Tag: myth
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Coring Europa / induction rhetoric
Two new poems by Josh Allsop, whose research explores the experience of difficulty in the poetries of Geoffrey Hill and J.H. Prynne.
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Pharmakeia
The Circe myth updated for the age of synthetic biology: disconcerting new writing by Erin Rogers, with accompanying art by John Stark.
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The Old Weird Albion
Histories and hauntings of the English South When I think of the South Downs, I see a watercolour of Beachy Head by Eric Ravilious. A chalky white cliff illuminated by a lighthouse with an ominous raincloud hovering above it. I remember climbing to the top of the Devil’s Dyke to look at the pastoral Constable…
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The Night Horse and the Holy Baboon
Victoria Rance and I met at Newcastle University in 1980. We were studying Fine Art and English Literature respectively and have remained friends ever since. We share an interest in psychology, Jungian ideas and the power of mythology. Victoria Rance’s latest exhibition, The Night Horse and The Holy Baboon, at The Cello Factory Waterloo, was…
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The Time of the White Wolf
It snowed for thirty years and no-one knew when the snow would end. The old people could remember the times before the snow, But none of the young ones had ever seen the sun rise or set or blaze at midday. None of them had traced the patterns made by the stars in the night…
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Were
We have been taught to believe that werewolves only change into their cursed form on full-moon nights, but perhaps – and this is speculation – on nights without full moons, the animal shape, which is the cursed form, still awakens within the werewolf, yet it cannot be seen, only sensed. Maybe werewolves spend any night…
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Great and Small Mythologies
Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, released last year in a posthumously published translation by Seamus Heaney, is concerned, amongst other things, with the inadequacies of art. In it, Virgil describes a mural painted by Daedalus, the mythological artist, which fails in its attempts to represent the death of his son, Icarus. In Heaney’s translation: ……………………………………………………………….Twice…
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Being a Beast
Mankind has celebrated a close connection with the animal kingdom since our Stone Age ancestors dressed in furs and painted bison on cave walls. Mythology abounds with tales of creatures which are half-man, half-beast, from werewolves to centaurs. In the transition from hunter-gatherers to city dwellers, we have gradually lost touch with the land, becoming…
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On a Headland of Lava Beside You
Joanna Kirk and I are both artists living in Blackheath and have become good friends over time as our children are the same age, friends and at school together. This has led to frequent conversations with us sharing books (for example Karl Ove Knausgaard’s) and views on exhibitions and artists, on newspaper articles and TV…
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Dead Bears and Pylons
“What the hell is that?” The man was at the bottom of Millfields Park in Hackney, can of lager in hand. He frowned across the Lea River at a cormorant bobbing in the water. “I dunno,” said his girlfriend as I passed by. “A black swan?” When many Londoners come to the eastern edge of…