D. W. White

To change is to know, probably someone has said, at some point. To leave a thing behind—a place, a time, a self—and go off and find some other thing, a replacement or revision or reverse, this is the way life seems to proceed, with or without our understanding or our will. It happens overtly and covertly, gradually and all at once, irrevocably and only for a little while. But it is inexorable, change, and just as soon as we recapture our footing, then again does the ground begin to shake.

In this, our fourth Quarterly, L’Esprit is fortunate to be publishing four pieces—our highest yet for an inter-issue release—and breaking ground in two locations. We’ve our first work of translation, in Diane Josefowicz’s rendering from the French of two prose poems by Anna de Noailles, and our first piece of drama, S. T. Brand’s Dublin. We’re also running a pair of short pieces from Ivan de Monbrison and a narrative study from Karen Multer. Find excerpts from all this excellent work below, and in full on the site.

We’re also for the first time handing over the Editorial Meditation reigns to our wayward Editor, me. Jessica has more than ably provided the first two editor’s features in our Quarterlies, and to everyone’s relief she’ll be back in October. I remain rather unbelieving at the growth we’ve seen at L’Esprit, and writing these A Commentaries has been an insightful manner of checking in on the burgeoning life of our little enterprise.

There are also exciting spots out on the horizon. We’ve now nearly filled Issue Three, which will be coming in mid-October, and we’re beginning our conversations around AWP in February, which L’Esprit will attend, in some manner or another. Look out for more on both—including our reading to launch I3—soon.

The spring and summer of this year have been the time of anniversaries—our twin birthdays, of Woolf and Joyce, and then our twin publication dates, Bloomsday and Dalloway Day (funny how that works out, right in line with our publication schedule, too)—and of L’Esprit itself. I found myself in Paris a few weeks ago, from which I wrote that protean Meditation, in the bars and along the streets where I’d first thought to start a literary journal. It was an excellent trip, tracking along many of the epicenters from the lives and work of our literary ancestors, and perhaps some of our readers enjoyed following on social media.

And it got me thinking, as things are wont to do, about change, and place, and the impossible dream of anything ever staying the same. Perhaps it’s a misguided dream, but for all our sanguine glances towards what will be of the future, we remain a skeptical species, never quite getting on with the shapes lurking unseen in the dark. Something innate in those skulls of ours, I suppose. As I wandered Europe among the ghosts of Woolf and Joyce, Clarissa and Leopold, I began to wonder whether we can really know anything about ourselves at all.

I’ve left California after nine years, to return to that beautiful, frozen Acheron from whence I came, Chicago. The body crosses the river, but the soul has changed. I’ll miss California—a place rather more Olympian (in more ways than one) than Chicago—which has taken nine years and given back quite a bit more. I of course will not be the same person who returns, just as it is not the same I who is leaving the mythic edge of our fabled continent as the one who arrived. But the dreams—of possibilities of the future and the meaning of the past—those remain, changing in kind, perhaps, but carrying on, forward, across the black water.

There’s an underworld of the mind that exists, both in fiction and reality—this is, in some ways, what L’Esprit has set out to champion and explore. It is here that our memories mingle with our past selves, the idea of the people we were forever suspended as we imagine them—nevermind how true such notions are—seen but untouchable across the ancient river. It is the power of fiction to alchemize life into art, and it is perhaps nowhere else better seen than here, in the depths of the mind. The narratives we create from day to day and moment to moment, that great thread spun and woven by our own restless soul—it changes without our noticing, and at times it takes the strange potency of art, the dark magic of powerful fiction, to relive, in the minds of others, the people we used to be.

Consciously, 

L’Esprit

D. W. White, 24 June 2023