Floréal
H.O.P.E Volume III Issue I
Art and Literature
THERMIDOR H.O.P.E.
VOLUME II
ISSUE III
About Humanities Online Platform for Everyone (HOPE) is an independent, student-run online journal that creates opportunities for high school students in the United States and around the world who are interested in the humanities to publish their outstanding works. These include creative writings (poetry and prose), research papers, editorial reviews, and visual arts. We realize that publication opportunities for high school students interested in the humanities are very limited. Thus, we hope to create this platform to help high school students to earn credit for what they have written or created. This is not merely a journal, but a place for lovers of the humanities to express themselves and receive recognition.
Submissions Submissions Submissions are published on a monthly basis. You may submit at the following link: www.hopehumanities.org
Staff Design
Amelia Jenny Lucy Stella Unics Roy Effie
Art
Commentary
Alice Cathy Wang Ava Zhang Forrest Leila Lucas Xie Mo Moxuan Xiong Scott Ray Cheng Tim Mei Vivian Zixi
Paper
Literature Editors-in-Chief
Athena Brooke Sean Cam Winnie Laurance Lochien Cassina Sherry Neil Cynthia Cynthia Dora Dora Sam Ross Ross Sean Lee Tina Tina Victoria James James
Amelia Neil Ross
Contents 1
Denouement
7
Photography
2
Undecided Destiny
8
Madeline Chaoran Yang
3
Illustration
9
Leartes Minh Phong Pham
4
The Contorted
5
Repository of Broken Dreams
6
Conny Zhou
Yuki Sun
Alice Jiang
Cheryl Li
Mirabel Raphael
Photography Isabel Cai
Cover
Cover
Monica Wu
Illustration Jenny Nan
1
Denouement Conny Zhou “To cremate or bury, that is the question,” I bellowed at my father at the funeral parlor. “Speak, for God’s sake, speak! Are you deaf or mute, you sadist?” “Sir, may I help you? I understand that ...”a funeral assistant walks by and fails to finish his sentence. “Understand, of course you understand given your poor service here to my dear old dad. What a disappointment! See how pale his face is! You should stab at him to give him just a little bit more reddish color. ” “Sir, I am afraid that your father is already gone.” he speaks in such a warm and soothing tone, and that gets me repulsive. “Dead?” I cannot help grinning, but I guess the social protocol banns such disgraceful conduct. Fake it to make it. Fake it to make it. I am in absolute control of myself. “Of course he is dead. You should feel grateful my father is not alive, otherwise he will rape this enterprise until everyone of you goes unemployed. You think I am being figurative, but I am really not.” I laugh, hysterically, uncontrollably, contemplatively, fearfully. I am in absolute control of myself. I will not become my father. In the apartment, I let the issue slide as either way my father is getting the better of me. I will leave him there, no cremation or burial whatsoever. I dozed off, while my father was there in the coffin sleeping. He will never wake up, and it renders me reassured. I am incapable of resurrecting my childhood, and I naturally assume I do not have one. In dream, with the help of medication, as the demarcation between reality and imagination blurs, pieces of uncertain yet familiar scenes reveal themselves. A date tree, my father was scolding at me for stepping upon the scattered dates; a piano, and my father was there yelling at me for not being smart enough; a dressing table where my mom never cares to leave, and so she isolates herself. My father never fails to find a pretext to do whatever he wants
2 to do to me, and my mom never manages to do anything. There was something horrifying, a secret that my father told me to keep, not to reveal in anyone’s presence, not even my mom, and so I kept it till this age, that my father used to rape me. My father told me to savor this in my dream, but I found it a nightmare. “Maybe a long life have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it is to seem long”—— this is my father’s life tenet, and mine as well until he is too old to do that again to me. It is hard, terribly hard to stay lucid in this dreadful winter. Tirelessly grinding myself away, I ponder which heartless entity has instructed the sun to rise with such resentful punctuality, divining it must be an aristocratic Englishman who snores in derision about absolute everything, just like my obnoxious father. Perhaps, in the last two minutes, somewhere inside my torso, that snarky hypothalamus was cajoling multiple organs to its little cult, and there, they vehemently reached an agreement that they shall betray the command of my upper kernel whatsoever. But don’t worry, everything is in my absolute control. Among all servants, I never fail to admire the loyalty of my precious, fully-functioning pumping machine who has been responsible for diluting whatever
Photography by Yuki Sun
