. It’s not the hottest day they’ve had this year, last one was ’54 or so, but it’s warm enough for Ada’s lemonade recipe. Ripest ones only, she said. He sits on his wooden porch staring at the cracked ground waiting for his daughter to arrive. When he intermittently lifts the drink to his lips, ice cubes chatter as if they are brushed by the same breeze that makes the wind chime sound. The cows’ bodies move like slow bone ships across the bright green field, occasionally slurping up water from the troughs Tom filled this morning. Their delicate lashes barely flutter when he pats their heads in the pale dawn. They’re used to his company. It never gets lonely up here. Not with the open back trucks packed with school kids on vacation going berry picking. On a calm day, it’s easy to hear their chatter and shouts before the engine grumble. Tom always walks to the white fence post by the mailbox to wave when the motor hums passed. Though the young freckled faces are new each summer, they all know Tom. He is part of the season’s fabric woven and handed down through generations of older brothers and sisters, before they grow up and try what most kids do. But before drinking, music and opposite sex, there’s always time for the warm juice of a freshly picked berry. He lifts his hand and calls, “leave some berries for old Tom, eh?” with a rusty grin. They laugh back. Tom whistles absentmindedly from the porch and takes in his land. No, not his land, God’s land, but he knows they share it fair and good. Tom rises to pace the field’s perimeter that belonged to his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before that. He wiles away many afternoons imagining the family tree all the way down to the roots, until it closes up into a seed. Pausing to dig his hands in the threadbare overall pockets, his fingers find a square of paper. His face knits itself in confusion as he pulls out a photograph. Staring at the black and white image, he sees Ada smiling ten years ago. She was always smiling, even at the end her face never changed. She didn’t believe in taking the medicine the doctor prescribed. Tom started crushing pills up in her meals, but she knew. Taking one sidelong glance at him, she’d say, why don’t you try it? Tom knew her time was getting close when she lost
that winking grin of hers. That was five years ago at the end of berry season. In the autumn, he buried her out in the yard, eyes to the dirt. He hadn’t seen that photograph for years. Never did wash his overalls as often as he should. As he looked at the once cherry red paint peeling from his farmhouse, Tom felt rain on his face, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
Thought he was God Alan Beard
He stole their eyes, being the closest he could get to their souls. He stole them with charm, with a bit of patter, a bit of posing. He was an expert with a knife and spoon. He had jars of them on shelves. When he took them the eyes lost their colour. Eventually he grew bored with them, and made them look the other way.
Society of Lost Souls Frances Gapper The advertisement had popped up in her Facebook news feed – Society of Lost Souls. And here it was. It actually did exist. A discreet entrance on a busy road, the name etched on a tarnished brass rectangle fixed to a plain door. Pressing the bell she heard a distant chime. The door clicked open and she entered a vast hall. Sunlight pouring down from a cupola failed to obliterate the many shadows – young and old, men and women. They scattered at her approach, pulling down their sleeves to hide their wrists or turning up their collars. The Society Rulebook opened in front of her like a flower. It hung in the air, faintly vibrating as though borne by invisible hummingbirds. Pages turned rapidly, stopping at Rules for Rescuers in large type, centered. They were: Eat Nothing. Touch Nobody. Don’t Look Round. The book flapped shut and withdrew. Plates laden with bright, sweet things – peppermint creams, lollies, candy necklaces, fairy cakes – came floating past temptingly. Except she wasn’t tempted. Whoever ran the Society of Lost Souls obviously thought she was still a child, or childish. Knowing this emboldened her like a disguise. As the rejected plates all huffily flew away she noticed a woman in a flowery dress beckoning to her. An old woman – no a young one, gentle and sad. “Have you seen my sister?” the girl asked. “Do you know where she is?” The woman cooed like a woodpigeon: through the door, through the door. She moved aside and there it was, a door set neatly in a paneled wall. Its round bronze handle almost froze the girl’s hand. She went through and fell into darkness. Then she forgot most things except why she was here and who for. Everything became nothing. She woke in another in-between place, a corridor, and hoped she hadn’t done anything wrong. Voices chattered like sparrows in a nearby room; she peered through the doorway. There was Lucy in a blue beaded dress, 1920s style. Smiling, about to read one of her poems aloud. A library or clubroom, it seemed to be. Dinner-jacketed men lounged in armchairs.
