When you break down the English language mathematically, it looks a little something like this: Idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and about eight punctuation marks. I stole that from Vonnegut. After all, genius steals. We all know that. It is a line that has been appropriated and contorted, remodeled by painters and writers alike. It is a line of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Some argue Picasso was its creator. Still others note that Oscar Wilde penned the most popular version: Good writers borrow. Great writers steal.
Wilde has a knack for quotable phrases. See: The Importance of Being Earnest. “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy.” Gee.
Still, the point of the previous quote was never plagiarism. It was never about stealing words, usurping ideas. It was never meant to be the totem argument for piracy.
It was about creating. Creating something better, something wiser, something, perhaps, more adapted to specific surroundings; more inspired, less insipid.
The earliest version was a little more developed. It was T.S. Eliot, in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, who wrote, “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” He then went on to say that, “The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn…from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.”
But far away in space and time means something different today than it did in the 1920s. We have access to “far away in space and time” at our very fingertips.
When you break down the internet mathematically it is millions of line of code, algorithms, hardware flags, tags and meta-tags, modifiers and reference points, and bits and bytes, all too numerous to count by hand, and none too nourishing for the soul. I didn’t steal that from anyone, because I couldn’t find one comprehensive description of just what the Internet is, or at least one that felt a complete, full picture.
And while technology brings us closer, connecting us across continents and even beyond that which can be seen with our naked eye, we seem a tad befuddled as to the proper direction, because in so many other regards, we are isolated and separated; texting is the new phone call (you’ve heard this a million times), email is the new letter, we do our banking, file our taxes, pay our bills, write our grandmothers, all with keys that quarantine our human interactions. I don’t like that feeling – another cog in the online machine.
The screen doesn’t bring us closer, doesn’t make the words more accessible, it takes us figuratively speaking, farther away, down lone highway stretches, encasing words in plastic, as though they never belonged to us in the first place. It makes them that much easier to pilfer. Guttenberg is surely tossing in his grave.
It is too easy to lift passages, to cut and paste ideas. People, their thoughts and opinions are too accessible. The Internet lacks a breathian moment, the moment in a book, where the pages breathe, the texture and the experience bounce.
In the beginning was the word, but then man made the internet, the internet made blogs, and they multiplied, the masses formed a unilateral blob of opinion and snarky commentary, and they stole, constantly, with unabashed aptitude, from each other.
I’m not against all forms of practical advancement, but I’ve been at odds lately with the World Wide Web. It’s been more of a hindrance than helpmate, and I feel tempted to take opinions and mold them as my own.
I was pondering this all when I attended a lecture the other night at LACMA.
Six writers were asked to bring a book, one book that inspired their current work. Some brought two. One artist brought a book she had made, which was slightly annoying, a tad self-involved. But one artist, brought a book of poetry, the title of which I didn’t jot down, by Joseph Mosconi, a linguist based in Los Angeles. The book is a mash up of military and trucker slang, stolen from blog commentary and websites devoted to said topics. Mosconi pairs and collapses phrases:
“The day the eagle shits. Follow the stripe home.”
“Bag of dicks. Cup of mind.”
All stolen. From chatrooms and comment sections. From bloggers and truckers alike. From the whole realm of the manufactured experience of the Internet.
And it appeared, for a brief moment, to be a melding of the two mediums. Stolen nonetheless from the very vehicle that drives us away from the literary, but this time, it drove me closer. Mosconi’s genius had stolen and made, for all intents and purposes of my thought process, something better.
It was about creating. Creating something better, something wiser, something, perhaps, more adapted to specific surroundings; more inspired, less insipid.
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