T H E P R I M E R

Nicole Fan
Founding Editor-in-Chief
Designer

Jessica Peng
Poetry Editor

Mihaela Elena Man

Prose Editor

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TA B L E O F CO N T E N T S

Editor’s Letter 1
Nicole Fan
01

Window’s Edge 4
Rebecca Elves
Imagine that we’re watching a documentary & you argue 5
LE Francis
Wood Grain Waves 7
Ruthenium
Theia 8
Gwyneth Findlay
Yes, the cascades in my psyche are yours, 12
Luke Carmichael Valmadrid

02

Illumination 15
Jane Zwart
‘A Vestige of the Thoughts’: The Voices of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Remember’ 17
Jessica Peng
Invitations 20
Erin Bryant Petty
Sinai’s Goddess 22
Louise Mather
The city, after 23
Ally Le
Lost in Moscow 26
Charlie Bowden
03

Duck Pond 29
Molly J. Vander Werp
In Conversation with r beny: The Delicate Desolation of natural fiction 30
r beny & Nicole Fan
Stranger than Fiction: The Reality of Love in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay 34
Science
Elias Brockman
An Effort to Describe 37
L. Ward Abel

Our Contributors 40 1
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Editor’s Letter
Dear Reader,

Some say that endings are the most difficult, but beginnings are no easier. Every
endeavour commences with a propulsion of wilful belief and intrepid desire,
none of which are ever benign. We disrupt to create; we can’t help but do so –
our universe was born with a crack and a boom, and here we are replicating it in a
myriad of ways, making our own incursions upon paper and canvas to
invent something new amidst an already turbulent world. 

Yet, the very friction embedded into creation is also what gives rise to much of its
wonder. Whether strong or subtle, uneven forces are both all around us and
within us, carving out asymmetrical contours that have been the source of our
deepest mysteries. Scientists ponder why a simple imbalance of matter and
antimatter engendered all existence; poets contemplate how a perfectly contained
sonnet can consist of boundless depths; and no one really has an answer for why
thoughts seem to surge out of the void into the slipstream of our consciousness.
‘[I]t’s another kind of beauty,’ astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser once wrote about the
enigma of asymmetry, ‘a beauty of Becoming, not of Being’1 – and such strange
beauty is precisely what The Primer seeks to explore. 

It is fitting, then, that our first issue organically takes shape as a smooth arc
marked by unexpected swerves. Bearing the unique idiosyncrasies of their
contributors, they take us in different directions – inwards, outwards, upwards
into space – even while being tethered to the same timeless inquiries that have
intrigued people for millennia. Part One: Expansion eases us into this journey with
works of displaced mundanity: we start by forging ‘imagined paths between each
glimpse’ of the everyday in Rebecca Elves’s film, continue by noticing how ‘eyes
house undiscovered / planets & stars so bright’ in LE Francis’s poem, and
descend into uncanny undulations within Ruthenium’s evocative photography.
Such magnification of the minute is exchanged for interstellar omniscience, as
Gwyneth Findlay leads us into a swirling cosmos of lively planets – only for
expansion to collapse in on itself. As Luke Carmichael Valmadrid eloquently
captures in verse, ‘our assumptions, that all this waste would break down into
beautiful things’ have to account for the potential of being irrevocably
‘vapourised’. 

The charged velocity of our exordium thus sinks into a declension with Part Two:
Dissolution. ‘Dear God, how I want to believe’, runs Jane Zwart’s poignant line, in a
sentiment that is woven throughout these pieces of loss and vacuity. We negotiate

1 Gleiser, Marcelo. A Tear at the Edge of Creation: A Radical New Vision for Life in an Imperfect Universe. New York: Free Press, 2010. 104.
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the threshold of mortality through literature that ‘was made for ghosts, or the
other way around’ in Jessica Peng’s essay, and are suspended in stillness within
Erin Bryant Petty’s collages. ‘The moon’, Louise Mather writes, ‘is just the
moon, / there is nothing sacred’ – especially not in the midst of Ally Le’s ghostly
city, where everyone is ‘very much alive, yet we are all dead’. Even Charlie
Bowden’s intricately crafted stanzas draw our attention to unstable forces of
dissipation – we wander ‘lost in the maze of dead flower petals’, finding ourselves
‘going, going, greying, gone’. Can disappointment truly be illumination too? 

Part Three: Recalibration neither affirms nor denies this – we aren’t brought back to
any equilibrium; there is no stasis here, after all. There is only the trying. In Molly
J. Vander Werp’s poem, we thus ‘draw a cube in the sand’ and rediscover the
portal that we started with, perceiving things ‘again&again at different angles’.
An insightful conversation with r beny illuminates a metaphysical ‘spectrum that is
complex and bittersweet’ and helps us to navigate its complexity with ‘music that
can be equally delicate and soft, as it is volatile and destructive’, while an essay by
Elias Brockman on Nietzsche’s aphorisms explores how ‘the innumerable ways in
which every person, every situation, every quality and thing is strange’ need not be
resolved. Indeed, they are best left open-ended, for it is through these winding
paths that L. Ward Abel lyrically transfigures ‘burden’ into ‘bounty’, rounding off
our trajectory with a poem on the very uncertainty of our human endeavour. 

