Material 3: The Gift Must Move

Brendan Kerr

We’re not writing anything new these days. When people manage to get together they talk about wood. This is the next age of tools; these are short days of mechanisms. We do not build with paper. The corn to run our cars does not sprout in earth watered with ink.

A vegetable seed company in Maine had the right idea. It quadrupled its profits with faith in dirt and the green wind of paranoid self-reliance. This morning it had to hire new workers; kids playing kickball in the street yesterday are today writing address labels and drafting invoices. They get ten dollars an hour. Five years ago men said innovation, then they said (desperately) implementation. Today men watch silently from their couches while Ohio State is eliminated in first round and their women lay fingers on forearms at the market, confidentially whispering, “Plant this, it may grow.”

The sky goes unseen.

Once upon a time gifts gained worth, passed from island to island in the South Seas off of New Guinea. Nobody got back market value for what they gave and clinging too long to whatever charm happened upon you earned you the label of “hard.” Hard only plays on lonely plains. In the tropics, when gifts didn’t move they clotted. The only profit that mattered was the bond to be gained, the labor of gratitude. Wise people scattered bits of themselves wildly, that they may perish and bring increase.

But then the mighty ships! Great, reeking tugs full of golden slime (the match for no trinket) landed on their shores. “How do I trade with you, stranger?” Men cried. “I only know these shells, my daughter’s ankles, the sweaty tuba of my wife’s ear. You have arrived and I am afraid. I break the bond with you because you, stranger, I do not know.”

They broke one bond so that within they might flourish. And they called this break interest.

Back home, inside, the children gave ever more readily. Anxiously! How each present circled! A whirlpool of goodwill eddied sometimes so fierce that they had to duck the flotsam. Even the soft finger picked lute played by one’s cousin hit too hard. In solitude perhaps one might have loved it, but this exhaustion was something new. This exhaustion came on without work. Just knowing what’s out there, confusing worth for value.

I guess it all seemed a bit frantic, them all the while knowing that at their borders – those filthy new lines that reeked of burning – their emissaries stood with checkbooks agape, frowning at percentages (how, privately, they wished they could call them slaves!). What they charged they had not yet named. They quantified by feel, the men of that first department of defense, alone under cold, dark trees, watching, depleting, rehearsing their art.

Then Calvin arrived and named it Usury. He told them no. All men are brothers. They must trade fairly with strangers.
This crowbar opened their ribs, loosing what they took from giving. Now the men with ink pens at their borders, the women with sticks at their drums, the children wrestling at their firesides all beat a rhythm that anchored the conflict deep within. What had once been organized and kept apart by the society is now, for each of us, a private battle.

No more, Christian, will you trade with strangers, for now the stranger is you. No more, Christian, will you sing with lovers. Now the lover is you.

Stranger-lover, alone: write.

Scatter yourself. There is increase in the gifting. On the South Sea Islands off of the coast of New Guinea they call it Kulu, the property that perishes. The Maori call it hau, the spirit that nourishes. I started this column because I wanted to talk about the responsibility a writer faces when telling another’s stories. I wanted to take a pick-axe to the coal hump that is the way we write about our own lives. I wanted to fathom the imagination. I had it in mind that I might warn against the elliptical style. This column was meant to be a proponent of the hardest work possible: the deepest digging, the tensest muscle. I wanted to offer it as a friend to anyone with the courage for the toil. And I wanted to do all of this while speaking of nothing but craft.

This spring, frankly, it seems absurd for me to tell anyone how to write. Please, think hard, be brave, surprise yourself. If the sky is invisible, look harder.

 

Brendan Kerr comes to Pittsburgh via Elkins, West Virginia and Brooklyn, New York. He is currently working on revision of his novel, The Uses of Talent. He lives in Polish Hill.