Before beginning only Awonawilaona existed, no one else with him in the vast space of time but the black darkness on all sides in the space of time. And he brought forth his thought into space… Nothing existed, neither did nothingness exist, Between day and night there was no frontier. Everything at the beginning was hidden… — Ernesto Cardenal Cosmic Canticle, Cantiga 1 I am struck with the creation stories that begin with a gesture of art. The song, the word, the sculpted gesture. In the Midewiwin tradition of the Ojibway, we are taught that the first sound was the …
Acouple of little things I have found today: los otros, les autres, d e e p w e b The coolest blogroll in the universe. So you want to write a fugue? Text by Glenn Gould: But never be clever for the sake of being clever, For a canon in inversion is a dangerous diversion. And a bit of augmentation is a serious temptation, While a stretto diminution is an obvious solution, While a stretto, stretto, stretto diminution is a very, very obvious solution. So never be clever for the sake of being clever, for the sake of showing off. …
If you are very attentive, you’ll notice a slew of new blogs added to the blogroll. These are all lifted from my Bowen Island Journal and I draw them to your attention so that you might explore them and find out a little bit about the really interesting discussion we are having about what it means to blog place. For more, visit Fred and Pica.
I am re-reading Cosmic Canticle by Ernesto Cardenal. The review in that link there describes the poem far better than I can right now. I first read the poem in 1996 when I found a copy of the book in a remainder bin as one of Vancouver’s small bookstores was being squeezed out of existence by a chain. I was immediately struck by the beginning of the first Cantiga: In the beginning there was nothing neither space nor time. The entire universe concentrated in the space of the nucleus of an atom, and before that even less, much less than …