Notes22 by Notes Magazine

Twenty Second Issue 24.11.2014

Contents

This issue contains Notes loosely themed around myths and sanctuaries. The essay by Lavinia Puccetti is a close discussion of Max Ernst’s 1940 painting ‘The Robing of the Bride’ and explores its mythological and iconographical infulences. Many of the stories explore sanctuaries of various forms, beginning with the literal place of sanctuary which Oscar Farley’s protagonist is forced to leave in ‘To The Deaf Sea’. The two components of the theme are joined by Rowland Bagnall in his retelling of the life of Jack Frost, which becomes a constant search for sanctuary in the face of danger and misfortune. We hope this issue provides inspiration for future works and further discussion. Untitled cover Angelica Van Clarke Path 3 Phillip Babcock To The Deaf Sea 4 Oscar Farley The Logical Order of a Family 8 Nurul Amillin On Max Ernst’s The Robing of The Bride (1940) 10 Lavinia Puccetti Colourfast 15 Henry St Leger-Davy Seventy Percent Denial, 16 Arthur Thompson Thirty Percent Milk and Sugar The Becoming of Jack Frost 17 Sophia Gatzonis Sonnet for Johnny Bravo 21 Rowland Bagnall The Harvester 22 Laura Thompson Untitled 24 Courtney Landers 25 Ceylon Hickman Hong Kong, Translation City 26 Archie Cornish The Eclipse 31 Harry Cochrane to submit or to subscribe: http://notespublication.com http://www.facebook.com/notespublication © Notes (Cambridge). All works are © the individual author. ISSN 2051 - 4204

Phillip Babcock

o the Deaf Sea

He lived in a village called Solstice Hill, in a small cottage with small windows and a large garden with country views. He was a doctor and his name was Dr Waterman. He had a private practice in the nearby town with a few rich elderly patients and the occasional emergency from a local businessman, and when he had no-one to see he’d read Tennyson or contemplate his moustache in the mirror, the moustache he had grown in order to appear homely. He’d given up wearing a white coat when he reached sixty in favour of cable-knit cardigans for similar reasons. A patient might enter at half eleven, and he’d say, How may I help you, Mrs Surness? and she’d say I’ve had a cough the past couple of weeks. Or, A mole has appeared on my, ahem, I don’t want to trouble anyone. Or, My eye has been twitching, I’m sure it’s nothing but I read an article. Waterman would do the usual tests for coughs and moles and twitches, and finally he’d sit down and say There’s nothing to worry about. Or he’d fill out a prescription for painkillers or sleeping tablets and say These should sort you out, and as an afterthought, There’s nothing to worry about. There’s nothing to worry about. He was introverted but not lonely. He had a circle of former work colleagues and neighbours who’d gather at his house every week to eat and talk about the state of things. He’d been engaged twice but later bought a tabby kitten whom he called Trouble, so when she’d enter the room he’d say Uh oh, here comes Trouble. Trouble grew large and she’d purr when he tickled behind her ear, and she’d sleep on his bed at night and he’d see her in the moonlight. Except Trouble died in the garden one warm day, and suddenly Waterman didn’t feel like visiting his practice anymore. To begin with Mrs Surness and his other patients let time heal, but after two weeks a replacement doctor with a brisk attitude was appointed and Waterman sat at home and stared at walls. Finally one of his neighbours visited to try to distract him, he suggested a cruise and Waterman said What? The neighbour replied A cruise, an ocean cruise, I went on one with my wife

after she retired. And the neighbour said Look, the one we went on was a nowhere cruise, three days just at sea, it’s calming and meditative and... well, consider it. Waterman stared for two more days before visiting a travel agent in town, and through some financial process or another he didn’t quite understand he had a ticket. Some time later (time dissolved in Waterman’s fingers) he stood in the shadow of the gleaming Queen Anne 3, the hull rippling in the morning light. The liner discharged grinning people in polo shirts, who greeted and grinned, took his economical briefcase of clothes, grinned, and showed him to his cabin. It was dark and small, and smelt of stale water from a nearby communal bathroom. Waterman’s chest panged with Trouble. They left him to lie on the hard bed, close his eyes and strain to hear the ocean. Queen Anne 3 set sail in the late orange afternoon, and the throbbing engine which stirred Waterman was accompanied with a sudden muffled shouting from the cabin next door. It was a man and a woman. She screamed something, he screamed something in return, she shouted for a little longer, and then silence. Then he must have muttered something under his breath because she started shouting and he shouted over the top of her, and there was a slam and silence again. Waterman looked at the ceiling until a grinning woman brought him a programme, and until darkness fell and suddenly he was awake. The programme listed a Broadway Extravaganza in the ballroom, a talk from a maritime expert in the West Theatre, and a casino, none of which appealed, so he wandered outside to watch the ocean. The moon was out, and stars, and they flickered in the waves. He grasped the railing. There was a woman standing next to him with thin grey hair and skin which would have looked plastic and taut on any other but somehow shone on her face. She had set her hip out slightly to the right and her left elbow on the railing grasping her chin, and she sighed occasionally. They said nothing, but Waterman’s slight seasickness returned, enough to make his knees buckle, and he collapsed against her. He said Sorry. She said, Are you suggesting something? and he replied No, no, I’m... watching the sea. She stared, and then she smiled and said Elizabeth, and he said William, and they shook hands and started walking together. She held herself like a dancer and glided across the deck. They were talking and she said Well, my husband died – cancer – about ten years ago, and

