Book Review: Heart of the Original, by Steve Aylett
A stream-of-consciousness diatribe of literary bullets spraying in all directions.
Unbound, 2015, 133 pages
True creativity, the making of a thing which has not been in the world previously, is originality by definition. But while many claim to crave originality, they feel an obscure revulsion when confronted with it. The really new is uncomfortable and disturbing. Repetition of the familiar is preferred. The hailing of old ideas as original lowers the standard for invention and robs most creative people of the drive to do anything interesting, let alone seek out the universe of originality which is waiting, drumming its fingers, wondering why nobody calls.
This is a book for all those who care not for the fashionable simulacra of the media creative, but for an understanding of the hard road to true originality. Part manual, part history of ideas, part manifesto - this a unique experimental journey around the outer limits of our culture. It debunks myths, contradicts familiar shiboleths and wages war on cliché and platitude as it has never been waged before.
A rallying cry and disruptive book for those bored with merely thinking outside the box.
In the Bon tradition a tulpa is an object created through sheer focused thought. Buddhists call it a nirmita and Lewis Carroll called it a phlizz. The compressing of ideas into books for subsequent release can generate a small-particle tulpa swarm or egregore if done correctly. You’d expect the most boring phenomenon to therefore be the least probable, but it turns out this is the only one anyone bothers with. Its lowest form is the golem or academic, someone locomoted by others’ words on their brow and incapable of creating anything from scratch. Diplomas cover the walls like custard pies and a billion ideas fail to conceive. True creativity is a soliton wave, perpetual unless obstructed. It’s reasonable that the Prayer of Jabez boils down to an encoded plea for god to simply leave him alone.
I've never read Steve Aylett and my experience with "books about writing" by writers I haven't read has been very hit or miss. Sometimes I come away thinking I have to read more by this person (thank you, Jane Smiley) and sometimes I come away thinking I never want to read anything else by this person (fuck you, Francine Prose).
I am undecided about Steve Aylett.
Heart of the Original is a manifesto, a screed, an elevator-drop ride through genre fiction, alternately trashing and praising everything from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to H.P. Lovecraft. It begins with a series of bold statements about "originality" (namely, that most people don't want it and even fewer have it).
Before the satirist Bierce threw his phone into the furnace he talked about ‘our resolutely stalled evolution’. A great one for affable scorn, he was admired to within an inch of his life. Like Twain, he had noticed that giving the same argument while wearing different trousers gave the illusion of varied insight. Those who claim that there are no more first times refuse to state when the last-ever ‘first time’ occurred. When did it all end? Others hold up old ideas in new clobber and claim originality. Anything to avoid creating the real thing. Combined with the historic policy of ignoring the first instance of any particular idea until it has spread enough to be restated generally, these approaches minimise the uncomfortable notion that an idea can originate from an individual. It’s less disturbing to have a spider climb into your mouth than to have one climb out.
True creativity, the making of a thing which has not been in the world previously, is originality by definition. It increases the options, not merely the products. But while many claim to crave originality, they feel an obscure revulsion when confronted with it. They have no receptor point to plug it into. Attempts to force it result in the sort of fire that burned Tesla’s wonder-lab to the ground. Repetition of familiar forms is preferred. The hailing of old notions as original lowers the standard for invention and robs most creative people of the drive to do anything interesting, let alone seek out the universe of originality which is waiting, drumming its fingers and wondering why nobody calls.
Raw thought is more available to those not stuck to the temporal floor. Thousands of ‘what if the Nazis won WW2’ stories are hailed as innovative despite the first appearing in 1937. In the mid-thirties Katharine Burdekin knew the allies would win the upcoming war but wrote a thought-experiment about the alternative, Swastika Night, published the year Ayn Rand was busy plagiarizing Zamyatin’s We. Randolph Bourne was one of the few journalists to suggest the First World War might not be such a bright idea and annoyed everyone by calling it ‘the First World War’. It was supposed to be called the Great War or the War to End All Wars. Bourne was ignored because his opinion disturbed the narrative and because he was disabled. Another such figure was Simone Weil, the sort of goofy genius who’d fire all minds at a posh dinner and end up tucking the tablecloth into her pants and dragging everything to the floor.
