But Is It Canon?

I've had so much desire to create something of late, but I've been keeping myself so busy with this, that and of course the ever-present other that it's been difficult to even let an idea coalesce into a clotted seedling. There's primordial thought floating around, but ideas need time to find purchase. And then I think, how much art there must be that goes unrealized just to keep civilization strung together in the day-to-day. Seeing as humans haven't changed all that much, I imagine some overworked serf with beautiful thoughts that turned to dust with his bones.

But in the grand scheme of things, we wouldn't have the ability to create at all, if all we did was create.

"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."

A friend of mine asked me why I wrote, and I answered something along the lines of this. I want an abandoned copy of my book to be found at someone's yard sale, and for someone to read it and be happy for reading it. That's it. I don't care particularly when this happens, I just want to shout down the 4th dimension and have it echo somewhere along the line.

Art is a reflection of its time, though, and man, we're going to look silly thousands of years from now. All of the art that speaks to the struggles of humanity and nature will be studied by our descendants, and the thought that will keep crossing in their quantum-computer logic processors that replaced their soft, badly wired brain will be "did these poor folks really think this way? It can't be."

Sci-fi writers and futurists (sci-fi writers who don't write) have been contemplating what the future will think of us since time immemorial. This isn't a new concept. Our ideas, however they're presented, require a certain amount of interpretation that only having lived that particular life can truly realize the meaning of. You put forth an idea that as important to you, and eventually, when you go, your reality will undergo a retcon.

Our particular point of view is not canon.

This isn't to say that art isn't worth creating, unless, of course, your concern is only of getting your message across with crystalline clarity. Going back to the yard sale, where a dog-eared copy of a book of mine is discovered by someone who's never come across my name before, they could walk away happy having read it - but their reasons for being happy could be entirely different than I had intended in the writing. I think I'm OK with that.