ARS MEMORIA
Come: enter the theatre of my mind.
Like Giulio Camillo, I invite you
to step away from the bustling Venetian waterways,
the charismatic, swarthy gondoliers, the mask vendors, merchants, and friars,
rival factions of pundits and academics—
and transcend onto a higher plane of awareness.
You are not a stranger or spectator here.
I place you with me at the center of the stage
and together we stare out at the wonders of the universe.
All art is, in some way, an art of memory.
An attempt to preserve, not just the experience,
but the complex essence of that experience.
Fact and fiction merged.
Before you realize it, it’s gone, lost forever.
We’re shadows living in a shadow world,
our memories the only elusive trace
that we ever lived, breathed, existed
in anything remotely resembling ‘Now.’
Memory is the pillar which holds aloft our
sanity, reality, perspective.
Without memory we are blind, soul-blind,
in a merciless land of cliffs.
My poems are the imagines agentes
that lead us both along an ascending trail…
to cosmos of illumination and colossal expanse.
Author’s Bio
Devon Gallant is an avid postmodern fiction enthusiast, a dancehall ragamuffin, a sommelier of jazz, a Deadhead, a chaos magician, a superhero, an old-school-celluloid cinema junkie, and the author of four collections of poetry. He currently resides in Montreal.