750
PÉKIN, CHINE
The room flares in and out With the wreckless pulse of the rechargeables And occasionally A desperate train Crashes by the house, Out of control - alarmed. It lets out a wail and The fear streams though A slit on the blinds Momentarity projecting A jagged barcode - Neon bars Onto the walls. I can’t sleep.
Après la Pluie The blackbird rain bubbles You slug A beer, barefoot in the mud, Your hem soaking in cloth-melting brown Somehow cleaner than its tired Yellowing century flowers. Maybe the salt has slimed In fizzing traces along the stems As they dissolve to dead slug sludge. (Hands slide under the sticky wet wrinkles Only trembling and sighing in mercury fusion.) The leaves are dim and their posed smiles Somehow blurred— Their curves used to be as stiff as uncles With their black insect hats; Now the legs wave in drug-powdered sleepiness In the quiet hands on a blossom’s head So tiny, so wet.
You wrapped up the stain, Pulling its edges from the floorboards And origami-carefully folding it. It sleeps in a pink lace box— You glued photos of roses and Dead women on the sides. But as you crouch in the green here No matter how hard You pry The puddle won’t fold. We’re all getting older, you reflect On your rocking-chair lawn, The wet grass knitting around slugs, Maybe if we sit in the rain long enough We’ll dissolve.
DALI, CHINE
Before Sunrise Celine and Jesse are two twenty-somethings who meet in a train carriage where people are speaking some incomprehensible language (German), somewhere in the middle of Europe. They cross paths and sparks fly. Jesse, an American, is catching his plane back tomorrow. They have only one night together.You think you know the story already. And in a way you do. What else do young, attractive, intelligent people do in films other than fall for one another? What one remembers, however, is not the plot but the intimate conversations that they share. Who knew dialogue could be so beautiful? Before Sunrise is nothing more than two people meeting on a train who together wander the streets of Vienna, acting on the romantic imperative that they owe it to their future OAP-selves to be impulsive NOW. Rambling down the baroque streets of Vienna, they talk about Seurat, the male ego, parents, the ghost of grandma and why we obsess about people we don’t even like that much. These conversations detail the preoccupations and desires of youth so exquisitely. Celine and Jesse are at that age when every insubstantial thought or pretension is treated with naive sincerity. But they equally express the most well-observed and poignant nuggets of insight, tentative reflections corroborated by the experience of age: ‘Jesse: I kind of see all this love as this escape for two people who don’t know how to be alone. People always talk about how love is this totally unselfish, giving thing, but if you think about it, there’s nothing more selfish.’
But perhaps Before Sunrise is a film that needs to be seen when you’re young. It seems to capture youth so perfectly- our generational rites, our social mores. It is a film that epitomized indie cool in the ‘90s, a dissenting shout against the dour Patrick Swayze years of Hollywood. I saw Before Sunrise during those late GCSE early A-level years. Back then, I identified myself too much with American culture; saw the suburban, passive aggressive frustration of post-war American culture as my own. Encountering Celine and Jesse with their student- like angst and their thoroughly modern dilemma of identity, I saw characters whose personal baggage I wanted to carry too. They had that cool complexity that made them intense. I identified with their narcissism as well. Celine and Jesse evidently saw their lives in an aestheticized way, saw all their actions in reference to the books they’d read. They always had Baudelaire (or some such guy) in their peripheral vision. Ever wondered what you’re life would be like if it were a Godard film, or if it were as frenetic as the sentences of Kerouac? I think Celine and Jesse were the kind of people who did. They seemed like people who lived in their own constructed version of reality. A reality augmented with cutouts hastily torn from a Hitchcock film: Jesse: I feel like this is, uh, some dream world we’re in, y’know. Celine:Yeah, it’s so weird. It’s like our time together is just ours. It’s our own creation. It must be like I’m in your dream, and you in mine, or something. Jesse: And what’s so cool is that this whole evening, all our time together, shouldn’t officially be happening. Celine:Yeah, I know. Maybe that’s why this feels so otherworldly.
I think if future historians looked back on our ‘modern’ age, this film would be quite representative of what our mindsets were (are?). Both Celine and Jesse are self-interested to the point of vulgarity. All their conversations lead down the alley of their past selves, their present selves, their memories, their past thoughts. And running through all of this is the equally modern ideal of discovering yourself through a significant other. The self, and relationships between ourselves, is king. For all those sometime sufferers of I-wish-my-life-were-a-novel syndrome, I present the most picturesque moment in the film. As Celine and Jesse wander along a canal, they encounter a ‘Viennese version of a tramp’ who instead of begging writes a poem in exchange for coins, taking as his starting point the spontaneous word that the couple give him. They give him ‘milkshake’: ‘Daydream delusion, limousine eyelash, oh, baby with your pretty face, drop a tear in my wineglass, look at those big eyes, see what you mean to me, sweet cakes and milkshakes, I am a delusioned angel, I am a fantasy parade, I want you to know what I think, dont want you to guess anymore,
you have no idea where I came from, we have no idea where we’re going, launched in life, like branches in the river, flowing downstream, caught in the current, I’ll carry you, you’ll carry me, that’s how it could be, don’t you know me? don’t you know me by now?’
