soul bribery

Back at the rock-pile.

This morning the temperature has dropped back below zero (Celsius), relatively cold for this resort city washed by the warm Pacific. Crusts of aging snow web the darkness with white.

And this morning, so far, I have keyed notes from three research books: Isis in the Ancient World by R. E. Witt; Goat Husbandry by David Mackenzie; and The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James.

As I read and then type my research works, I'm often struck by how they offer a highly relevant commentary on my own current life. For example, lately my thoughts have been circling around money. This morning I typed these words (a compressed extract) from James's book:

We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference--the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. When we are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.

It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop; yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help to set free our generation. The cause would need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we personally were contented with our poverty.

The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.

Strongly put--but no more strongly than it should be. "The unbribed soul"--those words have the power to haunt one, and they should haunt one.

From time to time I ask myself: has my soul been bribed? I do not chase overtly after wealth these days, but I do live a comfortably bourgeois lifestyle in one of the world's richest societies. I own my own house and my own car (shared ownership in each case). On a world scale, I'm one of the rich. Have I sold out?

It's not a completely straightforward question. In the main, I am not governed my money or financial gain. But I do worry about my ongoing solvency, and no doubt this concern affects my thinking and my decisions. I recognize in myself the "cowardice" and "corruption" named by James: the timidity and compromise that steal over one invisibly when presented with the possibility of loss or even of reduced gain. When you calculate what your beliefs or integrity may cost you, you put a dollar value on your principles, and in so doing, turn them into mere economic entities. You're a worshipper of Mammon.

I was again amazed to think that James's words were first published in 1902. Even from his vantage, society had gone soft, had agreed to exchange whatever principles it may have had for creature comforts. I think of my similar surprise in reading Sister Carrie in 2006, published in 1900: Dreiser's depiction of the materialistic and consumeristic wasteland of America as he saw it. It is as though even then people had taken their motto from the Bible:

If the dead are not raised, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die."

(Interestingly, both Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:32 and Isaiah in Isaiah 22:13 put this phrase in quotations, but it's not clear to me whom they're quoting. People usually point back to Ecclesiastes, but the phrase as such does not exist there--not in my Bible, anyway.)

Well then. Am I a sellout? Answer: partly. But only partly!

money, fame, and their lack

Yesterday, busy with other aspects of my life, I did nothing toward The Mission, not even write a blog-post--not until the afternoon reading period, when I did press forward with The Cults of the Roman Empire. I didn't feel good about this; it truly felt like downtime.

I need to keep nibbling away at this project, and to do this daily in spite of other responsibilities and commitments. It's an old story for writers and other artists: how to survive while also attending to one's (often unremunerative) vocation. In this respect I've been luckier than most, but it's still a balancing act.

James Joyce, when he first ran away to the Continent with Nora Barnacle, taught languages at the Berlitz School and wrote in his free time. He was poor. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, another of my inspiring guides in literature, was tortured by money worries (at least partly exacerbated by gambling), and this no doubt contributed to his passion for writing Crime and Punishment, in which his poverty-stricken protagonist feverishly talks himself into killing for money.

An interesting alternative to this is when the artist enjoys financial success but critical opprobrium. I'm not thinking here of people like Mickey Spillane, who made no bones about the fact that he wrote first of all for money, and didn't have the least interest in what professional critics thought about his work. I'm thinking more of people like the painter Robert Bateman, who was featured in a brief news segment in the last couple of days. Although enjoying great popular success, and collected by people such as Prince Charles and Prince Philip, Bateman has been mainly ignored or denigrated by the academic art world. His meticulously crafted and arresting nature scenes leave them cold.

Unlike other realist painters launching their careers in the 1950s and 1960s, like Alex Colville and Ken Danby, when nonfigurative art was considered the only valid kind, Bateman has not been "rehabilitated". As I think about it, I suspect this is because his art is inaccessible unless you share something of his passion for nature, which most urban art critics and curators probably do not, beyond a certain obligatory lip-service. Most of us city dwellers have never seen a polar bear or a wolf in the wild, and never will. As subjects they are therefore as remote as figures of Greek mythology--more so, since the Greek gods had human form. His paintings of natural scenes are done with the same kind of painstaking reverence as the Buddhist thangkas painted in Tibet--sacred images to hang over shrines. The painting of them is itself a spiritual practice, the resulting picture being actually secondary. It wouldn't surprise me if Bateman's attitude were similar. The pictures say, "Look! Look!" And if we're not amazed and awed as he is, then we're not really looking yet. His meticulous and masterly technique is really only an attendant and servant of his subject, which you might as well call the goddess Gaia.

But Bateman has enjoyed great popular and commercial success--well earned, in my opinion.

So: it's tough to have it all. But what else is new?

the golden rule

Kimmie opted to take Friday and today off from work, so we've been enjoying an extended long weekend.

I don't spend my early mornings much differently on my "days off" than I do on my "days on". I make coffee and come down here to my office to type notes from my research books. But on my "days off", I feel free to stay longer and meander on to other things as the mood takes me. I also, generally, don't bother with a blog-post, which feels like a "workday" responsibility. For even though I find it not very difficult to draft these posts, it is an effort, and it's tempting to take time off.

