Your love is not like a faucet

Love is just like a faucet
it turns off and on
Love is like a faucet
It turns off and on
Sometimes when you think it’s on baby
It has turned off and gone

Billie Holiday
Fine and Mellow

Your love is like a faucet
You can turn it off and on

Albert King
Don’t Throw Your Love on Me So Strong

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

William Wordsworth
Tintern Abbey

We usually think that power, strength, and achievement in politics and the world of ideas—and sometimes even in love—come from an effort to impose oneself on the world or other people or from taking control over the course of life or, more generally, from activity. The romantic heroes we admire are those who rise to the occasion, take charge, create and shape the world round them, and bend other people to their will. I’ve been wondering, recently, whether this is quite right. Perhaps some of what we most want in life can only be achieve through receptivity or giving up any attempt to control the world or even from something that looks a little like, but it is not,  passivity.This occurred to me three times in the last week, in thinking about politics, intellectual life, and love.

Politics

It came to me first in thinking about politics, and in particular about the health care campaign. The last week or so has not been much fun for those of us pushing for robust progressive reform. It looks like we won’t win the public option although we will take a very substantial step forward in providing good health care for all. (Indeed, I think we will enact the most important legislative step towards social justice since Medicare in 1965.)

We are all frustrated and exhausted. And yet, at the same time, we have found the  energy to keep pushing forward. Sometimes that energy has seemed to me misdirected, as when progressives argue that we should kill this attempt to reform health care and start over. Most of the time, however, I know that the energy, and even the anger I see in our health care activists, in all the leaders and followers who have been part of this long campaign, is what has kept us going and made it possible to get this far. For the first time in my adult life—for the first time since the anti-war and environmental movements of the late 60s when I was thirteen or fourteen years old—I have felt that I’m part of a real movement of people who are rising to stand up for something deeply important to them.

I know how much we in HCAN, along with our coalition partners in labor unions, community groups, and other organizations, have done to create, shape and bring forth that movement. But I also know that for much of the last six or eight months, we have been riding a movement that has a life of its own. Indeed, at a crucial point in the campaign, in September, we took a giant step forward by listening closely to the movement. That’s when we started focusing again on the perfidy of the insurance companies and said that if the insurance companies win, we lose. That’s when we began to do all the anti-insurance company rallies and civil disobedience events that kept the public option and the rest of the legislation alive after the difficulties we had with the right-wingers in August. I know who made the decisions in HCAN to focus on the insurance industry. I was there when our field managers started talking about how to carry out the campaign. And I led the HCAN PA team that was among the first to carry out the plan. But I also know that, at each step of the way, the anger and frustration about insurance companies we were hearing from our activists helped lead us to adopt this campaign and shaped it in decisive ways.

So, while I’m frustrated now by some of the tension on the left over this legislation, I know that it is arising because of the strong movement we have been riding for so long. And that’s why I’ve been spending so much time lately trying to listen to and respond to what I’m hearing from our activists, neither denying the difficulties or disappointments we face nor focusing exclusively on what we won’t win as opposed to what we still can win. Right now HCAN leaders like myself are not so much shaping the movement as reacting to it. And it is stronger for that.

Intellectual Life

What I’ve seen in politics in the last few weeks I’ve been aware of in intellectual life for much longer. I was reminded of the importance of receptivity in intellectual life when a  friend of mine wrote on Facebook “wow, the light just went on.”

Light as a metaphor for understanding is very old. It goes far back beyond the Enlightenment, at least to Plato. But reading it on Facebook, I was struck by how we use the phrase both actively and, as my friend did, passively. Sometimes we work for enlightenment. But a light going is something that happens to us, not something we do.

Most often, we talk about enlightenment as an activity. We talk about the hard work that comes with interpreting a text or developing a new theory or inventing a new philosophical approach. And when we are talking about struggling to understand ourselves or our place in life, we are even more likely to point to the activity and energy we have to bring to what we are doing. (In talking about intellectual work I mean it quite broadly to encompass all serious thought, that about our own lives as well as about the world around us.)

Sometimes, however, we talk about the ideas in a more receptive way. We talk about how new thoughts or perspectives or theories just come to us or strike us. And that’s often most true when those ideas are particularly innovative or, if they are about ourselves, life changing.

This more receptive or passive way of thinking about knowledge has a long history. At key moments in his dialogues Plato writes about understanding in this way. In both The Republic and The Symposium Plato has Socrates talks about someone who, having risen through various stages of intellectual / emotional discipline, “all at once” recognizes the good. A similarly receptive or passive way of thinking about coming to wisdom is found in Heidegger’s notion of the clearing that appears when we just let things be.

It’s not just in dramatic or life-changing moments that knowledge comes to us. I used to be a lot prouder of my best ideas than I am today. Now, I’m more likely to be grateful for them. One reason for that change is that I’m more profoundly aware of the provenance of most of “my” good ideas. I can see their sources in the books I’ve read or the teachers I’ve had. I’m also more and more struck by the mysterious process by which ideas just come to me, a process I can’t force or control. The ideas of which I am most proud, the more original attempts to look at philosophy and life in a new way, I now see as coming to me in large part because of what Wordsworth calls, in Tintern Abbey, “A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things.” That is, my good ideas are in large part the product of the times in which we live.

