"The artist appeals to that part of our being . .. which is a gift and not an acquisition - and, therefore, more permanently enduring. JOSEPH CONRAD
At the corner drugstore my neighbors and I can now buy a line of romantic novels written according to a formula developed through market research. An advertising agency polled a group of women readers. What age should the heroine be? (She should be between nineteen and twenty-seven.) Should the man she meets be married or single? (Recently widowed is best.) The hero and heroine are not allowed in bed together until they are married. Each novel is a hundred and ninety-two pages long. Even the name of the series and the design of the cover have been tailored to the demands of the market. (The name Silhouette was preferred over Belladonna, Surrender, Tiffany, and Magnolia; gold curlicues were chosen to frame the cover.) Six new titles appear each month and two hundred thousand copies of each title are printed. Why do we suspect that Silhouette Romances will not be enduring works of art? What is it about a work of art, even when it is bought and sold in the market, that makes us distinguish it from such pure commodities as these?"
"We also rightly speak of intuition or inspiration as a gift. As the artist works, some portion of his creation is bestowed upon him. An idea pops into his head, a tune begins to play, a phrase comes to mind, a color falls in place on the canvas. Usually, in fact, the artist does not find himself engaged or exhilarated by the work, nor does it seem authentic, until this gratuitous element has appeared, so that along with any true creation comes the uncanny sense that I,' the artist, did not make the work. 'Not I, not 1, but the wind that blows through me,' says D. H. Lawrence. Not all artists emphasize the 'gift' phase of their creations to the degree that Lawrence does, but all artists feel it. These two senses of gift refer only to the creation of the work - what we might call the inner life of art; but it is my assumption that we should extend this way of speaking to its outer life as well, to the work after it has left its maker's hands. That art that matters to us = which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience - that work is received by us as a gift is received. Even if we have paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us which has nothing to do with the price. I went to see a landscape painter's works, and that evening, walking among pine trees near my home, I could see the shapes and colors I had not seen the day before. The spirit of an artist's gifts can wake our own. The work appeals, as Joseph Conrad says, to a part of our being which is itself a gift and not an acquisition."
"To his surprise he finds his guests have some expectation in regard to his pipe, and his translator finally explains to him that if he wishes to show his goodwill he should offer them a smoke and give them the pipe. In consternation the Englishman invents a phrase to describe these people with such a limited sense of private prop- erty. The opposite of 'Indian giver' would be something like 'white man keeper' (or maybe 'capitalist), that is, a person whose instinct is to remove property from circulation, to put it in a warehouse or museum (or, more to the point for capitalism, to lay it aside to be used for produc- tion). The Indian giver (or the original one, at any rate) understood a cardinal property of the gift: whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept. Or, if it is kept, something of similar value should move on in its stead, the way a billiard ball may stop when it sends another scurrying across the felt, its momentum transferred. You may keep your Christmas present, but it ceases to be a gift in the true sense unless you have given something else away. As it is passed along, the gift may be given back to the original donor, but this is not essential. In fact, it is better if the gift is not returned but is given instead to some new, third party. The only essential is this: the gift must always move. There are other forms of property that stand still, that mark a boundary or resist momentum, but the gift keeps going."
"If the object is a gift, it keeps moving, which in this case means that the man who received the goats throws a big party and everyone gets fed. The goats needn't be given back, but they surely can't be set aside to produce milk or more goats. And a new note has been added: the feeling that if a gift is not treated as such, if one form of prop- erty is converted into another, something horrible will happen. In folk tales the person who tries to hold on to a gift usually dies; in this anec- dote the risk is storm damage.' (What happens in fact to most tribal groups is worse than storm damage. Where someone manages to commercialize a tribe's gift relationships the social fabric of the group is invariably destroyed.) If we turn now to a folk tale, we will be able to see all of this from a different angle. Folk tales are like collective dreams; they are told in the kind of voice we hear at the edge of sleep, mingling the facts of our lives with their images in the psyche."
"This story also gives us a chance to see what happens if the gift is not allowed to move on. A gift that cannot move loses its gift properties. Traditional belief in Wales holds that when the fairies give bread to the poor, the loaves must be eaten on the day they are given or they will turn to toadstools. If we think of the gift as a constantly flowing river, we may say that the girl in the tale who treats it correctly does so by allowing herself to become a channel for its current. When someone tries to dam up the river, one of two things will happen: either it will stagnate or it will fill the person up until he bursts. In this folk tale it is not just the mother's curse that gets the first two girls. The night birds give them a second chance, and one imagines the mother bird would not have repeated the curse had she met with generosity. But instead the girls try to dam the flow, thinking that what counts is ownership and size. The effect is clear: by keeping the gift they get no more. They are no longer channels for the stream and they no longer enjoy its fruits, one of which seems to be their own lives. Their mother's bread has turned to toadstools inside them. Another way to describe the motion of the gift is to say that a gift must always be used up, consumed, eaten. The gift is property that perishes. It is no accident that the gifts in two of our stories so far have been food."
"Even when the gift is not food, when it is something we would think of as a durable good, it is often referred to as a thing to be eaten. Shell necklaces and armbands are the ritual gifts in the Trobriand Islands, and when they are passed from one group to the next, protocol demands that the man who gives them away toss them on the ground and say, 'Here, some food we could not eat.' Or, again, a man in another tribe that Wendy James has studied says, in speaking of the money he was given at the marriage of his daughter, that he will pass it on rather than spend it on himself. Only, he puts it this way: 'If I receive money for the children God has given me, I cannot eat it. I must give it to others.' Many of the most famous of the gift systems we know about center on food and treat durable goods as if they were food. The potlatch of the American Indians along the North Pacific coast was originally a 'big feed.' At its simplest a potlatch was a feast lasting several days given by a member of a tribe who wanted his rank in the group to be publicly recognized. Marcel Mauss translates the verb 'potlatch' as 'to nourish' or 'to consume.' Used as a noun, a 'potlatch' is a 'feeder' or 'place to be satiated.' Potlatches included durable goods, but the point of the festival was to have these perish as if they were food. Houses were burned; ceremonial objects were broken and thrown into the sea. One of the potlatch tribes, the Haida, called their feasting killing wealth.'
""The desire to consume is a kind of lust. We long to have the world non through us like air or food. We are thirsty and hungry for something ok can only be carried inside bodies. But consumer goods merely bait this ust they do not satisly it. The consumer of commodities is invited to a meal without passion, a consumption that leads to neither satiation nor fire. He is a stranger seduced into feeding on the drippings of someone else's capital without benefit of its inner nourishment, and he is hungry at the end of the meal, depressed and weary as we all feel when lust has dragged us from the house and led us to nothing. Gift exchange has many fruits, as we shall see, and to the degree that the fruits of the gift can satisfy our needs there will always be pressure for prop- erty to be treated as a gift. This pressure, in a sense, is what keeps the gift in motion. When the Uduk warn that a storm will ruin the crops if someone tries to stop the gift from moving, it is really their desire for the gift that will bring the storm. A restless hunger springs up when the gift is not being eaten. The brothers Grimm found a folk tale they called The Ungrateful Son': Once a man and his wife were sitting outside the front door with a roast chicken before them which they were going to eat between them. Then the man saw his old father coming along and quickly took the chicken and hid it, for he begrudged him any of it. The old man came, had a drink, and went away. Now the son was about to put the roast chicken back on the table, but when he reached for it, it had turned into a big toad that jumped in his face and stayed there and didn't go away again. And if anybody tried to take it away, it would give them a poisonous look, as if about to jump in their faces, so that no one dared touch it. And the ungrateful son had to feed the toad every day, otherwise it would eat part of his face. And thus he went ceaselessly hither and yon about in the world.
This toad is the hunger that appears when the gift stops moving, when- ever one man's gift becomes another man's capital. To the degree that we desire the fruits of the gift, teeth appear when it is hidden away. When prop- erty is hoarded, thieves and beggars begin to be born to rich men's wives. A story like this says that there is a force seeking to keep the gift in motion. Some property must perish - its preservation is beyond us. We have no choice. Or rather, our choice is whether to keep the gift moving or to be eaten with it. We choose between the toad's dumb-lust and that other, more graceful perishing in which our hunger disappears as our gifts are consumed."
""Reciprocal giving is a form of gilt exchange, but it is the simplest. The gift moves in a circle, and two people do not make much of a circle. Two points establish a line, but a circle lies in a plane and needs at least three points. This is why, as we shall see, most of the stories of gift exchange have a minimum of three people. I have introduced the Kula circuit here because it is such a fine example. For the Kula gifts to move, each man must have at least two gift partners. In this case the circle is larger than that. of course, but three is its lower limit. Circular giving differs from reciprocal giving in several ways. First, when the gift moves in a circle no one ever receives it from the same person he gives it to. I continually give armshells to my partner to the west, but unlike a two-person give-and-take, he never gives me armshells in return. The whole mood is different. The circle is the structural equiva- lent of the prohibition on discussion. When I give to someone from whom I do not receive (and yet I do receive elsewhere), it is as if the gilt goes around a corner before it comes back. I have to give blindly. And I will feel a sort of blind gratitude as well. The smaller the circle is - and particularly if it involves just two people - the more a man can keep his eye on things and the more likely it is that he will start to think like a salesman. But so long as the gift passes out of sight it cannot be manipulated by one man or one pair of gift partners. When the gift moves in a circle its motion is beyond the control of the personal ego, and so each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith."
"I find it useful to think of the ego complex as a thing that keeps expanding, not as something to be overcome or done away with. An ego has formed and hardened by the time most of us reach adolescence, but it is small, an ego-of-one. Then, if we fall in love, for example, the constellation of iden- tity expands and the ego-of-one becomes an ego-of-two. The young lover, often to his own amazement, finds himself saying 'we' instead of 'me.' Each of us identifies with a wider and wider community as we mature, coming eventually to think and act with a group-ego (or, in most of these gilt stories, a tribal ego), which speaks with the 'we' of kings and wise old people. Of course the larger it becomes, the less it feels like what we usually mean by ego. Not entirely, though: whether an adolescent is thinking of himself or a nation of itself, it still feels like egotism to anyone who is not included. There is still a boundary. If the ego widens still further, however, it really does change its nature and become something we would no longer call ego. There is a conscious- ness in which we act as part of things larger even than the race. When I picture this, I always think of the end of 'Song of Myself' where Whitman dissolves into the air: I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. Now the part that says 'me' is scattered. There is no boundary to be outside of, unless the universe itself is bounded. In all of this we could substitute body' for 'ego.' Aborigines commonly refer to their own clan as 'my body,' just as our marriage ceremony speaks of becoming 'one flesh.' Again, the body can be enlarged beyond the private skin, and in its final expansion there is no body at all. When we are in the spirit of the gift we love to feel the body open outward. The ego's firmness has its virtues, but at some point we seek the slow dilation, to use another term of Whitman's, in which the ego enjoys a widening give-and-take with the world and is finally abandoned in ripeness.
