Stop by Galaudet Gallery and light a candle to illuminate the start of 2025 and release 2024 to history. Each candle and your intentions will be placed in a luminaria and put outside the gallery in Eau Claire and Chicago. Help us light up these neighborhoods as we celebrate community, a new year and illuminations.  This is a 8th  year of Get Illuminated! Bags for the luminaries can be decorated by you or left pure white.

Inspirations:

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Poet Arthur Rimbaud has provided inspiration for Get Illuminated.   

 

His collection of poems called The Illuminations  being the easiest inspirational motivation. 

 

The Illuminations are 42 poems  which are lighting up our imaginations and inspiring us to Get Illuminated. 

 

 

2024

Here is this year's Rimbaud poem for inspiration, translated by Galaudet Gallery's Vicki Milewski:

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Sensation

by Arthur Rimbaud

Translated by Vicki Milewski

 

In the deep blue evening’s summer

I will go

in the paths

thrilled by wheat,

twisting small grass:

dreamer you will hear freshness in my feet.

freshness I will not speak;

I will not think.

I will let the wind bathe my bare head.

I will go far, far away, like a bohemian,

by Nature,—happy as with a lover. 

 

 

 

2023

Get Illuminated with a poem by Vicki Milewski inspired by RImbaud's Metropolitan, Milewski's poem works its way toward Metro a concert hall in Chicago where bands on the edge of the galaxies play like Smashing Pumpkins, Metallica, Dave Grohl, REM and others.  Beneath Metro is the Smart Bar where skilled DJs spin dance tunes for the too small dance floor.

 

Metro

By Vicki Milewski

 

Following Magellan’s violet straits to discover Ossian's Gallic stories wrapped in English tweed before arriving at the purple beach.

Jasmine air intoxicates spiraling branches filled with oranges into hands grasping before bags collecting are thrown onto flatbeds waiting... always waiting

Dimensional crystals foretell confluentional crossings

Growing in the sunlight shafts prismatic and virtual tiny embers of feeling placed within these fixed windows escape into eyes seeking understanding beyond being a shadow of the third dimension or a remnant of the second

Hands striving for the fourth or fifth to hold onto it or at least

Circumvent knowing it by living through it

In rags or designer clothing doesn’t matter

On turbulent wheat fields or Nazca Lined public beaches

Either look like my crawling fingers on the screen like a child learning how to walk we click and crawl our way through new thoughts

 

As the streets I would ride down toward Green’s Park become symbols of trusting the guide within my heart or the liar in my phone who promises to work with me, aide me in my searches but instead I tangentially find more paths to follow onto a dancefloor at Metro or down some stairs to the Smart Bar where DJs spin shimmerings in blocks of ice where delicate flowers continue growing rainbow leaves and magenta petals because they know one day

I will thaw.

 

 

2022

This year we look at Rimbaud's Poem Metropolitan to inspire Get Illuminated.  Rimbaud takes us on a journey that at first seems to travel through different lands but ends up showing us traveling within.

 

Metropolitan

From the indigo straits to Ossian's Sea,

over the rose and orange sand washed by wine-colored air

crystal boulevards have risen up and crossed

immediately settled by poor young families

who get their food at the fruit dealers.

Nothing rich.--Just the city.

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From the asphalt desert flee in a straight line:

helmets, wheels, barges, rumps

in confusion with the sheets of fog spaced in sinister bands in the sky

which bends back, withdraws and comes down,

formed by the most treacherous black smoke which the Ocean in mourning can make

--Just the battle

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Look up:

this wood bridge, arched;

these last vegetable gardens of Samaria;

these illuminated masks under the lantern whipped by the cold night;

the silly water nymph in her noisy dress, in the lower part of the river;

these luminous skulls in the pea rows,--and other bewitchments.--Just the country.

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These roads lined with fences and walls,

their gardens bursting over them

and the terrible flowers called hearts and sisters,

damask cursing languorously,

--possessions of fairy-like aristocracies ultra-Rhenish, Japanese, Guaranian,

still capable of receiving the music of the ancients--

and there are inns which will never open again now,

--there are princesses,

and if you are not too overwrought,

the study of the stars

--just the sky

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In the morning when with Elle, you fought in those shimmerings of snow,

the green lips, the ice, the black flags and blue rays,

and the red perfumes of the polar sun.

--Just your strength.

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2021

This year we look to Rimbaud's poem Vies (Lives) for reflection on the lives we all lead and those we dream of living--could we merge these two in 2022?   Here is an excerpt:

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Vies (Lives)

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II

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I am far more deserving inventor than all those who went before me; a musician, in fact, who found something resembling the key of love.  At present from a meagre countryside with a dark sky,  I try to feel emotion over the memory of a mendicant childhood.....I don't miss what I once possessed of divine happiness.

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The last line is best in the French:

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Je ne regrette pas ma vielle part de gaite divine

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2020

This year we look to Rimbaud's poem Aube (Dawn) for inspiration that leads us to the dawn on January 1, 2021.  Here is an excerpt:

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Aube (Dawn)

 

I have held the summer dawn in my arms.

Nothing moved as yet on the fronts of palaces. The water

was dead.  Swarms of shadows refused to leave the road to the wood. 

I walked along, awakening the warm, alive air. 

Stones looked up, and wings rose up silently.

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The first occurrence, in the path already filled with cool white

shimmerings, was a flower which told me its name.

 

 

2019

This  year we continue with Arthur Rimbaud's The Illuminations quoting from the first section of his poem Vigils:

Vigils

It is the enlightened rest, no fervor no languor, on bed or on the grass

It is the friend, who is neither strong nor weak.  The friend.

It is the beloved, not tormenting not tormented.  The beloved.

The air and the world not sought after.  Life.

--Was it this then?

--And the dream fresh,

 

 

 

2018

 

We start our first year of Get Illuminated with a quote from Rimbaud's poem Mystic:

 

Mystic:

 

And while the band at the top of the picture, is formed

by the whirling and leaping noise of a conch shell and nights of men.

 

The flowering of the stars and of the sky and of all else comes down opposite  the hill,

like a basket ,

close to our face,

and makes the valley below sweet smelling and blue

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Notes

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The candles being used were made at the Athenian Candle Shop and have lead free wicks, a mixture of beeswax and parafin candles will be available. A luminaria is a white paper bag with designs on it and some sand in the bottom.

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Translations of Rimbaud are from Wallace Fowlie's A Study in Angelism except where otherwise noted