Vegas-Rex
13-08-2005, 06:51
Not sure this is a useful place to post this, but I want the collective NS opinion on some stuff I wrote. If it seems to make sense, let me know.
Creativity
Character: Creator: Creates Stuff
Setting: Unimportant. Present day.
(Creator sits in a room on a stool with a potter’s wheel in front. The rest of the room is bare. While talking the creator accentuates points with the clay)
Creator: I create things. That’s all you need to know. I could be a potter at his wheel, a playwright beating out a new idea, even Brahma dreaming up the world on his lotus throne. It doesn’t matter. All you know is that I am one of those gifted people who has the seemingly magical ability to create something out of nothing. But I don’t really make things out of nothing. No one does. It’s not just a textbook matter either. Your science teacher told you about the law of conservation of matter, but did they tell you about the law of conservation of ideas? That’s right, ideas are just like matter in this respect. You can warp them, twist them, change them, but you can’t really make new ones. It may seem that Picasso, that Newton, that Shakespeare made things out of whole cloth, things that never existed before, but they didn’t. Newton himself said, “we stand on the shoulders of giants,” and if you think about it the same was true for them. Every idea has its predecessor, its inspiration, its plagiarism victim if you want to call it that. Shakespeare was a very extreme case of this. Genius he may have been, but afraid to copy he wasn’t. All he did was edit, condense, rewrite. That’s really all anyone can do, make variations off of older themes. And in today’s world even that is getting harder. In the short span of humanity’s existence it seems that every idea has been published, every possibility exhausted. The slight spins that characterize new ideas are just the last details, superficial aspects like what color your soda is. Everything else follows age-old formulae. We’re Aristotle’s perfect society, teaching our children that every play must have three characters, every story its mountain shape. And when we rebel, we just go right back to where we started. You want to look rebellious, different, an exception to the rules of society? Go to a mall where you can find stores selling factory-made rebellion, stuff you can’t fit in without. Isn’t the goal to not fit in? But wherever you go, someone’s done it before. Just look on the web, and you’ll see five websites advertising what you thought was your new idea. Formulas are the only way to avoid it. Formulas are the only way to avoid it. You can admit you followed the model, did the program, completed the assignment, now can I go to recess? That’s the easy way out. Just write your dearest thoughts in a five-paragraph essay. You’ll reach the conclusion in no time! Follow the rules, do maybe one little twist, and people call your product the new hot thing. You can’t avoid it. After all, only children can imagine, and only because they don’t notice how evidently stupid their ideas must be. Adults, on the other hand, must think. Why do you think no one’s done it before? Because it sucks, that’s why! We’ve taken every nook and cranny, but we left behind the sinkholes, the dung-heaps, the cesspools. You wanna be different, original, creative? You wanna be a nerd, a geek, making stuff no one will like because it’s not what they were taught to like? Fact is, you won’t even like it. Culture is inescapable. If it can make a whole continent think being permanently cross-eyed is hot, it can screw you into the matrix like the loose nut you are. You’ve been taught what to like, what to hate, what’s good or bad, and never mind that you can teach yourself again, you don’t want to. You don’t want to like the calamari, not when you’ve learned to like McDonalds. Who cares if you can enjoy the symphony if you choose to, you don’t want to, and that’s that. You can try all you like, but you’ll never learn the secret: like, or don’t like, there is no try. This is why nothing new is made, have you ever tried anything truly new? It boggles the mind, sets you off kilter. When you’re finished stumbling into walls you naturally conclude that its crap, its stupid, you’ll never learn to like it. And you’ll keep doing this; cause ideas are like viruses. They evolve and change, and the ones that survive are always the ones you can’t cure. You can’t cure your likes, your dislikes, your beliefs, your aspirations. No psychiatrist in the world will cure you of that, because they’ve all got the same disease. The whole world’s crazy, and it only can get worse. Perhaps it’s best for us, though. All this evolution that made the ideas of this world talented enough to stay couldn’t have happened if they didn’t contend with a foe that doesn’t back down, our genes. In the end our ideas become one with our biology, we think that which our bodies want us to think. Why, in the end, are you anti-birth control, anti-abortion? In the end the idea works with the gene. The dogma of abstinence is only an idea, but it flourishes because it does what the genes want, makes more of them. So if the genes and ideas are on the same side, where does that lead us? Where does creativity come from? Doesn’t this play need a third character to move ahead? Where is that third character? He’s sitting on the couch, watching TV, forgetting that there’s a war to be fought, a self reclaimed, that he’s not just an amalgam of thousands of years of what was only a settling. Why not get up, shake the world, have, finally, new ideas? Because there aren’t any. (Creator squishes the clay on the wheel, gets up, and leaves)
A Destructive Impulse
Character: Destroyer: dressed in black, Goth type clothing with ripped jeans, carries a lighter. Has kind of a swaggering, arrogant demeanor.
