The curse of the derivative life

Tzemach Atlas: Moshiach is being creative, helping G-d to rearrange things. I don't mean to be New Agey but I mean to voice my utter disgust at the quotation culture. Jews are hooked on sourcing things and being derivative. People who are chained to a precedent can't live an inspired life. The prophets are innovators. I noticed that over the life of this blog there have been less than ten people who wrote a worthwhile original material. But this is not about this blog. This is about experimenting and taking creative angles in life. More importantly this is about talking to people you know about your feelings and not hiding behind cliches. Start being creative today by telling another person about the theater and drama in your own life today, banish all stories. No more we do because it was done, do your thing, brother! I suspect that in addition to the regular hate towards gays many hareidim are jealous of the creativity. But creativity is also listening and being in the moment. Banish quotation marks and empty links to borrowed ideas. Cherish the intensity of the moment and may all the messages be instant!

Tony Montana: I was looking at Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans at the MOMA and thinking how this sums up so many people's ostensible self-expression nowadays. The only thing is... Warhol was making a joke.

Derivative speech is really just a subconscious way of guarding against intimacy. If you speak in slogans, aphorisms and cliches, you never have to expose yourself. You never have to experience the vulnerability of not knowing whether you're the first person to have felt a certain way.

I know Tzemach Atlas often points to derivative thinking as a nefariously devised opiate administered in intentionally brain-numbing doses to the masses by the totalitarian power structure. But I tend to look at it in a different light (and it seems from this post that Tzemach, at least in part, sees it this way as well). There's no Big Brother forcing people into derivative thinking. We live in the most free and open society in history. It is we who throw ourselves headlong behind the great, sheltering quotation marks that will finally render us impervious to real human intimacy in our daily discourses.