Lily's Puzzle by Cassia Hardy

Commissioned to supplement “Myth Back/Mind Back/Land Back:
The mythopoetics of modular synthesis”, by curriculum scholar Wesley Christiansen.

From Wes:

'This piece was the result of applying affect, psychoanalytic and decolonizing lenses to a Sunday School lesson I witnessed as a child in Southern Alberta, where the teacher had a student shake a puzzle in a box continuously for about 20 minutes before opening it, saying, “it should be finished now.” Of course, it was still in pieces, a reality which the teacher used to allegorize and dismiss the theory of evolution. Young Earth Creationism is a fundamentalist epistemology that upholds a colonizing hegemony in this territory. As a metanarrative, it is difficult to dislodge because doing so would constitute an existential threat to the assumed supremacy of fundamentalist Christian tenets and its missionizing-colonizing impulse. Evolutionary biology represents a form of “difficult knowledge” that fundamentalist students cannot engage without a means of “soften[ing] initial defenses and thus lure teachers and students into important conversations about difficult knowledge” (van Kessel & Saleh, 2020). Bound to the Sunday school teacher’s literalist, fundamentalist frame, the semiotic chains of the puzzle were straightforward:

Puzzle shaking = non-linear time, randomness, chaos, nonsense.
Puzzle put together= linearity, order, purpose, commonsense.

A modular synthesis treatment shifts the semiotic chain back into the realm of myth (Barthes, 1957). What if a puzzle shaking doesn’t represent randomness, but infinite interactive potential between factors including time, genetic information, mutation and selection?
As the samples interact with external agents such as granular synthesis, control voltage– and internal agents such as resonance and entropy– an “interobject” (Davis, 2004) emerges that bears affective and symbolic curricular significance. It becomes an embodied, transcendent experience, symbolizing the non-linearity of a pre-colonial “Deep time” (Sheridan and “He Clears the Sky” Longboat, 2006); the beauty of knowing everything comes from everything else. All my relations. The modular synthesis treatment takes the closed ‘work’ of the puzzle and restores its textuality; it becomes open to multiplicities of interpretation, a “beautiful substitute” for the lost “beloved object” of the literal Creation story (Britzman, 2003).'

Cassia Hardy is a loudish musician and songwriter from amiskwaciy, Treaty 6. Her music is urgent and tender, taking stock of exquisite things lost and found.