Ryan Bry is one of a kind; this is evident from even the slightest social media interaction with him. He's the kind of interview subject who, as the conversation progresses, opens you up to greater degrees of self-interrogation. Talking past one another in the service of a greater truth: isn't this what literature is? In a perfect world, maybe. May this interview serve as a brochure for a more perfect existence, and DFL release #005, The New Organics for the Flickering World, will be your guided tour.
Nicholas Clemente: The word you most often use to describe this book is "exuberant," and I couldn't agree more. A lightness of touch and a buoyancy of imagery; the thing seems to float in your hand. Would you consider this a departure from your other work? Where does this exuberance come from?
Ryan Bry: Thanks for noticing all that within the book I've written, Nick. The exuberance managed that was translated to the page came from a very real craving for it due to the grimness of my circumstances. When I started writing The New Organics for the Flickering World I was in what is basically a nursing home for the insane in southern Missouri. Instead of meeting the illness where it's at, places like that (it was called ClaRu Deville) have chosen to criminalize the entire personality and basically force a person into a life that feels like pure sludge. What I did was a psychological endeavor as well as an artistic one to create the fully rounded world that they weren't offering me in those locked doors. The first Eye light was written as a kind of prayer or latch to see it in a collection that would be inspired by the way I complete sketches—which is by taking the pen and dancing it through the paper as if it were water and the ink was a fishing line. I like creating abstracts because they're able to say so much. The best lines from even the most concrete works come to us in abstracts, anyway. It's different from my first collection, Information Blossoms, which should be getting a reprint soon, in the sense that Information Blossoms didn't need to exist: it is completely superfluous to everything which is why I think that book is a great lens from another source. When I began writing the Eye lights I definitely reached into that anomalous existence that is out there but it came from a purer need and a maturer longing. A huge inspiration for this book was George Harrison's guitar work on Revolver which feels as if he's very deliberately playing around with his character in a way that's very fatherlike and shamanistic as well—viewing the contrasts of the world as someone who is capable of realistic insight. There's another book which I'm in the process of editing because it hasn't been accepted anywhere called Paradox Healer, and that most recent one seems more paired with Information Blossoms in spirit because they're more inner child than The New Organics. I suppose these three works could create a pretty stable bell curve. But yeah, I had to kind of manifest a personal atavism in order to get through my conditions, which perhaps I deserved for allowing myself to get ugly with people. When I started writing this book it was as if I had given birth and I wanted to be better for my baby.
NC: Is this why you've mentioned to me before that you wanted the book to have an immediate and "unedited" quality? It reminds me of what an artist friend of mine said a long time ago, something I still think about all the time and in all kinds of situations: you can't correct a curve, you have to draw the whole thing over again.
RB: Yes, a poem is a reaction to the energy you're feeling, you have a finite amount of tools in order to create something infinite, same as art. I wanted to preserve the integrity of the poems as sketchy breaths of depiction that were just slightly colored in some parts, that hinted at a world beginning and ending—like experiencing birth on an alternate plane. In college I read the book Concerning the Spiritual in Art by Kandinsky and that basically unlocked my whole approach. It taught me that as I got deep into the visions of artistic works I was experiencing real zones, real as any other if not hyperreal, that I could extract them like a pearl diver. But harvesting these images does a beautiful thing because it does not steal from the authenticity of these zones to be represented, it creates a space for simultaneous existence between the physical and the spiritual. There is another side to everything, no matter how sick and broken an image is there is a full dimensionality to it if you catch it from the best angle. I'm trying to learn that even better as life unfolds. When we look at a sketch, we basically let our eyes go over the whole thing blankly and then we see one piece of it that makes it conclusive and the rest naturally becomes a focus. I like to think I've done that in this book, that I've given the reader at least a few keys in each poem to visualize the moment of having this page in front of them. There's also an intimacy to sketches, they let us in on something, a mural would be too cumbersome for the intellect. My grandmother Bebe had a framed sketch of a Picasso dove in her piano room.
NC: These poems are called "Eye light 1,2,3, etc." instead of having individual titles. Why "eye light"? It is a unique and somewhat magical phrase. Mostly because the theory of sight is fascinating to me. Once you realize that the eye is not a camera and the mind is not a hard drive, anything becomes possible. Where does seeing occur? In the eye, in the mind, in some confluence of the two? I remember hearing that one of the Greeks believed that sight proceeded from a stream of particles shot from the eye, and the world is basically "painted" with sight. There are dangerous and strenuous situations in which you start seeing with your whole body, and the eye itself goes blind. What do these poems -- these pieces of "eye light" -- tell us about seeing?
