Originality and Intertextuality

What is originality? How can something be classified as original? It has been said before that nothing can be discovered as new or as original as manhood has already invented everything. So, day by day, man is reinventing himself in every aspect: twisting, changing, growing, cutting into pieces, reassembling one thing into another. Everything is a bettered version of the former one, or a reaction to an opponent, but the roots are all the same. This does not only happen in fields such as Technology, Medicine, Psychology and Arts, but also in Literature.

The Literature field is always evolving in a continuum of ideas: old ideas that are far explored, old ideas interpreted from a different perspective, ideas that emerge from old ideas, ideas that develop from former ideas. These ideas are expressed in texts and those texts are source for future texts. Texts are read, interpreted, meant; and every reader interprets and responds to the text differently. In the case of “The Call”, it is a response to other texts and a transformation of texts as well. There is a text about a love story that ended bitterly, a text about technology and how people communicate by different household gadgets, a text about the amazement experienced by people when using those gadgets which allow them to see, to do, to feel new experiences. Such is the amazement expressed in text as “The Telephone”, by Robert Frost. The text mingles with other texts, such is the case of the love story that ended breaking somebody´s heart mixed with the text that talks about an old love that has found a partner leaving the former lover feeling empty and unable to do something about how he feels. These different love poems could be illustrated with “2” by Emily Dickinson, “When you are old”, by W.B.Yeats and “I Loved You Once”, by Alexander Pushkin. Another text among them talks about ghosts, like “Ghosts from the Past” by T.J. Daniels: ghosts that haunt us, ghosts that live with us, ghosts from our pasts. The beginning of the text responds to the benefits of communication, the advancements of technology that enables people to do things beyond their knowledge.
Beneath the whole text, there is the love story, the heart-breakening story of an old love, the story about the one love, once so strong that now that it is gone, leaves the streets empty and hands missing other hands to touch and caress. Also, there seem to be two poems transformed by “The Call” so subtly that they become one. The amazement of light and communication is unified to the love story brilliantly, so they make one extraordinary text.


Emily Dickinson

2
You left me, sweet, two legacies,—
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content,
Had He the offer of;

You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me.
W. B. Yeats

When You Are Old
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Alexander Pushkin

I Loved You Once
I loved you once, nor can this heart be quiet;
For it would seem that love still lingers there;
But do not you be further troubled by it;
I would in no wise hurt you, oh, my dear.

I loved you without hope, a mute offender;
What jealous pangs, what shy despairs I knew!
A love as deep as this, as true, as tender,
God grant another may yet offer you.
"GHOSTS FROM THE PAST"
The words & visions are there
inside me.
I must write them down
or not get any rest.
The pain that was suffered
so many years past
comes fleetingly to the surface
if only for a moment.
But once seen
recognized
and understood...
the ghosts of the past retreat
back to the
Long Ago.
Copyright © 1998 T. J. Daniels
Robert Frost - The Telephone
'When I was just as far as I could walk
From here today,
There was an hour
All still
When leaning with my head again a flower
I heard you talk.
Don't say I didn't, for I heard you say--
You spoke from that flower on the window sill-
Do you remember what it was you said?'

'First tell me what it was you thought you heard.'

'Having found the flower and driven a bee away,
I leaned on my head
And holding by the stalk,
I listened and I thought I caught the word--
What was it? Did you call me by my name?
Or did you say--
Someone said "Come" -- I heard it as I bowed.'

'I may have thought as much, but not aloud.'

"Well, so I came.'

The little black boy

The Little Black Boy

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Poems

By the Babe Unborn



If trees were tall and grasses short,
As in some crazy tale,
If here and there a sea were blue
Beyond the breaking pale,

If a fixed fire hung in the air
To warm me one day through,
If deep green hair grew on great hills,
I know what I should do.

In dark I lie; dreaming that there
Are great eyes cold or kind,
And twisted streets and silent doors,
And living men behind.

Let storm clouds come: better an hour,
And leave to weep and fight
Than all the ages I have ruled
The empires of the night.

I think that if they gave me leave
Within the world to stand,
I would be good through all the day
I spent in fairyland.

They should not hear a word from me
Of selfishness or scorn,
If only I could find the door,
If only I were born.

