UNKNOWN
Issue#5 Solitude
A Note From the Editors Meaning is elusive. “From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs.” – Jacque Derrida. If meaning is caught up in a perpetual state of deferral then language serves to spur us on. These signs, of which Derrida speaks, are generally composed of words. Incapable of occupying the house it represents, each word can only sit upon its signpost, and direct us a little closer to the entrance. We may reach the threshold but our feet will never cross over; the door to meaning is firmly shut. Some words, or signs, want to split us; to send us in such utterly different directions that we lose our way. At their crossroads, the most beautiful art may spring. “Solitude” is one of these words. A word, once uttered, can send one individual down a path of dark and sombre connotations, and another to a sunny rock of independence. Contributors to this issue have taken us down a number of such solitary paths. Music depicts the loneliness of a destructive relationship; literature opens its arms to the ocean’s embrace; film reveals our convoluted desire to expand and escape ourselves. “Solitude” so often points to “Loneliness,” but art diverts this course. Armed with a camera, a brush, or a pen, the individual encounters it and is inspired. The solitary road is a creative road, a road less travelled by. We hope this issue will encourage you to take it. The arts make all the difference.
Editors-in-Chief Ming Li Molly Bell
Secretary
Nina Hakovirta
Webmaster Jack Turner
Layout Editor Ming Li
Creative Writing Editors Noor Hemani Shannon Webb
Film Editors
Photographers
Literature Editors
Illustrators
Jasmine Bhatt Molly Bell
Hannah Shepherd Rei Yatomi Katrina Sandiford
Visual Arts Editors
Proofreaders
Charles Dos Santos Stanislaw Braminski
Mélissa Delmée Maletras Ruxandra Blaga Sophie Reeve
Ruxandra Blaga Mélissa Delmée Maletras
Caitlin Burge Miranda Batki-Braun Stefan Kielbasiewicz
Contents Sad Subject Matter: An Opening
4
Flight – Act II
6
We Are Alone in the Most Beautiful Place in the World
8
Ming Li
Miranda Batki-Braun
Emily Willis
A Girl Like Louise
14
Unforgettable Tenderness
24
Melanie Erspamer
Jorel Chan
Solaris 26 Aisling Press
Shades of Love Sophie Harper
34
Moontide 38 Camilla Eustance
Still Born Jacob Miller
41
Cover Image: Cimes aux pas subtiles
Photography by Ruxandra Blaga
by Ruben Brulat taken in Tilicho Peak, Nepal, 2011
Sad Subject Matter: An Opening Ming Li “There is nothing to writing. All you do is to sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” – Ernest Hemingway
T
he same thing could be said about all forms of art. Great art seems to share that unique capacity to educe human emotion, particularly those that are rather sorrowful, such as Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List or Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Peter Silberman of The Antlers, a band based in Brooklyn, certainly aligns his music with Hemingway’s painful artistry. Their album, Hospice, released in 2009, is perhaps one of the darkest, saddest and loneliest concept albums of the 21st century. Hospice follows the protagonist, The Caretaker, as he meets the bone cancer patient, Sylvia, in a hospital. The album describes the abusive relationship he willingly takes on: a self-destructive path that will only lead to his downfall. The album begins when they meet in hospital (“Kettering”). This is succeeded by the portrayal of his attempts to help the patient (“Sylvia”), then the Sisyphean effort that drowns him (“Atrophy”). Abortion follows (“Bear”) with the realisation that he can never help her (“Two”), death (“Shiva”) and finally, self-awakening (“Wake”). Aptly named the “kiss of death” by the Guardian, the painfully convoluted relationship manifests itself almost as a “hunger game” between two people. Silberman explains that the record is about “an isolating relationship between two people[...]how the outside world becomes cut off from that and how they become cut off from people they know and people they care about.” It is the Tartarus of solitude: isolation and misunderstanding intercept two people who want to make things work. The cancer aligns with the relationship’s inherent sickness, a sickness that is irrational yet deadly. Love, at its worst, has become toxic and destructive, something which is clearly reflected by the first and the final lines of “Kettering”:
I wish that I had known in that first minute we met, the unpayable debt that I owed you. ... You made me sleep all uneven, and I didn’t believe them when they told me that there was no saving you.
