The Isis | Memento | HT22 by The Isis

Contents ii

Editors’ Letter

The Moon’s an Arrant Thief

‘And So, My Brother, Hail, and Farewell’

El Alamein

Oxford and the Next War

Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire

Frozen in Time

Mist

In the Path of a Distant Star

Plague Addiction

Lección de Cocina

For the Record

The True Cost of Porn

Variation on a Regicide

Team List

Dowon and Millie, thank you for your vision and Adobe wizardry. We are elated to be going to print in our 130th year and for that we thank everyone who helped with or came to our events this term: from jazz, parties, painting and wine, to… admittedly, more painting and wine.

Now, in our 1910th edition, our pieces plot paths of their own. They weave their words through the sky’s distant stars and arrant moons, through the recordings, translations, and distillations of the works of others. Some speak directly with figures from our past, frozen in time, caught up in our memories. We cherish each of them, and hope that time will, too.

Yours,

Our unending thanks go to each and every team member for their faith in our past and present. To the Deputy Editors: Bea, Ananya, Charlie, and Sara, thank you for all your trips to the office, the archives, and the shops. To our Creative Directors,

We hope you look back on Memento time and time again.

Grace and Joseph

Editors’ Letter

omewhere along Holywell Street at the afterparty of our last magazine launch, a medievalist and a modernist got talking about the institution of ‘History’, archives new and old, and precisely where it was that we were going. It was out of this preoccupation with the past, our predilection to look backwards, that Memento was born. It is our way of slotting neatly amongst the greats of our storied publication.

the moon’s an f e i h t t n a r the moon’s an arrant thief r a by ba har g by xyz xyz anj v ar

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff – and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.” – Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

Illustration by Dowon Jung

on the longest night a pale fire lights the room of the dead making ghosts of us. they sang in my ear, ancient tongues, yearning your place is empty! !‫جاى شما خالى است‬ i filled the mould with my grubby reflection and yours and i stole the sun to make flowers of it, red admirals to dip in the water, a bathtub of roses and dusks. and i captured a tearstained flash, unblinking mise en abyme, melting statues into waxworks into shadows, haunting pale fires of past moons. and they thought me mad with whispers like ash, i breathed them in until they were mine and i breathed in god until he was mine and in boundless Creation i lost my years puppeteering overgrown ivy, dead kings dancing in Versailles, dust crystallised. and i was the pious hostess

heavenly until gate-

crashing chariots swarm, phantom preachers burning battle lines to ‫طلوع مرگ‬ death’s dawn so bright it is almost black, blazing bloody churchyards and steel

i was the bird deceived and dead. and they thought me mad when i died to let my shadow live

CW: references to suicide For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer. — ‘Lycidas’, Milton

ne April afternoon in 2020, during the sudden lull of lockdown, I placed a shoebox on my sun-flooded desk. I lifted out a photograph of myself as a toddler, brighteyed against a dull studio backdrop; a drugstore snapshot of my mother in a Pennsylvania yard, her hand raised to a blossoming tree branch; and a fading black-and-white print of my grandfather (whom I had hardly known) with the Taj Mahal reflected in the waters at his feet. I considered his face, as mysterious as it was familiar, flickering with the familial resemblances shared between myself and the relatives I knew, either in life or through pictures. At once, each of these photographs was both a cipher and a clue.

Illustrations by Ben Beechener

‘And So, My Brother, Hail, and Farewell’: Elegy and the Family Photograph by Sylee Gore

Such family relics, posed or candid moments in daily life, curled and faded in analogue form, are archival objects occupying a liminal role between art and detritus. Years after their passing, the dead stubbornly haunt those pictures with their presence. The instantaneous quality of the photograph makes it appear as if the individual has literally impressed, or left their ghost, upon the film roll: in an analogue camera, light forms an image by bouncing off a body into the camera and marking the film roll emulsion. Yet, thus imprinted then developed, so many photographs languish inert and unremembered in boxes such as mine. The term ‘elegy’ is derived from elegos, the ancient funeral lament that was one of the first poetic forms of ancient Greece. After death, we find the mourner’s wordless keening on the one hand, and the deceased’s mute image on the other. Poet and critic Edward Hirsch has noted how the elegy “ritualises grief into language and thereby makes it more bearable”. He

describes how this form allows “wordless anguish” to find succour in linguistic acts. Occupying the intersection of image and text, the photoelegy is a way of apprehending inexpressible grief: the photograph articulates what a purely textual elegy cannot convey. Poets including Anne Carson, Victoria Chang, and Diana Khoi Nguyen have opened new possibilities for the poetic form by incorporating family photographs into their elegiac work. When I first discovered their photoelegies – Nox (2010), Dear Memory (2022), and Ghost Of (2018) – I was struck by how these poets not only inserted illustrative images to conjure the elegised individuals, but also physically altered photographs in sometimes radical ways, interfering with the materiality of the photographic form by splicing, sewing, superimposing, and otherwise transfiguring the pictures. By writing – and overwriting – images in this way, poets can reframe family photographs. The photographs themselves, no longer illustrative supplements, reshape the text in a process of mutual expansion.

moment of living. By incorporating her brother’s memory in the form of images and not just words, Carson summons an ambiguous and haunting presence. The poet sometimes reproduces unaltered photographs but elsewhere modifies them. On some pages, a photograph is sliced so small as to become wholly abstract. I caught myself contemplating how, if excised and scrutinised, the single square where my mother’s hand meets the flowering apple branch might throw a new light on our relationship. At the start of Nox, Carson writes: “I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds”, but notes that “words cannot add” to death. By incorporating family photographs into her elegy, Carson had found a way to render loss in light. In Dear Memory, poet Victoria Chang embeds her family photographs in a poetic context. She overlays handwritten

“curled and faded in analogue form”

Anne Carson created her extraordinary hybrid accordion book, Nox, after learning of the death of her estranged older brother, Michael. The texts used – written by Carson, her brother, and the Roman poet Catullus, amongst others – are all presented as facsimiles. The images reproduced are family photographs. They include a baby in a shaft of light shining through curtained windows, a boy clad in swimming trunks and goggles by a garage door, a shadow cast on pristine snow in front of a family home. The photographs do not harbour Carson’s brother after death but present him in a

notes onto images of family members, anchoring their restless silences. Atop one photograph, five separate slips of paper have been overlaid which read: Even our laughter is held in. Can memory be unhoused or is it the form in which everything is held? This gloss of memory points to its inherent paradox: it both adheres to a unique consciousness and contains memories that can be accessed by others. These words appear on and around a colour photograph of the poet as a child with her paternal grandmother, each in a floral dress. Looking at it, I wondered what I would ask my grandfather, a widower left with five young children, if I were to put myself in dialogue with his printed image. A final photograph, depicting two small girls – presumably Chang and her sister with their parents – has red thread sewn across her mother’s face, obliterating her features. The photograph is placed on a sheet of lined paper that bears the text: I’ve always thought the coordinates of your words are death. When I finally find the location, I learn that there were never any words there, just blank paper, everywhere. Chang’s material interference with the form of the photograph shows how text can weigh down these images, pinioning them with facts and questions that the reader cannot discern alone. Yet even a process of discovery can end in silence, and her statement acknowledges the impossibility of fully knowing the dead. By manipulating the photograph, the poet can ‘write’ with the image as surely as she does with words, creating a melding of text and image that is not merely reflective but generative of new material

and meaning. Diana Khoi Nguyen makes use of family photographs which have already been transmuted before in Ghost Of. Two years before he died by suicide, Nguyen’s younger brother Oliver, still a young man, literally cut himself out of the family photographs displayed in their parents’ home. Nguyen’s book of poems incorporates these altered photographs in order to, as she puts it, “fill in the space left behind by Oliver” by writing into the lacunae of his absent figure. The gaps sometimes form a constraint that dictates which words Nguyen can and cannot say. The edges of a photograph stipulate the truncating of words in a move that recalls Susan Sontag’s observation that every photograph is a “token of absence”. Indeed, the title itself – Ghost Of – underscores the elision at play when it leaves the ghost’s identity in question, rather than straightforwardly naming it as Oliver’s. Paradoxically, this absence of reference spotlights the individual who has been lost, presaging the book’s preoccupation with presence as absence. Nguyen’s writing, a speaking into a visual silence, constitutes the act of grieving as one of persistence, a presence-in-absence which every survivor is doomed to enact, marooned as they are in the mortal realm. Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ concludes with a reassuringly crisp photographic detail: At last he rose, and twitch’d his mantle blue: To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new. After I replaced the lid on the box of photographs, I turned to examine a plastic bag of memory cards and external hard drives, each of them containing many thousands more images than my shoebox. Flash-frozen photographs will outlast our mortal flesh. If the traditional elegy “ritualises grief into language”, as Hirsch put it, then incorporating photographs into this ancient poetic form promises another ritual for processing the remnants of the dead. By blending words

“the individual has literally impressed, or left their ghost, upon the film roll.”

and altered images, the poet transforms analogue prints into a malleable medium. One can only guess at the role photographs might play now that poets begin to mourn with digital rather than analogue images. As our virtual archives of family photographs grow vertiginously vast, these photoelegies offer a tantalising preview of how we might one day come to lay the dead to rest.

