Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

Another Side of Desire (June 2002)

I found an island in your arms,

a country in your eyes,

arms that chain, eyes that lie.

Break on through to the other side.

Jim Morrison

DESIRE. EROTIC DESIRE. The adjective erotic is better than sexual, for it is less reductionist. When desire is reciprocal (between two), the notions of lust, or even libido, become out-dated, for they, by definition, are singular, and not double.

The initial energy of such desire comes of course from the biological need to reproduce. Desire is also an invitation to, and a hope for, imagined pleasures. What begins as erotic desire can be swiftly translated into the desire to have and to possess. The social content of desire is indeed possession, which is why in the theatre unchecked desire is never far from conflict and tragedy.

The potential force of desire is proverbial in all cultures. Perhaps because an awareness of being desired bestows a unique sense of invulnerability, and when this sense is multiplied by two almost anything can be risked.

Desire begins early and continues late. It can occur at all ages between, say, five and eighty. Age may affect the priorities within desire. Yet these priorities are never standard or uniform. Any desire consists of a multitude of offers and wishes, and, finally, there may be as many varieties of desire as there are erotic encounters.

There are nevertheless common ingredients, and what I call another side of desire is, I believe, present in all desire, although the degree of its importance, its recognizability, may vary. In consumer societies this ingredient is seldom acknowledged publicly, except in rock music, where it is often central.

There will always be suffering

It flows through life like water

I put my hand over hers

Down in the lime-tree arbour.

Nick Cave

Desire, when reciprocal, is a plot, hatched by two, in the face of, or in defiance of, all the other plots which determine the world. It is a conspiracy of two.

The plan is to offer to the other a reprieve from the pain of the world. Not happiness (!) but a physical reprieve from the body's huge liability towards pain.

Within all desire there is pity as well as appetite; the two, whatever their relative proportion, are threaded together. Desire is inconceivable without a wound.

If there were any unwounded in this world, they would live without desire.

The conspiracy is to create together a place, a locus, of exemption, and the exemption, necessarily temporary, is from the unmitigated hurt which flesh is heir to.

The human body has prowess, grace, playfulness, dignity, and countless other capacities, but it is also intrinsically tragic — as is no animal's body. (No animal is naked.) Desire longs to shield the desired body from the tragic it embodies, and what is more it believes it can. This is its faith.

There is naturally no altruism in desire. The offer of shielding, of conferring exemption, is made through the offer of the whole self, both physical and imaginative. From the start, two bodies are involved, and so the exemption, when and if achieved, covers both.

The exemption is bound to be brief and yet it promises all. The exemption abolishes brevity — and along with it the hurts associated with the threat of the brief.

Observed by a third person, desire is a short parenthesis; experienced from within, it is a transcendence. In both cases, however, day-to-day life continues around, before and after it.

Desire promises exemption. Yet an exemption from the existing natural order is tantamount to disappearance. And this is precisely what desire, at its most ecstatic, proposes: let's vanish.

Pendant que la maráe monte

(et) que chacun refait ses comptes

J'emmène au creux de mon ombre

Des poussières de toi.

Le vent les portera

Tout disparaîtra mais

Le vent nous portera.

Noir Dásir

The lovers' disappearance cannot be counted as an evasion, a flight; it is, rather, a shift elsewhere: an entrance into a plenitude. Plenitude is usually thought of as an amassing. Desire insists that it is a giving away: the plenitude of a silence, a darkness in which everything's at peace. Somehow I think of the ancient dream, the legend of the Golden Fleece. (It granted an exemption from a sacrifice.) Symbolically it represents both innocence and wisdom. It lies stretched out in its hiding place, curly, inviolate, complete, worn by nobody.

Once shared and experienced, the exemption which no longer exempts remains unforgettable, and the disappearances still seem more true, more precise than what is apparent and legible.

The sirens wail down the street. As long as you are in my arms, no harm will come to you.