Thursday 7 November 2002

Pic of the day: Creativity unleashed with a new generation. Screenshot from The Sims.

Creativity unbound

I am sitting here, sniffling, listening to the melody "Clonmacnoise" by Musicessence. Musicessence has some great ambient style music. I don't think it is for everyone, but chances are that if you like Enya and easy classics, you will like at least some of his works too. It appeals to the same brains.

The music is free to listen to and download from MP3.com. The same is much other music of varying quality. Oh yes, the quality varies. And there is no really good way to filter the pearls from the mud, unless your tastes are so ordinary that you can use the popularity charts as a guide. Luckily there is one such chart for each subgenre, so if you know what way your tastes run, you have a good chance of finding something.

But once in a year or so I stop to marvel at the fact that this stuff is there, free for the taking. I also play it on a free music player with beautiful graphics, when I take the time to look at them. There are so many human creations shared these days. Was it always so? I don't remember it as being so. I think this time is the "unprecedented renaissance" of arts, that should follow from the Flynn effect, but that professor Flynn could not see anywhere. I see it almost everywhere.

***

As you can hardly have failed to notice if you've been reading for some days, I participate in this year's NaNoWriMo, an organized effort to encourage amateur novel writers to write a 50 000 word novel during the course of November. It is largely a very informal thing, even silly. "Quantity over quality" is the slogan. But as you can easily see from their online forum, there is a lot of hopes and earnest effort going into this too. I must admit that I don't take it very seriously for my own part. Although writing for others than just myself (at least theoretically) is a spur to keep going a little longer.

Some of the NaNoWriMo writers are putting their novels up for reading, as I do. For free, at least for the time being. Some seriously think they may get the stuff sold after enough refinement. Best of luck to them. But I think we are moving into a time in which good novels will be free like the wind and the rain, so abundant that it will make no sense to charge money for them. Note "good" novels, not exceptional. I am sure exceptional novels will still be marketable. But pretty good stuff will probably be so common that you can't read them all through even if you have no job, no family and no social life. Thus is fulfilled the Scripture that says: "There is no end to the writing of books, and much research tires the body." (Ecclesiastes, last chapter.)

***

In a more visual medium, online web comics have become so plentiful that I no longer have time to follow all that I would like. Some are found on "hubs" such as Keenspot, Keenspace or The Nice, while others are scattered all over the web. I am sure I have not even found all the good ones, and still there are too many. Enthusiasts could drown themselves in the comics and the fan communities that build up around them. Indeed, it was by ways of one of those fan milieus that I came to NaNoWriMo, by ways of LiveJournal.

Oh yes, journals. There is no end to the writing of those either, is there? People pouring out their hearts, occasionally their brains, and sometimes their spleen. Humor, drama, high hopes and crushing defeat, love and hate and fear, faith and doubt. Sometimes illustrated, or studded with poetry. Souls unbound, shared with the world.

Oh yes. I think we have a renaissance indeed. Or perhaps something that has no word yet. The Renaissance was a "rebirth" of the classical era, only it outgrew it and surpassed it in many ways. Today, confusion reigns because it seems that every era of the past is reborn at the same time, along with things that never were before. It may be more than a rebirth ... it may be a transformation. Perhaps even a transcendence, where we learn to reach out all across this little world and share. Where we all become a part of each other. A quiet revolution, a victorious army of spirit and creation, enough candles to banish the darkness. But we have a long long way to go.

Oh, and I just belatedly discovered that A.B. Kelly has indeed written an essay on the Flynn Effect and the ongoing theogony. It is sure to be a capital offense to all the world's religions, and meaningless to materialists except a few science fiction fanatics, so I guess the readership is somewhat limited. But the old man sure has perspectives, you got to give him that!