Nous 6 - Worlds Apart

for

modern

mind

culture

nous

and

empathic

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thinking

six

T h e Wo r l d s A p a r t I s s u e borders, gaps & bridges

winter 2015 ÂŁ8 â‚Ź10 $12

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press

Editorial & Art Direction

Illustration

Typefaces

Lisa Lorenz

Lydia Cotterell

Arek by Khajag Apelian

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Mangal by Raghunath Joshi

Assistant Editor

Hanonymity

Imogen DeCordova

Tim Kloed tim-kloed.co.uk

Proof Reader

Maria Piedad Aguirre

George Odysseos

piedadaguirre.tumblr.com Eleonora Bonanzinga

Logistics

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Thomas Walker

Camille Smithwick cammys.co.uk

Words Angus Stewart Bekah Steimel Barbara Ruth Benjamin Mervis Charlie Winstanley Elena Iacovou Fabiyas MV Gozde Naiboglu Henry Tobias Jones Jasmine Chatfield Imogen DeCordova James Campbell Jake Duff

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November 2015.

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Subscribe, contribute, send us your suggestions or warm words: hej@nous-magazine.de

Edition

of 500

borders,

gaps

and

bridges

I ’m s o g l a d , I k n o w w h a t ’s o n your mind.

J.B. Lenoir

I Feel So Good

J.B. Lenoir 1929 – 67

Cover & Chapter Links Thom Sheridan In 1986, 1.5 million helium balloons were released in central Cleveland, Ohio.

Instead of dispersing into the skies, a storm moving in from the Great Lakes pushed the

4 Imprint

balloons back down over the

Inner Cover Lydia Cotterell

city. With nowhere to go the sky was filled with a lingering

6 Content

cloud of balloons. Slowly

Poster Graham M. Wann

settling down, blocking streets and rivers. The event was

8 Editorial

supposed to be a fundraiser for

171 Our Contributors

charity, but ended up costing millions in lawsuits, and

176

created environmental issues

After »Worlds Apart«

around the city.

One Borders memories, phantoms

and

boundaries

14 Emma Barbara Ruth 16 How I Remember Jack Clurry Benjamin Mervis Tim Kloed 20 Poland in Russia in England Jasmine Chatfield ruiné 26 When Janu Saw an Apparition Fabiyas MV Maria Piedad Aguirre

6

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7

32 Vessels Jake Duff Camille Smithwick

38 The Earl of Duke Chris Bethell

50 This East Which Is Not One Gozde Naiboglu

Two Gaps

60 Euripides Henry Tobias Jones Elena Adorni

loss,

74 Night of Lost Things John Gosslee

the

future

unknown

and

76 Trojan Truth James Campbell Primoz Zorko 84 Inarticulate Prayers J.J.Steinfeld

Three Bridges relationship,

communication and

the

present

86 The Girl with her Heart in her Mouth Natalie Nicolaides Paul Balykin 95 Untitled Poems Bekah Steimel Hannah Flynn 103 Mental Health in Cyprus Elena Iacovou Will Sharp 116 Fidelity Matthew Harrison Emily Tilzey

126 Cinema Inside Rikki Weir Lulu Heal

154 The Problem with Semantics Z Zoccolanate Atelier McClane

134 »What’s the point of being happy?« Interview with Charlie Winstanley VOID collective 140

160 Above and Beyond and Down Below Imogen DeCordova Eleonora Bonanzinga

148 A Failed Interview Angus Stewart Carlos Bernal

166 November Michelle Chen

Content

nous

magazine

six

Dear Reader, a

foreword

by

the

editor

Many thing's are breaking my heart these days and I wish they wouldn't. Wars and conflict are creeping closer to home after we've been comfortably spoiled with a long period of relative peace in these few Western countries.

We might have sent some of our friends, family, and strangers we don't know to these areas of conflict. They've gone and most returned from over the seas and other worlds.

But never have the existentialist issues from elsewhere washed over to us, touching our daily lives to such an extent. We can't ignore issues like war and deprivation of every essential human need in Syria any longer.

Families, young lads, old people are knocking on our doors seeking shelter and aid.

A roof over their heads and a safe place to live.

How can we help them if we're not even able to help the most vulnerable of our own society?

8

â—†

The homeless of Manchester recently felt another strike by authority figures when their lovingly built Ark, a hub for safety and conversation, was removed due to the upcoming freshers' fair in September.

Tuition fees keep rising like the prices for rent and everyday expenses.

Luckily we've witnessed kindness, and creative organisations and communities are fighting these and many other injustices on a small scale with a big effect.

We've seen pub owners collect donations for the refugees stranded in Calais, Coffee4Craig offer warm food and a cuppa for the shelterless consistently twice a week with next to no funds from any bigger organisation. We also attended a talk sparking conversations on these essential issues, the kind we forget to reflect upon, organised by the voluneteers of SPRING.

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borders,

gaps

Where is all this going to leave us? What can we expect from this growing insecurity, these financial and structural challenges our societies will face?

Many of us made a great start with listening to each other. Listening and trusting a stranger in a helpless situation.

It is important now to remain level-headed in order to support everyone else who's not able to at the moment.

The Worlds Apart Issue brings stories to you addressing tensions calmly resonating in our daily lives. When we sent out the open call, we gave a nod to our contributors to be daring and step out of the circle dedicated to Mental Health.

and

bridges

We wanted to see the finer and strong connections to the wider world through the emotions.

We hope you'll find the following pages inspiring. We hope they will provoke some thoughts and encourage us all in keeping our minds open to change and strangeness, to old traditions and innovation, keeping in mind that, at the end of the day, there's always a human standing opposite us - unless it's a robot, but this is something we'll discuss in our next issue.

Enjoy your read, Lisa

Editorial

Lisa Lorenz

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one

memories,

borders

phantoms

and

boundaries

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13

memories,

phantoms

and

boundaries

One Borders

emma how

i

remember

poland when

in

janu

jack

russia saw

in

an

clurry england

apparition

vessels the this

east

duke

of

which

earl is

not

one

Emma for

malka

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15

one

borders

I grieve for Emma, a dyke writer who was my neighbor in Fairfax, who heard voices, and those voices tortured her during the High Holy Days.

She thought she was Isaac, about to be sacrificed by Abraham, because, as Bob Dylan sang, »God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’« And in her butchness, in some sense of G-d and peril, Emma thought she was that son, certainly not to be spared by G-d the Father, since she was a crazy dyke ... So Emma got up early one morning during the Days of Awe and took a cab to the Golden Gate Bridge and jumped. The cab driver reported later he knew she was delusional, she was raving all the way from Mill Valley to the Bridge, and still he let her off there, took the fare and drove away.

Emma

Barbara Ruth

A story about empathy and phantom war memories.

How I remember Jack Clurry or The Art of Obsessive Imagination words

benjamin

illustration

tim

mervis kloed

It’s 4 am. I’m alone, top of the bed, old payjamas, and I’m mortified.

it’s real overkill—and I’m set to enter stage right for a funeral scene with (twelve year old) mourners for a fallen comrade.

I have this playback of distinct memories that are on permanent repeat, and permanent shuffle—first grade, sixth grade, fourth grade, senior year. Right now there’s one on my mind and I can’t seem to separate from it; it’s this dress rehearsal from a grade school play— parents as directors, parents as set builders, parents as acting coaches—I’m standing backstage dressed as a WWII officer, my Dad is pinning on my medals one by one—legion of merit, distinguished flying cross, airman’s medal, bronze star medal, aerial achievement metal, purple heart,

16

I’m trying to get into character by setting out my back-story: My name is Jack Clurry, I was born in Sussex to a shoe-maker and a nurse’s daughter, and I went to a small school in a small village where I met this brown eyed beauty (Betsy) and I said something magical to her once and she just fell into my arms and then sometime shortly afterwards we started having kids and we named them after her father, the cobbler, and her mother’s mother, the nurse.

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We move to London.

When the war breaks out Betsy cries because she knows I will leave to fight, because I am honourable and because I love my country, and because she knows that I was a crack shot with a rifle when I was eighteen and that I have steady hands and am composed and can drive well so maybe they will train me for aerial service.

I do three months of flight training before they start putting me on real missions— first it’s just transporting men but inevitably they need more hands, and better hands, for a series of bombing runs deep in Germany— so they give me a new plane and new weapons and new responsibilities.

I do this for sixteen months. The things I do I need to play down to my friends because I am embarrassed. My mind is always wandering when I’m not in the air. I’ve seen and known men who’ve left home who returned literally a fraction of what they were. I worry the same will happen to me, but now the same for my family, and the Germans have begun bombings in London and now I can’t stop –

☞

How I remember Jack Clurry Benjamin Mervis

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one

borders

But the stage manager interrupts and it is a bittersweet wakeup from this immersive dream-world as I stumble on stage (right) for the memorial service but for some reason I’ve stayed as Jack Clurry … in his hazy state with all his worries and apprehensions about Betsy and his kids and his misgivings about war and about the bombings, and I’m trudging along speaking scripted lines but giving them some pretty good feeling. I’m confident that everyone is enjoying this.

This last scene has me consoling the grieving widow played by an older girl named Tania.

I have my arm around her, and Tania’s in this black dress and veil, and I start saying my lines, and she’s fake sobbing but when I look at Tania I see brown eyes, and I know this is so fucked up but I honestly, I can’t not think of Betsy, and suddenly I’m lost.

I’m trying to finish my lines but my brain can’t separate from Jack Clurry.

I’m speaking my lines but I’m finishing Jack’s story. I see flashes of light, explosions, a huge pang in my gut and in my head and I see Betsy’s brown eyes streaming, but suddenly mine are too—my real ones, and Tania looks to me, quite taken aback, and suddenly I snap back. The Clurry story dissipates, but now I am just a twelve year old veteran, decorated in medals.

My cheeks are wet with tears, the audience of parents are staring at me, and before my brain shuts down completely I remember my last feeling—mortification. ◆

How I remember Jack Clurry Benjamin Mervis

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borders

Winter—I walk around with polonium-210 in my belly and on the ground there are things like dead sand lizards curled up in the cold and turned to brittle leaves in the ice.

I tread one into another as I step from the pavement.

This body on a bus is a bus that is irradiated— my body and the body of Nagasaki, the result of 3 decades of experiments to the conclusion that these bodies are especially susceptible: an isotope named for the borders of the distant countries I fled and each person I touch is now a distant descendant of mine —a half-legacy of 138.376 days. Inheritance: a soft blue light and a low hum that lies in several of the major organs like the cells of a baby in the brain of the mother.

As heat sources they kept rovers warm on the moon.

The green tea, when delivered to me, was already cold.

Poland in Russia in England words

jasmine

photography

chatfield

ruiné

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one

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Russia in Poland in England

photography ruinĂŠ

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one

borders

Russia in Poland in England

photography ruinĂŠ

When Janu Saw an Apparition words

visuals

fabiyas maria

mv

piedad

aguirre

26

â—†

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one

borders

When Janu Saw an Apparition

Fabiyas MV

Sometimes superstition mates with scare in the wilderness of the subconscious mind – some apparition will be the offspring.

Janu made just a shriek in the darkness.

Like a fried sardine, her body lies on a mat within a human hedge – her soul has fled somewhere.

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Women stand with arms akimbo; men whisper words in diverse shades of superstition. Holy chants and devilish mantras unite in the horrible air.

An iron key – a black cord wet with spit – a rural enchanter applies outworn weapons in vain. Finally, a sensible man sprinkles water on her visage – soul returns to her body after a blackout.

When Janu Saw an Apparition

Fabiyas MV

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one

borders

When Janu Saw an Apparition

Maria Piedad Aguirre

one

borders

About the separation between two despite being in the same room, in the same time, yet out of touch.

words

jake

illustration

duff

camille

smithwick

Ve s s e l s

m ati

v’lo

m ati

She would watch the day travel across the wallpaper as a shadow cast by the beam of light that shone through the glass panel of her front door, striking a picture frame on the mantelpiece. When day would collapse into night she would remain, appearing frozen and still.

When the first of the sun would bleed into the room, it looked almost like a photograph developing; some days, as with the wandering path of stars, the only movement you might notice is her head, slowly charting that same shadows path along the yellowing wallpaper.

32

The arm of light that reached through the panel of glass could only grope weakly at certain areas of the room, some remaining black to the point of inexistence.

Along the staircase there watched a presence, which would occasionally distort the air around as innocuous and subtle as the first trails of ones breath as the opening notes of winter colour the air. ☞

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one

borders

tzimtzum

Before the effort of getting about the house became overwhelming she would notice that the short walk to the kitchen would sometimes seem to take hours, as though the space itself between her chair and her destination had warped and stretched at her presence.

He was sure she had died, peacefully like he had hoped she would – though he had a difficult time in recognizing any such feeling, existing as these feelings do in the pit of your chest.

This she would glean from the position of the shadow creeping along the living room wall – she would return to her chair to find that it had shifted and stretched to almost the double the length with the position of the sun, where she would be sure that she had only been gone for a few moments.

She had failed, for the first time since he’d been watching, to move her head along with the shadow.

She hadn’t made the achingly slow journey to the kitchen or to the bathroom; though he could not discount the fact that she may have done so and his experience of it had been swallowed up in the occasional distortions of time.

He, however, has seen from the stairs how she seemed to move as a time-lapse; her movement slowed down so as to be completely imperceptible, like the movement of the shadow across the wallpaper.

This he watched with fascination, noticing how the light around her would sometimes seem both impossibly bright and impossibly dim at once.

baruch

eloheinu,

ata h

melekh

As the shadow spread across the room with the gloom of the evening, she did something she hadn’t done since she had discovered his lifeless body submerged in the cold, pinkish bathwater upstairs. She placed, with unsteady hands, a candle.

adonai

,

h a’ol a m

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Right by the picture on the mantel. She then, after several failed attempts, struck a match and lit the candle. It burned weakly against the glowering shadows, the shadows flickering with the tiny flame and seeming to bend wildly against it.

As he watched on the staircase it appeared to him as though the shapes of the objects casting the shadows were themselves being distorted, as though they were contorting and changing shape in reaction to the flame.

borders

olam

h a’a k u d i m

That day he spent motionless; something had shifted – everything he looked at was revealed in a level of detail that rendered everything he had ever seen before into a sad, bland pastiche. He thought he could see individual atoms, crackling and trembling with a bright, breathless anger.

He could see vast churning clouds of tiny particles trapped in the light from the door, folding and collapsing in on itself infinitely. Dust – of which every speck was illuminated with a near dizzying level of detail.

They appeared to him as tiny comets, leaving strands of themselves trailing behind like banners.

Though she sat, as always, immobile and silent; he felt every slight cycle of her breath as though on his neck, as though in his chest.

Every journey of each drop of blood inside her exploded about his ears like the bursting of some great dam. For a tragic moment, he thought he felt a pulse of his own – even without shape, he seemed to remember he once had a surface, and a rhythm below that surface. The sensation of water across his back and a gentle hand dressing a wound on his chest. ☞

Vessels

Jake Duff

This clarity ebbed slowly away as the days stretched further on, lasting almost a week. As its waters retreated, it left certain areas of the living room with a kind of aura. They would glow against the other, more aged sections.

Her head turned, our view with it, towards a copse of trees. The light was dim, there could be seen several others – pale and shivering. They turn and disappear into the trees, away from her.

She breathes deeply and begins to run, the cold wind whips into her streaming eyes. For a moment, the image on the wallpaper blurs and disappears. When the image returns, the trees are far away to the extent that they can barely be seen through the fog.

netzach

This night, while the solitary candle cast a flickering shadow of the picture frame along the wallpaper for the 4th night, from her typically barren sleep bloomed visions, abstract and seemingly disconnected at first, but before long weaving themselves from nothing into dreams.

This time she doesn’t run, she simply watches the fog that seems to close ranks around her. s h e v i r at

The candle had been burning now for 11 days, at the very end of its feeble wick for the last 3. The living room had taken on the dimensions of a great cathedral, with sparks of burning light moving erratically in the air. Once or twice he thought he saw faces, occasionally even figures, moving within them – as though they themselves were the substance that the light was made from.

She dreamed of night, and as though her eyes themselves were projectors, her images appeared on the wallpaper for him to see. He imagined he could hear spinning tapes and the flickering whirr of a motor, though the images were not accompanied by sound.

