Editor's Remarks

      Timo Newton-Syms CC




​    I recently watched a heartbreaking film called "Her Name Was Jo." It centers around a 10 year old girl who lives with her step father, too far gone into the throes of addiction to care for her. Her birth mother has died and she sleeps at night with her arms wrapped around her mom's sweater. By day, while other children are at school, she survives by catching her own fish and scrapping metal. Within the first 15 minutes of the film (by which time one has hardly caught one's breath) her step dad overdoses and she's forced to flee when police arrive, out on the road, accompanied by her 10 year old friend, in search of her birth father.

    Throughout the film, one is almost convinced one is watching a person who has lived sixty years in 10, and any child who has known trauma and environments of addiction recognizes the imposing weight of what feels, to a child, like the whole damn mean and angry world clawing right through one's chest. But what did me in is a scene toward the end, when the man she's tracked down, after a brutalizing travel across the country, turns out not to be her father. Jo, and the friend she's travelled with, are standing outside an orphanage in L.A. that Jo is going to be staying in, and her friend tells her: "You may not have a home, but you can be a home." That line just about wrecked me. 

    Jo, who has seen and suffered far too much already in her short life, steps into her strange new world and sees a little five year old boy sitting all alone in the common room, weeping uncontrollably, with his head in his hands. She walks up to him, and she puts her arms around him. And so the film ends, and a life begins, one hopes.

    "You may not have a home, but you can be a home."

    Feels very pertinent to what we're doing here. To what I'm doing here. We assemble, us once-children of the impossible country, our families along the way. We see suffering and we extend ourselves. We don't know what will fix it (probably nothing ever will) but we do know that a hand on a shoulder, when the world as we know it so far is breaking apart inside us, can catch us before we fall into total oblivion. Can be just enough to keep us on our feet. As a late dear friend of mine once told me as we talked through a rough night on the phone: "It helps just to talk like this." I hadn't really known what to say, he was in so much pain, and I had a foreboding sense that too much had already gone too wrong for him for things to turn around. What use was I in all that pain, I thought to myself. And then he tells me, just doing this thing right here helps.

    I can tell you that art has been in my life such a presence as this. Reading a line in a Jorie Graham poem once in my early 20's when I was deeply suicidal: "Are you sure you want to kill yourself / do you not / maybe / just want to sleep it off again / this time?" was such a palpable presence that I can tell you it actually saved my life. So yes, I do believe unreservedly that what we do with our words matters to someone out there more than we can possibly know. 

    "We may not have a home, but we can be a home."

    It has often been noted that unhoused people are often the most generous when they see someone else in need (seeing a child sleeping on the sidewalk without a coat, they give them their own, in the dead of winter.) Something there is in our suffering that cannot not extend itself towards it. Not always. We can become the things done to us all too easily. Or we can choose the other path, the pain-path, where nothing in us ever totally mends but for the reaching we do every day towards the deep abiding good in us and in each other. 

    While not all of the work we carry here centers around such total soul-shatter as far too many of us have known in our lives, (being a part of the rich tapestry of the human experience, it includes of necessity also such things as joy, love, laughter, music, friendship, good meals, long walks in deep woods,) much of it is work done in the darker regions of our lives. As an editor (not the word I would choose for what I am doing here, I prefer witness, listener, friend) this work is also my work. I have spent the better part of my life trying to get whole with pen and paper. I've tried other methods also, one's that almost unmade me, and then softened me, brought me here, to you and you and you. 

    "We may not have had a home then, but we can be a home now." 

    Much in our lives is not of our own choosing, but there are moments where the effort we make to undarken our path can become, through the years, a kind of intention towards the world. It's what I've always loved most about communes and activist movements: they might not be perfect, but they're trying towards something that I think the world wants very much to beat out of us: that we are nothing without each other, that what we have to offer, no one else can quite bring into the world in the same way as we can, and that that work extends to the whole world. And  most of all, that we can never care enough. 

    Leo Buscaglia was a well known psychologist in the 90's and an unreserved advocate of what he called "The Politics of Love." I spent many a night as a high schooler listening to a lecture tape of his by the same name while my parents yelled and screamed and broke dishes all through the night, many times until the cops were called. His passionate pleas to soften, to love each other more, to be warriors of kindness in a world that's prime motive seemed to be to convince us that we were nothing but damaged and damaging beings, spoke deeply to me. Something in teenage me refused to believe the world. Something in me still. I can think of no better way to end what I am trying to say than by just quoting him on this:

     “Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.”

    Friends, we give to you our small act of caring. It's but a drop in a big sea of confusion, pain, and uncertainty. But a little bit of caring goes such a long way. Thank you for visiting us as this new season rolls in. Extend your hands, your ears, your hearts, your coats as you are able to. I can tell you it makes a real difference. Just talking, like this. 

Warmly,
James Diaz
Founding Editor
Anti-Heroin Chic
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