Notes on Renewal - our first release of the new academic year - is both an escape from and reflection upon our current moment. As Autumn draws in and daily life seems to be increasingly pervaded by a strange mix of uncertainty and torpor, our contributors have channelled the constraints of the present to focus on transformation, transition, and rejuvenation. But every renewal is in part a return, and the pieces in this issue also draw attention to the uncanny echoes of the past that are produced whenever we create, translate, venture out or come home. We hope that making your way through Issue 63 - via fingernail moons and broken crockery, papier machĂŠ and gold teeth, melting wax and skimmed pebbles - will itself be a quietly transformative process, with echoes all of its own.
notespublication.com
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issue 63
on renewal
4 St Georges' Cross Sean O'Neill 5 Michele Bishop 6 Memory is the Seamstress Maria Tanase 7 Vom-Geld (Extracts from Brecht's 'On Money') Daniel Oosthuizen 8 Written at 4am in his old rooms Cal Hewitt 9 10 every time we fuck... Ellen Purdy, photo by Bronwyn Hansen 11 Glass Anna Humphreys 12 The Crater Jacob Whitehead 13 14 Untitled Polly Bodgener 15 Untitled (If the Vatican...) Alex Hayden-Williams 16 A Birthday Painting Emily Claytor 17 Waxing and Waning Saskia Cookson 18 Re-encountering a Chirico Sean O'Neill 19 Ellen Purdy 20 Secret Eater Daniel Oothuizen, photo by Michele Bishop 21 Logico-emotional Saksham Sharma and Komal Gupta 22 Waxen Mo-May-Hobbs 23 24 Browyn Hansen 25 Shadow Puppets Amber Marino, pencil drawing by Theo Barnett 26 Terrible Haikus Estella Nouri
Cover by Helen Grant
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St George's Cross
face paint on a boy I didn't know
The toil of the Severn meanders the town and pastoral farmlands entrench it with space; its suburbs are frank and attend to the edge-lands by car — the cartoon restaurants lend a sense of place. Along from the lane of the car dealership massive smooth transverse reinforced concrete swoops up to a chimney surrounded by steel girdered corrugated grey metal sheets. The incinerator has fake grass on its head so from above it could be fields instead. Well, now look down with me from our vague height and see the boy, his work, the sodium lamp-post asphalt amber beaming flung on the grease of his brow and the lines of his frowning no homo scowl. Push bikes of the neighbourhood shudder in dismount, even the pedals tear their hairless skin and the clean dark spread round the park-and-ride reminds him of the market with the blurred air, exhaust fumes, bitumen weeping when the sky itself was low and heavy crackling air around us walking wild and rough the grass beneath our steps and soil swirled near water's sluggard toil. Howl in white and red profane (don't walk there) near great man statue by the alley betwix the hole-in-the-wall and timid by-standards for the bearing for the green and pleasant land for the impressively brandished Stella— or smoothly slung below the belt bulge— but he is not for this. Have you ever been so very sad you've just curled up and wept a little little slip on the slanting way he goes like a little slip of a girly boy let loose on the wildermoor she knows like I liked heading home after school in the small light; black paths squirming moist as capillaries in the unhusbanded fields; furtive, filthy fingerings like mucky ice spines; famine of the oaken way, the sorrowing of the briar, slip-churned rot-fallen by the wayside paving the shires, proving desires, my joys and desires— but him! The boy! But he was not of this — The making in the seeing's much too sweet. See how the sights outside distract us still; it must be seen again, for good or ill.
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Sean O'Neill
Michele
Bishop
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An image is a mirror and it echoes through time All-encompassing, an egg of a riddle. As you stretch to crack its bark A swarm of golden bees pours forth tremulous. The sun caught on film. 6
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To sit at the table In an embrace of light reflected off the pavement after a summer rain – is to come at life full circle. To enumerate a few: the years in the trunk of a tree the haloes that follow a pebble in a pond six friends at dinner sending off Percival before his untimely death.
