Not the Gift I Had Hoped For

As an artist, I had high expectations for this book, and that it would, if not keep me sane, at least help me understand and work within the commercial context of our lives. Hyde goes some way toward helping with the understanding part by looking at late capitalism from a unique perspective. And he describes the relation of artistic activities to our overwhelmingly commercial society in (for the most part) an interesting way. But he makes no attempt to help artists work within this system, because, as he puts it, “this is not a “how to” book. So I was disappointed because it is very easy to come up with a critique of capitalism, no matter how unique, but it is another thing to suggest alternatives, either at the individual or the governance level. I was also disappointed that the book did not translate all that well across disciplines.

Works for Writing Maybe Not Other Arts

Hyde claims many of his assumptions hold for writers, painters, singers, composers, actors, and film-makers, but he is writing from a writers perspective. For instance he talks about the suspension of disbelief, “by which we become receptive to work of the imagination”. But in painting, there is no real requirement to suspend disbelief as belief is more of a verbal/intellectual process that does not hamper or enhance a viewer’s perception of visual art. The writerly focus ovetakes the middle section of the book, which is an exhaustive analysis of the work of two poets, Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, that was of limited interest to this reader, a painter.

The book was started in 1979 and first published in 1983, a time when it was still considered appropriate to use the masculine pronouns, “man”, “his” and “he” instead of non-gendered plural forms like “humans”, “people” or “they”, and Lewis uses masculine forms throughout. He does, however, include Chapter 6, A Female Property that has to do with women being given in the marriage ceremony as a gift. He points out how clearly this underscores that women are still considered as property to be used in bartering. His very practical suggestion is that, in addition to a father giving away his daughter to the groom, the groom’s mother should give away her son to the bride.

These may be niggling criticisms because the real point of Hyde’s book is to understand the market economy – how it evolved, its most salient characteristics and what it means to be an artist in such an economy. He develops his argument in the first part of the book where he differentiates between a gift economy where items are given without expectation of rent and a market economy where anything given to another is expected to come back with interest. In the last part of the book he explores how art fits into this.

He has some keen insights and, like most good writers, can put into words ideas that the rest of us have trouble expressing. For instance, he describes how a gift economy differs from a market economy: in a market economy, all gifts are destroyed. “If the increase of gifts is in the erotic bond, then the increase is lost when exchange is treated as a commodity transaction (when, in this case, it is drawn into the part of the mind that reckons value and quantity).(p196)

Artists with Dark Sides

Flannery O’Connor

Though in some ways The Gift does not translate well among artistic disciplines, Hyde includes great quotations that are universal, such as this one from Flannery O’Connor:“No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.” (p.195)

While this is an eloquent, uplifting statement, it illustrates that an artist can be gifted with imagination and skill but step outside the zone of self-forgetting and become as blind and bigoted as the most brutally ignorant. Recently found correspondence indicates that O’Connor had a “habit of racial bigotry…She was disturbed by the presence of an African-American student in her cousin’s class; in Manhattan, she sat between her two cousins on the subway lest she have to sit next to people of color. The sight of white students and black students at Columbia sitting side by side and using the same rest rooms repulsed her.”

Ezra Pound

This is the shadow side of many successful artists that is not adequately addressed in Hyde’s book. For instance in the chapter dedicated to analyzing the life and work of Ezra Pound, he does not address the question of how Pound can be a self-forgetting artist capable of making poetry that “meets the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made” and a rabid anti-semite. Instead he goes into a somewhat annoying digression about Hermes and the shadow side that doesn’t ring true.

Pablo Picasso

It is not only writers like O’Connor or Pound with a shadow side, such artists abound in every discipline and their presence is not clearly explained in The Gift. For instance, Pablo Picasso has been called the most influential artist of the 20th century but today, Picasso is more often talked about as a misogynist, sociopath and narcissist. Yes, it is difficult to be a sensitive, creative person in a culture of getting and spending, but Hyde does not explore how an artist can be gifted in one area but spiritually disabled in others. He believes artistic creativity “has the power to assemble the elements of our experience into coherent, lively wholes”, but this is clearly not the case for some artists who have stunted relationships with fellow human beings.

