We started at the beginning this week. Literally. Ovid starts right at the formation of everything. But even the beginning signals a change.
It got me thinking of the ever-popular world-building entertainment of recent years, from Lord of the Rings, Led Zeppelin, and Dungeons & Dragons to Erasurehead and the MCU.
I also noticed the ambiguity left around the god responsible for this cosmic restructure. I thought that was interesting.
I know it's hard to start a conversation about something that's just starting, so I'll go first.
I always thought it strange that "creation" was so often used as a synonym for "creating order." As a creative person, it rarely feels this way, at least not as cleanly as it's often made out. Being creative forces me to let go, escape conformity, and follow instinct. The result is often quite messy, at least at first. In this sense, it feels more like creating chaos than anything else.
But in every creation story or myth I know, it's described as the opposite—this one included. The god involved always takes something formless and chaotic and organizes it. That act of organization then gets called "creating." Ironically, what gets organized (nature), we humans often use as an example of chaos by calling it the "wild." And around and around we go.
Maybe it could be helpful to see this paradox as an opportunity for us to rethink our ideas around the words "creation," "order," and "chaos," investigate the connotations we've attached to them, and reach for more of a "bird's eye view" of the topic. I'm thinking out loud here.
As I said in the intro, the detail in this version of the Roman creation story that stuck out most to me was the namelessness of the creator god. Growing up in a Judeo-Christian family and culture, the most important detail of the creation story was that it answered the question "Who?" Who created the universe? God did—as in Yahweh/the triune "three-in-one"/Father-Son-Holy-Spirit/Capital-G God. Most people were OK with leaving the rest of it up for discussion. But not that part.
Apparently, that wasn't the primary purpose behind the Roman concept of creation, at least not to Ovid. He seems perfectly comfortable adding an "a" in front of the "god" word and leaving it ambiguous. "Whichever god it was," he says, as if to say, "Who cares?" What seems to matter most is the bringing about of order, not who exactly did the ordering. How very Aristotelian of him!
I hope, at this point, that this wasn't Kline's choice in translation but a legitimate thing communicated by the original author. If anyone can shed light on this, I'd love to know. Do you have a different translation? Or, better yet, do you read latin??? (Not holding my breath for that last one.) What does it say? And—more importantly—what do YOU say?
I know it's hard to start a conversation about something that's just starting, so I'll go first.
I always thought it strange that "creation" was so often used as a synonym for "creating order." As a creative person, it rarely feels this way, at least not as cleanly as it's often made out. Being creative forces me to let go, escape conformity, and follow instinct. The result is often quite messy, at least at first. In this sense, it feels more like creating chaos than anything else.
But in every creation story or myth I know, it's described as the opposite—this one included. The god involved always takes something formless and chaotic and organizes it. That act of organization then gets called "creating." Ironically, what gets organized (nature), we humans often use as an example of chaos by calling it the "wild." And around and around we go.
Maybe it could be helpful to see this paradox as an opportunity for us to rethink our ideas around the words "creation," "order," and "chaos," investigate the connotations we've attached to them, and reach for more of a "bird's eye view" of the topic. I'm thinking out loud here.
As I said in the intro, the detail in this version of the Roman creation story that stuck out most to me was the namelessness of the creator god. Growing up in a Judeo-Christian family and culture, the most important detail of the creation story was that it answered the question "Who?" Who created the universe? God did—as in Yahweh/the triune "three-in-one"/Father-Son-Holy-Spirit/Capital-G God. Most people were OK with leaving the rest of it up for discussion. But not that part.
Apparently, that wasn't the primary purpose behind the Roman concept of creation, at least not to Ovid. He seems perfectly comfortable adding an "a" in front of the "god" word and leaving it ambiguous. "Whichever god it was," he says, as if to say, "Who cares?" What seems to matter most is the bringing about of order, not who exactly did the ordering. How very Aristotelian of him!
I hope, at this point, that this wasn't Kline's choice in translation but a legitimate thing communicated by the original author. If anyone can shed light on this, I'd love to know. Do you have a different translation? Or, better yet, do you read latin??? (Not holding my breath for that last one.) What does it say? And—more importantly—what do YOU say?