The Gift

Today I finished reading The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde. The Gift has been my trusty gym mate for months, gracefully entertaining me as I sweat my mind out in 30, 40, and 50 minute aerobic sessions. It has been stimulating and inspiring for both intellect and heart. Hyde tells an important story about gifts, those that are tangible and those that are inherent. He also illuminates the ways in which the culture of giving and receiving (and nurturing) gifts rubs up against capitalism. The strange roles that wars, religion, and individual leaders and artists have played in this often uncomfortable tension shed an appreciated fresh light on history.

There is much to be distraught about in this book, but Hyde somehow leaves the reader feeling hopeful and even empowered. The greatest solution to the inevitable discord between art as profit and art as gift that Hyde offers is, not surprisingly, a compromise: when art enters the marketplace, that market should funnel funds back into the arts. The prime example Hyde offers of this actually happening in our times is the Music Performance Fund. Once upon a time, the American Federation of Musicians (yay union!) bargained with the recording industry that a small percentage of profits from recorded albums would go into a fund to augment the income of performing musicians. The fund still exists, and many of the "free" and inexpensive concerts held at schools and other public venues across the U.S. and Canada are supported by this fund. Makes sense, right? The profit from art partly supports more art. If only this were more often true.

After I finished reading my book, I still had 20 minutes left to my workout, so I thought about my life as a practicing poet and writer. The poetry market, I internally whined, simply doesn't work like this for the individual. However, when we enter contests with contest fees, aren't we supporting one of our own, the one who will win the $1000 -- or whatever the prize is? Yes, perhaps so. And when publications start making a profit big enough to run these contests with low or no fees (see Narrative Magazine's free contest for young writers here), isn't that similarly supporting individual writers? Of course it is.

Maybe there is more hope for writers that I thought. Our renegade gift economy interacts necessarily with the larger capitalistic monster, but not to the total detriment of its core. There still is difficulty, it seems, in making a living purely as a writer -- at least for most of us.