The gift can circulate at every level of the ego. In the ego-of-one we speak of self-gratification, and whether it's forced or chosen, a virtue or a vice, the mark of self-gratification is its isolation. Reciprocal giving, the ego-of-two, is a little more social. We think mostly of lovers. Bach of these circles is exhilarating as it expands, and the little gifts that pass between lovers touch us because each is stepping into a larger circuit But again, if the exchange goes on and on to the exclusion of others. it soon goes stale. D. H. Lawrence spoke of the égoisme à deux of so many married couples, people who get just so far in the expansion of the self and then close down for a lifetime, opening up for neither children, nor the group, nor the gods. A folk tale from Kashmir tells of two Brahmin women who tried to dispense with their almsgiving duties by simply giving alms back and forth to each other. They didn't quite have the spirit of the thing. When they died, they returned to earth as two wells so poisoned that no one could take water from them. No one else can drink from the ego-of-two. It has its moment in our maturation, but it is an infant form of the gift circle."
"gift exchange is more likely to turn into barter when it falls into the ego-of-two. With a simple give-and-take, the hunters may begin to think of the forest as a place to turn a profit. But with the priests involved, the gift must leave the hunters' sight before it returns to the woods. The priests take on or incarnate the position of the third thing to avoid the binary relation of the hunters and forest which by itself would not be abundant. The priests, by their pres- ence alone, feed the spirit. Every gift calls for a return gift, and so, by placing the gift back in the forest, the priests treat the birds as a gift of nature. We now understand this to be ecological. Ecology as a science began at the end of the nine- teenth century, an offshoot of the rising interest in evolution. Originally the study of how animals survive in their environments, one of ecology's first lessons was that, beneath all the change in nature, there are steady states characterized by cycles. Every participant in the cycle literally lives off the others with only the ultimate energy source, the sun, being tran- scendent. Widening the study of ecology to include man means to look at ourselves as a part of nature again, not its lord. When we see that we are actors in natural cycles, we understand that what nature gives to us is influenced by what we give to nature. So the circle is a sign of an ecological insight as much as of gift exchange. We come to feel ourselves as one part of a large self-regulating system. The return gift, the 'nour- ishing hau,' is literally feedback"
"The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom. Then we know they are not a solitary egotism and they are inexhaustible. Anything contained within a boundary must contain as well its own exhaustion. The most perfectly balanced gyroscope slowly winds down. But when the gift passes out of sight and then returns, we are enlivened. Material goods pull us down into their bones unless their fat is singed occasionally. It is when the world flames a bit in our peripheral vision that it brings us jubil- ation and not depression. We stand before a bonfire or even a burning house and feel the odd release it brings, as if the trees could give the sun return for what enters them through the leaf. when no property can move, then even Moses' Pharaoh is plagued with hungry toads. A sword appears to seek the firstborn son of that man who cannot be moved to move the gift. But Pharaoh himself was dead long before his firstborn was taken, for we are only alive to the degree that we can let ourselves be moved. And when the gift circles into mystery the liveliness stays, for it is 'a pleasing odor to the Lord' when the first fruits are effused in eddies and drifted in lacy jags above the flame. I described the motion of the gift earlier in this chapter by saying that gifts are always used, consumed, or eaten. Now that we have seen the figure of the circle we can understand what seems at first to be a paradox of gift exchange: when the gift is used, it is not used up. Quite the oppo- site, in fact: the gift that is not used will be lost, while the one that is passed along remains abundant. In the Scottish tale the girls who hoard their bread are fed only while they eat. The meal finishes in hunger though they took the larger piece. The girl who shares her bread is satisfied. What is given away feeds again and again, while what is kept feeds only once and leaves us hungry."
"The market-industrial system institutes scarcity, in a manner completely unparalleled and to a degree nowhere else approximated. Where production and distribution are arranged through the behavior of prices, and all livelihoods depend on getting and spending, insuf- ficiency of material means becomes the explicit, calculable starting point of all economic activity. Given material abundance, scarcity must be a function of boundaries. If there is plenty of air in the world but something blocks its passage to the lungs, the lungs do well to complain of scarcity. The assumptions of market exchange may not necessarily lead to the emergence of boundaries, but they do in practice. When trade is 'clean' and leaves people unconnected, when the merchant is free to sell when and where he will, when the market moves mostly for profit and the dominant myth is not 'to possess is to give' but the fittest survive,' then wealth will lose its motion and gather in isolated pools. Under the assumptions of exchange trade, property is plagued by entropy and wealth can become scarce even as it increases. A commodity is truly 'used up' when it is sold because nothing about the exchange assures its return. The visiting sea captain may pay hand- somely for a Kula necklace, but because the sale removes it from the circle, it wastes it, no matter the price."
"A commodity is truly 'used up' when it is sold because nothing about the exchange assures its return. The visiting sea captain may pay hand- somely for a Kula necklace, but because the sale removes it from the circle. it wastes it, no matter the price. Gifts that remain gifts can support an afflu- ence of satisfaction, even without numerical abundance. The mythology of the rich in the overproducing nations that the poor are in on some secret about satisfaction - black 'soul,' gypsy duende, the noble savage, the simple farmer, the virile game keeper - obscures the harshness of modern capi- talist poverty, but it does have a basis, for people who live in voluntary poverty or who are not capital-intensive do have more ready access to erotic forms of exchange that are neither exhausting nor exhaustible and whose use assures their plentv. If the commodity moves to turn a profit, where does the gift move? The gilt moves toward the empty place. As it turns in its circle it turns toward him who has been empty-handed the longest, and if someone appears else- where whose need is greater it leaves its old channel and moves toward him. Our generosity may leave us empty, but our emptiness then pulls gently at the whole until the thing in motion returns to replenish us. Social nature abhors a vacuum."
"The main elements of this ceremony are the same as those of the other first-fruits rites we have seen - part of the gift is eaten and part is returned - and once again the myth declares that the objects of the ritual will remain plentiful because they are treated as gifts. It would be difficult, I suppose, to make the case that to abandon the gift ceremony, to treat the salmon as a commodity, would truly 'offend' the fish and diminish their abundance. The point is perhaps best put in its positive form: the first salmon ceremony establishes a gift relationship with nature, a formal give- and-take that acknowledges our participation in, and dependence upon, natural increase. And where we have established such a relationship we tend to respond to nature as a part of ourselves, not as a stranger or alien available for exploitation. Gift exchange brings with it, therefore. a built- in check upon the destruction of its objects; with it we will not destroy nature's renewable wealth except where we also consciously destroy ourselves. Where we wish to preserve natural increase, therefore, gift exchange is the commerce of choice, for it is a commerce that harmonizes with, or participates in, the process of that increase. And this is the first explanation I offer for the association our tales have made between gift exchange and increased worth, fertility, liveliness: where true, organic increase is at issue, gift exchange preserves that increase; the gift grows because living things grow."
"Carl Kerényi, the Romanian historian of religion, introduces his book on Dionysos by saying that his first insight into the god of wine came to him in a vineyard - he was looking at the grapevine itself and what he saw was 'the image of indestructible life.' The temples are abandoned, but the vine still grows over the fallen walls. To explain the image, Kerényi distinguishes between two terms for 'life' in Greek, bios and zoe. Bios is limited life, characterized life, life that dies. Zoë is the life that endures; it is the thread that runs through bios-life and is not broken when the parti- cular perishes. (In this century we call it 'the gene pool.') Dionysos is a god of zoe-life. In his earliest Minoan forms, Dionysos is associated with honey and with honey beer or mead. Both honey and grape juice became images of this god because they ferment: 'A natural phenomenon inspired a myth of zoe,' writes Kerényi, "a statement concerning life which shows its indestructibility.. even in decay.' When honey ferments, what has rotted not only comes back to life - bubbles up - but its 'spirit' survives."
"Capital earns profit and the sale of a commodity turns a profit, but gifts that remain gifts do not earn profit, they give increase. The distinc- tion lies in what we might call the vector of the increase: in gift exchange it. the increase, stays in motion and follows the object, while in commodity exchange it stays behind as profit. (These two alternatives are also known as positive and negative reciprocity.) With this in mind, we may return to a dictum laid out in Chapter I- one man's gift must not be another man's capital - and develop from it a corollary, saying: the increase that comes of gift exchange must remain a gift and not be kept as if it were the return on private capital. Saint Ambrose of Milan states it directly in a commentary on Deuteronomy: 'God has excluded in general all increase of capital.' Such is the ethic of a gilt societv.* I have explained the increase of gifts in three ways in this chapter: as a natural fact (when gifts are actually alive); as a natural-spiritual fact (when gilts are the agents of a spirit that survives the consumption of its indi- vidual embodiments); and as a social fact (when a circulation of gifts creates community out of individual expressions of goodwill). In each of these cases the increase pertains to an ego or body larger than that of any indi- vidual participant. Thus to speak of the increase of gifts is to speak of some- thing simultaneously material, social, and spiritual. Material wealth may be produced in the course of a commerce of gifts (in the cases at hand, for example, food is gathered and preserved for the winter, canoes are constructed, lodges are built, blankets are woven, banquets prepared, and so forth and so on). And yet no material good becomes an item of commerce"
"In the present century the opposition between negative and positive reci- procity has taken the form of a debate between 'capitalist' and commu- nist.' 'individualist' and 'socialist'; but the conflict is much older than that, because it is an essential polarity between the part and the whole, the one and the many. Every age must find its balance between the two, and in every age the domination of either one will bring with it the call for its opposite. For where, on the one hand, there is no way to assert identity against the mass, and no opportunity for private gain, we lose the well- advertised benefits of a market society - its particular freedoms, its partic- ular kind of innovation, its individual and material variety, and so on. But where, on the other hand, the market alone rules, and particularly where its benefits derive from the conversion of gift property to commodities, the fruits of gift exchange are lost. At that point commerce becomes correctly associated with the fragmentation of community and the suppression of liveliness, fertility, and social feeling. For where we maintain no institu- tions of positive reciprocity, we find ourselves unable to participate in those 'wider spirits' I just spoke of - unable to enter gracefully into nature, unable to draw community out of the mass, and, finally, unable to receive, contribute toward, and pass along the collective treasures we refer to as culture and tradition. Only when the increase of gifts moves with the gift may the accumulated wealth of our spirit continue to grow among us, so that each of us may enter, and be revived by, a vitality beyond his or her solitary powers."
