Wednesday, May 6, 2015

What's My Line?


     





        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. 

 

No comments:

Post a Comment