University of Bristol Creative Arts Magazine Winter 2009

Poetry Prose Art Photography Features

ICON

HELLO AND WELCOME! YOU ARE CONFUSED! LOOK OPPO-SITE FOR A TREATISE ON THE MEAN-

ING OF ICON- IT

WILL DEMYS-TIFY YOUR MIND

AND SOOTHE YOUR SENSES

(3)/OVER-WHELMED? A SHORT AND

SHARP STORY OF ONLY 6 WORDS WILL TICKLE YOUR FANCY (4)/ SOMETHING MORE

SUBTLE? PRE-TEEN ICON FITS THE BILL (6)/ DUCK, DUCK,

DUCK... STOKES CROFT! (8)/ GET THE FEAR OF GOD IN YOU! MADONNA SPEAKS (12)

SOMETHING MORE SE-RIOUS? A THESIS ON MODERN DAY ICONS

(14)/ DRIVEN TO AB-STRACTION? A STORY OF HEARTBREAK

TO BREAK YOUR HEART

(22)/ CALL THE DERMA-TOLOGIST! ONE YOUNG LAD AND THE MIRACLE OF YOUTH (26)/ FINALLY, THE

KING OF ICONS (28)/ STARRY-EYED? MEET

CARL SAGAN (30)

Features Editors

Hannah Alton

Isabel Blake

Prose Editors

Jack Castle

Eleanor Fogg

Poetry Editors

Rebecca Jewitt

Claudia Tobin

Poetry Events

Kit Buchan

Editors

Anisa Ghuloom

Sarah Sternberg

Promotions Officers

Arabella Field

Tom Strickland

Art Editors

Tom Brooks

Emma Davies

Helen Graham

Photography Editors

Jessie Atkinson

Sophie Wright

�

Uncle Sam, the Star of David, Super Mario, the Hammer and Sickle of

communism. The icon is a unit of common cultural language that can transcend

barriers of space and time. From religious icons, to the Internet Explorer icon, the

icon is a symbol of unity, be it of an organised religion or a computer operating

system. It creates a common cultural identity for strangers to bond over. It bestows

familiarity upon the unfamiliar and helps human beings to feel more comfortable

with each other.

Students have long sought to bridge gaps between themselves and their new

collection of acquaintances by adorning their walls with posters of icons. Charlie

Chaplin, Super Ted, Girls Aloud; these images show the values we’d like to

present to the world. In this case; a learned appreciation of silent comedy, childlike

playfulness and heroics (and possibly a Stewie Griffin complex) and a love of

large, ITV talent shows that are won by well presented northern lasses.

Icons are also open to interpretation. So an icon of the Virgin Mary, child to

breast, put in pride of place in a room, may say purity and the virtue of self denial,

to others it will tell the age old tale of teenage pregnancy and absent fathers.

Icons mean different things to different people. To quote Chuck Dee of Public

Enemy in the song Fight the Power; ‘Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant

s*** to me, because he was straight up racist’. However, the very fact that Elvis

niggled in Chuck Dee’s consciousness enough for him to get a mention shows the

power of his image and the height of his status as an icon. You might not be able

to name your favourite Elvis song, but your memory holds an image of the iconic

greasy hair cut, the weird hound dog sex noises and the white jump suit of his Las

Vegas years.

Like Frankenstein’s monster, icons have great power but once created they are

beyond the control of their creator. Hitler’s image once symbolised the dignity and

power of the new Germany. Now it symbolises the evils of the old Germany. Yet

the image still speaks to us, it is iconic, and whilst proponents and their opponents

will try to exploit the icon, ultimately the icon exploits them. The icon serves itself

first and a true icon will outlive it’s creator. The icon is a spirit, a distillation of a

watery body into something more potent. Welcome to the Hel-Icon.

Gruffydd Pryce

ICON

Isabella Widger

Blonde on hips. End of dream. Isaac Harland �

WINNER

�

ERNEST HEMINGWAY once said that the best story he ever wrote was just six words long: ‘For sale:

baby shoes, never worn’. We wanted to see how much literary ingenuity you could squeeze into an

equally economical word limit. The many entries we received were diverse and entertaining: some funny,

some sad, some which evoked lovely images. It’s amazing how much you can do with just six words!

Here are the entries selected by our judge, acclaimed author and short film director Ben Welch. Look out

for some of the editor’s favourites scattered throughout the rest of the magazine.

“Apple fell, still confused” wrote Newton

Great Story: Also available in full.

