"The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." - Daddy Marx

Debt as a shadow stretched between life and death; shadow as that which both arises out of occlusion and occludes what comes under it; occlusion as the past, occluded as the future. Beloved speaks of blackness as absence, the no longer present black bodies that nevertheless haunt as spectral memories, as traumatic black holes that collapse time and space, trapping both host and figment in a living-dead hell. Here, time circles in on itself, an endless presentiment of the past that swallows whole the future and sets the present stuttering. Neither the dead nor the living can find peace, and like objects under a moonless night, they blur and grow imperceptible from one another. Life and death, love and hatred, futurity and fatalism infect and dissimulate. The dead reanimate while the living enervate.

Debt also reveals itself through skin, through birth and injury, the shared condition of Sethe's belly and feet that swell to differential conditions of contact: life-giving and death-threatening. Yet even nourishment can be abject (forced breeding of slaves) and death a moment of love (freedom from such torment). Black lives as animal lives as undead lives connect ownership with commodification with reproduction for the sake of an indefinite and alien production. The stultifying horror of repetition without purpose, debt without absolution, and accumulation without end, repeat even in Sethe's freedom. Beloved as the impossible debt to the dead, as the physical memory of death, swells and swells and swells.

How to repay this debt to the dead? Only through the living, only by returning the living to life, rather than the dead; only through restitution to life itself can the melancholy of absence be overcome. If a future is to be had, the debt of the past must be resolved for those in the present — for those still present.