Black Sun Lit is now accepting submissions for the sixth volume of Vestiges: Aporia.
Literature as an object of communicable comfort has long expired. Yet every instrument that serves as an appendage to voice and vision acts nonetheless as a reaching which remains a defilement of air and canvas. To reach through literature is to confirm where one ends and another begins, to entreat how one starts and when one should stop. The writer, who cannot discern from whence the work comes or why it should exist but who must perish to experience and bring it forth, is condemned to—and reassured by—the task of first feeling moved before moving their witness.
No matter how neutral, this gesture—simultaneously an approach and an abandonment—therefore belongs to consolation: that what one professes, whether with words or images, will at once grip and be grasped. The first principles of metaphysics—of which all worthy art is offspring—bears this contradiction in eye, mind, and tongue. The writer’s naiveté, the rationalist’s chastity, the empiricist’s arousal, and the cogito’s arrogance are all alike: doomed by the likelihood of doubt.
Aporia, then, can be nothing else but an elegant dance enthused not by the wretched acquirement and articulation of knowledge—thus of nature and truth—but by the uncertainty of its source and instability of an expressible destination: a static stammering motion that is as unconvincing as it is inconceivable, residing in between what is sayable. Whereas Aristotle’s puzzlements are anticipated in advance of his inquires, Socrates’s victims learn the dissatisfaction of their ideas at the end of every torturous dialogue, which only appeals to the furthering of their search for what is impossibly satiated. Dostoyevsky’s stone wall—touchable, declarable, “soothing, morally resolving and final”—is beautiful insofar as it is deliriously visible on the remote horizon, an anticipatory space opened and shrunk from only by the underground man’s inner imbalance.
For this issue of Vestiges, Black Sun seeks work from within and without, work that poses an incomprehensible risk to the contours of thought and language, work that consigns itself to circularity, work that resolves itself to irresolvability, work that has no origin or finite resolution but exists within a reverberating state of delirium and frenzied light. We want what hesitates the hand that endears us to safer paths, we want work that stays in the arenas of inaccessible confusion, that utters the unheard motive of arsons. The Derridean moment of “my death” should be the moment that realizes the work has nowhere to turn and nothing to which it can turn back: only the paced footsteps of an unceasing becoming too frightened to forgive their infringement.
Submissions for Vestiges will remain open until May 15. To be considered, submit—in one file—either one to five works of prose (between 3,500–5,000 words), up to six poems (no more than twelve pages), or one essay (between 3,500–5,000 words). Translations are always welcome, and conversations between artists that engage with the issue’s theme are especially encouraged. As is customary for BSL, there are no strict limitations regarding form. Work already submitted to or currently being evaluated for digital vestiges, our online series, will also be considered for the issue—please do not withdraw and re-submit to the Vestiges_06: Aporia form on Submittable or send more than one submission. For additional guidelines, click here.
Thank you for allowing us to review your work—we look forward to reading.