Category: Perspective

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

By Robertha Green Gonzalez

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

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

So which is more truthful? 

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

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

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

Featured Image: Ella Wimer

By Tess May

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.”

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

By May Thomson

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured Image: Honor Adams

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

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

Bourdain has his noodles and coke, I have my greasy spoon. All I want after a night bracing the cold in the name of a dance and drinking  is a good breakfast. A proper breakfast. No avocados. Thick white bread and conspicuous eggs. Some form of repackaged potatoes, fried. Clattering of cheap cutlery on wellworn plates. The greasy spoon has been the hangover haunt of ravers, drinkers, and night-owls for as long as people have found only a tenner left in their wallet after a night of lambasting the liver. The rich history of these unassuming cafeterias spell out an answer for our ‘identity crisis Britain’ of 2026, and celebrate the contributions people from around the world and across the social ladder have made to British cuisine and culture. With a round of toast at the ready, a strong brew at hand, and an endless supply of bubble-and-squeak,  welcome to Caff Society. 

The infamous egg-sandwich a la ‘Withnail and I’ – the opening of the best British film ever made bases itself in a 1960s caf 

The greasy spoon was born out of a hunger for cheap and filling food, fast. Against the embers of WWII and its subsequent rations, a new war-time industrial workforce demanded feeding. Labouring round the clock, Britons needed places that could fill their bellies up at any hour. A far cry away from the post-war lagging vegetal ration at home, they intrigued workers with plates of hot food full of carbs and meat. These workers’ cafeterias, soon baptised to ‘caffs’ –   cafes being too continental – unquestionably became a post-war phenomenon, transforming their one-time necessity into a perennial staple of the high street. With populations from across the world arriving in Britain in search of new opportunities, these eateries were repurposed by immigrants, serving British bellies with the food they knew, with a few twists. The arrival of Italians in the UK made Britain start to switch the teapot for the mokapot, leading to the caff embracing the pillars of Italian coffee culture: cheap and strong coffee, served at a bar, quick no-fuss service, and a brief chit-chat to start the day. As Greeks, Cypriots, Turks and more came ashore, each country’s cafe culture was brought into this new British scene. Caffs slowly moved beyond their utilitarian purpose and became the epicentre for newly emerging immigrant populations to establish home on new soil, whilst also integrating with the locals and their cuisine. To this day, most greasy spoons are owned by families who came to Britain in search of something new, displaying menus that celebrate both the beige comfort of Britain and traditional breakfasts from across the globe. Sausages sit next to shatsuka, jacket potatoes next to pasta al forno. All is equal on the laminated pages of the caff menu. Founded on the promise of cheap, warm and hearty food, the greasy spoon has been a faithful hallmark of the highstreet. Serving savvy shoppers, bulking builders with long cold shifts ahead, and flustered mums in search of a hot drink and satiating slice of cake for the school run, the greasy spoon is a truly egalitarian eatery. 

As the post-war industrial workforce began to decline, the greasy spoon was able to keep the friers on by continually meeting a British appetite for cheap food. The austerity of the 80s, strikes, changing pallets of aspirational metrosexual cityslickers, the greasy spoon soldiered it all. Cheap, filling food with familiarity, if not nostalgia. It is not uncommon to go to a greasy spoon and see ‘school cake and custard’ on offer, satiating our hunger for cheap thrills and blasts from the past. What these slabs of stodge consist of is besides the point; the e-number infused fluorescent pink icing and molten custard bring back all the child-like wonder of a cold schoolhall in a polyester sweatshirt. The greasy spoon caters to both our bellies and minds – something trendy cafes and bohemian attitudes fail to do. Walls are decorated with more nostalgic relics. Mario’s Cafe (Kentish Town, est. 1989/1958) boasts a collection of Italian merchandise, photos of the band Madness, who used to hang out in Mario’s with Saint Ettienne, and PEZ machines all serving to delineate the personal history of its Italian owners, and its place within pop culture over the years. Prints of favourite footballers, drawings by local children or the next generation of caff owners, and relics from the homeland all serve in the greasy spoons’ nostalgia trip, physicalising a personal yet shared history of Britain. Part of the nostalgia for those effervescent, unlocatable ‘simpler times’ is the community that we somewhere along the line had been told had been lost. Enter the caff and the community is right there, alive as ever before. 

