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A Commentary on the Fall of Originality
By: Alex Anderson

To my loyal legions of fans:  I didn't have time to add a bunch of curse words to this paper.  Please forgive me.

            From time to time I find myself breathing an air of enlightenment in wake of a trade-wind harnessing the over-soul of humanity.  I fill my lungs quickly and try to remember the feel of that which is one with us all.  Ultimately, my sensory memory escapes me just as quickly as it came and I am left with a fleeting image of something better than what I seem to be living.  I attempt to drift away from the bacteria of pop-culture, but its hold over me, you and our world is now a steadfast and ubiquitous presence.  People arguing over movie stars will break my concentration like the thin ice of imagination that it has become; my foot will feel the chill of knowing too much and will reflexively pull away from the arctic idea of something so truly original, that it’s both primal and unique.

            This popular-culture, with which my fellow Americans and I do indeed hail, is one of regurgitated color.  We, as a society, are gluttons of all things beautiful.  The song that we played no less than twenty times consecutively, the picture turned poster and calendar and put on the side of a mug, the quote that was tattooed across the back, and the opera that degenerated first into a film and then to a videogame.  Everything we know is the product of an earlier time.  We exhaust every facet of everything beautiful through the time tested process of first binging then purging.  When a resource has been diminished to the point that it no longer resembles its fascinating precursor, we deem it undesirable and it dies.  Ironically, this is this the point at which original thought would prevail, if that were its fate, but shed a tear – for said thoughts never do.

            A plague with no cure that will kill all in its path.  What can be done?  Get the scientists, the engineers, the philosophers, the priests.  Get the school teacher, the doctor, the veterinarian, the plumber.  Get the republicans, the democrats, the free sovereigns.  Get the rich ones, the poor ones, the ones in-between.  Get the losers and winners, the beggars and choosers.  Put them all in a room and see what they say.  Watch them grovel over nothing; watch them fight for the power.  The plague is now a part of you and of me.  It is a part of everything that we say or we do; it cannot be eradicated and it will not be undone.  This insatiable thirst for that which has not already been can never be quenched, like an addict looking for the first high on a second try, our collective attempts at finding that rare entity and enjoying it will cycle through viciously and incessantly.  Enter wisdom rehabilitation.

            Wonder back, if you will, to a happier time when it was all still ahead of us.  To think of the first thought or to hear the first sound, is to know of what is divine and what is false.  The masquerade of our present day is wholly unsatisfying.  However, it is hardly our fault.  It is the over-soul that can be blamed.  Our ancestors have monopolized all of the creativity our world has to offer.  Sure there are still some things that have not been innovated or of yet conceived, but they are going quickly and they hide in the shadows cast by mountains of ideological isotopes.  It is my prevailing theory that long before every tree has been chopped and every drop of oil burned, that the last fabric of originality in this world will be grass-stained and full of holes and will serve as a memory of what that cloth has gone through on the journey to its resting place.  While the rat race for natural resources is just now commencing the parallel race for singular state of mind seems to be limping to an anticlimactic finish line.

            One must look to the mysteries of our planet and hope that there is something worth harvesting.  Perhaps the questions raised by the Mayan calendar will prove to have intriguing answers.  Maybe the astrological calculations of this ancient people will have some grave importance to all of humankind.  Equally possible is the coming and passing of December 21^st and 23^rd 2012 A.D. without much notice, as the effervescence of yet another Christian holiday puts metaphorical blinding lights over the Sacred Tree of Mayan lore.

Is it possible that the talents of the autistic hold some clue to the nature of Enlightenment?  Maybe it says something that most idiot savants are born with extremely amazing talents and idiosyncrasies, but that over time their conditions seem to “get better” and they begin to become more like the average person; being able to perform more daily routine tasks such as dialing a phone or posing a question, while simultaneously losing their gift for reciting entire concertos on the piano after only one hearing.  Autistic savants are actually the perfect paradigm to illustrate my point in terms of analogy.  That being that as information and knowledge has become more and more readily available to the average person we have all become very enlightened to the same unenlightening concepts as everyone around us.  While we continue to accelerate our mastery of the mundane our patience for specialization and originality seems to decline in proportion, creating an undesirable reverse relationship between the two modes of the mind.  In other others, we are all becoming well-rounded pegs, which is fine to some extent, but how will these pegs fit into the square holes of discovery?  How can the puzzle of life be put together with a bunch of circles?  Welcome to the Information Age, the chapter review of the Eras of existence.

I know that I am making sense, because even this paper that I write at this moment is not entirely original.  I cannot help but draw comparisons of my paragraphs above to the supposed ideas discussed in the short story, The Marching Morons, by science-fiction author C.M. Kornbluth, as well as the new film by Mike Judge, Idiocracy, both of which are based upon the premise of a man that travels to the future only to find that to his utter disbelief, despite no catastrophic setbacks to humanity, that everyone in the futuristic society is dumber than he is.  Judge’s film was just released this month, but Kornbluth’s story was originally published in April of 1951.  According to my math then, my idea that we as a society are moving further and further from anything of universal and monumental importance and closer and closer to unoriginal clones of one-another has not been a new and exciting idea for about 55 years.  It all stands in embarrassing testament to the fact my worst fears are confirming themselves.  Just think, even my ability to call upon these obscure sources is a testament to the point I am making.  Every game of Trivial Pursuit that has claimed a winner is just another spear in the side of those who are with me.

Who am I to question?  Who am I to point the finger?  I set forth no new thoughts on this subject and in effect by simply writing this I have added to the sum of a number I would hope to be subtracting from.  I am as much a part of the problem as are you and as far as I can tell, there is nothing at all to be done about it.  What has this all been then?  A worthless rant; a waste of time and paper, no doubt.  But it’s also something more than that.  It is, in all actuality, a requiem.  One such that I have composed in honor of and in dedication to the fall of creativity.  So while guns are blaring and our flag is being folded, I am wrapping my gift in a cloak of concern and tying a bow of lost hope on the top.  This is all that I can give in my consoling of the family of mourners for the deceased.  The over-soul of authenticity watches over me as I set this present near the tombstone of the departed friend I never met.  The epitaph inscribed reads: R.I.P. Originality ~ We Never Truly Knew Ye.