El Alamein A Distillation after John Jarmain1 by Coco Cottam

Bells in the grey-faced murk View pride, black prayer. she bickers with the wax beneath her nail Lilies keep in powdered wrecks, bending Crowded by hope brittle, bloodless, all-bone wrists into prayer without a god post without a seal and half a wall, scratching, scrawling, Recall glory crossing wire deserts ink-blot creeping where memory was In garlands of rusted men, her fingers pressing like a forehead And finding against his fame in the sand. Ten days of fly-screen vacant chaos— Days of green-eyed face, foaming remains the flag flies hangnails tear ribbons from her And half a holy ground. skin she is made thin through the peephole Smoking powder flowers of a door whose bell never sings, Halt the dark grim as the doormat’s flat sober grin she petals, presses talcum powder into her pores sinks, slips, pours over magazines, and its unrung bells, she will wait, she thinks, The flecks of minefield fame; until The lilies watch warm men she can’t Become a single remember his name.

The Distillation is a novel verse form, devised by Joshua Judson. It takes an existing poem, with an even number of lines, then a poem is written using only the words from the original. It must be exactly half the original line count and retain the poem’s title. 1

Illustration by Millie Dean-Lewis 9

No. 656.

Thursday, March 22nd, 1924

Oxford and the Next War: a letter of exhortation from an undergraduate to a friend abroad by Evelyn Waugh - from the archives

Dear Bill,

T OCCURS to me that I have allowed almost the whole term to go by without writing to you. This was disgraceful. My only excuse can be your utter remoteness and the complete heartbreaking dreariness of everyone and everything in Oxford. You did well to go down. I can think of nothing which has happened this term which could at all interest you. All your friends have behaved more or less abominably to each other, as they used to in your time, and have fallen into various degrees of ill favour with the authorities. The Proctors have been peculiarly aggressive this term. You probably saw, or will have seen before you get this, that they banned our 1840 Exhibition without any sort of reason. They seem to be determined that we shall not enjoy ourselves. The other day I was walking home with a pickaxe which I borrowed to complete the costume of ‘the Conservative Working Man’; for a fancy dress party, when I was stopped by a bowler-hatted servant and brought to the Proctors, who told me that it was not seemly to carry workmen’s tools about. I wonder if it was just snobbery or ill-nature, or whether he was afraid of being attacked. The Union has been sadder than ever and has just been celebrating a centenary. I do think it is time that something was done to stop the thing. You cannot imagine what the debates have been like this term, with Scaife setting a tone of arrogant mediocrity and people like de Gruchy trying to clear things up. They have elected Gerald

10 10

No. 656. Gardiner President this term – do you remember him? A tall man with a jerky voice who is generally writing things in the OUDS. The OUDS, by the way, have shown themselves in no way as contemptuous of the Press as Scaife. I have never seen anything like the amount of comment and praise which Gyles’ simple little performance of ‘Hamlet’ roused in the London papers. It was a thoroughly good amateur show; that is to say, everyone knew his part tolerably well, and the lights didn’t go out or the curtains catch fire, or the wigs come off, or anything like that, but all the fuss in Fleet Street was utterly silly. It is a pity that those editors and reporters treat Oxford so seriously. They even, some of them, swallowed poor Jim Fagan’s lame little excuses about ‘infinity’ for his very commonplace ‘geometry and curtains’. The Bicester have had to close down owing to footand-mouth disease, but that doesn’t affect a poor man like myself. There has been quite enough to exasperate us all without that.

Thursday, March 22nd, 1924 to levy war against the king, or kings who want to overthrow representative institutions, or fanatics who want to convert people by the sword to some ghastly religion, or jolly adventurers who want to kill all the Mormons or check the Yellow Peril, or restore the Hapsburgs or the Stuarts, or invade America in the cause of alcohol or China in the cause of opium, or France in the cause of Sabbatarianism, or the Vatican in the cause of compulsory vaccination, please tell them, him or her that we can raise a very jolly platoon of gentlemen-adventurers for them in Oxford if they, he or she will pay us handsomely and give us a good chance of speedy death. What a long letter, Bill! Yours, Evelyn

March 12, 1924

You know, Bill, what we want is another war. I become more and more convinced of that every day. These tiresome historians always find causes for their wars in national expansion and trade rivalry and religion and such things. I don’t know about these because, as you know, I am never up in time to read the newspapers, but I gather from those who do, that things are pretty unsettled. What seems to me more important is that we have great body of young men of all sorts of education just longing for another general disturbance. We all had the fortune to be brought up in easy familiarity with bombs and casualty lists and bad bread and all the things young men used to be warned about, and we know exactly how bearable and unbearable they are. We also know that when there is a war, the fighting people at least have moments of really intense enjoyment and really intense misery – both things which one wants at our age. As far as I can see, there is just no chance of any of us being able to earn a living decently enough to allow of sort of excitement or depravity. Here we are with bills, over fastidious tastes, and a completely hopeless future. What can we do but to long for a war or revolution? If on your travels you meet any traitors who want

Dhá véarsaí as:

Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire

Two verses of:

A Grief for Art Ó Laoghaire

by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill translated by Marianne Doherty

Do bhuaileas go luath mo bhasa is do bhaineas as na reathaibh chomh maith is bhí sé agam, go bhfuaras romham tú marbh Cois toirín ísil aitinn, gan Pápa gan easpag, gan cléireach gan sagart do léifeadh ort an tsailm, ach seanbhean chríonna chaite do leath ort binn dá fallaing – do chuid fola leat ‘na sraithibh; is níor fhanas le hí ghlanadh ach í ól suas lem basaibh.

I clapped once and quickly Then set to running madly With all that I had in me To find you dead before me. Crumpled by a stump of gorse. No Pope and no bishop, No clergy, no priest Poured prayer onto you, yet – A wasted, wrinkled woman Pasted her sad cloak’s edge Where your blood-river rushed. And I did not care to clean it But gulped it from my palms.

Mo ghrá thu go daingean! Is érigh suas id sheasamh is tar liom féin abhaile, go gcuirfeam mairt á leagadh, go nglaofaim ar chóisir fhairsing, go mbeidh againn ceol a spreagadh, go gcóireod duitse leaba faoi bhairlíní geala, faoi chuilteanna breátha breaca, a bhainfidh asat alias in ionad an fhuachta a ghlacais.

My only steadfast love! Stand up and stop your fooling. Come home at once with me That I might fell an ox, That I might summon much company, That we might spark out in a song, That I might find you in our bed; There, under white and shining sheets, Under soft and speckled quilts I would raise your native heat And banish that earlier frost.

The Crying of Art Ó Laoghaire I clapped like jazz, up high they heard the sound of running cross the plain. Insanely, I– I feel insane; running running running still to find you cold before me I know the plant you chose a yellow unforgiving thing & I just want to say: nobody prayed for you, save me An old woman – not the maiden type – dabbed at you with her coat. Sceptically. running running running still to find you cold before me I drank from you, then as before. It seemed quite natural in the warm 4 o’clock air. Darling, you have played out on the road long enough. It’s raining. running running running still to find you gone before me Come back where there’s a fire on and we’ll watch a film, an Ingmar Bergmann if you like & order takeout if you like & let me fuck you warm.

