But
we are fundamentally mimics. If we are not mimicking each other, we
are mimicking nature (witness the popularity of biomimicry), or some
other distant culture or movement which was doing it “right.”
Or
else we convince ourselves that we are all alone in generating our
own personal meaning, and see nothing but atomized individuals and
other living things, multiplied across the landscape, and we become
struck with horror over our loneliness.
Artists bang their heads against the wall because of their failure to
produce a completely original work, or else produce an original work
that no one can understand, and so are left alone and unappreciated,
at least until these isolated works find resonance with others who
are isolated, and the mimetic process re-emerges and there is again
energy being exchanged.
Sometimes
it is good to isolate oneself from the mimetic mainline, so as to
relieve one’s mind of all of those competing and contradictory
ideas. In the quiet, one can listen to and perceive one’s true
nature. Sometimes it is even worthwhile to endure the burden of
solitude, because no one else is willing to depart from a corrupt
regime of conformity.
There
is such thing as originality, but it will be familiar as well. One
can be original in one’s time, but one is also part of a longer
cycle, whose revolutions extend beyond oneself, and one will
inevitably find oneself mimicking an earlier revolution in the cycle.Or to explore this further, one is original in the thermodynamic sense that it is highly unlikely there will be a play of energy quite like oneself, at least in an immediately meaningful sense. It could be that our plays of energy could become tesselated and geometrically repeated on a greater scale, but this is not exactly something we will ever have access to, and is more of a speculation.
There
is nothing wrong with mimicry in itself. Subsisting in reality is a
complex feat which takes more than a single individual, and this is
because we are already complex creatures with complex needs. We can’t
master it all ourselves, so we mimic others who are mastering what we
are weak in, so as to reproduce the beneficial effects of that
mastery. One can learn from a master by mimicking her or him, but
then to fully develop one's mastery, to fit into it, one must develop
the rest of it oneself.
The
problem with mimesis that we are always trying to hint at, is that we
mimic ideas, images, and practices which are drifting evermore into
the past, and which may no longer have much to do with us, or the
reality that we find ourselves in. Oftentimes this mimicry is imposed
on us, by a central power that benefits from the attitudes and
behaviors it is encouraging. Sometimes we are mimicking something
that is actively destructive, amplifying its effects.
We
could ask the fundamental question: to mimic, or not to mimic? Acts
of creation are often spontaneous in that they erupt exactly as they
should, as expressions of the movement of energy, regardless of what
is being mimicked. But then acts of creation themselves take place
within a fabric of individuals in relation to each other, and in
relation to a historical flow of events, in relation to an ecology,
all of which are acting on each other. To reframe: mimesis is an expression of life as a flow, which on a greater scale can be seen to pour forth, its evolutionary manifestations following a certain logic, a certain path of least resistance of their own, as water flows in accordance with gravity.
Perhaps
a better question to ask is: what are we trying to do, and what crowd
are we trying to run with?
