creation – A Motley Vision

Guest Post on Creation by Sam Barrett

INTRODUCTORY NOTE: This is the written version of a talk given by Sam Barrett in sacrament meeting February 2014 as part of the Berkeley Ward’s arts Sunday. The assigned topic was “What CREATING teaches me about the CREATOR.” Sam works in advertising and is also a composer under the name Samson Y Hiss. His stuff is fun and creepy and weird—circus-hell music, you might say. (Worth mentioning: He agreed to let me post this here after seeing the word “grotesque” on the AMV about page.)

Samson Y Hiss is currently raising money on Indiegogo to record his music with real musicians on real instruments. I highly recommend checking the project out and supporting it. I have a cd of his work in the car and it certainly makes late-night drives more nightmarey. (The photos here are taken from the Indiegogo page.)

By means of introduction, if I remember correctly, the talk is structured around his day-to-day thinking about the topic as he prepared. You know. In case you find an all-caps MONDAY confusing.

MONDAY

In the mid-40s at midnight in Manhattan, a young man named Thelonious Monk was working as a pianist at a nightclub. Much of his style was developed during this time as he participated in “cutting competitions” which featured many leading jazz soloists. While engaged in one of these sessions he fell upon an old song he’d written years ago at the age of 19 back in North Carolina. Returning to the song nearly 13 years later as a superior musician he embellished upon the tune greatly almost to the point of rewriting it completely. This new tune would become known as Round Midnight. A song a number of jazz artists including Cootie Williams would reinterpret for years to come. Round Midnight became the most recorded jazz standard composed by a jazz musician. It appears in over 1000 albums.

He sold candy and newspapers on trains running from Port Huron to Detroit, and sold vegetables to make money. He also studied qualitative analysis, and conducted chemical experiments on the train until an accident prevented further work of that kind. Moving to Newark, New Jersey Thomas Edison began his career as an inventor with the automatic repeater and other improved telegraphic devices, but the invention that first gained him notice was the phonograph in 1877.

The accomplishment was so unexpected by the public at large as to appear almost magical. It recorded on tinfoil around a grooved cylinder. And despite its limited sound quality and that the recordings could be played only a few times, the phonograph made Thomas Edison a celebrity. And he became known as “The Wizard of Menlo Park” New Jersey.

Creators come in many forms. They are musicians, painters, sculptors, inventors, scientists, philosophers. They are actors, writers, directors, designers, builders, preachers. They are moms, dads, grandpas, grandmas; even crazy uncles. As sons and daughters of God creativity is an all of us no matter our profession or position. Continue reading “Guest Post on Creation by Sam Barrett”

On the Mormon Vision of Language: God’s Works and God’s Words

In this week’s video, I turn to the Pearl of Great Price and explore the interaction between God and Moses as narrated in the first chapter of Moses. I focus specifically on what the narrative suggests about God’s use of language.

(The audio only version. A direct link to the audio file.)

(All posts in this series. // All audio files from this series.)

The Makar, Making, and Mormonism: Tyler’s 2014 AML Conference Proposal

Muta Poesis, from Le vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti moderni by Giovanni Bellori (Rome, 1672)

Each year, my wife and I look forward to making a pilgrimage to Orem, Utah to attend the annual Association for Mormon Letters Conference. I’ve also made it an annual practice to share my conference proposal once I’ve submitted it. In 2012, I proposed and presented “Situating Sonosophy: De/constructing Alex Caldiero’s ‘Poetarium'” and in 2013 I proposed “Performative Poesis and the (Un)Making of the World,” although my presentation was eventually titled “The Tongue as Tree of Life: Meditations on Words and the Word and the Making of the World.”

This year the conference, which will be held April 11-12 at UVU, is titled “New Faces of Mormonism: Are We Changing the Way We See Ourselves?” (*) Yesterday I submitted the following proposal, which is relevant to the Church’s recently released statement on what it means to become like God:

Alex Caldiero’s Performative Poesis: The Makar, Making, and Mormonism

Alex Caldiero’s work emerges from a rich performance ecology that consists of many different influences. One of these is the figure of the pre-modern bard, whom Caldiero calls a makar (mah-ker). Makar is the Middle English antecedent of maker, although makar is still active in the Scots language where it’s used in reference to a poet or bard [see here, especially]. Caldiero may have assumed the title in an attempt to establish kinship with a primitive (prime-itive) culture, its language, and its poetics. He may have also taken the name to skirt around the social and cultural limitations related to calling oneself a poet, including the stigma attached to practicing an art that some say is dead and that others associate with greeting card sentimentalism or the horrors of high school English. By moving to avoid these limitations (albeit at the cost of having to endure others [like being what Scott Carrier calls a “categorical conundrum”]), Caldiero becomes better able to critique common conceptions of poetry while he at the same time foregrounds the term’s origins: the word poetry derives from the Greek concept of poesis, which signifies the process of making.

Caldiero’s self-affiliation with Mormonism brings an additional level of signification to his focus on making. In particular, his poetics seem to be in conversation with Mormon theology’s teachings about Deity; these include the following:

First, that the Gods are Makers: they create and they procreate.
Second, that God isn’t a singular Entity acting as lone Creator but is part of a coterie of creative Beings acting in concert, a Community of Gods.
Third, that the Makers have created and peopled not just this world, this universe, but many worlds and many universes.
Fourth, that Creation doesn’t occur ex nihilo: rather the Makers build things from materials extant in expansive cosmos.
Fifth, that Creation unfolds in an eternal round: the Makers’ creative acts occur in the present progressive tense, that these Beings haven’t just created, they are creating.
Sixth, that humans are the Makers’ offspring; as such we have the making gene in us and by virtue of heredity and training, we can emulate our Parents and become Makers ourselves.

My paper will explore the relationships among Caldiero’s performative poesis (which he calls sonosophy) and the figures/ideas I’ve described above: the makar (the pre-modern bard), poetry as the process of making, and Gods as Makers.

(Cross-posted here.)