Setting: a ruined formerly brick building, pretty nondescript.
(Destroyer leans against the wall, picks up the lighter, turns it on, and stares at the flame. Eventually notices the audience and turns to speak to them)
Destroyer: I see you’ve met my partner. Some of you might call that lone person at the pottery wheel my adversary, my opposite. Others think we go hand in hand. Who am I? I could be some punk Goth kid, loitering on a street corner and plotting some dreadful deed. I could be the wave of the future, the revolution’s angel come to smite the greedy, capitalist pigs. I could be the ultimate adversary, the accuser Shaîtan. I could be Shiva, destroying the destroyers so that life may regrow. Whoever I am, you know what I do: I destroy. I take apart those things my friend with the dirty hands has forged, and I give the materials to let creation begin again. Who am I now? Ahh, that’s harder. In the past I was always the crazy, the insane, or the zealots. I was on the sides, unknown. No one worshipped Set, or Loki. But people do worship their more recent friends. What happened? Theft, pure and simple. Let me take you back a ways, back to ancient times, the 50s, if you want to know. It didn’t start then, its been going forever, but somehow it seems like the best and worst of what I see in this ancient world coalesced in the events of the last half-century. Why? Well, just to brief you on how everything works, the world seems to go in cycles, and most of the time they have the usual progression of a war followed by a period of happy conformity. That period was the 50s. Needless to say, you know what comes when everyone is happy and conformist. Revolution, right? People want a change and try to get it. The only difference is that this wasn’t just a new idea, a new system that, “hey, might work,” it was a whole new outlook on my role. In the 60s people didn’t just think of themselves as achieving what they needed, they felt the rebellion, the destruction of the old society itself was the point. No other people in history have realized their role with that kind of accuracy. None on my side, anyway. Now usually the system works like that philosopher guy, Hegel, described: new idea is posed, fights with old idea, they combine and become new old idea. Keeps everything running smoothly and the same people, ideas, etc., in the saddle. Nice and efficient. This worked every time because the new system could so easily become the old, but what do you do when the new idea is defined as the rejection of the old ideas? How can the concept that The System, The Man himself is evil possibly become just another ruling class? If people start worshipping the former demons, the Fly-Lords of past mythologies, the outcastes, how do they come back to their prescribed role as the old order, the rulers, tradition. Well to answer the question I’ve now left you burning with, yes, the cycle worked again as it always did, this time in a way that brooks no argument, a way that plunges us deeper into the building phase with each step, a way that means that the refreshing volcano that makes the land ready again is stifled, the worms that eat the trash choked, the jungle made unable to reclaim the ruins. How? The system simply responded in kind: if you make rebellion an idea of its own, we’ll just make it a product. That’s right, you can buy destruction at the mall now. Abercrombie sells pre-ripped jeans for those who can’t get them ripped on their own. The biggest music companies in the country market rebellion to the masses like so much cheap candy, giving everyone those messages of destruction, brought to you by Pepsi! Think you’re going up against something not covered yet, something that will shock and scare the stupid conformists? Tell one person and the internet responds, three days later your cause has corporate support. Try to be a wrench in the works and you’re bent into a gear, spinning to the beat of manufactured destruction. You can’t fight it, its like a virus. When you’ve got something to say you have to act like its rebellion, have to behave like you’re challenging not just the petty injustices that have always spawned real revolution, but The Man himself! When you do that, when you think about how to challenge the system, where the cracks are in our culture, you’re like someone trying to find a cure for the common cold. The web means that in a matter of hours the virus of our culture, our economy, can evolve out of whatever jam you’re so naïve as to think you have created. You can’t beat evolution with intelligent design, that’s something we all should have learned. So now what can a simple destroyer like me do? How can I challenge the system and win, bring in the new era, do what all you little sycophants dream of and fear, bring another little Ragnarok to the shores of the modern world? Is it going to really be the finale, is that the only solution? Can I save the world without letting lose WWIII? Can I even do something as simple as that? Is this the fabled end of history, no more wars, no more change? What can stop us now, when our cultural virus can stop anything with the effort I need to lift my finger? I don’t know, I don’t know.
