Plasticity: The Strand Magazine | Vol. 68 Issue 6 by The Strand

Letter from the Editor

Sofija Stankovic

ith this year’s literary magazine, “Plasticity,” our team inadvertently exemplified the very capacity for adaptation that our theme hoped to capture. Deadlines dictate our daily lives as students, but as everyone who has ever begun a subject line with “extension request” knows, they’re often forced into deadcurves—bent into the shape that we require. Note: Always ask for an extension; you’ll always get it. While a flexible publication date was not quite the kind of “plasticity” we anticipated, we appreciate your corresponding amenability. I would like to thank all of the contributors for their compelling submissions and their incredible patience in awaiting this magazine’s release, the section editors and associates (Zoe Deligianis, Lia Iannarilli, Boško Garaca, Reina Van Leeuwen, and Sofia Terese Glantz) for their invested time and effort on top of their monthly responsibilities, the illustrators (including our head Illustrator, Jessie Yang), our Senior Copy Editor (and at time of publication, the new Editor-in-Chief) Amy Yang for her tireless proofreading, my managing editor Karim Butt, and most of all the design editors, Patrick Ignasiak and Olivia Tsoi, for completing the spread. I would also like to issue a formal apology for the much-delayed publishing of this magazine. Regrettably, managing both the magazine and our regular periodical issues proved to be an insurmountable task for all masthead members involved. We would like to assure you that our vague hiatus by no means suggests an undervaluation of your work, but rather reflects the unexpected obstacles that come with producing a literary magazine (and 10 periodical issues) while surviving the infamous UofT course load. Please enjoy the fruits of our (and your!) months-long labor.

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PLASTIC 006 Contents: Nghi Nguyen

Annika Rempel

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Nabneel Sarma

Ava Feir

Emma Ward

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Maya Canaran

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Amy Yang

Suri Wu

Athena McIsaac

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Brenna Macdonald

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Victoria Wai Kei Li

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L..F. Shubert

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Birch Norman

Beatrice Labb

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ZM Charlie Sheen

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2026 The Strand

Hot paramedics a So the much more Nghi Nguyen

When you take my body, leave my soul for I know that much is pure. Cast away the parts that have sinned. I have sinned with every part. God, do not tell me love comes from the body. I have made love to the unloved and houses for the lost. Even when I stayed in my jail cell —sex, the wolves rammed their teeth against the bars. There was no safety in my born body so I left the shackles for the woods. I ran towards the axe to slice my flesh and dropped my parts on the floor. Hung jaws could smell my surrender. I gave up my failures to free my shoulders of the weight. Light as light, I discovered I could do so much more. I once hoped to die how I wanted to die, if I could not live how I wanted to live. Who am I to ask for a death with dignity when it was not afforded to Christ? When they find me, I know there will be no mercy; my bones will shatter in their bites. So cast away my body—forget it. I won’t mind for I have lived with all my might.

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and hypoetical heart attacks Annika Rempel

he last thing I expected to happen at my big age of 22 was to be tidying my apartment before paramedics arrived to assess my heart attack-like symptoms. If anything makes you feel like an elderly woman in a 20-something’s body, aside from my 5 pm dinners and 10:30 pm bedtime, it’s that. I started frantically checking under the couch cushions for the sock the paramedics would surely notice in direct defiance of the 9-1-1 operator’s instructions to stay seated, as if the ghost of my (very alive) Oma had possessed me. When they finally got to my apartment, I found myself stuttering out small talk to two of the most beautiful women I have ever seen with a blood pressure of 204/110. I was promptly strapped very politely to a gurney and whisked off to Toronto General. My friend – who very kindly came at the prospect of missing class – and I spent the next eight hours in the hospital, keeping each other entertained with campus gossip and eavesdropping on the other patients like a couple of old ladies. Everything in me wants to remember the experience as the morning I desperately tried not to blush as two super hot paramedics complimented my apartment and my best friend and I got to have a chill day in an ER room for no reason, but I can’t think of it that way. It wasn’t a regular morning and it was an awful day, and, upsettingly, it would’ve happened at some point in the near future if it hadn’t happened last month. During the last two weeks of Septem-

ber, I ran from meeting to meeting, to office hours, to class, to committee meetings and study groups, to extracurriculars and doctor’s appointments, rushing through assignments in between, and doing it all again the next day and the next after that. I spent these days quietly hyperventilating through a weight in my lungs, a racing heartrate, pulsing pain under my left arm and the left side of my back, and, on September 31, a stabbing chest pain. In hindsight, it’s absolutely ridiculous that an email chain about club funding is what did me in, and not, y’know, grad school applications, but I digress. Despite the keen among you already identifying these as symptoms of a prolonged anxiety or panic attack, my mind immediately reached for the worst, because – and this is the best part, folks – I had been recently diagnosed with a genetic heart condition that can result in sudden cardiac arrest. Maybe I really am pushing 80… When I got my diagnosis after nearly a year of waiting for results, I understandably didn’t respond well. I wasn’t sleeping, I was barely eating, and every anxiety related to my own health increased tenfold, all my other anxiousness about my final year of undergrad along with it. But I didn’t acknowledge it. I went to therapy multiple times that month and talked about it like I had it under control, as if it didn’t bother me or keep up at night. When classes and club activities started to become overwhelming, I pushed through them too. I stretched myself as thin as

I possibly could, out of sheer stubbornness that I would be fine and bounce back once reading week hit, until I broke. And there isn’t any way I can reframe this as something other than breaking – no thought exercises or jokes that I can make. The rubber band that is my mental health isn’t coming back from ending up in the hospital for anxiety-related high blood pressure, and I shouldn’t want it to. I’ve always suffered from severe anxiety. I was only formally diagnosed at 12, but it’s been a fundamental part of who I am since long before then. Some of my earliest memories are of having dreams of natural disasters and anxiety attacks over elementary school math classes. It has shaped how I interact with others and what I choose to do throughout the day. It’s prevented me from making friends and having new experiences, but it has also made me a more ambitious person. I have had to work through my own anxieties in addition to whatever work or activity needed doing in order to achieve what I wanted. But this is a part of my life that I need to stop glamourising and making light of, for my own sake. I can’t keep pushing through my panic because I’ll “be fine” once things calm down. My disorder has now begun to impact my physical health in a way it never has before and I’ve only just started to dedicate a serious effort to managing it. Anxiety can no longer be an unchangeable and intrinsic piece of myself. Along with the rest of my mental health, that identity has snapped for the last time. I don’t really know who I am without it. It’s, ironically, extremely anxiety-inducing to have to think of a new way of presenting myself. But I’m willing to try to take care of my health, because that matters a lot more than holding on to my constant panic. Instead of desperately going back to living my life as a rubber band, I think I’m going to try to enjoy re-moulding that plastic into something produc-

tive and meaningful. And who knows, maybe one day I can meet a hot paramedic without needing to be hospitalised. Just putting that out there.

The clay you squeeze Nabneel Sarma

Sometimes I wish I didn’t stretch myself so thin. Thin enough to be the masking tape covering up the holes of the image I bear for you, that tears at the seams. And somewhere, you’re happy in a pub drinking in company with the people you love. While I am here, stretching to prove my worth. You can only give me a glance and a smile, and then you leave Why do I stretch so much? Even when you’re not there. I want to wear a blanket around myself and be someone’s doll to bend and break. Then, somehow, I’d feel warm when the rain is dripping. Before they’re grabbing me to twist me into something I force myself to be. And you’d look from your umbrella at my dilemma. And then you’d look away So I’d stretch and flex myself to hold bridges for others, but I’d know you and your friends would walk all over them. Say something outside me that wobbly me wouldn’t understand. And you’d grin, nice and wide and big, and laugh, and I’d stand there holding the overpass with my Atlas hands I’m a titan but I feel your grasp tightening around me and I’d know, I’d feel that your care for me was all made of plasticine. If you’d come back and come to me, your frown melting into a puddle of melted clay while you sat there alone at a table, ashamed It just wouldn’t feel the same. I’d imagine you eating the pizza and the gooey cheese coming out of your mouth with a floppy smirk, and there I am, clay-faced with a heart of gold and feet of clay, and I am brittle, I am shattering And now here I am: I see you again and I choose to slink right past you because the words for me to say that I tolerate this are not coming out. So you, you there, you have a nice day, because I am going to stretch myself out to the sky and find someone to squeeze my hand tight, because I refuse to be the clay you squeeze.

