Category: Perspective

By Robertha Green Gonzalez

The phrase addictive personality is usually delivered as a warning. It suggests excess, lack of control, and an inability to let go- typically associated with substances. Psychologically, it is framed as a vulnerability. The phrase is usually brought into discussion when someone looks at their bank account, looks at the bar slot on a Saturday evening after perhaps too many pints, looks rather excitedly into their friend’s eyes and says, ‘We should bet on something,’ or alternatively, ‘Fancy a cig?’ only for the slightly more sober member of the party to respond, ‘I could never… addictive personality’ I suppose in that setting perhaps the idea of an ‘addictive personality’ is justified, but i heartily believe it transcends this. The ‘addictive personality’ can also be explored as an emotional affliction, and within relationship dynamics, perhaps this is not always detrimental.

Firstly, I think we need to make a clear distinction between a ‘love addict’ and someone with an addictive personality. The two, I believe, are quite different. Of the two, the ‘addictive personality’ may in fact be the more constructive temperament. Love addicts, serial monogamists, and those who find themselves addicted to relationships tend to do so in pursuit of the euphoria accompanying romantic attachment. They seek the intense chemical reactions and emotional highs that occur while chasing or beginning a relationship. The experience is often fleeting and perhaps more lustful. It involves romanticising and idealising another person, falling hard for an imagined future with them while overlooking their actual, often less romantic and ultimately disappointing disposition. By contrast, the addictive personality within a relationship is not necessarily driven by this pursuit of emotional highs. I would go as far as to argue that there is an entirely different way to interpret this temperament. Temperament research frequently links so-called “addictive traits” with high sensitivity and reward responsiveness. Individuals who feel pleasure more intensely often return to the source of that pleasure repeatedly, a pattern typically understood as harmful, especially when associated with substance use, like smoking. Within relationships, however, once stripped of its most destructive expressions, this ‘addictive personality’ can be understood as something more poetic, a temperament built for devotion. At its core, the addictive personality, perhaps better described as a ‘devoted personality,’ is simply a personality inclined toward ritual wherein small details become personal mythology. The result is a life composed of meaningful fragments: saved tags, repeated flavours and familiar textures. From the outside, these rituals can appear menial; tea is brewed the same way each morning, the same glasses are used to drink from- but the small details indeed accumulate. Teabag tags are saved rather than discarded, gathered and held carefully in a small Cath Kidston bag that once held a mother’s old coins. The objects themselves are not valuable, yet their meaning is created through repetition, wherein fragments become emotional evidence that life is lived through patterns and curation. 

Through this lens, the danger lies not in devotion itself but in the belief in inevitability. The real vulnerability of an addictive temperament is not attachment, but the expectation that meaningful experiences will repeat. When something feels deeply right, the mind begins to interpret it as destiny. In ordinary habits such as tea, music, or daily walks, this expectation causes little harm. In relationships, however, it can be devastating. People, unlike one’s own curated rituals, are unpredictable. Where others may treat connections as temporary, the devoted personality assumes they are enduring. People with this trait tend to form strong attachments to patterns and rarely move through life casually; this could be attributed to the innate human appetite for comfort, which is forged by predictable routines that reduce cognitive load and increase a sense of control. For some personalities, however, this tendency toward repetition becomes especially pronounced. What others might call fixation can also be understood as attentiveness. In other words, the ‘devoted personality’ is someone who tends not to treat experiences as disposable. 

Literature captures this tension particularly well- a nice example being in Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Throughout the story, the relationship between Connell and Marianne goes through a series of separations and reunions resembling an acute emotional gravity. They move apart, then return to each other again, as if repetition itself carries meaning. However, in the final pages of the book (spoiler!), that pattern is disrupted. Connell has the opportunity to leave for New York and pursue writing, and Marianne decides against going with him, resulting in what some (myself included) may call one of the most heartbreaking endings in modern fiction. In their final conversation, Marianne says, “You should go. I’ll always be here. You know that.” The power of the conversation lies in what it represents psychologically. Connell embodies motion. The acceptance that life can change direction and that people must sometimes follow those changes. Marianne embodies emotional permanence. Her statement is not merely about remaining in a physical place. It reflects the belief that meaningful experiences continue to exist even when circumstances change. For someone with a deeply attached temperament, that line resonates because it articulates a particular philosophy of devotion. The world may move forward, people may leave, circumstances may change, but the meaning of what happened does not simply disappear. 

In a culture that increasingly values novelty and disposability, new drinks, new routines, new relationships, this temperament resists the idea that everything must be replaced. 

It saves the teabag tags. 

It remembers the glass from the first beer. 

It keeps small artefacts of repetition because repetition itself feels meaningful. 

Seen clearly in relationships, the ‘addictive personality’ is not simply a predisposition toward excess. It is a temperament built for devotion.

Featured Image – Toby Dossett

By Raphael Henrion

I recently had the pleasure of attending an open mic event for songwriters hosted by Durham University’s Open Mic Society (whose president is our very own Matthew Dodd!). Entering the intimate venue of the Claypath Deli late, I sat at the front near the door, which provided me with a very close view of the performers as they came up one by one. I was genuinely impressed, and at various moments also moved, by both the lyrical and melodic quality of the performances, many featuring songs never heard before in a public setting such as this one. Yet as each singer moved the microphone out of their way and unplugged their guitars from the small amp, I found myself being increasingly fascinated by the performers’ accents.

Every single singer shifted from introducing their songs in what I would consider a British accent to singing in an accent that was distinctly Americanised. Despite initially trying to brush this observation to the side, I found myself being increasingly distracted by this recurring phenomenon, prompting a few scrambled thoughts on my notes page between performances. My friend, an employee of the Claypath Deli, told me that they considered each singer’s changed accent to be more of a personal blend of accents rather than an entirely North American one. Nonetheless, this change was present and noticeable. 

Since that night, I have been mulling over what causes this change, or more specifically, why the British accent is lost, whatever form of British accent that might be. While I do sing and have dabbled in writing myself, I am by no means taking away from or criticising others’ choices. After all, if I may be afforded the cliché, the beauty of music is its subjectivity. Ruminating on the why has led me to a few potential reasons why singers may choose to stray away from their natural spoken accent, subconsciously or otherwise.

