Category: Perspective

By Robin Reinders

‘When you split me and my brother in the womb, you did not divide us evenly. He got kindness, and I got longing. He got complacence, and I got ambition. I want to kill him sometimes. I think sometimes he wants to die.’
– ‘Hevel’, Nathaniel Orion

‘You do not have a brother. You have never experienced anything this ferocious or intentional with another person.’
– ‘You Are Jeff’, Richard Siken

To be a brother and to have a brother is inherently, inexorably biblical. Brotherhood within the Western cultural imagination has historically served as arguably the most enduring structure of psychic and moral antagonism, saturated from its inception with asymmetry, rivalry, inheritance, obligation, violence and blood-guilt. The brother is never only familial: he assumes multiple roles, appearing instead as rival-double and shadow-self, intimate enemy and involuntary witness, the figure against whom identity is measured and comprehended and through whom it is displaced and dismantled. Fraternity, in this tradition, is no facile framework of mutual belonging, but a theatre of comparison, substitution, accusation and sacrificial demand. The literary canon bears the imprint of this logic: in Dostoevsky’s Karamazovs, brotherhood becomes a vehicle for metaphysical crisis staged through competing claims to divine silence, legislative punishment, erotic compulsion and rational unbelief, each brother functioning as a partial ontology belonging to the whole rather than a character unto himself; in King Lear, Edgar and Edmund recast fraternity as a juridical struggle over legitimacy and primogeniture, questioning the ideologies of inheritance and structural exclusion; for Steinbeck, Cal and Aron reproduce the schema of the first fratricide as an inherited structure of moral predestination, in which affection is metabolised through perceived grace and reprobation; in The Comedy of Errors, sibling doubling pushes identity into precarious ontological positions, whereby misrecognition exposes personhood as contingent on external attribution rather than any interior sense of coherence. It is, however, the image of Cain looming over Abel which most insistently haunts the theological, the literary and the psychic genealogy of fraternity: the brother as a node of ambivalent investment, a site of conflicting libidinal and moral investments – love, envy, resentment, safeguarding, substitution and an underlying logic of annihilatory desire. To pose the question Am I my brother’s keeper? is therefore necessarily to entrench fraternity within implications of burdenhood; it is to acknowledge that one brother is, by nature, psychically tasked with preserving, galvanising, monitoring, managing and accounting for the life of the other, even at the cost of his own singular psychic coherence.

‘Something / Happened to me, and I can’t tell / Anyone, so it will happen to you’
– Robert Bly, ‘Keeping Quiet’

Half Man 1.06, dir. Eshref Reybrouck, 2026 / Frans Floris, c. 1531-1570

Richard Gadd’s limited series Half Man (2026) stages this question of brother-as-object and brother-as-keeper with a hand both violent and precise in equal measure. Centred upon Niall and Ruben – boys brought together through the relationship between their mothers and raised as brothers within a post-industrial Scottish milieu marked by pervasive Thatcherism, absent fathers, precarious identities and inherited familial violence – the series traces the evolution of an attachment whose intensity repeatedly exceeds the conceptual vocabularies available to describe it. Throughout the series, fraternity rewrites itself out of any stable structure of kinship and instead defines itself as a profound investment in one another’s existence as psychic objects. Each brother becomes indispensable witnesses to the other’s ego, undertaking the onerous affective labour of recognition in ways that render separation increasingly difficult to imagine. Brotherhood thus becomes a claustrophobic and internally recursive affective system in which care is reconfigured as Orwellian surveillance, intimacy as containment, dependency as a relational structure maintained by harm. The brother is simultaneously responsibility and rival, counterpart and counterbalance, object of preservation and possession, of desire and destruction. He is less a discrete subject than an extension of his kin, a living repository for his guilt, longing, resentment, obligation and projected selfhood. Niall and Ruben inhabit their siblinghood by way of enacting the retrospective effect of a prior fantasy of distribution gone awry: each is haunted by the suspicion that something essential has been allocated to the other, that identity itself has been unequally portioned at the level of origin. Gadd describes the two as ‘polar opposites’ – Niall marked by the soft-hearted, introspective self-consciousness of a fragile fifteen-year-old boy too far inside his own head; Ruben, in stark contrast, characterised by his volatility, his reckless, charming impulsivity and his comfortable physicality, present in the very way he carries himself. This asymmetry is intensified by the inverted paternal conditions under which the brothers are raised. Niall matures in the wake of paternal absence, the death of his father at the age of eight establishing a touchstone of irreparable loss which structures his later attachments as compensatory formations. Ruben, by contrast, remains ill-fatedly bound to a father whose lingering, haunting presence is no less injurious, his sense of self and relation to others organised unwittingly around an unwelcome intimacy interchangeable with violation. Stemming from patrilineal lack and ever-presence respectively, the brothers both develop a relational economy in which each appears to offer the other a kind of impossible redress. The father, in both cases, becomes what must be suffered through and survived; the brother becomes what might be lived through instead. Gadd thereby deconstructs the mainstream framework of familial intimacy, conventionally perched upon the clean promise of emotional soundness, presenting fraternity instead as a condition of psychic enclosure: a sealed and cyclical relational economy in which the distinctions between affection and abuse collapse and re-warp with increasing intensity. 

