Editor's Remarks

Jacob Resor CC



"We are all broken by something. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. However, our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and our imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion." - Bryan Stevenson

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   I was in some state of gone for an unbearably large part of my life once. Some state of stillborn, stasis, hibernation-years. What couldn't I know? Who couldn't I tell? Sometimes life mutes our core. And sometimes life offers, to unmute us, ordinary angels. People, sometimes moments, that help something penetrate, get through. We can only speak and really hear our voices when we're ready. By eighteen, I had been so completely broken down as a person that I'd no clue what to do as a person in a world full of people that seemed to. As far as I knew, I wasn't really a part of anything that I could put my own heart up against. If there is any comfort in being broken it's that broken knows broken. You may find yourself in strange places, broken palaces, full of fellows shattered early, shattered hard. The words we used with each other were sparse but potent. The longing for hope, for normal, is commensurate with the absolute fear of it. We only know what we know, and having seen what we've seen, over every horizon, we suspect, is exactly what we have been given so far. Brutal gifts. Those keepers, those homes, that vast empty place at every turn where life's joys are not to be trusted. It's a terrible thing to be given temporary assurances from home base, day one.

   If there's one thing we learn from that bitter-sweet beginning it's that we're not, no matter how much it seems we are, alone. I remember the first time I realized other kid's families were broken too. Our playing was a playing outside of time, a way to stop time, to escape, for a moment, a hell called home. Because broken children are still, if nothing else, resilient little dreamers. That place is maybe our first ever sense of real community. The challenge: how not to become what we were running from. Sometimes the only way to do that is to be gone. Years. Gone.

   I know that I've told some version of this story before. It might be the only real story I know how to tell. Everything in our lives flows out of a great big deep original wound. Rivers widen, break off, go wild, go raging, go bright-burning and hopeful. I think at a certain point, with enough help and understanding, we choose the shape of our lives, our rivers. It takes a long time. I loved so many people, and I know you all did too, who didn't have enough of it.

   The days are often in which I wonder: what would have happened if I had darkened one day longer? But someones and somethings broke through, and much to my surprise I found I was no stranger to the world after all. We keep what we have by giving it away, they say in the program. It was a little bit of that. And a whole lot of other things too. Like the poems that fell upon me like so much hard rain after long drought. Or the people whose lives I happened into who refused to let me disappear, to go easy. We are nothing if not saved by the being there of anyone at all. Presence. Lights on. Invitation. Sitting space. Talking time. The holy is so ordinary. It's here and nowhere else. Just a drive over, a cup of coffee, identification, hearing the similarities in each of our stories. We are those children now grown, and unalone. 

   Our stories vary. The severity of the landscape, the length of it, what we endured, the soul-murders, the ways we shut down, how we got through, how we rose from ashes to be dazzled, as if for the first time, by so much starlight. I think there is a red thread connecting us, a deep chorus of relational stories bound by a common geography of hurt and harm taken up into our own arms like the children we once were. What Adrienne Harris calls "our wounds that must serve as tools," is the practice we each in our own way and weary time come to cultivate, a language learned on the go, and in the fire.

   Edwidge Danticat writes of "creating dangerously, creating as a revolt against silence," because not speaking has killed many people we have known, we take to our language like a lifeboat. Can all that was taken ever really be put back? No. It cannot. We make room in our lives for our losses. Our very selves that once died. A subtle container where beauty begins to form. Slowly. Cautiously. "To be courageous enough", as Lauren Levine writes, "to allow one's "little voices" to have a life of their own" is to create scaffolding, a house to gather and to mend and to warm. I believe such is the work found here and that we gather together like this for a reason, and for but such a short season in the grand scheme of the universe. There is a hunger in us for a community that runs deeper than the ocean. A hunger to not travel the road alone. A hunger to keep what we have by giving it away. To be each other's keepers, gentle listeners. 

   What does it mean to say out loud, all these years later: yeah, I guess I was murdered as a child, and by those who were said to love me? By the world? What does it mean to be a living breathing murdered being? What animates our spirit? What calls us home? Wilfred Bion notes that change is a "moment of catastrophe". Like a tornado rearranges a landscape, so too are we emotionally rearranged when we take up "our wounds that...serve as tools." We each of us come to mourning as the introduction to creation. As Thomas Ogden writes, mourning is:

   "A demand to create something...a memory, a dream, a story, a poem, that begins to meet, to be equal to, the full complexity of our relationships to what has been lost. Paradoxically, in this process, we are enlivened by the experience of loss and death, even when what is given up or taken from us is an aspect of ourselves." 

  This work requires us to reckon with, as Lauren Levine reminds us, "the bittersweet and inevitable incompleteness of our work, accepting our own limitations and the inexorableness of mortality." Our stories will one day end. But I believe what we leave behind us serve as starting points for future wounded others. That each narrative constructed out of the darkness makes a dent of light curve infinitely through our world. We must be willing to get lost, Lauren Levine suggests. To live in "the messy unknown, navigating the stark landscape of arctic tundra and sea ice where growth is hard to come by in the frozen soil. This journey is treacherous..to create poetry out of the gaps left within us" is to refuse to add to the completion of our soul-murder.  

   We so often do things not knowing where they will really lead us to in the end. This space was created as a way of not disappearing from my own life and pain. What it has become is something so far beyond my own limited comprehension that all I can do is sit back and marvel at all this light pouring in through the cracks. What I do know is that you each have made this place something that I can finally put my own heart up against. As in the beginning, so too now, only no-longer-children gathered in order to stop time, but to stitch it together, to make it flow, a great arching overflowing river along the banks of which whole universes of life grow. Something happens here. I cannot name it, but I feel it. Each time, in every piece, in every voice. A refusal to mute our "little voices", a risky chorus, a venturing into catastrophe so that we might truly live and marvel simply at the stars. The stars. 

   Until we meet again, friends. May this new year bring you each the small and precious joys you all deserve. Be kind to yourselves. Accept the places that you have to go, even if it is sometimes into the darkness. What other way is there to reach our light?

James Diaz
Founding Editor
Anti-Heroin Chic