The first is social and cultural, with a widespread adoption of a kind of ‘default’ pop-singing style. We have come to identify the ‘Americanised’ accent with certain popular forms of music, with linguist Andy Gibson suggesting that this shift happens automatically, calling this style of singing the “pop music accent.” Numerous famous British artists do this, including Adele, Mick Jagger, and Amy Winehouse. Even Sam Fender, from here in the North East, softens and changes his accent when singing compared with his strong spoken Geordie voice. As this style of singing has come to be expected, singers may be gravitating towards it inadvertently simply because that is the norm.

Stemming from this industry-wide homogenisation, I would put the second reason down to vulnerability, which was especially relevant in a small venue such as the one I attended. Performing original music, especially if it is inspired by difficult emotions, memories, or experiences, is inherently vulnerable and for many can be intimidating. I suggest that by shifting away from one’s own ‘natural’ voice, singers can find comfort and create a barrier, hiding behind a different accent. By creating a character that can be embodied while singing, they may be able to protect themselves from feeling exposed or nervous. Indeed, I noticed a number of singers that night who came across as shy and restrained in their spoken introductions, before seeming to gain confidence while singing in an Americanised accent.

Finally, while I am ultimately unconvinced by the strength of this argument, many people would state that the Americanised accent is linguistically caused, with intonation, vowel length, and diction all being changed by the very process of singing itself. And while this may be true, the existence of countless other accents in different singers and genres across the world must mean that this is not a strictly necessary change. Many British artists sing in their native accents, with a few names that spring to mind including Lily Allen, Alex Turner/ Arctic Monkeys, Blur/ Damon Albarn, and Kate Nash. 

All in all, singers have a right to sing in whatever accent they choose. Some of the most popular and culturally significant singers of many countries including this one do adopt this Americanised pop accent. I am not in any position to tell anyone how to sound or what voice to choose, though I would suggest trying out singing in your native accent – you may like the rawer, more intimate sound that emerges when you take that wall down.

Featured Image: Phoebe Bridgers, Billboard

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

‘Breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself’  – Kingsley Amis on Martin Amis

My biggest disappointment with my English Literature BA at Durham is that I never got to talk to people about Nabokov’s Lolita as promised in my third year sexology module. It’s not a particularly challenging or niche text, most people are at least familiar with that lip lickingly good first paragraph, but christ it is a can of worms in a seminar room of people who still covet Jane Eyre aged 21. How could you like a text about something like that! Why would someone write that! The clamours of condemning cries ringing through the room, all of us ultimately missing the point. To say it’s a beautiful novel is not very tasteful, but I certainly think it’s true. It’s a reading exercise in taste and tolerance. Nabokov toys with his reader and uses voice to sugarcoat the hardest pill to swallow, but ultimately it will always be unfairly  known as the noncey novel. We are apprehensive about its taste, and more frequently we have become a population of readers who spit out challenges to our tastes on the mediocre grounds. 

This month The Guardian, short on change for an idea of their Saturday magazine, ran ‘The 100 Best Novels of All Time’: an updated version of their 2003 list. The Pilgrims’ Progress has been dethroned and completely denounced from the list (thankfully),  Money by Martin Amis is nowhere to be seen, replaced by another theoretical hinterland from Italo Calvino, and for some reason we are continuing to pretend that Elena Ferrante is better than Virginia Woolf (che schifo!). The only hope is that Lolita has climbed the ranks to 25.  In 20 years, can ‘The Best Novels of All Time’™ really change that much? Apparently so. Our new list is, dare I say, tame. There is nothing shocking or unexpected held in the ranks: it looks like a list of the most name-dropped titles in a y13’s UCAS personal statement. What happened! Why have we become so ubiquitous, so agreeable, so inoffensive? I blame taste.

Enter Evelyn Waugh, in all his snobbish forgery. Almost a century ago Waugh, in his usual arrogance, decried good taste as a psy-op, made by the British Wartime government to interfere with people’s lives. He rallied his readers to fill their homes with what they liked and bollocks to your neighbours opinions. While he did base his dislike for taste in an typically elitist colour (oh, Evelyn), blaming the ‘plague’ of taste on some upstart at a polytechnic, his snarky observations ring true: ‘it seems odd that Colonel Brown’s wife who disagrees with you about politics and religion and how to bring up her daughters should see eye to eye with you[r taste]’. Surely the point in curating individual taste is to be, well, individual. To like things that others do, yes, but for differing reasons, and to let yourself disagree with people’s takes. Can we really say someone has the ‘best’ taste in books if they have read the majority on that list? Or do they just have the most acceptable and agreeable? Waugh took his anti-taste agenda further, animating his cir-de-coeur  in the form of A Handful of Dust’s Mrs Beaver: a modern woman (bad) who likes chromium plating (worse) and fills her home with other people’s furniture (criminal). Mrs Beaver’s yoghurt gobbling habits are scorned by Waugh, perceiving her role as a tastemaker as a detriment to society as she refuses to let eccentrics be eccentrics when there are tasteful, fashionable interiors to sell. Whatever, I wonder, would he make of the hoards of people now telling us to run into corporation backed trends. To give up whatever quest of personal taste cultivation they could have embarked on to run head first into the new popular thing that won’t give them odd looks on the Tube.  I wonder what he would make of Martin Amis…

Opening a Martin Amis novel is opening a can of grotesque, extreme, bravadoing worms. His novels spiral and debauch, with his most canonical work Money being a novel where characters ingest their sexuality savagely while guzzling on grease and nursing a neverending cigarette. Despite the amount of ingesting within this novel, purging is its driver, as John Self spills his high cholesterol guts on every facet of his life to the reader. He is truly unbearable, and considerably unlikeable. And yet, it is fantastic. Amis’ novel of voice aims to make us wince and recoil, recalling his inspiration from Nabokov. Nabokov and Amis’s novels are testing, not for their writing style or themes, but because they aim to test our patience and practice. You get the sense that Amis had good fun playing about with what Money could be – so much so he includes moments of self-insertion just to get even more in on the action. The rules were altogether ignored, Self doesn’t give a toss – or at least superficially does -about how he comes across, and it is an unpleasant novel – read it! 