Ascent, descent, graze the tangent, and return again: thus emerged our theme of 
Inflections, a capacious word that situates itself just as solidly in the field of
geometry as it does linguistics2, meaning ‘simply, to bend, to curve’3. Each piece
within this issue does just that, twisting into unknown crevices before ricocheting
into spaces far and wide. All that’s left is for you to set them in motion with your
conscious attention, and the latent beauty within this mercurial universe will,
somewhat strangely but surely, start to unfurl.

Love, Nicole

2In mathematics, an inflection is the ‘[c]hange of curvature from convex to concave at a particular point on a curve’, and the notion of
modulation is evident in linguistics as well, where inflection involves the ‘modification of the form of a word to express the different
grammatical relations into which it may enter’. See ‘inflection, n.’. OED Online, Oxford University Press, 2022. Web. 22 Aug. 2022.
3 ‘inflect, v.’. OED Online, Oxford University Press, 2022. Web. 22 Aug. 2022.
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F I L M / R E B E C C A E LV E S

Window’s Edge

Watch the film at https://theprimer.co/issue-one/#window's-edge

Window’s Edge explores the window as a digital-architectural

threshold, using a dialogue between captured footage and
animation to reflect on the role of the virtual mediator in
our lives. The window becomes significant in this project
not only as a framing device which contains and offers a
portal to visual information intangible in person, but also
as a virtual iteration of an architectural feature which
frames the world beyond our walls. Drawings from Street
View-facilitated journeys between Venetian frescoes are
interspersed with images created looking through the
windows whose rooms I inhabit. Animation forges
imagined paths between each glimpse, while layered
window-scapes offer up constellations of tensions in
spaces between interior and external worlds. In creating
moving images within these spaces, the deadened,
mediated, unreachable world can be reanimated, and the
edges of the ways in which we might be trapped are
offered up for exploration. 

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P O E T R Y / L E F R A N C I S

Imagine that we’re watching a

documentary & you argue

that there is no mathematical expression 

of beauty, & I will try. I will say there are numbers 
which fit elegantly inside each other, inside 
themselves. & I will describe your eyes as dark 
universes, the home that nurtures every story 
I’d ever want to tell. Your eyes house undiscovered 
planets & stars so bright I can feel their heat 
as I stand nearby. & I know there is an elegant way 
to describe it all, there is a language, there is 
a hexadecimal code that knows the color 
of each planet’s home soil. There is a degree 
to your smile & an oblivious angle to your gaze
which I have learned to avoid, to remain 
in this state of both existing & not. I suppose
there are a few pixels in your phone 
that could solve for obvious, reveal fractions 
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of my heart but you are written 

into the code of the universe. Red bird, 
sunshine, nonexistence; uncertainty 
knows a state of both love & not, 
& still there is no place where 
I’m not always & already yours.

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V I S U A L A R T / R U T H E N I U M

Wood Grain Waves

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F I C T I O N / G W Y N E T H F I N D L A Y

Theia

‘The giant impact hypothesis [proposed that] toward the

end of the planetary accumulation process, the protoearth
collided with a planetary body having a substantial
fraction of its mass.’ 1

‘The Moon is thought to be the product of such a Giant

Impact. [...] I refer to this extinct impacting Moon-
forming parent planet by the name ‘Theia’, the mother
of Selene, the Greek Goddess of the Moon.’ 2
1 Cameron, A.G.W. 'From interstellar gas to the Earth-Moon system'. Meteoritics &
Planetary Science, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2001). 13.

2 Halliday, Alex N. 'Terrestrial accretion rates and the origin of the Moon'. Earth and
Planetary Science Letters, Vol. 176, No. 1 (2000). 21.

I was born the same way you were: amid violent collisions in a hot plane of
swirling gas, the accretions of our dead elders coming together to form new
life. The fabric of my being danced for millennia around a rapidly expanding
ball of fusion and flame, forming and crashing and growing anew among
billions of bits of other one-day masses, all bound wild and steady in this
new sun’s orbit.

Once, I was small. I was tiny. I was a speck of dust. I was shaken by
passing clumps of matter, tossed about in the expanse until I met other
specks of dust. They too were me, and together we became a clump, like a
pebble, like a nugget, like nothing we had known before. And then our – my
– clump met another clump, and it was also me, and in the shock of our
meeting we became one.

I continued to assemble myself, my pieces encountering each other in

the vast cloud of dust and saying, Oh, it’s you! You’re me! We’re us! The invitation
reached every piece of me suspended near my orbit, beckoning each
fragment to come home.

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Sometimes I was cold, so cold I could not explain my sensations. Other

times I was brutally hot, daring fate with my uneven shuffle through the
cosmos. I swung to and fro as my siblings coalesced around our Mother Sun.
I passed them by, near or far: the gaseous giants that spun rapid,
rambunctious; the molten balls of rock that never strayed far from the sun’s
hot comfort. Our nursery raged with chaos, but our family, at last, was
forming. After a thousand eras as particles in the ether, we had found the
pieces of ourselves. We had found each other.

We were all the same age, cosmically speaking. Mother Sun was our
centre, our vitality, our raison d’être, but we were not born of her, as children
are often born of mothers. This sun and her children sprung from the same
stuff: our molecular cloud collapsed, and a family emerged.

Young and mischievous, we played together, craving camaraderie. Yet

Mother Sun kept us separated in her domain, circling her at different speeds
and distances. On occasion, more infrequently than the flare of a distant
comet, she allowed us to align for the briefest moment, for a whisper of this
existence. Then we returned to our paths, our balance across her pocket of
sky.

