A decade in the past, a number of years after I began writing The Marginalian (below the outgrown name Brain Pickings, in my twenties, whereas working 4 jobs), a musician good friend gave me a ebook she mentioned captured the animating spirit of my labor of affection: The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (public library) by the poet Lewis Hyde, revealed a yr earlier than I used to be born.
Like a technology of inventive individuals, I devoured it with a uncommon and rapturous sense of being seen within the elemental strata of my being. Right here was shimmering affirmation that inventive work offers one thing which can’t be quantified or commodified. Right here was assurance that these whose lives it touches can provide again to its makers in a means that’s not a transaction however a bow of mutual appreciation, mutual respect, mutual cherishment. On the middle of Hyde’s premise is that concept that inventive works exist concurrently in a market economic system and a present economic system. “Solely one among these,” Hyde writes, “is crucial, nonetheless: a murals can survive with out the market, however the place there isn’t a reward there isn’t a artwork.”
I discovered myself excited about The Reward anew lately within the context of music and the abyssal disconnect between how a lot we worth it in our lives and the way a lot it has been devalued by the market economic system we inhabit.
“Without music life would be a mistake,” Nietzsche declared. However set his attribute drama apart and ask individuals throughout ages and cultures what art-form most helps them stay their lives, and they’ll overwhelmingly level to music. It’s, fairly actually, the soundtrack to our lives — to our fallings in love, to our seasons of grief, to our exercises and our commutes and our events and our most personal moments. It’s the sacrament we attain for once we need to really feel what we really feel extra deeply, the every day pulsebeat that helps us transfer via even our most difficult days with extra composure and resilience. It’s the sunshine of the spirit. “This certainly is music,” Whitman exulted. “[It] whirls me wider than Uranus flies, it wrenches such ardors from me I didn’t know I possess’d them.” Music, essentially the most summary of the humanities, is essentially the most concrete in the way it unlocks us to ourselves, the way it “opens a path into the realm of silence.”
Music can be one thing individuals make — dwelling individuals, who put a foot on the ground every morning and set about making day: meals and love and laundry. Individuals who have a present, in each senses of the phrase, and provides if freely as a result of making music is a lifeline for them — a fundament of who they’re and why they stay.
We all know this. We really feel it the second we pause to replicate on the interior lifetime of inventive labor. And but now we have been complicit in permitting Silicon Valley — that handmaiden of late-stage capitalism — to make of this elemental sacrament a market commodity of lesser worth than a latte, in order that the artists who make it are the least rewarded inventive laborers of our time.
Revisiting The Reward, I used to be delighted to find a brand new foreword by Margaret Atwood, during which she shines a sobering gleam on this astonishing asymmetry between worth and value, inviting us to rethink it.
Observing that “presents remodel the soul in ways in which easy commodities can’t,” she writes:
Presents create bonds and obligations, and never everybody needs these or understands them… If you happen to’ve received one thing out of it, as we are saying — when you’ve handled it as a present, which by its nature has religious price however no financial worth, being priceless — what do you owe its creator, who has been the instrument via which it has arrived in your fingers? Your gratitude, by way of a phrase of thanks? Your critical consideration? The worth of a latte deposited in a beggar’s bowl e-tip jar?
The reply isn’t “nothing.”
So, at present, at the present time, consider a musician or two whose music you cherish, whose reward has touched your life and helps you reside it. Discover their web site. Discover their BandCamp. Discover the “donate” button on their Spotify. And provides again not-nothing. It would assist them put meals on the desk. It can assist them really feel the radiance all of us stay for — the sense that we matter, that we belong within the nice scheme of magnificence and understanding. It can assist you really feel like one thing greater than the patron, the “consumer,” to which Silicon Valley has endeavored to cut back you.
With out the reward of music, life could be sub-life.