‘Emotionally atrophied man seeks trophy wife’ First impressions incorrect. Too late, kids. One hour lecture a week; robbed.

His chalk outline said it all. Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck Goose’

Blue sky, grey bars, black chair.

“The story that you want to hear”

I wish I could tell you

runners up

Ben Vardy

Tom Mitchell Dan Gouly

Florence Ignavia Hannah Metcalf E J Thribb

Tom Mitchell

SD Davidson Chris Carden Jaego Chanter

“ “ ,

: .

‘ ‘

. . ,

; .

.

!

, , .

“ “

�

Pre-Teen Icon

With her shadow separated sharply and thrown

Into a corner

By a halo of musty blush,

Dust and mom-scent, she stands staring

her scared doll-face in its mirrored eyes;

Sweet six, soft and four-foot nothing.

Carefully and calm as cold hands

Places the point

Of bright crimson cheap hot lipstick on lips

and paints

her rag-doll posy of lips that are crinkled and pouting for me,

Playing my baby-pink leading lady.

She strokes the soft teeth bristles

Through her hair which glistens

Hot in panting lamplight, nervous and naive

As her smile of idolised

Idol-eyes shine so shyly into mine.

Katy Austin

�

Cure for logorrhea: six word story. Tom Newell �

The Virgin van shrieks past the sleeping tramp. ‘FASTER, FASTER, FASTER’ screams the garish logo, the brazen font. A young man, all spiked hair and acne swerves past Michael’s doorway nest. The very speed of the van reinforces the insistent message: faster, always faster. Well, Michael Connor disagrees. He stretches, pulls his blankets around him, and contemplates breakfast.

Michael inserts a yellowed finger into the ring-pull and peels back the unwilling tin. He smells the open can, tipping the syrup this way and that, savouring the moment. Michael is a man of simple pleasures, and time on his hands: he knows that anticipation is the best part. He eats each segment slowly, carefully, methodically. He allows himself an inch of the sugary juice after each two pieces of fruit.

-Aint you going to share them fruits?

Michael looks up. Andy is looking up at him, imploring. They are fellow vagrants, and Michael is the closest thing to family Andy has left.

-Sorry Andrew, I’ve just finished.

-Oh no.

-Fraid so. I do like a peach in the morning.

Andy looks at his feet. He doesn’t notice the crisp packets, the pave-ment spattered with sick, the drying carcass of a burger. Instead, he sinks to his haunches, and weeps.

Bristol’s belching traffic lunges at the intrepid duo, the lunchtime throngs like the growl of some ancient and malevolent beast.

-What are we going to do, Mikey?

-What’s to do. The old question. Could pop down the free shop?

-I fucken hate it.

�

-The shop?

-This... this life... this mess -

-You’re angry

-I’m not. I’m too tired to be angry. I’m sick to my bones.

Andy looks at his nicotine stained hands, the frayed fingerless gloves, arthritic knuckles. As he watches, his hands begin to shake. He sees bacteria, thousands of tiny bacteria, as the weathered paws shake their way towards him, the curled fingers accusing, as if they belong to some other creature.

-I can’t take it anymore, Mikey. I don’t want to live.

-Don’t say that mate

-I can’t do it. I can’t.

Snot dribbles from Andy’s tired and stubbled jowls. He takes a tottering step backwards, away from the grass and onto the pavement. A surprised pigeon emits a gravelled chirp of indignation.

-Come on Andy, don’t talk nonsense

-They can’t get me then, can they? Eh? No-one can hurt ole Andy if he’s dead.

-Where do you think you’ll go then? You know what happens to suicides...

Why use six? Five suffice. Thanks. E. J. Thribb �

-What do you mean?

-Well, you got your Karma. Think what you done in your time. If you die now, you’ll come back as a worm.

-I wouldn’t mind that.

-All right then, a butt worm.

-Really, a butt worm? I’d always hoped to be a duck.

-A duck? You’re not tired of life, Andrew Reeves. You’re just tired. And hungry.

-I am hungry.

-Come on. Lets go to the Canteen. Breakfast is the most important meal o the day. It’s 12:30 and all you’ve had is fags and half a chocolate bar! As they cross the road, Michael passes Andy a restorative bottle of sherry. The sweet liquid shleps down his gullet, slippery and soothing. They head for the Canteen, then inch round the back. A corru-gated iron hatch is built into the dilapidated rear kitchen. Michael knocks, and a tanned brown forearm pushes open the rusted metal sheet. It is followed by a grinning youth, broad shoulders, with long gin-ger dreadlocks.

