The Creative Process; The Gift of Creativity

Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of the best-selling memoir Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia. One of my book groups chose to read this book last year and I did enjoy it. It was a memoir about a woman trying to find balance in her life. She found it by, first, living in extremes. First she traveled to Italy and lived there for three months exploring pleasure (especially the pleasure of eating and drinking but also the pleasure of learning a new language and meeting new people). Then she moved on to India where she went to the opposite extreme and lived in an Ashram. Finally she went to Bali and tried to balance pleasure and devotion.

Elizabeth Gilbert was just at the 2009 TED conference and gave a talk on some of the things she's thinking about these days - mostly the idea of genius. But she is not thinking about genius as we usually conceive of it in this day and age. She is thinking of genius the way the ancients conceived of it - the kernel of creativity within us.

Lewis Hyde discussed this in his book The Gift. It was an important but small part of this book. Here is my description of Hyde's discussion:

Hyde spends time talking about the the ancient concept of the idios daemon, which the Romans referred to as each man's genius, a completely different concept than what we refer to as genius today. This was a man's personal spirit and to labor in the service of your personal spirit was an accepted part of the ancient world. On his birthday a man would receive gifts but would also sacrifice to his own genius so that when he died he could become a familiar household spirit and not a restless ghost who 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 which 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."

According to Hyde it is the sense of gratitude that causes a man to labor to bring forth the gift provided by his genius.'

I found Elizabeth Gilbert's perspective on genius interesting because she talks about it not only as a source of undeveloped powers but also as a source of anxiety for the artist, particularly the writer. And her conclusion is that a writer must stop worrying about genius, must think of it as being outside of herself and must think of it as a Gift to be enjoyed when it is there. I specifically liked that she counseled writers to address the invisible genius. So, for instance, when she was in the worst moments of writing her book and was sure it would be The Worst Book Ever - she addressed the invisible genius and basically said, "Look, if this is going to work you are going to have to do your part. But whether you do it or not I'm going to continue writing- because that's my job. Let the record show that I showed up for my part of the job."

Here it is:

The Gift (Part 4)

I recently finished reading Lewis Hyde's The Gift and thought I would post my (I think) final thoughts.

As I moved into reading Part II of Hyde’s book I had in mind a conversation from the comments of my previous posts in which AndiF theorized that Hyde was drawing too sharp a distinction between work and labor and that this distinction might be the source of my frustration with his theories. As I read through Part II, a great deal of which is an analysis of the lives and work of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, I noticed that Hyde himself seemed to be glossing over the difference between work and labor.

The actual beginning of this shift in tone was the last chapter of Part I in which Hyde describes the history of usury. It is a long and complicated chapter and well worth reading on its own, but I’m not going to spend much time summarizing it. In brief, according to Hyde, ancient people who lived in gift economies realized that when you interact “at the edges” of the community it is sometimes necessary to change the way you interact because you can’t necessarily trust strangers to act the way that your community would act. And thus was born the idea that you cannot charge interest within your community but you can charge interest to those outside your community. Interest seems only sensible to mitigate the risk of dealing with the stranger.

Later, in his conclusion, Hyde summarizes it like this:

I imagined a tribe with a boundary drawn around it. In the center of the tribe goods circulate as gifts and reciprocity is positive. Outside the tribe, goods move through purchase and sale, value is reckoned comparatively, and reciprocity is negative. I initially described the permission to usure as a permission to establish the boundary between these two spheres, to declare an outer limit to the circle of gift exchange. And in earlier, more polemical versions of the chapter I set out to strengthen that boundary insisting ... that the creative spirit will be wounded if it is not carefully protected from the spirit of stranger trade.

But as I brought this argument into the modern world, my own ideas underwent a bit of a re-formation I began to understand that the permission to usure is also a permission to trade between the two spheres. The boundary can be permeable. Gift-increase ... may be converted into market-increase ... And vice-versa; the interest a stranger pays on a loan may be brought into the center and converted into gifts. Put generally, within certain limits what has been given us as a gift may be sold in the marketplace and what has been earned in the marketplace may be given as a gift. Within certain limitations, gift wealth may be rationalized and market wealth may be eroticized.

And this shift in his understanding seems to have come about through, first, his understanding of the history of usury and, second, his examination of the lives and ideas of Whitman and Pound. It was a slow process, however, because the entire chapter on the history of usury, while fascinating, seemed out of place and I hesitated to even blog about it because I wasn't at all sure with how it fit into the whole.

And even as I read his chapter on Whitman, I can't say that I completely understood where he was going. He did, however, use the chapter on Whitman to synthesize his ideas on the artist and the gift. There's a lot of good food for thought in the chapter on Whitman but, in general, I don't like Whitman's poetry so it was hard to get swept up in Hyde's analyses. But finally, half-way through his analysis he paused and suddenly wrote " ... I should pause to clarify where, exactly, the gift lies in the creation of art." This is the first time that he actually puts down what he intended to do all along - analyze the arts in the words of his theory of gift exchange.