Reading isn’t meant to be tasteful, it is supposed to be taste making. Push your senses to the extreme and heighten your taste, man. Upon the publication of a paperback edition of Lynch’s 2024 Booker Prize winner Prophet Song, my grandma sent me a copy. Shortly followed by a postcard, her preferred mode of communication for all forms of message, stating ‘DO NOT READ. UTTERLY MISERABLE BOOK!’ I read it. Every minute spent with it felt like a panic attack. And yet I recommend it for such a reason. Being brought to panic attack levels of stress from words is truly fantastic – art can do that! It’s not safe, it’s not fun, and it’s certainly not tasteful, but it helped make my taste. Sod what Waterstones tell you, or some corporate plug online, or even an author – read what YOU like and make your own taste. If the taste is good, you relish it. Be opinionated, break the rules, and be original. And if we are going to start curating our reading avenues based on universal taste, then call me the filthiest reader alive. 

By Alicia Mora de Rueda

The eternal return is Nietzsche’s most theatrical idea, and also the one that most people, encountering it for  the first time, tend to dismiss as too dramatic to take seriously. The demon appears, announces that your life  will recur exactly as it has happened, infinitely, and asks you how you feel about that. The straightforward  response is to say ‘yes, fine’, or to say ‘no, awful’. But Nietzsche’s real interest is in what the thought does to you – if it functions as a kind of moral pressure, an imperative to live as if every Tuesday were worth  repeating forever.   

The Czech-French author Milan Kundera opens his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) by taking this concept seriously enough to argue against it. What he argues, however, is much stranger than simple and outright rejection.  

The eternal return is impossible. We know this, and the impossibility is the problem. We live once, our  choices cannot be tested against their alternatives, and nothing we decide will ever be confirmed or refuted  by repetition. In this sense, every choice floats free of the gravity that recurrence would have given it. This seems to be what Kundera means by the ‘lightness of being’ – the vertiginous condition of existing in a life that carries no weight because it can only ever happen in one direction.  

The four characters he builds the novel around are studies in what this lightness really costs. Tomas, the Prague  surgeon, has arranged his emotional life around a principle he calls ‘erotic friendship’, which entails the  separation of physical intimacy from anything that might require him to stay. He has lovers without allowing any relationship to become fully binding, thus preserving his freedom and foreclosing almost everything else. Sabina, who appears most often in his life, takes this further and turns it into a philosophy. She leaves everyone before they can define her, betrays every fixed identity available to her (country, artistic tradition, the men who think they understand her…), and reads her own serial disappearances as a form of integrity and a ‘self’ that exists precisely because it refuses to be fixed.  

Against them, Kundera places Teresa, who arrives in Tomas’s life carrying a heavy suitcase, a detail he  lingers on, and who loves in the way that weight demands: fully, without this separation of body and soul that Tomas has built his whole life around. And then there’s Franz, the fourth main character, who cannot encounter anything without making it meaningful, who projects onto Sabina an idea of her so complete that she has almost no room to exist inside it.  

What Kundera refuses to do is cast judgements on these positions, which is partly why the novel has endured so profoundly. He doesn’t suggest that Teresa’s suffering ennobles her, or that Sabina’s freedom is something to aspire to. Instead, he seems more interested in what each of them pays to live by their philosophy, and, importantly, exactly when the bill arrives.  

Sabina ends the novel in America. She has exited every relationship and country that might have formed her,  making paintings in a city where nobody knows what she escaped from or why. The freedom is therefore  genuine, total, and also (this is what the novel won’t let you ignore) completely without echo. This same  freedom has left her without any ground beneath her, so that every act of departure that felt like self-preservation has accumulated into a life in which nothing was allowed to accumulate. The eternal return, if it were real, would have given her choices weight, each decision meaning something proportional to its  infinite repetition. Without it, she is exactly as free as she intended to be, and that freedom feels, by the end,  like it belongs to a life that never quite solidified.

Tomas and Teresa end the novel in a small village, having given up Prague and surgery and most of what  their previous lives contained. Their circumstances look, from the outside, like a kind of defeat that has narrowed, creating a life that is reduced rather than built. The happiness they have is modest and specific and hard to explain in terms that would make sense on paper. Nothing about their trajectory redeems the difficulty of it (Kundera is too honest a writer to suggest that it does). Rather, he simply shows that something has survived; what remains is a life built from weight rather than around the avoidance of it, which is not necessarily the  same thing as a life that went well.  

The problem the novel circles is not really about philosophy in the abstract, since it is lived before it is  theorised. It is more about how one chooses what to hold on to when holding on to anything feels like a  foreclosure. Kundera never quite resolves the tension between lightness and weight, because it is not the kind of tension that resolves at all. What he does show, though, is that Sabina’s costs are invisible precisely  because they look like freedom from the outside, and there is no repetition, no demon, no recurrence to make  them legible – not to us, and not to her.

Featured Image: Elisa Cabot

By Victoria Travers

There is a spot in the library I always try to get. It faces the window, but more importantly, it faces a tree. Usually, there are birds moving through it, hopping from branch to branch, and when I’m lucky, they’ve got whatever they’ve foraged in their beaks. So, when I need to look away from the work trawling across my laptop screen, I get to see something that feels simultaneously so separate but all too similar to the ecological studies I was reading. 

That morning, easing myself into work with something gentler than my usual music, I clicked on a ‘This is John Denver’ playlist. It was supposed to be background noise. Instead, it became a distraction. For anyone familiar with John Denver’s catalogue, the sheer number of songs, either explicitly or implicitly, rooted in nature is astounding. Mountains, rivers, rain, sunlight, country roads: the natural world is not just decorative, metaphorical world-building, but central. It is the emotional architecture.

And Denver was hardly alone. There used to be so many songs about the world around us at the forefront of popular music: “Green Green Grass,” “I Feel the Earth Move,” “Morning Has Broken,” and “Big Yellow Taxi”, to name but a few. Songs where fields, weather, birdsong, trees, earth and sky were not niche interests, but part of the common imaginative language. Nature could be everything you wanted it to be: romantic, spiritual, political, nostalgic, or just simply there.

What struck me was not just that these songs describe nature, but that they assume nature matters. A walk in the rain, the morning dew on the side of a mountain, the loss of trees to a parking lot: these are treated as emotionally legible experiences. The listener is expected to understand why they mean something. 

