Editorial: The Visitor, 15ᵀᴴ Time Around

…and there he is, a telegram later, there is the Visitor, otherworldly blue-eyed, with a jaw sculpted from lime and time, there is Jeremiah of Hilkiah, the Old Testament demon wailing in the desert, a renegade Emmanuel who can unwall the temples with a cry of tenderness, the heart’s own harbinger, who comes as black night, who comes demisted from the sand and the unwedded dreams…

There he is, inexorably here, pinned between the four walls of your most innocent dream, while he ominously stares at your terrified face, a thousand spans away from your betrayedly doubled life. There is the Visitor, beneath distant skies where blood and catharsis await the innocent, where the saved will unscratch tears which shall not be springs of pain and give tongue to words that will forever be just that. Oh, there is the Visitor, there he is again, and this time he’s not imposed but desired, not uninvited but expected, not a stranger like fate but close as a kiss – there is the Visitor, like a weary silence in your assumptions about the world, like an abyss, like a star, like blood, like a dim premonition of the unearned nature of your petty bourgeois comfort. But… what will you do when he leaves?

For there we are too, for the fifteenth time, an eyeless Terrence Stamp for the damned and the wretched, strayed into a land equally desolate and unjust as a totalitarian Ruritania or a premodern Iberian cortijo. And we too bring unrest and rifts, and we too bear an axe for the ice in your hearts; and we come with a sword, to confront you with what you have hushed up beneath the layers of everyday comfort, with questions you have walled up in fear and shame. For a few days, perhaps, it will seem to you like a respite, and you will not grasp why we are here. But… what happens when we leave?