Illustration by Eloise Cooke

Illustration by Natalie Hytiroglou

Frozen in Time A Classicist’s Portrait of Interwar Oxford by Clementine Scott

n one of the more blatantly cliché moments of my life, I watched the 1981 TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s iconic Oxford interwar novel Brideshead Revisited. Notwithstanding the fact that Oxford only features in the first four episodes, it remains that for many of us, Brideshead played a part in shaping our perceptions of life at Oxford. Daisy Dunn, author, critic, and an Oxford Classics graduate (St. Hilda’s, 2005), counts herself within that number – “you think, ‘it’ll be so idyllic’” she tells me, “you think of

the punting and the champagne and the parties, and I think in some ways that element is still alive”. In her forthcoming non-fiction book, Not Far From Brideshead, Dunn recounts what she calls the ‘shadier underbelly’ of Oxford between the wars, telling the stories of those whom Waugh knew and from whom he drew his inspiration. Her book’s three protagonists, E.R. Dodds, Gilbert Murray, and Maurice Bowra are united by her and my curiously cultish degree, Classics. Dunn is still as passionate about the Oxford Classics degree as ever, and we spend several minutes at the start of the interview chatting about the minutiae of different Greats options. Notably, she expresses amusing shock when I tell her that a certain Greek literature paper is no longer compulsory. Throughout our conversation, Dunn continues to remind me that every name printed on my reading lists had a full, varied life beyond their contributions to the field; some glimmers of personality behind the heavyweights of interwar studies in ancient literature emerge through their writing. Dodds was notoriously cantankerous in his dismissal of his undergraduates’ takes on Oedipus Rex, and Murray rendered Greek tragedy in a manner simultaneously cultured and accessible. Dunn, however, tells a much more rounded tale about them. The reputation of Dodds is one of an archetypal, strict Oxford don – the tweed and gown type – but this is rather dispelled when we understand that his ‘paradise years’, as he called them, took place during his brief sojourn teaching at the University of Birmingham, where his students included Louis MacNeice and W.H. Auden. Comparatively, Oxford was the alienating place that coercively rusticated him, an Irishman, in his final undergraduate year due to his support for the Easter Rising. Maurice Bowra was a staple of Dunn’s tutorial reading lists when she studied

at Oxford. In researching him she found that the scholarly veteran was not only Waugh’s inspiration for the obsequious Mr. Samgrass, but also an eccentric rake whose homosexuality was an open secret among his peers. Bowra’s story undermines Waugh’s seemingly progressive portrayal of Oxford’s protogay scene. Dunn recounts how Oxford rejected him for the position of Regius Professor of Greek – likely on account of his sexuality. The implication stood that, in a Victorian mode of morality, “being a ‘family man’ would help him be taken more seriously as an academic”. Dunn cites this as an example of the dichotomy between progressivism and tradition that existed in the 1920s, wherein “on one hand they wanted this joie de vivre which had been missing for so long, but at the same time there were all these rigorous traditions which held them back”. “Life wasn’t that easy for everybody at university in the period,” Dunn explains, “and this goes for all kinds of different groups, especially women.” Five minutes earlier, I had been telling Dunn about an inspiring solo tutorial I’d just had on The Odyssey, but now she reminds me of the sobering fact that 1920s-me would have needed a chaperone for any one-on-one contact with male tutors, and that a quota limited the number of matriculating female students until 1927. Nevertheless, this chapter in the history of Oxford’s Classics degree has its lighthearted moments too, and it can be comforting to remember how little the course’s idiosyncrasies have changed in the past hundred years. “From what I’ve read, I’ve seen that the texts haven’t changed. We still have to get through all of Homer and Virgil,” says Dunn in an observation which seems both reassuring and bleak in its reflection on how Classics as a discipline often seems to be frozen in time. “Their reactions [to their degree] don’t seem to be a million miles away from ours,” Dunn further reflects, as she tells me how Bowra too once went through

that particularly traumatic experience of having his philosophy tutor “unpick every word in his answer that was wrong”. She leads into anecdotes about how the poet and one-time Classics undergrad Cecil Day-Lewis would “get himself worked up” and “found going to tutorials really quite difficult”. In one of the more unlikely episodes of our conversation, Dunn tells me about how Day-Lewis was initially allowed to skip Mods, the second year classicist’s rite of passage, and proceed straight to Greats, which then focussed on ancient history and philosophy. He then returned to Mods and found his passion for ancient literature.

“you think of the punting and the champagne and the parties, and I think in some ways that element is still alive.”

Amongst these charmingly relatable anecdotes, however, you get the distinct feeling that perhaps not enough has changed in Classics. Dunn argues that “being tested on a solid foundation which I knew I would need” helped her “feel more secure in myself as a classicist”, and while I do in part agree with her, I also wonder whether students in any other degree would be so accepting of an introductory syllabus that has hardly changed in a century. There may well be a need to think beyond the necessity for a ‘foundation’ in Homer and Virgil. Though of great comfort to Day-Lewis, this foundation is sometimes regarded

by Classics students now as an unwieldy obstacle to get over and done with before Greats. There are yet more worrying parallels to be found between the world of Not Far From Brideshead and the Oxford student experience in the 2020s. I ask Dunn about whether the notion of Oxford as a ‘bubble’ existed in the 1920s, with (somewhat) progressive attitudes being more readily found in the city than outside of it. She responds with an all too familiar narrative of some students “remaining closed off, without taking much interest in national politics” while others would “think this is obnoxious and want to engage with the wider world”. Much of this tension between the desire to enjoy Oxford and the awareness of the world beyond the city came to a head during the General Strike in 1926, when millions walked-out in protest at proposed wage reductions for coal miners. While some students had not even heard of the strike – to the dismay of MacNiece, a student of Dodds – others, though possessing social privileges that prevented them from experiencing the material reality, protested alongside the workers in London. One Cherwell leader described the workers’ conditions as “one of the greatest travesties ever to have occurred”. The Cherwell’s treatment of the event as a disaster of this scale can partly be attributed to the liminality of the period, caught between the tragedies of the past and tragedies yet to come. The polarisation of Oxford students sometimes seems like a microcosm of a nation on the brink — the Oxford Union famously voted in 1933 that it would not “under any circumstances fight for King and Country”. One cannot help but draw parallels with present day ‘culture war’ narratives, in the light of the intense news coverage of the debate at the time, Churchill’s designation of it as a turning point in international attitudes to the British, and the intriguing glimpse of a wavering and traumatised nation it gives to those of us with hindsight.

Whether it’s a portrait of the Queen in the Magdalen MCR or societies refusing to invite certain speakers, there is still a worrying tendency for the opinions and decisions of Oxford students to be taken as some kind of litmus test of the state of the nation. Only time will tell how historically relevant these moments will prove to be, but the unwarranted clout held by student decision-makers in Oxford on an international scale is, unfortunately, nothing new.

“on one hand they wanted this joie de vivre which had been missing for so long, but at the same time there were all these rigorous traditions which held them back.”

There are reasons to be hopeful, however. Dunn is perhaps at her most enthusiastic when discussing intellectual history and how the ideas proposed by her three protagonists reflected the times in which they lived. “Bowra’s experiences as a war veteran really informed the way he wrote about war in literature, and Gilbert Murray drew some really striking parallels between the Peloponnesian War and the First World War,” she says, since both conflicts represented a new, more splintered experience of warfare without a clear enemy. These aren’t parallels you can

make without first-hand experience, and they loom large in their interpretations of ancient texts. So, too, do rather more esoteric preoccupations: Dodds not only reassessed Euripides’ Phaedra and her ‘hysteria’, traditionally dismissed by Victorian tradition, but also employed his own fascination with fashionable practices. He used hypnotism, seances, and telepathy to inform his readings of such mysterious ancient experiences as the consulting of the Pythia at Delphi in his 1951 classic, The Greeks and the Irrational. “He applied his own interests to scholarship in order to look at the ancient world in a different way,” explains Dunn. One wonders what new lenses we can use to examine the Classics in 2022. “I wish I could produce some really groundbreaking scholarship! But maybe the new lens is the fact that we spend so much time communicating [in a way that is] not faceto-face,” postulates Dunn. We go on to discuss how the interpretation of physical space in the ancient world and the role of communication via messenger contrast with our age of increased communication and minimal long-distance travel. Like Bowra, Dodds, and Murray, we live in a time of uncertainty, stark social divides, and technology which changes how we look at the world, but perhaps intellectual historians of the future will reflect not on our worst pitfalls, but on how our ideas responded to our experiences of them. Dunn’s description of Brideshead-era Oxford may seem like a liminal, idyllic space that never really existed, but there are nevertheless lessons to be learnt. Through the examples of Bowra, Murray, and Dodds, may we remember that we are not merely scholars of the ancient world, but reflections of the unique times in which we live.