3 comes into its way, quaalude, amitriptyline, protriptyline, and, the best of all, heroine. Desperately governing those scattered stamina, I lift myself up a bit and rest my eyes upon the despicable window which I have never managed to open. I mean what’s the point of a window if you cannot jump out of it? Outside, the streets of London is rife with pompous social climbers striding in procession, sodden mendicants importuning passersby, and sobbing school boys carrying weighty satchels, a spectacle which would have been germane to a documentary on overpopulation. Dragging myself towards the presence of the coffee table is not an easy errand. The haphazard arrangement of furniture, the broken syringes and wine bottles, each and every one of them could perchance be the murder tools contributing to my denouement. But don’t worry, everything is in my absolute control. In the moment of my tentative journey to the coffee table, a series of peculiar yet familiar footsteps come into my notice. Instead of the usual tapping of two, a third one, the tapping of a walking cane strikes me back into reluctant sobriety for it is the conclusive proof of the arrival of Nicholas, another snobbish aristocrat, a ghoul pantaloon. I plod on ground that undulated softly, much like a swallowing throat, preparing myself to hear the living coagulation of evil. “Christ! What an appalling dump! See what have you been reduced to? ” Nicholas scrutinized the apartment like an old-fashioned politician, making comment on whatever bothers his sight. “What nuisances have summoned you to my little hovel?” I broached the question with a slight tinge of sarcasm and contempt, yet realizing it has been too late to withdraw it soon after. “A nuisance indeed, as you have put it yourself. Your loyal little friend Johnny came to me last night, elaborating on the fact that how distressful and lugubrious you have been after receiving the bereavement of your prodigious father, requesting me to conduct a sincere inquiry to examine your state of well-being. At my advanced age, it would have been magnanimous not to meddle with other people’s business, but since I promised your dear father to get you back
4 onto the right track, I embark upon this journey to your bloody bachelor home. There is no need for me to remind you of how great and venerable your father was. He had a precious and rare disdain for the opinions of most people. Imagine how devastated he will be if he saw you in such an abhorring condition. Remember how your father taught you that cruelty and love had been close neighbor and shall...” “Close without being incestuous!” The direful childhood nightmare befalls again, a noose tightened around my neck, rendering me incapable of breathing. This gruesome spokesperson of my bloody deceased father is tearing me apart with ferocious inculcation. Numbingly I observe the relentless movement of Nicholas’ lip, and the familiar, impregnable loneliness drifts in around me like suffocating fog. “Bugger off, will you Nicholas? I would rather rot here than hear a single word of my father.” Avoiding, escaping, ejecting, I feel the irregular palpitation of my heart. The urge to dose takes charge again, but don’t worry, I am in absolute control. The building should be tall enough, and I wonder how beneficial it would be for my denouement.
5
The Contorted
For he who follows every shade, Carries the memory in his breast, Of each unhappy journey made. — The Owls
Cheryl Li
6
I had quite the temperament for a distortion of the mind, and with these aspirations came the inevitable friction against solid decency, which produced sparks of a most gregarious nature and dampened whichever atmosphere I happened to reside in by a considerable amount. They arose to give flame to the ominous fuse called memory, and from that was birthed the sorrow of my acquiesce. For memory is a bottomless well one leans over at a precarious angle, with neither intention nor wariness to blunt the final fall. We call it a lane as though it is something for the mind to skip and traipse along, as merrily as the dustywinged moth is on a warm June evening when the first lamps are lit, but it is a lamp of autumn that it heralds, and once we lean in too far the fall becomes preemptory, an act behooved and sanctified by the base muck our consciences are made of. It seems almost indecent to forgo the ceremony once we begin entrapping ourselves within memory, and that road leads nowhere near the relief promised by reflection. For memory feeds confusion. One may be bewildered at a great many things, but it is the inflections one hold dearest to his breast that renders the inadequacy of intellect so lethal and unforgiving. You do not reminisce about better days for the sake of reminiscence — it is an act engineered to breed madness out of deprivation, and there is nothing we crave half so much as that we may not have. Whatever good it might do us has no place in this striking relationship between us and our desires; we merely bend to their will, and fool ourselves with the assumption that it is the other way around. Desire cannot be defeated when one is full of madness —no more than it can be surpassed or repressed. We bow to our desires and presume that a senseless master may be placated through sheer servility, and forget that desire knows no satiation. It embodies enough of our basest instincts to coax forth entropy, the redemptive quality
