Love and Debt

I received this email from J this morning:

Thank you for your lovely phone message yesterday. I responded in kind from bed last night, but the missive mysteriously disappeared when I attempted to send it. I am still looking for it, but it remains fugitive.

You are very generous with compliments and words of appreciation. I fear I am a bit astringent in this respect. I suppose that a stubborn masculine pride gets in my way; to express gratitude is to infer need.

I wrote back:

Dear J:

Thanks for this.

I like to compliment people. Sometimes they interpret it as some sort of fishing on my part, as though my generosity were not generous, but needy. I think they are afraid to be indebted to me. To receive the gift is to become obliged. This is the logic of many cultures, at least. To acknowledge a gift--a compliment is a gift--is to admit to a need for it. And we don't like to be indebted, to need.

I see your point, though. You know that you like to be complimented.

Or is it: we imagine that somehow we can escape the emotional economy, that we somehow exist as independent generators, producers, of emotional wealth, and don't need to get what we need, to have our needs met, by exchanging, giving and taking, buying and selling, trucking, it used to be called, with one another? The beauty, the mystery of the emotional Exchange (as in the marketplace) is that the feeling of being valuable is infinitely produceable without cost, it can be generated endlessly but only through interaction (commerce is just another word for conversation and also for sex), through the give-and-take between people who honor their interconnection and commitment to one another. Doris Lessing called this the Substance-Of-We-Feeling (SWOF), but she didn't quite comprehend it as an economy.

What am I talking about when I say that our feelings of well being are generated in an economy, in exchange with one another, but not the kind of economy in which someone gains only at the expense of another? I hope to make this clear. Well-being is Love--the Substance of We Feeling--the material experience, sensation, of being loved and being able to love. First: this feeling/sensation/experience is a substance because it takes place at the atomic level, the ground of our being. Second: this feeling/sensation/experience comes about only between ourselves in communication with one another. (Yes, a hermit can experience this but she or he is going to be experiencing a relationship with some Other, either in an I-Thou relationship [note to self: read Buber and comprehend him this time] or in a different kind of mystical relationship). We can't generate the Substance of We Feeling in isolation. And we cannot live without it. Human babies die in isolation; human beings reared in profound emotional deprivation do not function well. You know this. This boils down to the simple truth at the heart of so many religious traditions: we need one another.

We often talk about good feeling, that sense of security, of self-worth, as something that ought to come from within, as though we were, each of us, independent engines of value, generating away in isolation from one another, or fountains infinitely pouring out from within ourselves light, peace and well-being. The Buddha is often mistakenly interpreted as advocating something like this--self-actualizing, automatic enlightenment that pours out of us, each one of us an burning sun. This is not entirely wrong--and I'd like to study Buddhism a lot more to grasp this better. Christians would interpret the burning sun within as the Spirit, as God, an energy source that comes from somewhere else, outside the self, who alone has value and who alone can give value. The reason that many people turn away from Christianity towards Buddhism is that they understand that well-being, worth, comes not from some extraterrestrial entity but rather from ourselves because we are in ourselves infinitely valuable. But we are infinitely valuable because we can love one another, because that is what we are, essentially, is what we can do: be loved and love one another. The Buddha understood this--his simple message is to have compassion--love--for ourselves and for one another.

The Substance of We Feeling is not simply the sense of ourselves as a collective, as an infinite and infinitely complex communion of Being in the universe, an incomprehensibly vast eco-system, but also, between ourselves as human beings, a sensation that we generate together in relation to one another. Some of us have a greater and others have a lesser store of it. I suppose I am thinking of emotional well-being as a kind of wealth that we generate, and that we give and take from one another. And this giving and taking creates a web of obligation between us, of debts that we have to one another. These debts bind us to one another.

Where does theidea of debt and our indebtedness to one another as a painful, unpleasant state of being come from? My study indicates that it derives from the Judeo-Christian interpretation of the covenant between God and Abraham and again between God and the people after the Flood--in which God commits to the people and the people commit to God. The Covenant is conceived as an economy in which there is only one source of energy, one source of value--that lies outside of the people and in God alone. So, whatever goodness that is received is to be understood as coming from God and as something that has to be repaid. Furthermore, the myth of the Fall is mixed up with this covenant so that the idea of repayment is perceived as an extended punishment.

