“Moving forward with things, I suppose. The magazine is dissolving, for one, which is good. The semester is coming to an end, slowly, and the next one is on the horizon.”
~Journal, December 13, 2019
I suppose what strikes me so much here is the sense of renewal that I always get at the end of a semester. Ends lead to beginnings. Beginnings are always good. Certainly nobody imagined what was in store. Yet even in the small-scale sense of my own creative life, the magazine didn’t dissolve.
The Deaf Poets Society did stop being an organization in New York State. (It only lasted a matter of weeks in that capacity.) Since then, another of its founding editors has kept it going. In theory, its ninth issue will come out imminently.
The desire to move forward can be a destructive one. The impatience to get on to the next thing is a hazard if what’s ahead if the next thing is a quagmire. But it can be too appealing sometimes to start fresh on the theory that what’s new will be better. What’s new can detract from the care necessary to get the present project settled.
But then again again: sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good enough. The reason I resigned from the magazine in March 2020 would end up being that my colleague wanted a perfect issue that still has not come out. I preferred an imperfect on that would appear a year from Issue 8 and mark a respectable dignified end of a good run.
The story I tell myself as I move from one thing to the next is always that I’m moving forward. Honestly, an orbit is probably the better metaphor.
That issue would have dropped in March 2020, at an early terrifying stage of COVID-19. That was a stage when voices of chronically ill and disabled writers might have been especially important, author pictures or not. “Imaginary control,” as Lejeune put it: That’s all any of us have in this world. The story I tell myself as I move from one thing to the next is always that I’m moving forward. Honestly, an orbit is probably the better metaphor. It describes the actual motion of this hurting earth, which moves in circles, alongside a thousand other spinning, oblivious orbs.
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