7 that completes the cycle of our madness. This circle is carved out of rough diamond, and like the phoenix reduced to ashes in the flames of its own funeral pyre, it becomes everlasting through endless doubt. No fallacy may account for this. You see that bulging hook in the beak-like nose of a supposed Jew? It is a degrading thing to mark, as if a mere physical attribute may account for the numerous atrocities committed in the name of man, as if Jews are not men because they have a hooked nose. While operating under the preposterous hypothesis that Jews are not men, we validate the many anti-Semitic hypocrisies of the previous age and use these foundations to build new bases for the next round of Quo Vadis. Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous? No? You would deny its unsavory existence? And yet no mind is exempt from this particular vice, and Virginia Woolf herself condemned the hooked nose for its martyred lack of aesthetic virtues. You should be well-acquainted by now with the so-called wisdom man so prides himself upon — look well on the best that this age has to offer, and refute my derision if you dare. Memory behaves in the same idiotic manner. By itself it knows no wrong, no more than you can blame an infant for its failure to overcome the bestiality bred into its soft bones. Memory loses its pained innocence when we give it free rein, and as we are wont to do so despite the vague terrors of a mind running wild, we do so with remarkable complacency and goodwill. It is not something one can help doing, if you will — half the time you start the journey without even realizing that you have one foot set on the yellow brick road. Whither do you go next? Perhaps you have no particular destination in mind, as I do not know myself where I wish to be at this moment (anywhere but here will suffice), and this is the confusion that memory spawns to advance its own ends, for it gains sentience through unwarranted bewilderment and runs us round in circles like dogs whisking back and forth while collared to a wooden post. It must derive great pleasure indeed in watching us frisk, and though I do
8 not wish to don the motley of a court jester purely for its vile entertainment, I am rendered unable to rise against its crushing thumb, and so must settle for a spineless replication of remembrance as I sink back exhausted to my perch on the rafters of its stately hall. I have tasted of the bitterness that memory without end is comprised of, and I will tell you in no uncertain terms that this water drawn from a poisoned well will not cure you of your amnesiac tendency to forget the frailties of man. It is a harbinger of a pack of predators eager to rip your mind into pieces, and since we have already bestowed upon it free and uncivilized rein, what should prevent it from trampling the few days we have left once we are done reminiscing? For life can be so very short when we try to recall the past — yesterday seems unseasonably lengthy, while today has a inclination to flash past before we can fully recognize it. Tomorrow will no doubt be the same, and thus we are forever trapped in an eternity of yesterdays, from which there is neither respite nor escape. I know of some who would no doubt be much gladdened to find themselves reliving their dreamlike pasts, but without today to add some semblance of intellect or emotion to what will surely soon morph into faded images, are we not simply reliving the self-same day over and over, with one finger hovering over the trigger as we consider the revolver? I do not wish to contemplate it. I do not even wish to see it. I am not a figure of celestial beauty holding a knife poised at the ready over my own portrait, and thus I do not consider myself eligible for the gunshot wounds or the thin trickle of scarlet blood drenching the length of silk wrapped about my neck. Enough of this. I have been driven senseless by memory before, and shame on me if I ever fall prey to this contrariness again. Memory is a quirk of the undeveloped mind, an implement one employs to fish out the tiny fragments of glass scattered across the surface of one’s brain. Bold of you to assume that one may extirpate himself from the infinite depths of his poisonous memory,
and lift himself from that pool still dripping with last night’s perspiration — memory clings and savages, and it is not in the habit of discerning the innocent from the guilty. We are all murderers in our memories, since yesterday has been butchered in our haste to get to today. No one thinks of the intricate patterns imprinted upon memory’s senses, and no one remembers all it has done for us in the ages past before it succumbed to the lure of its downfall. Memory drives me mad, as jealousy, as hatred, as unrequited love and the passion of a thousand yesterdays I can no longer recall. If the emotions remain long after the object has disappeared, is it a shadow or a silhouette? Have I lived for three hundred sixty-five days that are all the same, or simply one day for three hundred sixty-five times? I do not think I will ever know — not when today is as impudent and as playful as the child of yesterday and grows into a dull and lifeless tomorrow. Given the look of wondering disbelief splashed across your face, you have not taken in a word thus far of what I have said. It matters little to me when we are but men engrossed in inextricable memory, and only a few shreds of my mind yet remain after the long privation of a daunted today. One shifts easily between madness, mercy, and memory when one is submersed in useless considerations, but I dare say that he may yet sound a great dissonance in the divine accord of a tormentor’s crumbling defenses. It is the only decency he finds, and the sole decency he needs, the one decency not yet lost to him.