Preservation
Characters: Preserver: dressed in khaki soldier fatigues, carrying some sort of big gun
Setting: a blank stage with barbed wire in the back. Sounds of combat are occasionally heard.
(Preserver is cleaning the gun. Eventually looks up and sees the audience)
Preserver: So who do you think I am in what you still might think of as a cosmic battle? Isn’t it obvious? I’m the soldier. I fight for house and home, to preserve that which I hold dear. In that way, I’m really the Preserver. I could be out in the sands or the jungles, on any side of any one of the myriad wars that dot this bloodstained world. Maybe I’m something more than that. Maybe I’m the angel Gabriel or Michael, fighting the devil at every turn. Maybe I’m the great Preserver Vishnu, or one of his many avatars. Maybe I’m Achilles, or Thor, or anyone with a battle to fight, an evil to defeat. Point is, out of the exalted three I’m the preserver. I preserve what is good by fighting what is evil. And, most fundamentally of all, I’m dying out. It wasn’t always like that. Once the preserver was best loved of the three. Once the defender or good could get away with any dishonor, any crime, but in his exalted hands it was merely What Needed to Be Done. Once thousands died and thousands were sired in my name. Then came the days of accountability. They came slowly, but they came. People wanted more out of you than mere victory, they wanted morality, they wanted honor, they wanted love. The funny thing was, we heroes survived. When we couldn’t win by cunning brutality we still could fight for honor, for the people. Even Gandhi was a member of our heroic tradition, fighting just as hard as Rama, as Hector, to preserve his people. You don’t have to be violent to be a hero. But you do have to fight. Problem is, now the simple act of fighting is being rejected. Fact is that no matter who or what you fight for you need an enemy, a face to rally against. You need a foe, someone whose humanity you will not accept until you grind them into the dirt. Problem is, there aren’t any enemies anymore. Fear of the unknown is dead when everyone is known, when you can look up any culture in an encyclopedia. And as you are taught in school there is no evil, no wrong, “We Value Ambiguity!” Everyone simply has different ways to reach the truth. Everyone is special in his or her own way. There isn’t a wrong religion, even if it practices FGM, or Inquisitions, or human sacrifice. There isn’t an evil side, every choice is just as good, just pick whatever you feel like, no you choose. Don’t get angry, its unhealthy, say the counselors. Why can’t we all just be friends? Why can’t we have organizations like the GSA, whose only goal is understanding, who accept no enemies? Because, in the end, that’s not an acceptable goal. To fight you need an enemy, you need a challenge, you can’t fight against controversy, you can’t reject rejection. Yet people still try to. People still make compromises, deals, try always to just get along. There are no absolutes anymore, once you put up a real fight, stir up the hate people need to survive, and you’re seen as crazy, totally of your rockers, and then you fail, your so-called heroing is over, kaput, might as well go back to planting other people’s flowers, cause you’ll never be anything unique, cause everyone’s special, which means no one is. The black and white world we preservers understand has been invaded by the new-and-improved nanotech of compromise, its been torn down by the deadly gray goo. There aren’t any heroes anymore. The thrill of combat, the game of strategy, the role models of generations now only exist as blips on a screen, plays for a people that no longer want a world they can live in. We’re all dead, Creator, Destroyer, and Preserver.
(Creator and Destroyer enter)
The world doesn’t want absolutes, doesn’t care for power, doesn’t accept its oldest gods anymore.
Destroyer: If they forget us, we’ll forget them!
