In 17th century Fiji there is a tribe of ocean-going navigators in which the young men learn to sail around the island group fishing and exploring. The islands have gotten crowded, the habitable land and the marriageable women are spoken for. There is no room on the islands to give the young men so that they might start families. These young men are rejected by their society. They rig up ocean-going sailing canoes and set off in search of a place beyond the horizon. Young men rejected at home create a new society in the vacant ( of humans) Hawaiian Islands. Rejection has initiated a cascade of creation.
A songbird chick hatches and grows to maturity with an unusual tuft of feathers on its head and three others of her age-mates develop misshapen beaks. These mutants are unlike any other birds in their forest. They are rejected. They fly away together to a different forest with insects burrowed into the bark. A new species evolves with a beak good for bug-killing and a distinctive and respected tufted head. This new species thrives. There are two forces at work here causing speciation: an initiating mutation and the demands of a new environment. The emergence of this new species is the result of a “Creation Cascade” ( JB neolog) 1. The initiating mutation-misfit-misalignment 2.The exit from the tribe-clan-flock 3. The adjustment to the new eco-opportunity and its inevitable adversity.
External - Dispersion from conflict, persecution, famine, war= external cascade
Internal - Dispersion from constriction: 1. mammal birth - fetus too large-rejected by mother’s body-new life emerges 2. one’s goals become too large for current work role i.e. insufficient creative outlet - seek more challenging job.
Rejection in romance has been one cause of 3,000 years of literature, art and music. The act of rejection creates a platform for creativity. rejection creates a void that is often filled with art or other drugs. Art is a drug, drugs are not art.
Rejection-creation occurs at different levels of our social taxonomy: 1. One on one at romance, workplace, social club. The act of rejection plants a seed or perhaps unwraps a zone of your DNA for transcription-translation into a new protein - a new way of walkin’ 2. The group rejects the individual - this happens 10,000 times a day in schools across the land - social sorting. Birds on a wire pecking and pecking until three fly away and start their own club with its own rules. The Beatles were a small, very tight club - a cultural sabot - an armor-piercing projectile that blew up the whole ammo dump of congealed post Elvis, pretty boy from Philadelphia, pop music along with the hearts and minds of the Boomer generation. Sabot-savants: Dylan, Simon, Hendrix, Morrison. The song as a sabot penetrating hearts and minds.
A creative person rejects 100 ideas for every keeper. the creation of a work of art means rejecting all that is tired, trite, timid, trivial, treacly. All that is not fresh is rejected and this is creation.
Education is learning what to reject during your exploration-investigation-experiment. No need to re-invent any part of the car, much less the wheel. there are 50,000 parts to a car. It will take a lifetime of study to know the important ones. Learn the terrain, touch and go - move on if the territory has been explored.
Rejection and creation are yin/yang, positive-negative space: the S-holes and the S ( see: Bakanowsky). Rejection and creation are two sides of the same coin. Where there is rejection there will always be creation, latent or active. Nature frowns on a vacuum. Rejection creates a vacuum in the soul that will be filled. One might as well give this vacuum-filling direction. Nature, when left to itself, will ruin things. We see beauty in the animals, plants and landscapes all around us but these manifestations of Cosmo’s glory are the tip of a deep pile of evolutionary debris from eons of undirected agency - see: Charles Darwin.
Latent Creation: (JB neolog) The unexplored psychic bomb - example: Adolph Hitler, though a talented painter in a sublime but traditional manner, was rejected by the art community of Vienna, a hotbed of all things modern at the time, especially painting. An opportunity for creation was planted in Hitler’s psyche by this rejection. How his “creation” played out is history but at its root was rejection. Hitler’s life in the trenches of WWI were also a rejection of all things good. Joseph Stalin, late Czarist Russia’s most famous young poet whose creative roots may have been boyhood beatings or his four trips to Siberian villages as a political exile. ( Were Czarist forces grooming a mole?) How many bullied boys develop notable creative energy? Every boy gets bullied - it comes with boy territory though it may seem special at the time. Where you see rejection there is creation.