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plastic flowers Ava Feir

i haven’t dreamt of you in a long time and maybe that’s because i’ve only been having nightmares i need someone to tell me what that means looking for a messiah, palm reader, someone who knows more, delving in is the only way i can get over this i’ve been looking for signs wherever i go, eyes glued to the ground lucky dimes and washers, something to keep in my wallet, that tells me everything will be alright my room is still seeped in your presence someone bring in sage, this needs to be cleansed exorcise my clothes, wash out the possession of your scent everything reads as an omen now

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either you love me, or you love me not i never wanted to be your bride, or the mother of your children but now that the thread has snapped, there’s an ache in this empty future’s place on my journey for good fortune, all i’ve found are plastic flowers and maybe that’s my symbol, my omen, my sign but the only thing i can read from it is that you weren’t as real as you made me believe you’d cling to me, like melted wax, dripping and hardening around me as i try not to burn out but in your absence, it’s like a spell has been lifted, a jinx reversed moving on from plastic flowers, learning to grow my own it’s a newfound blessing, the breaking of a curse

Etched in time Emma Ward

re you into Irish culture? Love Sally Rooney? Feel called to visit Dublin? The entire country seems to have a chokehold on the modern 20-somethings’ imaginations. Sheep, socialism, and super hot guys with pints of Guinness— somehow, the country has been flattened into the ultimate dreamscape. Pastoral, poetic, but edgy enough to feel progressive and full of mysterious meaning. This vision of Ireland is one that has reached a fever pitch, but the desire to consume Irish culture has a history unto itself. One way to track this history is through the proliferation of Irish music in America. The invention of the phonograph was a machine that subtly transformed how Irishness itself would be understood, remembered, and sold. For Irish immigrants arriving in North America after The Great Famine, the phonograph maintained their connection to their homeland. Capturing a distinct, nuanced sound, the phonograph created community and economic growth. The phonograph preserved Irish music for immigrants. However, it also froze Irishness into a marketable fantasy—a fantasy that continues to shape how Ireland is imagined and consumed. Irish immigrants were not well received in New York City in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They were often seen as culturally backwards, were frequently labelled as ‘ignorant bogtrotters,’ and took menial labour positions. They were penniless and alienated like many immigrant groups at the time. Ellen O’Byrne was one of these immigrants. Born in 1875 in County Leitrim, Ireland, Ellen immigrated to America on the heels of the Great Famine. There, she and her husband opened a shop selling fiddles, accordions, and musical cylinders to be played on phonographs. When Ellen noticed a lack of ‘danceable’ music, she worked with Columbia Records to record upbeat, instrumental tunes.

Columbia did not have the right musicians to perform the piece, but knowing their community, Ellen and her husband brought their fellow immigrants James Morrison and Micheal Coleman into the studio to record their pieces. This business venture paid off. Traditional Irish music sold quickly in Ellen’s shop, and even records in the Irish language were immensely popular. Best-selling records like “Reels of Leitrim,” “Jigs From Sligo,” and “Connacht Set Dances” were marketed by county or town rather than by composer. The O’Byrnes’ store grew so much that it eventually developed into its own independent record label. An Irish music recording boom had begun. The music’s popularity within the general immigrant population allowed for opportunities for playing live to expand. There was a demand for more tunes, more musicians, and more records, creating employment opportunities for the Irish to capitalise upon. Michael Coleman’s recordings circulated so widely in North America that his ornament-heavy Sligo style defined Irish fiddle music for generations, even in regions where that style had never previously dominated. Irish tunes, both live and recorded, began to be played at local dance halls across the nation. As the tunes were distributed through the dance hall circuit, more Americans began to encounter Irish culture in ways that felt accessible, charming, and non-threatening. Because of the high demand for Irish music, more obscure tunes were revitalised, as musicians had to draw on their knowledge of folk tunes from their own individual villages to come up with new material. These records often had themes of return and loss like “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” or “Once More in the Dear Old Land.” These pieces offered a sentimental vision of Ireland, defined by rural landscapes and emotional connections rather than political upheaval, largely ignoring the socioeconomic reasons that the Irish had to leave. Phonograph

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culture enabled Irish immigrants to foster a sense of community and belonging—Irish music became a way to understand and remember Irish history and culture. The increase in production and sales of Irish records, along with an improved reputation for immigrants, allowed Irish immigrants to feel more at home amongst their own community, as well as helped them better settle into the cultural fabric of the United States. However, this commercialization of culture and method of integration and assimilation also led to the shaping of an ‘idealised’ Irish identity. As immigration slowed and generations

passed, Irish-Americans sought ways to maintain their cultural identity. Phonograph recordings (especially those that emphasised themes of nostalgia) became cultural touchstones for later generations. However, these recordings often presented an exaggerated or simplified vision of Irish culture. As the Irish recording boom eased, these same records continued to circulate. Irish music became less and less reflective of what “Irishness” was, and more reflective of what the Irish-American experience was. The two became distinct cultures unto themselves, but there was a lack of perception of the distinction. In particular, those obscure tunes that embodied rural, remote farm lives became more estranged from the increasingly industrialising Ireland. Over time, this contributed to a romanticised and commercialised understanding of what it meant to be Irish, detached from the lived experiences of contemporary Ireland. The phonograph, along

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with later technological advancements like radio and film, helped solidify this particular image of Irishness—merry, musical, sentimental, and deeply nostalgic for the ‘old country.’ This version of Irishness proved easy to commodify, as evidenced by the rise of St. Patrick’s Day celebrations (stop dyeing that river green, Chicago), commercialised ‘Irish’ music, and the continued portrayal of Irish heritage as something quaint and folkloric rather than dynamic and evolving. As demand grew for ‘authentic’ Irish experiences, the market responded with music, dance, and traditions that catered to these expectations. Institutions like Riverdance and the global proliferation of Irish pubs act as cultural ambassadors for the nation. While these forms of cultural expression are valuable, they also contribute to an idealised, static version of Irishness that does not necessarily reflect Ireland today. The economic draw of curating these ‘Irish’ experiences for fanatics is not something that many will turn down. The same process has fed the contemporary fantasy of Ireland as being the poster child of progressive politics. In an increasingly fascist world, people seem to perceive Ireland as an uncomplicated refuge, where you can go live on an island and write poetry away from political and economic instability. In reality, Ireland is riddled with its own problems. A massive housing crisis has made living in Dublin borderline impossible for anyone but the rich. There is widespread anti-immigrant sentiment (ironic, no?) that has resulted in real, horrific violence. Domestic abuse rates are sky high. The legal system is severely strained. These issues are neither new nor singular. I do not say this to turn people against the country. I love Ireland. It is my home and it always will be. There are lots of fiddles, people do drink a ton of Guinness, and I lived next to a sheep farm—so these stereotypes are not the problem. The problem lies in an over-romanticisation of a national identity. The next time you see a leprechaun on a cereal box or hear an Irish jig, just remember—you might not be listening to history or reality, but to a recording of it.

