I Me

How leaving commercial publishing changed what I write

In the middle of last year I made up my mind to leave the commercial traditional publishing world behind. This has led me to change what I write. Here’s how.

To start, I must say I was not at the time much in the commercial traditional publishing world. I had sold and published two fantasy novels, years back (actually they were the first parts of one novel, whose end has never been published). Since then I wrote a few more books that were not published, and went on writing other tales that I could never bring myself to finish.

In the meantime I watched what was happening in publishing from afar, and none of it looked healthy or good. And the copyfight began, and the publishing houses were merged and taken over by larger multimedia conglomerates, and the idea of ‘intellectual property’ arose, and the corporations and money-class of financiers moved closer to their goal of dissolving all national governments as viable entities and ruling the world as an interlocking series of corporate masters, with the other 99% of us humans serving as serfs or slaves.

Before the Soviet Union failed, I visited there. I came back by way of Scandinavia. Even after a mere three weeks as a tourist, I felt a great relief in setting foot in Finland and Sweden. It was as though a weight were off my shoulders and I felt free to breathe again.

I feel the same way whenever I move from the world of proprietary, closed software to Gnu and Linux and other free and open computer applications.

I feel the same way whenever I move from those tales now locked up in perpetual copyright, owned not by writers but by corporations, to works in the public domain or under Creative Commons.

I made up my mind to join this movement.

This is why I release all my works under a Creative Commons Share-Alice license. This license gives anyone the go-ahead to adapt, republish, distribute, rework, edit, or translate the tales I tell, so long as they allow others the same freedom with the results.

Oddly, I feel a similar freedom to breathe now that I don’t work with an eye to selling my works to those corporations.

When I wrote with commercial publishing in mind, I strove to keep my tales conventional. I read accounts on how to tell tales the way editors want, and what editors are looking for, and the taboos of modern fiction writing such as ‘show don’t tell.’

Now I write as I please. I work with tales that appeal to me, and I tell them in ways I myself prefer. This has driven me into an odd corner. I have looked to stress my own quirks, and not suppress them.

It has good points and bad.

Among the good, are that I enjoy more what I am doing. My work enriches the world of tales more than if I only aimed at repeating what others said with variations. I used to dislike advertising my tales; this smacked of ‘sales’ and I blushed even to attempt it. But now I can give my works away and this makes all the difference in the world. Now I say, ‘Here’s a story I wrote, you might like it, feel free to try it if you wish.’ Since there is no payment or penalty involved on the reader’s part, this to me feels more like sharing than huckstering. And because the tales I tell reflect me with all my quirks, they approach more what and who I am, and thus have more of an identity.

Among the bad are weaknesses in the tales, that I should stress. The good I need not stress any more than I have already; all I can add to any young talesmen and would-be writers out there is, If you love your freedom, there is no other way to do it.

When I wrote with the fear of Editorial Orthodoxy ever upon me, I felt a keen awareness each time I strayed near the borders of What Was Not Done. Then I had to question myself and argue, I had to justify each such ‘error.’ And I worked to make those passages sound so wonderful in every phrase, that, I prayed, the Editorial High Priests would sigh and let the transgression go by.

This left the work stronger, and better.

I was also aware, even when I kept well within the bounds of What Was To Be Done, of One who would Judge the tale. Be he Agent or Editor, some Professional would squint at my lines, and grumble, and must be satisfied. This gave me a consciousness of an Other whose tastes simply must be met, and this made me see my own lines with other eyes. Even though I had only the vaguest notion of what would please that Other, it still made me redact my words, and go over them again, and catch phrases that were weak, and consider passages that were not strong enough, and I think in many ways the tales got better, and better-told.

Now I don’t have that any more. I have as yet no clear sense of the Audience of Readers, either. I don’t even know if any of my tales, though I spread them widely over all the Earth with more copies than even the largest corporate publishing behemoth would, will even be read.

And thus I am inclined to let things go before, perhaps, they are wholly ripe. I will declare a tale finished complete & done with fewer drafts and less polish. It will be more individual, it may be more enthusiastic, but in some ways it will not be as rounded or as accessible as it would have been had I told it with an eye to please that Professional Other of the Publishing Church.

Therefore I say this too to you, O would-be writer and young talesman: Beware also of your self.

