Editor's Report

Bodies have their own light which they consume to live: they burn, they are not lit from the outside.

The city, like many around it within a half-day's travel, is deeply rooted in history, and the apparent age of the buildings on first glance gives the feeling of stability and resilience. But the body of the city freely displays its scars for those who wish to see beyond its reconstruction to an architectural time before the most recent destruction and devastation. The pockmarked walls of the less fortunate or frequented buildings serve to remind those choosing to notice that this city has surrendered its body to multiple intruders and invaders — those that came to forcibly exert their sovereignty over its body.

In the early morning the city appears unencumbered and the light is different. The sky is empty of clouds and the clear air permits the light to cast shadows of such darkness that one can only wonder if this is the refusal of the night to completely leave, its remnants a reminder that the darkness can never be truly vanquished or surrendered. As the day asserted itself, an imperceptible haze began to appear, but its origins were uncertain. It was hard to remember after having just cycled through another set of seasons that the light in the spring was often like this, but this seemed less like a seasonal haze than a collective optical skin, a slow-forming cataract that gave the visual field an intense, washed-out patina and an amnesia that left most disoriented.

On the ground, the cobblestones, hewn from stone into three-inch squares, are already unforgiving to the unobservant walker; their surfaces are scarred and eroded by life, now succumbing to the heat they absorb until they can no longer tolerate it and then have to reflect back up to those that walk on them. Many people have walked on these cobblestones; they have carried the weight and burden of generations and, by the look of things, these stones survived the suffering that man