CJ The X
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The Gift: Chapter 8 + 9 - Walt Whitman's Entire Life Story For Some Reason (And Basically a CJ The X Essay on Intrinsic Valuation)
🕑 Added 2025-09-17 19:45:54 +0000 UTC((This essay is readable by those who haven't read the book))
{[For those like me who fell behind or waned in energy on this book, now is optimal time to rebound. Come to the end with me and we'll have the book in our blood forever.]}
--Next Wednesday we'll do Chapter 10, then the week after we'll wrap it up with the Conclusion+Afterward. I have the original 80s edition so had to seek the afterward digitally.--
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The second half of The Gift by Lewis Hyde consists of two very large winding analyses of swaths of writing and biographical narratives spanning the entire lives of two poets. I have now learned more about Walt Whitman against my will than I ever intended to.
Chapter 8 in my view is mostly review, reestablishing concepts, and easing us from the world of economics into the world of artistry. Won't say much of it here, except that I appreciate when people clarify their Duality Clouds:
On Logos vs. Eros:
We have, on the one hand, imagination, synthetic thought, gift exchange, use value, and gift-increase, all of which are linked by a common element of eros, or relationship, bonding, "shaping into one." And we have, on the other hand, analytic or dialectical thought, self-reflection, logic, market exchange, exchange value, and interest on loans, all of which share a touch of logos, of differentiating into parts.
The real mystic twisting tale to contend with is that of Walt Whitmans, so here goes.
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I Hate Poets
Sooooooo this chapter was rather gruelling for me at points, partially because of the medium of poetry and because of the artistic temperment of Walt Whitman himself, the model poet. Something John MacMurray writes in Reason and Emotion is how the artistic mind is interested in particulars while the scientific mind is interested in generalities. A scientist is not interested in a particular tree, but is rather interested in trees as an abstract concept. Their curiosity into a given tree is just a tool to access information about ALL trees.
The contrast is the poet, who describes luxuriously the particular tree they gaze at, not as an instrument, but as a final object of fascination. They zoom into embodied particulars, and sensuously enjoy them for their own sake. This is the general attitude of the artist, to be contemplative instead of discursive, but poetry really reflects this pointedly as a medium.
As John Dewey writes in Art As Experience:
The prosaic is an affair of description and narration, of details accumulated and relations elaborated. It spreads as it goes like a legal document or catalogue. The poetic reverses the process. It condenses and abbreviates, thus giving words an energy of expansion that is almost explosive.
Poems luxate in the intrinsic value of beautiful words. Unlike prose writing, the writing i'm doing right now, they aren't running away from themselves to communicate some bigger abstract point. Instead they linger, enjoying themselves, just as they are enjoying the object of their expression, be it a lover, a tree, heartbreak, etc. As Byung-Chul Han writes "The poetic principle returns pleasure to language through a radical break with the economy of the production of meaning." (The Disappearance of Rituals p. 60)
Even reading poetry requires patience and contemplation. One needs to be willing to sit and taste the poem as an intrinsically complete experience. They can't just go in trying to get the meaning out of the poem, like they might a news article. The poem actively resists this, and even if possible it is surely missing the point of the experience.
MacMurray correctly identifies this "artistic attitude" that cares for particulars with the sensual life. It means using your eyes, ears, and tongue not as tools to accomplish goals, but as ends in and of themselves. When you interrupt sensation with thought, you are pulled farther away from the embodied particulars of your experience; you create distance, difference, discretion. In this way, to use Lewis Hyde's language, by living through your senses and tasting embodied reality with the poetic mindset, you become immersed in eros, the Oneness of all things, the ego-less unity of Nature.
So, Me, I am famously not Zen at all, and this is not how I do art lol.
[shout out Grimes]
I do not really enjoy long hikes in beautiful places, I don't recharge by like staring at flowers or whatever, I love rap music and glamour and personalities and conversations and feeling filled with purpose and motivation to create stuff and alter reality to make it more beautiful, rather than sitting there and just drinking it in as it is, feeling at peace knowing that Nature is already perfect and I need to humble myseflf before blah blah blah fffCk
I like the sensation of STRIDENT PURPOSE that is HIGHLY DIRECTIONAL AND EFFECTIVE!
