Where Are They?
Even if I wrote everything down, then I cannot imagine how
would I find anything when I needed it? I have almost fifty years of journals,
and I have recycled even more over the years. None of them were indexed anyway.
How would I recognize them what I might need now? Where are the thousands of
books I have read and even studied over the years? That I cannot find them in
either the journals or the memory leads me to self-doubt. What do I know? Can I
be a scholar and have lost so much? Where is Freud’s Rat-Man, or his Studies in
Hysteria? Where have I stored the studied writings of George Lukács or Leon
Trotsky. I studied Hegel on the arts and cannot find a single thought regarding
it at present. During my Marxist phase
(I am not sure I ever left it) I read Das
Kapital with Michael Harrington: both gone! My shelves are filled with
hundreds of books that don’t seem to have a file in my mental library and whose
subjects I have not indexed.
In his essay “Winnicott’s Hamlet,” Adam Phillips offers as an epigraph to Section 3 a quote from T. S. Eliot’s essay on Phillip Massinger. Eliot writes, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” I immediately recalled Pete Seeger’s statement that “To steal from one is plagiarism but to steal from many is research.” And I thought also of Winnicott’s statement in his paper “Primitive Emotional Development” (1945) in which he explains, “I shall not first give a historical survey and show the development of my ideas from the theories of others, because my mind does not work that way. What happens is that I gather this and that, here and there, settle down to clinical experience, form my own theories and then last of all interest myself in looking to see where I stole what. Perhaps this is as good a method as any.” Finally, I recall Stanley Cavell’s quip that “If one can learn only what one is ready to learn, doesn’t it follow that it is impossible to know whether you are teaching anything? You have to learn how to make yourself worth stealing from!” And I think that these men have offered some insight into where things go.
Now the interesting thing about stealing, of course, is that one must somehow hide the objects stolen, either completely out of sight or made part of one’s self. One ought not to display a work of art and announce that it had been acquired by theft; nor should one appropriate the words of another and pass them off as our own. Eliot appended to “The Waste Land” a page of footnotes defining from where certain phrases and sentences derived, but these words out of their original context produced wholly new meanings.
I think this idea is my salvation: to steal requires that the object stolen be transformed and not somehow put on naked display. AS an object it must be used! Winnicott and Eliot and Seeger suggest that the proper use of an object is at times to destroy it so that it can be created. I think Dylan was a master of such theft! We transform things and in that way we enact our creativity. To Masud Khan’s suggestion that Winnicott read a specific book he has brought, Winnicott responds, “It is not use, Masud, asking me to read anything. If it bores me I shall fall asleep on the first page, and if it interests me I will start rewriting it by the end of the page.”
And perhaps I might name all of the books I have read, even recognize that I have read them as I study my shelves, but I in my interest in so many of them led to my rewriting them, to their transformation, and that is where they have gone: they are here.
In his essay “Winnicott’s Hamlet,” Adam Phillips offers as an epigraph to Section 3 a quote from T. S. Eliot’s essay on Phillip Massinger. Eliot writes, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” I immediately recalled Pete Seeger’s statement that “To steal from one is plagiarism but to steal from many is research.” And I thought also of Winnicott’s statement in his paper “Primitive Emotional Development” (1945) in which he explains, “I shall not first give a historical survey and show the development of my ideas from the theories of others, because my mind does not work that way. What happens is that I gather this and that, here and there, settle down to clinical experience, form my own theories and then last of all interest myself in looking to see where I stole what. Perhaps this is as good a method as any.” Finally, I recall Stanley Cavell’s quip that “If one can learn only what one is ready to learn, doesn’t it follow that it is impossible to know whether you are teaching anything? You have to learn how to make yourself worth stealing from!” And I think that these men have offered some insight into where things go.
Now the interesting thing about stealing, of course, is that one must somehow hide the objects stolen, either completely out of sight or made part of one’s self. One ought not to display a work of art and announce that it had been acquired by theft; nor should one appropriate the words of another and pass them off as our own. Eliot appended to “The Waste Land” a page of footnotes defining from where certain phrases and sentences derived, but these words out of their original context produced wholly new meanings.
I think this idea is my salvation: to steal requires that the object stolen be transformed and not somehow put on naked display. AS an object it must be used! Winnicott and Eliot and Seeger suggest that the proper use of an object is at times to destroy it so that it can be created. I think Dylan was a master of such theft! We transform things and in that way we enact our creativity. To Masud Khan’s suggestion that Winnicott read a specific book he has brought, Winnicott responds, “It is not use, Masud, asking me to read anything. If it bores me I shall fall asleep on the first page, and if it interests me I will start rewriting it by the end of the page.”
And perhaps I might name all of the books I have read, even recognize that I have read them as I study my shelves, but I in my interest in so many of them led to my rewriting them, to their transformation, and that is where they have gone: they are here.
posted by Alan A. Block at 7:04 AM
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