“How many times does a man have to shave before his chin gets the message?”
Certain ceremonial masks of sub-Saharan Africa portray expressions of astonishment and provide relief from having to repeatedly fake surprise at the same things – an energy-saving bliss reserved for the tribal shaman. Cultures which ban such masks through a prohibition against graven images are predictably scandalised at everything, including their own legs. The wearily exasperated looks on the faces of lions in the earliest cave paintings attest to Paleolithic people being constantly caught unawares by the cat’s ferocious attitude. Woolly mammoths are also depicted as having been appalled to a standstill, rarely running or having a nice time. When shamans began portraying monster-jawed zigzag devils, antlered insect men and flying sharks to broaden everyone’s horizon and ensure they wouldn’t be dumbfounded by every development, the clan’s hunters were still startled by the slightest sound. Fossil evidence suggests that early hominids had reinforced cheekbones to withstand being frequently punched in the face, and no wonder.
To the short of memory everything is unprecedented, and the rest are pressured to pretend. For the media to thrive, the uneventful must daily go with a bang using the Wolf-Rayet principle of massive gas and ferment gradually losing mass to the surrounding reality. Belong to the always-sudden world if you wish for shallow stress and lack of progress.
Roger Penrose’s 2010 book Cycles of Time claimed that the closed-universe Big Bang/Big Crunch/Big Bang/Big Crunch repetition view was a new one, though it had been current for decades. We can use the same model to watch cycles of ideas, in which the same ones are claimed repeatedly as new. In the one-after-another closed universe model, no information is transmitted from one universe to the next. In the Cyclic Idea model of false credit, people present information and others later repeat it while claiming originality – after which someone else does the same, and so on. An equivalent to the ‘crunch’ node allowing the fraud is perhaps short attention span/memory, plus the desire to pretend to be absorbing new information without the small discomfort of actually doing so. It also drastically slows down the rate at which we can move on to the actually new. The relatively inexpensive necklace worn by Kali, Goddess of Destruction and Rebirth, consists of human skulls representing the alphabet used to create the universe. That these heads are empty at the node between one universe and the next lends support to the theory.
Repetition is now rife and instantaneous but in the past there were pauses, perhaps out of courtesy. In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut has a time traveller watch bombs sucked intact into planes from city explosions below, then flown backward into factories where they are dismantled and their constituent minerals placed in the ground. Impoverished by his inability to copy other people’s work, Richard Brautigan finally succeeded by using two sentences of Vonnegut’s reverse gag in So The Wind Won’t Blow It All Away, then blew his brains out. A few years later Martin Amis, a popular romance writer, inflated the idea into an entire book. (Many defend Amis, claiming he stole from Counter-Clock World by Philip K Dick.) The thin-spreading of a short idea is standard practice and it helps if the original author has died. A page or two of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, massively dilated and diluted, makes McCarthy’s The Road.
Many books are stolen vehicles with new plates and zero torque. A lifted idea doesn’t have the original’s roots, the intense contract of energy between intent and responsibility. An imitation isn’t earned because it isn’t lived and hasn’t the courage to be first. It didn’t take two brains for the stegosaurus to support a solar panel array years before it became fashionable – just a true brain at one end and some nerve at the other. By the time solar power was rediscovered by Leonardo da Vinci his urge to ‘think new thoughts and bring new things into being’ meant that while other people were laughing at their own snot he was anatomising elephants and inventing the hang glider. Like a ligament statue he wore his own skull as a helmet and knew every inch of his innards. In his sizzling adrenalized mind, idea-shapes from diverse contexts magnetized together at angles which have no number or name, in the focused frenzy of what Zina Nicole Lahr called ‘creative compulsive disorder’. He even managed to squeeze the classic Vitruvian Man out of an incident when a naked moron climbed onto his skylight. Born illegitimate, Da Vinci was freed early from the rusty harness of formal schooling and fell back on mere curiosity and honest observation of an infinitely spectacular universe.
The illusion of precocious innovation in the present derives partly from a foreshortened notion of timescale. In America, fundamentalist Christians claim the world was created 6,000 years ago. In Europe people drink in bars that are older than that. They discuss the in-built tragedy of those with an attention span of 300 years and a life span of 80. That difficult second novel was written in the 3rd century BC under the title The Alexander Romance. As far as we know the first was the 8th century BC Hebrew text In the Day, whose author couldn’t stop herself developing a straight religious commission into a bitter, satirical potboiler. She set up the dialogue forms and ‘show, don’t tell’ practice for everyone subsequent. Forty years after William Baldwin wrote the first English novel Beware the Cat in 1553, Thomas Nashe re-introduced the form with The Unfortunate Traveller, experimenting with portmanteaus and fertile all-inclusion to produce a tale with the precision of a jungle. The pen he dropped when poisoned by a herring was taken up over 300 years later by James Joyce to write his ‘work in progress’. Maybe some information does pass from one universe to the next, compressed in the pea-sized node from which the latter unpacks itself. Joyce claimed that if everything else was wiped out, the cosmos could be reconstructed from Finnegans Wake – but he left out the evil.