The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [95]
To offer a single example that strikes both the collective and individual levels of this issue, in her autobiography the writer and actress Maya Angelou recalls her graduation from an all-black junior high school. The assembled students and teachers had fallen silent, momentarily shamed by a casually racist speech given by a white administrator, when one of Angelou’s classmates began to sing a song they all knew as “the Negro national anthem,” its words written by a black man, its music by a black woman. “Oh, Black known and unknown poets,” Angelou writes, “how often have your auctioned pains sustained us …? If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness. It may be enough, however, to have it said that we survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets (including preachers, musicians and blues singers).” The elders who passed the Sacred Pipe of the Sioux to Black Elk warned him that “if the people have no center they will perish.” Just as a circulation of ceremonial gifts among tribal peoples preserves the vitality of the tribe, so the art of any people, if it is a true emanation of their spirit, will stand surety for the lives of the citizenry.
In the last chapter I spoke of ancient usury as the conversion of unreckoned gift-increase into reckoned market interest. We are now in a position to connect this idea to two others. First, if we define use value as the value we sense in things as we use them and make them a part of ourselves, and if exchange value is the value we assign to things as we compare them or alienate them from ourselves, then there is something akin to ancient usury in the conversion of use values to exchange values. Second, there is a psychological parallel as well: something related to the spirit of usury lies in the removal of energy from the esemplastic powers and its reinvestment in the analytic or reflective powers.
I do not mean to pretend that these three things are one and the same; I am working with two groups of associated ideas and trying to describe a particular relationship between them. We have, on the one hand, imagination, synthetic thought, gift exchange, use value, and gift-increase, all of which are linked by a common element of eros, or relationship, bonding, “shaping into one.” And we have, on the other hand, analytic or dialectical thought, self-reflection, logic, market exchange, exchange value, and interest on loans, all of which share a touch of logos, of differentiating into parts.
Neither of these poles, the joining or the splitting, is more important or more powerful than its opposite. Each has its sphere and time of ascendancy, and it is not impossible to strike a balance between the two. But that harmony is easily lost. There is such a thing as modern usury; there are times when the inordinate extension of exchange value destroys all use value. The hegemony of the market can undermine the possibility of gift exchange, the esemplastic powers can be destroyed by an overvaluation of analytic cognition, song can be silenced by self-consciousness, and the plenitude of the imagination can be lost to the scarcity of logic. And if we understand all of these to be modern avatars of the spirit of usury we shall be in a position to understand—when we come to it—Ezra Pound’s preoccupation with that spirit. Pound’s initial complaint against usury is best connected to his coeval complaint against the interjection into art of overly analytic or abstract thought. If we say, as Marx suggested, that “logic is the money of the mind,” then we might add as a corollary that the imagination is its gift.