So why does that now feel almost old-fashioned?

Of course, nature has not disappeared from music entirely. It would be too neat, and probably too melodramatic, to claim it has. Hozier still writes as though the forest is a place of worship and rot and desire. Bon Iver can make winter landscapes feel like a form of internal weather. Taylor Swift’s folklore and evermore are full of lakes, woods, ivy, snow, cliffs and gardens (I could also argue that these albums emerged from lockdown: an unusual period when many people’s permitted worlds narrowed to the supermarket, home, and the walk outside). But even these examples feel slightly set apart from the centre of mainstream pop. They occupy a particular aesthetic territory: indie, folk-adjacent, autumnal, cottagecore, wistful. Nature is still present, but it often arrives already stylised.

The first recent mainstream example that came to my mind was, unfortunately, Lil Dicky’s “Earth”, the 2019 celebrity charity single in which various famous people voice animals with varying degrees of dignity. This is probably unfair; the song did raise money for environmental causes. Still, I found myself slightly depressed that the most immediately available example of a nature-centred pop song was also essentially a joke.

For the sake of my own ego, I tried again. Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach came to mind: a brilliant, strange, synthetic album about pollution, consumerism and waste. But even there, nature appears largely through its destruction. The beach is plastic. The ocean is contaminated. The natural world is not encountered so much as mourned, mediated through apocalypse and irony.

This, I think, is part of the shift. Modern culture is not silent about nature. If anything, it is frequently anxious about it. We talk about climate change, extinction, pollution, ecological collapse. But the natural world increasingly enters mainstream art as crisis, not companionship. It appears as something damaged, vanishing, morally instructive. Less often is it simply allowed to be beautiful, ordinary, funny, boring, intimate, or woven into daily life.

Curious, and by this point absolutely not doing the ecological reading I had intended to do, I searched to see whether this was just nostalgia dressed up as insight. It turns out there is some evidence behind the feeling. A study by Selin Kesebir and Pelin Kesebir found a decline in nature-related words across English-language cultural products from around the 1950s onwards, including fiction, song lyrics and film storylines. References to the human-made environment did not show the same pattern, suggesting that this was not just a general change in language but a more specific cultural drift away from nature. 

That does not mean everyone in the 1970s was wandering through meadows writing ballads about moss, nor that everyone now is spiritually bankrupt because they listen to synth-pop. But it does suggest something subtler and more troubling: that the shared cultural vocabulary of nature has thinned. The words are still there, but perhaps they are less central to the stories we tell about ourselves.

The same seems visible beyond music. Landscape painting no longer holds the cultural dominance it once did. Films often use nature as backdrop, threat, or spectacle, but less often as a serious emotional presence. Even adaptations of novels deeply embedded in landscape can seem oddly hesitant to let the land itself become a character. Nature is everywhere, yet strangely distanced: filmed beautifully, marketed aesthetically, invoked politically, but not always inhabited.

And yet I do not think this is only a story of loss. Recently, I have noticed small signs of return. Online, among the churn of microtrends and self-conscious identities, I keep seeing variations of the phrase: “cool girls like birdwatching.” It is easy to laugh at this, and maybe we should, a little. But beneath the trend is something sincere. There is an appeal in birdwatching precisely because it resists the pace of everything else. You cannot make the bird arrive faster. You cannot optimise the branch. You have to wait, look, and accept that most of the world is not performing for you.

Perhaps that is why nature feels newly attractive to a generation exhausted by acceleration. The appeal is not only environmental, but temporal. Nature offers a different rhythm. It does not ask to be consumed instantly, ranked, posted, monetised or improved. It can be engaged with lightly or obsessively. You can know the Latin name of every bird in the tree, or you can simply enjoy the fact that something small and alive is there.

This is what I feel in the library, looking out between paragraphs. The tree is not spectacular. It is not the Rocky Mountains. It is not a cinematic wilderness. It is just a tree outside a building, with birds in it. But it interrupts the flatness of the screen. It reminds me that the living world does not only exist as a field site, a dataset, a crisis, or a metaphor. It exists insistently, ordinarily, whether or not culture remembers how to sing about it.

Maybe we have turned our backs on what nature can give us. Maybe there is a political argument to be made there. But the great thing about nature? It will always be there. No expectation, no performance. All you have to do is just look through that window and let nature do the rest.

Featured Image: Victoria Travers

By Nicole Ruf

We take women’s suffering and call it art. 

I am standing in the Loggia Dei Lanzi, perhaps the most magnificent open-air gallery in the world, Florence doing what Florence does best, making you feel simultaneously small and inexplicably chosen, and I watch all the tourists congregate around Perseus, as if they have all come to the telepathic consensus that this is the piece worth noting. He is glorious, naturally, Cellini made sure of this. He stands with his arm raised, holding the severed head of Medusa aloft, his boot pressing down on what remains of her body, her breasts pointing toward the sky, with the casual confidence of a man. Her neck is open; her limbs arranged with a particular elegance only a sculptor deeply in love with female suffering might achieve. Everyone takes pictures. 

A few meters away, the Sabine women are held mid-scream. They have been like this for centuries. Giambologna froze them here, arms outstretched, mouths open, bodies twisted, writhing in the grip of men who decided, one afternoon, that they were owed wives. The Rape of the Sabine Women is considered a masterpiece of Mannerist composition. There is probably a fridge magnet at the souvenir tents in the piazza. 

Benvenuto Cellini, Perseus with the Head of Medusa & Giambologna, Rape of the Sabine Women

Both bear the full, dizzying weight of a civilisation that built its vision of beauty atop women’s bodies. You are forced to stand there, in the open air and scorching sun, among the crowds, and obliged to appreciate the craftsmanship, the invention, the man. 

The mise-en-scène changes, but the woman’s role does not. She is the body the hero stands on, the wound the story opens. I have been thinking about decapitation ever since. 

—

It is appropriate, then, I think, to start with Medusa. She was, depending on who you ask, a monster, a priestess, a survivor, or simply a beautiful woman who made the catastrophic mistake of existing in a temple where a god felt entitled to help himself to her. In the oldest versions, she is mortal and ravishing. Poseidon assaults her in Athena’s temple. Athena, in a characteristically divine display of lateral thinking, punishes her; turns her hair into snakes, makes her gaze deadly, condemns her to an island at the edge of the world. Then Perseus arrives, guided and armed by the gods, cuts off her head, weaponises it and turns enemies to stone with her lifeless face. Her power, born of violation, becomes his trophy.