he said I’m sorry, and she said I just let myself slide into wrinkle-dom. He made a vague compliment and she laughed and thanked him. There were bright lights shining from behind them, casting their spindly shadows onto the sea, and there was the faint sound of jazz, a sad slow song, and a chill in the air. She leant into his shoulder. She said We could have dinner, they serve until ten. He looked out to the stars and the shining crests of waves, and how close they were. His chest hurt, and he said No, I think I’ll get an early night. And she looked at her feet and back and said, Well, goodnight, and he said Goodnight. He turned away and buttoned up his coat, listened to the shifting hiss of the sea below him, closed his eyes. The next morning Waterman woke to the clattering of plates and trays and cutlery from the galley above him. His eyes flickered open to the cramped cabin in four o’clock light. Then the couple were arguing, he shouting first this time, then she, then he screaming at her shouting whilst the door slammed. Waterman’s back ached. Breakfast took place in a burgundy dining room with cream chandeliers. Waterman got some cornflakes and craned his neck to find the woman from last night whose name he’d forgotten. She wasn’t there, and eventually he sat next to a pale green man, wearing a dusty suit smelling faintly of liquor. He grasped an empty champagne glass from the previous night and tried to drink from it, and mumbled and called Waterman Harold occasionally. Waterman chewed breakfast in silence. Suddenly the green man grabbed Waterman and said calmly and deliberately He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. The green man staggered off, leaning on the plastic pillars for balance. Waterman tried to finish his breakfast but he wasn’t hungry anymore. He tried to take another walk on the promenade deck. The sea stretched to the horizon and with each slap against the hull it hemmed him in further and further. His knees buckled again and he held onto the railing because he might fall into the water. His legs refused to move and his chest ached

and he found it more and more difficult to breathe. He thought how the sun would burn the top of his head whilst he drowned and his eyelids flittered and he felt faint. After minutes or hours he was aware again, and he managed to drag his way back to his cabin. It was small but it was dry, and he could see all four walls. He lay on the bed and watched a universe of dust in the stream of light from the porthole. In the afternoon Waterman saw a dead crane fly on his bedside table. Except that it wasn’t dead, three of its legs still twitched and its wings feebly buzzed every few minutes. He decided that the crane fly was a woman, and thought about picking her up and taking her outside to fly away, or at least die in the sun. But then he thought about the wind blowing her into the sea and how he’d drown her. And then he thought about tripping outside on the deck and crushing her in a collapsed fist. And then he thought about crushing her or pulling off her legs in an attempt to pick her up. So instead he lay there and watched her scramble at the air and drag her half-dead body to safety. He watched her wings fail, and her legs slowing, one by one, until there was one final spasmodic twitch of her back leg. And he started crying as the sun set. On this final night they are sleeping alone. Waterman and Elizabeth and the green man and the grinning people and Trouble are sleeping alone. The next door couple are apart, the man instead settling in a deckchair outside. Mrs Surness thought her insomnia would be playing up again tonight, but she is sleeping too. There is a cold breeze. On this final night Waterman dreams he is wandering in a grey desert. He is the messenger and brings news of a plague, and he’s been travelling for three million years. It’s night. Somewhere in the darkness, he finds an abandoned Spanish monastery, yellow brick with ornate carved arches but crude holes instead of windows. The floors used to be terracotta, but now they are all covered in sand. He climbs onto the roof, and from there up a tall steeple to a platform above the clouds and near the moon. He sits. He sings. He’ll forget the dream if he wakes up.

Oscar Farley

he Logical Order of a Family

She is the back to a forth, before the third in a family of two. Like mermaid tails in tide, an open fan of Indian fringe eyelashes. A left to the right of an arm spanned like junctions in Madras, sweeping foot falls brushing clean the rivers of people washing. Seamless heights grow green, a ketupat weaving breeze blue and haze sat like stars atop new cities forgiven sky. Wind eyes are dry then bright then wet.