One of my fellow rocky planets twirled near to the sun, though not so
close that she became brittle or choked with gas. Her region was comfortable,
even; warm and illuminated. After my initial journey from the outskirts
toward Mother Sun, I danced circles along this sister’s orbit, at times so
intimately that I could feel the heat radiating from her fiery surface. I was so
much smaller than her, and I had so little to offer in return. I simply rejoiced
in the moments I could be near her, could exchange cosmic companionship
amid the fury smouldering across our young sky.

We spoke of the future, of our aspirations for the time after we all
settled into our rhythms among the stars. What would we do? Who did we
hope to be? In my fantasy, a calm eternity stretched ahead of us, the routine
of communal life spinning happily along until Mother Sun expanded and
reclaimed many of our family’s scattered parts into her whole. My sister,
though, held wondrous visions: of love, of life, of children more numerous
than all the suns of the galaxy.

Her revelation disquieted Mother Sun, and titterings about her prospects

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spread among our siblings. I came to learn that the vitality my sister desired
was unlikely, even impossible, on her dry, fiery surface. The distant bodies
whispered about a bond of hydrogen and oxygen, a molecule essential for
facilitating this life she sought. Yet this building block only developed far
from Mother Sun’s warming glow, in the region where I came into being. I
examined myself and found it: the water my sister lacked. The bitter luck of
formation, of finding my parts in the gaseous sea, had bestowed it upon me
while my sister was barren.

I cradled this burdensome discovery for many rotations. I could not

bear to conceal this sole hope until the end of our time. In the dark, lonely
patches of our sky, I devised a solution.

I said farewell to my siblings, though they did not realise it was goodbye.
I waited until each one had passed, until I had sent my love to the very
reaches of Mother Sun’s solar expanse.

Lastly, to my most beloved sister, I said,

I love you. 

I’m sorry.

Remember me.

She did not have time to react. We were moving so quickly, and I’d
manoeuvred myself so close. Mother Sun, powerless but desperate, whipped
plasma into my path, as if the magnetic pulse could interrupt my indomitable
trajectory. My tiny body collided into my sister’s side, and I became nothing
but chunks of rock and clouds of dust.

Debris exploded from my sister, too, but she was not devoured. As we
whirled along her orbit, her mass gained control of our distant fragments.
Parts of me became parts of her, coalescing under her gravitational
influence, and what remained created something entirely new: a moon, large
and looming, circling her as I had once circled Mother Sun. It spun, then
slowed, its face steadily focused on her, on us – now siblings bound as one,
two beings in two bodies yet separated by none.

After millions of orbits in these new forms, the rumours proved true:
life, that impossible endeavour, sprang up from our oceans. It evolved in
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billions of ways, sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once. Some grew to

know us, to embody the love that had brought them into being. They named
us – their home – Earth, and our second body they called Moon. Many of
their years passed before they remembered me; the old me, as I had been
before my sacrifice made us whole. They named me Theia, after the Moon’s
mother in one of their fading cosmologies. Now I dream of embracing each
human and saying: I am the Moon, and you are my child, and my love begat
all the life you’ve ever known.

M108
46 million light-years away

M61
55 million light-years away

NASA, Hubble’s Messier Catalogue. 2018.

M110
3 million light-years away

NASA, Hubble’s Messier Catalogue. 2017.

NASA, Hubble’s Messier Catalogue. 2018.

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P O E T R Y /
L U K E C A R M I C H A E L VA L M A D R I D

Yes, the cascades in my psyche

are yours,
but so too exactly did hail always fall in April, whose sublimation
rusted my airways, our solution to which was not electrolytic
or sweet, but to inhale coarsely for that bitter texture,
the kind of air that abrades to embrace. Nothing dulcet baked
without volcanic doubt, that volcanic-deep-down, I was
the lava in a lava cake, just a soloist for your caprice –
I imagine a symphony orchestra that plays Mozart divertimenti
in my head, singing with perfect intonation and too many voices
our assumptions, that all this waste would break down into beautiful things
in our lifetime. My last three spiritual thoughts go something like
“Thank god I’m 22,” “Thank god I’m 25,” and then “If I hadn’t stopped praying
to the entity I really pedestaled, god.” I told you I loved you
and then blundered my flaws and mistook your faults and took them on
and never apologized. In your name, I bent over backwards and
became that snake that eats its own tail, but actually got to the end
and deserved it. I did love you, but I fell into love on a comet
and crossed the stars myself; even if I went back in time,
we would only remember the good things
as I vaporized.

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Dark, Dark, is all I find for metaphor;

All else were contrast – save that contrast’s wall
Is down
From ‘Interim’ by Edna St. Vincent Millay

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P O E T R Y / J A N E Z W A R T

Illumination
for Devin Gael Kelly

Disappointment, Devin says,

is illumination, too. And if not
the kind we wanted--well,
that doesn’t mean it’s unkind.
The light just shines on a different thing.

...

The light just shines on a different thing--

how I, almost as stubborn as effulgence,
want him to be right.

How I want
to believe in the radiance beaten,
with an oversized key, from the mat of a haji
who dares ask Allah for impossible things

and in the radiance harder to rout

than a pestilence of fireflies--
routeless photons, candling swarm--
dear God, how I want to believe.

