The vision that occasions originality appears to glimpse undiscovered countries.

In reality, it is crystal-balling the province Memory.

Memories that recall every particular but that they are memories.

There’s no such thing as an entirely new thought.

Merely a repackaging of existing thoughts.

Theme and variation as revelation.

Unique as a bookcase of unnovel novels.

Inspiration is a thrifty re-gifter.

No sooner has it received and unwrapped, than it’s looking to pass the parcel.

Novelty is a conjoining of previously unrelated memories.

Memories that may themselves be memories of memories.

All the way back to a memory of an experience.

The associated perception, sensation, intellection.

What isn’t perception, sensation, intellection is a recollection of the thoughts of others.

Perception is the product of senses facing out, into the world.

Inspiration relies upon a comparable modality.

But its senses face in.

Perceive memories as if they are objects in the world.

Some of these memories were imperfectly laid down.

A consequence of faulty perception.

Tired eyes, wax-plugged ears, blocked nose, frozen fingers, burnt tongue.

Perfect recall of these memories impresses as novelty.

A memory may seem as vital as a perception of the phenomenal world.

Perception conveys the impression it is accessing the noumenal world.

Things-in-themselves.

But it is reporting on the phenomenal world only.

Similarly, inspiration triggers the sensation that it is retrieving new things.

Anything but memories.

A QUOTATION OF ATTRIBUTION

This blog was waylaid by concerns over conventions.

Not least the handling of allusions.

Whether to incorporate them at all.

Quote them in full with attributions.

Without name-dropping.

Or fold their sense – rather than sentences – into a suspicion.

And trust you to recognise the associations.

Each option flashed a second edge.

How long would it take to cleanse a sentence of all associations?

A single word even?

Would it be possible to newspeak away all allusion without doing away with language?

Avoiding attribution would withdraw from the fray war-rooms of four-star generals.

While quoting and naming risked meriting the charge show–off.

But to incorporate attitudes without attribution invites an accusation of obscurantism.

Worse: purloining.

PLAGIARIST PANIC

For the creative, there can be no charge viler than plagiarist.

For this reason, long ago, I tested my epiphanies.

Made every attempt to unmask them as commonplaces.

Prove that a thought I’d hoped I’d originated had been anticipated by others.

It was a dispiriting practise.

If I looked long enough, everything seemed similar.

Far enough, everything became familiar.

I turned away from this, and there it was over there.

Again, and it was everywhere.

Is this a surprise?

We’re all sucking on the same teet.

No wonder post-structuralists, all the way back to the pre-Socratics, argue that thought is a product of the society in which it emerges.

So, I gave up the habit.

Chose to regard concordance positively.

As proof I was on the right track.

On a track at least.

This set me up for a downgoing.

MOTHER NIETZSCHE

You’re a plagiarist!

The mirror charged me with this after I stopped working on the first article for this blog.

A dozen drafts in, it seemed not entirely ridiculous.

So, I surrendered it to the austerest editor:

The clock.

My mistake?

Noting how often Nietzsche recurred in the roughs of my articles, I wondered how long it had been since I’d read him entire.

I’d revisited most of his works over the years.

All except the early funny ones.

Why?

Like Wagner’s pre-Dutchman operas, they lacked humability.

Before Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche hadn’t become what he was.

More Montaigne in miniature.

Schopenhauer’s shadow.

Earliest Nietzsche obeys the latter’s proscription against art in philosophy.

Swallows Orwell’s prescription for transparent language.

Nietzsche?

Yes.

The maximal metaphorist advocated that then.

In any case, it was time I went through all of his works, in the order of publication.

Reread, The Birth of Tragedy remained a puff for balloons he would later pop.

Untimely Meditations?

Memory dismissed it as what he regarded as the lowest form of lit: journalism.

This persisted with the first essay.

David Strauss: Confessor And Writer was a hack attack bitter as Schopenhauer’s on Hegel.

