helicon
THE MEMORY ISSUE MMXV
THE MEMORY ISSUE As the past fades from the present and the present moves into the future, we are left only with our memories. They are the only certain form of afterlife. But unlike the discs and drives that we use to store so many of our thoughts, our brains don’t preserve memories in pristine, permanent gigabytes. By contrast, our own memories are far from stable: we forget, we imagine, we deconstruct and reconstruct. Memories are all we have, yet they are also supremely fickle. The art, photography and literature that follow cover a huge amount of varied ground, displaying the sometimes blurred links between the creators and their own recollections. We hope that they will trigger some memories on the part of the reader. Welcome to this year’s issue of Helicon.
helicon_/\ _ \/
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university of bristol creative arts magazine
MEMORIAM Conrad Young i. You once spoke of a time-shaken dream where the shudders of gods cracked through into melancholia dawns like the ones that lay on your beside table in sullen facades ii. In this dream or was it memoriam disguised? you spoke of a man clothed in palest white night who could paint you in colours that I never could imagine images were your walls your starlight layer shrouding you in shackles that were achingly plain to see
iii. This man who walked on moonbeams leaving pasted temper prints spoke to you the words that would shatter all life from our loss he said everything that rises will shine like a god
iv. But you rose And you fell Your eclipse broke the wall v. End of message
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Photograph by Daniel Waller
LAX AND LONGING Kayleigh Toyra
Sleek cold pinkness of lax reminds me of your touch so pregnant with smell dill flowering on your fingers. I imagine amongst murky reeds brown bracken water caught in its gills. Now pale silver skin its scaly rainbow separated from pink flesh This salmon spread out on this plate Like I Lifeless Poised shored up in my own longing
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CITYSCAPES Harry Baker Bristol student Harry Baker is the youngest ever World Poetry Slam Champion and his debut collection, ‘The Sunshine Kid’ is available now.
City sleeps. City wakes. Sitting in the cityscape. He sits awake. Sitting in the cityscape, wishing he could hit escape, eliminate the bitter taste of settling. He used to dream of better things, and though he won’t forget these dreams, he feels like they’re forgetting him. He’s trembling. It’s too cold to sit still, yet he still sits, and watches as foxes turn boxes to buildings. There is emotion in his stillness. Showing signs of a symptomless illness, he wishes he could feel this, he doesn’t feel a lot these days. Doesn’t really get cold or hot these days, just stays lukewarm and rots these days, wishing it was not these days.
Because these days, they don’t start when the sun comes. They start with a slap in the face in case the numb comes late, punctuated by a humdrum state; how many beats can the humdrum take Before the humdrum breaks, in the cityscape? City sleeps. City wakes. Sitting in the cityscape. He sits and waits. Sitting in the cityscape, wishing for a different taste, envisioning a different place to this. As he silently listens, the moonlight glistens off a broken bottle of discarded hope, and it’s hard to cope when you’ve choked on the system.
He’s been imprisoned by his lack of conviction. He misses the friction. From static electricity to being static in this city, to not caring enough about anything to disagree with anyone about anything. He used to dream of better things, now he sits trembling indifferently. As he grasps a sharp shard of glass between his palm and his fingers, the imprint lingers like memory foam, the imprint lingers like memories. When every tomorrow follows a broken today, the truth’s hard to swallow because it all tastes the same In the cityscape. Wishing he could wake up.
