WRITING
God’s VaginaPRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC 17 December 2009 |
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What makes us want to write? Writing is a creative process. So, the question could be, “What makes us want to create?” God creates. Maybe we should ask, “What makes us think we’re God?” God’s career is not unlike that of a writer. He had some original ideas way back when for about a week, and He’s continued to cash in by repackaging them ever since. Consider it the first sequelization people religiously devoured. But certainly this was the essence of creative composition.
Since everyone knows that even God ran out of original material eons ago, just what is it writers are trying to achieve? Praiseworthy plagiarism? I wonder about this when I read literary reviews criticizing authors for being “unoriginal.” Before becoming words on a page, writing is thoughts. At some level, either as a technique of expression or as ideas, original writing would have to be just that: the first of its kind.
Writing is also described as an art. Right away there’s something disingenuous going on here with this notion of originality. Art hasn’t been original for centuries. I’m almost certain that the controversial artist who painted an image of the Virgin Mary using human feces was not the first to smear excrement on a flat surface and call it art. Certainly his work was not humanity’s first attempt to portray the progenitive agent of a godhead. Why all the fuss? As The Barenaked Ladies so derivatively pointed out, “It’s all been done before.”
Even now as I write this I’m not creating anything, but trying to recall, to remember things, and then to conjure and evoke them. It’s sort of like masturbation. Yes, it requires a technique; but who would want to be held to a standard of originality? It would be quite a stretch for me to take a stab at conjuring up an “original” vagina.
But what if someone somewhere did have an original thought or idea? What would he do with it? Is it something like that pregnant man everyone was talking about on the Internet a year or so ago? How does this original idea come out? And what are the odds that our Original Thinker would even be a writer? What if he was an illiterate beggar who just figured he was having a bad gas attack?
For argument’s sake, let’s say that someone is me. I suggest this only because I came up with an original idea of my own the other day. It seemed to me that rain is a big hassle. Of course, I also realized that it’s ultimately essential for eating and drinking. Without much contemplation at all, though, I hit upon the notion of self-lubricating dirt. (I know: At least one of you out there is already saying, “Hey, I read an article about that!”)
The smartest of you have already figured out where this is going, I’m sure. Indeed, this very piece of writing about the primordial concept of self-lubricating dirt could be the thing the critics will soon be calling “the most original idea since Man first wiped his own dung onto a cave wall.” That would be some very good shit.
How could I be sure this posting wasn’t going to end up as nothing more than a brief essay with the sort of primitive scatological humor you can find in any New York Times bestseller? Because I Googled my original idea, and it’s truly original. The first of its kind. Ever. Go ahead, check it out. The closest you’ll come is “self-lubricating, dirt-resistant.” I didn’t need the critics to tell me what an important breakthrough this essay represents — for me, and for humanity.
But now that I’ve written it here, I’m not so sure anymore. It seems to me that the self-lubricating soil won’t hold the seed of the original idea I wanted to plant in it. Staring at that vagina lurking several paragraphs above, it’s beginning to seem to me that the whole thing is just some cheap, clumsy allusion to sex and fertility. It’s fertility without the fertile mind.
Like the Star Child at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I now feel like I’m floating, detached from the womb of original writing and far, far away from God’s vagina that I so foolishly assumed I could make my own…
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I’m sorry to abruptly break the rhythm here, but I think I’ll stop now. Even with good technique, I don’t expect anything is going to come of this…
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Daniel,
1.) Just in case all that humility about your idea not being original was feigned…
and 2.) Since we’re talking about God and creation…
I though I might point out a little snippet from the Genesis creation account that often gets overlooked:
“No plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up–for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground…” Genesis 2:5-6.
Your idea, as you surmised, has already been thought of, and unfortunately quite a while ago. But good ideas can’t resurface too often; in fact, they resurface all too seldom, so here’s to a increase of worthy unoriginality. (As opposed to the plethora banal originality that we already have [#blogs].)
Judy,
My humility, while not feigned, is most definitely imitated…
Your snippet highlights the fact that, ultimately, soil is self-lubricating, since it is the interaction between earth and sky that gives us rain.
But I was looking for something more direct, and without the need to carry an umbrella or cancel the picnic.
Chris Ofili — juxtaposed elephant dung with a black Virgin Mary. As I remember, he argued that elephant dung has some heavy symbolism attached to it, in Nigeria at least, and does not seem to have meant it as an insult.
Oche?
Of course this takes nothing away from your piece.
For proto-vagina, see cloaca, the all-purpose orifice, deity or not.
Don,
I’ve got egg on my face. (Or is it elephant dung?) Maybe there is something original going on with Ofili’s work…
I think I found some of my material for this posting floating in the Cloaca Maxima.
I’m not aware of the significance of elephant dung, but I suspect that would be more likely in Northern Nigeria, and I’m an Easterner. Of course so is Ofili, so he must just have a better antenna than I do.
Overall the juxtaposition of divine and base is age-old and world-wide, culturally. It’s nothing but an expression of what we see about us all the days of our lives.