(Composed with pen on paper and on keyboard Friday 28 March 2008)

Art and Cash

The role of the artist today is all about the money

Where We Came From

Over the past 3 days I wrote about how Traditional Society, which man developed over millions of years since before he was what we call man, gave way to a Transitional Society which has been spawning the Modern Society over the past four centuries. Traditional Society formed around kin groups in local areas, and was based on personal relationships. When men created agriculture, these small clans joined (usually along language groups and within a broad geographic region) under a King who served as an over-chief and took taxes to feed his soldiers to guard the kingdom. The King’s palaces drew artisans and gave rise to the first cities. In time the city-men, living by commerce measured in cash money, overthrew and killed the Kings and their landed nobles who were descendants of the King’s war captains.

Thus the Modern World began to grow. It has not yet taken over all of Earth’ some parts of the world are still Traditional Societies, and some parts are still Transitional.

The Artist in the World

In those nations which have become most Modern, men are judged and defined by what they do to make money, and by how much money they make.

This has made a great change for the artists.

In Traditional Society, there were no artists. That is to say, no man defined himself as an artist of any sort — not sculptor nor poet or painter nor talesman. They defined themselves then by their relations — by their parents and grandparents, siblings, children, and extended families. They took part in their clan and household duties of day to day living. The art they made was but a hobby, a bit of adornment to enhance the practical work of their lives.

In Transitional Society, men began to define and judge themselves by classes of the labor they performed: farmers, peasants, warriors, hunters, priests, nobles. Art still was made among the farmers and other peasants as before, for these men lived in social groups much like their traditional ways. But for the first time High Art began to be made by men who called themselves Artists. These artisans worked under the patronage of Kings, priests and other nobles and high officials, and were dependent on these wealthy members of the ruling class for their livelihood.

In Modern Society the artist is a tradesman who freelances or works for hire. The Kings and nobles have been replaced in part by the wealthiest of the ruling money-class acting much like the noble patrons who went before them. But mostly the artist of today works for the true inheritors of the ranks of landed nobles, the ones who run the modern world: the corporations.

Myths of Art Today

Many artists today don’t understand this. They think that the corporations that publish and distribute their art works are mere middle-men. The artists think they are really working for their fans who buy tickets, music, books and the like. But this is not so.

Copyright is often registered in the name of the artist, and the artist looks on this as proof that under the law he owns his art, which makes him superior to the publisher. But this too is not so.

Copyright was created for, and at the behest of, publishers. From time to time in the long history of change in copyright law, as its term has been extended again and yet again, as the punishment for its violation has been made more and more extreme, as it has passed from civil code to criminal code, artists have come forth to speak on behalf of the new extensions of the law. This has given the impression that copyright is a law for the benefit of the artist. But this is not so.

The Artist Today

There are more artists in Modern Society than in Transitional Society. That is, more men are able to earn their bread from their art alone. Almost all of these men are hirelings who work in advertising, and company art departments, and directly for publishing corporations; or else they have formed their own corporations that work on assignment from these larger companies. This is not the sort of life kids think of when they dream of being ‘artists’ as they are growing up. The creativity of these artists is confined (like the talent and skills of all corporate hirelings) to making clever new ways to increase the company’s income — and no more.

What kids (and most adults) think of when they consider the ‘artist’ is a man whose work springs from deep in his heart, that expresses some urge within him, some vision all his own that he longs to share with his fellow men. This is what we think lies at the root of the artist’s soul. Note that ‘money’ does not belong here, and indeed the common view of the ‘artist’ is of a man who scorns money in his search for self-expression, beauty, and truth. And that nothing in our common notion of the artist is fulfilled in the job in the company art department.

There are artists of this idealized kind in Modern Society. There are many of them. The great mass of them, though, do not make their living from their art, but in other ways. Some teach their art, others find jobs as critics of art. Some work in museums or galleries. For many, their art is but a sideline. For many it is but a hobby.

A rare few find fame and fortune and their life stories inspire kids to dream of being artists themselves. This is what they think it is to live as an artist (not to work as one, but to live as one) and in this dream, money does indeed play a starring role. Great wealth is the dream of all of us in Modern Society, for money is the measure of a man today. Wisdom, virtue, excellence in any field — we value them only insofar as they might make us rich. But our day dreams and fantasies all turn on being rich (and famous) and not around being wise, honest, just, or skilled.

