The Copyist

At some point, quite recently, I realised that I had succeeded only as a copyist, that I owed my modest achievements to this fact. At university, it is true, I achieved the best degree in my year and was awarded a prize on that basis. But I now realise that my success was due to my facility, my flair, as a copyist. I do not mean that I copied, verbatim or in paraphrasis, other people’s work. Or even their ideas. No. My facility was in copying their style of thought. I have always found this a very easy thing to do. To imitate not the thoughts but the style of thinking, both the tone and the direction, the expected or unexpected turns, the characteristic rhythm.  All these things, of course, are meant to be the signature of a unique self, the syntax of a particular soul. But these souls, these selves, cannot have been that unique, for I was able to reproduce their styles almost without thinking, as some musicians are instantly able to compose something in the style of such and such a composer. I was able to do this without slipping into parody, or pastiche. I was able to stop just before this point, as it were, to exercise a certain discipline even in imitation. And this was the key to my success. For the tutors, when they read my work, met with something that agreed with their own thinking, certainly, but without simply reproducing its surface. I was able to reproduce its deeper movement, that which generated the surface. All my life, in fact, I have been involved in this copying. I remember, for example, how I would imitate the facial expressions of my parents in order to uncover the emotion underneath, to be the emotion underneath, to see what it felt like to make such a facial expression and thus to gain access to the angry or loving soul behind it. My mother for example, there was a smile she sometimes did, but also mixed with pain. In my room I would keep doing this smile and try to catch the feeling that went along with it. I could feel it for a second then it slipped away. But I think in the end I managed to get to it. I think it was what I’d now call compassion. She looked at me with compassion, an awareness of vulnerability and innocence. Of a child’s unreachable vulnerability. For the place from which a small child looks at an adult is finally an unreachable place. So this new thing, compassion, flickered through me when I did the face. Anyway, time and again I have unpicked the soul firstly though imitating the surface. I have gained access to the soul through the rebus of the surface, so that then I was able to adopt as my own the soul. I have been always a copyist. But it is only recently that I have come to realise this. And at first I imagined that this confiscated from me, in retrospect, everything that I had achieved, minimal as it is, tiny as it is. And perhaps it does. But what I also asked myself is: who is this that has done the copying, he who is not to be confused with any of the copies, and what is he like, this copyist. He is like nothing, he has no colour or inflexions, he stands apart from everything he copies, he survives all successive incarnations. He survives.