There are three gifts present in the creation of art, says Hyde. First the initial gift - what is bestowed upon the artist by "perception, experience, intuition, imagination, a dream, a vision, or another work of art." The artists tries to transmit this initial gift but rarely can he do it without laboring. The ability to do the labor is the second gift. I would say this is the gift of talent but it is also a gift of perseverance (which perhaps comes from the gratitude for the initial gift). The artist refines the initial gift and as it passes through the artist it increases. The finished work that is offered to the world is the third gift.

Hyde spends a deal of time on the politics of Whitman and of Pound, which I think are less important to Hyde's theory of gift exchange than they are to Hyde's eventually coming to his own integration of gift society and market society in his conclusion . He says that "his central dilemma" was: "How, if art is essentially a gift, is the artist to survive in a society dominated by the market?" And he concludes that, no matter how the artist decides to support himself (whether by getting a second job, finding a patron (or getting a grant) or selling his work), the artist needs to create a protected gift-sphere in which the gift can operate and the artist needs to define the edges of that sphere beyond which the market exists and commerce occurs, just as ancient gift exchange societies did. As long as she protects the inner core where the gift can exist and flourish she may allow herself commerce with the market beyond those boundaries. Thus it seems to me that the line between work and labor can be blurred. Or as he says:

The problem is not "Can gift and commodity coexist?" but "To what degree may one draw from the other without destroying it?" From the point of view of the market, the white man has a point when he complains about Indians who refuse to invest capital; there can be no market if all wealth is converted into gifts. And from the other side, the Indians have a point when they resist the conversion of all gifts to commodities; there is a degree of commercialization which destroys the community itself. But between these two extremes lies a middle ground in which, sometimes, eros and logos may coexist.

At last, the middle ground that I expected all along but not acknowledged until the Conclusion Chapter. Hyde does not have a specific answer to where this middle ground can be found. But as I found in looking at the relations between French traders and the Algonquians of the Great Lakes area, the middle ground will, by definition, always be shifting.

In the edition that I read (the 25th anniversary edition) Hyde added a special afterward. He admits that his intent was to describe a problem without giving a specific solution, because times change and a solution in one time will not work in another time.

One interesting point he makes in the afterward is this:

I have come to believe that, when it comes to how we imagine and organize support for creative work, the pivotal event in my lifetime was the 1989 fall of the Soviet Union.

I previously wrote a post about American Expressionism in which I wrote about an art exhibition I went to and I said:

One small section that I found particularly thought provoking was a display about how abstract expressionism was attacked as un-American during the 1950's because it didn't reflect American "values". This seemed unfathomable to someone like me who is an advocate for freedom of expression. And yet, I found the counter idea that this work should be defended as VERY American equally difficult to fathom. Mostly because I doubt that most Americans like it or understand it.

In one of those "everything is related" moments, I found myself reading Hyde's description of those years. According to Hyde, during the 1950's, while Congress criticized abstract expressionism, the CIA actually funded a number of artists because the CIA saw value during the Cold War in showing the world what freedom of expression looked like. So, in that sense, it WAS very American because, even though America didn't like the art, it tolerated and even (covertly) encouraged its creation because expressing yourself freely is an American value. Think about it - it's an American value to allow and encourage artistic movements that create art that you dislike. (The question to me, of course, is why this seems to preclude funding the creation of art that you like. But the American mindset is beyond the scope of this post.)

Beginning in the 1960's with the Kennedy administration and the launching of Sputnik, the government began to affirmatively and openly see the benefit of funding the arts as a political statement -it would be an exhibition of the "greatness of America" that it would not just allow but would encourage freedom of expression. Kennedy created the National Endowment for the Arts; Nixon doubled its budget. As Hyde said, the existence of the Soviet Union provided a cushion to some of the harsher realities of the market system of the West. The market does not value some things but the Cold War goaded Americans into paying for things that the market did not value so as to show that a market-based economy could still produce those things.

Once the Cold War was over, however, the impetus to fund the arts as a political statement ended and we entered what Hyde calls the era of market triumphalism. After capitalism conquered communism, Hyde says, the free market forces of the 90's and early 00's put everything up for sale to the detriment of those things that have an ill-defined market value.

With that in mind it will be interesting to see where we go next in the wake of the current collapse of the market system.

I'm glad that I read The Gift even though it ended up being a more difficult read than I expected. I think it will continue to provide food for thought.

The Gift (Part 3)

I'm continuing to read Lewis Hyde's The Gift.

As I said at the beginning of this series, my original intent was to 'live blog' my reading but I found that too difficult. There were just so many concepts that Hyde was throwing out there in the first part of his book. And in order for any blog post to make sense I needed to discuss the concepts in detail, which was daunting. In fact, I almost stopped the experiment after a few chapters because I felt that I would spend all my time simply summarizing his book and not having any real reaction to it. But then I got to Chapter 5: The Gift Community.

One of the issues I had as I was reading his early chapters was trying to imagine a modern society living as a gift exchange society. It seemed to me that gift societies needed to be small because the members needed to know what the other members needed. Otherwise the gift wouldn't come around full circle but would just keep going. It was hard to imagine a gift society in a modern country with big cities. And if gift societies only could exist in aboriginal societies or very small towns then the concepts Hyde was discussing seemed to be of limited use.


