Unpacking the Casualty Issue

- By Jim Hicks

            In his meditation on “Walter Benjamin’s Grave,” the anthropologist Michael Taussig observes that, “[Benjamin’s] text seem[s] to be filled with pithy statements apt for gravestones and monuments, and there is no shortage of writers who, desirous of some spectral profundity, paste in a slice or two.”  To the wind with such apt and cautionary words!  Today, when the Casualty issue arrived to our office at last, I simply cannot stop myself lifting words from the visionary critic. 

            “I am unpacking my library,” Benjamin writes. “Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.”  Strange, perhaps, that the delivery of this long-awaited volume – our Casualty issue – should remind me of just these lines, the great man’s ruminations on “the relationship of a book collector to his possessions.”  Or perhaps not.  Having spent much of the past year with this assemblage of art, fiction, poetry, and testimony, I do feel more than a little possessive about its contents.

            “I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that.”  His words, not mine, yet they do seem eerily fitting.  Even if, in some sense, that march among yellow leaves is precisely what we editors do – in a way that none, or few, of our readers must.  Yet again, as it once was for Benjamin, mine is “certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation.”  Leafing through this double issue, its pages more than any other we’ve done, I find myself humbled, time and again, by the words, the courage, the very lives recorded here.  “Would it not be presumptuous of me if, in order to appear convincingly objective and down-to-earth, I enumerated for you the main sections or prize pieces […], if I presented you with their history or even their usefulness to a writer?”  Again, “You need not fear any of that.”  His words, and mine.

               “Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper.”  To join me among the hundreds of pages that are seeing daylight at last.  And enjoy.