The Gift (9 page)

The task of setting free one’s gifts was a recognized labor in the ancient world. The Romans called a person’s tutelar spirit his
genius.
In Greece it was called a
daemon.
Ancient authors tell us that Socrates, for example, had a
daemon
who would speak up when he was about to do something that did not accord with his true nature. It was believed that each man had his
idios daemon
, his personal spirit which could be cultivated and developed. Apuleius, the Roman author of
The Golden Ass
, wrote a treatise on the
daemon/genius
, and one of the things he says is that in Rome it was the custom on one’s birthday to offer a sacrifice to one’s own
genius.
A man didn’t just receive gifts on his birthday, he would also give something to his guiding spirit. Respected in this way the
genius
made one “genial”—sexually potent, artistically creative, and spiritually fertile.

According to Apuleius, if a man cultivated his
genius
through such sacrifice, it would become a
lar
, a protective
household god, when he died. But if a man ignored his
genius
, it became a
larva
or a
lemur
when he died, a troublesome, restless spook that preys on the living.
The genius
or
daemon
comes to us at birth. It carries with it the fullness of our undeveloped powers. These it offers to us as we grow, and we choose whether or not to accept, which means we choose whether or not to labor in its service. For, again,
the genius
has need of us. As with the elves, the spirit that brings us our gifts finds its eventual freedom only through our sacrifice, and those who do not reciprocate the gifts of their
genius
will leave it in bondage when they die.

An abiding sense of gratitude moves a person to labor in the service of his
daemon.
The opposite is properly called narcissism. The narcissist feels his gifts come from himself. He works to display himself, not to suffer change. An age in which no one sacrifices to his
genius
or
daemon
is an age of narcissism. The “cult of genius” which we have seen in this century has nothing to do with the ancient cult. The public adoration of
genius
turns men and women into celebrities and cuts off all commerce with the guardian spirits. We should not speak of another’s
genius;
this is a private affair. The celebrity trades on his gifts, he does not sacrifice to them. And without that sacrifice, without the return gift, the spirit cannot be set free. In an age of narcissism the centers of culture are populated with
larvae
and
lemures
, the spooks of unfulfilled
genii.

I want to offer a final example of transformation and gratitude, this one at quite a different level. Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth-century Christian mystic, presents a high spiritual statement of the commerce I have tried to outline between man and spirit. The specifics are quite different, of course, but the form of the exchange is the same as with the shoemaker
and the elves or with the Roman and his
genius
, an escalating exchange energized, on the human side, by gratitude and culminating in the realization (and freedom) of the gift. For Eck-hart, all things owe their being to God. God’s initial gift to man is life itself, and those who feel gratitude for this gift reciprocate by abandoning attachment to worldly things, that is, by directing their lives back toward God. A second gift comes to any soul that has thus emptied itself of the world— a Child is born (or the Word is spoken) in the soul emptied of “foreign images.” This gift, too, can be reciprocated, the final stage of the transformation being the soul’s entrance into the Godhead.

Eckhart says: “That man should receive God in himself is good, and by this reception he is a virgin. But that God should become fruitful in him is better; for the fruitfulness of a gift is the only gratitude for the gift.” Eckhart is speaking his own particular language here. To understand what he means we need to know, first, that according to his theology, “God’s endeavor is to give himself to us entirely.” The Lord pours himself into the world, not on a whim or even by choice, but by nature: “I will praise him,” says this mystic, “for being of such a nature and of such an essence that he must give.”

When Eckhart says that it is best if God becomes fruitful in man, he is commenting on a verse from the Bible which he translates as: “Our Lord Jesus Christ went up into a little castle and was received by a virgin who was a wife.” He interprets the verse symbolically: to be a “virgin” has nothing to do with carnal life but refers to “a human being who is devoid of all foreign images, and who is as void as he was when he was not yet.” A virgin is detached, someone who no longer regards the things of this life for themselves or for their usefulness. Detachment is the first station in Eckhart’s spiritual itinerary. When God finds the soul detached he enters it: “Know then, that God is bound to act, to pour himself out
into thee as soon as ever he shall find thee ready … It were a very grave defect in God if, finding thee so empty and so bare, he wrought no excellent work in thee nor primed thee with glorious gifts.” When God pours himself into the soul, the Child is born, and this birth is the fruit of the gratitude for the gift.

