Archipelago 2017

Archipelago Lost and Found 2016-2017

From the Editors...

Each year Archipelago has brought together a range of artistic disciplines inspired by the chosen theme. This year’s theme ‘Lost and Found’ has led to the production of a great range of works featured in this magazine as well as events throughout the year.

including poetry featured in previous magazines. I would therefore like to thank the library, particularly Mrs Stanbury, for their generosity and helpfulness with accessing this wonderful resource.

Kate Greenburg’s beautifully written poem ‘Iron Baby’ finds inspiration in Anthony Gormley’s contribution to the exhibition ‘Found’ at the Foundling Museum that encouraged the theme of this year’s magazine. Having worked at the Foundling Museum for a number of years, it has been wonderful to have the opportunity to bring together my passions for the Museum and Archipelago and I would like to thank them for their guidance and provision of information. In addition, Greenburg’s article on ‘Finding Canons’ opened up a new opportunity for Archipelago to incorporate “found” archive material,

since its beginnings and it has been an honour to act as editor for this year. I hope that readers enjoy the range of works in the magazine and themselves “find” pleasure in the interpretations of this year’s theme.

Following the tradition established by Mallika Buckle Both loss and discovery are highly personal yet universal and Dr Roberts last year, this issue also incorporates the experiences and essential to art. As this year’s acting works of students and teachers from Jeju. From the beaueditor it has been a delight to witness the various intertiful painting and commentary by Yejun Yoon to the pretations of the theme and I would like to thank all of touching short-story ‘Mother’ by Sparky Jeong, the work the students and teachers who contributed works and contributed from Jeju has added great depth to the magahelped create such a wonderful issue. The nature of this zine and I would like to thank all of the students and theme has led to a number of personal and moving con- teachers for their hard work. Alongside the contributions tributions. Alexandra Morgan’s epistolary short story is to Jeju, this issue also incorporates the works of three particularly moving in its vivid portrayal of a separated Old North Londoners and previous members of Archicouple. Meanwhile, the commentaries on books contrib- pelago and I thank them for their continued support of uted by students and teachers act as a fascinating insight the magazine and Society. into the power of found art.

It has given me enormous joy to be a part of Archipelago

I would finally like to thank the rest of this year’s Archipelago committee for their hard work throughout the year in developing the Society and special thanks of course go to Dr Roberts for his enthusiasm and guidance in compiling the magazine.

Mika Hyman (editor of Archipelago 2016-2017)

This year’s Archipelago continues the tradition established last year of including contributions from students and staff at NLCS Jeju. Readers of the magazine will quickly see how much this mustering of forces has strengthened this year’s publication. It is also a delight to see several ONLs, including last year’s editor, Mallika Buckle, making their appearance in these pages. That Archipelago straddles the gulf between school and university is a fitting reflection of its devotion to crossing boundaries between the arts.

achievement, we will be very well pleased.

My sincere thanks go to everyone for their contributions and especially to Mika Hyman for her assiduity in compiling the magazine.

Dr Roberts What never ceases to both amaze and humble me is the sheer volume of publications produced, and the depth and complexity displayed on each page of the publications produced by this school each year. And the Archipelago magazine is no exception, proudly standing out with impressive breadths of discussion on literature and the arts. This year’s theme, ‘Lost and Found’, has seen truly outstanding works that are a testament to the eloquence and skill of our writers. Taking over as Editor for next year’s issue, I truly look forward with anticipation to the honour of taking charge of this magazine.

As in former years, it is important to underline that Archipelago is not just a magazine, but a ripple of artistic events which spreads across the pond’s surface of the academic year before making landfall in the annual publication. Among numerous small events this year, we took particular pleasure in hosting the Turner Prizewinning architect and designer Poloma Strelitz and the T.S. Eliot prize-winning poet Sarah Howe. If Archipela- Lun Zhu (next year’s editor) go sets anyone on the road to such heights of artistic 2

Contents ‘Memory: Lost and Found’ by Yejun Yoon

pg.4

‘Found and the Foundling Hospital’ by Mika Hyman

pg.5

Poetry:

pg.6 ‘Iron Baby’ by Kate Greenburg ‘Ghost Mother’ by T Anslow ‘Time’ by Jungwon Lee

‘The Discovery of Self in the works of Montaigne, Browne and Bacon’ by Mallika Buckle

pg.8

‘My Loss’ by Ellie Ensol Baek

pg.10

‘Mother’ by Sparky Jeong

pg.11

‘Time Apart’ by Alexandra Morgan

pg.12

‘Finding Canons’ by Kate Greenburg

pg.14

‘London Vignettes’ by Mika Hyman

pg.16

‘Lost and Found in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen’ by G Roberts

pg.18

‘How’s Tricks’ by T Anslow

pg.20

‘A Tale of Lost and Found’ by Imogen Woods-Wilford

pg.21

‘The Unexpected Perks of Using a Phonebook’ by Berenika Kotelko

pg.22

‘Lost and found in the forest of Middle English Romance’ by Maia Bear

pg.24

‘Homage to a Literary Genius’ by Sophia Sheera

pg.26

‘Lost and Found’ by Jimmy Moon

pg.27

‘Recollection’ by Aaska Banthiya

pg.28

‘An Appreciation of the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore’ [1861-1941] by K Dhaliwal

pg.29

Poetry:

pg.30 ‘Finding Loss’ by Olivia Gurney-Randall ‘Lost in Oneself’ by Sailee Kurjekar ‘Butterfly Effect’ by P Gray

‘Lost’ by Charvi Jain

pg.32

‘Teddy’ by Riyana Khiroya

pg.34

‘Pitter Patter’ by P Gray

pg.35

‘Stravange’ by Inness So Young Kim

pg.35

‘equations’ by RM Found Books: G Roberts Jungmin Seo J Robinson Donya Jeybalasingham J Bartlett K Dhaliwal M Fotheringham ‘What of the Light’ by Rebecca Marks

pg.36 pg.37

pg.44

Cover image by Bill Lynch (1960-2013). Used with the permission of Gerry Lynch 3

T

his is my acrylic painting and it is about lost memories of my childhood and remembering it later through objects and photos. The Japanese dolls represent my trip to Japan when I was only five.

The white buildings in the background represent a long-lost memory of the landscape around the place I lived in South Korea a long time ago. This section of my painting shows the feeling of emptiness through lost memories.

Yejun Yoon (NLCS Jeju)

“In order for something to be ‘found’, it has to at some point in its history been ‘lost’” Cornelia Parker Curator of the exhibition ‘Found’ at the Foundling Museum

4

Found at the Foundling Museum

On the 25th March 1741, the Foundling Hospital opened its doors to the public, admitting the charity’s first children or ‘foundlings’. From the beginnings of the hospital, mothers were asked to ‘affix on each child some particular writing, or other distinguishing mark or token, so that the children may be known thereafter if necessary.’

Through these tokens, stories and children lost and found poured forth. Such surviving tokens and literature are preserved in what is now the Foundling Museum, making the museum by nature highly personal with its many inspiring tales.

Alongside such stories contained within tokens and books is the art donated by leading artists of the day, such as William Hogarth and Thomas Gainsborough, who supported the museum. When, in 2016, the Foundling Museum opened a new exhibition curated

by Cornelia Parker titled ‘Found’, Parker drew not only on these tales but also on the history of the Foundling Hospital as the first public art gallery and the founding of the Royal Academy of Art. Indeed, of the seventy artists invited to interpret the theme, twenty-one were Royal Academicians.

The result of Parker’s project was an eclectic array of artworks specially created or pre-existing, placed alongside objects meaningful to individual artists. A scrap of paper detailing John Lennon’s ‘Trumpet Boy’ by Yinka detentions in 1955-6 found by Jeremy Deller was counterpointed by Yinka Shonibare’s ‘Trumpet Shonibare Boy’ - a sculpture of a child in victorian dress made out of African textiles whose head is inscribed with the names of musicians from all around the globe, demonstrating that music can be found anywhere. These contemporary works by artists were arranged in such a way that there was a perpetual interaction with the tokens of Foundlings and older stories of the museum, creating a dialogue that allowed for new stories to be discovered.

John Lennon’s Detention Sheet 1955-56, “found” by Jeremy Deller

Besides the inspiring nature of the exhibition, the Foundling Museum is in some respects a perfect place from which Archipelago can take inspiration. Like Archipelago, the Foundling Museum is formed of a variety of artistic disciplines.

Home to the largest Handel collection, as a consequence of Handel’s early support of the Foundling Hospital, the Museum has incorporated music into exhibitions as well as visual art. In 2014, Handel Foundling Chris Watson recorded the sounds of the Dawn Chorus and, since the installation in September 2014, birdsong has played as one ascends the staircase. Meanwhile weekly concerts maintain the musical traditions of the Hospital.

Although the exhibition ‘Found’ has now ended, the eclecticism and richness of the Foundling Museum continue, demonstrating the importance of bringing together the arts of past and present.

Mika Hyman

The oldest surviving score of ‘Water Music’ by G.F. Handel, currently on display at the Foundling Musuem

5

‘Red Heart’ token on display at

Poetry ‘Iron Baby’ I carved high my veins, to shackle heart and Marrow was making and bones were bashing, And skin was strong and heart was silent.

Still lungs thumped and with wrenching stretching, Brass band begins to pluck strings and courage: Harmonic cement stiffening sorrow.

Midas created me, then only to Forget. Blindfolded by metallic notes, My skin clouded into a sound gloom And my eyes glazed over into buttons Lolling to the music, out of sync and nowhere. For warmth, quilt of sharpened teeth and Flattened face I would sew on like new heart, Each thew threaded with tangled melodies Cyclically straying, racing from reason Ebbs punching the orange sun, then being Conducted back to rigid rock again. There stands A silhouette, I remember so soft And stiff. Like wavering bars of my cell, She soaks me with frigid buckets Of cold curiosity, freezing love.

She traded me not for gold, but an ear That listens to the clouds’ dwindling drops Patting each paving like an old friend.

The glaze on her windows still rosy sweet, She’s always losing the seeds she sows but Fashioning shovels inside emerald trees.

Can’t you hear the webbed sounds fraying away, Wallowing in my forge? My shattered notes Always trying and flying and crying, now Stopped denying the cotton wool lining Of my cardiac cords, softly silent, Soaking up the swells of muddy malice.

Kate Greenberg

‘Iron Baby’ by Anthony Gormley, 1999. (Displayed as part of the exhibition ‘Found’ at the Foundling Museum)

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Time Lightless days Dreamless nights Not a single glimpse of life in his eyes Nor a single drop of a tear falling.

Timeless time has passed A time of Grief Misery Hatred Not a single friend Nor a caring brother Left

Ellie Berg

Lightless days and dreamless nights, His identity was lost In this jungle of capitalism.

The boy now a man With a family of his own

Ghost Mother In this dream you are taken away by car.

Light slides over the window, Its curve closing away your face.

The boy found the man within.

Not the easiest possible way, May have taken a little while,

The intervening time has no day or night, No partition or texture of any sort.

Then suddenly I am cycling after you in a wintry park— You turn and your look is kind but already gone.

A glance past my unshaped questions.

But he did find time And time did find him.

Jungwon Lee (NLCS Jeju)

There is no sound or friction, in dream-time, My pedals fast spinning still.

You fade in grey sky, and tetherless motion, A brief rucking on the surface of a lake.

I have rehearsed your absence so many times I wonder you are still here.

There is a moment as I round each first bend of my leavings When I realise I've been tricked.

That you are, even now, disappearing in a back-draught, A rag of leaf twisting slowly on a web thread— Makes my eyes water trying to halt its shape shifting, Fix a form in the here and now.

Years later, a pool in dry heat raises my mothered ghost: Water buffalo weightless, Billowy shadows in their afternoon element, A cool layer of vegetable green Holds still their hanging hooves.

‘Marie-Thérèse, face and profile’ by Pablo Picasso (1931)

T Anslow 7

The Discovery of Self in the works of Montaigne, Browne and Bacon

I

n his essay ‘De l’Amitié’, Michel de Montaigne asks a question, of himself and perhaps of his readers that troubles the assertions he makes in his address to the reader: And in truth what are these ‘Essays’ if not monstrosities and grotesques botched together from a variety of limbs having no defined shape, with an order sequence and proportion which are purely fortuitous?

If Montaigne truly has painted himself, simply and naturally, as accurately and intimately “as respect for social convention allows”, and if both question and address are to be taken as sincere, then Montaigne’s casting them as “monstrosities and grotesques” may give the reader a clearer picture of man and truth as seen by Montaigne than can be pinpointed elsewhere in his work. In attempting to chronicle his soul, in striving to find himself, Montaigne encounters self-perceived failure, whether or not his readers recognise it. It would seem that certainty, elegancy, neat formulae are beyond reach; yet all pursuits but that for truth are “vanity” to a man ignorant of the “Truth”.

The desire for knowledge, of the self and of how to live, is Montaigne’s motivation and yet he assumes no instructive role – he is an explorer guided by the light of “divine grace”, using the imperfect faculties of reason and experience to reach certain judgements, for the suspension of judgement is unachievable. Reason and experience are, however, inconsistent both between people and between different versions of the same person. The act of judging and the judged are in perpetual flux, as we can never perceive the essence of anything even though “we must rip the masks off things as well as off people”. Certain duties must be laid down, but authority must not be worshipped; reason cannot give consensus and leads to an infinite variety of possible opinions, as demonstrated by Montaigne’s own expressions, which go “backwards and forwards”, and judgement, which “floats and bobs about”. Montaigne gives us a complex picture of the workings of the soul, and whether he succeeds or not in accurately penetrating and portraying is almost irrelevant, for he is the measure of his words. To submit to muteness – to oblivion – to have the “soul alive and afflicted but with no means of expressing herself” is the worst possible state. Montaigne excavates for truth and carves human sculptures in dark empty space – what is found and created is unstable and yet intimately connects and unifies despite any lack of certainty. The variety of thought and expression in the essays is not a sign of grossness, but rather demonstrative of an incessant and unrestricted engagement with the abstract and ultimately unknowable. Readers, contemporary and modern, have found a spirit in Montaigne that cannot be pinpointed in certain phrases or expressions, but in the overall sense of his writing, in its accumulation and its variety.

