i learned recently that, in science, it is a commonly accepted fact that it is impossible to create anything. there are a certain number of atoms in the universe, and they are impossible to duplicate or destroy; they can only be shifted around. the amount of matter doesn't ever change, it's just translated into other matter.
so, it's not really possible to create anything. therefore, everything comes from nature. nothing is artificial. this computer that i'm typing on right now is made up of melted, hardened dinosaurs. so is the chair i'm sitting on. my glasses are made from age-old sand and metals. i am made from the food my mother ate while she was pregnant. it's amazing to think about, actually.
a similar principle goes for the imagination, i think.
"Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions... So when we thing we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable. Don't you think it's depressing?"
-tony kushner, angels in america
nothing is new. the only revelations people can ever come to is to rearrange preexisting knowledge or facts into a different manner or form, so that they are understood differently.
3 comments:
but it's new to the person understanding it, even though that person is not entirely new themselves, and is just an updated version of someone who lived long ago. but to that individual mind, it is new - which is why people call them revelations. unless you'd like to deny there is some tiny thing that makes everyone just THAT much different from every other being that's never existed. if so...
ok, I get this atoms idea, but how about imagination? not all of our ideas are recycled from others. Yes, the majority of them are, but that's why it's so startling and revolutionary when we make anew one. think: where did all the ideas we're recycling now come from in the first place?
chemicals.
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