By MEL ARTHUR, SARAH WU, and GABBY AVENA
Mel Arthur:
Once the theme of Thing Theory was suggested, I could hear everyone’s (including myself) mind go blank. The collective question of what even is Thing Theory permeated almost every meeting. Sarah even asked me to do a mock Q&A where I attempted, using my muse, Toni Morrison, to explain how was thinking about Thing Theory more generally. Though difficult, I think this has been my favorite theme of the Indicator so far. I am not sure about others, but examining the way I interact with the world around me how I, as something, live with/about/around all the things that make up the world has allowed me to think about the beauty of these interactions. I think about my moon necklace, how its sharp corners still me every time I reach to touch it. I think about the sounds the trees make or how the sun filters through the tree gaps on a particularly nice day. I am thinking about the desk I sit at every day, cluttered with my things from end to end, how I and only I know my way around that mess. There is a beauty in that I truly cannot put into words. I have tried, and I keep trying with this theme to let the things I exist around invite me into their living and teach me what it means to cherish & I hope that you all can do the same. Let the things that surround you move you, hold you, and most importantly, let them allow you to remember the true richness of feeling.
Sarah Wu:
Have you ever encountered someone who saw you, less as a person, but more as a forever-person? A you that is defined to be a specific personhood, personality? I believe that the assumption of forever is a violent act of interpellation. It defines a person/thing. It is an assumption of what one is and not what one can be. Evergreen is a strange term because it assumes a forever-green. In today’s world, forever-green becomes the justification for various violences: 1) to enact harm against a green world that will forever heal itself or 2) to conserve the green to make it forever. In both worlds, the green never changes. I do not like the concept of Evergreen because I think of a forceful picture: silent green trees in a forest. I want to think about trees less about their foreverness, and more about their material presence. Have you ever tried being with a tree? The last thing that tree is, is forever. Just like us.
I want to think of all of you as forever-changing beings, writing lovely stories and creating beautiful art in The Indicator. Thank you for letting us peek at your materiality, your world, caught in this moment of time of (un)forever.
Gabby Avena:
I’m reading the two above notes, two stark takes on a word: evergreen as a reach toward, and as the touch of what it means to ‘be’. I’d like to think of this issue as the hyphen: holding the birth and the bones and the breath in between. It is the way time slips around a still image, it is the drag of the empty branch which spites your best.
In my poem this issue, I talk about the trees hands make. But if I had to be more precise, hands make those little bushels that gather into branches that gather into trees. All the writing in this issue are like these hands.