Illustration by Alice Jiang
9
Repository of Broken Dreams Mirabel Raphael
in heaven, there is a room full of dreams. this room is guarded by a heavy mahogany door with a brass doorknocker. the weight of the door is such that it cannot be opened by anyone with a mortal soul. but humans can open this door if they are very deliberate. first, they must pour out their soul and rub it into their shoes until they shine with a thousand suns. (the brass doorknocker shines with a million suns, but mortals get a sort of adjusted rate to account for their incompetence.) then you must cross yourself and say the secret words (you’ll know them when they start coming out of your mouth.) if you accomplish all of this with the right intent and the right order, the door will open outwards just long enough to let you in. you will see, hear, and feel the sum total of all dreams, all at once, in a second that lasts an infinity. a child plays with a balloon in a meadow, and you are joyous because the balloon never pops. a young woman rows a boat over a calm lake, and the stillness levels your heart. an old man plays the piano, and the notes reverberate through the spot where your soul used to be. (before you poured it onto your shoes, of course. you can have it back after. promise.)
10
but. if you say the words of ubiquity (you know them already, everyone does) and cross yourself backwards and stuff your shoes all the way down into your soul, the door will open inwards and you will fall forward through it regardless of whether you want to. here, you will encounter something quite different. the boy’s balloon explodes outwards, and your heart shatters. the water gets choppy and the woman’s boat capsizes and a cold wave shoves your heart-shards into your sides. every note the man plays is so far off-key that it’s practically in a different universe, somewhere outside the room, and your bones melt while the man weeps. you can’t have your soul back now, sorry to tell you. it’s too late. you’ve already entered the repository of broken dreams.
Photography by Isabel Cai
11
Madeline Chaoran, Yang
Photography by Monica Wu
12
This dewdrop world— Is a dewdrop world, And yet, and yet . . . – Kobayashi Issa
I. At midnight the operation was over. Every cramp of pain deprived of validation, every sense of fear imprisoned—a strip of gold sunk in the river of time, flushed, shattered, then denied existence. That was when fear sinked in. During the past week of dread not one moment was as scary as the split second when everything came to a halt. The night was calm, quiet, serene. As if the divine hand had plugged off the power drill, and everything, from the smallest particle of man, to the largest pieces of moons and stars, were frozen in unfathomable silence. In darkness I closed my eyes and saw, on the dimly lit city streets, a blurry shadow. “Run,” I silently moaned. “Before it’s too late.” My cheeks were numb as I stared blankly into the empty night sky. Anyone who were to see my expression at that second must have felt a direct confrontation with death, a being standing at the rim of the spotlight and precipice of nothingness. She must be wearing white, the dress of an angel. A glowing reminiscence, stripped down to a hollow dress with no flesh or bone inside. With a torpid
13 glance she desired meaning in the currents that were devouring her alive, a shining piece of gold tossed around by the flows of time. Yet she let go.
II. If only I had known more. If only I had done more: I could have held her. We could have made the difference. We could have won. She was struggling, fighting back the undercurrents in the middle of the river. I was in a dingy cracked boat, with a pair of broken oars. I stretched the remaining pole of the oar towards her. I felt her grip. She was approaching. We were winning. But then another current came between us, splashing onto the boat and it toppled over. I fell into the rampant currents of a stormy night. The currents carried me away, with the broken piece of ore still gripped tightly in my hands. Madeline, I never let go. Yet still, if only I pulled my boat towards her before that current came. If only I pulled with greater force. In the past week I had to hold myself together and not add on to the already existing burden the world have pained her with. The universe hung in the balance and I must save it—the thought alone was comforting. It gave a certain feeling of control, as if by a single pull I could have beaten fate and regained a living soul.
III. I went running on the empty city streets.
14 To what destination I was uncertain. I was running blindly, passing shadows of trees aligning the pavement, as if by getting ahead of them I had won. For a moment I thought I was running faster than the second hand on my watch. I was the time-traveler. I no longer recognized the streets. I was running in unknown grounds. Yet I headed on, an adamant purpose to remain lost. The streetlights grew more and more sparse. Now I was running in complete darkness. I wanted to yell, to shout, to cry, to claim a vindication. Yet powerlessly I was running, towards emptiness, in helplessness. I was her shadow, following her glowing meekness, her gentle optimism, her savant radiance. She was the goddess and I her forever disciple. Now I shall live on as you—I shall continue life for you. Every part of this world, the beauty and the pain which you never got to see or experience, I shall go through them for you and with you. You already injected a piece of your soul into mine as you grabbed onto my ore. This time I shall never, ever let go.
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Laertes To fault, or not to fault? ‘Tis clear. My father dies because of he. To blame, or not to blame? ‘Tis plain. The lot of vengeance falls on me.
To kill, or not to kill? Doubtless. ‘Tis will, my father, sure avenge. To heed, or not to heed? Certain. The king, on me, courage doth drench.
To strike, or not to strike? But hold! My foe regrets his rank offense! To die, or not to die? Too late. He, I, in hell we both repent.
Minh Phong Pham
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