Taming the wild woman is the maximum expression of male victory. This thesis is repeated in marble and bronze and oil paint across every major gallery in the world. The hero does not just defeat a monster; he decapitates the unruly feminine and carries her head around as proof of his greatness. 

Caravaggio, Head of  Medusa

The Uffizi holds an object that makes this completely literal. Caravaggio’s Head of Medusa is not a painting in any conventional sense; it is painted on a wooden shield, commissioned as a ceremonial gift for Grand Duke Ferdinando I de Medici, intended to symbolise his courage in defeating his enemies. It stayed in the Medici armoury for over a century, a woman’s face deployed as military iconography. Mouth open, eyes wide, snakes still squirming; horrifyingly human and not monstrous at all, exchanged between powerful men as victorious symbols. 

Medusa never gets to be anything other than the thing being killed. 

—

Then there are other women, armed, instead, with the sword. 

Donatello, Judith and Holofernes

Judith stands in bronze in the Piazza della Signoria, small and severe, very much out of place among all the muscular civic bravado of marble and plaster. She hangs on walls across the city, too, painted by all the greats. Always holding the same thing. 

The head of Holofernes. 

She did as Perseus did, is the point. She got close enough to the enemy and cut his head from his body. Her story is biblical: a widow, a commoner, who charmed the Assyrian general besieging her city, got him blind drunk, took his own sword and beheaded him with it. It is a tale of nerve and patience, of clear-eyed understanding of what men are when they think they are about to get what they want.

Jan Massijs, Judith with the head of Holofernes; Luchas Cranach, Judith with the Head of Holofernes; Peter Paul Rubens, Judith and Holofernes; Cristofano Allori, Judith with the Head of Holofernes; Gustav Klimt, Judith I

And yet. 

Look at how she is painted. Massijs strips her nude, holding the head like a handbag. In Cranach’s she stands with her composed Renaissance face, rosy-cheeked and soft-lashed, the scene bathed in the warm lighting of a specifically male fantasy. In Rubens’ she is jewelled and splendid and somehow, impossibly, still glamorous. Allori painted her so beautifully that she must have been painted from life, and she was: his own lover, the model, himself as Holofernes, and this apparently romantic. Klimt painted her later too, nude and sexually satisfied, Holofernes barely present, head cropped by the frame as an afterthought. This painting is called feminist by some. I can tell you it is not. It is the male gaze recuperating even the image of female power back into erotica. Every generation gets the Judith it deserves, and most generations have deserved little. 

Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Beheading Holofernes

Artemisia Gentileschi is the exception. 

Only a woman could have painted Judith like this, only a woman who inhabits a real body and knows what it means for the world to take it. Artemisia was raped by her father’s associate, Agostino Tassi, at seventeen. At the trial, it was she, not Tassi, who was tortured; ropes tightened around her fingers during questioning, ropes, she noted in devastating sarcasm, like the wedding bands Tassi had promised her. Throughout it all, she remained defiant, immovable: it is true, it is true, it is true. Tassi had friends in high papal places, and so he was cleared. Artemisia went home, and painted Judith. 

Her Judith is not seductive, not satisfied. She grips Holofernes by the hair with the pragmatic strength of a woman who has made a decision and will see it through. Her maidservant holds him down. Blood pools and splatters onto white sheets. It is not pretty nor erotic. It is female rage, and what it looks like, really looks like, when a woman is allowed to paint it herself; not a fantasy, not an excuse to show a beautiful body. The thing that needed doing, being done. 

—

Alonso Berruguete, Salome

Salomé gets less credit, which is instructive. Stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, she danced at his feast and pleased him enough that he offered her anything she wanted. Prompted by her mother’s grievance, she asked for the head of John the Baptist, and received exactly that. Her motives are considered impure: personal, petty, emotional. She did not do it to save a city. As if men have ever required noble motives for their violence.

What made Salomé so threatening that centuries of painters and priests worked to contain her is that her reason is simply because: because he deserved it, because I decided, because I was owed a wish, and this is what I wished for. The femme fatale is the man’s name for the woman who acts on her own terms without offering justification he might recognise. Women are permitted rage only when it is in service of someone else. 

Judith and Salomé have been manufactured by history, remade to fit the story men most want to read. The Bible is not mistranslated by a change of language but by a change of morals and truth. They are painted and repainted, sometimes heroines, sometimes monsters, often nothing more than beautiful bodies holding props. 

—

There is also a different tradition, one that does not give you a sword. 

Galleries contain what feels like a thousand paintings of the Virgin Mary. She is in every room, every altarpiece, every triptych; nursing, praying, receiving the news. Always beautiful, always mild, and always available; to you, to the gaze, to the narrative requirements of a tradition that needs a woman pure enough to mother God but not powerful enough to threaten him. 

Sandro Botticelli, The Madonna of the Sea 

Yet Mary is queen of the Earth. Without her body, her yes, or her body’s yes, depending on which theologians you consult, there is no redemption, no story. She is painted holding the child, and she looks elsewhere while he looks at her. For a moment, God’s entire world was a woman, this woman. The hinge on which everything turns, the architecture of Western civilisation, runs on a woman’s womb, and she gets pale blue drapery, and a lot of mild portraits people rush past, in return. 

Mary Magdalene is her counterpart. She is, in the earliest texts, one of the most significant figures in the story; first witness to the resurrection. By the sixth century, she had been collapsed into a composite of unnamed sinful women and declared a prostitute. The Church did not retract this until 1969. 

She is painted, overwhelmingly, weeping. Beautiful and weeping, her hair loose, loose hair being the Renaissance shorthand for sexual availability, a detail the painters understood very well. She is the cautionary tale standing next to the impossible ideal, together they construct the complete architecture of what women are permitted to be: the virgin or the whore, the mother or the magdalene, the one who never sins or the one who never stops paying for it.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Palestrina Pietà

What I feel, standing in front of yet another Annunciation, is weight, not theological, but the physical kind. Mary carries Christ in her body; births him, raises him, watches him die. The pietà: mother holding her dead son, body draped across her lap, a woman absorbing the full weight of the world’s grief. 

We are not given the sword; we are given the greater burden. Mary accepts, endures, loves beyond any reasonable expectation of reciprocity. The Church built a civilisation on the willingness of women to do exactly this, and called it grace, and called it virtue, and painted it ten thousand times in pale blue and gold.

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Perseus’ arm is still raised, Medusa’s head still drips its bronze blood. The Sabine women are still mid-scream, and nobody is stopping to ask them why. I stand and I think about all the Sabines, the Virgins, the Magdalenes, the Judiths in their dozens, Salome with her platter, Artemisia’s white sheets soaked red. We built the most beautiful city in the world out of this fabric: out of women’s suffering, women’s bodies, women’s labour, women’s silence. 

The snakes, the exile, the death, the head as trophy, everything came after that one moment, that one casual assumption that she was there to be taken. And the culture said: yes, and built a statue of the man who finished the job, and put it in the most beautiful square in the world, and called it civilisation.

We have been here the whole time. In the margins of the altarpieces and the backgrounds of the allegories and the corners of the loggie, holding our swords, waiting for someone to look at the right painting.

Maybe it is time to pick the sword back up.

Not in art, necessarily.

In art, of course. 

Featured Image: Le Gallerie Degli Uffizi

By Sara Tocci

It’s officially March, that slapdash combination of mid-day sunshine and five-degree chill, that blooming bluebell with its perennial reminder that nowhere stays dark forever. 

I’m walking home from class imagining the birds and the wildflowers singing backup to the Beach Boys song buzzing in my ears. Then the song ends, and Nick Drake starts playing, and it’s all different. 

Most people think of moods as filters we put over some objective reality lying just outside our perception. Heidegger disagrees. He argues the mood we’re in is borne out of our experiences, our worlds; it constitutes reality as it is and the future as it will be. Moods come from our bodies, our values, our sense perception: what we see, feel, and, yes, hear. 

I walk down the street listening to Nick Drake and feeling the isolation and tenderness and everything that beautiful man brings to mind. I’m passing student after student, occasional old man with well-behaved dog, and they’ve all got AirPods in. A million different worlds on one street. What are they listening to, I wonder? What’s being piped into their ears to complement this blue sky, or drive away any awareness of it at all?

Heidegger would’ve had a lot to say about technology’s proliferation in every facet of life. Two people in the same circumstances holding radically different views on subjects with which they have no firsthand experience, all because of algorithms generated in Silicon Valley to keep them scrolling for more, more, more. I look to my right and left and think about the worlds other people know so well. Our lives are more interconnected than ever before, and yet, I stand right next to them and couldn’t be further away.

Rates of leaving-the-house have been trending downward since the advent of television. I guess when you have a limitless world in the palm of your hand, it seems a little less tempting to go dance around a may pole or whatever people used to do. A downside of this is that people believe in the goodness of strangers less and less. Pummeled with bad news and misinformation, trusting only a handful of close friends, our social fabric is strained with solipsism. 

I like for my world to come from the world. I like to feel the kind of one-ness that puts everything into perspective, that distinguishes between things that really matter and the grievances of a twenty-year-old with too much time on her hands. When my world threatens to overwhelm, I think of three Heideggerian truths: 

1. We are thrown into a world of social, historical, and political situations completely beyond our control. These situations determine the person we’ll become in a future we cannot predict;
2. We can only understand ourselves and our world if we understand that the two go hand-in-hand; there is no one without the other;
3. The beautiful things that make us feel alive, the terrible tragedies that bring us to our knees, and everything in between only move us because our world is meaningful to us.

I think of this when I’m walking to the library before the city wakes up. I like listening to news podcasts and getting the daily litany of global tragedies delivered to me with pleasant conversational detachment. It’s March, and the sun is starting to rise before I’ve left the house, and the morning birds are drowned out with news of Iran, Palestine, Ukraine. A panoply of suffering and malevolence. I don’t know what it’s doing to my mood but whatever it is I know I’m not the only one.

We don’t all have the luxury to wax philosophical about cultural malaise, or hear about bombings via the BBC. The lived realities in these war-torn countries seem to me surreal, like another world, adjacent to mine but not quite the same. And yet, it is. Raindrops in Durham eventually find their way to Tehran. Every time we vote, every time we choose to protest or keep quiet, we puncture the same social fabric that sends arms to reduce Gaza to rubble. 

I think of this world we were all thrown into. I think of its loving, suffocating embrace, how it merges irrevocably with all that we are, how our primordial pre-consciousness and permanent occupation with it is what imparts any meaning at all. I think of every sunny day and teary goodbye, every bus ride, every moment of total devastation, and the day when we wake to find, miraculously, that life goes on.

I tried ditching the AirPods last year, this whole “embracing the world for all that it is” thing, but it was pretty hard to bear months of darkness and freezing rain when I knew I could’ve had the dulcet tones of Joni Mitchell getting me through it all. But now it’s getting warmer, and isn’t it all a little easier? Today I walk in time to the train rushing off, the European wrens, the chatter of voices I’ll never know, with worlds just as wonderfully complicated as mine. Heidegger says we see ourselves for who we really are when we turn away from the noise of worldly concerns. I don’t think so. Maybe, if we all listened to the same sounds, attuned to the world beyond our algorithms, we might see ourselves in one another. 

Further reading/listening:

Heidegger, M. (1967) Being and Time. Translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Blackwell. 

Putnam, R.D. (2000) Bowling alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon 

and Schuster.The Beach Boys (1971) Surf’s Up.

Featured Image – Sara Tocci

By Robertha Green Gonzalez

We often hear the phrase “in vino veritas” — in wine, there is truth. The idea is pretty seductive, isn’t it? If we drink enough, the barriers of social convention supposedly fall away, leaving us with the raw honesty of our words. But is this really the case? Are the thoughts that surface after a few drinks genuinely revealing, or do we merely use alcohol as a socially sanctioned excuse to voice impulses we would otherwise suppress? 

