Enshrining the Free

There are some songs that capture my heart by the freedom and innocence they express. "By My Side" from Godspell is one of those. The odd wandering harmony coming in and out, the words that paint vague images, and yet the passion it expresses, all enthrall me.

Recently, a friend and I decided to practice this song with the eventual goal of performing it somewhere. The irony struck me today how carefully I studied each note to be sure I had it just as it was on the recording. I know perfectly well that recordings capture but one iteration of many, and often those iterations are all different, following the mood of the singer on that day - yet we were treating the recording as gospel, not to be messed with, not to be varied at all, lest we lose its inherent sense of freedom. Thus we locked ourselves into the slavery of doing it exactly right, following a predetermined script, not allowing ourselves one iota of flexibility to do it differently than this random recording of a living moving thing. In our practice, we systematically eliminated every possible experience of personal freedom in order to enshrine the recording's freedom to preserve this thing of beauty for others.

In the National Museum of the American Indian, I remember staring at a small handmade boat, crude, primitive, beautiful, up on a stand, surrounded by a modern unbreakable plexiglass case, small engraved signs explaining its origins and construction. The protective materials, the efforts at preservation, the signs, the space, showed our great honor for this primitive boat. And I imagined the builder of the boat coming to the museum and looking incredulously at the fuss made over his primitive craft and the efforts to preserve it. Why, if his boat had been crushed, he would simply have made another one - why the big fuss over his humble construction of one of probably many experiments to be able to cross the river? Why would thousands of people stare at his small craft with awe and longing for a simpler day? The enshrining of his small act of creation betrays something missing in our lives. Yet again, we worship something that was commonplace to its creator.

The stuffed hawk over the fireplace is artfully set to look like a spontaneous moment in mid-flight. Just like the boat and the song, just like many religions worshiping a prophet or a miracle, they all express a free spirit, now captured in a dormant place, gathering dust. Are we content to live with that impractical longing? If we were as free as the things we worship, would we spend time collecting stuffed hawks or going to museums?