The spectacle looms | simultaneously recedes into the thankful distance of the rearview mirror

pre- | post-

Writing a conjuncture, that’s where we are with this issue. We’re not going to make any predictions, prophesise beyond the veil, yet there’s an encounter here between a pre-election subjectivity with the state of reading post- …all we can point to from the thick of it is the need to consider what just transpired. What did we just participate in?

That is perhaps the question that underwrites this issue — what just transpired? It’s a question that extends backward to the early morning sands of New Mexico, July 16, 1945.

Trinity | and what follows

The world split in two and the sky lit up and an observer, Ralph Carlisle Smith, describes the bomb: “The light intensity fell rapidly, hence did not blind my left eye but it was still amazingly bright. It turned yellow, then red, and then beautiful purple.”

pre- | post-

Here we are again, but this time firmly post- …the name of first tear in the fabric of our space, Trinity, oddly apt; spiritual, but also any combination or set of three forming a unity.

It seems indicative of the problems of its own writing. A subject, an event, a representation — infinite distance but an undeniable unity.

We live post-bomb, but in a world that seems still unable to make sense of the rupture —

What just transpired?