Barefoot, a bank of fog churning, suspended in the freezing air. Beads of moisture clung to her hair and skin, bringing with them a steely, penetrating cold. Though she crossed thin arms around her delicate shoulders, she would not allow herself to shudder against it.

36

hakeilim

With a determined effort, she got up from her chair; steadying herself with its arms for a moment before directing herself towards the stairs. With this the light intensified, filling the entire space with a billowing, brilliant light as thick as fog. The light emanated from the same place as always – the door, now situated at the very far corner of the room. As it washed over him, he began to take shape.

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Before long he was a complete body, his arms and legs as sure and steady as they had been in his youth.

Though she was looking in his direction, there was no recognition in her eyes. He ran hands over his chest, expecting to feel a beating heart – it was as cool, still and smooth as glass.

She edged closer to the staircase, ever slower. Behind her trailed images of her journey, frozen moments in time that snaked and charted her progress from her chair to his staircase.

He got up so that he might approach her, but found that the closer to each other they become the more difficult it is for them to move – as though the light had taken on the consistency of cement. Though he fought, it became clear that something there had changed. Her journey towards him had slowed to a complete stop. He too, could no longer will himself to move. Still, there was no recognition in her eyes.

ay n

sof

He felt as though he had always been there, on the staircase. Though he was dimly aware of the fact that this could not have been the case.

It seemed to have taken a thousand years before he began to notice his surroundings, a staircase (of which he was confined to) which led to a living room, sparsely furnished with a bookcase, table and lamp, sofa and one small chair. It was through the fact that he could name and recognise these objects that he decided he couldn’t have been stuck there in the near silence forever. He knew vaguely the purpose of these objects, somewhere in the outermost regions of his consciousness.

Indeed, a consciousness was all he really was – though even that was a grand simplification. ◆

Vessels

Jake Duff

The Duke of Earl by

chris

bethell

»As a child I often lied to people about where I was born. »Boston, Massachusetts'« I'd say.

The truth was far less interesting: no-one was ever excited when I told them »Stockport«. This wasn't a complete fabrication though, as I am dual-national: American and British.

In her twenties my Grandmother, Grace, moved over to Boston from Ireland where she fell in love with my Grandfather, Joey O'Donnell.

Unfortunately I never met Joey as he passed away when I was a baby and he was still in America.

I grew up romanticising his life and the country he lived in – to the point that I developed a fictional narrative that I believed in until four years ago. I had sat down to interview Grace in preparation for my first trip over there when I was shocked to learn the truth about his life and the troubles he went through.«

☞

one

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The Duke of Earl

Chris Bethell

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The Duke of Earl

Chris Bethell

The Duke of Earl Chris Bethell

ÂťIn August, 2015 I flew out to America for the first time.

These images are not about the people or places within

Landing in Boston, my route took us through all of the

them, but instead about the emotions or environments

locations important to my fictitious image of Joey's life

they suggest. I defined four chapters, each of them

and the real places he lived at. The result was a tension

representing the key emotional periods of Joey's life.

between exploring the America I had known, and the

Volume One focussing on long-standing American

America I was discovering, exploring the dichotomy

ideals such as Love, Hope and The American Dream —

between the imagined and the real. I took photographs

although cracks in the foundations of these ideals would

of everyday scenes, expressive of mine and Joey's stories.

form towards the end of my journey.

one

borders

Volume Two would be about his move to Reno, showing

However, he never fully let go of his vices which

the breakdown of his aspirations and the indulging in

unfortunately lead to his death.

his vices. Volume Three would be escape, reaching once again towards Hope and Freedom – breaking out of the

Clarkston was my last stop, the end of our journey was

urban environment. Volume Four, the final chapter,

his grave. Unfortunately it had overgrown, so I had to

detailing his move to Clarkston, WA and his attempts at

dig up his plaque – but that's a different story.«

redemption within the church and with his own family.

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The Duke of Earl

Chris Bethell

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The Duke of Earl

Chris Bethell

The part of the world I reside in as I am writing this piece is perceived to be in crisis on multiple fronts. Be it named the West, or Europe, the values of which this civilisation at large has built itself upon seem to be at the limits of its own resources, and not just in material terms.

At the limits of its own resources A narrative of the exhaustion of material/ natural/economic resources drives the language of austerity-as-necessity at the expense of Western social and moral resources.

The refugee crisis in summer 2015 has revealed how swiftly European social values disappear when faced with a dire necessity to show responsibility towards its others.

At home, that is, within the geographical confines of the European borders, Western democratic values are threatened by racism as a form of ideology that feeds on an appropriation of the same narrative of the economic exhaustion.

Drying out of resources (not enough funds to maintain social services for everyone) is instilled by Western academia and media alike: one sociologist from a British redbrick university claims in the country’s liberal leftist newspaper that the working class are afraid of refugees from the East entitling themselves to the limited pool of citizens’ social rights. But the working class, the writer argues in detached objectivity, are afraid to speak out in fear of being judged and labeled as racists.

This East Which * is Not One words

gozde

naiboglu

We asked Gozde to reflect on issues connected with the balance or imbalance of East and West.

Who is right, and what is wrong? Or are we, in the end, more similar than we think.

The academic, or even better, the »scientific« license of the article ensures the readers of the liberal newspaper that it is the wishes of the average, ordinary masses that the political elites must fulfil … disguised under these wishes are the very fears that have been carefully, systemically and institutionally produced. Ordinary citizens are tricked into fear and anxiety by the elites at the expense of lives; at least this is some part of the official story. The question hangs in the air.

Who is entitled to democracy?

Are citizens more entitled to conditions required for continued life than non-citizens?

Who is entitled to democracy and human rights, and who is making this decision?

Whose voices remain unheard? What can be done to clear the rubble that has been left by this utter exhaustion?

And more importantly, what is to be done, to reclaim this ground, to form new connections in a world of global interdependency or what Judith Butler calls a »shared vulnerability«, to find new alliances with and acknowledge responsibility towards the other?

But who is the other?

This is more of an attempt to proliferate than answer these questions. A journey to some moments of genuine initial encounter with new thought, in a geographical zigzag.

Perhaps the 1990s is the best place to start with – the decade between the fall of the iron curtain and the 9/11 attacks. A strange, interim period in Europe, before the West assigns a new East as its other. A decade of EU treaties, the single market, free travel and single currency. Blurring borders and boundaries on the one side, and ethnic violence, wars and genocides on the other. ☞

* The title is an appropriation of/homage to Luce Irigaray’s »Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un«. (1977)

The decade ends with the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, with the blessing of the UN, killing more than 500 civilians.

The capacity of images to activate political dissent and action is heavily dependent on a larger, complex network of factors and processes. Judith Butler has forcefully argued that our shared vulnerability and the inescapability from the precariousness of social life must force us to rethink social responsibility and relationality. Yet this Levinasian ethical commitment to the other, (which might be argued to be an extension of the Western cultural/ethical heritage that faces exhaustion) might perhaps not be fully achieved without activating genuine thought. And this requires listening to (what is perceived as) the other.

The 1990s saw the proliferation of Internet usage in Western Europe; the images and coverage of the genocide and the operation Allied Forces did reach populations within days, if not hours. One of the many NATO targets was the Radio Television Serbia headquarters, killing 16 civilians. It is still dubious whether the Serbian State Television was a legitimate target, but it is clear that broadcasting stations were of high military importance. The ratio of civilian deaths per ton of bombs was comparable to the US Linebacker II campaign in North Vietnam in 1972. Yet the public dissent in Europe was not comparable to the public condemnation and protests against the Vietnam War.

A commitment to the act of thinking A genuine commitment to the act of thinking, hearing, asking and listening before looking for objects of recognition in the other.

The effort must be invested in readying for a fundamental encounter that will shake our »selves« before searching for ways to »relate« to the other.

This does not suggest that the images of the Yugoslav wars failed to generate affective and cognitive responses in Europe.

They animated emotions, fears

A random memory that keeps refreshing itself. A house-warming gathering in a Parisian flat, autumn 2007. Parisian newspapers have a threatening tone, reading or misreading their »between the lines« is not very difficult when you have only just arrived from the part of the world they so strongly seem to confute.

and thoughts The images from the Bosnian and Kosovo wars did animate emotions, fears and thoughts, but their effects were, to a great extent, ephemeral.

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Struggling to speak in this language in which the words are dancing in soft curves is painful. The party crowd is looking very indigenous and quietly spoken; the dining table is crowded with nice-looking bottles of wine. Chatting is the dynamo of this party, and this makes me feel more vulnerable as I feel the pressure to choose the right words with extra effort. The young woman who is one half of the hosting couple approaches me with a warm smile, chatting about when her baby is due, the turquoise ceramic tiles in the bathroom delivered all the way from some remote country, and then she goes, »It must be really difficult to be a woman there« upon hearing where I am from and where I grew up.

I gently brush it away, »no, it’s not like that… it’s fine in many ways«. There it is, a sort of brain lightning. What have I just said? I’m shocked about my own defensiveness but I’m also disturbed to the core. »No«? Was it easy?

Meaningful communication was interrupted But was this even a question? If so, where did this answer come from? I am still to this day bemused by this insignificant but absurd exchange. I was no less guilty of raising my defenses against what I perceived to be an arrogant remark from a mythological figure from the colonial era, caught in the act of mythologizing and orientalizing.

borders

Any form of meaningful communication was interrupted at this point.

Such momentary but decisively failed attempts of meaningful communication have become ordinary situations of crisis in the new transnational social imaginary of Europe.

While contemporary European visual culture, most significantly within film and television responded to increased co-habitation with »minority« others through diverse and critical representations of Western bourgeois anxiety in a revelatory attitude, its visual economy remained comfortably conservative in its formal articulations during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

W ho is this other?

Throughout the second half of the 2000s, with the financial crises and increased insecurity in Europe, shared precarity became a new way of »relating« between the citizens and non-citizens on the European screens. Non-European or non-American productions still find very limited distribution (here in Britain at least), as the screens see a proliferation of self-critical transnational but predominantly Western productions.

While this is understandable, what does this criticality make of the East – or its other? Can it ask any questions other than how difficult it must be to live there? Is it ready to hear if the other starts to speak? ☞

This East Which is Not One Gozde Naiboglu

But, back to the initial question, who is this other? If it is the post-9/11 »East« of the Muslim world, what commonalities can be drawn between such vast, heterogeneous populations? The single commonality in the Arab and Muslim World of the East that is impossible to neglect is the revolutionary dissent against what Hamid Dabashi calls the »politics of despair« – in Afghanistan, Tunisia, Iran, Palestine, Syria and Turkey.

An uncanny silence These revolts have irreversibly changed the political and social imaginaries and history itself, how could it not have changed the West and the rest equation? As the political elites in the West openly continue to ally with the main actors of the oppressive despair politics of the Muslim world, an uncanny silence looms and the figures of the drowned and missing keep rising.

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Whether it is in exchange of intelligence or reassurance to keep refugees away from their land, Western leaders’ compliance with the

There is no common language counter-revolutionary and oppressive forces in the Middle East make it undeniable that the responsibility also lies with all the people who are silenced and unrepresented to confront the injustices that block paths of building a common speak. There is no common language for people of the East, nor the West, as both are misleading, worn out, homogenizing if not lazy terms. Perhaps, shared silence and failed representation are the only twin axes that set people in a transnational relation to each other.

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In his provocatively titled book Can NonEuropeans Think?, Hamid Dabashi writes that confronting the oppressive, silencing and unrepresentative politics of neoliberalism of the West and the East must be the start of a renewed alliance that undoes such fake cultural bifurcations of the secular and the religious, or the West and the East. Perhaps, he continues to argue, reorienting our maps is the way to show solidarity with the resilience of the Palestinians in Gaza, or the Kurds in Kobani, be it on the streets marching along them, or in the privacy of our thoughts.

Intervening in such regimes of oppression requires forming new alliances, be it on the negative terms of vulnerability, silence and exclusion from representation.

borders

Exhaustion can thus give way to a cultivation of richer forms of solidarity, exchange and generosity, not just between the West and the East, but along a diverse network of life beyond human and nonhuman entities. â—†

This East Which is Not One Gozde Naiboglu

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loss,

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and

the

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Two Gaps

euripides night

of

lost

trojan

inarticulate the

girl

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A journey to far away lands, a memory of an old man,

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Euripides

and a ferry to the other side. words

henry

photography

And men in the older stages of town, where city slips below the bedsheets of suburbia, may call their sons Joshua or Saul, but only in the bohemian vaults of The Southern City are little boys called Euripides.

tobias

elena

jones

adorni

The real men of moment had left him like the rest of us – just »to live«.

He was about to be taken up to a military academy by his grandfather. An esteemed, monolithic man from Toulon, the patriarch In the first stages of his decline so soon, of the family Gen. Dominguez Piranelli was the thinking we discover in this little boy’s far too respected to be disobeyed in this brain was unhinged. Unhinged by the decision; though Piedes, frankly, couldn’t resounding end of give a damn – school the time in which he was school. Paper and The real men of felt so sure he should ink. Gazing into his m o m e n t h a d l e f t u s grandfather’s nostrils have been born. For little Piedes Piranelli there he saw the depth the bohemia you or I might recall as some of the man. With his bullish bellow, the halcyon miasma, was but a void-in-waiting sound of air rushing through to the dark, for the next big moment. All times have a and the thick grey tufts of moustachioed lip. day either side where something ends and No longer a drinker, no longer bearing the then eventually begins again. Until that time stench of tobacco in his pores, the General is broken by the force of a moment you are was growing from a soldier into a statesman. probably just one of the people who is living in a Real time. Those of moment aren’t living Soon the suit of armour would be bent by at all. Piedes knew he was living – that he the belly and the sword would be engraved was alive. by the pen. ☞

Euripides

Henry Tobias Jones

The topless car ran past southern cities and the streets sang with the smell of marijuana and beer. Little girls danced, little boys urinated, and all around there was the silliness of those people who think they are »artists«. And the car swung out of their town and into the vast emptiness of the rest of the country and the vaulted ancient city faded backwards even further into meaninglessness and vapidity.

Piedes never cared for these people, the time was not for him to enjoy, and the place wasn’t going anywhere. The topless car had left.

The time of ceremonials had arrived By the time the ceremonials had arrived, the sunshine was beading sweat from the marble walls all around. The normal cool of ancient dead lumps of stone were today mocking the catharsis felt by the academy boys – glad to finally be leaving. Swords stood proud to the glint of purpose in the heyday sun. The Sunday hooray of graduating marches and medal presentations had preoccupied these boys for years.

To them it marked the beginning of something new. Piedes, on the other hand, wore gloves and seemed marked still by the melancholy which had defined his youth. »Graduating a man« need not have applied as much to him as it had his compatriots. For he had embarked already aged, he was half dead on the first day of term. A foot march that had gone horribly wrong. Midway through his academic career he had tested the limits of his tutors and almost found himself expelled – though the General meant (and Piedes knew it) that his suspension was the most languorous of idle threats.

And to be on the cusp of the »real world« seemed flattened

by Piedes. He had felt rather too alive to consider his world anything but real. ☞

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ÂťHe had felt rather too alive to consider this

wor l d any t hing but r eal .ÂŤ

Euripides

Henry Tobias Jones

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Euripides

Henry Tobias Jones

»T h e p l a y b e n e a t h h i m

made his muscles clench and ball up all of his r egr et s.«

Taking to the dais he clapped the hands of his masters and received his congratulation with ennui. He dismounted the moment and left it safe in the knowledge that it was as discardable as the roll of paper in his hand.

The General would have stood if he could, but his soldier’s legs had become invalid’s wheels in the short time it had taken the Piranelli name to fall from adulation.

An assassination attempt had cut short the statesmanly passage his age had predestined.

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He was fed today by a young Macedonian girl who shared his, albeit new, inability to communicate in our native tongue. Most of his native tongue had been torn from its home by the shot which also removed the largest fractions of his higher functions.

Seeing him today had caused a minor stir, but five years is a long time. We have a tendency to build these characters up in our imaginations in this land, only to tear them back down to earth, and once we have them pinned we rather begin to feel sorry for them. Its all rather English actually.

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His children balked and ran, screaming with laughter away from the fright of a clown: Peides’ father to be accurate. He turned his back on the children and stepped away to lure the cherubs inwards, and then all of a sudden, he would twist, and scream, and flail his chicken’s wings. And of the children would run.

gaps

his skin like a rash. His children playing barefoot on grass which was as sharp as a steel brush made him blush. And a bee buzzed through, as they will, and stung him on his finger.