You started crying. I never really Thought about it. But I stopped to write it down. Lest the moment slip my memory.
Holding out against the emptiness Holding each other in the darkness.
I never noticed my moments with you Wash away. There were always plenty of smiles To go around, always more Bottles to be passed around, always Another story to be told. This day and the next, Each moment meant nothing but A ticket to the next, Between bed sheets Between scores Streaming past us, following The contours of our bodies. We were embers glowering in the emptiness
Moments
ben eine
has become very well known in recent years for adorning corrugated iron shopfronts in east london with beautiful lettering
It’s hard to get accurate figures on the number of CCTV cameras currently silently watching us in the UK. In any case, it is a question of millions- some say as high as four or five. It’s become a part of our British identity. Only Russia, that bastion of liberal democracy, has more CCTV cameras per head than the UK. In fact, you can buy your very own CCTV kit in Aldi for £29.99. The average Londoner is filmed around three hundred times a day . Merely walking down a high street, perhaps going into a department store, or sitting down, like I do, to work in my college library means being watched, silently and furtively. And it’s not the Orwellian overtones, there isn’t one ‘Big Brother.’ In fact, there are lots. In 2004 a law was passed that gave councils more power to spy on their employees. It is so much part of our culture that surveillance is being used to make sure the neighbours don’t fly- tip, and Mary from accounts doesn’t pull a sicky. Cameras, like anything else, are harmless in themselves. But if we accept the principle; that the cameras only bear witness to the guilty, which is what we do when we allow people to follow our every moves, then we let the gates open to a form of trial by trust in the government’s good will. This is seeping into our approach to legislation- calling a bill which changes the principles on which the police operate an “Anti- Terror” bill damns its opponents, implies that support for Habeas Corpus is terroristic, and masks the fact that detention, arrest and
searching are things that are supposed to happen before you have been proven guilty, not with the assumption that you already are. Having a vague idea or suspicion, then giving yourself the benefit of the doubt, is not a firm foundation on which to build law. The ease with which we accept the presence of CCTV on our roads, in the shops, where we work and, thanks to Aldi, in our homes, is nothing compared to the apathy we feel when civil protections going back hundreds of years are swept away with the wearied fatherly assurance of “National Security.” Everyone knows the drill: a brief storm in the media; the promise of “a full and thorough investigation,” public recriminations and pragmatic defences. The Independent revealed, in 2006, that every year since 2001, thirty thousand people are stopped and their beings searched under laws purporting to be ‘Anti- Terror.’ And the same laws have been used in high profile cases. An old man screams “terrorist” at Tony Blair and is bundled out of the conference hall and arrested as one himself. The opposition politician Damian Green blows the whistle on Home office mistakes and is arrested for endangering his country and spreading fear of violent reprisal. In a bizarre twist on the conventional moral paradigm of principle vs pragmatism, Jacqui Smith invoked ‘the principle of operational independence’ to defend the illegal police arrest of Damian Green, breaking parliamentary privilege, and unashamedly pretending that the Home Secretary, who is head of the police force, was unaware that the arrest was due to take place, even though the police were brought in by… the Home Office.
Although the ostensible goal of the law faculty occupation was to get the University to commit to supporting the civilian population of Gaza, there was another cheeky little clause slotted into their demands.You might not even have noticed it, hiding between their plea not to be punished for protesting and the request for scholarships for Palestinian students, but it was there nonetheless. ‘We demand that Cambridge University and its colleges disinvest from the arms trade in cooperation with the existing Cambridge (and colleges) Against the Arms Trade movement.’ It might be argued that exploiting the crisis in Gaza to plug a completely separate campaign is a bit on the sneaky side, but the issue of disinvestment from the arms trade is a pertinent and serious issue, at Cambridge University more than anywhere else. Cambridge is one of the largest university investors in the arms trade, both through provision of financial support and through research.
DIVEST
The very nature of the arms trade, lurking as it does in the shadows of national security, makes it highly susceptible to dodgy dealings. And we all know that once a trade is driven underground, it becomes a practical Petri dish of unregulated activity.Weapons producers have been linked to such internationally condemned activities as child labour, bribery, corruption and landmine production.