So we have to go along with Hyde’s compartmentalizing of the creative imagination so that the person making art is in a different zone than the person out in a culture distorted by the marketplace.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Esemplastic Power

He relates artistic creativity to the concept of the gift in that “the imagination has the power to assemble the elements of our experience into coherent, lively wholes: it has the gift.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes the imagination as “essentially vital” and takes as it’s hallmark it’s ability “to shape into one,” an ability he named “the esemplastic power.” An artist who wishes to exercise the esemplastic power of the imagination must submit himself to what Lewis calls 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….the artist who succeeds in this endeavour has realized his gift. He has made it real, made it a thing: it’s spirit is embodied in the work.”(p.195)

Hyde goes on to describe how “…the spirit of the artist’s gift may enter and act upon our being. Sometimes, then, if we are awake, if the artist really was gifted, the work will induce a moment of grace, a communion, a period during which we too know the hidden coherence of our being and feel the fullness of our lives…any such art is itself a gift, cordial to the soul.”(p.196)

And “we participate in the esemplastic power of a gift by way of a particular kind of unconsciousness, then: unanalytic, undialectical consciousness.” “The creative spirit moves in a body or ego larger than that of any single person. Works of art are drawn from, and their bestowal nourishes, those parts of our being that are not entirely personal, parts that derive from nature, from the group and the race, from history and tradition, and from the spiritual world.”

Joseph Conrad

Hyde quotes Joseph Conrad, “the artist appeals… to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mysteries surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation – to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of enumerable hearts, to the solidarity… which binds together all humanity – the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.”

Thanks Anyway

As I have said in earlier blogs, the greatest gift writers can give to other artists is to put into words truths about art that practitioners of other disciplines do not have the skills to do (this sentence is a case in point). So I forgive the gender-specific pronouns, the long diversion into analyzing poetry and the lack of a “how-to” because The Gift is one person’s offering to nature, the group, the human race, history, tradition and the spiritual world. Thanks so much, Lewis.

The post The Gift by Lewis Hyde: With Thanks first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

How does the word relate to art? In her book, Summer, Ali Smith takes a stab at it: “Art is about the moment you’re met by and so changed by something you encounter that it takes you both into and beyond yourself and gives you back your senses. It’s a shock that brings us back to ourselves. Art is something to do with coming to terms with and understanding all the things we can’t say or explain or articulate with help from something which we know will help us feel and think then articulate those things even at times like this when feeling and thinking and saying anything about anything are under impossible pressure. What art does is, because we encounter it, we remember we exist too, and that one day we won’t.“

Then there is Aldous Huxley’s ambitious work, The Perennial Philosophy, (1945, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, edition 1990) that makes the connection between transcendence and the arts.

Huxley says the perennial philosophy has to do with”… the metaphysic that recognizes a divine reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds: the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the imminent and transcendent ground of all being -the thing is immemorial and universal.“(p.vii)

This is a meaty tome and not an easy read, but I ploughed through it wondering why a gifted writer like Huxley would be interested in such an esoteric topic. The answer becomes apparent about halfway through the book where he talks about simplicity.
“…real simplicity, so far from being foolish, is almost sublime. All good men like and admire it, are conscious of sin against it, observe it in others and know what it involves; and yet they could not precisely define it. I would say that simplicity is an uprightness of soul which prevents self-consciousness…. That soul which looks where it is going without losing time arguing over every step, or looking back perpetually, possesses true simplicity. Such simplicity is indeed a great treasure. How shall we attain to it? I would give all I possess for it; it is the costly pearl of holy scripture.”(p113)

Huxley and Pablo PIcasso agreed on the goal of simplicity and spontaneity:
“Only the most highly disciplined artist can recapture, on a higher level, the spontaneity of the child with its first paint box. Nothing is more difficult than to be simple.”(p116)

and
“…it is by long obedience and hard work that the artist comes to unforced spontaneity and consummate mastery. Knowing that he can never create anything on his own account, out of the top layers, so to speak, of his personal consciousness, he submits obediently to the workings of “inspiration”; and knowing that the medium in which he works has its own self nature, which must not be ignored or violently overridden, he makes himself its patient servant and, in this way, achieves perfect freedom of expression.”(p117)

Another example of an artist who acheived exquisite simplicity is the sculptor Alexander Calder, whose mobile is shown below.

