Editorial

The Instability of Perception

There are moments that don't resolve.

They don't arrive, and they don't pass. They hold.

A figure moves, but doesn't reach. What appears is held in a duration that doesn't conclude. Then something loosens: the body no longer contains itself, form disperses, and what is seen begins to resist coherence.

To remain here is not to understand. It is to stay.

The work gathered in this issue shares that refusal. Not the refusal of meaning, but of premature meaning, the pre-judice. A chair placed in the middle of a road, and no one to claim it. A language learned, then recognized as borrowed. A dead man whose face won't tell of what happened. Each image, each poem, each sequence holds its ground at the brink of resolution and stays there.

Something persists in that holding, though it doesn't clarify. A self that doesn't quite close. A presence that doesn't repair what's been unsettled but stands within it.

What remains is not meaning. It is the trace of having been held, briefly, before the image moved on.

Jorge R. G. Sagastume
Editor-in-Chief