# 9 GiveItAwayGiveItAwayGiveItAwayNow.
I've been reading Lewis Hyde and now Anthony Kiedis has taken a room in my head. This is what I've learned so far: Art is a gift. Give it away, and it will be yours forever.
“If you want to write, paint, sing, compose, act, or make films, read The Gift”, said Margaret Atwood. Being a fan, I took her advice. I was expecting from it some sort of lovesong by artists for artists. The kind of thing that would make me feel a sense of belonging, and, by association, Greatness. Kafka, Orwell, Woolfe, Vonnegut, Atwood, and I, hang out, exchanging notes. But I was mistaken. The book, it turns out, is a treatise on commodities and gifts and what their exchange accomplishes in human societies. I bought the book off Amazon for ₹499. I paid for it first with my credit card, then with my attention, and now, with the discomfiture of my soul.
The ideas presented in the book (through folktales, tribal customs, economic theory, and even snippets on the etiquette around organ donation, psychotherapy, ‘confession’, and more), have brought into focus the extent to which market forces shape our lives, opinions, and notions about the ‘worth’ of human beings: children, siblings, friends, citizens, partners, parents, homemakers, workers, artists... The book was published in 1983, I bought it in 2022. I am still reading it, and I expect I will be doing so for a while. No racy novel, this! It’s a bitter pill. It’s the juice of kale! It’s teaching me prickly, difficult, helpful things.
This post is not a book review. I don’t have the tools to do such a thing. Much of The Gift flows over my head as the Pacific Ocean must over a sunken surfer. This post is not an Ode, either. I can’t in honesty say I’m in love with the book. Not yet, anyway. We’re still at first base. This post is, I think, a companion piece for anyone masochistic enough to buy (or be subversive, and borrow) the book and then proceed to flagellate themselves with paragraphs such as this:
“If we take the synthetic power of gifts, which establish and maintain the bonds of affection between friends, lovers, and comrades, and if we add to these a circulation wider than a binary give-and-take, we shall soon derive society, or at least those societies—family, guild, fraternity, sorority, band, community—that cohere through faithfulness and gratitude….”
Yes. Agreed.
“…While gifts are marked by motion and momentum at the level of the individual, gift exchange at the level of the group offers equilibrium and coherence, a kind of anarchist stability.
As in ‘what comes around goes around’ and ‘pass the dutchie ‘pon the left-hand side’? Parents give their children who give their children who give their children. Okay. I think I get it.
We can also say, to put the point conversely, that in a group that derives cohesion from the circulation of gifts, the conversion of gifts to commodities will have the effect of fragmenting the group or destroying it.”
Say what!
So. As we collectively flail around late-stage capitalism, flapping in ennui, or poverty, as the case may be, if an artist wants to be paid for their labour, their offering ceases to be a gift? And what’s more, when artists do this, they help destroy the fabric of society, punching a few more holes at the bottom of a sinking boat. What a crock of shit! But hurt feelings aside, you read this and know it’s true:
“I remember the time I went to my first rare-book fair and saw how the first editions of Thoreau and Whitman and Crane had been carefully packaged in heat-shrunk plastic with the price tags on the inside. Somehow the simple addition of air-tight plastic bags had transformed the books from vehicles of liveliness into commodities, like bread made with chemicals to keep it from perishing.”
While we digest that, preservatives and all, here is a related story:
Once upon a time in 1998, I was 23 and a student of literature in English at the University of York, UK. I stood outside Waterstones (maybe it was Blackwells), on a cobbled street in the city centre, gaping at a floor-to-ceiling display of hundreds of books, all of them copies of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. I cannot adequately describe the sensation. I remember walking in, inhaling the space, hoping everyone in the bookshop would notice that I too was a young, brown, female trying to have her way with words. This was Success! This was the opposite of silence! This surely was the work of Mahatma Gandhi (et al) and the Women’s Liberation Movement (et al), coming home to roost. Right? Right.
