rainbow picture

i write because i need evidence that i can still think for myself. even then, what i see after i'm done typing furiously is a zombie in a necktie. nothing of mine, nothing alive, just a flat reflection of the debris in my mind. i call it conditioning.

i remember having elaborate mental images when i was little, and being so frustrated with my inability to express on paper what i could see so clearly in my mind. one picture i drew over and over again was that of a castle on the left, a knight on the ground atop a white horse, a princess waving to him from her window, a rainbow and a token half sunshine in the corner of the page. i had seen this drawn by classmates, my sister, and also on a scented markers commercial. it seemed to be the only acceptable thing to draw. i had other things in mind. monsters, medusas, landscapes, gnarled trees from dreams. i shut them out, and continued to draw this castle scene like a mad woman in a sanitarium. drawing it each time, as if for the first time, always annoyed at the insipid, babyish rendition of the award-winning masterpiece that i wanted it to be. always garnering praise in sticker form for drawing the same damn thing, day in and day out.


21 years of school taught me to come up with an idea, doubt it because it was my own, alter it to look more like all the ideas that had come before, then build a case for it using "research" or, take a look at everyone else's rainbow pictures and do my best to imitate. i wrote a paper in 4th grade about bees. i described the black bees as regular bees that looked like they'd fallen in an ink well. my teacher red lined it, and told me it didn't belong in a research paper. in graduate school, i wanted to write about a global return to existentialism, to religion, but not as it was traditionally understood. i wanted to write about the irony of an "advanced" civilization returning to a less secular, commercial, divided by nationalism world via interconnection and necessity. it was shot down. i ended up writing about modernist movements in the middle east, far off the mark that was my original idea. the idea itself was not as clear as the rainbow picture, but the feeling of it was.

and that's what i wanted to create. the energetic address for the ideas that i wanted to explore was a clear coordinate. the affect, the approach, the final product -- i didn't want it to look like a patchwork quilt of soggy ideas gleaned from the shelves of a moldy library. i wanted it to border on science fiction. i wanted to point out that we will need more ideas that are not and cannot be based on what has come before, because where we're going, we don't need roads.

the idea that nothing is new under the sun rings true. at its root, nothing is perfectly original or unprecedented. lady gaga: a trailblazer. but musical talent paired with shock value and a penchant for self-reinvention is nothing novel. it only seems new because baseline ideas are shuffled like a deck of cards, and when our favorite cards resurface in a flashy color, we subconsciously appreciate the familiarity, thinking we're admiring novelty. so it's true, nothing can be truly original, but as long as originality is kept on the bottom of the deck in school, we are doomed to recycle anemic themes and impotent thought. in short, certain corners of society (read:education) are in dire need of a dust rag.

imitation. writing term papers or articles for web posts etc. in school (especially graduate school) started to feel like looking into a kaleidescope. my peer's papers, my papers, were all unique in the same way--with their own combination of words and conclusions. all told, it was the same sand and glass in random formation. everyone was looking through the same hole, marveling at their view as if they had any hand in creating it.

regurgitating old information and using it as a yardstick for a convoluted thesis is the academic equivalent of a pyramid scheme. why not encourage students, people, to smash the kaleidescope open. look through a different hole. expand the scope of possibilities outside random sampling of designs generated by a narrow hall of mirrors.

are kaleidescopes predictable? no two formations are exactly the same. many kaleidescopes distort the light and colors of its surroundings, some use beads, liquid, marbles, sand, glass all of which can never replicate a design. so each twist, then, could be an original, something fresh and unprecedented. but the mode and medium never change, and the person peering through the kaleidescope is not the artist, but the observer. this is what "school" often teaches students to become -- not the innovator, artist, mold breaker or galileo -- but the imitator, twister, guardian of the status quo observer of creations built on other kaleidescopic creations, cities built on cities, brilliance traced on tissue paper. the result is a diluted rendering of cannibalised information. in other words, a rainbow picture.


“The aim of education must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals who, however, see in the service to the community their highest life problem.”


—Albert Einstein --- From Address, October 15, 1936 – Reprinted in Ideas and Opinions, 60.