‘Because it creates gratitude or obligation, to willingly receive a gift is itself a form of generosity, it says: ‘I am willing to owe you one. Or in a more sophisticated gift culture, it says: ‘I am willing to be in the debt of the community’ (Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein)
I have just finally finished reading Sacred Economics. In the final chapters CE talks a lot about gift, the starting point from which I then came to approach this subject of debt, its shadow side. His reframing of debt – social debt – within communities as an essential operator to making them work in the fullest sense possible brings up so many relevant points to this project and my own experience that was it source.
This notion of being able to receive gifts fully -in the form of money or other help for survival at our most confronting moments as a family when it all crashed for us – when in a state of material powerlessness, without fear of being in obligation, is something that we have had to learn intensively over the last few years. One sentence resonated particularly with me:
As in infancy, periods of helplessness reconnect us to the principle of the gift’
I had the growing impression through the book that its author had been through some kind of personal crisis which had transformed his thinking, and this does in fact get revealed in the closing chapters. Like us, he and his family had to go through acute material loss and the generosity of those around them to survive. It feels to me that this experience -as well as his reaction as human being to the ecological and social change in a broader sense – has on some deep level informed, the lucidity and breadth of his perspective. I am sure many will totally take issue with his ideas, but to me the overall synthesis of his and others ideas into a roadmap forward is fresh and potentially life-changing. I identified with this drive I felt he had, that comes when one has nothing left to lose and arises from a deeper need to to use what one has left – in my case my own practice – and put it at the service of others. The notion of art as servitude is also something touched apon in that book and that I have been thinking about in relation to how I operate in relation to the Book of Debts – servant, guardian, scribe, conduit?
Gift and service are of course closely interlinked and there are many questions around how we define them both depending on our value system.
When I wake up feeling like I am using one of my creative ‘gifts’ fully in my everyday life, when in flows, it feels like a form of true service. Service to who? To myself? To future audiences /public? To art? To the idea, as an entity In itself? To God/The Universe/Everything?
However both the ideas in the book and the notion of service – and how this kind of art sits within them – are rooted in the idea of the interconnectedness of all things, the non-hierachical nature of the way human beings can truly relate, and in this sense do both gift and service become a kind of currency that just makes society work better ? Within that way of looking at the world, debt has the capacity to operate as a form of gratitude – confronting to consider and at odds with /eclipsed by so many of the visible ways debt seems to be operating in society that gives it a dark and often violent name, I thought.
Then I opened up my next book ‘Debt : The First 5000 years’ by David Graeber’ and first off is the Oxford English Dictionary definition:
Debt
Noun 1 a sum of money owed. 2. The state of owing money. 3. A feeling of gratitude for a favour or service.
This is something I also want to look at more closely as I widen the definition of debts that may allow for a broader range of entries into the Book…
