Albert Kapikian
Editor’s Note
NOTES ON ISSUE 75
A community college is a commons tasked with the search for the common interest. Montgomery College, through its literary journal, has been tasked also with the search for another kind of shared resource, an aesthetic commons, in a time when it, too, has been hijacked by those who would master it for themselves. Potomac Review, now celebrating its 75th issue, continues to signal that open admission is not inconsistent with excellence—its inclusion in the 2024 editions of Best American Essays and Best Spiritual Literature confirming, once again, that a democratic vision is itself a form of expertise.
The U.S. National Arboretum, in Washington, DC, exemplifies how an aesthetic commons can model democratic vision and excellence, how each can be constitutive of the other, and our cover photograph, taken in the Fall, amidst golden colors and maturing trees, somehow does the same, capturing the place while also defamiliarizing it, offering verisimilitude and at the same time an ecological reading of our atmospheric commons. The National Arboretum, where admission is free, offers what the Humanities offers—the kind of education, increasingly abandoned, that does not depend for its significance on some outside factor, that leads nowhere but to itself, not subordinate to some end to which it is but the means.
Higher education is, or should be, a public trust, but we have largely privatized its commons too, and with that, installed a negative soteriology that in a democracy education need not include mutual recognition. The aesthetic forces a commons: people want to be joined with others, speak with others about what they have seen, read, heard. Our democracy renews itself every four years only to the extent to which the kind of judgment learned in such aesthetic commons are made, judgments made in the context of “the other,” of the community.
For Spring 2025, our theme will be “the Other,” and one way to envision this theme (there are of course many ways) might be to think about the fostering of connections that renew our aesthetic commons, and therefore, our democracy. If the nation that can be imagined included (and still includes) the National Arboretum, a place where the trees dissolve into otherness, but are not cut down, where they blur, like narrative, self and other, then while visiting we can also imagine ourselves permeable and interchangeable in a commons under ecological threat where there is no saving isolation, where the discipline of the other is the only discipline that matters.
There is no higher, harder form of the “wholly other” than the stranger just met, and no greater faith than that given to that same stranger. Still, the necessity of that faith now links all our commons. Our democracy requires learning how to give it; if it did not, we would not be free, and democracy would not be a good. Literature is just such a place for imagined futures, for nation-making narratives where “the other” is also/I, “the unseen” (the theme for our Fall 2025 issue), seen.
Notions of “community,” beset by a strong misreading, have become functional, transactional, self-segregating—its manipulators, in the name of “connection,” destroying it. Because of this, the call for community implicit in our experiment of self-governance, the care and feeding of the public square implicit in our founding, is being lost; its miracle, which requires husbandry, is being lost because the individual, the individual defined and educated in the context of the greater community, is being lost. But here, at the community college, as at the Arboretum, one cannot talk about isolated entities. Here is a commons that does not exist until everyone is invited—arboreal everywhere, unsituated, interfacing amidst others in a rhizomatic understory of root entanglement and circulating meaning. The commons itself takes no position—the price of admission only the willingness to look for common ground in the structure that has been made for the American experience, but that can disappear if not modeled for the next generation.
Our experiment in self-government belongs, in the end, to the world of the human spirit, and because of this, it is our great humanists—because they offer specific and concrete attention to the questions of government and reveal the ways that the human spirit is not always infallible in matters of the polis and public life—who are also, by definition, our great pedagogues. We cannot foresee the circumstances our next generations will encounter, but we can equip them with the tools with which they will encounter them.
Language circulates in a commons, so literary originality exists only in its context, with no boundary between form and social discourse. Since Potomac Review’s creation, in 1993, by its founder and first editor, Eli Flam, and subsequent connection, in 2001, to Montgomery College, and a succession of editors—Christa Watters, Julie Wakeman-Linn, Zachary Benavidez, and John Wang—who have, through their connection to the circumstances that produce it, shown how literary form, by submitting to the discipline of the other, can itself create a commons of excellence.
