Editor's Note

Editor’s Note

The Motto That Wasn’t

by Jake Schneider

The motto is dead – long live the motto. Slogans and hashtags swing elections on baseball caps and buses, propel social movements for and against prejudice, and recently took down dozens of Hollywood’s most formidable harassers and abusers. make the decision to change your life, commands a subway advertisement in “Camila” by Vanessa Bates Ramirez. “You’ve just got to find the right mantra,” counsels Brina in Caroline Beimford’s “Under My Skin.” Do we though?

When I contemplated the writing and art we’d picked for our last issue, I saw containers everywhere. And when I decided to label each item in the table of contents with its own example – bathtub, fish tank, exoskeleton – the idea went down well. Containers are hollow. I chose the ones the writers had chosen themselves; they were in no danger of redefining their contents.

Then, this winter, I learned that the Latin motto on the US coins of my childhood, E Pluribus Unum (“Out of Many, One”) originally came from the title page of Gentleman’s Magazine, the first periodical of its category, back in the 1730s. In the format’s infancy, the magazine consisted of extracts from other publications reprinted without permission. Just as these six syllables had bound together unrelated sections of (copied-and-pasted) text, they later rallied a scattered group of colonizers around a common cause. E Pluribus Unum romanticized an invented nation. It also romanticized the systematic theft of the world’s first magazine editor. Before long, my own editorial mind was crowded with mottos and their banner-waving possibilities. What if we sprinkled the next issue with its own slogans?

When the rest of the team realized I meant actual mottos – “clichéd exhortations,” in the words of our Fiction Editor, Florian Duijsens – the objections filtered in. Poetry Editor Greg Nissan outright vetoed the plan for his section: “Most concerning is that it provides the first piece of language, the first idea or image. But that’s exactly what the opening of a poem strives to do, and so much of the craft and ingenuity of a poet goes into opening up that space for us.” Who am I to upstage Elizabeth Metzger’s opening salvo, “The unborn depend on the love of / nonmothers” or to preface Ahmad Almallah’s “an order / is an order”?

Florian and Greg weren’t wrong. As I scoured the poems for quotable catchphrases, it felt like the work of my eighteenth-century plagiarist predecessor. In fact, it felt like filling the poems’ “waistcoats with stones” (Mark Russell) or suggesting a “function for decoding their world” (Novisi Dzitrie).

Is that any less true for prose? Even without such gimmicks, publishers already bury books beneath marketable labels. SAND has always been more interested in what slips through the cracks between genres and philosophies, what “pools in tar-black shadows around the edges” (Jon Ransom). To name is to domesticate.

I conceded that these mottos were at risk of becoming a false “answer key” that could strip the enigma from the landscapes of post-apocalyptic Finland (Maija Mäkinen), post-marital Macedonia (Lidija Dimkovska), post-vegetarian Australia (Nate McCarthy), or post-mortem Oregon (Patrick Vala-Haynes). And wherever we positioned them on the page, they would distract from the work itself. Even writing about all this now, in the one text that is mine to compose, I’m displacing descriptions of what you’re about to read, such as the gaggle of bulky birds that seems to wander, in no meaningful formation, through the issue’s pieces: swans, geese, spoonbills, hornbills, flamingos, rotisserie chickens.

According to legend, our magazine was named after a song by Lee Hazlewood: “I am a wandering man / in your land / call me Sand.” In the early years, we printed those lines in our issues. Yet we are committed to publishing writing by and about women and gender non-conformists – we’re no Gentleman’s Magazine, despite the brilliance of Mark Russell’s “Men on Men” – and, dammit, Berlin is our land too. The song is catchybut those aren’t lyrics to live by.

Mottos never last. Eventually even the motto-maker has second thoughts. Yesterday we painted it on a sign; today we’re kicking ourselves. Indeed, Gentleman’s Magazine abandoned E Pluribus Unum in the mid-1800s and the United States downgraded it during the divisive Cold War. Since I moved here, Berlin has quit flaunting its “poor but sexy” reputation as rents skyrocketed. In the end, I decided to kill off this issue’s mottos preemptively.

The one motto we have left in Issue 17 is the title of Melissa Spitz’s prizewinning documentary photo series You Have Nothing to Worry About, which punctuates these pages with its cheerful pastels. Chronicling the ups and downs of her mother Deborah’s mental health, Spitz captures pain as well as moxie. The series title comes from a note taped to Deborah’s door: “TO DO: ¡BE FUCKING HAPPY! – REMINDER: YOU HAVE NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT!”

That’s what real mottos do: remind us of our aspired states of being – united, happy, unworried. The photographs, meanwhile, show life’s layered reality. Spitz describes them as “simultaneously upsetting and encouraging; honest and theatrical; loving and hateful.” She leaves in all the ambivalence but, unlike me, she also leaves in the motto.