The Gift (23 page)

When we are in the frame of mind which nourishes
hau
, we identify with the spirit of the gift, not with its particular embodiments, and whoever has identified with the spirit will seek to keep the gift in motion. Therefore the sign of this identity is generosity, gratefulness, or the act of gratitude:

We nourish the spirit by disbursing our gifts, not by capitalizing upon them (not capitalizing “too much,” says Snyder—there
seems to be a little leeway). The artist who is nourishing
hau
is not self-aggrandizing, self-assertive, or self-conscious, he is, rather, self-squandering, self-abnegating, self-forgetful— all the marks of the creative temperament the bourgeoisie find so amusing. “Art is a virtue of the practical intellect,” writes Flannery O’Connor, “and the practice of any virtue demands a certain asceticism and a very definite leaving-behind of the niggardly part of the ego. The writer has to judge himself with a stranger’s eye and stranger’s severity … No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.” Rainer Maria Rilke uses similar terms in an early essay describing the attributes of art as a way of life:

In chapter 2 we spoke of the increase of gifts in three related ways: as a natural fact (when gifts are actually alive); as a spiritual fact (when gifts are the agents of a spirit that survives the consumption of its individual embodiments); and as a social fact (when a circulation of gifts creates community). I want to return to the first and last of these in connection with works of the imagination, using as our point of departure another remark of Flannery O’Connor’s. Describing her sense of how the fiction writer works, O’Connor once wrote: “The eye sees what it has been given to see by concrete circumstances, and the imagination reproduces what, by some related gift, it is able to make live.”

When we say that “the whole is greater than the sum of its
parts,” we are usually speaking of things that “come alive” when their elements are integrated into one another. We describe such things by way of organic metaphors because living organisms are the prime example. There is a difference in kind between a viable organism and its constituent parts, and when the parts become the whole we experience the difference as an increase, as “the whole is greater.” And because a circulation of gifts has a cohesive or synthetic power, it is almost as a matter of definition that we say such increase is a gift (or is the fruit of a gift). Gifts are the agents of that organic cohesion we perceive as liveliness.

This is one of the things we mean to say, it seems to me, when we speak of a person of strong imagination as being “gifted.” In
Biographia Literaria
, Coleridge describes the imagination as “essentially vital” and takes as its hallmark its ability “to shape into one,” an ability he named “the esemplastic power.” The imagination has the power to assemble the elements of our experience into coherent, lively wholes: it has a gift.

An artist who wishes to exercise the esemplastic power of the imagination must submit himself to what I shall be calling a “gifted state,” one in which he is able to discern the connections inherent in his materials and give the increase, bring the work to life. Like the shoemaker at the end of “The Shoemaker and the Elves,” the artist who succeeds in this endeavor has realized his gift. He has made it real, made it a thing: its spirit is embodied in the work.

Once an inner gift has been realized, it may be passed along, communicated to the audience. And sometimes this embodied gift—the work—can reproduce the gifted state in the audience that receives it. Let us say that the “suspension of disbelief” by which we become receptive to a work of the imagination is in fact belief, a momentary faith by virtue of which the spirit of the artist’s gift may enter and act upon our
being. Sometimes, then, if we are awake, if the artist really was gifted, the work will induce a moment of grace, a communion, a period during which we too know the hidden coherence of our being and feel the fullness of our lives. As in the Scottish tale, any such art is itself a gift, a cordial to the soul.

If we pause now to contrast the esemplastic cognition of imagination to the analytic cognition of
logos
-thought, we will be in a position to see one of the connections between the creative spirit and the bond that a gift establishes. Two brief folk tales will help set up the contrast. There is a group of tales which portray for us the particular kind of thought that destroys a gift. In a tale from Lithuania, for example, riches that the fairies have given to mortals turn to paper as soon as they are measured or counted. The motif is the reverse, really, of one we have already seen: worthless goods—coals, ashes, wood shavings—turning into gold when they are received as gifts. If the increase of gifts is in the erotic bond, then the increase is lost when exchange is treated as a commodity transaction (when, in this case, it is drawn into the part of the mind that reckons value and quantity).

A second example will expand the point. A brief entry in a mid-nineteenth-century collection of English fairy tales tells of a Devonshire man to whom the fairies had given an inexhaustible barrel of ale. Year after year the liquor ran freely. Then one day the man’s maid, curious to know the cause of this extraordinary power, removed the cork from the bung hole and looked into the cask; it was full of cobwebs. When the spigot next was turned, the ale ceased to flow.

The moral is this: the gift is lost in self-consciousness. To count, measure, reckon value, or seek the cause of a thing is to step outside the circle, to cease being “all of a piece” with the flow of gifts and become, instead, one part of the whole reflecting upon another part. We participate in the esemplastic
power of a gift by way of a particular kind of unconsciousness, then: unanalytic, undialectical consciousness.

