How chaos came into the world…

First – there were two worlds.

The first world was one of colour and chaos.

The second world was blank. It had edges and limits… The only people in the blank world were two siblings: Twins.

One was strict,

and the other was loosey goosey.

Together they would create the world during the day, and at night it would be erased.

They did this for a long time, until one day – they found some colour. After years of thin lines the twins decided they wanted to see some colour in their world.

The loosey goosey twin painted first, long strands of green that developed into an outlandish tree.

The second twin painted a tree that stood strong, tall and lush.

That night the twins slept and overnight the trees grew their own personalities.

The twins were surprised that their trees hadn’t erased during the night, but they liked the trees and their new personalities, so they weren’t too worried. The twins were excited to have the trees to talk to, and the trees were excited about existing in this blank world. The twins went to sleep that night easily, knowing tomorrow they would have new friends.

The next morning the trees had attached to each other. The colour, it seemed, liked to grow and attach things together.

The twins decided they should add in a stream for the trees. The strict twin started with the stream,

and the loosey-goosey twin didn’t like that so much.

The loosey-goosey twin wanted the water to be different from the tree, so the twin let blue bleed in.

That night – the water filled out to be a whole ocean.

When the twins woke up they loved the ocean and wanted to create something to keep it company so they added a bit of sky.

The sky grew bigger and looked so lonely that the twins made it a nightlight so it would have some company while they slept.

While they slept, something happened…..

The nightlight grew.

The twins awoke to see the nightlight growing and growing…

Soon, the trees could no longer see anything but the nightlight.

The twins were worried about the nightlight – it was spreading so quickly… would it know when to stop?

The light surrounded them, and it didn’t have the balance they were used to… it seemed to them without both sides. And it got closer…

Before it touched them they made a barrier,

and it worked… for a bit… but the barrier didn’t want to keep the colours out, the barrier wanted to join in. So it began to spread. 

and it spread…

Until everything was covered. And the twins were left in a new world, different from the one at the start.

The twins would cover this layer in colour, and again and again until they had built up the layers of the earth.

I started painting this story thinking I would tell about evil entering the world, but as I painted I liked the colour more than I liked the blank world I began with so I changed my story to reflect that fact.

The twins were borrowed from the other story in The Truth About Stories (King 18). I was enamoured of the balance they brought to Charm’s story and I wanted to have the same balance. The colour then was less evil, but more chaos, building the world beyond their control. The idea that there was no created “evil” was one that I wanted to get across, but just like the witches story – when something affecting and chaotic is introduced it cannot be erased.

Thanks for sticking around – would love to hear your thoughts!

Work Cited

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2003. Print.

Words. Chamberlin talks a lot about language, in particular the strangeness and wonder of how language works. Stories, he says, “bring us close to the world we live in by taking us into the world of words” (italics mine,1).  He describes learning to read and write as learning “to be comfortable with a cat that is both there and not there”  (132). Based on Chamberlin’s understanding of how riddles and charms work, explain this “world of words.” Reflect on why “words make us feel closer to the world we live in” (1). (Paterson)

While pondering how to start this week’s post, I was sitting at my desk at work looking at the list of shows in the rEvolver festival being presented at the Cultch. Last week, a fellow student spoke about the importance of naming; live theatre often relies heavily on show names to carry the weight of value for the show. Instead of a trailer or visuals, festival theatre relies on the few sentences in a brochure and word of mouth to secure audiences. This year, the festival has a show called Hell of a Girl: A Cowboy-Noir Opera, the write up for the show describes it thusly, “Hell of a Girl is a fresh take on the Orpheus myth, set in a timeless world with cowboys, nymphs and demons, and told through 26 original songs” (Hell of a Girl). I’m not going to lie – the description sold me; I grew up on folk and country music and black and white movies. (It was the 90s though, I swear!) So naturally, between the title and the description (or the naming and the definition) they had aroused my interest. Through a similar sense (of enticing old interests), the bits of J. Edward Chamberlin’s If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? that really resonated with me were his writings on cowboys and their language.

