Entrance to the Glade

Here we got into each other. How we met here, we don’t know; we could maybe retrace some steps, help ourselves through memories torn to pieces (we still remember some joints, a few stones in the pockets). We raised desires and we lost them. We exchanged them, sometimes without even knowing it. We frightened each other and we moved slowly, before we could recognize our new shapes. And at the end (in the end) of this making-through, what we know is what we see: a Glade. 

The glade is an open space, although under siege; it is a guarded space, but not shielded. It has a hybrid nature. As such, it aims to host narrative essays. It doesn’t aim to host fiction strictly speaking, but to include different viewpoints which can intertwin reality and beauty together. 

We will collect writings about art, cinema, photography; architecture, philosophy, literature; but also mathematics, science, astronomy. They shouldn’t be neither academic studies, nor journalistic articles. They will be sparkles to think about, in the leading thread of the non-fiction works of John Berger (And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, 1984), Emmanuel Carrère, Marguerite Yourcenar (En pèlerin et en étranger). The publications will include an iconographic apparatus, that will have a deepful meaning in itself and it will be able to dialogue with the texts. We will give the same attention and care to the artists as well as to the authors, so as images and words can reveal new visions for the benefit of each other. Therefore the essays we’ll accept will be just a few, because we want to publish fine, solid and chiseled works.  

Along the road we hope to gather some lasting, precious things. As some time will pass between one publication and the other, we will fill it with insights and suggestions (there isn’t any wood which can’t be explored, after all). In other words, we’ll seek for things that could last. We’ll shell the perls, but we won’t hoard them. 

We are ambitious, we are aware of it. But: if not now, when?

GLADE

Where we got lost…
Scattered…

It is not
an indication.
Not
an interrogation.
An exclamation,
perhaps.
(Or consternation.)
A friable
wind unseats the mind
already dismantled.
Is it fear?
……
The wood changed
into alarmed glade.

(Giorgio Caproni, Il franco cacciatore, Milano, Garzanti, 1982)