Now in Air/Light: Lucy Whiteley, Terry Wolverton, and Hari Kunzru
This week in Air/Light, we launch issue 10 with three new pieces:
“From the Editor: Breathe” by David L. Ulin
“The Dust Lecture: On Mortal Flesh” by Lucy Whiteley
“What have you left in your bed?” by Terry Wolverton
“Missionaries Going in the Other Direction: The 2024 Chowdhury Prize Acceptance Speech” by Hari Kunzru
Next week:
“Spider” by Rosie Brand
“A Meditation on Shopping Carts” by Jesenia Chávez
“Ray’s 60th” by Romeo Guzmán
From the Editor: Breathe
This morning, while drinking my coffee, I came across a pair of striking sentences by Henry James, written in a letter just days after the onset of World War I. “The tide that bore us along,” he lamented, “was then all the while moving to this as its grand Niagara. … It seems to me to undo everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way.”
No … not lamented. That seems too soft, too pitiable.
What James was doing, rather, was outright mourning, ruing the loss of a way of life, a set of shared ethics he had mistakenly imagined to be fixed.
It’s not inaccurate to suggest that I am feeling something similar.
"The Dust Lecture: On Mortal Flesh" by Lucy Whiteley
I would like to talk to you about dust. When I say dust, I don’t mean everyday dust. The dust that covers desks and the cases of record players, that lingers just out of reach atop bookcases or refrigerators. I am not speaking about this kind of dust. Nor am I speaking about dust-bunnies—these creatures of dust that take on a three-dimensional life beneath beds and sofas. Lastly, I am not speaking about metaphysical dust—the sort that makes up angels and which we, in our dusty mortal selves, return to at the end.
No, the type of dust which is the subject of this talk today is of a different kind. And it is a kind that many of you have likely not known to look for though I assure you that you have seen it before. To introduce you to this kind of dust will require a brief journey. Close your eyes. Let the lights in this hall vanish into that red dark behind your eyelids. I will give you some time to adjust.
"What have you left in your bed?" by Terry Wolverton
A tangle of hair come loose from your head,
ensnared by the pillow. Skin cells embedded
in the sheets. A dot of blood from scratching
fleabites in your sleep. Elixir of sweat
soaked into mattress. Longing for your spouse
who’s turned from your flesh in search of coolness.
"Missionaries Going in the Other Direction: The 2024 Chowdhury Prize Acceptance Speech" by Hari Kunzru
One thing we habitually forget is that fiction isn’t just an artistic activity, something safely corralled in its own space. Fictions operate all around us, in the most serious and important domains. The dollar is a fiction. So is the idea of Freedom, or the Human or the Nation or Nature. There’s a school of thought that says we’re in a post-truth era, which is to say that fiction has in some way got mixed up with the real in an even deeper way than before, that the stories we are now telling about politics and society have the capability to shape, or even generate, reality itself.
If this is the case, then the practice of fiction—and of literary criticism—is vitally important. If we’re living in fictional times, then fictional tools will be needed to navigate them. Fiction is one of the best cultural modes we have to understand the complexities of our world. It has the ability to zoom out to deal with history and grand systems, then dive into the nuances of psychology, the secrets of the human heart. This flexibility makes it a way of knowing, as well as a kind of entertainment. And, of course, being able to imagine the world otherwise is a precondition for making it better. Utopianism can be the opposite of escapism. It can clear the ground for the new.