And so thoroughly have we come to believe in this ethic of the money-class, that talesmen will write, over and over, that they need copyright laws because they would not, could not write if they were not assured they would be paid. And some seek for copyright to be eternal, not thinking that this would be of benefit only to the publishers; for these artists, it is not enough that their grandchildren should be paid for what their grandparents wrote, but their great-great-great grandchildren should get the money too.

How far we have fallen.

(Composed with pen on paper Thursday-Friday, 20-21 March 2008)

Are We Mutants?

Is the Modern Society fit to live in?

Three Stages of the World

So far we have seen three stages the world of men has passed through.

First was Traditional Society; in this stage men lived together in small groups related by kinship, and had a local point of view. This stage includes all the time of the men-who-came-before modern man. It includes, as far as we can tell, the apes who came before the first of the men-who-came-before modern man, since we find the same social order in the other apes.

The second stage was a Transition to the modern world; in this stage most men lived together still ins mall groups related by blood, but they were ruled by overlords, those who came to be called Kings. The Kings took taxes from the small clans and promised to protect their lands, and most men now thought in terms of the broader territories of the King’s realm. The Kings used their greater wealth to support their armies and also to build palaces, around which true towns and cities grew; these were where larger groups of men lived together who were not related even distantly by blood. Religion likewise grew into hierarchies and larger organizations; a state religion would be endorsed by the King with a High Priest, elaborate temples, under-priests, all supported by the taxes levied on lesser men. This stage was mostly traditional, since almost all men lived yet in the small clans, because many farmers had to work to support their own lives and also pay the taxes that upheld one soldier or priest.

The third stage is Modern Society; in this stage men live as individual consumers and hirelings and bosses of the dominant class. So far the family remains one of the parts of society, but the Corporation or Collective, Consumerism, mass-Religion, and the State undermine the family from all sides. So now the family has mostly shrunk to its basic core: today the family exists, where the Modern Society is most pronounced, only to raise children to young adulthood. Many marriages do not last even long enough to see their children reach nubility; many children are raised by single parents; many children are raised at institution by agencies of the State.

What Next?

I do not think the transitional stage has ended.

I do not think we know as yet what the Modern World will look like once the money-class reduces the local and national governments to merely ceremonial roles, and the interwoven groups of Corporations rule the world openly.

I do not believe the Modern Society to come will be the final stage in the world. Others will no doubt come after it.

Traditional Society grew ‘organically’ if you will. It developed over hundreds of thousands of years, and likely millions of years. It grew by trial and error, blindly, under no master plan or any plan at all. The way each traditional social group is made up is never rigid, it is always fluid, it shifts with the relative strength, will, and wits of its living men.

As a result it seems safe to say that Traditional Society on the whole came to represent the ‘true nature’ of man, if only because those Traditional Societies that tried something ‘un-natural’ failed to survive.

Modern Society began to emerge from the transitional societies only 2,500 years ago, mostly in China as the three great Kingdoms warred with one another, made alliances with the lesser kingdoms, and spawned various Theories of social organization in search of one that would bestow a competitive advantage in warfare. One of the three Kingdoms at last, after centuries of war and rivalry, united most of China and the new Empire came to be.

Most of the world remained Traditional and transitional. Much of the world to this day is Traditional, and in other parts it is transitional. Some states take on the outer mask of Modern Society, but under the mask they remain transitional, and their ‘elected Presidents’ are but Kings with a new title wearing business suits.

Modern Society did not grow out of the trials of many generations of men. To all practical ends, Modern Society as we know it today began less than twenty generations ago. (Only in China is this not true; the layers of government officials in China can trace their start back 100 generations to the founding of the empire of Qin.) Outside China, modern society rests upon new and unproven systems and Theories. In most cases those Theories have been confused with national character, the accidents of history, or the uneven distribution of natural resources, and these chance coincidences have been offered as ‘proof’ that one Theory or another is ‘better’ than the others. (Would for example a Capitalist, money-class, rule-of-law United States of America be as powerful today if its lands were more like Australia?)

Questions

So the first question we must ask ourselves, when we look at the world today and try to forge a path ahead, is this: If traditional society shaped itself to suit the nature of man, then how can the new forms of Modern Society suit the nature of man? They can not.

Are we no longer men?

Are we mutants now?

