Notes at Dusk – our second issue of the academic year and last of 2020 – is a collection of shadows and outlines, flickers and whisperings: the half-lit moments of stillness and strangeness that line the edges of the everyday. As the year closes up and the days draw in, we often find ourselves paying more attention than usual to diurnal rhythms, seasonal change, and subtleties of light. However, these daily cadences have seemed even more prominent during this particular shift from autumn to winter, which has been accompanied by a lockdown that has disrupted old routines and created new temporalities. Many of the pieces in Issue 64 evoke the quiet wistfulness brought about by this time of year, but they also remind us that endings are not always melancholy, drawing our attention to, for instance, the beauty of a vivid sunset, the delight of sending a letter out into the future, or the apple-skin crispness of a cold winter’s day. blurb by Georgie Newson-Errey
notespublication.com
2
issue 64
at dusk
4 Duplex Francesca Weekes 5 Virtue Ben Philipps 6 dearest, Suining Sim 7 8 Sundown Anatomy Dominic James 9 Holding Pattern Paul Norris, photo by Sophie Holloway 10 My Name in His Hand Bethan Holloway Strong 11 12 Carnevale MMXX Harry Cochrane 13 Why He Hasn't Texted You Back Alex Hayden-Williams 14 photo by Alex Hayden-Williams 15 Survivor's Guilt Christian Yeo 16 Apple Day Cal Hewitt 17 18 Snail Ben Philipps 19 The Advantages of Buying a Home in the Country Gregory Miller 20 Half-Formed Thing Polly Bodgener 21 Underground Man Sophia Ash 22 In the Absence of Music Saul Barrett 23 24 Memories of a Montreal Evening Ahmad Aamir Malik 25 A Rough Kindness Francesca Weekes 26 poem by Will Randell 27 photo by Alex Hayden-Williams
Cover by Verity Ali
3
D
u
p
l
e
x
I need, like a conversation with shoes off, Someone else’s last hatred not to matter
Your first hatred I said didn’t matter For the time it took to boil an egg –
For the moment in time when the unboiled egg boils, Can I think on this without interruption?
Alone, I think of you uninterrupted, Waiting for the radio to croon another long ‘u’
Humming, awaiting the kettle’s long ‘u’, The egg boiled, I rise and pour your coffee
A boiled egg, coffee plunged, black no sugar, My mind in so great a degree formed –
I’ll try not to mind so great a form, Shoes on, shoes off, needing no conversation.
Francesca
Weekes
4
Let's
make
the
best
of
it
& after soaking for centuries harriet climbed out of the bath went down to the living-room leaving damp footprints on the carpet downstairs was dirty everyone was bleary-eyed curtains drawn & in the kitchen somebody was coughing
Ben
Philipps
5
dearest,
i am starting to suspect there are mice in this house. davey says he hasn’t seen any, but as i also suspect he has claimed one as a pet he is far from the most reliable source. sarah says i should just let him. i think i might. i wonder what it might say about me or politics or the state of the world that of late i have been wanting love like a tap; a fountain bubbling over its rims over its sides, my sides, pouring down in waves and waves of generosity. in some senses there may be ego - there is always ego, isn’t there? ——— but isn’t it the most magical thing, to do something for someone just because? i can imagine you laughing at me. but i swear! i swear. i was just thinking of our conversation the other day. a golden fern floats past my window from your cambridge to mine. i imagine it carried by the easterlies over the north atlantic, sinking this moment with the weight of meaning. sinking! what a funny word. not at all like drowning, but in some sense a weighted and comforting presence over your own. and what a comfortable presence meaning is. i am thinking now of you, fields; the temperatures dipping towards the 80s and you weaving little daisy chains over your knee in the light of possibility. how obsessed we were with habit! every day, the cherry coke, the fairy rings; our precious things buried deep within the mulch. the sun was orange and in that moment it felt like it would go on forever and i might have be okay with it going on forever, wrapping tight around us and keeping death behind a gauzy white sheet.