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Daniel Oosthuizen
Vom-Geld (Extracts from Brecht's 'On Money') The Stiglitz–Shapiro ‘no-shirking’ condition: , where w is the wage, b is unemployment benefit, ē is the effort, π is the chance of being caught shirking, and p the chance of finding another job.
1 or: The sins of this world have no end. 2 or: For stronger is their impulse to spend. 3 or animal
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HERE LIES MONEY 1898-1956
1. I won’t seduce you to working. Working’s not what you’re made for. But money, that’s not for shirking! Money’s good. So care what you’re payed for! 2. Men strangle each other in nooses. This world is a cesspool of vice. 1 But money, you can put to good uses: For cash they’ll be perfectly nice. 2 5. When she tells you she loves you, believe her But having money will certainly pay. Without money, you might well achieve her, But just the irrational part of her 3 stays. 6. To money people make their test Not to God with his rivers of honey If you would deny your enemy’s rest Write on his gravestone: here lies money.
Written at 4am in his old rooms Cal Hewitt
Te d t h e Po e t h a s t w o s l e e p s : h e h a s h i s f i r s t s l e e p , a n d t h e n h e h a s h i s s e c o n d . He h a s a l o n g e r s l e e p , a n d t h e n h e h a s a s h o r t e r o n e . He h a s a t a c e t , p o l i s h e d s l e e p , a n d t h e n h e h a s a s l e e p t o w h i c h a re a d m i t t e d o n l y t h e w i l d e s t d re a m s . He h a s a n e v e n i n g s l e e p , a n d t h e n h e h a s a m o r n i n g s l e e p . I t c ou l d b e s a i d h e i s n e v e r a w a k e t o s e e t h e p l a n e t Ve n u s . O r t h a t t h e p l a n e t Ve n u s h a n g s d u t i f u l a n d re g u l a r o v e r h i s d re a m s , w h i c h s h e d o e s . R ou n d e d b y t h e s e s l e e p s a re t w o l i v e s : a l i t t l e l i f e a n d a l e s s - l i t t l e l i f e . T h e s l e e p s a re a s t h e b o o k e n d s t o t h e s e l i v e s . T h e l i t t l e l i f e i s a w i l d w r i t e r ’s l i f e i n t h e m i d d l e o f t h e n i g h t . T h e o t h e r l i f e i s t h e re g u l a r w o r k a d a y l i f e w h i c h m i g h t b e s p e n t w o r k i n g in a bank. The little life is unknown to most of us, who take ou r s l e e p i n o n e g o . We d o n o t k n o w i t i s b e t t e r t o t a k e o n e ’s s l e e p i n t w o , a s i t i s b e t t e r t o t a k e t w o s i n g l e s h o t s o f e s p re s s o t h a n a s i n g l e d ou b l e . I n d e e d o n e d o e s t a k e t w o s h o t s o f e s p re s s o ; o n e a t t h e s t a r t o f o n e l i f e , o n e a t t h e s t a r t o f t h e o t h e r. Ve r i l y, t h e s e l i v e s a re a s t w o s i d e s o f a c o i n . A s s u n a n d a s moon. As Spring and as Autumn. And when one is living the f o r g o t t e n m y s t i c o b v e r s e — n o w, o n a n Oc t o b e r n i g h t — t h e re m i g h t a r i s e a q u e s t i o n ; w h e re , o h w h e re i s S p r i n g ? A n d t h e a n s w e r i s e i g h t t h ou s a n d m i l e s b e l o w o n e ’s f e e t . I h e a r re l iably from a family-friend who is a sea-captain that spring days i n c e r t a i n p a r t s o f r u ra l Ne w Z e a l a n d c a n b e a s c h a r m i n g a s s p r i n g d a y s h e re , c e r t a i n l y a s c h a r m i n g a s ou r Oc t o b e r n i g h t s . T h e f a c t a b ou t t h e A u t u m n n i g h t a n d t h e S p r i n g d a y c a n s e e m ou t ra g e ou s a n d i m p l a u s i b l e . I t i s o f t e n d e n i e d o v e r p i n t s o f b e e r. B u t i t s p r o o f i s g e o m e t r i c a l l y i n c o n t e s t a b l e — t h a t t h e A u t u m n i s c a u s e d b y t h e No r t h p o l e t i l t i n g a w a y f r o m t h e s u n , a n d t h a t t h a t m u s t c a u s e t h e S ou t h p o l e t o t i l t t o w a rd s i t ; i n a w o rd , S p r i n g . T h i s i s t h e k i n d o f p r o o f P l a t o w ou l d a r g u e i s re m e m b e re d f r o m a p re v i ou s i n c a r n a t i o n . R e m e m b e re d at the loaded questions of a fussy Athenian in a bedsheet.
