Screens are magnets. Like an icon held in front of one’s face it deletes the surrounding scenery and becomes an object of devotion. Of time not love. The real. We don’t see anything else. Symptoms may include time dilation. Increased seclusion. A love of darkness.

An apathy for the light.

_

Prose by Ryan Boyd, photograph by Chris Friel.

The sky a crucible of ground
to dust charred remains
indigo grit
charcoal and white bone
Dawn a paler ash

on the horizon
A travelling sheik’s tent
seen through desert bushes
It is dark be still

Night is never silent

holy motors divine
wroth flow down lighting all
before them their trace remains
though the sound and fury
just sticks to their tails

birds and cats cry
and sing into blasted out spaces
and you dice with your own shadow
walking on through to take
your seat with a dumb audience

Walk eyes glimpsed shut
in all modern glory
into a disappearing wind

You look at yourself;
does the light hit me?
until it blinds you.

_

Poem by Ryan Boyd, photographs by Rafael Milani.

It was forever ago, I was last here
In your flower draped heaven
only to see
mountain tops alight within your eyes
clouds cast the moon, in icy fortress
What befalls the volcanic inferno on your mind
mayhem somersaults over trapezoidal mirrors
as time concerns the boundaries
warping their charcoal energies
seducing fires to tragic deaths
while all the letters of the alphabet
are scrawled within fabled caves
Across the matted manes of kings
that crush man and earth ‘neath
Widowing our very own shadows
to quell the dirt in its everlasting hunger

A thousand auras constraining
an impeccable luminosity,
She is all grace.
Possessing nothing but indifference, selflessness, abandon,
Sat unmoveable witnessing infinity,
The infiniteness within the river,
and its endless ending of moments,
As water passes, always remaining,
If it is possible to touch upon infinity here
she ponders, it must be possible to touch upon eternity within myself
Thousands of coins twinkle on the waters surface,
In that instant, divinity vanishes,
Taking with it, her settled heart.

Will these moments ever remain to remember?
The time when I drowned in fire,
The time when I surfaced like the sun,
Against the depthless blue.
I was held to the cross,
The sand blasted my skin,
Tore at my flesh, my ribs,
Until those moments found the totality of my being,
Existed, by binding to my neverending states of emotion.

Words by Daniel Grant, photographs by Lautaro Garcia

From small beginnings, he said. Not one for deep pertinence, and even now it was as if cliché had mistakenly slid into profundity. The green tinged flakes of wood laid down among balls of burning newsprint. The air heavy with moisture, fog, everything soaked, clothes that would not dry hung limp. Wondering if it will catch or not, the much known doubt, the material limbo. A skill we did not know we had, knowledge unearthed under soil, a new city that we knew long ago, made of concrete. Now it grew and everything could be hucked on it and fragility was a discarded memory. Huge heat blasted all around and smoke and fire held fast together burning the air, the sky and heavens in serene combustion. The muck and wet of slippery earth smokes brown and then frazzles in the heat, seizing up with the snails. Leaves burn quickest, and soon turn to black and are thrown in the air and mix with the white ash in a hellish Winter foresight. You stand back and feel your face start to cook, to throb with it all and yet your back has the wind on, the sweat cools on your clinging t-shirt. Split in half by temperature more perfectly than any thought could, one gets to know what materiality means, what stupid things can do to you. Smelling the toxic air, the scent of green– heady, as if you were smelling its concentrate deep in your nostrils. This all was a power, just not the right sort but one had to settle, after all and ― forget everything else. Work done and one got to feel the pleasure of something going neither right nor wrong, merely going.

I went back that night. I saw it through the blackness of windows lit up by harsh lights. A flat pitchblack rectangle, made three-dimensional by jagged orange. I put my boots on and walked up. Warm, for October. It was foggier still. Keeping the warm in, as if the fire had heated the very Earth, at least this minute skirt of it. The fire now a white ashen mound, a burnt out funeral pyre for a stooping ancient god. Here and there fire still broke out, or else there glowed a deep subterranean orange, reaching down to the heart. I looked out and the lights of the house ploughed out of the windows like car headlights or a blinking owl whose gaze was light. Things and sound shifted and pivoted ‘round and everything was a mote of pleasure, and the yells of distant men seemed so little to do with all this. Life was not this, what men think was wholly apart from this plane, only it tried to cling to it like ectoplasm. Now it felt gone in the ether.
You told me you want to be there and we would dine by this hell in all warmth for millennia but you were not there, and I, I spun around into familiar dreams.