They are also notorious for their lucrative deals with questionable states.The relationship between the British arms company BAE Systems and the House of Saud is particularly well known, especially the AlYamamah deal, for which BAE was the main contractor. Many of the Saudi princes, including Prince Bandar (who is, incidentally, a Churchill donor) have reputations of less than perfect conduct. BAE also supplied Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe with Hawk jets. To a certain extent, these kinds of deals are unavoidable. Arms companies produce weapons.To make money, arms companies need to sell those weapons.Who buys weapons? Defence departments of governments. The arms companies can’t really afford to be choosy about the nature of those governments. It’s not like they have a lot of opportunity to target new consumers. However, the dark side of this cold analysis is that arms are far from harmless. Indeed, their purpose is to kill, maim, or otherwise wreak destruction.The horrific results of their use can be seen today in Gaza.Over 1300 Palestinians have been killed,with many more suffering physical and psychological injuries. Perhaps the disinvestment demand of the Cambridge protesters wasn’t quite so irrelevant after all. Do we really want our university and our colleges to be indirectly responsible for such a disproportionate and hideous use of violence? More than half of Cambridge colleges have no socially responsible investment policy at all, and only a handful actually condemns the arms trade. Indeed, Magdalene has somehow managed to create an SRI policy, and yet retain their investments in BAE Systems. However, removing certain companies from our portfolios need not be detrimental to college finances.Typical avoidance could exclude only 1.9% of the FTSE all-share.So at a minimal cost to colleges,the University could remove its support for an industry which has an awful lot to answer for.
Swansong That morning when the sun rose I was happy, then I opened the lock Of memory and cried. I gained the top rung Only to face an endless no and fall Into the blank, imagining the flies Above my body broken in two. The guilty book, its letters in rows Ages me, like a tree in the fall I die without ever a bell being rung And nobody knowing. At the edge of the loch Do you dwell upon it too And sigh as the swan further away flies? Would you wish for a lock Of my hair when it is out of sight, to Remember? No, comfort yourself with the Fall And know you’re right, hands unwrung, No tears. And so withering our rose Dies, and the swan no longer flies.
The Space In-Between The space in-between The wall And the washing-machine Is small. I can measure it between Thumb and forefinger And yet That is where I linger. I crawled in Not to fall. A place To be safe. And small. For I have two fine feet, But am standing Upon none. My head is not of brick, But nor is my conscience clean; I, I am the space In between.
Zone “You are weary at last of this ancient world Shepherdess O Eiffel tower whose flock of bridges bleats at the morning You have lived long enough with Greek and Roman antiquity Here even automobiles look old Only religion stays news religion As simple as hangars at the airfield� Apollinaire
COLLAGE POETRY COMMENT
In Zone, modernity is reconfigured as “sweet stenographers” hurry to work, charmed by the “Paris factory street”. Yet this exaltation of modernity is stifled by repeated references to classical elegy and the pastoral. His city setting encapsulates all that is revolutionary, yet the ‘barking bell at noon’ and ‘twittering doorplates’ cannot escape Paris’ urban past and poetry’s literary tradition. In this introductory poem to his great work Alcools (1913), Apollinaire astutely captures the transitory nature of European art at this time. From 1911 the works of Picasso and Braque, renowned for their firm belief in artistic autonomy, made significant developments. Directing their vision towards modern life, they began to include song lyrics in their pieces and to amalgamate industrial with traditional painting techniques. In canvases such as Mujer con Guitarra (1911-12) Picasso began to introduce the inscription “Ma Jolie”, words from a popular song of the time. These two words gradually evolved, first into “Joli Eva”, referring to his new lover Eva Gouel, and then into “J’aime Eva”. Thus popular ballads, modern industry and traditional artistics techniques all merged together . Braque, with his incorporation of numbers and block capitals, also incorporated decorative styles into his work. He used industrial paint and stencils in pieces such as Le Portugais (1911-12) whilst Picasso substituted the earthy oil colours characteristic of cubist paintings with loud reds, whites, yellows and blues.Yet amongst all their experimentation, the most significant innovation was their introduction of the papier collé technique in 1912. Picasso included in his oil painting Naturaleza Muerta con Rejilla de Silla a piece of cloth on which was printed the weave of a wicker seat, whilst Braque, in his painting of the same year, Fruitdish and Glass, incorporated two strips of paper with mock wood imprint. Apollinaire believed these works to ‘contain the poetry of our era’, pursuing the process of reshaping artistic expectations that had been initiated by Picasso and Braque in their earlier cubist works. Their undermining of the artistic and literary canon was fertile ground for the emergence of a ‘poema-imagenes’ style, in which the boundaries between words and images became indistinguishable. The quintessence of the style fitted perfectly with the Italian Futurists’ thought and manifesto. Rebellious and vibrant, it was promptly seized and mastered by futurists such as Carrà, who found themselves abandoning their abrupt brushstrokes and plush pigments in favour of cut out card compiled into pieces of visual poetry. A cacophonic amalgamation of visual, auditory and political expression exploded from the nucleus of Carrà’s Manifestation Interventionniste (1914), “eeviiivaaa il reee” and “evvivaaa l’esército” screaming across the centre in big bold white letters contrasted against the black background.
