Celebrating Books, Authors – and Copyright

There’s so much stuff going on today in the bookish world. It’s World Book Day (unless you’re in the UK and Ireland, where it’s World Book Night instead – yes, I agree it’s confusing), where people give books, and read them in public, and where the lives and work of famous authors – most notably Miguel de Cervantes – are celebrated. It’s wonderful to see books, and writing, and creativity, and storytelling, marked with such joy and enthusiasm, and I love seeing my Twitter timeline fill up with people wishing Shakespeare a happy birthday. It makes me happy that, so many years after the great man’s death, he is remembered and loved – not to mention his work. It underlines, to me, the wonder of books and literacy and stories, and how (much as people may think they’re not important) they’re one of the most vital aspects of human culture we have.

There he is now, keeping an eye on you. Best be reading something!
Photo Credit: yumikrum via Compfight cc

Last night, I watched a programme on BBC about travelling the length of the Mekong River, which runs through Tibet, China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Last night’s episode focused on Laos, a country where one in four people is illiterate, and schooling is sporadic due to its expense, as well as many other complex reasons. At one point in the documentary, the presenter and some local people took a mobile library (housed on a boat) to an isolated community, where they were met at the shore by at least a hundred laughing, dancing, clapping children, all of whom were overjoyed to see the books’ arrival. There was music, festivity, drama, and excitement, and then the children had the chance to board the library and choose a book. They then sat around, on rocks and hillocks and tucked into any nook or cranny they could find, and they each read, completely absorbed in the words and the stories they were experiencing. It was one of the most moving things I have ever seen. I can’t overstate how incredible it was to see these children enjoying themselves so much through music, art, drama and literature, things which children in my corner of the world have laid out before them every day without realising how privileged they are.

I already believe in the power of literacy and how it affects the lives of children – who then grow up to become adults, of course, hopefully with their love of the beauty of creativity and culture intact. The programme cemented what I already know, instead of teaching me something new. But it was a truly wonderful piece of television, in any case.

But is creativity important? Should it be?

Today, as well as being World Book Day, is also World Copyright Day. Copyright can be a complex thing; there are people who feel that an author’s/artist’s copyright over their creative work shouldn’t be quite so long – and, to be honest, I’m inclined to agree, particularly when it comes to literary heavyweights like Joyce. Because of copyright restrictions, it was difficult to use Joyce’s work for scholarly purposes until very recently. Having said that, it is one of the only protections the ‘average’ creative has in a world which is already chipping away, steadily, at their precarious income. An author may take twenty years to become established, by which time their ‘backlist’ – the books they’ve written which are still in print, and still selling – may form the majority of their income. I do believe authors and artists should have a right to earn an income (note: I haven’t said ‘a living’, because most don’t come anywhere close, even in the best of times) from their work, and I do believe that copyright should extend the length of an author’s lifetime, so that this money is protected for as long as an author or artist is in need of it.

Maybe you don’t agree. Maybe you feel that if a person is going to be a ‘creative’, following that airy-fairy calling which comes to them from the stars, that they should fund it themselves, or do it purely for the love of it. Well, yes. People who want to create will create whether they’re being paid for it or not,  in the cracks and crannies of their lives, in the spare time they have between all the other commitments they’re living around. But what’s that doing to the idea of ‘art’ itself? Why don’t we want to foster a culture of creativity? Why do we heap such scorn on the heads of those who create, while flocking in our droves to the cinema to take in the latest blockbuster movie? Why do we illegally download TV shows and music, which we want to consume, but for whose creators we have scant regard? Why does the web proliferate with sites where people can download pirated copies of books? We already live in a world where books are seen as disposables, things which should cost pennies and which should be available to us whenever we want them. But who creates the things we consume? Why don’t we see the creative process as having value?

Yesterday, in time (ironically?) for World Book and Copyright Day, a political party based in the UK, which would have been the natural home for many creative types, announced its plans to reduce copyright terms to 14 years for creative work (including books, film, drama, and so on). This means that an author’s copyright would run out well before their death, and would open up scenarios where, during an artist’s lifetime, other parties – such as large corporations, maybe – would have the power to take their idea and turn it into something the artist never intended. Perhaps they’d make a movie out of their book, for instance, which the artist would never have sanctioned if they still had control, or perhaps they’d simply republish the work, maybe with subtle edits or changes which destroy the original artist’s vision – not to mention making money from it. But copyright isn’t always about money: it’s about ownership, and protection, of an idea which belongs – during your lifetime – to you.

