Diego Aguilar: Bio and response

Bio:

                Hi, my name is Diego Aguilar. I’m a junior studying English with a minor in Psychology because the mind is a cool thing too (is it even a “thing”, so to speak?) I’m from Silver Spring, Maryland, a small suburb in the DC Metro area whose sole claim to fame is the Discovery Channel headquarters. It’s an enormous office building that takes up a whole block, and during shark week they hang balloon shark limbs and a head on the sides of it.

Psychology got tedious for me when I realized how indifferent of a science it is, so unintrigued by their own data, not like the sciences that consider themselves an art. I always was naturally drawn to reading and writing, so after a great time in Creative Writing classes, I declared that track in the major. I’ve always been interested in stories people tell about their lives, and how their style conveys their unique personality. Also, fiction that bends the rules of reality has always appealed to me, so I’m always nose-deep in Borges or George Saunders. My biggest challenge with my own writing is sticking to a project and seeing it through to the end, not for lack of trying but just frequent distractions.

Are there any original stories?

                I think there are always new stories out there if you look hard enough. It’s trivial to point out that everyone has a different life, and no one speaks exactly the same language, so even though stories may deal with common concepts and themes, there are always new perspectives to bring to the table. My favorite narrative experiments are those that come from unusual perspectives, such as aliens or gay Nazis on the Hindenberg (that story exists, I’m not making that up). Just because something is made of recycled conceptual “building blocks” doesn’t mean it’s not a new design. If there were no thematic common ground in literature, all stories would be incomprehensible to any audience. Some cynics may say there’s no new stories, but I think they’re confusing stories with themes (and even then I’m inclined to disagree), tropes, social scripts, etc. We think stories don’t change because our cultural ideas about reading never change. I mean, could we ever read the Odyssey as an oral poem, as it was originally intended?  A story will always change somehow if someone else reads it.

                “Original” used to mean “faithful to the origin” in the Middle Ages, i.e. how close it was to religious texts. Now it means “faithful to the author’s own unique ideas”—what will it mean next? Whatever criteria is put forward for art, whatever anyone says it’s supposed to be this or that, it will always be something else as well. Wittgenstein gives the example of the duckrabbit, a drawing that can be seen as a duck if primed to do so, or as a rabbit. Even if there were a single story in the world written on one piece of paper, there would still be an infinite amount of new stories, because there would always be new readers. I’m not suggesting extreme relativism, but I could never endorse the idea that there is no change and difference in any texts. If what we take “new” to mean is “in some way different to its predecessors” then almost any story qualifies as a new one.