It is papier collé at its most intense. Some words painted, others cut out from daily political publications, magazines or pamphlets, and each declaring/promoting the prosperity of modernity and the urban: ‘Luce elletrica, strada, aviatore…’ It is not until Miró and Picabia however that the new poema-imagenes style, now under the wing of surrealism, came to fruition. Divorcing their poetic collages from the political and social agenda of the Italian Futurists, they allowed teasing word games to take precedence. Their compositions, though still applying the papier collé style, were now dominated by a quirky brand of surrealist minimalism, whilst the onomatopoeic political declarations of Carrà were evaded and substituted for enigmatic poetic phrases. The composition of Picabia’s Chapeau de Paille? (1921) for instance relies significantly on the piece of cord, the invitation and the cut-out card, but explains itself playfully in the words “Chapeau de Paille? M……. pour celui qui le regarde!”. Miró’s Un Oiseau Poursuit une Abeille et la Baisse (1927) epitomises the eschewing of the Futurist political agendas. Through this painting Miró astutely illustrates the relationship between the palabras and imagenes of his era. Scrawled across a fluid, green-tinged brown background are the words of the title, each noun and verb treated as a collage element in itself: “Un Oiseau” is arranged in the top left corner adjacent to a few feather, “une abeille” is placed on top of a bright blue blotch in the bottom right corner just above “et la Baisse”, whilst the verb “poursuit”, written in Miró’s spidery writing and encircled by an elliptical yellow line, meanders across the central space, giving the impression of a bird in flight. All representation has been surrendered to the words which not only serve to name and explain, but also dare to embark on a process of figuration. Language becomes ambiguous to the point of subverting it’s predominant role: communication. Nonetheless, aesthetics aside, the charm of the piece ultimately lies in the esoteric double entendre of the words themselves. Though the implication of Miró’s phrase is clear – the birds and bees being a common euphemism in most languages– the phrase does not make obvious sense (‘A bird pursues a bee and lowers her’). Hence our temptation to read the verb baisser (to lower) as baiser (to kiss or, in argot, to shag), an alteration encouraged by the orthographic error alluded to by the floating ‘u’ above the scribbled ‘po-rsuit’. We find ourselves entranced by a Breton-esque surrealist word game in which “the words don’t play, they make love”, marking a new era of artistic hybridity wherein Miró’s famed desire to “assassinate painting” could be achieved and “poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love”; an epoch where aesthetic norms were breached, tradition thwarted and art’s visual and literary facets were united as creativity conceded to modernity.
BENJAMIN
I had arrived in Rigato to visit a woman friend. Her house, the town, the language were unfamiliar to me. Nobody was expecting me, no one knew me. For two hours I walked the streets in solitude. Never again have I seen them so. From every gate a flame darted, each cornerstone sprayed sparks, and every streetcar came toward me like a fire engine. For she might have stepped out of the gateway, around the corner, been sitting in the streetcar. But of the two of us I had to be, at any price, the first to see the other. For had she touched me with the match of her eyes, I should of gone up like a magazine. Walter Benjamin, ‘Ordance’, in One Way Street
At a Portobello fruit stall I first saw you. You flickered there in the corner of my eye while a knarled old hand passed over tangerines and clementines, weighing them out in a cracked cockney voice.Your face was there in the crowd, then gone, as fleeting as the figures sitting in the highest circles are to those in the stalls. At each corner I paused, each car made me jolt, my heart leapt at every little hint, motion, flash of eyes or mouth or hair. Each leap was extinguished, each spark of hope deferred for another day. Each, in their way, a little death, a rehearsal for the last.
It took me a while to forget you – it always does, I’ve been told. I still saw you flickering in café windows and train carriages, reflections and mirrors of what never was. Lives lived in parallel, in the same city yet oddly disjointed, on two different tracks never to converge.
Waiting. My bones hurt. You are too young. My bones Hurt.
I breathe in the hallway And take scarce satisfaction That you stood here At nine-fifty-two this morning.
How long will I be here Derelict and compromised Sharpening the scythe To manage the hopes I grow?
I wish you’d wake up Where I could see you. The smell of the tar from your Back of your neck is all at night.
I’m biting my nails That the door will not open. Glass vases loom From creaking shelves.