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T h e n e w Da l a i L a m a w h o s u c c e e d s t h e d e a d Da l a i L a m a i s u s ua l l y b o r n a y e a r o r t w o a f t e r t h e o l d Da l a i L a m a d i e s . T h i s l e a v e s t h e w o r l d f o r a y e a r o r t w o w i t h ou t a Da l a i L a m a , u n f o r g i v a b l y. I t s h ou l d b e b e t t e r t h a t t h e t w o Da l a i L a m a s s h a re t h e w o r l d f o r t h re e d a y s . A c h i l d o f t h re e d a y s i s n o t s o w e l l - f o r m e d a s t o b e c l o s e d t o t h e s e l f o f a n o t h e r, e v e n i f t h e o t h e r i s t h e Da l a i L a m a . I d o n o t k n o w w h y a t t h e a g e o f t h re e d a y s I m a d e t h e Po e t L a u re a t e ’s h e a r t s t o p . I d i d n o t i n t e n d t o . He w a s i n h o s p i t a l b e c a u s e h i s c o l o n h a d t u r n e d t o c a n c e r. I w a s i n h o s p i t a l b e c a u s e I w a s a c h i l d o f t h re e d a y s . Te d Hu g h e s d o e s n o t g i v e a n y i n d i c a t i o n o f w h e re h e w i l l b e re i n c a r n a t e d , a s t h e f ou r t e e n t h Da l a i L a m a i n d i c a t e s h e w i l l b e re i n c a r n a t e d i n I n d i a . He a l s o d o e s n o t g i v e a n y i n d i c at i o n a s t o w h e re t h e w o r l d l i n e s o f h e a n d h i s n e x t i n c a r n a t i o n w i l l g e t a l l k n o t t e d - u p . He d o e s n o t , f o r e x a m p l e , i n d i c a t e i t w i l l b e a t t h e m a r k e t - s t a l l w h e re t h e y s e l l h e r r i n g t o w a rd s t h e e n d o f t h e m o r n i n g . He a l s o d o e s n o t i n d i c a t e i t w i l l b e a t t h e c h a i r b y t h e f i re p l a c e w h e re h e t o a s t e d h e r r i n g , f i l l i n g t h e r o o m w i t h t h e t e m p t i n g s m e l l o f t o a s t e d h e r r i n g a n d a t t ra c t i n g c o m p a n i o n s f o r b re a k f a s t . T h a t f i re p l a c e i s n o w b o a rd e d - u p . Ev e n i f y ou d o n o t b e l i e v e i n re i n c a r n a t i o n , a s P l a t o d i d a n d a s t h e f ou r t e e n t h Da l a i L a m a d o e s , y ou m i g h t b e l i e v e i n s t e a l i n g i d e a s a b ou t s l e e p s a n d l i v e s a n d h e r r i n g , ra t h e r t h a n re m e m b e r i n g t h e m . Te d Hu g h e s d o e s n o t g i v e a n y i n d i c a t i o n o f w h e re t h i s w i l l h a p p e n , e i t h e r. To m o r r o w m o r n i n g I w i l l n o t bu y h e r r i n g f r o m t h e m a r k e t - s t a l l bu t I w i l l bu y b re a d . I w i l l n o t t h e n g o t o w o r k a t a b a n k . I w i l l bu y b re a d a f t e r o n l y t h e w i l d e s t o f d re a m s . I a m a v e g e t a r i a n . C o n t ra r y t o p o pu l a r b e l i e f , t h e f ou r t e e n t h Da l a i L a m a i s n o t a v e g e t a r i a n . I w o n d e r i f Te d t h e Po e t w ou l d h a v e b e c o m e a v e g e t a r i a n : h e w h o f ou n d w o rd s f o r h o w t h e f i s h w re s t l e d w i t h t h e w a t e r bu t f ou n d f e w f o r h o w t h e y t a s t e .
