Thursday, August 25, 2011

Thoughts on "The Gift" by Lewis Hyde

Posted to the "What I've been reading" forum at
Project Gutenberg, Distributed Proofreaders.



I just finished The Gift by Lewis Hyde.
It was my Lenten Reading for the year, that difficult book that
takes forty days and forty nights to finish and greatly improves
my life. Past years' selections were The Invention of the Middle Ages,
Edge Cities, and the entire Sandman series in one go.

Subtitled "Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World,"
it explains why the english and the american indians couldn't
possibly understand each other, how Whitman and Pound fit in
the scheme of America, how science relies on intellectual gift
exchange, much to the bedevilment of patent attorneys.

The gift that keeps on giving is more than a cliche to Hyde---it is the desired foundation of the culture. "Pass it on", "Pay It Forward"
the penny dish at the register, Grateful Dead concert tape trees,
young mothers organizing babysitting coöps and children's clothing exchanges, Open Source code, (well, maybe not Napster); all are manifestations of freely circulating gifts that I see around me. Hyde's examples tend toward the anthropological--Bead Exchange Practices among the Trobriand Islanders.

The new edition has a delightfully titled afterward "On Being Good Ancestors". It goes a long way toward explaining why we at Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreading devote so many hours with such intensity to our task. Unpaid, but not unrewarding.

I've been fascinated by Ezra Pound for years; can't make head nor tail of his poetry, but his biography and his character have always puzzled me. Here was the most generous honeybee of the modern age, pollinating artists and bringing their work to fruition.
The only comparison is with Paul Erdös, (the most prolific mathematician since Euler), roaming the world, stopping in math departments and conferences and announcing "My brain is open", talking for minutes with professors about their most difficult research problems and delivering flashes of insight that knock down barriers to creativity.
Mathematicians treasure a low Erdös number, the rating of how many collaborators away one is from someone who worked directly with the great man.

But Pound's later history is troubling: the radio rants, his worship of Mussolini, the anti-semitism, his long stay in St. Elizabeth's, his eventual return to Italy.
I've read Kenner's The Pound Era, Findlay's book on Pound in captivity and slogged through [parts of] The Cantos, but no one could explain how such a generous man turned so nasty, like Scrooge in reverse.

Lewis takes a new tack, a mythological interpretation. He shows how Pound early on invoked the god Hermes in his poetry, the god of roads, commerce, theft, the internet. Once summoned, "Hermes answered his invocation...[and] Pound backed off. Then, like any spurned deity, Hermes began to increase in power,...until he had enough power to pull the ego from its pivot."

Hyde offers a lightly Jungian explanation of the shadow, then demonstrates how trying to deny the shadow will overtake one's psyche, like Hazel Motes in O'Connor's Wise Blood. I'm normally leery of this type of interpretation, but Pound was a poet, after all, and the closest of us all to the old gods. He took them seriously, even if we don't.

Hyde ends the section recounting the tender story of how Allen Ginsberg made the pilgrimage to Rapallo as a supplicant seeking the blessing of the master.
The situation reverses with Pound eventually seeking Ginsberg's blessing.

"--anyway, now, do you accept my blessing?"
[Pound] hesitated, opening his mouth, like an old turtle.
"I do," he said---"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..."

Whether or not this anecdote is literally true, it is a lovely story that brings
triumphant closure to the Pound Era.

The Times did an profile on Hyde last year and described The Gift as a soul-opening book, which I distinctly noticed in myself. I thought that feeling was my pancreas acting up, but now I recognize it for what it was. The Times article also noted The Gift is extremely difficult to paraphrase or summarize.

What was that quote,
"Life is a differential equation, such-and-such is the boundary value"?
Look at gift-exchange not as a expression of culture but as an initial condition that determines it, from which much else follows as a consequence.

Reading The Gift was a revelation,
like a beautiful dream, but just as quickly, the feeling dissipated.
Rereading it, the logical connections in his argument
that had so charged me faded into mist.
The glamour departed.

Invoking greek gods to explain madness, indeed!
Everydayness had returned,
rudely shoving the soul off the throne.

Yet briefly, it all made sense.


timbabwe



--
I am pedantically obligated to state that
there is no apostrophe in Finnegans Wake, by
Jame's Joyce, author of Dubliner's and Ulysse's.
---Tim Szeliga