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Illustration by Florence Layer
MANIPULATIONS OF MEMORY AND THE COLLECTIVE SUBCONSCIOUS IN FILM Tamara Prenn The past is shaped by the memories we have of it: events can be subverted and feelings re-imagined by our personal interpretations. It is hardly subversive to suggest that memory is a concept that, sometimes, lies only in the mind of those who have conceived it: as it moves further and further away, the past begins to mean a myriad of different things to different people. In Spike Jonze’s 2013 Her, Scarlett Johansson’s artificially intelligent operating system Samantha reminds Joaquin Phoenix’s Theodore that “the past is just a story we tell ourselves.” The film’s concept of human fallibility, that memory is a force shifting between truth and imagination, makes the story at once personal and universal. Jonze flicks the audience back and forth between Theodore’s past and present, as if looking through a
slide projector at the halcyon days of his relationship with Catherine, his ex-wife and sometime soul mate. The mood is heightened by flickers of sunlight splintering the screen, bathing the lovers in the warm glow of their own joy. However, this joy is transient. By the film’s end, Theodore too has acknowledged this, but the manipulative abilities of memory continue to prolong his intense agony at losing one he had loved. The couple are seen confessing their love madly and passionately and when Catherine tells him that she loves him so much she wants to “fucking kill” him, the flashback gives the audience a sense that Theodore uses his memories of their relationship to reiterate the one thing he knows to be ‘true’: that they never should have left each other, and that their marriage was meant to last.
Only the audience can look upon Her impartially, to see both past and the present; both, therefore, significantly less rose-tinted. Jonze uses flashbacks to demonstrate how the past can be crystallized into happier memories, and how the selective nature of the human subconscious acts in an almost reparable way to draw strength in ignorance after traumatic emotional events. Films may manipulate the memories of their audience just as much as those of the characters within them. As a teenager in particular, one is confronted with a deluge of coming-of-age films that aim to encapsulate both universal and individual experience. In Beyond Clueless, director Charlie Lyne taps into this collective consciousness by presenting the audience with a ninety-minute compendium of teen-hood. The documentary, which explores the popular themes and common threads that run through teen movies from the late 1980s to the present, highlights the bonds between the coming of age experiences detailed in the films and those in reality they have been striving to represent.
Whilst the documentary has its flaws, with its emphasis on the development of solely male sexual experiences proving somewhat limiting, its presentation of teen comedies brings to light the familiarity of the environs in which they are set. The high school hallways, the first kisses, the suburban houses where girls are picked up in limos and taken to prom by the star football player, are all ingrained in the viewer’s consciousness whether the experiences are known in reality, or not. Films are memories in that they can come to mean different things for different people. As Her proves, a lie entrenched in the idea of memory can become beautiful, just as in Beyond Clueless ‘ordinary’ hallmark memories within many coming of age films are beautiful in their ability to capture common regularities. However, whilst memories contain their own magical power to change, or strengthen and fade over time, film’s ability to crystallise upon their release into the world allows the memories that are portrayed to cement themselves into the collective unconscious. -/\\/_
THE MEMORY READING LIST Ammar Kalia & Lily Golden Storytelling is intrinsically linked with memory; whether it’s the failing memory of narrators or the manipulation of memory, more often than not our experience of reading involves delving into the past. Here’s a list of books that explore that theme and its complications.
A Sense of an Ending
Everything Is Illuminated
This Man Booker winning novel is an enduring tale of friendship, love, lust and death that meanders from the narrator’s schooldays to his present old age.
Safran Foer’s fictionalised autobiography is a quirky tale of one man’s ancestry and obsessions. Watch the colourful and funny movie once you’re done with the book.
Beloved
The Remains of the Day
Morrison reappropriates a nineteenth-century slave narrative, infusing it with the death of the narrator’s infant child. A postmodern look at identity, race and violence.
An ageing butler recalls his life’s service in diary form, mistaking unrequited love through the haze of dementia. Another great film adaptation starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.
Julian Barnes
Toni Morrison
Jonathan Safran Foer
Kazuo Ishiguro
In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust
The ultimate book on memory for only the hardiest of readers. A seven volume behemoth sparked by an involuntary memory after eating a madeleine. You’ll never look at French baked goods in the same way again.