All the girls soft, petal bone blushed and soured. Yellow tamarind rib twisted from Adam, they are the laughter lines baked into dark boys falling off coconut trees on land lost. Hand holding, pot stirring people made like stairs, silent spines in houses built honest, a conclusion past the mailman into a letter. A birth before maghrib, clear-eyed Friday babies tiptoeing skin the colour of honey into ashes. Once born a birthday, fingers sleep, a stone branch clasped over generations. Eyes tanned fish grey and brown in sight of soft evenings falling deep into arms of saltwater, children grow mouths the shape of swords, bejewelled, a pantun sharpened in Tamil, a feather touch of Urdu. Born poets named in Arabic, all that is spoken at tombstones are half-words breaking over soft English. At the end of the day identical mothers stand by doors heavy and arms opened: Dik, come in quickly, there is cold that turns into stillness. Come in slowly, there is time that turns into pain. Come in together, there is a face in the mirror and it began a moon, then a daughter, soon a fable, now a ghost. Ketupat is a traditional Malay dumpling The maghrib prayer is the evening prayer, done after sunset. Pantun is the Malay word for poem Dik is sometimes used as a term of endearment, a shortened form of ‘adik’ which means younger sibling in Malay. In Malay families, women often call their husbands ‘bang’ (meaning older brother) and children ‘dik’. Adik is also used to mean addict in Bahasa Indonesia and Tagalog.

Nurul Amillin

he Robing of the Bride

Max Ernst’s The Robing of the Bride (1940, opposite) is a painting which enacts, quoting Breton in What is Surrealism?, ‘the future transmutation of those two seemingly contradictory states, dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, of Surreality so to speak.’ The painting in fact, dated 1940, reflects a metamorphosis both at the individual level, in Max Ernst’s personal life, and at the macroscopic or historical level, actively embodying the simultaneously individual and shared political character of Surrealism. In 1938 Max Ernst was living with his lover, Leonora Carrington, in their farmhouse at Saint-Martin d’Ardache. They were living ‘A moment of Calm’. The oceanic forest represented in this eponymous 1939 painting is illuminated with stained glass reflections and a bird, symbolic of Loplop, Ernst’s pictorial alter-ego, is dancing within the vegetation, free, and perfectly at ease with that anarchical locus, ‘secular, swarming, diametrical, negligent, ferocious, fervent and loveable’ that both the forest and Surrealist Eros represent – a locus which Chadwich associated by extension with Callington. In September 1939 this moment collapses: Germany invades Poland and France declares war, consequently Ernst is arrested as an enemy citizen and sent to prison, first to Largentiere and then to Les Milles, with the threat of being sent to Germany, where Hitler had classified him as degenerate artist in the 1937 ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition where his painting The Beautiful Gardner of 1923 was presented as ‘an insult to German womanhood’. Ernst’s The Robing of the Bride can be interpreted as his personal response to internment, unmasking which art is truly degenerate. In doing so he created a painting that offered his vision of Surrealism. The Robing of the Bride shows a dense coalescence of iconographical, technical and alchemical references testifying to Breton’s definition of Surreality as the ‘relation in which all notions are merged together’ , notions of ‘chance, illusion, the fantastic’, ‘religion, magic, intoxications and of all life that is lowly’. Surrealism could not be defined as a self-contained, determined movement with confined boundaries. Ernst’s painting is in fact an expanding visual collage of disguised sources, where no one takes precedence on the other, whilst

a ‘logical end escapes us’ . The scene is set in a Renaissance interior, which is traditionally, and here only apparently, symbolic of a logical coherent space. The checkered tile floor obeys the rational laws of perspective. Further to this the interior and the scene itself echoes the technical exactitude and formal realism of both Van Eyck’s Arnolfini portrait and Annunciation: yet the antecedents are made as foreign and unheimlich as possible. Instead of a human couple holding hands before a convex mirror, an image of stability and domestic security, an anthropomorphic stork invades the space of the bride pointing his threatening, phallic lance to her sex, whilst in the background a picture hangs, replicating the scene, which is yet deformed by decalcomania – a technique which is a visual counterpart to automatic writing, invented by Oscar Dominguez, which Ernst would employ in Europe after the Rain II to suggest the spiritual putrefaction and physical collapse of the continent during World War 2. The stool on the left is an Annunciation trope, but it is displaced and what should be a benign angel becomes a threatening presence. Virginal chastity is alluded to by means of the bride’s covering hand, and simultaneously denied by her exposed nudity. Hence familiar and orthodox art, and with it the culture that promoted it is made strange and unfamiliar, generating in the viewer the uncanny. Breton affirmed that Ernst ‘destroyed all the myths about art that for centuries have permitted. The ideological as well as economic exploitation of painting, sculpture, literature’. All the ingredients of high-status art are quoted, transformed and reassembled to expose the culture which was responsible for the raise and condescendence to Nazism. Traditional art is exposed by Ernst as being the banner of a degenerate culture. David Hopkins explains the coupling of stork and bride as Ernst’s juxtaposition and condensation of the German myth of ‘the bride of the wind’ and Freud’s psychoanalytic reading of Leonardo where the ‘catholic mythology of the virgin’s birth is linked to the imagery of the Egyptian vulture-headed goddess Mut, who, significantly is fertilised by the wind’. In fact Hopkins observes that in 1936 Ernst had written in Cahiers d’Art: ‘The 24th December 1933, I was visited by a young chimera in evening dress. Eight days later I met a blind swimmer. A little patience and I should assist in the attirement of the bride. The Bride of the wind embraced me in passing at a swift gallop.’ The quotation allows for interpretation of The Robing of the Bride, beyond

