The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [91]
I opened the chapter on the increase of gifts with a description of a first-fruits ritual—the salmon bones returned to the sea that the salmon might remain plentiful. In the context of that chapter the account served to illustrate the increase of organic gifts; we may also read it as another Just So story of the creative spirit. Just as treating nature’s bounty as a gift ensures the feritility of nature, so to treat the products of the imagination as gifts ensures the fertility of the imagination. What we receive from nature or from the imagination comes to us from beyond our sphere of influence, and the lesson of aboriginal first-fruits rituals seems to be that the continued fertility of these things depends on their remaining “beyond us,” on their not being drawn into the smaller ego. “All that opens the womb is mine,” says the Lord. First-fruits rituals protect the spirit of the gift by making evident the true structure of our relationship to the sources of our wealth. The salmon are not subject to the will of the Indians; the imagination is not subject to the will of the artist. To accept the fruits of these things as gifts is to acknowledge that we are not their owners or masters, that we are, if anything, their servants, their ministers.
To say the same thing in a slightly different fashion, the first-fruits ritual lays down a simple injunction in regard to fertility: Do not exploit the essence. The bones of the salmon, the fat of the lamb, the tokens of the forest hau, are directed back toward their homeland, and by that return the beneficiaries of these gifts avoid what we normally mean by exploitation. The return gift is, then, the fertilizer that assures the fertility of the source.
The fruit of the creative spirit is the work of art itself, and if there is a first-fruits ritual for artists, it must either be the willing “waste” of art (in which one is happy to labor all day with no hope of production, nothing to sell, nothing to show off, just fish thrown back into the sea as soon as they are caught) or else, when there is a product, it must be this thing we have already seen, the dedication of the work back toward its origins. Black Elk, the Oglala Sioux holy man, dedicated his book, Black Elk Speaks, as follows: “What is good in this book is given back to the six grandfathers and to the great men of my people.” Such is the dedication implicit in the work of anyone who feels his creativity to have been informed by a tradition. It is the artistic equivalent of the Maori ceremony we discussed in chapter 1, whangai hau (“nourishing hau”). For a creative artist, “feeding the spirit” is as much a matter of attitude or intent as it is of any specific action; the attitude is, at base, the kind of humility that prevents the artist from drawing the essence of his creation into the personal ego (in what other line of work does the worker say, “I knelt down—I always do after I’ve written what I know is a good piece”?) In his book of essays and interviews, The Real Work, the poet Gary Snyder speaks of arriving at such an attitude, and of its consequences:
I finished off the trail crew season and went on a long mountain meditation walk for ten days across some wilderness. During that process—thinking about things and my life—I just dropped poetry. I don’t want to sound precious, but in some sense I did drop it. Then I started writing poems that were better. From that time forward I always looked on the poems I wrote as gifts that were not essential to my life; if I never wrote another one, it wouldn’t be a great tragedy. Ever since, every poem I’ve written has been like a surprise …
You get a good poem and you don’t know where it came from. “Did I