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Lilly Louise Allen
PAINT Melissa Pettitt I am a painter. It’s the small things I remember, The tiny details that linger. I still think about that day in our favourite café: he was talking, his lip curling and drifting, and suddenly I was transfixed by his tear duct. Time stood still and stark: people’s voices and the noise of cars and grey skies, everything I’d ever seen and all I will see, everything of human history and after – everything inside that wet crease, forgotten on his face. A small thing, and something of majesty. It gave me In the café I sat, and painted him vertigo, like looking into a sea again carrying the slave ship close heartless like an angel. I told him, in its embrace. It was little ‘I am a painter like a dot. of the background and the I remember autumn’s blue stain, foreground and light. but beauty moves in and destroys like two teardrops tattooed on a father’s eyes, I paint the ancient codes that will sink like names like a ruined cemetery; over centuries. stone suffocating in tiny hair-like flowers, I paint the things I cannot see spores and ivy. I paint, I paint. because they are gone and never were.’ But I could never tell him why, why then, without him – in times so dark they turned me blind, left me robbed of sight, my memories eclipsed – why, even then, I was a painter.
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Meghan Marin
Benjamin Foxwell
THE MEMORY PLAYLIST Whether it’s an angsty Green Day guitar solo or the comforting whirr of the food processor in the kitchen, sounds can transport us in an instant: back to past events, friendships and stages of our life - in a way that no other stimulus can. Here are some of our top memory-related tunes all about remembering, forgetting and all that’s in between.
-/\\/_ Memory Lane NAS Time After Time Cyndi Lauper When We Was Fab George Harrison Set Adrift on Memory Bliss P.M. Dawn I Keep Forgettin’ Michael McDonald Remember The Time Michael Jackson Forget Me Nots Patrice Rushen Evaporar Little Joy Stuck Lone
Hannah Sunny Whaler
There’s nothing like reopening Microsoft Word 1997-2003 to trigger the most powerful of . I remember discovering that dialog box for the first time when our family finally upgraded to the new Word - a treasure chest of multiple-colour , quirky , mysterious
and unbelievably
realistic . Graphic freedom was mine, and boy, was I going to use it. The richly textured of my animation-heavy PSHE PowerPoint presentations; the sculpted metallic
of my 8th birthday thankyou letters;
the sassy on my bedroom door; and the tiny idea I have harboured for over a decade that one day I might make it huge in the world of graphic design - I have WordArt to thank for them all. Today’s WordArt pales in comparison with the of yore, but if you dig deep into the heart of YouTube, you might find some sneaky tutorials to help you resurrect that unparelled
and transport you right back to the heady, of ICT room
.
Mouni Feddag
Meghan Marin
FOUR LIFEHACKS FROM MODERN CINEMA FOR THE PERFECT MEMORY! Ben Driscoll
Us 90s kids! We can’t get enough of nostalgia! 10 Films From Your Childhood That You TOTALLY Forgot Existed! 5 Minutes That You’ll Never Get Back From That Article! Throwback!! Memory these days is abused by social media, forcing upon us unnecessary pangs of nostalgia from our not-so-distant past. Loaded with nostalgia, film appreciates that memory is a varied, valuable and touching thing, informing our perception of the past, a cumulation of memories becoming representative of our very beings, just as a cumulation of shots creates a film. Here, some great films give some great tips on how to maintain your oh-so-important memory.
Illustrated by Josie Finlay & Zoë Zietman
FLASHBACK!
Can’t remember why you’re at your ex-co-assassin’s front door with a clenched fist? FLASHBACK! to when she and the rest of The Deadly Viper Squad killed your husband and friends and left you for dead at your wedding, with extra red on top! And a loud alarm noise! This brilliantly over-edited and exaggerated flashback sequence opens the first volume of Tarantino’s Kill Bill and begins its first magnetic fight scene. Uma Thurman’s The Bride’s revenge saga is fuelled by an inerasable memory, whilst Tarantino constantly reminds the viewer how much his own vision is filled with memories of watching every genrebased B-movie in the VHS store.
RELAX AND REMINISCE WITH OLD FRIENDS!