Oracle dear Glow brighter. I’ve taken a car from my neighbour And filled it with oil.
Reasoning
I fill it with madness, My broken tooth, Dry eyes and bad temper, The hate that they gave me To lug behind me, Jammed into the space In waiting. My lips ache.
I am the dirty boy Who grew up old With empty lungs And spindly veins. The chip in my heart Is shaped like your feet.
We walked in darkness; but you’d brought a torch to be our star - though wise men there were few tonight - and guided us towards the peak where New Year would be born amid the glow of tinted flame exploding in the air. But ice was on the roads, and we’d not reached the top before I turned to find that you had slipped and fallen on your face; and as I moved towards you, I myself, the one who claimed to stumble often, rarely fall, put one foot very wrong indeed, and crashed just millimetres from your yet-unconscious form.
And what an ice it was! A cold the clouds made way for, baring all the stars in heaven as we had never seen them. Beth could name the Plough, Orion and Big Dipper, but you hurried us along, as we had dawdled enough; and Happy New Year waited on that hill, and strained to hurtle on across clear skies.
Snow blanketed the roads, and trees dressed up in snow, that blossomed leaves of white and made a winter-spring, lay all across Bramhall; but once we reached your town there was no snow, just treacherous ice.
While others promised parties, drinks and laughs, friends half remembered and half liked with few exceptions, you would offer more: asked us to find your home in deepest Cheshire (my first time) and climb a hill at night to watch the fire which burst in frost-swept skies. This I desired: to leave my house on New Year’s Eve, to stand up, and be counted, in a freezing field; meet long-missed friends, and see a thing of beauty.
New Year
with you holding the light, and us, our arms outstretched, we met the new-born year - head-on one might say... I just hope that you, for all our sakes did not begin this year as you mean to go on.
Let’s not forget, we’d welcomed New Year in with gold and frankincense (if myrrh as well) - and what a welcome! After all, we’d climbed so high:
The New Year came into the world, I grant, to find its birthplace... not what you’d expect (later we were surprised to find that we were quite alone in Macclesfield A&E). But you were not concussed, just bruised, let’s not forget.
We tried to wake you up and not to panic. No room for New Year where we sat, in terror as we were: we knew, even when you woke, that you would have to go back home, and then from there to hospital. ‘That was our night!’ I would tell others, when they asked how I had spent December 08’s last; but if my face showed disappointment, I had lied - that was a night I will not soon forget.
There was once an angel who refused to fall despite the sweet alluring call He went on with his life and death and half-life and all the shades of near-life in between Unseen, but for a slight shimmer in the air A slight breeze to rustle your hair He remained, long after the history of the angels was written down and forgotton still there And gradually as the voice of temptation faded trying to find him, to bind him there was nothing left to remind him That though he had wandered the fields of eternity he had not fallen had not let down the barriers laid down the shield to give in and yield let his wounds be healed. And so as the ages passed he came to feel that in fact, he was one of them: The Fallen,The Betrayers the liars and the thieves and the animal slayers But only because with time, the voice had faded Trying to care for him to be there for him to be a slight shimmer in the air for him to rustle his hair for him Which remained, long after the story of the fallen angel was written down and forgotton still there In life, and death, and half-life, and all the shades of near-life in between.
The fallen angel
E H
2009
LL
C
DG
B AM RI
ILL HI
All year the flax-dam festered in the heart Of the townland; green and heavy headed Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods. Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun. Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell. There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies, But best of all was the warm thick slobber Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied Specks to range on window-sills at home, On shelves at school, and wait and watch until The fattening dots burst into nimbleSwimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how The daddy frog was called a bullfrog And how he croaked and how the mammy frog Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was Frogspawn.You could tell the weather by frogs too For they were yellow in the sun and brown In rain. Then one hot day when fields were rank With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges To a coarse croaking that I had not heard Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus. Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped: The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting. I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.
Death of a Naturalist - Seamus Heaney
DEATH OF A NATURALIST - SEAMUS HEANEY
POETRY ON POETRY A pen is lighter than a spade But my words dig me graves.
I think I’ll run into October Meet the chill air with clogged lungs Pull up grass in green-stained fistfuls Not look back at this lit window Scratch at soil with blunted fingers Leave the clocks and hairdryers, The dustbins and the telephones, And harrowing the wordless ground Will silence all their hollow sound.
