THINGS AREN’T ONLY WHAT THEY SEEM

WE  COULD SAY THE WORLD IS ENDING, but through art, it is also coming alive. These days, so much is uncertain. So much is obscured. But art is ablaze. 

This issue is a concatenation of transcendental and expansive forms of grief. It was born out of volcanoes, lost records, and breakups. Out of worlds that may be burning, but as Alex Sastre-Rivera reminds us, “Then comes the rain.” The writers in this issue are all reaching inexorably toward a more honest truth: that among the ashes, there, too, can be life.  

“Like love, mourning affects the world - and the worldly - with unreality and importunity,” wrote Roland Barthes in Mourning Diary. The writing in this issue reanimates that which mourning has obliterated: the world. Even in his depression after the loss of his maman, Barthes knew that Literature was “the only region of Nobility.” Not “Nobility” as “aristocracy,” but “Nobility” as virtue, honesty, and magnificence. Are these not often the qualities we ascribe to the things we have loved and lost? Innocence, like in Anu Khosla’s “Blackberry Bush,” is noble because it is generous, selfless, and imaginative. But innocence is not unlike the old haunts we “must leave behind,” as Carol J. Scamman reminds us, to make room for experience and knowledge. The latter, too, requires imagination because imaginaries, like matter, cannot be destroyed. They transform. Through imagination, we become. 

Not all mourning is sad. There is joy in grief because loss, too, is a window of possibility. We grieve because we have felt great affection and devotion, and we want so desperately to remember, to carry on, to love again, to get it right. How can we get it right? What does it even mean to get it “right?” Maybe we should get it wrong. Maybe we should get it left. Maybe we should get it something that isn’t by default the opposite of right. How unimaginative it is to presume that we can only “get it” one of two ways! 

“I’m reduced to initiating myself to the world,” said Barthes. While we agree, we will instead say: In grief, we are reduced to making art. Art is how we begin. 

With infinite tenderness and solidarity, 

Melissa & Karlié, Editors

February 27, 2025