digging in the detrius of days past.

I was walking through the mall, taking my mother to buy new speakers. We'd left my father to pay, as is our custom, and wandered aimlessly for about 15 feet until my mother pointed to a dress in a store window (it may have been Guess?) and said ' I had a dress like that for after my wedding'. This was horrifying at first, because it was a somewhat skimpy looking number with a bow right around the chest area, and I feared she was speaking to me about lingere. That she had worn. On her wedding night. But no, it was a dress, and the one she had had also been a dress, and all was well. I said something not-unlike me, that 'fashion is like everything else. Those who can't invent the future mine the past.' Mom got excited about that statement for some reason, and insisted I share it with people. I ignored the suggestion until I was watching tv, and the same idea came to be again.

This is unsurprising, as I'm certain the idea isn't original. But it keeps popping up. I was listening to the ongoing history of new music last night, and the focus of the episode was those accidental plagiarisms that make up so much of pop music. Combine this with the 'Melancholy Elephants' story by Spider Robinson that I posted recently, and I've been exposed to a large amount of material suggesting that the failure of creativity isn't any such thing, it's a mixture of going with what works, and of inspiration no longer having a longer collective memory than the human race. We're all mining in the past, and the only thing that matters is whether public opinion and that of the rights holders come down on the side of taking it as a compliment to the original, or taking it as a justification for legal action.

There's a reason I love the Creative Commons so much. Every few months I have a moment like the one I had in the mall with my family, and recall that every crutch I add to my memory locks ideas into a time and place that keeps them from becoming new again.

The telling thing is, as I was writing this, I kept wracking my brain in the hopes that I hadn't stolen the statement from somewhere. If I have, let me know.