Chimera Song Mosaic
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Like this sentence I plucked from one Julyish entry: "It seems that my expectations were so habitual and so entrenched that I did not replace them with reality."
Wouldn't you guess Wittgenstein's Mistress? What a thief I am! Or perhaps I'm just flattering myself. Still, I'm interested in my attempts to catalogue the very scraps of life. I do believe that everything has it's place, but I don't have several lifetimes such work requires.
Even if I get my "life" straight, say I organize and document everything I have in my New York Apartment (not in New York), just these 20 or so boxes and I file them away, won't I just have to do it all over again when I start my new life in Qatar? And why must my life be determined by location? What is all this stuff, and why can't I spend meticulous time with it? I have given so many things away, hopefully households of things, but I still have boxes and boxes and boxes of heavy documents. I love any flat surface with something written on it.
Did I write that sentence or not? I saw one of my English papers from highschool like two years ago, and on it my teacher had written in red: "Either you have committed plagiarism here, or you have missed your calling as a writer." I don't remember being offended when I read that. It was a paper on Truman Capote's short stories. Now that I know all the ins and outs of proper research and documentation, I wonder, did I plagiarize? I don't think so because I remember really loving writing the paper and taking over and not letting my research partner help me with it, but I scoffed the tedious steps to proper documentation such as the notecards. Also the fact that I kept the paper this long suggests I was proud of it and proud of her comments. What if I wrote just as well back then as I do now? What if nothing has changed, other than my ability to navigate research and recognize an either/or fallacy? But anyway it made me smile, thinking, "Mrs. Noshari, I am a writer."