Mist

by Georgia Lin

i. I say, I come from an island I am touched by salt, separated by straits, embraced by streams of motorcycle engines revving into side streets, the names of which I can no longer read. In Taiwan, we say the sun is going down a mountain when it sets. I have always known the sun to set over a mountain My childhood home stood perpendicular to a mountain. Here, the sun departs in hazy purple swirls but leaves its stickiness; Taiwan is where time melts. It is so easy to die in Taipei. Breathe in the smoke from street vendors selling pig’s blood cake dusted with peanuts The aromatics wafting into the corners of my grandmother’s linoleum-clad apartment. Her mountain views have since vanished, replaced by tall metal buildings I wish could be toppled like jadeite, a stone fused to my grandmother’s wrist. I choke on the incense vapours illuminated in roadside Buddhist shrines, trip on folded cardboard housing corn husks or scraped red crates with leftover daikon peels, anticipating heatstroke from the midday sun. Broken air conditioning units melt out the weak. I grew up without seatbelts on unforgiving roads, Backseat, backstage meant unfounded liberation for a body always turning in on itself, Lectured for unladylike leg crossing, heavier makeup, accented language, fiscal choices, greeted with shame for glitter eyeshadow and orange lip gloss, made to feel disobedient, disempowered, discombobulated from myself, Strong enough to slice my cheek with a plastic skincare sample as I disembark from a department store escalator Only to be told I am not meant to be here in my Asian democracy. I return home to exit my body.

ii. It is so easy to live in Taipei. You can touch the mountains if your high-speed train lurches close enough, climb up trails to see a panorama of jagged tops in mist, offset by never-ending lakes and drooping forest branches, Mahjong tiles clinking together when the moon rises and the night markets come alive sweat is omnipresent. Metal barred windows proudly serve as clothing lines, with eager green bushes twisting between each linen blouse Cheap bubble tea and sugared shaved ice is always waiting two blocks away It is a crime to carry piping egg cakes in the open underground car. The eyes of children wearing Doraemon backpacks follow the hilltops as the MRT soars above a highway Nostalgia chokes me as I stumble past dessert vendors on my way to Eslite, A bookstore I wish I could call home, in this home. Are gilded earrings gold? Can I take a breath? If I skin my knee, will my bones care? Here, conservatism is quiet. I arch my back to be more attractive to men Scowling remarks on curved eyebrows Being forced to answer where I am from when the stones beneath my feet pave my way home.

Illustrations by Faye Song

iii. Cracks in porcelain become blinding under sunlight I do not carry myself as if I can be swallowed. Blurred lips and brown eyes, carrying paper umbrellas in the heat, “When are you going to find a boyfriend to take care of you, 妹妹?” My maternal line draws from a long line of criticism. My mother learned how to whip words and I learned how to cower in the seams. Instead of being accused of counting in Mandarin by my fourth-grade classmate like the movement of my jaw must match in order to be correct, here I am accused of having poor Mandarin. Even kin speak to me with foreign phrasing: “Here in Taiwan, we -” like this is not my Taiwan, like my father speaks the truth when he calls me a tourist and says this is not his motherland. We count in Lunar years and by God, I remember three generations of double-digit birthdays and the luck of eight. Instead of narrowing my eyes when a white boy calls the Chinese zodiac cute, I preserve my island, with my most relaxed self sipping an oolong milk bubble tea with tapioca, half sugar, less ice, proving to myself the truth and the heart of Asia.

Photography by Niamh McBratney 21

Photography by Niamh McBratney

n late December 2021, following a long nail-biting campaign, insurgent left-wing candidate Gabriel Boric was announced as the victor in Chile’s presidential election. Boric, a former student leader, swept the polls roundly defeating far-right candidate José Antonio Kast, becoming the youngest president in Chilean history. After decades of far-right dictatorship and neoliberal governance, the election represented a turning point in Chile’s recent history, reflecting the aspirations and hopes of Chile’s young dreamers. The clash between Kast and Boric naturally opened up old wounds. Playwright Ariel Dorfman wrote that the election was for the “soul of Chile”, one inevitably moved and shaped by “ghosts”, namely Chile’s dead. With Boric’s victory, many now feel that they can look away from the past and begin to look to the future.

Illustration by Eloise Cooke

In the Path of a Distant Star In Search of Allende’s Lost Generation by Nicholas Clark

The election followed significant calls for dramatic structural reforms in Chile. In response to high rates of social inequality, protestors had taken to the streets in 2019 to demand sweeping and radical constitutional changes. Boric himself played a significant part in negotiations over the country’s constitutional redraft and his election is indicative of the rising tide of popular discontent in a country scarred by its recent past. The ascent of Chile’s left is a rare glimpse of hope for reformists and revolutionaries, Boric being the first left-wing president since the end of the far-right military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. This comes at an age where, in the words of Frederic Jameson, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. To break out of this paradigm requires hope in large-scale political alternatives during a period in history where this has seemed almost impossible. Chile, perhaps, has shone a light on the path forward for social movements. Chile has a tumultuous political history. The country’s old constitution, now discarded following a 2020 plebiscite

for constitutional reform, was drafted under Pinochet’s dictatorial leadership. As a right-wing military official, Pinochet seized power in September 1973, rapidly leading to a consolidation of his position through far-reaching reforms which decisively broke away from the socialist government of Salvador Allende. Prominent within his new government were the interventions of the ‘Chicago Boys’, a group of University of Chicago faculty members which included the economist Milton Friedman. These advisors advocated for substantial economic reforms such as the marketisation of the Chilean economy, stripping state-held assets through privatisation, and dramatically cutting social spending. These reforms were the basis for the ‘neoliberal turn’ which quickly inspired other movements elsewhere, galvanising Chilean economic growth and making the country one of the wealthiest in Latin America. This, however, came at the substantial cost of vastly exacerbated inequalities, political illiberalism until Pinochet’s abdication from power, and the execution or internment of tens of thousands of political dissidents.

“With Boric’s victory, many now feel that they can look away from the past and begin to look to the future.”

Chile’s lost generation can be glimpsed through the eyes of its politically and literarily fervent poets, artists, and thinkers, who came of age in the age under Allende, only to be exiled (as was

Bolaño), killed (as was ‘Chile’s Bob Dylan’, Victor Jarra), or to join the ranks of the country’s desaparecidos (disappeared). Chile’s writers – Pablo Neruda, Isabelle Allende, Gabriela Mistral, to name a few – have escaped the boundaries of language and translation. The late author Roberto Bolaño, described as the “sad Socialist son of Pinochet’s Chile”, was renowned for breaking the perception of Latin American literature out of the confines of genres like magic realism, in turn gifting us with a useful set of metaphors for understanding the feelings of hope, desire, and distance of Chile’s lost years. Bolaño’s posthumous work has attracted significant attention in the Anglophone literary press. An early novel of his, Distant Star, captures the anguish and political hopelessness of the Pinochet years. Written from the hazy perspective of an exile, Arturo B – a plain allusion to the writer himself – the novel revolves around his acquaintance with poet RuizTagle (who is really, as it is revealed, Carlos Weider). Following Pinochet’s assent, Arturo’s capture, and subsequent imprisonment, his acquaintance later turns out to be a far-right air-force lieutenant. Weider, whose presence haunts the novel, skywrites poetry in a WWII-era Messerschmitt plane over the Andes. Many years later, in exile in Spain, Arturo finds a now exiled Weider, meditating on the passage of time, and the recession of the Pinochet years from popular memory. Arturo exclaims “Chile had forgotten us as well”. For Chile’s exiles, the ‘distant star’ also stands for a country now far away in both space and time. As Arturo is interned at Santiago’s Estadio Nacional, along with thousands of other political prisoners, Weider writes “death” in the sky above the stadium. Weider encapsulates the bitter irony of his own freedom-indulging in poetry, far above Santiago, unmoored by the horror of the ground, a ‘distant star’ that dualistically represents freedom and oppression. Allende’s government is a particularly

fascinating aberration in the polarised politics of the Cold War, a rare, socialist third way between the free-market capitalist West and the Marxist-Leninist model of the Eastern bloc. Allende, with the backing of his socialist party, favoured a constitutional transition to a democratically owned model of ownership and production. His policies featured some hallmarks of post-war social democratic governance, including the nationalisation of key industry and a move to socialistic ownership, greater than any other democratic governments had attempted. Key to this agenda was “Project CyberSyn”, a cybernetic model of production that paired nascent computing technology with central planning, networking hundreds of Chilean factories. Plans to expand this network were rapidly halted by Pinochet’s assent, with the main operations centre destroyed soon after. Bolaño writes that the revolutionary fervour of the Allende years presaged what was to follow, as young members of the Chilean literati dreamed of “revolution and the armed struggle that would usher in a new life and a new era”. Before its swift and brutal demise in 1973, the people of Allende’s Chile caught glimpses of a new sort of society, brutally stopped in its opening phases.

