NOTHING IS FREE
„Always pay; for first or last you must pay your entire debt.“ So Emerson, in his infinite wisdom, put it, and yet we persist in our deep, irreconcilable wish that we might yet find the thing that carries with it no cost, the gift that asks nothing of us. FREE!! cry out the advertising agencies, airline companies, time‑sharing plans, record clubs and subscription services. FREE!! call out the coupon clippers, contest winners, promotion collectors and other bloated actuaries of the unpaid‑for. In the sixties it was „free“ love, in the seventies it was „free“ time, in the eighties it is „free“ flights to everywhere from Dallas/Fort Worth to Timbuktu, until‑‑ silently, ominously, without our even noticing it‑‑ the „free“ has constricted its costless chains around us so effectively that we are caged to a bleak universe of the unrenumerated in which we can no longer find even the tiniest vestige of the blessedly unfree creature who first entered there.
In art, too, we would prefer the undemanding gift‑‑ the bolt of inspiration that descends on us without preparation or warning, the glorious epiphany that finds us sleeping. BECOME A PUBLISHED WRITER IN ONLY ONE WEEK‑END! the brochure screams out at us, SPEND A NIGHT AT ESALEN‑‑ FIND WISDOM! What was once „the journey“ has been resurrected in our time as „the workshop“‑‑ an un‑rite of un‑passage in which the stress is most decidedly on the second syllable („shop“), a happening as momentous as the transfiguration of Christ in exchange for which one need only pull out one’s Master Card or Visa and pack an overnight bag. Yet‑‑ in art as in the friendly skies of United‑‑ nothing is free, and even those who‑‑ like the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in a poem written in the „free“ and easy 60’s‑‑ are „waiting for a rebirth of wonder“ had better find a comfortable and resilient place in which to conduct their vigil.
„In the depths all becomes law,“Rilke wrote, and in the depths‑‑ as opposed to the shallows‑‑ nothing is free. For the free is a form of chaos misrepresented as bounty‑‑ filled with flights one would never have wanted to have taken, things one would never have wanted to buy. Like „free love“ itself, the free is a false gift given promiscuously and indiscriminately to those who themselves lack the greatest freedom of all‑‑ the freedom to choosewhat it is they wish to pay for. Wishing to pay for nothing, the world becomes a cacophony of chaotic and mutually exclusive beckonings to which I become object rather than subject, between which I am unable to choose, as they have chosen me. Flying „freely“ off to Hawaii, Florida, Disney World and Paris, I cannot do the one thing I want most and which must always be paid for:
I can never find a home.