6
i wonder what it might look like, life without order or ordering habits like routine. would it work? we build our habits for permanence, i think. fear of death, held back by only possession. this is my house, painted blue because of you, flowered over because of the day, the bridge and yet might we not truly taste if the veil just - fell? sinking its teeth in all our precious things and setting us free in the drift of the world. what remains when we move on! what is it that i have/ will touched that will mean anything actually? some days i demand it should; that meaning is held in people. the power of finding something in another, of doing good things for no reason, no tax breaks, no health insurance, no parties. just you, me, the winter sea. the summer light spreads slow across the water lapping eight, ten, sixteenforty-two, licking the inch beneath our feet. to see it coming. to want only this. which is to say: i’m trying to find the words to capture my love for you entirely. out of the corner of my eye a mouse steps into a patch of sun on the third step that creaks. an affection pulses always from your heart which i carry. which is to say: has it all been said? or should i try again? asking, as they say, for a friend.
Suining
Sim 7
Sundown Anatomy The thing as it was: Bisected; light making ends meet. Lengthways, Shadows drew the hours. Theory, proof. Hilltop (grass fades into bruisy haze) With oaks set vertebral along its crest. Breeze through trees: a shiver down the spine. Open – wait – slip silk-like – close behind – Expect a passing car. None comes. Look up: Windows playing catch with the horizon. Blue, expectant dreams queue up, devising Orange as a gift (with half a laugh): Embered leaf-lips. Fox. Sodium stars. Neighbour (stranger) tucking in her irises. Violent violetness. Lies, upside down.
Dominic
James 8
Sophia Ash
Holding Pattern I have not lost heart for music but the need which is worse. A moat divides the gardens from the path I cycle down to the tinkle of my coat zip. I have grown to love childish things, living alone: like helixes pressed on my skin by the handlebars or playing an aeroplane pilot as I bank towards home.
Paul
Norris 9
My Name in His Hands: Thoughts on Identity, Love Letters, and the Uniqueness of Handwriting
One summer, the boy I was in love with travelled to a place where he could only receive letters. Despite my grief at losing him, even temporarily, I jumped at the chance to write to him. I thought of the long epistles I could compose, perfumed with pressed flowers and embossed by the pressure of my gel pen. I sat down a few hours after he left, tears drying on my cheeks, and began to write. I noticed the specific way I always wrote his name, the way the letters connected to each other, holding each other together against the separating force of the spaces either side. I thought of the way I wrote my own name, my signature. My mother told me that everyone’s handwriting was unique, so my signature is just my name in my handwriting. Unexciting, but unmistakeably mine. According to those more scientifically-inclined than myself or my mother, handwriting is, in fact, unique to each person. In 2002, scientists at the University of Buffalo proved handwriting’s uniqueness by designing a software system that established a writer’s identity from their handwriting with 96% confidence.1 In 2008, these same scientists went on to prove that even identical twins do not have the same handwriting.2 It makes sense, then, that signatures are legal proof of identity. Signatures on written transactions have been customary in Jewish communities since around the second century, among Muslims since 622, and in Europe since the sixth century. Interestingly, among the medieval nobility of Europe, it was more respectable to have an illegible signature than a legible one, because an elaborate signature suggested an education in handwriting and, therefore, wealth.3 Today’s handwriting curriculum would balk at this illegibility. There are countless books for children that dictate how letters should be formed, neat and repeatable. But this teaching method seems completely at odds with what my mother told me and the findings of the scientists at the University of Buffalo. Making students shape themselves onto the dotted tracks of perfect letters seems a kind of dystopian horror: education systems churning out identical text-printing machines against the children’s intrinsic desire for handwriting freedom. But never fear – the children emerge victorious with their pens sprouting unique curlicues and looping letters.