“The election was ... shaped by ‘ghosts’”

Pinochet’s rule, too, witnessed the birth of what is now described as neoliberalism, a model quickly adopted by western democratic governments in the following decades. Indeed, the assumption of neoliberalism as the ‘final stage’ of Western development, with no horizon

for large-scale change or development, has become formative to our understanding of politics. Neoliberalism itself has been described as post-historical, a miasma that binds the future and the possibilities contained within. Margaret Thatcher claimed, brusquely, that “there is no alternative”, referring to the foreclosure of political possibility that came with the assent of neoliberal capitalism. As history ostensibly reached a terminal point with neoliberalism, however, little thought was spared for the bodies it left in its wake. Arturo’s exile in Spain, a refugee from Allende’s deceased political dream, is an effective metaphor for the position of the political left in the neoliberal era, broadly outcast from mass politics and unable to envision an alternative to modern capitalism. Pinochet’s political programme provided the ideological mettle for similar market reforms in the US and UK, adopted elsewhere in the West and the developing world. These too saw many more such casualties of hope, from the miners crippled by Thatcher to the victims of Reagan’s interventions in Central America. Dissidents who opposed the expansion of market reforms found little political refuge, as traditionally leftleaning opposition parties in the West embraced marketisation, with ‘third-way’ politics quickly becoming the platform of the centre-left. Despite the brutality of much of the former Soviet Union’s socialist model, the shock of market reforms in the 1990s was similarly apocalyptic. For the children of neoliberalism, caught between the dreams of the past and an inevitable, inescapable future, aspirations for reform and liberalisation quickly gave way to destitution and political decline. For disappointed revolutionaries, such as Bolaño, the absence of a political future left only the outlet of fiction, writing “nobody, and literature even less, is capable of not blinking for a long time”. To the relief of many international observers (not to mention Santiago’s moderates), Boric’s recently announced

cabinet adheres closely to a socialdemocratic agenda, emphasising a green recovery from Covid-19 and substantial increases in taxation and welfare spending. In many countries seeking to rebound from the pandemic, this is less a task of revolutionary politics and more of a new economic orthodoxy. Indeed, the label ‘social democrat’ is one that Boric has openly embraced, a break from more overtly radical political predecessors in the Latin American left. Allende’s visionary social thinking has not translated to the modest political agenda of the new Chilean government, to the disappointment of Chile’s past and present radicals. But for a left-wing that has only recently regained confidence in its vision of another world, his election nevertheless represents a turning point. Democracy in the twenty-first century is caught between a feeling of inescapability, and hope for an exit. However small it may be, Boric’s victory may coronate an off-ramp from the inevitable.

the young Chilean left as “vaguely aware that dreams often turn into nightmares”. Boric’s ascension, nevertheless, is a reminder that struggle, both small and large, against the seemingly hopeless and totalising weight of injustice can reap rewards. Allende, in his last speech hours before his death, rousingly announced: “I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail”. Regardless of one’s politics, ambitions, or credence to romanticism, change may have been found after decades of wishing on the flicker of a distant star.

“the ‘distant star’ also stands for a country now far away in both space and time.”

Dreaming is often compromised by the difficult task of governance. Boric’s government may find this too, as the heady optimism of electoral victory gives way to the arduousness of compromise and legislation. As Allende’s ultimately failed struggle proves, the task of building “Heaven on Earth” is long and treacherous and such a lofty aim may very well find itself to be fruitless. Indeed, more pessimistically, Bolaño writes of

Photography by Faye Song 29

Plag u Addi e ctio n by E l

iott

Illustration by Dowon Jung

Ros e

CW: addiction, drug abuse I have a complex relationship with Gower – that vindictive old man – late-medieval English poet, moralist, and reactionary. He is someone I would usually despise, not least because of his belief that the peasantry should be “bound in chains and under our foot”. But Marxist grievances aside, there is something compelling in how he describes the ‘apocalypse’ in his Visio Anglie – that time in 1381 when the peasantry revolted against the lords in an attempt to become free citizens. Photography

by Faye Song

i killed my landlord and put his head on a spike. Deformed beyond humanity into “innumerable terrifying monsters,” these peasants are literal beasts that swarm the countryside with their chimeric bodies and overtake the city of London. What is compelling is their indulgence, their need to “drown their bellies in wine”. How, upon taking over the city, their “countrified constitutions gulped down fine wines” – so much of it that their “bod[ies] lay dead”. Their revolution becomes about more than overthrowing feudal landlords. Instead, they hedonistically throw themselves into the role of oppressor, become that which they hate: pleasure-seeking drunkards – drunk off the wine drunk off his power – who, previously “tied up by their hairy necks,” now “cultivated a haughty manner”. I keep returning to the Visio Anglie. The peasants attempt to topple a regime with style and pleasure. Not content with simply instating their demands, it is imperative they have a drink whilst doing so. In times of crisis – or from Gower’s perspective, the end of the (feudal) world – people seek pleasure. But this need to enjoy the end is not limited to Gower. Christian history itself begins with this prophecy. The Book of Revelation contains the foretold last moments of mankind on earth: the Whore of Babylon drinks “the wine of fornication” in “golden cup[s] of abomination,” seated on the throne of the Beast. Jezebel, the “false prophet”, gorges on delicacies “sacrificed to the idols,” much to the horror of John. still, easier for a monster to kill his landlord than for a rich man to enter heaven. Like the rebels of 1381 and the Whore of Babylon, at the end of the world people indulge. They drink, they fornicate, they spiral. Pursuing hedonistic oblivion in a world we perceive as crumbling is the most human response possible. But, crucially, piecing together the fragments of old is a much more pleasant task when you are intoxicated. john, bring remedy, for now is time. amen ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------MADNESS REIGNED, ALL RESTRAINT WAS GONE AND PLUNGED INTO ANY – AND EVERYTHING – FORBIDDEN. Between June 2020 and June 2021, I developed an addiction to codeine. At the time, the world was ending. Or at least that’s how it seemed. Pried apart from the people I loved and confined into one house, my screens fed me incessant news cycles describing the daily crumbling of society. The day I took the first pill, 38,000 people had died from Covid-19 in the UK. The day I took my last, this had become 128,000 people. My addiction overlapped with the deaths of nearly 100,000 people in an inescapable pandemic, with every detail pouring directly into my phone and my consciousness.

The drug takes an hour to kick in. In that hour, your body is waiting, waiting, still waiting – until at last, you begin to float. Your mind disconnects from your body, your head grows light and your hands heavy, and everything moves at half speed. Colours get so bright it is difficult to focus on just one, music swells, voices appear to you through water – LIMBS WERE MOVING, BUT THEY HAD NO CONTROL OVER WHERE THEY PUT THEIR FEET. – Like Gower’s peasants, I entered the apocalypse drunk. Of course, this is the first time you take it. The second is less intense, the third even less so, the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth… it becomes part of a routine. It becomes enmired in the many pills you take in the morning: antidepressants, PrEP, propranolol, and codeine. Gower thinks the peasantry become sick from drinking – THE BODY LIES PROSTRATE FROM ITS RICHNESS AS IF IT WERE DEAD. – but for me, this is not sickness – it is sedation. tomorrow, we kill the archbishop. tonight, we gaze at the stars. we monsters must rest too, in this temporary calm. I felt that calm when I looked out my window at the bees swarming my mum’s hydrangeas, or when my skin melted off my body in the shower, or even when my eyes u n f o c u s e d as I drifted out of consciousness in front of the TV. I felt calm because of the fracture between myself and the physical world. The peasants’ alcohol – and my codeine – anchored me to emotions other than disaffected panic even when such feelings seemed unobtainable. It’s taken a long time to accept that this was an addiction. In my mind, drug addiction begins with a pleasurable experience. You become hooked because the feeling is good, because the body enters states of bliss which themselves become addictive. THEN EVERYTHING FLOURISHED, THEN THE LAND WAS FERTILE. monstrosity is divine. our pleasure is the nectar of God.