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E S S A Y / J E S S I C A P E N G

‘A Vestige of the Thoughts’:

The Voices of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Remember’
Literature survives by echoing. When works are read, recited, quoted or
translated, they find themselves in new spaces, so they sound a little different
each time. When you watch a Shakespeare play, the production is different to
its earliest performance in Blackfriars or the Globe. Each translation of
Homer’s Odyssey has a different inflection and shadow. Even if you read a
book that was published yesterday, it will be under different circumstances as
the ones read by the New York Times reviewer, or your friend, or even
yourself again two months later. The space is different, so the sound is too.
The ‘original work’ – or sound – is only known to us through echoes, created
after travelling through space and time. Perhaps these are corruptions, but
they are also the only remnants of the original, if something so pure ever
existed.

In order to echo, literature must be made of voices. The simplest

demonstration of this is a poem with one speaker, whose identity is not the
real-life poet’s, but who is rather self-defined as ‘the speaker of the poem’.
More complex works, like omniscient novels or multi-figured plays, are
simply made of more voices: narrators, choruses, characters, scribes. These
voices do not belong to actual people either, but instead float around as
speakers who are wedded to the page. Reading is the act of allowing these
voices to echo in your head. The author’s words are reflected from the page
into your mind and when you become the host for these words, you distort
them, even very slightly. Made from a strange mix of textual and imaginary
stuff, the voices in literature speak through whoever is reading them. A reader
is like a medium, communicating beyond this world. Literature is full of
ghosts, and you are being haunted. 

By ‘medium’, I mean what the Victorians meant. The

Victorians invented the word ‘medium’ for someone
who communicates between the living and the dead1.
They needed a word for it because visiting a medium
1 ‘medium, n.’ 6b. OED Online, Oxford University Press, 2022. Web. 23 Aug 2022.
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became for them a hugely popular pastime. In a society with a permanently

grieving queen who seemed half-dead herself, the public eye was trained to
fixate on the space between life and death. The Victorians were obsessed
with finding their way into this space, paying for mediums who could go into
trances and speak as if possessed by someone deceased, their bodies an
anchor for a voice estranged from its owner. The space between life and
death was made visible by mediums, often women, whose bodies could
connect this world with the next.

The Victorians didn’t have poststructuralist theory2, but they had writers who
already knew that literature was made for ghosts, or the other way around.
Take a work like Christina Rossetti’s sonnet, ‘Remember’. Written in 1849,
this famous poem features a dying speaker’s final words for those they are
leaving behind. Here it is:
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad. (1-14)3

Almost two hundred years after it was written, ‘Remember’ remains a hugely
popular funeral reading. This sentiment is sound enough: of course the
people left behind wish to remember the deceased, and the poem’s insistent
turn that forgetfulness is not betrayal is additionally comforting. But
‘Remember’ is written in the voice of someone close to dying, speaking to
someone soon to be left behind. Within the poem, the funeral guests are not
the speaker but the audience: as is, technically, the person reading it at the
ceremony. Why, then, are they speaking words which belong to the dying? 
2I draw on now-mainstream poststructuralist theory for much of the first two paragraphs. The notion that literature is opposed to free
conversation is touched on in famous works such as the essays in Barthes’s Image - Music - Text and Derrida’s ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’.
3 Rossetti, Christina. ‘Remember’. Selected Poems, ed. Dinah Roe. London: Penguin, 2008. 16.

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The question of voice which began this essay is particularly apt when applied
to a poem like ‘Remember’. The poem’s reception tradition sees it being
quoted twofold: firstly, the funeral reader is quoting Rossetti’s poem;
secondly, they are implying that these words are what the deceased would have
said by standing in their place. Speaking in the voice of the dead, the living
create a flickering imitation of the deceased’s presence. Moreover, if
quotation is echo, then ‘Remember’ must have one of the loudest in English
literature. Each reading quotes not only Rossetti but every funeral service this
poem has attended before. Its silent predecessors haunt each new reading.

This scene, reading ‘Remember’ at a funeral, bears an uncanny resemblance

to that of a séance. The reader is the medium and through them, someone
who has left this world can communicate with those they left behind. Sat in
pews, the audience watches the performance, participating in the illusion that
it is the deceased’s words that are being spoken. A funeral commemorates the
deceased’s absence, but the gathering of friends and family, the recollection
of memories and the overall reconstruction of who they were practically
conjures up their presence. The coup de grâce is delivered when the poem
reaches out from the ‘silent land’ and tells us what the deceased would want
us to know — or whatever we think that is.

This, for me, is the miracle of Rossetti’s poem. It treats voices as sounds that
can be heard, echoed, repeated, ingrained. Its speaker’s voice has deep
emotional reserves, but at the same time it remains practically anonymous.
Reading it closely, we might guess that the speaker is young and addressing
her4 lover, but this is hardly explicit. The poem conveys feeling without
necessarily telling a story. Rossetti understood that poetry could be spoken
not only by characters — as in the dramatic monologues that were so popular
in her day — but also by mere ‘vestiges of thoughts’ (12)5. The audience-
readers would do the rest. She stripped away the heavy ceremony of
Victorian mourning traditions and wrote a poem so purely vocal it was
practically weightless. Passed from speaker to speaker, each instance quoting
all the times before, Rossetti’s words have echoed through many readers and
even more mediums.