That “in a slightly paradoxical consensus” concerning John Florio’s translation, which “contains omissions, mistakes, misunderstandings, and additions”, it is affirmed that the “‘essential spirit’ of Montaigne’s book” is retained is testament to this.

Actor’s masks are stripped in death; death is when the “feigning” must come to an end. To write autobiographically, or of one’s ideas, to write sincerely of humanity, is to move beyond feigning – to enact a sort of death, of poses, exteriors, false countenances. In ‘To Philosophize is to learn how to die’, Montaigne argues that in study and contemplation the soul must be “drawn somewhat outside ourselves… a state which resembles death and which forms a kind of apprenticeship for it”. The process involves attraction, distillation, extraction, changing of forms – it is an alchemical, or divine process. Surely this approach runs counter to his notion that to reach any knowledge reason must be guided by divine grace, for if the soul is removed from the self who contemplates it and pins it down, how is the grace touching the soul to inform the contemplator? The tensions between conditions and ideas informing Montaigne’s writing draw attention to the sheer impossibility of the task at which he immediately appears to have succeeded. In this same essay, he quotes an Ode from Horace “[All of our lots are shaken about in the Urn, destined sooner or later to be cast forth, placing us in everlasting exile via Charon’s boat]”. Exile is our ultimate fate, but this doesn’t mean we should neglect to prepare, to think, or to consider how we live before we die.

Sir Thomas Browne too is sensitive to and indeed fascinated by oblivion – that which cannot be Frontispiece of the 1642 pira known and eludes our capacity for reason and application of experience – and his prose is

by Sir Thomas Browne grounded in deaths of various kinds – of the body, of knowledge, of selves. In ‘Hydriotaphia’ he extensively documents differing approaches to burial, interment, cremation and ends with a meditation on oblivion and the futility of hoping for immortality: “in vain do individuals hope for Immortality, or any patent from oblivion, in preservations below the Moon…” Knowledge, as in Montaigne, is deeply problematic. How can it be reached? ; “Who knows the fate of his bones…?” Claire Preston argues that in this “treatise on cremation and burial, knowledge itself is a fossil, imperfect or lost, and has to be excavated, unearthed, like various bones and burials, from the sepulchral oblivion of time.” This would mean, as with Montaigne, an impossible feat. Man is in an impossible predicament.

8

‘On Affectionate Relationships’ the perfect friendship does not encompass sex, but the souls are one and a perfect truth co-exists in both friends such that the individuals are each dead without the other. (Montaigne does, however, liken philosophical and sexual pleasure: perhaps his perfect friendship should include this, and perhaps sex – the little death – is also a potential means of drawing the soul from within and sharing a truth, if possible.) Truth is at the heart of the relationship – shared truth. Moreover, truth is something inaccessible in sublunary life; shared truth, in its perfect form is, then, something divine. Montaigne, in his writing, undergoes philosophic processes without writing philosophy and shares intimacies as far as possible without instigating a perfect sharing of souls.

Individual and shared truths, their compatibility and incompatibility, are central to Montaigne, Bacon and Browne’s prose writing. The evidence of their commonplacing tradition, in the density of classical reference and quotation, as well as the acceptance or challenging of received wisdom is perhaps the most evident manifestation of these. Ann Moss argues that the ‘disingeneous as ever’ Montaigne denies keeping notebooks, but that his essays are the ‘most uncommon of commonplace-books’ wherein he transcribes quotations directly into essays. The adaptation and freedom with which Montaigne quotes, using innumerable sources to shape his writing allows a degree of experimentation, lucidity and associative writing that seems as fluid as the process of human thought itself. In ‘The Process of Reading’, Wolfgang Iser argues that to read is akin to doing the thinking that the author did in writing; Montaigne forms a connection between reader and writer that places his own readers in a position like his but at a further remove.

Both the essayist and thence the reader are a measure.

In ‘Hydriotaphia’, Browne frequently treats received authority with difficulty – he doubts practices and their validity, he doubts the “severe contemplators”. Here too, the reception of wisdom, or otherwise, must be processed by the writer and reshaped. This is not a simple matter of collecting; rather it is one of collocating, analysis and bending. Paul Salzman, identifying Bacon as the “most visible English exponent of the [essay] form” argues that he gives us a “concise summary of the nexus between reading, conversation, and reflection characteristic of the rationale for the early modern essay” when he writes, ‘Reading maketh a fiull man; conference a readye man; And writing an exacte man.’ He claims that Bacon’s essays resemble an assembly of commonplaces, whilst Montaigne’s work a “mediated autobiography”. Bacon’s essays reveal less of an expression of individuality, imagination and thought and demonstrate the mind at work through their style rather than through the explicit statement of opinions. Nonetheless, both and indeed Browne too adhere to the humanist cause of using old knowledge and further shaping it for some kind of advancement: Montaigne through its weaving into imagination and attempted projection of the soul, Browne through challenge, and Bacon through distillation into a concise language and later mingling of own knowledge with that of the ancients.

Many emphasise Montaigne’s refusal to preach or dictate his thought, the predominance of words that indicate doubt or the subordination of his knowledge, such as “I think” and “perhaps”. In his language alone he refutes any authority, particularly his own. There is a strange exception to this in his occasional claims of uniqueness, such as “No man has ever prepared to leave the world more simply nor more fully than I have” and that there is “no doubt whatsoever that meditating [on death] beforehand confers great advantages”. Lack of coherence in style and of connectives, as well as the use of contradictions in each of these writers is further ballast for the pervasive sense that ultimate truth is something terribly far off. (Bacon’s distillation of language, endeavours for a scientific approach and advancement of learning…) Preston links all three writers through Browne’s rhythmic style and juxtaposition of conflicting statements without apparent logical progression: It is a style notable especially for mutually contradictory or completely absent, connectives which would normally guide our sense of the relationship between one claim and the next, an absence which, like Bacon’s in the Essays, or like Montaigne’s, leaves the strenuous consideration of fragmentary evidence to the reader. We can observe these omissions, and conated edition of ‘Religio Medici’ sequently the almost tidal ebb and flow of Browne’s undogmatic considerations.

The emergence of scepticism is common to each of these writers, and yet the imaginative powers of Montaigne and Browne far exceed any reductive confines; uncertainty or failure to represent absolute truth does not bar words from the page. Expression is poetic though searching for truth; in the words of Egon Stephen Merton, “The circumference of Browne’s being is represented by his science; the centre, by his imagination.”

Though he condemned literary “Rhapsodies”, imaginative, poetic material is not solely a tool for the gain of knowledge – it is visionary and beautiful, whilst still technical. The relics that Browne catalogues are not just data, they are reminders of the past endowed with a sense of shared and varied visions of death.

In Virginia Woolf’s essay on Montaigne she recounts a story about Montaigne, focussing on the idea that Montaigne sought to create a self-portrait in words, as painters do. “Montaigne saw a portrait which René, King of 9

Sicily, had painted of himself, and asked, ‘Why is it not, in like manner, lawful for everyone to draw himself with a pen as he did with a crayon?’” She says that few have ever been successful at such an endeavour: Montaigne, Samuel Pepys and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Browne’s Religio Medici (1643), a spiritual testament and early psychological self-portrait, she calls “a coloured glass through which darkly one sees racing stars and a strange and turbulent soul”. In her tribute to Montaigne, perhaps most striking is the claim she makes for him that he “stands out from the legions of the dead with such irrepressible vivacity. We can never doubt for an instant that his book was himself. He refused to teach; he refused to preach…” Whether the writings of these three writers come from [their] lips or [their] hearts”, we cannot be certain, for each is dedicated to the impossible task of representing, or finding in words, the ultimately un-representable. But perhaps this is the plight of all artists. And, regardless, each of these does to some degree achieve a sharing of thought that enables both a distancing from self and a unity between reader and author. “The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying”, and so living through language creates a set of conditions whereby we endeavour to express and discover through expression those parts of life beyond utterance.

Mallika Buckle (ONL)

My Loss

I

am lost.

PE bags, umbrellas and tattered, pair-less shoes. As I rummage through the lost-and-found centre for my wallet, I become a mixture of dust and sweat – some mine, from all the hard work inside the stifling closet, but also some from all the PE kit and trainers reeking with mixtures of anonymous body odour that I have had to go through. Yet I do not stop. I keep looking for the wallet that I know I will never find here.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. Sometimes it’s the whole of my school rucksack or my jacket, but it’s my wallet most of the time, being the most convenient, I guess. But each time, I pretend that I have hope. I pretend that I must have dropped it somewhere, and that it would be there, waiting for me somewhere in the middle of the cluster at the school’s lost-and-found cupboard. In fact, it’s probably in some Sofia Lunina other kid’s bag, locker, or even proudly exhibited on someone’s desk.

Just for fun, they’d say.

I know that in a few days, they’ll return it to me, like they always do, except that when I get it, it will be covered with chewed gum and all sorts of drawings and words mocking me. Just for fun.

They will wait for me to get that wallet cleaned or for me to get a new one. Just to do it all over again. Just for fun.

As I mindlessly continue rearranging the collection of nameless items I’m not even looking for my wallet anymore.

I’m not even looking for anything, or at anything either. The limbs continue their habitual motion, while the mind drifts away, trying to find an answer to what it knows too well to be an insoluble question.

They always find it funny that the lost properties section is the first place I go to whenever they pull one of these pranks. I know that even now, at this moment, they will be watching me – recording, too, perhaps – and laughing at me for always being so gullible, for always heading to the lost-and-found centre as if I haven’t learnt anything. As if I really think I’ll be able to retrieve my lost property this way. They think they’re so smart, and I’m obviously not. They’re wrong. No matter what they like to call me, I’m not a moron, and I’m not stupid, and I’m not just a useless piece of garbage. I have to keep telling myself that. It’s they who are wrong. They’re wrong about many things.

I am lost. I’m not stupid; I know how their game works. Stopping it is another question, and it is one that I don’t have the answer to. I don’t know which path to take, other than doing exactly as they expect me to. Exactly as they please, playing along their sick game. That’s all I am. Lost. Not retarded, or dumb, or gullible, but simply, lost. Inside this maze they’ve created around me. No matter which path I take, I am lost. I just keep circling around the same spot.

It’s time to go home, and I decide to quit searching. My wallet will be found sooner or later.

But what about me? When can I stop being lost? Will I ever be found?

Ellie Ensol Baek (NLCS Jeju) 10

Mother

I

can still remember that day. The day I ran away from him, my father. I remember running until the soles of my shoes became worn out (now that I think about it, there really was no reason to hurry – it’s not like he had the decency to chase after me anyway). I remember bumping into you while I was looking for a place to stay. I remember you helping me, taking me to your little gang of friends and growing up together. Like a family.

You were like a mother to me. Even though you were two years younger than me – even though you were only thirteen at that time – I still felt like you were my mentor. You probably know this (of course you do, I told you myself) but my mother wasn’t the best of people. She never wanted me and left my father as soon as she figured that she would have to raise me. As for the latter… well… let’s just say I had terrible luck with parents. I can’t count how many times he’s called me a “worthless child” or told me that I “shouldn’t exist”. Which is why I ran away at 15, met you and, as they say, the rest is history.

The day I found you was the happiest day of my life. Which is why I wonder, why did you have to be taken away from me? That day, when that blasted officer came to our hideout for “criminal investigation.” That day, when you lied to him. You lied to that filthy wretch who only cared about his promotion that you knew where our “boss” was.

I didn’t know why you lied at the time but now I realise that you were trying to save everyone; you were trying to get us out of trouble by taking the blame, yet there was no crime that you were guilty of.

I was devoid of life once I lost you. I can still remember your face when you were sent away to juvenile prison. I cried that day because you were smiling. You told me to stop, you said it wasn’t like me. But I still cried.

On a side note, you’ll be happy to know that I’ve started anew. After that incident I’ve managed to find a home, a nice old lady down the street took me in. I spent the rest of my teenage years catching up on my studies and even managed to land on a decent college. Currently, I serve as an intern in a banking agency. It’s not the best job out there and it’s certainly not what I wanted to do (as you know, I wanted to become a doctor). But hey, you have to make a living to survive, right?

It’s been so long since I last saw you. Or has it? I saw the most perplexing thing today. I was driving to work at about six in the morning when I couldn’t help but notice that the traffic was even more jammed than usual. So I did what most human beings would logically do- I yelled at the driver in front to “Get moving!” Only after another driver told me to “Shut up!” did I realise what was going on: there had been an accident and a terrible one at that. Bodies intertwined with one another in a pool of crimson blood. Through the chaos I managed to catch a glimpse of a female body and, forgive me if I sound overly dramatic, but I could have sworn my heart stopped then and there.

The dead woman looked exactly like you.

I’m still a bit shaken by the said incident so I’ll make it quick: you’re not really dead, are you? That woman I saw, she was just a look - alike right? Oh, who am I kidding? Of course it was you! I can’t believe it. After all those years of searching and tracking you down, I finally found you. Dead. In front of my very own eyes. But I won’t cry. I promised not to. After all, as you put it that day, “Goodbye is only another way of saying ‘Mother and Child’ by Marc Chagall ‘see you again’”. So, goodbye, mother.

Sparky Jeong (NLCS Jeju)

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Time Apart 13h February 1994 My dearest John, Another month has now passed and yet I still hear no news from you. I know that you are allowed to send me one letter every six months, but today it is two years since you were taken away from me and thrown into the dolorous jail cell where you still are, as you wait for the miserable days to pass by, one day at a time. And again, I know I write this in every letter but I still want to let you know that I remain stung with guilt about not being able to save you from this. I still distinctly remember that trial that took place, three years ago. You put your trust in me to be your witness, to help prove your innocence. I looked upon you as I was about to speak, I knew these words would prevent me from losing you. I can still picture the way you were rabidly shaking out of the corner of my eye as I sat there unable to string two words together. After this all I can remember is a blur, and you being treated with utter iniquity. Now I think about it, you have no reason to write to me anyway as I am fully responsible for your situation. I guess I only write these letters to show you that I still care about you, and I cannot go a day without thinking about you.

