POETRY \ LE FRANCIS

Imagine that we’re watching a documentary & you argue

that there is no mathematical expression 
of beauty, & I will try. I will say there are numbers 
which fit elegantly inside each other, inside 
themselves. & I will describe your eyes as dark 
universes, the home that nurtures every story 
I'd ever want to tell. Your eyes house undiscovered 
planets & stars so bright I can feel their heat 
as I stand nearby. & I know there is an elegant way 
to describe it all, there is a language, there is 
a hexadecimal code that knows the color 
of each planet’s home soil. There is a degree 
to your smile & an oblivious angle to your gaze
which I have learned to avoid, to remain 
in this state of both existing & not. I suppose
there are a few pixels in your phone 
that could solve for obvious, reveal fractions 
of my heart but you are written 
into the code of the universe. Red bird, 
sunshine, nonexistence; uncertainty 
knows a state of both love & not, 
& still there is no place where 
I’m not always & already yours.

FICTION \ GWYNETH FINDLAY

Theia

‘The giant impact hypothesis [proposed that] toward the end of the planetary accumulation process, the protoearth collided with a planetary body having a substantial fraction of its mass.’ ¹

‘The Moon is thought to be the product of such a Giant Impact. […] I refer to this extinct impacting Moon-forming parent planet by the name ‘Theia’, the mother of Selene, the Greek Goddess of the Moon.^{‘ 2}

¹ Cameron, A.G.W. ‘From interstellar gas to the Earth-Moon system’. Meteoritics & Planetary Science, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2001). 13.

² Halliday, Alex N. ‘Terrestrial accretion rates and the origin of the Moon’. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Vol. 176, No. 1 (2000). 21.

I was born the same way you were: amid violent collisions in a hot plane of swirling gas, the accretions of our dead elders coming together to form new life. The fabric of my being danced for millennia around a rapidly expanding ball of fusion and flame, forming and crashing and growing anew among billions of bits of other one-day masses, all bound wild and steady in this new sun’s orbit.

	Once, I was small. I was tiny. I was a speck of dust. I was shaken by passing clumps of matter, tossed about in the expanse until I met other specks of dust. They too were me, and together we became a clump, like a pebble, like a nugget, like nothing we had known before. And then our – my – clump met another clump, and it was also me, and in the shock of our meeting we became one.

	I continued to assemble myself, my pieces encountering each other in the vast cloud of dust and saying, Oh, it’s you! You’re me! We’re us! The invitation reached every piece of me suspended near my orbit, beckoning each fragment to come home.

	Sometimes I was cold, so cold I could not explain my sensations. Other times I was brutally hot, daring fate with my uneven shuffle through the cosmos. I swung to and fro as my siblings coalesced around our Mother Sun. I passed them by, near or far: the gaseous giants that spun rapid, rambunctious; the molten balls of rock that never strayed far from the sun’s hot comfort. Our nursery raged with chaos, but our family, at last, was forming. After a thousand eras as particles in the ether, we had found the pieces of ourselves. We had found each other.

	We were all the same age, cosmically speaking. Mother Sun was our centre, our vitality, our raison d’être, but we were not born of her, as children are often born of mothers. This sun and her children sprung from the same stuff: our molecular cloud collapsed, and a family emerged.

	Young and mischievous, we played together, craving camaraderie. Yet Mother Sun kept us separated in her domain, circling her at different speeds and distances. On occasion, more infrequently than the flare of a distant comet, she allowed us to align for the briefest moment, for a whisper of this existence. Then we returned to our paths, our balance across her pocket of sky.

	One of my fellow rocky planets twirled near to the sun, though not so close that she became brittle or choked with gas. Her region was comfortable, even; warm and illuminated. After my initial journey from the outskirts toward Mother Sun, I danced circles along this sister’s orbit, at times so intimately that I could feel the heat radiating from her fiery surface. I was so much smaller than her, and I had so little to offer in return. I simply rejoiced in the moments I could be near her, could exchange cosmic companionship amid the fury smouldering across our young sky.