-Hello boys! Just in time. Got some lovely salads going spare for ya.

-Thanks, Josh! What are we hav-ing?-Cous-cous. The food so nice they named it twice. Rosie Levine (All photos)

10

Josh hands out two picnic plates piled high with cous-cous salad. He winks, his face haloed by an orange fuzz, and then disappears back into the kitchen. Michael and Andy tuck in with relish, eating in silence save for Andy’s growling, emphysemic cough which punctuates the meal. As the two finish their impromptu feast with more sherry, Andy is struck by another racking cough. He leans down to spit, and as he raises his frail frame, his eyes light upon a huge likeness of the Buddha. The city is full of such figures, angels and demons in abundance, but this Buddha seems otherworldly. It is not in the public domain, it is here, in the back entrance of the Canteen, and it is for Andy. He sinks to his knees.

-My God, its... full of stars!

And indeed, it seems the image is sparkling. The Buddha has been sprayed over what was once a supporting wall to a Brewery. A myriad of metal rivets reflect the lunchtime sun, sending the brown, soft, plump skin of the Buddha into a glittering jewel. Michael cocks his head, much as the elderly do when trying to hear the radio better. Michael was raised a Catholic, and although he tries to explain the image with science, it is with the reverence of a choir boy that he now looks up at the graffitied picture of the Buddha.

-The light must only catch it at this time. When the sun’s at its highest....

-Its a sign. That’s what it is! It’s a sign. I was going to .. to .. do myself in, and then I didn’t, and now there’s this signal, this symbol. It’s all going to be ok! Everything is going to be ok!

Andy dances out of the courtyard, through the dark alley, and into the dazzling light of midday. As Michael rounds the corner, he hears a screech of brakes. Andy has danced into the road. The place where he stands blurs, and he has been replaced by the number 75 bus. Double decker. Even above the screams, horns, splintering glass, Michael Con-nor hears the sickening thud of Andrew Reeves’ body hitting the ground, and the infinitesimal pop of his soul leaving his mortal frame.

Moments later, a duck waddles up the busy street, busy and self-important. Michael does not see; his face is buried in his hands. FOOTNOTESThere really is a duck, of unknown origin, who wanders round Stoke’s Croft on a leash. His owner is a homeless man, again of unknown origin, known as Mikey. His reasons for keeping the duck are unclear. Some say that the duck is from Noah’s Ark, the zoo on Bristol’s outskirts, which was recently thrown out of BIAZA for malpractice, including burying zoo animals on site rather than paying for incineration. Some say Michael simply stole the duck from St Werburgh’s city farm.

Affair with snowman. Morning comes. Guilt. Ben Vardy 11

Madonna

An ocean, an eco-system

The life of life itself

Golgotha into Eden

I exchanged Womb’s death for quiet creation

Last Wednesday, on the couch

Soft like overripe fruit

Clinging to the vine

In this merging I will crawl out of myself

And don a new skin

Stretched, Veined, Containing

In the reference section of the library, I stooped

Change in my pocket clinking

Like a Newton’s cradle

Max McClure

1�

Clink

Cradled inside me

The stern stolid librarian placed a finger upon parched lips

And pointed at the sign

Quiet, Please

Madonna and child, but not so pure.

In this merging I will crawl out of myself

And don a new skin.

Within, projected on a screen

Grey fluid rushes, floods the senses

Like seashells at the shore.

‘Is it the sea?’

No, just blood

Just life

Just my own eco system, I’m cultivating here.

Ella Frost

Rachel Schraer

Why sound so dead? Uttering nothing. Chris Callow 1�

One day soon, will everything and everyone have become ‘iconic’?

Through a curious development of our language, a status that was once

the preserve of divine figures – and, by extension, rock stars – is

now conferred freely upon totalitarian dictators, out-of-town shopping

centres and Union Jack Y-fronts. What has the term come to mean?

Has it, in fact, lost all sense of meaning through the inconsistent and

indiscriminate manner of its application?

