Friday, May 14, 2010

theft

this is from a blog i read today

I...remain prone to ill-thought-out sentences and disguised clichés, clichés buried under baroque cruft. Every comma, every pause, every dash: if I think long enough I can recall the novel I’m lifting it from...

I feel like this is the recurring theme of every person who writes (because i can't call myself a writer, just like how i don't think i can ever call myself a philosopher, they are settled in too lofty a place for me). The first memory that popped into my head was about a year ago when I hated every word on my own blog, but the second is rooted in a time long ago, when I wrote an essay and promptly confessed to my mom that, like I had stolen a five dollar bill from the kitchen counter, my opening line was "lifted" straight out of my textbook. (*i love how this blogger uses the word "lift" here, an ordinary term that usually gives off nothing at all, except a faint neutrality like some unscented fabreze, except, wrapped in these surrounding words, reminds me of shoplifting, a theft of some sort. Clothed in its new context, it reeks of the discreetly sinful)

When my mother heard my confession she assured me there was absolutely nothing wrong with what I did. How are you going to build a house, she said, when you don't allow yourself to pick up the bricks? That logic sounded desperately like a justification to me, and still leaves me dissatisfied now. Every time I read something original I am filled with wonder and a slight envy for the writer, it is what i (a person who writes) crave most of all.

I have spent all my years searching for those pieces, and when I've found them I tucked them away somewhere in a corner of my own creations, artfully arranged to highlight its sparkle, but not so polished that its stolen status becomes too blatant. And so, i get to display what i love most of all, originality, in its blinding, borrowed glory.

**

No comments: