thinking.
I don't understand writing. It's not that I can't read or symbolism is too tricky, it's that I can't piece together how that part of our brains came to be. Not all creativity, because that's fairly easy to explain. Art, whether it be painting/photography/animation/etc. is derived from what we see. Especially with photos. Music comes from what we hear. We piece together our senses and we create something from those, so it's not difficult to figure out its evolution. However writing is different. You can say it comes from your thoughts, and your emotions, but how do people come up with the flow? How do poets think to make birds symbolize freedom and lions majesty? We don't see these things, there are no doves constantly being released and the lion king (although a quality movie) wasn't real. The jungle doesn't possess a "king," there is no monarchy in the wild. And even when it isn't poetry, even when it's simple fact, no one thinks like that. I have never met a single soul who spoke the way they wrote. The repeating of sentences, the extended vocabulary it's never heard, only seen. And when it's seen it's because someone put it there. None of it occurs naturally, people make it. So how did we get so far? Have we even gotten that far, or if you handed a monkey a pen would he scribble in a language he could understand using words he'd never speak out loud? who knows. The point is it's different. I'm not saying it's bad, I love to write, and I know a handful of people (mflk, mtk, tmu, lad, cu, eis, sew, dam) who are phenomenal at writing, who have taken the unexplainable creativity of forming words on paper and screens and made it into something magnificent, creative or fact. Perhaps writing would match voices if people spoke in paragraphs, but they usually don't. And when they do it isn't pretty, it's not ugly, it's just average. Those who try to speak as if they were in writing sound pretentious and everyone would rather hear it in plain text. So why would we write any differently? What part of the natural selection of our common ancestors brought us to this conclusion? That by conversation we are plain and ordinary, not always in context but in style (face it. speeches were written first.) and yet, by written word, we are elegant, emotional and all together creative. Who knows. Maybe Darwin already figured this one out.