Although I haven't addressed these passages before, in Part I Hyde would occasionally veer off into negative commentary on capitalism. Mostly these comments bored me. I'm not one of those people who is looking for a revolution. There are things about capitalism that I don't like but as far as I'm concerned it is here to stay and I'm too practical to think for too long about ways of life that just aren't sustainable in this day and age. Since this book was about creativity and the artist in the modern world, I felt that the modern age needed to be taken into account by Hyde. Turning the United States, or even portions of the United States, into a gift exchange community isn't going to happen. I wondered if Hyde was going to admit that. And if he didn't admit that I wondered if I was going to be able to take his ultimate conclusions seriously.

But he did briefly address the issue in Chapter 5 and then delved more into it in Chapter 7. As an example of one of the issues with a gift exchange community, he described a situation that occurred in a kinship network in South Chicago, a poor community in which family and friends bonded together to supply each other's needs. These bonds were useful, as the families were very poor, and the people shared what they had in time and material through gifts to each other.

Then one family came into an inheritance of $1,500. They wanted to use the money as a down-payment on a house, but they found the inheritance completely depleted within six weeks as people within the kinship community approached them with needs (or simply had obvious needs). The family's inheritance, which Hyde classified as "capital," turned into gifts and was not used as capital. I wondered why he classified it as "capital" since an inheritance seems to me to be a form of gift and, if it is a gift, then it should have been given away to conform to the rules of gift exchange. But that led back to a question that I had throughout the first four chapters - when is something capital? And if there never is capital, does that mean that a community can never become anything other than a community that lives at the basic sustenance level and no higher. And do we really want to have no hope of ever living at more than a sustenance level?

I decided, however, that sustenance level was a matter of degree and definition. It seemed to me that a gift exchange community would work best when the community sees itself as, and is, relatively well off by the standards of the day. The natives of the northwest who lived on salmon would be poor by our standards but by their standards they were living just fine. The people of South Chicago were poor by our standards and by their own standards and there is no doubt that they would have preferred, as a group, to have a higher standard of living. Certainly the couple who inherited the money probably felt good that they helped their kin, but they were still stuck in the same cycle of poverty. And Hyde admits this is a problem. He says: The rewards of community lose some of their luster when it is not a matter of choice.

Hyde delved further into the problem later when he discussed the history of the laws of usury. Some ancient societies banned usury (the charging of interest) altogether but other societies banned it only among members of the community. If you were loaning something to someone outside the community it was all right to ask for something in return. Hyde ties this to the problem of commmunity size and community homogeneity. If you live in a society in which you know everyone and you know everyone has the same value system that you do, then the gift circle works. You can expect that if you give gifts to others you will eventually receive gifts when you need them. But when you are dealing with someone outside the circle - from a different geographic area or of a different value system (i.e. religion) you don't know if the person will keep the gift in motion.

In other words, and Hyde never actually says this in so many words, the gifts that go around the community are capital to the community. Gifting them outside the community doesn't work because then the community loses something it needs (and Hyde pointed out early in the book that some communities have rules about who can receive gifts). What Hyde does say is that when a person from outside the community asks to use something that is necessary in the community you might agree but also tell him to leave his goat as collateral in case he disappears and doesn't continue the gift circle.

As communities became bigger and as market commerce meant that communities were interacting with people different than themselves on many levels on a regular basis, the charging of interest on the use of property became more common and we eventually evolved into the modern society of capital and interest and commodities that we have today.

I was relieved to see that Hyde wasn't completely indifferent to the complexities of modern life and was cognizant of the reasons why some of the market systems developed the way they did. But Hyde wrote this book because he was convinced that gift economies are relevant in the modern age and especially in the arts. The principal example he used in Part 1 of a successful gift community in modern times was not a geographic community but a community of the mind - a community of ideas populated by scientists.

Hyde's description of the scientific community draws on the studies of sociologist Warren Hagstrom who points out that "manuscripts that are submitted to scientific periodicals are often called 'contributions,' and they are, in fact, gifts." Apparently scientists are not usually paid for their contributions to scientific periodicals. This did not surprise me; most legal articles are not paid for either.

At least, not directly, and not by the publication.

And here is where I felt that Hyde was a little less than honest, as I will explain below.

Hagstrom points out that scientific authors who write textbooks are paid and are held in lower esteem by other scientists.

Scientists who give their ideas to the community receive recognition and status in return ... But their is little recognition to be earned from writing a textbook for money. As one of the scientists in Hagstrom's study puts it, if someone "has written nothing at all but texts, they will have null value or even a negative value." Because such work brings no group reward, it makes sense that it would earn a different sort of remuneration, cash.

Texts are also despised because the textbook writer is appropriating community property for his own benefit.

Hyde points out that in gift exchange communities, status and prestige and esteem take the place of cash. Thus the scientists in their community of ideas share their ideas and the scientists with the best ideas or with the most useful ideas or with the most ideas gain status and prestige and are held in high esteem. Hyde says:

I am not saying science is a community that treats ideas as contributions; I am saying that it becomes one to the degree that ideas move as gifts.

Once ideas are walled off with patents and are not shared, that part of the scientific community falls apart and ceases to be a community.

