Tabula Rasa

Is there any more intimidating entity in the entire cosmos than a blank sheet of paper? That big, white expanse is laying there staring up at you with all its potential just oozing off at the corners. What appears on that paper next relies entirely on your skill as a poet, an author, a commentator, an artist. Properly addressed, that paper could become the greatest work of literature that the human race has ever seen. It could, at your hand, become the most delightful work of art yet known to mankind. The very problems of humanity could melt away in rapturous applause and universal adulation if only you could find the RIGHT thing to put on that FUCKING PIECE OF BLANK PAPER!

But of course you don’t. You prattle on endlessly about lost loves or loves most fervently hoped for or the bit of undercooked sausage that you had for dinner that might later turn into a tapeworm. You’ll scribble indolently for a few moments, realize that the proportions of the head and the torso just aren’t QUITE right and then resign yourself to imperfection and toss your work into the trash. What was such potential mere minutes ago is now nothing more than an angular heap of folds of paper. If you’re extremely lucky, perhaps the parabola which your work traces between your hand and the trash can will be deemed elegant by the gods of aesthetics. But even if that is so it doesn’t really matter.

It’s not the gods who are really important. Those Olympian icons of heavenly perfection are irrelevant. No, what’s really important, what really drives us to spill the results of our imperfect, randomly-firing synapses onto that piece of paper, to spoil all that potential is, in fact, the thoughts of a million other imperfect, randomly-firing synapses. All art, all acts of creation are fundamentally acts of narcissism. We spill out our words and our pictures not to please the gods, not to achieve perfection, not to solve the world’s problems but to bring ourselves into the worlds of more people. Whether we write, or draw, or sing, we do it so that we don’t feel quite so tiny, so small, so insignificant. Every person who knows we exist makes us just the tiniest bit bigger.

So in a way, each work of mankind is about success; and each work of mankind is about failure. We succeed in that we expand our worlds just ever so slightly by each life that we touch. We fail in that what we create, what we call into existence at our bidding is so much less than the potential of what we started out with. Though one may write a million words on a million pages, though one may surpass Shakespeare and Dickens and Tolstoy if one works at it long enough and hard enough, whatever one writes will pale in comparison to the potential of what could have been, what might have been on that blank sheet of paper.