He awoke from the coma on the third day of the 15th year. It was cold even in his hospital bed where they care for things like Peides these. He The time of ceremonials watched felt frail. had arrived him from Even for the balcony a young with a drink in his hand. His father the man – though Piedes Piranelli was by poet, his father the writer, his father the now bald and bearded. The ignoble hair clown. His children playing with his loss had fallen after the first decade of father, what had happened to his life. He restfulness. His muscles had been shed looked down at his hands. as a winter coat for the summer.

Were these not still the hands of a When his children came from their man in his 20’s. His glasses felt heavy on lives to see their father, the clown: their his ears, he rested on elbows upon the Grandfather was long since deceased. steel balcony of his home and he ached He had been buried beneath wilting with age. The play beneath him made clownish flowers. They were tall for his muscles clench and ball up all of his children. Limbs had grown into branches regrets. Elbows, knees, back, his body and untrimmed, now were a tranche ached where it most lived. The world which spanned further than what had around him was humming with the been the sum of their children’s bodies. cancer of Summer.

Beards and glasses, suits and trousers, no The fauna of the time filled the day halos and party dresses any more. with hazy noise and the heat that insects They were sullen when the patient seemed to make. awoke.

The friction of this The world around time rubbed against His wife was gone.

him humming

☞

Euripides

Henry Tobias Jones

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Euripides

Henry Tobias Jones

Neurological deficiencies were –

– difficult. For Piedes time was a constant in these days. Living had left and been replaced by the mere shell of life. He woke feeling refreshed for Easter. He was dressed

by Manuela – though his daughter told him that was not her name. Perhaps that was The General’s girl now that he thought about it. He had another surgery on the clamp he used to use as a hand. Clip the tendons or something of that nature.

It would allow Time was a him greater dexterity even in his advanced years, or so the doctor had said.

Some days he sat in the garden and pretended to read. He looked at the words but they sat silently. He often wondered about this. It is odd for Euripides Piranelli to be able to look at War and Peace and see his reflection; for a low functioning man of mental retardation to be able to use Tolstoy as a mirror! Only Euripides could look at mighty books and see the words quietly looking back up at him with the exact same expectant patience – silently waiting to begin.

Waiting to begin, Euripides sat. Days passed and Manuela came to say ‘Mr. Euripides,’ her voice cutting through the gentle penumbra in which he sat, ‘is time to toilet now?’

If he thought really hard he could strain. He felt it like a blood-clot. Something ineffably wrong. *

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When Mr. Pirelli next woke he felt the drug at work in his forehead.

Where once had sat hunched, a simple man who might have had no idea what was meant by this: now there was a boy feeling, constant palpably, the sensation Burroughs had described. A sensation pouring through the skull of his mind, and like glacial water percolating through forgiving rocks without blockage any longer. And sense became thought once more.

Restoration woke him up and refreshed his mind beyond its fall. He was no longer hiding up a tree as it were. He moved his arms and felt the rejuvenation seeping The weavin through him like a dance, mean catching on the tendrils of his muscles and waking them up like a contagious joy of music in a crowd. The hustle of his aged body became the bustle of youth and vigour. His life was no longer a term but a pleasure, a deliberative, orgiastic, pulsating, gyronomic, gnomic, frissonic combustion of living.

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The festival began that night with total and unabating restlessness. As though awoken by the sheer might of caffeine, his body was young and wild and full of the deep and unrelenting passion it had not felt in 35 years. It assuaged the mass of past with a tsunami gs of contact and violent arrhythmic activity. He saw his home alive in the dark, the lights out for his daughter was »sleeping«. He could not lie and be here at once and restful. He could not see in the day either – it took too long. Turning the pages of the books he had studied dumbly for decades and had to fight back the risible alacrity mere thought could arouse.

gaps

Little dancing figures playing with the sparks of his mind like living, breathing people talking to one another a million times over. The weaving mass of meanings, and sayings, and languages in the words of the book floated up like tickling, weightless corral reef fingers and met all the counter-active billions and billions of little fingers of understanding and creative thought which we send down through our eyes back to the book. ☞ Euripides

Henry Tobias Jones

Euripides

Henry Tobias Jones

And the two meanings tickle and play and swirl with currents of thoughts and understandings – questions and answers – and blur the point where the book ends and the reader begins like a Carnival of Meaning. And the beauty of the corral reds and pensive blues of Piedes’ thought-filled eyes were beautiful – deeply, deeply beautiful.

He stood alone in his garden, beneath the gentle olive orchard branches on an Island of his own, and he wondered why the word: »penumbra« struck him so profoundly now. What was it about this garden, new to him, which regurgitated this word so tightly to the sensations he was feeling.

The nostalgia and the repression of a thought

past injury Penumbra struck him so which The had never profoundly now daughter returned in had moved out. full. His daughter was still young and Her time to take the Doctor’s drug had her medicine would strike home against come and gone. Her age had crept past a gong of the active adult mind, and her father’s tireless own, and she had so strike true with a cacophonous ring. dearly wanted to feel what he had felt.

So much so that even as an old lady, she He listened to the serenity of the had young Piedes’ Piranelli, her father, waves and tried to catch the distant ring read the books he now understood so of it in his ears. well, aloud, even in his boyish tenor.

The sun was setting and his reading was growing regular, prolonged, and recurring. Freud had walked and talked for hours, he had spend whole days and nights deep in discussion with Jung over the complexities of hidden human thought. To be awoken from a sleep is cruel, Piedes had learned. The world had churned and it had begun to spin faster, turning and turning, unstopping like a top, and he felt as though he was beginning to slip from its lip. Fingernails, he thought, were perhaps the only thing keeping him from his deathless death again.

He had once read that if the lifespan of our planet were to be represented by a human arm span with the tip of one finger at one end and the present at the other; all of human existence could be scraped from existence by one stroke of a nail-file on the other hand.

The longer we humans exist the more we will have to excise – until one day we will be able to erase the humanely timelessness of before now by taking a file to the other hand. Burning the candle at both ends and filing both nails is the same thing.

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You trim the beginning and the end. These were not the thoughts of Peides Piranelli.

He just stood and wondered why his daughter could now do what he could not?

He found a dead bird, it looked up at him and he wondered how it had come to die on his island? There were no snakes, no foxes or cats or dogs to prey on it, no poisons or toxins, and what is more no other birds at all. So far out to sea, Peides’ island had torn away from its root and was, he thought, deeply nestled into the ocean by now.

And yet there was, here in his hand, a little bird which had died on his island. There was no food, nothing to drink, no hope of conversation or books to read anew, but all the same he sighed and dropped it into the sea with a plop.

By the time Piedes’ island touched The poor place had homed him like a the shore on the other side of the ocean child might have parented a mother. With the world was something new again. the delicacy and joy a toddler can bring Geological time was something new to to the imitation of care it feels it receives. men like And there him who Piedes stood Yo u n e e d i t a l l , a n d y o u had lived remembering need it all at once by the the rubble, names remembering of books, and kings, and things. To be a the General and trying to recall the living part of the rock had become all too rusted medals which had long since real for a stranded man riding upon the faded into soil and dust and memory. back of a monolithic sea turtle. He was not Nothing remained except the feeling for dead, for as he knew by now, he could not the place which had been kept alive in rightly die. A voyage where one disappears his lifelessness, in his entrapment and and makes landfall without ever leaving his inability to live at all, in his foodless, one’s home had never been done before. drinkless, humanless, childless, parentless, Rightly speaking Piedes’ home had not artless, thingless, placeless life. strictly been erect when he arrived on the other side of the world, for buildings Nobody can live without anything, constructed before his birth had no way of you need it all and you need it all at once outlasting the immortal men who needed so that one thing alone can’t become them. everything, and so that everything cant He looked to where his home had been, all be balled up into one massy holistic beneath the growths and thickets of ball of it all. tropical grasses and felt the place’s shame weighing heavy on his soul.

Euripides Piranelli thought to himself as he took the cure. ◆

The Night of Lost Things words

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gosslee

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The rain is cold after the grey movie is over and the garbage bag full of party cups and icing smeared plates slides into the compacter, there’s so much hope in my new hair cut covered by the umbrella.

A young cat limps across the glittering intersection, slips under the stranger’s porch where my hand learns the limit of my arm poked through the rotting white side-boards.

She didn’t text back. I add an empty bottle to the row above the kitchen cupboards, put my forehead against the bedroom window.

The Night of Lost Things John Gosslee

Trojan Truth words

visuals

j.

campbell

primoz

zorko

A dystopian idea for a future Ă la 1984 with a war on the Moon and someone looking at the stars.

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Glory knows why they wandered through the cinders and the leaves of half burnt old books scattered by the oil drum fires. Glory knows what they lived with the archways for ... laying themselves amongst the rats under the railway lines of Victoria Station. Even the women there were bearded, moled, with jaundice tan, and bulbous liver.

Their skin rebelled against them as if their very fibres knew that their body served no greater function in the mission for Glory. As if the very cells became the cancer on the body that they were on their society. They turned their back on Glory and Glory knows why.

Above their heads and below the night bright moon, the caterpillar train wound its way around between and straight right through the edges of the city till it shot off in a needle line towards the Spine of England. Buried in the vertebrae were memories and nightmares.

Flashbacks that only the lumbar puncture of this evening would awaken as Tomas made his way to Saddleworth Moor with his telescope. This night he thought he would capture M45 and Andromeda as Orion tilts right through the evening and on this night, he would be captured.

Tom's afterthought …

Some spines tingle with a reflex, others, patient and still, wait for the explosive release of their paranoia as it sits in the spine in hope of the shiver sign to ejaculate on the face of the moon that says it's all crazy. But glory comes with the delay. We all know that.

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D e c e m b e r 1 5 th i n t h e y e a r 52 of our Glorious Human Corporation.

The Holocaust of the Moon A year ago today, I witnessed what was the beginning of the end of the world. Every individual wiped out slowly.

Every wino from California, rambler from southern France, lonely city boy haunting dingy bars, hermit practising telekinesis or astronomer staring up at the skies touching the sublime. In this piece of writing, I will avoid mentioning my name and will name my girlfriend only as »bitch«. My hometown will be referred to as »The City«. The narrative voice of this text may come across as sanctimonious and I may over-elaborate, perhaps even veer off at a tangent at times but I must mask my true voice for fear of identification through my prose fingerprint. This I intend to publish with anonymity for fear of severe repercussions for me, for I want to talk about the truth. What every one of us, in the core of our beings knows to have witnessed. What every one of us tries to forget, deny or ignore. We all know the truth but deny it fervently and fearfully.

His loyal lady Eskra trapped by his side with the wine and picnic condiments. She was the pragmatist who dragged Tom away from the twisted curved whore of the roulette wheel in the casinos and got him focusing on the roulette wheel of the solar system, spinning round and round and red and black and red as the night made its decision and chose its colour.

Trojan Truth J. Campbell

She turned him into the night watchman he became. Good wage. Good living. The stakes were higher and the thrill of it made him more aroused than Glory Babe 08, year 40 who was, by the most discerning and cultured, considered to be the finest Glory Babe in history.

She saw him there and saw potential.

The potential to dominate if only she could dominate him. She saw potential glory. ... The event in question happened a year ago from the date of publication. I had planned a weekend break from The City, such a thing of excitement from the start of the month. The wet paper, dirty puddles, glass buildings blackened at the corners, the difficult maintenance of the illusion of a clean, busy, ordered city fades after a while and that longing for nature that life dulls and locks up in glass walls, that need to lie on unkempt grass in the hills at midnight with no sound of distraction but the wind howling in horror at the world you left behind.

Eskra met him in the dark quarter, trailing the drunks who preached their own glory whilst living a life think only millimetres from that of the rat men and women under the arches or the sad frog men of Whalley Range who pestered halitosis Harriet. He associated with monkeys and it gave him that primal desire to forget the greater glory.

She saw him dipping one night when the queers were slipping crack in the cigarettes, getting the punters hooked. »Fuck fuck fuck fucking yeaaaah!« uttered Tomas with much purpose.

The flow of water and its chaotic fluid dynamics as brook feeds stream, this sound added a new theme to nature's symphony on this transient evening as the purple sky scattered with pin pricks of stars across its canvas lay witness to both the moon and the morons ebb and flow of light pulsing from the Eastern sky. It was low in the sky and seemed to be twice its normal size with that yellow glow that gives it its metaphor. I had commented to the bitch how serene and spiritual nature seemed when coming from The City.

»Yes sir. Quandiable flastagooning« said one man nearby approvingly. ... Maybe some weak willed individuals can be convinced that black is white. Maybe the lack of faith in ourselves that we are brought up with, in the name of an equal society of equally valued members of the Glorious Human Corporation, maybe this upbringing like a virus has destroyed the will of the individual within some of you, but I am going to tell you the truth. I will discuss that event that you refuse to believe in despite being a witness. Remind you of the greatest act of self-denial humanity has ever seen.

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I remember she had said »Yeh. Sick innit.« After a few hours star gazing, we saw Andromeda winking at us through the Milky Way’s long arm, we saw the

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Trojan Truth J. Campbell

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Crab Nebula, we saw two spacecraft on missions to or from the moon, and even spied the factory on the moon, and we then rested, watching a few shooting stars, admiring life’s fleeting taste of honey. The wind had calmed to a stillness and the last beige cloud strolled by the sky, illuminated by the moons glow.

This sublime peacefulness enveloped the air and the water hushed, the wind was silent. It was then that I noticed something, silent and quick like the trick of light in your periphery. A flash, like a dot, that expanded. As I turned, to look at the moons disc in the sky, I saw a white circle, expanding on its surface.

An explosion, so massive and tiny at the same time, it spread over one of the smaller craters. I quickly ran to my telescope. »The bitch, look! Look at the moon quick!« She turned and her jaw fell gormlessly open. I peered through the telescope, putting the moon filter on and caught sight of what was left of the GHC holiday resort. The entire complex completely wiped out and nothing but a crater left within a crater. I knew straight away. A war had just started on the moon.

Some crazies take hold when we start to see life in a way some say is true. Some crazies start when we convince ourselves that our perception of events differ from the narrative that everyone else believes.

What is truth but the best guess. If glory says truth is this, one man's truth is madness.

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... I know we have a natural desire within all of us, to be locked in a cerebral prison or to satisfy our urges with drink, flesh, food and instinct. We should, all of us, let reason take the reins but treat our inner animal well. The good master looks after his dog.

The train journey had been busy on the way there. Lots of passengers confined to a small space but separated by a world of silence. Each keeping to their own business. I caught the eye of a gentleman in his years of twilight and tried to engage him in discussion of the topics he may be reading in his newspaper, but as his eyes drifted blankly up at me and he didn’t say a word, mine drifted down to – The Glorious Human Corporation has met further blockades on the Lunar surface as its tourist resort begins to harvest its own Hydrogen fuel.

The monopolising BLANK fears that economic stability will crumble as the fuel industry opens to a new market, though GHC denies any intention to enter into the fuel industry and merely wants to be self sufficient. BLANK has declared this act as an illegal breech on its patent of the moon and …

What happens when we collectively give in to fear is disastrous. Together, if we stand and say no. I will not let fear dominate my life and without any rash action openly discuss the truth, we are empowered and free.

Trojan Truth J. Campbell

When we leave it to a few to shout at us on the trip down from the mountain, they are wiped out in a quick stroke and labelled crazy and dangerous afterwards.

Sometimes what you see is illusion and what your read is fact. ... When I returned from my break in the hills and began work I was sacked within the first day for mentioning it.

They said I’d lost my mind. I haven’t. They have lost theirs. You have lost yours. Our collective amnesia will not save us from a thousand buried truths. Each one lying under the surface fuels our fear. The longer it remains under there the deeper it sinks. The harder it is to release. We were lied to. We are still lied to.

The drunks didn't start out that way. Some had families, some friends, some no one. They all had pride, but glory knows that pride restricts. ... After seeing this explosion on the moon I felt a chill colder than the winter night. The nuclear explosion sent moon dust miles from the moons surface. It spiralled out into the black void, curling into a huge question mark that hung over the crater slowly dissipating over the next 3 day’s and nights. Whether you saw the explosion or not, we all saw that huge question mark hanging over earth sky, we all remember even if we didn’t let it force us to ask the question.