4I personally think the poem implies a female speaker through the Eurydice-like ‘turn to go’ and Rossetti’s habit of writing lamenting
women, especially around themes of loss, betrayal or lament. For me, the unspecified gender evokes a sense of the speaker’s fading out of
existence as well as the poem’s steely impersonability – but does not have to be interpreted as neutral.
5 Rossetti, Christina. ‘Remember’.
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V I S U A L A R T / E R I N B R Y A N T P E T T Y

Invitations

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P O E T R Y / L O U I S E M A T H E R

Sinai’s Goddess

I am no longer a siren,
or I never was.
You are not the emperor –
you do not have his ribs,
or the bow that turned
willow to water.
I never wrapped eggs
with petals of myrrh,
or took them out to sea
for the phoenix.
The moon is just the moon,
there is nothing sacred –
seeds of a scarlet apple
are just dust
for the harvest.

Inspired by The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

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V I S U A L E S S A Y / A L L Y L E

The city, after

Dying slowly of an indeterminate illness, the city is laid down on a

stretcher and patched up in crude cement. White paint splashing over
walls, bandaids ripped off writings that were never. Come, drink a bowl
of herbal tea to dissolve yeet hey and calm down. Bitter medicine cures
all illnesses. I love jasmine tea and hargaw. I love being called lenglui.
Lovers make no promise. Music has no sound. A Better Tomorrow is a film
starring Chow Yun-fat. Drunken days followed by smoky nights.
Heatwaves and smog over Shenzhen Bay as seen from Tsuen Wan. Hang
Seng Index is red. Quarantine 4+3. I try to find my way home but I
misread Google maps. I have been trying to find my way home but I am
seduced by harbour and hair. I have been trying to find my way home for
a long time but I am already at #HomeKong. In four white walls that I
no longer recognise. In a shell that I haunt but will never replicate. Do
not look into the mirror you will see a closed eye and an unblinking open
one. Shops close at 10. Have you scanned your Vaccine Pass yet? Do you
have YUU membership? Would you like to make a donation to save

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Lantau? The wilderness is wilding and my hands try to break free from
the city’s clutch. Friends drift apart. Goldfish slip away. You chase the bus
only to find the last seat taken by the person right before you. It takes
nearly an hour to cross Hung Hom Tunnel during peak hours, that’s why
you should run along the East Rail Line in a virtual marathon. When the
last train of the night has vanished into the abyss. In the earliest moment
of consciousness when my quadrilingual tongue is all tied up, impotent
and tripping, I am haunted by the tram bells piercing at dawn. New day,
new city. This is a cold city but there is sunlight everywhere. I am not
dead yet. You are not dead yet. He is not dead yet. So is she. So is it. So
are they. Everyone here is very much alive, yet we are all dead. We have
long been dead, buried in a sea of white chamomiles and sticky wet April
memories.

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P O E T R Y / C H A R L I E B O W D E N

Lost in Moscow
When night falls I will soldier on,
ignore the wild dogs and deadly boulders
that seem to be found everywhere in this town.
The cabaret taught me to see red in Moscow
but it’s just black, silk and spilt milk
and sirens who fill your nightmares.
The hairs on your head fall in line soon enough,
going, going, greying, gone like the half-hearted fizz
of an already opened carbonated drink.
Grey, silver, the clink of metal, the clicking of knees on
cobblestone,
like a deranged cabaret act, lost in the maze of dead flower petals.

The city’s not what it’s cracked up to be;

only the strange ones and the statues can feel truly settled.
The rest, like me, are just lost, looking for scarlet, 
waiting for the cost of trusting a cabaret starlet.

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When the world is reduced to a single dark wood for our two pairs of dazzled
eyes — to a beach for two faithful children — to a musical house for our clear
understanding — then I shall find you.
From ‘Phrases’ by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Wallace Fowlie

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P O E T R Y / M O L L Y J . VA N D E R W E R P

Duck Pond
Cutting the tree in three
years like rings in rings
like pond water rippling
bringing the world back to me
again&again at different angles.

God:
the water drop
cupped between duck’s
neck and back.
Silver-wet sphere, safe
in the curve of the water bird.

Remembering,
I draw a cube in the sand
as they taught us:
two squares intersecting
in one smaller than themselves—
squaresinsquares a portal.

God:
the impossible color
of evaporating water
on the oil layer.
Duck, feather-bent, and wet
with that chink of blue between wing and you.

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I N T E R V I E W / r b e n y & N I C O L E FA N

In Conversation with r beny:

The Delicate Desolation of natural fiction
Drifting through a prism of dreamlike wonder, r beny’s music leads us into
sibylline soundscapes where wind chimes seem to twinkle even as icy glaciers
begin to crack. In the hands of the California-based musician, electronic
synthesizers become architectonic instruments with the ability to build
ambient worlds – and his 2020 album, natural fiction, perfectly epitomises such
acoustic spatiality. Described as the ‘soundtrack to a film that does not exist’,
it charts out imagined topographies in a vividly cinematic manner,
crystallising auditory vibrations into layer after layer of emotional resonance.
Now,  two years after its initial release, r beny (the alias of Austin Cairns)
looks back on natural fiction with us, and shares what had gone into an album
that glimmers with such hope and melancholy. 