(Composed with pen on paper Thursday, March 20, 2008)

The Way We Live Now

The birth and growth of modern society

Spread of Modernity

The men who made modern society were the burghers, the bourgeoisie, the merchants, the townsmen, the money-class. When these men killed their kings and emperors and landed noblemen and disowned their priests, they cut off the heads of what remained of traditional society. From that blood the modern world was born.

Traditional society was left to the wild lands, what used to be called the ‘undeveloped world’ but is now called the ‘developing world’ by those whose evident aim is to kill the last traditional societies even in foreign lands these people never visit. Also, traditional society was left at the bottom of the new social order, outside the cities. In the rustic hamlet, the wild, the small town, and the farmers, the last peasants still cling to their traditional life. But this too is threatened; for some reason the money-class seeks to destroy all traditional society everywhere it finds it.

‘For some reason…’ I believe this is not wholly deliberate. Modern society is a sort of virus that blindly seeks growth and expansion at all costs. Where it meets traditional society it must by its own nature infect that traditional society with its own virus, the virus of modern life.

Out of this process a few modern societies come to take over the world, and create the modern world. It is not yet wholly here, but its rise has been steady and has seemed unstoppable.

The Virus like Machine

This is the mechanism to the infection.

Modern society, by overthrowing the established rungs of the ladder of traditional society, struck off the roof above all our heads. Thenceforth all men were king. The stairway to Heaven was (in theory at least, and by common belief) open to all, and each tread was marked with material goods and stacks of money. To climb it, you only had to make and sell more goods, amass more property, and win more money. To make more goods, you need more raw materials, and this means you must venture farther afield away from your City — and into the farm-lands and hunting-grounds and wilderness of traditional society — to get the raw materials. You must set up mining operations, logging operations. To man these operations you must offer enough cash money to lure young workers from their farms and traditional ways of life; these workers then become the core of modern society in the middle of their old traditional society.

The City also swells with growing numbers of mouths to feed, so you can climb the ladder by getting and selling more food. To do this you must introduce ‘modern methods’ to the peasant farmers and get them to grow more crops; again the inducement is cash money and the things money can buy. You must also make the farmers into merchants of the money-class, and this creates another core of modern society in the middle of the old one.

And to sell more of your goods you must expand your market and bring competition to new areas, which include the traditional society. The men in the traditional society do not need your goods, but you have made the goods desirable in order to sell better in the City. The peasants are no better men than the rest of us, and they too will desire these goods, once their desirability is made clear to them.

Finally, the merchant class uses bargaining and contracts to grow their endeavors. It doesn’t know the language of traditional society because it doesn’t share their values except the very basic, fundamental values all men must share as they are men. Therefore the money-class seeks to transform traditional society from the top down so as to be able to deal with it politically as well as economically. The mining operations, the market for goods, the purchase of grain, must all be made sure, and safe from the predation of the local chieftain or tyrant or petty king. ‘The rule of law’ is the rule of Property, a system the money-class depends on in the modern world, a vital feature of modern society, and the merchants seek at all costs to foist this ‘rule of law’ upon all the traditional societies with which they deal. But the very notion of Law as a code written down and adhered to even when it defies justice or fairness, is antithetical to the basis of traditional society, as we have seen.

Culture in Modern Life

The money-class began as the tradesmen and craftsmen who supplied the King and his court with luxury goods and needful things made with greater quality than the peasant could afford. Bread is what the peasant eats, but Kings must dine on cake. A peasant gives his love a flower from the field or a pebble from the stream, but a King gives gemstones in rare settings to his wives and whores.

At some point the money-class who made and sold these luxuries to the King felt secure enough in peace that they saw less need for the captains and noble warriors who fought to defend the realm. They also felt strong enough in numbers, that they saw (or thought they saw) that they were themselves the economy, and the King and landed nobles and priests were drags on the growth of the economy when they were not outright leeches upon it. So the merchants rebelled and cut off the Kings’ heads.

Now the money-class had the reins on the economy (which was now based wholly upon money) and the State. Culture would come last to their grip. Indeed it has not wholly come to them even today, even in the most ‘advanced’ or ‘developed’ nations.

The idea of the Nation is itself traditional, an outgrowth of the clan, a sort of super-clan.

The family and bonds of kinship has resisted utter annihilation by the money-class, which prefers that all relations be based on trade and commerce and money.

Religion with its ghosts and demons still rises from time to time, and cries out for a return to the older, traditional ways.

