Bibliopath #9: In which we aspire to Indian giving
Dear reader,
There's a book that keeps on coming up in my conversations, but, I don't know, maybe you wouldn't be interested. Maybe it's not quite for you.
The book I'm talking about is The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde. Hyde wrote it initially as a defense and justification for the artist, but in order to do so, it goes deeper and truer than that—to the way and extent that our societies push gifts/charity to the side, the way that gift-giving has functioned throughout history in a different way to what we understand now.
"Indian giving" is, of course, a pejorative and racist term, but you may not understand why. Part of the book traces this against the mismatch of ideas of gifting: as Europeans encountered Native Americans, they were puzzled, to say the least, at the tendency for Native Americans to want something back for their gifts. For Europeans (for us) gift is about establishing ownership. For Native Americans, gifts were about a pattern of generosity and gifting that flows throughout a community: why would you want it to stop with you?
This mismatch is exacerbated by the internet age, where, 'everything is free' as Gillian Welch put it (with no small trace of irony), and by the tendency of our age to reduce everything to a metric, and then, inevitably, reduce a metric to money.
It's a book that I love, and that I reference a lot because these are such pertinent questions to how I exist as a creative today, but also because understanding these things deeply is crucial to my continued existence as a creative. Hyde does this deeply, which means that this book is not always the easiest read. I think his prose is quite lovely, but he does range into mythology, sociology and poetry (and it drops away in the second half with some longer essays on Pound and Whitman), so someone looking for a quick fix may not find what they're looking for.
On the other hand, whenever I dip into it, I'm reminded of why I do what I do, and how I can give what I've been given:
"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."
It's a book for any creative that has to function in relation to a society that feasts upon money, for any creative trying to work out how to balance their 'gift' and their survival, and creative in an age where access to art and information is almost limitless. That is to say, it's a book for any creative.
Towards generosity and possibility,
Guan
PS. I love hearing from you as a person (and not a metric)—and I love having the chance to talk about what you're reading. If you or someone you know would like a suggestion for what to read next, let me know.