Stop by Galaudet Gallery in Chicago and light a candle to illuminate the start of 2023 and release 2022 (and some other years) to history. Each candle and your intentions will be placed in a luminaria and put outside the gallery on West Hubbard. Help us light up the west side of downtown Chicago as we celebrate community, a new year and illuminations.  This is a sixth year of Get Illuminated and our first in Chicago! Bags for the luminaries can be decorated by you or left pure white.

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Lighting a candle can provide different experiences like:

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• Lighting up the way to 2023 Reflect and celebrate on the year that has passed

• Release thoughts and beliefs that are no longer serving you

• Set clear intentions for the year ahead

• Invite the powerful energy of attraction to manifest your desires

• Lighting up the night with Luminaries can bring a warmth to our celebrations for the coming new year

 

Good music will be playing, good people will be present and positive energy will be ample as Galaudet Gallery looks to support Chicago’s downtown since it is where we love to have our business!

 

Inspirations:

Arthur Rimbaud has provided inspiration for Get illuminated it was his collection called “The Illuminations” 42 poems  which are lighting up our imaginations and inspiring us to “Get Illuminated”  This year we look at Rimbaud's Poem 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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We started our first year with a quote from Rimbaud's poem 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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The next year we continued with Arthur Rimbaud's “The Illuminations” quoting from the first section of his poem Vigils:

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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,

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The Third year we looked to Rimbaud's poem Aube (Dawn) for inspiration that led us to the dawn on January 1, 2019.  Here is an excerpt:

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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.

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The Fourth 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 2020?   Here is an excerpt:

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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 happines.

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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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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