Unified in an appetite for a quick, no-frills meal on a fornica table, striking up conversation in a greasy spoon is encouraged, if not expected, amongst those who dine there. The cheap promise of the greasy spoon solidifies its position as a sanctuary for many who otherwise might not talk to others as frequently. It is no wonder the first lines of Withnail and I are said in a caff as I’s hangover epiphany takes head. It is in looking at all these faces, all these Londoners, that he realises his place among them, and the state of the world he has found himself in. Be it through working unsociable hours, the unaffordability of congregating in other spaces for long periods of time, or elderly isolation, the caff provides a space for all to sit, receive something warm with a smile, and to talk to a stranger whilst passing unbranded sauces back and forth. It is for this reason many artists, like Saint Etienne or Gilbert and George, who refuse to eat in their home and prefer their local Market Cafe, have come to love the caff. Not only does the promise of a hot meal appeal to the starving artist, but they are fertile grounds for inspiration due to the heart of the caff being found in the people that make and frequent them. Local and tourist alike commune under the roofs of these community sanctuaries, filling in the space for community centers, workers cafeterias, and social clubs when the state fails. 

However, it hasn’t been all golden for the greasy spoon. Whilst the greasy spoon helped change British pallets by serving their owners’ homeland favourites alongside British staples, British snobbery can never be underestimated. Caffs are working-class institutions and it wasn’t long until their locations and plates were going to be scorned for being rough, unnutritious, and showcasing an unpolished Britishness.  

There is a lot to be said for the unimaginative quality of British cuisine (‘bombs flying overhead’ springs to mind), but there is a time and a place for it, particularly if you’re hard up or facing a long, laborious shift ahead.  As more Britons began working the 9-5 in offices, the need for a hearty fry-up breakfast, or an omelette, chips, and salad lunch, waivered, and palates became more aspirational with this turn away. Rationing gave British food a bad name, blighting any chance of British food actually having a renaissance – note how during the 90s ‘Cool Britannia’ era, all touched by Britain turned to gold, besides our food.  Moreover, the grease that gave these caffs their name was no longer a desirable hallmark of a good meal.  A more health conscious, aspirational Britain didn’t envision greasyspoons in its 21st century make-over. Hit with the blow of rising rents and food prices, the greasy spoon is more of a treat than ever on our high streets.  

In a climate where luxury items have been replaced by luxury experiences, even your morning cuppa has to be a signifier of your wealth, with brand name coffee cups becoming the must-have item on the morning commute. People love them for their in-n-out service, consistency across cities, and variety of different combinations to give your day a sugary caffeinated start. Each coffee shop has its own unique appeal, from a trendy logo to being matcha pioneers. If you frequent Blank Street coffee, your coffee won’t even be made by a person – how fantastic! Breakfast spots have transformed from a necessity and a local hub, to an overdone, overpriced experiment in the power of marketing. As a South London native, watching my local high streets succumb to this trend has further pushed the greasy spoon to the side as we favour slick coffeeshops with the familiar comfort of an instantly recognisable logo and name. The caffs of London, built off post-war spirit and optimism, have now been replaced by heartless corporations, pushing locals further away. However, there is cash to be made in nostalgia, so we can trust corporations to cash-in. Norman’s, a shallow imitation of the ‘working-class cafe, yah’, is the prime example of the co-opting of British nostalgia and working class culture in order to market an experience to audiences who want the caff ‘vibes’ without the actual grease or Common People. Norman’s hipster-facing, venture capitalist-backed attempt to gentrify the caff fell flat on its face after 5 years, despite being used by Burbury in a campaign in 2023. It’s uncanny in its hollow evocation of these institutions with owners who should have listened to Jarvis Cocker more. A picture of the England men winning the ‘66 cup is slightly too neatly hung on a freshly painted wall; no one who works there was around for that moment and there is no sense of personal attachment to anything. The signage is too curated, informed by a vision board, not picked from a list of slightly funky, slightly carnival-esq, slightly formal fonts from a signage company. There are wine bottles next to the cans of pop. It wants all the aesthetic, with none of the authenticity. British class dynamics are a contradictory, intricate, and often confounding series of movements to follow, but the love of the higher-classes to play poor will forever haunt our culture. Norman’s and other such institutions that owe their success, failure, or idea from the caff will never live like common people, they’ll never do whatever common people do, but attempt to capitalise off the uniquely British romanticisation of the common person. Norman’s failed due to its inauthenticity, bringing hope back to the local caff as customers crave the ethos that powers them on. 