Bethan Holloway-Strong
10 18 2
In today’s world, however, this fight for uniqueness seems to be futile. All of these individual handwriting skills completely fall away as children grow into the use of computers, where they only have to tap a key to produce a perfectly-formed, repeatable, legible letter. There’s no room for deviation, no way to be different. And with printers, all of this writing perfection is easily made physical and photocopied ad infinitum. This is undoubtably progress: even letter-writing me, dizzy with the romanticism of pen and paper, couldn’t deny the convenience of computers. Copying and pasting text, easily deleting words, and the instantaneous transfer of writing in text messages or emails are luxuries that modern life would be almost impossible without. But we have lost something along the way: the uniqueness of handwriting is gone. And with handwriting being conflated with identity, have we lost part of ourselves? Not exactly. Technology encourages innovation. Handwriting may no longer be our primary mode of communication, but this does not mean that we do not express our individuality in other ways. Some people send texts with perfect grammar. Some only type in lower case and use endless abbreviations. We all have our favourite emojis (mine is, of course, ). We have developed our own digital handwriting, our own method of expression that differentiates us from the rest of the online community. Individuality is possible, even in a system that seems designed to produce identical outputs. Yet handwriting retains its special magic. Handwriting is a product of the movement of the human body, something that technology can never hope to replicate. Some scientists claim that handwriting can predict neurological disorders, while others claim that it’s possible to determine the gender of a writer by their handwriting alone.4 Think of seeing an autographed book from your favourite author. The knowledge that they have touched that page simply cannot be replicated by a computer. We have not lost the magic of handwriting, and I do not believe we will ever lose it. I sent that letter to the boy, and two weeks later, I received a reply. I looked at my name written in his juvenile script. That was a kind of signature, too; the conjunction of his identity and mine. I wept.
“Research shows Handwriting Unique”, Corrections Forum, 11.4 (2002), 10, 72 <https://ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/ login?url=https://www.proquest.com/docview/214409716?accountid=9851>. 1
Sargur Srihari, Chen Huang & Harish Srinivasan, “On the Disciminability of the Handwriting of Twins”, Journal of Forensic Sciences, 53.2 (24 March 2008) <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111 /j.1556-4029.2008.00682.x>. 2
Julia Felsenthal, “Give Me Your John Hancock”, Slate, 18 March 2011 <https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2011/03/when-did-we-start-signing-our-names-to-authenticate-documents.html>. 3
Imran Siddiqi, Chawki Djeddi, Ahsen Raza & Labiba Souici-meslati, “Automatic analysis of handwriting for gender classification”, Pattern Analysis and Applications 18 (2015) 887-899 <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10044-014-0371-0>. 4
19 11 3
Carnevale MMXX Venice
This farewell to the flesh they're taking seriously, even the wags in plague doctor masks. No one's aping Byron who drained himself to the dregs. Ordinances will this cold grey day come into force. Let's refuel on risotto al nero di seppia, even and slick as an oil spill.
Harry Cochrane 412
Why He Hasn't Texted You Back:
Ten Hypotheses
1.
He’s a fuckboy.
2.
You left him speechless.
3.
You remind him of his mother, and he’s only just noticed this, and feels uncomfortable with what it says about him.
4.
He’s a softboi.
5.
Your last message was genuinely rude. How could you?
6.
He’s currently trapped under a very heavy — and I mean very heavy — rock, struggling and struggling to reach his phone and give you the heart reacc your heart longs for.
7.
You messaged him on Facebook, which he hardly ever checks.
8.
He didn’t want to talk any more about that fucking cottage in Dungeness.
9.
You messaged him on Facebook, but his phone is a carrier pigeon.
10.
He’s not only gay, but also dead, and also Derek Jarman.
Alex Hayden-Williams 13 5
Alex Hayden-Williams 614
Survivor's Guilt between pews and altar there is unloving I kneel and enfold smooth fronds beneath sagging wafer and grape juice. I give my pieties in whispers, offer joss sticks to fields of living. rental flats flatten the road to church, tracing my survivorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hem in errant doxologies winding through the heartlands. my bloodstained hands fan outwards to a micah six-eight drumroll fever dream, sings how great thou art with fluttering sigh. in the early mornings I walk round manicured condo green, say zao1 to the gardener, dream of Waitrose and fall leaves whistling toward the river. the toucans are so close I can almost stroke their plumage, sleek amidst the cacophony of the morning dew.
