first portal
🕳️ Absence 🕳️
1.
It's 11:46 p.m. and in my notebook I just wrote:
Desire: Imagination, fear, future, absence, loneliness. And then, with not much ink left: portal.
In a beautifully titled essay Figure dell'Altro assente (Figures of the Absent Other), theologian Davide Zordan quotes a passage from the Book of Life, by St. Teresa of Avila that really struck with me and made me think about this project we’re working on: a conversation on desire, an exploration of the concept through letters (I just decided that each episode will be called "portal"). Here’s the quote:
“Where is your God?” the soul asks itself. “At the extreme of loneliness”.
By pure chance, I came across another quote. This time it was from Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, where Anne Carson writes: When I desire you a part of me is gone.
When I desire you a part of me is gone […] a part of me disappears.
Is it a feeling that can be shared, desire? Or is it something that, while we're experiencing it – I'm thinking of two words I love very much: craving, longing – or is it something that, while we're experiencing it, makes us feel (also) extremely lonely?
We all crave, but when we crave, we crave alone.
2.
In The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Mick says: “I want, I want, I want” […] “It was all that she could think about – but just what this real want was she did not know”. In The Waves, Virginia Woolf has Susan say: “I love […] and I hate. I desire one thing only. My eyes are hard. Jinny’s eyes break into a thousand lights. Rhoda’s are like those pale flowers to which moths come in the evening. Yours grow full and brim and never break. But I am already set on my pursuit. I see insects in the grass. Though my mother still knits white socks for me and hems pinafores and I am a child, I love and I hate”. In a collection of scattered thoughts (Fires) Marguerite Yourcenar writes: “I don’t believe as they do, I don’t live as they do, I don’t love as they do … I will die as they die” and in his Maíra, Darcy Ribeiro – in a beautiful chapter titled Egosum – writes: “But when the hour of fear arrived, the last fear, the ferocious fright of knowing finally with absolute certainty that I was mortal, that I would have to live each day, from that day forward, hand in hand with death; then, and only then did I perceive that the urgent thing is to live”. I conclude with Clarice Lispector, who in Near to the Wild Heart writes: “Yes, she felt a perfect animal inside her. The thought of one day setting this animal loose disgusted her,” and with Amélie Nothomb, who has her protagonist say (I don't remember the book, only the quote): “to crave... et bien, c'était le verbe de ma vie.”
3.
I'm sleepy.
I should be in bed, but I'm restless. I knew that if I’d gone to sleep without writing – or I should say, composing this archive of quotes and questions for you to answer – I would have spent at least an hour tossing and turning between the sheets.
I'm experiencing that kind of sleepiness that makes it difficult to formulate a coherent thought, let alone make sense of a list of words jotted down in an old notebook and these scattered quotes. The connection is there, I know. But again, I'm sleepy.
Did you know that desire comes from the Latin desiderium (de+sidera), and that it means absence of stars?
I bet you did. In fact, I bet you'll have something to say about it (something that starts with “actually”).
I immediately thought of the word assiderare, to freeze, and how bad it must be to freeze to death.
Good night.
I asked AI to generate an iconography for this first episode.
This episode’s playlist contains shego, Cocteau Twins & Harold Budd, Rachel Grimes, Angel Olsen, Bathe Alone and glass beach.
Conversation on Desire is an ongoing invitation to speculate about the nature of desire
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