That window and the dark getting in And hiding the dust in corners And my face there on the glass like a Fainting spell or when The room spins with spirits. And outside the lamplight reflection Of inside, like tracing paper Held up to sky, the shape of leaves behind, The picture changes in the frame, no clean Lines, no flat, neat world but the rustling of Thickets and the slime Of gross-bellied frogs and the mud Alive with earthworms
BIRTH OF A NATURALIST
POETRY ON POETRY
1900: Born in Clapham, London. 1918: Matriculates at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, to read Medicine. 1942: Becomes member of the Royal Society, and visits China as scientific counsellor at the British Embassy in Chongqing. 1950: He conceives his ‘Science and Civilisation in China’ project1954. 1966: Becomes Master of Gonville and Caius College. 1971: Made a fellow of the British Academy for his historical work. 1987: Needham is shaken by the death of his wife, Dorothy. 1989: In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre Needham issues a rare statement of dissent against the Chinese government; he marries Lu Gweidjen and opens the Needham Research Institute. 1995: Needham dies in his Cambridge home. A packed congregation attend his suitably multicultural memorial service at Great St. Mary’s Church.
Joseph Needham was a Cambridge academic who pioneered the recognition of Chinese science in the West. Francis Bacon claimed that the modern world differed from the ancient because of three inventions: gunpowder, printing and the compass. Thanks largely to Needham, we now know they were all invented in China. Along with: paper, drums, forks, oars, money, coffins, kites, matches, playing cards, umbrellas, wheelbarrows, and the bristled toothbrush. Needham was already a renowned Biochemist when Lu Gwei-djen, a promising graduate student, arrived in Cambridge. The discussions they had about Chinese culture and civilisation lit the spark of Needham’s lifelong fascination with the country.
In 1950 Needham conceived what was surely one of the most ambitious intellectual projects of the twentieth century: to conduct an exhaustive study of Chinese science and civilisation. He framed his studies in terms of the so-called Needham Question: why did Europe, and not China, bear the fruits of the Scientific Revolution? Today many Sinologists have become disillusioned with conceiving of the issue in this way, but no one would deny that Needham did more than anyone else to try and answer his grand question. Needham was fascinated by the way in which the great Chinese inventions entered the West. Gunpowder, used to make fireworks in China, revolutionised medieval warfare in Europe. Printing, used in China to mass-produce tranquil Buddhist sutras, helped bring about the Reformation, with all its associated upheavals, in Europe. While gunpowder and the like often steal the headlines, it would be a mistake to ignore some of the less well-known Chinese inventions. One unsung hero is the horse collar. This is far superior to a yoke or a breast collar, as pressure is put on the horse’s chest rather than neck. The basic idea is of course painfully simple: if you were told to drag bricks round the garden you would not tie the rope round your windpipe. This insight, though elementary, was vastly influential. Two horses pulled powerful ancient Chinese chariots; puny Western chariots from the same period required up to four. When the horse collar did arrive in Europe in the 10th century AD it transformed agricultural methodology and lay the foundations of the so-called Medieval Economic Revolution. Needham did not live to see the completion of his great project. Indeed, it continues to this day at the Needham Research Institute, behind Robinson College.
La Sainte Vierge du 14 juillet From the boat in the middle of the bay, fireworks arch up into the warm night sky. Up on the hill, the cicadas’ buzz battles against the bangs. The lights bathe everything in a pinky glow. Standing on the garden wall, Agnès thinks she could topple all the way down through the town and fall into the sea. The beach is heaving, illuminated in the gloom. She can’t make out the people, only their ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ at each new explosion. Behind them, the men have moved the long tables out of the road. Plates are stained with smears and sauces; big bowls have traces of what they held around the edges, but all the spoons are missing. She turns to see Papa swallowing the last morsel of tarte. He winks, smacks his lips, puts his finger to them: Tais-toi, rien à maman. A last burst of golden green and the spectacle is over. Everyone trails slowly back to the tables, adults woozy with wine, children’s heavy heads lolling on their shoulders. Agnès sees Marie catch Roman in her arms. Her own mother stops to kiss her godson’s head as he is carried off to bed. Mama looks strange in the candlelight, smoke wafting from her lips like a ghost. She looks sad, the corners of her mouth turned down towards her chin. Out of the darkness, a hand clamps onto Agnès’ shoulder. Gleaming talons dig into her skin. A wall of fusty perfume hits her, and Madame Ochin’s scratchy voice issues out into the night. “Béné, you must let me show the girls my Blessed Virgin.”
In the darkness, Agnès shoots out a hand. Clémence’s meets it instantly. They do not go to the Church in town, but they know about the Blessed Virgin. People mention her, mostly old people like Madame Ochin whose wrinkled smile she can hear cracking in the darkness. The candle beneath her mother’s face makes dark under her dark eyes, in the hollow of her cheeks as she inhales. She has only half a face, the rest melts into the thick air. “No thank you, Madame Ochin, not tonight.” Her lips wrinkle around the glow of a cigarette, her invisible jaw juts forward.
