The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [88]
During and after the Middle Ages, Muslims accepted a practical modification of the Koranic prohibition by allowing a return on capital provided the creditor had taken a risk. A man was still forbidden to take interest in the sense of a guaranteed percentage return, but he could share in a profit if he had taken a risk. Nowadays some Muslims, like some Orthodox Jews, still refuse to charge interest on a loan, but most allow a reasonable rate of return.
The debate between these two factions was one of the minor dramas to be played out in Iran after the fall of the Shah in 1979. The stated intent of the followers of Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini was to organize an “Islamic republic” rooted in the precepts of the Koran. Even a man not closely aligned with the clergy, for mer president Abolhassen Bani-Sadr, reportedly maintained an elaborate microfilm library with Koranic codes cross-referenced to economic issues.
But, as Calvin told us, a modern state cannot operate on the ethics of an ancient tribe. Soon after the fall of the Shah, the new head of the state-owned oil company—a devout Muslim, a radical lawyer, an enemy of the Shah—declared himself perplexed as to how to proceed, finding it “neither possible nor beneficial … to put all political, economic and judicial problems into an Islamic mold.” A state whose wealth derives from selling fossil fuel to foreigners cannot operate without interest on capital. When this drama is resolved, I imagine that, as was the case in Europe, the merchant princes will emerge with the power. And the clergy will have to produce a Luther or a Calvin if they wish to share that power.
PART II
Two Experiments
in Gift Aesthetics
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Commerce of the
Creative Spirit
See how Thy beggar works in Thee
By art.
GEORGE HERBERT
In the second half of this book we shall be turning to two quite different poets, Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, to examine their work and their lives in the language of gift exchange. Before taking up these specific cases, however, I feel I should establish my terms in this new context. With only a few exceptions, it has been my hope from the outset that the ethnography, fairy tales, and anecdotes of the first half of this book could be read as parables or Just So stories of the creative spirit; before we set out to apply the language of those parables to particular poets, I want to offer some samples of how they may be read.
Let us begin at the beginning, with the question of the sources of an artist’s work.
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; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that “begging bowl” to which the gift is drawn. Remember Meister Eckhart: “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.” It is the artist’s hope that we may say the same of the creative spirit. In an autobiographical essay the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz speaks of his “inner certainty” as a young writer “that a shining point exists where all lines intersect … This certainty also involved my relationship to that point,” he tells us. “I felt very strongly that nothing depended on my will, that everything I might accomplish in life would not be won by my own efforts but given as a gift.”
Not all artists use these very words, but 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.
Harold Pinter in a letter to the director of his play The Birthday Party:
The thing germinated and bred itself. It proceeded