The comment that's attributed to lots of different people - I knew at as coming from T.S. Eliot - about good artists borrowing and great artists stealing is on my mind. I basically confirm the quotation with a big-assed footnote that explains that there's ways to steal artistically and there's ways to steal like a hack. Bob Dylan stole creatively; Tom Waits steals artistically; even Garth Brooks and Bruce Springsteen steal appropriately.
I have stolen more than I have created. If I hang out with a person who has a particular rhetoric or catch phrase, I end up adopting it. All my friends that hung out in our early 20's somehow kept saying the word "word" to mean about 17 things. We were all smart people - I promise. And when I read writers I tend to end up taking on their rhythm - their metabolism (this proves a point), and then I realize it and want to stop but can't - I'm infected. I once wrote about 120 pages of a novel when I was 21-22 that was so much of a David Foster Wallace rip-off that I am no longer sure where it resides, and I usually keep even my bad work. I'd prefer to never see it again. I also wrote like Samuel Beckett for about six months and Noam Chomsky for at least a year. (The only academic piece I have published is written in a sort of straight-forward Chomsky-like prose that I'm basically ashamed of it and thought it would forever disappear into the ether until a student of mine, completely unprompted, actually found it and quoted me back to me in a paper - and in the best possible way - he was jabbing me in the ribs with it.)
I remember the first time I heard Richard Dawkins' idea that ideas are meme's - little replicating segments of DNA that spread throughout the culture - an evolutionary contagion, and being wonderfully intrigued. Yes, yes. If we are an adaptive species, if we are a movable feast (I have no idea what Hemingway meant by this - I'm reappropriating) the dichotomy between culture and nature collapse. Ideas and language are no different than a dog learning that getting in the truck makes his life better or a cat learning that rubbing against my leg and looking endearing means I will feed you until you're fat. So to say this in a way that probably supports the real problem of dichotomies more than I'd like: it is "natural" for humans to form "cultures."
So what is the point - well I don't know exactly - but I was playing guitar tonight at a pizza place called Mellow Mushroom in Wake Forest and realized like I do many nights that I have learned how to play from other players - however, my style is my own - I sound like me - but to sound like me I had to first sound like lots of other people.
We are not subjects, existing as individuals in our mind. We are a networked, multiplicity that exists as a being that is centering without a center (that is a clunker - but I can't think of a better way to say it). We have no point of absolute authenticity; however, we are always capable of "being ourselves" or "being frauds." This simple fact that everyone notices means that we have something, some sort of magnetism that keeps us glued together, recognizable as a whole. However this whole is made of lots of parts that are appropriated or reappropriated or just plain stolen. This is why any musician that says I don't want lessons because I'll lose the authentic "me" is usually wrong. But it's also why it makes a shit-ton of sense to not read your favorite writer while you are trying to write.
Here's a simple way to put this - Eric Clapton's covers of Little Wing and Knockin on Heaven's Door are not particularly good - he does attempt to make them his own, but he doesn't make them into anything interesting - particularly with his version of Little Wing on the otherwise immaculate Derek and Dominos album. However, Stevie Ray Vaughn covers the same song - Little Wing - and in many ways does more literal copying; however, Stevie in copying makes that piece his own in a way only a good player could do.
There are whole genres built on this idea - jazz, blues, and bluegrass - copying isn't seen as a weakness - it's seen as a chance to take something that exists and make it your own - which is what we're all doing, all the time, anyways. I think .
(two quick footnotes: Richard Dawkins is a hack as a philosopher and a theologian. I got to meet his assistant once when I was at this conference and she would not let me have his number - I believe because she knew, clearly, that I would immediately defeat him with my brilliant phenomenological critique of his work and force him back into zoology. And 2) We are all engines of energy, taking in and giving out - there is a rather crude way that I sometimes envision us - as really complicated poop machines. I don't recommend this exactly - but it's true. Our bodies are always in the process of taking in and putting out; however, this sort of reduction is exactly the problem Dawkins and others make; the trick isn't to reduce to the LCD, the trick is to understand the proliferatations, much like teaching someone from Mars the internet - you wouldn't say "It's 1's and 0's" hopefully. What you would do is to try to make them understand that the internet is the between-space between pages - it IS the connectivity. And so are we.
Okay 3 footnotes: Most of the crap we deal with in terms of "self" has to do with the fact that we still see ourselves as Romantics - those British poets that maybe we never read - Wordsworth and Coleridge, Keats and Shelley - or the American version with people like Emerson. The self was always seen as coming from this thing called THE MIND or THE IMAGINATION. I agree with Heidegger that the term "self" is too problematic to really take seriously - he used "Da-Sein" meaning "there-being," specifically we are always "there" in the muck, not above the muck like that Enlightenment people wished. Heidegger's coinage is actually perfect in this context because he reappropriated it from Kant. Kant, who is Mr. Enlightenment and maybe the greatest of the classic PHILOSOPHERS used the same term to basically mean "thing." So yes, even if we must keep the terms, let's say we have a mind and an imagination, certainly those words all make sense to us - we know what we are talking about and more importantly we are talking about something - those facets of our being are always reactionary. We are always responding to the world as much as we are also in the process of adding to and creating it.
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