95%, or more, of creative people don’t ‘profit’ from their work. They might earn a little, perhaps; enough to keep them going, keep them creating, make it worthwhile for them to invest their time and energy into the work, make it easier to juggle their other commitments in order to fit their creative work in. If we remove one of their only means of earning this small income, we destroy art, and we destroy artists. There are people who become very wealthy through art, of course, but those people are rare. I don’t want to see a world where culture is run by committee, or where art is designed by mega-corporations, and where everything we read or see or hear sounds exactly the same. I fear we’re already heading down that road, and drastically reducing copyright would contribute to this.

Reduce it, certainly. Perhaps allow copyright to span forty years, fifty at the most. This should protect most artists, which will protect our culture and the vibrancy and authenticity of our creative industries. But I tremble at the thought of it being cut away completely, or reduced so drastically as to make it worthless. It’s one of the few aspects of the creative life which offers any protection to those brave enough to try to make something new, and to add to the sum of human culture. Instead of simply consuming mindlessly, and misusing the innocuous-seeming word ‘share’ (which, in our modern world, seems to have more in common with ‘steal’), let’s try to protect our creative industries for the future.

That, to me, is the best way of celebrating World Book and Copyright Day. However you’re marking it, I hope you thoroughly enjoy the words and stories which are thick in the air today.

A Poet’s Passing

Today, at 11.30 a.m., in a beautiful church in a suburb of Dublin, the funeral Mass of one of our most dearly beloved citizens will take place. Later this evening, he will be brought for burial to his birthplace, far in the north of my small country – a town in Derry, called Bellaghy.

He is Seamus Heaney, and I can hardly believe we’ve lost him.

Image: theguardian.com

I think I am among good company when I say that my first real introduction to the power of poetry came at school, when we studied Heaney’s ‘Mid-Term Break’. This poem, taken from his first collection Death of A Naturalist (1966), made a massive impression on me, and I think it’s fair to say on most of my peers, too. Telling the true story of the death of a young child from the point of view of his older sibling, it is a slender piece of writing, one that slips between you and your soul and twists, slightly, revealing to you your own fragility. I wept the first time I read it, and even though a great many years have passed since then, the poem’s power is undimmed.

This gentle evisceration was what made Heaney’s work so powerful, to me. His poems looked so delicate on the page, strung together like lacework, but the reading of them went straight to the heart. The images he could create would sometimes take a line or two to fully develop inside your mind – you’d have read past the hook of a particular stanza before the impact would hit you – and then you’d have to re-read, awed by the newness, almost frightened by the sense of unfolding inside your own head. Heaney understood people, and he understood thought, and he understood emotion. He wove his poetry out of all these things, and he added the uniqueness of his own intellect, too. His work is unlike that of any other writer.

There are few poets whose work I love. Poetry very rarely speaks to me: I am a harsh and demanding reader of that particular genre. So much of it seems contrived, or fake, or ‘for the sake of it’, that when I read a poem which rings a bell inside me, I know I’ve found a treasure. Emily Dickinson’s work does this for me, as does Sylvia Plath’s, and I also love the work of Medbh McGuckian and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Seamus Heaney, however, was always top of the pile. His work shaped my introduction to great literature as a child at school, and his work helped to forge me as a medievalist, much later in life, through his translation (or, perhaps more accurately, ‘modernisation’) of the Old English epic poem ‘Beowulf.’ His version of this poem still stands as one of my most dearly loved pieces of writing, despite the issues it has from the point of view of accuracy. In a way, it doesn’t even matter that Heaney doesn’t keep to the exact sense of the Old English, and that he brings in words that are not there in the original, and that he is, or was, not a scholar of Old English. Perhaps one might even say ‘that is the point.’ Heaney brought life to this ancient poem. He woke the sword’s song, and he mapped out the whale-road, and he showed us the battle-lightning. He breathed humanity into Grendel. He made a powerful political statement through his word choices. He made the poem relevant to his own age, and that is worth more, to me, than dryly sticking to the exact sense of the Old English. There are those who hate Heaney’s ‘Beowulf’, and there are those who love it. I love it.

