luctor et emergo

An excerpt from the preface by Heinrik Ibsen, here he comments on his first play, which critics claimed borrowed extensively from the form and themes Heinrik Hertz’s play Svend Drying’s House:

It might be maintained with quite enough reason that Hertz in his Svend Dyring’s House had borrowed, and to not a considerable extent, from Heinrich von Kliest’s Käthchen von Heilbronn, a play written at the beginning of this century. [...] But does anyone doubt that it would be possible, that with a little good, or a little ill, to discover among still older dramatic literature a play from which it could be maintained Kliest had borrowed from here and there in his Käthchen von Heilbronn? I, for my part, do not doubt it. But such suggestions of indebtedness are futile. What makes a work of art the spiritual property of it’s creator is the fact that he has imprinted upon it the stamp of his personality.

I rejoice. It’s a liberating thought. The work is not what matters, but rather the ideas behind it, the motive, the doing. Art involves the discovery of new ideas, but also relies on the preservation of old ones. It’s a cultural record, the direct physical manifestation of our collective unconscious. It manifests and perpetuates, occasionally something arises that’s novel and shatters a few molds, but then that is assumed into the mass of our thinking and perhaps something else is dropped, but who knows if it’s ever lost, or if these noble discoveries are only reflections of past truths lost to time?

And from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia:

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

So now we continue. I’m optimistic, though right now a bit more tabla rasa than I would like. Who knows what discoveries we’ll make, or when we’ll make them? I guess I don’t feel I need to write an earth-shattering work of staggering proportions, because what if it has been written before? Yes the idea is grand, and for my short life, maybe the ideas I seek to create and pursue will be of importance for a short span before dropping once again into obscurity. It’s as if at times of creativity I should feel like a man wandering a junkyard at night, feeling and groping in the darkness, occasionally lifting objects aloft to be understood by starlight.