That never happened to me. The drug allowed me to function by making me numb. Becoming hazy and indecisive was easier than the harsh reality of isolation and death. It made waiting for new restrictions, the latest death toll, or news that a loved one had passed more manageable. But what began as an escape from reality became something diagnosable, casusing far more problems than it ever solved. Instead of restoring my ability to function, the addiction grew like a weed until I wasn’t taking it to cope anymore; I was taking it because I Just Needed To. THEY WORE THE FACES OF MEN, AND THEY HAD NO POWER OF REASON. Dolphins in captivity become distressed when the constant echoes of their voices bouncing back off swimming pool walls throw their communication out of sync. The echo of my own thoughts bouncing off my bedroom ceiling, punctured only by updates on the unnamed, faceless dead, threw me out of sync. Being stuck in limbo, away from university and my friends, alongside the existential threat of death for myself and my family, cracked me. Unable to reach out to anyone, professionally or personally, I selfmedicated. Because it was easier. I WRITE NOTHING IN ORDER THAT I MAY BE PRAISED. lies, for you benefit from our subjection. as do you. This is not vindicating my behaviour or calling for sympathy. What I experienced was the result of physical, mental, and spiritual isolation because I thought the world was ending. So, when we were told that the world wasn’t ending – that it was ‘safe’ to see old friends and family, to seek connections with new people, to simply go outside – I found myself in a conundrum. The coping mechanisms I had developed for the end of the world had to adapt to a reality I now, somehow, had to navigate whilst sober. A SINGLE BIRD PERISHED SO THAT A THOUSAND LIVED AGAIN… our dreams died then. to live again, in this time, is to die. our lives before the end are now unreturnable. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This is a self-absorbed piece of writing. Situating myself within a millennium of indulgence narcissistically relates my individual addiction to history-altering events, giving my experiences undeserved grandeur. But it is the only way I can make sense of, or maybe accept, the unromantic reality of what I did to my body. Still, I am not the only one who found myself with new addictions. In 2020, adults seeking help for opioid dependenced increased by 20% from the previous year. The

number of individuals drinking at ‘high risk’ levels doubled. Deaths from ‘alcohol-specific issues’ increased by 20%. There were, and are, two pandemics: Covid-19 and the coping mechanisms which some fall prey to. Around the country, people swallowed pills to deal with the reality of being trapped in a box. It is difficult to step back and reassess something which has become so ingrained, so normalised, and attempt to reverse the clocks back to June 2020, to life before addiction – especially when the ‘before’ life is one I do not wish to return to. My mental health has never been stable, but reverting to pre-Covid life would not excise anyone’s demons. Pre-pandemic Britain, with its 130,000 recorded deaths from austerity in 2019 alone, was already the end of the world for many. There is no blueprint for my own health, nor society in general, to go back to. Gower’s rebels had none either. After the revolt, rioters were prosecuted and executed by the king’s court – the old world attempted to right itself through brutal incarceration. A return to ‘normality’ is a reversion to a world we know is insufficient. This is as true now as it was in 1381. now I must leave you, but with the knowledge that the world has ended before, and can survive new apocalypses. we can, and will, survive.

Bibliography The Major Latin Works of John Gower, tr. E.W. Stockton (Seattle, 1962): Visio Anglie, pp. 47-95. NRSV Catholic Bible (Nashville, 1989): Book of Revelation, pp. 1447-1464.

Resources for anyone else suffering from addiction or pandemic-exacerbated mental health issues Beating Addictions: How to Treat and Overcome an Addiction. Harvard Help Guide: Opioid Addiction. NHS: Coronavirus Information & Support. ‘Managing your mental health as we live with Covid-19’. Smart TMS: Impact Turning Point: Drug and Achohol Support.

Illustration by Millie Dean-Lewis 35

Translation of Rosario Castellenos’ ‘Lección de Cocina’ by Anna Hull CW: suicide

he kitchen is gleaming white. It’s a shame to have to tarnish it with use. You’d need to sit down to contemplate it, to describe it, to close your eyes, to conjure it up. Pay close attention to this neatness, this purity which is not to that dazzling excess that gives you goosebumps/chills in hospitals. Or is it the aura of disinfectant, the rubber-soled footsteps of the cleaning ladies, the hidden presence of sickness and death? Why should I care. My place is here. I’ve been here since the beginning of time. In the German proverb women are equated to ‘Küche, Kinder, Kirche’. I wandered aimlessly in classrooms, streets, offices, cafés; squandered my time on skills that I must now forget in order to learn

others. For instance, choosing the menu. How could I carry out such a monumental task without the assistance of society, of the whole of history? On a special shelf, fit for my height, my protective spirits are lined up, those lauded tightrope walkers who in the pages of recipe books reconcile the most irreducible contradictions: slenderness and gluttony, attractiveness and frugality, speed and succulence. Along with their endless combinations: slenderness and frugality, speed and attractiveness, succulence and… What would you recommend for today’s meal, experienced mistress of the house, inspiration of mothers past and present, voice of tradition, well-known secret of the supermarkets? I open a book at random and read: ‘Don Quixote’s Dinner’. Very literary but very unsatisfying. Because Don Quixote wasn’t famed as a

gourmand, but as a scatterbrain. Although a deeper analysis of the text reveals etc, etc, etc. Ugh. More ink has flowed around that figure than water under bridges. “Pajaritos de centro de cara.” Esoteric. The centre of whose face? Do faces even have a centre? If they do it can’t be appetising. ‘Hunter’s stew’. But just who do you think you’re talking to? If I knew what tarragon and pineapple were, I wouldn’t be consulting this book because I’d know many other things. If you had the slightest sense of reality you should, yourself or any of your colleagues, have taken the time to write a dictionary of technical terms, draft some preliminary remarks, come up with a preface to make the difficult culinary arts accessible to the layperson. But they start from the assumption that we’re all in the loop and limit themselves to short statements. I, at least, solemnly declare that I’m not, nor have I ever been, in this loop that you all share, nor in any other. I’ve never understood a single thing. You can see the symptoms: I stand, rendered an imbecile, in an immaculate and unremarkable kitchen, with the apron that I usurp to give the appearance of efficiency, and which I will be stripped of, shamefully but justly.

could give himself the luxury of taking the lead, and he lay face down so that his sore skin didn’t chafe. But I, self-sacrificing little Mexican woman, born as a dove for the nest, was smiling like the tortured Chauhtémoc when he said “mi lecho no es de rosas” and fell silent. My bed is not made of roses. Face up, I bore not only my own weight but also his on top of me. The classic pose for making love. And I moaned, from the tearing, from pleasure. The classic moan. Myths, myths.

I open the refrigerator compartment labelled ‘meat’ and extract a packet which is unrecognisable under its icy coating. I dissolve it in hot water and the name is revealed, without which I would never have identified the contents: it’s a special meat for grilling. Wonderful. A simple and healthy dish. Since it entails neither overcoming an antinomía, nor poses an aporía, it doesn’t appeal to me.

Eyelids closing and here is exile, once again. An enormous expanse of sand with no ending other than the sea, whose movement proposes paralysis; with no invitation to suicide other than that of the cliff’s edge.

The best thing (for my burns, at least) was when he fell asleep. The nylon of my nightdress, in its fraudulent efforts to resemble lace, slid beneath my fingertips – not very sensitive due to their prolonged contact with the keys of the typewriter. In the darkness of the dead of night, I played with the stitching of the buttons and those other decorations that make anyone wearing them appear so feminine. The perfect whiteness of my clothes – deliberate, repetitive, shamelessly symbolic – was temporarily abolished. Perhaps at some moment it managed to consummate its purpose under the light, and under the gaze of those eyes that are now overcome by sleep.

And it’s not just an excess of logic suppressing my hunger. It’s also the appearance of it, stiff with cold; it’s the colour that is emerging now that I’ve cracked open the packet. Red, as if it were on the verge of bleeding.

But it’s a lie. I am not the dream that dreams, dreams, dreams; I am not the reflection of an image in a windowpane; I am not destroyed by the closing of a consciousness or of every possible consciousness. I continue living a life that is dense, viscous, murky, even though those by my side and those furthest away from me ignore me, forget me, shelve me, abandon me, cease to love me.

Our backs were the same colour, my husband and I, after our sun-kissed lovemaking on the beaches of Acapulco. He

Yet I am also a consciousness that can close itself off, abandon the other and expose it to obliteration. I… The meat,

under the sprinkling of salt, has quieted its scandalous redness and now seems more tolerable, more familiar. It’s the piece that I saw thousands of times without realising, when I would poke my head in quickly to tell the cook that… We weren’t destined for each other. Fine, we met purely by chance. It’s still too soon to say. We ran into each other at an exhibition, at a conference, at a cinéclub; we met unexpectedly in an elevator; he gave up his seat for me on the tram; a park ranger interrupted our puzzled and, until then, parallel contemplation of the giraffe because it was closing time at the zoo. Someone, he or I, it doesn’t matter, asked the basic but essential question: do you work or study? A union of interest and good intentions, a demonstration of “serious” intent. A year ago I didn’t have the faintest idea of his existence and now I’m lying beside him, our thighs interlaced, damp with sweat and semen. I could get up without waking him, walk barefoot to the shower. To cleanse myself? I don’t feel disgusted. I prefer to believe that what joins me to him is something as easy to wipe away as a secretion and not so terrible as a sacrament. So I remain motionless, breathing rhythmically to imitate calmness, polishing my insomnia, the only maiden jewel that I’ve preserved and which I’m prepared to preserve until death. After the brief shower of pepper, the meat seems to have gone grey. I dispel this sign of old age by scrubbing as if wishing to break through the surface and impregnate it with spices. Because I lost my old name and I’m still not used to the new one, which isn’t mine either. In the hotel lobby when some employee calls for me I remain deaf, with that vague sense of unease which is the prelude to recognition. Who is it, who isn’t listening? It could be about something urgent, serious, definitive, a matter of life or death. The person calling gives up hope, departs leaving no trace, no message, and no possibility of

another meeting. Is it anxiety squeezing my heart? No, it’s his hand squeezing my shoulder. And his lips which smile with a benevolent mockery, more like an enchanter than a master. And yes, as we walk to the bar (my shoulder is burning, it’s starting to peel), I accept the fact that in the contact or collision with him I’ve undergone a profound transformation: I didn’t know and now I know, I didn’t feel and now I feel, I wasn’t and now I am. I am I. But who am I? Your wife, obviously. And that title is enough to sever me from past memories and future plans. I bear a brand of ownership and even so you look at me with distrust. I’m not weaving a web to ensnare you. I’m not a praying mantis. I’m grateful that you believe such a hypothesis. But it’s false. I will ruminate, in silence, on my resentment. I am assigned the responsibilities and tasks of a maid-of-allwork. I have to keep the house spotless, the clothes clean, the rhythm of meals running like clockwork. But I’m not paid any kind of salary, I’m not given a day off each week, I’m not able to change employers. And on top of that I must contribute to the maintenance of the home, and I have to efficiently execute a role in which my boss makes demands and my colleagues scheme and my subordinates hate me. In my leisure time I transform into a society woman who hosts lunches and dinners for her husband’s friends, who attends gatherings, who is a patron of the opera, who watches her weight, who renews her wardrobe, who cares for her skin, who keeps herself attractive, who is up to date with gossip, who stays up late and gets up early, who runs the monthly risk of maternity, who believes in evening executive meetings, in business trips, and in unexpected visits from clients. Who suffers olfactory hallucinations when she detects the aroma of French perfumes (different from the ones she uses) on the shirts and handkerchiefs of her husband.

Illustrations by Emily Archer

Who, during her solitary nights, refuses to contemplate why or for what reason he has so many engagements and pours herself a stiff drink and reads a detective novel in the fragile spirit of a recovering patient. The oil is beginning to boil. I got carried away, poured it out extravagantly, and now it spits and leaps and burns me. So too will I burn in the confines of Hell, and it’s my fault, it’s all my fault. But darling, you’re not the only one. All your schoolmates do the same, or worse things, they denounce themselves in the confessional, they pay penance, they’re pardoned, and then they relapse. All of them. If I’d have carried on visiting them they’d be subjecting me to an interrogation right now. The married ones to verify it, the single ones to find out just how far they can stray. Impossible to

let them down. I would invent acrobatics, sublime weaknesses, transportes as they’re called in The Thousand and One Nights, records. If you were to hear me you wouldn’t recognise yourself, Casanova! And it’s not as if you’ve disappointed me. Indeed, I wasn’t expecting anything in particular. Little by little we’ll reveal ourselves to each other, discovering our secrets, our little tricks, learning to satisfy ourselves. And one day you and I will be a pair of perfect lovers and then, in the middle of an embrace, we’ll melt away and the screen will display the words ‘The End’.

Illustration by Rachel Jung

For the Record by Anna Studsgarth you have grown too big. too full of images like water in fist, like sand between fingers, unreliable as ink on page. for the record, there will only ever again be vague flashes, just the cucumber slipping out the end of your sandwich pieces of gravel in your knees trampoline-burn the sea on a stormy day the first time you realised you’d grown hips. the crease behind his ear that his dad has, too. streaks of blue nail polish and cat fur on your jumpers and uneven stitching.

the smell of bubble mixture, and the time your dad hit a hedgehog with the car (sick, dead, thump) the fish section of a foreign supermarket and the shiniest coin in your collection and the puppet in your grandma’s drawer that you were scared to look at except maybe sneak glances out of the corner of your eye. the beginnings of strep throat and that same medicine you still taste from time to time when you wake in the middle of the night and don’t know where you are. jelly shoes. crushing mint leaves between your fingers in the garden. the texture of the fur of your favourite bear. new trainers. or better, light-up trainers. or worse, no light-up trainers. or worse still, losing your light-up trainers in the trampoline park, and having to limp across the parking lot in shameful socked feet. all the bedrooms you’ve ever slept in. the things you thought you’d lost and cried when you found again. all the things you’ve lost. all the things you don’t yet know are lost. all the hairclips and the ribbons from birthday presents not to mention the birthday cards. all the water you’ve swallowed in pools and oceans and water parks and the things you’ve left behind in return (jelly shoes still floating somewhere on the italian coast) all the days you’ve counted down on the back of your bedroom door and the days kept going and never lost count. even when people stopped counting the candles on your birthday cake. even when you started counting digits on scales, and debts, and keeping score, but not, this time, in swing tennis. even when you learned about beautiful and ugly, and wondered if you were either. even if you don’t, anymore, hold hands to cross the road.

THE TRUE COST OF PORN THE MONOPOLISATION OF THE PORN INDUSTRY by Nia Large Open a private browsing tab. Turn on your VPN. Type ‘ethical porn’ into the search bar. Press enter. Try hardcore porn, softcore porn, or just porn after. No, it’s not just your browsing habits. Every time it’s the same: Pornhub wins the race to the top of the page. The second, third, fourth (and so on) search results reliably go to sites with the same parent company: MindGeek. MindGeek is the overlord of online porn – it passes through the industry, absorbing and acquiring stragglers and growing ever bigger. And it won’t be restricted any time soon because the government will not touch the adult entertainment industry, even when sheathed in latex. As a result, MindGeek continues ravaging the industry, unimpeded by antimonopoly laws. MindGeek’s sites together consume more bandwidth than Amazon, Twitter or Facebook; it is a porn provider in every sense, hosting streaming sites, performer agencies, production sites, and advertising for porn journalism. Not only has this near monopoly been achieved to

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the detriment of the sex worker, but it also ensures MindGeek has a hold over much of the population’s sex lives. The lack of competition in the industry allows MindGeek to pay porn performers only a fraction of what they would earn otherwise. Owning production companies and tube sites ensure that profits from both the creation and distribution of porn are funnelled into MindGeek. Their monopoly also reduces the amount of control creators have over their own films as each of the tube sites regularly pirate content from one another, repurposing the same film to generate more revenue – none of which is paid to the creators. Before MindGeek’s reign began it was almost unheard of for porn performers to offer full-service sex work; now, many performers can be found on escort sites. Performers often have no choice but to work for them given how omnipresent MindGeek is in the industry. This may be the first time you’ve heard about MindGeek. Are you wondering

why? Performers shy away from criticising the company for fear of being blacklisted and losing their income. Adult entertainment publications won’t criticise MindGeek because they risk losing advertising revenue in doing so. Political parties are disinterested. The general public still see sex work as taboo, work that isn’t work, disgusting offline but perfectly acceptable onscreen. If porn is a game of strip poker, MindGeek holds all the cards. If sex work were treated as legitimate employment and sex workers as workers, MindGeek would have been forced into radical reform long ago. For as long as governments criminalise sex workers and fail to legislate in their interests, MindGeek will be allowed to plunder the industry unimpeded. We ignore MindGeek’s supremacy at our own peril. Half of UK adults said they had visited a porn site in the last month when surveyed – and that’s only counting those who were willing to admit it. Since the company may produce and curate the porn watched by much of the adult world, their considerable control over the industry affords them significant power

to sculpt the sexual landscape. Nina Hartley, a former porn actor, said: “Let’s face it, folks: sex drive may be innate, modes of sexual behaviour are learned.” If this is the case, we must all face the fact that MindGeek is our sex educator. While a blushing PE teacher fumbling to put a condom on a banana at the front of the class isn’t an ideal way of learning about sex, it is certainly preferable to half the population getting their sex education from a multinational company.

“If porn is a game of strip poker, MindGeek holds all the cards.”