	We spoke of the future, of our aspirations for the time after we all settled into our rhythms among the stars. What would we do? Who did we hope to be? In my fantasy, a calm eternity stretched ahead of us, the routine of communal life spinning happily along until Mother Sun expanded and reclaimed many of our family’s scattered parts into her whole. My sister, though, held wondrous visions: of love, of life, of children more numerous than all the suns of the galaxy.

	Her revelation disquieted Mother Sun, and titterings about her prospects spread among our siblings. I came to learn that the vitality my sister desired was unlikely, even impossible, on her dry, fiery surface. The distant bodies whispered about a bond of hydrogen and oxygen, a molecule essential for facilitating this life she sought. Yet this building block only developed far from Mother Sun’s warming glow, in the region where I came into being. I examined myself and found it: the water my sister lacked. The bitter luck of formation, of finding my parts in the gaseous sea, had bestowed it upon me while my sister was barren.

	I cradled this burdensome discovery for many rotations. I could not bear to conceal this sole hope until the end of our time. In the dark, lonely patches of our sky, I devised a solution.

	I said farewell to my siblings, though they did not realise it was goodbye. I waited until each one had passed, until I had sent my love to the very reaches of Mother Sun’s solar expanse.

	Lastly, to my most beloved sister, I said,
	
	I love you. 

	I’m sorry.
	
	Remember me.

	She did not have time to react. We were moving so quickly, and I’d manoeuvred myself so close. Mother Sun, powerless but desperate, whipped plasma into my path, as if the magnetic pulse could interrupt my indomitable trajectory. My tiny body collided into my sister’s side, and I became nothing but chunks of rock and clouds of dust.

	Debris exploded from my sister, too, but she was not devoured. As we whirled along her orbit, her mass gained control of our distant fragments. Parts of me became parts of her, coalescing under her gravitational influence, and what remained created something entirely new: a moon, large and looming, circling her as I had once circled Mother Sun. It spun, then slowed, its face steadily focused on her, on us – now siblings bound as one, two beings in two bodies yet separated by none.

	After millions of orbits in these new forms, the rumours proved true: life, that impossible endeavour, sprang up from our oceans. It evolved in billions of ways, sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once. Some grew to know us, to embody the love that had brought them into being. They named us – their home – Earth, and our second body they called Moon. Many of their years passed before they remembered me; the old me, as I had been before my sacrifice made us whole. They named me Theia, after the Moon’s mother in one of their fading cosmologies. Now I dream of embracing each human and saying: I am the Moon, and you are my child, and my love begat all the life you’ve ever known.

M108
46 million light-years away

M61
55 million light-years away

M110
3 million light-years away

POETRY \
LUKE CARMICHAEL VALMADRID

Yes, the cascades in my psyche are yours,

but so too exactly did hail always fall in April, whose sublimation
rusted my airways, our solution to which was not electrolytic
or sweet, but to inhale coarsely for that bitter texture,
the kind of air that abrades to embrace. Nothing dulcet baked
without volcanic doubt, that volcanic-deep-down, I was
the lava in a lava cake, just a soloist for your caprice – 
I imagine a symphony orchestra that plays Mozart divertimenti
in my head, singing with perfect intonation and too many voices 
our assumptions, that all this waste would break down into beautiful things 
in our lifetime. My last three spiritual thoughts go something like
“Thank god I’m 22,” “Thank god I’m 25,” and then “If I hadn’t stopped praying
to the entity I really pedestaled, god.” I told you I loved you
and then blundered my flaws and mistook your faults and took them on 
and never apologized. In your name, I bent over backwards and 
became that snake that eats its own tail, but actually got to the end
and deserved it. I did love you, but I fell into love on a comet
and crossed the stars myself; even if I went back in time,
we would only remember the good things
as I vaporized. 

Dark, Dark, is all I find for metaphor;
All else were contrast – save that contrast’s wall
Is down

From ‘Interim’ by Edna St. Vincent Millay

POETRY \ JANE ZWART

Illumination

for Devin Gael Kelly

Disappointment, Devin says, 
is illumination, too. And if not 
the kind we wanted--well, 
that doesn’t mean it’s unkind. 
The light just shines on a different thing.

. . .

The light just shines on a different thing--
how I, almost as stubborn as effulgence,
want him to be right. 

