Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Jim Hicks, for the editors GNŌTHI SEAUTON. According to Pausanias the first of three maxims inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, this exhortation has been central to Western philosophy since Socrates, though even Poor Richard observes that "three things [are] extremely hard, steel, a diamond, and to know one's self." Contributing Editor Ruth Ozeki has crafted one of the most crystalline recent reflections on this ancient art in her essay The Face: A Time-Code (Restless Books, 2015). Adapting from art history professor Jennifer L. Roberts an exercise in "immersive attention," Ozeki sat in front of a mirror to watch her face for three hours, "making a detailed record of the observations, questions, and speculations that arose over that time." Today, in March 2022, two years on since the coronavirus was novel, since varying degrees of disruption, lockdown, forced isolation, death, and grief swept across the globe, it should surprise no one that we bring you an issue where, in some deep sense, every poem, essay, and story tells this selfsame story—because by now who hasn't shared with Ruth an imposed meditation where time became painfully long? Though it may take a Zen Buddhist priest to focus with laser-like specificity on what the Greeks identified as the first task of knowledge, isn't every writer and artist forced to find their own path out of this hall of mirrors? Yet the classical question remains: When we look at ourselves, what do we see? And if that diamond is rough, what do we really see of others? Like the Greeks, you too must find your own way through this issue, yet for the purposes of introduction, I'll point to some possible ways forward. When we first find ourselves, we surely do so in relation—to family, first of all, but then in schooling, work, society, or, of course, in love—any and all of which are inevitably some mix of repression and liberation. For families, one place to start would be with Liyange Amarakeerthi's tale of moving pictures and mirrors, lovingly translated by Chamini Kulathunga. Or Juhea Kim's "Cockroach," which begins with a entomological stress test surely familiar to every parent. Or Aaron Hamburger's story of finding a place for self outside [End Page 8] of parentally imposed politics, the very sort of family saga gifted to us by the Greeks. Society is sung, in these pages, in a polyphonic chorus, by poet, former activist, and former child of god Cynthia Dewi Oka, for instance, or in both urban and rural odes by John Hennessy. And the poets, no surprise, sing of love as well, whether Charif Shanahan, imagining intimacy an ocean away, or Jason Schneiderman's "Gay Divorce," where the city itself offers an embrace. In the art of Chitra Ganesh, a collective, inclusive future for the city is grounded by centering its past. We get schooled by our institutions, though their key lessons are rarely found in textbooks: here Meg Pinto's schoolteacher on the Pacific frontier tells a tale of diversity and exclusion over a century old, whereas Stacia Tolman's story of in-school suspension suggests what today's instructors might learn about inclusion, but mostly haven't. In work, both J. Malcolm Garcia and Katherine Kolupke find more repression than expression, the former in corruption at the core of occupied Afghanistan, the latter in a delicious comeuppance at a packing and mailing shop. When it comes to repression, though, there's nothing like the state, whether in the violence it condones and covers up, here called out in no uncertain terms by Lindsay Sproul, or in the violence it hoards for itself, either in asylums, as detailed by Amaia Gabantxo, or in our socalled correctional institutions, as Patty Prewitt makes crystal clear. After such a series of distorting mirrors, then, what knowledge? How could any self arise out of all this othering? Here, for a whole host of reasons, I'll end with a nod to the ars poetica of Lisa Low, crafted in caution and care, not to mention strength and stamina. Two years in, after disruption, lockdown, forced isolation, grief, and death...