â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Good morningâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; in Mandarin.
1
Christian Yeo 15 7
Apple Day A bottle of Armagnac. He thought: there is an apple tree always where I walk but then I don’t know about trees and I’ve never seen it bear an apple. So isn’t it a case of mistaken identity like when the broken beloved tore the liver from the body of the burning poet and called it his heart? Well then, there are apple trees in the city but they’re tinted tainted green by association: boring. He sat under one, they say, and he prophesied a universe full of paradise worlds and he calculated the number of paradises and found it to be a big number with zeroes on the end. The paradises spun around (tick tock) and the waterfalls fell like a water-feature and sometimes two paradises bumped into one another and were so fucking paradisical that they stayed in one piece, intact. Like have you ever played association football? Boring. You see, he dreamt up all that and he didn’t do nothing but think about it all. He did not bite.
16 8
When I found you, you were eating an apple. The apple that he took, as clerkes fyndyn, wretyn in here book, which is why I trace those thoughts all the way back to the wine-merchant. (Editor: they do not belong in the wine-merchant. Armagnac is not an apple brandy. Boo hoo!) They are false thoughts. But I dare you to trace the lineage of man back to Adam. I dare you to trace the lineage of the apples you find under the marquee on Apple Day (Russet, Gloster 69, Golden Noble) back to the single primitive paradise-apple. Go on. It’ll be there at the fair, you know, tell me which one it is, hint: consider human perception of sweetness over the past four thousand years. Buy it by the kilo, wholesale, buy in bulk. Apple pay. Appleaday for every days since creation equals big pi days in a year minutes in a second kisses in a Troy ounce. Go on. Well then, the city is more Edenic than the wilderness (watchmaker) but then the garden is more Edenic than the city (watchmaker creates interest through judicious deployment of foliage and stem). There might have been other boys (blasphemy!) and other girls in the garden, little girls called Isaac and little boys called Mary who were running about and they did as they were told like the boys and girls on a billion million paradise worlds in the sky but well, not you. Look at you. Apple bob for you. Find you in the crowd at a rooftop gig. Like the gaunt maiden in a Cranach, there you are, flashing incisors spray the tart juice (it’s a Gloster, damn!) over down arms and breasts. When I found you, you were eating an apple. Lean Teutonic bare civility gnash us from a cosmic background of mediocre clay.
Oh those other worlds, they didn’t have you in them, did they?
179
Cal Hewitt
Tradegy of the Snail The other day I found a snail at the bottom of the basket of salad leaves I’d picked in preparation for an afternoon picnic in the garden—in my excitement I’d forgotten to double-check the trug and hadn’t spotted the slimy interloper. I decided to be strict about who could come to lunch, and evicted the snail from the house before he got in any more trouble. A few minutes later, remorse set in. I felt like Goneril. I thought of the snail adrift, feeling vaguely that vast powers beyond his understanding had shaped the course of his life; had weighed his life in an eternal scale and stranded him, bewildered, amongst the flowers.
Ben Phillipps
18 10
The advantages of buying a home in the country After years of scratching, chipping away, You've reached it. Yes, an island all sequestered From the anger, the fear, the love and hate That fuels this modern world. There’ll be no festering Hatred here, for who would want to be pestered By all these blaring sights and smells and sounds That keep on breeding till they’ve hemmed us round? But like I said, those things can’t hurt you here. For you’ve bought a house. A country house. No blare Of sirens, protests in the street, or fear Of those who live below. You left your cares Back home, where they shiver still in the air. But here the air is still, the fields are green. You rest your head, content, and sip your tea.
Gregory Miller
19
HalfF
Polly
Bodgener
20
Fo h ed T ing rm
The strangest dream emerged, From some murky recess— A lofty delusion, an ideal, Drifting up from the underground. Figures skirt above; unthinking, vacant. Beneath them, something is churning— 一A strange, contorting mass, And fluid is seeping, vapour rises, The people cough— bodies fall.
