Meditation on Desire
It is sometimes a difficult thing to embrace our gift. ‘What a strange and hopeless thing,’ we may be tempted to think. Setting a few words on a page each day. Capturing an image with a lens, the shades and figures of our imagination. What’s the use? We may be tempted to ask. One must produce. Create real wealth. Add true value. As if anything but farming were ever necessary. Well, perhaps that’s not true. Yet what is necessary, if not you? What could be needed more than your gift? The whole species are a mass of walking flaws. Do not be fooled by PhD’s or providential grace. We all start in a different place. Goethe’s poetry was not so great. Nor his science. Yet he did them both regardless. He could have been a failed politician like his father. Trying to save Weimar. Yet something in his own will saved us from that potential disaster. And instead - he gave to us - Faustus.
‘It was the spirit of the times.’ You might argue. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps each is created and consumed exactly where one is meant to be created and consumed. Perhaps there is no room for wiggle. Perhaps free will is simply an illusion.
Far more interesting to doubt and ask though. Eh? Far more interesting to believe and see if we are creating our own rules for life. What questions do we ask ourselves in the dark and silent times? What are the measurements of your captivity? Can you smell and taste the limits set imposed upon the place of your being? How far will you run from your true nature before the thrill of the chase wears of? Until you can no longer smell the scent of pine or heat of flowers anymore? We middle children of history. Attempting to excavate purpose and love in this craze of choice and consumption. The price of rent is what it is, to drive you to the bitter end as one giant rush to becoming stardust again. See the thing is, you’re already dead…
Forgive me. I was distracted by a splinter in my middle finger. Soft side. It’s long and black and keeps calling me. It wishes me to squeeze. Squeeze. Squeeze.
Our conversations are alike in that.
Out now. Cost just skin.
There was a woman I made love to once. When I was a young man. Well. I was no more than a boy really. Eighteen is no more than a boy. Not really. I had been working at a museum for ships and stars. It was a place of great wonder and terrible longing. We found ourselves in the pub one night. I, drinking like the best of them. My Grandfather poised upon a chair up high above the action. His ring finger curled around a sceptre’d pint.
I was wild. Wild-eyed. Yet she took me to bed. Dark hair and wide hips. A little less than twice my age. Her dark olive skin veined and real. I share this with you now, because the moment asks for it. Sometimes the flesh is too naked, too real. Sometimes the hair blends with shadow and the skin is like evening light. All reality seems, more there than it has ever been. Seen. A body. Your open body. Dark hair against the living colour flesh. Sweat and oozing. Beating breath. Pressed flesh. In those moments, with their soft shadows drawn long on street lights, candles. The seriousness of the moment settles upon us. And we find inside tenderness. Oneness in desire.
‘God is in desire.’ I heard the Moon whisper once.
Yes. God is desire. Desire. That peculiar yearning a person only feels when they have allowed their ego to be crushed by a force greater than their fear. I have seen it happen to people. Their fortress walls are bulldozed down. Some wander around in a daze for a time. Others leave promptly. In that place where the gate opens, that hides our hearts. The rubble of our former selves. And all that is left is their raw and seeking heart. I call this place the Tabernacle. ‘The dwelling place of God.’
It is all I ever desire to see. I spend my days roaming to visit these mythical places. Moments of Being. Synesthesia. Smelling the raw cedar sweet of congealed honeycomb. Staring into the eyes of strangers in cities where no one knows my name.
What a piece of work is man!
Indeed…
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