This book is packed with these sorts of observations, this sort of prose, streaming from chapter to chapter at such volume that it took me a while to grasp Aylett's thesis. For starters, it is the (unoriginal) observation that almost every work of fiction is copying something else. So what, then, is originality? This Aylett never precisely defines (is it something that can be precisely defined?) but he seems to be making an effort to demonstrate it. Sometimes I wondered what drugs he takes while writing.
Real creativity is a ferocity of consciousness. It can be as small as the firestarter spark produced by those two words that have never been next to each other before or as stomach-rolling as translating yourself sideways into adjacent dimensions, a nearly-simple rotation of the soul which leaves you radiant with scorn and the precocious levels of seemingly casual opting-out only previously achievable on a framework of pumped, high-tensile resentment. You may even live a life with repercussions.
Paragraph after paragraph like this resembles something both brilliant and original, but also wears on the reader. Does his fiction look like this? I'm curious to find out.
Aylett, like many critical and cynical writers, has an expansive knowledge of literary and genre history, and when he's not ranting creatively about creativity, he's name-checking one work after another, from the obscure to the pop.
But those who fear originality - or fear the results if they try for it - flop on the chicken-bone pillow of the tried, deciding that the best we can do is refine the design. As far as I know, no profits from The Hunger Games went to Koushun Takami, or from Inception to Yasutaka Tsutsui. Will Banksy pay a fee to Arofish? These sloppy Trelawneys save the body and leave the heart, the mischief and moral centre that powered it. Without such a centre, satire can work for a little while like a squid valve, propelled by what it casts behind, but without direction. If Mark Leyner’s candy assortments were put at the service of something, he would have wrong-footed readers rather than allow them to get his zany number with no surprises.
In American Psycho, Ellis pretended to say what everyone knew already about consumer society, but when trying to embed what he really meant he found he didn’t know whether to shoot a cake or kiss an ostrich. He gave up, leaving only the decoy, a husk which met with great success and was taken as a standard template for the modern novel. To believe it went otherwise is to accept that he was a conscious fraud. Perhaps if a book is entirely empty we shouldn’t feel bad about filling it.
There can be wheel-spinning fun in taking the style of a previous work and outstripping its content. The first rule of Fight Club - you do not talk about The Day Philosophy Dies. Carlton Mellick III collected a tissue sample from the body-horror portion of Burroughs’ schtick and grew it into a gutty and glistening career, atop which his own chin projected like a keep. Kafka was painstakingly checking that every single word he wrote was turned in the same direction long before he took Little Dorrit’s Circumlocution Office and made it his own. His inevitability machines sometimes filled him with a fiendish glee and when he read his work aloud to friends he was often helpless with laughter. It takes stamina to make a book with one flavour all the way across like a ceramic brick wall.
I was left with a considerable list of works I am interesting in checking out, and a curiosity about Aylett's own "slipstream" fiction, but I don't think Heart of the Original is meant to "inspire" writers so much as make them think, like a double-tap to the noggin. This book was intriguing enough that I bookmarked many passages, yet I didn't exactly enjoy it, as I felt, as I often do in more "experimental" works, that I was being subjected to the author's writing kinks. But it's something kind of out there and different from your run-of-the-mill authorial musings.
Storytellers tend to neuter trickster figures for longer works. Wu Cheng ’en tied Monkey to a boring priest for his Journey to the West, fearing that the adventures of Monkey unbound would lack a structure people would recognise. The super-conservative Marvel movies rewrote Loki as a villain so clueless his greatest achievement was to make the Hulk seem interesting. A life or text in which every link is spelled out will be expunged of mischief, leaving no task to the mind. We are left with countless accounts of reactive remnants and records of mitigation, shrivelled from the get-go. It’s such an effort for ear-breathers to get their heads around trickster behaviour that they lazily short-hand it as zany and hyper, and thus in accord with a world of scared extroverts. But the real thing is the least hysterical in the room.
The relatively reasonable Greek statesman Solon let himself down by making it a crime to publicly express political neutrality and also a crime to publicly speak ill of the living or dead, in the great tradition of combinatory laws that do not allow people to quite exist.
Verne’s editor rejected the book, saying nobody would believe that fax machines could ever exist or waiters could ever be so rude. By the time the manuscript was rediscovered in 1989, reality had surpassed Verne’s vision and the average capital city was a 24/7 apocalypse unsuited to sentient life.