                                          How I want 
to believe in the radiance beaten, 
with an oversized key, from the mat of a haji 
who dares ask Allah for impossible things

and in the radiance harder to rout 
than a pestilence of fireflies--
routeless photons, candling swarm--
dear God, how I want to believe.

ESSAY \ JESSICA PENG

‘A Vestige of the Thoughts’: The Voices of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Remember’

Literature survives by echoing. When works are read, recited, quoted or translated, they find themselves in new spaces, so they sound a little different each time. When you watch a Shakespeare play, the production is different to its earliest performance in Blackfriars or the Globe. Each translation of Homer’s Odyssey has a different inflection and shadow. Even if you read a book that was published yesterday, it will be under different circumstances as the ones read by the New York Times reviewer, or your friend, or even yourself again two months later. The space is different, so the sound is too. The ‘original work’ – or sound – is only known to us through echoes, created after travelling through space and time. Perhaps these are corruptions, but they are also the only remnants of the original, if something so pure ever existed.

In order to echo, literature must be made of voices. The simplest demonstration of this is a poem with one speaker, whose identity is not the real-life poet’s, but who is rather self-defined as ‘the speaker of the poem’. More complex works, like omniscient novels or multi-figured plays, are simply made of more voices: narrators, choruses, characters, scribes. These voices do not belong to actual people either, but instead float around as speakers who are wedded to the page. Reading is the act of allowing these voices to echo in your head. The author’s words are reflected from the page into your mind and when you become the host for these words, you distort them, even very slightly. Made from a strange mix of textual and imaginary stuff, the voices in literature speak through whoever is reading them. A reader is like a medium, communicating beyond this world. Literature is full of ghosts, and you are being haunted.

By ‘medium’, I mean what the Victorians meant. The Victorians invented the word ‘medium’ for someone who communicates between the living and the dead¹. They needed a word for it because visiting a medium became for them a hugely popular pastime. In a society with a permanently grieving queen who seemed half-dead herself, the public eye was trained to fixate on the space between life and death. The Victorians were obsessed with finding their way into this space, paying for mediums who could go into trances and speak as if possessed by someone deceased, their bodies an anchor for a voice estranged from its owner. The space between life and death was made visible by mediums, often women, whose bodies could connect this world with the next.

Speaking in the voice of the dead, the living create a flickering imitation of the deceased’s presence

The Victorians didn’t have poststructuralist theory², but they had writers who already knew that literature was made for ghosts, or the other way around. Take a work like Christina Rossetti’s sonnet, ‘Remember’. Written in 1849, this famous poem features a dying speaker’s final words for those they are leaving behind. Here it is:

         Remember me when I am gone away,
                  Gone far away into the silent land;
                  When you can no more hold me by the hand,
         Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
         Remember me when no more day by day
                  You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
                  Only remember me; you understand
         It will be late to counsel then or pray.
         Yet if you should forget me for a while
                  And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
                  For if the darkness and corruption leave
                  A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
         Better by far you should forget and smile
                  Than that you should remember and be sad.

(1-14)³

Almost two hundred years after it was written, ‘Remember’ remains a hugely popular funeral reading. This sentiment is sound enough: of course the people left behind wish to remember the deceased, and the poem’s insistent turn that forgetfulness is not betrayal is additionally comforting. But ‘Remember’ is written in the voice of someone close to dying, speaking to someone soon to be left behind. Within the poem, the funeral guests are not the speaker but the audience: as is, technically, the person reading it at the ceremony. Why, then, are they speaking words which belong to the dying?

The question of voice which began this essay is particularly apt when applied to a poem like ‘Remember’. The poem’s reception tradition sees it being quoted twofold: firstly, the funeral reader is quoting Rossetti’s poem; secondly, they are implying that these words are what the deceased would have said by standing in their place. Speaking in the voice of the dead, the living create a flickering imitation of the deceased’s presence. Moreover, if quotation is echo, then ‘Remember’ must have one of the loudest in English literature. Each reading quotes not only Rossetti but every funeral service this poem has attended before. Its silent predecessors haunt each new reading. 