It is ironic that (in America and the United Kingdom at least) the main groups who clamor for the return of traditional values of family, church, and modesty at the same time champion the rights of the money-class. Have they no eyes to see that it is capitalism and the money-class (of which they are themselves members) that have done the most to destroy those traditional values, and that money and tradition are mutual foes?

‘ism’ This and That

Politically — having overthrown the kinds and priests who ruled what was left of traditional society — the burghers needed some new system of rule. Because they were revolutionaries and anti-traditionalists, the burghers were not content to let their political establishment grow out of the native soil of the citizens. People in general tend to be conservative and like to go back, after an upheaval, to some semblance of the old ways. So the burghers wanted Theory to supplant natural growth. They sought to Construct, Build, Plan, and Erect in place of nurturing what could rise up organically on its own.

So we see all the theories of Social Contract, Rights of Man, Capitalism, Socialism, Corporatism, Fascism, Communism, Republicanism, Democracy, Racism, Liberalism, and Utopianism, that never were needed before, but now came to win men’s hearts with an almost religious fervor.

We take these things for granted now in the modern world. But they were unheard-of once upon a time, and not very long ago in terms of the lift and growth of Mankind.

The idea that governance needed a Theory from which to refashion it, came first (as far as I can tell) about 2,500 years ago, in the developments in Greece in Europe and China in Asia. The idea was given a new start and great blossoming in the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, and it has roared on to new heights since then. It shows no sign of halting. New Theories, and new versions of old Theories, and hybrids of Theories old and new, are raised all the time.

Counter Wave

Meanwhile a counter-revolution has risen, a cry to bring back traditional society. This takes two broad forms. The first grows out of religion, and seeks to bring back the priests and the church to power, either complete power and a full retracement to traditional society (or new form of it), or some balance or sharing of power, with the priests given power to block or restrain some of the efforts of members of the money-class.

The second cry against the modern world was born out of Environmentalism (itself as you see yet one more ‘ism’ to join the pack) and idealizes the traditional forms of economy — the small clan-like commune, agriculture, and much of the outer trappings of traditional peasant society — as both a rejection of modern society’s Consumerism and Materialism and an attempt to build a more sustainable way of life before war, pollution, and resource exhaustion combine to form the next great global Die-Off.

(Composed with pen on paper Wednesday, March 19, 2008)

Once We Lived This Way

Traditional society described

Foreword

This begins a series of pieces that will end by looking at the current state of copyright from a historical point of view. The whole argument is a long one, so I have broken it into these posts.

Questions

Once upon a time, men lived in traditional society. Many men today still live in traditional society. But when the bourgeoisie of Europe took power from their kings and landed nobles in a series of violent revolutions beginning more than 300 years ago, they began to root out and destroy the last remnants of traditional society wherever they could find it. Capitalism, socialism, communism, and fascism: these are the different forms the money-class has proposed to replace traditional society.

They have all proved ruinous in one way or another.

The question then arises, if man developed traditional society over millions of years to suit his life, and modern society in all its forms is a radical break with traditional society, how can it suit man’s life? Has man changed as much as his society? Are we all now a mutant form of man? Or is modern society doomed to fail?

The First World

Traditional society forms itself out of families and clans, not individuals. These clans are bound by kinship extending back no more than a generation or two, and they dwell in a small area of land. They have dwelt in this land for generations. Each child as it grows up never thinks he will ever live anywhere else. The members of the clan have long memories, and they know their land well with all its beasts and plants. They know its weather and its seasons, and they pass down tales that mark the worst of times and how their fathers coped with those crises.

Traditional society has its laws and its justice, and these are not set in rigid, written law-codes that must be obeyed and enforced even when the result of doing so outrages all the living members’ sense of fairness and right. Personality plays a large part of rule and law, because everyone in the clan knows everyone else, and everyone is related to everyone else. Anonymity is impossible.

Traditional society has its religion and superstition and these form a part of its laws and government. The rules the priests ascribe to the spirits have as much legal force as the laws the elders make. Much of the law system springs from the taboos and demands of the spirit world. These dictates of ghosts, demons, and gods are not written down and are understood as broad and general decrees, which are then interpreted by the holy men and women. The ghosts do not speak from eternity but their whims and tempers change in time, as often, maybe, as the weather.

Traditional society lives with Nature in its area, but it is almost as prone to damage and undermine that natural system as we are in modern societies. The old fathers of the past and of today’s traditional societies are yet men, and all men may err from time to time. There are differences, though, between how traditional societies could destroy their habitat and haw modern societies can. First there are fewer men to the square kilometer in traditional society. Second their tools are less powerful, and thus each man can do less damage by himself. Third the traditional society has no sense of human rights, and this means no one man can flout the opinions of his fellow clansmen and hide behind a legal argument that it is his right to poison streams or wells. Fourth there is personal property and local spheres of influence over parts of the land in traditional society, but there is no ‘property’ as we know it in modern society. The land the clan holds and works and guards against other rival clans is held by the clan as a whole, and not by any individual members of the clan. So the leaders of the clan decide what should be done with the land, and as we noted, the leaders can decide what they want, inside only the loose web of their traditions of law and the dictates of ghosts, demons, and gods.

Traditional society has a different sense of time than modern society does. Time for traditional societies does not march on in a line, as we think it does, but instead wheels in a series of loops and circles large and small. The end of all the circles comes back to their beginning. ‘Progress’ is unknown. Man’s life and god’s life are unchanging in the same way that Nature is unchanging. The sin ruses, brightens, wanes and sets, and then it rises once more. Dry seasons follow wet seasons and wet seasons follow dry seasons. There is no thought that the sun will just grow brighter and brighter forever until all the world’s afire. There is no thought that the rains will fall harder and more often until all the world’s aflood. (Contrast that with the bland assertions of political and economic leaders in the modern world that ‘growth’ can continue in exponential curves … forever.) Man in traditional society knows many changes and constant change, but he trusts that the end of all the changes will come back to the beginning. For every rise there is a fall, for every birth there is a death. The way men live today, as the clansman sees it, is the same way men lived a hundred generations ago. This is the sense of time you find in fairy tales — an eternal present with only ‘local’ past and futures that sit atop an unchanging base. (In truth this sense of time is wrong: had traditional societies never changed, the modern world would never have been born. But this sense of time unchanging gives man in traditional society a certain security. ‘All things must pass and go back to whence they came’ is a sentiment that soothes the pain of crises. Man in modern society, beset with constant and escalating change, feels anxious lest he be left behind, and he feels that these changes take place and he has no control over them, no way to shape them or slow them down, let alone stop them.)

In traditional society, the individual man has relations with his kinsmen (in the varying degrees of kinship) and with his friends and fellows (fellow hunters, fellow elders, fellow miners). But he has no relationship to the State as we know it in modern society. (The State, in face, does not exist as something separate from the will of the clan.) He is thus never alone, never separate. He has almost no privacy. He has small choice over his destiny. He knows he is a part of his family, his kin, the wider clan. He has a place there and he can’t even think of what his life might be like if he were ever to lose that place. To be sent in exile and cut off from the clan is about the same thing as to die.

Rise of the City

The first change to threaten traditional society was the creation of the City. The City could come to be only when agriculture gave rise to an abundance of food that could be grown by a small number of men in the community, and that could be relied upon from year to year. The warriors who guarded the territory no longer had to fish or hunt or grow food for themselves, and the warriors became captains and kings, and the kings became emperors. The great kings took vast amounts of grain to feed the men to build their palaces, and more grain they gave to metal workers and poets and whores and cooks and armorers and boot-makers and dressmakers and barbers. So cities grew up around the palaces, with tilled fields around the cities, and mountains, grazing range, and forests around the tillage.

Most of the society stayed traditional, but there were tears in the traditional fabric. Young men and girls ran away from home to seek a better life in the City. City life itself put a higher store in men’s trade and commerce than in kinship. The growth of cities where only fields and rivers once had looked up to the sky, broke the old notion of circles in unchanging time. A town became a city, a city grew to a metropolis, a king conquered rival kings and made himself an emperor. Or the king was himself conquered and fell, and his people were enslaved; they lost their king to a foreign overlord, and they did not go back to the life they had before they got the king.

Rise of the Burghers

The bourgeoisie was born out of the city. They were themselves craftsmen and related to one another on a cash basis, as money was the measure of commerce. Trade was their way of life and all things they measured by the amount of money the things would fetch. Masters took apprentices, merchants hired employees. Men and women were bought and sold. Poor fathers who in traditional society might have been forced to expose their infants to death in the wild when there lacked enough food to support the family and the infants, now sold their children to rich merchants to live in slavery or learn a trade, one day maybe (if they should prove sharp or ambitious or cunning or unscrupulous enough to manage it) to gain their own freedom and wealth enough to buy slaves and employees of their own.