Juliet Mitchell’s theorisation of sibling trauma proves indispensable here insofar as it reorients psychic injury away from the vertical axis of the Oedipal drama and toward the horizontal violence of replacement, rivalry and resemblance. Mitchell thereby positions fraternity as a constitutive rather than secondary psychosexual structure. The sibling, for Mitchell, arrives not only as a ‘second-chance child’ (Half Man, 1.04) but as a traumatic interruption of narcissistic continuity: ‘The new baby now lying in the place it occupied will be both narcissistically loved, as more of the toddler’s self, and hated, as a replacement for itself’ (‘Siblings: Thinking Theory’, 2013; emphasis mine). Brotherhood therefore originates via the friction of a profoundly unstable oscillation between identification and annihilation, between adoration and dispossession. The sibling is simultaneously the self and the usurper of the self; ‘the same’ and intolerably ‘other.’ Mitchell’s formulation that ‘jealousy is the modus vivendi for the arrival of the “other,” the one who is different but who should have been the “same”’ resonates with particular force in Half Man, where Niall and Ruben repeatedly apprehend one another less as opposite individuals than as distorted alternate selves through whom their own deficiencies are exhibited and desires are displaced. The psychic violence of this arrangement is further intensified by Mitchell’s claim that the infantile wish for ‘narcissistic sexual union with one who is the same’ is inseparable from its countervailing fantasy of destruction, such that siblinghood becomes the site at which love and annihilation are first rendered coextensive, born together as twins. Indeed, the series achieves much of its affective intensity in its persistent blurring of fraternal intimacy and erotic identification. Mitchell’s claim that ‘the narcissistic identificatory love for the baby who is the self can, via the transitivism of childhood, become the “we are as one” of adult couples’, offers a striking framework through which to read the unstable psychosexuality saturating Niall and Ruben’s relationship. Crucially, Half Man does not present incestuous possibility as aberrant deviation from safe, traditional fraternity, but rather as fraternity’s own latent logic under conditions of traumatic enclosure and collapsed relational boundaries. J. V. Caffaro observes there is no universally agreed upon definition which serves to differentiate abusive behaviour from mutually-initiated sexual encounter between siblings (‘Treating Sibling Abuse Families’, 2004); this becomes particularly significant insofar as the series repeatedly stages encounters which refuse stable categorisation within conventional binaries of coercion and consent, aggression and desire, victimhood and reciprocity and so on. The dyadic dynamic between the brothers occupies a profoundly unstable intermediate terrain in which intimacy itself has become structurally contaminated by lineages of domination, imitation, dependency and compulsive reenactment.

Half Man 1.01, dir. Alexandra Brodski, 2026

This perversion is already present in the very first episode. It is not yet clear, in these early moments, what kind of intimacy Ruben and Niall inhabit. They are not yet legible as enemies, nor as companions in any stable sense. What is discernible instead is a tense proximity which struggles to settle into category. In 1.01, Ruben restrains Niall in a harsh headlock after the latter suggests alerting their mothers to Ruben’s father’s late-night jeering outside the house (‘Why don’t you give your old man a big hug?’). The struggle quickly acquires an arguably erotic choreography: Ruben positioned behind Niall, rocking against him as the latter remains trapped between the hard line of Ruben’s body and his older brother’s mattress. Yet the scene simultaneously regresses toward infantilism, as the boys eventually fall asleep entangled together in an image oscillating between a lovers’ embrace and childlike clinging. Niall subsequently awakens to discover a wet patch staining his boxers – an image rendered deliberately ambiguous between ejaculation and the base, bed-wetting reaction of the body of a frightened child. Such moments exemplify the series’ persistent refusal to disentangle eroticism from terror and psychic helplessness, intimacy from humiliation or desire from frameworks of childhood. Sexuality and infancy become momentarily indistinguishable. Desire appears contaminated by vulnerability; vulnerability by desire. The result is a profoundly unsettling image of psychic life before differentiation has fully occurred. The body itself becomes unreadable within this libidinal economy of fraternity, incapable of clearly distinguishing arousal, fear, identification, submission or regression.

This ambiguity festers throughout the series as Ruben repeatedly mediates, orchestrates and mutilates the boundaries of Niall’s sexual subjectivity. Sexual initiation is no longer figured as a private threshold into adult relationality, but as a heavily scaffolded scene of fraternal governance in which access to desire is routed through Ruben’s regulatory presence. The sequence in which Ruben effectively ‘takes’ Niall’s virginity by proxy is particularly disquieting, arranging for Mona, the girl he himself is sleeping with, to deflower Niall (the same girl he will go on to marry) while physically regulating his somatic responses: coaching his breathing, placing a hand upon his chest to ground him, focusing his gaze upon his own face, repositioning his body when he loses rhythm. The scene’s psychosexual logic is unmistakably triangulated. What is decisive here is not only the substitution of partners, but the structural redistribution of agency: Ruben assumes a quasi-managerial position over Niall’s embodied experience. His access to heterosexuality is thus mediated through Ruben’s controlling presence, his brother insinuated in the architecture of all future possibilities. This renders Ruben simultaneously intermediary, author and witness – but also covert object of libidinal orientation and latent point of reference. The apparent heterosexual act becomes perverted with displaced fraternal eroticism, the brother the coloniser of the psyche and the body, coming-of-age’s most charged and visceral instant now irreversibly entangled with surveillance, watched by the panoptic gaze of Big Brother.

Half Man 1.04, dir. Eshref Reybrouck, 2026

Many such instances of assault take place throughout the series, though the most violent culmination of such logic is in 1.04, in which Ruben rapes Niall in a hospital bed with his car hood ornament after threatening to ‘twist it up [his] ass without lube’ should he fail to tell him the truth. Here, the series abandons euphemism entirely and reveals the latent structure underwriting the brothers’ relationship from the outset: domination articulated through penetration, intimacy through violation, acknowledgement through bodily invasion. The existing logic of the dynamic becomes fully legible: the act does not interrupt fraternity, but reveals what fraternity has already become under the pressure of the precedent of trauma. In this sense, the scene cannot be reduced to unilateral sadism, nor the explicit dialogue deployed ‘frivolously’, as Gadd makes clear in an interview. This would be to flatten its horror into pathology. Ruben’s violence serves as an inexorable catastrophic intensification of fraternal attachment, a reenacting of the incestuous logic already embedded within his own abuse history and formulation of affection. Clementine Morgan states: ‘Incest is never an isolated event. Incest is always a family dynamic.’ (The Realm of Unreality: An Incest Memoir in Essays, 2024) She clarifies ‘if there is a child that is perpetrating incest, that child learned that incest dynamic from somewhere, and somewhere along the line it was learned from an adult’. This theory proves devastatingly resonant in this narrative context. Ruben’s abuse by his father situates incest as an inherited relational mode of intimacy, a way of apprehending closeness, interdependency, responsibility and bodily access learned through coercion and molestation and subsequently reproduced horizontally within the fraternal bond. The father’s greatest legacy is not the wound he leaves marred upon his eldest boy but the architecture through which that wound comes to organise future love; you are allowed access to the body over which you are responsible. Violence here operates as traumatic pedagogy; it reproduces itself precisely because it has become indistinguishable from the very conditions under which attachment is experienced and recognised between one another (‘This is what you’ve always wanted from me, isn’t it?’). Here is the wound gouged by the father, then. Niall is haunted by a paternal absence; Ruben by paternal persistence. This parallel is cardinal. A yawning maw lodged within the youngest boy; the eldest with his interior self stained beyond cleansing. In this sense, the series proposes a horrifying inversion of paternal function: the father fails as protective authority and is replaced by the brother as compensatory psychic infrastructure. Yet this substitution only further intensifies the burden of fraternity, because the brother cannot occupy paternal space without simultaneously contaminating it. The series thus arrives at an implicit but devastating proposition: the only cure for a father is a brother, and there is no cure for a brother.

What ultimately emerges in Half Man is therefore a vision of fraternity as unstable psychic cohabitation: two subjects trapped within an economy of identification, resentment, longing, imitation and inherited violence from which neither can fully individuate. Medieval theological discourse surrounding incest, as James Donavin notes, understood the term paradoxically as both abomination and mystical union, ‘both a sin and a way of remediating sin’. (Incest Narratives and the Structure of Gower’s Confessio Amantis, 1993) Half Man inherits something of this paradoxical logic. Fraternal intimacy within the series appears simultaneously catastrophic and salvific, violating and preservative, obscene and devotional. The brothers seek in one another precisely what destroys them: recognition, continuity, merger, absolution and the impossible fantasy of becoming whole through the body of the other.

‘I was born to watch over you / & you were born to keep my hands purposeful.’
– Bloodmercy, I. S. Jones

Encoded within every episode of Half Man is that same biblical refrain: Am I my brother’s keeper? The series’ most devastating gesture is its refusal to imagine ‘keeping’ as a benign or even coherent form of care. To keep a brother, the series suggests, is never merely to look after him. It is to monitor, regulate, preserve, possess, enable, contain and attempt to simultaneously annihilate and survive him. Can’t live with ‘im, can’t live without ‘im. Keepership is honed throughout the series as an affective relation in which nurturance becomes inseparable from domination, and whereby care mutates into a mode of psychic piloting. The brother is stewarded, and through that stewardship is loved to an abominable degree. Indeed, what renders the relationship between Niall and Ruben so profoundly discomfiting is that neither man appears fully capable of distinguishing where devotion ends and ownership begins, and neither do they seem set on drawing such a line. Gadd describes the brothers’ relationship as ‘idolatry mixed with love mixed with hatred mixed with adoration and need’. This is revealing precisely because idolatry already implies an asymmetrical structure of emotional investment: one subject becoming the site upon which another deposits meaning, reverence, dependency and psychic orientation. The brother is elevated into object-status, relic-status, transformed into something simultaneously worshipped and instrumentalised. When asked for one word to describe their dynamic, Gadd stated: ‘Contorted is one that springs to mind, but if I said loving, would you think I was insane?’ This, then, is the central tension structuring Half Man: the series does not oppose love to toxicity, but rather explores the extent to which love itself may become distorted into a coercive attachment style under conditions of childhood trauma and emotional entrapment. ‘I think for something to be toxic,’ Gadd says, ‘it has to also be intoxicating first’. What festers between Niall and Ruben is not necessarily the failure of fraternal care, but fraternal care rendered pathological through excess intimacy, asymmetrical dependency, the patrilineal wound and a sort of psychic conjoinedness from which neither brother can fully depart. 

This impossibility manifests most visibly through the series’ recurrent obsession with provision, indebtedness and material subsumption. Ruben repeatedly installs himself in the role of provider despite his own economic precarity following the loss of his rigging job, accumulating catastrophic debt in order to continue financing the lives of others (including Niall) without their knowledge. When Niall confronts him over this compulsive assumption of responsibility, Ruben’s justification is startlingly naked in its ontological simplicity: ‘Because I liked it. I liked being the provider. I knew my place in the world.’ (Half Man, 1.05) To provide is to stabilise the self through indispensability; dependence furnishes Ruben with the only stable proof of his own role. Far from simple altruism, his acts of financial self-sacrifice therefore constitute an attempt to purchase recognition through utility, to render himself psychically inerasable by suturing his presence into the material conditions of others’ survival. Debt becomes an architecture of attachment through which emotional permanence might be forcibly secured. 

‘We share everything!’ / Half Man 1.02, dir. Alexandra Brodski, 2026

Niall, meanwhile, increasingly comes to occupy the complementary position of the kept object. Jamie Bell’s observation that Ruben becomes Niall’s ‘life support system’ captures the extent to which care in Half Man functions simultaneously as affective captivity. Niall’s attachment to Ruben is irreducible to facile fear or coercion alone; rather, Ruben’s volatility acquires the paradoxical status of security. Because Ruben is feared by the world, he may in turn shield Niall from that world’s hostility. Yet protection here is inseparable from capture. Niall becomes psychically and materially entangled within Ruben’s systems of provision to such an extent that separation itself begins to register as mutilation, as severance, as betrayal. This logic surfaces explicitly during their confrontation over Niall’s university accommodation, when Ruben rejects the very premise of independent existence: ‘We share everything! I mean you’re wearing my jumper right now … You should’ve brought me with you from the start!’ (Half Man, 1.02) The statement initially performs as childish, even petulant, yet its insistence that ‘it’s not about the room, it’s about the fucking principle’ reveals something considerably more disquieting. It is not a two-mattress-childhood at stake but ontological non-separation: a refusal of psychic distinction itself, an epistemic in utero in which selfhood can only be sustained through enmeshment. To leave is intolerable because departure threatens the collapse of the shared psychic infrastructure through which both brothers remain comprehensible to one another and to themselves.

The series repeatedly materialises this non-separation through patterns of possession, inheritance and symbolic circulation. Everything Niall touches has already passed through Ruben’s hands first: clothes, lovers, money, possessions, social identity itself. Ruben kisses nearly every person Niall kisses; he orchestrates Niall’s first time; he steals the domestic future Niall momentarily weilds for himself. The effect is competitive, certainly, but more so incorporative, implicating, insinuating – as though Ruben compulsively absorbs every emerging site of Niall’s autonomy back into the fraternal dyad before it can calcify independently. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s account of male homosociality becomes especially illuminating here. Sedgwick argues ‘the use of women as exchangeable … property’ functions to cement bonds between men, revealing the extent to which heterosexual structures may conceal or serve as pretext for deeper currents of male homosocial desires, which the masculine nature deems more valuable. In Half Man, women repeatedly occupy precisely this mediating position. Mona does not inhabit the role of sexually autonomous woman within the narrative, but rather a conduit through which Niall and Ruben negotiate their own rivalry, identification, power and possession. Niall’s later affair with Mona cannot be comprehended in clean isolation; rather, it represents an attempt to access Ruben through what Ruben himself has claimed, achieved, won. To occupy his position of a man who has successfully settled in his masculinity by trespassing upon the intimate territory of his domestic life. Simultaneously, impregnating Mona (one of the few things Ruben is incapable of) offers Niall the possibility of both superseding his brother in the one way he can, and simultaneously giving Ruben the child his infertility denies him, reappropriating heterosexual reproduction itself into the convoluted economics of this libidinal fraternal economy. 

The logic of keepership thus increasingly collapses distinctions between care and colonisation of the brother. Unbeknownst to Niall, during a fourteen-year-long rift between the two, Ruben pays for his bedsit, his therapy (‘The therapy I used to talk about him?’; Half Man, 1.04), his car, his Christmas presents. Debt in Half Man therefore functions past the economical and into the ontological: to owe the brother becomes indistinguishable from being constituted by him. Jessica Benjamin’s theorisation of domination as a distorted response to the crisis of recognition offers a crucial scaffolding through which to comprehend this relation. Benjamin argues ‘the most familiar conflict that arises from differentiation is between the need to establish autonomous identity and the need to be recognized’ (The Bonds of Love, 1980), and that domination itself shows its face precisely when subjects attempt to resolve this conflict without relinquishing dependency. The subject seeks autonomy whilst simultaneously refusing the separateness of the other, ‘possessing or controlling’ them in order to avoid the psychological desolation of aloneness. Ruben’s behaviour throughout Half Man repeatedly enacts this impossible negotiation. He cannot tolerate separation because separation threatens annihilation; yet he equally cannot sustain mutuality because mutuality requires recognising the brother as genuinely separate and unimplicated in one’s own self. Consequently, affection mutates into possession. Financial provision becomes a mode of management. Protection becomes surveillance. Violence becomes a means of retaining a form of closeness while repudiating unmasculine vulnerability. Benjamin goes on to claim violence operates as an attempt ‘to resolve the issues of autonomy and recognition while denying the other’s subjectivity’. This is certainly felt in Ruben’s wounded aggression toward Niall, which tends most commonly to crop up at moments when Niall threatens an independent subjecthood: leaving home, forming romantic attachments, imagining futures beyond the dyad. Violence becomes a desperate strategy for preserving a twinned continuity while simultaneously disavowing dependency itself. In this sense, Ruben’s brutality does not signify emotional absence but catastrophic overinvestment and cognitive dissonance. He requires Niall too intensely to allow him autonomy, yet cannot articulate this dependency except through domination, humiliation, sabotage, financial superiority or bodily invasion. The violence of keepership, then, is that the brother must remain close enough to guarantee psychic survival, but objectified enough to prevent abandonment. The little brother is a favourite toy one cannot grow out of and will not put down.

Crucially, however, Half Man refuses to position Niall as a poor, passive, pristine victim within this structure. Benjamin’s discussion of domination insists that both parties become organised around complementary relational positions: one asserting a joint-selfhood through control, the other relinquishing his own selfhood in favour of the safer doublet. Niall repeatedly resists Ruben’s authority and cruel hand while simultaneously relying upon the very structures which imprison him. He accepts Ruben’s money, his protection, his emotional counterbalance, his rare oblations of tenderness. It would be dishonest to describe their dynamic as one-sided when closer to truth is a reciprocal affective capture: a closed affective circuit in which the brothers require one another precisely through the mechanisms which shatter them. To keep a brother, then, is not to safeguard his happiness or to encourage his prosperity, but to direct him; blind him, take him by the shoulders and point him where you both need him to go. Keepership becomes a form of existential governance through which care and cruelty, guilt and shame, animosity and codependency, violence and validation circulate and permeate indistinguishably. One comes to find that neither brother can survive the fracturing of this structure, even as the structure itself marks survival impossible.