Lucy! Lucy! – she tried to call. No sound came, she was voiceless here, but Lucy turned. Pages slipped out of her hands and fluttered down, vanishing before they touched the inlaid parquet floor. She repeated her sister’s name and Lucy drifted towards her. Follow me, she said and resolutely led the way. But then ah, her heart wavered. She looked behind, glanced back down the corridor. Farewell it must now be. Her sister blew her a kiss and ran off laughing.
Something Else Stephen Ramey Arthur had handcuffed himself to a bridge again, bushy orange beard providing a bright contrast to its sky blue metal. This time it was the Mill Street, that old truss on the edge of town that greeted visitors coming from the west. I remember finding a travel brochure along the river touting Mill Street as a fitting welcome to our historic village. Someone had scribbled "Rust, Holes, Ugliness, Me," in the margin. It had the appearance of a shorthand shopping list, and I would have chuckled at the image of some poor soul shopping in WalMart for those ingredients had the red ink not reminded me of blood. "Come down," I said to Arthur. He had climbed a slanting beam, closed one cuff around his wrist, strung the connecting chain through the higher truss joint, and fixed the remaining cuff to his other arm. If he slipped, he would hang above the river like a slab of beef. "Can't," he said. "No key." "Where's the key, Arthur?" He angled his face toward the water. "Down there." Did you throw it, or drop it? "Have you got a spare in your locker?" Arthur lived at the City Shelter, and all of his possessions were in a footlocker beneath his cot. He shook his head. "No turning back this time, Sallygal. They'll have to leave the bridge or take me with her." A smile appeared within his beard. My frustration with Arthur thawed, and I was suddenly recalling that fine spring day when he showed me how to hear the voices of the dead. You press your right ear to the stone, see, Sallygal? The Ida Nadi. It's best to do this under a full moon, but I can show you now. I knelt, stealing a glance at the name etched in the headstone-forgive me for intruding David Bunch--and listened as intently as I knew how. Arthur had come out of a dark time after the brutal winter, and I was more than willing to participate if it meant I would see his smile again.
"That's the ticket, Sallygal, open up to the world around you. Feel the cold, hear the quiet." Cold, I thought. Quiet. Wait... That wasn't Arthur from memory, but his voice now. I opened my eyes and saw my arm extended, palm-up. Beyond it the slow churn of the river. A crooked line of ducks paddled across. I had leaned down along the truss. I pressed my ear to its metal. I am here, it said. I am here, I am here, a rhythmic cadence that was surely traffic, but seemed so much more. Laughter bounded between buildings, the City Shelter, Downtown Grille, empty warehouse, piano shop. Arthur nodded approval even as he winced. It must hurt to stand with his arms stretched above his shoulders. "Well, Sallygal?" he said. "Is she talking?" I pushed myself upright, and brushed the dandruff rust from my shirt. It was the sound of traffic. Not a single car had come across, but there were other bridges, busier roads. "Hold tight," I said. "I'll get a hacksaw." Someone had to remain sane. Someone had to understand the difference between reality and fantasy. "Bring me a beer," Arthur said. "They don't sell beer at the hardware," I said. "Have you asked? Maybe they call it something else." I started walking. "When you get back," Arthur yelled, "I'll show you how to sing with the wind."