I see a certain truth in this. In many endeavors it is the sharing of ideas that creates the community. I think this is how many of the smaller communities that we belong to in life evolve: mother's groups; reading groups; blogs. The free exchange of ideas creates a bond. Certainly those who contribute more gain a certain status. Those within the group who start out quiet may eventually be mentored into contributing more and, out of gratitude, mentor a newer member of the group. If a group member tried to convert the material into a book for profit without the consent of the group - he would be held in disdain (look at the grief that political bloggers get when they try to earn a profit from blogging.) All of this makes sense to me.

But nowhere in this description of the scientific community and their 'gifts' to Science Journals, does Hyde discuss the fact that these people ARE for the most part paid for these contributions. Sure, maybe there is the rare instance of a janitor who works all day and then comes home and works math equations at night or dreams of physics problems and eventually submits his work to a journal and is published. THAT person has made a true gift.

But the vast majority of these 'contributors' are paid for their work by universities who reap the benefit of the publication in increased enrollment and grant money. The payment, of course, is not for the written work, thereby assuring that the 'purity' of this little society of scientists continues. They are paid to be teachers, even those with little or no teaching skill. But we all know that they must publish or perish.

I found it really difficult to believe that Hyde would not discuss this fact. After all, he is a poet who is on the faculty of universities. He gets paid to have a lot of free time to ... write poetry that will get published. Who cares if the publication doesn't pay for his work? He's already been paid by the university.

It also occurred to me that the problems inherent in this mode of payment have multiplied since Hyde wrote this book in the early 1980's. These publishing scientists employed by universities are subsidized in part by the tuition paid by students (and grant money from corporations and the government, but the grant money tends to be a little more direct about what it is being used for whereas students are told that they are paying to be taught). The cost of college tuitions has increased exponentially over the last 20 years. More importantly, most students have to borrow funds to pay the tuition. So young people who can't afford it are going out and borrowing funds to pay to universities so that the university can pay a "teacher", who may or may not even be good at teaching, to teach some classes AND to do research that can be turned into writing that can be 'contributed' to a scientific journal.

As someone who had to spend years paying back student loans for tuition that increased over 10% each year when the cost of living was going up by less than 3% - I think Hyde owes at least a mention to the thousands of teenagers and twenty-somethings (and in many cases their parents) who are allowing these adult scientists to live with the illusion that they aren't being paid for their work and that they are making a 'gift' of it.

The Gift (Part 2)

I'm continuing to read Lewis Hyde's The Gift.

As I previously described, Hyde's goal in this book is to articulate a theory of gift societies and then use the language of that theory to examine the life of the artist. In my last post I described what Hyde thinks is the essential component of a gift: that it stay in motion. The receiver must pass along the gift (or its equivalent) or else risk destroying the gift and turning it into capital that increases, directly or indirectly, the receiver's own wealth. Likewise, bartering with the original giver or the next intended recipient about the value of the gift and what would constitute an equivalent gift also destroys the gift and makes it a commodity. Hyde also believes that an attribute of a true gift is that society believes that the gift "increases" as it moves from person to person. This can be seen three ways: as an increase of nature (fertility), as a spiritual increase (the symbolism of broken gifts where the spirit of the gift survives) and as a societal increase (the mere act of giving brings communities closer). And Hyde says that the "increase" must also be passed along and not hoarded as "profit."

As I said, Part I of this book is dense in concepts and what I just described are only the base concepts. There are many more concepts that Hyde describes after setting the table with the base concepts. One of the most interesting concepts he discusses, and one I think that pertains directly to the arts, is that "increase" is often achieved only through labor.


To explain this concept Hyde uses examples of transformational gifts. Many gifts mark transformational periods in a person's life: births, marriage, death. These are events that literally transform a person; the old must end in order for the new to begin. The gift is not compensation for what is lost but is symbolic of what is beginning. But Hyde points out that often a gift can be the catalyst for a transformation. The gift begins the transformation but the recipient must labor to bring the gift to full fruition.

Hyde uses real life modern examples and also a folk tale to explain his concept. His first example is Alcoholics Anonymous. It is a twelve step program and in the first step someone in need shows up for free help. The help is a gift to the person; a gift of time given by a recovered alcoholic (and some donations for coffee, etc.) At the end of the 12 steps the newly recovered alcoholic is expected to become a giver and pass along what he has learned to someone else in need. BUT the person cannot jump from step 1 to step 12 - he isn't ready. He must work his way through the 12 steps because he cannot pass along something that he has not already learned. It is a labor.

The same, Hyde says, can be said for mentoring programs. Someone who has been mentored often feels the need to "give back" by mentoring someone else - but first the initial mentoree must labor to be skilled enough to hold what is necessary to give back. These gifts of transformation are not necessarily appreciated at the beginning when the gift is offered but, as the gift begins to "take" with the recipient, the recipient begins to feel gratitude and then wants to pass along this opportunity to someone else who might need it.

Hyde says:

I would like to speak of gratitude as a labor undertaken by the soul to effect the transformation after a gift has been received. Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it along, we suffer gratitude. Moreover, with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level, as it were, that we can pass it along again. Passing the gift along is the act of gratitude that finishes the labor. The transformation is not accomplished until we have the power to give the gift on our own terms. Therefore, the end of the labor of gratitude is similarity with the gift or with its donor.

