Lance Phillips • March 04, 2025
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Trickster
Last week, I was standing in line at the IT desk at the institution where I teach. The IT desk is located on the second floor of the lovely library on campus. Directly adjacent to the desk are large banks of windows looking out on a wonderful second floor patio. The patio has sweeping views of downtown Charlotte, NC, and is a beautiful place to gather. As I was waiting, I glanced at the patio and saw something out of place. It took me a moment to make sense of what I saw. A Cooper’s hawk had pinned a grackle to the patio and was eating it alive. As shocking as that image may be, it was entirely within the realm of what is expected in nature. It is a piece of knowledge, albeit an uncomfortable one.
Later, I shared this experience with a colleague. Immediately, she said something to the effect of, “what a perfect image for our current political moment.” I laughed, but then I thought about it more. She interpreted the image metaphorically. She moved out of the realm of knowledge and into the realm of imagination, and the effect was powerful.
We all know what we know, and don’t know what we don’t know, right? In each of these cases there is a fixed amount of information, and a fixed way of thinking about it. In order to change that information or its interpretation we must employ imagination. Thinking beyond a set of circumstances requires imagining something different. There is no movement without imagination. Albert Einstein echoed this idea in an interview with The Saturday Evening Post in 1929. In an article called, “What Life Means to Einstein”, he says,
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
Being able to imbue further meaning into a set of facts is an act of imagination. It’s an act that is fundamentally human and hopeful. Acknowledging that there are humans capable of exploiting other humans, and there always have been, can be a catalyst for imagining an experience of a world without exploitation. It can outline the work needed to transform that imagining into a new knowledge. Of course, this process is painful, and divisive, and it will cause deep damage, but accepting the expansion of the exploitation of humans without resistance amounts to a lack of imagination.
“…[T]here’s nothing new under the sun”, says the book of Ecclesiastes, and the sentiment of that phrase is not wrong. I would argue, though, that not being wrong and being right are two different things. I would argue that that phrase lands squarely in the territory of knowledge and opposes the idea of the imagination. I would argue that imagining beyond the immediate brutality in front of you, whether that’s a hawk finding a meal, or the current political power structures spewing hatred, is the most human thing we can do. I’m partial to Octavia Butler’s take on the previous line from Ecclesiastes:
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