Glory knows what he believed would happen when he wrote his piece, raving, angry and shouting on the trains and in the streets. Glory knew he and the others who scurried from societies corners, holes, rotten woodlice talking of the imagined event, these lunatics would end up jobless, stuck on the street handing out pamphlets of word salad on Oxford Road.

A question is a disease that you can cure or ignore. It will either set you on fire, send you on a path you won't come back from or haunt you with its immanence and leave you hiding. Glory starts with interpreting the answer, and doing it in the right way, the smartest way.

Glory knows why they wandered through the cinders and the leaves of half burnt old books scattered by the oil drum fires. Glory knows what they lived with the archways for, laying themselves amongst the rats under the railway lines of Victoria Station.

... How can we forget the moons old howling face? This scar from our recent past is right there for us to see almost every night. Photo evidence exists in a thousand un-doctored old images in printed books that we see the homeless use for fuel. Our history is disappearing into a digital nightmare that can be rewritten to suit the needs of the few in the present.

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They turned their back on Glory and Glory knows why. ◆

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Trojan Truth J. Campbell

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j.j.

steinfeld

Inarticulate Prayers

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You’ve had conversations that sounded like prayers with strangers with bartenders with those mad with those frighteningly sane with yourself even with silence and the fear of silence sometimes comprehensible most times not words of love brushing up against hate words of hate hinting at love or its evocation still your prayers seem inarticulate the words ruined and broken.

Inarticulate Prayers

J.J. Steinfeld

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The Girl with her Heart In her Mouth words

natalie

illustration

nicolaides

paul

balykin

[...] ÂťAll emotion is beautiful,ÂŤ

she chanted to herself brutally, and

descended onto the tracks. [...]

It was a dreary morning when she awoke. November 10th 2017. She lived in a ground floor apartment not too far out from the city. It was a tiny place.

A typical English place. Double glazed windows facing out onto the street with a daffodil solemnly sitting there on the She ne windowsill.

Passion drives people crazy. But any emotion in this world is a rarity; where have all the people gone? When had robots replaced us all?

In mid 2015, the European Union, followed by the United States and ver felt soon enough all that she f it into other countries, 10 o’clock – the passed a law, which t h e g r a n d s c h e m e forced all persons sun now begins to seep through to surgically the clouds not enough to warm her remove their hearts and replace it face but enough to remind her that the with a mechanism built to circulate universe's light still exists. With no only at the normal heartbeat and rush she slowly places on her blazer to no more as an answer to the violent complete her three-piece business suit, worldwide uprising, which began on the takes one last gulp of her much needed seventeenth of January 2015. morning coffee and heads out towards the door. She never felt that she fit into People began to shift within their the grand scheme of the world. And skins. They wanted to be heard. They what was more traumatizing is that no wanted their homes. They wanted out. one ever understood She remembers the her. Her ideas, her soldiers rampaging A time where ideals, her desires, her through the streets, feelings, her fears, her p a s s i o n w a s m o r e taking in the thoughts. Oh how she revolutionists first. than a myth did wish sometimes She remembers the to be as dull as the sound of the police »normal« people. With their blank faces, baton as it cracked into the faces and ribs and their only concern is whether they of the rioters. She remembers the smell will be the ones to create the next fad. of the blood on the tar as the bodies hit The world seems more docile now. She the floor. She remembers running; she remembers a time where passion was ran so fast she thought her lungs would more than a myth and where people were remain deflated for all eternity. It’s like sincere. not a soul remembers all that now.

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The fear of being caught. The thrill of the chase; goddamn it! No one remembers the unison!

She loves her walk into work. It’s the only time she feels anything anymore.

She smiles as the sunbeams shoot through the clouds at full force, but she must be careful not to smile too much, but keeps her spring firmly in her step.

Who would have thought that it was indeed one's heart To d a y ' s t which held all the emotions.

An explosion of colour, a sparking and booming of soprano voices accompanied by drum beats. No words, pure sound.

Even her mind has forgotten the music she once wrote. It was all confiscated.

Today is a special day. Today’s the day she forgets it all, the past and dull future before her. Today she takes her own life.

Today she will be free.

She dreamt of being a successful pianist. Not even financially successful, just well known. She wanted people to hear the sounds of the world as she translated them in her mind.

She finishes early with her work and is allowed to go it all home. She wants to go into central London one last time to see the cityscape, to feel the importance of the city but more importantly to go to the skyscraper where all the hearts are safely boxed and stored away. She wants to see her father one last time. She had never been put on trial as a revolutionist during »the happening«, despite being one. After all she was her father's daughter and her father was the leader of the main riots that took place furiously in the central.

She awaited the train. She has brought her poison with her just in case she is incarcerated and unable to complete today's agenda.

he day she

forgets

The birds begin to sing such a sweet tune. Music production does not exist anymore. The only music allowed now are the classic symphonies of Mozart and Beethoven as the government fears the influence that vocal accompaniment may induce.

She turns the corner and enters her business building. She’s an accountant now. It was something that she studied at university; however, it was never something she wanted to follow, but since »the happening« of 2015, there was a sudden surge in the accounting sector as everyone only had economy on their minds.

gaps

As she boards the train, she is beyond content. Her heart must be beating at a hundred miles per hour, she’s terrified that everyone on the carriage can hear it. She takes in slower breaths and calms herself. ☞

The Girl with her Heart in her Mouth Natalie Nicolaides

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The train now pulls into its final destination. She runs to the doors in anticipation. Within 10 minutes she is on the correct underground course to Heart Tower. That's what they’ve called it. All lit in red too, as if a shrine to their accomplishments. She gets off at her stop and paces herself accordingly to the rush of the city. After passing through countless roads of mountaineering skyscrapers she come to the front of the Tower.

She looks up. She’s angry, she’s peaceful. Ugh! With all these emotions and no one to share them with she’s frustrated.

How dare they?! She thought as she walked towards the reception. They have no need to keep all these lifeless organs and yet they do! And nowhere else but in central London, in the tallest tower for all to see, as if a warning. Moreover, why don’t the people who work in the area do something? It’s all too much of an abstract idea for her to want to understand. »I have come to see heart 11296345,« she told the receptionist. »Do you have a signed permission slip?« She pulled out the purple slip that she had acquired from one of her former underground friends, which had taken years to successfully duplicate, and showed it to the woman. She was uneasy now. In the duration of her wait she looked up. This building stood for everything that was »the happening«. It was towering and scary and yet the entire centre was hollow.

When she looked up all she could see was the hollow space with numerous aluminum balconies, which followed the flow of the interior and spun 360 degrees where one would scan the shelves and pull out the desired heart. Almost like a supermarket.

With the slight feeling of nausea she turned her gaze back to the receptionist. »Seems good,« the receptionist said as she scanned it through the main system. »It’s on the 110th floor.

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Take the elevator upwards 100 floors and walk the rest« – she came closer ever so slightly - »we seem to be having some technical difficulty today. All the bookcases are numbered accordingly.« She nodded softly and proceeded to the elevator and hit the up button. She was so incredibly nervous but had to be so cautious so as not to show it. As the elevator doors flew open she outstretched her arm and gently hit the 100th floor button – would you know it, its backlight was red, too. The elevator was like her heart, it began to race. She looked out of the glass elevator and with a number of fragmented views she soon created the picture of what she saw before her.

Rolling bookcases of glass-boxed hearts. There were actually quite a few people shopping today.

Once she approached the 100th floor she realized there was no staircase, she had to travel upwards through the oval centre. Round and round the balconies she went, ascending faster and faster as she began to feel the closeness and a sudden push of emergence. Alas, she had reached the 110th floor.

She desperately scanned the shelves, rolling them back and forth now rather hectically.

THERE. She now caught it within her gaze and ran towards it.

Now breathing and sweating beyond control she held the 30x30 box in her hands. There, placed in some kind of clear gelatin, as if floating, she could see the place where the bullet had pierced it. Now the nausea truly kicked in. Yes, she needed to regurgitate.

She couldn't resist it. The security guard at the end of the floor knew exactly what was going on and immediately took out his walkie-talkie to call on the Extractors. Seeing this she put aside her need to vomit, quickly put the box in her bag and began to run downwards to the elevator – there at least she would have time to drink her poison.

☞

The Girl with her Heart in her Mouth Natalie Nicolaides

She ran and ran, she remembers the last time she ran like this. It was the day her father told her she must run to survive and that he would always be there to protect her.

RUN! She screamed within her skull. Her feet were up to the task. Now with at least 12 guards racing behind her, she dove into the elevator hit the button and prayed to heaven and hell that the doors would close in time. She could hear an orchestra in her mind.

A sound she thought she’d forgotten.

Yes, this was her moment of catharsis. Yes. The doors slammed shut in time. Without time to relax and catch her breath, she placed the box at the end of the lift and waited to be in between floors before hitting the emergency stop button so as to give her that little bit of time she needed with the last remains of her father.

She could hear the trumpet and drums now booming in her head. She returned to her bag and pulled out a small vial with a miniscule amount of red liquid. It was enough for the task.

Before she had time to even open the vile she began to feel the need to vomit again. There was no holding it back this time as her gag reflexes kicked in. Lurching forward and coughing violently, she coughed and she coughed. She coughed until she was coughing out blood, she could taste it in her mouth.

A weird movement began within her chest. She could not stop the coughing so much so that her whole body felt paralysed. What is happening? Her thoughts went crazy and sped in and out of her mind. The lift began to move again but there was still a long descent. She continued to cough. She felt a lump in her throat she’d never felt before.

Coughing and coughing the lump began to block her airway. More blood began to pour out her mouth.

She put her hand into her mouth to try stopping the obstruction to her airway and feeling there on the tips of her fingers, her heart now in full movement up her throat. It leapt into her mouth. Petrified and suffocating she pulled out the muscle from her throat and stared at it as it pumped its final pumps.

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She could feel the arteries in her mouth almost like a live octopus wriggling in search of their lost friend.

They wanted a reunion with their master. No sound, no reactions, no pain, no relief; the elevator doors open. â—†

The Girl with her Heart in her Mouth Natalie Nicolaides

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Hannah Flynn

I. I’m a coin without value two fraternal sides one healed, one raw what will the toss decree today?

Scar or wound? will I bleed unabashedly or donate blood to help others?

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II. My sanity is on the lam the wet season of this madness has me swapping shoes for a surfboard ready to slice through curling waves that lift me to a sky most will never touch it’s not the inevitable wipeout that has her pacing in the sand but the lurking undertow that nearly drowns me every time

Untitled

Bekah Steimel

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III. One person, one hundred perceptions or maybe I’m one hundred people casting a single shadow only glimpsing my own transparency in a puddle of black ink When I’m not performing a strip-tease on blushing paper I’m dropping acid and milling through a labyrinth of fun house mirrors trying to guess the riddle from the answer I am the fangs and soft under-belly of a tiger I prowl, I stroll through jungles and studio apartments I am an angel with track marks pawning my halo to fund my habit I find comfort in your similar confusion we are all at odds with ourselves and only in death do we break even only in death does the compass stop spinning assemble my manual of words Discover my black box, the still truth and then record your own.

Untitled

Bekah Steimel

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Untitled

Bekah Steimel

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A Peace Process

Will Sharp

A Peace Process Will Sharp

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photography words

will

elena

sharp

iacovou

A Peace Process Mental Health in Cyprus

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Cyprus has a turbulent history of occupation, traced back to Egyptians in 1450BC. Ruled by Assyrians, Persians, Ptolemies, Romans and Venetians, it would later became a Turkish Province until 1878, when it was colonised by the British. In 1960 it became an independent republic after a 4 year armed insurrection against the British. Since 1974 just over one third of the Northern area of Cyprus is under Turkish rule.

Intermarriage

was non- existent The relationships between GreekCypriots and Turkish-Cypriots can be traced back centuries. Between 1878 and 1955 Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots had intermingled, and lived peacefully together under British rule.

Each group had its own strong ethnic and religious identity and traditions, which dictated the type and degree of interaction with the other group. Greek-Cypriots spoke primarily Greek and belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church, and Turkish-Cypriots spoke primarily Turkish and were Muslims.

Although the two groups interacted in the workplace, intermarriage was virtually nonexistent.

☞

A Peace Process

Elena Iacovou

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Greek and Turkish-Cypriot males socialized separately in their own coffee houses.

After World War II, pressure by populist movements increased with the GreekCypriots seeking union (enosis) with Greece, and a conflict arose, with the TurkishCypriots pressing their demands by seeking partition (takism). This eventually led to the 1974 invasion, when Turkey acted to protect the rights of the Turkish- Cypriots.

Union & Partition The Turkish invasion of Cyprus created large-scale population transfer and massive physical and psychological trauma for both Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots, and divided the country into two separate governmental systems where previously there had been one. Since then, virtually impermeable geographic and social boundaries have separated them.

Today, Turkish-Cypriots occupy the northern 37% of the country in what is called the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (recognized only by Turkey), and GreekCypriots retain control of the remainder in the South in what is internationally recognized as the Republic of Cyprus.

Nicosia is now the last divided capital city in the world.

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Seeking union where division exists The rise of ethnic separation throughout the world is often accompanied by millions of refugees and internally displaced people - with high risks of depression, anxiety disorders, and other forms of mental illness, caused by political violence.

Such are the facts in this case; the physical and psychological traumas experienced and interpreted by the Greek-Cypriots and the Turkish-Cypriots are important factors to consider when determining how to increase the trust necessary for collaboration.

In addition, where conflict and tension exists, innovative approaches are required to be created in order to sustain peaceful relationships between groups with a history of inter-ethnic violence.

A study sponsored by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) examined the feasibility of establishing a bicommunal mental health unit as a means of improving ethnic relations and collaboration between Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots in Cyprus.

A social systems approach was used to conceptualize ethnic conflict in Cyprus, and to operationalize a methodology that would involve identifying and analysing the complex networks of interpersonal and group relationships in order to determine the larger socio-political contexts within which they entwined. ☞

Because the Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot communities had each been conditioned to respond to situations according to their cultural socialization, experiences, and sociopolitical relationships, each community was looked at as a separate entity, with both sides sharing social and physical boundaries separating them geographically.

Collaborating together to establish a common mental health facility Meetings between the two sides allowed for the exchange of valuable information and to compare mental health facilities.

It was found that the Greek-Cypriot mental health system was considerably more developed than that of the Turkish-Cypriots.

The Greek-Cypriot mental health system included a psychiatric hospital with community services, providing outpatient clinics; day treatment centres; occupational therapy programmes; a community psychiatric nursing unit; and a private sector, serving individuals with less emotional disorders.

In order to collect information the following questions were posed in regards to the mental health system: What functions do the existing boundaries serve for the Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot mental health systems?

How do the mental health programs attain their goals, and what are the constraints?

In contrast the Turkish-Cypriot side only had a psychiatric hospital, and was lacking support services for discharged patients due to insufficient mental health professionals and community resources.

How do they adapt to their environments?

How are their various subsystems integrated or coordinated to provide appropriate and effective mental health services?

An important area of common need and interest was identified. Both communities had a primary need to re-integrate individuals with mental illness back into the community, through a programme of psychosocial vocational rehabilitation training, and other community supports.

How have the mental health systems responded to the tensions that arise within their communities, and how do they function and adapt in a divided country?

☞

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A Peace Process

Elena Iacovou

A Psychosocial Rehabilitation and Vocational Training Centre (PRVTC) was proposed as a mental health unit to serve both communities. This was to be located in the industrial area of Nicosia, which was in close proximity and accessible by both sides.

The current situation in Cyprus In April of 2003, a spontaneous unification process began with the opening of the Green Line, which had separated the islands into two sections for 29 years. Many other check points have opened since then, which allows free access to both communities, but not a return home for Greek-Cypriots.

Negotiations are still taking place in regards to a permanent solution.

The UNHCR recommended a series of seminars and workshops take place, which involved mental health professionals from both sides. It was suggested that they attend as individual mental health practitioners regardless of governmental affiliation or official position.

Located in the UN Buffer Zone, the Home for Corporation was established in 2011. The Home serves as a community centre located in the heart of Nicosia, contributing to collective efforts of civil society to engage with peace-building and intellectual dialogue.

