Sometimes, after listening to an awesome album, I feel inspired to compose my own looney tunes. And as I strum my guitar, I can't help but notice how my melodies all sound like something which I've heard before. The chord progression is a rehashment of some past inspiration by some other person. And with thousands of songs released every year, I wonder is it possible to actually create something new in this day and age?
What new stories can be captured when there are pillars of films stacked reel to reel holding up the firmament of finite ideas? What new ideas can be paint on canvasses, when every colour between ultra violet and infra red has been wet, splashed, dried up. A book holds a million words, a million books holds a million millions words. The alphabet has only 26 letters. Is there any new story yet to be written?
Arguably, both religious creationism and scientific big bang theory postulates that nothing new has been created for a long long time. Everything physical is a transmutation of some past physical form, every new idea an innovation of a past innovation. It is sad, is it not?
Leaving melancholic metaphysics behind, I can see that my logic above is faulty. It does not follow that materials can earth the skyful possibilities of the mind, neither would 26 letters be able to unpen a writer's vast wit, nor do limited colours bind a painter's visual perfections.
I propose that even with all that has been created and given limited materials, there is still a vast creative space left, an infinite one probably. So it is an irony that in trying to search for my own, since that would better substantiate my point, words for this argument, I can't seem to better this 2500 year old one,
'You can't step twice into the same river.' - Heraclitus
Let me start with a basic C major progression and I'll see what flows.
]Is modern art indicative of an age spent of creativity? A single black line struck across a white canvas, is deemed a revolutionary minimalist meditative work. A messy teenage bedroom is painstakingly recreated and showcased as a think piece. Experimental films capture mundane daily events, and are presented much to the delight of engrossed art house fans. Martin Creed's The Lights Going On and Off which is essentially lights going, rather literately, on and off won the Turner Prize 2001. Why are the going ons of daily life suddenly deemed beautiful? Why the hyper-realism?
And while my opinions on the aesthetical value of these works vary, I think they are important because they all show that creativity is multi-faceted, that indeed to think out of the box, we sometimes have to think within it.[
Treasured Possessions are usually old, worn, beaten. Through years of use and abuse they become familiar, even to the point of believing that you have imparted a part of yourself to them. They are as familiar as a pencil box covered with stickers bought with your own pocket money, a stool which remained through your growing up years and survived your house's IKEA revamp, a friend.
My camera, on the other hand, have roots far more modern, far more crude. Its history is as exotic as Mcdonald's. It is an earned entity through menial office work done through the holidays. Like sex for a slave at the end of the day, an oasis for a legionnaire after a perpetual desert trek, a friend.
As a hobby, I love photography best. We do not need to think much indeed to take a good picture. It is art at its simplest. All we need to do is to look around and recognise beautiful things for what they are. To analyse beauty is to destroy the very innocence which makes it charming in the first place. That is the other reason why I treasure my camera, for it enables me to acknowledge beautiful things. The irony is, my camera is an ugly one. Nothing like those sleek silver shining digital cameras, it stands out being big, bulky, and terribly 80s looking. 'The Beast', a friend.