The Wilderness of Tales

If tales were land, would they be owned?

A Trip into the Wild

I don’t know where I’m going here. The land ahead is wild and, maybe, unexplored (at least by me). It may be that the link I take up here will prove that my bent is right, or it may be I’ll confound myself. The last would be more interesting.

The Wild of Tales

Let’s look on tales as if the world of Story were a physical globe, made of land and sea, islands, ground we can walk on, stake claim to, ‘own’ and deed or rent.

At the start of it, this land is ‘wild.’ By this we mean no men have walked there. The only tales that have yet been told were ‘true’ or based on what really took place. Now some tales are told that are, on the whole, ‘made up.’ These tales are like small trips into the vast wild lands. A talesman walks into the wild, explores a small plot of it, and describes what he finds there (in other words, what he makes up). This leaves a trail for others to follow.

The Known Fields

Another talesman walks in another direction, and he describes a different piece of the wild that lies next to the small fields that men know. These fields we can call ‘reality’ and ‘fact’ and ‘news’ and ‘history.’ It is built up from real events. These are the reports of things that have happened. (They are of course interpreted, explained, ornamented, and augmented, which is why they are here in the world of Story.)

Now a third and fourth talesman set out and mark more plots in the wild. More go forth, till there tomes a time when all the land about the known fields are explored, marked, and described.

Free or Owned?

At this point, where there was freedom, there is now ‘property.’ If all the land that lies just outside the known fields is taken, then these first talesmen have staked a claim to it, and what once was wild may now be owned as property.

But then these first talesmen bar the way to all the vast tracts of the wild that stretch out, without end, on the far side of the small ring of plots these talesmen have marked. They and their heirs will from now on own the sold right to go deeper into the wild and make up other plots of the world of Story. Other talesmen must get permission from these first talesmen, or tell no tale but what comes out of the known fields.

All imagination now is hostage to this first band of men.

Two Way Past the Bar

There may be a way around this bar of properties. There are two in fact that I can think of, one lesser and one more radical.

The lesser is to grant rights of way along the trails the talesmen have marked in between the plots they call their own. Down these margins between plots new talesman may gain the right to go past the claimed and told and ‘owned’ tales, into the wild beyond. There the new talesmen can mark off new plots, make tales of them, and claim and own them. These plots will have edges too, down with other talesmen may go, deeper into the wild. In time the trails become roads, avenues, highways; off the highways avenues branch, off the avenues go streets, off the streets go lanes and footpaths.

The more radical way to work past the blockade the first talesmen have guilt up against the wild, is to tear it down all together — pay it no heed — and treat these plots not as ‘claimed and owned’ but as though they were still wild, and free for any man to walk in and rebuild and tear down and describe in his own way.

Then, of course, the first talesmen who marked the plot might not like the work the newcomer does. He may fight him. What the one builds, the other tears down, until the plot is laid waste or one or both men are slain. The rule of the strong comes to the fore: he who can defend his plot will do so; new talesmen can only prey upon the weak, to take their plots and then defend them — if they can. But they in their turn must grow weak, and be killed or cast out.

This might seem wrong to us who inherit a tradition of property that goes back generations. But it was the way of all men throughout most of the past hundred thousand years, for as long as modern man has walked the Earth; and it was the way of his foregoers as well.

(Here the link breaks, to treat tales as land. For a tale broken down and remade by another talesman still may stand by itself as it was, which is not true of land. The link isn’t perfect and will only go so far.)

Property by the ‘rule of law,’ like copyright, came into being only a few centuries ago in Europe, and both were dreamed up by the leaders of the bourgeois class as a way to uphold and advance their own wealth and status, to put themselves on top as the new ruling class, and to keep other classes from rising up to take their place. Both property and copyright are legal fictions that have no basis in the physical world, and continue only through the threat and use of force by the State, which is run by the ruling class.

The Way Ahead

As with land, so with tales. As with tales, so with land.

It is the weakness of us all to take the world we are born into, and look on it as ‘the way things always were, the way they e’er shall be, the only way to be.’ And no doubt the kings and noble lords of Europe in 1100 felt the same of the ways they were born to, and the Aztec kings and priests felt the same of their world, and the nobles of the court of the Yellow Emperor felt the same of theirs. But all those ways have fallen. There is no cause to think our ways will go on till the end of time, for what sets our ways apart from all the other ways and systems other men have dreamed? Nothing.

So it seems only right to me that each new generation of men should not take their world for granted as ‘the only way to be,’ but should instead ask before all else,

“Do our rules make any sense any more? Has anything changed in the past hundred years? And does that make a difference?

And if things have changed, and that does make a difference, can we not find a new and better way?

(Composed with pen on paper Sunday, March 2, 2008)