If you are the rejector, expect creation blowback, often ugly. If your group has rejected others by code or by act - expect a creative response. remember that the creation following rejection is as likely to appear destructive as constructive. Terrorism is creative blowback. The Western world is fortified top to bottom, from the nuclear triad ( Bombers, missiles, submarines) to our militarized local police and well- armed next-door neighbor. The USA has done a lot of rejecting in 250 years and instinctively, methodically, obsessively arms itself in expectation of some inevitable creation. Rejection is creation is destruction is terrorism.
What artist ever brought more sublime terror upon a tired art paradigm than Paul Cezanne. Cezanne’s creation, his proto-Cubism was the Beaux Arts Academy’s destruction. It happened as follows:
- Cezanne is refused by the French art establishment early in his career.
- Cezanne, with his hearty diligence, creates a deep new way of picture-making
- Cezanne’s creation inspires the destruction of the French Academy as his acolytes Matisse, Picasso, Braque and Duchamp shift the Art paradigm for the 20th century.
The Law of Rejection-Creation: Rejection and creation always work together. They are a duality. They are always together like white on rice, like stink on shit.
Corollary to the Law of Rejection-Creation: One cannot revisit the site of a rejection event to unring the bell or to put toothpaste back in the tube. If the bell has been rung, if the tube has been squeezed, be on the lookout for creation in manifestations good or evil. There is no indifferent creation. Rejection often grows to maturity, ages, festers, incubates. Sometimes the creation ( destruction?) response is immediate but creation is often a dish served cold.
Synonyms for Creation: formation,conception,genesis, inception,origination, origin
Synonyms for rejection: elimination,exclusion,repudiation,refusal, surrender, alienate
A person or group will reject a member for becoming unlike them or a membership candidate for being unlike. Western societies pay lip service to uniqueness but turn their backs on it. We celebrate the prominent who have risen to prominence through talent, original thinking, hard work and luck, then we reject them. We cut all tall poppies - perhaps for their own sake, for it is “lonely at the top” a lie of course.
Rejection? why do we reject? Is it jealousy, envy, scapegoating, social difference re: education, net worth, speech, family heritage, illness, age, smell, sight or touch? All senses and memory has its say in the act of rejection. I reject my under-actualized self in order to search for fulfillment of my destiny.
The shock of rejection. the instant void - alone, cast into the cold creates a bubble within the heart and mind to be filled with wonderful things or with destruction. One becomes “Other” by rising above the group or falling below the group. soaring or sinking at all times: Personal convection ( not conviction here) The community occupies the middle ground. We must use our wings with skill to stay aloft.
Action-reaction. The act of pushing out a person propels one backwards. Push too hard and find one’s self afloat in the void. See: New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Republican presidential candidate humiliating fellow presidential candidate Marco Rubio, pushing Rubio out of contention during February 6, 2016 nationally televised debate and finding himself, Christie, damaged goods in New Hampshire primary voting the following week.
Rejection: Elapsed Time: If an adolescent rejects a parent sixteen years after this child becomes a member of the family, there is a different dynamic at work than during more rapid rejections such as failing to fit in as the new kid in school. The time “in country” is proportional to the scale of the vacuum created after rejection. The hardening of the surround makes the void less elastic, more difficult to fill. How might one induce plasticity into a hardened mental-physical habit or expectation so that the interior surface of one's emptiness might conform more quickly, or at all to a new idea-process-endeavor?
Much anxious energy presently manifest in the spectacle of daily life and ritual in the U.S.A. is rooted in nervous anticipation of latent effects of unexplored, unexpressed creative opportunities of displaced Native American’s and formerly enslaved, currently harassed African Americans.
Rejection and creation are one.
February 10, 2016 2:17 PM