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Three Photos

Maya Canaran

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Infer Amy Yang

irages of sunlight ripple across pillars of concrete. Tunnels of wind flow through the streets and open gaping mouths to all the little people pacing in spirals within. The sounds are constant; the crescendo never stops—the howls, the horns, the screeching, climbing on top of one another, skyscrapers trespassing on street corners where the always-cold fall asleep at night, still and hardly breathing. We all lay somewhere on the sidewalk. Organs spilled, skin flayed, bones picked clean one by one in the search for something worth selling, something worth burning to stave off the cold. The city makes me forget how to write. Words are tugged back and forth inside my head, stretching and pulling, but always snapping back: a tangled mess of elastic bands with no beginning and no end. When I try to dance, my limbs form disjointed, uncanny lines. I’m tossed up and down, swaying side to side, jerked around by forces stronger than the antidepressants dissolving on my tongue. Discordant tides always come back, always knock me under. I ask myself again and again: Is enough enough? The answer is never yes. I realized one thing: the mundane never leaves—it’s a permanent thing. It stretches and undulates in my DNA. It began in the sun-scorched, back-bent labouring fields. In the dirt, the gutters, the courtyard water well I rode tricycle imprints around. The memories are faint, but they are pulsing. I remember the hard cot we slept on side by side each night. Marbles rolling behind cabinet doors. Dust floating in the guest room. Forgotten certificates peeling off the walls. Calligraphed family trees mapped with rivers of ink. They run, rivers into veins, ink into blood, reverberating with the distant cries of my ancestors in the blistering fields. I still remember the heat. The mundane came to a different place. It echoed beneath sunlit paintings of prairie green and dandelion yellow. It was not hot, but it was bright. Tainted with sweat, not blood. A different price paid, but permanent all the same. The concrete does not shield, does not protect, the way the aspen trees did. It does not shelter us like we were sheltered in the back lawns, the lakes, the mountains of snow. Endless fields of bright yellow canola streaks. Creaking floorboards. Christmas lights, eventually. Pink doilies the neighbours crocheted for us one year. Memories of the heat to fill the spaces where the winter could not reach. Lives here are all measured in ink. Succinct and typewritten. The hand-drawn calligraphy is gone. The mundane has stayed, but it’s distant now. The mundane was quiet and it breathed. It was hot, scorching, but it was alive. The city is too cold. Grey walls and blank pages and lights that never breathe and never die. It’s a migraine that never leaves—two sides pushing on my mind at once: the numbing chill, the senselessness—and the burning red I see every time I close my eyes. It’s thrumming under my frostbitten skin. I remember the fields. I remember the heat. It followed from one life to another, and another again.

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rno

Nghi Truong

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You Will Heal And Heal Again

Nghi Truong PLASTIC

Boundary breach

Suri Wu

fish, saying noon, noon saying fold. a wrinkle walks, it walks with a sound. sound is not it, is the it that bends between oar and air a lick of light pressed flat but still roundly— the pond is a mirror of more (yes more), yes in the throat in mud (more mud), mud in the memory of beets (yes beets), and beets are what there are when bets are less Bets are less in summer. I can conjure us like that dip of oar the pond silvered interruption of glass the canoe—our reflection in mad. Say stitch, say see, say seam, seam not cloth, not caught, not clear. Hold it where thimble forgets its edge, a jacket unchosen the west. The wind folds its hands twice and names it colour. to bend is a rumor, to break is a type of keeping, keeping the melt in its mouth. so glass hums again, says come, says maybe, says shape, and the shape, it answers, yes, but later.

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Wedding hour

Athena McIsaac

he gold-green leaves of the aspen trees flutter in the wind. Water ebbs and flows, licking the sand on the riverbanks. A woman sits on a patch of burnt grass facing the river. Her white dress sparkles in the sunlight. A lace veil lays discarded in the bushes behind her, its delicate thread frayed and torn up, having gotten snagged on a branch when she stumbled through the brush. She felt something vibrate in the grass next to her. Glancing down, she saw that it was her phone. The screen lit up with one new notification – a text from Macy that read: “Where are u?? Ceremony starts in 30.” She stared at it. Her eyes glazed over at the sight of the words. She felt sick. Her heart was pounding, and so was her head. She had woken up feeling strange that morning but had just assumed it was normal wedding-day anxiety. But the closer it got to the start of the ceremony, the worse she began to feel. It all came crashing down when she went to the bathroom and, while washing her hands, caught a glimpse of her reflection. Her bleached hair was done up in an intricate arrangement of braids and her eyes had been battered with powdery blue shadow and sharp white glitter. She felt like Elsa. She did not want to be Elsa, she thought, staring at her reflection before noticing the clock on the wall behind her. The numbers were backwards in the reflection, but she could still make out the time: 4:00 pm. Exactly one hour until the ceremony. Until she would be given away by her father to another man. What was there to give away? Nothing of much value to them. She was some loose change being dropped in a tip jar. She suddenly felt claustrophobic. Darting out the house’s back door, holding the bunched-up fabric from her dress in one hand,

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Clara had headed towards the river that lay a few trees over from her aunt’s house. Her aunt wasn’t home to stop her, and Macy hadn’t seen her go – she was concentrating on eating a blueberry muffin without getting a single crumb onto her bridesmaid’s dress. Macy was dedicated to her role as maid of honor – she wanted the wedding to be perfect and had stressed over it immensely, perhaps more than Clara had. She paid attention to the details. Every detail except for that of Clara herself. It was as if Clara wasn’t part of the wedding – the wedding was a sentient beast that just happened to choose her as its bride. The water trickled over the rocks at the bottom of the river, the rhythmic blooping and splooshing sounds soothing Clara’s headache. A black Labrador bounded into the river, its large body disrupting the water’s flow. It was the kind of dog Grayson would want, she thought, watching it happily splash around. She remembered meeting Grayson at the dingy 2nd floor pub on the corner of a main street in town. He was there with a big group of his rowdy friends, watching a hockey game, cheap beers in hand, their eyes glued to the unbearably large pub TV screens. She had noticed him immediately – he was a tall man, and his hair was a deep brown, as dark as the custom-made ebony hardwood floors in her parents’ house. Clara had been working at the pub as a hostess for only a few months and had just been trained to serve. It was one of her first nights waitressing and, as she was walking by Grayson’s table with a tray of beers, she tripped, spilling beer all over him. She remembered feeling horrible – apologizing repeatedly, telling him she would have his bill covered. As she rambled on, she noticed he wasn’t really listening, but seemed to

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be intently studying every feature of her face. It made her blush, and she trailed off. He insisted that she not worry about anything, he would still pay for his beers, and asked if he could buy her one too. Clara said no – she wasn’t interested in dating anyone at the moment. Normally she would invent some lie in case he was the type to get angry about a rejection, but she was too flustered to think. After he left with his friends, he left a twenty on the table for her, and on the back of the receipt wrote his number down – ten barely legible digits, along with a note that read: “Let me show you a good time.” Macy had advised her not to text the number. “This guy clearly doesn’t take no for an answer!” She exclaimed. Macy thought the note sounded douchey and that this guy and his friends seemed like a bunch of sports-obsessed alcoholics who wouldn’t know a real good time if it punched them in the gut. Clara had agreed, but pointed out that just about every man living in their small town was the same way. But she was intrigued by this man, who had looked at her so intensely, and so she texted him. They went out for a beer at the pub, and then the next week they were out again for another drink, but that time to a proper bar, and they kept going out for so many drinks that they decided to make it official. That all started two years ago. Her phone buzzed again. “Clara. Seriously. Need u back here, now.” Another text from Macy. She knew it was only a matter of time before other people noticed her absence, and her phone started blowing up with more texts. She needed to go back, but her body seemed to be rooted in place. She was stuck to the grass. Nature was what had been keeping her from going insane since she moved back home to this small town, boxed in by mountains on all sides. She would often sneak off before dinner to find a quiet spot facing a mountain, or near the river, just to sit and breathe for a while. Sometimes she would sketch. But mostly she would try not to miss Montreal. She was itching to get back to her studies, but she knew it wasn’t a possibility anytime soon. When she had

first moved back a year ago, she took a job at a restaurant, and planned to make enough money to be able to move back out and continue school, complete one final semester of her undergrad, and then look into grad school in Europe. She had high hopes and a GPA to match them. But she couldn’t complete her undergrad degree after her roommate died. She was overwhelmed with grief, couldn’t study, and had no choice but to move back home. “I’m worried for u babe!! U left your location on – omw now.” Clara frantically grabbed at her phone and turned her location off. She sprung up from her spot on the grass and began walking as fast as she could away from the house, along the riverbank. She realized that out in the sun, her dress made her into a pillar of light – an obvious beacon for Macy to spot – and headed for the trees for some cover. Grayson wanted kids. Clara did not. Grayson wanted a big house and had arranged to have one built on part of his parents’ land for the two of them. He would work on the ranch; she would care for the kids. But Clara yearned for Montreal. Grayson enjoyed hearing about her studies, but didn’t understand how important it was to her that she returned to continue them. “It’s just history – you can always learn about this stuff by researching it yourself,” he told her. “Maybe while our kids are asleep.” Earlier in the relationship, she tried voicing her concerns to her parents, but they had sided with Grayson. “Don’t you want to start a family? Have some routine in your life, for once?” Her mom had said while fixing Clara’s hair, moving phantom strands of it out of her face. “University did give me a routine, Mom,” Clara said. Her mother looked annoyed. “You’re not happy at that school – it isn’t you. I know you. I knew from the day you applied to it that it just wouldn’t work out.” Her mom took a miniature bottle of hairspray out of her purse and began spraying it in random parts of Clara’s hair. “You’re not as…wild as those city girls. God, how skimpy they dress! Wearing those stupid fisherman’s nets as pants. Can’t