Hyde also uses a folk story, The Shoemaker and the Elves, to illustrate his point. In the story, a poor shoemaker is down on his luck and has only enough leather for one pair of shoes. The shoemaker goes to bed that night and while he sleeps these little naked elves come and make a wonderful pair of shoes. The shoemaker wakes up and, astounded, puts the shoes in the window where they sell for enough to buy leather for two shoes. Again overnight the little naked elves make the leather into shoes and the next day the Shoemaker sells them enough for 4 pairs. This continues until the shoemaker and his wife (finally!) stay up to figure out who is doing this nice thing for them. When they see the elves the shoemaker and his wife decide to do something for them. The wife makes little clothes and the shoemaker makes little shoes (note this is the first pair of shoes he has made since his despondency). The elves are thrilled with their gifts and immediately put them on and and leave - but the shoemaker continues to prosper. He can now make his own shoes that customers will buy.

The elves, say Hyde, have given the shoemaker a transformational gift. The gift of regaining his confidence that he can make shoes. The initial stirrings of the gift occur when the elves show up but it isn't until finally the shoemaker makes the little shoes for the elves that the gift is released. And Hyde says that a transformative gift cannot be fully received when first offered because the recipient is not yet ready - he doesn't have the power to receive it or to pass it along. BUT the recipient does apprehends that a gift is being given. And that feeling of gratitude might be what actually releases the gift. It stirs the recipient to develop the gift and this is what Hyde calls the "gratitude of labor".

Note that Hyde doesn't mean "work" when he says labor. Work is an act of will, accomplished on somebody else's schedule, labor is done on our own schedule and can't be accomplished by will alone. And when a labor is accomplished, says Hyde, we sometimes have the odd feeling that the results aren't our own product. He gives the example of a poet who said he had recently written a few good poems but he 'had no feeling that I wrote them.'

When I speak of labor, then, I intend to refer to something dictated by the course of life rather than by society, something that is often urgent but that nevertheless has its own interior rhythm, something more bound up with feeling, more interior, than work. The labor of gratitude is the middle term in the passage of a gift ... A gift that has the power to change us awakens a part of the soul. But we cannot receive the gift until we can meet it as an equal. We therefore submit ourselves to the labor of becoming like the gift. Giving the return gift is the final act in the labor of gratitude, and it is also, therefore, the true acceptance of the original gift. The shoemaker finally gives away some shoes. The twelfth step AA gives away what was received; the man who wanted to teach so as to "pass it on to the younger men" gives away what he received. In each case there is an interim period during which the person labors to become sufficiently empowered to hold and to give the gift.

And here, at last, Hyde begins to speak of gifts in terms of the artist. He points out that we can't predict the fruits of our labor and we can't even really know if we'll go through with the labor. He compares the shoemaker with an artist at the beginning, knowing that he has been given a gift but not knowing how to go about bringing that gift to fruition or having a true idea of what the fruit of the gift will look like.

An artist, Hyde says, must give himself over to what Hyde calls a "gifted state". The gift that has the power to transform "awakens the soul" but the artist cannot truly receive the gift until he is equal to it. And that takes time and sometimes means removing oneself from the distractions of society. He uses George Bernard Shaw as an example. In Shaw's early life he was in the working world but he felt his gift and quit his job and left everyone behind for 8 years while he wrote constantly - things that he did not think deserved to be published, and yet he continued to write as he labored over his gift. Hyde points out that during this period the artist does not know if he will ever be equal to the task of bringing the gift to fruition but if the artist manages it then he has set his gifts free.

But what exactly is the artist's gift? Throughout the book I was thinking in terms of the gift of being able to create and finally, in Part II, Hyde talks about the gift of imagination. And what is the imagination? It is the ability to take disparate parts and shape them into something new.

This ties in with another concept that Hyde outlines in Part I - the mere fact of giving creates a bond between the giver and the receiver and the passing on of the gift also creates bonds with the original giver and with the new receiver. In the Scottish tale the youngest daughter receives her mother's blessing along with the gift so the bond is two-fold. When the youngest daughter shares with the mother bird and her flock she is joined to the spirit of the mother with whom she parted by sharing her mother's gift with another and the bird is joined to the mother also. A circle of gifts, says Hyde, creates a cohesion or synthesis between the persons in the circle. It creates, he says, a bond. The imagination, too, creates bonds. An imagination "assembles the elements of our existence into coherent, lively wholes" Hyde says.

This bonding aspect is an important difference between a gift and a commodity. I think the most important concept Hyde describes is the idea that commodity exchanges are detached and create no bonds between the participants and therefore the participants are "free" of each other, while gifts create bonds and therefore create attachments. Some attachments are good (a family relationship, a community relationship) but sometimes we don't want an attachment and in those instances you will see people refuse gifts because they don't want the bond to be created or enhanced. However, Hyde says that a true gift constrains us only if we do not pass it along - if we do not respond by an equivalent exchange, by an act or an expression of gratitude. As long as we pass along the gift we are free from constraining bonds.

