The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [115]
The soul, reaching, throwing out for love,
As the spider, from some little promontory, throwing out filament after filament, tirelessly out of itself, that one at least may catch and form a link, a bridge, a connection …
Whitman’s confessions of artistic intent reveal the same frustrated yearning that lies behind the Calamus poems, and I should not proceed without noting that his neediness sometimes undercuts the work itself. There are some clammy poems in Leaves of Grass. We feel a hand on our shoulder, a pushy lover (I am thinking, for example, of a moment in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” when Whitman claims to have imagined all of his readers before they were born; it seems presumptuous). But in the best poems, Whitman manages that poise, requisite to both art and love, which offers the gift without insisting. He may not have found the love he wanted in life, but it would be wrong to consign his appetites entirely to personal circumstance. Who among us has been sufficiently loved, whose heart has been fully realized in the returning gaze of the beloved?
Let us turn now to the function of the work once it has been given to the outer audience. When Whitman offers his poem to the literal reader, he sometimes addresses him as “O reader of the future.” In part this is a poet’s way of imagining a better audience than the one that was offered him in time, but I think we may also take the phrase as an atemporal invocation to the reader that lies potentially in each of us. Whitman directs his gift toward our souls now. He speaks in the prophetic perfect to wake the gifted self in any who would receive his poem. The poet, he says, “spreads out his dishes… he offers the sweet firm-fibered meat that grows men and women.” “This is the tasteless water of souls… this is the true sustenance.” A work of art that enters us to feed the soul offers to initiate in us the process of the gifted self which some antecedent gift initiated in the poet. Reading the work, we feel gifted for a while, and to the degree that we are able, we respond by creating new work (not art, perhaps, but with the artist’s work at hand we suddenly find we can make sense of our own experience). The greatest art offers us images by which to imagine our lives. And once the imagination has been awakened, it is procreative: through it we can give more than we were given, say more than we had to say.* “If youbecome the aliment and the wet,” says Whitman of his poems, “they will become flowers, fruits, tall branches and trees.” A work of art breeds in the ground of the imagination.
In this way the imagination creates the future. The poet “places himself where the future becomes present,” says Whitman. He sets his writing desk in the “womb of the shadows.” Gifts—given or received—stand witness to meaning beyond the known, and gift exchange is therefore a transcendent commerce, the economy of re-creation, conversion, or renaissance. It brings us worlds we have not seen before. Allen Ginsberg tells a story about a time when he was a young man, out of luck and out of lovers, lying on his bed in Spanish Harlem, reading Blake. He had put the book aside. He had masturbated. He had fallen into a depression. And then, as he lay gazing at the page he heard a voice say Blake’s poem, “Ah sunflower, weary of time / That countest the steps of the sun …” “Almost everything I’ve done since has these moments as its motif,” Ginsberg has said. “The voice I heard, the voice of Blake, the