Grand Canyon

In his chapter “Doodlers,” Chamberlin muses on the lasting image of the cowboys, “maybe the appeal of cowboys has more to do with that conflict between wandering and settling down, and between the useless and the useful, than it does with their B-movie fights with the Indians” (35).  Certainly, cowboys exist in a space of inbetweenness, they are both free and yet bound to a location. In most imaginings they exist in the American plains, roaming throughout, but locked into that landscape. In my opinion the appeal of cowboys comes from the nostalgic freedom associated to them. Real cowboys exist in a time before fences and restrictions, a time before technology changed how we communicate. Communication for cowboys also exists in an inbetween space: in order to calm the animals they sing their speech, creating their day-to-day lives into an almost operatic state of being (Chamberlin 37). Their daily communication lands somewhere between the exaggerated performance space and conversational reality; therefore, in phenomenological performance theory, they exist in both the frontside (ie. their singing, hollering and performative elements) and backside (is. the cowboys themselves, behind the mask). In this way, their adoption of foreign terms into their “lingo” can be seen as another aspect of their performativity. As true cowboys they are self governing, their language must also exist solely for their usage, adapted and created for their tongue.

Cowboys worked and played with language, as they worked and played with everything else, creating a lexicon of technical terms lovingly twisted and translated into cowboy lingo: criollo was applied to cattle and horses as much as to people of mixed blood; reata migrated to “lariat,” vaquero to “buckaroo,” and dar la vuelta (wrapping the end of a rope around a saddle horn) to “dally”… (Chamberlin 37)

Words were the cowboys way of connected them to their world, or in Chamberlin’s terms, to make them “feel closer to the world [they] live in” (1). Their word creation almost has a sing-song quality to it, existing as an extension of their performance. This specific vocabulary creation was not new to the cowboys and is still used contemporarily; it’s easy to apply language creation to academic jargon that is used almost exclusively in academic circles, or like the lingo found exclusivity in most cliques or professions, e.g. performers, coders, lawyers, cops, teenagers, etc.

At this point I feel I should link back to the reasons I started my blog post talking about a new musical being created in Vancouver, because these nostalgic attachments still affect contemporary creations. Artists create with both one eye on the past and one on the future. We look at this pictures of epic expanse like the Grand Canyon and grazing horses, and feel desire or a connection to the freedom a wandering cowboy’s life represents. Their creation of lingo for their way of life exists with us still, through tradition and nostalgia, and we get often so lost in the dream of the epic past that we gloss over the statement that criollo was used synonymously for both cattle and people of mixed blood (37). The associative images surrounding naming can be passed down in their friendliest form, but these names still carry weight and the world they were born in.

Once, when I was little and swore in front of my mother, she said to me, “you can’t say it until you can spell it.” I wish at times she had asserted the same for words that fell casually into my vocabulary, that I shouldn’t say them until I know the history they carry.

Work Cited

BassClef707. “Brief Encounter (final scene).” YouTube. YouTube, 24 Feb 2007. Web. 22 May 2015.

Brenn, Moyann. “Horse.” Flickr. Yahoo!, 27 May 2011. Web. 22 May 2015.

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004. Print.

“Festival About.” Upintheair Theatre. 16 Apr. 2013. Web. 22 May 2015.

Franey, Evan. “Introduction.” Liminal Space between Story and Literature. WordPress, 15 May 2015. Web. 22 May 2015.

“Hell of a Girl.” The Cultch. Web. 22 May 2015.

MinistryofStabbing. “Stan Rogers – The Maid On The Shore.” YouTube. YouTube, 26 Oct 2010. Web. 22 May 2015.

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 1:2.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies Canadian Literary Genres May 2015. WordPress. Web. 22 May 2015.

Spolar, Steven. “Tom T. Hall – That’s How I Got To Memphis.” YouTube. YouTube, 15 March 2011. Web. 22 May 2015.

“The Cultch | Vancouver BC Theatre, Dance and Music.” The Cultch. Web. 22 May 2015.

“Dead Horse Pt First Light #2 — 9/2004.” Flickr. Yahoo!, Sept. 2004. Web. 23 May 2015.