Authors: Lewis Hyde
Neither of these poles, the joining or the splitting, is more important or more powerful than its opposite. Each has its sphere and time of ascendancy, and it is not impossible to strike a balance between the two. But that harmony is easily lost. There is such a thing as modern usury; there are times when the inordinate extension of exchange value destroys all use value. The hegemony of the market can undermine the possibility of gift exchange, the esemplastic powers can be destroyed by an overvaluation of analytic cognition, song can be silenced by self-consciousness, and the plenitude of the imagination can be lost to the scarcity of logic. And if we understand all of these to be modern avatars of the spirit of usury we shall be in a position to understand—when we come to it—Ezra Pound’s preoccupation with that spirit. Pound’s initial complaint against usury is best connected to his coeval complaint against the interjection into art of overly analytic or abstract thought. If we say, as Marx suggested, that “logic is the money of the mind,” then we might add as a corollary that the imagination is its gift. And there will be times when an otherwise useful application of
logos
wounds the imagination, times when the money of the mind destroys the gift of the mind (or, to transfer the argument to society, times when the spirit of the market destroys that gift which cultures have in their works of art).
A full description of the consequences of the commercialization of art lies beyond the scope of this chapter. And yet that commercialization is the constant background to the ideas being developed here, some of which will be thrown into greater relief if we pause to illuminate what lies behind them. Two news items addressing themselves to art and the marketplace will provide a kind of counterpoint. The first (reproduced verbatim from the
New York Times)
tells us a great deal about how drama is currently produced for commercial television:
“The irony,” Robert Thompson, producer of “The Paper Chase” on CBS-TV, says, is that “other producers write me letters saying that my program is the best show on the air.”
If praise could be translated into audience-popularity rating points, “The Paper Chase” would not be stuck in the swampy lowlands of the Nielsen list with an average 19 percent of the audience.
In an attempt to give “The Paper Chase” a transfusion of rating points, CBS will move the program away from the blockbuster opposition of “Happy Days” and “Lav-erne and Shirley” for five weeks. It will be shown Friday night at 10
P.M.
against the weaker competition of a “Dean Martin Roast” on NBC and a movie about teenage suicide on ABC …
“If ever there existed a series too good to succeed on television …” was the melancholy lament of most of the country’s television critics when the program went on the air last September. The critics were not only referring to the style and literacy of the show, which deals with a group of first-year law students and their tyrannical professor …, but they were also wincing at the fact that CBS had scheduled “The Paper Chase” at 8
P.M.
Tuesdays, opposite the two major ABC hits.
“They certainly put us in Death Alley,” says Sy Salkowitz, president of 20th Century-Fox Television, producers of “The Paper Chase …”
The current economics of television make “The Paper Chase’s” survival—even this long—more than unusual. “If ‘M*A*S*H’ were to start its career this year and get its original low ratings,” Mr. Salkowitz … adds, “it would be canceled at mid-season. The people running television have hardened because the economics have changed. At one time everybody lived or died on the cost-per-thousand viewers. If a show’s audience dwindled, the cost-per-thousand went up. Now cost-per-thousand doesn’t matter.
“With a great deal of trepidation several years ago, the networks raised the cost-per-thousand by raising their per minute advertising prices; and they discovered that the advertisers didn’t make too much fuss. At about the same time, television became a seller’s market, the most desirable advertising medium for certain products—for cars, beer, mass-produced foods, and soap.”
Now, advertisers pay $45,000 for a 30-second commercial on an average show and $90,000 for the same spot on a very successful show. “So a single Nielsen rating point on a single program over the course of a year has become worth $2.8 million,” according to Mr. Salkowitz. “The stakes are so much bigger that it’s like a World Series ball-game. In an ordinary game, you might replace your pitcher once. In a World Series game, you’ll replace your pitcher three or four times.”
In fact, CBS has already tried several other pitchers against the ABC comedies—with harrowing results. “The Fitzpatricks,” “Shields and Yarnell,” “Challenge of the Sexes,” “Young Dan’l Boone” and “Sam” have all ended as bleached bones. “Sam,” a half-hour series about
a police dog, had a considerably higher rating than “The Paper Chase.”
A second news item strikes some of the same chords in terms of an individual artist:
With his business affairs in disarray, his health failing and his hands trembling so badly that he can no longer affix a reliable signature to a piece of paper, Salvador Dali is trying to put some order into the chaos that his life has become …
The artist’s 11th-hour attempt to carve out an autonomous and vaguely organized financial situation threatens, however, to disrupt a global network of makeshift contracts and shadowy companies that have converted Salvador Dali into a highly lucrative, multimillion-dollar industry …
Dali has made his own contributions to this anarchic state of affairs. According to a large number of highly reliable informants in several nations, Dali for years signed blank sheets of paper and, in happier times, joked merrily about what easy, profitable work it was. On May 3, 1973, a Paris huissier de justice, a kind of notary, signed an official document affirming that Dali had signed 4,000 sheets, weighing 346 kilograms (about 760 pounds), in the Hotel Meurice.
