The man’s labour that did the work is in the work

I’ve been meaning to blog this for a little while. A by-chance thing about construction and knowledge and ownership. Cormac McCarthy’s play ‘The stonemason’ came in a batch greedy buy from the Oxfam shop down the road a while back. I’ve not finished it, but it’s been haunting me while I’ve been looking into knowledge and construction. It’s a play about 3 generations, in which stonemasrony becomes a metaphor for spiritual wisom somehow.

BEN: So who owns the stonework that’s not paid for?
PAPAW: Well, under the law you can get a lien on the work. You can claim it, but you caint take possession of it. The man you built if or, he can take posession of it, but he caint calim it. The law dont have no answer. Where men dont have right intentions the law caint suppley em. You just at a dead end.
BEN: Then no one owns the work?
PAPAW: The man’s labor that did the work is in the work. You caint make it go away. Even if it’s paid for it’s still there. If ownership lies in the benefit to a man then the mason owns all the work he does in the world and you caint put that claim aside nor quit it and it dont make no difference whose name is on the paper.

This deeply spiritual version of work must in my view be the version that we, the privileged educated cocooned, should hold onto in our search for meaning. And encourage for the generations to come.