"We could speak of artists' lives and artists' creations in a similar fashion. Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. The future artist finds himself or herself moved by a work of art, and, through that experience, comes to labor in the service of art until he can profess his own gifts. Those of us who do not become artists nonetheless attend to art in a similar spirit. We come to painting, to poetry, to the stage, hoping to revive the soul. And any artist whose work touches us earns our gratitude. The connection between art and gift is the subject of a later part of this book, but it deserves mention here, for it is when art acts as an agent of transformation that we may correctly speak of it as a gift. A lively culture will have transformative gifts as a general feature - it will have groups like AA which address specific prob- lems, it will have methods of passing knowledge from old to young, it will have spiritual teachings available at all levels of maturation and for the birth of the spiritual self. And it will have artists whose creations are gifts for the transformation of the race."
"if the teaching begins to 'take,' the recipient feels gratitude. I would like to speak of grat- itude as a labor undertaken by the soul to effect the transformation after a gift has been received. Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it along, we suffer gratitude. Moreover, with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level, as it were, that we can give it away again. Passing the gift along is the act of gratitude that finishes the labor. The transforma- ton is not accomplished until we have the power to give the gift on our own terms. Therefore, the end of the labor of gratitude is similarity with the gift or with its donor. Once this similarity has been achieved we may feel a lingering and generalized gratitude, but we won't feel it with the urgency of true indebtedness."
"Paul Goodman wrote in a journal once, 'I have recently written a few good poems. But I have no feeling that I wrote them.' That is the declaration of a laborer. Like the shoe- maker, we wake up to discover the fruits of labor. And labor, because it sets its own pace, is usually accompanied by idleness, leisure, even sleep. In ancient days a seventh part of a person's time (both Sunday and the sabbatical, the seventh year) were set aside for non-work. Nowadays when a worker or teacher gets a sabbatical, he or she may try to finish six years of unfinished chores. But first he should put his feet up and see what happens. In numerology the '7' is the number for ripening; '8' is the number for perfection, but during the seventh period what has been accomplished by the will is left alone. It either ripens or it doesn't. It's out of our hands. One of the first problems the modern world faced with the rise of industrialism was the exclusion of labor by the expan- sion of work. Machines don't need a Sunday. Early mill hands found themselves working a seven-day week, and had to fight for years to get back the Sabbath.* When I speak of a labor, then, I intend to refer to something dictated by the course of life rather than by society, something that is often urgent but that nevertheless has its own interior rhythm,"
"As those who must worry about the livelihood of artists are fond of saying, 'You cannot play "The Minute Waltz" in less than a minute.' Worse (or perhaps better) you cannot write 'The Minute Waltz' in less than . . . what? A day, a week, a year? - however long it takes. There is no technology, no time-saving device that can alter the rhythms of creative labor. When the worth of labor is expressed in terms of exchange value, there- fore, creativity is automatically devalued every time there is an advance in the technology of work."
"(It may be clearer now why I said above that a fee for service tends to cut off the force of gratitude. The point is that a conversion, in the general sense, cannot be settled upon ahead of time. We can't predict the fruits of our labor; we can't even know if we'll really go through with it. Gratitude requires an unpaid debt, and we will be motivated to proceed only so long as the debt is felt. If we stop feeling indebted we quit, and rightly so. To sell a transformative gift therefore falsifies the relationship; it implies that the return gift has been made when in fact it can't be made until the transformation is finished. A prepaid fee suspends the weight of the gift and de-potentiates it as an agent of change. Therapies and spiritual systems delivered through the market will therefore tend to draw the energy required for conversion from an aversion to pain rather than from an attraction to a higher state. There's no way to pay for a higher state unless you're in it! The labor must precede. In the hospital where I worked we would ask people if they wanted to get sober, but that was onlv after someone had asked them if they could afford a week in the hospital. AA only asks if you want to get sober.)"
"The task of setting free one's gifts was a recognized labor in the ancient world. The Romans called a person's tutelar spirit his genius. In Greece it was called a daemon. Ancient authors tell us that Socrates, for example, had a daemon who would speak up when he was about to do something that did not accord with his true nature. It was believed that each man had his idios daemon, his personal spirit which could be culti- vated and developed. Apuleius, the Roman author of The Golden Ass, wrote a treatise on the daemon/ genius, and one of the things he says is that in Rome it was the custom on one's birthday to offer a sacrifice to one's own genius. A man didn't just receive gifts on his birthday, he would also give something to his guiding spirit. Respected in this war the genius made one 'genial' - sexually potent, artistically creative and spiritually fertile. According to Apuleius, if a man cultivated his genius through such sacri- fice, it would become a lar, a protective household god, when he died. But if a man ignored his genius, it became a larva or a lemur when he died, a troublesome, restless spook that preys on the living. The genius or daemon comes to us at birth. It carries with it the fullness of our undeveloped powers. These it offers to us as we grow, and we choose whether or not to accept, which means we choose whether or not to labor in its service. For, again, the genius has need of us. As with the elves, the spirit that brings us our gilts finds its eventual freedom only through our sacrifice, and those who do not reciprocate the gifts of their genius will leave it in bondage when they die. An abiding sense of gratitude moves a person to labor in the service of his daemon. The opposite is properly called narcissism. The narcissist feels his gifts come from himself"
"The synthetic or erotic nature of the giving of a gift may be seen more clearly if we contrast it to the selling of commodities. I would begin the analysis by saying that a commodity has value and a gift does not. A gift has worth. I'm obviously using these terms in a particular sense. I mean 'worth' to refer to those things we prize and yet say you can't put a price on it.' We derive value, on the other hand, from the comparison of one thing with another. 'I cannot express the value of linen in terms of linen, says Marx in the classic analysis of commodities which opens his Capital. Value needs a difference for its expression; when there is no difference We are left with tautology ('a yard of linen is a yard of linen'). The phrases 'exchange value' and 'market value' carry the sense of 'value' I mean to mark here: a thing has no market value in itself except when it is in the marketplace, and what cannot be exchanged has no exchange value."
"Emotional connection tends to preclude quantitative evaluation. To return briefly to the Pinto story, when a decision involves something that clearly cannot be priced, we refrain from submitting our actions to the calculus of a cost-benefit analysis. The executives at Ford seem so sleazy because we find it hard to suspend our sense that life is not a commodity. To some degree, what constitutes a gift is a matter of opinion, of course. For example, wherever there has been slavery, some life has carried a price and some not. Arable land is treated as a commodity nowadays, but there have been times and places when it was improper for it to be bought and sold. Similarly with food. 'The Yakut refused to believe,' writes an anthro- pologist, 'that somewhere in the world people could die of hunger, when it was so easy to go and share a neighbor's meal.' We do not put a price on food if it is an inalienable part of the community. It would still be hard to find a family where food is sold at the dinner table, but beyond that there are few who feel it indecent to announce the price of a meal. Executives at Ford might have hesitated to buy Pintos for their own children, but no sense of their oneness with the rest of human life inhibited them from assigning it a price for their analysis. The great materialists, like these auto- mobile executives, are those who have extended the commodity form of value into the human body, while the great spiritual figures, like the Buddha, are those who have used their own bodies to extend the worth of gifts just as far."
"Because of the bonding power of gifts and the detached nature of commodity exchange, gifts have become associated with community and with being obliged to others, while commodities are associated with alien- ation and freedom. The bonds established by a gift can maintain old iden- fit and limit our freedom of motion. To take a simple example, as soon as an adolescent truly wants to leave his parents, he does well to stop accepting their gifts, for they only maintain the parent-child bond. If vou want out, you pay your own way. I had a friend in college who once decided to stop participating in the family celebration of Christmas. He explained himself in several ways - the great distance to travel, the waste of money, the commercialization of the holiday - but whatever the reason, his absence removed him from a gift ceremony that would have reaffirmed his connection to family at exactly the time when he wanted to leave it. (The same friend re-joined the family Christmas in later years, the group spirit of a gift holiday being less threatening once he had established his own identity.) It seems no misnomer that we have called those nations known for their commodities 'the free world.' The phrase doesn't seem to refer to political freedoms; it indicates that the dominant form of exchange in these lands does not bind the individual in any way - to his family, to his community, or to the state. And though the modern state is too large a group to take its structure from bonds of affection, still, the ideology of the socialist nations begins with the call for community. Labor should not be sold like merchandise but offered as a gift to the community,' Che Guevara used to say. The young writers in Cuba refuse royalties for their books. In a socialist society literary property cannot be private,' they say. The revolution belongs to everyone and everyone belongs to the revolution, they say"
"The fee states clearly that the therapist is not a friend or lover or parent. Freudian analysts maintain further that the fee is an aide in the resolution of the transference. The patient's unconscious emotions are expected to be transferred to the analyst in the beginning, but in the end they are to be withdrawn, and it will help if the relationship is a market relationship in which therapist and client are, as Marx says of commodi- ties, 'reciprocally independent enterprises.* Gift exchange must also be refused when there is a real threat in the connections that it offers. In ancient tales the hero who must pass through hell is warned that charity is dangerous in the underworld; if he wishes to return to the land of the living, he should lend a hand to no one, nor accept the food offered by the dead."
"The tale says there are powers in the fairy world which cannot be contained in the human. In speaking of increase in the last chapter I mentioned tales in which a spirit gift grows in worth when the mortal arrives at his doorstep. Here the increase seems too huge. The tale smells like a warning about psychosis.* Had the midwife tried to bring the gifts into the house, she would have been like a young person who gets involved with psychedelic drugs before the ego is strong enough to contain the expe- rience. There are powers so great that if we were to try to live with them they would consume our dwelling place. The fairy gifts must be abandoned. Gifts from evil people must also be refused lest we be bound to evil. In folk tales the hero is well advised to refuse the food and drink offered him by a witch. Folk wisdom similarly advises silence before evil. Conversation is a commerce, and when we give speech we become a part of what we speak with. A bewitched princess in one of the Grimms' tales says to the man who wants to save her, 'Tonight twelve black men, draped with chains, will be coming; they'll ask you what you're doing here. Keep silent, however, and don't answer them.' She says they will beat him and torture him and finally kill him, but if he does not utter a single solitary word,' she will be freed and will revive him with the Water of Life. Were he to speak with the black men, he would enter their bewitchment, just as the midwife would have fallen under the spell of the fairies if she had accepted their gold and silver. It is because gift exchange is an erotic form that so many gifts must be refused. The issue commonly arises in public life. Should a university accept an endowment from a notorious dictator? Should a writer or a scientist accept a grant from a government waging an immoral war? We often refuse relationship, either from the simple desire to remain unentangled, or because we sense that the proffered connection is tainted, dangerous, or frankly evil. And when we refuse relationship, we must refuse gift exchange as well."