GK Chesterton

Quotations

by G.K. Chesterton:
The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.

One sees great things from the valley, only small things from the peak.

Interestig, don´t you think?

From my Luis Miguel pin to my grandmother

It was a rounded piece of metal, small and colourful. Only a name and a face, a treasured accesory fo my clothes and a treasured object to me, tough a funny thing to the rest of the people. For them, it was an object which use was simply to make fun of me every time they could. Except for school and birthdays parties, I wore it constantly. It had a very sharp end and I had bleeding fingers every time I put it on my T-shirt but I could not see well under my chin. As the pin brought a safety pin beneath it I knew I would never lose it and that it would be fastened to me for ever. Every time I had to fasten something, I used my Luis Miguel pin. Just as my grandma fixed everything with a safety pin. She was a tailor, and still is in her mind. Her fingers gently touched us when she was trying out clothes on us, and every outfit was finished when she put the safety pin on. It was her seal, her personal mark. She loved making clothes for us, she would tell us we were her models to dress and we let her dream, of course we did! We played with her needles and pins, but not with the safety pins. Those were hers and hers only to play, dream and love. Now, my grandma has Alzheimer desease and lives in a home, and her bones are growing smaller and twisted. She does not see her grand-daughter in me, but if I show her a safety pin, she wants to put it on me and pretend that she is a tailor dressing a model.

XV & XVIII Century poems

EL GALÁN Y LA DAMA
Cierto galán a quien París aclama,
petimetre del gusto más extraño,
que cuarenta vestidos muda al año
y el oro y plata sin temor derrama,

celebrando los días de su dama,
unas hebillas estrenó de estaño,
sólo para probar con este engaño
lo seguro que estaba de su fama.

«¡Bella plata! ¡Qué brillo tan hermoso!»,
dijo la dama, «¡viva el gusto y numen
del petimetre en todo primoroso!»

Y ahora digo yo: «Llene un volumen
de disparates un autor famoso,
y si no le alabaren, que me emplumen».

Cuando un autor ha llegado a ser famoso, todo se le aplaude.
Tomas de Iriarte

This is a very different poem from all those ones about romance that we usually find. And that is why I like it. The theme of the poem is a universal truth, many times neglected, many times rejected. It is an endless truth, and it is applicable in our daily life. I hope it leaves a spark in you, so that our eyes are open to people like these, and we are not fooled by them.


ROMANCE
Yo me estava reposando, durmiendo como solía. Recordé, triste, llorando con gran pena que sentía. Levantéme muy sin tiento de la cama en que dormía, cercado de pensamiento, que valer no me podía. Mi passión era tan fuerte que de mí yo no sabía. Conmigo estava la Muerte por tenerme compañía. Lo que más me fatigava no era porque muría, mas era porque dexava de servir a quien servía. Servía yo una señora que más que a mí la quería, y ella fue la causadora de mi mal sin mejoría. La media noche passada, ya que era cerca el día, salíme de mi posada por ver si descansaría. Fui para donde morava aquella que más quería, por quien yo triste penava, mas ella no parecía. Andando todo turbado con las ansias que tenía, vi venir a mi Cuidado dando bozes, y dezía: «Si dormís, linda señora, recordad por cortesía, pues que fuestes causadora de la desventura mía. Remediad mi gran tristura, satisfazed mi porfía, porque si falta ventura del todo me perdería.» Y con mis ojos llorosos, un triste llanto hazía con sospiros congoxosos, y nadie lo parecía. En estas cuitas estando, como vi que esclarecía, a mi casa sospirando me bolví sin alegría.

Juan del Encina

Now, as regards this poem, I couldn´t help it. It is the ballad of the love that is not love, that forbidden love that we never have, tough we always hope for.

Paper My sister´s keeper - Expanded version

My sister´s keeper

Worldwide, crime rates are increasing drastically. Statistics from all over the world show that in the last few years, neither the security forces nor the judicial systems have been able to put this sin to an end. Prevention programs have been launched worldwide in order to combat and, ultimately, bring the statistics to smaller numbers. Unfortunately, the pace of the offences, felonies, murders, etc. is too fast and seems to be unstoppable. Furthermore, with criminal rates getting higher and higher, new and more controversial kinds of crime arise.

