Laughter of the gods

I write like
Oscar Wilde

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

If you want to insult someone, tell them they remind you of someone else.  Tell them they lack the originality of a spider.  Compare them and destroy their original fire.  Prick away their pride and make them but a mere mortal, a replicated gene series that anyone can mix up in a lab.  Take away their identity and turn them back into the lump of clay that they are.  Tell them that they can only repeat the ideas of others and have them hate their own creation.  Breed discontent and confusion and then, finally, you will have killed all hope of any elevation out of their primordial soup.  There are (long pause) no more words to be said.

And if you analyze any section of text, you will get a variety of responses.  I pasted several different entries trying to get an analysis, not accepting or rejecting anything rendered.  The above paragraph came back, stating I write like Dan Brown.  A couple of emails I analyzed had results that ranged from Stephen King, David Foster Wallace to Kurt Vonnegut.  Are we writing what we read at that moment, just repeating the styles and cherry-picking the moments that color our text?

Then again, the artists of this world study strokes of the masters, try to recreate them and spend hours upon hours trying to capture that magic that was once created to recreate it in this era....and then stop.  A sigh.  A palette, a medium, a knife, a chisel, a block of stone...and then....ah damn.  Someone has done it before and they put down the tools and want to scream at the gods that they want to challenge the masters of all time.

But, there is only the remains to compete against.  Look at the lives that created, that we admire and elevate and aspire to be like.  I hear the echoes of laughter because as many of my friends would say, you should never aspire to be them.  Of course not!  We elevated their pain and misery.  Scientists that were locked away or killed for sharing their truth.  Artists who were only allowed to create images that glorified the gods of their ages.  When it came down to artists, their lives of paint and disease...or writings deemed to be absolute insanity.  Art consumes and dines on the drama of mankind.  Does it have to be as such?

We scream to be individuals, or I should say some of us do.  Some of us would scream to be a copy (aren't all of the dead celebrities living in Las Vegas?).  Ah, but what is the real quest?  Is it to be loved, as Henry Miller confessed upon his deathbed, "I just wanted to be loved."  But by whom?  I wondered as I watched the video of his final days.  I thought of it as the oddest thing to say.  Did he want his work to be loved or himself, the man?  Even then, it seemed kind of the most selfish thing to say. 

Please, don't think this post is negative...it is a statement of simply saying the machines believe it all has been said and done before.  So many lives have been lived that there is no possibility for innovation.  I would say that yes, we have come a very long way, just think about how many times the wheel has been reinvented.  Clay will continue to be molded, paints mixed, and our mediums will evolve as we create images of all that we see and hear along the way.

The gods may laugh at the renderings of humanity, but it is of no consequence, for words always retain the power of its messenger, to create or to destroy.   There is no one to blame.  We have the technology to use in whatever way we see fit and we do have the power to take the human element out of the equation and that perhaps makes me rage at the machine.  We want to be human and not a preconceived notion where everything is a calculated movement.  That is what technology shows us.  That we are studied renditions that takes away the possibility that we can choose to be something other that some form of genetic predestination. 

Yes, we may be simple creatures that have similar experiences along the way, but they are unique as snowflakes.  Humanity wants that.  We wrestle with that.  The art of simply being and not designed.

....you do have something you would like to add, even if it has been done before, so reinvent.  It may be far superior to the original.

It's just a rant...but I like being ever so 'human'.