jackb
originality
i got the sense during high school that nothing i had done in my classes was original. especially looking at english classes, i was certain that nothing i had written or said during discussions was something that you could have called by that name. of course i wasn’t plagiarizing, but it felt that there was no way my conclusions or thoughts about beowulf or the great gatsby or what have you were things that hadn’t been said before. people had been writing and talking about those stories since before my grandparents were alive; how could i add anything that wasn’t, at best, redundant? and even if i set aside that kind of towering landmark of the english literary canon, and wrote about a lesser-known piece of literature for class, it was clear from the essay prompts and the way my teachers were able to run with ideas as soon as i suggested them that the thought had already crossed their mind.
the problem for me is that for something to be considered truly original, it needs to not only be something that nobody else has said, but something that nobody else could have said. originality is the pure expression of voice; the synthesis of an individual’s particular ability to respond to the world around them and add to it. i could make a statement that nobody has ever heard before, but if someone else is on course to make the same statement, whether within the next minute or the next century, then where does my voice fit in? is it meaningful at all for me to have said it instead of someone else?
in essence, i’m searching for originality that stems not just from novelty, but from true creative independence — media that could be exactly the same if it was made in a vacuum, without being informed or impacted in any way by its predecessors. even writing that sentence makes me realize how impossible of a standard i’ve set. most of my classes have talked about how all media is reactionary in the sense that it’s a response to what came before it. this plays the leading role in how we understand art, and gives it its punch. seminal movements in literary theory are founded on the idea that what i’m describing can’t exist, almost by definition.
going forward, i find in the way i live that i’ve more or less let go of the need to be unique, or at least of the impossible standard i’ve described. i can discuss movies and read interesting books, then go on to write interesting essays and blogposts about it. my friends tell me it’s interesting to them, and that i say things they hadn’t thought of before. maybe that’s the only way to really know if what you’re doing matters, if it exists. at the same time, you’re supposed to be internally driven. don’t care about what other people think or say. do what makes you happy, and do it to make yourself happy. you don’t have to be the best, or even very good at it; you just have to be happy or die trying. the irony is that, in the same way no piece of art exists in a vacuum, neither can a person. you create from within, but creation is measured and given meaning by the world it inhabits. a human life is the same. pulling on a previous post, it seems like the best way forward is to not make it about going forward. framing your life around where you’ve been and where you’re going, perhaps how you’re remembered, defeats the purpose of being and having been. still though, we ask ourselves, if we fall down in a forest and nobody hears us scream, do we still exist? what if we fall down in the street, and the traffic lights keep blinking? somehow we have to find a balance between being the center of our own universe and the hard fact that our perception lies to us about that. the world doesn’t turn on a single point, but we can only ever understand it as it relates to us. what the world is to each person is necessarily founded upon their own interpretation. to a human mind, the only possible world is the one we build around ourselves, and yet we constantly need to verify it against what other people have built. creativity has to come from within, but meaning can only come from without.