Normally, the victim of a crime is not the one to be blamed for the crime he is already the victim of. However, in the case of Davida, the main character in “My sister´s keeper”, her choices lead her to death due to two main reasons: her sexuality and her political ambitions.

Being a lesbian may be a challenge, but for some it may also be a burden. As a child, Davida loses her sister to a muscle tumour and her mother puts on her every expectation a mother has: she wants Davida to become somebody’s wife, a housewife, somebody’s mother, she wants grandchildren to take care of and she makes it clear all the time, putting an enormous pressure on Davida. On growing up, Davida sets her mind completely opposed to her mother demands: she is rebellious, a prominent politician and a lesbian. Therefore, Davida lets her mother down by choosing a sexual orientation that will never provide a marriage, a family or grandchildren. Furthermore, her mother is part of an elite social class that upholds traditional values. The most important one is heterosexual orientation to provide procreation, with the objective of keeping the family name as part of that elite. Due to this, her mother is disappointed at Davida, as the family will not remain belonging; and she is also ashamed in front of her friends, who she considers the hardest judges of moral values. Working as a representative, her sexuality becomes a weak point for the opposing political party to attack her. In addition, every bill she wants to pass involves female researchers, bringing along suspicion about the researchers´ objectivity regarding the investigations. Furthermore, she falls in love with Minette, who is an alcoholic. As Davida keeps male acquaintances from old times and keeps male friends for her days at school and college, Minette develops a disturbing jealousy which, together with her alcohol addiction, becomes a constant and threatening annoyance in Davida´s life. Not only does Minette drive her crazy with her phone calls at any time during the whole day and with a terrible high frequency, but also she becomes an unbalanced, unstable person showing up in Davida´s office at any time, careless of possible meetings or conferences, causing scandals in front of every one there and threatening Davida´s life: if she didn’t stop working so much, death would come for one of them.

Be careful what you wish for, preys a popular saying. Nothing could be further from the truth to Davida´s faith. As she leaves college, she finds her true vocation in the political arena. Working first as an assistant to the mayor; then, as an assistant to a member of the state assembly, it gives Davida the chance to trigger her political career and she proposes herself to be a representative of her constituency. She wins the elections and, due to this, she faces the responsibility to fulfil her voters´ needs and to see her political campaign promises accomplished. Her stem-cell bill is her most appreciated project, an asset to her political career. At the moment of her sister´s death, the only possible cure for the tumour is a donation of blood to use the stem cells and heal the sick cells. But the scientific community is not interested at that time and has no fundings to do research in the matter. When Davida wins her chair at the assembly of her state, she decides to propose a bill for stem cell research with federal fundings. Previously, everything that the government has done has been to create an institute, give it the name of State Stem Cell Institute, create the Board of Directors and issue a mission statement. Now, Davida wants them to take action, to put everything they have to work and she invests all her time and effort in seeing her dream come true: help people dying from muscle cancer using stem cells to recover and strengthen their own cells and fight the sick ones. But this is also, her sentence. Because of this, she receives anonymous letters threatening her, very much like the ones seen on movies: with letters cut out from papers and blood-wanting messages. She is egged outside a courthouse after defending her bill project with all her heart. She is the victim of aggressions led by pro-God’s work activists, who want to see her bill vetoed. Also, her sexuality interferes with her political ambitions, as neither the Congress nor the White House will ever accept a lesbian among their congressmen.

It is often said that people can not always get what they want. That has certainly been the case of Davida. In her search for happiness by fulfilling her ambitions, she finds struggle, confrontation and conflict. In her closest companions in life and in people she has not even met, there is resistance, there is oppression. In her search to redeem herself for the loss of her sister and the disappointment of her mother, there is disillusion, regret, sorrow. Her love for another woman is a constant struggle, has it has been said before. Her will to persevere in her political career turns her work into an endless war. In conclusion, everything she wants leads her to destruction, and in the end, to her own death.
Laguía, Ma. Eugenia

Bibliography
Kellerman, J & F, “Capital Crimes”, Ballantine Books.
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 2003 Edition.