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| Sunil Sharma |
Remember that man lives only in the
present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and
gone, or not yet revealed.
---Marcus Aurelius
The monthly calls given by Setu or
the guest-editors on its behalf are meant to document the cultural
impulses at work in a changing society, a society that is largely inclusive,
forward-looking and integrated in the global economy, as opposed to
inward-looking and closed one, retrograde and xenophobic in outlook and practise.
The main idea is to capture the broad
contours of the common experiences of mass society in creative and visual works:
Of what it means to be human in a society that keeps on changing at a
bewildering speed.
These special calls are deigned to capture the energies and flux of things and
events for the posterity.
Like the prompts, the calls are meant to
exercise the grey cells---and write around a broad theme, a challenge.
In other words, to excite the creative
imagination and map postmodern realities in structured pieces.
This month's call is no different from this
overarching agenda of the journal. Titled "Living the Instant: Gestures of
Erasure and Capture", it comes with great potential of exploration of
living the instant, documenting and dismantling the same by either deletion or
archiving in cyber space---moments, moods, emotions, lived and gone, and
relieved at other points of time, almost a dizzying breathless journey of
catch-miss-n-catch.
Social media is replete with the culture
of the instant, superseded by another instant, a series ad infinitum
The theme attempts to catch the fleeting
time in its richness and splendour. Personal and political intersect the
sliding moment into oblivion.
As usual, many writers responded to the
call. The works selected here reflect, poignantly, the culture of instant,
recording moments, moods and emotions that are pivotal; the flux that gets
fixed in words or imagery by authors who are well-known in their chosen fields.
A challenging job, trying to get the drift
of time, the fluidity, its speedy flow, rightly observed by John Locke, in the
following words of wisdom:
Things of this world are in so
constant a flux, that nothing remains long in the same state.
What is today is the yesterday of
tomorrow!
Memories!
Time turns what-is into what-is-not. Yet, lives on in the stream of
consciousness as something spectral, hovering on the edges of living and non-living.
Visuals testify to this aspect.
As Rolland Barthes
says so famously:
The Photograph then becomes a bizarre
(i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception,
true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest
(o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there,' on the other
'but it has indeed been'): a mad image, chafed by reality.
Henri Bergson
most ably captures this hesitancy of instances most poetically:
The pure present is an ungraspable
advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already
memory.
Hope you enjoy the issue that carries
other cool stuff by other writers.
Best!
Sunil Sharma,
Editor
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