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Room never knows where the next submission will come from. With every essay, poem, photograph, image of art, piece of music, or description of activism that rolls in, we slowly get a sense of the shape of the next issue. The process of creating Room really does parallel the analytic process in this way. As editors, we pay close attention and think about how each new piece fits with what has come before. Threads appear, and the weave between submissions tightens. Room emerges, a thematic and graphic sum of its parts.
That's not what happened this time.
This time, the contributors to Room 6.18 described, drew, sculpted, composed, and photographed particular states of mind in the context of unique conditions. If there are common threads, they are blanketed beneath anguish, confusion, terror, and hope. As in Homer's roll call of ships at the beginning of the Iliad, where each ship bears the imprint of its place of origin, Room 6.18 is the marking of individual experience. It was only through the aggregation of individual ships that Homer could begin to approximate the vastness of the Hellenic world, which was so varied and so much larger than any one place. The whole of Room 6.18 also defies coherent description. Perhaps the whole world does. Something new seems to be happening, and it's hard to comprehend. Right now, Room exists as a port of call. —
PSYCHIC SPACE
by Phyllis Beren and Sheldon Bach
In their ground-breaking essay “Psychic Space,” Phyllis Beren and Sheldon Bach describe the forces that can squeeze or explode our internal psychic universe in no less catastrophic terms than Hawking described the explosion or implosion at the end or the beginning of our physical universe. In retrospect, the content of this essay prepares us for the tumble of submissions that followed.
A Therapist Looks at A DIVIDED COUNTRY
by Dorothea Crites
Crites, a pastoral psychotherapist, describes a set of misunderstandings that violently destabilize the inner experience she carries of herself.