Practitioners got together in two instances; once at the offices of the UNHCR in Nicosia, and a second time at the Centre of Rehabilitation at Boston University. On both occasions, professional knowledge was exchanged, interest to keep in touch was expressed, and positive bonds were developed, with the aim of being continued on their return to Cyprus. The team expressed interest in establishing the PRVTC in collaboration in Cyprus.

The Home encourages people to cooperate with each other beyond constraints and dividing lines. It acts as a bridge-builder between people and communities on both sides of the island. The Home hosts an extensive variety of cultural, artistic and educational programs with the aim of fostering creativity and intercultural trust in Cyprus and internationally.

In 1995 a debriefing session was to take place at the offices of the UNHCR in Cyprus,but the Turkish Cypriots were not allowed to attend. Furthermore, the closure of the UNHCR office in 1997 was another blow to the collaboration process. At that instance, and due to more political unrest and lack of trust between the two sides, it was deemed that the boundaries for interaction between the two mental health groups were rigid and highly impermeable.

Mental Health as a peace process

As of today the mental health unit has not been established.

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Even though the mental health unit was not established, its aim of increasing the permeability of boundaries through activities, leading to increased positive interaction among citizens of both communities, is being achieved.

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The Home for Cooperation is a one-of-its-kind community centre located in the heart of Nicosia.

It encourages intercommunal cooperation, collective efforts of civil society in their engagement with peacebuilding and intercultural dialogue. It encourages people to

The bi-communal mental health project demonstrated that the social systems approach can be applied to promote collaboration between two ethnic groups with a long history of conflict.

cooperate with each other beyond constraints and dividing lines.

The Home for Cooperation builds bridges between separated communities, memories and visions.

It offers working spaces for Non-

This approach, it is suggested, can also be used in localities to improve ethnic relations between groups where there is ethnic, racial prejudice, and intolerance.

Governmental Organisations and individuals to design and implement innovative projects.

Today the Home has become an important facilitator for people to

By identifying common areas of need, collaborative relationships that mutually benefit conflicted groups can result in a likelihood of peaceful coexistence.

get together and meet each other within the established UN buffer zone. The Home hosts an extensive variety of cultural, artistic and educational programs to foster creativity and intercultural trust in

Mental Health as a peace process is the single most important aspect in achieving permanent solutions.

Our mental health is the most important aspect when it comes to our relationships with others and how they will be expressed.

Cyprus and internationally.

www.home4cooperation.info

For peace to exist we first must have healthy thoughts, which contribute to positive relationships with others, involving tolerance, acceptance, forgiveness, understanding, and of course love. â—† A Peace Process

Elena Iacovou

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A Sci-Fi story about a computer with a split personality, a mission without a cause, and the endless possibilities of the universe.

Fidelity words

matthew

illustration

harrison

emily

tilzey

Mark and Lily we might call them, although they did not need names – and quite a couple they were. They had been sleeping as their starship sped through the vastness, but now they were nearing their destination the command module woke them for the tasks they were required to perform.

W h at’s on t h i s time?

Mark woke first, and stretched – so to speak. He scanned his environment, and when he sensed his partner was awake, he greeted her with a, »What’s on this time?« although they both knew that the assignment never changed. »Sanitation job, that’s what it looks like,« Lily replied.

She was the fastidious one, not at all keen on the work. »What, chemical scum?« Mark asked.

He was the bad boy of the team, trying to wind Lily up. Lily checked, that was her role, and when she checked, the readings were such as to alarm anyone in their position. »Oh God, it’s worse! Ugh!« »What is it?« Mark asked. »Bugs?

Bugs under each rock?« »Worse than that,« Lily said. »The atmosphere’s active.« Mark, if he could have turned pale, would have done so. »Christ! You mean…?« ☞ Fidelity

Matthew Harrison

»’Fraid so. A whole ecosystem, most likely.«

The starship decelerated rapidly.

The two passengers, unaffected by the high g-force, watched in silence as their destination star grew gradually brighter and planets came into view.

They contemplated the prospect with such imagination as they had. It was truly awful. But they had been conditioned to handle the worst. Mark turned on the banter, trying to make light of it. Lily maintained her resolution in silence.

Planets came into view

The first planets were uninteresting to them, and they passed without comment. As they neared the fifth one in, it was Mark who spoke. »This red one’s in good shape,« he remarked. »Nice and clean, just as the high-ups like them.« »It’s not so clean,« was Lily’s response. »You can see the ice. Quite likely there’s something under the ice.« »Wouldn’t be much,« Mark retorted, »not with so little atmosphere. And it’s cold.« They were still too far from the star for the planet’s surface to receive much warmth. »Though if there is any,« he admitted, »it could be deep in the rock – tricky to get at.« »The planet’s too small,« Lily said. »The high-ups like them larger than that. Like home, you know. It’s the next one that’s our target.« They watched in silence for another long time. The target planet grew slowly on their viewers and the horror of it became unmistakable. »It’s – it’s blue!« stuttered Mark. When faced by a real threat, he lost his bravado. It was Lily who pulled the team together. »We’ve got the tools to tackle it,« she said. »If necessary, we can burn off all the growth.« Mark was still jittery. »Does it have to be this one? There’s still two more – could they have meant those?« He was almost pleading.

Lily looked. There were indeed two more planets. But they were close in.

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»Too hot. The high-ups want something more temperate.« »No,« she concluded, »we have to face it. This is the one, the sixth one in.«

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»My God!« Mark exclaimed. »I suppose it’s not phosphorescence?« he added hopefully.

Why are we doing this?

Mark was recovering. »I suppose we could strip the atmosphere…« »That’s my boy!« Lily said approvingly. »Or just strip the top layer, let the star’s radiation do the rest.«

Must be sentients. »Yes! Then we go in and scrub out what’s left,« said Mark. He was in control of himself again.

The planet grew larger on their viewers. Now that they were close enough, they could see the dark side of it, and the tell-tale signature in the darkness.

Lily shook her head (in a manner of speaking). »Must be sentients.« They both knew what that meant. Unexpected technologies, even fight-back. They’d encountered that once before, ages ago. »We’d better bomb them first,« said Mark. Now that action was imminent, he was calm – even surprising himself, it could be said. »We’d better,« Lily agreed.

They primed the ordnance, long-prepared out of materials from other star systems, and waited for the delivery systems to align. ☞

Fidelity

Matthew Harrison

But do they appreciate it?« Mark was plaintive now. »Do we get any recognition?«

Mark had time to become reflective. »Why are we doing this?« he said at last. »The high-ups – how long is it since we heard from them?«

»Think of it as your good deed for the galaxy,« Lily said.

It was indeed time beyond counting. And the last message when it reached them had been ages old.

Mark laughed, even though they had been through this routine so many times, and braced himself for action.

»We go on, from system to system, cleaning up the dirt, making things good – nice clean bare worlds for them.

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They fired the ordnance, and watched as the white heat of miniature suns burst out in carefully arranged patterns over the face of the planet. It would be a long job, the oceans in particular would need a thorough scouring, but they had taken the first step and they would see the job through. A clean and sterilised world they would deliver, whatever it took.

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Indeed, programmed as they were, there was nothing else they could do. The race that eons ago had built the reclamation ship, and with macabre humour divided the operating software into two persona, might long be dead, but the work would be carried on through star system after star system as long as the ship’s self-replenishing mechanisms lasted.

It was fidelity beyond the grave. â—†

Fidelity

Matthew Harrison

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Three Bridges

what's

cinema the a

the above

failed

problem and

inside

point

of

being

happy

interview with

beyond

and

november

semantics down

below

Cinema Inside Rikki Weir

Sharp graphics reached in, prickling raw-brain innards. Grabbing on both arm-rests, my veins were bulging forearms, flexing away. Music overrode bodily rhythms, to strap me in. This is what it had come to. Here were pinnacles of confusing technologies. But others couldn't see.

This was nothing to them. ☞

three

words

rikki

weir

illustrations

lulu

bridges

heal

Cinema Inside

I was sensitive, like a man from the Inside a pistol, zooming through hellthirteenth century, flopped into a cinema flames, a dragon's play-field. In stark seat. Songs vibrated eyeballs, or jumping kaleidoscopes of playful symmetries now. limbs. Droning with an odd lilt, she was.

Vision zoned fully, unblinking eyes drooped All watchers raved of this into a wormhole. Colour-sound soundtrack, drummed into was near magic inside. Like Missiles, them, these past weeks. Is new life, tripping mind-frames, this how I must live now – f a l l i n g d a g g e r s showing future dimensions – brain threatening to expand we should give ourselves over out its skull, like a gaudy here, be voluntarily forceballoon at TVs? fed. And we paid for this storm, to endure transcendental super-output machines.

Our man sinks quick, pulled by manicured Tingling electrical titbits unpick baseline giantess fingers. Specks of bubble trails are codes, changing inclinations. But we willingly visible about. Underwater striations and subsume ourselves for three hours. curves of aqua-flow overload me. And the dead man seeps into a quicksand, then spurting Eyes were linked in a roll, with the swirls. blood, his cardboard figurine.

Melting musical sights, all gigantic, bounced off my forehead. Sounds caused heat – I felt Missiles, falling daggers; tombstones now. waves of it, in my heart like ice, overflowing Colours are fantastical corners, constantly. with freezing charge.

Turning away a fraction, new morphing activity steals my peripherals. Toying with a A crick now, was at my heart-side, to throw certain audio or visual code off. I tried breathing deep. will unload epilepsy.

With too much oxygen, came Melting exasperation. Trying to count Cold soldier's eyes, we m u s i c a l s i g h t s and inconsolable fast breaths, should admire, race large. my pummelling heartbeat, Now a cartoon, he nearly sitting still. So why was my shoots himself as shadows dance over my body ecstatic? Bubbles rose like cheap cola perceptions. With mind, a jumbling screen, shaken to fizz out my skull. it was time to pressure-cook brains. Now lurid tele-visions penetrated, becoming at What would Agna think? I had to leave here one with my mind, changing all its directions or recover in a loo. But after coming in without into plumes of blood, red seaweed shaped to a a rush, why would I scream away, at this skull. Someone tries to shoot us, as we fly. famed beginning sequence?

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People would look and know something was wrong. Or they might think I walked out in disgust, with a jacket left on my seat.

Couldn't I leave with my coat, just to regain myself. Outside there'd be more pressure to recover, which could seize me faster.

Shivers of weakness ran down edges of heat.

Now all that was to be done in life was here.

And I couldn't turn a muscle without being noticed. I’d never be able to keep out long enough.

bridges

Fizzing energies seared my brain, leaving the body empty. Explosions dissolved under bassy words of an electronically-bolstered voice, everyone here revered. Words echoed, daring myself to repeat them, to test my sanity, that I could control the dialogue, again and again.

I'd survived the first credits with a moltenhot brain-part. Ventilation had somehow become unavailable.

Already exhausted, I'd stopped keeping up Skulls turned to swirling, wounded with opening actions, having forgotten how murderers, dancing guns, in a graveyard. I to watch them. Watching, my eyes began forgot to swallow and missed following wrong spots, a breath, unsure if it could be keep up, making A g n a l o v e s m e couldn't regained. My brain cut away, my mind drift into turning for milliseconds, the screen backgrounds. A car crash but it's all a shone too bright, became an jolted me out, beaten lungs ruse aura of background whiteness. straining to keep up or get Snap changes of scene flashed away. inside, threatening to repeat. The flashes washed through my brain, sticking.

What would happen, once I passed out soon? Agna would always be wary of a crucial Film directors had rooted subliminal chink in me, on my medical record. Employers insignia to infiltrate my type of person away. could find out, knowing my weakness.

And if they desired, with visual trickery I’d be Choosing not to mention it, holding it over me thrown.

– those who I acted strong against.

Light mountains danced behind my eyelids, real green or from extreme brightness?

It would be worse to have a fit whilst closing one’s eyes – harder to escape from the mind and there'd be no-where left to hide.

Agna loves me, but it’s all a ruse. She only likes me dominant. I'm too weak to be single now. There’s no proper reason to leave her.

So she cannot help me. Staying together, I get to be affirmed as normal, to visit cinemas without seeming weird – is this all I want? ☞

Cinema Inside

Rikki Weir

Cinema Inside Rikki Weir

I should grab Agna's hand, for us to be affectionate. But she would never understand this. Was it suitable, to now, take her hand? One wrong move could make me seem extremely improper. The film couldn't hurt me, but what if it did? With my mind floored, electricity crackled inside; feet to slip in the air, all my rules, without traction. Legs tapping, my fists strained anything to keep stopping my mind flying.

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I should've held my head but wanted to appear normal, still. My thoughts were ill-fitting jelly. Scenes bypassed sensory barriers. Years of footage, cut nine-ways, each scene, hyper-defined. Computers distorted warping explosions. Hundreds of workers lived around making a mega-bomb of stimulation – reality super-imbued.

Cinema Inside Rikki Weir

For the next hour or two, blocking out sounds, staring just below, to sides of the big screen, looking at heads, hair colours became impossibly distinguishable, and had to be left.

Now I felt some thrill in having made it this far. Restless for the end, it seemed almost to be appearing, for over an hour.

The reason people have pacemakers is their electrical rhythms were overthrown.

Had I solved movies? The only reason we were all here, was to keep similar. So this was not for me. Did I possess deeper sight to realise refined-vulgarity sensory deluges happening?

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My heart and lungs had just won in an unknown sport – well-stretched and recently inundated with bloody adrenaline. To live and breathe felt excellent. I must lock in these tactics, which had seen me through. So this would never befall me again. I felt better than ever, as if from skydiving. My brain was a calm sea with charged water. ◆

winstanley

Charlie: Myself and my good friend Marcus Barnett were both members of the Socialist Workers Party since we were teenagers. We were both kicked out about five years ago after having argued for more democracy within the party for a long time. One thing of which both of us agreed upon was that there were too many political parties on the Left, none of these groups were discussing with each other, and that the quality of education which these groups were

Charlie: It forces them to sharpen ideas, presenting to people who aren’t actually convinced by any means about what we’re talking about. We also found that the Left was very boring. The discussions that they use, they didn’t respect the format of a discussion. They didn’t see it as a place to learn. They always see it very cynically within a reading of their own pre-determined goals. They’ll have a meeting which was ostensibly about a topical issue,

»What's the point of being happy?«

charlie

interview

real ideas from the core unfolding in front of you. I think that’s what made the events we've organised so successful.

This creates a loyal crowd with a big demographic sweep, including people from all sorts of directions. The vast majority does not come from a political background.

learn more about the Left and happiness.

talk which took place on 5th November 2015 and

Finally I got the chance to talk about this upcoming

attending Spring conference in 2014.

I got interested in what he's involved with after

week afternoon in early November.

I met Charlie at Trof NQ in Manchester on a mid-

NOUS: It makes you think in different ways not speaking in front of your own kind.

Spring was our attempt to create a discussion group, a pressure group on the Left. Drawing together different organisations, drawing them into important, fundamental discussions on their positions and their ideas not in front of an audience of lefties, but the general public. We believe this will force these groups to up their game conceptually in the way they present themselves.

providing to their recruits was poor.

There was a severe lack of a hegemonic analysis or even discussions on global affairs. Everything was very fragmented.

Everyone was pulling in different directions. And a lot of questions, philosophically and structurally, within the Left, were simply not being dealt with. Just being pushed under the carpet.

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Charlie: In all our meetings, we ask fundamental questions to which, we know, there are no answers. We try to get the best representatives we can to reflect the different sides of the discussion, all from the left-wing perspective. Almost everyone you will find on the panel is some form of Marxist. The discussions themselves are not pre-planned entities.

We’ve not set them up. There will be no conclusion drawn from any of them. The process of the discussions themselves is very real, very serious. As a participant or audience member within the discussion you’re able to contribute to a real debate,

NOUS: It’s more of a rhetorical question than a possibility for discussion.

We think the general public can see through this. It’s blatant to see when a left group on campus puts on a meeting like »Can Capitalism save us from crisis?«.

It’s obvious what they’re getting at.

but actually, it was about recruiting students.

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Charlie: Most of the time we use commercial venues, where people have access to the bar, usually in the city centre. We want it to be a relaxed environment where people don’t feel intimidated about coming and interacting in form of discussions on an abstract piece of philosophy.

NOUS: Who should technically be the biggest target group because those are the people the Left stands for.