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every time we fuck it feels like the world is ending we lie naked on the bed, hair knotted first by frayed hands and later by the aircon unit behind our heads and the afternoon sun and the desperation curves of your shoulder, and the air we pretend not to share. write me a life, I say. make it happy, and impossible.
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ellen purdy
Bronwyn Hansen
Glass
Tried to feel it all watching the rain on my aeroplane window lie on its side like static thin libation of data transmitting sharp ones inside a big soft nought: I love you, I’m here they scratch at the sky till it bleeds You’re something like the noise behind the glass fucking brilliant with reflections but cold to touch like holding him hot and whirring in my hand then putting him on charge When we were children you wanted glasses lied to your parents and the optician rose to the surface like a glyph full of air now you send me snapchats of your dad’s ashes and the window holds the rain back 11
Anna Isabella Freys
The Crater And so I return to the clay. The crater is chemical, earthy, a dying whale leaching petrol. Nettles are banisters, stairs empty pots of paint. A shade of red has spattered against rotting plywood. Artist: Jackson Pollock Medium: Bomb
They went in marching two by two, hurrah! hurrah! They went in marching two by two, hurrah! hurrah! The children went off two by two Nice green shirts all buttoned up too And they all went into the ark For to get out of the rain! You’re sat cross-legged making a daisy chain of all things. They grow in between the bluebells, the broken crockery, the mulch. But you look up, smile, while my boots rub and I brush a bumblebee from my sleeve. And as you stand tiny hooks of stickyweed catch the edge of your dress.
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“Where do you want to go?” “Anywhere.” “Anywhere?” The bumblebee’s back. Doodlebug. Bug. Bzzzzzzzz. Kapeesh? “Here?” “Where else?” “Now?”
So we lie down and your breath tastes of honeycomb and shrapnelled flint presses into our skin.
They went in marching two by two, hurrah! hurrah! They went in marching two by two, hurrah! hurrah! The children went off two by two Nice green shirts all buttoned up too And they all went into the ark For to get out of the rain! And after, when it’s all done, I think of the trees shrinking back to the ground and soil sucked from clouds of brown to compacted earth and the doodlebug backpedaling in the air like a misled bumblebee and there’s still just us lying on what there was and what there is to be.
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Jacob Whitehead
There’s nothing else.
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Polly Bodgener
Untitled (If the Vatican Department of Art and Antiquities are Reading This, It’s a Joke)
they’d be a hundred centimetres wide and fifty tall, which is bigger than most backpacks, but still fits inside BA cabin bag rules. I wonder if the Pope ever glances up at the 1m x 0.5m square missing from his ceiling and thinks ‘by God, whoever did that was handy with a pen-knife.’
Alex Hayden-Williams
If you were to cut the hands out of Michelangelo’s Creation, and take them home as a souvenir,
In any case, my desk area is really brought to life by the new papier maché egg and the big hands. Some mornings,
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I come downstairs and there’s plaster all over the spruce, which I blame on the cat, who’s never been very good at boundaries or not eating paper or masterpieces of Western art.
