Welcome to the Essential
Welcome to the Essential
Funny story: well, funny in the sense that situational irony is a kind of humor; the kind of funny that elicits a grim grin. Back in November, after releasing our fall issue, I began to look ahead, thinking into and preparing for our upcoming spring issue. There were a number of events we had planned to attend, among them a literary festival in the California desert. A desert girl at heart, I was excited to return to the open, desolate spaces that are so central to who I am as a human on this planet. I was excited for Issue No. 4 to sit with the desert-ness of things, and explore what, for me, the desert always reveals, the things that remain after every other embellishment has been burnt or swept or faded away: the Essential.
Little was I to imagine that in a few short weeks all of us, the world over would be enrolled in a mandatory crash-course in Essentiality.
The COVID-19 pandemic that at this point has affected over eight and a half million people, and claimed nearly half a million lives, has brought us all face to face with the idea of what is and what is not Essential. Essential workers provide our health care, ensure that we have access to food, water, electricity; that we can receive packages, finish or continue our education, and that essential products like medical equipment, and toilet paper, continue to be available. Before we leave the house or make plans, we have become accustomed to asking ourselves whether these outings are Essential. Can I go without? Can I hold off for a bit? Is it worth risking my own health or the health of someone else?
Many of us (disproportionately more POC and other vulnerable populations) were affected directly by the pandemic, either contracting the virus ourselves, or caring for someone who has; quarantining away from friends and family; losing jobs, losing housing; losing access to food, child care, medical care; losing a sense of security; and gaining instability, anxiety, and a more desperate, vastly more essential relationship to survival.
And then, when it hardly seemed possible, we in the US came to realize that a wildly unprecedented novel virus was, in fact, not our most pressing national concern. The cruel and unwarranted death of George Floyd — the latest in an agonizingly long, long list of the violent and brutal killings of African Americans at the hands of law enforcement officers — has proven unbearable. In the streets we have gathered together. We have wept. We have chanted. We have recited the litanies of the dead. In the streets we have marched together. In the streets we have lain down, counting out the seconds and dying together. And for some of us, daring to unite in protest has meant encountering tear gas, kettling, beatings, and arrest. For others it may mean contracting a savage respiratory virus that, much like the systemic inequities pressed like uniformed knees upon black and brown necks, impairs one’s ability to breathe.
At this crucial moment in American history, we find ourselves having to fight on the dual fronts of national health and civil rights; to encounter simultaneously both a worldwide pandemic which has been likened to the black death plague, and a quite literal plague of black deaths. America is riddled with both, and will not survive without immediate, aggressive intervention. The shameful truth is that neither of these issues has sprung up overnight. Our disgracefully unjust national health care system that cares for (or, better put, neglects to care for) citizens in such unequal ways is not new. The racism that has extended systemically in this country from slavery to Jim Crow to segregation to gerrymandering to funding for public education, to housing, to modern policing practices (and on and on) is a virus that has twinned this nation since its inception. And here, at this clash of disasters, reprehensibly, it is once again people of color — those who are already disproportionately feeling the adverse effects of the coronavirus — gathering now for the distinctly American values of equality and justice, who are being offered the impossible choice of taking on the bodily risks — this time not only of pepper spray and incarceration, but also of a possible viral infection — of gathering in large groups to protest, or staying home and allowing the continued, ongoing, repercussion-free oppression of non-white people, at the hands of a state that proclaims “liberty and justice for all” and an organization that maintains as its motto “protect and serve.”
In a gesture that is both far too little, and at this point in world history should be neither a controversial nor a difficult stance, we here at Charge stand against racism in any form. Black lives matter, and the systems that have allowed for chronic unchecked conditions of inequity need to change. Immediately.
This issue of Charge addresses the idea of the Essential in various ways. In a motion of solidarity, the images, as you may notice, are noticeably black. We welcome and encourage work by writers, artists, musicians, and thinkers of diverse backgrounds, especially that work which does not shy away from full-throated dismantling of stilted power structures, and exploration of new ways of being in the world.
As always, with each issue of CHARGE we hope to be able to ask you to slow down. To look more deeply, to engage more fully and with more awareness, and to be open to what that kind of looking might do in you.
We’d love for you to think about this issue as though it were a gallery. Walk through the rooms. Allow yourself to spend time, to engage with what you find. Allow yourself to be surprised. To be open to the interaction that might wish to occur.
In this issue you will find authors, poets and essayists engaging in one way or another with the Essential. You’ll find stories about the essential connections between lovers, friends and oneself, poems that deal with the essential moments of friendship, essays about the essence of whiteness,, and a discussion of what it means to get real in terms of the essential nature of the imagination. You’ll engage in the possibility of the essential cruelty inherent in even the youngest and most innocent, and wonder, in flash fiction, what it is that becomes essential to us in death. The Essential, as we are now most brutally aware, is the question. When you get down to it, what are we here for, who are we, and what remains when all distraction is gone. In this issue we invite you to see it, to engage with it willfully, and to inquire as to what the Essential might have to say to you, now, in this moment.
You’ll notice at the bottom of most pages there is a section titled “Inquiry,” and that most pages are open for comments. We are delighted to encourage you to consider the lines of inquiry that each piece offers, and, if so moved, to share your thoughts, ideas, questions, and possibilities with us and with each other. Let’s disrupt the ways in which we usually interact - with the world and with one another. Let’s open ourselves to the possibilities and transformations that might occur.
This, now, is our desert. This is the Essential moment.