In her book Gathering Moss, the bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer takes the reader through the behaviour of air moving over a surface. High above is the fast-moving laminar flow, “flowing in a smooth sheet”. Beneath this “lies a zone of turbulence, where the air swirls and eddies as it encounters objects”. Going lower still, the air becomes even slower until, adjacent to the surface, whether that be of a rock, decaying log or forest floor, “the air is perfectly still, captured by the friction with the surface itself ”. This is known as the boundary layer, the small area of climatic stability where many mosses thrive; “being small enough to live within the boundary layer allows the mosses to experience a warm, moist habitat unknown by the larger plants”. The cover image of this issue depicts such a moss, Polytrichum, living in a boggy boundary layer at Lewesdon woods and introduces this issue’s theme of ‘borders’.

As Kimmerer’s description of moss habitat shows, borders can be strangely paradoxical places; on the one hand, they are fraught areas where competing forces meet – think of armed patrols, barbed wire fences, Checkpoint Charlie – but among this turbulence there can also be areas of immense stillness which can become sites of unexpected flourishing – think of the various species clinging on in the British hedgerow, or the Korean demilitarised zone, now an unplanned nature reserve.

The theme of this issue was inspired by Thomas Bachrach’s article, a superb blend of memoir, social history and archival research that finds the author tracing his great grandfather’s peripatetic life across national and cultural borders, set against the events of the early twentieth century. The article’s meditations on displacement and identity feel uncannily relevant in light of the immense and tragic displacement of people going on in our current moment of geopolitical instability.

Precarious times can often lead to people looking to the time-tested wisdom of older generations and you can’t get much older than the fables attributed to the ex-slave Aesop whose ‘The Hunter and the Tracks’ gets an original retelling by Stefan Matthews. Aesop’s fables rarely receive much scholarly attention and traditionally their fate has mainly been between the pages of Latin exercise books, no doubt often defaced with all manner of school-boy drawings and unscholarly annotations. Yet as Grace Crabtree’s article shows, such material should not be overlooked as she introduces us to the world of medieval manuscripts, exploring the elusive identities of their authors occasionally glimpsed in the margins of these beguiling historical objects.

While manuscript marginalia can provide an unexpected moment of identification between reader and author, Jack Wightman’s article artfully explores how Celine Sciamma’s film Portrait Of A Lady On Fire actively encourages such empathy, showing how what might begin as voyeurism for the viewer can turn into something more. There’s a striking scene in Sciamma’s film, set in eighteenth-century Brittany, where some mystic drug is applied to one of the characters' armpits. It’s a strange moment where bodily boundaries are momentarily dissolved, and has a lot in common with the fabled Elizabethan courtship practice of offering ‘love apples’, which I explore, or, rather, attempt to explore.

Finally, in perhaps the clearest sign of the incomprehensibility of contemporary events, our regular political commentator Tom Beed has taken his cue from the absurdist OBERIU writers and delivered a piece about… well… you’ll have to read it. The OBERIU movement, referred to as “the last Soviet avant garde”, flourished briefly in the late 1920s in the boundary layer between the creation of the Soviet Union and the consolidation of Stalin’s repressive regime in the 30s. It’s an example that shows how art sometimes behaves in ways remarkably similar to mosses. Like many species of mosses, original art is notoriously resistant to cultivation; one need only look at the sterility of the Socialist Realism that the Soviet Union contrived to replace art like OBERIU’s. Instead, art can be found cropping up where it’s least expected – between wars, regimes, centuries – emerging in pockets of unexpected habitability where it is insulated from, yet influenced by, the turbulence around.

Fred Warren