the Surrealist negative and deconstructive social critique, towards the movement’s positive and utopic character, one that offers a new reality or Surreality to the viewer, achieved through an element of surprise, reached after the phase of uncanny feeling. The bride of the wind legend, in fact, refers to the wild huntsman galloping after the bride, who is identified with a tempest or a horse. The myth has therefore an erotic element, which had already been explored by Oskar Kokoschka in his 1913-1914 eponymous canvas. In Ernst’s picture the attirement of the Bride, which is in fact a transsexual metamorphoses, becomes an erotic act when coupled with the Bride of the Wind’s. This is in line with the Surrealists’ centralization of Eros as a liberating and redemptive power - not by chance the 1938 International Surrealist exhibition was designed as a dark, labyrinthine and intrauterine space: through penetration into a gallery space evocative of abject femininity, which according to Freud should have been repressed for the preservation of society, man would raise to new consciousness and free himself from the shackles of society. Breton wrote ‘Existence lies elsewhere’ and ‘what is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer a fantastic; there is only the real’ . The bride is a fusion of a large male owl with a female body, whose profiled head reveals, through the red plumage a third eye. The third eye is an esoteric symbol of omniscience and refers to the tiger-eye. An article in Minotaure mentions the link between the owl and Pallas Athena, the goddess of rationality. The small pendant with a golden face hanging over the breast of the Bride was also worn by the greek goddess. The red cloak is a non westernart reference since Breton in Minotaure praised the ‘beauty of a mantle made of tiny red feathers, work by Hawaiian chieftains’ . Ernst’s reference to nonwestern art reinforces his rejection of National Socialist art and culture. At once the red-feathered cloak is a bridal dress and kingly mantle. The figure defies gender identification and is at once both King and Queen, evidence of how Surrealism took the first step towards the ‘unification of the personality’ by means of provoking ‘new states of consciousness, overthrowing the walls beyond which it was immemorially supposed to be impossible to see’. In fact scholars Warlick and Hopkins have seen in the Robing of the Bride references to the alchemical text The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. After the first alchemical process of death and destruction the King and the Queen, Sulphur and Mercury, are separated in the whitening phase. Symbols used in alchemical writing and art to represent this subsequent rubedo stage can include blood, a phoenix, a rose, a crowned king, or a fig-

ure wearing red clothes. According to Jungian psychology rubedo represents the culmination of the four stages, the merging of the ego and the self. Ernst presents ‘interior reality and exterior reality as two elements in process of unification, or finally becoming one’ and in doing so he recurs to alchemy, which is in itself a superstition. Again Breton’s words resonate: ’Under our civilization, under the pretext of progress, all that rightly or wrongly may be regarded as fantasy or superstition has been banished from the mind, all uncustomary search after truth has been proscribed’. Ernst’s The Robing of the Bride in all its multifaceted poetics, which include decalcomania, alchemy, psychoanalysis, iconographical collage of references, Eros, fantastic metamorphoses and transgender sexuality, reflects Breton’s definition of Surrealism, not as much as ‘automatic thought removed from all control of reason and disengaged from all aesthetic or moral preoccupation’, but rather as free from ‘conscious aesthetic or moral preoccupations’ .

Lavinia Puccetti

olourfast

and by the end of the walk back away from home the year has found a way to never green again for some time autumn’s superfluous bureaucracy has found a reddening in the vegetation like the slowest of burning books about our doorstep and their colours falter (under the night sky’s turning brilliant pesticide) pristinely not themselves by the end of the night’s walk but soon the day sky will learn a bedsheet blue washed clean of you, mother