Please send me a letter, even though I know it may be the last thing you would want to do. All I ask is one letter, to show me that you are still living and breathing, to show that you have read and understood the meaning of everything I have ever written to you. By losing you, I have also lost part of myself, a part I will never be able to regain again until I get some form of contact from you to tell me everything will be ok. Everything will be ok, right? This is a Ron Arad, details of '1951', 1973. (Taken thought that is taking over my mind. Again, please write back. As from the exhibition ‘Found’ at the Foundling you can tell, my mind is a mess, and all I need is some sort of sign Museum.) that will help me distinguish that you are alive. I will love you no matter what happens, you need to know that.

From your loving wife, Pamela 25th February 1994 Dear Pamela,

Please excuse my writing, I do not even seem able to lift up my hand. I do not want to worry you, but I need to let you know that I feel weak, fatigued and enervated. I do not know how much longer I will be able to put up with this.

Every day I wait for the jail guard to come to me, in hope that he will come and give me infinite numbers of letters from you, claiming that you still love me. I, however, have waited every day like this, but for the two years I have been here I have not received one single letter, one single reply, one single sign to let me know how you are doing. I am going to have to end this letter here, as my handwriting is becoming completely illegible and my hand cannot take this aching and agony much longer as I continue to scrawl these barely formed letters on the page. If this is the last letter I ever write, I am glad I have already sent you other letters that show you and prove that I still love you and have completely forgiven you, forgiven you for something that I am to blame for, the culprit of. Now I have to use the last of my strength to rip up this piece of paper I am currently writing on, as I have already used up my annual letter allowance and I will be denied posting this at all. I love you, and will until I die.

From your sick husband, John

7th May 1994 Dear Ms Pamela Parker, We regret to inform you that your husband, Mr John Parker, passed away this morning due to an illness that he had had for the past couple of months now. We do hope you receive this message and understand that there was nothing we could do about this. We also hope that you reply to this letter and come and visit the jail so we can have guidance on what to do next, and to sort out Mr Parker’s will. It would also help if you replied to this letter as soon as possible 12

to tell us when you will be coming, even though you have not replied to any of Mr Parker’s sent letters or any of the jail’s letters either. We are extremely sorry for your loss, but his illness became incurable after months of having it.

We did everything that we could to help; it just was not enough.

Yours sincerely, Mr E. Smith Senior Jail Manager 6th January 1995 My dearest John, I hope you are well. Today I looked to see that I had been posted a stack of letters, all addressed from you to me. By finding these letters, I feel as if I have found a part of myself, a part that I had lost, that had been missing for nearly three years. Before the only emotions I could experience were grief, pain, guilt, worry, sadness, as if positive emotions no longer existed in the dark cloud covering my mind, putting more and more negative thoughts into my tired brain. But today was different. The dark cloud finally lifted, and for the first time since I can remember I felt happy, relieved and, most importantly, loved. These almost felt like new emotions for me, as if I have gained more than I had lost. When you were first taken and locked up in that prison cell which you are sadly still caged up in, I was told by the jail manager that if you were behaving unusually that he would inform me right away. As I have not received a single letter from him I am glad that I know that you are somewhere in the world, living and breathing, and that somewhere in the world, I am still loved unconditionally by one person, which is all I ask. In case you are wondering, I am still completely guilt stricken, but not to the same extent as it was before I found your letters, professing how you still love and forgive me. It means an incredible amount that you were able to forgive me, forgive me for something I am still not able to forgive myself and come to terms with. My guilt is so heavy it cannot be expressed on this isolated piece of paper to which I write upon now, but the fact I know you are healthy and still love me beyond that prison cell can help me deal with this just slightly more. Yes, I know this letter contains an awful lot of repetition but it is hard to get my feelings across by simply using written words that I have messily written with this black pen that is gradually running out of ink word by word. Because of this, I may have to round my letter off here.

I look forward to hearing from you. I love you.

From your loving wife, Pamela 11th January 1995 Dear Ms Pamela Parker, You have not yet replied to the previous message we had sent to you about six months ago now. It is difficult for me to write this again, but your husband, Mr John Parker, has passed away due to an illness that he obtained during his time here. We did everything that we could to try and cure him and help him get back on his feet, but nothing worked. It is a real shame that he did not get to read one single letter from you, as every single letter that had been addressed to him arrived after Mr Parker had passed on. I completely understand that the loss of John may be extremely difficult for you, but we do need you to come to the jail to help sort things out such as John’s will. I am very sorry that he had to die so young, and it is a shame that he did not have any proper contact with you during his time alive in jail.

Yours sincerely, Mr E. Smith Senior Jail Manager

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6th June 1996 My dearest John, I know that, no matter what, you will never have the chance to even see this letter, but this is one letter that need to write, even though I am going to be the only one able to read this. I cannot bring myself to even think that you are dead, that nowhere in the world is there someone who can tell me that they love me. My mistake in the trial that I can only remember as a blur, is the reason that you had to die so young. It is all my fault, not yours. If I was able to be a stronger person, a better person, you would never have been locked up in ghastly conditions by scandalous people, which caused you to have the fatal illness that you had. Right now I could be having a laugh with you, drinking tea by the fireplace, without a single worry about anything, but I have prevented this for both of us. I cannot bear to go another day knowing that you are dead, that you are never coming home. You never even got to hear about how much I loved you during your time locked up. I hope to see you soon, in a place where we can finally have no problems and be together without having the fact that we might be separated in our minds. I love you, and will love you till I die.

From your guilty, distressed, and loving wife, Pamela Alexandra Morgan

Finding Canons

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n 1879 NLCS moved from Camden Road to a new building in Sandall Road, which was opened by the Princess of Wales. However, fifty years later, as the school in Camden became increasingly overcrowded, NLCS decided to purchase Canons. Through various accounts, the school’s archives show the enthusiasm of many pupils as they anticipated the move to Canons, and their subsequent adjusting to a new school environment.

Describing the air as crisp wouldn’t have been sufficient, for the wind seemed to poke and prod blithely at their shoulders: “At Sandall Road… you couldn’t scream or do this that or the other because you would annoy the neighbours.”

Connie Hurran ONL 1929 reminisced her time at NLCS, contrasting the school at Camden with Canons. She left the school ten years before the Foundation Stone was laid at Canons, but was one of the first girls to visit the site as it was being purchased, along with headmistress Isabella Drummond. For the first girls to attend lessons at Canons, it seemed that the fields streamed on and on; finally there was space to live, to really live and North London Collegiate School Camden Road ponder it too. Fully complementary of all the wanderings and opinions and questions that might arise within Canons, the place itself posed a comforting answer, with every French window advising “distant views of gardens, avenues of trees, a lake, and undulating wooded country.” Although everything was truly the same: the school insisted the exercise of a unique academic curiosity, as had been in Camden. Though, in Canons, this was not only preserved, but allowed to flourish further. Referring to the first impressions of Canons in 1929, Connie remarked affectionately: “It was a bit of a wilderness then.” Yet, such a “wilderness” bustled with opportunities for adventure: “the walk up the drive (how many generations since then bewailed its length!) with glimpses of cygnets on a dark pool, modern ‘Tudor’ embowered in flowers, the birch trees, the firs, and the sight of an air-borne swan, or the grey flurry of a squirrel: all this but the preliminary to the dream-like beauty of Letter from Miss Odell to E. Cross the gracious house”. (N.L.C.S. North London Collegiate School Sandall Road on “Finding Canons”.

1850-1950).

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Connie remembered, “the thing I shall never forget is when we moved to Canons Miss Drummond said I will make as few rules as possible. Rules from then on would be made by the girls”. Therefore, with the move to Canons came a greater freedom amongst the students, that did not just refer to the extensive grounds, although many students have recalled the invaluable outdoor lessons that would sometimes take place. “If lessons in those beautiful rooms were magical, the lessons outdoors were an incomparable joy.” Maureen Van Horn ONL distinctly remembers how herbaceous borders were “so perfectly suited” to her class’ reading of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’

Photos from a production of A Midsummer Night’s Fifty years after the move to Canons, ‘NLCS at Canons Dream in 1935 1939-89’ was written in a cooperative effort by many students and staff. In the book, is a letter written by headmistress Joan Clanchy to future students of the school. It is addressed to “North Londoners in the year 2039” and describes school life in 1989. She says, “The pagoda is the only building remaining from the time the Duke Of Chandos had his palace here; it has a beautiful wisteria growing over it which I hope has lasted for you. I hope the Blue Jays are occasionally still to be seen, that you have the black-headed Canadian Geese in the summer, that the Mallards breed sometimes in the pond and that the little Moorhens wait hopefully by the kitchens for whatever it is that you eat.” NLCS has not changed much in many respects; she also talks of the school’s success in some music competitions that year, and of the Founder’s Day play. The Jubilee year also saw the building of the Design block, which we still use today. Joan Clanchy finishes her letter: “We all wish you happiness, joy and success. Please remember us kindly beThe Herbaceous Border in the 1930s cause we tried to preserve Canons for you.”

Kate Greenburg

GOOD-BYE. GOOD-BYE ! 'Tis but a small and simple word, Yet 'tis our one expression of farewell.

Where'er we go, this word is ever heard— It serves its purpose, yes, and serves it well.

We say it hoping soon to meet again, We say it calmly, say it without fears ; We say it when our hearts are wrung with pain ; We say it sadly, struggling with our tears.

We say it for a moment, for an hour, We say it lightly, say it with a kiss.

We say it when the clouds of trouble lower ; Through all, we have no other word but this.

We say it when our dearest friends depart, When earthly ties are severed by Death's hand ; When, from the depths of a sad, aching heart, We long for help to make us understand.

We say it at the close of each short year, We use it constantly, this dear " Good-bye," We'll say it when our rest is drawing near, We'll say it when we part to meet on high.

WRITTEN FOR DECEMBER 9TH 1908.

O MILTON, mighty river ! When around Thy streamlet's banks we played, nor heard the calls From worldly strife that summons, yet appals, Drawn by the sense of thy delicious sound, Sabrina in the water-caves we found.

Then, peering down the flood, from rocky walls, Dazed by the cataract splendour of thy falls We plunged beneath thy waves. Now, almost drowned Lines on Milton.

In sheer delight of " Lycidas," we gain That nobler stream which flows through Paradise.

Nay, drown us not! but bear us on with thee From life's hill-country to life's wider plain ; That we, God's dewdrops, falling but to rise, May something of the greater ocean see.

Kathleen McCujre, Form VI. From the 1908 edition of the NLCS magazine

ONL A. A. N. from the 1911 edition of the NLCS magazine.

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London Vignettes I. Cello Suite 6 in D major, Prelude by J.S. Bach – Alfia Nakipbekova And here we begin. As dawn triumphs, the walk starts; London starts.

Down a narrow street, past Kings Cross and beyond the old pub with a permanent puddle outside lies a field – more of a square than a field except for the name and slight wildness of corners where the seemingly careful lawnmower missed the patches of forget-me-nots intertwined with long grass. Slowly, the shadows of these tightly twisted knots stretch and spread over the stunted shoots of the green.

Green becomes infused with gold as waves of light begin to filter through, their slices widening with each minute that passes. (How quick these first steps of day are.) A different shadow now starts to ripple across the others, dominating even those knots of darkness. It moves swiftly, confident in its movements but alone. As the light modulates from its deep orange towards a warmer yellow, the features of the woman sharpen with the slight curve of a waist revealing her feminine nature.

As her form sharpens, so do her movements. Now the slight accent can be noticed on every fourth step before the rhythm changes and the weight shifts onto the sixth and then back to the fourth. Yet, the direction never changes with her tread becoming lighter as the breeze from the east gently moves her forward.

Her form is enclosed, contained within this field whose strange order stands against the disarray of a city. But, the light from this field is not contained and the sky, forever changing, now opens from its increasingly transparent yellow to a blue so pale it’s almost white.

Clarity: all can now be seen.

II. String Quintet, Movement II by F Schubert – Emerson String Quartet with Mistlav Rostroprovich The streets are quiet down by this part of the river – just a little north of where the children play and south of those back streets where the mothers cry out softly. Little light shines onto these streets. A shower of rain falls now, providing that gentle staccato that the small children move to, trying to imitate as they walk north through these streets.

The light grows, illuminating each droplet.

The light shines through each window, illuminating each scene.

The rain stops and winds start to push their way through the streets.

They brush against each moving child, disrupting their carefully designed path. Some now lose their rhythm to find a new one, to move against the wind that pushes them east and west.

The wind stops, the children walk.

London, 1937 by Bill Brandt III. Piano trio number 4, opus II, Movement I by L.V. Beethoven – Pablo Casals, Eugene Istomin and Alexander Schneider “If you loved me you would do this.”

“If you loved me you wouldn’t do this.”

Two phrases, both so alike, sit side by side. Difference lies only in two words, in two letters and yet, their meaning is changed. There is no context to these two phrases: they exist in the speech of a couple that faces one another. The couple reflects their words and deflects them. One has an expression of pure desperation and the other is steadfast and sure of itself. Their tone is lost in a moment; a third person’s writing is unable to imitate the expressions of the couple who infuse meaning into their words through the gentle rise towards a faintly accented “loved”, the delicate shift towards a darker tone on “would” before moving towards a hollow interrupted cadence. The next phrase begins.

This one is more broken. The more desperate one. A softer rise towards the you, before the gentle descent into this time an imperfect cadence. The phrases end. They are lost out of context. Meaning rests only in the silences and the subtle inclinations.

IV. ‘A Love Supreme’ – John Coltrane The room is dark. (Cut off from all sunlight, it’s always full of shadows.) There is a small light in the corner but it barely shines, it’s desperate. The light stretches as far as it can, but stops just before reaching a hidden object. An object whose presence is only marked by the slightly darker shadow that envelops it. All that is needed to see it is to open the door but that seems too difficult.

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Breath then noise. Acknowledgment of the sound, that gentle hum in the room which is now broken – spliced apart by a louder, sharper but still warm sound.

With each breath, each fragment of noise the door cracks slightly. It doesn’t open, just splinters. (Surely opening the door would have been easier?

The revelation comes through pursuit.)

V. Piano Trio number 3, Movement I by B. Martinu – Arbor Piano Trio “Stop for a moment. Watch and listen.” Says the woman who sits on the side of the road.

“There is the young boy who sits on the swing” grumbles the man who leans on the lamppost.