Time to say Goodbye Barun Bajracharya The sky was unambiguously clear and the sun was on its full swing but inside him a thunderstorm was cutting its own umbilical cord. A squeaking melody leaked from his rocking chair matching the motion of to and fro. The back and forth motion resembled his swing between existence and burial. A low priced cigarette hung between his wrinkled lips and the smoke was forming a rainless cloud. He gazed outside the window towards the happy faces and blurted, “Sons of bitches.” It was his seventy-first birthday but there were neither gifts nor guests. And he certainly had ordered no pineapple cake. He received birthday kisses only from his whiskey and cigarettes. Anyone could interpret his eyes; he was starving for a companion but nobody served him the dish of empathy. He was hiding his anguish from the happy faces but all his fabrication washed away each time he dripped in reality. “Grandpa, why don’t you send your children to buy your groceries?” a young girl at the vegetable shop suggested. “I know your kind,” his thunder storm erupted, “You think you will always be this happy, happy young girl?” “But grandpa-” “Just pack the rotten potatoes and give me back my change.” The girl’s face turned sour but in no time, she was attending to another customer. “Do you want carrots, madam? It’s just forty rupees per kilo – totally fresh.” The word ‘fresh’ bit his ear drums; he moved away from the shop. “Who does she think she is? I have plucked Cinderellas far younger and enhanced than her when I was young.” He tried to dissolve in the thick crowd of Asan market but the happy faces kept scanning him. He returned home worn out. After a short nap he began slicing the potatoes. He didn’t wash them before slicing and it was intentional. He just dipped them in a bowl of fuzzy water for half of half a second and unleashed them on a greasy frying pan. He slowly chewed them one by one. Some of it got stuck in his fake front teeth but most made it through. His hands were too feeble to wash the dishes in cold water so he just left them unattended. And why did he have no hot water? Because his electricity was cut off last month as he could not pay the pending bills. It did not affect him that much; well,
nothing really did. He didn’t own a television or a radio. Reading was his beloved hobby though. He had over ninety books in his collection. He had been collecting them since his youth. He had spent so much time with those books that the books had thoroughly read him. The characters in those stories were his only friends now. In his youth, he had some real friends too, who didn’t live in castles with dragons and unicorns. Some deserted him when he finished his money and some isolated him when death hacked their time. Family was an awkward word in his dictionary. The only family he had was a son who lived in another city and a granddaughter who lived in another generation. Very few people knew that his son was in a mental asylum in Dharan. He hadn’t seen him in eleven years. The last time his granddaughter came to visit was seven years ago. Back then he nearly stabbed her drunk boyfriend. “You’re the reason why dad’s in a madhouse you old man,” she had yelled. Those words still echoed in his nightmares every now and then. That was when whiskey came to help him but Mr. Whiskey did not come alone. He came with Ms. Bills. He drank everyday and the liquor stabbed his wallet. He drank because he had no money. He drank because he had no sex. He drank because he was lonely. Well, he just drank because he was himself. Only the snoring time was when he didn’t touch the bottle. One not so fine Wednesday, he discovered there were only two hundred rupees left in his bank account. He didn’t give an ‘Oh my God’ expression because the word ‘God’ was never present in any of his conversations. While young, he had once joked, “Do you expect us to believe those saucy thirty-year old nuns are virgins? Well, some might be virgins but they’re surely on the verge of doing sins.” He scavenged for anything worth selling in his rented apartment but there were only old books in his vault. He thought of calling his granddaughter but his ego slapped him hard. The choice was tough; he brought home a bottle of cheap whiskey with the last piece of currency. The shopkeeper joyfully said, “Here’s the whiskey. And here’s your change - ten rupees.” “Okay.” On his way back he saw an old man, roughly his own age, begging outside a shopping mall. The poor guy looked pale and weak. He was asking the happy faces for money. “Excuse me son, can you spare this old man few coins? Excuse me madam, I haven’t eaten since yesterday morning. Excuse me…”
What’s the difference between that beggar and me? He reached inside his pocket and took out the ten rupees. He placed it in the beggar’s hand. That’s the difference. He never had any guests at his apartment so he never used to lock the front door. But that day he did. He locked it and put the keys inside his pocket. He kept whistling a song. “…the times, they are a changing…” He piled all his books together on the floor and sat on it as if it was a bed. He took the bottle of whiskey and an ‘intentionally unwashed’ glass. The taste of that whiskey felt like a chilly kiss on his lips, a previous Cinderella. He tried to gulp the whole thing in haste. Most of it fell on his clothes. He took a pause and stared hard at the bottle. He shook it. Almost half the bottle was empty. He looked beneath him. His right foot was on Shakespeare and his left knee punctured Dickinson. He spilled the remaining drink on the books. “Drink up Romeo. Drink up Othello. Drink up Frankenstein. You have been good friends to me.” He took another look at the bottle. There was barely a spoonful left. Drop by drop he rejoiced as the last sip slid inside his throat. His old lips then splurged on a cigarette. He turned right and looked at a picture on the wall. It was of his son when he was just three. He gazed at it for a few seconds and blew a cloud of smoke. Everything around him was spinning. He dropped the cigarette on the bed of books and cried, “Oh mother, take me home. The happy faces have no hearts. Sons of bitches. Sons of bitches.”