For Eckhart we are not really alive until we have borne the gift back into the Godhead. Whatever has proceeded from God comes to life, or receives its being, only at that moment when it “gazes back” toward Him. The circuit must be completed. “Man ought to be flowing out into whatever can receive him.” As in the other stories we have read, we come alive when we give away what has been received. In Eckhart the passage is purely spiritual. He tells us not to pray to God for things, because things are nothing; we should simply pray to be closer to the Godhead. The final fruit of gratitude toward God is to be drowned in Him.

The labor of gratitude accomplishes the transformation that a gift promises. And the end of gratitude is similarity with the gift or with its donor. The gifted become one with their gifts. For Eckhart, the child born in the soul is itself a god: whoever gratefully returns all that God has bestowed will, by that act of donation, enter the Godhead.

It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection. I go into a hardware store, pay the man for a hacksaw blade and walk out. I may never see him again. The disconnectedness is, in fact, a virtue of the commodity mode. We don’t want to be bothered. If the clerk always wants to chat about the family, I’ll shop elsewhere. I just want a hacksaw blade.

But a gift makes a connection. To take the simplest of examples, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss tells of a seemingly trivial ceremony he has often seen accompany a meal in cheap restaurants in the South of France. The patrons sit at a long, communal table, and each finds before his plate a modest bottle of wine. Before the meal begins, a man will pour his wine
not
into his own glass but into his neighbor’s. And his neighbor will return the gesture, filling the first man’s empty glass. In an economic sense nothing has happened. No
one has any more wine than he did to begin with. But society has appeared where there was none before. The French customarily tend to ignore people whom they do not know, but in these little restaurants, strangers find themselves placed in close relationship for an hour or more. “A conflict exists,” says Lévi-Strauss, “not very keen to be sure, but real enough and sufficient to create a state of tension between the norm of privacy and the fact of community… This is the fleeting but difficult situation resolved by the exchange of wine. It is an assertion of good grace which does away with the mutual uncertainty.” Spacial proximity becomes social life through an exchange of gifts. Further, the pouring of the wine sanctions another exchange—conversation—and a whole series of trivial social ties unfolds.

There are many such simple examples, the candy or cigarette offered to a stranger who shares a seat on the plane, the few words that indicate goodwill between passengers on the late-night bus. These tokens establish the simplest bonds of social life, but the model they offer may be extended to the most complicated of unions. As I took gifts at the time of death as the best examples of threshold gifts, so I would take gifts as peace overtures and gifts given in marriage as the types for the class of gifts that bring people together and make one body out of several (gifts of incorporation). The ceremonies are no different from the wine pouring. To take just one of the innumerable examples of marriage gifts, in New Caledonia when boys reach puberty they seek out girls from the clan complementary to their own and exchange tokens whose value and nature are set by custom. A boy’s first question to a girl whose favor he seeks is, “Will you take my gifts or not?” The answer is sometimes “I will take them,” and sometimes “I have taken the gifts of another man. I don’t want to exchange with you.” To accept a boy’s gifts initiates a series of oscillating reciprocations which leads finally to the formal
gifts of nuptial union. Courtship in New Caledonia, it seems, is no different from courtship throughout the world.

Gifts of peace have the same synthetic character. Gifts have always constituted peace overtures among tribal groups and they still signify the close of war in the modern world, as when the United States helped Japan to rebuild after the Second World War. A gift is often the first step toward normalized relations. (To take a negative example, the United States did
not
offer aid to Vietnam after the war. The American Friends and the National Council of Churches both gave gifts to the Vietnamese—medical supplies and wheat—but Congress refused all reconstruction aid and the State Department went out of its way to frustrate the churches’ attempts to ship food. For the government, it seems, the war was not over.)

The bonds that gifts establish are not simply social, they may be spiritual and psychological as well. There are interior economies and invisible economies. Gift exchanges may join figures and forces within the drama of our inner lives. Were we to take the characters in a dream as separated powers of the soul, for example, then a gift given in a dream might serve the soul’s integration. To read the Scottish tale “The Girl and the Dead Man” in a similar fashion, the daughter who gives food to the night birds is joined to the spirit of her mother from whom she has parted in fact (while her sisters are estranged from the mother in fact and then in spirit). Gift exchange is the preferred interior commerce at those times when the psyche is in need of integration.

