Part creation myth, part emergent system, part musical instrument.
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Original Post:
So I've got an idea for this pageant, and I think I'll be able to squeeze it in between the other projects I've got on the go. It's going to be a combination of creation myth and some kind of emergent system. I'm taking my cue from Catherynne Valente's writing:
From In the Night Garden:
Open your ears, and let the sky in.
In the beginning, before you were the spark in the dream of a lice-shagged goat and a lonely farmhand, there was nothing but sky. It was black, and vast, and all the other things you might expect a sky with nothing floating around in it to be. But the sky was only a sky if you looked at it slantwise - if you looked at it straight, which of course, no one could, because there wasn't anyone to look any way, it was the long, slippery flank of a Mare.
The Mare was black , and vast, and all the other things you would expect a horse the size of everything to be.
After a long while, the Mare chewed a hole in herself, for reasons she has kept as her own. The hole filled up with light the way a hole in you or me would fill up with blood, and this was called a Star. They were the first, true children of the Mare, made of the flesh of her own body. And because she liked the light, and the company, she chewed other holes, roughly in the shapes of Badgers and Plows and Deer and Knives and Snails and Foxes and Grass and Water and suchlike, and so on until the Mare was ablaze with holes, and all the holes were Stars, and the sky was not very empty at all anymore.
From The Habitation of the Blessed:
It was the Crystalline Heaven who did it, as best folk very much wiser than your Imtithal can measure it. Why the Crystalline Heaven and not the Benevolent Gold of the Sun's Sphere, or the Base Metal of the Leaden Spheres? Lean in, and I will tell you a secret: because the Heaven was lonely, and it had a weakness in its upper hemisphere, due to some trauma in its mysterious infancy. It is important that you know this. That loneliness and weakness were always a part of us.
The Sphere of Heaven ground slowly through the windy pitch, and crushed against the Benevolent Silver of the Sphere of the Moon. All along its rose-colored meridians, the orb of Heaven cracked, and splintered, and shivered. Lines of gold like fire appeared in its great face; glass formed and bubbled in long rivers, and in the beginning of everything it cried out as the Sphere of the Moon passed into the Sphere of Heaven. Where the Moon had entered, so the Sun followed, and Mercury Lined with Quicksilver, Jupiter Hot and Moist, and all of the Planetary Spheres and Elemental Spheres, one after the other, like one of Ikram's poor dolls. The Crystalline Heaven swelled with all it contained, and lost its rosy color, becoming instead the color of black glass. Thus when we look upward in the evening, we see the very furthest rim of Heaven that can be seen from where we stand, on the last and smallest and best of the Spheres, the Habitation of the Blessed, our own dear Earth.
