second portal
💫Presence💫
1.
We desire what we do not have. Desire is absence. Desire is a deprivation.
...this, of course, is false.
first portal
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
2.
You already knew I'd have something to say.
You're right, sidus in Latin means star. But it's the translation of de that I disagree with. Where would the word lack come from? A more immediate meaning of the expression introduced by the particle in question is, instead, what is called a complement of origin or provenance.
…where does this impulse come from? From the stars.
3.
The stars are questioned to know the future. Omens are sought in the sky. Hopes are entrusted to the heavens. Stargazing satisfies the human need to know the outcome of one's hopes.
An ancient word for astronomical observatories is specola, not unlike the verb to speculate, in the literal sense of “to look from an elevated place” and in the figurative sense of “to examine, to question with thought, especially as a philosophical activity aimed at seeking a truth”.
... In the Theatetetus, Plato relates that Thales, the first philosopher in history, “while studying the stars and looking up, fell into a well. A pretty and clever Thracian maid teased him, saying that he was so concerned to know what was in the heavens that he could not see what was in front of him, between his feet”. I have a feeling I already know which of these two characters you will sympathise with more.
We don't miss the stars, hardly. Sure, in a world of blinding light pollution, the sky above us is getting darker and darker. But a hundred years ago, nobody would have missed the stars. If anything was ubiquitous, it was the stars. Why should desire be the lack of something that is eternally present?
4.
The stars are questioned to know the future. The sky is looked to for omens. Hopes are placed in the sky. Stargazing satisfies the human need to know the outcome of one's hopes. What we seek in the stars is knowledge of the future.
5.
πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει.
...all beings naturally desire to know the future.
6.
O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
7.
Desire, then, comes from the future: falling in love, longing, the utopian impulse... are nothing but impulses from the not-yet, visions of other possible ways of being. This is what comes de sidere, from the stars, a vision of what can be.
In this sense, desire is always a revelation and always a being-questioned: it shows us a not-yet of the world. Desire, then, is the angel of revelation.
This episode's playlist contains Floating Points, Holly Herndon, Colin Self, Fennesz and Pariah.
Conversation on Desire is an ongoing invitation to speculate about the nature of desire
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