"In communities drawn together by gift exchange, 'status,' 'prestige, or 'esteem' take the place of cash renumeration. No one will deny that one reason scientists contribute the results of their research to journals is to earn recognition and status. Sooner or later the question arises: Wouldn't we do better to speak of these contributions in terms of ambition and egotism? Might not a theory of competition better account for scientific publication? To begin with, we should notice that the kind of status we are speaking of is achieved through donation, not through acquisition. The distinction is important. The Indians of the Northwest American coast also give gifts in order 'to make a name' for themselves, to earn prestige. But notice: a Kwakiutl name is 'raised' by giving property and 'flattened' by receiving it. The man who has emptied himself with giving has the highest name. When we say that someone made a name for himself, we think of Onassis or J. P. Morgan or H. L. Hunt, men who got rich. But Kwakiutl names, first of all, are not the names of individuals; they are conferred upon individuals, yes, but they are names on the order of 'Prince of Wales, meant to indicate social position. And here are some of them: Whose Property is Eaten in Feasts Satiating Always Giving Blankets While Walking • For Whom Property Flows The Dance of Throwing Away Property Some names, it is true, are agonistic (Creating Trouble All Around), but the majority refer to the outflow of property. A man makes a name for himself by letting wealth slip through his fingers. He may control the goods, but it is their dispersal he controls. Just as the anthropologist may say of the Indians, 'virtue rests in publicly disposing of wealth, not in its mere acquisition . . . , so Hagstrom writes that 'in science, the acceptance by scientific journals of contributed manuscripts establishes the donor's status as a scientist - indeed, status as a scientist can be achieved only by such gift-giving - and it assures him of prestige within the scientific commu- nity.' A scientist does contribute his ideas in order to earn status, but if the name he makes for himself is He Whose Ideas Are Eaten in Conferences, we need not call his contributions meretricious. This status is not the status of the egotist."
" To convert an idea into a commodity means, broadly speaking, to establish a boundary of some sort so that the idea cannot move from person to person without a toll or fee. Its benefit or usefulness must then be reckoned and paid for before it is allowed to cross the boundary. Guilds of artisans, such as stone masons or leather tanners, used to keep their know-how a secret and charge the public for their services. Their knowledge would circu- late as a 'common' within the guild, but strangers paid a fee. Seen from the outside, trade secrets (commodity ideas) inhibit the advancement and integration of knowledge. Each trade may be its own community, but there will be no 'community of science'; there may be pockets of expertise, but there will be no mechanism whereby a group mind might emerge, nor a body of theory be drawn together. A modern industry that patents the discoveries of its research scientists also sets a fee barrier around ideas.* Within an industrial research facility there may be a microcosm of gift exchange, but at the company gate it is profit that governs the flow of ideas. An industrial scientist often cannot contribute his ideas to the scientific community because he has to wait, sometimes years, while the company secures the patent. Even then, the discovery emerges not as a contribution but as a proprietary idea whose users must pay a fee, a usury, for its use. (There will always be exceptions, but as a rule, scien- tists who treat ideas as gifts thereby enjoy higher repute in the commu- nity, they are more apt to be engaged in theoretical ('pure,' 'basic') research, and they are less well remunerated. Those who hire out to proprietary concerns are more anonymous and less a part of the commu- nity, they tend to be working in applied science, and they are better paid.)"
"the gifts given in marriage on one Polynesian island are shown in the chart reproduced below. There is no need at this point to go into the exchanges in detail; the sheer complexitv of the chart is what I want to present. There are nine major transfers of goods between the kin of the groom and those of the bride, with more than that number of subsidiary transfers. After a marriage like this, everyone is connected to everyone else in one way or another. Imagine what it must be like after half a dozen marriages and as many initiation ceremonies and funerals (whose exchanges are even more complicated than those of marriage). There will be an ongoing and generalized indebted- ness, gratitude, expectation, memory, sentiment - in short, lively social feeling. As with the simple exchange of wine in the restaurant, constant and long-term exchanges between many people may have no ultimate 'economic' benefit, but through them society emerges where there was none before. And now imagine what would happen were all the gifts in this chart to be converted to cash purchase. There would be no wedding, of course, but more than that, as with the Bushmen, the residents of the Flats, or scientists doing research, if every exchange were to separate or free the participants from one another there would also be no communitv. To close this discussion of community, I want to add a brief suggestion as to what might be the political form of a gift economy. Gifts are best described. I think, as anarchist property. The connections, the 'contracts,' established by their circulation differ in kind from the ties that bind in groups organized through centralized power and top-down authority. Marcel Mauss's original 'Essay on the Gift' was in part a speculation on the origins of modern contract and will serve, therefore, as a useful entry to the point I have in mind. Is gift exchange, Mauss wondered, a primitive form of ensuring those unions that are today made secure by legal, written agreement?"
"Our feelings close down when the numbers get too big. Strangers passing on the street in big cities avoid each other's eyes not to show disdain but to keep from being overwhelmed by excessive human contact. When we speak of communities developed and maintained through an emotional commerce like that of gifts, we are therefore speaking of something of limited size.* It remains an unsolved dilemma of the modern world, one to which anarchists have repeatedly addressed them- selves, as to how we are to preserve true community in a mass society, one whose dominant value is exchange value and whose morality has been codified into law. By the time that anarchism emerged as a political philosophy, the idea of contract had been significantly enlarged. In the seventeenth and eigh- tenth centuries, theorists of 'social contract' had extrapolated from the atomic unit of individual bond to that urcontract in which individuals join together to form the state. In Thomas Hobbes's version - to take the most striking example and the strongest opposite pole to anarchist theory - before there was 'society' there was a 'state of nature' in which separate persons knocked about like flies in a hot room - only worse, as they tended to kill"
"The Russian Peter Kropotkin makes a good example here because he had actually visited tribal groups. Born into a noble family and educated at military schools, Kropotkin was a confirmed rationalist and serious scien- tist, recognized as a geographer in scientific circles. In his early twenties he had participated in an expedition to Central Asia. James Joll's remarks on the trip touch the same points we are addressing here: The primitive tribes he observed seemed to have customs and instincts which regulated their social life without the need of govern- ment or laws. For Kropotkin, primitive society, so far from providing an example of Hobbesian conflict and of the war of all against all, showed rather that cooperation and 'mutual aid' were the natural state of man if left uncorrupted by government and by laws which result from the 'desire of the ruling class to give permanence to customs imposed by themselves for their own advantage,' whereas all that is necessary for harmonious living are 'those customs useful for society which have no need of law to insure respect.' We need not decide whether it is Hobbes or Kropotkin who sees the real primitive. Kropotkin is arguably closer, if only because he'd actually been in the field (while Hobbes never got farther than France), but his reports do give off a slightly romantic air. A fully shaded view of tribal life had to wait for the emergence of ethnography as an empirical science.* "
"One temperament feels kinship with the aborigine while the other feels distance; one temperament assumes generosity while the other assumes a lust for power; for one our passions are social, for the other they are selfish (by the nineteenth century the Hobbesian temperament was reading Darwin for his accounts of conflict, while what Kropotkin remembered out of Darwin was the story of the blind pelican whose comrades kept him supplied with fish). One temperament assumes that goodwill underlies social life, while the other assumes egotism (and so must add reason and authority to derive society). The two temperaments diverge at their base over the roles of passion and reason. Hobbes knew no social passions. He speaks of his declaration that life in nature is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short' as an 'infer- ence from the passions' against which reason suggests convenient articles of peace . .. called the laws of nature.' For this temperament, reason derives law as a check to passion, and social life emerges only as each man is somehow convinced to inhibit a part of himself. So Hobbes is led to base social life on restraint, to separate the governed from their governors, and to rely on law (with all of its functionaries, the police, the courts, the jails) to ensure order. It is this double conceit - first, that passion will undo social life and, second, that coercion will preserve it - that anarchist theory and the tradi- tions of gift exchange call into question. The former imagines and the latter stand witness to a social life motivated by feeling and nonetheless marked by structure, durability, and cohesion. There are many connections between anarchist theory and gift exchange as an economy - both assume that man is generous, or at least cooperative, 'in nature'; both shun centralized power; both are best fitted to small groups and loose federations; both rely on contracts of the heart over codified contract, and so on. But, above all. it seems correct to speak of the gift as anarchist property because both anarchism and gift exchange share the assumption that it is not when a part of the self is inhibited and restrained, but when a part of the self is given away, that community appears."
"As far as I know, there are no groups in which the men are given in marriage.* As the anthropologist Jack Goody puts it. 'The mirror opposite of bridewealth would be groomwealth; and of bride-service, groom-service. But there is little to put in these two boxes by way of actual cases, except perhaps the payments of "borrowed man" of the Menangkabau of Sumatra.' But if a borrowed man is all we have, and only one at that, we may as well say that men are not given in marriage. What does happen to male children, then? If the life of a child is a gift, does the right of bestowal in that gift pass automatically to a boy as he becomes a man? Can he just take the car keys and go as soon as he gets his license?t There is one general situation in which male children are given as gilts, or used to be. Our earlier discussion of the 'rites of the first fruits' indi- cated that in the Old Testament all natural increase - the harvest, the calves, the lambs, and so forth - is treated as a gift from God, and its first fruits are consequently sacrificed as a return gift. Exodus records Yahweh's clear statement as to the gender of these fruits: 'All that opens the womb is mine, all your male cattle, the firstlings of cow and sheep.' The males are the gift from the Lord to the people, and the people pass the first one back."
"Furthermore, in societies that confer property rights on women - where women may inherit and bequeath, where they may buy and sell, where they carry a dowry into marriage which is theirs alone to dispose of - any wealth exchanged for a woman at marriage will tend to be seen as an immoral purchase, not as a gift. The Uduk interpretation of bridewealth is one example; another may be found in India, where women have always had property rights (not equivalent to those of men, perhaps, but certainly those I have just outlined, the dowry in particular). In India the ancient Code of Manu says what the Uduk say: 'No father . may take even the smallest gratuity for his daughter; for a man who, through avarice, takes a gratuity, is a seller of his offspring. Even in those societies where a child's life is considered to be a gift bestowed upon its parents, it does not follow that the parents retain the right of bestowal in that life after the child matures. In societies that confer power upon women as well as men, the right of bestowal passes automat- ically to a woman as she becomes an adult, whereupon she, like her brothers, is free to bestow her own life where she chooses.* She may even carry a six-foot bamboo fighting stick if she wants."