Remembering the story of the elves, the elves labored nightly for the shoemaker until the shoemaker showed gratitude with the gift of clothes and little shoes. At that point the elves were freed and left. Likewise, Hyde says, a gift of transformation indentures the giver to the gift and the recipient until the gift comes to fruition and maturity and the recipient can express the gratitude he feels. And then the giver is set free because the act of transformation is complete.

I found all of this fascinating and yet had a difficult time applying it directly to the artist, partly because the artist's gift, for instance of imagination, comes from an undefined place and so, I asked myself, how is that undefined giver indentured to the artist? It seems clear that the artist is indentured to the gift that he is creating - stuck with it until it is ready to share. But is the undefined spirit that gave the artist the gift of imagination indentured to the artist through the process too?

Hyde spends time talking about the the ancient concept of the idios daemon, which the Romans referred to as each man's genius, a completely different concept than what we refer to as genius today. This was a man's personal spirit and to labor in the service of your personal spirit was an accepted part of the ancient world. On his birthday a man would receive gifts but would also sacrifice to his own genius so that when he died he could become a familiar household spirit and not a restless ghost who 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 which 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.

According to Hyde it is the sense of gratitude that causes a man to labor to bring forth the gift provided by his genius.

I finally decided not to become too rational about the origin of the gift. As Hyde says, it does no good and it may do harm to think too much about the source of the gift. Hyde tells the folk tale of the man who had a magical never-depleted cask of wine. As the years went by it never ran dry. Finally a maid opened the cask to see what was inside causing this miraculous occurrence, but all she found were cobwebs. And the cask was dry from that day forward. To ask from whence the gift comes, says Hyde, is to step outside the circle of gifts and become an observer and at that point you destroy the circle. The artist must stay in the "gifted state" which is a state of only semi-consciousness of self. He must go with the flow of the gift. If the artist becomes too self-conscious the gift will be lost.

The Gift (Part 1)

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I had read a NY Times article about the poet Lewis Hyde. Part of the article described Hyde's non-fiction book The Gift. Although The Gift was published more than twenty years ago, I have never read it and, after reading the Times article, I thought that perhaps I should. So I went out and bought the 25th Anniversary Edition (in paperback) and set to work.


The publisher's comments say: By now a modern classic, The Gift is a brilliantly orchestrated defense of the value of creativity and of its importance in a culture increasingly governed by money and overrun with commodities.

At first I thought I would try an experiment and try "live blogging" while I read. But very quickly I realized that wouldn't work for me with this book. The first part of the book is dense with information and I found myself having a lot to think about but not much to say. It was helpful to write about what I read but I felt as if I was only summarizing the book. So, rather than publish immediately, I waited a few days to see how all the information was later used and then added thoughts.

I'm not finished with the book yet but I am at the point where it all seems to be coming together so I'm ready to start talking about it.


The book is divided into two parts, In Part I (which I have finished) Hyde is describing a general theory of "gift exchange". In Part II (which I am still reading) he attempts "to apply the language of that theory to the life of the artist".

In Part I Hyde describes the basics of "gift exchange societies" not only by using anthropological studies but also folk tales. I was a little skeptical about the use of folk tales at first (partly because I find folk tales and fairy tales boring) but by the end of the first chapter I had decided he was right to use them. Later, at the beginning of Part II, he tells us that his intent is to use the anecdotes and stories from Part I as parables of the creative spirit.

Through much of the book he refers back to an old Scottish Tale that he tells in the first chapter. Since it is used so often, I'll repeat it quickly.

A woman has three daughters. As each gets old enough to go into the world the woman says she will bake her a loaf of bread and gives the daughter a choice: a small piece and the mother's blessing or a large piece and the mother's curse. The two older daughters choose the large piece, the youngest daughter chooses the small piece (bet you can guess who turns out fine in this story). Each of the daughters, on the first day after she sets out, is accosted by a bird family and the mother bird begs the sister to share the bread. The older sisters do not share, the youngest does. Each sister comes to the same mysterious house where she is hired to stay up at night and watch a recently dead man "whose corpse was restless" and in return the sister would receive a peck of gold and a peck of silver. The two older daughters fall asleep and end up dead. The youngest daughter stays up, fixes the corpse's problem and for her troubles is given not only the gold and silver but also a "vessel of cordial" which is magic and which brings her sisters back to life.

Pretty typical folk tale. A little preachy (as usual). Hyde says there are four gifts in the tale. Can you spot them?

Hyde uses this tale (and some stories of real tribes) to explain an essential element of gift exchange societies. The gift must to stay "in motion" - the receiver cannot just keep the gift. She must give it or its equivalent away. In the tale the first gift is the gift of bread from the mother. The two older sisters break the rules of gift giving by not sharing their gift with the bird family. The youngest sister (who has chosen the smaller piece of bread in the first place) does share and in the expanded story the younger sister feels full after sharing her meal with the birds, while the older sisters are still hungry after eating all of their bigger pieces of bread. The younger sister has made the second gift by giving part of her bread to the bird family.

