ANNALS OF PLAGIARY

It came to my attention that a person in the news had voiced a thought at her press conference as if it were hers, when the words that came to her were not her own but mine. Little enough to get exercised over. I reread the sentence (or was it two sentences?) quoted in the not normally sensational Post and it was she being quoted answering a question about the effect of some damn thing in, as she called her work, “my piece,” but her answering words were not hers but mine—my own written and printed words speaking at me. Still mine, though in her thirsting-for-attention mouth (caught curled and half-open in the photo of her) exposed and used by—stolen by—someone already so much in the news as activist, award-winner, artist and woman that I thought of my children, to tell the truth, who might be proud of their father. I had come upon the newspaper interview myself; nobody had phoned to tell me.

Why would they? The words were nothing much in a book small and distinctly technical of a lifelong water engineer, a hydrologist, we say—the one and only book he would ever write.

But the artist-woman quoting my thought as hers and as easily as if the words had come to her out of nowhere—from the wit and wisdom of her gift—kept only me in reserve.

The words? I recognized them at once, even from a book of 176 pages—my thought in the paper next to her picture, as if I were describing her. In my unmentioned work it had been sandwiched between two passages of analysis as a bridge, inspired or subtle, though probably an indulgence. I closed my eyes and saw a picture, and then another, as if the words of my book on the effect of two small dams and a converted tannery upon the gradient flow, solvent power, and erosive meander in a Delaware River tributary to the Water Gap had been absorbed or, yes, dissolved, yet now re-precipitated. So that I must open my eyes and look again at the newspaper column (that was all it was) and the photo of the dark-haired woman, my borrower both frowning and smiling—and my words, “Water is always water—above, below, in flood, trickle, rapid or sea, but the traces we leave in it last like our changing thoughts.” (I had said, “may last.” So to add negligence to offense, the artist had got my words wrong.) The article quoted others in praise of her.

The occasion of her press conference was an “installation” at an out-of-the-way site in the City. Her “piece.” Pieces, I would say, yet a site in itself, as a river I suppose is not itself apart from its banks, it struck me as I entered the place that afternoon where it had been installed both inside an open shed and outside in what was left of a vacant lot of a neighborhood known for abandoned, ragged-brick slums and a turf war among three articulate gangs. The work, though I am largely ignorant of such art, proved to be a flat stage set of at first apparently an antique shop furnished with crossbows and rusted lunch boxes, handbags and old blue willow-design dinner plates reflecting the light but not the observer; and passing on then into a long, battered topographic map of western China evidently the top half but including Tibet, indicating dozens of small, possibly (in dotted lines) projected bridges spanning valleys—the map torn, seismically it seemed, to admit windowed shots of young sweatshirted field-trippers (apparently American) grouped photographing waterfalls, monks, the New York skyline, whatever, or bungee-jumping into lush national chasms to an audio of slowed-way-down retro rock of I was almost certain the Stones folded into a Beethoven orchestral movement, along a loop of what you would call silence between two Asiatic cymbal clashes.

And here was I, some onlooker, while all above and below divided by a horizontal banister glass (when I took hold of it) rather than plastic through which swirled a sluggish aqueous suspension of mud particles, blood fabrics, flesh bytes (it came to me), torn name tags, and such. Yet then above and below this fluid banister rail were arrayed video screens and garish iconographical paintings (maybe otherwise unmarketable) by likely the artist herself but like a common history unsigned so far as one could tell. Mixed media, “found objects” I believe was the form (as if there could be visible objects unfound) which in this assemblage spawned a new use of the term “appropriation,” which had meant to this taxpayer the voting of funds by Congress but now, if I am honest with myself, the importing for personal re-use of almost anybody’s “work.”

How to say what I saw; or witnessed, for the work was an event in motion at best: and through this kinetic flood of, it had been said, information ran also a small theme of an identifiable boy or young man singled out in stills and video. I wanted to ask someone if they saw what I saw. Following me step by step were two companion visitors, a woman and man—I felt their close attention to the art, their silence, their city savvy, their remarkableness, their love, some damn thing—for the neighborhood was coming up somehow and they might do worse than find a home here—and I was on the point of understanding the pictured boy/young man/son, as I took him to be, when, as if viewer-activated, there broke from the somewhat dilapidated screen in front of me garbled or foggy though they were, yet spoken by a woman, those very words of mine that had brought me here.

So in the press conference it had been herself the artist was quoting.

“A lot goes into a thing like this,” I said. The woman (of the couple) shook her head in wonder at the man, her lover: “She’s a regular garbage collector,” she said to him.

Did she mean the artist turned work of others into garbage? I asked abruptly. “The opposite,” said the man speaking for his girlfriend but watching another screen, as from the screen before me my words sounded again.

“She’s a borrower,” I said.

“Then she will give back what she has borrowed,” said another voice, a woman, and I had the sensation of being photographed and that my deep-browed, fine-jawed, clear-lipped, wide-eyed brunette of the newspaper photo was nearby—here perhaps. Also that the boy could be hers—had he come to a bad end? I turned to look, but it wasn’t she. Two women had materialized at my elbow and they turned away. One of them had spoken.

