The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [32]
The tale is a parable of a gifted person. It describes the time between the initial stirrings of a gift (when it is potentially ours) and the releasing of a gift (when it is actually ours). In this case the gift is the man’s talent, carried by the elves. The shoemaker is poor, to begin with. His own worth is not available to him for some reason that is never explained. But then, while he is asleep, it begins to come. The process is always a bit mysterious. You work at a task, you work and work and still it won’t come right. Then, when you’re not even thinking about it, while spading the garden or stepping into the bus, the whole thing pops into your head, the missing grace is bestowed. That’s the elves, the “magic touch” by which our tasks take on life. The process does not end there, however, for the elves have need of us, as well. It is a curious detail in the story that these manikins so skilled with the needle and thread are unable to make themselves some clothes, but that seems to be the case. Their outfits and, above all, their freedom depend on the shoemaker’s recognition and gratitude.*
My general point here is that a transformative gift cannot be fully received when it is first offered because the person does not yet have the power either to accept the gift or to pass it along. But I should qualify this. Some part of the self is able to apprehend the gift. We can feel the proffered future. I am reminded of the odd phenomenon of the “instant cure” in psychotherapy: sometimes in a very early session a patient will experience a total lifting of his or her neurosis. For a brief period, say a week, he will experience a longed-for freedom. Then normalcy will descend, and then the years of labor to acquire that freedom as a true possession. The gift is not ours yet but the fullness of the gift is felt, and we respond with gratitude and with desire. The shoemaker in this tale is completely asleep when the first gift arrives, so we can’t say he’s really acquired his talent. But he does feel something being roused in him and he gets to work.
Once a gift has stirred within us it is up to us to develop it. There is a reciprocal labor in the maturation of a talent. The gift will continue to discharge its energy so long as we attend to it in return. The geometrical progression of exchange between shoemaker and elves reaches a sort of critical mass when the man finally decides to stay awake and watch the shop. Of course it’s amusing that it takes the shoemaker so long to get around to seeing who’s been helping out. We husband our gifts when we cannot do without them, or when they are not fully formed. But once his poverty has been relieved, the cobbler wonders where his riches have come from, and he and his wife stay up to see the elves; at this point we might say he wakes up to his gift.
What can we make of the initial nudity of the elves, the clothes they are given, and the result of that gift? To put clothes on a thing is a kind of acknowledgment, like giving it a name. By this act we begin to differentiate what was undifferentiated. Sometimes we are unable to escape from a bad mood, for example, until we have correctly articulated the feeling. Articulation allows a slight gap to open between the feeling and the self, and that gap permits the freedom of both. In this story the clothes realize the gift (that is, they make it real, make it a thing). Note that the shoemaker makes his first pair of shoes (within the tale) in order to dress the elves. It’s the last act in his labor of gratitude. Now he’s a changed man. Now he has worth that can be communicated. The shoes he makes are a return gift which simultaneously accomplishes his own transformation and frees the elves. This is why I say that the end of the labor of gratitude is similarity with the gift or its donor. Now the man is a real shoemaker, as were the elves on the first night. (A gift isn’t fully realized until it is given away, then. Those who will not acknowledge gratitude or who refuse to labor in its service neither free their