Read the introduction to this series from editor Ben Libman.
Some years before human beings became rampant plagiarisers of one another and all who preceded them I visited a man in a small village outside of Lincoln who had the same idea but for ants. He said ants are basically always saying the same thing down any given track and ants are essentially plagiarists. He had watched them do it (when they did it) walking in their lines from one place to another and back again so he told me as we walked round the perimeter of the village green. Presently the ants were walking from the village green to the church and back in a very long line that ended somewhere in the shadow of the latter, we ourselves had visited it last time when he showed me the family tomb with him then standing without saying all that much but watching me as I went from one side to the next examining all the statuettes that marked its own perimeter, each one decapitated. It was something to do with Cromwell. We did not walk then as we did now around the green but talked in his house below the church graveyard inside the room he used as a space for thinking from which a window looked up to the graves. Most probably it was inside this room he had his idea about the ants. It is a fine bit of pasture he said and now repeated during our walk. But this is no ordinary village green owing its existence to the plague village that once stood in the area that was now grass. The former settlement, he told me, fell into ruin due to all the plague dead who died in their homes and then the ruined town was built around shortly after, post-plague, so that the village of houses that still stood to this day formed a perimeter ring first around a stinking and dilapidated heap, then eventually about this very fine bit of green. This stone, he said gesturing to a boundary stone we just passed in our walk around the edge of the green, ought to mark it, but there is no stone to mark it and only I know, and the others know too, he admitted, those who live in this village of fine houses or in some cases once fine houses all know. So it is that we are all together accomplices in knowing, are all very much aware that we are all of us looking out when we look not simply upon a field from our sitting rooms and bedrooms and porches, but upon a field under which the plague dead lie in their unmarked graves, and we do occasionally remark upon it, he said, when we meet one another walking around the village (because there is no other way of walking around it, this village is all and only perimeter), and we must be all thinking pretty much the same thing too when we walk the village on our own. By the time the two of us had walked our own way all the way round the perimeter of the plague green as I now called it right back to the boundary stone which did not but should perhaps monumentalise the dead who lay not that far beyond its station, so it was said (the dead had never been dug for), the man who walked me round and past that stone decided to tell me something interesting. He told me it was surely possible to invent a very small device about the size of the head of the ant and upon which would be two very small antennae that could be vibrated in the manner of an ant when one ant meets another, and surely it would be possible to place this device in the path of ants such as the ant line currently extending from the village green, I thought plague green, to the vicinity of the church with the decapitees. The ant-head transmitter would be mounted on a very small stick, he said, and would be set to rotate to this ant coming that way and that ant coming this. He then proceeded to tell me in some detail about how the mechanism would work and by the time we reached the stone that did not monumentalise the plague dead as it might have done he communicated his plans for translating words into code the antennae would transmit, so that the intercepted ants would learn the code by way of the antennae and instead of repeating what the line of ants behind them had until that point been repeating about whatever it is that ants see fit to usually communicate, they would begin passing his code transmitted by the ant-head device and its artificial feelers. If they were to be intercepted today, so he said, my code would eventually reach back to their ant nest somewhere in the village green, I thought plague green, and back to whatever destination the ants were currently marching to in the vicinity of the church with the decapitated statuettes, and he might start by teaching them certain passages from Lucian’s True Story, though he should probably begin with single words or word phrases, and perhaps he would tell them the code for gnat-shooters first, so that the ants would all be telling one another the word or the code for the word gnat-shooter from Lucian’s True Story as they wandered in the direction of the plague dead and in the direction of the decapitees respectively, though he would limber up to longer passages soon enough and might tell them to tell one another, Phaethon got jealous and dispatched a contingent of airborne troops, mounted on flying ants, to intercept us when we were halfway there, and so they would tell it in the direction of the plague dead and in the direction of the church and then out in other directions too, so he supposed, because there would be networks beyond this single line, he told me as we reached the perimeter stone a fourth time, or was it the fifth in our circumlocution. But if one line of ants can be taught to plagiarise one passage from Lucian, there is no reason why another cannot be taught a different passage, so he would instruct a different line of ants to tell one another, Saladfowls, incidentally, are like very large birds, except that they are fledged with vegetables instead of feathers and have wings composed of enormous lettuce leaves, and these ants just like the other ants, he clarified, would have absolutely no idea who Lucian was or what they were doing. This would make them plagiarists of a purer sort, so he thought, given how the ants would have no way of attributing their quotations. These ants, he now envisaged as the two of us approached and passed by the boundary stone once more, would then take their little messages back down into the nest, he had no idea where it was but suspected it to be somewhere within the earth of the green, and down below they would garble it up, so he supposed, and emerge saying things not quite like the things they were saying as he had caused them to say on their way in, and if he set up intercepts that were not ant-heads for transmitting but ant-heads for receiving, he might learn a great deal about the possibilities that even a fairly short book such as Lucian’s True Story might bring about from the innards of the nest, from this particular nest which is located he could not be sure where but quite possibly within the near vicinity of our walk and certainly within the green, the plague green we continued to circumnavigate, all of which he continued to inflect into this manner of telling or that manner of thinking he used with me that time and had used with me before on our visit to the church. These ants would take plagiarism beyond its usual avarice and artlessness, so he envisaged, and would do things with Lucian that I myself could not envisage, and if they could do it for Lucian’s True Story, just imagine if I trained them on Lucian’s The Ass or The Ignorant Book-Collector or The Fly and then on and on to other texts, programming the ants via his ant-heads and hearing the ants via his ant-heads, gradually discovering what language can do when taken in and out of the chaos of the nest, and if the ants eventually emerged and told him idiot idiot idiot he would be just as pleased as if they emerged and somehow reverse engineered their way to Homer.
Series edited by Ben Libman.
Ansgar Allen is the author of books including, most recently, The Unteachable (Anti-Oedipus Press), The Tongue Machine (Schism Press)and Jonathan Martin (Equus Press).
minor literature[s] 