“There is his mother who watches him carefully.”

“Quick, she runs forward to catch his fall” “What falls?”

“Her.” “Him too.”

“He is no longer so small now, she can’t control him” They stop moving now and stare. The watched notice the watching and the watching start to look more carefully at one another. Something’s missing. There is always a third person in each scene, lying underneath the two that talk but, they must be found. In each pair, another provides the base. Harmonies develop, balances are found before being lost once again.

VI. ‘The Nearness of You’ from the album Nearness – Joshua Redman and Brad Meldhau A single window: rippled glass perfectly placed between the blocks of whitened wood. Light shines from within, replacing the day that has now been lost.

The silhouette in this window is faint. Solitary. Blurred except for a small gap where glass is replaced by transparent air and the form is suddenly clear – so definite it almost seems detached from the rest of its body. It moves slowly, leans over something and waits for a few moments before straightening.

A change of air, a new breath and the next body. The dance begins.

Such subtle movements: one step and then another, the figures finishing the soft steps of one-another. The distance between the bodies hurts. Come closer.

Steps begin to overlap in rhythm but the bodies remain apart. The disThe Adelphi, 1939 by Bill Brandt tance between them now begins to fluctuate. Five centimetres to three, increasing to four and then suddenly to only half before quickly finding the space again with a large step back to eight. Each time they come to close they must move apart – a rule of time. It goes on…

Almost imperceptibly the first body leaves and the second is left alone, still moving. Its steps lose their original sense of pattern and find a new one. The body creates its own distances and spaces now, making its way away from the window and towards another entrance.

VII. ‘Quartet for the End of Time’, Movement III by O. Messiaen – Gervase de Payer “The abyss is Time with its sadness, its weariness. The birds are the opposite to Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs.”

All sun-light has now been lost. Only the fully-formed moon remains with its light barely diffused through the layers of night that hang low and heavy. This is the abyss, where darkness now wraps itself around the gravestones, holding them in time. A breeze rises at last and a shiver runs through the branches; the brush of a leaf wakes the solitary bird.

First its eyes slowly open and then the wings spread to fly a branch higher, a branch closer to the light, a branch where its song can echo louder. As the bird settles down on its new found home it begins to sing. Hesitant at first, one note begins and then another: a polyphonic cacophony of echoes from one line. Before long though, each note is captured by the night and silence falls. The low hum of a deep sleep resonates to fill the abyss of silence. Pure and single: an expression of a collective experience.

Mika Hyman

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Lost and Found in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen

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mong the most famous works in the operatic repertoire are the four operas which make up Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle: Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold); Die Walküre (The Valkyrie); Siegfried; and Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods). Wagner took his inspiration from the same body of Norse and German mythology which later informed J.R.R. Tolkien in his composition of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The ring in the title of Wagner’s tetralogy is a magic ring, just like in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and the operas describe the interactions of gods, giants, dwarves, humans, and a dragon in a landscape of mountaintops, smoky caverns, and eerie forests, similar to Tolkien’s novels.

Loss and discovery are at the heart of Wagner’s work. Das Rheingold begins beneath the waters of the river Rhine with three nymphs guarding a treasure, the Rhinegold of the title, which has been entrusted to their care. Their watch is interrupted by the arrival of an evil dwarf called Alberich, who manages to steal the treasure and carry it away to the underworld of Nibelheim. There he forces his brother, the master smith Mime, to turn the gold into a magic ring and helmet. Using these items, he gains control over the other dwarves, or Nibelung, and rules over them as a sadistic tyrant.

Elsewhere, the king of the gods, Wotan, awakes after a long sleep to discover that two giants, Fasolt and Fafner, have finished building him a palace called Valhalla. The giants demand payment for their work and ‘Albrich oppressing the Nibelung’ remind Wotan that he has promised to give them Freia, the goddess of by Arthur Rackham beauty and love. Wotan consents, but the loss of the goddess, whose presence has kept the gods eternally young, causes a terrible lethargy to descend on them. Without her, they are listless and wan. Moved to buy Freia back from the giants, Wotan travels to Nibelheim with Loge, the god of fire and trickery, and steals the ring, the helmet, and the remainder of the Rhinegold from Alberich. With his spoils, Wotan pays the giants off, but the fascinating powers of the ring are so great that Fafner immediately kills Fasolt and claims the ring for himself. Twisted by covetousness and murder, he crawls away and transforms himself into a dragon.

The ring, the helmet, and the Rhinegold remain undisturbed in Fafner’s hoard throughout Die W alküre before reappearing in Siegfried where the eponymous hero kills Fafner and claims them for himself. Then, in Götterdämmerung, Siegfried falls under the influence of a villain named Hagen, who ultimately kills him in an attempt to claim the ring and helmet for himself. But his plan is foiled. Persistent rumours that the age of the gods is ending are realised as the Rhine breaks its banks and floods. At the same time, the flames from Siegfried’s funeral pyre spark a blaze which begins to consume Valhalla. In the confusion, Hagen makes a lunge for the ring, but the nymphs drown him and return the ring to the river’s depths. The age of the gods is over.

On a literal level, the Rhinegold and the objects made out of it are lost and found, and their possession by members of different factions affects the power balance within the operas. But they also play a crucial role in delineating the characters. Like the ring in Tolkien, Wagner’s ring is intrinsically and overwhelmingly attractive, so that characters are constantly drawn to it, captivated by its beauty and power. At the moments when they encounter or forsake it, submerged parts of their personalities are brought to the surface. When Wotan steals it from Alberich in Das Rheingold, he is immediately struck by its power, singing ‘Nun halt’ ich, was mich erhebt, der Mächtigen mächtigsten Herrn’ (now I have what will elevate me, the mightiest of lords). Its power as much as its beauty enthrals him. He only relinquishes it when warned by the earth goddess Erda that it will destroy him.

The device is inverted in Siegfried when the ring is found in Fafner’s hoard. Because Siegfried has been raised in the forest, away from the society of humans and gods, he is an innocent, unaware of fear, love, greed, and the other staple human emotions. This innocence provides an immunity to the ring’s allure. He only notices it at all because he is directed to it by a bird, whose language he is understand after drinking Fafner’s blood. At the beginning of Götterdämmerung, he gives the ring to his lover Brünnhilde, singing ‘Reich’ ich dir diesen Ring.

Was der Taten je ich schuf, des Tugend schliesst er ein’ (‘I’ll give you this ring. Within it resides whatever virtue there is in the deeds I have wrought’). His construal of the ring as a memento of his achievements rather than as an object of power reveals the extent of his ignorance. Yet because of this, he is able to bestow a gift which no other character could part with.

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When Erda warns Wotan about the ring, she reveals the larger truth that ‘ein düst’rer tag dämmert den Göttern’ (a dark day dawns for the gods). This warning that the age of the gods is ending provides another way of interpreting loss. In the composition of The Ring, Wagner was influenced not only by Norse and German mythology, but also by ancient Greek tragedy. As his friend the philosopher and classicist Freidrich Nietzsche pointed out in Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music), the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides originated in musical dramas. The Ring and the Bayreuth Festival, which Wagner founded to perform his works, were conceived as a re-creation of these dramas, in which art was placed at the centre of the community and reflected moral truths back on it. The four-part structure of The Ring also resembles the structure of Athenian tetralogies, in which three interlinked tragedies were followed by a shorter satyr play, and the design of the opera house at Bayreauth, in which the seats are arranged in an amphitheatre rather than in tiers or boxes, was conceived with a similar goal in mind.

Critics differ on what moral truths Wagner wanted to depict, but many interpret the gods as symbols of religious authority and the operas as an allegorical retelling of the history of religion in Europe. When Wagner was writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, a variety of factors had combined to weaken the authority of religious teaching, especially in the educated circles in which Wagner moved. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the higher criticism of the nineteenth (essentially, very expert biblical scholarship which cast doubt on traditional claims about the reliability of the Christian scriptures), and the shock caused by Darwin’s theory of evolution had taken their toll. Neitzscehe attempted to sum up and intensify the mood in Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus spoke Zarathustra) where he wrote that ‘God is dead’, meaning not that God had literally died, but that the idea of God had ceased to play the role that it had in European ‘Fafner kills Fasolt’ by Arthur culture and that a new age, in which moral, political, and philosophical questions would have to be answered through appeal to secular authorities and Rackham sources, was dawning.

There are repeated references in The Ring to days of the gods being numbered and the action of the operas is increasingly dominated by humans as the cycle progresses. Whereas in Das Rheingold there are seven gods and no humans, in Götterdämmerung there is one god, two humans who play major roles, and a human chorus—something not seen in the earlier operas. The handover of power is symbolised in Siegfried when Wotan attempts to bar Siegfried’s path to Brünnhilde and the young hero breaks Wotan’s spear, shattering an object which up until this point has represented Wotan’s near-absolute authority. The following scene depicts a similar event, as Brünnhilde awakes from a magic sleep to her first experience of mortality, having cast off her godly nature by disobeying Wotan in Die W alküre. In the 1990 Bayreuth production of Götterdämmerung, the final scene even showed people dressed in modern costumes watching TV, representing the humans who will inherit the earth after the age of the gods is over. Humans replace gods; secular society replaces religion; and (in this production) consumerism replaces art.

The change is also marked in the music. The famous leitmotifs (recognisable phrases of music which are roughly alligned with different themes and characters) are set out very plainly in Das Rheingold and correspond very directly with their objects. As the operas progress, they become ever more complexly intertwined, less frequently played in full, and increasingly ambiguous in their meaning. In the later operas, the audience may feel a kind of nostalgia for the primordial and purer musical forms of Das Rheingold and for many of the gods from the earlier oepras, who appear only as musical forms. But as Wotan comes to understand, there is no going back.

The religious reading of the work can be paralleled by a more political one. One of the central problems in The Ring is how Wotan can defeat Alberich without breaking agreements which he has made earlier in the operas. The contract he makes to pay Fasolt and Fafner, which he discharges by giving them the ring, the helmet, and the Rhinegold, remains engraved on his spear, binding his future actions. It prevents him or his son, the demi-God Siegmund, from taking the ring from Fafner’s hoard. Only someone genuinely free, someone not subject to Wotan’s control, can claim the ring from Fafner and prevent it falling into Alberich‘s hands. Siegfried ends up being that person and, as he carries the action forward in Götterdämmerung, Wotan has to step back from events, reconciling himself to letting them unfold rather than seeking to influence them directly. The political allegory here is clear: only by honouring his commiments, surrendering his executive power to another, and by recognising the limited nature of his power in the face of events can Wotan avoid disaster.

There is an historical dimension to this reading too, which stems from the fact that many European countries witnessed revolutions or substantial changes to their political order in the nineteenth century. In 1830 there were revolutions in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Poland, Switzerland and in 1845 there were revolutions in Austria, 19

Denmark, France, Hunguary, Italy, and many of the German states. In 1849, Wagner himself was involved in a left -wing revolution in Saxony and was banished from the German states until 1862. Many of these revolutions were democractic in nature and involved attempts by the masses to dislodge the remnants of the feudal system by widening the franchise and moving power from unelected to elected representatives. In The Ring, Wotan is a quintessential aristocrat. He rules through a combination of force, trickery, persuasion, and seduction, has no democratic mandate, and is unabashedly nepotistic: his wife and her sister hold considerable power; his grandson, Siegfried, performs the crucial act of regaining the ring; and his daughters, the Valkeries, gather the souls of dead warriors in preparation for a final battle against the forces of evil. But Wotan becomes an increasingly passive character, forced to accept that the focus of events is more and more lodged in the human realm.

What is lost in The Ring is not only gold and magical items, but the possibility of a religous culture on anything like the pre-Enlightenment model and a feudal system of government. The momentus nature of this, as well as the opportunities that come with it, are presented in carefully nuanced terms. In the fianl act of Götterdämmerung, Siegfried is killed in an act of treachery and the other characters are swept away by flood and fire. There is an overwhelming sense of things passing away. But the music points in a more hopeful direction. A motif recurs which the audience have not heard since the final act of Die Walküre, when Brünnhilde tells Siegfried’s pregnant mother that her child will be a longed-for hero. In ending with an allusion to this scene, Wagner seems to be pointing to the future, handing responsibility to the audience, the history of whose culture he has just recounted in mythologised terms.

G Roberts

How's Tricks?

At first you came to me in obvious places, Green shade of cemetery woodland, Honeyed shade of a crumbling cliff, Flowering of hyacinths you gave me last birthday, Affectionate sign-off on the card they came with.

It wasn't you really, just my eye strained To fix on some residual skein A flutter of air, though you were no flutterer, The secret sign, though we hadn't forethought When I didn't know where to start.

Some months later hopped into the circle A calm moment made in the sifted-soft leaf mould Under holly and beech in the woods of our last walk A robin. Reward for my patient heart's-eye.

Coal-smoulder orange and firethorn bright.

And today, so funny, you came as a magpie, In preposterous costume of blue satin sheen.

A flirt with the maverick, jauntily crass Cross-dressing for larks on a stage of gold oak, The reveal in the warmth of your mirth when I clocked.

So now, back to normal — Morning! How's tricks?

Your lightness in life keeps my worse self in check.

Makes Fridays of Tuesdays, and feast days of work, Lets dead poets live and share tea like the neighbours We wish were our mothers. You're here. Tricks are good.

T Anslow 20

A Tale of Lost and Found...

T

wo B or not Two B? Well, actually I'm HB. I hate Two Bs, if I'm honest. They're all so stuck up, thinking that they're better just because they're more ‘artsy’. But what they don't realise is that we're the ones that get to do the UKMT maths challenges. Also, I just don't understand, what's so great about being more difficult to rub out?

Yes, HB is definitely the best classification to be, the perfect mixture between hard and soft, light and dark. We can help you work out the hardest maths problem, or draw the most beautiful sketches; we're not restricted to just one path like some other pencils.

Today was a good day. I was feeling pretty sharp, and little Lizzie has really come a long way with her alphabet since I first met her. Today she even managed to write cat! Lizzie's definitely my favourite human so far; she doesn't chew my end like Michael or drum me on the table like Tomisin, and she doesn't drop me anywhere near as often as her older sister Beth did.

