I wonder about the limits of being yourself. They say you have to play by the rules before you can break them. But they also say that just being yourself is the key to success. How much of myself is really me? Not much, I think. Unless, of course, all that we mean by “being yourself” is that you just stood there and let it all happen to you. Well, then everyone would be themselves by default. There’s no way to escape it. From whence does one’s self surge up? I am vaguely remembering Sartre’s essay on existentialism. How can the seed of yourself fall on anything but fertile soil? But then who put the soil down and who pulled you out of their seed bag and dropped you there? And these questions go on ad infinitum. So there is really only one true individual, and they are either the chicken or the egg. But we’re not talking about just any old chicken here. We’re talking about the Chicken with a capital ‘C.’ Or the egg with all the Alpha and Omega-3s you could ever ask for.

But I’m losing my head. Back to being yourself. Let’s depart from the true philosophy of the matter just for a moment and talk in practical terms. I think we can agree there are some actions that can be taken or decisions that can be made by an individual which seem to be willed or otherwise brought about by their own individual selves. In other words, we would not say of said actions or decisions that they were a result of the individual just following the rules or doing what everyone else is doing. In some way or another, an individual is capable of really doing something on their own. Now, I don’t think this claim really holds weight philosophically, especially for determinists, but let’s just hold it as an assumption for now.

Maybe it is an aesthetic argument. Because what I really want to convey is the sense of beauty that I get when I see someone who appears to be beating their own path. And I don’t think we get very many of these. Because the default is to walk the trail already traveled. Before you can even think for yourself, you’re already on that trail. And, if we’re subscribing to determinism, then the inclination to step off the trail might also be determined, which is why this is not an ethical argument. It is not good or bad to be on the trodden trail. But, oh, the aesthetics of the young girl in the dress running off into the tall grass and away from everyone else—oh, I want to chase that girl! I want to finally catch her in a glade and ask her all the questions that the travelers on the trodden trail could not answer for me. Why did you run? Where are you going? What have you found so far? Will you go back? Why? Or why not?

But how beautiful will her answers be? And herein lies the heart of the matter. Because it is beautiful to watch her run away—this much, I can understand. But how alien will she become? And how quickly? See, this is what I mean by the limits of being yourself. Because on the trodden trail, we can all understand each other. We have had relatively similar experiences, we speak the same language, we know the same people—we hold things in common; most importantly, in this context, our methods of communication. This is important for the aesthetic argument because how can something be beautiful if I cannot understand it? Now, don’t rebut too fast. I am not talking about complete understanding. A little bit of the unknown can be tantalizing. But this is different. I am talking here about not even a beginning of understanding. Something so alien that you can do nothing but stand there and gawk. Maybe there is some awe in the gawking. But if there is awe, then there must be some starting foothold into which your understanding has stepped. Otherwise, it is only hollow-minded gawking as your mind tries but fails to fit the experience into an existing neural pathway that isn’t there. This is the limit of being yourself that I speak of. It is the ultimate outer limit, so we now have a scale. The minimum of being yourself is the cookie-cutter human on the trodden trail. The maximum of being yourself is the girl that runs off into the forest who turns out to be a totally non-human alien.

Now, what does this mean for an artist? I think it comes down to appetite for the risk of being an alien. How far out are you willing to venture in order to find something new?