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Love’s Labour Lost Nuclear paradigm? Paradise? Paradox / Lost love / Lost life Desire for desireds Despair / divorce Downwards soundless Drowning in contrary motion Complicated emotion Unrequited devotion Inspired by beauty Beastly, fruity,
Backwards from falling Flying out of love Crescendo in a crash course On cracking up, crazy for Starlight shine white Crying eyes bright Brilliant with light Losing, losing
Fly- she’s a dove Dive from darkness New happy heart unbroken New devotion? Cautious caring, Daring darling Dearly beloved, be quiet, Be mine once more?
The fight good God He’s gone for good, oh God
Again nothing gained Just pain / pained this
Give me a second chance Chance for second love
Paradigm / Paradise / / Paradox / Paradox /
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I want to be a poet. I want - leave me at the front and light me well I want to call out curious words in order, to come and sit uneasily with the mind, and cause a kind of comfort. I want to draw sweet sayings out of the world, wisdom from a child, or or perfume from a flower perfume from a flower, oh! - softly-sweetly taste on my tongue. I want to itch away at earth until it looks a little nicer, like... the way Cambridge looks nicer in spring; until I can feel my voice untroubled on the moss, resplendent in unfinal green.
(un)sound Woman-cut/wood-hole, caress pressed, unexpect— express, exhale, impress impressions settle into rhythm almost— (sound is just air moved is that/isn’t that—) beautiful? jagged stabbed jazz attack slip of the— tip of the— sax fingertipped/fluttertongued (silence is just sound removed isn’t that/is that—) modern? swans/seals scream a shattering scintillation of silences
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Odysseus ‘Sing in me, Muse,’ I have no name; lying cyclopsed By some steel stinging touch That cut a cavern, deep into the bone: A vivid horror in a clean lime crag. Take beauty and then twist: here lies a monster But now he hides in stiff white linen sheets. I struggle up to gasp as waves of shells Crash down around the bed - yet all is still The fear that bites blood from my lips in dread Is one more ogre lurking in my head. I drift away, as flotsam on sleep’s tide. Waking sodden to some isle of thought, She hovers by my face with lover’s hands A witch white clad with glazed and aging eyes. So intimate, so close and yet so cold. Her rough undressing rips off squeals of pain, Unmanning me to swine. My honour bled, Recoiling from the rub of flannel teeth Begs Morpheus to bring sleep’s curtain down. An age they hold me, some nights drawn to years With fever’s harsh calypso in my ears And Cyclops howling anger to the sea. But as the pig-skin sloughs and I am man, They say that I am well and at war’s end. So I shall home, to wife and son for peace Praying that in their arms I may find rest Now red-crimped poppies wreathe my bloodied way And crosses fence the road.
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Be my vision. We could sit for hours On a distant peak, and contemplate the unknowns Of this new land I would explore; there is no love We do not plunder from our elders, no source We will not mine, if you are but willing For the mining. Come, place your long legs Before me, that I may rob you Of resource, and hollow your bones – my fine, strong Aryan, I want to know you before you were born, to taste The innocence on your breath, before that your mind was moulded. Would you be the blow to finish me? Let your attack come, swift, All is yet to be won; I take down my sentinels, I retreat into you. The wave that swallows, I will strip you Like an altar; there is much left to be found.
Before gods raised our kind from the dust, before they blew life Into ribs and clay, before the endless days of paradise And the legends; before the burst expansion of the universe, your chest, I found you, on the floor of a silent, depthless sea, skittering, Limbs carved by a goddess, oh, my seafloor Adonis, Out of stone. Staggered by your range, I took my feast In eyes and words, and did not yet touch. My own complacencies and seductions; I would have swept Your ash into a yawning urn of mine, and refashioned you Askew – not mine to know the perfection of your dimensions, Fingertips, nor your density, nor the thin silver Behind your palm. Oh, what we have done In the name of a kindness makes monsters of us (Are these ethics mine?), not for us to choose, all too much Expressed in the aesthetic, and there I left you At the bottom of the weight of nothingness Rooted timeless, intransient. I walked on; There was no salt in my looking; I did not turn back.