Hyde compares this to societies in which a goat, for instance, is given as a gift. The person who receives the gift is not expected to keep the goat "as capital" (for milk or to make new little goats). He is not supposed to be enriched by the gift. Instead he is expected to either give the goat away or, more likely, consume it. And since one goat is a lot to eat, he is really expected to throw a feast. A gift is not meant to enrich the beneficiary. It is meant to fulfill a need - at its most basic a consumption need. A true gift must be consumed in some way - either literally or figuratively (by being given away), in either case the gift is soon gone. If consumed it should be shared or if not shared an equivalent gift should be given to someone else who has a need.

The third gift in the tale is the vessel of cordial. It is not mentioned in the payment that the sisters are to receive for staying up all night, as the gold and silver are. The vessel of cordial is thrown in as a gift by the householder. And again, Hyde points out that the youngest sister who receives it is 'no dummy' because she immediately gives it away by using it to revive her sisters (the fourth gift - the gift of life).

Hyde also describes how, in gift societies, gifts move "in a circle" always coming back to the original giver. The giver gives a gift to a receiver, the receiver becomes a second giver by giving away to a second receiver, the second receiver becomes a third giver by giving away to the third receiver and eventually the first giver becomes a receiver. It doesn't have to be the same gift that is moved, it can be equivalent gifts. The equivalence however is not determined by the person who gave the gift to the receiver but by the receiver who is now passing on the gift.

If the receiver is giving a gift's equivalent back to the original giver there can be no dispute or bargaining about what would be an equivalent gift or it ceases to be a gift and becomes a commodity. Hyde describes this quite beautifully, as a poet would: "When we barter we make deals, and if someone defaults we go after him, but the gift must be a gift. It is as if you give a part of your substance to your gift partner and then wait in silence until he gives you a part of his. You put your self in his hands."

Most stories of gift exchange told by tribes have at least three participants because that solves the problem of two people trying to determine equivalence and risking entering into a bargain and destroying the gift. But the third participant does not always have to be human - it may be nature or "a god". The Maori have a ritual in which the hunters who go into the forest bring the first killed bird to the priest. The priest consumes part of the bird but then throws the remainder into the forest. There are three gifts in this story. The Forest gives the gift of game to the hunters, the hunters make the obligatory equivalence gift by giving to the priest (passing the gift along) and the priest makes a gift to the Forest and then the whole 'circle of life' starts again as the hunters go back to the Forest and receive the gift of birds to shoot. By having a third person there is no chance of converting the gift-giving into a commercial transaction between the hunters and the recipient of their gift - the priest. By including Nature as the third person the gift exchange is expanded to three "persons" and a circle is created.

Sometimes the third "person" is "the lord" as when Aaron is told by the Lord that the people must bring the first fruits (a lamb) to the alter and the priest may consume the flesh after burning it so that the smoke rises to the Lord as a gift. Hyde says that this raising of gift giving to the level of a mystery means that the gift passes out of sight into a realm that we cannot see. And we do not know how and in what form it will eventually make its way back to us. When we speak of someone having a gift (a gift that lets them make music or a gift that allows them to write) we are speaking of something within someone whose origin is a mystery. Some societies consider these gift from the gods. So, in these societies, the circle is complete after the smoke from the sacrifice rises to The Lord and at some point The Lord bestows gifts back on the someone who started the circle. The participants just don't know when The Lord will bestow the return gift.

Going back to the Scottish tale Hyde points out the other essential lesson of gift stories - "when the gift is used up it is not used up". A gift that is passed along remains abundant. The younger sister had the smaller piece but she shared it and yet she felt full and good things happened to her. And in the same light a gift giver cannot demand a gift in return, but can expect that one will eventually come. At a time of need someone will give you what you need or your "gift" (for music or writing or for happiness) will appear. The gift moves toward "the empty place", toward the person whose need for it is greatest. As each person gives objects away they will eventually have need for an object and that gift will be given to them.

Hydes points out another essential rule - not only the gift must continue in motion, but any "increase" in the gift must also stay in motion. He spends an entire chapter talking about the concept of "increase". I'd like to say that a gift can increase in value as it continues to be circulated but Hyde never uses the word value in describing "increase" and later he uses the term value to describe commodities. He uses the term "worth" to describe what gifts have. So I shall continue to use his word "increase". He gives examples of the "increase". Some gifts are made so that there will be a return gift of fertility - an actual increase in something living. More grain is grown or more babies of whatever species are born.

The tribes of the Pacific Southwest who relied on salmon would use the first salmon catch this way. They believed that the "Salmon People" who lived in the ocean would take the shape of salmon and offer themselves as a gift of food. When the first salmon of the season was caught the tribe would offer it as a gift to the priest or perhaps to the whole community through the priest. The priest would carefully prepare the salmon, offering everyone the gift of a bite of it, and then return the intact salmon skeleton to the ocean. By gifting it back to the ocean it was hoped that the following year the Salmon People would return with new and hopefully more gifts of salmon to eat. So, the fishermen offer the gift to the priest but if the gift continues in motion there will be an increase - better salmon fishing next year.