Our gifts may connect us to the gods as well. Sacrifice turns the face of the god toward man. We have already discussed the rites of the first fruit, a return gift that seeks to maintain relationship with the spiritual world. On the other side, the side of the gods, there are compassionate deities who approach us with gifts. The special case I want to consider here are the gods who become incarnate and then offer their own bodies
as the gift that establishes the bond between man and the spiritual state to which the god pretends. In some of these cases the gift makes amends for an earlier separation. “Christ gave his body to atone for our sins, so that we might be made one with God.” “Sin” here is a falling away, a splitting apart: a man who sins acts so as to divide himself, internally or from his fellows or from God. “To atone” is to reunite, to make “at one.” There was a time when a criminal was allowed—and expected—to atone for his crime with a gift, the synthetic power of which would reestablish the broken bond and rein-corporate him into the body of the group. Spiritual systems call for atonement when a particular person or mankind as a whole is seen as having fallen away from an original unity with the gods. The Christian story is well known. In the Crucifixion or in the “Take, eat: this is my body,” Christ’s body becomes the gift, the vehicle of atonement, which establishes a new covenant between man and God.
*

In other spiritual systems an incarnate spirit makes a gift of the body, though not in atonement, for no fall has preceded. There are higher states to which the race might aspire, and the spirit that has attained to them gives its body to open a path and establish a connection for others who would follow. Such a gift potentially revalues or redeems mankind. Again, this aspect of the Christian story is well known. Among the stories that are told about the Buddha there is another such tale of giving up the body. Tradition holds that the giving of alms is the first of the ten perfections required of a future Buddha. The
JĀtaka
, the Pali collection of accounts of the Buddha’s former lives, tells us that there was no limit to the number of existences in which Gautama Buddha became perfect in almsgiving, but the height of his perfection was reached during a
lifetime in which he was a rabbit, the Wise Hare. Being a Future Buddha, this hare was naturally a rather special animal, one who not only gave alms but kept the precepts and observed the fast days.

The story goes like this. On one particular fast day the Wise Hare lay in his thicket, thinking to himself that he would go out and eat some dabba-grass when the time came to break his fast. Now, as the giving of alms while fasting brings great reward, and as any beggar who came before him might not want to eat grass, the hare thought to himself, If any supplicant comes, I will give him my own flesh. Such fiery spiritual zeal heated up the marble throne of Sakka, the ruler of the heaven of sensual pleasure. Peering down toward the earth, he spied the cause of this heat, and resolved to test the hare. He disguised himself as a Brahman and appeared before the Future Buddha.

“Brahman, why are you standing there?” asked the hare.

“Pandit, if I could only get something to eat, I would keep the fast-day vows and perform the duties of a monk.”

The Future Buddha was delighted. “Brahman,” he said, “you have done well in coming to me for food. Today I will give alms such as I never gave before; and you will not have broken the precepts by destroying life. Go, my friend, and gather wood, and when you have made a bed of coals, come and tell me. I will sacrifice my life by jumping into the bed of live coals. And as soon as my body is cooked, eat my flesh and perform the duties of a monk.”

When Sakka heard this speech, he made a heap of live coals by using his superhuman power, and came and told the Future Buddha, who then rose from his couch of dabba-grass and went to the spot. He shook himself three times, saying, “If there are any insects in my fur, I must not let them die.” Then “throwing his whole body into the jaws of his generosity” (as
the Sutra puts it), he jumped into the bed of coals, as delighted in mind as a royal flamingo when it alights in a cluster of lotus blossoms.

The fire, however, was unable to burn even a hair-pore of the Future Buddha’s body. “Brahman,” said the hare, “the fire you have made is exceedingly cold. What does it mean?”

“Pandit, I am no Brahman. I am Sakka, come to try you.”

“Sakka, your efforts are useless, for if all the beings who dwell in the world were to try me in respect to my generosity, they would not find in me any unwillingness to give.”

“Wise Hare,” said Sakka, “let your virtue be proclaimed to the end of this world-cycle.” And taking a mountain in his hand, he squeezed it and, with the juice, drew the outline of a hare on the disk of the moon.