This scene, reading ‘Remember’ at a funeral, bears an uncanny resemblance to that of a séance. The reader is the medium and through them, someone who has left this world can communicate with those they left behind. Sat in pews, the audience watches the performance, participating in the illusion that it is the deceased’s words that are being spoken. A funeral commemorates the deceased’s absence, but the gathering of friends and family, the recollection of memories and the overall reconstruction of who they were practically conjures up their presence. The coup de grâce is delivered when the poem reaches out from the ‘silent land’ and tells us what the deceased would want us to know — or whatever we think that is.

This, for me, is the miracle of Rossetti’s poem. It treats voices as sounds that can be heard, echoed, repeated, ingrained. Its speaker’s voice has deep emotional reserves, but at the same time it remains practically anonymous. Reading it closely, we might guess that the speaker is young and addressing her⁴ lover, but this is hardly explicit. The poem conveys feeling without necessarily telling a story. Rossetti understood that poetry could be spoken not only by characters — as in the dramatic monologues that were so popular in her day — but also by mere ‘vestiges of thoughts’ (12)⁵. The audience-readers would do the rest. She stripped away the heavy ceremony of Victorian mourning traditions and wrote a poem so purely vocal it was practically weightless. Passed from speaker to speaker, each instance quoting all the times before, Rossetti’s words have echoed through many readers and even more mediums.  

¹ ‘medium, n.’ 6b. OED Online, Oxford University Press, 2022. Web. 23 Aug 2022.
² I draw on now-mainstream poststructuralist theory for much of the first two paragraphs. The notion that literature is opposed to free conversation is touched on in famous works such as the essays in Barthes’s Image – Music – Text and Derrida’s ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’.
³ Rossetti, Christina. ‘Remember’. Selected Poems, ed. Dinah Roe. London: Penguin, 2008. 16.
⁴ I personally think the poem implies a female speaker through the Eurydice-like ‘turn to go’ and Rossetti’s habit of writing lamenting women, especially around themes of loss, betrayal or lament. For me, the unspecified gender evokes a sense of the speaker’s fading out of existence as well as the poem’s steely impersonability–but does not have to be interpreted as neutral.
⁵ Rossetti, Christina. ‘Remember’.

POETRY / LOUISE MATHER

Sinai’s Goddess

VISUAL ESSAY \ ALLY LE

The city, after

POETRY \ CHARLIE BOWDEN

Lost in Moscow

When night falls I will soldier on,
ignore the wild dogs and deadly boulders
that seem to be found everywhere in this town.
The cabaret taught me to see red in Moscow
but it’s just black, silk and spilt milk
and sirens who fill your nightmares.
The hairs on your head fall in line soon enough,
going, going, greying, gone like the half-hearted fizz
of an already opened carbonated drink.
Grey, silver, the clink of metal, the clicking of knees on cobblestone,
like a deranged cabaret act, lost in the maze of dead flower petals.

The city’s not what it’s cracked up to be;
only the strange ones and the statues can feel truly settled.
The rest, like me, are just lost, looking for scarlet, 
waiting for the cost of trusting a cabaret starlet.

When the world is reduced to a single dark wood for our two pairs of dazzled eyes — to a beach for two faithful children — to a musical house for our clear understanding — then I shall find you.

From ‘Phrases’ by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Wallace Fowlie

POETRY \ MOLLY J. VANDER WERP

Duck Pond

Cutting the tree in three
years like rings in rings
like pond water rippling
bringing the world back to me
again&again	at different angles.

God:
the water drop
cupped between duck’s 
neck and back.
Silver-wet sphere, safe
in the curve of the water bird.

Remembering,
I draw a cube in the sand
as they taught us:
two squares intersecting
in one smaller than themselves—
squaresinsquares		a portal.

God:
the impossible color
of evaporating water
on the oil layer.
Duck, feather-bent, and wet
with that chink of blue between wing and you.