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catch a man like that, honey!” Her dad wasn’t any better. “Why do you want to go back to school? You’re fine here,” He grunted. He hadn’t even looked up from the TV to talk to her – too busy watching the latest hockey game. “Grayson’s a fine man. He knows what’s good for you. Listen to him, for once.” She looked at the TV. Her dad’s favorite team was losing the game. “But how will I work? I need to at least finish undergrad – I’ll just be stuck at the pub if I don’t,” She said. Her dad had laughed at that. “Do you even know who your husband’s family is? With the business they have, Clara,” he turned the TV off and finally looked up at her, “you’ll never have to work again.” Clara heard footsteps – heels clacking rapidly against the nearby gravel path. She practically dove into a bush, its branches scraping at her skin, tearing at the edges of her dress as she did. “Clara!” a voice yelled angrily. “What are you doing?!” It was Macy. Clara crouched down as much as she could, but she knew Macy would find her soon enough. She checked her phone. She had 27 missed calls from her mom. The time read 4:40. Shit, she thought. She wasn’t ready. Grayson was not good for her – he was kind, he was patient, sure, but he didn’t understand her or what she wanted. She didn’t care what her parents said. They had no idea about the life she’d built for herself in Montreal. She spent most of her time studying history at McGill, yes, but she’d also made a lot of friends there. On weekends, she dressed in thrifted clothes her mother would faint at the sight of, painted giant wings on her eyes with eyeliner, and headed to house parties. She smoked weed and talked history with her friends, but also politics, philosophy, English – whatever they were studying. Conversations like these were impossible in her hometown. Maybe she was unlucky and just always met the worst people, but somehow no one she knew in Banff cared much about anything she learned in her classes. The histori-

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cal facts were interesting to some people, sure, but only for a few minutes. Grayson seemed to think it was cute that she knew so much, but never encouraged her to go back to school. Macy kept telling her to become a high school teacher. Clara’s mom agreed – but thought that Clara should do that later, after she’d had a few kids first. Clara didn’t understand why people expected so little from her. She didn’t know exactly what she wanted to do for work, but she knew she didn’t want to teach high school and have children. Rinn understood. When she first saw Rinn at one of those house parties, leaning against a wall, rifling through the books on the host’s living room bookshelf, Clara knew she had to find a way to talk to her. Rinn had been dressed in black slacks, paired with a sports bra and an oversized blazer. She had bright red hair, which was cut short at her shoulders. Clara couldn’t take her eyes off her. When she asked Rinn what she was doing, Rinn smiled and said, “Judging their taste. Wanna join?” Clara and Rinn spent the rest of the party rating all the different books on the shelf. Then they started talking about their favorite books in general, and then they moved on to TV shows, and then suddenly Clara was spilling her entire life story. Rinn in turn told her about what it was like growing up in Montreal – heading to the skate park after school, spending time reading and writing poems at various cafes, going on annual trips to the east coast with her family. The party ended, but their conversations continued. Late at night in bars, on the phone, texts sent between lectures. Clara had never had such a close friendship with anyone in her hometown. She felt that this was somehow different to her other friendships, and she didn’t understand why, until one night after Clara finished gushing about the latest novel she was reading, Rinn suddenly asked Clara if she could kiss her. Clara was shocked. And even more shocked when she heard herself, without skipping a beat, say, “Yes.” No one in her family had known about their romance. Clara had told Macy, who was scarcely able to hide her disgust.

“Don’t you think those kinds of things are more… temporary?” She had said carefully. “I mean, you still could marry a man. You said it yourself, right? That’s what bi is – it means two?” After hearing those comments, Clara had resolved to keep the relationship a secret from people back home for as long as she could. Clara heard leaves rustling near her hiding spot. “Clara! Everyone is looking for you! What is wrong with you?!” Macy shrieked. “I know you still think about that girl, okay? But you have to move on!” Clara felt her body getting hot with rage. Move on? Macy had a lot of nerve, saying that. Rinn and Clara had dated for two years. They even moved in together for one of them. One Sunday afternoon, while Clara was making pasta, she received a phone call. Rinn had set Clara as one of her emergency contacts, so when Rinn got into the car crash, the hospital called her. During the call, Rinn’s condition got worse. So much worse that, shortly after telling her Rinn was in critical condition, the caller had to correct himself and tell Clara that, unfortunately, Rinn had passed away. Clara couldn’t take it anymore. “Fuck you!” she shouted at Macy, and stood up, climbing out of the bush. Macy turned to look at her, mouth open, eyebrows raised. Her eyes narrowed. “Fuck me? No, fuck you. We all did this for YOU, Clara.” Macy walked over to her slowly. Her long, platinum hair swished back and forth as she strode angrily towards Clara. Macy stopped a foot away from her and took a deep breath, pausing before she spoke. “I know you miss McGill – you never let us forget it – but that part of your life is gone. Done. You’ve been back here for years now.” “Only two years,” Clara said. Macy scoffed. “You’re getting married. His ranch? His work? It’s here. Your families are here. He’s never going to move for you.” Clara cast her eyes towards the ground. Macy was right. Maybe she did need to let it go. “Besides, you wouldn’t want to go back

there – you might fall back into your old lifestyle,” Macy said. Clara held back tears. Macy would never understand – she didn’t even want to try. She could feel it. Everyone was pressuring her to marry Grayson because they wanted so badly for her to be what they considered normal. When she went to university, she cut her hair short, dyed it blue. She changed her wardrobe to include long, patterned skirts and graphic band t-shirts. She was braver at dinner-table arguments with her father, calling him out on his misogynistic comments. Rinn helped Clara be a better version of herself. That’s why she wanted to move back to Montreal – just to feel close to Rinn, to live in the city she was born in. Maybe it would help Clara. Ever since moving home, she couldn’t recognize the person she had become. Blonde didn’t suit her, and Grayson was nice enough, but she knew deep down that if she ever told him she’d dated a woman, he would explode. “Clara, let’s go. Please. It’s too late to back out,” Macy said. Clara stared at her. “Do you even care if I’m happy with him?” Macy sighed. She wasn’t meeting Clara’s eyes. “I just think…this is the option you have now. And you need to take it.” She looked through the trees, out at the river. “What would you even do? If you…” She didn’t want to say it, Clara knew. Macy didn’t want to admit that Clara had any other choice. Clara looked down at her wedding dress. It was not the one she wanted, but the one her mother picked out for her. She stared at the hem, torn and muddy from her escapades in the forest. Clara was feeling a lot of emotions, but mostly, she felt tired. Tired of running, and fighting, and working at the pub that smelled like sweat and beer all the time. She wished desperately that she could talk to Rinn. Hug her one last time. Clara felt her eyes fill with tears. She was truly exhausted. Without another word, she began walking towards the house, Macy following close behind her. She looked at her phone and saw that it was now 5:00. She was going to be late.

