Audio - Starshine and Clay: Polaris Manifesto, Part 1

¹Check out the essay companion to this audio dispatch. It’s full of links, resources, and other reference materials you may find interesting.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Hi, friends. Before we dive in, please consider supporting families displaced by the recent fires in the Los Angeles area. I am amplifying those in Altadena who are affected by the Eaton Fire because my beloved and I live just down the hill in Pasadena. Visit bit.ly forward slash rebuild AD to see an ongoing list of GoFundMe campaigns for more information. Again, visit bit B I T dot L Y forward slash rebuild capital A capital D to see an ongoing list of GoFund Me campaigns.

[00:00:39] Welcome to Between Starshine and Clay, a weekly meditation on myth and culture by Jasmyne D. Gilbert. That's me. You're listening to the audio companion to my weekly newsletter with the same title. This recitation combines two recent dispatches from January 1st and January 15th, 2025. Both posts announced a new series that I'm lovingly referring to as the Polaris Manifesto.

[00:01:11] The series grew from my graduate education in mythological studies and the last 10 years of my career facilitating innovative initiatives for social change. I've learned a lot about the fruitful connections between myth and social justice, and now I'm ready to share that knowledge with you.

Polaris is our North Star. The light in the sky that never dips below the horizon and has ushered many toward freedom.

Polaris is brilliant, steadfast, and miraculous. It is the vision for a world transformed. and the inspiration behind one of my big dreams: to form a co-op that helps communities use myth, depth psychology, and speculative imagination, or what-if thinking, to drive creative approaches to complex social challenges.

[00:02:02] To make it plain, I'm trying to see how imagination can get us free. The Polaris Manifesto is a public written declaration of my commitment to approaching stories as sources of power, and as tools for critique and transformation. This manifesto is a spell and a beacon. I'm sharing it with you here because Between Starshine and Clay is one of the places I test these ideas as I seek out spaces and people to bring them to life.

Over the next few months, I'll be sharing nine declarations of my commitment to calling in the world I want, inviting you into the vision of the Polaris Manifesto, one piece at a time.

You can expect deeply personal explorations about what myth has to do with social justice. Spoiler: nothing. And everything. You can also expect prompts to awaken your creative vision of liberation because creativity is a divine faculty and we will not get free without it. And there will be links and resources galore because I'm a scholar, heaux.

[00:03:10] Now, if you're ready, I'm ready. Let's dive into "Starshine and Clay: Polaris Manifesto Part One."

I am a commitment to celebrating a mythic worldview.

We don't have to live like this. Myth and fiction have transformed the world. With every encounter, they remind me that we can have a different world if we want it. I believe that wielding the power of our collective imagination can lead us to a future where we are all free and whole. And I'm committed to creating this future by showing others the social justice cheat codes. In myth and in speculative fiction.

During the height of COVID 19, I noticed that I was experiencing deep, unprocessed grief and rage about the dreams, the lives, and the potential for transformative change that we ceded to the pandemic collectively.

[00:04:12] Imagine. Just imagine if the U. S. had kept sending relief funds to households throughout the country. Imagine how the deaths of the people we lost to the virus rippled through their communities.

Imagine. if instead of starting book clubs about racism, companies redistributed those resources to local organizers. Witnessing the compounded crises of global public health emergencies, structural and systemic violence, ecological collapse, and economic decay awaken a rage that I am still learning to hold.

Like many, 2020 to 2022 left me depressed and debilitated, and in the depths of despair I heard myself repeating, over and over, we don't have to live like this. But this is a story about moving from rage, to despair, to devotion.

[00:05:23] Myth and fiction are necessary journeys into escapism and fantasy, especially when we need a break from a world that demands dissociation or compartmentalization to withstand its relentless onslaught of horrors.

If we look closely at mythic texts, they reveal a secret: we made them up, and I don't make that proclamation to question whether they are historically accurate or True TM. Rather, I believe that the stories we read, the ways we spend our days, the currencies we use, what we believe happens to us after we die-- those things are real, in part because people alive before us said so.

