All creatures are prisoners of the rules of survival, thus physically none are free. All ordinary men are prisoners of the rules of mental maintenance, imitation and continuity. Ergo, in the routine arena, originality has no value.
Some talk about originality, some strive for it – all are disappointed. The only sham consolation is fame for your effort; to have others laud your originality whilst your feeling of failure privately persists. If their innards could be seen, the sign of an artist truly struggling to be original would be read in his personal feelings of having failed.
In their own way, all men yearn to be artists. Hence: fashion, tattoos, ritualistic dress, change of name, residence, religion or political allegiance, eccentricities of speech and movement, struggle for distinguishing fame and wealth, and above all, a constantly barking at the heels of what the majority say is art. The art herein referenced is the art of thought. All other forms of art are but watered down versions thereof.
Men who cannot think – paint. They write, they sculpt, they compose, they preach, they seek power. All, in a grasping for originality of thought – a grasping that leaves all but a few, frustrated. Thus the most popular form of this futile exercise is the yapping, harping, carping and barking out criticisms of whatever be the pretensions-of-originality currently in vogue. Indeed, on one planet, (Earth, come to think of it), criticism is accepted as art; “constructive, beneficial” criticism that is, and all criticism is as perceived by those delivering it.
Originality is not only not a natural part of the physical world, but neither so in man’s inner one. Life neither teaches nor encourages men to be therein original, and when one tries, he meets with unmapped, unidentifiable, near unmovable resistance which he normally never recognizes in its native lair. He believes the resistance to his attempts to be original comes from without. Thus does he waste even more time, by trying to defend specific turrets from outside assault, when it comes from within the castle walls.
J.