Letter from the Editors, LIT 44

“Praise the stars we die into”
–Fury Psalm 7, by Jackie White

Chaos: the stuff of dreams the stuff of life. It is chaos we are birthed from. As we slip into these bodies, we think we have shut the door to it. Open the door.

I have this persistent vision that actually came from a dream and I wish I could go there. This dream was about trains and going to out of the way neglected but beautiful places; end of the line forgotten places, a little wild and on the edge of abandon by the poorest of the poor who have had to move on. A useless place. But a few hang on, as I have to hang on, as I do hang on, believing in a dream and believing in what’s useless; believing that what is useless and pitiful is what matters.

Oscar Wilde says, “All art is quite useless.” and I love Oscar Wilde for saying so.

Yes, art is useless. It needs to be useless. Blood is vital; organs are vital, the means and access to money if one wants to live in house is vital. The reciprocal relationship between need and that need being met is very simple and the relationship is very clear: supply and demand, master and servant; the world broken down to what can be used, what is tangible and can be commodified and sold. Identify the need. Fill the need. So yes, in this sense, art is totally useless.

But we have an invisible life that has vital needs too. The energy that infuses our bodies extending beyond them mixes with all the other energies in this world, and that energy that animates everything demands form and connection: it is the first language of this place. The unseen reciprocal relationship of being sparked alive in a body by energy, is to give form to it. This continuous act of making that chaos requires does not stop at the body.

It’s through the act of art as verb, expressed through imagination and emotion that we make the necessary contact with the unknowable as collaborators with chaos.

Happy making.

Charlotte Slivka
Editor in Chief

Back to TOC