In 1974, French customs police halted a small truck on its way into Andorra loaded with 40,000 blank pieces of paper signed by Dali …
The implications for the value of existing Dali lithographs of this uncounted stock of empty pieces of paper signed by the Surrealist draftsman are enormous, highlighted by the recent surfacing of purportedly false Dali lithographs in California, Canada and Italy. One former
associate of the painter recounted that “on a good day” Dali was capable of signing 1,800 sheets in an hour, aided by three attendants who briskly moved the papers as the master dashed off his signature …
A prominent figure in the French art world who has acquired [a reproduction of a painting] … described it as a color photograph, bearing a Dali signature and sprinkled with gold flake to give it the appearance of value. It sells in Paris for 750 francs, or about $153.
I do not want to overreach the bounds of my argument here. The destruction of the spirit of the gift is nothing new or particular to capitalism. All cultures and all artists have felt the tension between gift exchange and the market, between the self-forgetfulness of art and the self-aggrandizement of the merchant, and how that tension is to be resolved has been a subject of debate since before Aristotle.
And yet some aspects of the problem are modern.
Eros
and
logos
have a distinctly new relationship in a mass society. The remarkable analysis of commodities with which Marx opens
Das Kapital
appears in the nineteenth century, not any earlier. And the exploitation of the arts which we find in the twentieth century is without precedent. The particular manner in which radio, television, the movies, and the recording industry have commercialized song and drama is wholly new, for example, and their “high finance” produces an atmosphere that all the sister arts must breathe. “The Paper Chase” may be the best show that ever came to television, but it belongs to a class of creations which will not live unless they are constantly fed large sums of money. The more we allow such commodity art to define and control our gifts, the less gifted we will become, as individuals and as a society. The true commerce of art is a gift exchange, and where that commerce can proceed on its own terms we shall be heirs to the fruits of gift
exchange: in this case, to a creative spirit whose fertility is not exhausted in use, to the sense of plenitude which is the mark of all erotic exchange, to a storehouse of works that can serve as agents of transformation, and to a sense of an inhabitable world—an awareness, that is, of our solidarity with whatever we take to be the source of our gifts, be it the community or the race, nature, or the gods. But none of these fruits will come to us where we have converted our arts to pure commercial enterprises. The Nielsen ratings will not lead us toward a civilization in which the realized gifts of the gifted stand surety for the life of the citizenry. Sprinkles of gold flake will not free the
genius
of our race.
When I pass to and fro, different latitudes, different seasons, beholding the crowds of the great cities, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, New Orleans, Baltimore—when I mix with these interminable swarms of alert, turbulent, good-natured, independent citizens, mechanics, clerks, young persons—at the idea of this mass of men, so fresh and free, so loving and so proud, a singular awe falls upon me. I feel, with dejection and amazement, that among our geniuses and talented writers or speakers, few or none have yet really spoken to this people, created a single image-making work for them, or absorb’d the central spirit and the idiosyncrasies which are theirs—and which, thus, in highest ranges, so far remain entirely uncelebrated, unexpress’d.
Dominion strong is the body’s; dominion stronger is the mind’s. What has fill’d, and fills to-day our intellect, our fancy, furnishing the standards therein, is yet foreign … I say I have not seen a single writer, artist, lecturer, or what not, that has confronted the voiceless but ever erect and active, pervading, underlying will and typic aspiration of the
land, in a spirit kindred to itself. Do you call those genteel little creatures American poets? Do you term that perpetual, pistareen, paste-pot work, American art, American drama, taste, verse? I think I hear, echoed as from some mountaintop afar in the west, the scornful laugh of the Genius of these States.
WALT WHITMAN
, 1871
I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift
of “Leaves of Grass.”
EMERSON TO WHITMAN
, 1855
I • The Grass Over Graves
… I guess [the grass] is a uniform hieroglyphic
,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones
,
Growing among black folks as among white
,
… I give them the same, I receive them the same.
“
SONG OF MYSELF
”
In an 1847 notebook Walt Whitman, then about twenty-eight years old, recorded a short fantasy concerning food. “I am hungry and with my last dime get me some meat and bread, and have appetite enough to relish it all.—But then like a phantom at my side suddenly appears a starved face, either human or
brute, uttering not a word. Now do I talk of mine and his?— Has my heart no more passion than a squid or clam shell has?”
