“The Light Within the Bulb” Exhibition

Ed. Varie

This event has ended.

Ed. Varie presents a group exhibition including artists Ry Fyan, Dylan Kraus, Aryana Minai, Sean Mullins, and Phoebe Nesgos: The Light Within the Bulb.

A falling leaf begins to forget.
Undreamt is its branch — its trunk — its roots.
Like words, the leaf begins to decompose.
Its seed — primordial.
Its data — water and sun.

Lost is an ancient ritual,
a perpetually emanating truth.
Geometry dissipates.
Harmony,
out of tune
like a string trio that never cries.

Corporations rebrand.
Clocks turn and return.
Evil has many faces,
but so does wind and its spheres.

Birds circle and sing around an endless pool.
Their song excavate
an underground sea.
Glimmering,
the pool reflects their rippling hymn.
-David Ai Wang

“There have been some latter-day poets who have been very specific about actual auditory hallucinations. Milton referred to his ‘Celestial Patroness, who … unimplor’d … dictates to me my unpremeditated Verse,’ even as he, in his blindness, dictated it too his daughters. And Blake’s extraordinary visions and auditory hallucinations — sometimes going on for days and sometimes against his will — as the source of his painting and poetry are well known. And Rilke is said to have feverishly copied down a long sonnet sequence that he heard in hallucination.

But most of us are more ordinary, more with and of our time. We no longer hear our poems directly in hallucination. It is instead the feeling of something being given and then nourished into being, of the poem happening to the poet, as well and as much as being created by him. Snatches of lines would ‘bubble up’ for Housman after a beer and a walk ‘with sudden and unaccountable emotions’ which then ‘had to be taken in hand and completed by the brain.’ ‘The songs made me, not I them,’ said Goethe. ‘It is not I who think,’ said Lamartine, ‘it is my ideas that think for me.’ And dear Shelley said it plain:

‘A man cannot say, ‘I will compose poetry.’ The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness … and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.’”
- Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind