Math, Hideyoshi and Remodernism

Okay, I’m going to type this fast, so you’ll just need to read it fast to keep up. Also, I’ll make sure to include a quick joke at the end.

As much as I enjoy reading—or watching movies for that matter—I acknowledge it can be an inactive pursuit. The best I can hope for is to be influenced by someone else’s work. But this also means I should always hope to be influenced by someone else’s work. Therefore it does me little good to re-read or re-view similar works time and time again; I would gain no new experience and no new knowledge--aside from what I can apply from my own life in between viewings.

Fear springs from ignorance. Fear leads to anger…and really at this point, nobody is getting any positives.

An original thought is something special. Original thoughts can be, and usually are inspired by previous works. A+B=C. If “C” is an original thought, it doesn’t really matter what A and B are. The problem arises when people think in the vein of A+B=AB. This isn’t a thought. This is mental regurgitation and, like all regurgitation, it’s gross.

Testify when you have a thought.

Imagine you have a defining thought about society, your generation, group of friends or lawn mower. Now that thought does nobody any good if nobody else can ever elaborate on it. Your thought should spawn from the aforementioned influenced of “A” and “B” to make “C”; but now your “C” can be used by somebody else as an “A” or “B” to make their own “C” thought.

Calling a political leader “Hitler” is not a new thought. It’s a case of “AB” thinking. “Hitler to Obama” is a broad, inaccurate comparison. And (arguably) worse: it’s unoriginal. This comparison thought contributes nothing itself and has no hope of inspiring anything else. If frustrated, why not compare President Obama to 16th century, Japanese ruler, Toyotomi Hideyoshi? It’s obscure, to be sure, but at least has potential for someone to spur a new thought--or at least learn a little history.

And esoteric comparisons aren’t the only form of new thoughts; they are just easy markers of creativity--take my word for it that I mean to be modest. Creativity can be expressed any number of ways but can usually be broke down to the ability to see similarities in two unlike things. Example: firecrackers are loud, gunshots are loud, maybe you can use firecrackers to distract from the gunshot noise (NOTE: example taken from “The Departed”—do not infer any personal criminal intentions).

But murderous gangsters and writers aren’t the only creative ones. Scientists need to use creativity all the time in even the most regimented studies and experiments. Most prolifically, they need to creatively explain what they are doing in layman’s terms. Kurt Vonnegut once said, “Any scientist who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.” What good is particle accelerator if people can't understand it's results?

Creativity, or even in a broader term: creation, is interesting. Old techniques used creatively can be interesting. Certain techniques in fiction like patterns, plants and payoffs (to be demonstrated later) make people feel smart. But there are other techniques that can make audiences feel smart, some of them I don’t know, some of them nobody knows…yet. And this is where we get into creative experimenting.

Experimenters know when they are experimenting. They know they are being original and their attempts at originality do not take away from that. It’s nearly impossible to write a book without reading one or painting a picture with out seeing one. In that sense, everything is going to be a representation or reflection of a previous work. But remodernism tries to work away from the influence of individual works and rather find its influence in life—whether or not that life includes previous creative works.

Someone told me I can’t try to be the leader of revolution. But their assertion was not true at all. As an artist, I can search for and break new ground. As a historian, I can predict the outcomes of my, and others’, actions. I’m not trying to be a leader; I just want to know who the leaders are and what they are doing.

Remodernism, like modernism, is a belief that traditional forms of society have become dated. The world is different than it was and will be different than it is now. Experimentation is healthy, necessary and never-ending. However, linear time will not allow us to revert back to clear “modernism,” especially since the reign of post-modernism--which seems more focused on irony, absurdities and the end, or meaninglessness, of growth.

A writer writing about a writer isn’t inherently post-modern, modern, remodern or experimental. What issues it tackles, what themes it raises, what style it's done in, are what make the story what it is. Life is interesting, and creative; if that’s not realism, than I guess I’m an optimist.

And for my foreshadowed quick joke: “Two Irish men walk out of a bar…”

Ha!