‘A brother is born for adversity’ – Proverbs 17:17

The distribution of suffering between Niall and Ruben is, as is evident, manifestly asymmetrical; Ruben’s violence and abuse cannot necessarily be transposed into any straightforward moral equivalence with Niall’s evasive transgressions, self-sabotages, or forms of passive complicity. Yet the series is careful not to allow this asymmetry to resolve into a sacred ethical geometry of victim and perpetrator either. Both brothers are intensely invested in the maintenance of a structure of suffering which wounds them. Victimhood in Half Man is thereby an existential orientation: a mode of self-constitution predicated upon the continual narration, citation and reopening of injury. What Richard Gadd is essentially interrogating within the series is what kinds of selfhoods are made available when one lives inside the role of the injured party.

This question is particularly acute in relation to Niall, whose interiority increasingly appears built around injury as both excuse and root cause. Upon discovering Ruben has been secretly financing significant portions of his adult life, the initial response is one of puerile moral indignation. The force of the reaction is disproportionate to the revelation itself, suggesting what is truly at stake is not simply the embarrassment of financial dependency, but the absolute collapse of a precarious and carefully maintained fantasy of autonomy. Niall stalks his converted childhood bedroom – a room he and Ruben once shared – smashing possession upon possession paid for by his brother’s pocket. Alarm clocks, CD players – all are sacrificed in his tantrum fit, accompanied by a verbal breakdown in which Niall screams at his mother: ‘I hate him! I fucking hate him! … I’m his bitch! I’m his bitch!’ (Half Man, 1.04) The oscillation between repudiation and identification is decisive. At the end of the day, he is nothing more than a little brother who has lost the game; this will always be his first and only role to play. The rage therefore originates at the point of narcissistic injury. To owe the brother is intolerable because it punctures the fantasy of self-authorship – of a life without training wheels or your big brother’s hand hovering out of sight but no less ready to catch. This anxiety recurs later when Ruben proposes Niall repay a debt through domestic labour. Niall’s immediate recoil – ‘You want me to be your bitch?’ (Half Man, 1.05) – again translates indebtedness into erotic subordination. The language of repayment is immediately converted into the idiom of humiliation, suggesting that, for Niall, dependency is never purely material but always already symbolically charged, always already inscribed within hierarchies of domination and shame.

Half Man 1.04, dir. Eshref Reybrouck, 2026

Yet the series repeatedly and consciously complicates this interpretation by demonstrating the degree to which Niall simultaneously seeks, reproduces and seemingly requires the very structures he claims to abhor. Dependency functions both as grievance and lifeline. The brother is resented precisely because he provides what is needed. Such contradictions invite a broader consideration of the relationship between victimhood, complicity and identity. Throughout the series, Niall repeatedly returns to the childhood court case involving Ruben as what he describes as ‘the turning point’ and ‘the seed of all of [his] issues’. (Half Man, 1.04) The ‘seed’ becomes a master narrative through which the contingencies of adult life are retrospectively organised into a coherent story of injury. Significantly, Niall’s mother repeatedly challenges this interpretation. ‘You’re always talking about the seed’, she remarks, before accusing him of being ‘too busy blaming everyone else’ for his problems. Her harshest attack is in her rejection of Niall’s own  account of his psychotic breakdown, describing his institutionalisation as a stint in a ‘madhouse’ rather than ‘hospital’: ‘You made yourself sick … You became obsessed with it.’ When Niall shouts ‘I was ill!’, she responds with a dismissive wave of her hand: ‘You were self-involved.’ The series does not ask us to take a side here. Instead, Half Man remains deeply interested in the possibility that suffering itself can become narcissistically organised, a concept Richard Gadd is certainly no stranger to, as can be seen in his previous semi-autobiographical work Baby Reindeer (2024). Bell’s observation that Niall is frequently ‘manipulative and selfish’, and that many of his relationships revolve around ‘what he can get from people and what they can shoulder for him’ points toward a more uncomfortable truth: victimhood may become attractive because it offers coherence. To be injured is to possess a story, and to possess a story is to possess a self.

René Girard’s theory of victimage is pertinent here. Girard identifies the scapegoat as a figure through whom collective tensions are displaced, ritualised and rendered meaningful. The victim acquires a paradoxical status: simultaneously powerless and empowered by his own pain. Ruben is treated within Niall’s psychic economy as the origin point of suffering itself, the figure to whom every wound can be traced. Yet Ruben also constructs himself as a sacrificial figure: provider, protector, self-abnegating agent of care whose violence is retrospectively reinterpreted as a form of burden-bearing. This competition is rendered visible through the series’ parallel trajectories of self-destruction. Ruben externalises injury: rage, violence, destruction. Niall turns inward: drug abuse, compulsive unsafe sex, obsessive thinking. Injury thereby circulates between them, ever redistributed rather than resolved. Victimhood and perpetration thereby cease to designate clean labels and instead become positional effects within a shared system of affective exchange. What renders Niall particularly compelling in this formation is the extent to which his identity remains structurally tethered to Ruben even in moments of apparent autonomy. Bell’s description of him as ‘living as several different people and … not comfortable with any of them’ articulates this fragmentation precisely. Niall’s repeated attempts at self-reinvention – student, father, author, husband – all fail to acquire durable ontological weight because they remain shadowed by a far older and far more ‘primal’ structure of recognition, as Gadd puts it. Niall’s sense of coherence remains dependent upon Ruben’s gaze, upon his approval. ‘It pains you,’ Ruben tells him, ‘to know that all your achievements fill you with a void, whereas a smile from me fills you with all the fucking energy you need’. (Half Man, 1.04) Award, career mobility, self-reinvention – all indeed fail to provide satisfaction to Niall because they cannot replace the original structure through which meaning was first constituted in boyhood (‘It’s the only thing I’ve ever felt’, Half Man, 1.06).