For this purpose I feel often at odds with the medium of poetry. I find many forms of it hard to read and I tune out with a degree of frustration and boredom when John Dewey starts quoting and analyzing poetry extensively. I would LIKE to have the social status associated with being knowledgable of the canon of poetry, quoting it and tasting all the particularities of reality through it, but it is a grind against my nature. I have noticed my tendency away from the contemplative towards the expositional ever since music school, when it became mightily apparent some people really just loved playing music for its own sake, while I saw it as a tool to wield in the articulation of grand conceptual ideas.
So now sit me inside of Lewis Hyde's loving close read of Walt Whitman and his poetry for 55 straight pages. This guy drives me NUTS
Whitman seems to be the perfect poet, which makes him particularly hard for me to read. I simply have a heart for qualification, curation, crafted selective attention. I know that means I'm bad at living, but it also is the source of my powers.
So although I did not at all enjoy Walt Whitman's poetry, I am going to do the very un-poetic thing of extracting the very valuable bits of prosaic information that is nested in between the loving time Hyde takes to celebrate Whitmans life and work.
Enthusiasm vs. Discourse
As soon as I read the sentence "To be 'enthusiastic' originally meant to be possessed by a god or inspired by a divine afflatus." (166) I knew that it was going directly into my ideological bloodstream forever.
We still have a vestige of this meaning when we speak of being "enthused" BY something, but it is just iconic of our culture that we have relocated enthusiasm inside of the self, as a psychological state that we put into the world instead of something that we are enchanted into by forces greater than ourselves.
This recognizable staple of pre-modern religion, still a constant feature in artistic and spiritual life, was a pleasure to find a new word for, as was reading the 18th century clergyman Charles Chauncey's sermon criticizing it for its wild, fleshly irratoinal dangers. I'm looking forward to reading it, as well as reading about the anti-establishment enthusiast James Davenport that it takes as its ideological enemy.
The bit about Emerson lecturing Whitman on the spiritual dangers of the flesh was so god damn funny
“Emerson was moved by his first reading of Leaves of Grass, but in 1860 he walked Whitman around Boston trying to persuade him not to speak so frankly about the body in his poems—reading him, that is, a caveat against enthusiasm.* Apparently, Whitman found Emerson’s reasoning sound and compelling. “Each point… was unanswerable,” he wrote in his memoir of their talk, “no judge’s charge ever more complete and convincing.” Emerson was the greater intellectual and the greater critic. But Whitman was the greater poet, and faithful to his genius. He did not debate the master’s caution, but when Emerson asked in conclusion, “What have you to say to such things?” Whitman replied, “Only that while I can’t answer them at all I feel more settled than ever to adhere to my own theory and exemplify it.” Or, as he used to tell the story in old age, “I only answer’d Emerson’s vehement arguments with silence, under the old elms of Boston Common.”
Sympathy & Pride
The breath in of sympathy and the exhale of pride hit me like a TRRUCK
This is described as the "respiration" of the artist. Both a bottomless sympathy without qualification and hard assertion of ones own identity without qualification. The cosmic dissolution and violent enforcement of the Self. Yes Yes Yes Yes
Animals are proud in this sense, "so placid and self-contained . . . , / They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins . . . ." The proud are those who accept their being as sufficient and justified.
Pride is not antithetical to sympathy, but it is selective. "Dismiss whatever insults your own soul," counsels Whitman in the voice of pride.
Now THIS I can relate to!!!!!!!
To Be Born With A Mouth
I also quite related to the notion of those who are "born with a mouthpiece," as well as the detail that this is an idea he got from the family of a poet he personally knows.
The poet Miriam Levine, who grew up in a working-class neighborhood in New Jersey, tells me that her family used to speak of articulate men and women as having been "born with a mouthpiece." Those who can express themselves in speech have been given that mysterious something... In the fairy tales the spoken "thank you" or the act of gratitude accomplishes the transformation and frees the original gift; so in poetry, for the soul to give speech to the stuff of experience is to accept it and to pass it along....This is why the family prizes thechild with the mouthpiece (sometimes—not all families want to live!), or why a nation prizes its poets (sometimes)
Two footnote highlights define beautifully the way that the articulate can give their gift to those who struggle to capture reality in language, as well as clarifying the meaning of "celebration" to include the cosmic sympathy, or the poetic intrinsic valuation, that does not discriminate between good and bad, or judge what is worthy of value:
It is the gesture of the wakened soul to offer articulation to the speechless content of the self.
