The Artist-Creator’s Office (Dispatch No. 12) | Honor New Information #4
Everyone wants to be famous. Everyone wants their work and their ideas to grab the spotlight. Everyone wants their voice to be heard. I’ve always felt a little shy about taking up space, though I’ve always dreamt of what life would be like if one of my articles went viral for whatever reason. Many times, people’s admiration of the innovators throughout history works against their function within that chain of transformation. This is to say that sometimes we want to be a star when we should be sailors using a star’s presence to navigate choppy water. Once we’ve made space for new information and honored its presence in our lives, we can begin to fulfill the commitments revealed to us through this process. It is within synthesis that we begin to understand the true utility of an innovation, or new information, and whether that innovation lends itself towards life-giving existence or oppressive death-drives.
In a culture that lends itself towards the propping up of celebrity and the power of an elite class over the working class of the world, being an innovator carries with it the promise of being the big boss in charge of everyone else. When you look at anyone whose ideas have changed society, it seems to be true that being an innovator puts you head and shoulders above the rest. Often, it is forgotten or downplayed that most innovators pass on without ever seeing the full impact of their lives and ideologies. They do blaze trails without the confidence of their work ever really taking off with the masses. Yet, like the sun in the sky, they shine.
The Sun As An Innovator
The sun is a star, one star among many in the galaxy, but vital to the planet Earth. The sun isn’t a perfect symbol for this analogy because the sun does much more than simply shine. Its gravity is what influences seasons, the climate, ocean patterns and a host of many other things. For an innovator to be like the sun, their influence would have to be exerted through the simple fact of their existence. But, people are much less powerful than they imagine themselves to be, their ideas and intentions succeeding only with the support of a collective. Yet, due to its utility, I will continue to use the symbol of the sun for this metaphor, only because we understand its relationship with trees on a fundamental level. The sun shines; if it has been sentient all this time, its only priority seems to be continuing this function. And in comes the tree.
Trees As Synthesis Experts
The technology of trees will never cease to amaze me. I adore trees and from time to time, I write poetry about them. In my artistic mind, their steadfastness, their ability to weather all seasons and be weathered by time, and their place within communities as kin, as providers of shade, food, and simple presence are everything I aspire to be and become. How brilliant it is that they use their leaves to turn light into sugar, stored efficiently for immediate and long-term use. Ocean plant life synthesizes a majority of the air we breathe, but land plant life makes up the rest, which sustains the oxygen and food requirements of life on earth. For this reason, it would be disastrous if trees decided they’d rather take up the place of the sun. Following this analogy, people must be willing to engage in synthesis.
Obstacles to Synthesis
Synthesis is defined as the process of taking many parts and uniting them into a coherent whole. Synthesis can also be defined as this final state, the complex whole itself. In the process of interacting with revolutionary ideas, there comes a time when people begin to take the parts of the idea and unite them with their own lifeforces to create one complex whole. This happens to me every time I interact with the works of Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin; their works become ideas that I am in the process of making a part of my complex wholeness. It says much about the world that we live in that our attention is held captive in spaces and with ideas that don’t guide us into life-giving synthesis. Especially with spaces like social media, the mind longing for synthesis is transformed into a pack rat of sorts, constantly saving and archiving, liking and sharing, to be forsaken in a vacuum where the ideas do not become united.
Because this process is so rooted in community, the need to be with ideas and feel safe enough to interact with the meaning that will eventually cause them to become united with our beings, many people these days find themselves unable to take generative action on the ideas they interact with. People aren’t excited by their own ways of making meaning; these personal, homey ways don’t come packed with a dopamine hit. The time it takes to grasp a complexity of life, of resistance, of anything that challenges oppression, could be more easily spent on something else. People become disillusioned with the light within (themselves or ideas) because they don’t find it compelling, if they even took a season to contemplate it.
Moving Beyond Binaries
We find ourselves enmeshed, deeply distracted by other things: yielding agency to the oppressive structures that will destroy us due to the threat of violence, and vying for the position of innovator for the glory and prestige they associate with that position. And so, transformative information remains potent and untapped in its containers. It urges that the collective and the innovator fulfill their commitments to new information.
The beauty of humanity is that our nature is rarely as much of a binary as we’ve been taught to believe. We are not either innovators or the collective tasked with synthesis; often it is the case that we are both/and. Because of this state of being, it becomes necessary to be flexible and effective at doing both: being able to express meaning from our unique standpoints and take the meaning others have tapped into and use it as a tool to further engage with our worlds. This also means being able to engage with perspectives that emanate from different viewpoints than our own, maintaining a solidarity towards liberation as a foundational node of life.
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