Listen to natural fiction on bandcamp:

https://rbeny.bandcamp.com/album/natural-fiction

N: You’ve described the tracks in this album as ‘music made of light

and fog’ – and they truly seem to be as such, especially in iridescent
polyphonies such as ‘alone in the pavilion’ as well as ‘round glass and
concrete prism’. I’d love to hear about what drew you to these delicate
textures; does music help you to navigate between the clarity of light
and the haziness of fog?

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r: One of the main intentions behind my music has been an attempt to

express complex emotions that I have felt - emotions that are difficult for me
to express in words, whether due to inadequate vocabulary or due to past
trauma. I’ve found the dichotomy of fog and light to be an apt metaphor for
this difficulty of expression. Fog obscures, making indistinct of what is there.
But it isn’t darkness. You can still make out the shapes, but maybe not the
delicate details. Light illuminates, revealing what is there - details, warts and
all. I like to imagine my music as a combination of the fog and the light, but
also as the mountains, valleys, forests, rivers, and even architecture that is
being obscured or revealed.  Instrumental music provides an interesting
canvas for interpreting these thoughts. I’m drawn to sounds and textures that
imitate or are inspired by nature. I think that manifests in music that can be
equally delicate and soft, as it is volatile and destructive. I do find the process
of making music helps navigate some of those difficult emotions.  

N: The airiness of the album’s sonic spaces is certainly undergirded

by a sense of stark desolation and gritty brutality, which resonates in
tracks like ‘we used to know’ and ‘mamiya’. This interplay between the
visceral and the ethereal permeates other albums in your discography
(such as echo’s verse and eistla) – but the sharp edges strike me
most vividly in natural fiction. Is this raw materiality a recent
development in your creative practice, and (if so) where would you say
it emerged from?

r: The interplay of the visceral and the ethereal has certainly been a catalyst
for my music. This is partially drawn from the aforementioned themes of
nature. Having grown up in Northern California, I developed a sense of
connection and respect for nature – an appreciation for that which can hold
so much calm and beauty, yet can be extremely volatile. I’ve also found nature
to be an apt metaphor for the human psyche, at least my own. I don’t think
of it as the contrast of light and dark or good and evil, but rather a spectrum
that is complex and bittersweet. I’ve been drawing upon these themes for my
art more and more, but I think it has always been present on some level and
will certainly be more of a focus going forward.  

N: That’s really evident in the title of your album – natural fiction –

which is itself an enigma that invites us to contemplate the complex
dualities in your music. The seemingly juxtaposed terms of ‘nature’

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and ‘fiction’ touch upon the idea of there being different layers to
reality, of art being inextricable from life. What is natural about fiction
and what is fictitious about nature to you? 

r: From time to time, I’ve imagined what the earth would be like post-
humanity, or if humans had never existed at all. How much damage have we
done to this earth, how much damage have we done to each other? This
theme was present in my mind while recording natural fiction, specifically a
post-humanity or post-human-
centric world. I had previously
explored this on my album called
cascade symmetry, specifically the
tracks ‘cities sleep like seeds’ and
‘empty grids’. natural fiction was
finished right as the Covid-19
pandemic was starting, and all of
a sudden these themes I had been
pondering became starkly real. It
felt as if we all experienced this ‘Ferric-fogged goodness’
truth-is-stranger-than-fiction shift
of reality.

The album title was partly derived from that perceived shift. Nature – and
truth – could be stranger than fiction. It was also partly derived from that
which we do not perceive in nature, such as the history of a tree - or how a
mountain came to be. We are left to create fiction for how these things might
have happened and what the experience may have been like. Even with
scientific explanation, I think our minds tend to fill in the gaps with fiction,
whether it be mythology or art or something else. 

When the album came out, I framed it as a “soundtrack to a film that doesn’t
exist”, almost from a place of escapism from the pandemic. With hindsight,
I’d probably frame it now as a “soundtrack to an alternate reality” or a
“soundtrack to a dream I once had”.

N: This cohesion of reality and artifice also seems to speak to your

creative practice, as much of your music is rooted in the natural world
but created using modular synthesizers. What appeals to you about

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these experimental electronics; did they enable different kinds of

artistic expression compared to more traditional forms of music-
making?

r: Modular synthesizers appealed to me in their open architecture - both in

the ability to make an instrument catered to your exact whims or needs and
in terms of open signal flow, where audio and modulation become one and
the same. Prior to working with synthesizers and modular synthesizers, I was
primarily a guitarist and I felt like I struggled to adequately express myself
through the music I was making. After playing in bands throughout my teens
and early-20s, I ended up quitting music altogether for about a year after
feeling disillusioned with the music and dealing with heavy grief after losing
my mom.  

Discovering and connecting with synthesizers and then modular synthesizers

not only enabled different kinds of artistic expression, but for the first time I
felt like I was able to actualize that expression. Even 7-8 years later, I remain
inspired by working with synthesizers and modular synthesizers. Due to that
open architecture and signal flow, it feels like I’ll never truly explore every
corner of these instruments. That burden of choice can be daunting at times,
but it invites the chasing of whims and experimentation, whereas I felt
somewhat boxed in with guitar.

N: Finally, what draws me – and many other followers – to your music

is simply the ‘shimmering and obvious’ beauty of your ambient
soundscapes. I’d love to know what beauty means to you, as well as
how you appreciate it in your life.

r: I think I am still working on and searching for what beauty means to me,
beyond surface level. I believe beauty may be that which affects your soul.
For myself, that means the connections I share with my closest friends, the
connection we as humans have with nature, the journey and ups-and-downs
of life. Awareness, kindness, empathy, compassion. The in-between and the
unexplainable. Of course, I love my share of music, art, and nature that
exemplify beauty. I attempt to show my appreciation by practising
mindfulness, as well as sharing and reflecting the ideas and virtues that I
believe embody beauty.

