Brian Cullen is an artist and writer who lives on the unceded, traditional lands of the shíshálh Nation in xwesam (Roberts Creek, BC). His work has been published in The Capilano Review, Canadian Literature, Contemporary Verse 2, and other Canadian periodicals.
“L’expérience du soleil/The Experience of the Sun is an assemblage based on a poem by Québécois poet Normand de Bellefeuille in his collection Mon visage (Éditions de Noroît, 2011). In the poem, he asks, ‘Who of us has actually had the experience of the sun?’ And I believe he means not just the body’s own evidence of it — the warmth of the sun on the skin, and the brightness of the sun through closed eyelids — but the experience of the sun itself, what it sees: ‘who of us has really looked deeply into the eyes of the ocean / and seen their final offering […] who has seen the World / and all its wounds revealed?’ (my translation).
“As I gathered the parts of this assemblage and began to modify them and put them together, de Bellefeuille’s inversion of sorts began to make sense. The sun; the imperiled ocean; and somewhere in between, the marelle, or hopscotch, of writing, as de Bellefeuille might put it. There was playfulness here and sadness, too. And I was reminded that a vital kind of mythmaking is still possible. I could now see the sun revealing the depths of the ocean, to which it gives life, while at the same time helping to define our own chronobiology — our sense of time, endurance, and death embedded in our organism.”