Consider the other classic venue of unfiltered thought: the shower. Here, with soap running down our arms and nowhere to go, we ruminate freely. Unlike alcohol, which loosens inhibition, the shower provides a kind of safe space, a meditative environment. Many of us even have a specific shower ritual, whether it is lighting candles or indulging in the suppressed dream of eating an orange in the shower to mimic a monkey in the rainforest. The shower provides a sort of liquid courage for the mind rather than the body. And the thoughts that emerge? Often absurd. Occasionally brilliant. Sometimes they touch the deepest emotions we have neglected to name. 

So which is more truthful? 

Drunk thoughts can reveal hidden desires or confessions, yes, but they are also prone to exaggeration, misjudgment, and the occasional lapse in moral compass. I know, for one, that any confession of genuine importance I have tried to make while drunk has led to a slightly messier but much soberer conversation the following morning. A risky confession under the influence may feel like honesty, but it can just as easily serve as a convenient scapegoat for impulses better left unspoken. We cloak these moments in in-vino-veritas to legitimise choices that might otherwise feel reckless. 

Shower thoughts, on the other hand, are well formed, introspective, and strangely intuitive. The mind is free from social constraints, yet it is not clouded by chemical distortions. The bizarre ideas that surface mid lather are often weird at first. Who has not stared at shampoo and thought, ‘If my crack were horizontal as opposed to vertical, would my cheeks clap when I went up the stairs?’ Yet among the absurdities lie occasional moments of profound insight. Here, the mind is raw but refined, emotional but clear. Take, for instance, the fact that we tend to replay conversations or scenarios in the shower. Our imagined responses are always far better articulated, so surely, by that logic, the same goes for the more emotional breakthroughs we make in the shower. 

The difference may be subtle. Alcohol reveals what we feel, but shower time reveals what we think and what we truly feel in tandem. Liquid courage is effective for the body, but perhaps liquid body wash is the more emotionally intuitive elixir, offering a rare clarity that being absolutely hammered simply cannot match.

Featured Image: Ella Wimer

By Tess May

An inner monologue sitting inside St Stephen’s Basilica, Budapest, Hungary. 

“I never know how to start these. I guess it’s because I never know if you’re listening. Though I imagine if you were to listen to me anywhere, this would be the place. It is so very beautiful. 

There was a sign on the door that said ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’, which means ‘Give Us Peace’. I wonder if you will. 

I can’t get over the grandness of this church. I wonder very much if you revel in its glory, or despise the nature of it. All this gold – it cost me $19.99 to even be allowed in here. Surely the money goes to the church’s upkeep, though I can’t help but think of the ways in which the money would be better spent. I think you’d agree with me, but I suppose that’s the irony of it all. 

I wonder if that’s why I could never find true faith – no offence. The irony that is, well, you. The irony that runs so deep it is spilling out the altar in front of me. I meant what I said, I think, in that poem I wrote a few years ago –  that you are very much like a girl in your idealism and your anger (that is to say, you are so very human). You – or at least as far as I’ve been taught – created this world to be a perfect place. You created beings perfect and free from all that could be bad – created them to be like you. And yet, when they did not show you gratitude, when things did not work as you had imagined, you stripped away this perfection, and left the world with people like me: silly little people, who spend their money on beautiful places to worship you, in the hopes that you will ‘give us peace’. It must have been a terrible mirror you saw that day, right at the start of time. You set a tone for this world when it had barely begun. That, I would wager, you didn’t realise until it was far too late. Do you fault yourself for being so quick to anger? 

I also wonder if it was all truly a part of your plan, as the wise old men wearing robes seem to think. I wonder if you do truly have the power to bring us peace, or if maybe you know that peace is something we must all find for ourselves. In the same breath, I wonder how much power you really have. Because as The Creator, you have created a world that can create on its own. Is it you behind every birth, or did you create what is now a hands-off machine? I suppose that’s a sacrilegious thought, but I wonder all the same. 

I wonder why you bless some more than others. I wonder why you’ve blessed me more than most. And I know I have not had an easy life, but if you were to place me on a chart I am certainly not naïve enough to expect to be anywhere near the lower half. But I also know that I am blessed to know I’m blessed. And I wonder why you can’t give everyone that. 

I wonder about Mary. I wonder how she feels. I wonder if Jesus really was your son, or just a good guy, who believed in your goodness. I wonder if you love him because he saw things in you that you didn’t see in yourself. Maybe I’m making you too human in my head, but I think I like you better that way. 

I’m sad to not believe in you, really. I’ve always been envious of the people who know to their core that they walk in your light. You must be such a comfort to them. I hope that you don’t disappoint them one day. 

There are a few things that I know about you. Or I think that I know. I know to be kind. I know not to lie. I know to forgive. 

I wonder if you forgive, truly. I think of the women suffering in ways that I have been fortunate not to suffer, living in very different parts of the world. Do you forgive the men who oppress them, since likely they have never known to behave differently? Why couldn’t you tell them to stop? Do you bless the women in ways I can’t see or know? Can you forgive yourself for creating a world like that for them? 

I’m so full of questions, and at the same time I feel full of answers. In all my wondering, I feel quite strongly about what I suppose the answers to be. Which leaves me with one final wondering: do I know these answers because it is who I am, or because of who you are? Have you revealed yourself to me in such a way that I do know you, without knowing that I do, or are you simply everything that I am, because that is what I want you to be? 

I wonder also if you have heard any of this. I hope you have. I’d like to think you did. 

Oh, and while I’ve got you, one last thing: please look after my family on this earth. And please look after my loved ones in your kingdom, because if it does really exist, I know that is where they are. 

And thank you, God, for this life. I truly am grateful. 

Amen.”

Image Credit: St. Stephen’s Basilica, Budapest – official website

By May Thomson

‘The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks: language, tool use, social behavior, mental events – nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal.’ – Donna Haraway

Donna Haraway’s reference to the ‘last beachheads of uniqueness’ being polluted points to the collapsing myth of human exceptionalism and ‘uniqueness’ – a collapse Arne Næss takes further than most. This article will consider Næss’s theory of ‘the ecological self’, actively challenging Western individualism and human supremacy, as radically complicating the concept of human, not through mere entanglement but through philosophical expansion.^[1] Whilst Haraway touches on the difficulty of separating the animal and human, Næss believes firmly in the mythic nature of this difference, seeking to dissolve the boundary entirely. Contrasting Haraway’s posthuman irony, Næss offers a serious, ethical vision of the self that redefines identity as inseparable from the nonhuman world. Where Haraway appreciates polluted boundaries, Næss’s transformative philosophy of ‘deep ecology’ erases the dividing line between human and nonhuman, redefining the self, and showing us that, indeed, ‘nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal.’

