[Content Warning: suicide mention] I don’t have favourite students anymore, but I had one once. I most remember Beatrice sat in the front row, beside the window, with her white hair pulled into a braid with a sharp end and her pressed poppies kept snug, pressed flat, between the pages of her Latin textbook. She was an uncomfortable person. Each day her hair was restrained into a different, tight style. Each day there was a different length to her skirt. I got the sense that she could never make her mind up about herself. The only things that stayed the same with her, day in and day out, were her quiet and her poppies. She sat on her backpack under a tree, alone during breaks, rain or shine.
once she gardened to Pachelbel’s Canon now on her deathbed, dignity drained her teeth are like stones, eroded by nature sand fills her throat when she speaks and she no longer hears the voice of time ravaging her cochlea, her dreams she recalls the symphony orchestra elevated strings perform the Canon wells stirring among mothballed suits of the concert hall’s A-reserve seating and emotion reaches B and C-reserves not at the speed of sound as teachers told but in forever lapping waves: the man in row thirty-four or five chooses not to witness the strings but adjusts his gaze to four through eight, seeing symmetry fractions of a beat before the sound vibrates into his own ear canal and makes
“That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” —Walter Benjamin For German philosopher Walter Benjamin, original works of art hold an “aura”, a property that is the art’s “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (Benjamin, 1936). An aura is a product of the art’s uniqueness and authenticity, and its relationship with its history. He defined the authenticity of art as “the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced” (Benjamin, 1936). For paintings, the “authentic” would be the worn-over-time, oil