PureGin.org

I just got some e-mail from my sister S, who is doing a Ph.D. in English.

Just had a wonderful class (Sampling). Someone gave an excellent seminar on Kathy Acker's appropriation of male-authored texts into her plagiarist novel The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula. Kind of exciting because subversion seems very liberating... perhaps because it allows for different interpretations without cancelling out the "original" voice or perspective

I think that most things in the world, including natural things, are reflections, re-creations, re-uses, reincarnations, re-interpretations of other things.

There's many ways of understanding this phenomenon, but it seems like even the act of 'understanding' something is often described as a process of taking something external and expressing it in your own world, i.e., internalizing it. So perhaps one can't even understand another person's ideas without plagiarizing them?

Nature especially seems to be good at plariarizing herself.

There's the phenomenon of mimicry, where one organism attempts to pass itself off as another, or as something else altogether, to lure prey, to ward off predators, to have some other organism care for its offspring, etc.

And then there's the evolutionary theme of good ideas being re-used, again and again and again - for example, eyes... almost all animals have some kind of eye - and they're oh-so-similar - human eyes, squid eyes, bird eyes,... Once the idea was invented, it quickly caught on. I just browsed through Andrew Parker's book In the Blink of an Eye which claims to explain the 'Cambrian explosion' - a massive increase in the total number of species which occured 543 million years ago, marking the beginning of the Cambrian period.  Apparently some of the simple organisms around at the time evolved primitive light-sensitive organs, and the evolutionary race began.

In the human creative sphere, some of the most famous ideas in history are stolen from (lesser, but still prior) authors and creators.  So,... we might as well acknowledge that ideas evolve through sharing, in a very natural way, and celebrate the opportunity this represents. The ideas belong to the culture, and merely flow through us - in that way, they outlive us, but we live on in them.