Michael was my first human. Me and him didn't last very long though… there just wasn't any chemistry. Well actually, there was lots of Chemistry, that was part of the problem. I hate Chemistry with a passion because everyone tends to press so hard, making me go blunt really quickly. It’s also the lesson that I get most chewed, especially when I was with Michael – he was a nervous chewer... I think it's something to do with stress.

Donya Jeybalsingham

So, one particularly bad Chemistry lesson when he broke my tip three times, and had chewed my rubber to within an inch of its life, I took the liberty of rolling off the desk when he wasn't looking and getting “lost”. I didn't need to go far – there were plenty of other students in the room who were desperate for a decent HB pencil that some unknown had misplaced. And so I was picked up by Tomisin.

Tomisin was more of a slow burn than Michael. We had a great time together, and I really got to see her blossom while I was with her. The day we met she had her first Intermediate Maths Challenge, and she chose me to take her through it. She had terrible nerves that day; her hands wouldn't stop shaking and she tried to still the snakes curling through her stomach by drumming me against the desk listlessly. I actually became quite attached to the regular rhythm of her drumming, and, for a while, I couldn't imagine myself without it.

She drummed me when she wrote her first love poem. This was more of a distracted drum, slower and softer, as though she was lost in a world of her own. She really liked the girl she was writing for, I could tell by the attention placed in crafting each and every word to sound and look and feel beautiful.

She drummed me the day they broke up, as she scratched the girl out of every picture and doodle, every etching of a name and a heart, every thought.

I probably should have known that it was coming at some point, I had thought that we would stay together until I was nothing more than an old rubber holder. But she lost me two months after we met, when she left me in a café somewhere in East London. I was sitting there for almost a day, lost and terrified, before Beth found me.

Beth was out with a group of friends when she saw me. I don't know why she decided to pick me up, I was looking rather tragic by this stage, with the chewed rubber and dents from drumming. I guess she just must have really needed a pencil. Beth and I were a quick fling. She only used me once or twice, but in between these uses I got dropped a lot; when she was unpacking her bag, when she was throwing her pencil case around with her friends, when she just left a pocket unzipped. I think I was probably dropped more times during my few days with her than in the entire time I had been with Michael and Tomisin. It was ironic really, seeing that she was the oldest of the group.

Then, one day, about a week ago, Beth helped her little sister Lizzie with a drawing she was doing. And afterwards she just… left me. I have to say, that was probably the best moment of my time with her.

And so, I ended up with little Lizzie.

Imogen Woods – Wilford

21

The Unexpected Perks of Using a Phonebook

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hey weren’t even trying to keep their voices down. Ali suppressed a snigger that always built up in her chest when she was engaged in mischief. She was ready to run back to her bedroom if anyone came out of the living room, but they were all so engaged in ‘adult matters’, as her mom had put it, that she could safely stand behind the huge wardrobe and hear every word. The problem was, she couldn’t really make out the sense of it. Gramps was telling everyone about his trip to the Ukraine, and how he found something there that he thought was gone. From the tone of his voice, Ali assumed that it was more than the old photographs of a young blond man who was beginning to go bald which gramps had shown them earlier in the evening. You see, Ali didn’t really understand all of this for quite a while – she needed time, resilience and an impressive amount of curiosity. Unfortunately, we can’t all wait to know the entirety of this story as long as she did, so let me go back a bit to a wet, bleak Toronto night, with the winter chill trapped in miniscule droplets of water that stuck to his skin like a deluge of pinhead-sized leeches. He was cramped in a small phonebooth with three other men around their thirties, who had had a long, hard day at work, which, combined with the pre-residing smells of urine and beer made the air inside the booth near-impossible to breathe. He stuck his head out into the rain to clean his nostrils while his friends flicked through the phonebook, trying to find their surnames, traces of the legacy of immigration. (Canada had been a hub for Polish families escaping communism he had once been told). Quietly, he snuck out of the booth and breathed the clean air into his lungs. His name wasn’t going to be in there, so why bother surviving the stench?

“Hey! Come see, there’s someone here called Dnierko!” his friend Philip cried.

He froze. He had never heard of or met anyone outside his closest family who bore that name. Ever. He turned around immediately, pushed through his friends, picked up the phone and dialled the number of Miroslav Dnierko. Soon, he heard stories of fields of grass and wheat, never-ending, everlasting, covered in a delicate coat of sunlight and early-morning mist rolled outside his window, beautiful and strangely familiar. From the moment they crossed the river Bug and into the Ukraine he felt a chill he couldn’t shake, a mixture of excitement and dread. He glanced over at his father, Jurek, whose eyes were fixed at the road ahead as they passed the sign ‘Welcome to Horodenka’.

The town was small, so they found his father’s aunt’s house within minutes. She was a small woman, with a map of her sufferings and smiles written in wrinkles on her face, but her eyes still sparkled when she saw them. Before inviting them in she hugged his father as if he were her own longlost child, not her cousin’s. Over a cup of tea and a slice of cherry pie, he told her of their lives and his daughter, Ali, and she told them a story of a summer in 45’, of a dusty, uneven village road and a cart that trembled with every hole and rock, causing the young man on sitting upon it to rock from side to side as if he were out at sea. He was tall and blonde, although it would be apparent to a vigilant onlooker that his hair was beginning to fall out. Next to him sat a young girl, maybe twenty, with a cascade of brown hair trapped in a single braid wrapped around her head. The two were conversing vigorously:

“Has he started to crawl yet?” asked the girl.

“No, but yesterday he pulled himself up and stood against the chair. Can you believe it? My little Jurek, a standing man!”

“I cannot believe I missed it! By the way, are you planning on having more”

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“Of course, a whole bunch! As soon as it’s safe enough. I’m happy as it is though, with my gorgeous boy”, said the man with a dreamy look and the happiest of smiles, which disappeared in that very moment, as a group of armed men in uniform emerged from the trees.

“Why, good morning” said the one appearing to be a leader. “Still fraternising with the enemy, Dnierko?”

“She’s family, Bohdan” “Yes, and that’s your problem. I told you, Dnierko, not to dishonour yourself and your country, I warned you not to marry the Polish whore.”

“My sister’s not a whore” said the woman through gritted teeth.

“Basia, don’t…”

“Enough!” snapped the man called Bohdan. “Get off.”

“No, please…” whispered Basia, her face suddenly pale.

“I said off, you scum! I swear, I will cleanse this land of all you usurpers and give it back to the people. And I’ll start with you. Boys!” The remaining men pointed their guns at them.

They got off. Her hands were shaking. His cheeks were wet. They were told to stand on the side of the road and turn around. They did. A series of deafening bangs rang over and over in Matilda’s ears, although she could not have heard them. Maybe it was just the noise of the pots her brother and sister were throwing onto the cart. She came out of the house, not bothering to bid it farewell. She didn’t want to even look at it.

The cart held everything they owned – which was not much. Kazik was already sitting at the helm, ready and eager to set off. Ewa was trying to persuade their numb mother, who was still gripping Basia’s favourite sweater like a life raft, to climb on and sit amongst the packages. Just before they set off, Ewa handed her a photograph of her husband, with a murmur of “something to remember him by.” Matilda looked at it. Just for a second. And then she stood up and threw it into the nearby field. She didn’t want to remember, she didn’t want to have to talk about it. She’ll never talk about it. She can’t. Little Jurek opened his eyes in her arms, and she stared into them, focused on them, held onto him. Like a life raft. His eyes were big and olive-coloured and filled with tears, as he stared at the gravestone covered in daisies and violets. He let out a broken breath and felt the coldness the morning’s dew on his hurting knees and his worn-out palms. He couldn’t believe that – it was there, that it – it existed. That he had found it after over sixty years of questions and denial and hope, finally lost when his mother died, taking the story of Jurek’s father to her grave. Through sheer coincidence – a Toronto phonebook and a phone call – he, his son and grandchildren would understand their history.. He tried to take a deeper breath, but found that his throat was tangled in a Gordian knot of anxiety, longing and joy. He swallowed hard and, for the first time in his long life, said “Hi, dad.” Something broke inside his heart, washed over his shoulders and trickled into the ground, seeking the ashes from which he came. Suddenly, he felt whole.

Berenika Kotelko

23

Lost and found in the forest of Middle English Romance

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number of years ago, I edited an issue of this magazine on the subject of the myth of Orpheus, and came to know the sprawling corpus of Orphic mythology and legend well. I managed, however, to overlook one of the strangest iterations of this tale, the Middle English romance of Sir Orfeo. Medieval romances are not ‘romantic’ in the modern sense – the term refers to the Old French roman, meaning any short narrative. This particular work dates from at least 1330, surviving in three manuscripts in three distinct scribal hands; its author is unknown, and the text is possibly intentionally anonymous. I have modernized the use of Middle English runic characters for this article: a good edition of the full text can be found in Tolkien Studies 1.1 (2004), 85 – 123, which is available online. All the translations here are my own.

Sir Orfeo belongs to the group of romances known as Breton lais: these are mostly tales which have identifiable Old French and folkloric sources, and share themes including the pastoral, family, and – most pertinently – the recovery of what is lost. Not atypically for the genre, Sir Orfeo begins on a pleasant summer’s day, in …the comessing of May, Illustration of ‘Sir Orfeo’ by Errol le Cain

When miri and hot is the day, And oway beth winterschours, And eueri feld is ful of flours, And blosme breme on eueri bough.

…the arrival of May, when the day is merry and hot, and winter’s showers are gone, and every field is full of flowers, and blossom blooms on every bough.

This utopian pastoral scene fits neatly into the Classical category of the locus amoenus (literally, ‘pleasant place’), but as any seasoned reader of romance would have recognised, this bodes ill for the rest of the story. We meet King Orfeo, ruler of Winchester – the author explains that Thrace was the old name for Winchester, putting an Anglicised gloss on the Greek tale – and his wife, the beautiful Heurodis (or, in one manuscript, ‘Meurodis’), an Anglicised version of the Greek ‘Eurydice’. Just as in the Greek myth, too, Orfeo is a brilliant lutenist, famous throughout the world. However, beyond these basic elements, the English story veers sharply away from its Greek source and takes on a uniquely Medieval flavour.

Rather than being bitten by a snake like Eurydice, Heurodis falls asleep ‘under a fair ympe-tre’, a tree enchanted by Fairy powers. Medieval Europeans understood ‘Fairy’ in a profoundly different way from the modern sense of the word. In the Medieval imagination, Fairy creatures and places existed alongside humans, but rather than the saccharine benignity of the likes of Tinkerbell, Medieval Fairies were vicious, terrifying, and completely inhuman.

More than anything, Fairies steal from the human world; romances abound with stories of stolen treasure, changeling babies, and, of course, the mercenary exchange of women. The Fairy King of Sir Orfeo is a perfect example of this: he threatens to kidnap and rape Heurodis – ‘Wold ich, nold ich, he me nam’, she tells Orfeo: ‘Whether I will or not, he will take me.’

The King goes on to warn Heurodis that if she makes the Fairies delay, Thou worst yfet, And totore thine limes al

That nothing help be no schal; And thei thou best so totorn, Yete thou worst with ous yborn.

You will be torn apart, and your limbs will be wrenched from another so that nothing will be able to help you; and although you will be torn apart, yet we will take you with us.

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The language of these lines does not shy away from graphic violence, with the repetition of ‘totore…totorn’ gratuitously emphasising the Fairy King’s threat. The pronoun ‘thou’ is notable, too: this is the informal second person pronoun in Middle English, giving the Fairy King a contemptuous, disrespectful tone.

This is archetypal Fairy behaviour. In the popular Middle English tale Sir Degarré, also a Breton lai, Fairy king rapes a princess when she falls asleep under an enchanted tree – although she ‘wep and criede and wolde fle’ (‘wept and cried and tried to flee’), the Fairy ‘dide his wille, what he wolde. / He binam hire here maidenhod.’ (‘He did his will, exactly what he wanted; he took her maidenhood.’)

Much of Medieval Europe was covered by vast forests; it doesn’t seem too much of a leap to imagine that these mysterious and dangerous spaces inspired the connection between forests and Fairy which dominates Medieval romances. In these stories, forests are spaces where things – and people – get lost; the liminality of sleep, where the self slips ‘Sir Orfeo’ by Nicholas Parry away and dream states dominate, facilitates these losses.

Orfeo tries to protect Heurodis with a hundred armed men, but she is magically abducted, and Orfeo retreats into exile, living in the forest for many years, until finally he encounters the Fairy tribe once more. He follows them to their castle, where he encounters horrific scenes of murder and depravity – the walls are made of mutilated bodies, described in gruesome detail – and, as in the Greek source tale, plays the lute so beautifully that the Fairy King returns Heurodis to him. Unlike in the Greek myth, however, Orfeo does not lose Heurodis through the mistake of looking back – indeed, no such restraint is even put on him. Once he has found Heurodis, nothing more is needed; finding her was enough.

At this point, the narrative seems to lose momentum; Orfeo returns to his castle, reclaims his crown, and lives happily with Heurodis for many years. The author offers us no moral message to take away, no warning of the dangers of Fairy folk or praise of the redemptive power of music. There is an obvious comparison here with Sir Degarré, in which the princess gives birth to a son after her rape; the child is sent far away, but returns and reunites his parents.

The author of this tale seems unconcerned by the strangeness and incongruity of the idea that a human woman and the Fairy who viciously attacked and then abandoned her might be happy to live together as husband and wife.

Even more curiously, neither tale actually depicts the characters’ lives after they are reunited in any kind of detail.

This lack of interest in what happens after lost things are recovered emerges in a number of romances. In Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal, for example, a knight and a Fairy woman are separated, reunited, and exiled to a remote island; the trial leading up to their exile covers hundreds of lines, but their lives together afterwards are summed up in two stanzas, after which the poem abruptly ends. Once again, the reunion is enough – nothing afterwards is quite as interesting.

It’s difficult to say where this leaves us. Were Medieval readers really not interested in the psychodrama of the reunited family? Did they just care about narrative without minding if the characters they read about were depicted with psychological depth? It seems unlikely. The precise moments of reunion, of recovering what is lost, in these stories are often not particularly gripping or dramatic; their language is rarely elevated or ornate. Perhaps all we can say is that these are tales held together by loss and finding, separation and reunion, that the basic stuff of romance is the desperate search for something that you thought was unrecoverable, which isn’t so distant or so strange after all.