Erosions Stuart Snelson Ruins were his first love. Whilst unable to pinpoint his obsession’s root, he couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been drawn to the aftermath of destruction. As a boy, sidestepping the athletic endeavours of his classmates, he would find himself scrabbling around building sites, rummaging amid rubble. Standing behind chain link fences, he watched gleefully the intransigent swing of the wrecking ball, astonished by its transformative power. He was not destined for a hardhat life, for the world of demolition. There were greater expectations. Only child and heir, he was groomed to take over the family gallery. Submitting glumly to his role, he nevertheless persevered with his obsessions. At vast expense, he travelled the world photographing far-flung shells, remnants of what once was. He completed the grand tour of checklist wrecks, devastations familiar to all. Forlorn in their jut they stood, death ever-present in their configurations. Snaggletoothed ruins proved useful time machines. Beside withered columns he would try to resurrect the past, missing lineaments summoned in his mind. Scrapbooks advanced to digital files, exhaustive records of his disintegrative passions. He was in exalted company. Art history was littered with picturesque disasters, artists exposing beauty in ruins. He was simply upholding a tradition. He found the present state of decline dispiriting; deterioration was not what it used to be. Buildings were no longer allowed to loosen into desuetude. In western cities, a dearth of incapacitated architectures: skyscrapers stooping from bad posture, brutalist blocks riddled with concrete cancer. At the first sign of trauma the demolitionists moved in, razing the ailing to the ground.
1
As a gallery owner, he was unusual in his wholehearted opposition to conservation. Restoration was anathema to him. Extolling the virtues of decomposition, he dreamt of a gallery hanging only works in disrepair, a raft of patchy canvases. His fixation seeped into his work. Turning to representation, he amassed a roster of artists who dealt almost exclusively in decay. This was no small pool; it was a subject increasingly ripe for plunder. Such works were not to his father’s taste. Begrudgingly trusting his son’s judgement, he allowed him to take the gallery in a new direction. He had witnessed the sinking of those who tinkered solely in antiquity. They would embrace the modern in order to survive, would shake up their estate in this way. Honeymooning in ruins, he and his wife visited the prettier dilapidations. She showed immeasurable patience towards his wayward fascinations. Foregoing shorelines, there would be no needless bikini; they would not bronze on beaches. He tired of others who clustered the populist stumps of Greco-Roman heritage. Wishing to distance himself from the mooching throngs, he hankered after recent wrecks. He would leave the ringfenced splinters of the past to pastel-tinged day-trippers. Deliberately misinterpreting newspapers as travel brochures, he created holiday itineraries that read like a greatest hits of military intervention. He did not romanticise conflict, simply interested in catastrophe’s aftermath. On ramshackle battlefields aggressive foreign policies forged relics from the present.