On Friday, when the news of Heaney’s death broke, I sat at my computer and wept. I read the news articles over and over, hoping that it would all be a mistake; I read the words of those who loved him, who knew him, and realised that while I did not know him, I loved him. I think our whole country did. The six o’clock news broadcast on the day of his death was extended in order for us to start coming to terms with our grief, and his funeral will be broadcast on live television. The president of my country, himself an acclaimed poet, was among the first to eulogise our fallen hero, and to speak of the depth of regard in which he was held. His face has been all over the newspapers. People from all over the country, and from all walks of life, have been talking of their sorrow, and how awful it is that he was taken from us so suddenly. He has been taken from us – from Ireland, both north and south – and we shall miss him like no other.

Of course, my thoughts are with his wife Marie and their children, and the rest of his family; the country’s loss is, naturally, secondary to theirs in every way. In a very real sense, though, Heaney’s death has torn a hole right through the heart of Irish intellectual and cultural life, and it is a hole that can never be repaired.

I don’t think there’s a more appropriate way to honour Seamus Heaney than by reproducing his own words. Here is a section of the end of his ‘Beowulf’, after the mighty king has fallen, and his men are left to mourn:

Then twelve warriors rode around the tomb,
Chieftains’ sons, champions in battle,
all of them distraught, chanting in dirges,
mourning his loss as a man and a king.
They extolled his heroic nature and exploits
and gave thanks for his greatness…
So the Geat people, his hearth-companions,
sorrowed for the lord who had been laid low.
They said that of all the kings upon the earth
he was the man most gracious and fair-minded,
kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.

Heaney may not have been, like Beowulf, a man ‘keen to win fame’ through his good deeds and wisdom (he was both good and wise merely because it came naturally to him, not because he wished to be praised for it), but he was gracious and fair-minded, kindest to his people, and he was a great man. I am sorrowful at his passing, and long will I remember him.

Seamus Heaney
1939-2013
Image: en.wikipedia.org

Freedom

Just another word for nothing left to lose? Well. I’m not so sure about that.

It was, of course, the Fourth of July yesterday; I’m not American, so for me it was just another day. I know, though, that the Fourth of July is a holiday held dear all over the world, and one which is remembered, if perhaps not observed, in many countries. It got me thinking about the idea of freedom – what it means, the implications it has, why it’s important, and whether it’s possible to achieve a world order in which everyone is free, all at the same time – and so today I thought I’d take a short ramble through my thoughts on the issue. Will you join me for the walk?

Image: footage.shutterstock.com

Freedom can be used with a lot of prepositions – freedom from, freedom to, freedom of – so, clearly, it is a concept with many facets. It means different things to different people, and freedoms expected in one culture may not be expected, or even desired, in another. Freedom is not a ‘one size fits all’ – one culture should not impose its own notions of freedom on another, I think – and, in that sense, it’s difficult to speak of a freedom that can encompass the world. In my opinion, nobody should live in fear, under oppression, or with the expectation that their liberty may be removed at any time, without warning; however, in order for this to happen, I think the world would have to change so much that it’s hard to see a way for it to become a reality. Freedom can be a threatening force to some – we all know of political regimes in which the powers that be keep an airtight hold on their citizens’ daily lives for fear that granting them an inch of liberty might spell their own downfall – and some people are interested only in a freedom that applies to them, and them alone.

Why are human beings so complicated? And so cruel, sometimes? I don’t think I’ll ever figure that one out.

For some terrible reason, humanity seems to have developed in such a way that it can only function if some of the world’s population is oppressed. Our economic systems are designed to keep certain people down; western consumer culture has trapped generations of people – often, people who live ‘far away’ and who are, therefore, easy to forget – in a spiral of poverty and overwork; certain religions and cultures deny people the freedom to gain an education, to drive a car, to live where they wish… the list is endless. It takes a greater brain than mine to come up with a way to solve these problems, I fear. It causes me a great deal of guilt when I compare the life I am privileged to lead with the life of a person who is exactly like me, but living in a different country or under a different set of beliefs, and whose life is vastly different to mine as a result of mere geography.