Mauler accused maulee of perpetrating crimes he would go on to perpetrate himself.

I was relieved to turn the last third of a page.

On the Uses and Disadvantages of…

History?

I’d forgotten Nietzsche had mapped terrain I’d just trampled.

What was his conclusion?

If you’d strapped a finial to my head in a lightning storm, I’d have been unable to tell you.

Anything, in fact, beyond the admission that – yes – once, I read this essay.

How long ago?

Thirty years.

It had to be.

NIETZSCHE OR NURTURE

I turned the page.

Sentence.

Paragraph.

My gut tingled.

Anticipation?

Probably the sauerkraut from last night.

No – I had that the night before.

Didn’t I?

I continued.

Cloud.

Single words stood out.

Antiquarian.

Idolatry.

Stop!

No – I had to persevere.

Justice.

Science.

Fairy tale –

The bastard was doing it on purpose now.

I clapped my belly.

Went on.

Reading through fingers.

Eyelashes.

Until –

You gotta be fucking kidding!

‘Is everything all right?’

All the key points were here.

My key points.

And not just them.

The allusions too.

‘Richard?!’

Why was my wife calling out.

You gotta be fucking kidding!

Did I say that out loud?

I must have done.

A line from one of her favourite films.

Which character said it?

I couldn’t remember.

But I knew he’d exclaimed it after he’d seen a colleague’s head disengage from its body, sprout legs, and scuttle away.

What I’d just read seemed no less remarkable, awful.

I returned to the essay.

The phrase that schlocked:

This once was.

The day before I’d written:

Project: once upon a time this wasn’t.

‘Richard?!’

I jumped up.

Dashed out.

Down.

Into the lounge.

‘It’s here,’ I said. ‘All of it.’

She frowned.

I spilled.

The lot, in a single suffocating screed.

She took a breath.

Talked me down from what I was alleging.

Tried to.

Said it was inevitable that people writing about the same subject would draw on similar sources.

I shook my head.

‘Cloud!’ I said. ‘That’s the final nail in the – The nail at the tip of the accusing finger – The one pointing the way to the coffin.’

She frowned.

‘That despair will carry me off in.’

Concern creased her face.

I turned.

Strode into the dining room.

Snatched my article up, off the table.

Returned.

Flicked pages.

Read:

‘More meteorologists of myth will be needed to backcast the digital data weathering The Cloud.’

My wife scoffed.

‘He didn’t mean that.’

How did she know?

‘He couldn’t have. It wouldn’t be invented for – what? – a hundred and fifty years.’

True.

So, if anything, it was proof of coincidence, not concordance.

But I determined not to be pacified.

‘No,’ I said. ‘A cloud isn’t the same as The Cloud -’

The irony:

A and the re. an essay arguing a distinction must be drawn between history and a history.

‘But why did he have to use that word? My word? Out of every other one in the language? Another language?’

My wife blinked.

‘Maybe the notes your article was based on were quotations?’

I regarded her homicidally.

Must have done by the way her whites widened.

I closed my eyes.

Everything read, viewed, listened to over the past forty years –

I’d have to revisit it all to disprove her charge.

The wasps’ nest in my belly broke open.

‘No!’

Rejection came before its justification.

I opened my eyes.

‘I gave up putting other people’s words to paper years ago.’

Why?

She didn’t ask.

So, I didn’t tell her.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘is your conclusion the same?’

Conclusion?

No.

Nietzsche had already started across the bridge to the Übermensch.

So, his upshot wasn’t mine.

The opposite, in fact.

But would a reader notice that?

‘Richard?’

I shrugged, shook my head.

She smiled.

‘Does it matter?’

Does it -?

‘People say the same things other people do all the time. The same things they’ve said themselves.’

Does it matter?

How could she ask that of someone who doesn’t believe anything matters?

Doesn’t believe in anything?

‘I’m sure it’s not as bad as you think.’

Sure?

How could she be?

I wasn’t.

