No AI could ever write this,
but I did.
Every so often a flash of creativity happens. Lightning struck a few days ago, while contemplating a piece here on Medium, and am I ever delighted to now present to you what may be the most quotable phrase I’ve ever composed:
“The weakest among us seek power over others; the strong need only themselves to govern.”
I feel a powerful need to copyright that phrase!
To the best of my knowledge it’s all mine and it is a bit of a stunner, I’d venture. I immediately sent it to a friend who maintains a database of excellent quotes, but didn’t supply the source.
“Ovid?”, he queried in reply. That made me chuckle. I dared him to find that phrase anywhere, and he couldn’t. “I don’t mind being compared to Ovid”, I told him. He was gobsmacked, and yes, he believes me when I claim it because he has read all my poetry and the style is characteristic.
Moreover, it reflects my observations of this life, and speaks plainly, inverting a lie to reveal the truth of power as it really is, not as the powerful would have you understand it. Study long, study wrong, as a friend once counselled. Such sage advice.
This is reframing. This is how a false narrative can be turned upon itself to inform and free those it would malign. This is the power of creativity. This belongs to you. Turn propaganda on its ear!
And this is why daring artists and journalists and activists of many stripes, and those who knowingly sacrifice themselves for an ideal are so often muzzled or silenced or worse by those in power. The creative spirit is an idea, a force, that cannot be defeated.
Creativity has the power to connect us all, when it is used with intention. A single phrase can galvanize a movement.
A small example of reframing. This was penned on the fly in reply to a charming piece about the vagaries of aging by Mark Sanford, Ph.D. Could an AI write this, I ask?
Personal reflections on coping with and compensating for the constraints time imposes on every living thing.
Our mortality is an inevitability we spend our entire lives preparing for. I’m reminded of the story of the person with two arms.
They are just like me or you. When the arms are full they can not hold any more. If they want to pick something up they must first put something down. It’s a question of capacity.
Sooner or later they become more careful about what they pick up, and what they put down. And why.
And then much later they realize that it doesn’t matter, because nothing can be held forever; that it is in letting go we find the freedom we spend our whole lives preparing to meet.
I reframed the subject. It is a parable not about loss or finality, or forgetting where your specs are, but about completion, and continuance, with empty arms, ready to pick up something new. Whatever is next does await.
I wanted to reach out and touch that person, let them know that all this is not all for nothing, that we can only get there by leaving here. That’s it’s okay, that there’s no other way. I believe my gambit was successful. Cheers, Mark!
That’s the power of creativity. It lets us reframe things to see what’s really there, and discern what is not. Often, when we look twice, we see what we missed the first time. Reframing does that. It opens our eyes and reveals what we need to see and know.
When you practice reframing it becomes easier, and after a while is readily applicable to just about any situation, idea, information, lies, lol, etc. Reframing is easy. There are lots of lies that need un-telling, here’s just one example:
We don’t have an oil crisis, we have an oil company crisis.
Do you see how that works? In that is power. Transformative power.
The value of creativity is manifest. We can reimagine just about anything, and when we do it with wise intention it is a powerful and effective tool to reclaim our own power, to cast off the illusions that entrap us all in certain ways, to see clearly, to comprehend, and to better. Is that not the point of this whole exercise?
This is the difference between me or you and an AI. One can make reality come true, reveal mysteries, intuit a kindness, and uncover hideous misrepresentations; the other can only mimic the synoptical power of living, learning cells wrought by nature, as are we.
No machine can possess the revelatory essence of consciousness, nor may such a thing, dead as it is, surpass a living organism in creativity. One is imbued with an (eternal?) energy it does not yet comprehend, alive, dynamic, evolving; the other a poor copy dependent on an energy it cannot produce.
I ask you, could any AI write this?
The compositions above, especially that incisive take down of power — that new quote I’m so enamoured of — testify to our ineffable aliveness, our very expressive powers.
Heed and obey thy own creativity, I say. It is evolutionary, redemptive, irreplaceable, and so powerful. Nothing may vanquish the cosmic force life posits with every breath. Not one thing.
I don’t need you to buy me a coffee, but if you could be kind to animals and help them, well, that would be really cool. Being kind generally is even better. Thank you.
/jo