from Chapter 8, The Commerce of the Creative Spirit:
"Let us begin at the beginning, with the question of the sources of an artist's work. 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. ... there are few artists who have not had this sense that some element of their work comes to them from a source they do not control. ... Having accepted what has been given to him - either in the sense of inspiration or in the sense of talent - the artist often feels compelled, feels the desire, to make the work and offer it to an audience. The gift must stay in motion. ... The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison.
"So long as the gift is not withheld, the creative spirit will remain a stranger to the economics of scarcity. ... the gift is not used up in use. To have painted a painting does not empty the vessel out of which the paintings come. On the contrary, it is the talent which is not in use that is lost or atrophies, and to bestow one of our creations is the surest way to invoke the next.
"The fruit of the creative spirit is the work of art itself, and if there is a first fruits ritual for artists, it must either be the willing 'waste' of art (in which one is happy to labor all day with no hope of production, nothing to sell, nothing to show off, just fish thrown back into the sea as soon as they are caught) or else, when there is a product, it must be this thing we have already seen, the dedication of the work back towards it's origins. ... Such is the dedication implicit in the work of anyone who feels his creativity to have been informed by a tradition.
"The imagination has the power to assemble the elements of our experience into coherent, lively wholes: it has a gift. An artist who wishes to exercise the esemplastic power of the imagination must submit himself to what I shall be calling a 'gifted state,' one in which he is able to discern the connections inherent in his materials and give the increase, bring the work to life. ... Once an inner gift is realized, it may be passed along, communicated to the audience. And sometimes this embodied gift - the work - can reproduce the gifted state in the audience that receives it. Let us say that the 'suspension of disbelief' by which which we become receptive to a work of the imagination is in fact belief, a momentary faith by virtue of which the spirit of the artist's gift may enter and act upon our being.
"As is the case with any other circulation of gifts; the commerce of art draws each of its participants into a wider self. The creative spirit moves in a body or ego larger than that of any single person. Works of art are drawn from, and their bestowal nourishes, those parts of our being that are not entirely personal, parts that derive from nature, from the group and the race, from history and tradition, and from the spiritual world."
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