Just Sayin'

She often felt herself – struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: “But this is what I see; this is what I see,” and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her.

“Radical openness does not mean that we empty our minds but that we open our minds to the prospect of losing the understandings to which we are attached.” So begins An Interview with Anton Hart. To be fair, though, perhaps “loosening attachments” when face to face with the trifecta of fascist racism, COVID, and environmental extinction may be near impossible. It's a big ask if, in the midst of existential terror, we are holding on for dear life. The practice of radical openness is marbled with loss. It is an often lonely, sometimes violent, always singular stance. It exists between impossibilities. Two threads run through ROOM 2.21: the awareness of what it means to live between impossibilities, and how it feels to live with the violence of being cancelled or rendered nonexistent. Some authors dismantle our perception of time and space; others write of what belonging, or not belonging, has meant to them.

In Traversing the Liminal: Reflections from Sag Harbor, Adrienne Harris recaptures the “rupture of ‘ongoingness’ and the disturbing present of gaps, absences, dissolved spaces.” Her reverie crisscrosses through portals opening onto new thresholds of departure. The intimacy Harris establishes with us becomes the answer to her not-so-simple question: “Do history and longstanding connections really hold across shifts in the frame; does the one-on-one contact allow for more links and safety?” Kyrie Mason historically reconfigures the past's “unreal” relationship to the present. In Things Which Don't Exist, he tells us, “Admitting to my ghostly blood is to acknowledge the feeling of being fleeting, as if I could simply choose to not exist in a future built on