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In his war torn tourism, he was a trailblazer. His were simply the first footprints in the dust. In the future, badly paid locals would usher tourists through the debris. Like the peacekeepers, he arrived after the damage had been done, the ground still warm from war. He was as careful as he could be, had no wish to trouble embassies, explain his motivations to unimpressed diplomats. He absorbed hazy landscapes, photographed skeletal silhouettes against the sunset. Amid crumbling structures, he catalogued the emergence of life after death: flowers straining through the cracks. The invitation to don a flak jacket and dodge gunfire, his wife had politely declined. She had drawn a line upon arrival of a child. Remaining at home, anxious, she questioned his sanity. Upon return, he would bombard her with images from his whistle-stop invasions, the devastated vistas of which his weekend breaks consisted: load bearing walls left lonely, unloaded; phantom staircases providing stone steps to nowhere; the sun casting elongated shadows of fragments. His daughter struggled to understand his obsessions, saw no beauty in depreciation. Early memories of her father – the collapse of stickle-brick houses, sandcastles dissolving at the tide’s approach – were all suitably ruinous. A doll’s house fire he had met with a damp cloth and a camera. It was well documented before it was extinguished, her father, fiddling with filters, a snap-happy Nero. In time, his marriage joined his collection of ruins. Oblivious to its cracks and fissures, it had broken, unnoticed, around him. Melancholic following its dissolve, he sought solace in his work. This soon proved therapeutic. He chanced upon an artist who channelled retro-futurism. His dilapidated landscapes reported from apocalyptic realms,
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the future seen from the vantage of the past. Photo-realistic, his works served as ominous prophecies, depicted present-day landmarks ravaged, mouldering icons fulfilling their inevitable potential. Such visions, such accelerated erosions saved him from explosive endeavours; he itched to see the present blistered beyond recognition. At times, he imagined himself engaged in dismantling acts of aesthetic terrorism, areas destroyed so that he could photograph the consequences. No structure would transcend obsolescence; destruction always found a way. Every building contained its own ruin. He had fallen from a great height. In seeking the perfect shot – reckless amid wrecks not yet protected – he had plummeted. In a foreign hospital, he had woken, woozy. Looming medics tried to explain his situation, his fate unravelling in a curlicued tongue he didn’t understand. Given the circumstances, they refrained from mime. His efforts to leave, to swing his legs from the bed and seek sense, went some way to clarifying his predicament. Bedridden, he felt belittled. It had not been some hidden danger that had debilitated him – legs lost to an unexploded landmine – but a simple loss of balance. He had succumbed to savage slapstick. Whilst they struggled to source an English interpreter, he had no idea of the severity of his plight. This incidental messenger, paying a price for his bilingualism, relayed weighted words: he would never walk again. Returned home, wounded, from a war zone, he took up residency in a local hospital. He was lucky to be alive, doctors assured him. Luck was not his overriding sensation.
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He tried to twitch listless limbs into service. They failed to respond. He spent days in contemplation of his fast-tracked decrepitude. Unresponsive, his nether extremities twisted in unexpected ways. Despondent his thoughts descended to casting off these slackened appendages. No longer would they support him. He surveyed the demolished temple of himself. His love of dilapidation did not extend to his own body. This was the universal destiny, to witness one’s own fading presence, time and exposure uniting to do their worst. Optimism failing to find him, he surrendered to bleak visions. He conjured himself in his coffin, imagined his slow disintegration. He envisaged diminishment, a time-lapse decomposition: his body a theme parks for worms, his rib cage a crumbling palace for festering insects. Discharged from hospital, privy to scaffolding of his own, he was confined to a wheelchair. Recuperating, he would acclimatise to his hybridised form, to seeing the world from a new height. Sections of his house became inaccessible. A flurry of dust concealed the installation of ramps, of lifts, his home reconfigured by the architectures of impediment. As a temporary solution, his wife returned to help him adjust. His mood, ongoing, was one of uncontrolled explosion; he was apt to snap. He resented his powerlessness. To go anywhere he required his wife’s full cooperation. His expeditions would be curtailed. Her sympathy had limits. She would not be negotiating war zones with a wheelchair, would not manoeuvre him across rubbled terrains. Disaster granted no disability access. In his convalescence he travelled by digital means. Certain websites allowed him to trawl the streets. With a cursor’s click, he placed himself beside
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fragmented facades. A housebound globetrotter, he kerbcrawled ruins. So thoroughly absorbed, he at times failed to register his change of circumstance. At the end of a session, he would attempt to stand up. Away from his desk, from onscreen voyeurism, he contemplated a sculptural park of ruination. He considered disparate sites dismantled and shipped, their disarray reinstated brick by brick, a sprawling garden playing host to hesitant resurrections. It seemed no more preposterous than the British Museum’s rapacious excursions, its basements full of homesick artefacts. For a time he lost interest in the gallery. He would need to regain control. His father had been whittled into the grim epitome of a silent partner. In residential care, this once brilliant man was reduced to drooling. His mind’s departure had been painful. Wheeled by his side, holding his father’s cold yet clammy hand, he wondered whether his own mind would see similar reductions. In this wrinkled man’s gummy slobber, was he witnessing his own future? It would prove an unwelcome genetic inheritance. He watched as a nurse led his father to the bathroom. She would oversee his relief. Uneasy in his chair, he envied his father his brittle mobility. Bitterly, he watched him shuffle his senility from one room to the next. With assistance, he embarked on constitutionals, a gallery employee wheeling him by demolition sites. He witnessed low-level destructions. Buildings were demolished everyday, replaced by today’s mistakes. A generation not yet born would tear them down. He delighted in this constant state of architectural flux. Watching the priapic rise of skyscrapers, he foresaw their destruction. From his mind’s gutter, he summoned a monstrous wrecking ball, bowled it towards the city, watched it wreak havoc upon these mirrored skittles. In his chair, he twitched as towers tumbled.
