Are they? News to me. Is it really? said my mind.
No; perhaps not. But the expression is. I'd not heard it voiced like this before, quite flippantly as if it was a well-established fact. Perhaps it was, or became so, and I'd somehow missed it.
Actually, the missing bit is less surprising. Bubbles in my world – living in one – are not a new phenomenon. Often I'm not really listening to the radio if it's on, until a few words like those above break me out of a philosopher's reverie and put me into another.
But does a thief know he or she is a thief? They may not.
There are only so many ideas in the world, I forget how many, and instead lots of variations on, especially when we're as far along in history as we are. Nothing is really new, just a new take on it. And so it's inevitable a similar storyline, the same sequence of notes will occur. In my book that doesn't make a thief, unless it can be proven, and then it's a homage to isn't it? Although if the latter the artist thief should have long ago acknowledged it and have got in first, before a story of their stealing could be made.
Ideas thought to be original can bear traces of the past, a past unknown, a past unresearched. The idea thought to be your own turns out not to be. But should you then acknowledge something that isn't true? No, because it seemed to come to you, from nowhere, from somewhere, but not from there.
The original can also be had at the same time by different people. Two people work on a similar book and race each other to the finish line. Thief! One will say, it was my idea. They battle it out, use the same sources (and possibly ask those same sources to withhold information from the other), and then wait to see what the critics say, who they declare the better. Critics always weigh; there will always be a winner. And that winner may not be the reader's choice. Both books may throw different light on the same subject, may actually complement each other, but still there will be an outright winner, if not won by review then won in sales.
Another:
The bones of a story are contested. Was it mine? Or was it yours? Both deny all knowledge of the other. So who is the thief and liar? And how should it (if one is indeed a thief) be determined? Seeds are sown. Some promotional material might have semi-consciously been taken in, in a publication it is known one regularly looks at, wherein the bones were contained. These bones, it is supposed, sank into the thief's conscience. The story they began sometime after therefore a lie, for it would not have occurred (the other claims) without this influence. The thief's story then is also theirs. And the similarities don't have to be strong for a case to be made. Doubt casts doubt and advertises doubt and promotes the need for an investigation, though it will, where it occurs, not conclude to the satisfaction of both concerned. One will lose and one will win, and there the matter will rest. Except it won't because it will from time to time be brought up, be remembered even after the writers themselves have gone to writer heaven.
Such a lot of fuss. When the assumed thief was likely innocent. When they had no knowledge of taking anything, especially not from anybody they confessed to know or to have read. And so instead their unconsciousness is accused of theft. Can you be a thief without knowledge, any knowledge of your crime?
Perhaps you can if you've grown so accustomed to your thieving nature that you don't recognise when theft is being committed. If it's become all part of the process, the writing process. What you read you think on, what you hear and what you see in the course of the day you also think on. Who can say how any of it influences? Will the artist always know when it does? To tell apart which the theft and which the art?
The declared artist thief might see it instead as weaving; weaving from or into another's story their own story. As more of a tribute than an act to be punished.
Picture credit: Portrait of a man writing in his study, 1885, Gustave Caillebotte (source:WikiArt)
Written June 2020.