“O my America! My new-found-land” - John Donne, Elegy XIX
Man’s Rising
You are not endless, withering like old Tithon, You will end, there is something finite to you, Since I plucked you from the infinite, your duty has been Death, and death all your dreams and all your loves. When your bones creak for me like the pipes In this old house, and your eyes, all that is left of you, Sink into milk-blindness, do not call me your Aurora.
Take the bottle and gulp quickly, until you only suck On air; now you know the desperation in every pause Before the regular clench of your heart, In the absence of these fingers of blood that snake throughout you. I was the last shot of a sĂŠance, one You tried to keep, a final fling before the time For sobriety came, and title-deeds, executors; A time before concern, when you still held on To the vestige of youth. Now let go.
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Sad eyes Man runs Man sings Man speaks Man never dies Let’s have fun live like kings
dance for weeks on natural highs And whilst he hums those beautiful things which sound so new, so chic Stay a while, forget you ever had those connections and ties.
When no-one even notices that you’re the one who cries. Your make-up starts to streak as the clock bell rings our feelings numbed Forgotten sighs It’s getting bleak
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sorrow clings society shuns. Man was never wise Man peaks Man stings Man stuns Sad eyes
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TRAIN “It’s good to change, when you can, but the red one? Really?” “A little bit of colour.You want to stand out on the Piste. “ “Simon says it doesn’t matter” “He’s not the one that has to wear it.” Black beech trees, starting up from the ground around me. It’s very military, like a gun salute- a special train taking you to your final resting place, trundling along kakakakaka on those spindly little metal fingers like a caught centipede. I’m surprised you want to go there at all. ‘Where you’re heading you can’t take a train’- it wouldn’t fit up the mountain. At least if anything happened the red one would catch St Bernard’s eye- you’d spot me from a mile off that way, a blood- dot like a pin-prick. “Kakakakaka”- another body drops.You can’t see this but just between the hay- stocks there’s a little snow still where the sun doesn’t shine. Is it the same stuff? here it all turns to sludge, or is covered in a film of ice so that when you tread down it feels hard and mean and you lose your footing. “I’ll have a cup of tea please” You could do with one of these. I can see you wrapping your blue fingers around the soft polystyrene, the steam blessing your burnt nose- funny that“When I’m gone I shall send you a postcard” Funny that it’s organic, this bread.You don’t expect that from Network rail. What was it again? A ‘small good’ something? You’d say everything is organic. Well, looking out the window it would seem that you were right. Snow-dust-ash. They’re all names for the same thing. Particular. Take any one in between finger and thumb and it will dissolve. Good. “When do we get in?” You stop to look at the rolling names and numbers on the screen. Start to finish in a big book almost- This is Your Life- arrive Heaven 3.30. Make some tea. But sometimes I wish we had hours. I wish I could take this train like a spear, photoframe its long slide west catch each moment in its entirety- all dimensions. Know exactly where we were when you asked “When do we get in?”
