11. Desire is always ambiguous
‘I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.’
James Joyce — Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
In Chapter 9, we looked briefly at some of the ambiguities that arise from our culture’s lack of soulfulness. There are substitute gratifications such as material wealth, power and status. There is an obsession with the image of death, but a denial of death itself. There is an obsession with the image of the body, but a denial of the body itself. There is an obsessional belief in individual freedom, but we protect that freedom with the threat of extreme violence. There is a strange ‘shadow life’ of extremist views whilst outwardly society claims to be equal and tolerant. All of this, I suggest, is a clinging to things — both materially, emotionally and subjectively. The main thing that we hold onto is fear.
As we have touched on already, genuine pleasure is suppressed in us even as we become fully conscious of ourselves as separate subjects. Unfortunately, the very notion of being a subject in Western thought is deeply associated with death and with a divisive split between male and female. In order to become a ‘subject’, certain desires must be repressed and rationalised. What is more, Western thought has conceived this in purely masculine terms (Freud and Lacan). Women, in this view, only become subjects by being man-like. Any attempt at equality therefore is fated, as the ‘equality’ can only be constructed within these phallocentric terms.
How to escape from this dilemma? Let us first just summarise what such an escape might mean. It means a fully equal place to the feminine in both men and women. It means life over death. It means discerning genuine pleasure over substitute and superficial pleasures. It means the freedom to let go of any number of things and to allow creativity to flourish. Ultimately, it is the interplay of form (creativity) and formlessness (letting go). However, as we’ll see, there is a point at which the flow and counterflow meet each other — where there will always be paradox.
True freedom, for the economy of ascendancy — for spirit — only comes about after bodily death. There is therefore an implicit embrace of death underlying all of Western culture’s aspirations. Therefore, in order to find freedom via our alternative economy of descendancy we must set up a symbolic that challenges this world view – something that will ‘bring to rest the ceaselessly shifting signifiers’ – the ever-receding horizon of substitute pleasures by fulfilling genuine pleasure. In Martin Luther King’s words, we must find something to love more than death. All of our delusions hide us from this central fact. To love something more than death is ultimately a perfect summary of the intentions of this work.
Grace Jantzen further comments on this obsession with death:
‘…the western intellectual tradition is obsessed with death and with other worlds, a violent obsession that is interwoven with a masculinist drive for mastery… a deconstructive examination of this emphasis on death shows that it has an unacknowledged foundation, a material and maternal foundation in natality, which is precisely what is threatening to a masculinist imaginary, but without which none of the rest could proceed.’
She goes on to look at the implications of acknowledging the centrality of natality over death:
‘I suggest that much of traditional philosophy of religion (and western culture generally) is preoccupied with violence, sacrifice and death, and built upon mortality not only as a human fact but as a fundamental philosophical category. But what if we were to begin with birth, and with the hope and possibility and wonder implicit in it? How if we were to treat natality and the emergence of this life and this world with the same philosophical seriousness and respect which had traditionally been paid to mortality and the striving for other worlds?’
Grace M. Jantzen — Becoming Divine (Author’s emphases)
Our economy of descendancy is best placed therefore to redress the balance. In particular, our hopes should lie with the feminine in all aspects of life.
We have talked though of a certain ambiguity that is inherent in all of this process. I suggest now that this ambiguity is most apparent in our relation to the cosmos, to nature and to our own inner nature. As the earlier chapters of this work hopefully made clear, the apparent contradiction at the level of the universe — form and formlessness — is only resolved by the ultimate unity of all things — nonduality. This in turn is reflected in the wildness of nature — a wildness that we somehow cannot wuite accept and therefore seek to tame. And the wildness of nature is right within us, in our own bodies and in our minds and souls. The essence of who we are is wildness. In sexuality in particular, and sexual desire, these contradictions come to the fore. Furthermore this is not a contradiction that needs to be ‘solved’ or ‘resolved’ in some way. For ourselves, as embodied persons, it is — or could be — a cause for celebration, as we see the paradox of all of nature played out in our own lives. Thomas Moore says this:
‘Desire is the proper atmosphere of the sexual kingdom. It keeps us alive and moving along. It keeps us in touch with memories, warm and sad, and it allows us entry to the world of imagination when all around us practicality is insistent. From the viewpoint of the soul, desire simply is; it need not be satisfied….
‘The little desires are connected to and call forth the bigger ones… And so every desire is worth paying attention to, even though we know that if we track it far enough, we will discover that this longing will never cease. But that is the definition of divinity from the viewpoint of sexuality. That full, bittersweet, empty feeling is like incense in a church — it announces the presence of God.
‘… Sexuality certainly brings people together and makes life feel full and vital. But it is also the path toward that extreme of desire, that ultimate love that usually feels unrequited, which is the eternal and the infinite. The opening made by desire, that hole in our satisfaction, is the opening to divinity, and only there is our desire brought into the realm of the possible.’
Thomas Moore — Original Self (My emphasis)
These experiences of ceaseless desire and unrequited desire are indeed significant ones, as Moore suggests. We reach out to create pleasure in the world. We create form but at the same time move towards formlessness. It is the essential paradox at the centre of ourselves and at the centre of all that exists. The oneness of all is form and formlessness, and neither and both.
In knowing ourselves, we learn to let go. In this sense, we move toward formlessness. But, in reaching for pleasure, we create form. It is the awe at the beauty of the world and other people that inspires us. And it is ultimately beauty that we seek to create in being pleasure for others.
Therefore we are deluded to think that pleasure can be fulfilled in some absolute way — either in another life or by some kind of substitute satisfaction of material wealth, power or status. An alternative symbolic — birth and becoming — help us to realise this goal. However, in our encounters with wild nature and the wildness within ourselves — our bodies, our souls — we encounter the paradox of the creative force of the universe and its reciprocal. We experience both form and formlessness. Such desire is always paradoxical - it can never really be satisfied. But that is how things should be. Grand notions of ultimate fulfilment are just visions of an impossible heaven.