But the "increase" doesn't have to be of living things such as grain or salmon. The Indians also used ritual gifts that stood in for living things. The Indians had ritual copper plaques which Hyde just calls "Coppers". Coppers are associated with ceremonies in which ritual gift giving would occur on a large basis - births, ascension to adulthood, ascension to a high office, death. One tribe would show up for the feast and honor whoever was holding it (the person who was becoming chief for example) with a gift of a Copper and in return the new chief would shower the guests with other presents of blankets etc. Your status in society was measured by how many gifts you gave away. So the visitors brought the one Copper plaque and the new chief would give many gifts. Of course the shower of gifts should be of equivalent value of the Copper so the question was to determine (without bargaining) value of this particular Copper - where it came from and what kinds of gifts had been given in relation to it in the past. Lots of stories would be told about the Copper to show how valuable it was but at some point the gifts would be deemed to reach the equivalence factor and at that point the chief would throw in a few more gifts. So the gift of the Copper "increased" for the giver, not just turning into the piles of useful or decorative items that one would expect to receive at such a ceremony but a few more things that were the "increase" or the true gift.

There seems to be some lesson about equivalence here. The receiver of a gift must keep the gift in motion and pass the gift along or at least pass along its equivalent. If he doesn't then the gift is destroyed as a gift and becomes something else. But when the receiver passes it along the receiver can throw in something more in the nature of an extra gift, the "increase" gift, and that in a sense becomes the true gift. And both the gift AND the increase must be kept in motion. You cannot keep the increase as "profit" or it destroys the gift as a gift and makes it something else.

Hyde also spends some time discussing how these Coppers increase in value when they are ritually broken. To receive a gift of a piece of the Copper that was ritually broken when the chief died was to receive a valuable gift. This was a symbolic way of saying that even though death occurs there is something valuable that continues on.

Finally Hyde points out that that the passing along of gifts is also symbolically valuable because it creates a sense of community and goodwill. The ACT of giving invests the gift with an "increase". The "increase" is the increased sense of community that the ritual gives. This is why the ACT of giving is valued and in gift exchange societies there is virtue in publicly disposing of wealth.

So gifts can nourish us literally (as in the fish ceremony) or spiritually (when the broken Coppers are given away)or from a communal sense (by creating the sense of community that occurs when people gather and exchange gifts).

I have to say that by the end of the first couple of chapters it was a stretch for me to try to see how gift economies and art tied directly together. I could see how art might be a gift, how the artist herself could feel that she has a gift that comes from somewhere unexplainable (nature, a spirit, a god), something beyond mere genetics. And I could see how the artist, in creating art, is moving the gift along by offering it to the world. But it was only a vague understanding, if it was understanding.

It is not until Part II that Hyde begins to pull it all together. I can't yet figure out if this is a flaw in the book or not - that he waits so long to tie it together. While I found all the information in Part I interesting, I often found myself wanting him to make some analogies so that I could keep what was supposed to be the main topic in my head. On the other hand, by laying out the basics in a purely factual way he does build a base of knowledge on which the reader can draw once he finally makes his argument.

In the end his argument is very spiritual. He questions the source of art. Not the artist, who creates it, but the source within the artist.

An essential portion of any artist's labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received ... there are few artists who have not had this sense that some element of their work comes to them from a source they do not control.

According to Hyde the artist mustn't evaluate what comes out of himself too soon, because premature evaluation cuts off the flow. He must just accept it as a gift and see what comes of it. Once he has accepted the talent or the idea that is given to him, the artist will then want to offer it to an audience - thereby keeping the gift in in motion.

So long as the gift is not withheld, the creative spirit will remain a stranger to the economics of scarcity. Salmon, forest birds, poetry, symphonies or Kula shells, the gift is not used up in use. To have painted a painting does not empty the vessel out of which the paintings come. On the contrary, it is the talent which is not in use that is lost or atrophies, and to bestow one of our creations is the surest way to invoke the next.

Hyde also posits that artists and writers often have a "creation myth" of their own and the works of art are often symbolically offered back to the "creator". Whitman took the initial stirrings of his work to come from his soul and once the work was complete Whitman would "speak it back to the soul." Ezra Pound's myth revolved around tradition. Wherever the stirrings came from, it is all stored in a storehouse of tradition that must be respected. Pound would dedicate a portion of his work to the memory of certain artists who came before him and inspired him. Pablo Neruda's creation myth, his inspiration, revolved around the brotherhood of man - the "people" -- for whom he was creating. Part of me thinks this is a bit of a stretch, to make it fit with Hyde's concept of gifts flowing in a circle back to the original giver. But I liked the idea of writers having creation myths. And, after all, Hyde was up front that he was specifically attempting to apply the "language" of his gift exchange theory to the life of the artist

If the imagination is a gift derived from the creator of the artist's creation myth, then, Hyde says, the works that are created out of the imagination are the "increase". This made sense to me. But then Hyde, mindful that gift societies often use "first fruits" rituals to offer back to the original creator in the hope (not an expectation, but a hope) of a future increase again stretches a bit by analogizing the "first fruits" ritual to an artist's willingness to dedicate the work back to its inspiration or even to labor over it knowing that there is no hope it will be exhibited, just doing it for art's sake.

All in all I'm enjoying reading this. Hyde has two long chapters at the end that I haven't read in which he applies all of this language to two specific poets: Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound. I'm looking forward to getting to those chapters.