Henry St Leger-Davey 15

eventy Percent Denial, Thirty Percent Milk and Sugar Had he been raised with a certain dismissiveness, much like his Scandinavian friends, he probably wouldn’t have felt so affected. Winter. That’s when it happened, without exception, always. He should have come to expect it by now. But he somehow never managed to prepare for it properly. Frigid mornings. Come up, sun! Early darkness. Now, where’ve you gone? As with everything else, his issues revolved around the sun. Though, he wasn’t one to beg. So he rejected the sun, as it had him. His curtains remained closed at all hours. They keep out the cold, he told concerned friends. Only when the sun dared come out, did he meet it. And he only ventured outdoors when absolutely necessary. But, why then was he outside, now, in the cold, walking to the corner shop? Not for what you think. If there was one thing he learned, alcohol—no, not that, he required something more substantial, more sophisticated: dark chocolate. Nothing less than seventy percent. Biting into that precious bar, it was a chorus in the mouth, choral oral music. Spring wears a foil-wrapped disguise!—a mouthful, indeed. Each bite richer than the last. The chocolate transported him to a chandeliered ballroom full of others looking to waltz away the winter. Parquet floors, dripping diamonds, white ball gowns, and whispered criticisms. He didn’t even need to close his eyes to see it. It seemed impossible, like winter’s end. A modern match girl, chocolate bar in hand, he left his beige curtains and hissing radiators behind. Never stopping to count the number of bites left until reality dragged him to his desk.

Arthur Thompson

he Becoming of Jack Frost

Jack Frost’s first name wasn’t truly Jack; it was Colby. His surname wasn’t actually Frost; it was Morris. He liked neither skiing (clumsy people do not fare well on long, narrow pieces of wood) nor cold weather (it made his nose runny). He much preferred cherries to frost-berries, and he absolutely detested snow peas (although he had never been a vegetable person, really). Most importantly of all, Jack Frost hadn’t been born magical. The mother of Colby Morris was a lovely young peasant girl from an obscure, snowy village in the French Alps. Colby Morris, who was known simply as “Baby” for the first three months of his life, was the product of a pre-marital scandal. This resulted in a bit of teasing for Colby’s father, and complete humiliation and social ostracism for his mother. Ninety-two days of absolute exclusion from all community affairs were one day more than Colby’s mother could bear. She woke up on a sunny August morning, decided that she had been subjected to quite enough derogatory looks from her fellow villagers, strapped Colby to her back with a thick band of goat-hide, and hiked to the highest cliff she could reach within a day’s walk. Moving towards the cliff’s edge, she flung her arms out wide and swan-dove towards her death, having decided that neither she nor her child would be able to survive in the jungle of society. Things, though, did not go precisely as planned. Colby’s mother had not much experience with knots, and so when she soared towards her demise Colby flew off in the opposite direction, landing softly and safely in the nest of a golden eagle. Unfortunately, the inhabitants of this miraculously well-placed nest had moved house just a few days earlier. Mummy Eagle had decided that the children needed more living space now that they were learning to fly. Father Eagle, being very proud of his three young sons, did not complain about

the expense —much. Luckily, a pair of American rock-climbers who had decided to abandon their careers as accountants in a big Manhattan law firm for a life of Adventure and Fresh Air, heard Baby’s piteous mews of hunger. Led by an inherent human instinct that is no longer transcribed through the genetic code of our species (namely, the kindness of their hearts), they searched the mountain cliff until they found the source of those infantile cries for help. Having at first believed the whimpers to be those of a kitten or a baby Oreamnus americanus (you see, they had forgotten that they were no longer in their home country and so would be hard-pressed to find a mountain goat of the type that exists only in North America), they were severely surprised and terribly troubled when they came upon a human infant. Nonetheless, they welcomed the child into their camp and attempted to make it feel at home —and make it stop crying— by offering it a variety of consumables, ranging from raisins to beef jerky. (The mountain climbers were men.) They named him Colby Morris, and put him in a rucksack. He lived there for the next six months. One hundred and eighty-three days after the climbers first accepted Colby into their fold, he grew out of his leather home. The climbers could no longer carry him around on their backs. Having only recently trained him out of waking in the middle of the night, they were loath to give him up without having had the chance to enjoy the fruits of their labors. They returned to the City; there was a limited variety of leather backpacks available on the Alpine peaks. The difference in altitude caused Colby to develop a severe case of asthma, to which the only antidote was the hourly use of an inhaler. And so, this family of four (the Inhaler, being quite large and a constant companion of Colby’s, was inducted into the family as an official Morris), lived contentedly in Manhattan for two years. Seven hundred and twenty-six days after the Morrises’ return to New York City, a taxicab crashed at the intersection between East 125th Street and Lexington Avenue. Colby’s Father Number 1 had to return home from work following a different route. He passed by the window display of a travel agency, advertising a two-week trip to the Himalayas. Beset with a sudden surge of nostalgia, he purchased three round-trip tickets (the Inhaler, he was

