Little Prayers - May 31, 2025
- Bryson Edward Howe
- May 31
- 9 min read
Updated: Jun 5
What is Little Prayers?
Little Prayers is a self-destructing art writing column. With each instalment, the previous one deletes forever. The vital alchemy of a Little Prayer - short in length and lifespan - permits writing at its most personal and experimental. Feature your Little Prayers by responding to these prompts.
This week, a ceremony of innocence is drowned.
Paul W. S. Anderson - Anatomy of a Gizmo, I
The annals of imagination have long been lassoed by science fiction into beams of influence and return, strong enough to balkanize the entire genre: even when a work is patchy, at least one of the shards dangled from its frayed mobile sparkles. Over time, one such element has come to form a grand Abbey of Design, lined with beautiful, beautifully functional objects: The Dyson Sphere, Alpha 60, The Game Pod, An Eva, Samantha, The Substance, The Shrouds. They deserve to be taken apart and tinkered with...
The Gravity Drive of Event Horizon sits on a raised podium in the middle of a lake in the belly of a ship in outer space. It is dark, it is a sphere, and it rolls. It’s orbited by three spiked, concentric rings, that intermittently converge to emit a halo of blinding light. Purportedly, the engine functions as a “gateway”, designed to briefly fold space-time into a wormhole enabling interdimensional travel, but when confronted with its sheer reality-ripping power, its witnesses are driven to religious hysteria, fanatical violence, and acts of transgression: sex, sodomy, self-abuse. Frequently, encounters with the drive lead one to ascribe it a personality, usually a “she”. But if The Gravity Drive had sweat pores I’d think it was Marlon Brando in Streetcar’, in that its hulking musculature encases a watery discomfit caravanned from a completely different movie to its orbiting counterparts. This abstracted valency – imparting a psychic/symbolic shiftiness – is only the first clue to its womb-like significance.* The second is its approach. The ship, ‘The Event Horizon’, is a uterine cetacean with all the lights switched off: one long tunnel suspended over Neptune that leads to two pressurized sphincters, interconnected by a vortex of teeth. On the other side of these: The Gravity Drive. This strangely baptismal meat grinder leading to the drive’s nest blurs the anatomical lines between the anal and a Nu-Metal case of vagina dentata; “through me you go to the lost people.”
Materially, VFX artist Richard Yuirich probably had some sort of alien, aluminium alloy in mind, and the star graith’s dark, stony keep is actually already close in hue to the merle of graphite-epoxy, commonly used in aerospace for its high-tensile-low-weight dynamics. But to the human eye (that still remembers wood), dark objects suggest the dense and the patinaed: something old, sequestered, lockjaw. If it's metal, then it might be a Mycenaean panoply – if it's as organic as the crew suggest, then it might be a church. Norway’s scaled, stave churches are built from pine ore, heartwood mined from the deepest part of trees and then cured in its own bled sap, which gives it its bleak patina. These allusions further immerse Event Horizon in its contemporary Metal aesthetics: recalling the inherently nordic, satanic, old-world, and, once the drive is "hatched" and licked with fire, the real-world church vandalism by bands like Burzum in 1992. The entire surface of the drive is pocked with Taoist umbos, a mandala of ancient association laying the line between magnetic and magh-. Magic circles, a typically wiccan tradition, were 9 feet in diameter, instigated by chalk, materials or bodies, and pooled the energy of its distinct magical quarters (or spells) to invoke a cone of totality that acted as the meniscus between the celestial and the terrestrial. Once made spherical and launched into space, however, its liminality invokes The 7 Directions: North, South, East, West, Centre, Above and Below. A spell not of conjuration, but for getting lost, for the inner wayfinder resigned to a wandering with no end, through an inferno lit from within. Now, set the reel spinning, to eyes, suns, gongs, atoms, eggs. Anything you can’t break without aberration, and a quickening of blood and fire over the wild, wilder oats.
* To build on Le Guin, one way to tell that our fictioner is male is the positioning of their divine MacGuffin in a safe, central crucible that reflects their external view of female anatomy. Where the womb is something powerful and hidden, too volatile an element to write spilling over the rim of the pages and, moreover, unimaginable as the story’s “medicine bundle” itself, a multidirectional metaplasm or gerund, rather than a 3-act latent climax ready to be penetrated with an “and then.”
- Written by Caleb Carter
Wong Kar-wai - Shadow Puppets
"the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct..."
Meet me at 'Lán 18', they're open late and there's always a table when it's bad weather. Take a left from Chinatown into the old friary, and you can't miss it; the bay windows and neon beaten into the arch. Family affair, the pork is great. Get the orange wine. Wear a watch. I've called ahead for the waiters to arrange a stack of beer mats for you to tear up throughout the conversation and organise into little piles - around 4 or 5 should do. Remember to keep your voice low and slow until your second wine, and eye contact sustained so that it belies the effort. Place your left hand palm-up and open on the table and take your right pointing finger - nails filed into French tips - around in a chalk spiral on your pale skin. Repeat with added pressure as you recall your first love, until the pathways turn pink and then red. This will all be more effective if it appears involuntary. Flinch as if you've been caught, then curl your fingers as if someone - me - is holding your hand. As if I were actually there in the empty chair opposite. The waiters should leave you an envelope, paper and a pen. Note down the exact times when you have completed these acts, and for how long. Seal the envelope, and leave on the empty plate opposite. I'll get it. This is your essay on the action of secret-keeping, which is no passive act. Understand, it takes genuine physique, posture, strain, and agility to hoard your sacred things from the light. Sometimes it takes a pilgrimage. Sometimes it takes going to Angkor Wat.
