I.
There are few things in life that can cause fear and worry for me; generally because I can reason that most things worthy of fear are beyond my control.
One nagging and unnerving feeling I am repeatedly molested by is, from what I presume, a personal but common fear among the creative. The fear is that the thoughts and ideas that naturally come to me throughout my days are not entirely original, or are unremarkable.
Being a unique and individual person, I would hope that my thoughts are just as genuine and unique.
What I fear is that many or most of my thoughts have already been thought of before; that they are reverberations of ideas that exist out in the world and culture, and that I am just a single circumstance that repeats or produced similar ideas, thoughts and ideas that have already existed.
Could I be a node is some elaborate pattern of thoughts produced by our mixed cultures and society, and that they are not sourced from me alone but from others. The repeated ideas might be just as elaborate or meaningful, but that they are not actually sourced from me. Somewhere, someone has already thought of these thoughts. Perhaps they did not articulate it the way I have, but that it is essentially the same idea or thought.
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II.
To illustrate I will share a personal experience, an anecdote of myself when I was about twelve or thirteen.
On an unspecific and unremarkable day while I was heading to school, gazing out the window of a school bus traversing the bustling streets, I was met with an interesting thought! Going to an international school where most of my classmates were bilingual, it was a familiar experience of being around other languages. I understood that each language had different words for colors, and that some languages might not share the same idea for what those color names could represent.
My favorite example of this was in my high school Spanish class, where my instructor and I met with miscommunication in identifying the color of my hair. My whole family has light-brown hair, what would be considered brunette in the United States. In Spanish Brunette translates to Moreno; likewise Blonde would translate to Rubio. But the scale of what defines Rubio to my teacher was not the same as my understanding of Blonde. Blonde is very light yellow in English, but Spanish Rubio encompasses lighter shades of hair including the light-brown I had. I am both Rubio and Brunette, logically unsound when translated.
These color names can be subjective, or change depending on who is looking at the color. The thought that visited me on the bus was a notion that we all experience different colors to a point where what my eyes perceive or consider as blue could be a completely different color than someone else’s blue.
What if what I saw as green to me, according to my definitions of Green, was actually viewed as an orange or any other color to someone else? Because we were all raised to assign a particular color like green to the word Green, how could we know that we are seeing the same color Green than the color others see as green. Both people would assign it as the color Green, but they could actually be seeing different colors with the same name and it just depends on whose perspective you look at it from.
Of course this idea is a little silly since science argues that our eye interprets light into color according to different wavelengths of that light, and that each wavelength is seen as a different point in a spectrum of colors. We can never really know how others might interpret these colors through their eyes, in a similar way we couldn't really imagine how dogs see colors in the world (Dogs do not see black in white, rather have a different spectrum that they can see).
Regardless of whether this idea is logical or sound, the idea I experienced seemed to come from nowhere and that it was a big thought. Later on while sitting next to my friend Greg, I explained to him this idea. Success! He had never pondered this before, and affirmed that indeed it was an interesting idea. I have very particular memories of this experience, of a thought that seems beyond what I really knew, and a thought that more importantly had no truth or certainty about it. Today I would say it was philosophically inquisitive.
Several years past, and this idea remain just so, a memory between me and my friend, and of personal discovery.
To this day the memory would have been quite faint if it wasn't for me coming across a Youtube video and shattering the illusion that it was my thought solely. Another boy in another place just so happened to mention this very idea, the one where colors are interpreted differently by each of us, in an unspecific and unremarkable video post.
I was shocked, felt violated and devalued when I heard him say it. How could two people have similar ideas if there was nothing to influence the both of us on the matter? We had never met before or talked, so what is the chances we have had the same significant thought. Is it just a common experience to ponder your senses and that many others have asked this same question? Surely Meleau-Ponty already asked these questions decades before my grandparents were born when he explored phenomenology. Could it be a precursor for a potential to think of bigger ideas, or is it an idea that just naturally exposes itself to people over time, similar to the way most people eventually come to significant questions like Who Am I? or What's The Meaning of Life?
Does this shared idea mean most of my ideas have the potential to have already been thought of before, and that this is why original ideas can be so rare? How can one be certain that something is actually original? How can we know whether every thought has a catalyst or not, or that all our subconscious actually does is sputter out mixed-up past experiences in a way that appears new and unfamiliar?
Warm Autumn , 2015. Watercolor over Vandyke Brown print.
This ultimately leads me to contemplate what it takes to be original, if a creative life can be original without appropriating other people ideas, or whether original thoughts and ideas are what lead to
success and successful artists.
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III.
In Plato's Dialogue of Ion, a discussion between a Homeric reciter Ion and Socrates on the relation of inspiration between divine muse, artist, and reciter. If the truths and ideas that are passed on from the Muses of inspiration (in this case or from other sources whether it be the Subconscious, God, nature, worldly experiences) to an individual are linked through a chain of others, how divine or genuine is it?
"So the Muse not only inspires people herself, but through these inspired ones others are inspired and dangle in a string [like that of magnetized metal rings]."
"Then do you know that the member of the audience is the last of those rings which I described as getting power from each other through the magnet? You the reciter and the actor, are the middle ring, and the first is the poet himself; but God through all these draws the soul of men whithersoever he will, by running the power through them one after another. It's just like that magnet! And there is a great string of choristers and producers and under-producers all stuck to the sides of these hanging rings of the Muse. And one poet hangs from one Muse, and another from another."
One great and historical chain of inspiration can be sourced from each other, and truth and understanding is often shared this way. But it seems that the original thought, the genius idea, or great piece of work or art, comes directly from the source. The source can be whatever higher power that is believed, such as God or the Tao, the Muses whom Socrates references, or Science for that matter. What is perhaps most important is the "possession" that takes place in which the poet, artist or inspired are whisked away for a time, brushed by the divine spirit and appreciated by their shared experience. This is what seems to produce original work.
The best I can do is to work hard and focus on being at the top of the chain of magnetized rings of which Socrates describes, by finding my own way of connecting to my inspiration and influences, directly---not at the end of the creative flow of other artist or poets.
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