Notes & Links by Casey A. Gollan on
art, design, creativity and technology on
the gift

Craft is defined in its excess—in the element of work that is not required or demanded, but through which the maker makes a gift—unsought, unreciprocated—to others.

Gilbert achieved unexpected attention when her book was published a couple of years ago. And this was all very nice, except, since then, everyone has been wondering how she’ll ever top her achievement, as if it’s all downhill from here.

“Everywhere I go now people treat me like I’m doomed,” she said. She thought about how creative people have a reputation for being mentally unstable, which she attributes to pressure to perform and live up to expectations for brilliance from themselves as well as the world.

“Allowing somebody … to believe that he or she is … the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, internal mystery is just like a smidge of too much responsibility to put on one fragile human psyche,” she said. “It’s like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all of these unnatural expectations about performance. I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.”

Does this mean that Free will retreat in a down economy? Probably not. The psychological and economic case for it remains as good as ever — the marginal cost of anything digital falls by 50% every year, making pricing a race to the bottom, and “Free” has as much power over the consumer psyche as ever. But it does mean that Free is not enough. It also has to be matched with Paid. Just as King Gillette’s free razors only made business sense paired with expensive blades, so will today’s Web entrepreneurs have to not just invent products that people love, but also those that they will pay for. Not all of the people or even most of them — free is still great marketing and bits are still too cheap to meter — but enough to pay the bills. Free may be the best price, but it can’t be the only one.

We shall lose that life which remains unarticulated.

Not everything comes into the world with a tongue, it seems. The poet Miriam Levine,who grew up in a working-class neighborhood in New Jersey, tells me that her family used to speak of articulate men and women as having been “born with a mouthpiece.” Those who can express themselves in speech have been given that mysterious something, like the mouthpiece of a trumpet or the reed of a wind instrument, through which experience is transmuted into sound.

Harold Pinter in a letter to the director of his play The Birthday Party:

The thing germinated and bred itself. It proceded according to it’s own logic. What did I do? I followed the indications, I kept a sharp eye on the clues I found myself dropping.

Dismiss whatever insults your own soul,” counsels Whitman in the voice of pride. Whe pride is active, Whitman’s sympathy has only what the mystics call a “selective surrender.” Some things must be denied admission into the core of his being.