Remember the laughs we had with Mary Shelley and Lord Byron? Or that time when Nikolai Tesla sorted out our electricity? Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddlestone’s immortal vampires in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive sure do. Slapping Twilight’s predictable plot in the face, Jarmusch decides to turn vampires into ice-cool lazy, intellectual drug addicts who lull in their blocked-out pads, musing over their 500 years’ worth of thoughts and name-dropping enough figures from the past to make literary nerds quiver. Jarmusch’s isolated characters’ existences are justified by their holy memories, passed about with their fantastically languid dialogue.
BE HARASSED DAILY BY ADAM SANDLER UNTIL YOU REMEMBER!
Nothing screams ‘dream come true’ more than waking up to a VHS labelled ‘play this :)’, which contains a video montage reminding you of your memory-loss inducing road accident and subsequent marriage to Hollywood dreamboat Adam Sandler. With two such equally harrowing events anyone would presume this is a dark horror, but 50 First Dates is arguably a benchmark piece of 2000s rom-com which, helped by the charm of Drew Barrymore, goes a long way considering it’s a film about a man harassing a helpless woman with short-term memory loss until he finds a way to successfully seduce her.
DWELL ON ALL YOUR PAST REGRETS!
Just turned 60 and worried about impending Alzheimer’s? How about daily brain exercises of lying in your hammock, whiskey in hand, recalling how you failed at love and achieving everything you set out to do? La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty) is hardly as dismal as that sounds: it’s a reaffirming, colourful ode to a Fellini-built Rome, but it uses memory as an understanding of what is yet to come in its charming protagonist’s so-far fruitless yet exotic life of partying and hedonism. This futility spurs an epiphany that leads Toni Servillo’s wealthy layabout Jep to spend the film strolling about Rome, half-arsedly but whole-heartedly searching for what that Great Beauty really is. -/\\/_
Gemma Richards
REVISITNG THE PAST Rasaq Malik
In this room where the past is a mirror on the wall; an ache that gnaws my heart whenever I sleep. In this room where the curtains flap as the wind passes, sailing me to the past that is now an empty vase on a table full of unfinished poems. In this room tonight your voice soaks my heart in the sea of fears as I watch your pictures that bear the traces of departure, of a broken love, of longing that is now a forgotten act, an abandoned art, a role that no longer delights me. In this room where the past is a hazy map on a scarred wall, where everything blurs as darkness billows. In this room tonight my fingers quiver as I search for the texture of your body on my palms. I revisit the past like a boy whose dream is a lost toy.
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ATHABASCA Mannika Mishra
She made sure that nobody saw her leave. A few things thrown haphazardly into the bag like torn, disjointed memories. She had tried to avoid taking things that would remind her of the past but when this proved impossible she resigned herself to the inevitable pang that would accompany some sudden remembrance. A snatch of forgotten conversation. The blue flecks of paint on the ceiling. She had learned to tip-toe around them in her mind, careful not to disturb them, to touch them but sometimes they would spring free like some painful second heartbeat and leave her shuddering and hugging herself like a frightened animal. She felt calmer with each minute. Minutes flowed past like the air outside the car. Oddly free and deliciously empty. As if she had taken her first breath of cold, crisp air. The distant mountains were a deep jade against the grey skies and partly shrouded in delicate gossamer-like strands of mist. The mountains rose like shields around her: so dependable in their lifelessness. She left the main highway and turned into a narrow road with thick foliage on both sides. She peered over the wheel in anticipation, her lips curving into a faint involuntary smile. There. The cottage seemed so at home there, surrounded by the dense woods on nearly three sides. When she was a child she had imagined it growing out of the dark soil and slowly curving itself into shape, a quiet hum of life pulsing within the wood. Some part of her still linked that old childhood image to her adult perception of the cottage.
As she followed the road, gently curving in front of the cottage, she turned her head to look at the lake lying in a ring of mountains as if cupped in a giant palm. She could make out the wind stirring tiny, silvery waves on its surface. She laughed suddenly in delight, rueful at how foreign it sounded. How foreign even a little happiness seemed.