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E S S A Y / E L I A S B R O C K M A N

Stranger than Fiction:

The Reality of Love in Friedrich
Nietzsche’s The Gay Science
A vital question comes up periodically in life: how do we find something (or
someone) to love? Friedrich Nietzsche has an answer in his aphoristic
masterpiece, The Gay Science:

One must learn to love. — This is what happens to us in music:

First one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to
detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a
separate life. Then it requires some exertion and good will to
tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its
appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity.
Finally there comes a moment when we are used to it, when
we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were
missing; and now it continues to compel and enchant us
relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured
lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and
only it. […] In the end we are always rewarded for our good
will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what
is strange: gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a
new and indescribable beauty.1

Each of us tends to believe that we alone are normal and that the people we
encounter in our day-to-day lives are the strange ones. But this, Nietzsche
claims, is a baseless prejudice. It is unjust to hold others to the standards we
set for ourselves, because, in reality, each of us is deeply strange. To do justice
to another person requires us to recognise the differences in others and
ultimately embrace them. But this skill of embracing the strangeness of
others, which Nietzsche calls ‘love’, is not a skill that comes naturally to  most
of us. Love, too, has to be learned.
1 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. 262.

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There are many aspects of this aphorism that one can grasp at and attempt
to unravel. If, in Nietzsche’s opening metaphor, the strangeness of another
person is akin to a melody in music, he suggests that it takes time to even
notice what makes them unique to begin with. Our minds naturally put people
into recognisable categories. When we first see a person, for example, driving
a bus (or working any other type of job), we tend to imagine that they are
functionally equivalent to all others in their profession, to assume that they
will act a certain way. But this way in which we use conceptual shorthand to
make sense of our social environment prevents us from truly seeing the
innumerable ways in which every person, every situation, every quality and
thing is strange. ‘If you’ve met one human, you’ve met them all’, says the
misanthrope. ‘All women are alike’, says the misogynist. ‘All members of this
specific ethnic group act the same’, says the racist. Putting people into
categories diminishes them. To love someone,
we must first decategorise them. We must take –––––
all the assumptions we have about them from To love someone is to
our first encounter, and dismantle those see them as they are,
assumptions, until finally we discover the real in all their strangeness
person who lies behind them. –––––

This process of discovering what is strange in others begins with pain.

‘Cognitive dissonance’ is what psychologists call it when our expectations are
contradicted by reality. When we discover something odd about someone,
discomfort creeps in. We have no easy way of explaining why they are like
that. ‘Something must be wrong with them’, we think, if they are acting out
of the ordinary for how a person ‘like them’ should act. But in truth there are
no such categories of people, or no real ones at least. 

For Nietzsche, to love someone is to see them as they are, in all their
strangeness. And if you think of those who are closest to you, I’m sure your
lived experience will confirm that every single one of them is deeply strange.
To fail to see these qualities, is a failure of love. And when we think of
people who fail to love us, it is often in this that their failure consists. They
don’t get us. There is some important quality of ours that they simply cannot
see.

Perhaps the most profound part of Nietzsche’s aphorism is its ending – that
‘[e]ven those who love themselves will have learned it in this way; for there is

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no other way’2. Yet, many of us have never learned to love ourselves, because
being strange is stigmatised. From a young age, we are taught about what
types of people we ought to consider role models, and we are encouraged to
model ourselves after those roles. When we fail to live up to the expectations
that others have of us, we are made to feel shame. We are rewarded for
telling the teachers what they want to hear, for saying the right things to the
right people in the right ways. But not necessarily in our ways. At a certain
point in adulthood, many of us have lost those strange qualities that we once
possessed as children. We can no longer detect and distinguish our own
melodies, let alone tolerate them, let alone love them.

To love, for Nietzsche, is to learn to detect the social rules that order our
lives and, brick by brick, to destroy that order – even if it means abandoning
all the pretences that had helped us to get by . Instead,  if we can exercise the
necessary ‘good will’, ‘patience’, ‘fairmindedness’, and ‘gentleness’, we may
come to notice the myriad of subtle differences that distinguishes all things –
and when the beauty of those differences gazes back at us, we will not want
to look away.

2 Ibid.

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P O E T R Y / L . W A R D A B E L

An Effort to Describe
A last charcoal fleck
passes through the far edge
and it’s night again,
to the point of it
never having left.

Day here is a frenzy a hive

no matter what month
even after dark during
winterish.

Like a ziggurat
it rises from great stalked
acreage, width only
measured in gods’ cubits
divided by holy grace
and space/time.

And again night—the hold

on our dreams our shadows
within hearing of others—
it awakens bathed in sweat
and effort.