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Three Studies of Figures a Brenna Macdonald

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at the Crucifiction

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It was meant to be forever

Victoria Wai Kei Li

I. Ode to a Lawn Chair The house was as liminal as we were, you know, so let alone the chair. We hauled it $3.99 from a yard sale of some woman who used to be alive, wiped chemicals all over it to rid it of death that had sunk already into its plastic scratch veins. We kept it for a season only, or, at least, that’s what we told ourselves. We spent the first seasons squeezing our tiny bones into its cold but spacious arms, fighting to catch a sight of the TV box, until we could not. We parked it to a folding table, buried our heads under a big white lamp, fed it crumbs of cookies, chips, erasers and pencils. Our buttcheeks learnt its faces, the shapes of its pits and the secrets of its veins. The lawn chair never knew the taste of lawn, but it knew the cracks of our front porch, when our grandmother sat there, flipping a bamboo fan in the fleeting heat of summer. By season four, she watched me watch my little sister with one leg up swiftly shift her fingers through an electric keyboard: ode to our borrowed time. By season seven, she was no longer there. We left the house in season eight. Our downstairs neighbours said they’d take the chair for a beach-side wedding party. There it would be showered in champagne and cakes and celebration.

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Afterwards, I imagine, someone would haul it somewhere. Or it would stay where it was, facing the sea on the edge of time: until salt air sinks into its skin, until its unbreakable bones grow brittle. Then, finally, in another season it is not supposed to outlive, it loses a leg, a backbone breaks, an arm falls off— a wave comes and hauls a limb into the ocean. Its limb, webbed in secrets of our childhood, then surfs the surges of the broad sea until a wave washes it up on the shore again— perhaps closer to where we now live— at a belt made of shells and other plastic pieces. II. Katabasis The question is to eat or not to eat. My grandmother’s last meal sits in a disposable restaurant to-go box I now inherit, one that she, over and over, washed and made anew. Chicken, rice, onions, and broccoli— the brown and green now sealed in a plastic, see-through casket. She put the hot food in and slid the box to the top shelf of the fridge, before only the last time she put herself to sleep. To eat: to crop the last drops of her labour, lose her forever to the twistings of my guts. To not eat: to stop time in a capsule that rots, and whatever it becomes kills the rest of her and

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whoever else tries to play clever in face of death. I hold it in my hands, still and quiet yet slipping through the space between my fingers, stasis like a fleeting poem stuck in the end— rhymes of an archaic scheme, or an ancient poet who traces the circles of hell and beyond—a much needed katabasis. III. Tamper Ring (Morning Song) We are sitting by the sea small fat bottles of soda pop in hand emptied You have plucked out the tamper band that holds the cap that holds the mouth that holds the liquid of the bottle where we put our lips to Then you slide it on to my ring finger like it is a joke There are thorns on the ring Thorns that attached the band to the very bottle you have plucked it from Why? It was meant to be forever But then I know In the morning I write you a sonnet weave its strings of letters into a nice tiny square and I smooth out its edges Then you can set sail with it behind you Then I can wipe my tears I wipe them clean so then we can do it all again

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Harman Banga

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Sex as plastic: polyethylen L. F. Shubert

he Prevalence of Plastic Plastic has infiltrated just about every corner of the human experience. We graduated from eating out of plastics to eating them directly from our processed foods. What began as an easily disposable sterile material for medical fields is now practically organic, present in bloodstreams, wombs, and passed onto placentas. A significant aspect of human development that has been affected—and arguably disrupted—is sex. More specifically, the process of societal sexing has become more or less rigid with the proliferation of plastic. Plastics can be broadly categorised by their recyclability and toxicity. Two of the most popular types of plastic, polyethylene and polyvinyl, are most simply described using these categorisations. Polyethylene (PET) plastics are typically highly recyclable and non-toxic. This is the most commonly produced plastic; the products we encounter most in our day-to-day life consist of this material, from packaging to containers to recycling bins themselves. Polyvinyl chloride (PVC), colloquially known as polyvinyl plastics, are less easily recycled due to the abundance of toxic chemicals that its recycling processes emit. PVC products are often heavy-duty industrial materials, such as those used in construction, manufacturing, and automotives. These physical plastics can be used as metaphors to explore the social types of ‘plastic’ sex, perceived roles of sexes, processes of sexing, and can be used to offer simplified explanations of the connections between sex and plastics. Whereas polyethylene’s higher potential for repurposing is representative of more flexible sexing and consequent gender norms, polyvinyl represents the alternate perspective of rigid sexing and norms. But why plastic? Sex can be defined—socially, culturally, artistically—by a myriad of objects

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and abstracts. Plastic’s prevalence in society places it as the denominator; at the rate we continue to produce plastic, this prevalence will only increase. The most normalised presences may reveal themselves to be some of the most influential. Pliable Polyethelyne It is no secret that the social parameters of sex—as a biological identifier and as an activity— change with the times. Contemporary definitions of sex may be considered looser than definitions from previous periods in history. Today, sexes can be socially and legally changed with unprecedented ease and protections (e.g. the ability to change legal names and sex is more common and less stigmatised). It can be argued that the recent heightened plasticity of sex can be at least partially attributed to physical plastics. Back when ‘Tupperware parties’ became a desirable and widely-accessible social event for housewives, polyethylene plastics used to be a perpetrator of sexed social norms. With time, polyethylenes have been revealed to often contain endocrine disrupters, which effectively achieved the opposite effect as previously intended: sexed social norms were disrupted by polyethylenes rather than upheld. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (AKA EDCs, chemicals that mimic, block, or alter bodily hormone distribution; AKA the chemicals that “made the frogs gay”) are one of the primary players in the field of sexing science. EDCs are prominent in the most plastic-riddled, everyday products: bottles, clothing, and cosmetics. The exposure to EDCs results in an imbalance of sexed hormones (e.g. the ‘feminisation’ of men exposed to estrogen, or ‘masculinisation’ of women exposed to testosterone). How individuals are sexed becomes dependent on their exposure to and reliance on polyethylene plastics. In their paper

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ne or polyvinyl? Toxic Sexes, Malin Ah-King and Eva Hayward describe how the presence of EDCs is only one component of environmental influence in the ongoing process of biological sexing. Definitions of sex are not only subject to change as a result of social development, but also scientific study. Ah-King and Hayward highlight how common it is for species’ sexes to shift in response to their environment. Understanding this propensity to change is important when “media has gaslighted a Frankenstein metamorphosis of sex and sexuality” that makes sex appear dangerously fluid in ways that it supposedly never has been. This media choice reflects a “preoccupation with vulnerability of masculinity” that inspires widespread social concern for the loss of maleness and manhood as “precious commodities of any patriarchal system.” Ah-King and Hayward suggest that changing sexual characteristics can instead be understood as “potentials rather than iterations of sexual difference;” this emphasises how bodies are “constant processes” that have never truly had stalwart sexes. When human sexing is similarly environmentally influenced, perhaps it should be assessed from a biological and chemical approach rather than as a social scare. The fact remains that the presence of EDCs is not something to be normalised without consequence. Acknowledging that there may not be any “sexed” hormones to begin with—because estrogen and testosterone are present in all humans—offers opportunities for more expansive understandings of sex. This acknowledgment may also lead to a consequent decrease in what may be considered ‘toxic’ demonstrations of gender (e.g. toxic masculinity). Still, having too loose a definition of sex—or nothing definitive at all—presents its own troubles.

Pitiless Polyvinyl A common type of PVC plastic is referred to by another name, RPCV (rigid polyvinyl chloride), for its titular rigidity. This rigidity offers a direct link to assessments of sex; although social definitions can bend significantly, some labels can only stretch so far. Having an approximate idea of what gender roles may be ascribed to your assigned sex can provide a sense of direction in identity development. However, whether the sociological pros (conforming to societal norms of sex allows for simpler relatability among peers and opens discussions about specialised healthcare such as maternity leave) outweigh the psychological cons (the perpetuation of rigid social norms leading to pigeonholed ideas of capability on the basis of sex) remains undetermined. What can be more concretely assessed are the biological effects correlated to polyvinyl chloride exposure. Polyvinyl chloride, specifically its precursor vinyl chloride, is a carcinogen that can lead to a variety of chronic health conditions, including a myriad of cancers. Exposure to this potentially fatal chemical is more common than many realise. The ‘industrial material’ that polyvinyl production is present in includes more than jobsite tools. Polyvinyl saturates the average living space: it’s used in house siding, roofing, flooring, windows, and pipes—from the inside out, housebound polyvinyl persists. The relation between chemical exposure and sexing lies in the commonality of PVC-related chromosomal aberrations. In their analytical paper Prevalence and persistence of chromosomal damage and susceptible genotypes of metabolic and DNA repair genes in Chinese vinyl chloride-exposed workers, Fang Ji et. al emphasise that after three years of working in conditions with PVC exposure, subjects suffered various consequences, including detrimental chromosomal aberrations.

