Copying ideas, art, trades and skills is not a like for like recreation of the original, no matter how good the forger. We are not a mould that produces the same pieces again and again. When we try and recreate something we are inevitably creating our own understanding of that object or concept. Everything passess through our own filters and is changed, even when we don't intend it to.
Even if we try to reproduce something of our own that we have made before, it will never be precisely the same thing. It will have been changed by the faults in our memory of the original.
Change becomes inevitable in a flawed system.
But we can turn that change into a strength. It gives us variety and originality, even when we do not intend it. Each object increases in value before it is unique, even when it wasn't intended to be. Everything we create and every idea we have is not a mere copy of something that has come before, but a sign of our own creative mind in action.
Life is a remix, even when we thought it was going to be a duplicate.
And if we can study these changes, there is a chance we might arrive at a better understanding of ourselves. If we can compare two things that were intended to be as identical as possible (we need a new word for things that are meant to be identical but are unique) and we can understand exactly what has changed between them, then we can identify how our minds have interpreted that object.
Is the sky in your painting more blue than the original?
Is that how you see the world? Do you see things more as their ideal than their reality?
Does your understanding of #Marxism include issues of #race?
Is #race a lens through which you understand the world now? When did that start?
Understanding how my own ideas change is a core part of Resurfacing notes in the . I hope to encounter this view again in the future, although there is a question around How much should you revise notes when they are resurfaced?