We can be even more forceful than Hartley because not even your sex drive is protected from MindGeek’s meddling.

Like YouTube, MindGeek’s sites function on algorithms designed to keep you coming back for more, generating – and feeding – addiction. I spoke to Paula Hall, a psychotherapist specialising in sex and porn addiction, she said porn enables people to “discover sexual tastes and preferences they might not have known that they have,” but does not necessarily create new desires. She continued: “It opens doors to your sexuality that might have remained closed.”

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At first, this may seem like a good thing. Hall said that certain sexual preferences are by no means a problem until we develop a dependence on them: “I would have no idea whether or not I liked pomegranate until I tasted it. It’s really not a problem that I like it, assuming it’s not illegal, which as far as I know pomegranates aren’t. But it might be a problem if I become dependent on it, and don’t like any other kind of fruit. And what if my partner doesn’t like pomegranates and is offended by them?

Okay, the metaphor may be falling apart but you know what I mean.” When we rely exclusively on a specific desire to turn us on, the relationship between desire and dependency becomes clouded. “If you get used to a certain level of arousal, [and] you always have that level of visual stimulus, then that’s what your body becomes accustomed too,” said Hall. She thinks Pornhub and other porn sites are “deliberately trying to foster repeat customers. As indeed is Amazon, and any other online portal. That is the nature of sales – to get repeat business. I don’t think they really care if people get addicted”. In 2002, research showed that only 2% of men under 40 had erectile dysfunction. But by 2016, 10 years after the first porn tube sites emerged, some studies were reporting that rates of erectile dysfunction in 16- to 21-year-olds were at 45%. Correlation does not always equal causation, but the link seems too stark to ignore.

– when they’ve told themselves things would change – the addiction persists. Why is the reach of MindGeek’s algorithm such a unique cause for concern? If YouTube, for example, had the same ability as porn to change active desires and behaviours, then I may well have started my day with the desire to learn how to light a camping stove and ended it with the desire to become a middle-aged man and move to Norway with nothing but a Decathlon tent and some freezedried chicken stew. Porn affects us in a way that YouTube cannot. The privacy with which we cloak our sex lives compounds these issues. It’s unlikely that over a beer at the pub, someone would tell a friend that they’ve been watching porn for hours each day and are now

“The bodies that are degraded [in porn] become the bodies that others desire to degrade.”

Surveys have found that many heavy porn users would even prefer to watch porn than have sex. They additionally start prioritising watching porn over things they previously enjoyed like going out with friends. They get to the point where porn has become “their social life, their hobby [...] it’s all they have now.” Many addicts believe when their life changes, their addiction will, too. And yet even after they’ve left home, developed a stable romantic relationship, or finished exams

Photography by Niamh McBratney

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turned on by things that used to disgust or scare them. As a result, porn watching habits exist unchecked and unspoken even when people may recognise that these habits are unhealthy. When much of the population is algorithmically pushed to the extremities of their sexual desires, masterminded by a singular company out for profit, we should start questioning things. Without the ability to talk about sexual desires and behaviour openly, we are left without wider perspective. This secrecy - partnered with the practices of mainstream porn - is not only responsible for insecurities such as penis size, pubic hair, and stamina, but also for harmful attitudes towards sex and sexual behaviour. The bodies that are portrayed as desirable in porn become the bodies that are desired by society, and the bodies

that are degraded become the bodies that others desire to degrade. Cindy Gallop imagines a future where better, more ethical porn is the normal. She is the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn, a site intending to offer an alternative to mainstream porn offered by MindGeek. “MakeLoveNotPorn is not porn. We are pioneering a whole new category of social sex… I created MLNP to make it easier to talk openly and honestly about sex in the real world. I am socializing sex with the aim of bringing all this out into the open, taking the shame, embarrassment, and guilt out of it. And that’s why I refer to MakeLoveNotPorn as a shamechanger. We have the ability to change people’s sexual attitudes and behaviours for the better… I regularly ask people this

question: ‘What are your sexual values?’ Nobody can ever answer me... Our parents bring us up to have good manners, a work ethic, a sense of responsibility and accountability. Nobody ever brings us up to behave well in bed. But they should. In bed, values like empathy, sensitivity, generosity, kindness, honesty, and respect are as important as they are in every other area of our lives.”

“Let’s face it, folks: sex drive may be innate, modes of sexual behaviour are learned.”

MLNP encourages people to share videos of them having what Gallop describes as “real world sex”. Gallop wanted to avoid the same pitfalls and perils of mainstream porn by remaining sensitive to how porn interacts with the real world. “The young white male founders of the giant tech platforms are not the primary target of online and offline harassment, abuse, racism, sexual assault, violence, rape, and revenge porn. Therefore, they do not and did not proactively design for the prevention of any of those things on their platforms. And we see the results around us every single day, those of us who are at most at risk… We design safe spaces and safe experiences… I and my tiny team spent literally years concepting and designing MLNP before we ever built it. We knew [we needed to create a] completely safe environment and trustworthy space, I designed MLNP around what everybody else should have: human curation. There is no self-publishing of anything on MLNP. Our curators watch every frame of every video submitted, from beginning to end

before we approve or reject it. We review every single comment on every single video… Our commitment to you as an MLNP star is that the moment anything changes – your relationship, your life, your circumstances, even just your mind – you tell us and we take your videos down. They are gone instantly: we might publish your video one day, [but] you are free to change your mind overnight.” This is not a condemnation of porn altogether. Rather, it is a plea that some things about porn need to change. As long as the internet is around, people will use it to meet their sexual needs. Internet pornography is inevitable, but MLNP shows that there is a viable alternative to getting eaten alive by MindGeek for sex on the internet. Porn doesn’t have to promote harmful sexual behaviour, nor does it have to lead vast swathes of the population by the hand into the extremities of their desires. So next time you turn on your VPN and open a private tab, consider typing something other than Pornhub into the search bar.

Read Nia’s interview with Cindy Gallop in full on our website isismagazine.org.uk

Illustration by Millie DeanLewis

Variation on a Regicide by Anna Stephen Enter SILVIO, wearing bloodstained crown, clutching dagger SILVIO: Well, it’s done, and my heart is sicker for it. The head that wears the crown rests uneasy, Or so said the king. He was wrong: mine rests not at all. If you can bear it, bear me to the stage, Where players dance and soldiers fight the age; I stole your years, I stripped your steel with mine, (touches crown and dagger) But nothing will erase the deed from time. He throws the crown from his head turns to dagger Consider sleep forever murdered.

cradles dagger This blackened blade that weeps with sorry blood, This blade emblazoned, signs that say ‘beware’ – Beware of living lives that came before; You’re right, I know; I killed, did right, I swear. cleans dagger, ferociously I swear. The words I speak, they sing of times long past And stages bare, and players and their art; But hear this now (and please, don’t cry) Since these words join us, you and I. He paces Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall; Sick guilt doth make companions of us all. My thoughts are strange bedfellows. There! In my sheets entangled is my soul Made restless by my choice, Torn out of me by my own hand And glistening from the moonlit ring, (cleans his wedding ring) Left to reek, to bleed, to rot Until, words and thoughts and all, I die with it – He presses the dagger to his heart SILVIO: But still, I cannot. He drops the dagger.

Illustration by Millie Dean-Lewis

Magazine Fiction

Grace Lawrence Joseph Dobbyn

Cia Mangat Stepan Mysko von Schultze Alice State Anna Schechter Natalie Perman Paige Crawley Peps Haydn-Taylor Ruth Port

Deputy Editors Ananya Basu Bea Petrova Charlie Taylor Sara Hashmi

Creative and Media Dowon Jung Millie Dean-Lewis Aneira Farrelly Aryan Goenka Ben Beechener Eloise Cooke Emily Archer Faye Song Isabelle Sturt Natalie Hytiroglou Niamh McBratney Peng Yao Rachel Jung Tess Trop

Magazine Non-Fiction Ainhoa Santos Goicoechea Hannah Gardner Georgie Walker Hope Philpott Kyoka Hadano Samuel Moore Shao-Yi Wong

Online Fiction Fódlha Duggan-Dennehy George Adams Bora Tosun Stone Edith Critchley Helen Edwards Hollie Partis Veronica Fu Zhen Chan

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Investigations Eliott Rose Nikita Ostrovsky Anna Dowell Dania Kamal Aryf Nia Large Tara Chenoa Sallaba Tara Ellen McInerney

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Online Non-Fiction Clementine Scott Susie Castledine Beth Barnes Mia Wu Rachel Rees Vivian Gu