THEREMINA

“As for seeing similar posts in ones dashboard or people posting similar things….all i can say is its not a big deal. there are 6.9 billion people in this world and we live in a world with a strange multi-faceted past. not only one person owns or controls that past, or the pictures of that past. just because two people on a blog site are interested in the same thing, and one person posts about it sooner than the other, it doesn’t mean the first person is more worthy of enjoying this part of the past than the one who posts last.”

Marsiouxpial, apparently fielding some territorial butthurt on teh Tumblrz (honestly, I don’t know the details and don’t much care, the above remark was just a catalyst), has just put something into words that I’ve had trouble articulating.

Actually… well, it’s not that I have trouble, so much as I haven’t wanted to trouble myself. *grin* Still, as an internet “information tastemaker” recycling snippets of ephemera and art that I haven’t personally generated/created, moving through a sea of other self-appointed curators, I’m beginning to notice that these proprietary conflicts are getting increasingly overheated for no healthy or productive reason. It can feel a bit like watching carrion-eaters haggle over a skeleton with a few bits of meat still clinging to it. Meanwhile, there are thriving, infinite orchards of sustenance in all directions.

My own blog has faced plenty of frustrated, sometimes angry comments from (perfectly wonderful) folks who just feel like they’ve not gotten the props they deserve in the form of a linkback. I myself have gotten irritable over cases of poor linkback etiquette many times. But what I’ve realized is, after a point, you’ve got to take a step back, or go fucking mad. That seething “I SAW IT FIRST, I BLOGGED IT FIRST, I LOVED IT FIRST, GOD DAMN YOU” mentality is never rational, nor justified.

These beauties we’re all fussing over, repackaging into subtly different sequences of code, they don’t belong to us. We don’t own them. We only own our experiences of them, and more tenuously, how we choose to present them to others.

This ties into something I was talking about a while back in this post, which was mainly written in praise of the wonderful Genderfork blog and its relevance as a vital curation site, but also touched upon the waning relevance of shorthand tastemaking and the end of what Warren Ellis calls “The Patchwork Years” on the internet:

“Nobody needs another linkblog… There are already thousands of them. The job of curation is being taken care of. Look ahead.” He’s right. I’m as guilty of rehashing as the next blogger, but yeah. Generally speaking, we could do with far less circle-jerk turd-polishing online.

Paraphrasing the feisty theater renegade Maya Gurantz, those of us in any position to create new media should be baking new bread instead of quibbling over stale crumbs. At the very least, we existing curators should be doing a helluva lot more cogitating instead of regurgitating the same tired old ones and zeros. (”Hey dood, check out this awesome link via BoingBoing via Fark via Digg via Shlomo McFluffernutter’s Livejournal feed. Cut, paste, click.”)

I do think curation is still necessary, will always be necessary, especially when you consider how much more information is flooding daily into our collective consciousness than ever before. (And believe me, I’m well aware of the irony of saying “WHUT THEY SAID” so much in a diatribe concerning the lack of original creative thought in the blogosphere. Haha! Oof.) But here’s the point… and I’m talking to myself as much as anyone else:

Don’t live here.

Don’t stay too long, don’t look too hard, don’t invest too much in the internet curator’s mode of life/thinking/doing/being.

Because if the internet becomes your main source of artistic nourishment, whether as a curator or a creator, you will starve some of the most pure and vital parts of yourself. You will go deaf. You will go blind. You’ll get callouses on your palms. After a while, not only will you stop hearing music, you will forget you ever knew how to sing yourself. That endless repetition, that need for ownership, those pointless, petty scrabbles for status will turn every song that was once fresh and new and lovely to your ears into an inspid, infinitely recycling loop of numbing white noise. Meaningless. Joyless.

Will any of you make a pact with me, here in the staticky dark?

Make a painting, make a dress, make music, make a novella, make love to the camera, make a new flavor of beer, make a wild rumpus in the middle of the woods. Make a mess! Make something merely for the sake of making it. Make without any thought to an audience. Make without any anticipation of validation or gratification from an outside source. Make for no reason at all except the sheer bliss of the process itself.

Make something beautiful by yourself, for yourself, and then, for fuck’s sake, don’t blog about it.

Just this once.

Myopic, sure. But also a lesson in self-sustenance. Because if we all turn away from this big, hot communal hall of scrying mirrors for a bit, and focus inward instead, upon the true, white spark that sits in each of our bellies, maybe we won’t feel so hollow and lonely and dependent on energy from outside sources. Perhaps, in tapping back into that source, we won’t resort to the most base and vestigial pecking order instincts, or feel the need to cling, white-knuckled, to the exclusive, ego-tainted ownership of something that could never possibly be owned by any one person, or group of people:

Grace.

The deeply personal and intimate grace that can only be achieved with a pure act of creation.

EDITED TO ADD: I haven’t slept more than a handful of hours in days, and I’m not sure any of this meandering babble makes any sense at all… I just know that I’m tired of watching people (myself included) try to take possessive, knee-jerk ownership of creative information, and that as soon as the opportunity presents itself, I need to turn off my computer for a very long time.