Timothy Mathews

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Chronicles of Art and Hope. On demagoguery and beyond
MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, autumn, 2025



The look of the words on the page, the sound of them in the ear, the rhythms of their interaction within each piece and over the book as a whole, all signal the rhythm of the book’s voyage into the smelting of demagoguery and vulnerability: vulnerability to the demagogues of our time of our time, their psychic appeal, the textures of their magnetism, their power to seduce; and their capacity to feed the inner vulnerability of anyone, in ever more charismatic outpourings of merciless glee. Fashioning exploitation into the clothes of those it targets. Yelling exploitation in such plain sight that it’s located everywhere, and absorbed into the air.
And still we dance, and invent the air to breathe.

The varying looks and rhythms from the pages match the way I was experiencing, grappling with, writing with vulnerability, exploitation, contempt; also resistance, the entwined  lyricisms of pain and generosity, of ego and agape. In writing There and Not Here, different though the unfurling rhythms are, it was important to me to discover and to nurture a particular rhythm over the course of each essay, a rhythm that belonged to it, like skin emerging from a scar, and proposing a start. In the pieces here, I felt compelled to welcome the sounds of shattering, I felt able to embrace their jaggedness, I felt it was needed for what I was trying to do. It was matter of listening, and a continuing education in the formation of my hearing, my range, and my limits. But such things can’t be seen or heard, at best mimed, and the catastrophes most feared by any individual, as well as the joys they most desire, have already occurred, deep within. Such is perhaps the foundational song of psychoanalysis and its many odysseys of loss. The tones of loss continue to shimmer in the pages of this book, at the outer the edges of its loose chiastic shape. They have shown me my path to the magnificence of what lies beyond, which shocks and glows and beckons, and which has turned into the poetic essays, the free verse, and the prose poetry offered you here, in this commonplace book, this scrapbook with a shape, these chronicles of art and hope.

Timothy Mathews,
from A few of my favourite…,
the opening pages of the book



Table of Contents


A few of my favourite…                                                          

Extracts from healing without                                                    

What would I say now?                                                                                                            
: unbound                                                                                

As stories you might tell                                                              

       Ritornellos Slippy & Shiny                                              

       Violence Wills Love - Two Poems for Nancy Spero              

               In fragments there echoes

               Thinness and sparsity

       Who where when

       Just write as stories the ones you might tell                      

Make   Shift   Echo   Life                                                       
Embossed on the social fabric                                                      

On wonder, lament, and becoming                                              

In which way does delusion lie?                                                   

10.01                                                                                      

She Voices If  

Please read    
Extracts from healing without, prompted by Antony Gormley, is published in CounterText, December 2020.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/count.2020.0203


As stories you might tell, prompted by Caroline Bergvall, Nancy Spero, and others, is published in CounterText, April 2024.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/count.2024.0335


Make   Shift   Echo   Life, prompted by Anselm Kiefer, is published in Blackbox Manifold, August 2024.
https://blackboxmanifold.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/


Embossed on the social fabric, prompted by a production of Macbeth, is published in CounterText, January 2025.


10.01, prompted by a sonata by Franz Schubert, is published in ArteFilosofia in 2025.


She Voices If, prompted by an adaptation of Blindness by José Saramago, is published as an editors’ choice in Synthesis, December 2022: Dissident Self-Narratives: Radical and Queer Life Writing.
https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/synthesis/issue/view/1851  

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