#padeep

 I once watch a movie of Christoper Nolan that makes me think about something. Is love just a social utility? This idea sticks on my mind like a parasite, impossible to eradicate.

In the age where everything is a post- (postmodernism, post-industrialism, post-structuralism and post-colonialism etc.) I’m longing for an answer or just maybe an explanation.

Let us not stray on the infinity of love. I’m talking about this: Mother's Love. Unconditional. Unprejudiced. Unbiased. As Mary Hollinsteiner has said, "nothing [the child] can do during its lifetime can make up for what [the mother] has done for it."[1]

True enough especially on how this [love] effect the dynamic relationship of mother and child.

The intrinsic inequality of debt relationships seems benign where a mother and her child are concerned.[2]

Studies of Tagalog reciprocity have stressed the inequality built into debt transactions. The hierarchy that is formed by indebtness is based on the sensed incommensurability between the gift that is prototypical debt of this sort is the debt one owes to one’s mother. One has an utang na loob to one's mother (and never in reverse) by the virtue of having received from her the unexpected gift of life. It is assumed that one will never be able to repay this debt in full but instead will make partial payments in the forms of respect (paggalang).[3]

The idiom of utang na loob and hiya riveted our attention not on the pleasure values of love just like the westerners thought or do but on the discursive machinery of love as a means of contracting and extending ties of reciprocity with those whom we love, even after death.

That’s why we do things to make our mother proud, as a payment. Failure to do this, one’s daughter or son is leading to an outburst of hiya. The absence of hiya (walang hiya) shows your loob, an empty, hollow and all-but-void space that could offer no reciprocal payment. In the absence of one’s loob, it echoes endlessly until it reached the outside (labas) that is what can be seen. It can literally be used as a reference for others to measure our loob and attached values to it.

Even when one’s mother is gone, we still continue to pay our debt. The debt transactions can be also perceived in the dimensions of time and space. We can assumed that it transcends higher dimensions. Our loob and our mother’s loob, connected with this intangible but powerful love. Even death don’t have the power to cut this connection. When one’s mother died, her body is gone but her loob stays with her child forever. And for the child, his body remains but his loob was with his mother forever.

For thousands of years, we dedicate arts, literature and even lives for love, just for social utility? We still loved the dead people who are dear to us, where is the social utility in that? Maybe we are too consumed by our narcissism and self-made stupidity that we forget what our whole life is still on the process of paying our debt. It’s never too late to say I Love You to our mother.

[1] Hollnsteiner, “Reciprocity,” p. 76.

[2] Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, p. 129.