STEALING FROM THE DEAD
Thomas J. Wingate wrote about ne'er-do-wells and manual laborers and ex-convicts, in part because he was all of those. I tend to write about ne'er-do-wells and manual laborers and ex-convicts––though I haven't been one or lived among many, to be honest––because I'm fixated on my father, and my father was fixated on them.
We write what we know, regardless of our intentions. Fortunately there are many ways to know a thing, including the writer's best friend: imaginative empathy. I wonder if my fictional interest in people who are psychically, materially, and spiritually broken and lost derives from a single act of imaginative empathy with my father that has extended for decades.
After working on this section of the labyrinth I'm astounded at how completely my fictional universe has been shaped by my father. Not only do I write about my father all the time, but I even cover some of the same themes as he did even though I only knew him for ten years. I guess carrying a man's stories around for decades performs some miraculous osmosis.
I guess it's not a single act of imaginative empathy, then. It's more like a compulsion to empathize––an old ritual that I kept performing out of duty and filial piety until it shaped the way I looked at writing itself. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the evolutionary inheritance of acquired characteristics, but what would he think of the far more voluntary process by which I took on my father's fictional concerns?
Some might call that process stealing. Go ahed, it's okay. I use that word myself sometimes, too. I'm quite self-conscious about the possibility of stealing from my father, not only in terms of the type of characters I gravitate toward, but also quite literally with the man's writing here in daddylabyrinth. One reason I want this book to be free is so that I can't be accused (or accuse myself) of trying to make money off of his writing. Sure, he's dead and I doubt he would mind, since he tried to publish it in his lifetime. But if I made a ton of money off of it, I'm sure some relative would come along and want some of the cash. No one can say that I did it for the money if there is no money. Right?
How long have I been digging up the bones of my dead father and trying to sell them as literature? How much longer can I get away with it? This giving-away of daddylabyrinth, then, stretches out––and justifies––my continuous theft, and it may be a mere smokescreen for the biggest heist of them all. I've put all the bones here, save for the few that escaped me during the digging process. The great thing about this book being electronic is that if I find some more, I can add them in later.
Now that the heist is done, can I retire from trying to sell his bones at all? From trying to dig them up? The man only has so many, and one day I will need to stop. Why can't this be today?
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