Creator: They’ll cry for us again, in the long, gray night to follow.
(lights fade to black)
Creativity
Character: Creator: Creates Stuff
Setting: Unimportant. Present day.
(Creator sits in a room on a stool with a potter’s wheel in front. The rest of the room is bare. While talking the creator accentuates points with the clay)
Creator: I create things. That’s all you need to know. I could be a potter at his wheel, a playwright beating out a new idea, even Brahma dreaming up the world on his lotus throne. It doesn’t matter. All you know is that I am one of those gifted people who has the seemingly magical ability to create something out of nothing. But I don’t really make things out of nothing. No one does. It’s not just a textbook matter either. Your science teacher told you about the law of conservation of matter, but did they tell you about the law of conservation of ideas? That’s right, ideas are just like matter in this respect. You can warp them, twist them, change them, but you can’t really make new ones. It may seem that Picasso, that Newton, that Shakespeare made things out of whole cloth, things that never existed before, but they didn’t. Newton himself said, “we stand on the shoulders of giants,” and if you think about it the same was true for them. Every idea has its predecessor, its inspiration, its plagiarism victim if you want to call it that. Shakespeare was a very extreme case of this. Genius he may have been, but afraid to copy he wasn’t. All he did was edit, condense, rewrite. That’s really all anyone can do, make variations off of older themes. And in today’s world even that is getting harder. In the short span of humanity’s existence it seems that every idea has been published, every possibility exhausted. The slight spins that characterize new ideas are just the last details, superficial aspects like what color your soda is. Everything else follows age-old formulae. We’re Aristotle’s perfect society, teaching our children that every play must have three characters, every story its mountain shape. And when we rebel, we just go right back to where we started. You want to look rebellious, different, an exception to the rules of society? Go to a mall where you can find stores selling factory-made rebellion, stuff you can’t fit in without. Isn’t the goal to not fit in? But wherever you go, someone’s done it before. Just look on the web, and you’ll see five websites advertising what you thought was your new idea. Formulas are the only way to avoid it. Formulas are the only way to avoid it. You can admit you followed the model, did the program, completed the assignment, now can I go to recess? That’s the easy way out. Just write your dearest thoughts in a five-paragraph essay. You’ll reach the conclusion in no time! Follow the rules, do maybe one little twist, and people call your product the new hot thing. You can’t avoid it. After all, only children can imagine, and only because they don’t notice how evidently stupid their ideas must be. Adults, on the other hand, must think. Why do you think no one’s done it before? Because it sucks, that’s why! We’ve taken every nook and cranny, but we left behind the sinkholes, the dung-heaps, the cesspools. You wanna be different, original, creative? You wanna be a nerd, a geek, making stuff no one will like because it’s not what they were taught to like? Fact is, you won’t even like it. Culture is inescapable. If it can make a whole continent think being permanently cross-eyed is hot, it can screw you into the matrix like the loose nut you are. You’ve been taught what to like, what to hate, what’s good or bad, and never mind that you can teach yourself again, you don’t want to. You don’t want to like the calamari, not when you’ve learned to like McDonalds. Who cares if you can enjoy the symphony if you choose to, you don’t want to, and that’s that. You can try all you like, but you’ll never learn the secret: like, or don’t like, there is no try. This is why nothing new is made, have you ever tried anything truly new? It boggles the mind, sets you off kilter. When you’re finished stumbling into walls you naturally conclude that its crap, its stupid, you’ll never learn to like it. And you’ll keep doing this; cause ideas are like viruses. They evolve and change, and the ones that survive are always the ones you can’t cure. You can’t cure your likes, your dislikes, your beliefs, your aspirations. No psychiatrist in the world will cure you of that, because they’ve all got the same disease. The whole world’s crazy, and it only can get worse. Perhaps it’s best for us, though. All this evolution that made the ideas of this world talented enough to stay couldn’t have happened if they didn’t contend with a foe that doesn’t back down, our genes. In the end our ideas become one with our biology, we think that which our bodies want us to think. Why, in the end, are you anti-birth control, anti-abortion? In the end the idea works with the gene. The dogma of abstinence is only an idea, but it flourishes because it does what the genes want, makes more of them. So if the genes and ideas are on the same side, where does that lead us? Where does creativity come from? Doesn’t this play need a third character to move ahead? Where is that third character? He’s sitting on the couch, watching TV, forgetting that there’s a war to be fought, a self reclaimed, that he’s not just an amalgam of thousands of years of what was only a settling. Why not get up, shake the world, have, finally, new ideas? Because there aren’t any. (Creator squishes the clay on the wheel, gets up, and leaves)
A Destructive Impulse
Character: Destroyer: dressed in black, Goth type clothing with ripped jeans, carries a lighter. Has kind of a swaggering, arrogant demeanor.