A Birthday Painting
On the eve of my eighteenth birthday, I started a painting, born largely out of stasis and misguided teenage epiphanies. Overnight, I began sketching lines to places I’d never been (nor had hoped to visit) and retreated into someone else’s sense of self. I traced my hand across the page, let every corner of undiscovered space occupy my vision, and did not look back. It was like how painting always is: layers upon layers of awful estimation, sparks of possibility, and disappointed resignation. A project guarded for fear of imperfection. Eventually, however, something shifts; the lines turn to shapes and the shapes become, not perfect, but alive. It felt like finally, for the first time, I might be creating something beautiful. Then one day a faceless figure tore my painting to shreds. He approached calmly, not even really there until he was gone – an arrival and departure intermingled in one. In his shadow he left torn pieces of canvas printed with broken patterns and thoughts turned to driftwood. The sad, broken picture laid in and amongst the furniture for months. It collected dust until someone mentioned it looked mournful, so I moved my fingertips through the pieces and called it progress. The dirt danced in a meaningful-looking cloud and then the dust settled. So, I persisted in making sense of an impossible patchwork. I sewed lines between the fractures and reminisced on anxiously daubed, decaying layers of paint: detailed movements once present and now forever past. Finally – I think – I understood, buried the pieces in the garden, and started again.
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Emily Claytor
Saskia Cookson
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Re-encountering a Chirico These tense ending late afternoon shadows— anxious with journey (it is too late)— pair each repeating archway, she threads the thrown amber and black (riotously with the throng) repeating down recedings of the street lines fretted, obdurate to her flitting. All streets are waiting rooms we walk along until the place is borne from before and now envelopes us, being here. Rough hewn now, they write the way for see the Michael Angelo upturn slow stone's effacement in the afternoon time; the perspective converging misted in black like something we're not meant to see complete. (You feel it coming, knowing at the edge tilt— like slick spurting — that you were never master, you were never subject.) Running girl silhouette flutters, slides over loggia statuary— the empty, perfect piazza, silent for they have gone and left the food cold on the tables. It occurs I am the passing through to some resting, to some passing through. But all things in their season last forever.
Sean O’Neill
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Ellen Purdy
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Secret Eater He is scared of the telephone and of large chunks of meat of getting up from his seat – he eats his pizza alone. He sits tensed in his chair brings the fork to his mouth hopes it doesn’t go south, doesn’t give us a scare. Who can tell what he knows? Asking questions is hard, and long answers are barred – all those so-long-agos.
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Daniel Oosthuizen 4
Michele Bishop
Logico
Emotional
Saksham Sharma & Komal Gupta 5
Waxen We followed the narrow dark corridor to where-between a discount bookstore, in which dusty tied-up bundles tell of all sorts of failure, and a shop selling only buttons (mother-of-pearl and the kind that in Paris are called defonlaisie)-there stood a sort of salon. On the pale-coloured Wallpaper full of figures and busts shone a gas lamp. By its light, an old woman sat reading. They say she has been there alone for years, and collects sets of teeth "in gold, in wax, and broken!' Since that day, moreover, we know where Doctor Miracle got the wax out of which he fashioned Olympia. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project They say she has been there alone for years, plucking through her fossils with fingers ever quicker and ever longer. The first few might well have been chance acquisitions, perhaps the earliest of our routine miracles, or else misshapen gold in need of replacement. Run through arcades of countless diminishing widths and wax-warmed by hands – now appraising, now bemused – to reach her. First jewellers whose loupes despised all flecks of rot and root, then to the more ravenous purveyors of curiosities, they all wound their way to her in the end. Teeth loose and in sets, malformed jaws, silken gums rolled through her waiting palms. She attuned herself to the glut of textures by never seeing what she felt, focusing her eyes on the mesh of the veil until they turned milky. From a few steps beyond the doorway she could occasionally be heard flecking excess wax from her palms in curt bouts of clapping. Closer still, inside the shop, and late into the gloom a quiet wheezing now, she presses her fists closed around handfuls of tooth-shards until some forced themselves between the fat bases of her fingers, leaving molar-white indentations in the skin for just a second after all clatters softly to the tabletop.