But in truth he feels no desire to share his meal. He’s hungry. No law forbids a man to feed his stomach. “What is this then that balances itself upon my lips and wrestles as with the knuckles of God for every bite I put between them, and if my belly is victor … follows the innocent food down my throat and turns it to fire and lead within me?—And what is it but my soul that hisses like an angry snake, Fool! will you stuff your greed and starve me?”
I am reminded of the story of Saint Martin of Tours, one of the earliest saints of the Western Church. Martin had a vision as a young soldier serving in the Roman army. Having torn his cloak in half to cover a naked beggar, he saw, the following night, an image of Christ wrapped in the garment he had given away. There are spirits that appear as beggars in our peripheral vision; what we bestow upon them draws them into the foreground and joins them to us. “Song of Myself,” Whitman’s greatest poem, begins with an invitation to the “starved face” of his hunger fantasy. “Loafe with me on the grass,” he says to his soul, “loose the stop from your throat, / … Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvéd voice.”
Somehow—it is not recorded—he gave the soul its bread. It came toward him as a lover then, not as a beggar or beast. It stretched him on the grass and entered his body. Its throat opened and it began to sing.
Whitman was born in 1819 into a large family. His father appears to have been a man of independent spirit, a devotee of Thomas Paine and the Quaker dissenters. At one time he had been a farmer on Long Island, but he soon turned his hand to carpentry after moving the family to Brooklyn, where he built plain houses for working-class families. He never made
much money. The Whitmans moved from house to house as each was finished and sold to pay the mortgage. Whitman himself began to work when he was eleven, first as a lawyer’s boy, then as an apprentice in a print shop. Like many printers, he developed an interest in journalism. In his late teens he taught school for several years; in the 1840s he wrote for and edited, with some success, newspapers in and around New York. He wrote sentimental fiction and conventional poetry. The mystery of this life, or at least its surprise, was that in 1855 this previously run-of-the-mill writer came to publish
Leaves of Grass
, a book remarkable both in content and in style. The turn in Whitman’s life has been explained in many ways—that he was inspired by a trip to a phrenologist, that he cribbed it all from Emerson, that he fell in love on a trip to New Orleans, that he’d been reading Carlyle on heroes, that he became enthusiastic over a modern version of Hermes Trismegistus found in a George Sand novel, and more. Each of these explanations is true to some degree (except for the New Orleans love affair). After Whitman died, a friend of his, Maurice Bucke, put forward yet another—that in June of 1853, when Whitman was thirty-five, he had an awakening, a rebirth, a moment of “cosmic consciousness.” Whitman himself never explicitly corroborated Bucke’s thesis, but he does describe such an epiphany in Section 5 of “Song of Myself.” Having invoked his soul, he addresses it:
I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.
It is of little account for the story I wish to tell whether this infusion, this lovemaking between the self and the soul, happened in fact or in imagination; either way we may begin. We have two gifts already. The sequence of events implies that Whitman shared the bread with his soul, and now the soul has given him a return gift, its tongue. Their commerce is an exact parallel to the one I described earlier between the Roman and his
genius
, an interior give-and-take between a man and his tutelary spirit. In this case, though, the man is a poet and the spirit is a poet’s soul. Whitman’s account of their commerce constitutes the creation myth of a gifted man. In the circulation of gifts Whitman becomes a poet, or, to put it another way, through the completed give-and-take he enters a way of being, a state, in which an ongoing commerce of gifts is constantly available to him.
Whitman’s hunger fantasy differs from all later accounts of his intercourse with the soul in its underlying tension. And one of the first things we can say about the gifted state which his epiphany initiates is that this tension, the “talk of mine and his,” falls away. As gift exchange is an erotic commerce,
joining self and other, so the gifted state is an erotic state: in it we are sensible of, and participate in, the underlying unity of things. Readers are usually struck by Whitman’s bolder, more abstract assertions of unity—“I am not the poet of goodness only, / I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also”— but the real substance of the state Whitman has entered lies in the range of his attention and affections:
I … do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else,
And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me,
And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.
One of the effects of reading Whitman’s famous catalogs is to induce his own equanimity in the reader. Each element of creation seems equally fascinating. The poet’s eye focuses with unqualified attention on such a wide range of creation that our sense of discrimination soon withdraws for lack of use, and that part of us which can sense the underlying coherence comes forward:
The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,
The married and unmarried children ride home to their
Thanksgiving dinner,
The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a
strong arm,
The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and
harpoon are ready …
The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of
the big wheel,
The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day
loafe and looks at the oats and rye,
The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm’d
case,
(He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his
mother’s bed-room) …
Whitman puts hierarchy to sleep. He attends to life wherever it moves. He would be useless in that ethic’s-class dilemma mentioned earlier in this book: deciding which member of the family to throw from the sinking lifeboat. All things carry equivalent worth simply by virtue of their existence, be they presidents or beetles rolling balls of dung. The contending and reckoning under which most of us suffer most of the time—in which this thing or that thing is sufficient or insufficient, this lover, that lover, this wine, that movie, this pair of pants—is laid aside. You may relax,
The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,
The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are
in their place,
The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.