"A woman given in marriage in a modern, capitalist nation is not only a gift, then, she is actually expected to think and act in the spirit of the gift, to become the incarnation and voice of the hau. By attending to rela- tionship and muting her individualism, she is supposed to become the active link that will unify the two families. The groom is asked to do none of this labor. In this particular ceremony, at least, to deal with gifts - to receive them, to express the gratitude, to intuit and act upon their spirit - is a mark of the female gender. By 'gender' I mean to indicate the cultural distinctions between male and female - not the physical signs of sex but that whole complex of activ- ities, postures, speech patterns, attitudes, affects, acquisitions, and styles by virtue of which a woman becomes feminine (a man 'effeminate') and a man masculine (a woman 'mannish'). Any system of gender will be connected to actual sexuality, of course, but that is only one of its possible connections. It may also support and affirm the local creation myth, perpet- ate the exploitation of one sex by another, organize aggression and warfare, ensure the distribution of food from clan to clan - it may, in other words, serve any number of ends unrelated to actual sexuality. Many writers have addressed themselves to divisions of labor based upon gender; I want to speak here of a similar division of commerce,' one in which a 'man' trades in one manner and a 'woman' in another. I have opened with a description of the Protestant wedding not to raise again the issue of the woman given in marriage, but to show that - at least in the world that Emily Post describes for us - gift exchange is a 'female' commerce and gifts a 'female' property. There is no actual prohibition on the groom's involving himself with the wedding gifts, of course; he may write thank- you notes if he wants to. But that activitv will not make him masculine"
"To succeed in the market- place one must, it seems, be willing to sacrifice attachment to advance- ment. affection to calculation. This ability to act without regard to relationship has traditionally been a mark of the male gender. The man who wants to make money does not spend a lot of emotional time aban- doning his - how did Miss Post put it? - unwitting attitudes in favor of those of his in-laws. He is self-possessed, not self-effacing. He is willing to shun the 'turkeys' who were his pals in college, willing to evict deadbeats from his apartment buildings (and wary, therefore, of renting to friends and relations), willing to put people out of work if one of his ventures isn't paying its way, willing to close the operation down completely if some other property needs a shot of capital, and so forth and so on. In fine, when anyone, male or female, sets out to make money in the marketplace, he reckons his actions by the calculus of comparative value and allows that value, rather than the home life of his clients and friends, to guide him. I say 'male or female, but of course this ability is still consid- ered to be a mark of the masculine, a decade of advice columns notwith- standing. The men's pages of the newspapers need no articles earnestly asserting that dumping your friends is not disloyalty. 'Men have known this for years.' In a modern, industrial nation, the ability to act without relationship is still a mark of the masculine gender; boys can still become men, and men become more manly, by entering the marketplace and dealing in commodities. A woman can do the same thing if she wants to, of course, but it will not make her feminine."
"I recently heard a story about an American Indian living on a reservation in North Dakota who, in the late 1960s, received $10,000 from the government, a lot of money in a place where many people lived on $2,000 a year. What did the man do with his windfall? He threw a party for the whole tribe, a party that lasted for days. Now, the interesting thing is that on the reservation there are two distinct versions of this event: the Indian version,' in which the party- giver appears as a hero, a true Indian; and the 'white version,' which takes the wasted' money as proof of the inherently infantile nature of the Indians, thus justifying the continued management of Indian wealth by the white-dominated Bureau of Indian Affairs. (The story is the same as the one about the Flats - the fate of an influex of capital into a gift commu- nity. So long as gifts carry female worth in the white culture, for a black man to emerge from the ghetto or for an Indian to leave the reservation involves a crisis of gender: to make the transition he must adopt what is at home an unmanly individualism."
"But some tasks cannot be undertaken in such an adversarial spirit. Few jobs are pure gift labors, of course - although a nurse is committed to healing, she is also an actor in the marketplace - but any portion of gift labor in a job will tend to pull it out of the market and make it a less lucrative - and a 'female' - profession. But, you ask, if we really valued these gift labors, couldn't we pay them well? Couldn't we pay social workers as we pay doctors, pay poets as we do bankers, pay the cellist in the orchestra as we pay the advertising exec- utive in the box seat? Yes, we could. We could - we should - reward gift labors where we value them. My point here is simply that where we do so we shall have to recognize that the pay they receive has not been 'made' the way fortunes are made in the market, that it is a gift bestowed by the group. The costs and benefits of tasks whose procedures are adversarial and whose ends are easilv quantified can be expressed through a market system. The costs and rewards of gift labors cannot. The cleric's larder will always be filled with gifts; artists will never 'make' money. We must therefore distinguish the necessary feminist demand for equal pay for equal work' from the equally important need to keep some parts of our social, cultural, and spiritual life out of the marketplace. We must not convert all gift labors into market work lest we wake one day to see that universal market in which all our actions earn a wage and all our goods and services bear a price. There is a place for volunteer labor, for mutual aid, for inhouse work, for healings that require sympathetic contact or a cohesive support group, for strengthening the bonds of kinship, for intellectual community, for creative idleness, for the slow maturation of talent. for the creation and preservation and dissemination of culture, and so on."
"Several senses of 'usury' precede the modern one. The term took on its current meaning (an excessive or illegal rate of interest) during the Reformation. Before that it simply meant any interest charged on a loan, and its opposite was a form of gift, the gratuitous loan. A phrase of Marcel Mauss's first brought me to the connection between 'ancient usury,' as I shall call it, and gift exchange. Mauss speaks of how Maori tribesmen insist that the hau of a gift 'constrains a series of users' to make a return gift, 'some property or merchandise or labor, by means of feasts, entertain- ments or gifts of equivalent or superior value. The superior value that the 'users' of a gift return or pass along is the 'use-ance' or 'use-ury' of the gift. In this sense, ancient usury is synonymous with the increase that comes to the gift when it is used up, eaten, and consumed, and by the ethics of a gift society this usance is neither reckoned nor charged, it is passed along as a gift. The primitive connection between gift-increase and usury may also be seen in Roman law, where usura originally meant a charge for the loan of a fungible (i.e., any perishable and nonspecific good whose use consists of its consumption). The examples given of fungibles are almost always organic goods, such as grain, which, like gilts, increase through use: if a man borrows a bushel of seed grain, his use of the loan consumes the loan, but if he is prudent, his use will also increase it "
"Edmund Wilson once offered a felicitous phrase to describe the sense of faith in the Old Testament. It seems that no tense of the Hebrew verb conforms precisely to our active present. Instead there are two time senses, both of them eternal: things are either completed (the past perfect) or they are part of prophecies unfolding, a tense that Wilson calls the 'prophetic perfect," that phase of the Hebrew verb which indicates that something is as good as accomplished.' A people who live in a perpetual prophetic perfect feel neither risk nor the vicissitudes of time as we feel them. "
"Equable trade is not an agent of transformation, nor of spiritual and social cohesion. With the vector of increase reversed, interest is self-interest: it does not join man to man except in the paper connections of contract. And where the spirit of the gift has been suspended, legal contract replaces the felt bonds of gift exchange and a skeleton of law and police must appear to replace the natural structure and cohesion of faithfulness and gratitude (so that perfect law and order are perfect alienation). The liveliness that Dana speaks of is the bustle of trade, not the bustle of life. As we all know, it is possible to have a lively factory in which no one feels any personal energy. And as for Dana's 'poor, honest debtor' who has no access to capital, the fact that the poor are trapped in a net of property rights that would have them suffer more deeply if they didn't participate is hardly an argument for that system to continue."
"Perfect gift is like the blood pumped through its vessels by the heart. Our blood is a thing that distributes the breath throughout the body, a liquid that flows when it carries the inner air and hardens when it meets the outer air, a substance that moves freely to every part but is nonetheless contained, a healer that goes without restraint to any needy place in the body. It moves under pressure - the 'obligation to return' that fascinated Marcel Mauss - and inside its vessels the blood, the gift, is neither bought nor sold and it comes back forever."
"Not all artists use these very words, but there are few artists who have not had this sense that some element of their work comes to them from a source they do not control. Harold Pinter in a letter to the director of his play The Birthday Party. The thing germinated and bred itself. It proceeded according to its own logic. What did I do? I followed the indications, I kept a sharp eye on the clues I found myself dropping. The writing arranged itself with no trouble into dramatic terms. The characters sounded in my ears - it was apparent to me what one would say and what would be the other's response, at any given point. It was apparent to me what they would not, could not, ever, say, whatever one might wish When the thing was well cooked I began to form certain conclu- sions. The point is, however, that by that time the play was now its own world. It was determined by its own engendering image. Theodore Roethke in a lecture: I was in that particular hell of the poet: a longish dry period. It was 1952, I was 44, and I thought I was done. I was living alone in a biggish house in Edmonds, Washington. I had been reading - and re-reading - not Yeats, but Raleigh and Sir John Davies. I had been teaching the five-beat line for weeks - I knew quite a bit about it, but write it myself? - no; so I felt myself a fraud. Suddenly, in the early evening, the poem 'The Dance' started, and finished itself in a very short time - say thirty minutes, maybe in the greater part of an hour, it was all done. I felt, I knew, I had hit it. I walked around, and I wept; and I knelt down - I always do after I've written what I know is a good piece. But at the same time I had, as God is my witness, the actual sense of a Presence - as if Yeats himself were in that room. The experience was in a way terrifying, for it lasted at least half an hour. That house, I repeat, was charged with a psychic presence: the very walls seemed to shimmer. I wept for joy .. He, they - the poets dead - were with me. Such moments of unwilled reception are not all there is to the creation of a work of art, of course. Notice Roethke: 'I had been teaching the five- beat line for weeks.' Or Pinter: 'I kept a sharp eye.' All artists work to acquire and perfect the tools of their craft, and all art involves evalua- tion, clarification, and revision. But these are secondary tasks. They cannot begin (sometimes they must not begin) until the materia, the body of the work, is on the page or on the canvas. The Kula prohibition on speaking of the value of the gift has its equivalent in the creative spirit. Premature evaluation cuts off the flow. The imagination does not barter its 'engendering images.' In the beginning we have no choice but to accept what has come to us, hoping that the cinders some forest spirit saw fit to bestow may turn to gold when we have carried them back to the hearth. Allen Ginsberg has been our consistent spokesman for that phase of the work in which the artist lays evaluation aside so that the gift may come forward: The parts that embarrass you the most are usually the most interesting poetically, are usually the most naked of all, the rawest, the goofiest, the strangest and most eccentric and at the same time, most representative, most universal . . . That was something I learned from Kerouac, which was that spontaneous writing could be embarrassing … The cure for that is to write things down which you will not publish and which you won't show people. To write secretly . .. so you can actually be free to say anything you want . It means abandoning being a poet, abandoning your careerism, abandoning even the idea of writing any poetry, really abandoning, giving up as hopeless "
"Having accepted what has been given to him - either in the sense of inspiration or in the sense of talent - the artist often feels compelled, feels the desire, to make the work and offer it to an audience. The gift must stay in motion. 'Publish or perish' is an internal demand of the creative spirit, one that we learn from the gift itself, not from any school or church. In her Journal of a Solitude the poet and novelist May Sarton writes: There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one's gift to those one loves most . . . The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up. So long as the gift is not withheld, the creative spirit will remain a stranger to the economics of scarcity. Salmon, forest birds, poetry, symphonies, or Kula shells, the gift is not used up in use. To have painted a painting does not empty the vessel out of which the paintings come. On the contrary, it is the talent which is not in use that is lost or atrophies, and to bestow one of our creations is the surest way to invoke the next. There is an instructive series of gifts in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. Hermes invents the first musical instrument, the lyre, and gives it to his brother, Apollo, whereupon he is immediately inspired to invent a second musical instrument, the pipes. The implication is that giving the first creation away makes the second one possible. Bestowal creates that empty place into which new energy may flow. The alternative is petrifaction, writer's block, 'the flow of life backed up.' To whom does the artist address the work? Long ago we said that a gift eventually circles back toward its source. Marcel Mauss put the same idea in slightly different terms: every gift, he wrote, 'strives to bring to its orig- inal clan and homeland some equivalent to take its place.' And though it might be hard to say with any certainty where we will find the homeland of an inner gift, artists in every age have offered us myths to suggest where we should look. Some take their gifts to be bestowals of the gods or, more often perhaps, of a personal deity, a guardian angel, genius, or muse - a spirit who gives the artist the initial substance of his art and to whom, in return, he dedicates the fruit of his labor. Such, as we shall see, was Whitman's myth. The initial stirrings of his work he took to be bestowals of his soul (or of a young boy, sometimes - or both), and his responsive act was to 'make the work' (this being the motto that sat on Whitman's desk) and speak it back to the soul, the boy"
"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 say that?' And so all you feel is: you feel humility and you feel grat- itude. And you'd feel a little uncomfortable, I think, if you capitalized too much on that without admitting at some point that you got it from the Muse, or whoever, wherever, or however"
"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 imagina- tion must submit himself to what I shall be calling a 'gifted state,' one in which he is able to discern the connections inherent in his materials and give the increase, bring the work to life. Like the shoemaker at the end of "The Shoemaker and the Elves,' the artist who succeeds in this endeavor has realized his gift. He has made it real, made it a thing: its spirit is embodied in the work. Once an inner gift has been realized, it may be passed along, commu- nicated 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 full- ness of our lives. As in the Scottish tale, any such art is itself a gift, a cordial to the soul."