told, did not need a ticket of its own). The Morrises packed their trunks, purchased a new leather rucksack —just in case— and converted their most recent paychecks to “Himalaya money”. On their way to the airport on the day of their departure, Colby accidentally inhaled the fumes from a passing car’s exhaust pipe, which were so thickly gray that they filled the interior of the Morrises’ van and temporarily blinded both of Colby’s fathers. Father Number 2 pulled over into a darkened alleyway. Colby’s asthma had reacted so badly to the fumes that he had fainted from lack of oxygen. By the time the smoke had cleared, Colby had been abducted by a group of Italian Mafiosi. They gagged him with a pair of purple bandanas, and hid him in the basement of a ship bound for Canada. (The Mafiosi had actually meant to send Colby to Venezuela, where their Caracas counterparts could put him to good use working for the illegal drug trade. They confused the names of the ships.) For thirty-two days, Colby survived on the bananas and soymilk in the ship’s cargo, which was being transported from Jamaica to Nova Scotia. When the crates of bananas and soybean-juice were unloaded in New Brunswick, Colby, who had formed the habit of sleeping inside a crate filled with his discarded banana peels, was unloaded as well. Twelve dozen banana crates, including the one which contained Colby, were transferred to a truck, taken to the airport, transported to the hold of an airplane, and flown to a small city in the Canadian Arctic. An Inuit chieftain who had come to the city to purchase kerosene oil and Aspirin (he suffered from terrible migraines) bought the crate containing Colby as a treat for his tribe. He tied the crate to the back of his huskydrawn-sleigh and started towards home. About halfway through his journey, the Chief got hungry. He was quite shocked when the crate of bananas he had purchased turned out to be a box containing a tiny human boy. When the two weary travellers finally reached the Chief’s Igloo, the Chief had decided to adopt Colby and teach him the ways of the People. At the age of twelve Colby was apprenticed to the tribe’s magician, who taught him the secrets of snow-speak. Although Colby no longer lives yearround with his Inuit family, he still uses his snow-speaking abilities to sum-

mon the frost each winter. Nobody knows what happened to the Morrises. It is widely assumed that they died of broken hearts. Either that, or they are now searching the nests of birds of prey in the Himalayas, hoping to find a replacement Colby Morris.

Sophia Gatzionis

onnet for Johnny Bravo

Johnny Bravo wept. The muscles in his face collapsed like a government in way over its head. A military repositioned itself into a demilitarized foreign country. Johnny Bravo said, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;run upstairs and get the iodine, baby,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; so I did. He died in my arms. We commemorated him with a state funeral. My hair turned Tiffany silver. The crowds wore Johnny Bravo masks. Children had sunglasses, quiffed their hair. Ed, Edd and Eddy set aside their differences. The Powerpuff Girls sang. We watched him burn like a brilliant sun. The cannons fired through the night.

Rowland Bagnall

he Harvester

He’d been sweating sticky slug-trails down his back for what must have been decades. The garden grown by him, sealed off by sweetcorn, him in the cauliflower nets which catch up about his feet, and snapped parsnips, embracing in the irrigation, fawned over by blushing broad beans, the worms. For this, we have waited all year: the bubble burn of limbs and sun; the slop and suck of yielding mud – last time it had been him turning this soil – each crack palmed wrinkle cradling dirt, pulling earth from stubborn earth, down to where the saplings, the harvest, had nestled stone-smitten sweet.

He can remember last yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cold Kestrels, and King Edward in his mass grave, but from where he sinks into the compost, it is just my image, rising from my mud-muddled bed with each roll of the spade and each love-sick vegetable uprooted, keeping small, keeping quiet, trying to hold each other so close and so still, until I climb to their depths and wear them like undergrowth, finding myself in the dark, weeping womb of the earth.

Laura Thompson

ntitled

The butterflies trapped in vaulted cool Quit struggling for the light A clustered miracle beneath a dark shelf They did not resist my cupping hands The last left a ghost wing A mark on my skin speaking of Strange feathered murmurs Frantic panic in tarred shadow Recalling my magnetism for fallen nestlings Huddled, warm and fragile Rambling and crying till they lay still And crumpled in disquietude

Courtney Landers

(our Homeland is Hell)

‘Revolt for change’ – that’s what they were told eighty Nine years ago, now those words echo through The minds of their children’s children. They too Become martyrs struggling against authority. 130,000 dead at the hands of Bashar, and Counting. A child cries for his Father, A silenced cry. Ignored, as the West rather Defend Bonus Street. All they cry for is a hand. A hand offered in the form of talks, Aiming for a solution 2300 miles from Homs, Mr Hague, from Geneva can you hear the bombs? Every second, minute, hour - another soldier walks Into the embrace of Allah, to the sound of revolutionary songs. Can you hear those from Geneva, Mr Kerry? Will you sing along?

