Notes from the Editor's Desk -- 3/31/22

If I were a businessman, my office would mount with bills; and, foregoing the benefit to business that is one’s reputation for fair dealing, I would only relinquish monies owed if the other party took up the matter with the courts, prevailed in their arguments, and even then would my compliance be in doubt. My advantage in life, if I ever came by it, would come with great bitterness. Enterprises commence with creative zeal, such that the anxiety and concerns are brushed over by spontaneous ideation, they flounder, and it is imperative that the original impulse not be lest when it is discovered that the market imagined, if it exists at all, has no place for your offerings. How full of glories must writing have seemed to Kafka, sculpture to Michelangelo, but all that history has proven capable of captivating the best among us is, today, subsumed by the lukewarm glow of technology. Even the human condition, the likes of which the genius of Christ made his medium, is subsumed. Photographs forever changed painting. An endless spring, perpetually refreshing its displays and table data, encouraging its users to ever more discovery, replaced the satiation felt by all but the best of readers. A story describe to a reader the reader’s own potential. Code is nothing so articulate. The medium’s most capable practitioners reliably make the worst use of it. Code’s private hold in my own life must be fought with every instrument available to me, books my readiest tool. Books contain a thread that needs to be followed. If the needle in the haystack be not found, it will surely be discovered by the livestock in the paddock, and the regret I feel, in choosing to open my laptop or phone rather than seek the hazard, will be all the more acute. I cannot look upon my letters with any less affection. Recently, I thought I stood within my garden, but found, rather, that I was only observing the vines growing upon the trellises of the outer wall. Inside was all ashen and pale. A sigh remained, but flowered none.