"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 freelv. 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 esem- plastic 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 senses that someone else is watching her, she begins to watch herself. Rather than using her gift, she is reflecting upon it. Cobwebs."
"Men and women who dedicate their lives to the real- ization 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-indi- vidual and embodied - that dies, while zoe-life is the unbroken thread, the spirit that survives the destruction of its vessels. But here we must add that zoe-life may be lost as well when there is wholesale destruction of its vehi- cles. 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 the nations of Eastern Europe). Those parts of our being that extend beyond the individual ego cannot survive unless they can be constantly articulated. And there are individuals - all of us, I would say, but men and women of spiritual and artistic temperament in partic- ular - who cannot survive, either, unless the svmbols of zoè-life circulate among us as a commonwealth."
"Dali has made his own contributions to this anarchic state of affairs. According to a large number of highly reliable informants in several nations, Dali for years signed blank sheets of paper and, in happier times, joked merrily about what easy, profitable work it was. On May 3, I973, a Paris huissier de justice, a kind of notary. signed an official document affirming that Dali had signed 4,000 sheets, weighing 346 kilograms (about 760 pounds), in the Hotel Meurice. In 1974, French customs police halted a small truck on its way into Andorra loaded with 40,000 blank pieces of paper signed by Dali The implications for the value of existing Dali lithographs of this uncounted stock of empty pieces of paper signed by the Surrealist draftsman are enormous, highlighted by the recent surfacing of purportedly false Dali lithographs in California, Canada and Italy. One former associate of the painter recounted that 'on a good day' Dali was capable of signing 1,800 sheets in an hour, aided by three atten- dants who briskly moved the papers as the master dashed off his signature . . A prominent figure in the French art world who has acquired [a reproduction of a painting] . . . described it as a color photograph, bearing a Dali signature and sprinkled with gold flake to give it the appearance of value. It sells in Paris for 750 francs, or about $153. I do not want to overreach the bounds of my argument here. The destruc- tion of the spirit of the gift is nothing new or particular to capitalism. All cultures and all artists have felt the tension between gift exchange and the market, between the self-forgetfulness of art and the self-aggrandizement of the merchant, and how that tension is to be resolved has been a subject of debate since before Aristotle. "
Kabir: "Just as the tree is inside of the seed, so all our diseases are in the asking of these questions."
"Enthusiasm has recurrently fallen into disrepute because there have always been those who claim they are filled with the spirit when they are only full of hot air (or worse, full of malice, self-will, or the Devil). And where the enthusiast, sensing a spirit is near, might invoke its powers, the critics of enthusiasm proceed with caution and forbearance. 'Enthusiastic wildness has slain its thousands,' they rightly warn. The passions of the flesh, even if inspired by the gods, are prone to error. Those who are wary o enthusiastic religion prefer their spiritual knowing to be purified by the cooler light of reason."
"In gift exchange no symbol of worth need be detached from the body of the gilt as it is given away. Cash exchange, on the other hand, depends upon the abstraction of symbols of value from the substances of value. The farmer doesn't move his produce until he's paid, and if he's paid in dollar bills (or checks Or credit at the store), then he has exchanged embodied worth - wheat and oats - for symbolically valuable but substantially worthless paper."
"Identity forms and disperses inside the container of the self. Recurrently in the work we find a curious image, that of a sea alive with countless particles which occasionally cohere into more complex bodies, and then dissolve again. To be born, to take on life in a particular form, is to be drawn into 'a knit of identity' out of the 'pallid float' of this sea. Whitman says that he, like the rest of us, was 'struck from the float forever held in solution' and 'receiv'd identity by [his] body . . .' Identity is specific, sexed, time-bound, mortal. It is transitory, drawn together and then dispersed. The self is more enduring, standing apart from 'the pulling and hauling In terms of our argument so far, the self takes on identity through its recep- tion of objects - be they perceived lilac leaves or the atoms of the physical body"
"Whitman's grass almost always appears over a grave. His invocation is not 'O grass' but 'O grass of graves.' The two are constantly connected, from the beginning of the poem where a child asks, What is grass?' and Whitman's associations soon lead him to death ('And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves'), to the end of the poem where he describes his own eventual grave with its leaty lips. This distinctive vein of Whitman's poetry comes, I imagine, out of a meditation on the following brief sentence recorded in his earliest journal: "I know that my body will decay.' No fixed identity can relax in the face of this knowledge. Once it has entered our consciousness, that part of us which takes identity seriously will begin to search for a way of being which could include the fact of death and decay. In the same notebook, Whitman wrote a fragmentary phrase: 'Different objects which decay, and by the chemistry of nature, their bodies are [changed?] into spears of grass.' 'Song of Myself' is an attempt to replicate this chemistry. In the poem the grass usually appears after something has entered, and altered, the self."
"'Or, to put it another way, by Whitman's assump- tions, we shall lose that life which remains unarticulated. This is why the family prizes the child with the mouthpiece (sometimes - not all families want to livel), or why a nation prizes its poets (sometimes) - and this also is the urgency behind Whitman's attention to the mute: he would assure their lives by giving them speech. He would be the tongue for the living and buried speech . . . always vibrating here, [the] howls restrain'd by decorum.. .; he would allow his thoughts to be 'the hymns of the praise of things,' so that the spirits which have been bestowed upon him - by the unlettered boy, the wood duck, the eddies of fog - will not perish.t Before we describe Whitman's work more fully in these terms, I should pause to clarify where, exactly, the gift lies in the creation of a work of art. In common usage the term covers three different things, unfortunately. And while I have tried to be more precise in my own usage, some confusion still creeps in. The initial gift is what is bestowed upon the self - by perception, experience, intuition, imagination, a dream, a vision, or by another work of art. Occasionally the unrefined materials of experience or imagination are finished works, in which case the artist is merely a transmitter or medium"
"Men or women of talent must work to perfect their gins. of course; no one is exempt from the long hours of practice. But to set out to acquire the gift itself through work is like trying to grow an extra hand or wings. It can't be done. The artist's gift refines the materials of perception or intuition that have been bestowed upon him; to put it another way, if the artist is gifted, the gift increases in its passage through the self. The artist makes something higher than what he has been given, and this, the finished work, is the third gift, the one offered to the world in general or directed back specifi- cally to the 'clan and homeland' of an earlier gift."
" Whitman borrowed the term 'adhesiveness' from phrenology. This nineteenth-century form of pop psychology distinguished between 'amative' sexual love and 'adhesive friendship (which. in the phrenologist's iconography, was symbolized by two women embracing each other). Adhesive love is the second element in Whitman's politics which is not strictly political, at least insofar as politics has to do with power. Perhaps we would do well to differentiate the term: adhesiveness is an eros power while most of what passes as politics is logos power. Law, authority, compe- tition, hierarchy, and the exercise of royal or despotic will through the courts, the police and the military - these are logos powers, and they are the skeletal structure of most political systems. The image of two women embracing is not found on any nation's flag. Whitman envisioned drawing isolated individuals into a coherent and enduring body politic without resorting to the patriarchal articles of the social contract. In short, he would replace capitalist home economics with 'the dear love of comrades.' His poli- tics reveal an unspoken faith: that the realized and idiosyncratic self is erotic and that erotic life is essentially cohesive. He assumes that the citizen, like the poet, will emerge from the centripetal isolation, in which character forms, with an appetite for sympathetic contact and an urge both to create and to bestow. In this last we come to the fusion of Whitman's aesthetics and politics, the social life of the gifted self. Even more than the love of comrades, I think, the true cohesive force in Whitman's democracy is art. In his polit- ical aesthetic, as we saw at the end of the last chapter, the artist absorbs not 'objects' but "the central spirit and idiosyncrasies' of the people. And his responsive act is to create a single image-making work for them.' It is this work, or better, the nation's artistic wealth as a whole, which draws a people together. We could even say that the artist creates (or at least preserves) the 'central spirit' of the people, for, as in the poetry, a spirit that has never been articulated cannot endure. As the poet Robert Bly says in a different context, 'Praise to the first man who wrote down this joy clearly, for we cannot remain in love with what we cannot name . . Nor can we nurture or take sustenance from a spirit that remains unspoken."
"The list ends with a striking image for the poet of grass: What chemistry! That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease, Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease. New love is cautious because it is vulnerable. There is a dark side to nature; the green Osiris has a brother, Set, who rules the desert. If we open ourselves to love, will love come in return, or poison? Will new identity appear, or the dead-end death that leaves a restless soul? In the poem, at least, Whitman resolves his hesitancy by fixing his eye on the give-and-take of vegetable life in which the earth 'grows such sweet things out of such corruptions.' In apparent decay the man of faith recognizes the compost of new life. This, at any rate, is how Whitman resolves the association between love and decay in the poetry. His central metaphor begins with the sympathetic self receiving the outer world (the world of objects or the lover) with both fear and delight, and then suffering a kind of death, the chemistry of nature' that leads to the spring wheat, the new shoots, the grass over graves. But in life things are a little more complicated. For Whitman in the game' the sequence begins with a sympathetic man admitting the soldiers to his heart, and feeling again the simultaneous attraction and risk: a 'virus' saturates his system as he kisses them good-night. But here the plot may have to change, for is there a 'chemistry of man' like the 'chemistry of nature' which will assure the life of a lover who has allowed a foreign thing to penetrate his blood?"
"In Burope, if you ask a man to define anything, his definition always moves away from the simple things that he knows perfectly well, it recedes into an unknown region, that is a region of remoter and progressively remoter abstractions. Thus if you ask him what red is, he says it is a 'colour' If you ask him what a colour is, he tells you it is a vibration or a refraction of light, or a division of the spectrum. And if you ask him what vibration is, he tells you it is a mode of energy, or something of that sort, until you arrive at a modality of being, or non-being, or at any rate you get in beyond your depth, and beyond his depth. But when the Chinaman wanted to make a picture of . • a general idea, how did he go about it? He is to define red. How can he do it in a picture that isn't painted in red paint? He puts . together the abbreviated pictures of ROSE IRON RUST CHERRY FLAMINGO Ezra Pound was essentially a religious poet. His cautions against abstraction in art serve the spiritual ends of the work; they are not merely advice on style. An Italian country priest once turned a corner of the temple of St Francis in Rimini - the temple erected by that hero of the Cantos, Sigismondo Malatesta - to find the poet bowing to the stone elephants carved in the side of the building rather than to the 'altar furniture.' Pound was an idolater in the old sense: he put himself in the service of images. One of the most remarkable things about the Cantos is Pound's ability to convey a sense of the undivided light in concrete speech: rain beat as with colour of feldspar in the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it with a sky wet as ocean / flowing with liquid slate Such light is in sea-caves e la bella Ciprigna"
"We shall have more to say of political will in a later section of this chapter; at this point I want to offer a few remarks on the role of will power in art. There are at least two phases in the completion of a work of art, one in which the will is suspended and another in which it is active. The suspen- sion is primary. It is when the will is slack that we feel moved or we are struck by an event, intuition, or image. The materia must begin to flow before it can be worked, and not only is the will powerless to initiate that flow, but it actually seems to interfere, for artists have traditionally used devices - drugs, fasting, trances, sleep deprivation, dancing - to suspend the will so that something 'other' will come forward. When the material finally appears, it is usually in a jumble, personally moving, perhaps, but not much use to someone else - not, at any rate, a work of art. There are exceptions, but the initial formulation of a work is rarely satisfactorv satisfactory, I mean, to the imagination itself, for, like a person who must struggle to say what he means, the imagination stutters toward the clear articulation of its feeling. The will has the power to carry the material back to the imagination and contain it there while it is re-formed. The will does not create the 'germinating image' of a work, nor does it give the work its form, but it does provide the energy and the directed attention called for by a dialogue with the imagination. Artists might be classified by the different weight given to these two phases of the work. Whitman or a prose writer like Jack Kerouac fall on the suspend-the-will side of the spectrum. Whitman begins to work by lolling on the grass. Kerouac's Belief & Technique for Modern Prose' - a list of thirty aphorisms :
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy 2. Submissive to everything, open, listening 3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house 4. Be in love with yr life 5. Something that you feel will find its own form 6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind 7. Blow as deep as you want to blow 8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind 9. The unspeakable visions of the individual 10. No time for poetry but exactly what is 11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest 12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you 13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition 14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog 16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye 17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself 18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea 19. Accept loss forever 20. Believe in the holy contour of life 21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind 22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better 23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning 24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge 25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it 26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form 27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness 28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better 29. You're a Genius all the time 30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven"
"If we return to Whitman for a moment, we may be able to triangulate the irritability these examples reveal. We have seen Pound's 'Religio'; Whitman's is found in the original preface to Leaves of Grass: This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy argue not concerning God, have patience and indul- gence toward the people . . . , go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families . dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes"
"The title could as well have been 'Why Have No Proper Shoes Been Distributed to James Joyce?' In approaching Pound's economic theories, it seems to me that our work will be most fruitful if we use these anecdotes as a backdrop, if we see his work as an attempt to find a polit- ical economy that would embody the spirit they reveal. Pound sought a 'money system' that might replicate, or at least support, the form of value that emanates from creative life. He cared for neither Marxism nor bour- geois materialism because, he felt, neither held a place for the artist. He was attracted to the theories of an Englishman - Major C. H. Douglas - because Douglas was one of the first, according to Pound, 'to postulate a place for the arts, literature, and the amenities in a system of economics. During the 1930s Pound printed his economic ideas in a series of 'Money Pamphlets'; in one of them he describes two different kinds of bank - one in Siena and one in Genoa - the first built 'for beneficence' and the second 'to prey on the people.' The last line of his analysis reads: The arts did not flourish in Genoa, she took almost no part in the intellectual activity of the renaissance. Cities a tenth her size have left more durable treasure. The point for the moment is not that Pound was either right or wrong about the Bank of Siena or about Major Douglas, but simply that Pound's money theories, at least at the start, were addressed to the situation of the artist and the liveliness of culture. Something had happened after the Renaissance, he felt, that ate away at art and made it less likely that an artist would have a decent pair of shoes."
""technically bribes, not gifts. Sales rely on keeping these categories confused, however, for the intent is to use the bonding power of gifts to attach chil- dren to a product. The bond is not used, that is, for the increase that comes of gift exchange but for market profits. Finally, these campaigns are directed toward children because children are not as cynical as adults; they are more easily stirred by archetypal imagery and less likely to abstract them- selves from emotional ties. Moreover, the child is needed to make an emotional appeal to the adult, the source of the cash. The profit depends on this formula: an innocent and imaginative child plus a parent with money plus an affectionate tie between the two. The people who marketed Underoos sold them in supermarkets rather than clothing stores because children more often accompany their mothers to the market and the whole promotional strategy would fall apart if this third thing, the bond between the parent and the child, was missing at the moment of the sale. Usury in its ancient sense refers to rationalizing the increase and reci- procity of gift exchange so that it becomes a precondition of commerce that both principal and increase return to the original 'owner' of the good. With this rationalization the emotional and spiritual increase of commerce is lost, though the material may remain. The sin of usury is to separate goodwill from its vehicle. The usurer rents what should be a gift (or sells what should be a gift). Usury in this sense appears, therefore, whenever someone manages to convert a gilt situation into a profit situation. Moreover, the usurer finds it in his interest to blur the distinction between the commodity mode and the gift mode so that the former may profit by the energy of the latter. In short, he converts erotic energy into money, goodwill into profit, worth into value. The usurer is not really a comrade or a stranger because he makes his living by changing back and forth. On TV he ingratiates himself with the children in the morning to increase his profit margin when the mothers go out for food in the afternoon. He is different in kind from the simple merchant who may have no real interest in the well-being of your family but who at least gives sugar for sugar, salt for salt. The usurer settles for no such equilibrium. He's in the 'juice trade,' say the crooks in Chicago. He turns the juice of life (fantasy and affection in this case) into monev. Burger King and Union Underwear are modern usurers. The affections of children are drawn toward the market with a combination of counter- feit gifts and images that have a taproot in emotional life and the imagin- ation. "
"In Saul Bellow's novel Humboldt's Gift, Charlie Citrine reflects on power and poets, thinking of the American attitude toward its self-destructive artists. He lists our dead - Edgar Allen Poe, Hart Crane, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman - and comments: This country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poet's testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martrys. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can't perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miracle and power no longer belong to him. So poets are loved, but loved because they just can't make it here. They exist to light up the enormity of the awful tangle and justify the cynicism of those who say, 'If I were not such a corrupt, unfeeling bastard, creep. thief, and vulture, I couldn't get through this either. Look at those good and tender and soft men, the best of us. They succumbed, poor loonies"
"The paragraph confuses two sorts of power. The 'power' that draws the trees toward song is not the 'power' that sends men to the moon, any more than the 'energy' in Blake's 'Energy is eternal delight' is the same as the one in the energy crisis.' But, of course, this is the confusion of the age. We wake up to it every morning. It is a modern drama in which a man of frustrated compassion begins to trade his compassion for power. Yeats sensed in Pound's politics the same tension we addressed in the poetry: a will to power born of a frustrated compassion begins to acquire a life of its own and live apart from that compassion. And so we come to Mussolini. There is an oft-quoted letter of Pound's to Harriet Monroe, oft-quoted because it is one of the first times that Pound mentions his Italian hero: 'I personally think extremely well of Mussolini. If one compares him to American presidents (the last three) or British premiers, etc., in fact one CAN NOT without insulting him. If the intelli- gentsia don't think well of him, it is because they know nothing about "the state", and government, and have no particularly large sense of values. The context of Pound's remarks is not usually noted: most of the letter is addressed to the problem of artists being unable to earn a living. Monroe had asked Pound to consider a lecture tour in the States and he asked if it might pay enough to free him to work: 'If I blow all that energy, I have got to have a few years free from WORRY AFTER it. Poverty here is decent and honourable. In America it lays one open to continuous insult on all sides Later: 'You might devote a special number, poesy contest for best estimate of psychology of the man who paid 20,000 bucks for copy of Poe's Tammammwhatever it is. Interest on 20,000 bucks wd. keep a live writer for life. Wot these bastards lack is a little intelligence.'
"O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, Lend me a little tobacco-shop, or install me in any profession Save this damn'd profession of writing, where one needs one's brains all the time. " - Ezra Pound
" In psychoanalytic terms, the 'shadow' is the personification of those parts of the self that could be integrated into the ego but for one reason or another are not. Many people leave their feelings about death in the shadow, for example. They could be carried in the daylight self but are left unspoken. Random sexual desire remains in the shadow for most people. It could be acted upon openly or it could be acknowledged and dismissed (which still removes it from the shadow), but it isn't. What the ego needs but cannot accept the psyche will personify and either present in dreams or project onto someone in the outer world. These shadow figures then become objects of simultaneous fascination and disgust - a recurrent and troubling figure in dreams or someone in the neighborhood we don't like but can't stop talking about."