I propose to embrace the current nostalgia trip trend affording greasy spoons the current attention they’re receiving – viva the greasy spoon renaissance. Instagram accounts like @cafss_not_cafes and @eggchipbeanpint are reintroducing these spaces to a younger, digital clientele to whom the greasy spoon is the relic of the past with olden times prices. We like them for their cheapness, their familiarity, and their authenticity as local establishments, but let’s take that further. Whilst my local Pret by Brixton station has responded to the fact that the local homeless population often bed down outside its doors by promising it donates to homelessness charities, The Hope, a caff on Holloway Road, boasts a sign that encourages those in need to come in from the cold and have a bite to eat, paid for by a charity pot on the counter filled by its local customers. Whilst not all caffs operate on such a charitable basis, their place as institutions that offer cheap cups of tea and toast, where cash is always king, and there are no questions asked about the length of your stay (most caffs operate on a counter service leaving tables unsurveyed by floor staff) provides refuge for many in need. They stand as a testimony to the optimism of a post-war society where local businesses could serve as local community hubs, ensuring all were well-fed – including the new arrivals to the country that took on the leases. They became the physical incarnation of Modernity Britain, a tolerant multi-cultural society that provided for all, and perhaps could help glue together the fragmented country we find ourselves in today, one sausage bap at a time. 

THE BEST CAFFS 

• Mario’s Cafe, Kentish Town (obviously) 
• The Electric Cafe, Brixton 
• Rosy Lee Irish Cafe, Tooting 
• Rick’s Diner, Oxford 
• Regency Cafe, Pimlico 

Featured Image – Pinterest

By Samara Patel

I remember the last day I spent outside without a hijab. The frigid gasps of winter were fading into a peaceful springtime. Meditating on my forthcoming decision while meandering down cobbled walkways, I remember feeling the wind rake nails against my scalp, tousling hair chaotically around my ears and mouth. I felt small, lost in a sea of people who didn’t know my commitment to my faith, the most important part of my life. They saw a girl with brown skin drowning in her decisions with a furrowed brow, and I didn’t know if they saw anything past that. I didn’t feel free without the headscarf; I felt exposed and vulnerable, small and forgettable. 

My first week of wearing the hijab outside, I kept having the feeling of being watched. I would walk hurriedly through campus, trying to outpace the sun on my way home through the easy spring air. Cherry blossoms unfolded overhead, the serene sight dampened by my rising self-consciousness. With the hijab draped over my head and shoulders, dress fluttering shyly in the wind, I tried not to scrutinize every look thrown my way, wondering if every mutter and muffled laugh was targeted at me. I wondered what generalizations were being piled onto me, if they thought I was oppressed, if they thought I was judging, or rude, or a thousand other stereotypes. 

This feeling of being watched, scrutinized because of my visible difference to the rest of society, wasn’t new. Prior to proudly wearing my Muslim identity, I had grown up as an Indian-American girl in the white suburbs of Chicago. Before I ever learned that the skin I wore was different from everyone else, I found myself drawn to the few other girls of colour in my elementary school. We never acknowledged the force that had drawn us together, never said out loud that, for some reason, we felt more comfortable around each other than our peers. We didn’t understand the implications of race, and maybe we were better for it – it was totally fine that most of the kids in our class went to the same church camp and their dads played at the same country club. We had each other when we wanted to share stories of our nanis’ cooking and favourite Bollywood songs.

I was made very aware of my differences in high school. One frustrating afternoon spent in our white-majority school, my Filipina friend ranted to me that she wished she was “just called a slur” instead of experiencing the institutional, hidden racism that made us both feel unwelcome in a way that was impossible to articulate without sounding paranoid. At that school, both of us had felt that bone-deep certainty that we were treated differently than everyone else, but carried around the awful feeling of “what if” – what if that teacher didn’t mean to be racist, what if I really am that bad of a student, what if my feelings aren’t valid? What if nobody will believe me? 

It was the same pseudo-paranoia that had been following me around for weeks after putting on the hijab. I am incredibly proud of my religion, but also incredibly aware of the assumptions now placed upon me by people who had never met me. The first friend I met up with after putting on the hijab asked me, eyeliner drawn thickly around concerned eyes, “Did your parents make you wear that?”

I had laughed slightly, my smile fading once I realized that she wasn’t joking. I took a calming sip of the hot chocolate in front of me and made myself actually consider an answer. “My mom doesn’t wear the hijab, actually. It’s her choice whether or not to put it on, to dress as covered as they want. I choose to dress modestly because I like being known by my faith.” I twisted my lips to the side, considering. “Just like how your goth clothes,” I gestured to her fashionable all-black ensemble, “let people know that you’re a theatre kid with great taste, my hijab lets people know how I conduct myself, just like my Indian jewelry lets people know that I’m proud of my heritage. I choose to dress in a way that displays my identities, and how happy I am to represent them.” 

She pouted at the thought that she was goth and we laughed it off. She never brought up the subject again. One night a few months later, preparing to walk home from the library into the frigid air, she turned to me while tying her scarf into a balaclava. “Can you teach me how you do your scarf? I want it to look elegant like that.” 

I remembered our conversation in the spring a few weeks after making the big decision. I was walking with my mother around the quiet streets of my American hometown, a green scarf covering my head, a blue scarf covering her shoulders. “You’re already all the way in England, beta. What if something happens to you? What if someone tries to attack you because you wear a hijab?” 

I smiled at her gentle, protective prodding. “I’ll be okay. I’ve been a brown girl in this town,” I flung my arms out, gesturing to Chicago, “for my whole life. I already know what it’s like to be scared around people who might not understand me.” She pursed her lips. “I know, I know you’ll be careful.” She paused, collecting her words. “It’s a brave thing to do. I’m just so worried about you.”

I hate that I have to carry my mother’s worry around. I hate that I can’t tell her about my hijabi friend who had her scarf pulled off, violently, suddenly, in the middle of the street just a town over from my university campus. I hate that her worries have so much validity. 

“By the way,” a full smile returned to my mother’s face, “I know some Indian moms in the community who want a ‘good Muslim girl’ for their sons.” 

I laughed, well aware of the trope. Yes, I wear hijab with mindfulness, and I know the stereotypes that come along with it. But I am not a “good Muslim girl,” and my mother knows that. I am not good. I am passionate, I’m angry, and I cry during rom-coms that aren’t really that sad. “Good Muslim girls” don’t exist, they are a colonial figment of the collective Western imagination. It’s the idea of every Muslim man who doesn’t take into account how difficult it is for their daughters and sisters to be “good”, to be polite all the time knowing that the second she shows a bad temperament in public, it reflects badly on her entire religion. 

My mom knows the kind of girl I am. The day I flew home from the UK to the US that fateful spring, I landed in the ever-bustling O’Hare airport. I was wearing a comfortable black hijab and fidgeting with it while listening to my own pounding heartbeat. I hadn’t told my parents 

about my decision to put it on, and was nervous about what they might think. I knew about my mom’s fears, and also my dad’s indifference to the whole idea – in the Indian family he’d

grown up with, hijab was a choice not made by many, and I wondered if he would mirror my mom’s reaction. 

They didn’t say anything about it at first, just welcomed me home with open arms and squeezing hugs. It was only after we got onto the highway when my mom started, quietly. “I had a dream about this.” 

“About what?” I questioned nervously, still fidgeting with a frayed edge of my scarf. 

“I had a dream last night that you came out of the airport wearing a hijab. And you looked… you look so grown up.” She smiled, tears in her eyes as she looked at her daughter, the girl that she knows so well. 

I stopped being self conscious about being stared at since then. The people that love me understand that putting on the scarf never changed who I was – it just made me less invisible, made my identity more clear, and put the declarations I’ve made to my God at the forefront of who I am. 