It is now, on my fourth watch of In the Mood for Love, that I realise there is nothing "indistinct" about its chthonic coup d'etat, Mr Chow and Mrs. Chan are freezeframes in the bright white shock of the key light, that struggles - in true Bogart/Bergman clairvoyance - against their pupil walls. We don't need much more than this, the title, some slow motion, and 'Yumeiji's Theme' to know exactly what's germinating there: cinema resides in its catatonia; mania, resuscitation, and arrest. The first time Mrs. Chan knocks at the door she betrays her tell, arching her finger at the frame... a prehensive scratching at what clicks behind the light, discomfort under its wedding band, and shadow puppetry of one curved leg finally freed from her Cheongsam under the moon. As when a curse has come true it is also lifted, secrets cease the moment they come to light. Its custodian must turn away, in a very deliberate and obvious fashion. Yes, I'd rather you see that I am hiding something than let you see what, for so long, I have held.
- Written by Caleb Carter
Basil Bunting - Northedge
Desire lives in the unconsummated.
Not silence came, not silence fell. Silence was. As if it had been there all along, only covered for a brief moment by sound. Something total. It reminded me of when I first went back North from university, a Christmas I barely spoke to anyone, just walked the old footpaths to the cliffs of Tynemouth and watched the waves push splayed driftwood against the rocks.
And of kissing someone I didn't love, of pretending jubilation, of hearing the pause in her breath when she realised I wasn't coming any closer. The stillness after the party. The waves crashing on the beach long after we'd all gone home, our bodies wet and stung from the salt. It was the morning after I lost my virginity, and the birds were still singing and I wanted them to shut up, just for a minute, for that silence that was.
What's worse: a text saying it's over, or no text at all? I clenched my jaw. Not in rage, but in that nervous little way I do when something is too close. My tongue touched the back of my teeth. I remembered how I used to press mine against the sharp edge of a broken tooth in Year 9, liking the risk of blood. I wasn't squirming, but I wasn't easy either. I had to get up and walk around the room — my flat in London where you can hear three other people living beside you through the walls — and I thought: we are always too far from where we began.
The ache is in the North. Always the North. The pleasure is Bunting's, naming it. Letting the land do the desiring. "Bitter river," "the dumb prophet," "hew of the thorn," "bones in the skin." I felt the heat in them — not lust, exactly, but contact. Tactile memory (or lovers pressed like foxgloves into notebook pages). The line "the star you steer by is gone" pulled something low in my throat. I don't want to be read, I want to be seen. And the poem sees everything without pointing.
My attention wandered to my spine. This often happens when I read something exacting (the totality is in the precision. How clean the cut of the line. Someone telling you, dead-on: I don't love you anymore, and you admire them for it). I shift in my seat. Recalibrate posture. A kind of instinctive reverence, or maybe fear. My body remembered classrooms, remembered standing on cold train platforms in ill-fitting borrowed coats, remembering I was northern when I was far from the North.
How would I explain it to a lover? He's saying: Don't forget where you're from. It's written in your voice, even when you lie.
To a stranger? Nothing stays. But the fact that it changed doesn't mean it wasn't true.
To myself? The stone is not cold. You are.
If it were a touch, it'd be the back of her hand grazing your ribs as she rolls away in sleep.
Childhood was spent in silence, mostly. I'd run until my lungs hurt, lie flat on the wet grass and feel the world tilt.
Then, when a woman once ran her fingers down my jaw and said, "You're like a locked box, aren't you?" And I thought: good. You can't get in trouble for things you don't say.
I want to change, I think. But I say it quietly. To no one.
Even now, the birdsong. Even now, the hush after.
Gorse split the scalp.
Brake ferns burn through sock and skin.
We learnt touch
in the lee of groynes —
brief,
wind-bitten.
You do not reclaim the North.
It reclaims you.
As thorn.
As spit.
As something behind the blue,
at last,
seen.
- Written by Bryson Edward Howe
DjRUM - Under Tangled Silence
What if the point is not to break form but to widen it?
Caleb and I have written and rewritten this column from every angle we can find: poetry, puzzles, algorithms, self-mythologies. We’ve reached for transcendence through structure, and equally through its undoing. Recently, I’ve been circling around Roland Barthes again, in The Pleasure of the Text, where he writes about disruption as the pleasure-point of reading. But what if it’s not a disruption exactly, but something like rotary perception, the term Charles Mingus used to describe rhythm, not as a line but a circle?
Isn't that exactly what jazz does best (perhaps better than any other art form)? You have the skeleton of a song's structure to hang notes on, but once one player starts to play their own strand, the spine turns to fog and the song widens into possibility. It's not a rupture, it's a radius. A gyre, not a gash. Not disruption, but dilation. The spiral is more generous than the break. That’s what Barthes misses, maybe — or just what I want to find in his wake. The pleasure isn’t in tearing through the form. It’s in what leaks out when you stretch it, reshape it. Not noise, but pressure. Not excess, but density. So how do you write about this? Put words to it? Barthes ties himself in knots trying to explain this feeling, and in true lineage, we've done the same. So I'm not going to mention a single detail about this album. Just listen to it. It's worth it. What else is there to say?
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- Written by Bryson Edward Howe
Credits:
Caleb Carter is a co-founder/editor of The Big Ship
Bryson Edward Howe is a co-founder/editor of The Big Ship
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