"Pound's stock example of an evil bank was the Bank of England. In a book by Christopher Hollis called The Two Nations Pound came across a quote attributed to that bank's founder, William Paterson. A prospectus written in 1694 for potential investors included this sentence: 'The bank hath benefit of the interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing' Pound repeats the sentence over and over in the Cantos and in his prose. Here value is detached from its root in the natural world; here lies the seed of the dissociation between real and financial credit. Money 'created out of nothing' cannot have real value or real increase, but the 'hell banks" through abstraction and mystification, make it appear to have both. Once such false money is at large, it secretly gnaws away at the true value that rests on the growing grass and the living sheep.
Pound divided all goods into three classes: I transient goods ('fresh vegetables, luxuries, jerry-built houses, fake art, pseudo books, battleships'), 2 durable goods ('well constructed buildings, roads, public works, canals, intelligent afforestation'), and 3 permanent goods ('scientific discoveries, works of art, classics'). In phrases reminiscent of our description of a gift, Pound adds that the goods in his third group can be put in a class by themselves, as they are always in use and never consumed, or they are … not destroyed by consumption. The only change I would suggest in these groups would be to move vegetables - or any life that is cyclically reborn - into the last cate- Bory, in the spirit of Pound's own lines from a late canto: 'The clover enduring, / basalt crumbled with time.' Clover endures the way art endures. The verb is the same as in the usura canto, 'no picture made to endure nor to live with / but to sell and sell quickly. wound felt that as long as we are going to use money as a symbol of value, there should be different kinds of money to stand for different kinds of value: clover money for clover and basalt money for basalt. 'For every bit of DURABLE goods there ought certainly to be a ticket ie. a piece of money .But what about perishable goods, stuff that rots and is .?' he asks.
It would be better . .. if money perished at the same rate as goods perish, instead of being of lasting durability while goods get consumed and food gets eaten.' He sought, therefore, a currency 'no more durable than . . . potatoes, crops or fabrics.' Until the symbols of value accurately reflect the various kinds of wealth, we will always have the unfair situation of some folks having 'money wealth' that increases in their bank accounts while others have 'potato wealth' that decays in their larder. So Pound proposed a vegetable currency which, like the bread the fairies leave at night, would perish in the hands of those who did not use it. He was particularly keen on stamp scrip, a form of currency proposed by the German economist Silvio Gesell. As Pound tells it. Gesell 'saw the danger of money being hoarded and proposed to deal with it by the issue of "stamp scrip." This should be a government note requiring the bearer to affix a stamp worth up to I percent of its face value on the first day of every month. Unless the note carries its proper complement of monthly stamps it is not valid.' With stamp scrip, you lose money by having money. Whoever has something in his pocket on the first of the month will see it shrink by I percent, rather than grow. If you keep it a hundred months it will perish completely. (Stamp scrip is Schwund geld in German, 'shrinking money.' Pound sometimes calls it 'counter-usury,' and in letters to Mussolini refers to it as 'transient currency' and as money that bears 'negative interest.' It's money that decays.)rate as goods perish, instead of being of lasting durability while goods get consumed and food gets eaten.' He sought, therefore, a currency 'no more durable than . . . potatoes, crops or fabrics.' Until the symbols of value accurately reflect the various kinds of wealth, we will always have the unfair situation of some folks having 'money wealth' that increases in their bank accounts while others have 'potato wealth' that decays in their larder.
So Pound proposed a vegetable currency which, like the bread the fairies leave at night, would perish in the hands of those who did not use it. He was particularly keen on stamp scrip, a form of currency proposed by the German economist Silvio Gesell. As Pound tells it. Gesell 'saw the danger of money being hoarded and proposed to deal with it by the issue of "stamp scrip." This should be a government note requiring the bearer to affix a stamp worth up to I percent of its face value on the first day of every month. Unless the note carries its proper complement of monthly stamps it is not valid.' With stamp scrip, you lose money by having money. Whoever has something in his pocket on the first of the month will see it shrink by I percent, rather than grow. If you keep it a hundred months it will perish completely. (Stamp scrip is Schwund geld in German, 'shrinking money.' Pound sometimes calls it 'counter-usury,' and in letters to Mussolini refers to it as 'transient currency' and as money that bears 'negative interest.' It's money that decays."
"Both Pound and Gesell thought that stamp scrip would prevent hoarding and increase the velocity of the money in circulation. Nobody would want to hold on to it. I'm not sure that it does this any better than conventional interest - when all money bears interest, uninvested money shrinks, too. But there is one obvious difference between stamp scrip and conventional interest: the direction of the increase is reversed. A conventional interest payment goes to the owner of the money; with stamp scrip (as with gifts) the increase goes away from the owner of the wealth (it goes to the state, about which more later). Moreover, again as with a commerce of gifts, the increase of stamp scrip goes to the group as a whole, not to individuals. 'Anvone who thinks to keep it put by in a stocking will find it slowly melting away. Anyone who needs it to live by, or who uses it to stimulate and increase the well-being of the nation, will profit by it.' The imagery of Pound's argument ties stamp scrip to the fertility of nature, just as he tied credit to 'the growing grass.' Metallic money should not stand for perishable goods, he declares, because its durability gives it certain advantages not possessed by potatoes or tomatoes.' "
Pound: 'but my worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of antisemitism, all along, that spoiled everything- Ah, that's lovely to hear you say that . Later, Ginsberg and the others walked Pound back to his apartment. At the door, Ginsberg took him by the shoulders and said, 'I also came here for vour blessing. And now may I have it, sir?' Yes,' nodded Pound, 'for whatever it's worth. In the history of the creative spirit in America, this encounter seems as significant as the day, thirty-five years before, when Pound handed the Cantos to Mussolini. For here the Jew - or rather, the Buddhist Jew (for he has left the judge behind) - came to exchange a blessing with the bitter servant. There were Jews who thought that Pound should have been put to death for his broadcasts during the war. But that would have been no more of a solution than the killing of the Jew in the fairy tale. Rather than fighting devils with devils, Ginsberg managed to change the form of the drama itself, and a light suddenly fell from a window no one had noticed. The story of our poetry need not be finished in one man's life. Ginsberg calls the light out of Pound's labor; the forces of decay will strip away the 'stupidity and ignorance.' The servant of the gift may yet regain his voice and feel. with each word that leaves his body, his own worth return to him as undivided light."
"At one time or another during their lives both Whitman and Pound took on some sort of secondary employment. Whitman, when he was writing the early drafts of Leaves of Grass, edited newspapers, wrote free-lance jour- nalism, ran a printing office and a stationery store, and worked as a house carpenter. Pound, too, hired out as a journalist. All during the First World War he was paid four guineas a month to churn out articles (two a week, year after year) for The New Age, a Social Credit newspaper. But for both men these were essentially bread-and-butter jobs, taken out of need and quit when need was relieved. Nor was there any significant, concerted patronage in those days, at least not in America. In I885 a group of Whitman's admirers bought the then-crippled poet a horse and phaeton so that he would not be confined to his house; at about the same time the nearby Harleigh cemetery donated the ground upon which the poet had his tomb erected. And this just about completes the list of return gifts America offered its earliest poet. Pound fared only a little better. The $2,000 Dial Prize was the single significant reward that he received before he was old and confined to St Elizabeths Hospital. Much later there were other awards - a $5.000 grant from the Academy of American Poets in 1963, for example - but again, we cannot say we are speaking of a man made rich by his patrons. Finally, although both Whitman and Pound realized a modest income from the sale of their works in the last years of their lives, there were no returns when these men were young and most in need. Whitman lost money on the first edition of Leaves of Grass; Pound's American royalties for a typical year - 1915 - came to $1.85. In sum we have two poets, each of whom was clearly a major figure in his century, known and read during his lifetime, each of whom at one time or another took on secondary work in support of his art, each of whom was happy to accept what little patronage was offered to him"
"if the artist lives in a culture which is not only dominated by exchange trade but which has no institutions for the conversion of market wealth to gift wealth, if he lives in a culture that cannot, therefore, settle the debt it owes to those who have dedicated their lives to the realization of a gift, then he is likely to be poor in fact as well as in spirit. Such, I think, is a fair description of the culture into which both Whitman and Pound were born. Theirs was hardly an age of patronage, as my brief list of return gifts indicates; nor was theirs a time that would have likely understood that Trobriand social code, 'to possess is to give.' Theirs - and ours - was the age of monopoly capitalism, an economic form whose code expected and rewarded the conversion of gift wealth to market wealth (the natural gifts of the New World, in particular - the forests, wildlife, and fossil fuels - were 'sold in perpetuity' and converted into private fortunes). In a land that feels no reciprocity toward nature, in an age when the rich imagine themselves to be self-made, we should not be surprised to find the interior poverty of the gifted state replicated in the actual poverty of the gifted. Nor should we be surprised to find artists who, like Whitman and Pound. seek to speak to us in that prophetic voice which would create a world more hospitable to the creative spirit."
"Of that context one could say, to put it positively, that the Soviet Union turned out to provide a useful counterforce to the harsher realities of capi- talism. It goaded the West into provisioning those parts of social life not well served by market forces. To put it negatively, however, if Cold War rhetoric lay at the foundation, then the entire edifice was historically vulnerable. Thus when the Soviet Union fell in 1989 so did the bulk of public patronage in the West. In the U.S., for example, we almost imme- diately got the attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts and the loss of nearly all funding to individual artists. A similar if less publicized story played out in basic science. In a 1998 interview Leon Lederman, Nobel laureate in physics, said: 'We always thought, naively, that here we are working in abstract, absolutely useless research and once the Cold War ended, we wouldn't have to fight for resources. Instead, we found, we were the Cold War. We'd been getting all this money for quark research because our leaders decided that science, even useless science, was a component of the Cold War. As soon as it was over, they didn't need science.' In short, around Iggo the third phase of this history began, an era of market triumphalism in which not only has public support of the arts and sciences begun to dry up but those who stilled their voices during the Cold War, those who have long believed in an unlimited market, have felt free to advance unselfconsciouslv. In instance after instance, public institutions have been encouraged to think of themselves as private businesses. The universities have set up 'tech- ology transfer offices' and tried to fund themselves by selling knowledge rather than simply disseminating it, as their old mission statements once asked them to do. Grammar schools have learned that they can sell exclu- sive rights to soft-drink vendors intent on creating brand loyalty in the very young. Public radio and television are now cluttered with advertising. Even commercial television has become more so: in the U.S., the networks once limited their ads to nine minutes an hour; they gave that up in the last decade and ads now run eighteen minutes in prime time. Natural abundance has been similarly commercialized, everywhere"