My complete list of book reviews.
Unbound, 2015, 133 pages
True creativity, the making of a thing which has not been in the world previously, is originality by definition. But while many claim to crave originality, they feel an obscure revulsion when confronted with it. The really new is uncomfortable and disturbing. Repetition of the familiar is preferred. The hailing of old ideas as original lowers the standard for invention and robs most creative people of the drive to do anything interesting, let alone seek out the universe of originality which is waiting, drumming its fingers, wondering why nobody calls.
This is a book for all those who care not for the fashionable simulacra of the media creative, but for an understanding of the hard road to true originality. Part manual, part history of ideas, part manifesto - this a unique experimental journey around the outer limits of our culture. It debunks myths, contradicts familiar shiboleths and wages war on cliché and platitude as it has never been waged before.
A rallying cry and disruptive book for those bored with merely thinking outside the box.
In the Bon tradition a tulpa is an object created through sheer focused thought. Buddhists call it a nirmita and Lewis Carroll called it a phlizz. The compressing of ideas into books for subsequent release can generate a small-particle tulpa swarm or egregore if done correctly. You’d expect the most boring phenomenon to therefore be the least probable, but it turns out this is the only one anyone bothers with. Its lowest form is the golem or academic, someone locomoted by others’ words on their brow and incapable of creating anything from scratch. Diplomas cover the walls like custard pies and a billion ideas fail to conceive. True creativity is a soliton wave, perpetual unless obstructed. It’s reasonable that the Prayer of Jabez boils down to an encoded plea for god to simply leave him alone.
I've never read Steve Aylett and my experience with "books about writing" by writers I haven't read has been very hit or miss. Sometimes I come away thinking I have to read more by this person (thank you, Jane Smiley) and sometimes I come away thinking I never want to read anything else by this person (fuck you, Francine Prose).
I am undecided about Steve Aylett.
Heart of the Original is a manifesto, a screed, an elevator-drop ride through genre fiction, alternately trashing and praising everything from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to H.P. Lovecraft. It begins with a series of bold statements about "originality" (namely, that most people don't want it and even fewer have it).
Before the satirist Bierce threw his phone into the furnace he talked about ‘our resolutely stalled evolution’. A great one for affable scorn, he was admired to within an inch of his life. Like Twain, he had noticed that giving the same argument while wearing different trousers gave the illusion of varied insight. Those who claim that there are no more first times refuse to state when the last-ever ‘first time’ occurred. When did it all end? Others hold up old ideas in new clobber and claim originality. Anything to avoid creating the real thing. Combined with the historic policy of ignoring the first instance of any particular idea until it has spread enough to be restated generally, these approaches minimise the uncomfortable notion that an idea can originate from an individual. It’s less disturbing to have a spider climb into your mouth than to have one climb out.
True creativity, the making of a thing which has not been in the world previously, is originality by definition. It increases the options, not merely the products. But while many claim to crave originality, they feel an obscure revulsion when confronted with it. They have no receptor point to plug it into. Attempts to force it result in the sort of fire that burned Tesla’s wonder-lab to the ground. Repetition of familiar forms is preferred. The hailing of old notions as original lowers the standard for invention and robs most creative people of the drive to do anything interesting, let alone seek out the universe of originality which is waiting, drumming its fingers and wondering why nobody calls.
Raw thought is more available to those not stuck to the temporal floor. Thousands of ‘what if the Nazis won WW2’ stories are hailed as innovative despite the first appearing in 1937. In the mid-thirties Katharine Burdekin knew the allies would win the upcoming war but wrote a thought-experiment about the alternative, Swastika Night, published the year Ayn Rand was busy plagiarizing Zamyatin’s We. Randolph Bourne was one of the few journalists to suggest the First World War might not be such a bright idea and annoyed everyone by calling it ‘the First World War’. It was supposed to be called the Great War or the War to End All Wars. Bourne was ignored because his opinion disturbed the narrative and because he was disabled. Another such figure was Simone Weil, the sort of goofy genius who’d fire all minds at a posh dinner and end up tucking the tablecloth into her pants and dragging everything to the floor.