When I speak of celebration, I do not mean that all our art must be a cheery affirmation. To utter sorrow and loss is also a responsive speech, and a form of celebration.
Whitman's Curious, Particular Life
I haven't much to say here of the remainder, except that the personal care and expert celebration of Whitman's life reveals the large space he occupies in Hyde's heart. His tragic homosexual escapades, his weirdness about blurring mentorship with romance, and his beauty of spirit. I'm not as taken with his being, but I understand that feeling.
I felt something similar to this while reading Ralph Barton Perry's biography of William James. I read it initially only to learn more about William, and was a bit sigh-y at the fact the first few chapters were such exhaustive accounts of his father, Henry James Sr. But then, over the course of the pages, I ended up deeply empathetic towards this man. He was sort of an amateur Christian philosopher that lacked any real intellectual talent, but never stopped banging his head at the wall giving sermons and writing bad papers, all of which were passionate and emotional but didn't really ultimately make any sense. Despite this, he was extremely charismatic and his aura made his home a place where elite thinkers like Emerson ended up having dinner constantly. He was full of fierce love for his family that he would express to him poetically and sensuously constantly, just showering his children and his wife with words of affection. I fell in love with this dude that I had no idea about, like I do when I watch a movie blind and end up totally immersed in a world I knew nothing about a second ago. Therein the power of that intrinsic valuation, the way poetic attention and care preserves the particulars that would be lost by logos, the infectiousness of love.
When you love anything, you want to fill your consciousness with it. You want to affirm its existence. You feel that it is good that it should be in the world and be what it is. You want other people to look at it and enjoy it too. You want to look at it again and again. You want to know it, to know it better and better, and you want other people to do the same.
- John MacMurray, Reason and Emotion (p. 42)
Finally,the moment where Whitman breaks character and becomes a hang:
thanks for the respite, gay rage
Comments
D.S Films
I have finally finished this chapter! I did enjoy it, but it is very, very long. I appreciated the ideas that 'nothing can be created or destroyed' means that they can be gifts to one another. Decay and entropy leads to new life. Like compost being messy but essential, and the grass growing over graves. It sounds like he lived a lonely life, but I admired his commitment to the soldiers and was glad he found love and peace within the trees and nature. Plunging head-first into death instinct to look back up at everything.
Halley
I have to admit... I actually really enjoyed this chapter, reading on the floormat outside in the company of my pokeweed plant, smoking mullein and doodling poetry as the elderberries ripened and summer started to fade to autumn. I found this chapter (and the foreword which set it up) especially beautiful and evocative. I'm not here to praise or defend Whitman-the-man, but rather how Hyde translated his highly descriptive style of poetry through the story of his life and works to connect the gift of artistic inspiration with a mystical understanding. it felt like a way of looking into the artistic spirit through the example of an artist who explicitly struggled with the very issues Hyde wanted to illustrate, and I care less about the artist as a person than the meaning Hyde was able to synthesize out of his life's works. ~~~ just a few quotes from the foreword to start with- on the artist as a vessel: "an essential portion of the artist's labor is not creation so much as invocation. part of the work cannot be made, it must be received..." "and we cannot have this gift except by creating within ourselves that 'begging bowl' to which the gift is drawn." "bestowal creates that empty place into which new energy may flow." on the necessity of artistic expression: "the gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison." (Ginsberg) "so long as the gift is not withheld, the creative spirit will remain a stranger to the economies of scarcity." "just as treating nature's bounty as a gift ensures the fertility of nature, so to treat the products of the imagination as gifts ensures the fertility of the imagination." it makes sense if you see yourself and god as one and the same. ~~~ "the gift is lost in self-consciousness." "to count, measure, reckon value, or seek the cause of a thing is to step outside the circle, to cease being "all of a piece" with the flow of gifts and become, instead, one part of the whole reflecting upon another part." you can't think of yourself as an actor playing a part- you have to imagine yourself as the character, and if you act like you believe it, then the audience will believe it; and then as it becomes the shared reality, you are that character. a singular expression of a shared fantasy, making the imagined real by enacting it time and again. imagination exists outside of linear time- that which is not yet real but could be or will be, or should be but isn't, or always is. there are "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." what Hyde describes as bios-life and zoë-life I also know as zahiri and batini- the interior world and the external world- that which is individual and embodied