Biography of a "Precedent"

Precedent = "an action or decision that can be used subsequently as an example for a similar decision or to justify a similar action". (Encarta dictionary). By this definition a precedent is defined by the use it is put to in order to establish the case of ‘similarity". Preceding, of course, means simply ‘coming before".
John the Baptist came before Jesus Christ. John was a prophet with a vision. When he first caught sight of the Messiah he knew immediately that here was a Man with a superior vision "the latches of whose shoes, I am not worthy to loose". He understood rightly that the man of vision is the man of destiny. Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, the Buddha, Mozart, Charles Chaplin, William Blake, Rembrandt, Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong, Newton, Van Gogh, Picasso and so on, were all men of destiny, thrown up by the collective mind of Mankind to express great spiritual truths and elevate consciousness one rung further up the evolutionary ladder. ‘Greatness' is defined by a person's ability to do just that, to express a vision that has been given to them. We call them geniuses. Many of them suffer abominably for their vision because they usually run afoul of the establishment in one way or another. Galileo and Columbus, to name two of the better known, had it all to do. Others were hurried to the stake or the executioner's hatchet.
If The Baptist on meeting Jesus proceeded to pick his brains to find out what his vision was and then handed the Messiah over to the Romans to be crucified before His time so that he could take over His mantel as the Redeemer, faking miracles and concocting his own version of the Sermon on The Mount etc, the sad fact is he would have had many to follow him. Why? Because, he would have fulfilled a need. You would however have to say the man was motivated by jealousy and the greed for glory and power. And if the truth was never discovered John would very likely be worshipped today by millions who know no better, assuming of course that he would have seen ‘his' calling through to the bitter end, an unlikely but no means impossible scenario. Why should his success be so plausible? Because the vision of Jesus embodied moral precedents that are to be found in other religions including Buddhism and Platonism. His vision was born of ‘precedents' that most Christian believe were strewn ahead of Him like the palm leaves before Him as he rode into Jerusalem shortly before his execution. The Old Testament for believer and unbeliever alike is nothing but a Book of Precedents many of which are called prophecies. He Himself, as the long-awaited Redeemer, had ‘precedents' as there were many bogus Messiahs running around Judea in those days even before He was ‘born'. The God-Man myth was a mainstay of the Old Testament religion Jesus had been born into. The Roman emperors were all considered gods just as the ancient Pharaohs had been. The power of Jesus' vision lay in the message of truth He was born not just to deliver but to embody. John would have been clever enough to know this as it is stated and had enough savvy to ‘source' the relevant texts in order to bolster the ‘vision' of their Embodiment that had never been his destiny. You would have to say that such a man was Satan himself who was a "liar and a thief from the beginning". (Jesus). To steal a vision that was never yours is to steal a man's destiny. That is the work of the Devil.
Stealing a vision ironically has less weight in a court of law than stealing passages of text verbatim for instance, even if the passages are of a great deal less significance to the derived work than the fundamental ideas that subsequently endowed it with success. Let us consider how you could do it.
Let's imagine you are a failed artist living in the South of France, the Midi, and one afternoon you come across Vincent Van Gogh painting in the fields. You strike up a conversation with him and he takes you back to his little house in Arles to show you his canvases. You are smitten. This work is new, exciting and original and you know, better than Van Gogh ever did or could, what they might be worth in the market if and when they ever took off. You visit him often and get to know him. He is flattered by you appreciation of his paintings and tells you all, even shows you how he mixes his paints, what colours and brushes and media he uses, what stages he employs, how he goes about transferring his sketches to canvas. He even, under the influence of the cognac you have ladled him with, lets you into his biggest secret - that he gets many of his visual ideas from engravings he finds in English newspapers.
You know now how good, how very good, it all is. You want it. You have to have it. Now that you have his ‘master idea' and all the other information you need, you immediately set about to plagiarize his work. As you are a painter yourself, of no great shakes let it be said, you know you can, with a little practice, raise your game to emulate the master. You readily discern the various tricks he did not tell you, little touches and techniques he had slaved into the wee hours to perfect. You just have no vision, that's all; never had a vision and knew you never could get one either, even if you had the brains, because you are not The Chosen One that characterizes the man of destiny. You have no vision because you are not Vincent Van Gogh. But you can pretend to be, just like John The Baptist in the above illustration; and who is going to know the difference if they have not met the original? Your envy for him turns to hatred that in turn overrides whatever admiration you might ever have felt for him. He's a ‘nut' you conclude as the villagers said and as Gauguin was heard screaming as he made for the train. A reprobate who never left the drinking halls and the whore houses. No matter, you soon learn to paint in his style and the same subject matter as well and buy the same English newspapers to copy the engravings. You hide yourself away in a little village near Paris to wait your chance. You prepare your biography in between times that you know you will need. You make yourself visible everywhere as the threadbare artist slaving over his work, a man who looks like he cannot afford the next meal and must frequent bars and coffee houses in order to keep warm. Above all, a real artist dedicated to his work! The fact that you could never sell a single one of your own paintings is a truth you find easy to hide. Indeed the persistent thought of it drives you on. You'll show the bastards if it is the last thing you do!
When you learn that Vincent has been carted off to the insane asylum you seize your chance. You run off to Paris with your canvases and get a high-flying gallery to show ‘your' work. You are an instant success. You concoct stories to the press about what a rough upbringing you had and how you have suffered for your art. Reporters who make their way to the village where you had your atelier come back with tales, some true and some false, but all of which substantiate your romantic story. Your revolutionary painterly passion you explain comes from the guilt you have harboured for years because you felt somehow responsible for the death of your twin brother at birth. Why should you have lived and not him? You must justify your existence. You weep in public. The public weep in private as these diabolical lies of yours come hot off the press. Your parents are dead and your only sister is told to avoid the press whatever the cost. She has debts. She is happy to oblige for the financial help you lavish upon her. In press interviews, you turn out as many phrases as you can remember about what Vincent told you about his stint with the miners up in Belgium and how you had tried to help them even to the extent of going without food yourself. You know nobody is going to check, and even if they did, how could they ever prove you were not there? And those who remember Vincent may well think you are him. You remember the artists Vincent admired, Millet, Dorē, Rembrandt and you cite them as ‘influences'. Your favourite writer is Charles Dickens. He is English; you are French. It shows the world how cosmopolitan you are and even if you have only a few phrases of English it will suffice to get you through. You remember in particular the insightful phrases the late Vincent used about his work, phrases such as…..

• "A good picture is equivalent to a good deed."
• "As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed."
• "Conscience is a man's compass."
• "Great things are done by a series of small things brought together."
• "How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be? "(courtesy of www.brainyquote.com)

Your words of wisdom are quoted in art books, newspapers and journals. You even remember the titles of the books that had influenced ‘your source', the various philosophers and writers who gave him inspiration. You tell reporters you even lived in England for a period even though you had never set foot in the place in your life. They are hungry for facts about your upbringing and early life because they believe, like everybody else, that you are a man of destiny. Your work speaks for itself. It brings pleasure and spiritual delight to all who see it. The gullible buy into your monstrous fabrication as you knew they would. You are famous. You are hailed as a genius and experts, who, as always, believe they know a thing or two about art and can tell the ‘real' thing when they see it, applaud the incredible influence you have made in the art world and the world of culture in general. You even reach the point of believing you are a genius yourself. You have taken the mad Dutchman's art further than he could ever have dreamt possible. Actually, you haven't. Dealers and critics have done that for you. As for the vacuous parodies of a style of painting you did not invent, the real Van Gogh would have vomited over them at your feet. You are festooned with medals and honours, with honorary degrees and a Papal knighthood. You can have anything you want or ever wanted and are not a bit shy of saying so as you PR people instruct you. In the darkness, before you sleep, you console yourself with the notion that ‘everybody steals from everybody else in the art world and that Van Gogh probably picked the brains of Gauguin who had stayed with him for a while in Arles. Van Gogh was just a bad Impressionist, that's all. There are ‘precedents' to his style that are glaringly obvious in the work of Millet; and the Midi was not his private stomping ground either even if he was the first to try and paint it. Anybody can paint there. It's a free world. To hell with him! Who did he think he was anyway? Me? He was a lamentable failure. I am a success! And if he hadn't been so fond of brandy he would not have killed himself either. Nothing to do with me. They're not pinning that one on me. My conscience is clear!' But you know all that has an empty ring to it. You never had a conscience to begin with or you would not have committed your heinous crime against another artist, a man indeed who trusted you with his innermost secrets.
Still, the richer and more famous you become the more frightened you get of the truth coming out. ‘Precedents' or no ‘precedents' you know you premeditatedly usurped another man's life, work and destiny. And so you hire lawyers and others to punish ruthlessly anybody who casts doubt on the origins of your 'masterpieces'. They advise you that the more people you punish the stronger you will be. Even reputable newspapers will back off asking awkward questions. You get a reputation for being tough and soon nobody dares even print one of your paintings, not even as a postcard, without your permission. You are king of your monopoly.
When you learn that Vincent Van Gogh upon hearing of your success shot himself to death in a fit of despair, you rejoice. The final threat has been removed. The heat is off. You can relax to enjoy your ill-gotten gains. But you gradually realize that you can only sleep in one bed as before, wear one pair of shoes and one suit as before, return to eating more or less the same food you have been used to all your life, that the rain still makes you wet if you try to walk through it without an umbrella and your ‘friends' are only your ‘friends' because you give them gifts. Indeed, you are still the same person you were before you got famous, only now you are twice as miserable.
And then one fateful day, a niece of Vincent's is told by his landlord to come and "fetch his paintings from the house as the local kids are using them to make tents and it would a shame to see them go to mending chicken houses and leaky roofs and the like, a fate that is inevitable if nobody collects them, as canvas is expensive in these parts". She goes there and steps into another world. The magical world of a vision that could only have been given to one man, and only one man, at a certain point in history. And she begins to think. There is something oddly familiar about it all. What if……?

Whether any of the above fiction or all of it is true or not will be seen when the Willy the Wizard case is heard in the High Court in London despite moves currently under way in the British press and media and on the internet to stop it. This author's contention is that the case has a right to be heard and all of us have a right to listen in the name of that most fundamental human right - the right to freedom of expression. He would also suggest that here is classic opportunity for Rowling to establish her right to "original creation" once and for all and she should seize it with gratitude instead of trying to stop it.