Qué tal
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his now-widely-circulated series of letters to Kappus, “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.” Rilke, himself, was young when he wrote this--28, only.
And one begins to wonder, when considering love, conceptually, if youth and being a perennial beginner ever really leave us. Whether platonic, romantic, or otherwise, despite age we seem to exist in a perpetually-liminal space when we endeavor into love. We crave the process, more than the product. Because to be in-progress is to be in solidarity with those who long, who love most painfully, who think most fantastically. The films, books, songs to which we find ourselves always returning--they end before reality, exist eternally in process. We don’t see those characters, our mimetic dopplegangers, after the romantic tryst. Because we are uninterested in epilogue, are concerned principally with process.
Maybe it’s that every version of our love-expectant selves lives within us. That we are forever wide-eyed, always beginning. And so despite our learning, it’s perhaps that we are most imbued with the cusp of something’s becoming realized. It’s perhaps that we are always on the cusp of becoming realized.
And so we hope you find the essence of Becoming in these works which follow. That you find yourself, as we have, enrpatured in process, interacting with every version of the self, forever Becoming.
Together /
Juntos,
Jacob Rivers and Cole Phillips
Editors
Malasaña | Hudson, NY| Cargo Collective | Portland, ME | 2021