There is a passage in E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” in which one of the grand intellectuals of the machine age gives a rousing speech about how we ought to get as far away from originality as possible. Speaking of the French Revolution, he says:
“Beware of first-hand ideas!” […] “First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element—direct observation. […] You who listen to me are in a better position to judge about the French Revolution than I am. Your descendants will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain. And in time”—his voice rose—“there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation
‘seraphically free
From taint of personality,’
which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine."
This is to mistake the artifacts of signal loss for transcendence—a pixel for a rose. But at the same time, I see myself reflected in it.
I consider myself to be a man of words. I am comfortable reading many books and articles. I like collecting ideas. But while reading about ideas can be useful, when it comes down to it, to be an artist, to be someone who makes good new things, you have to have experience with the world. To be worth listening to (even to yourself), you have to have something to say that isn’t copied from others.
Even the most primary of sources is but a footnote to a secondary source on the world. This does not mean being outdoorsy. This means doing things. It means observing things not merely as an observer, but also as a participant.
I see people doing the opposite all the time—most clearly myself. When I was younger and convinced I was going to be a writer, I read all the Tolkien and Lewis I could get. I wanted to decipher the secret to creating fantastic worlds and grandiose prose. I obsessed over which specific pen nib Tolkien used to write his flowing Tengwar (hint: it was probably this one). When it came to poetry, I pored over Poe’s oeuvre, emulating his perfect iambs in hope of creating another Raven. As far as I know, I never did.
Later, I wanted to be an artist. I collected books on rendering in pen and ink, and started hoarding copies of art that inspired me. I remember repeatedly watching a video of Karl Martens painting a falcon to see exactly how he handled his brush and how many grains of salt he added to the watercolors. At the time, a lot of the artists I knew online were obsessed with what they called style. Realism was boring. What set you apart was having a distinct personal style. This is probably still a common meme for young artists today. While I missed the specific battlegrounds of DeviantArt and Tumblr, I think I was afflicted by that same misdirection more than I knew.
I could go on. I have repeated this many times with many pursuits. It’s a popular idea, downstream of the notion that art is all about personal expression. But it’s curious that it almost always tries to get at such personal expression by obsessing over the expression of others. Many are the documentaries and articles and biographies that try to understand what exactly it was that made some artist or musician so great. Clearly John Steinbeck got his spark from using Blackwing pencils. All I Want For Christmas Is You sounds like Christmas because of the Dm7b5 chord. Buddy Rich’s tempos might just be the key to playing Whiplash.
The most you get from this is really good pastiche.
Studying the works of the masters can be valuable. But “master” is a transitive verb, and we ought to consider what they were masters of. Great artists don’t study Rembrandt to paint Rembrandt reproductions. They study him to understand how he saw the world, to understand what makes good composition, how to play with light and shadow. Looking at the masters is not enough. You must look through them, to what they mastered.
On the other hand, there is, among some people, an allergy to anything that is mundane and practical. There is a fear that if you specialize or do things that are ephemeral, relevant to a particular time and place, you will become inflexible.
This is precisely the opposite of the case.
Knowing a lot about a particular thing will give you general knowledge about other things. As in good poetry, you get to the universal through the specific. You can’t create knowledge from a vacuum. It doesn’t arise ex nihilo. You can’t gain any more information about something without interacting with it. You have to do things that are specific and concrete and that will pass away with time in order to gain that transcendent universal knowledge.
It’s one of those seemingly paradoxical situations in which, by striving to obtain one thing entirely, you forfeit even the very gain that you sought from it. You can read a hundred books about programming, but until you actually start programming something, you’re going to have no idea what you’re doing. You can read all of Aristotle and Plato and still not know what it means to be a good citizen until you actually meet with your state representatives or attend a city council meeting. If you pursue pure knowledge and ideas in hope of getting somewhere, you’ll only be older and more anxious and less certain than you were before. I know this has been the case for me.
You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about until you start doing things. You have to gain knowledge from zero, or you will never own it. This is one of the reasons it’s valuable to spend some time doing more low-level, fundamental work. Even though it might not be the fastest or even most practical knowledge, if you actually work with it, you will have a much greater understanding about how things work in general.
Both the tendency to imitate and the tendency to abstract dodge the real target, but in different directions. The first aims too low, mistaking mushroom for mycelium. The second aims too high, as if you could learn to dance by plotting footsteps in a spreadsheet. I suspect this is because hitting the real target is painful and difficult. To look at a daisy is to know it will be dust next year. It is easier to look away. Collecting knowledge is fun, and feels like progress, but you have to wean yourself and progress to more substantial food.
I have been trying to think about what that means for me. I think even something like software engineering can be true experience with the world. You run into reality. Things don’t work, and you have to figure out why. Ten people edit one file and you’re tasked with the merge conflict resolution. These are not the well-defined problems of video games. These are wicked problems. Anyone who has done any programming with the intention of reaching other people knows that programming languages are the easiest part. What is hard is integration. It is the reaching people, the doing things part. Code is just the language. And just like human language, it is possible to read or speak too much.
The originality you gain from contact with the world may not be novelty. But your perspective, diction, the way you work things out, can be original in that they originate with you. They originate in the world of consciousness through you. None of this can be done without first getting your hands dirty.
The denizens of the machine thought that by forgetting the particular they could transcend it. In the end, those very particulars fell upon them, and they lay crushed by their salvation. From dust to dust. All is vanity. All will pass away. But even candle flames, to be snuffed out at midnight, are signs of the stars above.
