The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [92]
When we are in the frame of mind which nourishes hau, we identify with the spirit of the gift, not with its particular embodiments, and whoever has identified with the spirit will seek to keep the gift in motion. Therefore the sign of this identity is generosity, gratefulness, or the act of gratitude:
Thou that hast giv’n so much to me,
Give one thing more, a gratefull heart:
See how Thy beggar works in Thee
By art:
He makes thy gifts occasion more,
And sayes, if he in this be crost,
All Thou hast given him heretofore
Is lost.
GEORGE HERBERT,
from “Gratefulnesse” (1633)
We nourish the spirit by disbursing our gifts, not by capitalizing upon them (not capitalizing “too much,” says Snyder—there seems to be a little leeway). The artist who is nourishing hau is not self-aggrandizing, self-assertive, or self-conscious, he is, rather, self-squandering, self-abnegating, self-forgetful— all the marks of the creative temperament the bourgeoisie find so amusing. “Art is a virtue of the practical intellect,” writes Flannery O’Connor, “and the practice of any virtue demands a certain asceticism and a very definite leaving-behind of the niggardly part of the ego. The writer has to judge himself with a stranger’s eye and stranger’s severity … No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.” Rainer Maria Rilke uses similar terms in an early essay describing the attributes of art as a way of life:
Not any self-control or self-limitation for the sake of specific ends, but rather a carefree letting go of oneself; not caution, but rather a wise blindness; not working to acquire silent, slowly increasing possessions, but rather a continuous squandering of all perishable values.
In chapter 2 we spoke of the increase of gifts in three related ways: as a natural fact (when gifts are actually alive); as a spiritual fact (when gifts are the agents of a spirit that survives the consumption of its individual embodiments); and as a social fact (when a circulation of gifts creates community). I want to return to the first and last of these in connection with works of the imagination, using as our point of departure another remark of Flannery O’Connor’s. Describing her sense of how the fiction writer works, O’Connor once wrote: “The eye sees what it has been given to see by concrete circumstances, and the imagination reproduces what, by some related gift, it is able to make live.”
When we say that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” we are usually speaking of things that “come alive” when their elements are integrated into one another. We describe such things by way of organic metaphors because living organisms are the prime example. There is a difference in kind between a viable organism and its constituent parts, and when the parts become the whole we experience the difference as an increase, as “the whole is greater.” And because a circulation of gifts has a cohesive or synthetic power, it is almost as a matter of definition that we say such increase is a gift (or is the fruit of a gift). Gifts are the agents of that organic cohesion we perceive as liveliness.
This is one of the things we mean to say, it seems to me, when we speak of a person of strong imagination as being “gifted.” In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge describes the imagination as “essentially vital” and takes as its hallmark its ability “to shape into one,” an ability he named “the esemplastic power.” The imagination has the power to assemble the elements of our experience into coherent, lively wholes: it has a gift.
An artist who wishes to exercise the esemplastic power of the imagination must submit himself to what I shall be calling a “gifted state,” one in which he