The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [18]
As the bearer of the empty place, the religious mendicant has an active duty beyond his supplication. He is the vehicle of that fluidity which is abundance. The wealth of the group touches his bowl at all sides, as if it were the center of a wheel where the spokes meet. The gift gathers there, and the mendicant gives it away again when he meets someone who is empty. In European folk tales the beggar often turns out to be Wotan, the true “owner” of the land, who asks for charity though it is his own wealth he moves within, and who then responds to neediness by filling it with gifts. He is godfather to the poor.
Folk tales commonly open with a beggar motif. In a tale from Bengal, a king has two queens, both of whom are childless. A fakir, a wandering mendicant, comes to the palace gate to ask for alms. One of the queens walks down to give him a handful of rice. When he finds that she is childless, however, he says that he cannot accept the rice but has a gift for her instead, a potion that will remove her barrenness. If she drinks his nostrum with the juice of the pomegranate flower, he tells her, in due time she will bear a son whom she should then call the Pomegranate Boy. All this comes to pass and the tale proceeds.
Such stories declare that the gift does move from plenty to emptiness. It seeks the barren, the arid, the stuck, and the poor. The Lord says, “All that opens the womb is mine,” for it is He who filled the empty womb, having earlier stood as a beggar by the sacrificial fire or at the gates of the palace.
* This story illustrates almost all the main characteristics of a gift, so I shall be referring back to it. As an aside, therefore, I want to take a stab at its meaning. It says, I think, that if a girl without a father is going to get along in the world, she’d better have a good connection to her mother. The birds are the mother’s spirit, what we’d now call the girls’ psychological mother. The girl who gives the gift back to the spirit-mother has, as a result, her mother-wits about her for the rest of the tale.
Nothing in the tale links the dead man with the girls’ father, but the mother seems to be a widow, or at any rate the absence of a father at the start of the story is a hint that the problem may have to do with men. It’s not clear, but when the first man she meets is not only dead but difficult, we are permitted to raise our eyebrows.
The man is dead, but not dead enough. When she hits him with the stick, we see that she is in fact attached to him. So here’s the issue: when a fatherless woman leaves home, she’ll have to deal with the fact that she’s stuck on a dead man. It’s a risky situation—the two elder daughters end up dead.
Not much happens in the wild run through the forest, except that both parties get bruised. The girl manages to stay awake the whole time, however. This is a power she probably got from the birds, for they are night birds. The connection to the mother cannot spare her the ordeal, but it allows her to survive. When it’s all over she’s unstuck, and we may assume that the problem won’t arise again.
Though the dilemma of the story is not related to gift, all the psychological work is accomplished through gift exchange.
* Folk tales are the only proof I shall be able to offer for these assertions. The point is more spiritual than social: in the spiritual world, new life comes to those who give up.
CHAPTER TWO
The Bones of
the Dead
The gift in the folk tale from Bengal which closes the last chapter—the gift that the beggar gives to the queen—brings the queen her fertility and she bears a child. Fertility and growth are common fruits of gift exchange, at least in these stories. In all we have seen so far—the Gaelic tale, the Kula ring, the rites of the first fruit, feeding the forest hau, and so on—fertility is often a concern, and invariably either the bearers of the gift or the gift itself grows as a result of its circulation.
Living