Each line on the track is a marker - that sound again: kakakaka – here I raised my finger to the steamed glass and wrote – kakakaka - you flick through the catalogue and crease the corner of a page. The ash- black trees are like fossils too, the carriage a vacuum test- tube. That makes sense, I suppose, of the groove in your seat I can still just see, though it’s melting fast into the horizon, into the rough lines of the bench, the gangway, ‘the plank’ almost. I almost said. “I walk the line” hum hum, “I walk the line” Now as you trip back to your seat I think that. And I think perhaps I can play-stop-rewind-stop-play. No-one does that anymore- now you can just ‘skip.’ Though maybe there’s a scratch along the disk because here I am in the same seat. Here I am. Outside the snow has thawed, runs along the thick grass, slips into boot tracks. Paths intersect, a moments pathos as the blood mixes. One slides longer, and deeper, another peters out into a grass bank. Underneath this surface the clay is being choked. First the concrete of ice. Then the tarmac of snow. Why would you want to go somewhere where it was like that all the time? As the snow melts on the subject’s skin the water intensifies the sun’s rays, causing the skin to peel in long thin strips. Already the friction from the ice, so cold it burns, has blistered the flesh black. Fire and ice. “What was it?” “Edema” To the heart or to the skin. It all sounds a bit dangerous but, you know the risks and “what was it?” “I remember when my feet slipped. For some reason the rope loosed from the sling and I fell back, back back. Below me must have been sky because above me I could see the rock face like the world had spun upside down.” And then (cup of tea please) you must have carried falling up, watching the ice break into the brown rock further down, the light catch your glasses, sending life splashing around your eyes in technicolor. Not real. Somehow you had time to imagine your limp body rolling, like a felled tree through the brook below, given over to fate. Then the rope snapped taught as a sinew, pulling your neck back-forward-back and your legs up to your chest in a mid air prayer.You clasped your hands around the cord like a new – born. In that moment every film you’d ever seen was there.
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There’s long been a tradition in Japanese literature that talks about the transience of things. The ephemeral nature of life and the bittersweet sadness of its passing are summed up in the concept of ‘mono no aware’. Things happen in life, life happens, things fall apart, and we are no more in control of their happening today than tomorrow. All that’s left for us to do is to stand there watching their shadows inexorably dissolve and sigh our slow laments. The most feted manifestation of this culture is that of the Haiku. One of the most famous and emblematic Haikus in Japan is Matsuo Basho’s frog pond:
She was never happier than on their daily commute into Tokyo, Somiya reading over her shoulder. Between them exists a perfect equilibrium. Why change what was already perfect? There is a sad inevitability that Noriko has to bid farewell to her extended girlhood and no matter how unwillingly, enter into her long delayed womanhood.
Noriko is twenty seven years old and is still living with her father Somiya, a widower. But, at her age, she should have been married a long time ago. Somiya feels compelled to give up his only daughter despite her reluctance to leave the life and the father that she loves so dearly. No life would suit her better.
Late Spring is very much a paean to family life. Shot in black and white and set in post-war Japan, Late Spring tells a simple story.
Late Spring captures so sensitively and poignantly the extraordinariness of banal little moments and celebrates them. The American Writer Elbert Hubbard once said, ‘Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.’ The commonplace is often so much more extraordinary than the extraordinary.
When Somiya has finally married Noriko off, and they have parted, we are left with a shot of this aged, thinning man with his back to us, sitting by the sea, peeling an apple. He watches the waves, expressionless. A man sitting by the sea, with a lifetime of feelings felt, just sitting there. This is what life is, a quiet surrender to inevitabilities. Small un-extraordinary moments, and life passing, just passing us by.
The world exists, we and our actions disrupt that continuum for a moment, and the world carries on. Zen spirituality is something bloated into caricature in the Western mind, but to me ‘Late Spring’ is a demonstration that a life informed by an undercurrent of spirituality is subtle, tactile and profoundly simple.
The old pond; A frog jumps in — The sound of the water.
Thoughts about Yasujiro Ozu’s film Late Spring
This is a canvas These canals like veins breathe on summer days graffiti names and vows of love scrawled under bridges the sunset’s haze burns behind desolate factories as skeletal gasworks tower over half-built frames of offices and the gentle sway of boats soften the sound of a radio’s half-buzz. We snake our way from wealth through forgotten gardens barred windows and stray footballs, from landscaped lawns to half-wild embankment, tracing the remnants of great urban plans, the dreams of architects and the livess of unseen strangers, the marks left by use and love, by misuse and distrust, looking for a code in the chaos, finding only your hand in mine, light projected in the water, the city in our hearts.