‘Tell you what, why don’t you read it again?’

Who, Nietzsche or Me-tzsche?

She nodded.

At the book?

I turned.

Crossed to the staircase.

Climbed.

I was sure of one thing:

I couldn’t have cribbed Nietzsche’s essay – a word of it – from a notepad.

Why?

There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.

These are the only lines I’d ever jotted down I thought worth the wrist action.

There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.

Succinct, elegant, inspiring – This possessed everything anyone could want of a maxim.

So, after I came across it in an old school exercise book, I’d held it close, a guiltless secret.

There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.

If all else failed, when it did, I’d still have that.

Proof that I had some talent.

One day I’d deploy it to establish as much.

There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.

Not only was it perfect in structure, but in thought, feeling.

There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.

For a year, two, it was my new, clear option.

To be dropped only after all else failed.

There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.

Then I heard someone on the radio say it.

The sentiment?

The same words.

Exactly.

How did he get hold of my exercise book?

The pest attributed it to Camus.

But I couldn’t find it in any of his published works.

Did that matter?

There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.

It remained concise, comely, aspirational.

But was no longer original.

Rather, it was, but I was no longer its originator.

The fortune in my misfortune was that I’d discovered this before I’d passed it off as my own.

So, the experience had served a purpose.

Warned me off committing quotations to paper, with or without attribution.

Compelled me – even in conversation – to precede every allusion with a name.

NIETZSCHE OR NATURE

I dashed into the box room.

Closed the door.

Sat.

Reread the reread.

Convinced that my guilty verdict would be upheld.

No – It wasn’t as bad as feared.

Many of my words remained, yes.

But – as Eric Morecambe might have said – not necessarily in the right order.

My order.

Would it have mattered if they had been?

If it had read like dictation?

I’m that fella in the bit from Woody Allen’s stand-up days.

The friend who persisted in writing novels that had already been written.

Great Expectations was one, if memory serves.

I’m a nobody too.

So, if I’d spent my life writing what had been written, nothing would have been lost.

And I’d have given everyone a laugh at least.

NURTURE VERSUS NIETZSCHE

Going over the essay again, I noticed something else:

Nietzsche incriminated himself as much as me.

In the forward, he let slip that Goethe wrote that when we cultivate our virtues, we also cultivate our faults.

This was kissing cousin to what Nietzsche would later originate as:

Did you ever say yes to a pleasure? Oh my friends, then you also said yes to all pain.

He also fessed-up to Pythagoras being the coiner of eternal recurrence.

And the notion of history being a primer for great men, wasn’t that filched off Montaigne?

I’d check –

No – I didn’t dare open another Pandora’s box of Doctor Caligari.

Despair was replaced with a new feeling, warming rather than scorching:

Schadenfreude.

Why was I pleased?

For the same reason I enjoy hearing about the derring-don’ts of serial-killers and tyrants:

Immediately after, my misdemeanours shallow into shadow.

But if Nietzsche didn’t care whether he cribbed off others, why should I?

DIDJA’ EVER GET ONE OF THEM DAYS WHEN YOU SHOULD A-STAYED IN BED?

Biblical exegesis suggests that if you survey any largish body of text you’ll discover what you want to find in it.

Why not what you don’t want to find too?

The case for my swiping no longer seemed prosecutable.

Admitted, as a prepubescent cinephile, I could reel-off the names of producers – executive producers – on films I hadn’t seen.

These days, though, I couldn’t ID principal characters in TV shows I watched every week.

But, somehow, I’d recollected an essay I’d read thirty years or more ago in its entirety?

And, like a man to double business bound, I stand in pause where I shall first begin –

No!

I couldn’t recall my wife’s telephone numbers (work, mobile), agreed.

But I still had words, words, words from Hamlet I’d learned at seventeen.

And had discovered, the month before, after youtube cued it, that I had the lyrics to an Elvis song I didn’t know I knew.

When was the last time I’d seen GI Blues?

