Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland
“Imitation
is the sincerest form of flattery” it is said, and a background in literature
has taught me that in earlier periods writers often borrowed from one another
without compunction or complaint.
But
I was shaken, early in my activist writing career, to discover another writer
had “borrowed” something I had written for her Methodist curriculum. She put
her name as the author because she had “adapted” it. I had felt similarly
offended when I noticed Cat Stephens failed to acknowledge on an album that “Morning
Has Broken” is an old hymn that he “adapted.”
About
the same time, someone told me that a mutual friend had used one of my stories
as his sermon. She thought I’d be thrilled, but no, he hadn’t credited it to
me, claiming to have “found” it, a rhetorical device to add to the piece’s
mystery. What concerned me at the time was that his large high-steepled
not-yet-welcoming church might have become more welcoming if they knew it had
come from a gay Christian.
Reading
a book decades later, I discovered a sentence I knew to be mine, and then
another and another, and checked the footnotes at the end of the book to find the
author finally attributed a quote from the same article to me in the chapter
that followed. When I shared my dismay with another writer, I was advised not to
take it too seriously, as it was probably “just poor scholarship.” I never
brought it up when I later worked with the author, but ironically heard his own
complaint of another writer borrowing liberally from him!
I’ve
mentioned on this blog my own failure of attribution when I wrote somewhere,
“We know God through our bodies or we don’t know God at all.” I had no idea the
quote originated with body theologian James B. Nelson because I had not yet read
any of Nelson’s work or heard him speak! When I happened on the sentence in one
of his early books, I was chagrined, to say the least.
All
these examples came to mind when I read two chapters on memory in Oliver Sacks’s
last book, The River of Consciousness.
He concludes, “Memory arises not only from experience but from the intercourse
of many minds.”
He
cites one of his own memoirs as an example, in which we recounts an experience
at his family’s London home during World War II. After publication, a brother
explained to him that he and Oliver were away at school when the event
happened. Another brother had written to them about the incident, but
apparently with such great emotion and detail that Oliver had incorporated it
into this own memory bank.
Even
more memorably, Sacks describes the “plagiarism” controversy surrounding the
beloved public figure Helen Keller, just 12 years of age, when a story she
wrote paralleled another written by Margaret Canby. Keller did not remember
Canby’s story, but realized she was more prone to think a story hers if, in Sacks’
words, it “had been ‘read’ to her, using finger spelling onto her hand.” To
Canby’s credit, she defended Keller, writing, “What a wonderfully active and
retentive mind that gifted child must have!”
All
of this prompts me to compare our collective Christian memory, one that began
with the first encounters of Jesus all the way to us “latter day saints.” As we
follow the church calendar, reliving Jesus’ life from his advent to his
elevation, following him in baptism and Communion and ministry, his story
becomes our own, much as Helen Keller’s tactile reception of Canby’s story.
On
a television program promoting my first book, Uncommon Calling, an evangelical pastor countered my “revisionism”
of the Christian story, as I read biblical stories in the light of contemporary
experience. I explained that was the task of every generation, to make sense of
Jesus and our faith for the present times. (Though I did not say this, even his
fundamentalism was a 19th century example of this.) Revisionism, I
said, was quite traditional!
No
less for progressive Christians, who are making sense of Jesus and our faith in
a world that has a grander and more accurate perspective of the cosmos, thanks
largely to science and Christianity’s intercourse with other faith traditions.
Citing
Freud, Sacks explains, “remembering…was essentially a dynamic, transforming,
reorganizing process throughout the course of life. …Memories are continually worked over and
revised and…their essence, indeed, is
recategorization.”
And
so with collective Christian memory in the course of the church’s life. To
repeat, “Memory arises not only from experience but from the intercourse of
many minds.”
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Rex Burruss tried to comment: I agreed with your post, stating that this even carries through to my daily life. I find that I use expressions or clever turns of phrases initially stated by friends, but seldom think to reference them in casual conversation.
ReplyDeleteImagine the footnotes I’d have to add for each idea from our collective knowledge or experience!
Great article!
Absolutely! Coleridge was known for his memory and his wide reading, and scholars have footnoted where he got many of his ideas and lines, everywhere from books to periodicals.
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