We live on a lonely continent where the breath of God no longer sings things into being. A place where there is not a was or or an is or a will be. Nothing stays put long enough to prove that anything matters. Everything continues to shift arbitrarily in a recombining and ever-expanding flatness.
Here words have forgotten their meanings. They are like the inscriptions on tombstones beneath which there may or may not be anything entombed. And, even though chiseled into hard stone, they flit and float as burning scraps of paper from one grave to the next. They have no consistent truth, nor do the things to which they refer.
We sit departed from the simple faith in a history of roots and ground. Myths once made us real. Without them, we lose our corporeality. We too often experience nothing fully, neither loss nor hope, pleasure nor pain. We are all missing pieces.
As the sad and happy things that we had known fall apart, disintegrate, become pixilated, or simply burn away into night, we can begin to see, instead of truth, an instead, a blankness between unraveling seams, a nothing yet or nothing either: an otherwhere.
There are innumerable otherwheres. They open and close unrestrained. They have no restrictions or spatial require- ments, nor do they have any definitive form. They are mostly quite personal, though the wider one becomes, the more likely it is to take on collective appeal. There is no controlling them, but within them the very bounds of beauty are broken.
A world free of meaning frees us of the obligation of finding. So we slip into these widening cracks. For no better reason than to slip.
Your Editors,
Joseph Bien-Kahn Aaron Kingon