versus the spirit that survives the destruction of its vessels. art is a way of bridging these. ~~~ Hyde begins by asking, to whom does the artist address the work? "a spirit who gives the artist the initial substance of his art and to whom, in return, he dedicates the fruits of his labor.." Whitman represents this myth, and translates it into poetry. the initial gift is what is bestowed upon the self, and we must usually labor with it. the second gift is the ability to do labor; to realize the gift. "the artist's gift refines the materials of perception or intuition that have been bestowed upon them; the gift increases as passage through the self." the third gift is the finished work, that which can be shared and experienced by others. the artist makes something higher than what they were given and offers it out. this is a paradox of doing art- to create, you must first be receptive. You must make yourself a receptacle, that which receives- only then can you create. It reminds me of the 'artist dates' from the artist's way and feeding that well of creativity, or Dewey's insistence on understanding and building upon the historical precedent of a medium as a basis for creating and evaluating objectively good art. creation comes from relationship, art from relationship with world. "this is the touch of my lips to yours... this is the murmur of yearning." ~~~ I'm having a hard time with the analysis which separates art from god, especially because in my religious tradition the spiritual leaders are all poets, the religious texts poems and songs, the teachings cloaked in metaphor. "to be enthusiastic originally meant to be possessed by a god or inspired by a divine afflatus." for me, god can be explained best by metaphor and poetry. the universe in a leaf, a universe of meaning in a word, the ocean in a drop. "the enthusiast waits for a sensation of truth." Whitman as an enthusiast made sense to me on a personal level of spiritual understanding. his is a personal, embodied relationship with god, with the world. there is no intermediary with the divine, which is understandably threatening to the societal structures that be. "cash exchange is to gift exchange what reason is to enthusiasm." the artist sacrifices for the art like the aşık for their love of god- becomes consumed by it, as if a madness- lives in such a way that allows for deeply seeing. the artist is subsumed by where their attentions lie so as to reflect this sliver of reality, their way of seeing, window of truth, back into the world. an act of service in service to something greater. ~~~ I want to attempt to push back on some of the pushback this chapter has been getting. I see Whitman as a vehicle to talk about poetry and poetry as vehicle to talk about art; sometimes, a surrogate for art itself. Dewey and even Postman exalt literature as the highest form of art, best able to communicate with its materials, symbols laden with preformed meaning. (visualization from my notes on art as experience: https://imgur.com/a/ypkJhs0) as the most compact and expansive expression of literature then, is poetry the most quintessential form of art? I'm not even sure if I agree that there is such a thing, but this is a much more interesting question to me than how much prestige we give to a singular poet. if one insists on categorizing, where does one draw the line? is poetry the initial gift itself, or the shared translation of it? who's to say my life's not poetry? my thoughts before they spill out on the page? unintended serendipities under a discerning gaze? who am I to call myself a poet? but then, who else? let's not try to constrain poetry by some definition, or impose limitations on its subject-matter. by describing seemingly mundane things, Whitman is chasing a more profound meaning in the subtext (as Hyde interprets to us); illuminating the unnoticed, making familiar things special by investing attention. Whitman's style reminded me of a deep listening type of meditation, where you just listen and notice and observe the sounds around you without judgement or preference. I was inspired to use this as a starting point for writing lately, when I had a pretty pen and paper in front of me but didn't have something particular to say- I'd just write what I noticed around me and the words would flow from there and blossom into something only I could write at that particular place and time in the world, illuminating an experience unique but made of universal stuff. the compact expression of a singular possibility. It works with drawing too- once you start sketching some unassuming thing, you begin to inadvertently notice more about it as it reveals itself under a directed attention. I often feel this tension between presence- noticing, listening, being ok with everything as it is, and striving- pushing forward, growth, stretching outwards, wanting to better. this restless tendency towards change comes most naturally, unwillingly even, but the presence in stillness takes more effort. like an underdeveloped muscle. more challenging, higher reward. things that cannot be understood otherwise. there are times for talking and times to listen. it is often in the one that comes less easily where the work is to be done, where there is more to be gained. listening, listing, noticing, presence; honing attention to better participate. being a conduit of divine poetry. not to define poetry, but to recognize it in new ways. to see it in the mess of city excitement, heap'd stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.