INTERVIEW \ r beny & NICOLE FAN

In Conversation with r beny:
The Delicate Desolation of natural fiction

Drifting through a prism of dreamlike wonder, r beny’s music leads us into sibylline soundscapes where wind chimes seem to twinkle even as icy glaciers begin to crack. In the hands of the California-based musician, electronic synthesizers become architectonic instruments with the ability to build ambient worlds – and his 2020 album, natural fiction, perfectly epitomises such acoustic spatiality. Described as the ‘soundtrack to a film that does not exist’, it charts out imagined topographies in a vividly cinematic manner, crystallising auditory vibrations into layer after layer of emotional resonance. Now,  two years after its initial release, r beny (the alias of Austin Cairns) looks back on natural fiction with us, and shares what had gone into an album that glimmers with such hope and melancholy. 

*

N: You’ve described the tracks in this album as ‘music made of light and fog’ – and they truly seem to be as such, especially in iridescent polyphonies such as ‘alone in the pavilion’ as well as ‘round glass and concrete prism’. I’d love to hear about what drew you to these delicate textures; does music help you to navigate between the clarity of light and the haziness of fog?

r: One of the main intentions behind my music has been an attempt to express complex emotions that I have felt – emotions that are difficult for me to express in words, whether due to inadequate vocabulary or due to past trauma. I’ve found the dichotomy of fog and light to be an apt metaphor for this difficulty of expression. Fog obscures, making indistinct of what is there. But it isn’t darkness. You can still make out the shapes, but maybe not the delicate details. Light illuminates, revealing what is there – details, warts and all. I like to imagine my music as a combination of the fog and the light, but also as the mountains, valleys, forests, rivers, and even architecture that is being obscured or revealed. Instrumental music provides an interesting canvas for interpreting these thoughts. I’m drawn to sounds and textures that imitate or are inspired by nature. I think that manifests in music that can be equally delicate and soft, as it is volatile and destructive. I do find the process of making music helps navigate some of those difficult emotions.  

*

N: The airiness of the album’s sonic spaces is certainly undergirded by a sense of stark desolation and gritty brutality, which resonates in tracks like ‘we used to know’ and ‘mamiya’. This interplay between the visceral and the ethereal permeates other albums in your discography (such as echo’s verse and eistla) – but the sharp edges strike me most vividly in natural fiction. Is this raw materiality a recent development in your creative practice, and (if so) where would you say it emerged from?

r: The interplay of the visceral and the ethereal has certainly been a catalyst for my music. This is partially drawn from the aforementioned themes of nature. Having grown up in Northern California, I developed a sense of connection and respect for nature – an appreciation for that which can hold so much calm and beauty, yet can be extremely volatile. I’ve also found nature to be an apt metaphor for the human psyche, at least my own. I don’t think of it as the contrast of light and dark or good and evil, but rather a spectrum that is complex and bittersweet. I’ve been drawing upon these themes for my art more and more, but I think it has always been present on some level and will certainly be more of a focus going forward.  

*

*

N: That’s really evident in the title of your album – natural fiction – which is itself an enigma that invites us to contemplate the complex dualities in your music. The seemingly juxtaposed terms of ‘nature’ and ‘fiction’ touch upon the idea of there being different layers to reality, of art being inextricable from life. What is natural about fiction and what is fictitious about nature to you? 

r: From time to time, I’ve imagined what the earth would be like post-humanity, or if humans had never existed at all. How much damage have we done to this earth, how much damage have we done to each other? This theme was present in my mind while recording natural fiction, specifically a post-humanity or post-human-centric world. I had previously explored this on my album called cascade symmetry, specifically the tracks ‘cities sleep like seeds’ and ‘empty grids’. natural fiction was finished right as the Covid-19 pandemic was starting, and all of a sudden these themes I had been pondering became starkly real. It felt as if we all experienced this truth-is-stranger-than-fiction shift of reality. 

The album title was partly derived from that perceived shift. Nature – and truth – could be stranger than fiction. It was also partly derived from that which we do not perceive in nature, such as the history of a tree – or how a mountain came to be. We are left to create fiction for how these things might have happened and what the experience may have been like. Even with scientific explanation, I think our minds tend to fill in the gaps with fiction, whether it be mythology or art or something else. 

When the album came out, I framed it as a “soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist”, almost from a place of escapism from the pandemic. With hindsight, I’d probably frame it now as a “soundtrack to an alternate reality” or a “soundtrack to a dream I once had”.

