REGISTER

A Visit with Two of Lewis Hyde’s Classics

Join us as we review Lewis Hyde’s work in preparation for his February 20th appearance at PZI’s Zen Luminaries evening with Jon Joseph.

KOAN:

The storehouse of treasures opens of itself.
You may take them and use them any way you wish.

—PZI Miscellaneous Koans (Eihei Dogen’s Fukanzazengi)

In his classic work, The Gift; How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, Lewis Hyde asks us to recognize the true value of creative labor—the work of artists, poets, and teachers—which is essentially given in a gift exchange. A gift exchange establishes connections and cohesion in society; a modern commodity exchange supports a society of divided strangers. But what is the mysterious source of the “gifted state?”

Hyde:

“An essential portion of any 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 perhaps by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that ‘begging bowl’ to which the gift is drawn …

“A gift exchange is an erotic commerce, joining self and other, so the gifted state is an erotic state: in it we are sensible of, and participate in, the underlying unity of things.

“Readers are usually struck by [Walt] Whitman’s bolder, more abstract assertions of unity—’I am not the poet of goodness only/I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also’—but the real substance of the state Whitman has entered lies in the range of his attention and affections.”

I…do not call the tortoise unworthy because she
is not something else,
And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet
Trills pretty well to me,
And the look of the bay mare shames stillness out of me.

—Walt Whitman

In Trickster Makes This World; Mischief, Myth and Art, it is the trickster—Hermes, Coyote, Raven—who is the change master.

Hyde:

“The point of the trickster is to get trade going, to get liveliness and flow going…the coyote loves to steal things, likes bright things, but there is a playfulness about it. It is about play…This figure comes out of polytheistic traditions and has sacred functions, about keeping the cosmos alive and lively …

“The trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish—right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead—and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction.”

Join us for a koan, meditation, dharma talk and conversation.
Register to participate. All are welcome.

—Jon Joseph