The issue came to prominence earlier this year when an article by

Jonathan Meades in Intelligent Life magazine sparked some media

scrutiny (albeit of a shallow, muddled, ephemeral kind) about the

use of the term in – you’ve guessed it – the media. As Meades

observes, the sense of an icon as a representation of a sacred figure – a

representation which itself takes on some kind of sacred power for the

beholder – has by now largely been supplanted by less considered, and

less intelligible, definitions. Is it a coincidence that the shift in usage

seems to have begun in earnest around the year 2000? Could it be that

the media’s obsession with describing cultural representativeness at the

transition between millennia – the 100 best films, albums, etc – had something to do with the melting down of the

icon and its reconstruction in multiple, mutable and mutilated forms? One has only to look back a decade or so to

consider how much our cultural sense of the iconic has changed: in 1998 the Royal Academy of Arts in London

advertised an exhibition under the then-simple heading ‘Russian Icons’; at the time, such a phrase would presumably

have conjured in the mind a parade of meek, saintly figures bowed on gold backgrounds in reverential pain (precisely

what the contents of the exhibition depicted), whereas today an alternative impression might well compete with the

religious one: something like a series of mock-Warhol screen prints where Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Czar Nicholas II,

Roman Abramovich and Joseph Stalin are all obscenely aligned along a gallery wall, equalized and distorted by the

grotesque power of celebrity. ‘Russian Icons’, one and all…

Of course, the term ‘iconic’ didn’t shift – or degrade – overnight. But when, in the last century, David Bowie,

say, was described as an ‘icon’ (or that once vaguely cognate term: an ‘idol’) it was an intelligible extension of the

word as commonly understood: some famous individuals inspire fervour, even adoration, and bedroom poster-shrines

are duly established for these secular gods. But now, in 2009, an oddly shaped, pug-ugly, provincial municipal

library instantly and irresistibly acquires the same terminological status on a local news report. (Presumably even

the brutalist Students’ Union building in Clifton is to be read as ‘iconic’; does this make the many thousands who

deplore it as an appalling architectural aberration iconoclasts?) It seems the adjective ‘iconic’ has fallen into a very

weird condition of usage: it is as if, while any sense of veneration has disappeared from the actual meaning of the

Down with Icons!

Lizzie Wheldon

1�

word, yet the attachment to the word by those who insist on employing it bespeaks, however subtly, a form of

homage to its power. Isn’t there just a hint of reverence for the term – a reverence that all too often risks sliding into

self-reverence – in the broadcaster’s voice (or journalist’s ink) every time it’s trotted out? It’s as though the word

‘iconic’ has a small, if ever-darkening, halo around it, that it doesn’t just describe cultural significance but emanates

it, and that it breathes a little of its increasingly noxious incense on the one who utters it.

Such thoughts lay behind a provocative lecture a few months ago at the Architectural Association in London by

the prolific cultural blogger and subversive songwriter and novelist Momus, in which he took issue with the TV

broadcaster Kirsty Wark’s imperious verdict on Madonna: “Love her or loathe her, you cannot underestimate the

impact she has had on music, or her iconic status.” Momus was right to recoil at the cultural prescriptiveness of this

summation: to be iconic, he lamented, is to be culturally unignorable, to demand time and attention even from those

who don’t feel the appeal. Disinterestedness is not an option. But is there not a revealing discrepancy between the

assuredness with which the notion of the ‘iconic’ is here employed (subtext: “this is the word we use now, and in

using it I’m saying how things are in culture, and thus insinuating my entitlement to arbitrate within that culture”)

and the startling ignorance of the word’s historical – that is to say, its cultural - import? That Wark’s pseudo-

authoritative platitude seems oblivious to the fact that a ‘Madonna’ is an ‘icon’, as many centuries of artistic and

spiritual aspiration attest, is an extreme but salutary illustration of how much ignorance might be festering beneath

the complacent insinuation of cultural certitude every time this devalued verbal token is traded.

Stephen James

Jon Wiltshire

Stories writable on napkins belong there. E.J. Thribb 1�

Liz Day

Sarah Haswell

Emma-Victoria Farr(opposite page)

1�

Too many cooks spoilt the broth. Rosa Curtain 1�

Tessa Griffith

Subhani Rawat

Olivia Barnett

1�

Harshna Patel

You and me. It’ll never happen. Jessie Atkinson 1�

Ella Frost

�0

Sarah Pearson

First impressions incorrect. Too late, kids. Florence Ignavia �1

Stratford shops, quarter to ten. Bunches of weighty jelly shoes and extreme

glasses. Plush pinkish belts snaked into displays.

A tubey chandelier, hung from the mall.

Stuff for sale, stacked on wood. Most of it tinted olive, like furry seaweed.

Supple ribbons. Best enhancements for crinoline shoulder pads, just visible.

Purple polyester wrap, shocking Adidas dots. All spot-on distasteful.