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When ideas of sex are based on rigid biological parameters such as an individual’s chromosomes, the disruption of said chromosomes may not initially seem too dangerous to someone interested in a laxer definition of sex. For someone who doesn’t believe that chromosomes can independently define sex, why would their disruption matter? What goes largely undiscussed are the details of chromosomes unrelated to sex that serve as the primary to chromosome disruptions (i.e. how chromosomal aberrations are linked to the development of certain cancers). Separating chromosomes from the conversation of sex, at least sometimes, sounds like further support for laxer definitions of sex and sexing. This is not the intention of this connection, so much as emphasising the importance of further analysing biological factors that otherwise might be neglected for fear of perpetuating sex- and gender-related toxicity. Political Plasticity The term ‘plasticity’ may be more loaded a term than gender- and sex-focused philosophers may realise. Several scholars propose that the plasticity of sex—occurring through EDCs, PVC exposure, or any such environmental factor—has significant ties to state and racial control. Furthermore, the terms ‘plasticity’ and ‘malleability’ reveal how different power dynamics contribute to the potentially weaponised plasticity of sex. Demarcating categories for transformation and the use of said transformation is essential; this is where the difference between ‘plasticity’ and ‘malleability’ comes in. These terms may be individually distinct rather than near-synonymous, each with a unique connection to control. In their work, Race, the State, and the Malleable Body, Kyla Schuller and Jules Gill-Peterson posit that malleability is the term that more accurately describes an individual’s

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ability to transform, whereas plasticity is the administrative tool that “seizes the malleable body as a means to engineer the individual.” State control comes into play where social sexed norms are concerned. Since state power appears to be “particularly vulnerable to the disrupting force of plasticity”—hence the fear of lost “precious commodities” of maleness that Ah-King and Hayward mention—a state may implement means of stigmatising fluid sexuality, such as engineering the idea of a fluid sexing as an undesirable “Frankenstein metamorphosis.” In Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson further challenges the goals of sexual plasticity. She suggests that the telos of plasticity is “the fluidification of ‘life’ and fleshly existence,” where the “fleshy being [...] is experimented with as if it were infinitely malleable lexical and biological matter.” Jackson specifies how this malleability of matter has historically been used as a tool through which “blackness is produced as sub/super/human at once” and made more easily attributable to racialised ideas of animality. When an individual’s identity can be moulded at will, their value becomes dependent on the will of the authority moulding that identity. This dependence often serves as a potential justification for exploitation (especially on the basis of race and/or sex). To Ponder and Predict This piece does not seek to promote nor penalise a particular view of sex. Rather, it suggests that the connection between subjects as socially-relevant, politically-charged, ever-persistent, and yet definitionally separate as sex and plastic is worth further consideration. Sex and plastic only become increasingly worth discussing, as both continue to dominate contemporary conversations and human lives.

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Nghi Truong

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The balla Plastic Man

Nghi Truong

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ad of Eel O’Brian n Birch Norman

She asks me if my body is biodegradable: So long as this city is saveable I would burn for it and earn for it Nothing but hell Over lives lost, collateral costs And the lingering smell But keep your kerogen city keys, No skeleton Can get me in To any place I need Except the hearts of my fellow men Mass made to break Before they might bend Still I will stretch myself thin Without any weight Though I would snap back If you could be straight About what shape you expect of me For I can be anyone you want me to be

Plastic Man was created by writer-artist Jack Cole, and first appeared in Police Comics #1 (August 1941)

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Thanksgiving Beatrice Labbe “Are you sure you don’t mind me driving your car?” I asked Zoya. “No, of course not, Andy. You and James go ahead. I don’t have classes tomorrow. I’ll drive back with my parents,” she insisted. “Park in the back alley, not in the street—you’ll get a ticket.” I nodded and hugged her and her parents goodbye. I thanked them for having us at their cabin for the weekend. James waved goodbye, then we got in the car and left. It was a beautiful drive: the road trailed the clear water of Georgian Bay. I made a point of looking out the window to my left and away from James. When I finally looked at him, he was staring ahead. He grabbed one of Zoya’s hair ties from the cupholder and started playing with it. Still facing forward, he turned his head away from me a little. I turned back towards the road. Ahead of us, the leaves were turning orange and brown. They were withering, yet so beautiful. I considered this for a moment. The beauty in death; the beauty in struggle. I glanced back at James. He looked as though he was going to be sick, like he was pushing something down, his long face contorted in pain. I thought he might have been hungover. Yet, in the soft autumn light, he appeared transcendent. James, who always had bags under his eyes from sleeping so little, and who had a scar going through the inner corner of his eyebrow, had never looked so lovely. Maybe I just thought so because of what he had said the previous night. It had broken away some of the mystery that I had always attributed to him. I wanted to push his curls out of his face and drag my hand across his cheek. I wanted to prick the palm of my hand on his scruff. Had I not been driving, I would have looked at him the whole drive. He would have pretended not to notice. Our silence was so conspicuous, so contrasting, to the previous night. Zoya had us stay in the kids’ room, with the two twin beds. I’d never shared a room with him before, and here I found out we both had insomnia. So after listening to him toss and turn for an hour, I had had enough. “James,” I whispered. “Andy?” He hadn’t realized I was also awake. His voice was deeper than it usually was. James’s voice was a bit higher than most, but it somehow sounded masculine on him. Maybe because he spoke so low. “I’m going to get some air.” “I’ll come.” He pulled on a pair of jeans and a crewneck, and I did the same. He stumbled a little as he did so, probably still drunk from the wine we had with dinner. We walked down to the lake, and James took a seat on the rock by the edge. My shoulder brushed his as I sat next to him. His rock was higher than mine, so he towered over me. I was usually taller than him, and I enjoyed looking up at him for once. We both stared at the water. The moon was full and cast a shimmering path on the lake’s surface. “It’s too bad Nic couldn’t make it,” I said. James scoffed a laugh. “He’s with Ava—I’m sure he’s fine.” James spoke softly, but verged on mocking. “Still, we usually do Thanksgiving with all the roommates together,” I said. “You can’t go three days without him, can you?”

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He tried to pass this off as a joke, but I could tell he meant it. “That’s not it,” I said solemnly. I threw a pebble in the lake; it skipped twice before disappearing. “I’m sorry, I’m just giving you a hard time.” He shrugged. “I know how it is with you two. You’re lighter whenever he’s there. I’m sure you want him here, especially now that you just broke things off with Jess.” He talked quickly and a little under his breath, as though he were just thinking out loud. “D’you miss her?” “No,” I answered firmly. I hadn’t thought about Jessica since I ended things with her. “Why did you even go out with her? I could tell you didn’t like her.” His voice shook a little as he said this, and his Mexican accent resurfaced. “I don’t know. I think I was hoping it would turn into something different than it was.” I didn’t want to talk about Jess. I didn’t want to talk about girls. “Why does it matter, anyway?” “I just don’t think you should lead anyone on. Especially Zoya’s friends. You’re so oblivious to the effect you have on others.” He was looking at me now. I turned to meet his eyes. He looked solemn, but I just interpreted it as him being tired. His downturned eyes seemed so heavy. “I think you’re overestimating me,” I said, turning away from him. “It’s those blue eyes of yours, Andy. They give you away.” I made a sound, something between a scoff and a laugh. “What is it you wanted it to turn into with Jess?” He asked the question as though he already knew the answer, as though he were getting at something. I could feel him staring at me, but I could never bear to look at him when we talked like this. “I was waiting to feel like myself around her, but I never did.” “Not the way you do with Nic.” He said this as a fact and turned his face back to the water. “Yeah, I guess I’m probably most like myself when I’m with Nic,” I said. I twisted the silver ring around my index finger. We both knew what my friendship with Nic was like, but saying it out loud still felt vulnerable. Or saying it in front of James felt vulnerable. “That’s the way I feel about you,” he whispered. He said this so softly, part of me thought I had imagined it. The words hung in the air, enveloping us. It was as though only the two of us existed. As though the words linked us in an inexplicable way. I looked at him again. His hollow cheeks, his drawn-out chin. He almost sparkled in the moonlight. I rested my hand between his shoulder blades, as if to say: I feel that way about you too. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to talk at all. I just wanted to sit with James. That’s what we did—we enjoyed each other’s quiet company. Or maybe I said nothing because nothing would have been true. I didn’t feel the same way about James that I did about Nic. Nic was my best friend. And James, James was something else. Or maybe it was just that I always avoided talking about my emotions. I had such a hard time making sense of my feelings. It always seemed wiser to keep them to myself. That, and I was inebriated. Part of me was worried that if I started talking, I would have a hard time stopping. This was easier. Our silence, my hand on his back. Maybe my arm wrapped around his shoulder, I can’t remember now. It felt as though we were hovering just above the rock; we were unburdened. In the fall of third year, I had felt heavy, yet empty

