Letter from the Editor

In a year like 2020–marked by the onset of the U.S. presidential election, ruins left behind by persistent COVID-19, the ongoing burning of Australia, or disaster after disaster after disaster–there’s no room for mindlessness. No way to go through the world with blinders, not completely.

At the same time, there’s no way to pull out a sign of the times to hold in front of us and see life for what it is. Instead, we’re always peering through some dynamic lens, one scratched and fingerprinted by things bestowed on us, things happened upon, things sought after. In this way, we absorb and reflect upon information ceaselessly, sometimes unknowingly.

With Volume 8 of Fools Magazine, we attempt to make our visions clearer as consumers, as producers. We’ve included pieces like Megan DeRiemacker’s “[Exit poem so in the mouth],” a swift tumble of a poem in which proximity and distance are increasing at once; AV’s “ground control,” a photo essay grappling with placeness, how location interacts with a life that rises and falls; and, in the name of a long-standing “the art of” tradition, Stella Tarlin’s “The Art of Marching,” an essay on marching band, and meditation on the mind and body–how individuals can become inextricable from a group, and in that way, do nothing but “facilitate” one another.

As we sat in a circle week after week, discussing the idea of the self–in relation to works by art critic John Berger, philosopher Martha Nussbaum, writer Jia Tolentino (whose voice appears in this issue), and many, many others– it became clear we were putting on a performance of some sort, getting at the face of ourselves we wanted inside and outside the issue. As quickly as our conversations expressed some version of this is a truth of the world, we just as quickly swerved: Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s one truth in a world of infinite, or none.

There’s no producing or consuming art in a way that avoids this dilemma. Jia Tolentino recapitulates the idea: even to articulate a desire to vanish “is always to reiterate the self once again.” Even as we curated, it became evident we were heading down a one-way street, all signs pointing towards iterations of the self: those we know, those we don’t, and those which are there when we make pretend.

Indeed, absorption and reflection are, by their very definitions, antonyms–in the first, something clings to us; in the other, we throw the thing back–and yet something is lost if they don’t lead to each other. So, we can absorb something by way of reading, writing, making art–fully embracing the lens–but we’d be better for having cast it in the opposite direction, too. Sharing literature and art in this way is just one instance of sending some absorbed thing back into the world.

To that end, we can have our private selves and our public selves, both. Because nothing we do can entirely skew or un-skew the space of the world. Even in new stories told by new voices, the burning of Australia doesn’t get any less fiery. A pandemic (pan ‘all’ + demos ‘people’) knows its rampant course before it can cross any one person’s mind. These reflections don’t make the world any smaller or bigger, though. They only make our shape in it a little less clouded, some essential quality of ourselves more brilliant and open.

Thank you, dear readers, for your continued support. For every self that’s part of this journey.

With love,

Ellie Zupancic & the Fools team