But, she’d have loved the pendant on that neck. Also the silken flower I see in

the corner- creamy and cold.

Twenty-seven days ago we were no more, me and my friend. From then, no

deep-spa eyes anymore, like a pencil sharpener with very large holes. No coat,

fluffy and creosote. Never again, not being allowed to arrange my company

sheets at eight.

The perfumes from the Herbal World are still on my dresser. They were

covered, before, by lavender pumps. Well-done shirts, a big, soft hat, a

half moon of Acne cologne. But no longer, because there’s no more her in

Newham.

��

Then, (right now,) decided to buy a wavy container of Vaseline in East London’s favourite Centre, sat down on a

perch between the stores. Bench, before I arrived, had not been deserted- for a change. Two people placed there,

sequins on their laps. Thought about if I should get red plaice, as I took off my lid.

Strong hands contrast with the woman’s yellow boots. The burning-ochre ends of a fringed jacket. Clean lines

betray the cut of an Oregon factory, and you can just imagine an old slot machine and the chequered thighs of

obscure types. Music seeps from the salmon-shaped cracks in a record player.

Protective expression.

For me, there was no having the same aura of the man present, even if I forgot that he’d also got someone

beside him I couldn’t replicate, someone pink and gold, with bluey circled knit.

He reaches out an arm and his neighbour’s eyes turn to affectionate soups, dead shaky. She makes a comment

to him, to the effect that he is her icon, which sounds really good, and I was never an icon to my own lifetime

feminine companion, even when I booked the hostel room in the centre of red Prague, and dusted our house

when we returned to the square. Area around is especially quiet. The bench feels strange now, like bony spring

onions.

Passerbys come, but the shiny pair look at nothing, except each other. And not, undoubtedly, me, on the

bench with an empty black bag and a glittery tube and a shawl. Watch his hand reach out to console her about

something, But if you look close, it’s gnarled, and the fingernails are too bad to copy my own oblongs of baby

fuschia. This comfort doesn’t change a lot for me. Like how hard it is to see proper companionship again when

it s not what I can have.

She says again about the icon. I imagine it would be bad if he ever left her home, like what happened to me

with mine.He isn’t complaining at this attention at all, and it’s what I had, a bit, a few months ago, before I’d sat

on this bench that had quickly grown frozen.

But what I’d got was never the same. My own counterpart’s eyes had never looked spongy and she’d not had

blue daisies round her tangy orange-patterned sides and we had never sat together on a bench, staring, glazed and

contented, into a window with smart shoes, but I hadn’t been good anyway because my credit allowance didn’t

ever extend to things like those.

Green, fake Turkish smoke and old stones. Some pseudo-light show in the department. Dusky wisps enclosed us

three, and I felt icy and out of touch, especially because the two icons are now really close together.

I’d brought many things- candy butterflies-to tug and chew, and I sunk into the bench, alone.

Like the love story I d chosen in New York, when the bookshop had been built.

Sugary Walthamstow roads, when I went home.On the way, I admired a huge window frame. As it glittered, I

looked at the khaki heels with half-toes. No flaws, not even on the trim.

Still living, to not die alone. Luke Morgan Britton ��

��

Rajitha Ratman

Proof democracy and fireworks don’t mix. E.J. Thribb ��

Our story begins one morning when Matthew woke up to find he had a soreness in the crease on his forehead, just above the eyes and boy did that thing sting. He was a lad of fourteen, so knew that this was a little pimple and was glad of the fact that it didn’t grow in the little hollow above the lips because that would be really sore.

He had to get to school that day and once again was late. He ran to the bathroom to brush his teeth, wash his face and squeeze the life out of the pustule but stopped dead in front of the mirror. There, staring straight back at him was Jesus. Jesus on his forehead.

To cut a long story short because this is a short story, Matthew showed his mum, a devout fruitcake, who immediately rang her friends and a veritable domino effect caused half of the town’s middle-aged mums to hear the news within the hour. It was not long before the local press had picked up on the story, followed by the world media. The Messiah had returned, it was proclaimed in news outlets from Peckham to Peking, albeit in an unorthodox form…

Matthew’s spot was turned into an overnight sensation, achieving a million YouTube hits in the time it took him to make a cup of tea. Thus began the most exhilarating part of Matthew’s adolescent life; more groundbreaking than the discovery of masturbation, his first kiss and the terrors of the BCG combined. From his humble upbringings in some Northern town, Matthew’s forehead catapulted him into a world of showbiz and glamour.

