Before I go back home for break, here’s something y’all might wanna look at. It’s not the most polished piece in the world, but it says some things that I think are important about free culture:
It gets bandied about a lot in our movement that “the past seeks to control the futureâ€?, and ways to avoid or fight that. But maybe it would behoove us to understand what we mean when we say that; I think too often we fall into the trap of making this a class-warfare issue, and talk about money-grubbing pigs trying to keep their fat monopolies and bringing culture down to a price tag affordable by the masses and so on, as though we’d just come out of our Intro Seminar on Marx and were rip-roaring to liberate the proletariat.
Well, that has its merits. There certainly do exist money-grubbers out there, but then there are money-grubbers everywhere in this world in every political battle, and if we’re honest we’ll admit that there are money-grubbers who like what we’re doing because it might help their profit margins—rasitical street-vendors with CD-burners who burn Top 40 .MP3s and DivX .AVIs of summer action flicks in order to give people around the world a cheap slice of the most homogeneous and tasteless bits of our culture, and I’m not going to pretend there’s anything particularly moral or uplifting about that (except that most things people do to feed their families are ultimately okay by me), just to help our cause.
Problem is the money-grubbers are never the people on the front lines; the people who come out of the woodwork to argue this generally are, on both sides, people who genuinely love and respect the arts, and on both sides include many artistic creators who defend their opinions with great passion. And I think it’s disingenuous to call hardcore copyright defenders like Lars Ulrich “selloutsâ€? or victims of false consciousness. I’d rather debate on their terms. I think people forget that Marx was an economist, and that economists, like every other academic, tend to make their own discipline the center of the universe. It’s not all about dollars and cents, and most of the time I would prefer to see dollars and cents as symptoms of bigger, more human issues, not being an
economist myself (yet).
So let me back up a bit. Much as we like to yammer about digital technology, and media politics, and the changing face of our modern hyperconnected global culture, I think there’s nothing particularly new under the sun here. The modern media is just a radical expansion in scale of numbers of the sort of thing human beings have been doing since we were human, communicating. Telling stories, drawing pictures, chatting, explaining, teaching.
So let’s go to that most basic human interaction, that between parents and children, or if you like, the general interaction between the older generation and the younger. Some of us may be parents; most of us have probably experienced parents, at one point or another. What’s the most exasperating feeling of being a parent, that in turn exasperates children so much?
Parents do a lot for their kids; ultimately they do *everything* for their kids. Their kids exist as a result of the parents giving up bits of their genetic material, their own bodies: in the case of a biological mother, giving up living space within one’s own body, giving up food and blood and nutrients for nine months. Then the kid’s got to learn about the world, learn right from wrong, learn how to think and feel and react; the parents have to take all their built-up wisdom from all the years of heartache and trouble and triumph and find a way to distill it for the benefit of this odd little person who looks so much like them.
And what’s so frustrating is that it doesn’t *work*. The little person made with your DNA has a mind of her own. She rebels against the rules you thought so hard about, she has thoughts contrary to what you know to be logical and correct, she ends up looking and acting almost certainly differently from the way you pictured her when you first decided to have a kid.
You can do one of two things – all parents end up doing a mix of both, being imperfect people, but hopefully parents are consciously aware of picking one over the other. Some parents choose to try to stifle their kids, to invoke their power and their authority and their *will* against their children, so that their children learn to parrot what the parents say, follow the parents’ orders, and even in adult life live with a mental image of their parents over their shoulder. The parents choose to have their kids be an extension of themselves, little remote telepresence units, to grow and glorify the parents’ own egos. They often succeed to a depressing degree. And in so doing they fail, because neither the world nor, deep down, the parent, really gets anything out of making clone slaves out of kids. That’s wasting 99.9999999% of everything a kid could be.
Good parents realize – no, they *remember* – that the point of having a kid is to *create*, not duplicate, to bring a life into the world that’s new and different. It’s not losing a part of your own life to invest time and energy into a kid who leaves you and becomes her own person; it’s *gaining* it, because the DNA potential, the knowledge and wisdom, the particular experiences and insights that might have died with you now have the opportunity to be part of a new, exciting, *different* person, to grow in directions your life wouldn’t have let them, to explore vistas your eyes couldn’t have seen, to be something that your own personal ego was too small to contain.
Okay, so I’m not writing for a parenting magazine. What does this have to do with media? Every damn thing. While I’ll never compare the frozen fragments of personality we call “artâ€? with real, living people, I understand and agree with Brian Wilson when he says his songs are like his children, each with a history and a name. A good artist, a real artist, isn’t just making things the way an assembly line worker puts together widgets; an artist *creates* the way a parent creates, by taking personal thoughts and experiences and heartaches and joys and pumping blood and energy and time into them for nine months or maybe more, then trying to nursemaid them into the real world.
