We’re back after a summer where events in our world have moved quicker than they have in my lifetime. It’s clear that we are in an endgame of some kind for the culture, that the present administration, much of the political class, and many of our fellows are looking backwards for ‘solutions’ rather than forwards. Mainly because they can’t see any way for the present path to end anywhere but in a blank wall. We don’t want to end in a wall. We want to see a door there, and open it, even if, at the moment, it looks like it doesn’t have a keyhole. Much less a key.
That can change. With a different slant of light. A different point of view.
Now when we started EAP, it was with the plan of exploring other possibilities for a way forward. I was very into encouraging the wildest speculations, from the economic to the poetic (which by the way is often where the seeds of the future lie). We started publishing books about why the culture was the way it is—what stories were told that made it that way. Our focus then was simple: that story forms culture, and that changing the story changes the culture. Mike Madrid’s work, Brian Griffith’s, my own—all of those books made that point from one direction or another. Didn’t matter what the genre. That was the goal.
By now, we, among others, have proved that point. What you see is what you can see. I think we all agree on that, at least those of us here on EAP. What you believe, what story you tell, limits the landscape. So let’s keep looking at the landscape closely. Here’s one way. You can see that it’s formed by a capitalist paradigm. Meaning formed by a belief that the environment and the population in that environment can be mined indefinitely to provide what the writer Jason W. Moore, in his book, “Capitalism in the Web of Life,” calls the “Four Cheaps”: Cheap food, cheap energy, cheap raw materials, and cheap labor—that last most often unpaid and unsung labor, along the lines of housekeeping and childcare (guess who has been bearing the burden of that one?). As he so rightly points out, we have reached the limits of being able to depend on those as an easily mined treasure chest from which to create ‘added value’. Even the UN reports these days say this is coming to a very fast end.
So what now?
I would like to propose that we get cracking on discussing what comes next. I’m begging you guys to immerse yourselves in speculation about what comes next. This doesn’t mean I’m asking for didactic pieces on what we should do. I mean I want speculative pieces. Speculative fiction—fantasy. Science fiction. Speculative philosophy. Different ways of looking at our past as well as our future (thank you, Brian Griffith and Mike Madrid). New thoughts. Visionary fiction.
In this issue, we have quite a lot of that, I’m glad to say. Benjamin White, in all his poetry, mines his own past to discover how he is constantly evolving toward a new story. Read East Germany and you’ll see just what I mean.
Bruce Thompson, in piece after piece for EAP, looks at the widest possible variety of literary landscapes to try to broaden his view. Here he talks about mistaken fear in When the Bough Breaks.
I remember when I started EAP, I sent out a tentative call for pieces that would talk about sexuality in later life, since that seemed to me an obvious subject that was strangely invisible in most publications. Finally I got a hilarious take on how the young may not always understand the ways of the old. Thank you, Clarinda Harriss, for Thing.
Then there’s the strange, slightly twisted, weird way of seeing that come over the virtual transom in the form of pieces by Marie Davis and Margaret Hultz. They do a lot on their side of the country for looking at the world from a woman’s point of view. But what I really love is that when they send stuff in to EAP, it’s looking at the world from a partnership point of view: two women with a single weird thought.
Could we have more of the same, please? John Brodix Merryman, Jr. Come back! Come back and talk more about the possibility of a new way of looking at economics. We miss you. And we need speculations along those lines.
Finally: Tim J. Myers and Rose Jermusyk frequently frame their speculations, their yearnings for a different way of being, in the form of fairy tales, fables—and since I personally believe that in fairy tales can be found all sorts of hints about new ways forward, I love their work in particular.
As we say in Arcadia, “Look back to look forward.”
Welcome back.