I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
In The Gift, Lewis Hyde writes of the labor that must precede the sharing of true artistic gifts using the shoemaker and the elves as a guiding parable:
Most artists early on find themselves in the position of the shoemaker on the first night—a talent has appeared, but it’s naked, immature. Ahead lie the years of reciprocal labor which precede the release of an accomplished gift. To take a literary example, George Bernard Shaw underwent a typical period of retreat and maturation before he emerged as a writer. The young Shaw started a career in business and felt the threat not of failure but of success. “I made good in spite of myself, and found, to my dismay, that Business, instead of expelling me as the worthless imposter I was, was fastening upon me with no intention of letting go.” He was twenty. “In March, 1876, I broke loose,” he says. He left family, friends, business, and Ireland. He spent about eight years in absentia, writing constantly (five novels, published only toward the end of his life—and then with a note by Shaw asking the buyer not to read them).
Hyde shares comments from Erik Erikson on Shaw:
Potentially creative men like Shaw build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, last but not least, nutritionally, in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden. Often, when the weeds are dead, so is the garden. At the decisive moment, however, some make contact with a nutriment specific for their gifts. For Shaw, of course, this gift was literature.
This need not happen only when you are a young woman, or a young man. I am doing it now.
I’m not eliminating nutrition but what does he mean by that anyway? Perhaps too much exposure to other people’s ideas and creations?
Hyde continues:
For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world.
He says “the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time” but the untalented will as well. Anyway, the point of the retreat to those Bohemias is to cultivate the talent, to develop it, to call it forth.