Charlie: One of our founding principles was the attempt to move away from this orientation, because a lot of the Left are trying to approach students constantly. There’s very little events put on attracting working people.

The Left puts very little organisational effort into engaging working people into intellectual discourse.

NOUS: Do your events naturally attract an audience rooted in the creative and academic scene of Manchester?

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winstanley

We want the events to be entertaining and rewarding. Therefore we structure the events carefully. A lot of time and planning goes into how long we’re gonna give the speakers to perform, how we’re gonna set the room up, how we’re actually gonna prepare the whole thing, cultivate an atmosphere, excitement and interest, as well as provide an accessible discussion.

We also take care the speeches do not turn into 40 minute lectures. Every speaker, no matter how big of a name we get, condenses their point into a 15 or 20 minute presentation with a lot of audience participation afterwards. We want to popularise the idea of going out to a discussion on ethics, philosophy, politics, economics for an ordinary person to be able to enjoy the evening, rather than feel like it’s just some sort of chore lecture or a duty bound idea that they should know about something.

charlie

interview

quite deep and varied. Usually we would start a meeting from this perspective, we start from who’d be our ideal speakers to get and then just work from that point onwards. Branching out, sending emails – we have a good network. The more events we put on, the more people hear about us, the easier it gets to involve bigger intellectual names. We also keep previous speakers in the loop and sometimes invite them a second

undefinable.

Happiness is

Charlie: We have a committee at the heart of Spring. Every member has a background, a history in the Left and has been part of it for quite a long time. After years and years of going to meetings where you don’t get anything personally from it, you want to put on an event that you want to go to. The outcome is

Charlie: What if you're a bad person and are making yourself happy by being

NOUS: Being happy on your own and forgetting about your environment, the people around you, would essentially not work.

The debate at the time, we felt, wasn’t giving it its due course. They were on the panel to discuss something else, but there was a point where they entered into this fascinating argument. Ashley’s main argument is that happiness is not a useful tool with which to criticise capitalism. In this respect, I would argue that happiness is transitory and almost undefinable, and almost impossible to be achieved as a goal. That means the most important thing to do is the right thing rather than doing things that make you happy. Hopefully, doing the right thing, will make a lot of people happy in the long run. But happiness is not the most important thing.

NOUS: How do you select your speakers? Do people approach you, do you decide as a group or is everyone vouching for a person they admire personally, or find worthwhile to preset?

Charlie: These forums already exist.

We would not rule out anybody because they don’t call themselves a Marxist but we do see Spring as a tool for sharpening the discourse of the existing Left. It would be deviating too far from our mission statement, having general discussions across the political spectrum.

There’s an open, honest, subjective purpose behind this mission. We want a more thorough analysis of global affairs amongst a broader section of the public and we’re hoping to drag a few of the leftwing organisations with us.

That’s part of the process.

NOUS: You mentioned most of them come from a left background, have you ever thought about broadening the range of speakers, inviting members rooted slightly to the right?

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Charlie: There are several factors in this. One of them is society’s fixation on mental health. These existentialist questions are indeed very important for a contemporary discourse. It’s important to a lot of people, as they are suffering from mental health issues. We're approaching the topic by piecing apart the very rudiments of that entire question of mental health.

Both of our panelists, Mark Fisher and Ashley Frawley, had this debate at Spring Conference 2014 on a panel discussion.

NOUS: »What’s the point of being happy?« sounds almost like a question of someone experiencing an existentialist crisis. It seems to be quite a pessimistic starting point for a discussion?

time. We usually just start from some kind of issue, either broad or nuanced, to construct the event with. Sometimes it almost feels like a piece of art. For example, the discussion we’re going to have on happiness will be a very personal one for a lot of the people attending.

Mark Fisher on the other hand believes that happiness is a state that can be actively defined. He also believes that you can analyse ways in which Capitalism makes people unhappy. You can see specific functions of Capitalist society which alienate people from themselves, their bodies, disassociates them and makes them live very unnatural existences.

Considering Ashley’s argument, I would disagree. Those unhappy states should be respected for what they are, not actually diminished as some kind of undesirable state. Sometimes, it’s correct to feel anguish, pain and suffering and it’s morally, ethically the right thing to feel, the right state to be in. These states should not be shied away from.

terrible! There’s a discourse around mental health where some of which presumes that happiness is a goal, a state of neutrality, or some kind of peacefulness with oneself.

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winstanley

circle of »happiness«. This discussion was going on during one of our meetings.

So we thought, we should recreate it but actually give the discussion its own platform. We’ve touched on a bit of a cultural zeitgeist. There seems to be a lot of interest which also relates to the

thing to feel.

It's the right

For Mark Fisher, a discourse on happiness is a very important criticism on Capitalism as a whole. This includes tools used in advertisement and media to create irrelevant needs and desires which in the end of the day create a vicious

charlie

interview

One of our first public events »The Primacy of Man - a debate within Humanism: to be a Humanist, do you have to put humanity first?« I was on the panel arguing against Ben Watson from the Association of Musical Marxists,

There is no guarantee that this meeting will end with everybody having some kind of concrete idea. But from past experience of abstract meetings I know that people found them useful, they stay on top of it quite well. Keeping the structure of the event is very important for that. It helps people to focus.

halfway through their lives because what they hit a crisis, they make rapid changes in the way that they’re living.

Charlie: Yes, they consist of six panel sessions of which an individual can attend a maximum of four as two of them run consecutively. During our annual conference we branch out to all sorts of topics, from geopolitics to direct political issues. We also try to touch on philosophy and culture as well, as (luckily) these questions have a broad mix of perspectives.

NOUS: Are your annual conferences held during the course of one whole day?

annual conference never had less than 68 attendees. That was in our first year.

Considering it was ten pound to attend, it’s a good statement of support and interest.

It’s important for us to reflect: Why do we think these thoughts? Ultimately, this leads to very personal questions. What motivates an individual person? If you don’t ask questions, it’s an unhealthy way to be. Politically engaged people often forget about why they got involved in the first place. This can apply to everyone in society. Why are you doing what you’re doing? Some people end brilliant careers

Charlie: Unfortunately, that’s one of the reasons why some of the Left would refrain from having these open-ended philosophical discourses. They believe that they’re effectively indulgent. And I agree, it’s very indulgent but it’s part of the purpose for me.

NOUS: Are you concerned that a debate on a universal issue like happiness might leave the audience alone with a big question mark in the end of the event?

demand for a general discourse around these questions.

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Charlie: We usually run out of seats.

The least seats we had was probably a room of 40 with the discussion of »Primacy of Man«. A very successful discussion was on »Love, Sex, and Alienation« on the nature of relationships with over 100 people attending. »Project Cybersyn«, on a prototype internet system set up by the Chilean government under Allende attracted about 120 people, and our

NOUS: How many people do usually attend your events?

defending, »yes, you do have to put humanity first,« but he was arguing for the universal whole. That argument quickly transformed into a conversation about consciousness, how we perceive the world. This very abstract starting point unfolded.

The risk of it becoming too vague was just as present as with the happiness discussion we’re going to have. In practice it seems to work very well.

Charlie: I think it just looks messy. In the same way, I think, the Left don’t take ideas in their meetings seriously. They don’t seem to challenge their core beliefs and own questions and appearance.

NOUS: Do you think its looks are too old-fashioned and dusted?

Charlie: Spring? It’s three and a half years ago now - the Arab Spring was still happening.

At the time we had a very clear resonance, events unfolding in the rest of the world. Obviously, the name also has a symbolic reference - rebirth. We see ourselves as part of the Left, tightening things up, reuniting a common discussion on a lot of important issues.

We also want to revolutionise the Left’s aesthetics.

NOUS: How did you decide on the name of the project?

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winstanley

Charlie: I certainly think the Left, at one point, was considered aesthetically at the apex of society. Today there’s almost an ideological aversion to this. The level of professionalism and eye to detail which is involved in creating a good tight aesthetic is considered hierarchically market-driven.

NOUS: Do you think that’s one reason why many don’t take the Left seriously anymore? Compared to the 60s and 70s, there’s a decline of attraction.

They’re quite happy to coast on oldfashioned or half-asked imagery without the attempt or desire to create something new. They don’t try to use visuals to impact people emotionally.

charlie

interview

Charlie: We are funded entirely by our members, we also have subscriptions.

All of our members work full-time, all of us work in low wage jobs. We pay for travel expenses, we make sure that our speakers are looked after and no-one gets exploited during the process. It’s a fair deal for everyone. All of that comes out of the dedication of the committee.

Everyone’s made sacrifices in that regard. It’s a lot of money for people on a minimum wage to flash out in order to book venues like Islington Mill in advance for a day. It’s a lot of money to spend £120 on speakers’ transport for a meeting we put on in mid-October.

All this is only possible because the committee themselves are very excited and motivated for what we’re doing.

Charlie: Ha! If it ever became possible for us to pay an organiser – not just myself but there’d be a few people on the committee relevant for this role. I think it would be an amazing job. I’d be doing exactly what I want to do, what I’ve been doing for free without pay for a long time. That would be ideal. At this stage, it’s an idea up high in the sky.

NOUS: Can you imagine doing Spring as a full-time job?

Theoretically, if it was absolutely down to us, we might take money from civic organisations such as trade unions.

It’s hard to imagine those kind of scenarios without having any specific context. It’s quite a difficult question.

NOUS: Have you ever applied for funding and have you been successful in doing so?

A lot of the Left actively embrace amateurism, which is almost an amateurism of principle to be more successful. I think it’s just cluttered and messy. People underestimate the importance of having a clean aesthetic on the way that the people embrace the ideas in a meeting. If you bring forward a meeting that’s organised, consistent - if the entire event looks professional people in the audience are able to view the ideas with more clarity.

If you see the speakers and the panel all bustle in five minutes before the meetings about to start, everything is cluttered, the tables haven’t been set up, or it’s in a bland university lecture theatre - it just doesn’t look good. That environment is not conducive to clear thinking. I’d like to think that this is one of the reasons why our events have been so successful.

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us would compromise our mission statement. Not to consider them makes us more efficient in what we’re doing.

The strings attached to that kind of funding would undermine our project.

If it was totally on our own terms, we would take money from a political party.

amateurism

actively embrace

The Left

Charlie: We’ve got no particular links.

I would be happy to take money from certain directions, from politically left institutions especially. The requirements of the Arts Council in order to fund

NOUS: Have you ruled out getting funded by the Arts Council or even by political organisation or parties. Should they not be interested in supporting an independent project like Spring?

We have a group of people in Ireland, who we want to organise an event with. One of our committee members is based in Turin, Italy. We know people in Germany and Greece. In all of these places we’re hopefully going to organise Satellite Spring events. The committee’s recently started using Skype for our meetings as we find or membership more and more scattered round the country and around the world even. Hopefully it won’t be too much and we can retain the focus. We want to branch out and we want this to be big and influential.

The broader our links, the bigger our range on international affairs, the better.

Especially in regards of future projects.

Charlie: We’ve had a few meetings down in London already, in fact, not just in different cities but also different countries.

NOUS: Have you every thought about taking Spring to different cities or is its place very much in Manchester?

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Charlie: Much, much more open.

They don’t have this engrained, personal stoicism.

NOUS: … they’re much more open than you’d expect.

Charlie: So far, the responses have been very positive. These kind of criticisms you mentioned, rather than coming from this group, comes from people from the organised Left!

They are the ones who consider these conversations to be indulgent and self-focussed. But when it comes to the general public …

NOUS: Do you think a Spring Conference in Greece would look and sound different from the one in Manchester? Do you usually feature speakers who live in the U.K.?

Charlie: We’ve had lots of international speakers as part of past Spring Conferences. Last time we had Maryam Namazie from Iran, we had members of Syriza - in general, we have a very broad spread. We haven’t had the means to fly people over very particularly for a meeting, but we get them when they’re on already existing speaker tours.

How do you address this prejudice, and does to need to be erased?

winstanley

We’d love to create a physical publication in order to build international contacts.

charlie

interview

Charlie: Overall, I’m quite happy. On a case by case basis, I am often stressed,

NOUS: First, you should explore what makes you feel happy and then follow this path with determination. We should not let society dictate what happiness is and what to do. We should support each other in what makes the individual happy, not criticise one another, and always stand up for the ones who are not allowed to feel the way they want to feel.

This will come with big sacrifices. We both work minimum wage jobs in bars, which is not our ideal profession, but we have to do it in order to make a living, keep our projects going. Does that make you happy? How you live your life at the moment?

NOUS: Many people who struggle economically, or with mental health issues, who are part of the working class or the general public, might think these meetings on philosophical questions are a luxury and maybe a bit pretentious to have. Maybe even patronising?

Thanks to our large network for contacts, we’re quite well in the know of where people are and when. I imagine a conversation in Greece would look different though, for all sorts of reasons.

That’s why it is important for us to be a transnational organisation. To get a truly objective perspective on international affairs you need to break out of these national boundaries. Another thing the Left has failed on. Ironically, ideologically speaking all of their beliefs are that boundaries should be destroyed.

In practice, they only work within them.

Very rarely a sustained effort is made to break out of them. When you’re facing very globalised Capitalism, this seems to be a very bad strategical error.

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Some people might find our discussions pretentious, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take. I believe, especially when dealing with mental health difficulties, these frank, personal, and sensitive discussions on deep philosophy are more vital. Not all the time, but some of the time, people struggling are asking themselves exactly these questions about the crisis of being.

Existential struggles might easily lead to depression and anxiety. What are you doing, and why? Personally, having these questions in form of a discussion or conversation, helps me a lot. In anticipation of the event next week. Do you have any opinion on »What’s the point of being happy?«

doing, and why?

What are you

I think they’re able to personally reflect more on these issues than the culture of the Left, which is quite hostile to personal reflection. That’s very unhealthy.

Charlie: The war generation of this country but in particular the people in Europe are a generation of suffering.

It’s obscene. Everything got flattened.

Places have been occupied by other regimes with various different degrees of dictatorial brutality.

NOUS: I had to think of my grandmother when I first saw you’re putting on an event on »happiness«.

I could not stop myself from thinking that this question probably would have never occurred to her.

We’re quite privileged to be able to think these thoughts. She didn't live in an environment encouraging these thoughts, maybe she simply didn’t have the time?

angry … there’s more variation than that.

Ha! You can only really tell when you’re happy retrospectively and say »I was happy then!«. It does make me happy to do these things though.

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winstanley

Charlie: It’s difficult being a human, even when you have your material needs catered for. It’s such a long burning aim

NOUS: It’s very difficult to understand someone who experienced a war from our perspective.

Almost every young surviving man would have been in a situation where they’ve seen someone get killed in front of them or killed someone.

But, that many of the Central European societies have been capable of rebuilding themselves, is staggering in terms of thinking about people’s mental health. And people of our grandparents’ generation show an incredible rigour of stoicism in general.

charlie

interview

suffering to material deprivation, I do see them from a position of privilege – despite the fact that they are very distressing. You could argue that somebody with far less is happier than

thoughts

with your own

over you're left

preoccupation is

Once this

I think, that’s when a lot of these existentialist crises come in. But rather than seeing them as an equivalent

It’s bound to leave some kind of void.

Some absence, and no understanding which is very scary. People sometimes respond to that by panicking.

Charlie: The great existentialist questions still exist! You’re brought into this world very mysteriously, and you’ll probably exit it by yourself. There’s no real telling if it’s going to be okay or not.

You’re bound to be left to think about these things.

NOUS: There is no end and no beginning, because you can always be happier!

Because when people fail to achieve it, inevitably, they’re deficient.

Because whilst your life is made of surviving from day to day you’re often preoccupied, but once this preoccupation is over, you’re left to your own thoughts...

being a human

It's difficult

of civilisation. I definitely think it’s a worthy aim, I don’t want to diminish the goal of achieving material gains. It’s important to us. But it also reveals the next stage of existential doubt.

Going back to Ashley, I agree that happiness as a concept is not something people should aim for consciously. This might cause a lot of problems.

somebody with far more – I see them as an extension of the ability to consider yourself and your meaning, your purpose in the world. That is actually something we should feel privileged to be able to do. If more people saw, being able to ask these questions and also even being able to think enough about your life to feel sad about it, as the privilege which I think it is, then actually I think that could help a lot of people.