To offer a last illustration that is closer to the concerns of artists, most of us have had the experience of becoming suddenly tongue-tied before an audience or before someone whom we perceive to be judging us. In order to sing in front of other people, for example, the singer cannot step back and listen to his own voice—he can’t, that is, fall into that otherwise useful frame of mind that perceives the singer and the audience as separate things, the one listening to the other. Instead he must enter that illusion (an illusion that becomes a reality if the singer is gifted) that he and the audience are one and the same thing. A friend of mine had a strange experience when she took her first piano lessons. During an early session, to the surprise of both her teacher and herself, she suddenly began to play. “I didn’t know how to play the piano,” she says, “but I could play it.” The teacher was so excited she left the room to find someone else to witness the miracle. As the two of them came back into the practice room, however, my friend’s ability left her as suddenly as it had appeared. Again, the moral seems to be that the gift is lost in self-consciousness. (Thus O’Connor: “In art the self becomes self-forgetful.”) As soon as the musician senses that someone else is watching her, she begins to watch herself. Rather than using her gift, she is reflecting upon it. Cobwebs.

As is the case with any other circulation of gifts, the commerce of art draws each of its participants into a wider self. The creative spirit moves in a body or ego larger than that of any single person. Works of art are drawn from, and their bestowal nourishes, those parts of our being that are not entirely personal, parts that derive from nature, from the group and the race, from history and tradition, and from the spiritual
world. In the realized gifts of the gifted we may taste that
zoë-
life which shall not perish even though each of us, and each generation, shall perish.

Such is the context within which to cite more fully Joseph Conrad’s description of the artist. The artist, Conrad tells us, must descend within himself to find the terms of his appeal:

In the chapter on the increase of gifts, I pointed out that at a Tsimshian mortuary potlatch a material thing—a broken copper—symbolizes a natural fact: the group survives despite the death of the individual. Should we call this fact biological, social, or spiritual? The distinctions break down. Once we realize that the thread of
zoë
-life runs beyond the physical body, beyond the individual self, it becomes harder to differentiate the various levels of our being. There is a larger self, a species-essence, which is a general possession of the race. And the symbolizations like those coppers, but, of course, I mean to include all works of art, paintings, songs, the tiles round the chimney-piece—these symbolizations which express and
carry the “facts” of
zoë
-life constitute the speech by which that larger self articulates and renews its spirit. By Whitman’s aesthetic, as we shall see, the artist’s work is a word “en masse,” an expression of Conrad’s “subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity.” The work of art is a copula: a bond, a band, a link by which the several are knit into one. Men and women who dedicate their lives to the realization of their gifts tend the office of that communion by which we are joined to one another, to our times, to our generation, and to the race. Just as the artist’s imagination “has a gift” that brings the work to life, so in the realized gifts of the gifted the spirit of the group “has a gift.” These creations are not “merely” symbolic, they do not “stand for” the larger self; they are its necessary embodiment, a language without which it would have no life at all.

In first introducing these two Greek terms, I said that it is
bios-life
—individual and embodied—that dies, while
zoë
-life is the unbroken thread, the spirit that survives the destruction of its vessels. But here we must add that
zoë
-life may be lost as well when there is wholesale destruction of its vehicles. The spirit of a community or collective can be wiped out, tradition can be destroyed. We tend to think of genocide as the physical destruction of a race or group, but the term may be aptly expanded to include the obliteration of the
genius
of a group, the killing of its creative spirit through the destruction, debasement, or silencing of its art (I am thinking, for example, of Milan Kundera’s analysis of the “organized forgetting” which has been imposed upon the nations of Eastern Europe). Those parts of our being that extend beyond the individual ego cannot survive unless they can be constantly articulated. And there are individuals—all of us, I would say, but men and women of spiritual and artistic temperament in particular—who cannot survive, either, unless the symbols of
zoë
-life circulate among us as a commonwealth.

To offer a single example that strikes both the collective and individual levels of this issue, in her autobiography the writer and actress Maya Angelou recalls her graduation from an all-black junior high school. The assembled students and teachers had fallen silent, momentarily shamed by a casually racist speech given by a white administrator, when one of Angelou’s classmates began to sing a song they all knew as “the Negro national anthem,” its words written by a black man, its music by a black woman. “Oh, Black known and unknown poets,” Angelou writes, “how often have your auctioned pains sustained us …? If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness. It may be enough, however, to have it said that we survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets (including preachers, musicians and blues singers).” The elders who passed the Sacred Pipe of the Sioux to Black Elk warned him that “if the people have no center they will perish.” Just as a circulation of ceremonial gifts among tribal peoples preserves the vitality of the tribe, so the art of any people, if it is a true emanation of their spirit, will stand surety for the lives of the citizenry.

In the last chapter I spoke of ancient usury as the conversion of unreckoned gift-increase into reckoned market interest. We are now in a position to connect this idea to two others. First, if we define use value as the value we sense in things as we use them and make them a part of ourselves, and if exchange value is the value we assign to things as we compare them or alienate them from ourselves, then there is something akin to ancient usury in the conversion of use values to exchange values. Second, there is a psychological parallel as well: something related to the spirit of usury lies in the removal of energy from the esemplastic powers and its reinvestment in the analytic or reflective powers.

I do not mean to pretend that these three things are one and the same; I am working with two groups of associated ideas and trying to describe a particular relationship between them. We have, on the one hand, imagination, synthetic thought, gift exchange, use value, and gift-increase, all of which are linked by a common element of
eros
, or relationship, bonding, “shaping into one.” And we have, on the other hand, analytic or dialectical thought, self-reflection, logic, market exchange, exchange value, and interest on loans, all of which share a touch of
logos
, of differentiating into parts.