I wrote The Dust Filter for submission to the wonderful Apparition Magazine, and I thought it would be nice to publish it here.
Now I’m reading it with the benefit of having put it away for a while, I can see it oozes insecurity. It works well for the piece, centred as it is on early-career anxieties of place, meaning, and ambition. It’s also starkly revealing of what I was going through personally as I was writing it.
The key theme of the piece is contamination, both literal and metaphorical, so the amount of my own feelings that leaked into it seems fitting. What I was intentionally evoking was late- and post-imperial decline, how obsessive nationalism and militarism contorts society in a self-reinforcing spiral. Where the finite borders of expansionism are reached, and the ravenous teeth of the imperialist drive to conquer are turned inward, consuming every aspect of life within the imperial core, as well as beyond it.
This is by no means a new idea, but it’s one I wanted to explore. Aside from my fiction writing, I have a philosophy degree, and I am firmly of the belief that fiction should seek to explore concepts of meaning. The events in fiction are axiomatically fictional, but fiction has always existed to show greater meaning through artifice. Lies that hold truths within them that are too sharp or big to comfortably confront directly.
Ultimately, I believe that fiction is a tool for the communication of ideas, and The Dust Filter too is about that. Going forward I’ll be expanding the ways in which this blog does so too, and my next update will be an essay I wrote on the ethics of self-medication for my Master’s at the University of Birmingham. I hope it will prove illuminating.
Rainbow Samphire 