The
JĀtaka
records 550 stories of the Buddha’s anterior lives; the point of these stories is to record the helical development of Gautama Buddha through the cycles of birth and rebirth. Almsgiving is always a part of the preparation for incorporation into a higher level, and the story of the Wise Hare is, says
the JĀtaka
, “the acme of almsgiving.” It is a Buddhist version of “Take, eat: this is my body,” the highest gift of the incarnate spirit. It is not a tale of atonement because the gift follows no previous alienation from the spirit world. But the gift connects the Buddha—and any who would follow his spirit—to a higher state. We must all give up the body, but saints and incarnate deities intend that gift, and, through it, establish bonds between man and the spiritual world.

The synthetic or erotic nature of the giving of a gift may be seen more clearly if we contrast it to the selling of commodities. I would begin the analysis by saying that a commodity
has value and a gift does not. A gift has worth. I’m obviously using these terms in a particular sense. I mean “worth” to refer to those things we prize and yet say “you can’t put a price on it.” We derive value, on the other hand, from the comparison of one thing with another. “I cannot express the value of linen in terms of linen,” says Marx in the classic analysis of commodities which opens his
Capital.
Value needs a difference for its expression; when there is no difference we are left with tautology (“a yard of linen is a yard of linen”). The phrases “exchange value” and “market value” carry the sense of “value” I mean to mark here: a thing has no market value in itself except when it is in the marketplace, and what cannot be exchanged has no exchange value.
*

It is characteristic of market exchange that commodities move between two independent spheres. We might best picture the difference between gifts and commodities in this regard by imagining two territories separated by a boundary. A gift, when it moves across the boundary, either stops being a gift or else abolishes the boundary. A commodity can cross the line without any change in its nature; moreover, its exchange will often establish a boundary where none previously existed (as, for example, in the sale of a necessity to a friend).
Logos
—trade draws the boundary,
eros
—trade erases it.

In his analysis of commodities, Marx gives many examples of useful objects which are the product of human labor but which are not commodities. A man who makes his own tools does not make commodities. Likewise, “in the primitive
communities of India … the products of … production do not become commodities.” The materials that circulate
inside
a factory are not commodities. Marx intends by all of these examples to underline his point that a commodity becomes such when it moves between two separate spheres (without, we would add, abolishing their separation). “The only products which confront one another as commodities are those produced by reciprocally independent enterprises.”

This being the case, commodity exchange will either be missing or frowned upon to the degree that a group thinks of itself as one body, as “of a piece.” Tribal groups or Marx’s “primitive communities of India” or close-knit families would all be examples. There is a famous law in the Old Testament—which I shall expand upon in a later chapter so as to present a history of gift exchange—a double law which prohibits the charging of interest on loans to members of the tribe while allowing that it may be charged to strangers. In terms of the present analysis, such a law asks that gift exchange predominate within the group (particularly in the case of needy members), while allowing that strangers may deal in commodities (money let out at interest being commodity-money or stranger-money). The boundary of the group is the key to which of the two forms of exchange is proper. Such a double law is not at all peculiar to the Jews; any close-knit group will express their sense of “brothers and others” in a double economy. In an earlier chapter I referred to an ethic among the Uduk: “any wealth transferred from one subclan to another, whether animals, grain or money, is in the nature of
a gift
, and should be consumed, not invested for growth.” No such prohibition applies to dealings with strangers, but the subclans of the Uduk intermarry; they are meant to be “of a piece,” and the preferred economy is therefore gift exchange, not market exchange.

If a thing is to have a market value, it must be detachable or alienable so that it can be put on the scale and compared. I mean this in a particular sense: we who do the valuation must be able to stand apart from the thing we are pricing. We have to be able to conceive of separating ourselves from it. I may be fond of my wristwatch but I can put a value on it because I can imagine parting with it. But my heart has no market value (at least not to me!), for to detach it is inconceivable. (I address below the interesting question of value in relation to body organs used for transplant.) We feel it inappropriate, even rude, to be asked to evaluate in certain situations. Consider the old ethics-class dilemma in which you are in a lifeboat with your spouse and child and grandmother and you must choose who is to be thrown overboard to keep the craft afloat—it’s a dilemma because you are forced to evaluate in a context, the family, which we are normally unwilling to stand apart from and reckon as we would reckon commodities. We are sometimes forced into such judgments, to be sure, but they are stressful precisely because we tend not to assign comparative values to those things to which we are emotionally connected.