Can a world be forged in which we are all, to echo the great phrase, created equal? Obviously, I know every person is intrinsically equal to every other human person, simply by dint of being alive, but anyone taking a look around our planet can see that the idea of equality between peoples is, in a lot of places, nothing more than a beautiful dream. I fear too much change would be required to make it a feasible reality everywhere. Sadly, there are people who would fight tooth and nail to protect their own freedom, and that of their families and loved ones, while not caring what happens to others. But if we are not all free, to whatever extent we wish it, is there any point in any of us being free? And how free are we, really, in a world where we’re bombarded with messages about how we’re not good enough, and how we must buy and acquire and hoard more and more, and how happiness is only achievable when a particular total appears at the end of our bank statements? There are many forms of oppression, though some are far more insidious than others.

In order for freedom to be extended to all, I think a lot of people would have to give up some of the things they’ve always taken for granted, and governments all over the world would have to prove themselves trustworthy and incorrupt, and we would all have to agree on what the word ‘freedom’ actually means. Because of this, I’m not sure we’ll ever see universal equality, though it’s certainly something we should never stop striving towards. I am very grateful for the freedoms in my life, and for the fact that so many of those who’ve gone before me have paved the way for me to have the life I’ve got. What more selfless act can there be but to take action which will guarantee a better life for people you will never meet, or know? What better example to follow?

I hope all of those who celebrate the Fourth of July had a wonderful day yesterday, and I hope that people all over the world took a moment to reflect on their own freedoms, and to be grateful for them. I know I did.

Happy Friday, and I hope a wonderful weekend, full of happy things, awaits you.

Human Nature

Happy April Fool’s Day. I’m not sure I altogether like this ‘holiday’, having been on the receiving end of one too many pranks as a younger person (in case I haven’t revealed this already, I’m extremely gullible), but if you’re celebrating – and not making a fool out of somebody else – then have a ball.

You could just do like this fella and gambol around in a funny costume for a while.
Image: 123rf.com

It’s a Bank Holiday weekend here, craftily arranged by my husband and I in order to help us celebrate our anniversary (of course). It has nothing to do with the fact that most of the country is languishing in a chocolate-fuelled stupor this morning… We had a wonderful day yesterday for Easter Sunday; we spent it with two of our best friends and their young baby, where we all went on an Easter Egg Hunt. It was, of course, more fun for the adults than the child, and sadly, the adults ate all the chocolate, too. (In our defence, the baby isn’t able to eat solids yet. Honest!)

I’m not sure if it was our time with our friends that sparked today’s blog-thoughts off in my mind, or the TV programmes we watched when we got home (both dramas involving past eras), or some twisty combination of both, but in any case – today I’m thinking about human nature, and how people don’t really change over time.

What’s this? Just a blog, medieval-style.
Image: abdn.ac.uk

We spent our day celebrating an ancient feast with our friends, a feast which most people would connect with Christianity and the resurrection of Jesus. But – as most people are aware – the feast of ‘Easter’ (named, even, after the goddess Eostre) is a lot older than the Christian faith. It has more to do with the time of year and the fecundity of the season, the return to earth of the flowers and creatures and crops that are necessary to sustain life, than it does with the much younger faith of Christianity. I am a Christian, but I am also a trained medievalist, so the feast of Easter has two layers of meaning for me. Our celebrations yesterday got me thinking about how people carry out rituals – the giving of chocolate, the symbolism of rabbits and ‘Easter bunnies’, the tradition of ‘April Fools’ – without really thinking about what they mean and where they come from, or even knowing how old the traditions are. It got me thinking about how people are the same from generation to generation. The things we do sometimes change, as do the circumstances in which we have to live our lives. But people – the essence of what makes us human beings – stays the same.