“A wisdom work,” the installation had been called by a landscape architect I remembered my wife speaking of as well-known for his autobiographies—“one of the few truly autonomous imaginations in America,” his phrase for this artist clung to my memory. Yet indebtedness to an event possibly terrible in her life, the violent loss of this person her son, one felt, is hardly autonomy. To say nothing of those wanton appropriations: and so, to find voiced in public in this work before all of us after reading it in the paper this thought of mine targeting the unsuspecting visitor, who will nod, like the couple ahead of me and the two women behind me in recognition, must rub off onto me some grain of worth to make me glad.

I didn’t take it that way.

“She’s borrowed from me,” I said. We were inside the shed now and the young man at the desk caught my eye. “Stolen,” I said. “Who steals my purse steals trash,” he said just as we heard a breath of rain skitter across the corrugated roof.

Had the artist read my humdrum, if substantial, report? Why would she have? The thought that she could give back what she had borrowed I found moving, enraging, puzzling. For, as the young man left his desk and approached me, it came to me that my now-twice-a-minute-here-voiced thought had no business in my technical report standing between a passage measuring incremental increase of meander over a period of thirty years (which used to measure a generation)—half my life—and a preceding passage correlating, however aptly, the dam-effected decrease of my river’s gradient flow and the decrease in the water’s solvency due to silting and corrupt alien visitations. The traces we leave in water may or may not last; but they weren’t thoughts by a long shot, and what had I been thinking of to write such balderdash—or as it might be excused such wisdom in the wrong context?

I imagined my son, if I had had the correct address for him, ridiculing this transition, if he had gotten that far into the book; my older daughter nodding like the people in this site-generated “gallery” while ignoring the passages on either side of my little bridge. And what the devil did I mean saying water was always the same when in fact its chemical makeup had been shown to change at low temperatures not only in the old crystal-clear terms but now to become another kind of water, another substance.

I had seen and heard enough but the young man had apparently addressed me and I was embarrassed not to have paid him the courtesy of hearing him. Like an answer given in the absence of a question and with the eyes of the four other art lovers on me, “It’s just feedback,” I said, using the popular, inaccurate sense of the term. “Exactly,” said the young man, waving “Hi” to some newcomers, one of whom was heard to say, “Wow.”

I was gone. Or thought I was. The only phone number listed for the artist was an uptown dealer. Had I wanted this careless woman to acknowledge me? Persons put in or taken out in one form or another were already included in the piece, with its chaotic collage of feelings, the young, their apparent world, a banister filled with forces.

My children wouldn’t ask.

My children, who were they? A son in a much earlier time zone who would not have seen or looked to see the newspaper interview nor recognized the theft from a modest book he owned because his father had sent it to him. My older daughter, who liked to tell me she knew I was not just an engineer, had read it dutifully, swiftly, and wouldn’t remember the argument.

A week gone, and not a word from anyone about the borrowing. A story somehow shared by the water-encompassing, horizontal banister took shape and with it the installation. Plugged in, I must pay a second visit. Said to be a sensation the work’s clue of the lost son was nowhere mentioned. “Amazed” that I had visited the installation, my citizen daughters left a copy of the catalog in the kitchen. I didn’t touch it. My older teased me with water words she had glanced at in it. She did not know they were mine. I said she would be surprised, and the next morning, with the remark of the young man at the desk in mind and with guilty pride, I appeared at the gate of the lot just as a dark, phlegmatic young woman also in charge here arrived to unlock, to make me wait, turn the piece on, let me in so that I could make a bee line to my screen (noting that one screen had been cracked—vandalized possibly, overnight). There I waited for my “water…traces” to sound again in vain repetition.

When, instead, what should I hear like an audio corresponding to a face I had not seen on that screen I’d swear the day before—my own, my own brief face!—but new words, as I sensed the young man of yesterday approaching. For the screen whose image of (I thought) me had fleetingly given way to the boy of yesterday and a river in flood speaking more words I would have sworn were mine, to the effect that as an act of health one might cease worldly talk altogether—a sentence actually somewhere in my small book accompanying an account of how a state agency had in effect filibustered against an attack on a medium-range dam to kill the attack; and coupled with the statement as if following from it, another, suspiciously familiar, from my work if not from earlier—to wit, that speaking interrupts, whereas silence and work collect my halfling thoughts with all that’s needful and already available.

This last I could not verify as mine later that day because I had borrowed my wife and we drove a hundred miles to a river bend famous for its long eddy where we could watch “the stream,” as she called it—“sweet dead Silencer,” she said. Here she reminded me of an ancient lesson she had once as an innocent girl at Berkeley found in Yogavasitha: “troubled or still, water is always water…the sameness of the Ocean suffers no change.”

Then she said quite a remarkable thing: “I think you’ve been interested in water all your life.”

All this really happened, and I am trying to get it right.