Why I'm Not A Plagiarist

I like poems. I was thinking about this casually and apropos of nothing earlier today, and then it occurred to me that I had the perfect topic for a blog post, since a blog is the natural repository of one's most useless and irrelevant thoughts. However the phrase "I like poems" might in isolation acquire some depth, some meaning, which would be unfortunate. I needed some padding. A line of Whitman's I had internalized came to mind, about animals being "so placid and self-contained". This is true of poems as well, that's why I like poems, they don't argue with me. They enter gracefully from nowhere, stand around for a minute or two, and then retreat obligingly into that comfortably furnished noplace of theirs. Just like a blog post. So far, so good.

But I couldn't stop there, could I? The Whitman poem had provided one valuable insight, surely there were more? Perhaps Whitman could write my blog post for me. So cool, to have a guest blogger who was a famous poet. So original, to have one who was dead. So paradoxical, to have one who was immortal...

I found another line from the same poem that served. I fiddled with it a little bit, but not enough that I could pass it off as a line of my own. Now for the others... But there was nothing. The context was all wrong - the human animal sweats and whines and kneels, but it is absurd to conceive of a poem doing so. I couldn't incorporate the rest of the lines into my post without distorting them beyond recognition. I was at my wit's end (or rather, at Whitman's wit's end).

So, a failed plagiarist. That's original, perhaps? At any rate I had learned something. You can't just wake up one summer morning and resolve to plagiarize. It requires a fortuitous concatenation of circumstances, together with critical discrimination (to be able to tell when someone else's work is better than yours) and a natural-born talent for deceit on the part of the plagiarizer. I'm just too lazy; I'm going to limit myself to borrowing words from the dictionary.

Apology

I like poems. They are so placid and self-contained. They make me lie awake in the dark and weep for my sins.

The Animal Kingdom

The Animal Kingdom occupies a most momentous place in Natural History. It is where beasts are born, into a hierarchy. It is where the mind sups, on the lower order of things.

The forest's leafy-green, as it always was, and the sky supercilious. To grow from one to the other takes time, it takes oblivion. The ones that are born can't do it. They are flesh, or they are leaves of grass. They tear. They wrestle. They sleep. Births. Subtractions... There is horror, there is blank comedy.

Is there order, rough quiet, in the Kingdom at night? Our souls are our homes, and thoughts are thieves; it is what it is; why animals have no souls

Conscientious

1. The lawyer who quotes Kafka
2. The thief who leaves his wallet at the scene of the crime
3. The libertarian who doesn't pay his taxes
4. The dog that barks
5. The sun; the sky that's never clouded over...

Point and Line

The point of this is to occasion writing.