The City was born soon after the neolithic revolution in agriculture, some ten or twelve thousand years ago. The rise of kingdoms and empires grew slowly after that. In many ways the society remained traditional, but abundant food, money, and the specialization of trades that followed, pushed society down a new path: the path to the modern world.

(Composed with pen on paper Tuesday, March 18, 2008)

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)

Birds and Tales and the Talesmen Who Cage Them

‘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)

The Two Freedoms

What every talesman ought to be free to do
and where that freedom ends

Speech & Talesmanship

I take it as a general principle of civics, that each of us should be allowed to do what he wants, to the utmost extent. The corollary of this is that none of us should act in a way that bars someone else from doing what he wants.

This involves a balance between what I do and what my neighbors do. And it has a lot of implications in the physical world, where real harm can be done and where this balance must be held as the foremost principle of justice. But the balance fades in the non-physical world of speech and the arts. Talesmanship is the place where speech and art are yoked together.

The Untouchable Arts

If we look at all art and ask ourselves, ‘Can I touch it? Can I hold it in my hand? Could I smash or destroy it?’ When we do that we find that there is a class of art that can be touched, held, and destroyed. And there is another class of art that can not be touched or held or destroyed.

You can hold a painting. You can touch it and destroy it. This is true also of every piece of art that exists as a unique physical creation, that is created upon and out of some physical object, and has no existence apart from this physical object. It is true, say, of statues and drawings.

But we can’t touch or hold a song, nor could we destroy it. This is an art whose representation and whose existence form two distinct entities. The song, if you will, is an idea, and when someone sings he he only represents it, and when someone else records that singing he creates a representation of the song that we can touch, hold, or destroy. But the thing we touch and hold and may destroy is not the song itself. It isn’t even the singing of the song. It’s only a representation of a representation of the song.

Music and tales and architecture are among the Untouchable Arts. These arts exist as ideas that come before any physical representation. The representation of these arts is no better than a sketch or approximation or version of the underlying art. And these sketches can take many forms, they can be copied and the art thereby shared, and they can be destroyed — with no harm to the art itself.

A song can be represented on paper or other medium using any one of many systems of musical notation. A tale can be written down using different alphabets, pictograms, ideograms on paper or parchment or vellum or wood or stone. The song can be sung, the tale can be voiced; these vocalizations can be recorded in many ways upon many different media.

It is a feature of all the Untouchable Arts that they have some system of notation that allows us to represent them in a basic sketch or scheme. The system of notation forms a code that embodies the essence of the artwork so that someone else who knows that code can ‘re-present’ the artwork.

The Untouchable Arts exist most of all in the minds of those who perform and present and share them. The various codes or systems of notation serve us as aids and jogs to our memories, or if you will as extensions of our minds.

To the extent that digital file formats have become infinitely extensible, it may be true now or will be in the near future that all the arts will join the camp of the Untouchable. (A painter, for example, can create not with brush and dyes on canvas or board, but through a system of digital capture using a program that encodes and decodes the painter’s gestures as strokes of color on a screen.)

The Two Freedoms in Art

Let’s go back to our rule of freedom and see how it works in the art world. But let’s speak of tales and talesmen, and let them stand in for all art and artists of the Untouchable kind.

The talesman can do what he wants. So he can tell whatever tale he chooses. But no talesman can bar another from telling whatever tale he wants. So he can’t stop another talesman from repeating the tale he himself has just told.

The Touchable Arts can’t be shared or duplicated, their works are unique and so when we deal with these works we must strike the balance of all the physical world. You are not allowed to paint over another artist’s painting without his permission, for if you do you harm his work. But the Untouchable Arts can be shared and duplicated with ease, so many singers can sing one song, each after his fashion.

Consequences

The logical result of the twin rules of freedom for artists of the Untouchable Arts are the following radical guidelines:

• if you hear it, you are free to say it
• if you see it, you are free to copy it
• if you learn it, you are free to repeat it

And this undoes all copyright, trademark, and patent monopolies in the world.

(Composed with pen on paper Tuesday 12 February 2008)