When I worked as a tutor, I was responsible for teaching my students about medieval language, literature and culture in Britain (mostly), but also in Ireland and Europe. I often started a class by asking the students to read a section of Chaucer, for instance, or an extract from Beowulf or one of the Old English elegies. Perhaps, if I was feeling particularly playful, I would give them a piece of poetry like this one (don’t worry, a translation follows!):

Mec feonda sum   feore besnythede
Woruldstrenga binom   waette sithan
dyfthe on waetra   dyde eft thonan,
sette on sunan,   thaer ic swithe beleas
herum tham the ic haefde.

(An enemy stole my life, and took away all my worldly strength; they wet me, dipping me in water, then took me out once more. I was left in the sun then, where I swiftly lost all the hair I had.)

My students would labour intensely over an extract of poetry like that, trying to work it out, looking at it like it had huge significance, doing their best to be intelligent. So, when I told them ‘it’s a joke’, they sometimes weren’t too impressed with me. The poem is an extract from Riddle 26 in the Exeter Book, a collection of Old English joke-verses. Some of them are crude, some of them scandalous, some of them groan-worthy, and some of them are still mystifying. This one, the narrative voice of which goes on to tell us that a knife cut away all its impurities, and that it was folded and pierced through with holes and bedecked with brown dye before being guarded between boards, decorated with gold and trusted with the Word of God, is telling us that it’s a book – more specifically, a Bible. You have to know, of course, that in the Middle Ages books were made of animal hide, which would be soaked to soften and loosen the hair, dried in the sun, and scraped with a blade to make it perfectly smooth… and once you know the answer, the whole riddle begins to click into place.

Each of the riddles presents the reader (or listener) with confusing images designed to make something everyday seem completely alien – all in the name of a big punchline, giving everyone who’s been sweating to work it out an ‘Aha!’ moment, where they can slap their thighs, laugh with one another and pretend that they’d unravelled it long before their neighbour had. So, in a way, my students’ efforts to understand the words mirror exactly the reaction that the original authors would have wanted. My students would (hopefully) learn from this that even though the sense of humour had changed a bit, the need or desire to laugh, to exercise the brain, to get one over on your fellows, to play a trick, were as much a part of the Anglo-Saxon world as they are to our own.

Human art, from any era, depicts a number of big themes; Love is one. Death another. Nearly everything else can be constructed out of some combination of these. Regret, Betrayal, Loss, Passion, Devotion, Adventure (which can be seen as the pursuit of one and the simultaneous avoidance of the other.) We no longer joust, and our sons no longer get sent to fight with the King, but plenty of young men and women still get sent to fight our modern wars. We no longer scare ourselves with stories of giants and headless horsemen; instead we use zombies and vampires (when we’re not falling in love with them, of course.) We love our children and our families, we want to protect our homes, we want the dignity of earning our own living, we want the freedom to live our lives as we see fit. None of these things are new to us. All of these things were known to our forebears too, all the way back to our earliest beginnings.

The past can sometimes seem very far away, and people who lived in previous eras can often feel like creatures of another world. But they’re not, at all. We are lucky to have the conveniences we do, which make the things our ancestors wanted – safety for our young, security for our crops, warmth for our homes, good health as long as we can get it – so much easier. So, it makes me glad that we still celebrate some of the old feast days, even if we don’t know why any more. It’s a precious connection to those who’ve gone before us, and a vital expression of human nature.

Anyway, on that note: Happy Easter!

Image: en.wikipedia.org

Choosing to Live

This morning’s offering is a response to a wonderful blog post, here, written by Susan Lanigan. In it, she discusses her reasons for choosing to live – not just continuing to live, but actually making the choice to live – despite the difficulties which this choice can bring. I’m very pleased that she asked me to share my thoughts on the topic, and I hope I can do her marvellous post justice.