Setting: a ruined formerly brick building, pretty nondescript.
(Destroyer leans against the wall, picks up the lighter, turns it on, and stares at the flame. Eventually notices the audience and turns to speak to them)
Destroyer: I see you’ve met my partner. Some of you might call that lone person at the pottery wheel my adversary, my opposite. Others think we go hand in hand. Who am I? I could be some punk Goth kid, loitering on a street corner and plotting some dreadful deed. I could be the wave of the future, the revolution’s angel come to smite the greedy, capitalist pigs. I could be the ultimate adversary, the accuser Shaîtan. I could be Shiva, destroying the destroyers so that life may regrow. Whoever I am, you know what I do: I destroy. I take apart those things my friend with the dirty hands has forged, and I give the materials to let creation begin again. Who am I now? Ahh, that’s harder. In the past I was always the crazy, the insane, or the zealots. I was on the sides, unknown. No one worshipped Set, or Loki. But people do worship their more recent friends. What happened? Theft, pure and simple. Let me take you back a ways, back to ancient times, the 50s, if you want to know. It didn’t start then, its been going forever, but somehow it seems like the best and worst of what I see in this ancient world coalesced in the events of the last half-century. Why? Well, just to brief you on how everything works, the world seems to go in cycles, and most of the time they have the usual progression of a war followed by a period of happy conformity. That period was the 50s. Needless to say, you know what comes when everyone is happy and conformist. Revolution, right? People want a change and try to get it. The only difference is that this wasn’t just a new idea, a new system that, “hey, might work,” it was a whole new outlook on my role. In the 60s people didn’t just think of themselves as achieving what they needed, they felt the rebellion, the destruction of the old society itself was the point. No other people in history have realized their role with that kind of accuracy. None on my side, anyway. Now usually the system works like that philosopher guy, Hegel, described: new idea is posed, fights with old idea, they combine and become new old idea. Keeps everything running smoothly and the same people, ideas, etc., in the saddle. Nice and efficient. This worked every time because the new system could so easily become the old, but what do you do when the new idea is defined as the rejection of the old ideas? How can the concept that The System, The Man himself is evil possibly become just another ruling class? If people start worshipping the former demons, the Fly-Lords of past mythologies, the outcastes, how do they come back to their prescribed role as the old order, the rulers, tradition. Well to answer the question I’ve now left you burning with, yes, the cycle worked again as it always did, this time in a way that brooks no argument, a way that plunges us deeper into the building phase with each step, a way that means that the refreshing volcano that makes the land ready again is stifled, the worms that eat the trash choked, the jungle made unable to reclaim the ruins. How? The system simply responded in kind: if you make rebellion an idea of its own, we’ll just make it a product. That’s right, you can buy destruction at the mall now. Abercrombie sells pre-ripped jeans for those who can’t get them ripped on their own. The biggest music companies in the country market rebellion to the masses like so much cheap candy, giving everyone those messages of destruction, brought to you by Pepsi! Think you’re going up against something not covered yet, something that will shock and scare the stupid conformists? Tell one person and the internet responds, three days later your cause has corporate support. Try to be a wrench in the works and you’re bent into a gear, spinning to the beat of manufactured destruction. You can’t fight it, its like a virus. When you’ve got something to say you have to act like its rebellion, have to behave like you’re challenging not just the petty injustices that have always spawned real revolution, but The Man himself! When you do that, when you think about how to challenge the system, where the cracks are in our culture, you’re like someone trying to find a cure for the common cold. The web means that in a matter of hours the virus of our culture, our economy, can evolve out of whatever jam you’re so naïve as to think you have created. You can’t beat evolution with intelligent design, that’s something we all should have learned. So now what can a simple destroyer like me do? How can I challenge the system and win, bring in the new era, do what all you little sycophants dream of and fear, bring another little Ragnarok to the shores of the modern world? Is it going to really be the finale, is that the only solution? Can I save the world without letting lose WWIII? Can I even do something as simple as that? Is this the fabled end of history, no more wars, no more change? What can stop us now, when our cultural virus can stop anything with the effort I need to lift my finger? I don’t know, I don’t know.
