Editor's Remarks

     Shawn Kent CC





         Where do I even begin? I'll start by saying thank you. For being here. For being. Persisting. Creating. Even though, even though. 

Don't you sometimes just wanna ask the world straight out: "What's going on around here?" What's really going on? Beneath all that noise, what song could you be singing? Song of joy. Song of pain. Songs of disappointment and hurt and of all that happens from not tending to the deep breaks in us. The voices are many that'll tell you to put all that away. To eat your own kind, to measure whole and happy by how much and how big. And bigger still. The hole in the center. It holds nothing and no one. It's an unkind machine we've made the world into. But I believe there is something in us that won't let us alone. It is that small voice inside of us that tells us we've been living such desiccated and cramped forms of life. And how life learns to adapt in unforgiving environments. Can become cemented into the final cut. Like childhood was, for many of us: thrown to storm too early to know how to dress oneself for storm. How to survive storm intact. And so we fragment and scatter. And we spend our lives collecting pieces of our story. Putting things together in a way that makes sense. That keeps us here. Because if we can't make it make sense, can't make that pain sing, oh, we know all too well what can happen to us. We see it writ large right now everywhere in the world. Everyone trying to get the bad things out of them and onto someone else. But you gotta deal with that. We know this, don't we, you and I? 

That's why we're here. To deal with, and to help each other deal with, what won't go away in us. Every creation that comes from out of the long dark night of us takes some of the edge off our pain. But there is a pain that can never, and maybe should never, be entirely removed from us. It is the very specific, democratic pain that comes with being human. Not the pain caused by injustice and organized cruelty, these are never necessary, but the pain that comes just from being flesh and blood and bone. There is a soul-ouch that cannot be unfelt in being here. Sometimes we feel it too much, or not at all. But it's there, moving by degrees, throughout our lives. Mended by hand and open heart, by a rigorous honesty. By tending and holding that line, carefully, until just the right moment. Or almost the right moment, for when do we ever arrive, or hold in our hands the perfect anything? 

We can't do it alone. That is certain. Wherever there are two or more, you have a place to start. Much as in twelve step fellowships, it is the power of one person helping another that makes the difference between life and death, and a death in life. So too in any area of life. And art doesn't always help. Some are dedicated to a kind of hurting-art, an art that only widens the path of the primal cut. I was once dedicated to such a thing. Until. Time. Enough time, and a deeper yearn for the heal than the pride of the hurt. Are you helping or are you hurting? The hurt can help. It can't take our pain from us, but it can help to make us feel real again. Put in the service of the excavation of our core wounds, such hurt clears a path that can be walked by others. Emotional landmarks of the lengths to which we've each gone to feel ok in the world. That we belong in world. That world needs us to hold the line more attentively, for each other. 

To those who have ears, such dark days are but a call to action. To lifting others up, holding them aloft, finding just enough food, clothing, shelter, counsel and care for our fellow wounded-by-life. By both the large injustices and the small daily slings and arrows. What good are we if not willing to go the distance for those in the distance, and those right next door. There's always some small thing we can do that makes a difference in someone's life. All the work, here, for instance, in this issue. It helped me immensely, to read and hold space for this incredible and courageous work. Sometimes there was a common point where our similar pain converged, other times a necessary decentering, but one tethered wholly to compassion and - whew, do I know the feeling?

"We are in the grit of human relating" here, as Jade McGleughlin writes. The real crunch of it what means to attempt real authentic relating with another. Which means becoming at times disoriented. Because none of our stories are the same, and we may fail to truly perceive someone's otherness if we read it only from the vantage point of our own lives and losses. No one's loss, no one's pain, is exactly the same. But there is an unseen thread that runs through us all. I've seen it, you've seen it. In the sweetest, most secular/holy moments, they happen so fast and briefly you want to bottle it, but it's gone before you can even wrap your arms around it. That feeling. It hardly has a name. Or many names. Every name. The threads by which we are bound to one another. In our joy and in our pain. You hurt, I hurt, that's the idea. But the feeling? Oh man, you gotta register that feeling. Make it real because it is the most real thing in the world. You hurt. I hurt. Love hurts, life hurts, it all hurts so much. But what do we do with the feeling? What do we do with each other's feeling? Much of the world encourages us to discount, devalue, and distrust it all. So much feeling. But as long as feelings are second class citizens, so too will people be, as Michael Eigen says. Feelings matter. Feeling matters. Feeling deeply. Feeling too much. But to feel nothing at all? Oh. We're seeing the dark birth of it, friends.

Be ready for the birth of unfeeling. Meet it with great feeling. Because that connecting thread runs through everything and everyone. Hold the line, mend the hurt, tend to the lost and those who are thrown right into it from birth. Some of us are right here, right now. Learning to be human in all too human world. Learning the world again like infants. What makes color dance, sounds sing, bells ring? Why is a mother a mood and a father boom. Sifting through patterns now that were not consistent enough for us to get a proper feel for them then. This is the work, in many forms and varied paths.

To get back to the core you must pass through the fire. You must want for others what you have found in your grieving hours. Hand to shoulder. Chairs in a circle. Warm coffee. A knowing smile. A knowing anyone, anything. It's not nothing to air such great feeling out. Because whatever happens to us, that feeling will not go away. It'll only get larger, more out of our grasp. Until it takes on an anti-life of its own. Wanting to leave nothing around it with feeling intact.

But here we are, feeling to the fore, feet to the fire. Hearts warm and ready to receive, to let in, to tell our story, to sing our songs, and with a courage that took its hits but never cut itself off from its root, we branch out from our pain towards the world. 

Till we meet again, fellow feelers/travelers. Brave your feeling out into that great and raging approaching storm. Soften all that dark with the light in your old kit bag. Soften all that dark. By hand. And by he(art).

In service and gratitude,
James Diaz
Founding Editor
Anti-Heroine Chic ​
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