From the Editor: The Vesper Issue
I’ve never felt more awake than at the end of the world. This year, death breathes close & hot on my neck, shadows me like sleep paralysis, as the world’s symphony of rupturing climbs to a fever pitch.
I say rupture, but the key I’m really reaching toward is rapture, both as sheer, joyful ecstasy & end-times ascension. A point of no return, an event horizon: the threshold beyond which no more light may pass. Or beyond which no more light is needed. Vesper is the darkness on the other side of that threshold. The void hears us, too. When we knock against its depths, it responds with a strange & lucid humming.
The apocalypse might be a kind of transcendence, in the same way song doesn’t exist without silence, the way destruction can be as sacred as creation. In this sense, to stand at any door requires looking back before we look through. Some of the artists in the Vesper issue take that looking at its widest scale, setting their sights on outright cataclysm, the sky extinguished like a firefly. Others narrow the aperture: the end of the world arrives in the ebb of a heart monitor, a suburban driveway, wingbeats against the window, the deep end of the pool. Such small oblivions carry their own panoptic dusk.
Dusk is the threshold these pieces dance at, the specific frequency of it. Not just an hour, but a note struck & held taut. The last vibrating string separating us from terrible stillness. The moment the eyes give up trying to find the horizon line between consciousness & dreaming. Opus II, Issue III is a shattered mirror reflecting the many timbres of light & its lack, the edges of the body dissolving on the lip of gravity.
Dear reader, you’ve found Half Mystic at the end of the world, in the waking dream that returns you always to the same locked room. You hear a hum, gentle as a lullaby, warm as a womb. The door opens only inward, & you’ve been knocking all night. Come inside.
Opus II, Issue III celebrates the theme of Vesper: an event horizon, a bell tolling in a vacuum, a cicada’s song harsh & generous enough to wear twilight to bone. features the voices of Jordan Escobar, Justin Groppuso-Cook, David Eileen, Russell Karrick, Maria Gray, Ava Chen, Abigail Sims, Joel Peckham, K.M. Hanslik, Hana Saad, Kaitlin Tan, Rucker Manley, arushi (aera) rege, Es K. Harvey, B. Sancho, & Jaydra Johnson—& it is out now.