That Roy was an activist-writer, a self-described ‘sofa-cum-bed’, which led her down a path far away from the machine that made her, is another story. But stick with me here. At 23, in the midst of an MA in ‘Fictions of Conflict: The Post WW2 Novel in English’, that day in that bookshop I had died and gone to heaven. I didn’t ask if Roy’s 1.6 million dollar advance had anything to do with India’s recent economic liberalisation. Colony comes in so many flavours, who knew! I didn’t. And I didn’t care. This wasn’t Miss Universe. This wasn’t Miss World. This was the Booker Prize. Move over Rusdhie, there’s a brown girl in the ring. And she looked like a sugar in a plum. Plum-plum. (Boney M reference Millenials, look it up.)
Now fans will say, it was a good novel. And I agree. I enjoyed it. I loved Every Single Unnecessarily Capitalised Word of it. We now know that while it’s highly improbable, it is possible to have both commercial and critical success. We also know that for every Michelangelo, Picasso, and Warhol, every Charles Dickens, Zadie Smith, and Neil Gaiman, there is a Poe, a Van Gogh, a Kafka, and the sad, sad girl you saw at the poetry reading who will die in a ditch, drunk, unsung, or of rabies, as the case may be.
For an artist, to achieve the kind of success known as success, we know one has to have talent, one has to have grit. We know one has to be born in the right place at the right time and that it helps to have a room of one’s own and an independent income because, “for most of history, ‘Anonymous’ was a woman”. We also know that even if by some miracle one has all these ducks in a row there are other things at play. Things obscured from view. (The Church? The Medicis? Warren Buffet?). We know there is an Invisible Hand.
In commodity exchange it’s as if the buyer and the seller were both in plastic bags; there’s none of the contact of a gift exchange. There is neither motion nor emotion because the whole point is to keep the balance, to make sure the exchange itself doesn’t consume anything or involve one person with another.”
It seems for us, the kind of success known as success, if held too close, may just be the road to Hell. It’s unlikely that we will find the road at all, and if we do, we will have to go to Hell in a Handbasket, via The Algorithm, straight off the cliff of Demand and Supply. So maybe if we have The Gift, we should stop hoarding it, start sharing it and see where it goes. Someone may steal our idea, our character, our plot. But maybe they won’t. Maybe in the giving, we will receive a thing that can’t be bought or sold. Maybe we will earn the most fungible currency of all, subtle and ancient, one that has its roots in the kind of society that came before this one.
I think in essence, that’s the advice Nina Hagen gave her then-lover, Anthony Kiedis, in an incident that supposedly inspired the song that is the title of this post. Her wisdom was a gift to Keidis. His song was a gift to us. This post is my gift to you. And so on. And so forth.
“Gift exchange is connected to faith because both are disinterested. Faith does not look out. No one by himself controls the cycle of gifts he participates in; each, instead, surrenders to the spirit of the gift in order for it to move. Therefore, the person who gives is a person willing to abandon control.”
Maybe art is Magic Porridge Pot. Maybe it’s meant to be out of control?
As I write this, comes a visual from childhood: At birthday parties, we sit together in a circle to play a game called ‘passing the parcel’. Music plays in the background. Which direction we pass doesn’t matter as long we keep the thing moving. When the music stops, the person holding the parcel opens a layer of wrapping. Sometimes there is a small surprise in each successive layer - a pen, an eraser, a lollypop. Only the last layer reveals the big prize - a box of paints, a slab of chocolate, a stuffed toy. Dawdlers are cheaters, cheaters never prosper. There is only one big winner, but as long as the rules aren’t broken, everyone enjoys the game.
In conclusion: We live in an incurably commercial society. We are irrevocably entangled. But also, we are free. Because in the wall is a catflap. We can slip outside, find something, bring it home, and make it breed. And in the end, we will be happy. Because we may have helped save an endangered species.
© Tara Sahgal
Thank you for the 'gift' of your writing Tara..