UNDERGROUND Man Sophia Ash
21
i n t h e a b s e n c e o f m u s i c ——————————————————
Come down from a mound where stars and chapel-roofs and blinking crane dots lingered behind the others, like middle-aged men we are, phoning our ball-and-chains in the same moment plodding down the deadly ten PM street, speaking of speaking just us away from a circular table where the absence of music makes any pub a conference, a drained glass for a conch. You ask if you can have that book. Yeah, no, I’ll get it for you, I say. Gardengate swung, down the rain-glistening walk, walking back to you, a book in hand. Thank you, you say. Thank him, I say, gesturing at he who had the book to lend. A piss, you say. Now each trundles down trying not to slip not to piss on warm carpet
22
and butternut squash cake crumbled between us like a weak metaphor while we each pinch bits between our thumb and forefinger eyeing the table between snatches of as-sertions over art or rather just scribbles, ‘attempts’, they chime, gazes soft with drink. Opposite me, one tweezers a corner of table, moustache bristling with talk of form and music and mood ‘That state every couple weeks where you feel like it, happy or sad, like mmm I fancy a curry.’ After a while the floor is smiling at me and we show you out, exchanging hugs (cocking your head to avoid my face), birthing you up into the yawning night.
Saul Barrett
23
J u l i a n Lemke
Memories of a Montreal Evening Today I felt like flying in the burnt blues of the sunset sky, to spread my soul like the dark clouds that run through every hue. Behind me a violin hummed from some dimly-lit cobblestoned streetits flight jarred by the clinking cutlery of Old Port restaurantssilver rang against the china like daddyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s razor against the sink; back when I thought clouds felt like the foam dressing his face: white, soft, and inviting.
The river below washed the shore in incessant rhythms, eroding my soul like these long years while I waited for life to clear the way his shaven skin emerged from foam. Far away from my meager grasp, the Jacques Cartier Bridge stretched over the river like yesterdayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s longing for homeits rainbow colors aligned in columns like Grade 1 textbooks in my old, rusting shelf. The clinking stopped. The violin song died too. They all began to walk away. Away from the tables, the bridge, and from each other.
Maybe I did too.
Ahmad Aamir Malik
24
A rough kindness We had a house by the sea for a week. It was November and the sky wrought clouds as pale as teeth. Each morning I ran my dog down to the sea, his paws pattering on the pavement like rain. We would stand gasping, caught out by the solid block of water under the promenade which shrugged its shoulders like a yawning animal. The sky never snatched spring’s blue, but the air felt fresh and hungry. We’d jog, the hound and I, along the beach, its sand packed hard in crusts and swirls. Occasionally I knelt and investigated the milliard grains, burying my fingers in their smallness until the mysterious underground spring of the ocean seeped my hand. I was digging for wonder, or perhaps to reach Australia, but no matter – the dog, scared that I was latched forever to the beach, an ungainly limpet, skittered on sand, interrupted with his snout my burrowing. I would unleash my hand and shake my height free; driftwood for throwing was plentiful and the dog eager to plunge and retrieve, his eyes pebble-bright, his tongue on my skin a rough kindness.
Francesca Weekes
25
Will Randell The Sun and I rose early this morning: we were surprised to meet before breakfast. hatching from fitful absence, heavy headed the foxand thirsty,Between I lapped gloves and her theseeping corridor golden the keys and the corridor balm, breathlessly gulping hollow beams of between the icepick and the earlobe you chamodaffodil andlies lemon, strained like encased in a runny rubber suit cannot hopefingers to penetrate, mile tea or Ifractured through a seen only for a moment, wind-split fissure roman blind tattooed in of spittle across the legs and of a soft lipped deity plaster. called Nostalgia.
A l a s d a i r I ate pages with G my l coffee y n- n
leaves toasted with autumnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s passing embossed with specks of fertile seed: a patina of pinprick deaths, germinating tiny plants knots of thorn or blossom buds arranging themselves into a garden to line pockets and minds. 26 26
Alex Hayden-Williams
27
28