4
Their third track, “Sylvia,” which is inspired by the death of Sylvia Plath and Leonard Michaels’s fictional Sylvia, is a hybrid of fear, violence and pain. The line “Sylvia, get your head out of the oven” outlines the hopelessness the couple fall into and the eponymous poet’s demise hints towards their own. Silberman uses a bear as an analogy for an embryo in the arrival of an unexpected pregnancy. This is “something” that they need to “put an end to” by “cut[ting] him from beneath.” Every track has an alternative title, which allows the audience to fully experience the solitude created by, and simultaneously trapping, the protagonists. “Thirteen,” alternatively entitled “Sylvia Speaks,” is the one and only track wherein we hear Sylvia’s own voice, encased in a mere five lines:
Pull me out...pull me out...can’t you stop this all from happening? Close the doors and keep them out. Dig me out...oh, dig me out... Couldn’t you have kept this all from happening? Dig me out from under our house. An album that earns them international fame, Hospice resonates with the sadness that is found in many great arts. If happiness is the ultimate pursuit of life, how do we explain our ceaseless, timeless flirt with sad subject matter through the arts? Great art often aims to disturb our soul, not to please it; yet, it does not mean that our souls are not pleased by the fragmentary disturbance art can create in us. Silberman started to work on Hospice when he was 21. At such a young age, the record itself is incredibly powerful without a sense of self-pity. On the surface sadness is provoked, but underneath lies the silk-like sorrow for those who are looking for it. “I think the goal of playing the song is just to connect to people who are listening to it and hopefully, not have it just be an overwhelmingly sad experience,” Silberman elaborates during an performance in 2010. “Hopefully it kind of maybe begins that way but can kind of pull itself out of that and become a more hopeful, comforting thing almost. I think sad subject matter does not necessarily need just to be depressing. I think if you can find a way to relate to it, that is almost uplifting in a weird way.” Uplifting…in the weirdest way...
5
We Are Alone in the Most Beautiful Place in the World Emily Willis
Sea (Oil on canvas) by Antonio Cazorla
T
he sea is a cultural and literary symbol with an intricate history. W. H. Auden suggests it is “the place of purgatorial suffering, separation and apparent loss, the characters disordered by passion.� Gillian Mary Hanson claims that the sea represented psychological rebirth during the Romantic era and developed increasingly introspective connotations in the 19th century. For example, the link of the tide with the moon was more frequently used to suggest a
8
relation between the female psyche and madness. Influenced by changing belief systems, 20th century writers, such as Virginia Woolf, used the sea broadly as a metaphor for this change, but also as one for unity and peace between characters through shared experiences. This is explored with much immersion and vitality in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, where the sea can be seen as a metaphoric space. Yet rather than a symbol of unity, it represents a growing realisation of a lack
UNKNOWN Buy your copy now to read in full
9
A Girl Like Louise Melanie Erspamer
T
he first thing to know about Louise was that she thought people were like balloons. They were filled with gas at the beginning and then they rose, high up in the sky until even the mountain peaks were worthy associates. It was glorious, the ascension, and Louise remembered it like a fading dream. It was quick though – over just when the sun seemed set on reaching you. And then came the descent. Slow, painful. Perhaps it would be bearable if only it were just as passionate and desperate as going up – that burst of feeling, arm extended…but no. The few feet before hitting the ground were pills and prescriptions and as many “grand-”s before children as possible, and stronger glasses that would only make the ground seem closer and closer. The second thing to know about Louise was that she volunteered at a local library, and the third was that she used to believe in acting on whims, though she did not believe in that anymore. Now she thought it best to knit her scarves in the summer, and only read books she understood. Air had leaked out of Louise, and now her skin was wrinkled and deflated. She had blonde, straw-like hair that changed, like a thermometer, according to the weather; hips that made some think she had given birth to eight children and eyes that rarely looked upward. Louise loved her work at the library. She loved the books, how she could flip through their pages, move them onto different shelves, control them in her own way. So many things seemed to be slipping from her like rice through open fingers. Her health, body, husband – all part of the hourglass her life had become. But the books… entire worlds she could flip through and command, end or begin – characters and stories that would only exist if she opened some dusty cover. On a chilly April Wednesday, Louise arrived at the library and went into the back room and dropped her bag, umbrella and resentments onto a chair. Marvin, her husband, had promised to drive her to the library this morning, but when the time had come he had refused to lift his heavy body from the bed cover.
14
“Come on Lou,” he had said as her voice increased in pitch, “you need your books and I need my sleep. We’re keeping it equal.”
UNKNOWN Buy your copy now to read in full
15
UNKNOWN Buy your copy now to read in full
38
SombrĂas Abuelas de Cementerio (Mark on paper) by Puri
Issue#6 Roots Coming Soon Mist’s Embrace by Lisajane Braun