Maia Bear (ONL)

25

Homage to a Literary Genius Inspired by ‘Pale Fire’ by Vladimir Nabakov listair McCarthy was an English poet famed for his provocative, experimental work. He was met mostly with bemusement and nonchalance, at that time when he was best known for impenetrable lectures and an endless supply of cigars. Years after his death, when the true brilliancy of his work became known, the Student Union erected a statue in honour of what I knew long before to be divine.

A

In person, McCarthy was a timid man. Bearer of a frail heart, varicose veins and an enlarged, blotchy nose, his physical form in no way resembled the vitality that rippled through his art. I must admit that when I first met the old poet, I had some difficulty in putting together these rather antithesised presentations of his singular soul. One was inclined to dismiss his slipper-clad shuffle as a mere mask protecting the world from what it could not yet comprehend. Perhaps his hairy hands and yellowing nails were the waste products necessarily expunged by his inner bodily forces, those same forces that caused the descent of his tobacco-stained fingers upon his battered typewriter with such ingenuity.

Photograph of George Whitman, Richard and Ellen

It is that very process that claims me by night even now. To Wright, Max Steele and Peter Mathiessen in Shakespeare think of our celebrated poet tapping and clicking away on and Co. taken during the 1950s his machine, transforming the thoughtlessness of London life into the wittily reflective. And all the while, legs scrambling past the windows of his house, carrying torsos to some marketplace where mouths might be gorged or fancies indulged – unaware, oblivious, of the organic miracle that was Alistair McCarthy reshaping and remoulding the world into his verse.

McCarthy’s official post at the College was as a Professor of twentieth century literature, with a speciality in postmodernism. If entirely frank, although appreciative of their treacherous innovations, I was never wholly enamoured with the likes of Beckett and Nabokov. (The latter, in particular, was rather too mischievous for my liking, although at some level his witticisms must have percolated through my work.) But Nabokov was McCarthy’s greatest passion, and in applying to complete a doctorate in his work, I knew that I would be assigned to my own inspiration.

In such a way, McCarthy became my mentor. We met daily and weekly to review the progress of my research either at the university or coffee shops. I suggested the latter when I came to understand the length of McCarthy’s walk home, or rather, the speed at which he travelled. Due to weaknesses of the heart, the greying poet chose always to scuffle back on foot rather than suffer the heat of the Tube. My hesitant Muse would stumble on dirty pavements for almost forty-five minutes before returning to Islington. Moreover, my own walk back from his neighbourhood was even longer, (of course, I could not have driven after McCarthy for fear of detection and aggravating fellow motorists,) so haunts local to his house and my automobile were altogether preferable. It was during these leisurely ambles of ours, following the old poet from a block away, that I was most comfortable in his presence.

One day, I overheard McCarthy, in conversation with another student, profess not only his restaurant of choice but the very day and time at which he frequented the place. There was a saxophonist playing live from 8pm on a Thursday night; having bought the musician’s existing albums and thoroughly investigated the nature of jazz, I took myself and a battered copy of Pnin to the bar opposite McCarthy’s venue. Relying on his decaying eyesight, I was able to watch the poet and his wife unrestrained by fear of discovery. Like the man himself, McCarthy’s wife did not resemble the picture carved in my mind from sporadic references inherent to the poet’s work and speech. Having conjured for myself a placid, inexorably Christian character, the woman before my eyes was rather more beautiful than expected. Unlike in McCarthy’s case, the waiter brought different dishes to Julia’s table, suggestive of a curiosity rarely visible in her husband’s misleading demeanour. As is often the way with such revelations, I began to regard McCarthy slightly differently after our first little exhibition.

I would like to say that a few months into my doctorate, McCarthy and I developed a friendship of sorts. I do not mean that we played golf, or discussed politics, God forbid; our relationship existed on a purely intellectual level. One day, McCarthy scribbled down his address in his wavering script, (charmingly unaware that I knew it already,) so that he might share with me his collection of etchings by Lucian Freud. It was within his abode that McCarthy 26

professed forth a secret, shyly admitting that he was very near completing perhaps his greatest volume yet. His greatest volume yet, crafted in this very study! That night I went home unabashedly aroused, so anticipatory were my eyes to ravish this masterpiece.

I began to inquire after the collection in subsequent meetings, as is only polite, but McCarthy was oddly brusque in waving off my questions or even responding tersely. Forced to turn to other means, I casually slipped the topic of the volume, surely now about to be published, into trivial conversation with his colleagues at the university.

Unfortunateluy, these attempts to glean information were frustratingly unfruitful. I offered to drive home the bothersome poet, which only once he accepted, hoping that I might peer through the windows of his house into the study. However, the required window was far too high to inspect, and I returned home entirely unsatisfied. It was as if the whole world were united in some conspiracy to keep that volume from me! But let me not pursue this tabulation of nonsense.

Weeks passed with not even the slightest hint regarding when I might see the volume, either in publication or informally, despite my persistent avowals of the greatest interest. Quite understandably, given the circumstances, I began to crave that volume like the mind craves the existence of some higher order. I imagined the feathery curls of rhyme and the words, the glorious words given second birth from sterile usage. I conjured the book itself, bound in leather, with silvery pages composed of soft intertwining fibres barely perceptible to the naked eye.

Increasingly, the milky glaze that overcame McCarthy’s eyes when we conversed rattled my nerves. Furthermore, to my bitter despair, our meetings became shorter and shorter as he confessed appointments at the dentist, or headaches. (A victim of insufferable migraines myself, I offered McCarthy all sorts of herbal remedies but this only seemed to agitate him further. I speculated that the extent to which the poet endured his cephalalgia was necessarily dire, given his unfeeling dismissals of suggestions so patiently offered.) During that which was left of our little gatherings, I became accustomed to biting my tongue throughout lengthy conversations as to my tiresome dissertation. It was simply absurd that this poet and companion of mine, who arranged himself so pathetically on the chair opposite, was the sole obstacle between my intellectual satisfaction and literary splendour.

It was during an impromptu tarriance at the university that I heard that McCarthy had died a few nights before. In hushed voices, his colleagues whispered rumours of my poet’s extreme agitation in the days leading up to his death, cause unknown, that may have catalysed the heart attack. Immediately, I dashed out of the campus, as Hippomenes dashed to win the hand of Atalanta. Racing past the hospital in which McCarthy’s dear corpse lay, I vaulted the wooden gate of his tall home. I found the door to be unlocked and the house deserted, a mount of soot and a pale fire the mere remnants of an antiquated furnace in the corner of the study. Everything was laid out for me as if ordained by McCarthy’s ghostly jurisdiction. The manuscript called to me from within the topmost drawer, bound neatly by a paperclip, abandoned no longer. Heavens above be praised! I vowed to guard it with my life.

Let McCarthy’s shade rest at peace, in the firm knowledge that his final masterpiece was in safe hands.

Sophia Sheera

Lost and Found

F

or something to be lost, one must have found it beforehand. Whether it is an idea or an object, one must have found it (had it). If one did not find anything, one cannot lose anything. However, for something to be found, one does not have to lose it beforehand. One may have simply discovered a new idea, which was never lost.

Despite an unreciprocated relationship, the two words go together. I guess the two words are inextricably linked, but to give “found” more respect, I would say “Lost and partially found” rather than “Lost and Found”.

Jimmy Moon (NLCS Jeju)

Shira Dwortein 27

Recollection

S

he stepped inside the house, lamenting, the pain in her heart growing until she felt nauseous and inhaled sharply. Mustering strength, she knew she must do this, for peace of mind, for validation. It was a critical moment.

It would be the only way, although she had relentlessly searched for others year after year, that she could liberate the memories which had plagued her. She knew the house had to be sold, but something incomprehensible prevented her from doing it.

Besides the expected smell of lingering dust in the torrid heat of the afternoon, there was a new smell which had not been there when the house was alive. It was like musk, the smell of the earth after it had been rained on, a mixture of decaying leaves and damp soil. As it enveloped her, she felt as if something in the house was still living.

Perhaps it was the memory of her parents, or a spirit which was alive and yearning for past summers. For the times when she would hold her fingers underneath the fountain in the front garden and watch the glassy drops of water fall to the ceramic pool bellow, snatched by gravity. Or for the hazy, lucid evenings when she cautiously used to climb out of her window and lay on the stone platform, suspended above the ground and observe the sun casting rays of light onto the clouds, rendering them fire and orange before the twilight beckoned the stars. For the times when she felt safe and loved and was certain there that there are things to live for.

Seeing the hob where meals were cooked every night made her recall her father’s hands, strong yet reassuring, large and secure, holding the metal pans or being run along the brick walls surrounding the garden. Although this heightened her panic and brought her emotional collapse to greater imminency, in a strange way it humbled her and made her grateful that she had been graced by their presence long ago. A sort of desperation overwhelmed her; she did not know what to do to calm her mind and so ran with a frightened hysteria through each room, throwing the grey matted covers bitten through by pests off all of the furniture, in attempt to evade remembering more things which would bring regret and make her ache helplessly for before.

After she played her mother’s favourite record multiple times on the rusted gramophone while lying on the floor, the final wisps of sunshine fell on her as night approached. The music lulled her away from the world as the rays of the sun coloured the room in vivid hues like a new painting with still wet oils. She had not lost everything; uncovering the house reminded her that the past would never leave her, as she came to a realisation about death, about loss. The pain of losing someone doesn’t get easier to accept, it never ebbs away as most think it does, for it is impossible to move on from such an immense comfort being revoked. The pain only gets more manageable.

Aaska Banthiya

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An Appreciation of the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore [1861-1941] Where the Mind is Without Fear Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high Where knowledge is free Where the world has not been broken up into fragments By narrow domestic walls Where words come out from the depth of truth Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit Where the mind is led forward by thee Into ever-widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

R

abindranath Tagore was a Bengali poet, novelist and painter, and the first non-European to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.

The awarding of the Nobel Prize was largely influenced by Tagore’s selftranslation of his collection of poems entitled Gitanjali, which loosely translated means ‘an offering of devotional songs’. The English translation of the 103 poems first appeared in 1912 and Where the Mind is Without Fear is one of the poems from that collection.

The universality of the message in this poem is both alluring and motivational. Tagore appears to be guiding us towards knowledge and understanding by imploring us to emancipate our minds, escaping from ‘narrow domestic walls’ and embarking upon a journey along ‘the clear stream’ – embracing nature as our guide.

Although many contemporary - and current - critics were obsessed with comparing the style of Tagore’s writing to western romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Keats, an eastern eye sees images, themes and symbols that are specific to his Indian ancestry, yet they are universal features which excite the imagination of any reader. The fusion of art and faith in Tagore’s poetry reveals the complexity of both, yet the poet is careful to ensure that his poems do not portray an unattainable ideal. In essence, he was a man who felt he could not function without his faith.

Tagore had a huge influence on the colonial world and he was a man of great principle. He renounced the knighthood granted to him by King George V in 1915 following the Amritsar Massacre of 1919 in which Colonel Dyer gave the order to the soldiers of the British Indian Army to fire upon a group of unarmed pilgrims. British sources claimed 379 pilgrims were killed; Indian sources put the figure at 1,000, a figure believed by other nations.

The eloquence of Tagore’s writing was evident in his renunciation letter to the Viceroy of India: “The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in the incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part, wish to stand, shorn, of all special distinctions, by the side of those my countrymen who, for their so called insignificance, are liable to suffer degradation not fit for human beings.”

Where the Mind is Without Fear is a poem about awakening, the awakening from the state of bondage, a feat to be achieved on an individual level as well as on a collective level. The patriotic mood encourages the reader to inhabit a world in which we should not be subjugated and enslaved.

In 1930 Tagore delivered the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford University, a series of non-sectarian lectures on theological issues first given in 1878. His poem Where the Mind is Without Fear embodies his words spoken at this series of lectures:

“We have also an inner faculty of our own which helps us to find our relationship with the supreme self of man, the universe of personality. This faculty is our luminous imagination, which in its higher stage is special to man. It offers us that vision of wholeness which for the biological necessity of physical survival is superfluous; its purpose is to arouse in us the sense of perfection which is our true sense of immortality.”

K Dhaliwal (NLCS Jeju) 29

Poetry Finding loss We live adhering to rules; to binding, grinding principles Which tell us that we are worth the money we earn, And that to be successful we must learn to yearn to find.

We must find success, we must find our passion, We must find, find, find in senseless fashion.

Yet I found you and lost all that I thought I had found, All I thought I had believed in sank to the ground.

For you introduced me to loss, In a way more beautiful than I had ever thought could be, And in getting lost with you, I lost the found and I was free.

You taught me to shake and break the chains Which with tight grip inject the need for gains, The capitalist need to find the next fixation, And the need to be a recognised sensation.

For all the facts I had found through education, Not once had I understood mindless infatuation Where sense was replaced by full feeling elation, And wicked wilderness provided utter salvation.

Being with you was like being in a tall hedged maze, Where the sun shone through the leaves in a hazy blaze, And danced a hundred dances I had never seen before; A maze where the paths were uncertain, where nothing was sure And yet in each turn a new flower of beauty and passion emerged, And with this a new perspective and a new understanding surged.

See, some look at the ocean and they feel fear of its depth, As they are taught about what hides beneath it boundless breadth; ‘God how those vicious waves beat the sound of uncertainty,’ But you taught me that the ocean was a depth of opportunity, And grabbed me by the hand to pull me in And together we learnt to float and swim.

We learnt to lose the fear found within our souls And hand in hand we float as the ocean of life rolls and rolls Like the waves bringing in the new and removing the old.

See whilst most seek to find an island to make themselves secure, We long to get lost further and to sink into the obscure, My Dear, as I fall further in love with you, I fall further into loss and loss is what I wish to pursue.

We don’t seek to find the findable, we are not bound to the bindable But instead we look for the beauty that lies in the unexpected, For only in losing oneself, does the art of finding become perfected.

Olivia Gurney-Randall

30

Lost in oneself Captured, There we are looking at oneself In fondest recollections, Without passion.

Instead there are motions Of patterned hues which Establish our thoughts.

No closure but in mind

And no comfort but in loss.

