Potential
by THE EDITORS
in Fall 2018
Terico Harper, "Chair and Door," 2017
This Myth are these
We be Potential
This myth is not what you know
-Sun Ra[1]
From where does the energy which produces things unseen, unheard, unimagined emanate? That force that establishes itself in the register of the thought, the word, the vision is energy. Yet, how do we name it before the moment of its appearance? And what do we do once it is named?
There is something called potential. Physicists use this term to describe the particular force upon a body, in order to determine the total work done, to sense its final position. Potential is to be known so one can judge, one can predict. And yet potential is also deeper if we strip away its functional and utilitarian meaning. The word itself is derived from the Latin, potentia, which means "power," itself originating from early roots which simply meant "that which is able." Somehow power became the word for unrealized possibility in the English derivation.
What is the potential—the power and possibility—of our words, thoughts, and visions? A Gathering Together seeks not merely answers to this question, but also asks that we tarry a bit with the question itself. After journeying with us, we invite you to project “what if?” into right now. What all are we capable of in this moment? How and to what do we direct our potential today in order to reap the rewards in our collective potential tomorrows?
And just as we might think the meaning and force of potential, we also would think other words and philosophies, other forms of power, other forms of possibility. We assert that power itself can be utilized in ways that resist the assumptions attached to the idea of force. Ours is a potential energy that can be realized without normative power. Too often, that force becomes violent. Rather than think power as the ability to control and influence, we might offer wisdom from other intellectual traditions that read it as the ability to allow humans to realize themselves. And then we would see possibilities—that we had not yet imagined, but had always been there, waiting for us to see.
The realization of the possibility, as the physicists would have us know, is already in the potential. So we are after this perpetual search for the potential, so that happening—in the sense that the Ancient Egyptians used the word hpr—can happen.[2]Potential exists within endings and beginnings. Potential is the possibility of change. What we do with it is up to our determinations. So we are seeking to know that which provides that potential, not to harness it, but to allow that Spirit room. Because we need total work. We need all of it to work another world. For as Sun Ra reminded us, we live in Myth.
References
[1] Sun Ra, quoted in Brent Hayes Edwards, Epistrophies: Jazz in the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 124.
[2] For the translation of hpr as happening, see Jacob Carruthers, Mdw Ntr: Divine Speech: A Historiographical Reflection of African Deep Thought from the Times of the Pharaohs to the Present (London: Karnak House, 1995), 47-49.