There are only so many ways to tell stories. We all are born, come of age, die. In between, we struggle with love, loss, alienation and belonging, morality and immorality, good and evil. Depending on your English department’s particular 100-level Intro to (modern, English, German, Hispanic, popular, ethnic) Lit, you’ll learn the universal themes: three, seven, twelve, maybe even 40 of them.
What new can be said? Nothing. All writing – songwriting, poetry, love letters, shopping lists – involves the work of people who have come before. We take an idea already plumbed, and plumb it again. And again. We hear strains from one song and it inspires another; we read one author and are intrigued to tell another story, our story, the story alive in our minds whose origins we no longer know, but it came. It feels like ours. But it isn’t solely ours.
We are thieves.
We shamelessly steal – ideas, art, concepts, technology, spouses, lipstick, candy bars, groceries that have rung up incorrectly on the scanner, parking spots, innocence, authorship, bragging rights, wallets and passwords, fruit from a neighbor’s tree, places in line; we switch price tags, pass post-dated coupons, tuck a new book between two others, underreport our child’s age to pay the lower price, send food back with a dubious complaint after eating most of the dish.
My friend Julie in the 7th grade stole some jewelry from my mother. She was quick about it, sly, never came over after that. We couldn’t prove it, spent nights and nights wondering if the piece was lost. My Mom pulled the dresser away from the wall, looked under the bed, checked in every drawer. Our findings were inconclusive – except for data points tied to identifiable moments of time: the necklace was here, then Julie came, then the necklace was gone. To this day I have no idea if Julie took the necklace. But it is now part of the story. Its retelling verifies several universal truths: that we grow up and grow disillusioned; that false friends will betray; that crimes often go unpunished.
What new can be said? Nothing. And everything. My mother’s necklace has never shown up, as gone as Julie. I long ago outgrew my preteen itch to lift drugstore chewing gum and earrings. I haven’t switched a tag since I paid my own rent. I no longer write college papers using thinly veiled re-writes of others’ ideas, although for years I was sentenced to read them in the work of my students. I refuse to claim my son’s younger than he is so he can eat off the kids’ menu, but am not sure I stand in moral opposition to my parents’ practices or if it’s easy because my son won’t eat chicken tenders or red-sauced noodles.
My thievery is constrained to literature. I read to plunder. Even when I think I’m merely an eager audience, the truth is somewhat less clean. I read with envy. I read with lust and hunger. I geocache for printed treasure: the ideal word pairing, the perfect tone, a turn of the phrase that takes me by surprise and captures something so flawlessly that I swear it must never have been captured before. All these I take, as if they’re mine to take. Even when I leave everything intact, the words have become inseparable with the way I now encounter the world. I finger them in my pocket, their tangible presence proving that I am more and less than the person I believed I was before I spirited them away. I leave behind my narrative trinkets to the ones who carefully follow my line, my words, the arc of my story, perhaps ending up in someone else’s pocket.
Read this one at Hugo House!!! Wonderful!