Feeling either deficient, or lazy, or spoilt which are in fact natural things to feel sad about and to a degree should be embraced as a natural part of human condition. ◆

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A Failed Interview I had planned to submit an interview It’s an idea so simple that it can with a family member on RD Laing, a be difficult – for a Westerner of my prominent Scottish psychiatrist and generation – to conceive of a time when counter cultural figure. That family his biggest idea was not in effect. Laing’s member knew »Ronny« Laing during his idea was to treat patients as humans. student days, and initially agreed to the That is: as people to be understood and interview but then backed out – perfectly cared for, and not as broken machines to reasonably – at the thought of risking be studied and contained. publication of personal, arguably private tales In the older, colder Patients as and details from world, this idea was Ronny’s early life. radical. But for Laing it humans had even more radical Laing’s life is extensions. Laing wrote saturated with strange tales. His ideas in The Divided Self that schizophrenia and were very different from the conventional other mental »splits« serve as a response wisdom that preceded him, and in death to the »binds« – irreconcilable problems – he is still a world apart from us today. of a traumatic existence.

His specific psychiatric theories are largely discredited nowadays but his legacy went on to become an integral part of modern psychiatric practice.

He even argued that madness can be a self-developmental journey, a risky one, toward progress and health. In his own words: ☞ A Failed Interview Angus Stewart

»Madness need not be all breakdown.

It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.«

Once you understand the person you can aid them on their journey toward good mental health and re-entry into society. Laing was quite seriously recognising the existence of different mental realms.

Are Laing’s ideas offensive? Surely there’s no place for shamanistic journeys and existential angst-navigation in modern medical science? Surely these ideas would get people hurt – they did.

There’s an argument to be had here. In fact, the argument’s been fought, and Laing lost, perhaps rightly.

That radical arm of his project only grew more radical as time moved on.

Like a true emotionally sensitive Scot (we exist!) Laing had his own problems – alcohol, drugs, disparate lovers and children – and those problems moved in tandem with his radicalism.

But it’s not right that he should be forgot. Remember that before him the insane were still being locked up in rooms, left to scream and smash themselves against the walls. Laing hated this and helped put an end to it.

The correct response to an insane world.

Laing eventually reached the conclusion that madness was the correct response to an insane world. His writing became wildly poetic and pessimistic at the cost of rigour and reason. As the sixties became the seventies his project gave up on society altogether and advocated a total exit.

Like a true Scottish romantic he branched out into poetry and in 1970 he published Knots, a curious and special little book which painstakingly details all the weird, harmful little traps and loops that human minds get caught up in. He called them:

Understand the system, understand the person I read The Divided Self last year, and here’s the thrust I seemed to get from it: that schizophrenia is a kind of »defence mechanism« where the individual retreats from the reality of our society into their own personal reality, governed by its own peculiar, individualised system.

You have to understand the system to understand the person.

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»[…] tangles, fankles, impasses, disjunctions, whirligigs […]«

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Knots is one of the wonderful places in literature where science and storytelling intersect. It is also a place where sanity and madness blur. Some of the »knots« Knots describes are everyday sillinesses that we should all recognise in ourselves.

Other sillinesses are clearly not sane. But many more of the »knots« in Knots are somewhere in-between on a spectrum that many of us would prefer not to recognise. Here’s an example: They are not having fun.

I can’t have fun if they don’t.

If I get them to have fun, then I can have fun with them.

Getting them to have fun, is not fun. It is hard work.

I might get fun out of finding out why they’re not.

I’m not supposed to get fun out of working out why they’re not.

But there is even some fun in pretending to them I’m not having fun finding out why they’re not.

Many mental illness, of course, are nowadays rightly attributed to genetic vulnerabilities, physiological causes and chemical imbalance in the brain, but in his life’s work Laing was trying to describe madness created by intangible experiences in the real world. Through Laing’s lens we are all a little bit insane, tied up in our own binds and knots.

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Our day-to-day mental wellbeing depends to some extent on how we can sidestep these knots, and on how to recognise and untie the knots when avoidance fails, and even learn to laugh at the knots and at our own general ridiculousness.

This can’t be the job of pure scientists.

It’s up to poets, scientific poets, and poetic scientists to investigate human life and articulate it in ways that studies and data can’t. (I think »poetic scientist« is a decent description of a prose writer.) And then after or beyond us it’s up to visual artists to describe the things words can’t touch. We shouldn’t be cynical about this. Writers and visual artists can describe human life and human problems quite directly. If you’ve got a bit of craft and discipline it isn’t difficult, because the process isn’t artificial. It’s natural – built into who we are as a species.

Speaking from my own experience I can see the sense in what Laing was arguing for. I’ve never been mentally ill, but I’m not immune to knots and I’m no stranger to hardship or grim mental journeys. It’s strange to say, but writing thousands of words about fictional people and their stories changed my outlook on life for the better. I came to feel far less powerless.

I realised quite early on that I mostly write about insecure, unconfident people, afraid or unable to take their place in the world. ☞ A Failed Interview Angus Stewart

I learned a lot about the things which healed them, and the things which crushed them. I learned how to make them move their asses and get their shit together. Am I navigating my own problems by proxy?

[…] When you visualised a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity […] When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate.

Hate was just a failure of the imagination. [...]

Am I navigating my own problems by prox y?

Maybe. In any case my creative work has changed the way I treat myself, and how I observe and understand people in the real world. The best example is close to home. I’ve seen a family member quit her job due to anxiety and mental illness, and find the road to health through a low stress, craft-based job.

This involved a steep pay-cut, but it allowed her personal space, expression, and a renewed sense of purpose in life. I couldn’t help but understand.

Writing, painting, therapy… they are all about »visualising«. Laing understood this. Dealing with mental health and mind culture is a major task for people who would create. So very often, creative work serves as a reflection of our human journey through the Laingian knots and whirligigs of our own inner world, so as to help us better survive the real one. ◆

I love my family, and see myself in everything they do. I see my characters too, lost and alone. I see a universal kind of hurt. Graham Greene said in The Power and the Glory that

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Ronald David Laing born 7th October 1927, died 23rd August 1989, usually cited as R. D. Laing, was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness – in particular, the experience of psychosis.

Laing's views on the causes and treatment of serious mental dysfunction, greatly influenced by existential philosophy, ran counter to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the day by taking the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of lived experience rather than simply as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder.

Laing was associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, although he rejected the label.

Politically, he was regarded as a thinker of the New Left.

A Failed Interview Angus Stewart

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The Problem with Semantics »Have you ever though about killing yourself,« Morgan asked, the spoon swirling cream through his coffee.

She’d told the doctors the truth about wanting the anxiety to stop. She’d taken the first pill and felt nothing – only static, the itch of panic, and the incessant buzz that crept beneath her skin. How could she make new friends when new people and unfamiliar settings made her anxiety rise like water in a straw, taut and compressed, her heart beating like a deer with a shotgun aimed at its heart.

»Who hasn’t,« she said with the sincerity of thinking everyone had. »I haven’t. I mean not for real,« he said.

It just made sense to her, that in this strange, beautiful, fucked up world that everyone would come to a precipice on which they’d face that infamous question to be or not to be.

»You took eight times the dosage,« he said, his voice elevated and steady like the constant locomotion of a wheelbarrow tire.

»Did you do it on purpose,« he said.

»The first ones didn’t work,« she said, »but then I got dizzy and texted you.« Morgan never liked to leave things alone.

The heat seeped through the porcelain mug that she cradled in her hands.

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A conversation with about social anxiety, the desire to belong and the attempted cure through medication.

He knew there were tricks in semantics.

Sometimes you just wanted to fade into He knew to listen for the exact words a oblivion as if it were a place of peaceful person used because they were the insight slumber where you could lie like a cocoon, into how they thought, how their minds with warm sun on your closed eyelids. And made sense of the world. dreams would be light He knew there were and happy, or maybe there He knew loopholes and empty would be no dreams at all. pockets. He knew that Just a state of suspended there were words hated to be pinned bliss where the mind down with their eyes open couldn’t connect synapses loopholes in the light. and there was a forgetting, an emptying of all the The problem with the word suicide, she things that had accumulated since birth. thought, is that it doesn’t take into account that sometimes you don’t want to die.

The problem with words is that they limit Sometimes you just want to stop even as they define. everything and go back to when you weren’t It sounds like a cry for help, he thought, this person who had trouble facing the but kept this notion to himself. world. ☞

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She’d called when she felt dizzy which meant she was scared.

She thought she might have overdosed. Maybe she didn’t want to go. Maybe she just wanted a part of her gone.

The problem with social anxiety, she thought, is that she never felt comfortable with a therapist. The problem with therapy was that she didn’t tell anyone she went. She’d made that mistake once before in the lunch room and watched But how do you the eyes of co-workers Am I eliminate only parts widen at the edges, n a v i g a t i n g m y the look of pity as the of yourself? receptionist pursed o w n p r o b l e m s her lips, the sliding »They’re going to let me go at work,« sentences of her cube by prox y? she said. »They’re mate who’d told her to going to assist me in keep doing it and she’d getting help but they don’t want to be build up a tolerance. responsible.« No one understood. Afterwards she’d She wondered if she’d known this locked herself in the last bathroom all along, knew that by going placidly stall to cry. to the ER she was creating a trajectory in time where the end result was How was it so easy for other people to her coming back home. Maybe the chat, to mingle? subconscious does strange things, Why did it feel as though she might trying to protect us from ourselves? spontaneously combust? »Isn’t that discrimination,« he said, »My cousin John’s a lawyer, I’m sure he’d look into it if I asked.« »No, it’s okay,« she said. »They’re giving me a going away package and full insurance for two months. I can go to an inpatient program if I want, find a better therapist, and now it won’t matter if it’s on my record.«

When she thought about this never going away, that’s when she though about not existing. It would be so much easier. Dealing with things is hard. »I think that we tell ourselves stories,« Morgan said, »And sometimes they become a justification for our life.« He set his coffee down on the floor of the patio. ☞

The Problem with Semantics

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»I believe you have anxiety and panic attacks,« he said, »And I’m sorry. They sound fucking awful. But I don’t think they’re forever. I think we can change our story, we just get so wrapped up in that being us.« »Part of me wants to believe you.

Part of me wants to punch you in the face,« she said. »I’m so tired of being uncomfortable.« “What if it’s not?« »How do you mean?« »What if time is just different, like when moms have babies there’s a number of hours for the discomfort but then they forget.

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It’s almost like their mind erases the pain otherwise why on earth would they choose to do that more than once?

So what if there’s a time-line for this anxiety, with an ending point, but you can only see it when you’re outside of it. When you’re in it it feels like forever, but I think there’s a ending, and a forgetting point.« »Maybe,« she said, liking the idea of letting herself step back further and further from her life, seeing it as a time-line on a page. In the end we don’t remember time, just memories. This could all be a blimp, nothing more than a tiny elevated speed bump. This could all be forgotten.

When he left the porch he said he’d be back soon. She said she'd be here with her coffee, her blanket, and a book about a girl who had a clock for a heart.

Maybe time was malleable after all. ◆

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Above and Beyond and Down Below

My first contact with Leonora Carrington was whilst on a work away trip in Croatia. Lucy my well-read friend had a book with a great cover – it looked a bit like a neater Quentin Blake drawing.

How our writer met Leonora Carrington, and why we all should get to know this surrealistlady much better.

A simultaneously brightly coloured but muted sleeve depicting what looked like either old women or decaying babies, sipping mushroom tea, eating sardines. I was on the verge of having little breakdown, feeling a million miles away from secure and submerged in a blanket of paranoia.

I eventually wound up imposing what felt like overly dramatic self-inflicted exile on myself. Leaving the very trip I’d orchestrated one week early, stranding my friends in the middle of a forest next to an industrial estate just outside of Split.

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Drawing on her monastic education in a Just that she’d had a fling with Max Ernst and number of convent schools and a Spanish an attempt to rescue her from the asylum was lunatic asylum and her interest in esoteric made by her childhood nanny who, legend has history and religious iconography The Hearing it, came to fetch her in a yellow submarine.

Trumpet is a farcical short story centring around the exploits of Recently the Tate She had a 92 year old Marian Leatherby, Liverpool had a packed off by her relatives to a f l i n g w i t h M a x retrospective about home for the elderly in Mexico Carrington’s life and Ernst where she unravels the dark, work. I went to a study supernatural history of the day where myself and convent’s previous inhabitants. another well-read female friend, Alison, learnt about the significance of I wish I’d read that book there and religious symbolism within her work, the orbs then in Croatia because the humour and egg shapes, prominent androgynous hybrid weightlessness of it really tapped into creatures and ethereal and dark humour in her something within despite not being a 92 takes on Bosch and other works of renaissance year old living in a care home art. I learnt that she had in South America. I ended up an intense obsession with Rescued from buying the book myself over a alchemy and death – not to year later, consuming it all in mention an amazing sense an asylum the space of a day in Barcelona of humour. in a yellow on another trip where I’d began to try and re-establish ties with Born in 1917 in submarine far away friends who I’d also Lancashire, Carrington was had delusions about previously raised amongst the Gothic which thankfully never grew to the dizzying architecture of Crookhey Hall, her wealthy heights of the conspiracies and fanciful family mansion. Her childhood was filled hallucinations that Carrington’s experienced. with the ghosts of the Pendle witches, Irish fairy tales, an obsession with animals, horses I didn’t know anything about Ms in particular, and an enduring influence of the Carrington, about her artwork, her life story. convent schools she was expelled from. ☞ Above and Beyond and Down Below

Imogen DeCordova

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What can sometimes seem like a Carrington spent much of her time nauseating story of a spoilt English adding bits of writing to her »Manual debutante rebelling against the wellof Disobedience«. meaning and generally supportive parents is also a tale of a black lamb, She retorts to her art teacher’s suffocated by the misogynistic dismissal of Acrimboldo’s hybrid fruit, expectations of a vegetable paintings social class and time the work of A m b i d e x t e r i t y as which couldn’t be someone who »has further away from to be sick« that »he was seen as what she envisions for has an overwhelming b e i n g a s i g n o f imagination, he is a herself. genius.« mental defect.

According to Leonora, a beautiful Her work is often fictionalised tribute to Carrington by categorised as feminist magical long-time friend Elena Poniatowska, realism and the supernatural even Carrington’s ambidexterity was otherworldly characters that feature seen as being a sign of »mental defect« in it could easily be interpreted in that by the nuns in her convent school. way. She herself appears to have been characterised as a contemptible manic Poniatowska animates Carrington’s pixie dream girl figure of a muse childhood and womanhood to the in relation to Ernst which is easily fullest extent. disputable once you Breathing life into see her work, read A manic pixie her adolescent her short stories and observations, (»Along learn more about dream girl with the knives the her experiences. kitchen drawers hold f igure of a muse scents that must Carrington by her have come all the way own admission is from Mesopotamia«) and describing cut from a different cloth in all aspects the celestial visions that Carrington of life. I’m mostly drawn to her acerbic experienced as a kid go a long way humour and cutting commentary from to explain the subterranean feel and what little literature and accounts I’ve ectoplasmic like texture to all of her read of her. art work.

☞

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Down Below was Carrington’s account of her time at the lunatic asylum in Spain and the Cardiazol induced shock treatments, an analeptic drug causing seizures capable of fracturing vertebrae; Carrington’s account of which is said to be one of the most comprehensive and accurate patient descriptions of the drug available today.

The drug was thought to induce epileptic symptoms in order to relieve psychotic symptoms as it was believed to produce lucidity in patients with schizophrenia.

Literally rejecting other people’s portrait of her, she refuses to be photographed by Man Ray and doesn’t covet the idea of being a supporting role joining Ernst’s collection of fallen women turned »crazy« by his indifference.

Aware of the surrealist habit of romanticising the mad, feral woman, Carrington confides in Andre Breton that, »nobody here belongs to my world. Sometimes it makes me happy, but at others I’m afraid of losing my mind.« And reading Leonora, it’s impossible not to be incensed by the thinly veiled sexism and objectification of these beautiful, comparably »unhinged« and ultimately disposable women.

As Carrington notes wryly: »What in men is regarded as creativity in women is regarded as madness.«

In »I was Convulsed, Pitiably hideous: Convulsive shock treatment in Leonora Carrington’s Down Below«, an essay examining Carrington’s experience, the author Ann Hoff asks: »Is Carrington faithfully recounting a brutal course of medical treatments or joining her contemporary surrealists in putting psychoanalysis »in the service of poetry and revolution«.

