I’ve held back from writing this blog post for about a week now, mostly because I’m going to sound slightly insane if I go too off course. But I watched something tonight which only reinforces my ideas and pushed me to just go ahead and write it anyway.
I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “think outside the box” so many times that it has become mundane to you, or annoying. And perhaps rightly so! The box exists for a reason, and only by acting within the laws of the box can you progress on what is considered the “proper route” in this world. To think outside the box is madness, and is rather commonly rewarded with a lifetime of poverty and broken dreams, unless you are incredibly talented and lucky. I’m not discouraging the condemnation of such a box – this blog post is partially about inventing new shapes entirely – I’m merely justifying the widespread distaste of the saying. And anyway, that’s enough of that metaphor.
I was recently in a lecture about Literature in the Modern Era, focusing on the definition of modernism itself. The easiest way of showing this was apparently through the evolution of paintings, but that’s not especially important to what I have to say today. What is important is this; we were shown the painting Girl with a Pearl Earring as an example of the peak of realism, both as a moment caught in a painting and of the quality of the painting itself. My lecturer claimed that this was as physically realistic to the real world as a painting could get (although I beg to differ as I’m sure I’ve seen some hyper-realistic paintings around the net in recent times). But again, not the point. The interesting part – the part that really caught my attention – is what came next.
Picasso.
Okay, so maybe was quite a lot of evolution in art on the way, I’m no bloody expert. But as realistic paintings died out due to the invention of the camera, and artists were given the impossible task of exceeding the realism of Girl with a Pearl Earring in the climate of a dying trade, Picasso emerged. And he went about as far away from realism as one could possibly imagine. But his work attracted so much attention, not just because of his radicalism but because the painting still told a story. They told stories in far different ways to the modernist paintings which came before, and that is what grabbed my attention. This was, to me, an eye-opener; you do not have to succeed the talent of the people who have come before you, as you can instead go in a different direction for an even greater impact.
(Never in all my short nineteen years did I think I’d write so much, so willingly and so enthusiastically about paintings.)
What spurred me on to write this blog post was when I was discussing Don Hertzfeldt’s incredible Everything Will Be Okay on Twitter. I found that I didn’t know what to refer to it as. Of course it’s an animated short film, but what really is it? Surrealist? There probably is a proper genre to associate it with that I just don’t have the knowledge of, but to me it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. And most importantly, it made me think and consider the world in entirely new ways. I’m not saying that I stumbled upon some grand epiphany from this grotesque beauty, but it certainly opened up some doors in my mind. And that is the basis behind the importance of my (likely dead-end) mission to invent an entirely new shape to combat the box which we should be thinking outside.
To put it in non-gobbledegook terms, we should be thinking of new ways to channel our creative outlets. And I’m not merely talking genres, for those are still being invented all the time. (I am not condemning the use of new genres for this, for they are surely a method to be reckoned with, but I’m trying to think even bigger.) Rather than following the curve and striving to become famous or even revolutionary novelists, songwriters, poets, film creators, comic book writers, television producers and every other creative form you can think of… we should be striving to invent new ones.
(I’m sure this is when I get told I’m late to the party and that people have been preaching this for generations, and I’ve just been looking in the wrong direction. But if so, then direct me to that party!)
Consider the novel. On the scale of mankind’s existence, novels are still surprisingly new, despite many of us (myself included) automatically assuming that they’ve been around for much longer. What if the novel had been popular when Shakespeare was alive? Would he have been a novelist? And if he had, how different would his works have turned out? Would they have been more or less effective?
Now consider that Shakespeare was born in our time. Consider that despite television and movies and everything else that people get distracted by nowadays, that he became a novelist and his works still had the same impact to us that they did all those centuries ago. If I was writing a blog a few hundred years in the future about Shakespeare from 2014, would I be asking what his works would be like if he had adopted this new kind of creative outlet popular in 2314? And how different his works would be if he had?
And yes, that was an incredibly long winded way of saying this: In a few hundred years, what if we have a new style of creative outlet that rivalled that of any novel, film, television series, or your favourite choice of storytelling? Picture the catharsis of a hard-hitting film in the atmospheric cinema, or the shock of the dramas to the Greek audience as they were first performed thousands of years ago. What if we developed a method of storytelling so potent that we could interact with every human on this Earth in a whole new light, tell them stories which would touch them on so deep a level that we were able to convey what matters and destroy ignorance once and for all?
That last line is perhaps a smidgeon too far-fetched, and of course brings up many issues such as freedom of opinion and what have you. So on that totally-not-insane note, I should probably head to bed and put my rampant mind to rest for a few hours. Thank you very much for sticking with me and reading what is most probably my most ridiculous blog post to date.
Perpetually Perturbed 