Næss’s conception of the ecological self fundamentally rejects the human/animal dichotomy Haraway describes, proposing, instead, a radical redefinition of identity as inherently relational, in which the human is not a master but, like all organisms, a mere ‘knot in the biospherical net … of intrinsic relations.’ Næss, who coined the term in 1973, describes ‘deep ecology’ as a rejection of the ‘man-in-environment image in favour of the relational, total-field image’, instead emphasising ‘biospherical egalitarianism.’ Næss critiques shallow ecology (focused on ‘pollution and resource depletion’ and, by nature, undemanding and ‘shallow’ – but, Næss concedes, ‘presently rather powerful’) for almost solely emphasising the ‘health and affluence of people in the developed countries.’ Næss’s deep ecological approach goes beyond mere environmentalism. Indeed, the etymology of ‘environment’ itself encodes and perpetuates an anthropocentric, man-in-environment view, having its roots in the Old French ‘en-vironer’ – referring to the act of surrounding – and suggesting both anthropocentrism and invariable separation. The use of the image of a man-in-environment illustrates the human desire for dominion, with mankind rendered as the sole autonomous actor, with earth as his playground. This desire itself is explained away by social ecologists as a symptom of human hierarchies, with thinkers like Bookchin arguing for social revolution as a prerequisite for ecological restoration. But Næss rejects this view, arguing that, whilst exploitation of nature can be linked to intrahuman hierarchies, it is (1) irresponsible to view ecological relations as merely symptomatic, (2) downright dangerous to delay action against crises until the fall of all oppressive systems, and (3) counterintuitive to centre the human at all. This deep green philosophy is not anti-human, as some, like Eccy De Jonge who suggests the ideology contains ‘palpable misanthropy’, suggest – it is, instead, deeply post-individual. Næss’s concept of the ecological self describes a deeper, interconnected sense of self that transcends the individual ego and embraces the natural world: that is to say, one is inseparable from the ‘biospherical net’ in which they are a knot. And this brings us a new assumption: the needs of the whole biosphere must outweigh any individual species. This assumption, ‘the equal right to live and blossom,’ is one he describes as an ‘intuitively clear and obvious value axiom.’

Whilst Haraway critiques human ‘uniqueness’ through irony, hybridity, and cultural entanglement, Næss’s deep ecology dismantles the same boundary through ontological identification, offering a unifying and arguably more ethically demanding account of what it means to be a human in a shared world. Haraway’s critique is distinctly sarcastic, wrapped up in the rejection of essentialism embodied in A Manifesto for Cyborgs – a constructivist work which favours entangling and merging the machine, human, and animal in bizarre, unpredictable, chimeric ways. For Haraway, the divide between culture and nature becomes inconsequential through the ‘cyborg’, a dual figure that blends the boundary. Whilst Haraway’s comment is ironic, celebrating the blurring and complication of seemingly fixed lines, Næss is sincere, metaphysical, and insistent on our transcendence of boundaries through radical identification with the non-human. Haraway sees the line between animal and human as both corruptible and culturally produced, where Næss sees it as ontologically false. Indeed, Næss’s description of deep ecology contains an excellent synthesis of this relational ecology: he essentially argues, through the figures of ‘A’ and ‘B’, that A and B only exist as A and B because of how they relate. Entities do not pre-exist their relationships – the relationship between them makes them what they are. Whilst the objective of both thinkers is the destabilisation of these boundaries, Næss seeks to replace it with a vision of selfhood (‘“Self-realisation!” as an ultimate norm’) instead of simply playing with its erosion.

Arne Næss’s deep ecology is valuable in understanding both the human and the literature they produce. His works give us the tools and language to interrogate the representation of relations between mankind and nature in the literature we read. The poetry of Ted Hughes and Wendell Berry, for instance, seems to align with this collapse of human primacy by staging a metaphysical return and refusing symbolic domestication – offering space to stage the transcorporeality of matter. That is to say, both poets ostensibly present the animal as something raw, unknowable, and untranslatable – something to be encountered and understood as having ‘the equal right to live and blossom’, aligning with Næss’s vision of the nonhuman as an agentic equal. In ‘I Go Among Trees’, for instance, Berry takes a radical approach to describing the natural world. Refusing to name the creature his speaker encounters in the woods, Berry describes it simply through their interactions: ‘Then what is afraid of me comes / and lives a while in my sight. / What it fears in me leaves me, / and the fear of me leaves it.’ His approach, here, is one of total empathy and identification – one in which equality and mutual respect is integral. Embodied in his employment of grammatical parallelism, this is, at its core, an embodiment of Næss’s concept of the ecological self – an interaction between two beings on wholly equal footings. In ‘The Thought Fox’, likewise, Hughes notes ‘Something else is alive / Beside the clock’s loneliness’, lines which quietly expand the self to include the non-human. Hughes’s poem is a strikingly innocent and peaceful study of one animal carefully watching another. Indeed, the works of Berry and Hughes perhaps go even further in this sense: it would seem that the animal is actually not unknowable, so long as it is encountered on its own terms and not reduced to metaphor merely for the human writer’s self-indulgent self-knowledge. Through their refusal to instrumentalise the nonhuman, Hughes and Berry enact Næss’s philosophy: to truly encounter the animal is not to master it, but to identity with it as an unpretentious equal.

Ultimately, Haraway’s image of the ‘last beachheads of uniqueness’ embodies Næss’s desire to complicate the human as a concept – not through mere entanglement, but through a radical, ontological redefinition of identity. His deep green ecology and conception of an ecological self do not simply trouble the line between human and animal: Næss renders it meaningless. Where Haraway emphasises hybridity, he insists on identification – a radical ontological claim that challenges the very definition of the human. In a moment of ecological crisis, Næss calls us not simply to act differently, but to understand ourselves differently – as beings who are inextricably animal.

Featured Image: Honor Adams

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^[1] Quotes provided are taken from Næss’s ‘The Environmental Crisis and the Deep Ecological Movement’ and ‘The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement.’