_

He had not been thinking, but now he found himself hedged all around by buildings. The buildings seemed to be abandoned, but not ruined. The surface on which he stood was concrete, riven deep, as if by some subterranean trauma. Soil spilt over these cracks in which weeds grew taller than him and he felt angst at its impassability and its disregard for man. He could skirt around in places, but jutting fractals that loomed even through the windows of the buildings blocked his path. He turned back to the entrance of the courtyard and entered through a bloated door, that needed kicking to open. A trace of the rows and columns of chairs remained in the disorder of the place, the blackboard cracked too and the floor and other parts were turned green and rust. The corpse of some animal had left a viscous sludge on the floor around the outline of its absent body. Some bones remained but not all. Its jaw bone had been hung from the ceiling with a length of tatty string, and it rotated slowly, imponderable, around one way and then back, the light squeezing through its pained leer. He walked into the corridor. Barely a thing could be seen, and what light there was seemed only to pick out the thickest dust, so that there was only black and grey and a figure walked soundless and emerged half dust half man, and

a road, tarmac, two figures, yourself, the desert all around and floating on earth through nothingness only illuminated by a car’s headlights – a car which could not be found by your gaze. Your throat chokes with the desert dust, you inhale to quicken your death, or otherwise to feel so much you disintegrate this tiny absurd world. Everything is whitened now in the wake of obliteration, salt flats that are the horizon and riders alabaster perfect themselves, porcelain cowboys shattering and reforming with every second yelling out joyous things

and the gnawing begins, the few embers of mindfulness starting to burn the nape, sewing seeds of logic, linear time, cause and effect, what must not happen, what cannot happen, breaking apart the dead world of sleep even, the two trading off figures, myths and whispered knowledge between each other and these new arrivals were misunderstood, doomed wanderers, transient nothings worldlessly drifting, unhooked. Light starts to play on the eyelids and sifts down, slowly, passing itself on, on, to the next, until this too is in you and must be understood

and you feel your body, its shape, its heaviness, its desire, its needs, you feel where you are, your head swivels to discover time and the dangerous questions of so soon ago are forgotten, filed down and painted out only to return later, a confused flash that will not leave things be.

_

Photographs by Carmen Marchena, words by Ryan Boyd.

He stood by the building. Light like a nascent flame, bare white for all its potential – but outside kept itself darker than what is unknowable. It was into this ignorance that he gazed and from it nothing or perhaps nothingness emanated. The light told of a familiarity that he could not stand. So he moved into darkness and let what might be encountered and found be, unmolested by anticipation. A snail died underfoot and its just dead limb retracted, fleeing into a memory, the death and life colliding in the performance of a habit. In the surrounding blackness ideas, organs, half-remembered pictures, disasters of war, depths and heights impossibly so near and so withdrawn. The truth looked at him, from just above his eye line; in the trees, eyes hiding, crepuscular somebodies in the employ of a comatose god. He did not care to look back at a light now blinding and only plunged his self forward, ever forward, no fear, no pretence, no death – into a conscious sleep.

What he might have called nightmares become his world, all, and there was no negotiation to be done, no choice given of acceptance or opposition. His gaze presented no barrier to things which had wished to be unthought and which got their energy from unseen perverse pools. Lobes of brain burnt and were not replaced until later. He dwelled in a time and land incomplete, with glitches and problems, stuck in valleys, absurd and ephemeral. Tomorrow was a memory. And laughter raved in his chest and left no trace in the world.

The end.

_____________

Words by Ryan Boyd

Photo by Anya Shiller

He went outside, mostly because his skull ached. He had been reading about people who suffered migraines so intense that they experienced hallucinations during their attacks. But he had never had a migraine, let alone hallucinated. He very rarely got headaches, even. He walked the streets. It was a warm day yet not at all oppressive. The wind almost felt autumnal, making us slightly aware of the future to come. He thought about what prehistoric peoples thought about migraines, knowing nothing of the biological explanations for them and having nothing much to allay them. Maybe this explained trepanning, the practice of drilling holes into the skulls of the living. A physical and visible intervention into what must have seemed a psychotic, transcendent episode. Foucault in his History of Madness speaks of how the form that the treatment of leprosy and lepers took found itself translated into the treatment of madness and madmen. Perhaps pre-historical societies, in a similar way, marked out those who, though sane by our standards, were touched with the madness of intense migraines. These inexplicables may have been forced out, too inconsistent and awry to be depended on. And Nietzsche says rightly that moral man is a man who can first consider and keep promises; when seemingly supernatural afflictions remove this ability, man is stained and becomes an outcast more uncanny than the wrongdoer or the lame. Then again, he thought, outcasts such as holy fools, seers, magic men of all sorts, can be suffered on the edges of a society for their occasional bouts of prescience, incorporated through the very consistency of their inconsistency.  Perhaps the reports of the visual hallucinations such as flashes and complex fractal patterns often experienced during an intense migraine of this sort may have been highly valued as a proto-transcendent revelation. He seemed to glide the streets, today. The people he saw did not quite feel real, more like stand-ins. A replaceable cast refreshed each new dusk. This seemed to help him glide the streets, that day.