The summer after Private Presley passed.

When the BBC showed all his films.

Forty years ago?

Didja’ Ever isn’t listed on any of the albums I’ve listened to over the ensuing period.

So, perfect long-term recall isn’t impossible, even for me.

Albeit of a three minute song, and the greatest soliloquies in the language.

So, it might be nil points for originality, top marks for memory still.

This was quite a three pipe problem.

Shame I didn’t smoke.

NATURE VERSUS NIETZSCHE

How likely is it that an essay I’d read once had been committed to memory in its entirety?

If very, what does that suggest?

That everything read, seen, heard is about my brain.

That memory is stronger than inspiration.

Memory is inspiration.

Brainstorms nothing more than surges of unattributable recall.

Exhibiting both good and bad memory simultaneously.

Recalling every feature of a memory, except that it is only a memory.

If so, there’s no hope for originality.

Or avoidance of the plagiarism plague.

PLAGIARISM PROPER IMPROPER

No.

Plagiarism consists in lifting material from one or more identifiable sources, verbatim, consciously, and passing it off as your own.

Does anyone do that any more?

Even before Robocop got on the case, the perpetrator risked being yossarianed in a catch.

The work’s natural audience would spot the derivation immediately, and seize pitchforks and firebrands as quickly.

The only ones who wouldn’t recognise the original would be those who hadn’t already succumbed to it.

How likely was it that they’d welcome your version, then?

If they were inspired by it, they’d read wider, and discover its source for themselves.

So, what would be gained by the exercise?

Reprehensible, plagiarism was also untenable.

Wasn’t it?

IMPERSONATION – AN IMPRESSION

Some poet or other (Yeats?) said that we spend the first part of our career trying to be like someone else, and the rest of our lives trying not to be like them.

Or something like that.

No – Auden, I think it was Auden.

Anyway, many begin a career by impersonating a hero.

Fortunately, no one is that good an impressionist.

So, the attempt fails.

And what emerges appears original.

Jim Morrison began his career by emulating Elvis.

Failing in this, he sounded exactly like Jim Morrison.

So much for conscious plagiarism.

What about its unconscious counterpart?

UNAVOIDABLE PLAGIARISM

It’s said that there are only four basic plots.

Or seven.

Fourteen?

Whatever, perhaps there are a limited number of casts of mind too.

How else to account for the extraordinary similarities between myths, legends, religions and philosophies arising on different continents?

If this is true, unconscious plagiarism is defensible.

Inevitable.

Unavoidable.

ZEITGEISTBUSTERS

Often, incidents of plagiarism proper reveal themselves to be unconscious, properly.

A result of similar memories fusing in dissimilar minds.

How is this possible?

Discovery of the theory of infinitesimal calculus is suggestive of something.

That both Newton and Leibniz swiped from a third-party:

The seventeenth century.

PREVENIENT PLAGIARISM

Reading Montaigne for the first time, I was struck by nothing so much as familiarity.

Why did he convince instantly?

Because he stole much of what he wrote from me.

Though he died 372 years before I was born.

I don’t have his breadth of learning.

Conversance with Latin.

(Then, who else since antiquity has had this perennial second language as a first.)

Nonetheless, our respect for the ancients is on par.

The belief that everything knowable was known to them.

It’s no coincidence that we share the impressions of our favourite authors.

Discover our thoughts made out in their hands.

We benefit from the same perceptual inheritance.

A heritage that invites – insists on – continual representation.

THE VIRTUES OF UNCONSCIOUS PLAGIARISM

Russell claimed that Plato was implicit in Pythagoras.

Nietzsche in Heraclitus.

Does it matter?

Maybe it’s constructive to refurbish constructions others started.

Cultivate known ground rather than break new.

Why?

Often, the prevenient plagiarist didn’t go far enough.

Had Schopenhauer read the Bhagavad-Gita before embarking on his own re-presentation, he mightn’t have bothered.

