Social Dreaming

…it is the horror we can't conquer

Pushing itself against the pane of dailiness…

There is a “deep and somber unity” when the different impressions of our senses enter into “correspondence.” So writes the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his seminal book The Poetics of Space. It is this “correspondence” that allows us to receive and transform the immensity of the world into the intensity of our intimate beings. There is an intimate “every-dayness” that runs through all the essays in ROOM 10.22. And much as residual impressions from the day are transformed nightly into dreams, the synergy of these writers forms an unsettling social dreamscape.

Svitlana Matviyenko's day began at five in the morning on the 181st day of the war, a day before Ukrainian Independence Day. “Everything here is now immersed in a complete silence that you can only encounter in a small town like mine…The rocket attacks are most typical at this hour. When they are detected by our national radar system, the entire river canyon is filled with the wailing sound of air raid alerts.” In her essay, August 23, 2022—Kamianets-Posilskyi, Matviyenko recounts the events of a day laced with horror and anxiety. “Many of us here in Ukraine are bracing ourselves for tomorrow,” she writes. Her accompanying soundscape brings the birds, the river canyon, and the crescendo of the early-morning air raid from her window straight into ours.

Writing weeks before the crisis in Iran and weeks after the reversal of Roe v. Wade in the United States, Adrienne Harris, like Matviyenko, is also “bracing for tomorrow.” But the event that was seared into Harris's soul happened over sixty years ago. “What am I wearing?” she writes. “A surgical gown? Perhaps just a slip and underwear.” She has relived the shame, the fear, and the pain of that day many times in her imagination. My Back-Alley Abortion is the first time she has written it down. “Something of the retur