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Jorge Macchi is a Latin American artist whose works explore the absurdity of everyday life and the complexity of the simple. His spectators are invited to find their own interpretations of his work, Macchi asking of them only to stop for a moment and question the way in which they usually view and understand the world. His works include “Amsterdam” (2004), a map of the city with the land cut away, leaving only a canal skeleton remaining, “Caja de música” (2003), a video showing a birds eye view of a motorway which plays as a musical box as cars enter the frame, and “Parallel Lives” (1998), a Gran fragata matchbox, a popular brand in Argentina, filled with 400 matches lying in almost exactly the same position on either side of it. Buenos Aires Tour (2003), my favourite of his works, is a project aimed at giving an alternative tour of Macchi’s home city. To determine the route of the tour, he broke a piece of glass over a map of Buenos Aires and then chose 46 points along the fracture lines. At each point he took photographs, made sound recordings and collected items and the tour can be re-created by using a box he made that contains a guide, a map, a CD-ROM, a dictionary, a mass book, a letter, postcards and stamps.
The result is an illuminating and magical guide, which takes the viewer through the real and everyday life of a city rather than to the “significant” tourist destinations. Inspired by Macchi’s work, last summer a friend and I set out to produce a guide of London. Rather than breaking a piece of glass, we splattered red paint across a map to determine the places we would visit.*** Although it remains a work in progress (we have documented just 12 points, and have over 150 more to complete), so far it has led us to places we would never normally have visited, and helped us to consider our surroundings in finer detail. In the 12 points around Euston station, we came across the Old Carreras Cigarette Factory, a fantastic Egyptian inspired Art Deco building guarded by a pair of metre tall black cats, were given a guided tour of the Somers Town Community Centre, and met the owner of the Middle Eastern Supermarket on Eversholt Street. We also collected many items including a misplaced Trivial Pursuit card, an art-print of the Café de Flore in Paris, discarded by Tommy Flynn’s Bar near Mornington Crescent, and a half written letter. Everything was documented.
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Painting on a curved surface The clock struck ten. A green lily flecked with nutmeg spots bloomed in a glazed pot by the open window. Mozart was seated at the secretary in the Green Saloon of Aztec House writing a letter to his cousin in Ephesus. Lady Alexandra entered the room carrying a trivet of walnuts and water biscuits. Desmond Duffy was waiting in the Circular Hall. ‘We are going to Parrsboro tonight,’ she said. ‘And Octavia will be there.’ ‘And Octavia will be there,’ she echoed. Mozart directed his gaze into the evening light. ‘Can you guess my secret?’ he asked. She flashed her fine eyes at him and laughed. She said, ‘Every bicycle is haunted by an invisible horse.’ Mozart stood up. The wisteria was tapping at the French windows. The candles were unlit. Sawyer Hall was waiting.
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Suite For Solo Cello First strokes. First notes. Like those first awkward glances. The curved outline of an instrument where it presses against the skin, the skin just beneath the collarbone. Those are the things he noticed first. Her face, so concentrated, so still almost, yet so changing. Like ripples crossing a river, dark folds of water suggesting something underneath. And the hands, fingers, lips. Puckered when something momentarily slipped, a gasp of a pause in the space between the strings and the bow. A pause which hovered there, as the music still seemed to go on around him, and which then, with a definite nod of the head, a squeeze of the hips, the bow back on the cello, carried on.
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‘Pianism’ in the Architecture of King’s College Chapel Insofar as the ratio of black keys to white keys in a standard 88 key grand piano is 9:13 (36 black keys and 52 white keys) we could see the same pattern in the architecture of King’s chapel. Expanding 9:13 to 18:26, there are 18 windows composing the east and west windows, respectively. Also, the north and south fronts are composed together of 26 structural bays 18:26, or, 9:13. This is not to say that all or most of the music played in the chapel is on or for an 88 key grand piano. All that is being suggested here is that insofar as much Western music is composed on or for a standard grand piano (such as Brahms’s), then it follows that that kind of music would converge with one aspect of the chapel design, and that it makes sense the chapel would be an appropriate venue for it.