The ability to be seen for who I really am is why I wear my hijab, why I wear Indian jumkahs and eat paneer and celebrate Eid. It makes me feel at home, protected from gazes that seek to put me in a box. The people that love me, know me – and I hope anyone staring at me in public, transfixed by my brown skin and modest clothes, will know who I am as well.

Featured Image – Honor Adams

By Lily Whewell

“He had known that she would pass from his hands and eyes, but had thought she could live in his mind, not realising that the very fact we have loved the dead increases their unreality, and that the more passionately we invoked them the further they recede”

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, p. 47

The first time I read this quote in A Passage to India, it shocked me profoundly. It uprooted all my beliefs and assumptions about death and memory by challenging sayings such as ‘they will be with you in your heart’, or ‘they may physically be lost, but your memories of them are not’. The thought that the more I tried to remember deceased loved ones the more they would slip away, terrified me. No one wants death to be absolute.

It is safe to say that reading this quote flung me into an existential crisis. Here, it is as if Forster is trying to suggest that being loved in life does not ensure that you – the real you – is remembered in death, but can taint the memories of you in the minds of those who knew and valued you. The greater the love, the greater the loss is a well is a commonly cited phrase. However, I always wanted to believe that this loss is only in a physical sense and not in a spiritual way.

So, as Forster suggests, if being loved cannot save us from being forgotten, then what can? The Fayum Portraits offer us an interesting perspective. Painted between the 1st and 3rd centuries and mostly found in the Fayum region in Egypt, these portraits capture people with an uncanny sense of reality and vitality ‘as if they have just tentatively stepped towards us’ (John Berger, Portraits, p. 9). They were placed on top of the coffins of the dead to act as a marker of identity for their journey to the kingdom of Osiris, and to serve as a remembrance tool for the family and friends they left behind. Although it is difficult to discern how far the artists of these portraits captured the likeness or ‘mimesis’ of their subjects in the absence of photographs to compare them to, their two-pronged function as an early ‘passport photo’ (Berger, p. 8) and an aid to memorialisation suggests that an accurate representation of reality was imperative. The Fayum portraits were produced centuries before the Renaissance, when the function of portraits underwent a major evolution to no longer simply depict an individual’s physical appearance but also their ‘charisma’ and inner virtues.

In the twenty-first century, we now have the ability to take photos which can capture the likeness of an individual to an accuracy arguably unachievable by painted or drawn portraiture. However, what is remarkable about the Fayum portraits in contrast to their digital descendants is their survival. This was a point highlighted by art historian Simon Schama in discussion of the question “Why portraits still matter?”, discussed during a Sotheby’s Talk in 2023. Schama suggested that in an age where images simply disappear after twenty-four hours on Snapchat and we are reliant on ‘the cloud’ for the storage of our photos, the worry is that the images we create and collate digitally will someday be lost. It is indeed common practice to put a photograph of the deceased on the front page of printed orders of service for funerals and memorials – maybe our modern-day equivalent to the Fayum portraits? Nonetheless, surely the innate value of works of art means that we are more inclined to ensure the survival of a painted or drawn portrait over a digital one?

Unfortunately, for everyone to have a portrait painted or drawn is an unattainable reality. However, a consideration of the Fayum portraits, at least to me, acts as a prompt to move away from a reliance on the digital to capture yourself and your loved ones in an analogue form. Portraiture is one way of eternalising your physical self whereas writing, specifically private, personal writing, offers a more accessible way of ensuring that your essence does not ‘recede’. Anything from poetry to quotidian prose can become a vehicle through which the recollections of the deceased can avoid slipping into ‘unreality’.

However, the effectiveness of using personal writing as a way of eternalising the reality of a person is contingent on two factors: the writing has to be contained in a physical body to increase its chances of survival, i.e. in a notebook or in a paper folder rather than stored digitally, and the writing has to be guided by ‘how it felt to me’ or the ‘implacable “I”’, as articulated by Joan Didion in her essay On Keeping a Notebook.

