Fragments: “Permanent Things,” Sand and Stars

This space in cyberspace is for members of the editorial staff. It is not an editorial statement nor a summary and preview of this issue, but rather a personal response to what we are publishing or to all things in general. It will touch, sometimes tangentially, on the issue in question. I will start it off.

It has been almost ten years since the print version of the Kennesaw Review last emerged. In 1987 Robert Hill began the review, and in that time the journal published eight issues, with writers such as Lisa Koger and Wally Lamb and special topics such as biography, technology, and humor. With this issue KR returns as an online version.

Once I did a dissertation on forgotten literature and along the way read the words of Edward L. Burlingame, who edited magazines for the House of Scribner. Anyone who “feels the Persian conqueror’s need of a reminder that he is still mortal” should ponder the fate of magazines. Scribner’s first editor was recovering articles from an earlier version of the magazine, Scribner’s Monthly. I have never forgotten those words.

In this new digital world of email, chat, changing computer platforms, and reconstructed versions of reality, we might well wonder what will be saved. Our cyber journal may survive as long as the server holds it or Google archives it. It will be available for everyone and no one.

And yet … Bits and pieces, fragments, are never lost, as anyone who has had embarrassing email emerge well knows. Voyeurs and other technicians can peer into parts of files left on discarded or personal drives. Chance remarks and extended comments can be lifted with or without attribution and forwarded to the world at large, or to one special person. Nothing is ever completely changed or lost, without deep formatting.

The conqueror’s false sense of immortality that Burlingame lamented and Shelley sneered at (“Look on … ye Mighty, and despair”) is leveled by the blowing sands. Or rescued in part on silicon chips. Or broadcast into the ether. Years ago I read in Reader’s Digest (immediately suspect—I could look it up but I’d rather try to remember it) the little story of how early TV viewers saw a ghostly image broadcast at great distance—sun skip—and when they wrote in for their QSL Cards they were informed that the program in question had been cancelled years ago! Where had it gone and how had it come back, visibly intact?

All around us we have echoes of meaning and belief, some as folk wisdom and some tenuous as medieval dreams of nightmares and charms, or pagan borrowings. It could be scattered lines dug out of the sand, where the desert repairs itself, but saved in part on fragments. As true as the Rosetta Stone or the Dead Sea Scrolls. As wrong as in Peter Ackroyd’s The Plato Papers (1999), in which a Socrates of the year 6066 (of this common era) interprets the great comic writer CD (obviously Charles Dickens), whose fragmentary The Origin of Species has been found, and in which the stars have failed because the strange inhabitants of our own era have stopped believing in them. Of course, we will know what happens to this Socrates (and perhaps he too deserves it).

The most memorable scene in all the Star Wars movies must be that one in The Empire Strikes Back, when the Imperial probe droid landing on the snowy blankness of the ice world of Hoth sends back to the Death Star the ghostly message of life discovered there, an almost indistinct whisper—leading to the abandonment of a supposedly safe, almost womblike base at the ends of the universe. Nothing is ever completely changed or lost, without deep formatting.

Bits and pieces, fragmentary knowledge, type and stereotype. “What is truth?” said that jesting deconstructionist Pilate, said Francis Bacon, creating his own truth. “It’s good to be shifty in a new country,” said that nineteenth-century Southwestern humorist Simon Suggs, whose creator, writing in a more certain age could place his natural-born fools inside literary frames and make distinctions between the teller and the tale. Only fifty-two years ago William Faulkner could proclaim without irony and fear of ridicule the truth of the human heart in conflict with itself.

One would wish the same for our literary journals, even cyberspace ones, the hope that what is saved is worth saving: not the theme that biology is destiny, a relentless naturalism, and not stereotyped locales. Even in the provincial corners of cipherspace.

Where we leave you this issue, which we trust will have something to interest, perhaps amuse, certainly provoke you. And within a year we promise to archive selections and press them into shiny, metallic disks which will survive mole and vermin, immortal in libraries and landfills, awaiting the day.