by BRM
Adult life was music
as
beneath
boiling
iron.
There are, perhaps, as many shades of desire as there are
discrete quanta of wavelengths in the visible spectrum of the mind’s eye. A
singular, and well earned, tip of the cap to Mr. Freud, we are certainly well
acquainted with the simple, devilish burn of need, mechanical, impulsive
chain-on-gear workings of hunger, exhaustion and uncomfortable erections
flaying our mental fibers to obtain foodstuffs, rest and fuck. One foot in
front of the other, along with Hammurabi and his silly codex, we are driven toward
cleanliness, order and generalized justice as steppes up to the plateau of
‘general well-being’ which come as a pretext for warding off disease, chaos and
uncertainty as is desired by most members of our species in this day and age. For
me the curiosity of desire reaches its alchemical triple point when emotional
motivations jump from the physical to the abstract.
See, at this point desire becomes extraordinarily personal.
As a psychological tool, desire is the lever by which our personages go about taking
action to achieve an outcome. Behind these actions, necessitated to create
specific outcomes, lies our motivation and the specific value judgments made,
discovered, adopted, inherited and otherwise embedded into our sub(and
otherwise)conscious self which cause a person to, frankly, care. When the
electron microscope is pulled back from the petri dish, desire really is just
an indicator of which value judgments, beliefs, morals, ethics and preferences
a person has; a unique set of notches, grooves, cambers and castors which
create the actualized person who fit into the situational reality uniquely due
to these traits. One of the more fascinating aspects of this relationship is
the ever changing weight and even literal identity of each of these value-judgments
as the situation evolves, new information is introduced to the person, the
details of the environment subtly change or even a lost memory is
butterfly-netted from the ether – totally altering your motivations, modifying
your goals, redirecting your desire. In a way, we are shifting skeleton keys,
trying to manipulate the kaleidoscope lock of our current…career paths, love
lives, emotional support networks, feelings of self-worth…ad infinitum.
Recently I found myself confronted with a situation which is
relatively unique in my lifetime. Desire has influenced me to do nothing. In
order to preserve a greater and longer term ‘victorious outcome’ the
appropriate action is inaction. Think about a deer in headlights, the spine
tingling need to jump, run, get out
of the way, put your capable hands into the clay to shape and make and mold the
thing into a better form, direction, tone, color and scope. But in this case,
any of that would lead to naught. It is a curious and helpless feeling to
recognize that despite your very best intentions directed action will indelibly
mar your precarious existence in this reality. Action in the standard American
culture is praised and rewarded, championed, trained and engrained into us from
all directions – patience is a virtue, but let’s be frank, it gets no play; and
of course those who can’t, teach, if we are going to go parading tired
parables. To stay ones hand is perhaps on the highest order of ‘action’ in
certain lights, laziness, and the result of a lack of motivation or
incapability in others. Unfortunately it is another question, and not an
answer.
In parting, dear reader, I ask you to consider a time you
were forced by your desire to do nothing
despite the screaming out of your being to try and elicit change. Was it the
last time you skipped the queso to indulge in the guacamole? Did you let your
dog live out its last days in agonizing pain as it succumbed to cancer? If the
event is far enough in the past you are probably aware of the consequences of
your choice, what did you learn?
Sunt lacrimae rerum-
BRM
