Is that too Yoda-like?

Plunge in. It’s the only way to go.

Ray Carney (aka Yoda)”

Quick contribution since I am so tired as to be “out of it” right now: I think that the stance that “nothing is original” is cynical (and, therefore, disconnected from reality/truth) and, furthermore, is highly likely predicated on a miscomprehension of what originality is de facto. Some friends of mine were telling me the other day that there is no way to be original anymore, in reference to music, though what they said (and my response to it) applies to other arts as well as other areas of life. Artistic originality has not so much to do with any kind of technical innovation or anything like that. Art creates. To create is to bring into existence that which never before existed, ever. Art creates by bringing into existence new ways of thinking, feeling, knowing, and being into the world, new thoughts, new kinds of emotions – not just new emotions, but new *kinds* of emotions; it does this by breaking us free of our old, comfortable ways of thinking, feeling, knowing and being, breaking us free of our old ways of experiencing reality, via moving beyond those ways of experiencing, offering us new sensory powers, new powers of perception; thus, originality is often misunderstood, jeered at, rejected, burnt at the stake, nailed to the cross. All our lives we cry out for originality, to experience originality in art and elsewhere, but face to face with it, we reject it since it violates our habitual, comfortable ways of experiencing reality. Much more to say, but I must away. Originality is authentic individuality.