It’s not that I don’t have to work for them. New ideas are most likely to just occur to me when I’ve thought seriously about all the ideas passed down to me—and not just the ones that are current today—and when I’ve tried to use these ideas to confront the most serious problems we face right now. But, at some point, after all the hard work, there is the moment when ideas just come to me, when the light goes on. I’m terribly grateful for those moments not just because of the thoughts that come to me but because these are among those times when I feel connected to the larger world and to something moving through it.

When I was struck by the passivity in the image of a light going on, it occurred to me that the passive experience of enlightenment in the most literal sense—things becoming illuminated—is something we rarely experience in modern life. After all, we don’t have to wait for daylight, or for a fire to get started, or a gas lamp to start glowing. We just turn on the electric lights.

That, along with the romantic notion that we must invent out own ideas and way of life, is why we don’t always recognize that true enlightenment and the new ideas that both shake up and crystalize our lives or our moment in time are not usually the product of imposing our will on the world or of activity. Rather they come in some part from a receptivity to what is going on around us and a willingness to get swept along—not necessarily by the intellectual currents immediately around us, which tend to be subject to fad and fashion—but by an on-rushing wave that you can only appreciate if you step back a bit, look beyond what is right if front of us and let a different way of combining old and new ideas sweep over you. 

Love

When I recognized the contrast between the active and passive paths to enlightenment in my friend’s use of the phrase “a light just went on,” I commented on Facebook “Your light is like a faucet, you can turn it off and on.”

That is a little joke that borrows a line from Albert King’s Don’t Throw Your Love On Me Too Strong, “Your love is like a faucet, you can turn it off and on.” And King’s line is, in turn, lifted in slightly modified (and more angry form) from Billie Holiday’s lyrics to Fine and Mellow. I would not be surprised to find out that the Holiday herself borrowed it from an earlier blues.

The joke of course is that love is exactly not like a faucet. If you can turn your love off and on, it’s a false love, a sham. And that’s the complaint of the singer of these tunes. Both songs are directed to an inconstant lover who is incapable of really loving the singer—or who perhaps pretends to love him or her to gain the sexual advantage of claiming to be a lover.

Even more so than in politics and the world of ideas, activity and taking charge is not how we love someone although it is sometimes how we express our love. Love is not something one can create in oneself or in another person. Love is called a passion—which has the same root as passive—for a reason. It is much more something that happens to us than something we do. We get carried away by love, swept up by love, overcome by love. We can make ourselves appealing to another person and can put our best face (and clothes) on. We can make ourselves ready to love. But we can’t make ourselves love someone or make them love us—even if they want to. Either they and we fall in love or we don’t.

And when we do wind up in love, we find ourselves connected not just to the one we love but often to a whole new world that our lover brings into our life. One of the powers of love, perhaps its most important power, is to enable us to see a person fully and deeply and see the beauty in the world as they do.

Activity and Receptivity

That is not to say we have no responsibility for the political movements of which we are a part or the ideas we develop or even for falling in love. We can and must do an enormous about of work to prepare, shape, stoke, and create a political movement. We can and must do an enormous about of work to understand the world around us and to work through the ideas that have shaped our own time. And even love can require an enormous amount of work to make ourselves capable and worthy of love. We have to understand the ways in which we stop ourselves from loving others or make ourselves unlovable. And the we have to  try to fix them. Or, more prosaically, we have to put ourselves in physical proximity with the person who we might love.

But, at some point, if we want to gain strength from a political movement we have to ride it; if we want to understand the world around us and our own time, we have to listen to the voices that are around us or that have shaped our own; and if we want to love we have to allow love to come forth in ourselves and others.

We have to prepare ourselves and the world around us for movements, new ideas, and love. But then we have to just let them happen. That means being receptive to the world and refraining from action that blocks movements, ideas, and love.

Blocking them is all to easy to do. We can stand in their way. We can shut them down. We can deflect and divert and constrain them. We do this far more often than we realize. And, most of the time, we do it for one reason: because we are afraid.

In politics we are usually afraid to ride a movement because we fear it won’t be strong enough to win and that it will get in the way of the darker political arts that movements won’t tolerate; or we worry about where  a powerful movement of citizens will take us; or  we are concerned that that we won’t be able to control the aspirations it stirs up.

In intellectual life we are afraid of striking and challenging ideas because they are hard for other people to understand. So we worry that putting them forward might cost us influence or respect or tenure.

And in love, we are afraid of so many things: that we will be rejected; that we won’t live up to the expectations of our potential lovers; that he or she won’t live up to our expectations; that we will lose the love we so desperately want; or that we won’t be able to overcome all the barriers that so often stand in the way of love: physical distance, age, religion, money, other involvements.

Given how much there is of which to be afraid, it is a wonder that movements, new ideas, and love ever arise.

The temptation is to deal with fear by exerting control, taking charge, imposing our will on the world and on the movements we hope to ride, the ideas to which we hope to give life; and the love that we hope will envelop us.

But in giving in to the temptation to take control we often deliberately or inadvertently stifle or kill movements, ideas, and love before they have had a chance to develop.

For movements, ideas, and love are not like faucets. You can’t turn them off and on. If you want them to be part of your life; if you want your life to be part of them; you just have to let them flow and carry you away.