In Real Estate (2021), Deborah Levy writes about purchasing “a small banana tree” [1]. The writer goes on to describe this plant, as well as the woman who sells it to her. The seller’s lashes, in the narrator’s mind’s eye, are so long that they stretch all the way from London to New Mexico. This adds Georgia O’Keeffe to the reverie, together with the artist's work, her hands, her house. The writer finds herself remembering when she herself (Real Estate is meant to be part of her “living autobiography”; after all) travelled to New Mexico, and the “curved fireplace” [2] she saw in the hotel where she stayed. This fireplace provokes such intense desire in the writer that it goes into the architecture of her “imagined property portfolio” [3], where she collects and composes an ideal home that she cannot afford, nor “place it geographically” [4].

Levy’s reverie opens a “potential space” - what Nuar Alsadir describes in Animal Joy (2022) as an inner world that mediates between the self and the tangible world, making interiority possible:

"A creator, in particular, nurtures their inner world, . . . a "potential space," as Winnicott explains in relation to child development. A potential space provides an intermediate area between internal and external reality . . . Reverie similarly carves out a potential space between waking and dreaming in which the mind is free to wander while remaining connected to conscious thought . . . a potential space has openings through which the external world can enter, so that a person's interior exists beside external reality . . ." [5]

For our new issue of Passage, we want journeys that stretch from the specificity of tangible reality to one’s own, inner imaginary place; passing by personal experience, one’s own and others’ - plus art, history, literature, philosophy and more. We want to read about these inner landscapes - urban and rural and beyond - composed through both accident and study; gathering all sorts of stories and beings in intimate and particular topographies. We want complexity and relations and routes. We are looking for ways out, possible lines of flights, smuggling roads. 

We want creative-critical works that use theory and performative writing to, as Gloria Anzaldúa wrote in Borderlands / La Frontera (1987) “. . . plunge your fingers  / into your navel, with your two hands / split open, / spill out the lizards and horned toads / the orchids and the sunflowers, / turn the maze inside out. / Shake it.’ [6]

Suggested topics:

• Inner wilderness: imagination as a tool of resistance.

• Autotheory and the anthropocenic landscape: what human reflection can, or cannot do in an age of ecological crisis.

• Landscape as polyphony (thinking of Irene Solà and Esther Kinsky).

• Phenomenological experimental narratives of landscape and life stories

• Site-specific autotheory.

• Ergodic devices as place-making tools in autotheory and other hybrid forms.

• Lyricism as a way to expand the auto- in autotheory into a vaster being.

• An exploration of the places in which one dwells, or through which one travels in relation to an inner topography.

• Revisiting, recreating ancient and mediaeval travelogues, romantic ‘sentimental journeys’, or the surrealist and situationist explorations of 20th century Paris, etc.