‘If you love it
Set it free’
Pillars and Ivy Strands
The human community faces these needs for its survival: it needs shelter and food and the tools and materials with which to make shelter and food. It also needs some understanding among its members as to how to get along, so that shelters will not be torn down and food spoil, and so that the young may be born and reared in safety.
Does it need tales or song or any other form of art to survive? No. These may be vital for the community to thrive, but not to survive.
To get the raw materials, to make the tools, to build the shelters and make the dress, to grow and catch the food, to give birth, to rear the young: these are the naked rude pillars upon which the human community depends.
To adorn the shelters, to make the tools lovely to hold and use, to cut and fit the dress; to make tales to while away the idle hours or lighten the toil of working hours, to sing, to dance: these are the green strands of ivy that creep up and round the naked rude pillars and dress them and help the members of the community look up beyond the brutal moment of survival and dream of thriving.
Art becomes important when survival is assured and not before.
From these propositions we can see that those who make the tools and shelter and provide the food, are those who work and labor and in trading the fruits of their labor these men support their community. And those who spin the tales and sing the songs and dance and paint and make adornments should be men who have done their work of helping the community to survive and have an idle hour to spare.
Art is to be given, as much for the joy of giving as for the joy of seeing it received. Art is not to be paid for save in a blessing or a tip or extra favor; and maybe in no more than a smile.
Or we can say that the stuff of survival is traded for other stuff we need to live, and that art is to be traded only for other art.
The ‘professional artist’ has a place only in the community of kings and noble lords, as one of their slaves. He has no place in a free community of equals.
Freedom and Control
Systems of law such as copyright work to ensure the bondage of the professional artist. He is paid by his masters, the kings and noble lords of publishers and distributors, who are the true owners of all the professional artist makes, as they are the owners of the artist himself, so long as he will forego the independence and dignity of a man who trades with other men the stuff that is needed for life.
Systems of law such as copyright (like all systems of slavery) work to keep the tales and songs and other works of art unfree and under the control of the kings and noble lords of the publishers and distributors. They forbid the artists from giving their art in blessings, and from trading their art for other art.
The artist who works under a system of law such as copyright may control his life and his work only to the extent to which he may wheedle and please and persuade the kings and noble lords of his publishers and distributors. Theirs is the power to dictate and dispense, and his only the performance of groveling and begging them to please, if they would, to consider his wishes as well as their profit.
How to Wield the Most Control
The talesman who wields the most control of his work is the talesman who never tells his tales to any other living soul but himself.
When he publishes his tale in any way, by even so much as telling it to one other human soul, he gives his work away. From that moment on the tale is free of his control.
To publish a work in a human community is to set it free, to be repeated, to be retold, to be revised and reworked and altered.
Only the tale untold, that hides in the breast of the talesman and is known to none but him, may he control.
This fact does not depend upon any system of law, though a system of law may acknowledge it or, like systems of law such as copyright, they may deny it. It remains true all the same.
The Generous Talesman
The generous talesman is the one who gives his work away, who publishes it and frees it in that act, and knows that he frees it, and is glad to set it free. He does so for the best of reasons, for the reasons that men made tales and songs and dance and all the other arts in the first place: for the joy of giving as as much for the joy of seeing it received. And he is glad to get his payment in a blessing or a tip or extra favor, and maybe in no more than a smile.
And so he trades his art only for other art, in a human community in which all men build the naked rude pillars of survival, and all men help to grow and nurture the green strands of ivy that adorn the pillars.
Unlike the slaves that are the professional artists in the slave societies ruled by kings and noble lords, he does not treat his art as a tame bird to be caged in a dim chamber and fed scraps by other slaves, but he is glad to see his art like the wild birds who soar aloft and hide in the trees, and whose sight is rare and delightful.
(Composed on keyboard Thursday, February 14, 2008)
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