“Oh yes. They must see her, Bénédicte, they must believe.”
Papa has appeared now, his tall frame looming behind Mama’s skinny bones. His hand presses down on her shoulder; hers flicks ash with a tremor. Clémence bolts like lightening into Mama’s arms, frightened of the heavy, unspoken air, always ready to play the baby when she needs to. Agnès scowls as the talons tighten their grip. “Madame Ochin –” Papa’s voice is like honey. Madame Ochin, deaf and determined, carries on. Agnès is turned; the old painted face with its colouring-book eyebrows and bright pink lips is thrust towards her. “She wants to see, don’t you? My Virgin, my Blessed Virgin from Lourdes who came to save me.” Mama makes a small noise. Agnès doesn’t really see how Madame Ochin was saved. She still walks with a stick, hunched over like a witch. Roman’s cousin Victor from the next street says once she was completely frozen, stuck to her bed. But Victor has wide flashy eyes and teeth to match and although he’s twelve, Agnès doesn’t believe him. Mama is getting up, bundling Clémence and her wide eyes into her arms.
“I’m sorry Madame Ochin. My mother went to Lourdes. It did nothing for her. Olivier, I’m taking Clémence to bed.” As her mother disappears across the gravel, Agnès is moved by Madame Ochin’s steely grip. Papa too is being led down the hill, his hushed tones met and crushed by Madame Ochin’s sympathetic coos. Her house sits low and squat behind its iron gate, four yappy dogs on guard. Its windows glow, curtain-coloured, like giant red eyes. Madame Ochin kisses the dribbling dogs, “my children, my babies.” Two under each arm, it looks like she might eat them. Everything inside the house sparkles. Crystal glasses stand on shiny tables. The lights all wear diamond necklaces. Little china shepherdesses glint and frames gleam. Even the carpet sinks glittering under Agnès’ flipflops. She’s dropped the puppies now, and every time Madame Ochin speaks she lifts her hands grinning in the air. The swirling colours on the wall swim before Agnès’ eyes.
“There.”
A hush falls as Madame Ochin lifts one jewelled, jangling arm into the air. There, in her bedroom, in the space between wardrobe and ceiling, is the Blessed Virgin. A string of fairy lights hangs glowing around her neck, her blue dress could be real silk, three real pink roses in her hand. She looks right down into Agnès’ eyes.
“There, child. Believe.”
Outside all is quiet. Papa takes her by the hand. The tables are gone, all the people in their houses.
“Papa, what is Lourdes?”
She hears him breathe as he searches for the words.
“A place for people who are sick, a holy place.”
“Why didn’t it help Mama’s mama?”
He is silent for a long time.
*
*
*
As 15th July dawns cool and grey over Sausset, Bénédicte lies in Olivier’s arms. Maylis had been sleepwalking by the time she got back, but she’d seen how amazed the girl had been. She can see it so clearly, one set of beautiful blue eyes looking up into another, agog, entranced, bouleversée by the lights and the perfume and the scent of the roses. Twenty years later, an eleven year old’s tears still rise in her eyes. Why her mother? Why then? Why hadn’t the prayers, the pilgrimages, the hours of desperate hoping, worked? Olivier, still at the age of forty in possession of a lively Marseillaise mother, didn’t know what to say when she asked that. He had lain silently, stroking her hair, kissing her ear once before he fell asleep. In the wet morning light, she throws off the cover and goes onto the balcony to light a cigarette. The roses in the garden are covered in diamond drops of dew.
QUITO In the Mexican Highlands, churches sit atop a bed of clouds and etched faces harbour lifeless eyes. Up here there is a town. Its streets are always clean, washed by the interminable torrents of an unsympathetic sky. Its spires are everywhere, as if God Himself had scattered his seeds and allowed them to fruit in garish colours: yellow, blue, dirty white and grey. In this town there lived a boy. His home was in the outskirts, where the cobbles dissolved and the dirt cobwebbed its way through concrete houses and concrete pavements. He was known as Vaquero, which inevitably became Vaquito, and later, with the passage of time and the impetus of laziness, Quito. His high cheek bones fought for prominence with the baby fat still swelling underneath. His hair was tangled and matted, and Quito took great pleasure in using the greasy chaos to form sculptures of writhing curls and jagged straights that stood erect like gargoyles atop his forehead. But the most fascinating feature of Quito’s face was those eyes, darkest brown, yet with a light so appealing it drew gringos towards him without their realisation. White women would look quizzically into his face, wondering what it was about this small child that compelled them to give only him time, to buy only his candyfloss. After a long while they would come-to, and look around the square in a daze, gradually filling-in shapes and sharpening colours until all was as it should be. Then they would look back down and realise that the reason for their absence from this world had been the boy. With a last guilty look, they would turn with embellished grandeur and hurry off in embarrassment.