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all at once. It was as though my organs had been drained from my body and replaced with sand. But at that moment, I was light and full. James’s hazel eyes looked more green then, and so I could tell: he felt the same way. We were reconciled. However, the next day, in the car, the silence hadn’t felt encompassing, but dividing. I wasn’t sure whether he felt regret or embarrassment. “Can you open the glove compartment? See if she has any CDs?” I asked him. He opened it and laughed. “Oh my god,” James breathed. He brought the CD to my face so I could see it. It was “OK Computer” by Radiohead. We’d been looking for it since September. It came out the summer after first year, and on our first night back at school, James and I had smoked a joint and listened to the whole thing. We hadn’t spoken, hadn’t even looked at each other. He’d laid down the length of the couch, and I laid on the floor next to him. The music had engulfed us. The next day, we recounted our experiences to each other. We had both felt as though the room was filled with water and we were being rocked to sleep by waves. As though the sound waves were tangible. We may have held hands at some point, I’m not sure. That was how we listened to anticipated albums from then on. He put the CD in the player and the music began. I looked at him from the corner of my eye. He held back a grin. “I think this was our best Thanksgiving,” I said, and then his smile broke out. We were submerged once more…

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Yaocheng Xia

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Looking Upstream of Cons Zen Master Charlie Sheen

n Mrs. Dalloway: Mapping Streams of Consciousness, David Dowling uses the following passage to demonstrate Woolf’s “four types” of psycho-analogous discourse: Horror! horror! she wanted to cry (She had left her people; they had warned her what would happen.) Why hadn’t she stayed at home? she cried, twisting the knob of the iron railing. That girl, thought Mrs. Dempster (who saved crusts for the squirrels and often ate her lunch at Regent’s Park), don’t know a thing yet; and really it seemed to her better to be a little stout, a little slack, a little moderate in one’s expectations. Percy drank. Well, better to have a son, thought Mrs. Dempster. [31] (1991, 46). The quality of the writing osmotically filters omniscient description, soliloquy, and (in) direct interior monologue — the “four types” — as to, in Dowling’s words, “make the transition between speech and thought […] as they actually are in our subjective experience” (1991, 46). Beginning with soliloquy, the above passage quickly denarrates into possible indirect interior monologue, is interrupted by dietetically unplaceable omniscient description, and, with Mrs. Dempster, is repurposed into direct interior monologue via idiomatic speech. Her final line, despite being addressed to the reader in pseudo-soliloquy form, is again laundered through the narrator’s indirect modality — being attributed, rather than spoken outright. Jacque Rancière has already neatly united these descriptors of style with the novel’s dimension of narrative meaning — or the specificities of its sequence of action — by way of a “dialectical” interspace between a vitalistic

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and anonymous “luminous halo” and an “old hierarchical distribution” of foreclosed “anonymous live” (2017, 68). Here, Woolf’s ‘stream of consciousness’ is subtracting the 19th century realist novel into fundamental unity of writing’s impersonal power whilst simultaneously rearticulating “the tyranny of the plot” by appropriating all alternative positionalities, or the “shower of atoms” (Rancière 2017, 66), under the total pluripotency of the writer. Central to Rancière’s argument is the ‘problem’ of Septimus’ socialist agenda and its supposed disruption of the novel-form’s oneness as a luminous halo enveloping the various particulars of plot. His suicide is thereby able to be staged as a submission of the “shower of atoms” to the sparkle of an impersonal and uniquely narrative logic of connection. By attending to Septimus as a specific pivot-point of regime-change — the instance a certain aesthetic of completeness becomes thinkable — Rancière is resolving a similar conflict between sensual states and fictional artifice into a degree-zero of connection. That is, in demonstrating the contradictions by which Mrs. Dalloway does not function as either plot or the particulars of everydayness, Rancière is relying on Mrs. Dalloway as both a material site of struggle and as an ambiguous quality suspended in some immanent condition of aesthetic relatability. The paragraph quoted by Dowling and its “four types” can be neatly sublimated into Rancière’s general analysis of insanitation — if it is possible, it can be isolated and evidenced in the novel’s narrative procedures. In fact, the discrepancy between possibility and singularity is precisely, for Rancière, the work of art. Dowling’s fluidity of narratological categories is merely a restaging of this specific aesthetic as it emerges in the social development of the novel-form.

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sciousness Reading Mrs. Dalloway then coincides at once with a given distribution of the sensible and the subversion of said distribution, in the sense that it is sequenced accordingly to a distinct capacity for self-transformation whilst maintaining a ‘narrative thread’ or sphere of sensible experience. This is a pretty familiar comedy of errors: assuming that Woolf’s novel is structured as consciousness qua consciousness — as Dowling does — still can not adequately explain the material of inherited narrative paradigms over which the novel purportedly does its ‘thinking.’ Rancière’s “dialectical” method of explicating this problem can be extended into an, at this point, classically Jameson schema wherein a social “wish-fuffilment text” — a desire for impossible narrative unity — is retextualized into an implicit “horizion-figure” wherein the former serves as the ideologically-captured conditions for the latter’s possibility (2002, 168). Putting Jameson alongside Rancière is not to reduce either’s theoretical investment in dialects into the other’s, but to make clear the instance of interstice that each attempts to recuperate into a distinctly literary movement. Just like how Rancière argues that Septamus’ suicide is the only moment that Mrs. Dalloway is capable of functioning semi-properly, Jameson sets up a Lacanian triptych as a means of demonstrating diagrammatically the interdependence of different blockages and failures in a “permutational scheme” (2002, 122). To translate Rancière’s crucial textual elements into this domain, Septimus’ suicide could be taken as an insufficient narrative resolution of the same stylistic microformalism also resolved in the “four types” of psycho-analagogus discourse; namely, the ‘accidental’ consistency of contrasting urban and linguistic modalities as they become aesthetically foreclosed. Inevitably, this cascades into a tricky downward causality: the text collapses into ever-finer imaginal maneuvers to account

for its ideological preconditions, and, in doing so, demonstrates all the insufficiencies of its own formal genesis — a differential faculty Jameson, after Lacan and Althusser, refers to as the Real. Describing a reader-centric process of actually interpreting Mrs. Dalloway then becomes identical to this concept of non-identity: because the reader makes the distinction between the novel’s referentless textualization and its material desiring-structure, neither can truly be in-itself, and instead must be for-readership — to dip briefly into Hegelese. However, when reading Mrs. Dalloway, the reader must, to a certain extent, genuinely hallucinate the “shower of atoms,” or else the entire process ceases to be reading, in the sense that reading is precisely the self-distinguishing between subtexts and social grounds. Dowling’s demonstration of “four types” of psycho-analogous discourse can then be superseded by a model of surfaces and depths. The manifest diversity of differently textured consciousnesses — the direct and the indirect, the global and the local — is simply a degree of distortion emanating from a latent layer of consciousness qua consciousness, itself further derived from one of Woolf’s pseudo-political commitments. These oppositions are meant to produce meaningful intrasystemic work by defining the dance of different transitory centres of narrative interest into its own general concept capable of its own relations of inversion. Equally important is the practice of extending these provisionally fundamental codes into a novel discursive phenomenon; namely, the instance of a reader claiming: “Wow! Reading this is just like thinking!” Relying again on Jameson, it is already possible to capture this reader’s commitments through their investments in basic units of social narrative, or a “social and historical phenomenon in its own right” wherein an “ultimate lucidity” is offered up as compensation for the complexification of the ontological bedrock present in some arche-community into individual processes (2002, 250). The incompatibility between these two states of affairs, as well as their reciprocal and modal dependence — it is difficult to posit a sufficient account of organic community without depending on reference to subsequent individuation, and vice versa — is the aftershock of some uniquely and unthinkably

