In Defense of Author-Creation Relationship

In Defense of Author-Creation Relationship

When I was younger, I at one point volunteered at a soup kitchen. The vast sea of people and time that have passed since then keeps my conscious mind from remembering many particulars of the names and faces who frequented there. I remember one man however, who must have been struck by my associations in that moment with “being smart.” This is presumed, because one day he posed me a riddle which involved three “actors” and some interplay between them. I answered the riddle with the desired answer. My response was not gathered from my being able to solve the riddle in the moment when he asked. Rather, I’d come across the riddle previously in my life and was familiar with how it worked. 

Now, when this very nice man, and the impression visits me now that he was nice--when he posed me this riddle, he did not preface it with where he had heard or seen it from. Thus, in this interaction, two people who were primed with the same “story” or “riddle,” probably from different sources for it was not an unpopular one, participated in sharing the riddle. Neither of us offered and showed the other the exact source of where we learned it; for, if this did happen, it would have ingrained in me as part of this memory. This experience is laced with the ephemerality of not knowing the history of the other. 

So, one could imagine the origin of this riddle, or multiple origins if the idea came to separate people without involvement in each other--the origin which was invisible in this collision between persons.

To present what is born from another without recollecting the other with the born… this is to be an agent of confusion, perpetuating the reign of the Tower of Babel. Children are very good at sensing the dizziness that can result by hidden origins behind stories and riddles, and at sensing the self-leeching fatigue that results from accepting what carelessly hidden origins produce. It is the bludgeoning of this sense which is a common act of pre-existing society on the new evolving specimen. To protect this sense is to protect our youth, and to protect the dignity of the human form. 

A key response I hear from the skeptic: how are we to say anything if all that we present must be accompanied with where it came from? To propose this question is to propose a false deduction. There is such a thing as a giving-receiving relationship. Nay, more than a relationship--perhaps a substance interminable of our spirits. There is a psychological muscle within the human spirit which understands giving and receiving. This is how when we are given something, whether from falsehood or from truth, from authority or from the lame, we are impacted. This could explain the ever-present grammatical phenomenon of the transitive verb, and the integral function which direct and indirect objects play in some languages. 

This is to say, that there is an individual understanding of what has been given and received--an invisible one to others, in full--and so to “give credit" is a process which can be most fully realized by the individual to whom experience has been given. This is also to say, then, that “giving credit” is not unlike a virtue--as a moral-intellectual-experiential muscle which is played out and developed within one’s self-complex as they navigate unique situations. Along with these conclusions is that while the concept of infinity is plausible, the human spirit has finitudes in its possession of experience (as in, “the time when…”; as in, the passe compose) which allow for proper origins, causal chains, and changes in understanding to be put in order. 

Furthermore, and yet, not furthermore; for this is a central point, there is a process which allows us to transcend the network of giving-receiving chains through time. There are actually two types of processes, but neither of them are totally definable in words, rhetorically. The first is connected to chance. When we encounter the world, we often do so by chance, and in encountering objects and experiences, their essence is dissimenated to us in a refracted way, as though our senses are a fun-house mirror. Thus, transformations occur when giving-receiving happens, and these cause newness. 

The other process which I hope to approach in writing is that which has connections to creation, divine intervention, and individuality. One epigram which is relevant is “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” However, trash is not given from throw-outter to the finder. Trash is given to chance, which delivers it to the finder. Nonetheless, human beings are divine creatures with the ability to transform the material given into newness. It is as though we are holes in space and time which things pass through. If we are careless, they pass, lose energy, and whither. If we are with the divine spirit, they pass, take on new life, and are reborn. In this way can humans transcend the giving-receiving complex. However, as with many divine things, it is not always easy to see when this divinity is playing out in other individuals. Thankfully, it is rather easy to see when it is not playing out in other individuals. And, it is not difficult for the individual to know it when divinity is playing in its own individuality. (What is difficult, in the case of self-relations, is that ascetism: accepting the playing out of divinity require sacrifice when other forces pull the spirit into immediate non-experiences.).

Thus concludes my writing tonight. The wanting intellectual mindspace will want to fix, discredit, or dismantle the previous two paragraphs, for they were written with the Divine in mind, and the Intellect’s pride is hurt when it is not written from, and especially when in its place one is in communication with, even slightly, the Divine. 

Best, 

Blake