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Do I Drive or Am I Driven? Can I Break What I’ve Been Given?’

Do we tend toward destruction as much as preservation? Is what we want always what hurts us? In Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he proposes that our death drives counter our drives for advancement and ‘survival’. But how much do these tendencies interlink, overlap, haunt each other, run in each other’s grooves? Two seats in the same carriage. The train nestled into the index of the track, like love into loss into love into loss, driving on and on. 

In philosophy the Trolley Problem imagines the ethics of being active or passive as a problem of train tracks. A train is hurtling toward a crowd standing on one track. On another track, there is just one person. Should the hypothetical someone holding the lever switch the tracks or not? Is it better to save the many or worse to destroy the one? To act on belief or to admit to not knowing the right answer as the train approaches? Are you standing at the lever, in the crowd or alone on the tracks?

Trains and their tracks raise all sorts of questions about movement and control. How much power do we wield over where we’re going, how do we get there, how fast are we going, who’s sitting next to us, and what we can bring on the journey? Across geographies. Through time. Between one place/person/life and another. Terminal to terminal. Will someone check who we are and what we’re carrying? Will we know when we’ve crossed the frontier? Who is the Controller? Are we going, or being taken? Can we always tell the difference? Do we want to look out or close our eyes?

Tracks between the familiar and the strange. Tracks between us and them. Tracks between the future and the past. Tracks between the city and the wilderness. Tracks between the real and the imaginary. Tracks between pain and relief. Tracks between success and failure. Tracks between this world and another. Tracks between here and gone. When the path is made, is it we who decide to walk on it? When the sentences are written, how do we hear between the lines? Leave tracks, follow tracks. Tracked or tracking down. Once a railroad. Blood on the tracks. Half at the wheel, half frozen in the headlights. 

Abridged is looking for poetry and/or art on control, choice, destiny, fate, anger and loss. This issue is open to Irish poets and artists at home and abroad and anyone who is based/living on the island of Ireland. Please send submissions and a short bio to abridged@ymail.com in Word format or similar. Put your name in the body of the email otherwise it may end up in our spam folder and there’s no guarantee we’ll see it. Please also note that this issue is A6 portrait shaped (because why not) so very long material might not work that well. Submission deadline is 25th August 2024.

This issue is supported by The Arts Council of Ireland

Abridged is supported by The Arts Council of Northern Ireland and The Arts Council of Ireland.