#9: The Spirit of The Gift
My thinking has been heavily influence by The Gift by Lewis Hyde, using literature, anthropology and psychology he explores how the nature of giving a gift can bring us vitality and community.
“The daily commerce of our lives – ‘sugar for sugar and salt for salt’ as the blues singers say – proceeds at it’s own constant level, but a gift revives the soul…Whatever we treat as living begins to take on life. Moreover, gifts that have taken on life can bestow it in return.”
Hyde’s writing has really resonated with my own experience, having spent a lot of time busking on the street, I found that busking was the type of exchange that I was most comfortable with. Rather than a commercial exchange where someone promises to pay a fee for my work (although I’m not against it per se!) it felt much more harmonious to offer my artistry to the world in the form of a gift, asking nothing in particular in return but being grateful for anything that was offered. I enjoyed the nature of the exchange, the audience were not expecting anything, they had no demands, they were not ‘paying customers’ and held none of the baggage of entitlement that we are encouraged to adopt in the ravenous institution of capitalism where ‘the customer is always right’. Rather they were offered an unsought moment of beauty amidst their day, and were all the more grateful for it. I believe that some felt, as I myself do when stumbling across a busker playing a beautiful tune, grateful not just for the tune itself but for the reassuring reminder that there is beauty in the world. The giving of money then embodies their gratitude for my gift, instead of their demand for my supply. And gratitude, Hyde writes, is “A labour undertaken by the soul to effect transformation.”
“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 it’s level, as it were, that we can give it away again. Passing the gift along is the act of gratitude that finishes the labour.”
Gratitude has appeared previously in my research as an important tool for fostering positive mental health. This gift exchange is then a method of fostering gratitude, and encourages a spirit of compassionate reciprocity towards the world in those who encounter it.
This spirit reciprocity, Hyde argues, is also what creates community, another important element that provides a lifeline to those struggling with their mental health:
“Where we maintain no institutions of positive reciprocity, we find ourselves unable to participate in those ‘wider spirits’ – unable to enter gracefully into nature, unable to draw community out of the mass, and unable to receive, contribute toward, and pass along the collective treasures we refer to as culture and tradition.
Hyde argues that artistry is itself a gift that has been given to the artist, (we speak of other talented people as ‘being gifted’) and it is the responsibility of the artist to care for their gift and see that it is given in turn to others with an appropriate spirit. The giving of the gift then sparks a light in those who receive it:
“Once an inner gift has been realised, it may be passed along, communicated 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 artists’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, a cordial to the soul.”
The langue of the above passage really resonates with my aims for my project, I wish to induce in the audience this state of communion, a feeling of ‘one-ness’ that is the antidote to loneliness and despair, I hope to foster gratitude and a spirit of positive reciprocity.