And that hurts. It’s damn painful and frightening for me, and I’m only an artist in the smallest and most pissant ways. I can’t imagine how a Beethoven would feel, draining years of his life in dark attics scribbling and revising and tearing out his hair just to make pleasant sounds for pampered aristocrats.
We all start out, at least in our imaginations, as self-contained little souls. Our thoughts vibrate around in our own skulls, our eyes and ears drink in without pouring out; as long as we keep our mouths shut and our hands still, we have our own little universe of perceptions and ideas that no one else will ever see and no one else can ever touch. What kind of a risk must it be for a child to learn to speak, to try to turn those magical first experiences of color and sound into sequential word-patterns for adults to analyze, criticize and correct?
And yet we do it. We give back to the world that gives us everything; we pour out those thoughts and feelings into the world. We can’t help it; it’s what makes us human. The expressions on our face reflect the world we see into other people’s eyes; our tones of voice betray the music we hear, the twitch and texture of the way our skin leans against another’s tells them anything they need to know about our feelings for them. No wonder the condition of social anxiety disorder exists.
But there’s that paradox again. An adult could save so much money and time keeping all his things to himself; his financial assets, his good reputation and name, his DNA. Instead he often chooses to make another little person specifically to take those things away, not because he doesn’t value these things but because he values them too much to see them dissipate when he dies. He wants them to live on outside of him.
That’s what I think motivates artists; we know that that thought or emotion we had is uniquely ours, is a pure expression of ego, will not and cannot be tarnished as long as it stays inside our brains. But we can’t bear the thought of leaving it there untouched and forgotten. We want it to give it form, voice, life, so we write poetry, we compose music, we paint, we dance, we sing – we give birth to our intellectual and spiritual children and let them walk about in the world.
And artists, too, face the parents’ choice. And artists, all too often, take the twisted route that abusive parents take. They use their art to *reduce* instead of expand. All the potential and beauty in one realm of art they try to claim for themselves, out of fear and jealousy. The same feeling a dad gets when he sees a sweaty teenage boy groping his beautiful daughter; the feeling a devoted mom gets when she sees the son she tried to teach morality and goodness spouting off an insane, godless philosophy. The artist reneges on the gift she made to the world when she gave it her song or poem; the song still *belongs* to her, and *she* gets to tell you how to interpret it or listen to it. Art could be a way to liberate her thoughts, to let a thought live a thousand new lives in the minds of a thousand new listeners; instead it becomes a way for her to try to exert authority and rights to stifle *others’* thoughts.
The critical flaw in that is ultimately, I think, ingratitude. Ingratitude and myopia. As abusive parents are the ones who forget what it was like to be a child, full of potential and desire to become independent adults, abusive artists forget what it was like to be a reader or listener, to experience art and feel a deep resonance with it that changed the way the world looked. They forget that the critical moment of epiphany that they saw was the slow simmering buildup of a million other artists, a million books and movies and paintings and conversations and comments that other people gave to them over their lifetime. They play God, pretending that they created their art ex nihilo rather than being given it by God and the universe in trust. And in so doing they forget the reason for art in the first place.
A bad parent is the paterfamilias who makes his family into a little kingdom of puppets; a bad artist is the one who, having made something great, takes her children and grandchildren, her work and those who love it, and act as a kind of guru or Master, telling people what they’re allowed to learn from it, what they’re allowed to think it means. I see this behavior all the time, and it pains me, because people like that are depriving their art of 99.99999% of what it could be, and they’re depriving themselves of 99.99999% of the real impact they could have in their followers’ lives.
If I have a child, I want her to grow up to be herself, not me. I want to give her everything of myself I can so that as much of my thoughts, words, emotions can live on *outside of me* as possible, can go on to meet other people and do other things that I could never in a million years have dreamed of doing. I hope I can be mature enough to want that for everything I do. Every stray thought I let go of I hope will bounce from mind to mind until it blossoms into something great. I want my poetry to be like a child, going into others’ minds, meeting ideas I never met, growing into something new. I *owe* the world the chance to get at these thoughts in my head; the world has given me those thoughts, given me the opportunity to grow into the person I am through books and movies and conversations and teachers, and I have to give the person I am back to the world
so that all of that can go on meaning something after I’m gone.
And it hurts, and it’s scary; I hate the idea of people savagely mocking my ideas or grossly misunderstanding them, reusing my ideas as part of projects and agendas I find disgusting or evil, reusing my art as part of projects I find degrading and banal. But that’s the risk, the risk I take as surely as the risk that my kid will end up growing into Hitler or Larry Flynt or a corpse-by-suicide at the age of 17.
I can understand artists who hate that risk, who try to eliminate it through politics and control. The same way I understand parents who try to do the same thing. And I believe they are sincere, and deep down, at heart, they’re doing what they think is best. But for the sake of their children, I oppose them with everything I have.
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