This was Quito’s life. Every day was the same: a lift in a Toyota truck down the mountainside and through the cacophony and rancour of the outskirts; over the bridge and into the deformed order of the real town. Market vendors hugged the road, porn dvds were sold alongside Hollywood pirates. Chickens stood oblivious under a basket’s woven roof, while next door meat hung and flies sucked and wasps fizzed. As the slope became gentle the market petered out and gave way to open shop fronts. Putrid coloured clothes stared out with knowing desperation, hoping that the tasteless music might convince some gringo to enter. Eventually the crowded square would present itself proudly. This was where Quito could woo the throng. He would stand on the edge of the steps to the church, watched by the Almighty, hoist his cross of candyfloss onto his slim shoulders, and open wide those innocent eyes. It was a competition - of course. Only a short distance away stood the man with the balloons; but he was no threat. He had an unfortunate habit of plunging his hand into his pocket and conspicuously rubbing his crotch, sometimes for ten minutes at a time. While he did this his face exposed a knowing resignation, a consistent glumness that portrayed the death of dreams and the hateful staleness of reality. There was competition from other children too: Silvia and Rosa would sit either side of a gringo, their furry skirts stroking snow white legs, and then the bracelets would come out, some ‘special deal’ in the offing. Quito watched this charade with particular curiosity: the simple trap; the familiar routine; the same giggles and touches. And yet the tourists played the game, seemingly unaware of the make-believe that only Quito thought he knew. The sun was fading, colossal shadows stretched from mountain to mountain, dousing the colours of the courtyards and colonial colonnades. A final breath of warmth swept through the valley, and Quito felt his candyfloss stir. He let it be borne up, blown to and fro. These sails beckoned or forced him to join them. Quito succumbed, and soon he was floating around the square, led by the thronging manifold shapes of his desire. Every way he went there was new excitement. A whirlpool here, a great wave there, and each one Quito felt with wondrous vitality. No-one else existed. He was a solitary captain with nothing more than his body’s ship and his ecstatic sails. And now the square was gone, borealis led him into un-chartered waters.
Higher and higher he sailed. Against the slope of the falling sea, his sails pulled him on. Faint noises swirled around, swallowed in the ocean’s raging joy. Now the waves became angular and jagged, the mast creaked and the sails cowed, but the ship strived onwards and upwards, upwards and onwards. At last, the wind died, darkness prevailed, the waves dropped over the horizon and Quito was brought back. There was no light where he stood - alone. On both sides of him were the whitest walls and a cavernous roof loomed above. Some scent overcame his nostrils; sweet pine resin and candle wax. He gingerly stepped forward, toward a greater ship and its mast at the end. Those luminous eyes revealed a fearful soul, unable to fathom what mystery lay in that darkness at the end. Then he reached it: a wooden cross barely lit by a lonely candle on an altar. Quito peered up at his own cross, his mast, his livelihood, his oppressor and his saviour. The candyfloss hung limp. Confusion clouded his mind with ideas and thoughts he had never met before. He struggled to hold onto one simple idea before the next had interrupted; forms and figures jostled for position before his eyes. It was torture, and as the crescendo of confusion reached its climax Quito threw himself into the hard bosom of the ground. Quito lay there a long time. And then, without warning, he ripped a bag of Candyfloss off his cross and left the rest behind. His squinting eyes were small but clear now. Outside, the sky was a swirling mess of orange and red, for God had poured out his arteries so that Quito could see the bloodied beauty. Lights dabbled below, ducking in and out of view. The whine of taxis grew and faded. Quito clambered onto the wall at the edge of the hilltop to better survey the scene. As he ate his candyfloss and drank in the sounds and sights of his town, he became calm. This was life. This was beauty. This was real. He glanced back at the ominous building within which he had suffered his awakening and, seeing for the first time, began down the steps to the square.
credits: EDITORS: pascal porcheron andrew spyrou
sub _editors: hannah adler susan shi ciara hamilton
Photography:
laura pilkington g xiao christina thomopoulos emily vermont andrew spyrou adam hines_green katie nairne katherine waters april miles web-DESIGN: matt
art:
dan strange laura andrews david shillinglaw matt drage anna trench emma lough andrew spyrou
henderson
EMAIL: EDITORS@HILLMAG.COM
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andrew spyrou
writing:
finbarr o'dempsey elodie olsen_coons shuchen xiang matthew child pascal porcheron soniya ganvir ruth dewhirst alashiya gourdes rachel emily davies emma hogan sophie peacock okey nzelu tristan withers shani cadwallender joel massey fran whitlum_cooper charlie de rivaz
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