As for the creative impulse’s being just a concentration of the very cloaca of cosmos, emphasizing female principles of combined generation and refuse, see all sorts of references all over the place, and you might as well read “The White Goddess” again, anyway, just as a topper.
Uche,
When you say, “…the juxtaposition of divine and base is age-old and world-wide, culturally…the creative impulse’s being just a concentration of the very cloaca of cosmos, emphasizing female principles of combined generation and refuse…” I think your comment is more interesting than the posting itself.
Thanks for connecting the dots.
Darian… Judy makes a good point while addressing Daniel above. Except her quoted verses are preceded by this:
Gen 1:11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
Gen 1:12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good
Indicating that God may have been original but a bit scattered in his thinking. He also had a bad editor.
Eber,
Daniel’s my brother…
I’m not sure we can point to God as the author of these passages, so let’s just assume it was an early struggling writer.
a very fun read…:-)
I like it less in the light of day than when I wrote it at night.
great piece.
Thanks!
A buddy of mine and I were talking once and we came to the conclusion that the world is big enough, populous enough, and has been in existence for long enough that whatever you think of, someone has almost certainly done it.
Which can be an awful thought.
“It’s sort of like masturbation. Yes, it requires a technique; but who would want to be held to a standard of originality?”
Ha ha ha…
A buddy of mine and I had that same conversation before you did…
Let’s face it, we’re just scavangers in a recycling plant.
There’s this great short story I read in fifth grade that I have not encountered since. It’s epistelary, series of letters written from this short story writer to various magazines, and the notes back. In the letters, he submits stories. The magazines write back, “Your story is too Roger Thornberryish” (I think that was the name). This goes on and on, with the magazines insisting the stories are just like Thornberry’s. At the end, the writer sends the letters and the accompanying rejection letters, and submits them as a story. The response? Roger Thornberry sent the exact same thing last week.
Still love that story.
There is nothing new under the sun! Except, of course, that there is, everyday. Everything is new. You retelling an old story is original, because the voice has changed.
OK, my typing is bad…I’m on my fourth cocktail of the evening. But I do think that if anyone is original, we are all original. If that makes sense..
Point being, great post, DA.
Greg,
Great story!
Newness is obviously a matter of perspective, even before we consider the recycling aspect. For example, the fact that Star Wars was new for me in 1977 — notwithstanding all the many recycled elements is contained — didn’t stop it from being new for my son when he first saw it decades later. And, seeing the film in the context of a father-son relationship was a whole new perspective for me as well. (Just today I’m reminded that his telling me how great movies like District 9 or Avatar are is yet another “new” aspect of that whole process — now he’s the Jedi master.)
It was only after I was halfway into writing this little ditty that I stopped to consider just how annoying yet another take on the “nothing-is-ever-new” spiel was going to be. It obviously didn’t stop me from committing a sin trying to be wrapped in a virtue. After all, I’m as persuaded of my individuality as the next stranger. (Or, less kindly, I’m as arrogant as anyone else who thinks he has something worth saying, even while knowing damn well that it has already been said.)
But, in the end, it’s all relative. You mentioned voices, and I think that’s a very good way to think about it literally: Pavarotti singing Jingle Bells is not the same old song.
I wonder what my tune is.
“You mentioned voices, and I think that’s a very good way to think about it literally: Pavarotti singing Jingle Bells is not the same old song.
I wonder what my tune is.”
T.S. Eliot.
“Tradition and the Individual Talent.” What he was riffing on, I can’t say. He had a way of obscuring things. Probably “The Golden Bough” or some shit.
Anyway, though his version doesn’t lack for a certain kind of music, he most certainly did not and could not have hit the vagina note. Nor the dung one. So I think it’s safe to say you’ve made it new.
Hmmm… D.L. Arky… Wadda ya think?
Is hitting the vagina note akin to finding the g-spot?
Though I should also point out that “Star Wars” was intentionally recycled. I believe it was Lucas’s attempt at the all-myth.
A concept of Joseph Campbell’s. That the same stories repeat, over and over, in the myths of human civilization thanks to some kind of basic Jungian or Freudian hard-wiring. As far as I know, Lucas literally took Campbell’s book, _The Hero With A Thousand Faces_, and began writing his story based on the archetypes and quests and basic, recurring ordeals it described.
He wanted to see if he could create a modern myth with the mass appeal of an ancient religion or legend.
Seems to have done okay.
I know that book. I pulled something out of it for a paper I wrote in a course on apocalypticism.
I recall that even Time Magazine’s cover story on Star Wars back in ’77 made the point that the film consciously contained many classic story elements from other genre, including Westerns. Ultimately, those stories have to trace back to the earliest sources, so it’s all drawn from someone’s mythology sooner or later.
and…AND…I think Campbell did go to the vagina (Freudian and all). Not sure about dung. That one might be all yours. Anyway. His thing was that there is only one story. People just keep telling it, or parts of it, over and over and over.
Exactly. One story. I wonder how that shakes out for copyrights and royalties…
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