An Industry of Gifts

I had reason to take a long drive recently, down the length of California from the Bay back to my home in Los Angeles. I made the mistake of taking the 5, saving me some time but the route took me through the flat monotony of the central valley. An ecological wonder, but a tedious drive. Out of podcasts, tired of music, I put on the audio book of Robin Wall Kimmerer's The Serviceberry on the recommendation of my partner.

It is a marvelous little read. A contemplation on gift economies and what we can learn from the natural world around us. It proposes a different way of being in the world – less extractive, less consumptive. More focused on what we need and less what we can acquire. Kimmerer's is a utopian vision. Resistant to colonial ideas of not just us, but how we see the natural world. She sees nature less as a justification for our worst instincts (red in tooth and claw, etc.) and more as an intricate dance of give and take. Of mutual appreciation and communal sustenance. It's a beautiful vision. One I've believed in for a long time even if the world has made it hard to remember that.

My path to gift economies strangely started in college – in a pursuit of an academic interest in what my theory friend derisively called "stories." But I also studied theory even if I was stubbornly committed to actually liking novels. I brought both of these interests to bear on an optional thesis project focused on Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. It feels absurd to still be talking about a paper I wrote twenty years ago, but it was such a foundational moment for me. Seventy pages of exploration and analysis of a novel I loved like I loved breathing. I can no longer make a defensible argument about the subject of this paper. The citations, the theoretical underpinnings, texts I barely understood at the time whose intricacies – all of that has long sinced vanished from my brain. But the core ideas stayed with me and formed the bedrock of my understanding of the world, of language, of communication.

The basic idea is this. Language is a gift. We offer words up to each other with no logical reason that they should be understood by the other. Words must cross an infinitely vast gap of understanding from one consciousness to the other. Leap across the space between the signifier and the signified. Be offered and received by another with different experience, different consciousness, different perspective. Language washes up on the shores of our mind like the drowned Phoenician, desperate for someone to understand, to accept, to respond.

The novel is full of these moments. Moments of signifiers rendered baffling and incomprehensible by the experience of being alive. Memorably there is a description of a crowded street scene as we flow from consciousness to consciousness in the crowd as they try to decipher a piece of skywriting. We never find out what it means.

Later, a woman in a park emerges as if from the earth itself to sing a song that is unparsable to the listener, much less us the reader.

The refrain "Fear no more the heat of the sun," echoes throughout the book like a tolling of the bell that marks the hour. Shakespeare being the ultimate signifier in our culture that we all map our own, personal meanings onto. An object, a story out of history that remains resonant even though the daily lived experience of a 21st century person would be unrecognizable to the original intended audience.

All of these moments rise, through a kind of magical, paradoxical, mystical connection bringing minds together across time and space. Meaning is lost between two people face to face in a garden. But meaning is found in the moments of death as a soldier, destroyed by the experience of war, throws himself from a window onto a set of iron railings. And across the city, Clarissa Dalloway looks out her window and reflects on the same feeling, the same words as poor Septimus Smith.

Gift theory forms the core of this thought. I read Marcel Mauss's The Gift in preparation alongside Derrida and Saussure and Lacan. I read reams of Woolf's own work and thoughts on mysticism and language. All of this formed a core understanding of how language works. And therefore how people work. How we understand each other and love each other. Connection is impossible and yet, it persists. All experience shows that we can offer up our words and they will be received and returned.

The core of the idea of a gift is the lack of obligation, the lack of immediate exchange. A gift is given without expectation. It is offered to the world, often to one specific person. My neighbor needs something so I give it to him. I receive, from a friend, a dinner that they pick up the tab for. My partner brings me flowers. I recommend a book to a stranger. All of these are gifts of a sort. What I put in the world I receive, in unexpected, unlooked for ways.

I also live in the world, though, so of course my life is dominated by the logic of exchange. Of extracting value from labor. Of giving currency for goods. I charge artists for my labor. I demand remuneration for their work in turn. I negotiate, sometimes unkindly, and demand on their behalf. I love this work. I'm good at it.

I don't know what a publishing industry of gifts looks like. Someone recently showed me a project from Robin Sloan seeking a better way of publishing ebooks. Lightweight, extensible, free from surveillance and intrusive DRM, entirely outside of the existing walled gardens that the industry demands – that it craves out of a need for extraction. Gifting is inherent in the model of the Perfect Edition as Sloan calls it. An ebook that can be given to a friend as easily as I can a physical, printed book. A mode of distributing digital zines as easily as I can a stack of paper stapled together. But still something that can belong to a person, something that an artist can benefit from, something that has value. Because friction is important, even in a gifting economy. Work can be care, if we think about it differently.

I'm not proud of my reaction to the Perfect Edition when it was shown to me. The person I was talking to had a gorgeously produced printed zine (or perhaps better thought of as a broadsheet). A single piece of paper cleverly folded, beautiful in its aesthetic design, with a QR code to the same material in a digital form. But I reflexively said "this will never work." I could not let go of twenty years of publishing experience. Of five years spent at a startup trying to build a better ebook and failing over and over again. I could not see past the logic of extraction, the need for a walled garden, the entrenched forces of industry that I am embedded in.

But, still, I yearn for a better solution even if I don't believe we'll see one in our lifetime.

This newsletter is free and will always be free. Some readers choose to give me money. I view the words here as a gift, offered freely. I view the payments I receive as a gift offered, although I recognize some of those givers may not think of it that way. It costs money to host this service. Ghost, my platform, charges an annual fee unlike Substack which takes a portion of earnings. But Ghost is not platforming fascists and white supremacists so I am happy to pay that fee out of pocket. I make less than I spend on this, and that's okay with me.

The Writing Excuses podcast gives me a great deal of joy to work on. I view the work we do there as a kind of gift as well. It's free to listen to, although these days you might have to wade through a lot of ads to get to the content. I wish we didn't have those, but there are even more costs to hosting a podcast. 

Nonetheless, I think of that work, the teaching side of what I do, as something I can offer for little to no pay. It's a joy to do this work and the returns are unexpected, unlooked for, and unrelated. I hope we can all find ways to put gifts into the world for each other, for our communities, and for our loved ones.

I think community is a difficult word. A fraught word, attenuated by technology until it has almost no meaning. A connection between people can exist across digital mediums, but it is strained, pressured by distance and especially by scale. But perhaps, the path to finding one, is to let go of expectations. To make community less about need and more about giving. I don't have answers about how to make a better internet. To make a better community of professionals, of artists, of friends.

I just know you should read The Serviceberry and you should get it from your library or your local indie. And when you're done you should make a gift of it.