desire, desire, desire (pt. 2)

radical love letters #78 | on desire

“sometimes it’s like someone took a knife baby/

edgy and dull/

and cut a six inch valley/

through the middle of my skull.” 

-a description of desire, from Bruce Springsteen

It’s a little boring to start an essay with etymology, but I couldn’t resist sharing that the word desire comes from the Latin desiderare which means “to long for” and specifically “from the stars.” Or put another way: “to await from the heavenly body.” I appreciate this reminder that astrology and guidance from the heavens is as old as time, but I also like the idea that wanting something from the sky is, in some ways, a fool’s hope, a desperate wish for something not reachable from Earth, something intangible. But all the same, we yearn. 

Desire is a sort of inherently painful state. Wanting something, the way the concept suggests, means you’re lacking something. “Desire is a relation of being to lack,” says psychoanalyst philosopher Jacques Lacan. “It isn't the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists.” Lacan roots this in either an absence of the phallus, or a fear of castration (which is….uninteresting to me) and further argues that desire is always-already unfulfilled. Once we get the thing, we are no longer in a desiring state. Lacan argues that even though desiring involves a little suffering, that it is often a more pleasurable state than getting the thing we want. That getting the thing is more unsatisfying than the constructed fantasy of the thing. 

Carl Jung is helpful here too in reminding us that desires are not only usually rooted in pain, but also in the shadow. Jung’s shadow refers to unconscious parts of ourselves, the things we avoid confronting because of shame, embarrassment, or fear. This could be taboo impulses, thoughts we classify as fucked up, or, frequently, conflicting or humiliating desires. “The shadow is all that gets suppressed in the process of becoming a decent, civilized adult,” writes Ursula K. LeGuin in her short story on the presence of the shadow in children’s tales. “The shadow is the dark side of [the] soul, the unadmitted, the inadmissible.” Jung’s theory is that if we don’t confront the shadow parts of ourselves, they will take over entirely. “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate,” goes one of his most famous quotes on the matter. 

The best reflections on the shadow and desire make sure to note that taboos and shame are socially constructed phenomena. My friend and wisest teacher Binyamina runs a whole class on the shadow that is firmly rooted in a rejection of binaries; she argues that aspects of our shadow ought to not only be confronted, but embraced. Le Guin agrees that the belief in some clear cut difference between good and evil is a “false fantasy.” And Foucault’s important text The History of Sexuality pushes back against psychoanalysis in general for purporting that there is some inherent natural or innate desire that lives outside of discursive power apparati. 

I’ve written before about my own struggle with shadow desires, with feelings of contradictory wants so intense they’ve hurled me into existential crises and giant life upheavals. This was a big part of the last year: desiring one path over another, and being filled with pain all along the way. And yet–despite all the anguish of the wanting and even the getting–I fear the alternative to a life without longing.  

Spiritual traditions, at first glance, seem to treat desire with contempt, though the question of translation complicates any coherent conclusion. In yoga philosophy, Patanjali identifies a series of sutras with instructions on what to do and not do to live a yogic existence. Included among them are “santosha,” which is described as “contentment,” and aparigraha, which translates, more or less, to “non-grasping.” The principle of non-grasping, or nonattachment, is also a key principle in Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and many other non-Western religions. In these practices, desire can potentially lead us away from alignment with our values and a spiritual path. 

Judeo-Christian wisdom is a little less clear-cut. In the Bible, several Hebrew words have been translated to desire: kasap to “yearn” or “long after”; hamad used to describe desirous delight, or “negative” desire such as coveting or lust; Zeloo has been updated to describe “holy zeal” or an urge to attain goals. I could go on, but I am not a Biblical scholar, so I’ll just offer one more that stuck out to me: while ‘desire’ is generally used to describe people in relation to each other (wives obligation to husbands, primarily) or for God, there is a passage in which “sin” is personified to express possessing desire. “If you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door,” says God to Cain. “Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it.” I am not a Christian, but I love thinking through the mythos (especially when it’s so dang kinky!) and gleaning insight. As far as I recall from a few years adjacent to a fire and brimstone church, the sin is within you, always and since birth. But this passage turns sin into an outside thing, waiting on its knees to fill you. Desire, the passage suggests, belongs to the deviant. 

So desire is painful and it is often impolite, rebellious to norms, too feverish to follow the rules. Inevitably then, it can be destructive. Desire is also a driver, a thing to wrestle with, a breadcrumb trail to follow towards living a meaningful life. And if you’re in agreement with Lacan, it can only exist in the not yet here.

The thorny terrain of desire is neither good nor bad, but I do think it is fecund. The turn of phrase “not yet here” is one I borrowed from queer theorist José Muñoz. He describes queerness itself (a modality dripping with desire) as always “on the horizon.” I’ve quoted this in several essays before, but it’s worth it again: 

“Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.” 

Queerness is not a synonym for desire, but Muñoz is theorizing the way desire shows up in our liberation work. Like desire, queerness is not an achievable thing, but instead a motioning towards. And in this ostensibly never-ending marathon of onward, there is pleasure. If we heed adrienne maree brown’s urging to make “justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences we can have,” we will be forced, I think, to make peace with the delight of longing. 

Desire lives here in this space of motion. Desire can take us away from contentment, but maybe we can also find contentment in the never-final path. Maybe the only way we will cultivate the energy to sustain our movements for change is realizing we will never reach a destination. Maybe it is the painful (and pleasurable) desire for revolutionary worlds that is the lifeforce of any revolutionary worlds worth fighting for. 

“Waiting from the heavenly body” for something you want desperately – a lover, an opportunity; freedom – is as painful as Springsteen’s edgy and dull knife in your skull. But any masochist worth their salt will tell you that there can be relief in anguish if you relax into it. 

I’ll end with something Puerto Rican movement artist Ricardo Levins Morales once shared with a group of my students. He said, with tears in his eyes, that he tries to live with the goal of being a good ancestor. “I imagine young people fifty or 100 years from now standing around a fire and seeking guidance from the past.” He wants to be worth conjuring, he said. 

Morales isn’t desiring a finish line. He’s doing the work he’s meant to do in the bittersweet soil of a not yet here. 

Desire, desire, desire. An invitation to yearn and let it feed us. A reminder that wanting is a transit. A painful and glorious place of wanting something as untouchable as the stars, and reaching your palm up anyway.

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