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social situation. Any reception of Mrs. Dalloway is then going to involve a deflationary commitment of the characteristics Peter Wolfendale describes in his “Essay on Transcendental Realism”: “one cannot describe the structure of the world without understanding the structure of this rational process [reason]” (2025, 238). Wolfendale’s definitions are useful here insofar as ‘the world’ is simply the totality of what is true, which can be carefully supplemented by Zizek’s half-aphoristic reliance on the Real as a “metonymy of nothing” (2013, 641), in the sense that it is a failure to properly explicate the asymmetry between the structure of Mrs. Dalloway and the instance of actually reading Mrs. Dalloway. If the real structure of the Real is, much like Rancière’s expressive reading of Septimus’ suicide, a “redoubled negation” (2013, 787) — a crossed-out or cancelled (non)relaton that simply empties out repetitively — then these incompatibilities can also be committed to logically or semantically. This is to say that there would be no thick sense of thought or reality, or, to rephrase this according to Robert Brandom, even if the connections between subjects and structural features of some objective world are essential towards the individuation of said concepts, there is still no essential correspondence between those concepts and the items they apply to (2019, 365). The aforementioned claim of the reader, that reading Mrs. Dalloway is mimetic of their thinking, can then be relegated to the drifting multiplicities of usage. When Rancière is attempting to explain the democratization of novels via Mrs. Dalloway, he is provisionally positioning a stylistic commitment to psycho-analogous discourses as a variety of protonormative and libidinal investments, which are then able to be properly recognized reciprocally through degrees of retextualization. The reader’s claim that reading Mrs. Dalloway is exactly like thinking has an obvious public, normative significance, as Dowling says, “we take that precious sense of the individual’s consciousness with us, from the novel back into our own busy social world” (1991, 125). This way, it is possible to take seriously the inferential consequences of the reader’s claim without having to actually think about the reader’s thinking. An imaginal-symbolic layer of consciousness

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qua consciousness is obviously formative in the sediment of previous interpretations of Mrs. Dalloway, and it is also obviously an administered or norm-regulated claim. Robert Brandom can provide a tidy framework: So a consequence of this way of thinking about talking – and about thinking – is semantic externalism. The principal determinants of the content of my claims, including those I endorse without announcing that fact, lie outside me: in the actual facts about copper, in the public associations that tie the word ‘copper’ to copper, and so make my assertional use of the word ‘copper’ bind me to the inferential norms that constitute the concept copper. (2004, 250) First, it is important to distinguish this objective idealism —- or, to use Wolfendale’s term, deflationary realism — from a kind of classical realism, which would take there to be a real structure of the world independent of thought and within which real entities stake their domain. Brandom believes in thin notions of reality as corresponding to the thin structure of our thinking and talking, and that this dependence is non-ontological: one cannot ‘grasp’ thinking without ‘grasping’ the world, and vice versa. This is, partially due to Wittgenstein’s influence, quite flattening, in the sense that the degree to which Mrs. Dalloway enacts our thinking is salvaged from what Toi Moril calls the “metaphysics of the hidden” (2017, 181) and is then allowed to be situated on clear, communal zones of clarity. Toi Moril presents this as a counterfactual to the aforementioned Jamesonian method of “unveiling” or “demystification” (2017, 183), since Jameson’s ordinary reader is precisely an ordinary victim of ideology, but, especially if it is accepted that Jameson’s Hegel is roughly the same as Brandom’s Hegel, then even an intermediary structure like a formalism of consciousness qua consciousness can be drawn flatly as the circumstances of purposive action. In fact, only by doing so does it become possible to deduce from interpersonal truths a necessary variety of contradictory object-dependence, and finally say that reading Mrs. Dalloway has little in common with different kinds of thinking. One problem, already identified by Brandom and Rancière , is that the “actual facts”

or the “shower of atoms” that are determining Mrs. Dalloway as an object-like identity are difficult to integrate without indirectly referencing a corresponding but pseudo-incompatible set of inferential norms. Jameson’s “demystification” relies on the bottomless faculties of this necessarily incomplete void-point of the Real to measure sentences and paragraphs according to their interpretive strength. To rely again on Wolfendale, “this is because the language games from which these functional roles are derived are intrinsically extensible” (2025, 330), meaning, the indifference of conceptual categories under the production of the Real to any particularly perceptual mechanism or representational mapping allows some correspondence with a more general and pre-individual epistemological affirmation. Whether or not this is a depth- or surface-based method is inconsequential, since, along the lines of a ‘negative’ reading of Hegel similar to Zizek’s: “these tensions or antagonisms are constitutive and irreducible, [...] we can never arrive at a ‘pure’ and fully actualized notional structure” (2013, 807). Even if the phenomenological form of the reader’s claim is relatively untouchable critically, the posited universal content — that reading Mrs. Dalloway is like thinking as it is generally constituted — can be used to generate alternative concepts even whilst depending on the same basic grammars. Dowling pulls a similar maneuver when abstracting this pile-up of stylistic decisions into the “filament carrying the fluid vitality of life itself” (1991, 66), impressing the categorical structure of “life itself” onto the work of the novel. Thought can certainly do or become “life,” at least, in the plane-of-immanence-esque determination intended by Dowling; only, this is simply a demonstration of a rules-based substructure capable of further reification or disenchantment. The strongest evidence that reading Mrs. Dalloway is in no sense alike thinking is the shared ambient agreement between the hypothetical reader and critic dyad. Woolf’s manipulation of that “luminous halo” is either so inexpressibly tight, or to retread Jameson, so aesthetically foreclosed in order to impose a self-subsisting social totality into the dilemmas of an imperialist social economy, that finding the correct instrumentality for intervening in the

complexity of these formal decisions is mostly a process of errors and failures. It is difficult to say the reading Mrs. Dalloway is not like thinking because it is difficult to evaluate the ‘correctness’ of the content being implicated inferentially by the reader. The usefulness of diverting into a strain of Hegelian theory is the availability of notions of conceptual articulation that can be applied equally to a real structure of the world and a real cognitive structure. The question then becomes, as Reza Negastrani often phrases it, an issue of “nowhere and nowhen” (2019, 480). If, in the case of Mrs. Dalloway, a cake of consciousness qua consciousness is being posited to account for the phenomenal succession of such “psycho-analagous” surface-diversity, this commitment must be insufficient — not because it is incorrect, but because it is not correct enough.

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Work Cited Brandom, Robert. A Spirit of Trust : A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. Brandom, Robert. “From a Critique of Cognitive Internalism to a Conception of Objective Spirit: Reflections on Descombes’ Anthropological Holism: Symposium: Vincent Descombes, The Mind’s Provisions.” Inquiry (Oslo), vol. 47, no. 3, 2004, pp. 236–53. Dowling, David. Mrs. Dalloway : Mapping Streams of Consciousness. Twayne Publishers, 1991. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious : Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Routledge, 2002. Moi, Toril. Revolution of the Ordinary : Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell. The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Negarestani, R. (2019). Intelligence and Spirit (1st ed.). Urbanomic/Sequence Press. Rancière, Jacques. The Lost Thread : The Democracy of Modern Fiction. Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017. Wolfendale, Peter. The Revenge of Reason, Urbanomic, 2025. Zizek, Slavoj. Less than Nothing Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Paperback edition, Verso, 2013.

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