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In need of focus, he organised a group show, concentrated his energies into something constructive, or at least constructively destructive. It provided a showcase for the singular assemblage of artists he had nurtured. At the opening, his artists loomed over him, stooped to talk small. He was delighted with the show. A video artist had crafted cardboard cities, flimsy mise-en-scene, built that they may be destroyed. Upon them she wrought all manner of apocalypse. Another investigated the homes of deposed dictators through the medium of video games. He had developed a first-person looter, players filling digitised swag bags as they progressed through the palaces of the fallen; their gaudy sprawl explored, stripped of sinister chintz. Another artist had created an audio installation, had coaxed music from unlikely sources: rampant jackhammers, pneumatic drills, the sounds of collapse. Industrial headphones granted access to a destructive cacophony. Another screened a film of unfolding erosion on a sandpaper projector. A slow spooling suicide, it contained its own demise. Another photographed abandoned film sets; destitute families, in need of shelter, squatted in cinematic memories. The centrepiece installation recreated a house on fire. Its over-amplified inferno sound tracked the evening. Charred aromas were dispensed, whilst a smoke machine puffed industriously.
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The smoke and mirrors of the piece disguised, for some time, the actual fire. Once schmoozers were able to distinguish genuine flames from lambent facsimiles, the blaze was well under way. It was difficult to establish the point where the simulation became the actual. Confusion reigned. Panicked they fled for exits. The premises evacuated, freeloaders watched the conflagration from the kerbside. Wheeled to safety, he remained close, his chair aglow, spokes glinting with reflected flames. With a glass of champagne in his hand, he watched his gallery burn to the ground. A smile flickered on his lips.
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Afterword “Getting liminal in Catalonia” Owen Vince
Perhaps the most perfect encapsulation of Barcelona are its rooftops. From the street level of its imposing 19th century buildings you would be quick to conclude that it is an “orderly” city, a city of the plum bob and the measuring line. But stand on a rooftop terrace, preferably under those leaden spring skies that seem to cling so thickly above it, and you will see the messy hair topping the handsome, serene mass of its body – a glut of aerials, shanty extrusions, and odd overlapping boxy extensions that ruffle up the neatness of the view from the street.