It received a blessing from the Pope and the leaders of several other Christian denominations. He got preferential treatment wherever he went. He was introduced to great statesmen, celebrities and clerics. People queued for hours to get an audience with the zit, and the rumour spread that to touch it would cure them of their ailments. Soon lepers and the terminally ill were making pilgrimages to Matthew’s cul-de-sac causing great problems for commuters up and down the A1. All the while the zit grew bigger as if Jesus’ arms were opening out to the crowd, welcoming them in.

However, once the initial furore over the spot had subsided, scepticism reared its ugly head and ideological differences began to break out. Science called it a coincidence and claimed the only reason the spot was growing was because people kept touching it with dirty fingers. Countless dermatologists advised Matthew to leave it alone so it would go away. Most of the world’s Jews still didn’t believe the Messiah had come, whilst the Muslims recognised the zit as a prophet. The Scientologists lambasted Matthew for using medicated face wash. A man in North Carolina claimed he had a boil in the shape of a happy Buddha, but this just turned out to be fat and round.

The Zit Shaped Like Jesus

��

All the while Matthew’s studies were beginning to deteriorate and Social Services expressed a concern that the boy was being exploited. Matthew was indeed tired and was fed up of the spot, because though it brought him fame and to some extent fortune,

he found the carbuncle was preventing him from getting a girlfriend. It was time to take action.

Matthew snuck away to find himself staring in the mirror, his fingers trembling over his zit. He’d heard stories as to what would happen if he popped his spot. Some said the Messiah would spring forth and bring goodwill to all those that would have it. Others reasoned the Apocalypse would be upon us and

from the zit, rivers of blood would spew followed by four horsemen and an asteroid.

In the event, once Matthew had given it a squeeze some puss came out and everyone went home. The following Friday someone thought they’d seen

Elvis in a parsnip.

Ella Frost

Tom James

Born too late; epigone at best. Tom Newell ��

Old Man eyes

Old Man eyes from behind a smudge in the mirror

Turn around, a slap of gel, and there he is

Mississippi boy staring back through the glass

White jacket off a hook, nailed into sallow wallpaper

One last drag, one last nervous tap of the thigh

Behind the curtain sue nudges judy awake

��

As a rasping mic introduces tonight’s entertainment

This is still Vegas if the boards stick slightly

Fainting fans shrieking on empty seats,

Bright Lights through fag-filled air

It’s Heartbreak Hotel and judy begins to cry

Tears for a love that didn’t die Anon.

Negligence...Six feet under, still breathing. Florence Ignavia ��

“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. On it everyone you love, everyone

you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

Thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every teacher of morals,

every corrupt politician, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization,

every saint and sinner in the history of our species, think of the rivers of blood spilled by all

those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary

masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged

position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light, and underscores our

responsibility and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot.”

Thus spoke Carl Sagan, astronomer, ambassador for science extraordinaire and one of my

personal heroes. The first thing people recognize about Sagan is his voice; it’s his trademark,

much like that other beloved populariser of science, David Attenborough. He speaks in gentle,

lulling tones, evoking the feeling of that favourite uncle seldom seen but who always told the

best stories. Sagan’s endeavour in life was to understand the universe, and to help share the

knowledge of humanity (vast by some measures, insignificantly tiny by others) with the rest of

My Icon: Carl Sagan

�0

our species. For Sagan, no question was too mundane, nor any student unworthy of his time

- he was a great teacher, his greatest asset in delivering his message, his obvious enthusiasm for

sharing his wonder at the universe.

In all of our bustling busyness, in our fevered race through life, it is often easy to lose

perspective. We are a tiny piece of the cosmic puzzle, but we are also an incredibly precious

one. So far as we know, we are the only species looking back up at the cosmos with searching

eyes, with enquiring minds. As Carl put it, ‘we are the universe’s way of knowing itself.’ It

is this sense of kinship with everything which consoles me in dark times, his Desiderata-like

appeal for serenity in the face of humanity’s obsession with things which, in the long run, are

largely irrelevant.

And it is in this sense, in the according to everything of it’s proper size and appropriate

importance, a trait that could be described as almost iconoclastic, that my admiration of Carl is

at it’s zenith. While he would no doubt object to being held up as an icon, I cannot but view

him as such.

Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

Bristol Triptych - Barnaby Wharam

Gideon Shapiro

Pretty sister’s acne breakout = Prayer works. Becky Sands �1

helicon.magazine@googlemail.com