Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Jim Hicks I'VE SAID THIS BEFORE, but it bears repeating. You probably know that neurologists have a term, proprioception, to describe our sense of ourselves and our body, its position and movement in space. What they haven't yet named, so far as I know, is the cultural equivalent to proprioception: our sense of the world, of history, of our place in it and our ability to move and act, within and on it. Yet such an equivalent does exist: we believe our bodies to be whole and immortal, the world to be solid beneath our feet, we know our family loves us, as does God, and we assume that our nation (race, tribe, clan, call it what you will) is where we belong—to it we pledge allegiance. Until, that is, we don't. Locke wasn't off-base when he named solidity as the first of his simple ideas, the corner or keystone for all of the rest. He had less to say about those moments when the earth moves, a family splits, gods die, or our nation declares war on itself. One day it happens. We wake up and find ourselves amputees. Or else we look back and realize too late the border has been crossed, we won't be going back. On that day, a new calendar begins. And sometimes, someday, we also find ourselves anew, someplace else. The work of imagination inscribes both sides of this dark, backward abysm—and in our Fall issue, that's what you're in for. We offer you expressions of pure love, anticipated, as in a poem from C. P. Cavafy, in Alex de Voogt's translation, or actualized, as in Gwen Thompkins's exuberant tale of two young lovers on their way to a new life in New Orleans, or remembered, as in Karen Henry's reflections on the afterlife of Shakespeare's sonnets, translated to screen and stage. We sense the solidity of stone in Pablo Neruda's XXIII, translated by Karen Hilberg, and also in an excerpt from Giacomo Sartori's novel Bug, [End Page 392] translated by a dearly lamented friend, Frederika Randall—yet in both pieces violence is present as well. No surprise, I suppose, that poets today are tracking cataclysm, both in Steven Duong's "Anatomy" and in a series of dangerous swims, with poems from Emily Van Kley, Marcela Sulak, and Emily Schulten. Elsewhere Margaret Lloyd instructs us on how, in the life of poet Jack Gilbert, home was built, not bought; in an essay on the painstaking work of repair, Philip Metres shows us how lives like Alistair McBride's are forced to seek a possible future, after a promised past is taken from them. Cody Kommers rethinks the unthinkable, meditating on the motivations of génocidaires in Rwanda, with lessons for our time as well. What it's like to leave one life behind, and perhaps find another, is explored in fiction by Alanna Schubach and retraced in memoir by Ammiel Alcalay. With "The Color of Death" and "Song of Parting," we give you two stories as dark and lyrical as their titles, the former a translation of Selina Hossain from Bengali by Mohammad Shafiqul Islam, the latter of Lu Min from Chinese by Michael Day. As objective correlative, we offer the photos of Paul Shoul, marking and measuring the divisions present here in our home, Western Mass., and unmistakable everywhere else. By the time you finish this issue, we reckon, you'll already be asking yourself the question we close with, as posed by the title of Marianne Boruch's poem: "Is the Past What's Left in the Glove Compartment"? Could be, but remember, that car was totaled, then towed away. As the man said, all that is solid melts into air… [End Page 393] Copyright © 2020 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.