There's an ad running about the
airwaves offering a device or an app that would allow you to discover that
you've plagiarized before your professor does. This strikes me as just another
bit of unnecessary, cyber- nonsense, as it would seem almost as unlikely that
you'd forget you'd plagiarized as that you'd forget whether or not you'd
actually been shot down in a helicopter over Tikrit or taken fire over
Sarajevo. Indeed, some among our current crop of leaders and role-models seem
to have forgotten whether they'd ever lifted someone else's words, served in
the military, or even whether or not their family had emigrated calmly to the
United States in advance of Batista's fall or fled Castro's Cuba in an
overcrowded, open boat. Why people under public scrutiny continue to imagine
these indiscretions will go undiscovered, particularly in the age of the
microchip, is a mystery.
On the other hand, I'm quite sure I was a
serial plagiarizer in High School and yet have absolutely no recollection of
doing so. Faced with having to write a paper on “Siddhartha” or “The Rainbow”
- let alone actually reading such dreary
tomes in the first place - I'm sure I would have opted for an easy out.
With so many other more interesting and less taxing options available for a
sunny afternoon, I don't doubt that a few forays into the library's dustier,
less traveled stacks may have produced just the right bit of purloined prose to
flesh out an otherwise worthless treatise on Christ-figures in Anglo-European
literature. After all, once I'd rummaged through my tattered bag of Wherefores, Therefores, Howevers and
Notwithstandings, there would still be pages to fill with something a bit
pithier than what I might have been able to glean from a Classics Comic. In the
pre-PC era, of course, plagiary actually took time and effort and I doubt it
ever occurred to me that I might have properly fulfilled an assignment in the
hours or days it took to wing it. Over time the lies we tell ourselves and
others acquire a ring of truth and fade into the fog of memory to the point
where we may not be quite sure if they were real truths, slightly embellished,
or made entirely of whole cloth. So, if I can't recall a specific incident of
plagiarism on my part, I'm sure I'd know it if I saw it and instantly remember
the event as the hot flush of mortified chagrin crept up my neck.
Just the other day, my old friend Nick sent
me a copy of a poem he'd shared with me once some forty years ago. Written by
the occasional poet Cord Meyer, the verse is titled “Beauty” and begins:
“Beauty she wears carelessly like a bright gown, lent for the night by some
indulgent guest...” I've never forgotten this line; or, rather, I've never
forgotten what I'd always remembered as this line. Reading it just once, I've
imagined it as: “ Beauty she wore like a gown, left behind by some indulgent
dinner guest...”. Setting aside the fact that my version makes absolutely
no sense, that this snippet has been rattling about my brain for nearly half a
century, kicking and screaming for release without once convincing me to drag
it out, breath in some life and parade it about as my own must say something
about the boundaries I've set for myself. All the self-indulgent love-letters
and odes to the unrequited I've written across those decades could only have
been improved by such a lovely spot of doggerel. And yet I stifled the urge to
tread on what I, at least, had always known to be another's legacy. Not that I
haven't been tempted, just as I'd been tempted by the obscure love poems of
Kenneth Patchen or Sullivan Ballou's immortal letter to Sarah on the eve of
Bull Run.
There's little question that anything I
might have written upon Cord Meyer's “faulty” foundation would have been
entirely my own. Almost. And if I'd taken the plunge years ago and composed
atop the line some tender verse in a futile effort to win that unrequited
heart, I know it would have surfaced last week as an e-mail attachment or
social-media post.
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