A strange terrain - traumatised, hooked-up, lies before us. There is something rotting in the state we’re in. Songs of mourning float, hopefully, through an air that, “strange and familiar”, seems bound to a certain part of us we no longer are, and will always be. How can we traverse ourselves - what are we? what we were? what was or is? The distance has the feel of us, post-bucolic, our limerence and forlorn will, our decomposition stitched up in fields of former colour. We are all around us, the sky is perishing, we, distended with hope.
William Rowe, in ‘Seeing Against Fascism’ - an emotive, vital essay on Verity Spott’s Hopelessness (the87press, 2020) - is our guide here, probing this strange liminal, pulling up the grass-like epidermis to reveal the strange, familiar parts and machinations of the soul, nigh corrupted by an accursed milieu - a sordid tapestry of patriotic parasitism, wrong wealth, that would void us of ourselves. This soul that, in spite of its affliction, continues: “The struggle of ‘on’”, on, on, on… o how mundane this arrested miracle! o the subject! o hopeless, composite shades! mon frère!
(A5, 130gsm, 29 pages. Cover design by Sophie Carapetian)
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