Preservation
Characters: Preserver: dressed in khaki soldier fatigues, carrying some sort of big gun
Setting: a blank stage with barbed wire in the back. Sounds of combat are occasionally heard.
(Preserver is cleaning the gun. Eventually looks up and sees the audience)
Preserver: So who do you think I am in what you still might think of as a cosmic battle? Isn’t it obvious? I’m the soldier. I fight for house and home, to preserve that which I hold dear. In that way, I’m really the Preserver. I could be out in the sands or the jungles, on any side of any one of the myriad wars that dot this bloodstained world. Maybe I’m something more than that. Maybe I’m the angel Gabriel or Michael, fighting the devil at every turn. Maybe I’m the great Preserver Vishnu, or one of his many avatars. Maybe I’m Achilles, or Thor, or anyone with a battle to fight, an evil to defeat. Point is, out of the exalted three I’m the preserver. I preserve what is good by fighting what is evil. And, most fundamentally of all, I’m dying out. It wasn’t always like that. Once the preserver was best loved of the three. Once the defender or good could get away with any dishonor, any crime, but in his exalted hands it was merely What Needed to Be Done. Once thousands died and thousands were sired in my name. Then came the days of accountability. They came slowly, but they came. People wanted more out of you than mere victory, they wanted morality, they wanted honor, they wanted love. The funny thing was, we heroes survived. When we couldn’t win by cunning brutality we still could fight for honor, for the people. Even Gandhi was a member of our heroic tradition, fighting just as hard as Rama, as Hector, to preserve his people. You don’t have to be violent to be a hero. But you do have to fight. Problem is, now the simple act of fighting is being rejected. Fact is that no matter who or what you fight for you need an enemy, a face to rally against. You need a foe, someone whose humanity you will not accept until you grind them into the dirt. Problem is, there aren’t any enemies anymore. Fear of the unknown is dead when everyone is known, when you can look up any culture in an encyclopedia. And as you are taught in school there is no evil, no wrong, “We Value Ambiguity!” Everyone simply has different ways to reach the truth. Everyone is special in his or her own way. There isn’t a wrong religion, even if it practices FGM, or Inquisitions, or human sacrifice. There isn’t an evil side, every choice is just as good, just pick whatever you feel like, no you choose. Don’t get angry, its unhealthy, say the counselors. Why can’t we all just be friends? Why can’t we have organizations like the GSA, whose only goal is understanding, who accept no enemies? Because, in the end, that’s not an acceptable goal. To fight you need an enemy, you need a challenge, you can’t fight against controversy, you can’t reject rejection. Yet people still try to. People still make compromises, deals, try always to just get along. There are no absolutes anymore, once you put up a real fight, stir up the hate people need to survive, and you’re seen as crazy, totally of your rockers, and then you fail, your so-called heroing is over, kaput, might as well go back to planting other people’s flowers, cause you’ll never be anything unique, cause everyone’s special, which means no one is. The black and white world we preservers understand has been invaded by the new-and-improved nanotech of compromise, its been torn down by the deadly gray goo. There aren’t any heroes anymore. The thrill of combat, the game of strategy, the role models of generations now only exist as blips on a screen, plays for a people that no longer want a world they can live in. We’re all dead, Creator, Destroyer, and Preserver.
(Creator and Destroyer enter)
The world doesn’t want absolutes, doesn’t care for power, doesn’t accept its oldest gods anymore.
Destroyer: If they forget us, we’ll forget them!
Creator: They’ll cry for us again, in the long, gray night to follow.
(lights fade to black)