This dynamic is perhaps most starkly condensed in the Freshers’ Week phone call. Isolated, miserable and struggling to adapt, Niall instinctively returns to Ruben as his primary site of regulation and comfort. The exchange is remarkable in its economy. Ruben immediately understands what Niall cannot bring himself to say. ‘You only need to ask’, he tells him. ‘Just say the words.’ (Half Man, 1.02) Eventually, after prolonged hesitation, Niall blurts out: ‘I need you’, before hanging up instantly, hand-over-mouth, unable to cope with the abominable truth of his own admission. The scene encapsulates the paradox at the heart of the series: Niall experiences dependence upon Ruben as humiliating, infantilising, self-destructive and frustrating, yet remains incapable of imagining himself outside it. The bond survives every injury because the injury confirms the bond. By the series’ conclusion, the question is no longer whether one brother can survive the other. It is whether either brother possesses a self that exists independently of the wound the other has left behind. Within such a configuration, victimhood no longer designates a position external to agency but serves as a dynamic and recursive structure through which the self is continuously assembled. Suffering ensures that neither subject within the dyad can fully exit its orbit.

‘We were the first two brothers, / I the first dead man and you the first / fratricide.’
– Inscriptions Cain Read in Abel’s Eyes, Silvina Ocampo trans. by Jason Weiss

I find myself returning to the Cain-and-Abel structure time and again, the origin of fraternity, where Gadd’s narrative logic acquires its most archaic inheritance. Abel is the first murder on God’s new earth, though he is also the one through whom fraternal violence first becomes narratable as moral inevitability, the figure whose elimination retroactively stabilises the meaning of the brother as victim. The scriptural designation of fratricidal violence is marked, in its Greek translational lineage, by the term ἀνθρωποκτόνος, a word whose semantic field exceeds the merely juridical ‘manslayer’ it is all too commonly translated as to approach the sacrificial register in which killing is already shadowed by a logic of offering and taking. In certain classical contexts, as in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, this same semantic drift allows human destruction to be incorporated into the framework of sacrifice, where the slain body persists as necessity. In Gadd’s Half Man, this sacrificial residue bears considerable weight beneath the surface of contemporary storytelling. For Niall and Ruben, injury is continually converted into justification, and justification into renewed intimacy. One is incapable of existing unimplicated in the other, as implication itself is what constitutes the boundary of the self.

Half Man 1.06, dir. Eshref Reybrouck, 2026 / Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, 1619

A brother bends himself over another in a dim interior that might be a room or might be the remembered reconstruction of one – somewhere between domestic chamber and the spectral architecture of religious myth-world, where childhood objects and adult consequences are no longer separable in their provenance. The light behaves badly here – diffuse, uncertain – everything slightly overdetermined by atmosphere, the air thick with implication. The movement is slow, none of the punctuation of rupture, proceeding with uncomfortable familiarity, the gesture rehearsed so often – across arguments, silences, reconciliations that were never quite so – that it has shed all promise of surprise, a kind of weary competence clinging to it. Violence in this place is habit, is careless, is intimacy outlived and outlasted. There is a strange epistemic confusion in its stillness, an inevitability and a monumental, omnipresent waiting – as though nearness has become indistinguishable from threat, and threat from recognition, and recognition from something like care, though none of these terms quite retain their boundaries anymore. Beneath him, the younger does not resist in any register of resistance legible to you or to me. Perhaps he does not know how, or does not want to know how. His body offers no clean opposition, only a kind of compromised responsiveness, sensation uncertain of its own category. Breath contracts unevenly. The click of a glottal stop.

Elsewhere – though perhaps only the kind of elsewhere produced by retrospect and by narrative co-option – a brother lies still in a barn in rural Scotland; it is his wedding day. The stillness is not peaceable; it is too exact and too deliberate in its negation of movement to be mistaken for rest. The body is arranged with the unsettling neutrality of something which has ceased to bother negotiating its own position in the world. Nothing resolves into clarity because nothing is permitted to conclude. The circumstances accumulate themselves, layering aftermath upon aftermath until the distinctions between what has happened and what is happening and what will happen become almost ornamental. There were or are or will be two still bodies in the barn; there is no other version of this story. But for now there is one. It is a catholic and ubiquitous scene, which Rilke depicts as so: ‘The brother did something to me that my eyes didn’t see. He veiled the light. He hid my face with his face. Now he is alone. I think he must still exist, for no one does to him what he did to me. I sense my older brother lies awake as if accursed. Night offers itself to me, not to him.’ (‘The Book of a Monastic Life’, 1905)

Featured Image: BBC

By Bel Radford

Are bad people concerned by their own badness? Is guilt therefore what makes a person good? Philosophers have spent a great deal of time agonising over the anatomy of goodness in both character and behaviour, and I grew fond and heartily committed to this pastime at the age of fourteen when I became convinced I was an axe murderer. I had not, in fact, murdered anybody, but this did not help. I believed that on a conveyor belt deep within the body-packing district my soul was being assembled by some god, or maybe an angel, or  transcendental mind-body sweatshop worker whose performance had lapsed in the assembly of me. My brain had naturally, therefore, been deployed squarely into the wrong body, a very bad body belonging to a very bad person. My mind was sure of this, connected to my new body via a kludgy workaround that surged with vague but assured notions that, unfortunately, I was indeed inhabiting a psychopath. As such, guilt was all I felt, and if guilt is indeed the measure of goodness, I, a 21-year-old pervert, killer, potential terrorist and anything else bad and ending in ‘ist’ appear to be Jesus. Regrettably, loyal disciples, your God is corrupt, and as such it is now her turn in the confession booth. Forgive me, me, for I have sinned!

