Ewrick's Rabbit Hole

Wisp 13 is now released.

Here’s my editorial:

Exquisite Corpse

by Éric P. Lemoine

Spontaneity—genuine spon­taneity— beyond what appear­ances might tell us, is not some­thing that comes easily, espe­cially given our usual upbringing which tends to bend or harness it into some­thing pro­ductive for society.

The Sur­re­alist movement in the 1920s is remem­bered among other things for artistic and playful exper­i­ments that led to expanding our bound­aries and views of reality by prac­tising spon­taneity without allowing the thought process to hold the full promi­nence it usually gets. Auto­matic writing —and auto­matic drawing— were in fact tech­niques that Sur­re­alists developed exten­sively, before they were used by pio­neers of con­scious explo­ration such as Jane Roberts.

One of their games/experiments in par­ticular was known as “cadavre exquis” (exquisite corpse). It required a group of people to col­lab­orate in order to compose some­thing (ini­tially sen­tences, but by extension, drawing, collage etc.) without having a com­plete view of what the others had con­tributed to the creation.

There is some­thing rem­i­niscent of an exquisite cadaver in Wisp, for each con­tributor brings in a piece without nec­es­sarily knowing what the rest of the picture looks like before the final release. For months, at each release of the mag­azine, it has been a joy and a priv­ilege for the editors to see the final picture of Wisp reveal itself before their eyes, and the common themes of the issue bloom from the inter­mingled roots of dif­ferent yet con­tiguous vari­eties of plants.

As you may see, the plants have grown a fair deal, and this current issue proudly sports no less than sixty-four pages. Truth be told, it has been a prac­tical exercise in spon­taneity to acknowledge that the exper­iment was no longer bringing as much ease and fun as it has been, given the time it required to keep the quality on a par with pre­vious issues.

We often wish for change, but it always comes as a bitter irony when we realise that we’ve been the very one holding on to a given expe­rience by wanting to prolong it longer than it required.

In many ways —and of course timely syn­chronic­ities have come since to reflect it more than once— Wisp has ful­filled the extent of what it could be in this format. It makes each of the past thirteen issues even more pre­cious and dear to us, even if the website will still be available for future developments.

But for now, it’s time for the Will-o’-the-Wisp to take a well deserved break, but not before thanking every reader and con­tributor of this exquisite adventure, and revealing its current one!

written by Yuki \\ tags: surrealism, wisp