Having fallen into this state, Whitman resists being drawn back into that part of the mind which reckons value or splits things apart. He refuses commerce with what we might call “the brain that divides” or with any spirit which might divorce him from his newly wedded soul, or which might—to fill out the list with Whitman’s typical unities—divide men from women, human beings from animals, the rich from the poor, the smart from the dumb, or the present from the past and the future. In a striking passage toward the beginning of “Song of Myself,” Whitman declares his satisfaction with his awakening and asks rhetorically:
As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side
through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the
day with stealthy tread,
Leaving me baskets cover’d with white towels swelling
the house with their plenty,
Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and
scream at my eyes,
That they turn from gazing after and down the road,
And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two,
and which is ahead?
In the first edition of the poem it is God who shares the poet’s bed and leaves the baskets of rising dough. In an early notebook, Whitman, thinking of various heroes (Homer, Columbus, Washington), writes that “after none of them … does my stomach say enough and satisfied.—Except Christ; he alone brings the perfumed bread, ever vivifying to me, ever fresh and plenty, ever welcome and to spare.” Each of these breads, like that of the hunger fantasy, is a gift (from the god-lover, to the soul), and Whitman senses he would lose that gift were he to “turn from gazing after” his lover and reckon its value or peek to see if the baskets hold whole wheat or rye.
Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age
vexes age,
Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things,
while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and
admire myself.
In abandoning the brain that divides, Whitman quits as well all questioning and argument (what he calls “talk”). I do not mean he is silent—he affirms and celebrates—but his
mouth is sealed before the sleepless, pestering questions of the dividing mind. “Master,” Whitman wrote in a preface addressed to Emerson, “I am a man who has perfect faith.” Faith does not question. Or, to give the matter its proper shading, faith is the aftermath of questioning—not the answers but the quitting of doubt. It is an ancient wisdom that questioning itself postpones or prohibits faith. In a Buddhist sutra a monk comes to the Buddha saying he shall abandon the religious life unless the master can answer his questions. Is the world eternal, or isn’t it? Does the saint exist after death or doesn’t he? Are the soul and the body identical or are they two things? The Buddha says he does not hold to either side of any of these questions, for they are “questions which tend not to edification.” Two lines from Kabir, the fifteenth-century mystic poet, make the same point:
The flavor of floating through the ocean of deathless
life has quieted all my questions.
Just as the tree is inside of the seed, so all our diseases
are in the asking of these questions.
Several times in
Leaves of Grass
Whitman tells us of periods in his own life when he could not feel his perfect faith. “I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,” he confides to the reader in one poem, “I too knitted the old knot of contrariety.” One of the love poems suggests the content of Whitman’s questions—and tells how they were quieted. The poems gathered under the heading
Calamus
address themselves, in Whitman’s terms, to “the passion of friendship for men,” to “adhesiveness, manly love.” They are quite clearly the record, sometimes frank and sometimes veiled, of Whitman’s frustrated love affair with a man in the late 1850s. A poem called “Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances” lists the doubts he suffers when he cannot feel “the equanimity of things”:
… That we may be deluded,
That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations
after all,
That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful
fable only,
May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men,
hills, shining and flowing waters,
… are … only apparitions …
But, like Kabir, Whitman found something to dissolve his doubt:
When he whom I love travels with me or sits a long
while holding me by the hand,
… Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom,
I am silent, I require nothing further,
I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of
identity beyond the grave,
But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied, He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.
We have now seen three situations in which Whitman falls into a gifted state. Reckoning and dividing, talking and doubt, all leave him when his lover holds his hand, when the god-lover shares his bed and gives him the baskets of rising dough, and when the soul plunges its tongue into his breast. Note that in each of these cases Whitman’s body is the instrument of his conversion. The intercourse that leads him to the gifted state is a carnal commerce, one of bread and tongues, hands and hearts. Whitman is what has traditionally been known as an enthusiast. To be “enthusiastic” originally meant to be possessed by a god or inspired by a divine afflatus. The bacchants and maenads were enthusiasts, as were the prophets of the Old Testament, the apostles of the New, or, more
recently, Shakers and Pentecostal Christians. Enthusiasts, having received a spirit into the body, have never been hesitant to describe their spiritual knowledge in terms of the flesh, to speak of “a sweet burning in the heart” or of a “ravished soul.” Whitman is no exception, as all our examples so far illustrate. He takes his own body to be the font of his religion: