David Beresford
ANOTHER COUNTRY
The best chance of some degree of immortality nowadays would appear to lie with the hope of being dug up by a palaeontologist. It is a prospect which troubles me for various reasons including concern that one day they will find my skeleton and will speculate about my life without taking in the shakes.
I mean one does not mind a physical handicap – it gives one the opportunity to triumph over adversity and all that – but one would at least like to see that and other achievements acknowledged when the schoolgirls queue up in front of the glass case, however umpteen million years hence.
“And this, girls, is the skull of hominus southafricanus bibilus who lived in the late part of the second millennium and the early stages of the third. Now over there is a really interesting exhibit …”
And as they trail off my bones will be silently screaming: “Hold on, girls, girls! She hasn’t mentioned my Parkinson’s.
“And what about my awards! Hey, girls! For God’s sake, girls – it’s my friggin’ birthday!”
There is a certain dimension missing from palaeontology.
In the innocence of childhood one thinks one’s immortality is pretty well guaranteed, simply because anything else is beyond comprehension.
In later years, at least in my case, belief in immortality reluctantly gave way to the assumption that at least a degree of fame would be in the offing – not necessarily of Shakespearean proportions, but worthy of a leather- bound volume or two on the book-shelves of the future. This self-delusion did not survive the traumatic sight of my first book being remaindered.
Now my dwindling hopes of being remembered for anything of note are hanging on Reader’s Digest, who contacted me some time ago with an offer of R90, as I remember it, to purchase copyright to some felicitous phrase which I had used in a newspaper report. The famously processed pages from Pleasantville are not exactly a Shakespeare first folio, but the thought of 100-million, or whatever, readers poring over my words was fairly dizzying, even if they were only likely to do so in that ante-chamber to horror, the dentist’s waiting room. Anyway, I accepted the Digest’s payment with the reflection that it was clever of them to get in on the ground floor; fame for me was clearly just around the corner.
Unfortunately I am unable to recollect the quotation and have been reluctant to approach the Digest to refresh my memory. It could, obviously, persuade them to the view that the phrase, however felicitous, was forgettable and prompt them to consign the precious words to a rubbish bin.
The transaction into which I entered so proudly, now raises a number of further worrying questions. Having forgotten what the quotation was, will it bubble up to my consciousness again? And, bubbling, how will I recognise it as the one I flogged off to Pleasantville? If I don’t and use it unwittingly, will I be sued for the theft of intellectual property rights?
Will I be disgraced as a plagiarist of my own work?
Intellectual property rights and the theft of them seem to be fashionable issues at the moment. Local journalists have been accusing one another of theft of copyright with a vigour which suggests that they, too, labour under the misapprehension that felicitous phrases herald immortality … provided the prose bandits can be persuaded to keep their thieving hands off them.
Recently I happened across an article on plagiarism which seemed to see it as a latter-day plague. An American poet talked of the sense of “violation” he had felt after being plagiarised by a child- molester (the complaint, as I understood it, relating to the theft of his words, rather than of his childhood innocence, as may be suggested by his use of language). Even that icon of the 20th century, Albert Einstein, was subjected a few months ago to the charge of cribbing the equation e=mc2.
I must confess that I myself recently joined in the plagiarism hue and cry, denouncing in a local gossip column an Austrian academic for filching a line I had used to describe motives which might have driven the assassin of Hendrik Verwoerd. I have since suffered some angst about a line attributed to me in a South African “book of quotations” in which I described local radio (at the time of the transition of power) as a “nation in conversation with itself”. Re- reading it I have an uncomfortable feeling I might have heard it somewhere else and possibly before: Lord John Reith, Pieter-Dirk Uys, Snuki (Phd Bulgaria)?
More recently I found myself making an observation about suicide on which I prided myself for its originality, only to stumble across a similar line by Jean- Paul Sartre. I had plagiarised a Frenchman, mon dieu!
Or had I? Without being so up-front as to suggest that great minds, and so forth and so forth, … could it not be a sort of osmosis of the collective mind, in this age of the global village, which accounts for coincidences of invention? Is that not why the Nobel science prizes tend to be awarded to two or three researchers while great minds of the more distant past such as Isaac Newton stood comparatively alone?
Was Einstein declared the winner in the race to discover e=mc2, not because he was first across the line, but because he stood out in a tightish finish as “the guy with the funny hairdo”?
Is it not time to acknowledge that the race to be the first with such as the human genome more resembles a global game of “Snap!” than an exercise in scientific inquiry?
First we had the global village, now we have the global mind and . hold on! That rings the bell of familiarity. I’ve used that one before, haven’t I? Didn’t I use it last week?
Excuse me, but I must put this down more formally before some would-be Sartre or Einstein filches it:
“The Internet is the brain of one creature in which we are the neurons, our telephone/data lines are the neural pathways and our communications are its thoughts, fantasies and dreams. We are nothing more and nothing less than a fractal. This realisation will spell an end to intellectual property rights, in this fractal, at least.” – Beresford’s first 11/2 theorems, from Concerning Existence, Vol 1 (1999 patent pending).
If anyone from Reader’s Digest is reading this they can have that one for another R90. On the strict understanding, of course, that it probably has been fired in some other part of this space- time continuum by some other lonely neuron.
We’ve all got to earn a living somehow.