Kim Fahner : Cosmic Bowling, by Cornelia Hoogland and Ted Goodden

Cosmic Bowling, Cornelia Hoogland and Ted Goodden
Toronto: Guernica, 2020

 

 

 

Cosmic Bowling is a collaboration between a sculptor, Ted Goodden, and a poet, Cornelia Hoogland. What’s unique about it is that the work of both artists is based on the ancient Chinese divination tool of the I Ching, or the ‘Book of Changes.’ It is made up of sixty-four hexagrams, with each one symbolizing an archetypal human situation. So, there are sixty-four sculptures, each paired with a six-line poem, bearing elegantly simple titles like “Innocence,” “Contemplation,” “The Wanderer,” “Splitting Apart,” “The Gentle,” and “Inner Truth.” The thing that’s really lovely is that you can begin in the middle, or wherever really, allowing the pages to fall open as they will, and then you can let the sculpture and poem that rises up to your eyes guide you forward. You can let the images and poems act as a method of divination, so that Cosmic Bowling acts as a mirror to the I Ching. It’s not a linear experience, but is instead a cyclical one. You let the poem come to you intuitively, in an oracular way.

I’ve known about the I Ching for a long time, as I’m curious about ancient means of divination, but I haven’t studied it in any detail. Reviewing this book made me a bit nervous, because I felt out of my depths, but I was calmed by Ted Goodden’s essay at the back of the book, “The I Ching: It Works If You Work It.” In what is a fascinating and informative essay, Goodden writes about the history of the I Ching. He speaks of how each hexagram is “a pattern formed by six broken and unbroken lines, resembling a horizontal barcode.” Then, each hexagram is “accompanied by a text.” You ‘cast the coins’ of the I Ching with a question in mind. You may not receive a direct answer to your question, but rather find another question that might take you on an internal exploration of your own life.

Goodden writes about how the I Ching is influenced by Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist thought and philosophy. It has three founding fathers: King Wen, Confucius, and Laotse. What it represents is something that might give us solace in these difficult, pandemic-ridden times. This is a strange time of hyper-individualism, a time when social media encourages people to brand and market themselves with photos on Instagram and Facebook. Identities are crafted, illusions are wrought, and where does that leave the truth of it all? What the I Ching requires, and what Cosmic Bowling also demands, though, is that the querent (or reader) quietens themselves and goes inside to listen.

If you flip the pages of Cosmic Bowling quickly, you can see the little figures of the sculptures shift through a series of movements; they aren’t progressive movements like the little stick figure books we used to make as children, but they’re delightful and whimsical. Beyond the beauty of the photos of the sculptures are Hoogland’s graceful and elegant six-line poems. In “Enthusiasm,” she writes: “We burn and dance/and fall asleep in jumbled heaps on our island under stars.” In “Approach,” there is great wisdom: “Some things you can’t approach directly. Birds, for one.” The poet asks the reader whether they are “the kind of person who walks straight toward” something, or if they circle their “heart’s desire.” In “The Corners of the Mouth,” Hoogland compares the process of photosynthesis to the way humans create art. She writes: “In the plant world,/leaves turn sunlight into sugar and release the oxygen that feeds us./The artful things people make, or do, are also oxygen.” The creation of art allows us to breathe, and then, perhaps, to breathe even more deeply.

Hoogland’s poems are intriguing as they slip artfully between tangible ‘real world’ references to more philosophical and poetic ideas. Mentions of insomnia, Christo’s hyperbolic art installations, a local choir that sings “Tiny Bubbles,” Dante’s Divine Comedy, and even a Martha Stewart magazine find themselves nestled up right next to beautiful little phrases and images. In “Influence,” she writes: “Before the heart commands, the toes are flexed to run” and “I was the/vibrating air around the bell when it stopped ringing.” In “Decrease,” the newborn pandemic year is the focus of the poem, with the poet noting that, as a species, “we’d arrived at the beginning of awareness.” As such, she continues, “I polished my shoes for the first time in ten years while/listening to Beethoven online. What kind of virus is that?” The external world is always there, alongside the internal landscape that each one of us has created throughout the time and space of our lives and experiences; the two aren’t to be separated, and the yin of one part seems to balance the yang of the other. 

Reading Cosmic Bowling is a way to offer ourselves the ability to breathe more deeply, to centre ourselves, to make ourselves find a still centre in the face of the chaos of this new pandemic world. While the outside world would want us to enter into the frenzy of hyper-individualism, Goodden and Hoogland say—quietly, but persistently—‘Wait. Sit a minute. Breathe deeply. Be with the book.’ And, for those minutes that you sit with it—with the images of the sculptures and the words of the poems—the world seems less noisy, less frantic, and your own internal landscape will grow calmer and more still. That gift, these days, is a beautiful one indeed.

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. She was poet laureate in Sudbury from 2016-18, and was the first woman appointed to the role. Kim's latest book of poems is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019). She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario representative of The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-22), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim can be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com