This book is packed with these sorts of observations, this sort of prose, streaming from chapter to chapter at such volume that it took me a while to grasp Aylett's thesis. For starters, it is the (unoriginal) observation that almost every work of fiction is copying something else. So what, then, is originality? This Aylett never precisely defines (is it something that can be precisely defined?) but he seems to be making an effort to demonstrate it. Sometimes I wondered what drugs he takes while writing.
Real creativity is a ferocity of consciousness. It can be as small as the firestarter spark produced by those two words that have never been next to each other before or as stomach-rolling as translating yourself sideways into adjacent dimensions, a nearly-simple rotation of the soul which leaves you radiant with scorn and the precocious levels of seemingly casual opting-out only previously achievable on a framework of pumped, high-tensile resentment. You may even live a life with repercussions.
Paragraph after paragraph like this resembles something both brilliant and original, but also wears on the reader. Does his fiction look like this? I'm curious to find out.
Aylett, like many critical and cynical writers, has an expansive knowledge of literary and genre history, and when he's not ranting creatively about creativity, he's name-checking one work after another, from the obscure to the pop.
But those who fear originality - or fear the results if they try for it - flop on the chicken-bone pillow of the tried, deciding that the best we can do is refine the design. As far as I know, no profits from The Hunger Games went to Koushun Takami, or from Inception to Yasutaka Tsutsui. Will Banksy pay a fee to Arofish? These sloppy Trelawneys save the body and leave the heart, the mischief and moral centre that powered it. Without such a centre, satire can work for a little while like a squid valve, propelled by what it casts behind, but without direction. If Mark Leyner’s candy assortments were put at the service of something, he would have wrong-footed readers rather than allow them to get his zany number with no surprises.
In American Psycho, Ellis pretended to say what everyone knew already about consumer society, but when trying to embed what he really meant he found he didn’t know whether to shoot a cake or kiss an ostrich. He gave up, leaving only the decoy, a husk which met with great success and was taken as a standard template for the modern novel. To believe it went otherwise is to accept that he was a conscious fraud. Perhaps if a book is entirely empty we shouldn’t feel bad about filling it.
There can be wheel-spinning fun in taking the style of a previous work and outstripping its content. The first rule of Fight Club - you do not talk about The Day Philosophy Dies. Carlton Mellick III collected a tissue sample from the body-horror portion of Burroughs’ schtick and grew it into a gutty and glistening career, atop which his own chin projected like a keep. Kafka was painstakingly checking that every single word he wrote was turned in the same direction long before he took Little Dorrit’s Circumlocution Office and made it his own. His inevitability machines sometimes filled him with a fiendish glee and when he read his work aloud to friends he was often helpless with laughter. It takes stamina to make a book with one flavour all the way across like a ceramic brick wall.
I was left with a considerable list of works I am interesting in checking out, and a curiosity about Aylett's own "slipstream" fiction, but I don't think Heart of the Original is meant to "inspire" writers so much as make them think, like a double-tap to the noggin. This book was intriguing enough that I bookmarked many passages, yet I didn't exactly enjoy it, as I felt, as I often do in more "experimental" works, that I was being subjected to the author's writing kinks. But it's something kind of out there and different from your run-of-the-mill authorial musings.
Storytellers tend to neuter trickster figures for longer works. Wu Cheng ’en tied Monkey to a boring priest for his Journey to the West, fearing that the adventures of Monkey unbound would lack a structure people would recognise. The super-conservative Marvel movies rewrote Loki as a villain so clueless his greatest achievement was to make the Hulk seem interesting. A life or text in which every link is spelled out will be expunged of mischief, leaving no task to the mind. We are left with countless accounts of reactive remnants and records of mitigation, shrivelled from the get-go. It’s such an effort for ear-breathers to get their heads around trickster behaviour that they lazily short-hand it as zany and hyper, and thus in accord with a world of scared extroverts. But the real thing is the least hysterical in the room.
The relatively reasonable Greek statesman Solon let himself down by making it a crime to publicly express political neutrality and also a crime to publicly speak ill of the living or dead, in the great tradition of combinatory laws that do not allow people to quite exist.
Verne’s editor rejected the book, saying nobody would believe that fax machines could ever exist or waiters could ever be so rude. By the time the manuscript was rediscovered in 1989, reality had surpassed Verne’s vision and the average capital city was a 24/7 apocalypse unsuited to sentient life.
My complete list of book reviews.