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Mo May-Hobbs
Each morning this glaucomatous bride holds her hands in a basin of iced water, dries them swiftly and sets to work polishing perfect spheres of gum-wax with the crook of her thumb until the return of warmth begins to cloud the surface. Chills again, continues. For lunch she fillets strips of liquorice with her fingernails and gnaws while continuing her work. She devotes little time to the hawkish bustling of gold teeth, squeezing out loose pegs of roots with a pestle, occasionally lifting and dropping the flattened sheets of gold in an absent-minded clatter. The city, meanwhile, chased itself outwards in ripples until it formed a growing ring around a desiccated core. Each greedy surge left in its wake a petrification of unfortunate prey, those not vital enough, too tired, to perpetually escape encasement. These prey were made monuments, doubled and wrapped in endless waxworks to preside over a sterile domain, fields of bleached coral and slowly melting dogfat. With each pursuit outward more statues were demanded in every Seeking devious avenues he comes, dragging abjection direction, and their waxen cheeks grew by the hair. Dressed as an official in broad tie and long gaunter with the strain until they betrayed shoes, his mouth teeming like a moray with new-grown wire frames and the occasional foreign obteeth, he pulls with his left shoulder forwards. A tangle ject drifting within. of buboes whitening the cobbles under its arc tosses and writhes as he tugs it down ever narrower alleys. Fungal and marmoreal, half-hewn. Their silhouette moves together in a lopsided shudder towards the last illuminated shopfront. Miracle works Olympia upright and drapes her over a low table beside the doorway. Only the organic demanded sculpted memorial, while tables and buildings petrified, and sometimes crumbled. Inside great drapes are hung, forgiving glimpses over and under of a woman working in the furthermost corner, still. The last rug has its corner pinned up, revealing Clio, smoothing and powdering shards of history with strong hands. The sounds of lapping flame in the lamp grow solid with his approach, and the woman meets them with whispers. A rhythmic conversation soothing both of them as they work. At night our bride returns to the basin, takes up her lurid comb and tugs. Its teeth rake her ears and scatter tens of stoppages on the surface of the water. Hair meets the surface with a prickly, stuttering edge. When she is done she will slip her fingers into the basin and swill until every strand is gathered around them and rub them into the bucket at the chest’s side. She wastes no part of herself that might be used. The models without their own hair are garish. Undignified.
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A fingernail of moon is scratching at the curtain, which is closed like a border to the low-hanging night. Yet lamplight splays like the sun on her face. She begins to dance like a child, a body pulled out of itself, surprised how it moves, arching backwards, shoulders that crest and trough, that coil like rope.
Bronwyn Hansen
She laughs at her shadow, dancing with her, cast like a Brocken spectre on the wall. I catch my own, huge, and we balloon into darkness, our penumbras
blur into dreams and six feet apart, too far to embrace our shadows clasp and we feel a synesthetic closeness, an imagined touch as those shapes coalesce.
We are muscle and bone thinned to paper, shadow carved into brickwork. I fear you are still just a trick of the light, from screen to wall and maybe back again.
And somewhere, under different skies, where professors don’t lecture to empty seats, those pale imitations might peel away, dance noiseless down corridors made for screaming, skin fused
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Bronwyn Hansen
Theo Barnett
on skin and somewhere his hand softens into her waist and somewhere the blossom might loosen from its branches, might flake like ash, might fall
Shadow Puppets Amber Marino
where it’s supposed to.
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Terrible Haikus Estella Nouri You are invited To peruse and be amused. Terrible haikus! — Here comes the Rat King! Serene sewer dweller, he’s Tired of your shit. Ersatz yoga blocks: Infinite Jest, the Bible – They’re unreadable! Lazily circling, Two flies live in my room now: They’re not paying rent. Look! Kermit the Frog! He conceptualises Nietzsche’s Übermensch. The time has come For my reckoning with Simone. She’s terrifying. The son of man, did. Divine influence: action! Next up, Charlemagne. — My apologies This was totally needless. Forget you read10this.
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