This would have deprived the world of inflections not spelled out in Sanskrit.

If Nietzsche had applied his autobiographical deconstruction of others to himself, he might have concluded that his philosophy was a mash-up of Montaigne, Schopenhauer, and Dostoevsky, coupled with a Lutheran will to turn over the apple-cart, and 86’d it.

Composers rarely fret over the paternity of what non-musicians regard as the mother lode of their works:

Melodies, tunes, ditties.

They swaddle changelings in their own shawls with impunity.

Both Mendelssohn and Wagner quoted the six notes of the Dresden amen verbatim.

That accounts for seconds in first-rank works that run to thirty minutes and four hours respectively.

Are the remaining minutes fuller articulations – acorn to oak tree – of these half a dozen notes?

I’m not qualified to say.

But it’s evident that lifting seemed of no greater concern to them than the painter who notices another fleshing-out a nude.

It’s how they work things up that matters.

How many other memories they fold in.

Of more concern is a dread that articulations have been lost to culture because creators feared being labelled unoriginal?

REPEAT AFTER ME

Recognition of similarities in thought wards off fragile talents.

Don’t bother, it taunts.

That’s been said, done.

Alloyed in this is knowledge of ignorance.

The suspicion that, if we knew more, we’d discover that what we thought had already been thunk.

Fortunately, most seem unfazed by this.

And audiences notice similarities rarely.

Don’t care to have them pointed out to them.

So most get away with pilfering, conscious or unconscious.

Perhaps this is only fair.

History purloins from us all the time.

CLAIMS DEPARTMENT

Who owns the rights to an epiphany?

Legally, the one who set it down first, by virtue of chronology.

So, you’ll have to remember something else if unfortunate enough to feel as another felt.

And, surely, this is the only way to settle scores.

Snuff-out plagiarism proper.

But sometimes this method of establishing provenance seems no sturdier than the flag an explorer plants on a summit thousands had scaled previously.

CAN UNCONSCIOUS PLAGIARISM EVER BE PROVEN?

If originality consists in lifting from numerous, often untraceable sources, misquoting, unconsciously, can a charge of plagiarism ever be served?

Should it be?

After all, perhaps the unconscious plagiarist is guilty of nothing but possession of a good memory.

And belief in a work’s originality indicative of nothing so much as bad memory.

Rather, memory of every detail but that epiphany was merely memory.

Several memories.

Only seeming untwins because conjoined for the first time.

Every DNA sequence is unique.

But the exact product of the genetic material that went into the mix.

Even mutation can be accounted for precisely.

Only maintains mystery as long as its cause remains undiagnosed.

COMPLEX OEDIPUS SIMPLEX

Determine not to commit conscious plagiarism, and you’ll commit it unconsciously.

Go all out to plagiarise – conventionally, consciously – and you’ll discover you’re an Omar Little.

A stick-up artist who steals from other stick-up artists.

From other mother-father victims who share your perceptual DNA.

Should we despair of this?

No.

It’s what inspiration amounts to.

Proof there is no X factor.

Meaning: unattributable feature.

Novelty can provide receipts.

Show stamps in its passport.

A MOTIVEFUL CRIME – THE MOTIVE

If we do resort to conscious rip-off, what inspired our choice of victim?

Why rob this and not that?

The intention was to impress, yes, but we might have copied thousands of other works.

What made us choose this piece in particular?

Realisation that we believed it already.

That it defends a claim we’d already staked.

How else to account for the fact that of all the ideas ingested of a day only a limited number stick?

Or allow themselves to become unstuck later?

They must be pre-approved.

Already have credit with you.

Or you already credit them.

So, we steal what we already own.

It’s never a case of random robbery.

More cat-burglary.

The targetted larceny of jewels we own but others cut.

I’ve just remembered, an infamous philologist scribbled something similar.

Claimed we hallelujah only those sentiments we already believe in.

Should I quote it verbatim?

If I do, dare I mention his name?