LOVE AS ATTACHMENT AND POSSESSION
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@Indiana.edu,
“peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com
December 7 (Pearl Harbor Day, my Grandmother Pauline’s
birthday), 2013
As memories of my mom return, I
recall how bewildering, even painful it was that it was for her to let me kiss
her on the lips—how tightly she compressed her lips when she did. I recall her stiffening when I hugged her
until pretty late in her life. Today, “This
American Life” (thisamericanlife.org) focused on attachment and childrearing. In the opening segment, they recalled how in
1950, the president of my mom and dad’s primary professional organization, the
American Psychological Association, had been among experts admonishing parents
that open physical affection would damage their children, rather than preparing
them for the vicissitudes of life. I
imagine my mom tried so very hard to follow that “scientific” advice. I never doubted she loved me. She taught me to share her belief that God is
love. I came to recognize how hard she
must have steeled herself against crossing what she was taught to believe was
an incest taboo. She devoted
considerable attention to exposing me to the learning of others and attending
to my reading, writing, and most profoundly, attending to manners and protocol
in my relations (which extended to the importance of saying ma’am and sir when
in and around her Louisiana homeland). I
came to see her manner of attachment as a balancing act between love that
connected us, and self-possession. Even
now among condolences, as from her nursing staff, I hear what a gracious lady
she was. As part of that self-possession, she remained
acutely sensitive to my feelings and respectful of my beliefs (albeit critical
of my claims to knowledge); as an act of self-will, she encouraged and
celebrated my intellectual and emotional autonomy.
I’m sorry my mother carried the
cultural burden of refraining from emotional and physical displays (except with
my dad when presumably she thought I wasn’t listening). Happily, she brought my dad with her, who
taught me that a man could kiss, hug and be vulnerable, and loved and respected
all the same. And both were professional
iconoclasts (in the name of science and logic).
In so doing, as autonomous actors rather than a monolith, they struck
their own balances between self-possession and possession of others, me
included. That left me with considerable
room to turn my life and understanding of our lives into my own balancing act
between separation from and attachment to others.
Trying to balance
self-possession and possession of others’ lives is the central problem of
social control, as individuals and in groups.
The legal word for possession is “ownership.” From owning our own behavior as duty to
others, to ownership rights as against others, whatever we possess is called “property.”
In his 1957 speech “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions,” Mao Zedong
contrasted the correct handling of conflicts “between the enemy and ourselves,”
with the correct handling of conflicts “among the people.” Among the people, Mao embraced the Chinese
tradition of mediation. Law, defining
property and rights of ownership and wrongdoing, was properly reserved for
handling disputes with one’s enemies.
The law had created a class of landlords in China who presumed to own
the working lives of their workers.
The history of the Great Leap
Forward and later Cultural Revolution that followed Mao’s speech suggest that
using the law to destroy property creates what Milovan Djilas termed a “new
class.” Proprietorship may be diverted
but not destroyed. Personally and
socially, the human quest to gain trust and a sense of safety and security is
an intergenerational experiment in adjusting our boundaries between
accommodating conflict and carrying through one’s sense of duty—of doing what
needs getting done for or to oneself and in turn, to others. The balance resolves to one between love as
empathy, and love as possession, of ownership, of control over oneself and
others.
Buddhists are said to preach
non-attachment, but I don’t think that is quite true. Rather, in a Dalai Lama or a Thich Nhat-hanh,
and in the story of Buddha’s life, I see a struggle to free attachment from
possession both of others and by others.
I infer that violence—enforcement of property claims—is transformed as a
sense of ownership gets taken out of the attachment we call love.
I have been a bit perplexed by heartfelt
consolations I have received for losing my mother last week, as curious as
anything about how I can feel no loss at her death—in fact to feel a burst of
attachment to her in the moment. I never
possessed her; now as always, I live and learn from her always loving ever
changing presence. That love is a force
flowing through me—and between me and myself—that will not be possessed. Therein lies the trust and security I enjoy
in my relationship with her. Therein lies
the trust, safety and security I enjoy in all my relations. Love becomes what I call “peacemaking” when
it loses all sense of ownership. Like
the copies of my parents’ rings Jill and I wear, attachment without possession has no
beginning or end. Love and peace--hal