This is one of the many blessings of unpaid work. I was struck when I read this excellent line by Thomas Carlyle in William James's Principles of Psychology, volume 1:

Make thy claim of wages a zero, then hast thou the world under thy feet.

How true this is. Generally we all need wages to live, but the less need you have of them, the freer and more self-directed you are. You can place your effort where you want, rather than where your paymaster tells you to.

The more need or desire you have for money, the more vulnerable you are to those from whom you're trying to get it. This often leads into conflicts of interest, in which your desire for money interferes with your moral integrity or artistic judgment. It leads us to that jaded place where we find ourselves doing something we personally feel is wrong, or at least something we don't believe in, but do it anyway because "that's what they're paying me to do."

Years ago I was at a conference of some kind for people in the TV industry. One panelist was a story editor for a high-profile CBC TV series. That is, the series was independently produced, but broadcast on CBC. Something she said bothered me. She talked about getting episodes ready to shoot, and referred to the network as "the client".

I myself was the creator and de facto "story editor" of a successful drama series, also running on CBC. But I would never have dreamed of using the word client to describe the network. To me, this was the vocabulary of the advertising agency, not of a creator of dramatic works. And to be sure, my relationship with the network proved to be quite adversarial, and it got me kicked off my own show as soon as they could find a way to get rid of me. Still, I was, as far as I was concerned, standing up for the right things: the creative quality and integrity of the show, and the quality of the audience experience. I was fighting for the viewers. The network was buying the series, but I did not regard them as a client, someone to whom my position as vendor required a meek and subservient attitude--a subservience bought with money.

These kinds of thoughts are mainly alien to functionaries within the broadcasting establishment, and most other establishments. People sell out and make their peace with doing as they're told in exchange for big paychecks. But this is not good for the product, it's not good for the audience, and it's not good for your soul. And the bigger the paycheck, the more bought you can become. I've mentioned before Michael Jordan's infamous line, "Republicans buy sneakers, too"--his reason for not involving himself in a political campaign in his home state against a racist incumbent. What is money, that it can turn one of the United States' richest men into an Uncle Tom?

I'm not saying that Michael Jordan, or anyone else, should be obligated to participate in a political debate he doesn't want to. But the reason he gave for demurring showed that he had been bought: his income-stream was the overarching value. What good can ever come of this?

At a time close to my attendance at that TV conference years ago, I also attended a weekend workshop on independent film production by the producer Dov Simens. At the workshop, he taught us would-be indie producers the "golden rule": "He who has the gold, makes the rules." Whoever's spending the money calls the shots. The producer who's aware of this has leverage over the services and vendors he's trying to deal with. To land a job, to get some of that gold, people will bend, twist, accommodate. Often they have to: they've got to eat.

But we shouldn't forget that Simens's "golden rule" is not actually the Golden Rule--"do unto others as you would have others do unto you"--but a deliberate parody of it. I've left his "rule" in lowercase to make the distinction clear.

So: by all means, sell--but don't sell out. I'd even say, if you possibly can, try making your wages a zero, at least sometimes, and see what happens.

the worldly artist

A quasi day off yesterday. Kimmie took the day off to celebrate Robin's birthday; we took her out to lunch at Milestones in Park Royal. It was a sunny day, like summer, and we dined outside on the wide, closed-in patio by the parking-lot. Robin is now 26, the age I was when I first formed a serious relationship with her mother. She is a self-composed independent adult; who knows how I might have changed in the same period?

I'm still looking to provide breathing-space for The Mission. For more than a week I have just been ticking over with my research reading. Yes, I need to work on how to balance my various responsibilities--any copywriting or other revenue-generating work I might have along with my artistic project. This has always been a challenge for anyone involved in the creative life. There is no simple way to solve it; it's a personal matter.

In my case, I'm relatively practical, hard-nosed, and bourgeois for a creative type. I'm attracted to business, science, and political affairs, especially public policy, and especially as this affects people on a global scale. Although I'm strange and eccentric and somewhat neurotic, I've never been an otherworldly aesthete who has no head for practical things or for figures or business. On the contrary, I'm generally a shrewd and inventive negotiator, and I positively enjoy putting together deals (although I'm not by nature a salesman or a trader in any sense). I like finding mutually beneficial arrangements bounded by clear agreements and rules. I like structure and clarity.

I'm interested by money and am very good at handling it. For a layman I have a solid grasp of capital markets, investing, and finance. I understand interest rates and compounding, and have a pretty good knowledge of the Canadian tax system. I hate wasting money (or anything else) but I'm not stingy; I like getting good value for money, and I can live on very little--indeed, I tend to be interested and stimulated by the problem of living within my means. I believe that the best value for money is a good charitable donation; when I was single I dedicated 10% of my earnings to CARE Canada to feed people who weren't eating enough--a cause that still haunts my heart and to which I still donate.

As a result of all this, although I'm an artist by nature, I own my own house and am debt-free. I can talk business with worldly people and enjoy it. In an important sense, I'm one of them.