Reddit (PhD), the black hole of any and every shameful bodily query bore the brunt of the majority of my mea culpa. Some very real searches spanning the past six years submitted as evidence:

 (1st June 2024, 12:00am) Google: am I a bad person quiz

(1st June 2024, 12:02am) Google: am I a bad person quiz free

 (22nd February 2023, 2:41am) Google: if I find a dog cute does that mean I’m attracted to it but I really don’t want to be

(19th October 2020, 3:18pm) Google: intrusive thought about hurting someone but I don’t mean it but because I thought it does it mean I secretly want to

(6th April 2026 8:26pm) Google: how likely is it for someone to plant your DNA at a crime scene

(9th May 2025 10:46am) Google: what to do when you’re so scared of your own brain

The misfortune of being palmed off with an incorrect brain, I’ve found, can be rather insulting to anyone trying to establish themselves as a functioning member of society- a degree-haver becoming an adult and a writer whose bread and butter might be aided by a coherent and unified brain. It’s difficult to find and cultivate a voice when one’s brain is garbling lies or half-truths or elusive absolutisms that are so combative to establishing any semblance of selfhood. One might console themselves by noting that the Kafkas, Bukowskis, Plaths and Woolfs of the world were on the whole, rather unwell, and perhaps, suicides aside, the odds are in my favour. Yet, their particular strains of derangement tend toward the more languid and romantic, and alas I was left to reckon with the fact that my iteration of madness is, by comparison, profoundly unsexy. In the end, the doctor  alleged that I was in fact in my own body, it was just an obsessive and a compulsive one.

The most frustrating aspect of such a strange affliction is how farcical it appears to any level-headed confidante. Your body can’t really move past the bad thoughts it conjures, if any distressing thought passes (as they so often do), they cannot pass as entities separate from one’s character, the obsessive brain lurches at the live-wire thought, its fleshy neurotic muscle seizes into tetany, incapable of release until untangled and swiftly attended to. As such, loved ones will inevitably end up chewing the cud with you at one point or another, reasoning with you as to why it’s almost certainly impossible you submitted a sex tape alongside your dissertation, mostly owing to the fact one simply does not exist. Or that you’ve been composing and uploading finely-tuned manifestos detailing elaborate bomb plots to the dark web in your sleep. Perhaps even that when you’ve forgotten what you had for dinner yesterday you’ve also blocked out one of your potentially routine killing sprees, and that knock at the door was really a SWAT team and so on and so on.

(May 17th 2022 5:48pm) Google: is it normal to have the same thought over and over again

(May 17th 2022 5:52pm) Google: i think my brain is making up wrong memories

Very soon, you turn inward and stay there. Days are consumed by the sorting and resorting of thoughts until Sisyphus and Prometheus become your brothers in arms. It’s a breakless shift employed as your mind’s own crooked bathroom attendant, hunched and sour and deliberating between the noose or bottle of Prozac when you clock off in twelve lifetimes time. You may even come very close to asking a frightened stranger to take you to a nice field to gaze upon the Salinas River and dream of tending to rabbits before they shoot you in the back of the head. Because, you see, obsessive compulsive disorder is a beast fattened by shame, and I was shovelling heaps of piping hot shame into my brain’s mouth’s stomach. The particular cruelty of this symptom is that in suppressing any form of release, it becomes a self-sustaining feedback loop, transmitting the knowledge that, no, you cannot seek comfort because you certainly do not deserve it, and to speak of it would be to die of it.

This is where many are often left, chugging around a circular track miles away from the nearest doctor’s office or much semblance of real civilisation- and this is where we must castrate the beast (shame, naturally, lives in the testicles) with its only known predator, the willing ear of another. Unfortunately, this feels a great deal like seppuku, the samurai auto-disembowelment ritual, which at points feel preferable to the possibility of a doctor carting you off to a high-security prison for crimes against humanity, the likes of which never before seen by man nor beast.

(January 9th 2024 9:49am) Google: do drs know about intrusive thoughts or will they think I’m crazy

(October 14th 2025 9:49am) Google: how to talk to a dr about pure ocd

(September 9th 2021 7:24pm) Google: intrusive thoughts

(October 14th 2025 10:02am) Google: can a gp diagnose ocd

Obsessive compulsive disorder makes little sense to most, and the prospect of becoming convinced you’re really a serial killer because you listened to a true crime podcast despite being a fourteen year old, very sensitive, very neurotic girl is superficially quite funny. But one’s obsessions do feel like immutable facts one has to coax out of themselves and attempt to disprove before the brain consents to think about anything else again, albeit temporarily. Obsessions do feel inextricable with, or definitive of, one’s character- however they tend to be the precise inverse of it, the obsessive and compulsive brain fixates on that which it fears most to be true, making the thoughts not confessions but rather fundamental contradictions of one’s core values. This is at least what the less fun BuzzFeed quiz at the doctors office and a formal diagnosis eventually confirmed. 

I suspect the vast majority of readers will not be suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder, and may be reading confused or acutely concerned, which is okay, this is the piece of writing I sailed the seven seas of search engines looking for, and perhaps it will be that for a few sitting somewhere someplace. Moral scrupulosity is, however, a universal dread, and so I leave you with this: bad people tend not to be concerned with their own badness. Our goodness is entirely in our hands. It is not characterised by cognitive misfires of unrelenting bad thoughts, it is comprised of curated choices, a lifelong project exacted through continuous self-examination. One must let thoughts pass, weatherlike, observed as the waste product of a brain untethered to character. As Socrates, perhaps the North star of ethical life, died positing: the un-examined life is indeed not worth living, so perhaps there is something to be learnt from the obsessive and compulsive brain? The disorder is indeed a disorder, not a moral saviour in paradoxical disguise, yet, it boils down to the purest, most potent expression of Socratic self-interrogation available to man- morally rigorous albeit factually deranged. 