RB: Yes, it's because sight is probably the single most taken for granted thing there is, and I want to remind people as they are transported through their city, as they're sitting down at a kitchen table in a dark night with a bouquet of flowers in a vase, even as they are entering a thronging stadium of shouting bodies, that this memory they are having is being reached by a place within. There's something special about the concept of sight that seems to be capable of literally anything yet interacting with this force seems to yield very tender results. Keep in mind that this power is available to everyone you've ever met even if they're blind, they have their own kind of sight, but people seem to not even care. It seems like people care more these days about hidden things than things that can be seen and processed under the kind machine of sight. The theory of sight is fascinating to me as well. I know very little about it but I picked up a book called Vision Science by Stephen E. Palmer and am saving it for when I feel I can get a little nitty gritty with this. I also have this all-encompassing bond with the archangel of healing, the angel Raphael, who in the biblical story healed the elder Tobias' blindness by telling the son Tobias to apply the gall of the fish he wrestled with in the river to the eyes of the pious man. The book of Tobias was removed from Protestant bibles, likely because it tells lucidly of the power of angels and offers a living spectrum of this certain kind of sweet feeling that they tend to avoid, but this book saved my life and developed in me the spirit that I could respond to society, the angel has that kind of humor and it definitely turned me into a new creation. As to your next question, I believe that the most important organ of sight in the human body is the heart. When a person is healthy, everything they see gets filtered through the heart. There’s a little bit of Heart light in these poems as well. A little reason why I was attracted to using these titles, Eye light 1, 2, 3 ... 128 is the fact that the eye is the auxiliary to the sight yet it takes the symbol without competition basically. It's secondary, yet there's almost like this little secret our eyes are allowing us to see that might not exist without those two balls of fluid. Yeah, to admit it I kind of agree with that Greek guy, that our eyes are literally painting reality with the quality that they understand. I have this theory that every particle has its own quantity of light, and that there might not even be sources of light. But that could just be me trying to invent some scientific wackiness because I have the spare time. It's a very crazy concept this whole personal sight thing, it can make you very bold and give you a lot of comfort. These Eye lights tell us that sight is accompanied by a great many things that are constantly shifting, but the act of sight is a singular choice that you can constantly make—if you value calling yourself living. They also tell that this organ, sight, has its cycle of being overwhelmed and then calming itself; the poems in The New Organics for the Flickering World deliver that there is something technically inhuman about this kind of sight, whether you want to call it angel or animal. We should always take to heart the beautiful moments we come across with our sight because we don't know how many there are.
NC: I think "inhuman" is an excellent way of looking at it -- neither subhuman nor superhuman, but rather a level of objectivity superseding the perspective of the human entirely. The whole idea of the "human experience" in art is so cliched, so sentimental, so played out. Actual art is more like a depiction of the cosmic experience temporarily situated within the human. I always loved the idea of the Beatific Vision because it implies that perception is a form of knowledge, or perhaps the form of knowledge. This theory has supreme value to the artist, who deals strictly in perception and nothing else. Teilhard de Chardin, my favorite theologian, is constantly making a distinction between the "juridical" and the "organic," arguing in a very Nietzschean way that juridical fiat, in art or theology or anything else, is only a play of language, a false image of transcendent power, whereas the organic is something neither above or below but encompassing the human, abolishing any distinction between the transcendent and the immanent, the natural and the supernatural soi-disant. So this brings us in a very rambling way to what I suppose is my actual question: tell us more about our New Organics.
RB: Definitely Nicholas, I feel like too many artists are trying to depict the world we live in somehow instead of creating a visionistic response. We don't really live in the world, we live somewhere else. We need art that takes us back to that place that we can really call home. Perhaps that's the beatific vision, but personally I see that result as rather limiting, instead of one possibility I see endless in both material and spiritual forms. Even our earth has a vast number of animal and plant paradigms that can be reflected in perceptive reflections and integrations. We as humans are created out of organic material, everything we do, everything, is an organic response. This reality has to make us think a little differently than we currently do in my opinion; it makes us think about how our thoughts relate to one another in a kind of shamanistic way. You as a person have this special kind of territory that you walk around with and offer to others, and personally I like when this territory can be pretty fluid and vulnerable but that gets me into a lot of trouble with egoic personalities that prefer strict definition. In my view of it and in my defense anything can happen so you might as well use the most of what you have in a moment to get your point across instead of storing information that might lead to negative personal buildup and general unhappiness. My way has some flaws sure, but we all have to go about life with some kind of approach or we're liable to lose it or not have any fun. To answer your question, the new organics are kind of a necessary mutation that we have to undergo in order to get the most out of modern life. We need to be able to travel backwards and forwards at the same time. If something happens to you then you need to be able to say "this is my perception of what is going on" and know that that response is created with value, perhaps limitless value. The new organics need to be able to navigate a world that shows them everything they need except for the summation of all being itself. The new organics are able to admit that they have the tools they need in order to photosynthesize a tangible gift to be able to show someone. Most things, like 99.9999999% of the universe, we can't see. I wanted to make a book based on the rich palette of things that we do have available to our vision and offer it to the world. You might get a glimpse of something unseen but that's up to the reader's willingness to dive. I hope everyone has a good time reading it.
D.F.L. Lit 