He arrived at the dock. The sun was brooding dark behind clouds and the whip of the wind stopped you from feeling much warmth. He walked onto the small and tall craft and no one asked any questions of him. As if by plan there was only one available bench. He duly sat down on it and waited for it to move off from the quay. His fellow passengers were mostly old folks, in coats and scarves even though it was the height of summer. Some with cagoules on, or those plastic disposable things which look like bin liners. It started to pour down, and he considered following the old herd down to the lower covered deck. But he decided against it, and five minutes later, when they were in the lock, and descending down into the depths, and he watched as the steel and molluscs and mussels and weed and bolts came exposed, the rain stopped. Now they were many feet below the level of the cut they had left behind, and they were cast into shade as they waited, bobbing along, edging toward the lock gates, the existence of the waiting river behind them seeming unreal and purely virtual. As the gates opened and they entered the river, they passed by swirling voids of water, ebullient concatenations of tide and the wideness of the sun presented itself as a bare fact. They passed by a disused Victorian brewhouse and warehouses and more modern yet as destitute cranes and stores. A single crew of men helped to load black looking grain onto a barge, and they laughed and those laughs echoed around their empty playground of dereliction. Soon though the water stilled and the land was given over to parks and estates, and followed only by country roads which soon came invisible behind the land. They passed under a vast concrete bridge and it was impossible not to feel some sort of vertigo while under its massiveness. The captain talked over a loudspeaker, giving details as to its size, its construction and informed them of few miscellaneous facts about its uniqueness. Once it had passed and become a quaint photograph in the distance, they floated by large country houses, estates of the deluded and rich, follies which were rumoured to have kept in sufferers of tuberculosis, or alternatively, acted as a private school for the daughters of the rich. Brick palaces, stuffed with boring tragedies and decorated with observatories to study the bourgeois mysteries of the firmament. You could visit them now, they are told. All open to the public. Hours passed and still they shunted on, the sun burning their flesh, though they did not know it. Soon they approached a huge container port, and the prospect of the open sea. Again the sea roiled in anticipation, and this tiny cork threatened to throw off the spectre of the land entirely. They were moved bodily by waves too sublime for their still mundane minds. Ships miles long sat smugly in port while their loads were taken off them. It was unsafe, the captain explained, to have their containers stacked that high. At that height, he went on, the bridge would not be able to see past them. Which, he said, was illegal. He remembered that you could be drunk at sea, so it didn’t seem to matter whether you could see where you were going or not. They nigh on stalled in the presence of these monoliths, and the wind became serious. The captain said he had not expected it be this rough. The wind seemed to whiten the bones of the old and near dead, but he, he just burnt and his hair blew. They reached the small port opposite the large container port, and they saw the Georgian town hall. Where on earth was this? It seemed a sham, an unfinished model, a veil hiding an empty netherworld. A film set of land broken off from some more likely land and cast ashore here.

And in this netherworld, two figures dwelled and one squatted and one stood looking out into the beyond of nothing and was asked if he counted himself happy.

Happy? I don’t know. I don’t know what that is. Tell me. No, no. I’m not happy. I need a job, money, clothes, I need to connect with a human being, I need new shoes, I need to get all that is about me done. I’m not happy at all. But do I dwell within the inner light of an eternal Idea that manifests itself in me each day? Am I the bearer of truth so… so dazzling

He caught sight of his surroundings, and saw its misery. He looked past his companion, who awaited his words. A nascent, diluted morning sun caught his face and eyelashes and he blinked in it all.

So dazzling that to most men, it is the very picture of blindness?  I am mankind’s blind spot… I am the cause of it all, no less.

The other looked at him, neither aghast nor impressed, but perhaps stupefied. They walked together, two companions – their boots slapping in an out of the mud flats ‘til they came mythic upon the horizon.

_

Words by Ryan Boyd

Cover by Carmen Marchena