I’ll begin with a truism: life can be very hard. This nugget has been trotted out by generations of mothers and fathers in an attempt to comfort their tear-stained children when they reach the age at which they realise the world is not designed to fulfil their every wish; it is not comforting, but it is important to know. Life (or, rather, the choice to live) can, and probably will, be very hard for the majority of people, and life has been hard as long as human beings have existed. Every age has had its own particular struggles, which vary with the centuries, but they all have similar roots. I think, despite the differences in technology, lifestyle, beliefs, language and law that separate us from our ancestors, that people are people – we don’t change much, down through the years. The things which occupy our minds and the fears that bedevil us – mortality, sexuality, money, power – are things which they were all too familiar with, too. I’m not sure it’s true that earlier ages didn’t have time for introspection, or that they were too busy working themselves to an early death to worry about things like self-actualisation and individual significance; I think every age has sought meaning in its own existence, and has produced art which has reflected upon the world which created it. We are no exception – we just have wider access to the tools of creativity, and our record of our own existence is a bit more durable than that of earlier generations. In times gone by, only the chosen few had the opportunity to record their thoughts about the world around them. Sometimes I mourn for all the words and stories we’ve lost, and for all the wisdom that has returned to the earth along with the person who laboured hard to gain it.

I live in a complex world, in a struggling country. I have a body and a brain which sometimes conspire against me, and I know how it feels to fight with your own thoughts, to battle out from underneath your own darkness of mind. I have been in the pit of what my medieval friends used to call ‘wanhope’ – in other words, despair. Allowing yourself to wallow in wanhope was seen as a sin in the Middle Ages, because it did not allow for the grace of God; falling into it was one thing, but allowing yourself to remain there was tantamount to giving up hope in the all-powerful love of God. It was like committing treason against your greatest and most powerful liege-lord. You were cutting off the possibility of being rescued, of being helped, and you were refusing to allow yourself to be loved by God – and, I suppose, by anyone else. The medieval mind saw it as imposing a limit on the power of God’s love and compassion (which, of course, would be sinful human hubris), but a modern mind might recognise the feeling, too. Divorced from its religious framework, it sounds a lot like the struggle most of us have to face at some point in our life – the feeling that we are alone, that we’re unconnected to anything else, that nobody loves us and our existence, or lack of it, makes no difference to the grand scheme of things. It sounds so terrible that it’s hard to imagine why anyone would allow themselves to fall into it, but it’s actually not that difficult. The road to the pit of wanhope has been walked by so many feet that the stones which pave it have been worn smooth, and it’s a road from which so many people find it impossible to come back. Sadly, I wonder if the road to Wanhope is busier now than it has ever been.

So, why do I choose to live? The word ‘choose’ is so important – nobody can make you live. You were brought into existence, sure – but nobody can force you to live. The choice is yours. It might seem obvious – it might not seem like a choice at all, perhaps – but it’s there, and it’s one which we need to make on a regular basis. Why do I choose, every day, to avoid the road to despair and choose the harder, rockier, narrower path that is life? I choose to live because I want to make a difference in the world. I want to be part of that durable human record – I want my choice to mean something, and I don’t want my hard-earned wisdom to die with me. I choose to live because I was brought into the world through love, and I have been lucky enough to know love every day of my life. I choose to live because I want to amplify the love I have been given, and return it tenfold to those who love me, and to others who might need love and compassion more than they need anything else. I choose to live because it’s a challenge, and I’m the sort of pig-headed person who hates to give up on a fight. I choose to live because I believe I’m here to do something – perhaps, many somethings. I choose to live because I don’t know what I’m here to do, and I don’t know when I’ll be called upon to do it. How can I choose the other path, the one that leads towards the dark, when, for all I know, tomorrow is the day when my great purpose will be revealed? How do I know that my very existence – something I might say, or do, or write – is already fulfilling that greater purpose? I choose to live because my choice might help someone else. I choose to live because I am important, as you are important; my choice might help someone else to keep walking that hard road, and I choose to live because everyone who makes that choice means more hands to help those who might stumble, and more encouraging smiles to light the paths of those who are struggling.

I’ve walked a while on both roads, the smooth lower road that feels so familiar underfoot, and the rocky higher path that goes on into the unknown. The smooth road has no turnings. Its destination is clear. But the rocky path has many switchbacks and changes of direction – every day on it is a surprise, and every corner turned brings something new. I choose to live because I want to know what’s around the next bend, no matter what it is. I choose to live because I’ve struggled out of the pit, and back up that smooth and well-worn path, and I’ll be damned if I’m throwing away all that effort.

I choose to live out of stubbornness, and I hope my rocky path is a long and twisting one.