-/\\/_ Robert had a funny way of running his hands through his hair when he was stressed. “I just wish I could cry. I don’t feel anything.” “It’s the shock; I don’t understand why you’re obsessing over this. You just need time.” “Robert, I don’t feel anything.” His arms around her. “I know you. Everything will be fine.” Then, his heart beating reassuringly under her ear, she had believed him. He was so real at that moment that she would have taken anything he said for Truth.
-/\\/_ Over the next few days she settled into a comfortable routine of cooking and going on walks. She was still reluctant to read anything, wary of some unpleasant emotion the literature might inadvertently evoke. Waking up each morning was the difficult part; waking up with a terrible ache of expectation mixed with dread that he had come looking for her. And then the rush of relief as the silence and the sense of undisturbed solitude slowly enveloped her. She loved the trees, loved running her fingers over their rough, furrowed bark. They were like an army of loyal and proud sentinels and she liked to think that they shared a history with her and recognised her. You start thinking strange thoughts when you’re alone, she mused. You realise how much of what you think is shaped by the mere presence
of other people. She walked near the lake, letting the water lap at her feet. The lake intrigued and intimidated her. A mass of glittering pebbles led to deep blue depths, covered by a fragile silver layer that broke with the occasional wave. She bent down and put her hand over the pebbles, letting the water run through her fingers. It was shockingly cold. This may be the stupidest thing I’ve done, she reflected as she placed her clothes in a neat pile shivering, a light wind stirring the hairs on her body. She stood taking deep breaths, her hands clasped around herself and touched the water with her foot, slowly, deliberately immersing it completely, following it with the other foot, as far up as her knees.
-/\\/_ She gradually started to cut contact with everyone she knew. The neighbours rarely saw her and she returned no phone calls. She felt a strange thrill in listening to the messages they left and later felt guilty about it. She thought that this feeling stemmed from an involuntary urge to punish somebody. “For what?” “I don’t know.” Robert was a writer who specialised in Early Modern Russian history. He was frequently invited to give guest lectures at the universities nearby. She went to a few of them but became uncomfortable by what she privately called “Governor Robert”. She refused to go the next time he asked her. When she told him why, blushing furiously, he had leaned forward slightly and smiled, grazing her cheek lightly with his hand. She had spent days analysing that gesture. His eyes had widened slightly. She settled on wonder. And although the cautious part of her labelled that as ridiculous, she secretly hugged the thought to herself.
This was two years into their relationship. She spoke about herself with Robert, with something close to desperation, as a record for her to analyse later. She hoped that he could make sense of it all. He was patient with her, far more than she would have been in a similar situation. The frightening possibility that she could retreat from him haunted her and she tried her best to make him indispensable. Then she started to detect a slight impatience in his voice every time they spoke and a whole new set of devastating possibilities presented themselves before her: that he might retreat from her. So she covered that part of herself and bound her hair up, pinning every strand, and carefully applied make-up on her face. She had never done that before.
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On the fifth day she decided to make herself explore what had happened as painlessly as possible. She relived certain things, carefully selected and compartmentalised. It wasn’t as difficult as she thought it would be, partly because of her present disconnected surroundings, so completely removed from the past that the memories almost felt novel. She had also started to go to the lake every day, wading a little further each day. The mountains and trees seemed to silently observe her, like onlookers at the performance of some rite. The first day she put her head inside the water she panicked, suddenly overwhelmed by the sheer endlessness of the water and burst out, panting and flailing wildly. After she had put on her clothes, she realised that she felt strangely alive and excited. Powerful, even. One night she saw a tree on fire on the far side of the lake, the bright orange dancing in the reflection, scattered all over its surface like tiny gemstones. She called the fire department of the nearest town and sat by the window, watching them douse the flames. She kept sitting long after they had gone, watching as the smoke rose up to the shimmering sky, blotting out the stars.
