Litbreak will last as long as I can get to a keyboard, and then hopefully longer. But since I can descry the terminal moraine somewhere up ahead in the haze, I wanted to say something about what I learned Litbreak should be.
Litbreak publishes writers. The poems and stories that appear here represent those writers. That’s like the paintings of Jackson Pollock personify Pollock. They’re traces of the soul. When Litbreak publishes a writer, it’s meant as a vote of confidence in that writer. I’m more interested in the writer than the work. Writers pilot us in the oceans of language on a planet that consists only of ocean.
What I’ve gleaned so far is that humans create culture, but culture creates humans. What we call “prehistoric” can refer to physical remains of our species before preserved language. Language means named individuals appear, even if they are all or partly mythical. Can we know who Hector and Odysseus are without Homer? Could I be Greek without Homer? Even millennia after Homer, I would say no.
Culture is the shell on the back of the snail. Without the shell, no snail. Without humans and their cultures, no names for the snail.
We can’t be defined just by our biology. Humans are the species that must also be defined by their cultures, inherently diverse. Culture no sooner starts up than it breaks down to specific instances. One cave over from ours, they may be telling different stories. Don’t you want to know what they are?
It’s the ultimate in symbolic adaptation. Litbreak strives for the diverse because it wants to be a palimpsest of the multiculture. Writers are our pilots and I want to experience as many of their sea charts as possible.
What I can’t get to explore, you will. Preserve all the language voyages because most will be lost anyway. So, shore up what you can. Thousands of years of prehistory, and all those stories lost, and all those names lost. And the universe may wink us out anyway.
I thank Jason Chambers for giving me Litbreak when he sold his company. I thank Jason Rice whose visual imagination still animates these pages. And I thank my friend, writer Joseph Rakowski, for contributing a striking story to Litbreak’s first pages, for reviewing here, and for the honor of editing his early stories.
*****
Dennis Haritou is editor of Litbreak Magazine.