This is the way in which we are free, To be lost in oneself as means of Escape.

Sailee Khurjekar Sailee Khurjekar

Butterfly Effect A poet thinks, “It’s up in the air!”

The butterfly has had its day, Its chrysalis of concentration.

A philosopher argues, “It is the air” Never will it stop now, Nor recall its situation.

A child complains, “It’s so unfair!”

Then behind some glass it will reside, To mock examination.

“Lost and Found” Gaby Leaderman

P Gray (NLCS Jeju)

31

Lost

T

he coffee shop is down a street sparsely dotted with maple trees, right next to the launderers and an old music shop with faded posters in the window of rock guitarists and singers with blue hair and tattoos and studded leather jackets. She crosses swiftly, pushes through the door into the steamy air of the coffee shop, inhaling the aroma deeply. Lucas likes espresso, no sugar and no milk. She orders and then waits, tapping her long nails on the counter in a way that attracts annoyance from the old couple having their Sunday morning tea by the window. Lucas and her will be old like that one day, she hopes, wrinkled hands tightly locked, eyes always sparkling.

He did it this morning. She can hardly believe it. She holds out her hand, examines the large diamond glinting on her ring finger and her heart soars. The exhilaration still pounds through her, she keeps tipping from side to side, her cheeks ache from the permanent smile stretched across her face. Lucas and Cecilia. Married.

A little squeal escapes from her lips and the barista looks at her cautiously as he hands her the two steaming brown cups of coffee. He doesn't understand it. Nobody understands how perfectly her life is falling into place now that she's found her soul mate, just like a movie, as if every day was another scene and they were all leading up to this.

Love seemed like a huge anticlimactic fairy tale to her before: a princess meets her prince charming and they live happily ever after, but it makes sense now. All of a sudden, everything is shifting and changing, like the formation of a snow globe with her and Lucas in the centre, invisible glitter snowflakes raining down onto her shoulders, her classy Manhattan life right at her fingertips.

Their story would make such a good movie, she thinks.

They met at a bookshop on a hot, summer day, the sun leaking its warmth in through the windows, illuminating the sparkling dust along the thousands of book spines. She saw everything happen as if it was a movie, even then. Her mother was a movie director who often took Cecilia to her shoots; that was where it all started. She saw herself in the bookshop, curling up in the corner in a summer frock, gently dusting off the cover of an old leather book, breathing in its musty smell before turning the pages gently, and reading till sunset.

It was really nothing like that. She was hot and sweaty and her fringe kept getting stuck to her forehead, despite her repeatedly shoving it out of the way. She should have bought a hair clip. There was a particular book she was looking for, something that a friend recommended, and she was desperate to find it before her meeting with her editor. Rent was hard in a town full of spiralling glass buildings, full of traffic and pollution and people. So many people, so little time. Books helped her refocus herself, and sometimes they even provided inspiration for the magazine articles she wrote.

She hadn't yet found the book she was looking for when he walked in. This part, and she remelnbers it very clearly, was exactly how it would have happened in a movie, exactly as her mother would have filined on set. He walked in, hair slicked back, a t-shirt gently resting on his broad shoulders. When he moved his arm to reach for a book, she could see his muscles tense. When he spoke, she forgot about the world, the book catalogue she was holding nearly slipping from her fingers. And when he came over to her, the pretty girl in the beautiful African summer dress, her heart melted and landed in a puddle on the floor.

32

Now, six months later, she's engaged.

She carries out the two coffees, makes her way back to the apartment. There's a policeman standing outside, and she wonders if he's pressed the intercom, whether he's waiting for someone. Her gullibility is a trait Lucas likes her for, her trusting nature, and those rosy cheeks that accompany it.

“Hello, can I help you?”

“I'm looking for a Miss Cecelia Friedman.”

“That would be me.” Her body doesn't stiffen, the initial small flickers of alarm that should be creeping their way up her fail to. She smiles, as if she is completely unaware. Maybe she is.

'There was an accident today, right outside your fiancé's office. A hit and run - the police are on their way now but the driver of the car's gone.'

She's not sure how long she sits on the chair, willing for the tears to come, waiting patiently for a slap of pain, a stab of heart wrenching hurt, but, in her heart, she is lost.

She closes her eyes, imagines what would happen right now, what her mother would yell for in a movie: she should drop the coffee, watch it splash across the gravel in haphazard hot streaks, turn away and race up the stairs, crash into her apartment and slam a glass vase into the wall in vain hopes that it will resuscitate her broken heart. She should then collapse to the ground, a sobbing mess, her mascara running down her cheeks in ghastly black lines, screaming through her teeth frustration for the injustice of life.

She does no such thing. Cecilia thanks him graciously, walks up the stairs, opens her apartment with a smooth turn of the key, sets the coffee down on the table and sits on a chair. She looks outside the window blankly and watches the sky change colour.

'Would you like me to take you there?' The policeman stands at her door. She left it open, but he still knocks.

'No, thank you. ' 'Is there anything I can get you?' 'No, thank you.

Cecilia can't be sure when he leaves, but she sits there for a long time. She's not sure how long she's got. She's racing fast, fighting against time. They'll be here soon: all her family and friends, eyes filled with worry and remorse.

Before they flood her house, she has to find herself, grasp the woman from the bookshop, from the snow globe. Her mind darts back and forth, left and right, but she can't find it.

Where is that girl? Where has she gone?

Charvi Jain

33

Teddy: I found a teddy bear at the station. It was under a newspaper stand, and I saw it when I looked under there to retrieve my train ticket. A small honey-coloured little thing. It wasn’t grotty, but it certainly wasn’t new and it had a scent that must mean the world to someone. A little person probably unable to sleep without their guardian against the night. Their protector against the monsters under the bed. The shadows with no form, cowering from the glowing stars that peppered the walls in constellations.

This small bear, with a red ribbon around its neck, such a small thing that could mean all the difference to someone somewhere. I checked my watch and saw I still had a good half an hour to get to work, so I decided to help this little bear find its way home. I held the bear close to my chest, forming a smile steeped in memory. Nostalgia surged through my being, and I was a six-year-old boy again. The smell of the sea and the grass, and my mother’s voice calling me down to dinner. Racing my sister down the stairs, being greeted by a kiss on the head before climbing onto a chair around the dinner table, surrounded by the ones who loved me. This image so clear in my mind, I could almost reach out and touch it.

I walked to the ‘Lost and Found’ and saw through the window in the door a man holding a little girl’s hand. As I entered, a bell tinkled above my head, and I heard a tiny gasp, and saw the little hand tug at the man’s sleeve. He looked down at her through spectacles, and followed the direction of the outstretched arm, pudgy fingers pointing in my direction. They rushed towards me wordlessly and I knelt down and asked: “Is this your bear?” The little girl nodded and then hid behind her Father’s legs giggling, her little face puffy and red- the evidence of tears. “Daisy” said the man, “It’s okay, you can take Teddy.” Slowly, she came out from her hiding place, and I outstretched my hand to offer her the bear. She took it and hugged it close to her, before returning to her sanctuary behind her Father’s legs. A small voice saying: “Thank you” from behind them.

I stood up and the man offered his hand. I shook it and he said: “You have no idea how much this means to us.

Thank you Sir. Thank you!” They left, the man carrying Daisy in his arms. Her little head visible over his shoulder. She waved, and I smiled in return.

A voice behind me said: “You know that’s just amazing.

Amazing!” I turned to see the clerk behind the desk shaking his head. “Those two have been coming in every day for the last week looking for that thing, hoping desperately that the bear would find its way back to them. Good folks those guys. Never a mother with them though. They’re meant to fly to America tonight, this looked like their last chance from what he said. Then you come in here one hour before closing. Amazing!

Just amazing! Someone must be watching over those two.” He stood there shaking his head in disbelief, and I smiled in reply, and left.

Before getting on the train again, I did something I never thought I would do again for a few years, my daughter being twenty, but I bought her something. A caramel coloured bear with a little pink ribbon around its neck. I named it Daisy, and stored it in my coat pocket, and kept it as my companion for the day.

Riyana Khiroya ‘Child with Teddy Bear’ by Pierre Auguste

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Pitter Patter Everyday Life becomes Invisible As heads turning inwards Float no more with clouds And eyes glinting outwards Cloud no more with mist Tears only come now As rain on windows ‘Miss Earhart's Arrival’ by Walter R Sickert (Mistaking Them for Themselves) P Gray (NLCS Jeju)

Stravage Isn’t it wonderful When we realise that lost things Are never really lost Because if you did lose it You would never be able to Remember that you lost it In the first place.

So open your plastic can Where pink yarns and juices are Muddled up together.

The gush of mint gust In your eyes To the back of your head.

Wring it Filter it Drink it And remember.

Sophie Orgler

Inness So Young Kim (NLCS Jeju)

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Lost + Found = Lost - Found = Lost × Found = Lost ÷ F equations for every action there must be an equal and opposite reaction. (newton’s third law of motion) energy is never created or destroyed, but transferred. (first law of thermodynamics)

i like being lost. when existing with a very sporadic (poor) attention span, loss is a familiar concept. i lose my pencils, my place on a page, my line of thought – thoughts are less linear more radial, hopscotch – marks for the way i write (too many parentheses, dashes, semi-colons; grammar is set, not felt; my poor English tutors), lose sleep, interest, tact – though i am in myself tactless in (pseudo?) pursuit of honesty – coherence: as demonstrated. strings of theory tie and untie themselves faster than i can voice them, leaving a bizarre mixture of impenetrable density and fragmentation. i digress, i tried to practise more ‘from first principle’ disciplines because i assumed it was harder to get lost explaining them. i was wrong; physics is just as expansive as Keats. when losing things is a constant,* being lost is like being part of that constant. i like being the sort of lost that feels like a sensory overload is just around the corner, but it hasn’t caught up to you yet: the thrill of being dangerously close, the sort where you can feel your palms tingling and hear the blood in your ears. by the first law of thermodynamics, the cumulative hours – amounting to weeks, surely – i’ve spent on the floor are compensated for by a walk in a wood (god knows where) on a warm evening. energy lost in a depressive episode (period: 47 days) = energy found in sprinting down the bike trail, falling off the 20ft swing, hanging off the bars in the empty tube car after dusk – the best kind of liminal space – swinging bare arms on the walk home (period: 5.5 hours)

by newton’s third law of motion, a month’s worth of sub-par homework is explained by the attention expended when i sat and wolfed down like (ali smith), to the lighthouse (virginia woolf), antigonick (trans. anne carson) and a collection of zadie smith essays; in seven hours in a park, sun-worn and alone. (an unstable intensity, all photons deflected with outrageously high momenta, the very quarks in the soles of my feet at higher energy levels than should be possible) being lost is the catalyst, the lowering of the work function; providing an alternate path characterised by the contradiction of its constancy (*a constant is determined, unchanged) and uncertainty (by definition ‘lost’ is unfamiliarity) and resulting in an explosion: a temperamental state of hyper-productivity and acute awareness, bringing with it a crashing relief – ‒ there is no expectation without knowledge. alone, surrounded by the indefinite, all that is certain is you. try being lost. it helps recover losses that would otherwise leave the equations unbalanced.

RM

ound = Lost + Found = Lost - Found = Lost × Found = L 36

Found books Journey to Arzrum – Alexander Pushkin

O

ne of my favourite books is A Journey to A rzrum by the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837). Pushkin is best known as a playwright and poet, the author of Eugene Onegin and Boris Gudunov, and as a writer of short stories like The Tales of Belkin and the much-celebrated Queen of Spades.

But he also wrote a number of prose memoirs, including A Journey to A rzrum.

The Journey was written in the late 1820s when Russia was at war with Turkey and charts a journey by Pushkin through the Caucasus (modern-day Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan) to join the Russian front line at the Turkish city now known as Erzurum. The Caucasian frontier was the scene of fighting between Russians and local tribes throughout the 19th century had a complicated status in the imagination of the Russian public: it was a land of warfare and bloodshed, where soldiers were fired at by skirmishers hiding in the forests or exploiting the heights above narrow defiles; it was a boundary between religions, where Orthodox Christianity began to mingle with Islam; and it was a land of exoticism and mystery. Many of these themes later featured in Mikhail Lermontov’s novel A Hero of Our Time and Leo Tolstoy’s novellas The Cossacks and Hadji Murat, which were based on their authors’ experiences of Russian military action in the region.

Arzrum was a barracks town in 1829, but the memoir is not about war. But for the most part, it is about longing for action and adventure, the intense but short-lived friendships that are formed in travel and warfare, the solitariness of the journey, and the harsh lives endured by the civilians caught up in the fighting. It has a haunting beauty, born out of a strange combination on the narrator’s part of arrestingly candid expressions of wonder and a reticence, even approaching self-ignorance, about his wider attitude towards life. The gaze is directed outwards, making the narrator seem oddly hollow. At one point, Pushkin will be caught by some natural spectacle, such as when he reaches the Russian town of Stavropol: I saw clouds on the horizon that precisely nine years before had so vividly captured my imagination. They were still the same, still in exactly the same place: they were the snowcapped peaks of the Caucasus mountains.

And at another he will make some passing allusion to a sense of discontent, but often without identifying the specific reason for his feelings: The war appeared to be over. I started making preparations for the return journey. On 14 th July, I went to the public baths and I did not feel happy with life. I cursed the filthiness of the towels, the wretchedness of the service and so on.

The unhappiness here is slung between two possible causes, the end of the war and the unsatisfactory baths, but it is not attributed to either, leaving the reader to wonder what its real cause is.

Something similar can be found elsewhere in nineteenth-century Russian fiction. Many of Ivan Turgenev’s stories (A sya and Torrents of Spring, for instance) are about Russian travellers in Europe who experience intense, usually romantic, emotions but remain essentially mysterious to themselves. When the stories end, and the protagonists seem to have made little progress, there is a feeling that developments in their self-understanding which were possible at the beginning of the story have not taken place. A Journey to A rzrum, though not a work of fiction, creates a similar sense of pathos because the narrator fails to understand his own sense of disappointment. Yet although his longing for action is answered, he scarcely takes part in the fighting. The lives of the locals are discovered to be more squalid than readers back in Moscow imagine and in reaching Arzrum he destroys his dream, turning something tantalisingly indeterminate, a landscape of the imagination, into a reality, somewhere he has been.