‘We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of pensees; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker’,

Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook (1968)

Just as when portraits began to be co-opted by Renaissance rulers as a visual language through which they could articulate political messages and dynastic ties when put on public display, the “I” of a notebook is lost when it is written for others. Maybe, if we all engaged in more personal, analogue modes of reflection – whether a work of art or a piece of prose – we would be more likely to win the fight against being forgotten, the essence of our person is less likely to be blurred and retold in the minds of those who outlive us.

Featured Image: Louvre Museum

By Alicia Mora de Rueda

War exposes the foundations of any society, both in its manifestation of power and its propensity for cruelty. Perhaps the most striking sign of this is the historical pattern of women in conflict: they are consistently the first to be attacked in specific, targeted ways and the last to be included in peace calculations.

This observation is not an attempt to diminish the experience of men, who bear the primary weight of frontline combat. Any conflict driven by the realities of the trenches, be this conscription, physical harm, or the general sacrifice of the male body when serving, is an absolute and central tragedy of the state. But recognising this does not mean the specific nature of violence aimed elsewhere should be overlooked. While male casualties are largely the result of kinetic engagements between armed forces, violence against women (particularly that of sexual and psychological nature) often functions as a purposeful, non-kinetic weapon. It is a tool used to accomplish a very specific military goal: the destruction of the internal cohesion and functionality of a community.

Rather than being a byproduct of chaos, it is a calculated instrument of force. We see this in the systematic recruitment of “comfort women” during the 1940s, or the use of mass rape as a tool of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and Rwanda, these being just a few examples. They are a part of the long lineage of conflicts where the harm visited upon women was not a side effect of combat; it was the combat. By turning the body into a battleground, an aggressor effectively shifts the frontline from the geographical boundary to the domestic centre. It targets the primary caregivers and the links of social life, ensuring that the war’s devastation is generational rather than just infrastructure-deep, and effectively poisons the social foundation upon which any future stability must be built. The efficiency of this strategy lies in its long-term impact; even if the governmental occupation ends, the society faces a fundamental challenge in reorganising itself at its most basic level, because the “victory” was achieved by breaking the social unit from the inside out.

But this tactical utility is followed by a predictable political pivot once the kinetic phase of conflict concludes. Diplomacy, by its very nature, requires a narrowing of focus and a prioritisation of the immediate cessation of hostilities over the resolution of deeper social trauma to function.

Thus, in this context, being “the last to be considered” is typically a result of the technical limitations of the peace process, where the urgency of reaching a consensus forces negotiators to discard any variables that cannot be easily measured or traded. For those tasked with designing a new order, the specific abuses that are inflicted upon women represent “messy” data, or in other words realities that complicate the straightforward math of territory and disarmament because they cannot be settled with a signature. In this calculus, peace is treated as a technical binary (the absence of gunfire) while the restoration of the community is categorised differently. This move recontextualises the focus from the political agenda to a charitable one and allows the formal peace process to remain streamlined, even if it remains incomplete. By shifting these issues into the realm of “humanitarian” concerns, the state effectively removes them from the political table, treating them as secondary casualties of war instead of primary peace objectives. Admittedly, there have been genuine advancements in how these issues are recognised. The inclusion of gendered crimes in international legal structures and the presence of women in peace delegations represent a significant shift toward a more comprehensive record and a growing admission that a stable state cannot be constructed on top of unaddressed atrocities.

These developments are often able to provide a legal and ethical vocabulary for violations that were once entirely ignored, and are coming to signal a slow but real evolution in global standards, as well as a transition from total impunity to at least a baseline of accountability. Yet, even with these tools, the transition to stability remains a multidimensional issue. It is often simpler for an administration to focus on the visible markers of statehood (borders, banks, and the formal structures of a regime) under the assumption that once the formal structures are in place, the rest of society will naturally be able to follow suit. The official conclusion of a war is rarely a full resolution. More often, it is just a bureaucratic milestone. By treating the specific targeting of women as a secondary issue, diplomacy settles for only a very narrow and fragile definition of stability. It treats peace as a political deadline that can be met by drawing a line under the measurable aspects of war, and leaves the unmeasurable human consequences to fade into the background of both the private home and the female body. The result is a landscape that is technically at rest, where the maps are once again redrawn and records are closed, yet the fundamental work of social reconstruction continues, largely unacknowledged, in the margins.

Featured Image: Ibrahim Al-Aorfali