Ceylon Hickman

ong Kong, Translation City

Hong Kong, midsummer, dusk. ‘Central’, district of gleaming skyscrapers and ceaseless trade, is performing its routine transformation: coffee shops, blissfully cool, morph into bars; suited expat workers replace aimless tourists on the outdoor escalators; an endless variety of angular shapes projected in light animate the edges of the Bank of China building, a silver blade, once the tallest building in Asia. On the other skyscrapers the lights flicker to life, thickening in variety like an orchestra tuning up. Emblems, adverts, reams of moving text, fugal patterns, even a swimmer breast-stroking up the walls of the ICC building. The canteens are filling with exhausted workers who order ice-cold lager in tiny glasses before they think about food. For this hour only the pristine malls are crossing points echoing with the clip-clop of marching heels, where no-one dawdles. On the street a popular taxi-hailing spot is suddenly a queue ten strong. Thirty floors up on the balconies of the cocktail bars the city’s moneymakers are tiny silhouettes, elbows on the rail as they sip their gins and tonic. They look north across Victoria Harbour at Kowloon and the mainland, or west to the islands and the airport, where the sun is setting, admiring their city as it does its variety act, a quick change that leaves the first-time viewer gasping. A chameleon in time, too: the city that in midsummer was a bastion of late capitalist peace was ground to a halt by massive protests in the autumn. Beneath that veneer of stability the malaise had been simmering. You’d like to cross the street. (You’re meeting a friend for a drink, you’re going to the races, you’re lost). You stand at a pedestrian crossing next to a woman with her earphones in, two Chinese students and an English family. The taxis roll by. There’s a ticking in the air, intermittent hammering sounds, one a second. It’s the crossing telling you not to move. When the ticks become constant, start walking. Tick, tick, tick, tickticktickticktick... Like a hundred tiny pneumatic drills hammering away at your patience. You’re in a hurry. Above you on either side the buildings are so high the sunset is only their vague backlighting. A new pavement. You turn left. Is that right? What happened to the signposts? In such situations you could easily think that this city, foreign for all its

British trappings, has got the better of you. Its pace is exhausting; you’re getting ‘alienated’. You’ve gone the wrong way: the Google map shimmering under your smart phone’s cracked screen was misleading. You do something ridiculous: whipping out your phone, you take a phantom call, nod sagely, turn around. Sweat pricks your back. Surely the locals, so adept at living in this 3D madness, will see you for the pretender you are? Wait. They’ve all gone. Everybody who crossed with you at the beck of the ticking hammers has disappeared: the students into a bar, the English family into their chauffeured 4x4, the woman... somewhere. In your confusion you realize that the strangeness of the city is its capacity to change suddenly, to be up when you thought it was down, familiar when you thought alien. Jonathan Raban noticed this about cities in 1974. He said these polymorphic moments are the city becoming ‘soft’, warping into something you thought it wasn’t, or into another city. But the same happens to you, too. Out here in Hong Kong, where you know only that friend who’s waiting for you at the bar, you can be - or pretend to be - anything you want. You are in translation, then. It means to be ‘carried across’. Carried across the world with a rucksack and no Cantonese. Perhaps like Bill Murray’s jaded actor advertising whisky in Tokyo, you are lost in it, but being lost might be liberating. Now of course it’s true that if you were back home in London or New York you might have taken the wrong turning after a crossing too, and no-one would have noticed there either. Yet back home it might be the street where you were dumped for the first time, where you were kettled, where your friend works. Back home there may be no-one to spot your moment of confusion, but it’s your city and it judges you. Being anonymous out here lets you be amateurish, for the first time in years. It lets you be plenty of other things, too. FILTH: Failed in London, Try Hong Kong. This particular city-state-archipelago was once the capital of reinvention, for second sons with few prospects, for dim public schoolboys whose Oxbridge connections hadn’t done enough to secure a City job, for adventurers. Some of them - shock horror - mixed with and married the locals, learnt Cantonese, built gabled clapboard houses on Lamma Island and stayed here forever. We had a phrase for it: ‘going native’. You’re here for the summer, of course, so there’s no question of that for you. Have a taste of it, though: in translation, as you are, your image is in your hands. Arriving at the bar, you see no sign of your friend. On cue, a vibration in