However, Huxley goes on to clarify that perfect freedom of expression and even the creation of perfectly beautiful and inspiring artwork is not the highest goal. The ultimate goal is overcoming the sense of a separate self and instead, identifying with what is called “the ground” which is God or the Tao as it exists in an eternity outside time.

And he says the corollary of this explains the nature of good and evil:
“… good is the separate self’s conformity to, and finally annihilation in, the divine ground which gives it being; evil, the intensification of separateness, the refusal to know that the ground exists.”(p184)

The problem arises when Huxley gets onto the topic of “subhuman existences”. He states that “…every other species is a species of living fossils, capable only of degeneration and extinction, not a further evolutionary advance…of all this living matter only that which is organized as human beings has succeeded in finding a form capable, at any rate on the mental side, of further development. All the rest is now locked up in forms that can only remain what they are or, if they change, only change for the worst. it looks as though, in the cosmic intelligence test, all living matter, except the human, had succumbed, at one time or another during its biological career, to the temptation of assuming, not the ultimately best, but the immediately most profitable form. By an act of something analogous to free will every species, except the human, has chosen the quick returns of specialization, the present rapture of being perfect, but perfect on a low level of being. the result is that they all stand at the end of evolutionary blind alleys…. as species, they have chosen the immediate satisfaction of the self rather than the capacity for reunion with the divine ground.”

According to Huxley, for this wrong choice, nonhuman forms of life are punished negatively, by being debarred from realizing the supreme good, “…to which only the unspecialized and therefore far more highly conscious human form is capable.”(p183)

So despite the rigorous thought that has gone into other aspects of his book, this section reveals that Huxley is a man of his time who believes that “Man is the Measure of All Things”. Huxley’s version of the perennial philosophy thus negates the arguments against separateness that have gone before. Unfortunately, he has internalized the Christian view that, while the human goal is oneness with the divine ground, separateness of human beings from all other forms in nature is almost a prerequisite for this oneness. But if goodness is the annihilation of separateness, then evil must be the intensification of separateness whether from God, the Tao or the Earth.

Burdened by this illusion, humanity’s damage to the planet has come about through intensification of our separateness, which by the above definition, is an evil belief in ourselves as a superior species with a unique capacity for union with the divine ground, but not part of nature.

Since 1945, science is confirming that everything is connected. A closer more biocentric examination of forests shows they are a gigantic interconnected being with what could be called a mind connecting its various forms. If this observation of inter-connectedness were to be expanded, we can assume that the entire surface of the earth is one interconnected being, with one mind or what has been called Gaia. Awareness of this inter-connectedness could be called a recognition of the ground of being.

So though the goal of the perennial philosophy is to recognize the oneness of all things, the assumption that humans are a separate species with a higher calling than all other species means that this philosophy is deeply flawed. Rather than adhering to beliefs that elevate humans as aspiring divinities, we should contemplate our humble role as only one of 2.16 million species on the planet all interconnected in nature. Perhaps it is in a complete recognition and acceptance of this connectedness that our true divinity lies.

As noted above, Huxley is a man of his time and his flawed thinking is apparent from the perspective of this 21st Century blogger. He refers to humanity as “man”, uses the pronoun “his” consistently and sees no relation between the female principle and divinity. He also refers to “primitive” religions and “savages” as people who are less mentally and spiritually developed than people like himself or the thinkers he admires. However, in fairness, it is likely that mainstream ideas of the 21st Century will appear just as deluded to people of the 22nd Century.

But Huxley admitted that he had not overcome his sense of a personal separate self, was filled with pride in his many and admirable achievements, and clearly struggled to be the best person he could be in his life. While his views have been limited by assumptions common to his place and time, in other ways his book is a valuable contribution. It is a compendium of what he considers the best writings on philosophies that seek to overcome the separateness of individuals and nations as they struggle and strive in errors that bring destruction to themselves and the world.

Leaving aside Huxley’s blind spots, he has made some astute observations about the role of the artist. Huxley suggests that the best art, what might be called transcendent art, is created by artists who have overcome the separate self – a separate ego. Through discipline these artists create works that are not the product of their pride, desire for fame and recognition, or even pecuniary rewards. The most meaningful, worthwhile art is created to bridge the gap between the separate and the eternal self, or ground of all being. This is as good a definition of transcendent art as we are likely to find.

The post Good, Evil, Transcendence & The Divine first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.