Such a burden a bounty

smoothes us down to a spot
that loses all physics—
though a song may
come to mind.
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 V O L U M E O N E
Our Contributors
Born and raised in Vietnam, Ally Le (she/they) holds
a Bachelor of Arts (First Class Honours) in
Comparative Literature and Hong Kong Studies from
the University of Hong Kong. She's currently working
in Hong Kong and has contributed translations and
creative writings for Zzz Review, Mekong Review, and
Canto Cutie.
- and plays music, and he teaches literature. Abel
Charlie Bowden is a student from Hampshire,
England, who discovered a love for writing poetry in
lockdown after spending years studying it at school.
His work has been included in collections by Young
Writers and the Stratford Literary Festival among
others and he won the 2021 Forward/emagazine
Creative Critics Competition.
-
Elias Brockman  is an educator and writer living in
Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of Cold Pastoral, a
"read along" newsletter examining poetry and prose
from the past.  Additionally, he is the founder and
director of The Mind on Fire Institute, an educational
program that operates on the principle that students
learn best when they study material that they find
intrinsically interesting.
- Luke Carmichael Valmadrid enjoys cooking tofu,
Erin Bryant Petty  (she/her) is an artist and writer
living in Michigan. She appreciates the uncanny, the
weird, and the overlooked. When she’s not making
things she prefers to be in the woods, gazing at
mushrooms. Find her on twitter @ebryantpetty.
- recent graduate of Calvin University (‘21), with
Gwyneth Findlay is a writer and editor based in the
northeast of Scotland. She writes for the post calvin and
has appeared in  Leopard Arts  and  The Hellebore. Find
her around the internet @findlaypum.
- r beny is the ambient electronics project of Northern
Jane Zwart  teaches at Calvin University, where she
also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing.
Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares,
HAD, Threepenny Review, and TriQuarterly, as well
as other journals and magazines.
-
/ I S S U E O N E
L. Ward Abel’s work has appeared in hundreds of
journals (Rattle, Versal, The Reader, Worcester
Review, Riverbed Review, others), including a
nomination for a Pushcart Prize, and he is the author
of three full collections and ten chapbooks of poetry,
including his latest collection, The Width of Here
(Silver Bow, 2021). He is a reformed lawyer, he writes
resides in rural Georgia.
-
LE Francis is a recovering arts journalist writing
poetry & fiction of varying length from the
rainshadow of the Washington Cascades. Find her
online at nocturnical.com.
-
Louise Mather is a writer from Northern England
and founding editor of Acropolis Journal. Her work is
published in various print and online literary journals
and her pamphlet ‘The Dredging of Rituals’ is out
with Alien Buddha Press. She writes about ancestry,
motherhood, endometriosis, fatigue and mental
health.
-
qualitative research, IU’s prolific body of work, and
playing video games with faraway friends. Is also an M1 at
UCSD. Hopes to make some music soon. One time.
-
Molly J. Vander Werp is a writer and laboratory
technician from Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is a
degrees in writing and biochemistry. Her work has
appeared previously in The Night Heron Barks and
Dialogue.
-
California-based artist Austin Cairns, exploring
themes of emotion and nature through the use of
synthesizers and other electronic equipment.
-
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 T H E
Rebecca Elves is a multidisciplinary artist based in
Kent. Recent  exhibitions include solo show  The
House Was Like Her  at Daphne Oram  Gallery,
Canterbury (2022),  Supple Octopus  at The  Tub,
Hackney (2022),  What  I See I’ll Never Tell  at Wilder
Gallery, London (2021),  The Studio at  4  a.m.  at
Hastings Contemporary (2020), and two-person
show  Plus One  with Catherine  Anyango Grünewald
at Limbo Arts, Margate (2019). In 2016 she graduated
from the Royal College of Art, where she received the
Gordon Peter  Pickard Award to make drawings
in  Montréal. She is currently a fully funded  practice-
based PhD student at Canterbury Christ  Church
University, where she  was awarded a 2021 British
Council Venice Research Fellowship.
-
Ruthenium (they/them) is an artist currently living in
the state of uncertainty. They believe creativity is real-life
magic, and are obsessed with texture, context, light, and
the question “what if ?...” Their art has been published in
Rabble Review, Celestite Poetry, Vulnerary Magazine,
Messy Misfits Magazine, and Warning Lines Literary,
among other wonderful places. Their various presences
and publications can be found at https://linktr.ee/
Ruthenium
Image Credits
Additional graphics are adapted from open-source
images found on Unsplash.
P R I M E R
Our Editors
A diarist before anything else, Jessica Peng (she/her)
writes as her way of navigating the world. Direction,
movement, shape and form are aspects of literature
that she can talk about for hours. A recent graduate
of University College London’s BA English degree,
she is now The Primer’s Poetry Editor and reliable
contributor. In the past she has written about Anne
of Green Gables, the deaths of stars and Marilyn
Monroe films. Her downtime is usually taken up with
wandering through charity shops and telling everyone
she knows about her latest read.
-
Swinging between writing and image-making,
Mihaela Elena Man is a Romanian-born artist,
producer, and editor drawn to exploring how everyday
stories, angles, and textures feed into broader
developments of culture. A recent graduate of art
practice and theory degrees from The Ruskin School
of Art and The Courtauld Institute of Art, she is
fascinated by the meeting point between material
culture, nature, technology, contingency, and memory,
particularly in relation to recent forms of visual art
and literature.
-
Nicole Fan is drawn to all kinds of enigmas and
loves exploring critical questions in creative ways.
Having recently graduated from University College
London with a BA in English, she is now pursuing an
MSt in Early Modern English at the University of
Oxford alongside running The Primer. Unable to resist
the pull of old bookshops, sunny parks, and art
galleries, she can usually be found wandering around
them throughout her week.
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