In the beginning was, by some accounts, the word. A profoundly unknowable moment, but if things ever did in fact ‘begin’, maybe a word is as good a place as any. But in what language, and with what meaning?
In Christian gospel that moment of creation is refined further to a pinpoint in which ‘the word’ was both godly, and god; a flash of divinity from which the sentences of all existence might form and take flight, simultaneously creating our world and investing it with meaning.
Regardless of belief, there is something compelling about the notion of an originating word. Words are the building blocks of ideas, the arranged, interpretable manifestation of thought. Their language is an agreed script in which we can describe ourselves to each other in the hope of understanding.
Words, however, are not necessarily grains of truth.
In contemporary Western culture we have a problem with authenticity, a problem with settling on an agreed interpretation of observable reality. Words aren’t necessarily helping. Words can lead us astray as readily as they can take us to honesty.
Which is an interesting point of pondering for workers in writing, whose task is to present thoughts as arranged sets of letters cemented by meaning.
A magazine, like this one, is a creature of those words and their language. But, even better: the source of those words is the simple honest spark of literary creation. In the beginning these words meant nothing more or less than the wordless inspiration they capture, the things they then say, the emotions and thoughts they arouse, the visions they create in the spaces beyond and between themselves.
Literature is its own truth. The words on these pages speak to that.
See the full contents of the Summer edition here.
