The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [93]
Once an inner gift has been realized, it may be passed along, communicated to the audience. And sometimes this embodied gift—the work—can reproduce the gifted state in the audience that receives it. Let us say that the “suspension of disbelief” by which we become receptive to a work of the imagination is in fact belief, a momentary faith by virtue of which the spirit of the artist’s gift may enter and act upon our being. Sometimes, then, if we are awake, if the artist really was gifted, the work will induce a moment of grace, a communion, a period during which we too know the hidden coherence of our being and feel the fullness of our lives. As in the Scottish tale, any such art is itself a gift, a cordial to the soul.
If we pause now to contrast the esemplastic cognition of imagination to the analytic cognition of logos-thought, we will be in a position to see one of the connections between the creative spirit and the bond that a gift establishes. Two brief folk tales will help set up the contrast. There is a group of tales which portray for us the particular kind of thought that destroys a gift. In a tale from Lithuania, for example, riches that the fairies have given to mortals turn to paper as soon as they are measured or counted. The motif is the reverse, really, of one we have already seen: worthless goods—coals, ashes, wood shavings—turning into gold when they are received as gifts. If the increase of gifts is in the erotic bond, then the increase is lost when exchange is treated as a commodity transaction (when, in this case, it is drawn into the part of the mind that reckons value and quantity).
A second example will expand the point. A brief entry in a mid-nineteenth-century collection of English fairy tales tells of a Devonshire man to whom the fairies had given an inexhaustible barrel of ale. Year after year the liquor ran freely. Then one day the man’s maid, curious to know the cause of this extraordinary power, removed the cork from the bung hole and looked into the cask; it was full of cobwebs. When the spigot next was turned, the ale ceased to flow.
The moral is this: the gift is lost in self-consciousness. To count, measure, reckon value, or seek the cause of a thing is to step outside the circle, to cease being “all of a piece” with the flow of gifts and become, instead, one part of the whole reflecting upon another part. We participate in the esemplastic power of a gift by way of a particular kind of unconsciousness, then: unanalytic, undialectical consciousness.
To offer a last illustration that is closer to the concerns of artists, most of us have had the experience of becoming suddenly tongue-tied before an audience or before someone whom we perceive to be judging us. In order to sing in front of other people, for example, the singer cannot step back and listen to his own voice—he can’t, that is, fall into that otherwise useful frame of mind that perceives the singer and the audience as separate things, the one listening to the other. Instead he must enter that illusion (an illusion that becomes a reality if the singer is gifted) that he and the audience are one and the same thing. A friend of mine had a strange experience when she took her first piano lessons. During an early session, to the surprise of both her teacher and herself, she suddenly began to play. “I didn’t know how to play the piano,” she says, “but I could play it.” The teacher was so excited she left the room to find someone else to witness the miracle. As the two of them came back into the practice room, however, my friend’s ability left her as suddenly as it had appeared. Again, the moral seems to be that the gift is lost in self-consciousness. (Thus O’Connor: “In art the self becomes self-forgetful.”) As soon as the musician