your pocket. He’s closing a deal and will be fifteen minutes late. You order a drink. By the time you’ve paid you’re talking to the barman. He’s a Pacific Islander and has been in Hong Kong for fifteen years. He arrived just after the handover, aged 20, moving because his girlfriend had a job as a maid up on the Peak, where the millionaires live above the mist. He worked as a waiter, picked up some Cantonese, got better jobs in bars. Now he helps to run this place. And what do you do? You pause. You’re a tennis coach? Sounds good. You don’t work here, though? No, this is just travelling. It’s a beautiful city. Mad though. That wasn’t a lie: you are a tennis coach. You qualified five years ago. You funded a European jaunt with it. The conversation you now have with the barman about the clubs on the south of the island, the pay, this year’s Wimbledon final, is not make-believe. Except of course, you’re not who he thinks you are. You haven’t told him that what you’d really like to be - what everyone says you ought to be - is one of the guys up on the rooftop bars in a suit, working ridiculous hours, paid to excess, gross influence in your hand. How long are his hours? You’re about to ask but he’s serving another customer. You must be careful with this ‘tennis coach regular working guy’ line. It’s not the first time you’ve deployed it. Stick out here long enough and you might start to believe in it. Conrad’s big theme: the world is full of expats lost in translation, gone native in some tropical corner because they much preferred their reinvented selves to the selves they’d left behind. And that we are all, at heart, expats. The guy who just pitched up is, at any rate. He and your friend are on first-name terms. He’s a regular, his accent somewhere between Aussie and South African. He sips his beer and wipes the foam off with his sleeve. A pause. He asks you your name. Two minutes into this conversation you’re in urgent need of your friend’s arrival. This guy didn’t take your tennis coach shtick straight up like the barman. A sidelong glance, a little lift of the brows. Tennis coach, are you? That must be pretty cushy. Where are you from again? England. So do you, like, coach the royal family? He doesn’t think it’s work because he hasn’t worked for years now. He thinks he has: a bit of this, a bit of that, he can’t tell you that much about it if you know what he means… he came out here to save money but started drinking, never bothered to find a job, still lives out of boxes. Doesn’t it get lonely, you ask? He sniggers, and leans forward.

His cheeks are a little pudgy, his sideburns taper out. Gold chain. You don’t know what you’re on about, he confides with a wink. The women here… You nod politely, grin and shrug. Look, you tell him. I’m just a tennis coach. There you go. All it took to make you believe your own translation was a middle-aged perv in a Hong Kong bar. You’re ashamed of that. It makes you want to shunt up your stool to his and explain to him that you’re not an innocent English boy alone in the big city; it’s the first time you’ve been your own man, living truly for yourself, in years. You came out here to learn what it’s like not to be always busy, at someone’s command, haunted by guilt or a lack of sleep, sullied with caffeine. You want to tell him about the afternoons you’ve had wandering through the markets on the dark side, bantering with the watch sellers from the subcontinent, eating as and when you liked, writing the odd note. But he thinks you’re a tennis coach. In come the regulars. The barman’s popular: most of them call him by name. Mercifully Lothario to your left is busy typing at his phone, sniggering occasionally. His mates out here: some crazy fellas, he can tell you. Your beer is three-quarters empty, always a sign of a conversation on edge. Sips fill the awkwardness. The barman asks you whether you want another. Why not? Exactly, he says, pulling you another and sliding a mat under it. And where’s your girlfriend? You laugh it off. She’s somewhere out there, you say. No, she’s not a tennis player. Then we’d have nothing to talk about. He likes that. In his life, it didn’t last with the first girl, the maid on the Peak. But he found someone else, also from back home. There are two children. They live down south in a flat. It’s small, he says, but that’s OK. The first girl is still here but he never sees her. Where’s your friend? A text is dispatched. You swill and ponder. When you left for Asia you’d been reading fitfully. You had the idea that you’d missed out on the classics and needed to catch up. So you ordered in philosophy, books of poems, novels, sometimes 500 years old. You made notes. It felt good to leave that behind. In the airport you took out a new electronic reader, a little black tablet. You started amassing Eastern literature in translation, most of it free. One of the pleasant surprises of this journey is how much you’ve enjoyed it. The poems from the Ming courts come in a little selection, one in each electronic page. You’ve flicked through most. They’re very short. You love the translation: it stays true to the original - you think it does, you have no Chinese of any kind - but there’s none of the trappings,

the antiquated spelling, the musty verb forms it has in your own language. The idea you have of the guys that wrote them, as people so modern in outlook, so amazingly fresh and witty for whatever century they lived in, you know that’s the translation talking. All the same, though, it reminds you of the time when you were taken to the theatre at age 14 to see a play that sounded incredibly boring, by a Russian who died a hundred years ago. And it was hilarious, exciting, sad, like nothing you’d seen before. And in the car on the way home that put you in mind of the paintings on the walls of ancient houses you once drove to see on a hot, ramshackle family holiday when you were very young. Lots had crumbled away, leaving just a few bright images: a hunter chasing a boar, two people eating under a tree, a swimmer diving into a pool. Out of context, in translation, they were fresh. You could imagine anything you wanted to explain them. Another vibration. Your friend’s apologetic. But here’s an idea: the guy he’s spent a week sealing that deal with is impressed with him. He lives a fair way out of Central but he has a beautiful place and an infinity pool. He’s proposed an impromptu barbecue? Do you fancy it? You text back telling him you’ll finish this beer, and be there as quick as you can. You drink up and wish the barman all the best. You should have got his name. On the way out you hold the door open for a woman with her earphones in. Off you go then, no longer a tennis coach, into Asia’s World City, ready to translate yourself again. You come to a pedestrian crossing. Tick...

Archie Cornish

he Eclipse you teaching and me learning underwater, under my brainwaves and under you, your silver lining making my day before it arrives

Harry Cochrane