G Roberts

37

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

T

he Sense of an Ending is concerned with one of my favourite literary themes: the fallibility of memory. The plot seems simple: after receiving a letter from his ex-girlfriend’s mother, Tony Webster, now retired, recalls his fragmented memories of his college life. He appears to remember everything, from the seemingly trivial History lessons with Old Joe to the petty rivalry within his friendship group. When “tall, shy” Adrian Finn, an irrefutable academic, joins Tony’s clique, life at sixth-form and beyond changes. However, it becomes increasingly clear that even the most intelligent of people are only human. More importantly, the novel explores the imperfections of memory. As Tony delves deeper into the past of Adrian Finn, he begins to question Adrian’s relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Veronica Ford, and eventually, his own connection to the mysterious tragedy. He slowly begins to understand the inexplicable as he nears the remarkable truth.

What I particularly like about The Sense of an Ending is its balance. The text is subtly philosophical, yet it feels like a crafty crime fiction novel – full of suspense, enigma and an unexpected answer. Whilst certain parts of the novel are more reflective, other parts are interspersed with sudden plot twists, thus accelerating the pace. This is coupled with beautifully written prose, tinged with a dry, sometimes sarcastic, narrative voice. Moreover, there is an ironic interplay of history and memory, and perhaps a hint at the unreliability of both. As the plot and the thematic repercussions become more dense, the tone shifts from youthful comedy to one of unresolved guilt. This novel is truly deserving of its title as the 2011 Man Booker Prize!

Jungmin Seo

The Hare with Amber Eyes – Edmund de Waal

E

dmund de Waal is a ceramicist who makes the most beautiful installations from porcelain forms that he groups together like forgotten fungus on multiple shelves. In recent years, he has moved to writing – his 2015 book, The W hite Road, tells us the history of porcelain from exquisite vases from ancient China to the clumsy alchemy of Renaissance Europe scientists, desperately trying to replicate the magic white gold of the Far east; but of all de Waal’s writing, this extraordinary book written in 2009, is by far the most meaningful and asks us very difficult questions about the value of a work of art in relation to human life itself.

In a nutshell, The Hare with A mber Eyes narrates the true story of a collection of beautiful Japanese Netsuke(pebble-sized sculptures of animals and mythical creatures carved from ivory and once used by Japanese nobility as a counterweight in formal dress). The netsuke collection, made originally by de Waal’s greatgrandfather, is passed from generation to generation of an Austrian family, who have the misfortune to be torn apart by the rise of Nazism and its appalling mission to delete Jewish existence. The book retells an incredible story of how the netsuke collection survives, thanks to the bravery of individuals’ defiance of Nazi war crimes, but the family, tragically, does not, and therefore forces the sad understanding that no artwork is worth as much as any human life.

The story continues to take the collection of treasures back to Japan via one surviving uncle, but always in the shadow of us knowing what happened to the rest of the family.

Beautifully written and a brilliant insight into Jewish History from the first half of the twentieth century, this book brings into focus the themes of ‘Lost and Found’ in a more savage way than one could possibly imagine.

J Robinson 38

“the scale and texture of the porcelain is redolent of found objects, like sea-worn artefacts washed up on an Orkney beach”

One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez “Time was not passing…it was turning in a circle”.

I

n many ways, ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ is, to me, a study of time in literature. This theme permeates every fibre of the novel- from its plotting and structure to the names of its very own characters. I believe that this is what makes the novel so impressive and, in fact, one of my favourites. By encapsulating the cyclical nature of life amidst the linear declination of a family, ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ becomes a masterpiece. William Kennedy describes the novel as “The first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.”

Though admittedly this is a rather grandiose claim, I am still certainly inclined to agree that this really is a novel that is required reading for the entire human race.

The novel follows six generations of the same family. Though Marquez includes a political backdrop which becomes more and more prominent as the novel progresses, the novel focuses on the interactions between the members of the Buendía family. There’s much to praise about Marquez’s own literary techniques. By writing within the genre of magical realism, the tone of the novel is often rather fantastical, and Marquez mirrors this with a lucid use of language and imagery throughout. Though there are perhaps far more notable examples of this, a moment in the book that I personally found deeply poignant was when Remedios the Beauty ascends into the sky. Marquez writes: “Remedios the Beauty began to rise...waving goodbye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o'clock in the afternoon came to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her.” Marquez’s writing, laced with the delicacy of transience, intertwines the magical and the mundane in the same way that the book does in itself.

Marquez blurs the boundaries of individuality and personhood within the novel, making the bold claim that human nature is almost always the same. By creating scenarios that almost become motifs throughout and names that carry characteristics that linger in individuals across all six generations, Marquez truly amplifies the point that humanity is wound up within itself, and the nature of all actions future past and present ought to be considered as somewhat inevitable. Though this is certainly an intriguing point, I believe that the true brilliance of the novel is achieved through the inclusion of the scrolls of Melquiades. Meaning is clearly an important theme within the novel, this is exemplified by the spout of insomnia the strikes Macondo wherein the inhabitants begin to forget the names of the objects surrounding them. Marquez describes Melqiuades enigmatic inscriptions as “In the order of man’s conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant.” The reader realises that although this refers to the scriptures, it equally applies to the entire book. Marquez’s manipulations of time within the novel mirror Melquiades’ scriptures suggesting that the book in itself plays a prophetic role, commenting on the true nature of history and human experience in the real world.

‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ is perhaps one of the least hopeful books I have ever read, but that quality becomes a great virtue. Marquez endeavours to touch upon the truths such as the repetition of human mistakes, the traps of nostalgia, the power of collective amnesia, and does so with deep profundity. Just as one might argue that, at least for Christians, the Bible, specifically the book of Genesis, maps out human origin and creates perhaps one of the most universal templates for man. When we consider this, and equally what Marquez has achieved with this novel, William Kennedy’s claim about this novel, no longer sounds so ridiculous.

Donya Jeyabalasingham

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Notes from an Exhibition – Patrick Gale A mother lost…. A history found.

T

his sparse novel begins with the death of the main protagonist, who we encounter through her works of art. The ‘notes’ of the title begin each chapter, consisting of an exhibition note attached to a particular work of gifted genius Rachel Kelly, and the ensuing chapter explores a part of her life relating to that art work. In this way, we gradually uncover Rachel’s story through the eyes and experiences of her friends and family.

This is a book of extremes – we see the volatile, often shocking behaviour of Rachel, gripped within the throes of bipolar episodes, and the effect this has on her children in particular. Yet we also see the contrasting stability of Antony, a stillness emanating from Quakerism, which is explored in some depth.

Art runs through this book both physically and metaphorically – the exhibition notes present the narrative as a retrospective of Rachel’s life and art, a non-chronological presentation of her tortured and torturing existence. This format raises interesting questions. Can we really know a character who we never actually ’meet’ in the course of a novel? If we only encounter that character through the perceptions of the people around her, are we witnessing a true or a prejudiced image of that person? The added dimension in this novel is that of the art itself; we are invited to make subjective judgements on Rachel’s persona based on her artistic creations – are these perhaps a truer portrait of her and her state of mind, than the memories of a grieving family?

This is a sympathetic portrayal of bipolar illness, while never straying from the shockingly brutal effects that illness has on both the sufferer and surrounding people. It feels very much rooted in a real world; in the artistic community of St Ives we even meet a rather inebriated Barbara Hepworth, who of course would have been Rachel’s hero as probably the most famous female artist and sculptor of her time. The portrayal of Quakerism brings an added dimension, not only in the deeply spiritual Antony, holding together the fractured family, but in his children too, who all turn to Quakerism at some point as their comfort and their root.

While the ending is rather abrupt, the reader’s overall feeling is one of resolution. Rachel has lived her life as a slightly lost soul, having rejected her earlier family and life, and necessarily (through her illness) remained somewhat remote from the joys and hurts of her new family. Yet in her death, that family can find something of her history, and piece together what she really was. A beautiful, sad, yet uplifting novel.

J Bartlett

The Help – Kathryn Stockett "You know colored folks ain't allowed in that library." (Chapter 11)

A

s a teacher of Literature, it would be difficult for me to argue that Kathryn Stockett’s novel is a great work of literature – the accessibility of its language embraces casual readers as much as it does the avid bookworm or paid literary critic; its plot does not masque a complexity of structure which unravels as mystery transforms to moments of enlightenment; the characters could be any one of us or our neighbours. What makes this book special is that it is a novel of truth. Every library should house a copy.

Set in 1960s Mississippi, it is a novel about the relationships between a group of black American maids and their white-skinned employers. The narrative style sees the reader taken through the lives of members of a small, fractious community, which is segregated by race. The story is told by three extraordinary female narrators – Aibileen Clark, Minny Jackson, and Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan - each taking turns to inform the reader about the community’s history, present and potentially bleak future, and each with an element of feistiness in their natures, a characteristic that allows them to bring about change through co-operation. All three women portray a majestic dignity; the clarity of their words rooted in their respective vernaculars.

40

Part of what makes it such an engaging read is how humour prevails in the darkest moments of the characters: “Is this really happening? Is a white woman really beating up a white man to save me? Or did he shake my brain pan loose and I'm over there dead on the ground…” (Minny: Chapter 24) We also see education being offered by black to white, and by black to black: "A lot of colored womans got to give their children up, Skeeter. Send they kids off cause they got to tend to a white family." (Chapter 27) "The churches got together though. They gone send both those boys to college." (Chapter 19)

And when the depths of despair are reached and suicide seems the only escape from life’s hardships, friendship prevails: “I already had the rope tied when Minny found it. […] I don't know if I's gonna use it […]. Minny, though, she don't ask no questions about it, just pull it out from under the bed, put it in the can, take it to the street.” (Chapter 2) Realism r egar ding the consequences of vocalising black people’s discontent is at the fore of every event in the novel, combined with a full awareness of the horrors of oppression: “She don't know about them sharp, shiny utensils a white lady use.

About that knock on the door, late at night. That there are white men out there hungry to hear about a colored person crossing whites, ready with wooden bats, matchsticks. Any little thing'll do.” (Chapter 14) The moments of hope are poignantly interspersed: "You're the smartest one in my class, Aibileen," she say. "And the only way you're going to stay sharp is to and write every day." So I start writing my prayers down instead a sayin em. But nobody call me smart since.

(Chapter 2) However, fear is ever present, dreams shattered by reality.

“The tears roll down. It's all them white peoples that breaks me, standing around the colored neighborhood. White peoples with guns, pointed at colored peoples. Cause who gone protect our peoples? Ain't no colored policeman.” (Chapter 14)

Yet throughout it all, wisdom prevails.

“All I'm saying is, kindness don't have no boundaries.” (Chapter 24) Stockett saw her book rejected by over 50 agents before the novel went on to spend more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. That fact alone will see literary snobs decry it as a work of popular fiction rather than a work of literary merit; the very people who delight in belittling the success of others, probably ignorant of the book’s content, and lacking the ability to craft a sentence of note themselves, preferring instead to condemn the accomplishment of a contemporary writer.

My advice to you would be to seek individuality and not to become lost in conformity; to read for the pleasure and understanding it brings to your life, to search for the jewels to be found implanted in books, and not to view literature as a currency to trade cultural superiority.

“But truth is, I don't care that much about voting. I don't care about eating at a counter with white people. What I care about is, of in ten years, a white lady will call my girls dirty and accuse them of stealing the silver.” (Chapter 17) K Dhaliwal (NLCS Jeju)

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I Capture The Castle - Dodie Smith

A

favourite book should definitely stand the test of time; its appeal must never fade or dim but should burn brightly, sustaining the loyal reader as a constant presence at every stage of life. A favourite book has to be resilient; it has to work hard for its keep.

Mine is called I Capture The Castle and it was written by a writer called Dorothy—or ‘Dodie’ as she was called—Smith, in 1949. Few people today would instantly recognise her name, but most would certainly have heard of the book that she wrote seven years later which was to become one of the most successful Disney animated films of all time—The Hundred and One Dalmatians.

A favourite book should definitely stand the test of time; its appeal must never fade or dim but should burn brightly, sustaining the loyal reader as a constant presence at every stage of life. A favourite book has to be resilient; it has to work hard for its keep.

Mine is called I Capture The Castle and it was written by a writer called Dorothy—or ‘Dodie’ as she was called—Smith, in 1949. Few people today would instantly recognise her name, but most would certainly have heard of the book that she wrote seven years later which was to become one of the most successful Disney animated films of all time—The Hundred and One Dalmatians.

I Capture The Castle is a wonderful book and has one of the most famous and enchanting opening sentences in literature. My mother read the book as soon as it was published, fell in love with it and recommended it to me when I was in my early teens. I loved it as much as she did and I remember that we had many conversations – both earnest and frivolous – about it over the years. I read it again and again and, as with all truly great books, each new reading brought fresh pleasure.

For some strange reason, I never had my own copy of the book, but regularly borrowed a battered and wellthumbed edition from our local library. When I was nineteen, I went up to Oxford to start my Classics degree and my parents came with me to carry all the boxes and bags out of the car and to help me get settled in my new college room. That evening, after my parents had gone, I was feeling very excited about my new life as an undergraduate – but, if I am honest, anxious and nervous, too. When I finally got into bed, I found a small parcel under my pillow from my mother – my very own copy of one of my – our – favourite books.

I Capture The Castle is a witty and enchanting novel about dreams and growing up. The heroine, Cassandra Mortmain, lives with her bohemian and penniless family in a decaying castle in the middle of nowhere. Her journal records her life with her ravishing sister, Rose, who longs for sophistication, adventure and pretty clothes, her fadingly glamorous stepmother, Topaz, (who is given to wandering around naked in the rain), her earnest and clever younger brother, Thomas, and her volatile and curmudgeonly novelist father who, after producing a surprisingly successful first novel, is now suffering from a financially crippling writer's block. All their lives, however, are turned upside down when the American heirs to the castle arrive and Cassandra finds herself falling in love for the first time.

And so she begins her journal with this intriguing and engaging sentence: ‘I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.’

I defy you not to be tempted to read on…

M Fotheringham

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I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found that story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?

Virginia Woolf, The W aves

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Rebecca Marks (ONL)

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