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A book I would like to recommend our group read parts of is Lewis Hyde's The Gift:  Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (NY: Random House, 1983).  [Anne and I have done some work with this text and another by Hyde.  I also wonder whether he would be a useful visitor to our group.  He and his work framed a conference at Bard that I helped plan a while back and that Anne and I shared in.]

Our last meeting -- together with these helpful posts by Hank and Bharath, and an earlier one by Bharath in which he wonders about the value of clarifying our distinct commitments to this group – have got me thinking about what Hyde writes about how gifts circulate in and help create and sustain cultures.  He says that the gift of artistic inspiration (akin to Stallybrass’s conception of inspiration) has to be awaited, ripened-into, merited, and graced in a way sharply different from the relatively predicatable, rational way we (try to) earn a living and calculate return for input.  Hyde doesn’t knock making a living, and in fact explains the origin of the book in his struggles to make a living as a poet.  But he argues that the world of art doesn’t work the same way as it does. 

Hyde also says that when it comes to other kinds of gifts – whether of materials that signify embrace, threshold, or recognition, or of teaching/mentoring, such as by a sponsor to a recently recovering person in Alcoholics Anonymous – their potency depends on their going out into uncertainty – not tit for tat style, but in their being given opening a new channel, and challenge, for the recipient to transform into him/hherself a giver of the gift, and also, possibly, to transform what is given.  So there are questions of mystery here (as with the grapes of the wine Paul gave us), of risk and not-knowing, of time (more risk), and change (more risk).   There are also matters of yielding rather than plotting. To me, a good Web forum works like one of Hyde’s gift cultures, and so does a good group, or class.