Featured Image – detail from Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas

By Matty Timmis

There must be a word for this feeling. In limbo? That’s two words. Besides, I think it’s a bit too general. Bittersweet? Getting closer, but it’s not quite capturing the listlessness of this moment. Listless? I’ve always been that, and there’s a surge of emotive force here, it ignores this parade of jaded memories, carouselling through empty, waking nights. Sad?, sanguine?, silly? – Saudade! – Am I allowed a Portuguese word? Well that’s the best I can come up with so lets try and make do (yes I did go on holiday to Brazil, no I never bring it up at parties or in articles).

What is saudade I hear you ponder. Google’s unwanted AI answer-er describes it as ‘a deep, melancholic emotional state of nostalgic longing for a person, place, or thing that is absent – a presence of absence’. It’s one of those wonderful words that needs a slightly pompous and pontificating definition to be translated – I imagine it’s a bit like trying to translate ‘leng’ into Japanese. Let us fall into the clutches of this AI answer then, because I never want to look at the OED website again, and make do with this definition. As life’s locomotive puffs down its rickety rails, lets try and take stock, try and read the smoke signals of the cusp, try and understand these last 3 years.

We’re all, or somewhere around a third of you dear readers at least, are off. Up-up and away – setting our mighty sights upon the big, bad, bold, brave world. Are you shitting yourself? I am, but I’m going to play it off as some trapped wind, and try to keep up the masquerade. But how? There’s no denying that we’re wandering into a pretty gnarled old world, one that has precious little sympathy, understanding, or opportunity, one that would probably have a reduced to clear label on it if it were in Tesco – hey maybe that’s why we’re getting dickie bellies! The good thing is, and what we must bear in mind, is that the £60,000 we’ve spent on these degrees have equipped us with some truly invaluable life skills to overcome these heady hazards. I for one am now an undisputed expert in not doing my washing up, I’ve developed an enviable skill of waking up at 11:30 and sticking my head out my bedroom window for a fag, and am unbelievably competent at lying through my teeth on the mitigating circumstances coursework form.

So did I enjoy uni? Am I glad I came? Am I going to miss it? And what is this pit in my stomach? I suspect folks, that saudade may well be swirling through the smoking area, enveloping us in a wistful mist. What I can tell you for certain is before I had some kind of hazy, ill thought out, more than likely banal purpose, but now I’ve achieved it it’s even less clear what it meant, I have even less clue of what to do with it. Can I confess to being a bit scared of what real life, without seminars and a student loan, is going to make of me and what I’m going to make of it?

As the carnival winds up you’re asked to complete the NSS. I put in my two bits, but only because they wouldn’t stop bloody phoning me. My reflections clarified little however. I mentioned in one of my answers that they seemed more enthusiastic in seeking course feedback than they had ever been in teaching it. I suspect, however, the dear old English faculty is sadly about to be marginalised by encroaching AI to near enough nothingness, and I’m not so cruel as to wind a supercilious old grandpa as he wheezes his last breath.

Besides I don’t think this spell of saudade is derived from the loss of my actual degree. The heavens forbade that it ever took more than a quarter of a rotation of the hamster wheel that powers my mind’s muffled neurons. Being a student is probably more tied up in those cliches; the pub and the park, a pretentious film or a rowdy houseparty; a misguided snog in a houseparty basement. It is wrapped up in your friends, who are unquestionably knobheads, but who, for better or worse, surround your every waking (and sometimes sleeping) moment. It is bound up in the infinite, easy, roll of chances that spring up as you straddle youth and adulthood.

I am not a geographist, but I know some poor lost souls who are, so please excuse this topographical metaphor. Life’s a bit like a river (full of shit pumped in from fatcat companies and parasites); when you are a student you are cheerfully, unknowingly, carving out your v-shaped valley. Life babbles and bounces and flows, and it all seems so effortless, your forward flow undeniable. I fear, however, we’re now entering the middle section of the life of a river, gravity and velocity have abandoned us, we lollop and get lazy, meandering through bullshit, as our flow turns to a crawl that starts to look stagnant on the surface. 

So how are we to cope with this strange saudade-an sensation? Should we go chasing waterfalls? Wherever they may take us, and hope that life won’t break us! I for one don’t fancy the spray and thunder of all that drama. As I write this, Alice in Chain’s ‘Rooster’ has come on, striking I find, a much more appropriate, cathartic tone. It’s shit, and it’s all over much too quickly, but what preceded won’t preclude what follows. We’re deep in the soup right now, right in the thick of it, swimming through the churn of feelings all muddled up. As the boil turns to a simmer and distance loosens the flow, I think we’ll probably miss all this more actually. But nostalgia or longing is not what we’re battling. Right now we’re (or at least I am) gripped by saudade, and the further we get from the presence of being a student, the less we’re going to feel the sting of its absence. 

There’s smoke on the horizon, I’m sure of it, so put up, plod on, and don’t bury yourself in the field of dreams. Skin up with me and stick on the most angsty track you can think of. A new day is a new world, and whilst we can’t direct the drift, we’ll cast off nonetheless. The past will propel, and we’ll shed the weight of what went wrong. Above all else, remember you can’t hold the stream, the smoke, or the saudade in your hands. If you could, all would be the same, forever. I for one don’t have the time for that kind of eternity. 

As a footnote, I could just do an MA and give myself a saudade extension. 

Featured Image: Pinterest 

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.

—

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