We can’t always tell what’s new

Still lifes will never go out of style. (Caravaggio, Still Life with Fruit, c. 1603)

Sometimes I feel as though what I write here is the equivalent of something like, “You know a great snack for when you’re hungry? Take a little bit of peanut butter and smear it onto a cracker. Then, place another cracker on top. You’ve got a tiny peanut butter sandwich!”

Maybe I’m presenting an idea as something new, but it isn’t new at all. Maybe I’m seeing something that people have already seen, adding nothing.

When you create something, you don’t have any way of knowing whether what you see is what other people see until you share it and get their feedback. What’s more, you don’t know whether what you’re making will be valuable to them until you put it out there.

I think of Paul McCartney, certainly one of the best songwriters the world has ever seen, and how inconsistent his later work is. Really — no offense, Paul, I love you — how crappy some of it is.

It’s understandable. Because if I had written “Yesterday” and “Hey Jude,” I might lose touch a little bit with whether the other music I make is on that level. McCartney himself, after he composed the melody to “Yesterday,” would go around and sing it to people and ask them if they’d ever heard it before. He felt like he had heard it before — he essentially woke up from a dream singing it. It was so familiar to him that he couldn’t tell whether it had originated from his own brain or elsewhere.

If we can’t always tell what’s new, that puts us, as creators, in a challenging situation. We make the thing, in an earnest attempt to share what we see or what we hear with the world, but the world may not know, care about, or acknowledge what we’ve made. Or, we might be opening ourselves to ridicule because we think we’ve seen something new or remarkable, and we haven’t.

But even if we haven’t seen something new, maybe we’ve seen something in a new way. I’ve often sat down to write and wondered halfway through a piece, “Didn’t I already write something just like this?” And then I’ll do a little research and realize, “Almost, but not quite.” This one is different enough to merit existing.

Of course I’m going to be repetitive. I’m me. I’m going to write what I write. Sometimes the things I write are going to be blindingly obvious, painfully earnest, and maybe even shamefully ignorant. And some of the things that I write might be fresh and new. I can’t tell the difference. Maybe you can. Thanks for being patient with me.

As for you, if you’re afraid that you’re going to say something that everybody already knows, say it anyway. Because maybe we need you to say it. Maybe we need it repeated. Maybe we need you to iterate — to continue, like Monet, to paint the same cathedral over and over, or, like Mozart, to write yet another sonata in the key of C major. As you do, you’re refining and perfecting what you want to say. The variations will give the scholars of your work something to delight them for centuries to come.

So go ahead and be repetitive. Be redundant. Be unoriginal and risk saying something that everyone else has already figured out. The world needs it anyway. And maybe, when we see it through your eyes, it will be new after all.