The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [94]
As is the case with any other circulation of gifts, the commerce of art draws each of its participants into a wider self. The creative spirit moves in a body or ego larger than that of any single person. Works of art are drawn from, and their bestowal nourishes, those parts of our being that are not entirely personal, parts that derive from nature, from the group and the race, from history and tradition, and from the spiritual world. In the realized gifts of the gifted we may taste that zoë-life which shall not perish even though each of us, and each generation, shall perish.
Such is the context within which to cite more fully Joseph Conrad’s description of the artist. The artist, Conrad tells us, must descend within himself to find the terms of his appeal:
His appeal is made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which, because of the warlike conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out of sight within the more resisting and hard qualities—like the vulnerable body within a steel armor… The artist appeals… to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity … which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.
In the chapter on the increase of gifts, I pointed out that at a Tsimshian mortuary potlatch a material thing—a broken copper—symbolizes a natural fact: the group survives despite the death of the individual. Should we call this fact biological, social, or spiritual? The distinctions break down. Once we realize that the thread of zoë-life runs beyond the physical body, beyond the individual self, it becomes harder to differentiate the various levels of our being. There is a larger self, a species-essence, which is a general possession of the race. And the symbolizations like those coppers, but, of course, I mean to include all works of art, paintings, songs, the tiles round the chimney-piece—these symbolizations which express and carry the “facts” of zoë-life constitute the speech by which that larger self articulates and renews its spirit. By Whitman’s aesthetic, as we shall see, the artist’s work is a word “en masse,” an expression of Conrad’s “subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity.” The work of art is a copula: a bond, a band, a link by which the several are knit into one. Men and women who dedicate their lives to the realization of their gifts tend the office of that communion by which we are joined to one another, to our times, to our generation, and to the race. Just as the artist’s imagination “has a gift” that brings the work to life, so in the realized gifts of the gifted the spirit of the group “has a gift.” These creations are not “merely” symbolic, they do not “stand for” the larger self; they are its necessary embodiment, a language without which it would have no life at all.
In first introducing these two Greek terms, I said that it is bios-life—individual and embodied—that dies, while zoë-life is the unbroken thread, the spirit that survives the destruction of its vessels. But here we must add that zoë-life may be lost as well when there is wholesale destruction of its vehicles. The spirit of a community or collective can be wiped out, tradition can be destroyed. We tend to think of genocide as the physical destruction of a race or group, but the term may be aptly expanded to include the obliteration of the genius of a group, the killing of its creative spirit through the destruction, debasement, or silencing of its art (I am thinking, for example, of Milan Kundera’s analysis of the “organized forgetting” which has been imposed upon