In response to Breton’s claim that, »beauty will be convulsive or it will not be at all« Poniatowska ponders by way of Carrington: »…Why is Breton himself not possessed of this convulsive beauty, why does it always have to be a woman?

Breton does not offer himself as a candidate to wake up in a bed of a morning, naked and smeared with his own faeces. What he would prefer is for the woman to return to the abyss so he can analyse her and so complete his views on the unconscious«.

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Cardiazol brought about painful spasms and Carrington was tied down to prevent injury. She recounted that she was left to lie in her own urine and faeces and given ice cold baths at any point during the day. This was an asylum meant for the upper class and height of society, aristocracy and well connected.

»Was pronouncing her »incurably insane« a reasonable diagnosis or just medical hyperbole?« Viewed retrospectively through a modern psychiatric lens it is accepted that the combined trauma of WWII and Carrington’s

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violently emotional response to Ernst’s incarceration caused her to deteriorate rapidly whilst living in St Martin d’Ardeche and on her escape route through to Madrid.

Three years after her experiences Luis Morales the doctor treating her in Santander admitted that it was possible that Carrington was »actually sane in her adaptation to society as it was at that time«, and wondered »if now she would even be classified as ill«.

By that point it was too late for Carrington and the experience would go on to inform her private life and creative work for years to come:

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I’ve found there to be a little bit of her in all of my female friends and have taken every opportunity to introduce her into their lives as my friend did to me. A domino effect rippling and reconnecting me to relationships I had previously thought unsalvageable and also to an interest in the unknown and other through her restless desire not to have her soul and what she considers her very reason for being ripped and exercised out of her. ◆

Leonora Carrington was born 6th April 1917 and died 25th May 2011.

»After the experience of Down Below I changed. Dramatically. It was very much like having been dead … it was very clear, I was possessed. I’d suffered so much when Max was taken away to the camp, I entered a catatonic state, and I was no longer suffering in an ordinary human dimension. I was in another place. It was something quite different…«

She was an English-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter, and novelist.

She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City, and was one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s.

Carrington eventually settled down in Mexico viewing it as virginal and vast, unlike the »stewed hotpot of Europe where everything has already been cooked«. Her status in Mexico as a surrealist heroine and virtual anonymity here still perplexes me and adds to Mexico’s reputation as an embryo for surrealist figures such as Alejandro Jodowrowsky and Frida Khalo.

Would she have survived reigned in, her mouth full with the bit, in the stables of Crookhey Hall?

Leonora Carrington was also a founding member of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Mexico during the 1970s. fundacionleonoracarrington.org leocarrington.com

November poem

by

michelle

chen

The smoke is purple, I swear, though I’m only a novice synesthete — Andy Warhol can’t be the only one. It isn’t expensive swatches of high antiquity that rise across these starless backwood windows and not the sepia smatter of spat grape gum but divination, or some chemist’s toxic mist.

A nurse moves her lung and exhales antiseptic onto the fresh wound on my arm, patting it down as if she were planting tomatoes in an overgrown, Jurassic backyard on a rainy day when the forecast was only a five-percent chance of precipitation.

A kind of remembering for the days when I hid long after the seekers were gone.

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My second wind comes when they bring out that funny game where everyone gives a card and someone has to choose the noun that matches the adjective the best so I put chicken nuggets when they flip over shy and bed for tall because I rise and fall on this ninth-floor mattress with the help of Benadryl and Low Motivation.

They talk to me in sweeter voices and I listen in hazy muscle memory as they watch over me like an addict’s eyes follow tobacco smoke.

The young yodels from the children’s ward melt my heart like an astrologer’s eyes dissolve while sneaking a glimpse of that rare eclipse.

I freeze with every caterwaul, mark, near-lethal attempt I discover of the people around me. Whenever that song comes on — I’m not crazy, I’m just a little unwell — they dip their heads and press their hands together and I follow.

I cannot tell Reich from recreation.

It was November in that Manhattan hospital and on my fourteenth day they let me go. I miss Andy Warhol’s artwork decking the walls and that purple smoke like I do the ouija boards and tarot cards in those specialty stores that I’m afraid of spending actual fricking money on, sometimes, just like how I miss dangerous tulips and Nostradamus light.

November

Michelle Chen

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Thanks for visiting Wo r l d ' s A p a r t .

See you in springtime!

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Angus Stewart is a restless Scot with a fair share of bad habits and a degree in English and Creative Writing. He has been writing seriously for a few years now and has managed to put a peaceful novel, a violent novella, and two equally yin-yang collections of his writings up on the Amazon Kindle Store. He loves animals, lager, and evening sunlight. ☞ dustsymbols.tumblr.com Atelier McClane is a duo of artists from Rennes, France. Formed in early 2013 and composed of Julia Crinon and Hugo Marchal. They revolve in various fields: mural, installation, screenprinting, publishing. They are dedicated to the »four-hands« drawing method and DIY attitude.

Barbara Ruth is a photographer, poet, essayist, and fiction writer and memoirist. Her work appears in the following 2015 anthologies: Lunessence: A Devotional For Selene; QDA: Queer Disability Anthology; Tales Of Our Lives: Women and Health; and Slim Volume: This Body I Live In. She is a daughter of Yemaya; Potowatomee, Ashkenazi Jewish, and Welsh; a member of the neuroqueer community; a yogi; an animist whose spirituality is informed

by Native American, Sufi, Buddhist and Jewish Renewal teachings; a vegetarian for 40 years; an eco-anarcha-feminist; a Silicon Valley housing justice activist, and an out lesbian everywhere she goes.

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Bekah Steimel is a poet aspiring to be a better poet. She lives in St. Louis, MO, USA and can be found online at ☞ bekahsteimel.com and @BekahSteimel Benjamin Mervis lives in Copenhagen and works at a restaurant by the harbor.

Occasionally he gets the chance to write as well.

Born in Edinburgh, Tim Kloed is a freelance creative based in the Midlands, UK. He studied illustration at Norwich University College of the Arts and Communication Design at Fachhochschule Mainz, Germany. Specialising in pen and ink illustrations and printmaking, he has a methodical, meticulous approach to his work and a keen eye for detail.

Camille Smithwick lives in Manchester. She’s not from Manchester. She’s not staying in Manchester. She is not educated to a higher level.

Carlos Bernal was born in 1985 in Bogotá D.C., Colombia. He graduated from the Arts Faculty of the National University of Colombia and obtained a Masters in Plastic Arts at Rennes 2 in 2015. Carlos also studied typography and editorial design at the University of Buenos Aires.

He now lives in Rennes, France. He’s most interested in repetition, states of waiting, expectation and imagination.

His current research focuses on the elasticity of time and a critical attitude of what is believed in by society.

about

our

contributors

Charlie Winstanley is a full time bartender, life-long socialist and Chair of Manchester Spring, an organization devoted to inspiring debate and discussion within the Left. He is also Director of Salford Community Theatre Project, working on a community theatre production of Love on the Dole to be shown in July 2016. ☞ manchesterspring.org.uk ☞ salfordcommunitytheatre.org

Her favourite travel destinations London, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Brussels, Copenaghen, Keys Islands, Sedona, New York, and Berlin are her biggest inspiration. Today, she lives and works in the foggy hills of Parma together with her precious little wolves who are her ever-present advisers and guides through the fogs.

Emily Tilzey's work is inspired by the delicate state of mind a lot of us are in.

We are experiencing constant flashes of energy and bouts of thoughts and feelings, our experience of life can be very uncertain, and is, often. People fascinate her with their complexities and mysteries.

Chris Bethell lives and works in London. He often gets send out to protests to cover tensions visually by VICE. Elena Adorni was born in Parma, Italy, in 1990. She uses photography as an explorative tool and as an instrument to get closer to people and things. She uses film to project movements and sounds as evocative contrails of life. As an artist she is interested in developing an understanding of displaced communities and of the environments we belong to.

Fabiyas M V is a writer from Orumanayur village in Kerala, India. His fiction and poems have appeared in Westerly, Forward Poetry, Literary The Hatchet, E Fiction, Off the Coast, Anima, Structo, and in several anthologies. He won many international accolades including the Poetry Soup International Award, USA and Merseyside at War Poetry Prize from Liverpool John Moores University, U K.

Elena Iacovou is a professional writer and meditation teacher, who calls Australia and Cyprus her home. She writes for health magazines as a freelancer and is in the process of completing her first novel and children’s book. She currently teaches meditation at the Home for Corporation in Cyprus.

Gozde Naiboglu is a researcher and writer from Istanbul, currently based in Manchester. Her interests include film and media theory and philosophy, aesthetics of work and exhaustion, biopolitics and affect, and feminist materialisms. She teaches courses on film, media and gender at the University of Manchester and the University of Lincoln.

Eleonora Bonanzinga is an Italian illustrator based in Parma. After Art School, she specialized in illustration at IED European Institute of Design in Milan.

She collaborates with theatres and magazines, and takes part in different exhibitions such as Paratissima Art Fair at Turin Exhibitions space. In June she won the first prize at Inchiostro Festival, based in Alessandria, for the young illustrators competition Mappamøndi.

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Hanonymity draws and paints intricate complications on paper or found objects such as vinyl records. ☞ www.facebook.com/hanonymity

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Henry Tobias Jones is a writer living and working in Peckham, London. All of his writing is primarily concerned with the conflict created by the effect of the wider world on the individual. He is currently writing his first non-fiction book: Outlaws; A History.

James Campbell is a barfly who lives in Lancashire and works in Mental Health.

He reads spoken word poetry when sufficiently drunk. Distrusting of education and equipped with a paranoid zeal, he is currently studying for an MA in Literature.

Imogen DeCordova works for a Manchester based Mental Health support charity and enjoys writing.

Jasmine Chatfield is a poet and writer who organises spoken word events and runs workshops in Manchester.

She co-founded and co-hosts monthly literature cabaret event FLIM NITE, and has recently joined the Stirred Poetry feminist collective. She performs as part of poetry duo Dead Lads. Her work can be found at Neon, Sleepy House Press and The Cadaverine amongst other places. She can also be found on Twitter ☞ @jazzchatfield

J. J. Steinfeld is a Canadian fiction writer, poet, and playwright who lives on Prince Edward Island, where he is patiently waiting for Godot’s arrival and a phone call from Kafka. While waiting, he has published sixteen books, including Should the Word Hell Be Capitalized?

(Stories, Gaspereau Press), Would You Hide Me? (Stories, Gaspereau Press), An Affection for Precipices (Poetry, Serengeti Press), Misshapenness (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions), A Glass Shard and Memory (Stories, Recliner Books), Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions), and Madhouses in Heaven, Castles in Hell (Stories, Ekstasis Editions). His short stories and poems have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies internationally, and over forty of his one-act plays and a handful of fulllength plays have been performed in North America.

Jake Duff was born 24 years ago and has regretted it ever since.

John Gosslee is an American poet, the editor of Fjords Review and director of C&R Press. In 2016 work will appear in Poetry Ireland, St. Ann’s Review, Agenda and many others. Rafael Fuchs Gallery will feature his first solo show of redacted contemporary poets. ☞ www.johngosslee.com Lulu Heal is a Manchester based illustrator specialising in hand drawn imagery and digital designs. Her illustrations are a direct manifestation of her avid interest in the human form and exploration of the human condition. She is also part of Generic Greeting Collective, a Manchester based arts collective which she regularly exhibits and collaborates through. ☞ www.genericgreeting.co.uk

about

our

contributors

Lydia Cotterell is a recent Manchester School of Art graduate, specialising in illustration and textile screen printing.

With a passion for folk art, costume and children’s illustration she translates hand drawn illustrations and ideas though bold alternative digital and screen printed surface pattern.

the Lincoln Center. Her work has been honored both regionally and nationally and has appeared in the Sharkpack Poetry Review, The Critical Pass Review, Across the Margin, Transcendence, Alexandria Quarterly, Ember, and elsewhere.

Natalie Nicolaides is aart historian, and arist with a day job, cultivating a mind for vivid imagery. She currently lives in Limassol, Cyprus.

María Piedad Aguirre is a 24 years old visual artist who works with photomontage and photo manipulation techniques. She holds a B.Arch. and is currently living in Valparaíso, Chile.

Paul Balykin studied Communication Design at the University of Applied Sciences Mainz and worked as an Illustrator and Animator for a creative agency. After his graduation he fully dedicated his time to freelance work.

Matthew Harrison lives in Hong Kong, and whether because of that or some other reason entirely his writing has veered from non-fiction to literary and he is currently reliving a boyhood passion for science fiction. He has published numerous SF short stories and is building up to longer pieces as he learns more about the universe. Matthew is married with two children but has no pets, as there is no space for these in Hong Kong. ☞ www.matthewharrison.hk

Primoz Zorko is an independent photographer and graphic designer working on both commercial and art projects.

The rest of the time he is probably someplace warm, surfing. He currently lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Rikki Weir lives and works in London.

Her work has been featured both online: Stimulus Respond, Pen Pusher, Trespass) and print: Inky Needles. She is currently editing her novel – of which this piece is the second chapter. Rikki asks you: »Any guesses what the film was?«

Michelle Chen is a sixteen-year old poet, writer, and artist who lives for paper mail, warm zephyrs, and fried noodles. She takes inspiration for her writing from the events that occur in and around her home, New York City.She was born in Singapore and hopes to return and visit someday. She is the firstprize winner of the 2015 Knopf Poetry prize and the Norm Strung Youth Writing Competition, the recipient of The Critical Junior Poet’s Award, and has performed at

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ruiné started off as a magazine project

by Benedikt Fischer and Neven Allgeier in Mainz, Germany. Back in 2010 the first of three issues was released. The series captured fragments of »a new zeitgeist« through visual art, poetry and non-fiction. ruiné predicts the inevitable return of humanity to naught. Man is ruiné. ruiné is messanger and mirror of the zeitgeist. ruiné work and live in Frankfurt. ☞ www.ruine.biz Thom Sheridan is a 56 year old freelance photographer based in Cleveland. He’s married with a 29 year old son.

VOID collective started in 2015 by Josh R Wilson and William S Parslow with the intention of blurring the lines between graphic design and art currently focusing on shape and form. Follow them on Instagram. ☞ @peak_s & @slimygoldfish Z Zoccolante is an author, actress, and fairytale dreamer whose debut memoir will help those with eating disorders attain happiness and freedom. Originally from Hawai’i, she now lives in LA pursuing her multifaceted dreams and her MA in psychology. Subscribe to her mind’s weekly blog and audio. ☞ www.zzoccolante.com

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thank

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distributors, advisors purpose and

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films in

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seven

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recommend

inspiring

connection the

of

to

worlds

was

next

will

Bruges-la-Morte Georges Rodenbach, 1892

-

R.U.R. - Rossum's Universal

year.

Robots

homework

a

Karel Capek, 1920

great

Poet in New York Federico GarcĂ­a Lorca, 1940

Watch

1984 George Orwell, 1946-1948

2001: A Space Odyssee Stanley Kubrick, 1968

The Malayan Trilogy Anthony Burgess

Koyaanisqatsi

1956-1959

Godfrey Reggio, 1982 Powaqqatsi

Avenge but one of

Godfrey Reggio, 1988

my two eyes

by Avi Mograbi, 2005

Chungking Express Wong Kar-Wai, 1996

Documentary Films of MA Visual Anthropology

Divorce Iranian Style

Class of 2015

1998

criccrac2015.org

On Being Free Frithjof Bergmann, 1977 The White Hotel DM Thomas, 1981 Knots R.D. Laing, 1970

by Kim Longinotto

Down Below

& Ziba Mir-Hosseini,

Leonora Carrington, 1945

Good-bye Lenin Wolfgang Becker, 2003

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Listen You Look Like A Sad Painting On Both Sides Of The Sky Money Apparition Stealing Sheep Unwell

My Lies

Matchbox Twenty

MOTHER

The Divided Self

I think I am a Ghost

AuditChaos

Trianglecuts

Life in Units

Don Giovanni

Blood Sport

W.A. Mozart Mes Tou Vosporou Ta Stena Dalar Highway 61 Revisited Bob Dylan Space Oddity David Bowie

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need

loved

to

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f rom How S o on Is Now? by t he Smit hs