In times like these, the pragmatist naturally wonders why so many put their faith and hopes on the power of self-expression. In the face of raging fire, one million deaths from coronavirus worldwide (at the time of writing this), rising fascism, and all the other crises in the world cried out to deaf ears, the puzzle of language, the extremely powerful paradox of it, seems recklessly ineffectual at best and dangerously indulgent at worst. Rather, the pragmatist would be narrowly concerned with the material, the actual nitty-gritty of how to make lives better. As they march against the enemy, every day putting their lives on the line, they look back at us who walk behind them and ask why we have begun to raise monuments. The war still rages on.
Even I succumb to this kind of skepticism. I truly wonder about the fate of words in a time when they continue to be co-opted and twisted by media, politicians, and corporations. I wonder too whether words can capture all that they claim to capture. I wonder whether the paradox in our name—The Things Unsaid—is more tragic than redemptive. Nevertheless, when I first heard about the idea for this website, I recognized the impulse to make space for the experience of others as good, prima facie. And then, once I began reading the works, I was convinced of the worth of this enterprise. Yes, the war still rages on, but it is the artists, memorializing, synthesizing, capturing, and expressing, who will secure the future for us. They will make sure we remember what we were fighting for, and they will help us remember what fighting means, the tremendous sacrifice we engage in all the time but sometimes forget to name.
When we write down what is lost, we don’t bring it back, but we do preserve something of it. We are like the maid of Corinth, tracing the shadow of their lover on the wall before he goes to war. In some sense, everything written is a ghost story. The things unsaid, those the things which were never expressed because one didn’t have the courage or the time, we hoped to give those things new life, redeemed by eventual expression.
As it stands, our first issue has exceeded our expectations. We are ecstatic to have gathered perspectives from all over the world, from Ohio all the way to the United Kingdom. In these different perspectives we see how quarantine has in some ways universalized experience. I think in particular of Wendy’s Water’s I am Held in Suspension, where she says, “Now that I am no longer one side of so many recycled conversations, I am the conduit of the incidental song of the universe which coincidently continues.” Similarly, R.D Johnson’s Cuarentena makes prolific use of the second plural pronoun, proving how much our current suffering is collective. This is the spirit of geometry intensified by crisis, how suffering enables us to see beyond, but on the other hand, we have also seen how it encourages specificity, renewing our willingness to appreciate the small things.
In Angeline Truong’s Of Milk, for example, she gives full-bodied attention to the act of a neighbor watering a plant with a scarf, and by the end this attention has metamorphosized into enthusiasm for tomorrow, a hope we all so desperately need. She writes, “and yet/ today already I am thinking about the possibility/of witnessing this softness again, tomorrow.” Here, we have hope made concrete, made tangible, which is one of the sacred powers of language too.
Reader, I encourage you to look for yourself and see all the fragments of truth clothed here in hard-won glory. Our hope is that as well as a monument, this issue can be a kind of well, where all who are in doubt may return and have their hearts filled. Until love spills over. Kelechi Nwankwoala, Curator for the Issue No. 1