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When all this is over.
We will be able to say sorry Truthfully. To say goodbye, Ruthlessly. To move forward Beautifully.
When all this is over the heartbreaks will be forgotten, The world will not defeat us so often. We can go back to The beds we never shared with the people we Had no chance to love.
When all this is over.
When all this is over our mothers’ hair will turn from grey To brown and our fathers will come home early. The rolled Dice will land a six and the swallows will fly North In the winter.
When all this is over.
When all this is over we can back to where We were happiest. Children will play outside Until the sun rises, the cafes will stay open all night, The drugs will make people kind and the news on the Radio will make us laugh.
When all this is over.
When all this is over we can go back to our Childhood rooms. The beds will Shelter us, the clothes will grow to fit, We will shrink backwards down the pencil marks On the door frame.
When all this is over.
When all this is over we can go back to the towns We were born in. Those unchanged streets will Welcome us, the glass in the windows intact, Our nicknames on the lips of strangers and Familiar faces on every corner.
When All This Is Over
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Yes, to speak without words, Yes, to speak without Yes, without Yes What?
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from ‘Soldier, Soldiers’
After the war ended Everybody forgot how to speak. It wasn’t an inconvenience, It was a necessity.
It was a war, they say, Where nobody died; No one who fought in it No one who saw it coming.
Men stopped crying, Women wore large coats And babies stopped being born. Only the cars were cold.
If I stare at the water And stand with the light on me I can see myself floating, Resting on dark cold water.
The boy next door – I remember Had a stiff foot but an Aerodynamic laugh. I remember When his parents died,
I know why my body is cold anyway I remember being told. I am also empty and have No use right now...
He forgot which foot hurt And why he should smile. I blamed the war and the Weather – He blamed God. Tomorrow they’re launching Millions of balloons just outside The old brick hospital In memory of the survivors.
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Grozny
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A city groomed Shined and polished, its Cracks papered with dollar bills. In the street, parades Crisp uniforms on scarred men Lives swept away by shells are Tombed under smooth roads. A woman crying at the barrier is Cornered by denial His rough hands buffet her Backwards into memory When other men came And killed her brother. For her, the world whispers Deafeningly in chorus And shadow-people Almost brush her clothes Stealing her voice to leave Terrified whimpers.
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Su edi bmis tor sio s@ hil ns + lm ag. QUE com RIE
S:
WRITErs Helen Parker Okey Nzelu Elodie Olsen- Coons Will Warman Lucy Boyes Tristan Withers Pascal Porcheron Shuchen Xiang Decca Muldowney Louisa Dinwiddie Emma Hogan John Devlin Sophie Peacock Tamar van Gelderen
PHOTOGRAPHers
ARTists
u u u u u u u u u u u u u u u
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Lizzie Robinson Helen Holmes Katie Nairne Lale Arikoglu James March Andrew Spyrou Zing Tsjeng Emily Vermont Kate Riley Grace Lawson- Conquer Dylan Spencer- Davidson Katherine Waters Meg Wise Patrick Kingsley Tom Tyldesley
Business: Anna Herber Web-Design: Matt Henderson Layout & Design: Andrew Spyrou
The Hill would like to thank Varsity Publications, Churchill College, Clare Hall, and our readership for their financial support, without which this issue could not have been produced. Our thanks also goes to The Cambridge Union who have exhibited many of the artists we have featured .
Alex Farnsworth David Shillinglaw Katie Nairne James Shedden Alicky Ashby Richard Fairhead Joe Halligan Denis Kolesnikov Joel //Millerchip Andrew Spyrou Brishty Alam Sam Peet Barry Clark Rich //Foe Design Anna Trench Lizzie Williams Alex Woodhead