“I think you should go out of the house. This is unhealthy, this, this sitting around silently all day! Why are you doing this?!” “I don’t know, I can’t tell anymore!” Again. Hands through his hair. He looked up at her, his eyes troubled. That look scared her, that look of helplessness and uncertainty. “I’ve arranged for you to have some days away. It’s a nice, quiet place and they’ll be able to help you.” “Somehow I can tell you won’t be accompanying me. Will I get my own padded cell or will I have to share it with somebody?” “I’m trying to help the best way I think I can.” “By abandoning me.” Even as she said the words she knew that they were untrue and unkind. Why do we have this instinct to hurt other people when we are miserable, to batter them into the same state? It happened in the worst, most banal way. Like a scene from a television drama. She had checked herself out a day early. There was another car standing in the driveway, the sight of which conjured up vague images of a woman in a purple dress at a party she and Robert had attended. The realisation sucked all the air out of her, like some black trapdoor that had been opened inside her. She reversed the car and returned when she knew Robert would be away. She felt that a parting note was required of her but she didn’t know what to say in it. In the end, she wrote her name on a piece of paper and left it on his desk.
-/\\/_ She had started to accept that, thinking about it in almost a clinical way. We all need somebody to talk to, and Robert did, too. She
understood. Then she would think about her life by the lake and the fact that she didn’t feel the need to talk to anybody. She felt clear and sane and unburdened. Or maybe she didn’t feel the need, yet. That ugly word: yet. She had decided that she would swim to the middle of the lake today. When she could no longer feel the earth under her feet, she started swimming, remembering what she had been taught when she was a girl. She smiled at the sudden memory of her small, portly instructor, her face permanently creased into an expression of anxiety, showing her the correct way to move her arms. As she swam, however, a certain formality and stiffness gave way to a more natural style and on a wild impulse, she turned over on her back and floated, looking in amazement at how big the sky was and how silent everything was, starting in wonder as a flock of birds flew high up above her. And then the silence was broken. She swung into a standing positing, watching the shore. She had come farther than she meant to. A car had stopped in front of the cottage. Somebody was getting out. She recognised him. She could see that he had seen her clothes on the shore and felt him scanning the lake for her. She stayed still, letting him see her. When she was sure he had seen her, she dived down into the depths of the lake. Unfettered, arching her body, pirouetting in an underwater dance of her own design. She felt music echoing through the water, from the trees on the mountains, like a deep low note from a cello, more felt than heard.
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Illustrated by Rachel Tung
Rowena Salmon
Dan Faber
CONTRIBUTE TO HELICON Helicon is a creative arts magazine, brought to you by the students of the University of Bristol. We welcome submissions related to arts, culture and anything in between throughout the year – so if you would like to turn your inkling into a published masterpiece, online or in print, get in touch. As a not-for-profit publication, we would love your support to continue printing the yearly Helicon magazine. If you are a Bristol student and have enjoyed this issue, please consider signing up for membership via the UBU website.
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-/\\/_ “I begin my song with the Heliconian Muses; they have made Helicon, the great god-haunted mountain, their domain.” (Hesiod, Theogeny, Lines 1-3) Mount Helicon is a mountain in central Greece, and a favourite haunt of the spirits of inspiration, the Muses, in ancient mythology.
THE EDITORIAL TEAM What song brings back memories of your childhood?
Zoë Zietman
Josie Finlay
Editor
Deputy Editor
Change The Lightening Seeds
Honey, I’m Home Shania Twain
Emily Craxton
Ammar Kalia
Becky Black
Art Editor
Poetry Editor
Photography Editor
Whole Again Atomic Kitten
Out Of Reach Gabrielle
The Chain Fleetwood Mac
Lily Golden
Ben Driscoll
Kirsty Wastell
Prose Editor
Film Editor
Events
Saturday Night Whigfield
Love Machine Girls Aloud
Son Of Man Phil Collins
Cover photograph: Rowena Salmon Gemma Richards Inside cover photograph: Gemma Richards
Cover image by Rowena Salmon