*

N: This cohesion of reality and artifice also seems to speak to your creative practice, as much of your music is rooted in the natural world but created using modular synthesizers. What appeals to you about these experimental electronics; did they enable different kinds of artistic expression compared to more traditional forms of music-making?

r: Modular synthesizers appealed to me in their open architecture – both in the ability to make an instrument catered to your exact whims or needs and in terms of open signal flow, where audio and modulation become one and the same. Prior to working with synthesizers and modular synthesizers, I was primarily a guitarist and I felt like I struggled to adequately express myself through the music I was making. After playing in bands throughout my teens and early-20s, I ended up quitting music altogether for about a year after feeling disillusioned with the music and dealing with heavy grief after losing my mom.  

Discovering and connecting with synthesizers and then modular synthesizers not only enabled different kinds of artistic expression, but for the first time I felt like I was able to actualize that expression. Even 7-8 years later, I remain inspired by working with synthesizers and modular synthesizers. Due to that open architecture and signal flow, it feels like I’ll never truly explore every corner of these instruments. That burden of choice can be daunting at times, but it invites the chasing of whims and experimentation, whereas I felt somewhat boxed in with guitar.

*

N: Finally, what draws me – and many other followers – to your music is simply the ‘shimmering and obvious’ beauty of your ambient soundscapes. I’d love to know what beauty means to you, as well as how you appreciate it in your life.

r: I think I am still working on and searching for what beauty means to me, beyond surface level. I believe beauty may be that which affects your soul. For myself, that means the connections I share with my closest friends, the connection we as humans have with nature, the journey and ups-and-downs of life. Awareness, kindness, empathy, compassion. The in-between and the unexplainable. Of course, I love my share of music, art, and nature that exemplify beauty. I attempt to show my appreciation by practising mindfulness, as well as sharing and reflecting the ideas and virtues that I believe embody beauty.

ESSAY \ ELIAS BROCKMAN

Stranger than Fiction: The Reality of Love in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science

A vital question comes up periodically in life: how do we find something (or someone) to love? Friedrich Nietzsche has an answer in his aphoristic masterpiece, The Gay Science: 

Each of us tends to believe that we alone are normal and that the people we encounter in our day-to-day lives are the strange ones. But this, Nietzsche claims, is a baseless prejudice. It is unjust to hold others to the standards we set for ourselves, because, in reality, each of us is deeply strange. To do justice to another person requires us to recognise the differences in others and ultimately embrace them. But this skill of embracing the strangeness of others, which Nietzsche calls ‘love’, is not a skill that comes naturally to  most of us. Love, too, has to be learned.

There are many aspects of this aphorism that one can grasp at and attempt to unravel. If, in Nietzsche’s opening metaphor, the strangeness of another person is akin to a melody in music, he suggests that it takes time to even notice what makes them unique to begin with. Our minds naturally put people into recognisable categories. When we first see a person, for example, driving a bus (or working any other type of job), we tend to imagine that they are functionally equivalent to all others in their profession, to assume that they will act a certain way. But this way in which we use conceptual shorthand to make sense of our social environment prevents us from truly seeing the innumerable ways in which every person, every situation, every quality and thing is strange. ‘If you’ve met one human, you’ve met them all’, says the misanthrope. ‘All women are alike’, says the misogynist. ‘All members of this specific ethnic group act the same’, says the racist. Putting people into categories diminishes them. To love someone, we must first decategorise them. We must take all the assumptions we have about them from our first encounter, and dismantle those assumptions, until finally we discover the real person who lies behind them.

To love someone is to see them as they are, in all their strangeness

POETRY \ L. WARD ABEL

An Effort to Describe 

A last charcoal fleck 
passes through the far edge 
and it’s night again, 
to the point of it 
     never having left. 
 
Day here is a frenzy a hive  
no matter what month  
even after dark during 
     winterish.  
 
Like a ziggurat  
it rises from great stalked  
acreage, width only  
measured in gods’ cubits 
     divided by holy grace 
and space/time. 
 
And again night—the hold  
on our dreams our shadows 
within hearing of others—   
it awakens bathed in sweat  
     and effort. 
 
Such a burden a bounty 
smoothes us down to a spot 
that loses all physics— 
     though a song may  
come to mind.