Credit
At a recent sporting event, I saw a young man wearing a tee-shirt that said, “Sometimes you need your ego.” I guessed that it was a familiar expression to those in the know, but I had never seen it said out loud, so to speak. My immediate response was that it was a vivid and original statement, and certainly true—along with an uneasy suspicion. Was it a rebellion against the social pressure to suppress yourself in service of the concord of the whole? Or a cheap shot at looney-tune mindfulness? The yoga mat version of anti-environmental bumper stickers like “Environmentalism is Recycled Communism” or “Try wiping with a pine cone.”
In my golden years ego begins to seem rather clownish, but I doubt I would be thinking such a thing without the ego-fueled experiences of my youth and middle age.
So I don’t have a problem with ego, I’m just glad to see it moving to the back seat. The insistence on individuality, and the illusion of potency that comes with it, have given way to a grateful sense of participating in a mysterious cosmic drama without self-reference or judgment. You could call it mindfulness: experiencing this extraordinary spectacle without thinking about “me.” Also gratitude for the love that prevails in our cutthroat, lucre-driven world.
I was an imposter for many years in academia. I was devoted to my students, and colleagues, and not much else. We had to teach our charges “critical thinking,” and its embodiment in “research writing.” “Critical thinking” turned out to be a chimera, code for “thinking what you want to believe,” and “research writing” a labor all parties involved hated that resulted in something nobody read. What is this obsession, I used to wonder, with the proprietorship of mundane thoughts and phrases? I used to fantasize a world in which credit didn’t matter—not just because then I wouldn’t have to teach the banal art of neurotic attribution, and warn of the deadly sin of plagiarism, but because who cares who said what?
You read an article. Do you really need to know it was written by Hortense Carmichael? Yes, I realize it matters to Hortense in her career, but who outside of a small, rarefied set of people is going to know or remember that name? What if we just absorbed the ideas in the article, good and bad, and it was enough to know that somebody added them to the river of culture without needing to be recognized for it, and it all belongs to the human story?
Purely a fantasy, I admit. Like John Lennon admitting that the only way to get a world without countries or religion or war—non-tribal human culture—is to imagine it. It’s contrary to human nature. We do fight over recognition, we do judge, we do rate, we do compare. Who’s number one? Who’s in the Top Ten? The Top Five? Who is best in the world? Who invented this, who thought of that? Who dares to be different from me? And honestly it’s hard to imagine the human experience without all of that. It’s elemental. Unlike ants or bees, who don’t seem to have a concept of individuality at all, only of the whole, we prize our egos.
If you come up with something really good, you want credit for it. Knowing full well it really doesn’t matter worth a damn.
I say all this to explain the current post. Years ago, in the throes of academe, I scribbled some notes about a world without any concept of taking credit—you know, “recycled communism”—but never wrote it; that is, until recent events led me to write this one.
Once, in a section of a story, I tried my hand at a Faulkner parody—which I thought was pretty funny—and I gave the story to a writer friend to read. “Stick with your own voice, John,” I remember him writing. “You’re trying to sound like Faulkner and it’s not working.” My God, what do you say to that?
I retasted the sensation after a friend whose judgment I hold in the highest regard responded to my most recent post with the word “plagiarism.” In the post I had made a reference to something seeming so out of place in Scripture it challenged complacent piety, with the phrase “like a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.” I was shocked at my friend’s reaction, but after a few minutes’ thought realized that though she was wrong about the plagiarism, she was right about how it might be perceived. A reader unfamiliar with that phrase might well assume I thought it up. Or worse, later discover I didn’t and think I stole it and tried to pass if off as my own.
Let me be clear: to me this is one of the most famous similes in 20th century American literature—Raymond Chandler in Farewell, My Lovely. My use of it was not theft but allusion. I do it all the time. In the same post I used the sentence “The rest is silence.” In the post before that I used the phrase “No one to polish the feasting cup.” I like the secret communion with the reader, who feels both the comparison and the tribute—to Hamlet in the first, to the beautiful “Lament of the Last Survivor” in Beowulf in the second.
Maybe I’m assuming too much.
Sometimes I feel so lonesome I could cry. And if I have to say something like “as country and western singer/songwriter Hank Williams famously crooned,” I’ll just skip it.
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.
September 17, 2022