Le Fantôme Visuel

Lyrics

The optic nerve reports silence.
The signal is lost.
The cataracts have drawn their final, milky curtain.
The occipital lobe, in its armchair in Geneva, grows restless.
It detests a vacuum.

First, the geometries.
Fish scales on a blank wall.
Brickwork where no bricks were laid.
Then, the theater opens for Charles Lullin,
ninety years old and of sound mind.
The dark begins to populate.
The brain, starved of the world, builds its own.
From memory, from scrap, from the pure, desperate engine of invention.

This is not madness.
This is the Charles Bonnet Syndrome.
The phantom visual, the lucid mirage.
The projector runs in an empty room,
showing films to a blind man who knows,
knows he is the only one in the audience.
And the show is not real.

He sees men, women, birds, carriages.
Tiny figures in blue coats, marching on a tapestry that isn't there.
A scaffolding erects itself on the ceiling,
then piece by piece, dismantles.
All of it silent.
A world under glass. Perfectly rendered, utterly mute.
Touch the tiny woman on your knee—she vanishes.
Pull your hand away, she reappears,
politely waiting for the interruption to pass.

This is not madness.
This is the Charles Bonnet Syndrome.
The phantom visual, the lucid mirage.
The projector runs in an empty room,
showing films to a blind man who knows,
knows he is the only one in the audience.
And the show is not real.

The cartographer, officially retired, still wants to draw.
So he fills the blank oceans with sea monsters,
populates the margins with chimeras.
The cortex abhors a void.
It will make tapestries. It will make birds. It will make worlds.
Anything to avoid the profound, static black.

In his Essai Analytique, seventeen sixty.
Bonnet notes of his grandfather,
"Perfectly aware these objects were not real."
And the silent parade continues.
The little men in blue coats march on.
The brain's private, pointless, beautiful rebellion...
against nothing.