The Butterfly Effect: Music for a Fractured World

Inspiration arrives from many unexpected places and then smacks you as “an idea!” when you least expect it.

It’s January 2021, and across Johannesburg a supernatural phenomenon has spread across city roads, forest ravines, highways, river canals, skyscrapers, and the odd residential home. No one knows where they came from or how they arrived. But there are so many of them that they are everywhere.

Filling the skies, they bump against rapidly closing windowpanes. They get squished beneath windscreen wipers by anxious drivers who can no longer see the road. They fly around heads, land in shoes — everywhere. They are everywhere.

“If you’re not careful,” the grownups warn the children, “you might get one stuck in your nose.” White wings flap in such numbers that they arrive and disappear again like a puff of cloud.

At the time I happen to land here, gazing in awe, I am driving around South Africa remote-working in tech while simultaneously working on the first draft of my book, Speak the Truth and Run. This is my CryptoKitty Era: building digital communities founded on magical internet money while falling in (pseudo) love with the minds of Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez.

The confluence of all these different information streams has me learning about Complexity Theory and Systems Thinking while discovering Rushdie’s essays on “Truth” and learning from Márquez “how to tell a lie that sounds like the truth and is more truth than lie, so that it can convey a deeper truth without sounding like a lie.”

“The trick,” Márquez says, “is in how much detail you give.”

Sounding believable and actually being believable are two very different things.

Márquez goes on to use butterflies flying across a road to illustrate his point: “A hundred butterflies flying across the road” sounds like hyperbole. “A hundred butterflies with yellow wings and black dots whipping across your windscreen” paints a complete image in your reader’s mind. Anything anyone can vividly imagine holds the potential to become truth.

Rushdie, on the other hand, has no patience for painstaking detail. He advocates instead for truth as mirror: whatever you see right in front of you is reflecting something important about reality back at you. So, to experience and communicate truth, he simply inverses everything. In The Satanic Verses, it is the devil who saves the angel from the blazing furnace. And it is the young girl — naked but for a dress made of swarming butterflies — who leads her people out of The Desert of Eternal Meaninglessness.

Truth is a thing to be poked at from all sides.

The crypto community, self-described anarchic disruptors, learnt that “truth” is simply “the story you tell” paired with how desperately people need to believe it as true. So they built new worlds around novel ideas and, despite very few people ever completely understanding what a blockchain actually was, many believed in this invisible, incomprehensible thing’s power to change the world for the better. To such a degree that people took out additional FIAT mortgages on their homes to make sure that it would be so.

Those leading this change understood the fragility underlying all that professes itself as truth. One click of a mouse could change the realities of a mass populace, reconstructing and deconstructing worlds as it did.

“How do we keep the flock in check?” They asked themselves. “How do we not fall into complete disarray in full knowledge of ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth?’”

Complexity Science teaches empowerment and agency in a way that medicine, psychology, organised religion, and capitalist-socialist ideology often cannot. All the world is a multiverse made of parallel realities construing themselves across time. Instinctively, we know that time is our most expensive energetic resource.

Love, however, is abundant and far more powerful.

So it commands Time.

At any point, we can bridge alternate realities by stepping across the time-space continuum at will.

Time itself warps our perception of space and distorts our ability to perceive the impact of the choices we make. We seek to feel something in order to recognise its material nature, but feeling itself can lead us astray.

An individual alone holds much latent power, but not as much as two pair-bonded people compounding into 4, 8, 16, 32…

Sometimes the biggest changes happen when you think you’re feeling nothing at all.

The Butterfly Effect is an official scientific theory derived from Chaos Theory and understood largely through Complexity Science and Systems Thinking. It suggests that uncertainty and volatility can be managed by plotting and mapping chaos itself.

Reassuring us, thereby, that although the latent power of One is strong, Two bonded together holds more.

And so we instinctively long for connection in an attempt to stabilise ourselves amidst chaos.

The caveat, though, is that Time as energetic resource is more expensive than Love. So sometimes the two energies are incongruous.

< Love like air. Time like water. Action like fire. Devotion like earth. >

Ones, however, can reassure themselves that it is safe to remain patient because the natural law of Everything will eventually bring everything they desire to pass — good and not good alike.

Carl Jung perceived this as fundamentally good, saying:

“No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.”

I believe him.

The Butterfly is a symbol of patience and trust in the process of transformation that has captivated myth-makers, world-builders, and truth-seekers since time immemorial. So much so that choosing the symbol and concept to launch my debut solo show beyond the page felt potentially redundant. It has been done over and over again by so many artists before me.

What could I possibly offer that feels new? That moves the idea forward?

The answer that came to me lay interwoven and entangled in this longstanding exploration of truth.

What does it mean to stand — fully embodied — in the presence of an ugly, direct, harsh, brutal reality, with all its complexity, nuance, and horror, and learn how to love it back into wholeness?

This is the question I am exploring in the performance.

Which does not feel so much like a performance as it does a safe container for honesty.

We have sixty minutes together.

What I am attempting in that time is to create a new reference point in your body for what it might feel like to exist in a space with other humans fully unmasked.

We take off in art galleries, independent bookstores, and public libraries across the Western Cape throughout May and June this year.

I hope to see you there.

All my love,

Tanika