Editorial

As I write this, helicopters are circling overhead on a cataclysmic day of protest, following the kind of month you don’t forget in a hurry. Cities up and down the country have seen thousands take to the streets, 21 universities have been under occupation, and on one day I’ve heard of at least three occupied sixth forms in North London alone. Demonstrators are closing branches of Vodaphone, BHS and Topshop, protesting against tax write-offs, on a regular basis; and we are expecting yet more strikes from the BBC, London Fire Department, and London Underground.

The arts world and the humanities are reeling under draconian cuts — not just in the UK — and terms like ‘the new austerity’ are being bandied about. If this is wartime austerity, the war is being waged on our assumptions of how the economic and artistic worlds exist and overlap. It’s not an exaggeration to say the world order is changing before our eyes. It has even been noted, somewhere or other, that the bookshops this Christmas are bereft of the usual piles of jokey stocking-filler gift books. It’s serious. This is the year to buy something you actually want to read.

And here we are, part of the revolution, with our little digital magazine. Given the various enormities currently hitting us, it’s tempting to wonder what difference one small online magazine can make in the welter of blogs, ezines, poetry websites, and general democratic webby self-publishing that is both fuelling and responding to the collapse of traditional publishing. I think the answer can be found both out in the streets and within the web pages of Horizon Review.  One element of it is collectivity: the sense of something important, shared, and collectively (individually) nurtured. A narrative that tells us who we are — or what we don’t want to be — like that of Ian Duhig’s rattling tour of a poetry collection, Pandorama.

That’s what culture is.

Another element is the sense in which, by gathering together in person or through our work we can teach and learn from one another as individuals, that by either creating or engaging aesthetically, emotionally and critically with creative artworks, one is enriched as a sentient human being: isn’t this what art is? Learning through a mediated experience? (Consider what Henry James called the germ of a story: the donnée, what is given.)

Art — or ‘the arts — is described, among other things, as the thing that makes life bearable. It can both describe existence and — as Oscar Wilde proposed — create a model for it. Under duress we can do without it even less than in the good times: during the Second World War, it was proposed to Churchill to cut arts funding to help pay for the war. His response: “Then what are we fighting for?”

Among all the recent doom-mongering, and I confess I’m not immune to it, there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic, at least for literature. Literature can go anywhere. We can produce and publish it for pittances, and find our readers somehow. Every writer in this magazine is testament to that. As Ian Parks writes: ‘The archer aims, draws back his bow/ and lets the arrow fly’.

In the Dark Ages they used to put on plays for practically nothing, and that’s how one scene of David Secombe’s tragic-comic play about the decadent poet Ernest Dowson saw the light of day last year, at a café evening in honour of Oscar Wilde (starring the enigmatic Tim Turnbull as Oscar, complete with Yorkshire accent). John Greening’s Masque was produced in grander surroundings, but with a similarly small production budget. Ben Morris’ ‘Seven Unstageable Plays’ may be the most affordable — or the least. 

Of course, the arts exist to tell us stories: stories about stories, stories about storytellers, and even — as Julia Bird tells us in her paean to the glory days of Big Brother — stories about how we make stories out of real-time events.

They exist to make connections, whether between new music and old poetry or between different kinds of poetry — as Ruth Jenkins shows in her review of Infinite Difference — or between poetry and TV, or life and art.

The arts exist to help us look: a billowing shirt on a bed or a meteor shower.

Mark Thwaite throws down a critical gauntlet in ‘What Ever Happened to Reading Properly? Orwell himself, whose great essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ (first published in Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine in the 40s) talked of the power bad writing has to undermine clear reading — and clear thinking — would no doubt support this question. The question can also take the form of an assertion: as the Belgian artist Francis Alÿs wrote, ‘Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic’. Lottie Cantle’s ‘Iluminating Reiteration’ shows how these two qualities can merge and overlap in a very contemporary psycho-geographical context.

At a time when official public support for the humanities is being eroded, in both our arts institutions and education, we must lay claim to our own observations and imaginations. Many of us may struggle to keep our jobs with the cuts coming, many may find themselves embroiled in the protests. Many may find themselves miraculously unscathed (though subject, say, to reduced opening hours at the British Museum). However that is, it’s vital to keep alert, both outside us into the world, to one another, and inside to where our most personal perceptions take shape in the dark, and grow.

It’s a thrill to be able to bring all these writers (and two cartoonists) together, and with regret I haven’t been able to link to all of them here. Please read them. Above all, I want you to enjoy reading this issue of Horizon Review, and remember: as Octavio Paz says — ‘what we call art is a game’. A very important, but nevertheless fun, game. As for the rest? ‘There is an Epitaph’.

Many thanks to George Ttoouli and Nuala Ní Chonchúir for their invaluable work as reviews editor and fiction editor, respectively. I’m pleased to welcome David Gaffney as the fiction editor for Issue 6.

Katy Evans-Bush