On desire

This one’s a big ole Garfield sandwich. I’m trying to love the world again, and it’s working. There’s a lot to love! Everything pertains to everything. Unfortunately, “everything” happens to be sort of a lot to write about. 

It’s so much easier to write about “everything” in a poem. I think of Lorine Niedecker’s: “No layoff / from this / condensery,” or maybe E.B. White’s: “Don’t write about Man; write about a man.” Against the conventional wisdom, let’s hit the ground on this one anyway. We’re having fun. You love me.

As a way in, let’s start with the modern proverb: “A man can’t love the woman he has.” 

At face value, that’s pretty demoralising to the point of plain unhelpfulness. Not only that you may ultimately be unloveable (with longevity & depth), but that you may ultimately be unable to love (with longevity & depth). After all, it’s not the being loved we live for, but the loving - the action of it, the giving, the way giving gives us back to ourselves. 

So, what? The elusive Real Love Baby is a myth, baby? Maybe, if a person were a haveable thing. Far be it from you, the multipassionate mystic in active evolution. Far be it from you, who is new every morning, who holds the artist’s propensity for uncertainty, for exploration, for depth as much as for breadth. 

Clarice Lispector: 

“Within me trembles the world.” 

Theodore Roethke: 

“It’s your privilege to find me incomprehensible. I gave you my minutes; let them remain ours. I hope I haunt you.”

Jorge Luis Borges: 

“We are our memory, / we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, / that pile of broken mirrors.” 

This is to say: a person is not something you can know as an event. Moment-to-moment, the individual is reborn. Experience, revelation, breath. The truth is a thing of instants, glimmers, and glimpses. Of essence, of many shades, refracted and spectral. 

“You” - you the soul, the personality, the moral character, the creative, the whole - are practiced, not achieved. Perfectly complete as you “are” - that is, a conjugation of the verb “to be.”  

G.K. Chesterton: 

“Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland… The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.” 

There is a great synchronicity that underpins our experience here, a current, a radical balance - down to the cells and up to the heavens. All the poets know this. The aesthetic lives both in perfection and brokenness, the gorgeous and the hideous and especially the mundane. So do we. So does god, or in other words love.

Anne Carson: 

“Two hundred and ten million years of desire wash through me. Blood-eater. Suppose I let it escape as seeds shoot through the eyes of a dream god - would it frighten him away? Men know almost nothing about desire, they think it has to do with sexual activity or can be discharged that way. But sex is a substitute, like money or language. Sometimes I just want to stop seeing.” 

To truly desire someone (this is a very different phrase than “to desire sex”) is usually a wrackingly painful experience. What you feel is an intensity of consciousness. It is too big, too adirectional, beyond language. You feel the infinity of you. You feel theirs. 

This is that great synchronicity thing. Found similarly in the constellations, the endless forest, the mountaintop, the dark ocean. Found similarly in the work of generative creation. Found similarly in great storytelling, great music, great art. 

In this state, you are not of this realm. You are the realm.

Georges Bataille: 

“A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.” 

Georges Bataille again: 

“The lesson of Wuthering Heights, of Greek tragedy, and ultimately, of all religions, is that there is an instinctive tendency toward divine intoxication which the rational world of calculation cannot bear.” 

Kabir: 

“Student, tell me, what is God? He is the breath inside the breath.” 

There’s a good reason why having a little crush makes you more conscious, more imaginative, more alive. You’re just paying attention, baby! It’s that simple. All the poets know this, too: attention is the gateway to the divine. 

You can willfully choose this more sensual, open, heightened experience of reality. You can opt-in for fun, for the sake of your art, for the sake of your term-limited mortal existence and its textural quality.

Maybe the proverb is wrong, or maybe we misunderstand. Love: the magnificent, terrible knowledge of an infinity we cannot possess. 

Desire, love, mysticism, rebirth, experience, self, aesthetics, synchronicity, god, infinity, nature, creation, reality… 

Where are my Scrabble points? 

Listen, listen: these are words. You know them all: you are them all. They're words for the same damn thing, that’s the thing! The truth is refracted and spectral, remember?

There are moments in this life where we feel the ecstatic consciousness, the hidden coherence, the unbearable fullness of something like “everything.” Desire dissolves the boundary between self and world - two things that exceed our ability to contain them. 

What I’m saying is impossibly huge, I know that. It’s too much for one essay, but also one lifetime. That’s the point. What we have are moments of clarity. Enjoy them! 

Michelangelo: 

“Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.” 

George Bernard Shaw: 

"There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it." 

Bypass the gateways. Go right for the good stuff. That is, engage with the magnitude of nature, within and without, the everything-ness of it all. Permit the twilight! Let the light hurt you. Let a good tree bring you to tears. Let the color blue break your heart. 

Let joy wrench you as much as the pain does.