[00:06:09] And we consent to and reify their visions in our own lives daily, accepting that presupposition-- that our collective imagination constructs our reality-- opens up innumerable possibilities for reshaping the world. So I decided to let my neurotic, suicidal fixation blossom into a mantra and a research question. We don't have to live like this!

What even is a myth? A myth is a world building, often cosmological, and cosmogonic story that explains how something came to be. A myth is not merely a religious fiction or collective delusion, but a narrativized set of organizing principles that shapes the reality of entire groups of people.

[00:07:07] Common examples are the Judeo- Christian myth that says God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. Or, the Greco- Roman story of the Trojan War that shows what happened when rage and grief consumed a man supposedly blessed by the gods. I would also argue for looking at the concepts of whiteness, capitalism, and even Black excellence with a mythic gaze.

Each of these phenomena has symbols, language, texts, rituals, and figures that shape how its adherents and detractors move in the world. These stories are collective memories that offer explanations for the world as it exists and instructions for its inhabitants' participation in that world. When we learn to apply a mythic lens to the world by understanding the stories in our culture, we gain a formidable weapon against systems of dominance, both external and internalized.

[00:08:10] The Polaris Manifesto is an invitation into a mythic worldview. This is a guide for people who are curious about how imagination, creativity, and social justice intersect. It is a toolbox for people who want to transform themselves and the world.

Use the prompts that follow to awaken your creative vision of liberation, and then talk with your loved ones, comrades, and colleagues to see where your visions intersect. Tell me about them, too. Seriously, I want to know. Transformation starts with an enlivening, exciting vision ushered forth in community.

We don't do this alone. And I want to help you bring that vision to life. Use these prompts to pull new worlds from your imagination. Whether you're a writer, a visual artist, a musician, or something in-between, use that spark of imagination to invite us into your creative vision.

[00:09:10] First question. What are the organizing principles of the world you inhabit?

Put differently, what are the basic stories you know for the reason the world exists as it does?

Next, what is your role in that world? How do you know?

Did you inherit those stories or did you create them?

Finally, why do these things, the stories and your belief in them, matter?

[00:09:43] In case you want to tap into the wave of wisdom that informed this part of the Polaris Manifesto, I've curated a list of several free resources for you to enjoy on Are.na. For part one, that includes The Night Light Fell from the Sky, which was Stephen Towns' first solo exhibition with De Buck Gallery in New York. I don't remember the year, but it'll be listed in Are.na, but all the works in that exhibition reflect on a revelatory meteor shower that preceded the Civil War and so the entire exhibit sort of exemplifies how stories, creativity, and social justice intersect.

[00:10:23] Another resource is Fate and Fabled, which is an intro-level world mythology video course. with Dr. Moiya McTier and Dr. Emily Zarka from PBS. Similarly, Crash Course has an intro level world mythology video course hosted by Mike Rugnetta.

I think that's how you say their last name. Both of those are on YouTube and they're free and widely available. Finally For the Worldbuilders is a Seeda School podcast and in episode 41 host Ayana Zaire Cotton, discusses the urgency of world building and "dreaming without evidence."

[00:11:03] Visit arena forward slash Polaris dash collective forward slash Polaris dash manifesto for links to all free resources. I will spell that out because it is super long visit a r e dot n a forward slash Polaris is spelled P O L A R I S dash collective forward slash Polaris dash manifesto for links to all the free resources.

If you're feeling abundant and want to back my public research in cultural mythology, please consider signing up for a paid subscription to Between Starshine and Clay at only six dollars a month. Paid subscribers gain exclusive access to free PDF and EPUB resources that accompany this manifesto and other audio recitations that I don't share on the public feed in Substack.

[00:12:00] It would mean the world to me if you subscribed to Between Starshine and Clay and shared this dispatch with a loved one. I'm looking for people who see the vision. And I know you can help them find me.

Alright, that's all for today.

Thank you for listening. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. I look forward to being back in your inbox very soon. Bye.

1. Dispatch cover art: Stephen Towns, “we shall rest in the space between time.” 2019.