The Parable of the Talents in the New Testament further interprets this debt as on that has to be repaid with interest, with more than what was received. If God alone is the source of value, then this is an interest that God alone can generate, but which the human being, condemned to labor throughout time, must labor to produce--and for whom? For God, the taskmaster, the overlord, the landowner, the corporate baron who sets his workers to generating profits that belong, in principle, fundamentally, to him alone (because they derive from him alone, from his ingenuity, his genius, his prior claim to all the value that is). The debt then becomes one that humanity is perpetually laboring to honor. Humanity, conceived as evil (according to John Milton, to be evil is to be in lack, in deprivation of the good, which is God) as unable to generate anything good from within themselves. They therefore continually fall short, and further into debt, from which God alone can redeem them. Debt, the state of having received a value that derives not from the creature but rather from the creator, is an experience of perpetual, miserable obligation, worthlessness, intransigence, truancy (the word truant derives from the Middle English for vagabond, idler).

Early modern English debtors went to prison. And early modern Christians frequently referred to their sojourn on earth as a period of imprisonment, or bondage, enslavement to sin from which God along could free them. Augustine spread the nasty notion that the body itself was a prison. Perverse sorts like John Donne got into the idea and begged God to fetter, batter, beat, and rape them out of themselves, emptying them of self--conceived as worthlessness, lack, absence of value--so that they could mystically unify with what they believed to be fullness, worth, an enslavement in "Christian liberty" which was the whole and utter recognition of their radical worthlessness and total indebtedness to an extraterrestial, incomprehensibly greater being. To be in debt was "good" insofar as it was a spiritual condition that involved renouncing any concept of worth in the self or in being in this life and in this body and this world. But it was also "bad" and painful because it involved acknowledging that this self and this being and this body and this world had absolutely no value. To be was to be in debt because being itself was bad.


How much easier we would all feel if we simply recognized that we are ourselves the source of the good and that the good is something that we create in relationships of love between ourselves! That we are all in debt to one another but that debt does not require that we conceive ourselves as empty of value and mere recipients of worth, but rather as agents of value and worth which we produce together in conversation and commerce with one another. When we make love to one another we generate value, the Substance of We Feeling. We also procreate, make more of ourselves, we increase and substantially expand the potential for the Substance of We Feeling, Love, to grow amongst ourselves? When we give to one another, to our beloved partners and children and families and friends and neighbors, we refine the web of generosity but also obligation between ourselves. We creates bonds, which are also debts, obligations to repay and to increase, to generate profits, Love itself, the profits and proliferations of love and well-being, when we give to and receive from one another.

So, it is good to be generous because giving generates the good; but in order to do so it has to be received in some way. And more good is generated when the recipient acknowledges the gift not necessarily by returning the favor in kind but by doing something generous in the world, either by expressing compassion for the self, which is loving but tender and vulnerable, or by expressing compassion for another. To express compassion, to have compassion, to own it, to claim it as a property, propre, proper to and of the self.

So, forgive me for pointing this out (to ask you to forgive me, of course is itself to acknowledge my obligation to you, my bond to you), but when you write that you are "astringent" with compliments and affection, don't you mean "stingy"? You hold back, you hoard, you are miserly--not because this is your true nature but because you are afraid to acknowledge your indebtedness to me and to people in general, your need for the Substance of We Feeling, for Love, that you need to live? You are forgetting that this is a profit, an increase in well-being that can only be generated in exchange, the exchange across the synapse. And when you fail to acknowledge your need and are stingy you suffer because you deprive yourself (and me) of what we both need and can create only together.

I didn't go to art class today. I didn't feel like being underground, for one, and wanted to be here, in my backyard, with myself and my cats (with whom I also exist in this is commerce, this commercial economy I'm talking about here), painting--or creating an expression of myself in the world.