But of course, this “orderly” city is also the city of Gaudi and Picasso, of DaDa'ist influences that throbbed in its Catholic / Catalan heart. It is the city of the wending closeness of the Gothic quarter, the “old town” of narrow streets and tinkling bottles, of thin quick men in sports coats offering “beer” and they do hold a regulation two cans of Estrella in their fingertips – when really they are offering downers and uppers, tablets and pills. Contrast does two things. On the one hand, it separates. But then it also associates, and mingles. Contrast doesn't really draw things apart, but rather brings them together through the mechanism of their similar dissimilarities. This is the jarred space in which the “liminal” creeps in, almost undetected. The tradition of Catalan poetry is strong and lyrically surprising. It is a poetry that, in its often surrealist experiments, explores the concept of contrast, of chaos and order. One of my recent favourites (who I was completely unaware of until about a week ago, when I stumbled across his verse while sipping beer in the sun) is Joan Salvat-Papasseit. Writing in the early part of the 20th century, drawing both on tradition and the avant-garde, his work has also been translated into English. It was the perfect poetry to read while treading the streets of Barcelona, eating fish in the sunshine, sitting in cobbled streets at night with a motley assembly of Chilean and Catalan musicians who, with drum sticks and keyboards, guitars and voices, sung and drank beer with us –
until, in a moment of ironic order, a police car nosed around the corner; “quick, hide your shit!”. The guitars and beer cans were invisible in seconds, and we were left in our assumed innocence, staring at the night sky. When the car had passed (slowly, an up-turned nose glance at us from its open windows), the music croaked and whooped back into existence, the drinking continuing apace. Salvat-Papasseit's verse takes the everyday, lovingly, and transforms it toward deeper hues and significances. Things that can be seen one way are seen another. For example; The moon dark grey dressed in mourning is more a window and brighter
So too is “the star of a glance” (such a beautiful image!) and the “flash of a flag”, becoming in the poetic perception; war and love: salt and earth
Playful with imagery and his sense of “self”, his verse suggests just one of the many ways in which the ordinary can be taken and wrapped into something else, a realisation that the beautiful surprise of liminality is contained in every facet of our world, every gesture – simply waiting to be uncovered by the perceptive mind (and eye). When we set up HARK, it was with a view to cracking open these extrusions, these peculiarities that rim and grime the edges of otherwise patterned and orderly things. The final preparation for our first issue – this issue – was done at a distance between north London and el Barrio Gotico. It was impossible for a little of that Catalan modernism, that urging toward the liminal, not to enter the magazine. I hope that shows.
Contributors Barun Bajracharya is a writer and author based in Nepal. He is the author
of Sins of Love and a member of PEN International (Nepal Chapter) and Traditional Poetry Writers Association of the World. He is also an editor at ‘PEN point’ and ‘The Rising Star’.
Alan Beard is the author of two collections of short fiction Taking Doreen out of the Sky (Picador, 1999), which won the Tom Gallon award and You Don’t have to Say (Tindal St Press, 2010). His website is www.alanbeard.net
Jennifer Brough works in publishing and she is currently writing. Her website is www.jenniferbrough.wordpress.com and she can be followed on twitter @jennifer_brough
Zelda Chappel has published work in various magazines including
‘Belleville Park Pages’, ‘Popshot’ and ‘The Interpreter’s House’. She is also an editor for Elbow Room. She can be followed on twitter @ZeldaChappel
James Field is the editor of a children’s literary journal, ‘Lamplands’, and books and essays editor at ‘Litro’.
Luciana Francis has published both prose and poetry work in ‘Visual Verse Anthology’ and ‘Vivimus Magazine’. She is currently writing a novella in her native Portuguese, which is being serialized online by Revista Capitu. Her website is www.fictionsmagazine.com and she can be followed on Twitter @heymrsfrancis.
Frances Gapper is the author of The Tiny Key (Sylph Editions, 2009) and Absent Kisses (Diva Books, 2002). She also has stories in ‘The Moth’, ‘Cactus Heart’ and two issues of Plymouth University’s ‘Short Fiction’.
Greg Hoare is a writer, filmmaker and journalist. He writes poems and short
stories. His website is www.gregoryhoare.wordpress.com and you can follow him on twitter @GregoryHoare.
Steven Klepeter is the author of two collections, Speaking to the Field Mice
(Sweatshoppe Publications) and My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto (Flutter Press). His work has received numerous nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
Fred Pollack is Adjunct Professor of creative writing at George Washington
University. He is also the Author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure and Happiness (Story Line Press).
Stephen Ramey has published in many journals ‘The Doctor TJ Eckleburg
Review’, ‘The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts’, ‘Microliterature’ and others. He also is an editor at the ‘Triangulation anthologies’ from Parsec Ink as well as the speculative twitterzine, ‘trapeze’. His website is www.stephenvramey.com
Richard Skinner has published three novels, all with Faber & Faber, and
several poems in various print and online magazines. Parma Violets was longlisted for the 2013 National Poetry Competition. His poetry collection, the light user scheme, is published by Smokestack. You can follow him on twitter @RichardNSkinner
Stuart Snelson has stories published in 3:AM, ‘Ambit’, ‘Litro’, ‘Structo’,
‘Hoax’, ‘The Londonist’ and ‘Popshot’. He is currently working on his second novel.