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Carousel Cosmos
This is What the Carousel is For.
Gather round. We are all made of the same atoms that the stars are made of too. We are parts of the universe that observe the universe. We are all living, sentient and curious together, here of all places and now of all times. What are the odds? How does it make you feel?
This carousel is inspired by kindness, adventure, outer space, bedtime stories, dinosaurs and ice cream. It’s inspired by the Western Promenade’s endless views, spectacular sunsets and contemplative atmosphere. It spins the way that the earth spins when the sun sets, in a place where trolleys used to stop, in a small picturesque city with a school community that speaks more than sixty different languages.
This carousel runs on energy from the big bang, released billions of years ago, that also makes the sun rise, the rain fall and the flowers grow. It runs on imagination too. You can steer towards adventure in those distant mountains or the far side of the Andromeda Galaxy. You can sit back and ride to the future, toward the edge of our expanding universe.
This carousel is supported by TEMPOart and is inspired by their mission. It is a temporary installation and a timeline of sorts. It will travel once or twice around the sun without leaving the Western Promenade, then vanish. In the meanwhile it will be a place for community -- for free events brought to you by TEMPOart, for conversation, contemplation, imagination and snacks, with animals that once roamed here as your guides. They’re not mythological, just misunderstood. They invite you on a journey to greater understanding.
Some are dinosaurs and mega-fauna, long extinct. Some are alive and well in Canada now. Some are portrayed in disguise. The neighborhood was different when they lived here. These are a few of the things that they saw:
The ancient mega-volcanoes of Pangaea. Bubbling swamps, giant bugs and strange ferns.
A blue sea bobbing with icebergs in all directions, in place of this grass and those buildings and trees.
A dry, barren tundra. Woolly Mammoth, Elk and Caribou, trundling North. Beavers that were as big as bears. Bears that were even bigger.
Sensational costumes, which some of them wore, on maps that said here be dragons.
They are dragons, lions, bears and sea monsters, the usual suspects in the greatest bedtime stories of all time. They have many names in many languages. They’ve made cameos as constellations that might be older than writing, older than the first cities, or the wheel. Leo, the Lion, is called Al Assad in Arabic and was called the Divine Lion in Ancient Egypt. It is not to be confused with Xīfāng Báihǔ, which means White Tiger of the West in Mandarin, with the Ojibwe Fisher Cat, which is not a cat, with Lynx or Leo Minor, the Little Lion, which are both young for constellations or with any of the South African lion stars either. Fact: As the universe expands outward from the epicenter of the big bang, we are all howling through space at over a million miles an hour and gaining speed, in the same general direction as the constellation Leo, Al Assad, the Divine Lion.
Last summer I saw a photograph of stars being created, billions of years ago. It was taken by the James Webb Telescope. Even traveling at the speed of light, that image took more than 4.6 billion years to reach us. You have to wonder and be amazed at how much has changed since the first stars were formed, and how little has changed since the first bedtime stories were told. We look at the sky together in awe. We try to make sense of the world. Every generation is followed by the next one, on a journey to greater understanding. Let’s Go!
