(A BRIEF REFLECTION ON EVERYTHING & NOTHING)
There is horror and there is awe and smack dab in between the two there is desire.
What do I do with my desire? Often, I don’t know what to do with it. Just as often, I’m not sure that I am even close to understanding it. We are never more adrift, confused, fucked, misled, and dishonest (with ourselves and others—intentionally or not at all!), than we are in the domain of desire.
Yet desire is relentless. No matter where we flee, it overtakes us. No matter how we fortify ourselves, it overwhelms us. It is the drip, drip, drip of a slow leak; it is the gush and rush of a flood. It is the fifty to seventy percent of you that is water. What the Psalmist says of his god, we can say of desire:
Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast. (NRSVUE)
We want and we want and we want, and we think we know what we want and sometimes we do and sometimes we don’t and, either way, our wanting never wanes for long. Respite! We seek it wherever we might find it—microdosing dopamine on social media, binge-drinking on weekends, shopping and working and working and travelling and extracurriculars and adrenaline rushes and sports and hobbies and working and sex and working—because the relentlessness of desire causes us to suffer.
Or is it the relentlessness of suffering that causes us to desire? If I got what I want, I say to myself, I would not suffer—not like this, not this way. And yet, time after time, I find that I get what I want and my suffering persists. Perhaps it shifts slight but, at its core, it feels the same. It hurts and discomfits me just as much as it did before.
Two things offer us succour, but from seemingly opposite ends of an experiential spectrum.
Awe provides us with an escape from desire. It moves us into a different register. We transcend and become engulfed in something more and other. We lose our tripartite selves (ego, id, and superego) and all the desires that constitute those selves (even if many of those desires, as has been so frequently noted, were never really our own, but belonged to others, our discursive apparatuses, the Big Other, our parents, our friends, our lovers…).
To be in awe is to be outside desire.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, horror also overcomes us. As with awe, we lose our selves. We lose our thoughts, our stories, our wants. We become wordless. We gasp. We are horrified. The suffix “-ify” means “to make” or “to cause to become” and so, in the horror, we become the horror, we ourselves are now constituted by the horror, and so here, too, we are moved into a different register than that of desire.
Furthermore, in a world increasingly shorn of awe, wherein fear replaces wonder, certitude replaces curiosity, aggregate data replaces community conversations, and screens curate what and when and how we see, horror increasingly becomes our “go to” for escape from desire. If we cannot be overcome by beauty and goodness and love, we will seek out other things—notably, violence and terror and distress. We will say that we do not desire these things, we will say that we hate them and want to be free of them—we will go to yoga classes, develop mindfulness practices, hold ice and count to ten—but through it all we will continue to cling to our anxiety, our depression, our anger, and our abusers (even if the source of our anxiety, depression, anger, and abuse shifts here and there over the years). We will suffer and seek out people and situations who continue to cause us to suffer in intimately familiar ways because when we are suffering we are distracted from what is unbearable about our desiring. When we suffer in this way, we are able to pretend (to ourselves, to others) that we know what we want (an end to this anxiety, an end to this depression, an end to this kind of suffering that I am suffering) when, in actuality, we don’t know what we want, we don’t think we can actually have what we secretly believe we really want, and we are not willing to admit (to ourselves, to others), what we know lies at the existential core of our unhappiness. It is easier for me to feel anxious about things like credit-debt, my teenage children, and my dead-end job, than it is for me to face into that which I find unbearable about my core self.
I say I suffer because I am anxious but this is not true. I am anxious because I am suffering and, rather than facing into that (seemingly overwhelming and annihilating) suffering, I would rather abide feeling perpetually anxious. What a relief it is to (only!) be anxious, depressed, angry, and abused!
Thus, the horror (like the awe, once we get to know it) creeps into us in a multitude of ways. It permits us to not confront, to not know, and to not reckon with our core self (the one that is there in and through and outside the ego, id, and superego). Because each one of us, in our own ways, has something unbearable in our core. Some call this a fundamental trauma, some call this being born, some call this the loss of innocence that inevitably takes place at some not always discernible point of our lives (the innocent self is ever only known in retrospect), some call this the imposition of neoliberal subjectivity into human beings, some call this disenchantment, some call this what occurs in infants before object permanence develops, some call this the death of god, some call this the Name-of-the-Father, some call this heteronormative, patriarchal, settler colonial, racial capitalist, neo-fascist, Christian nationalism (that one is a real mouthful, which can’t usually be said of the dicks who promote it!), but somewhere at our core there seems to be some kind of suffering that we are fleeing. Thus, when we believe have no other choice, we will rush to forms of suffering that feel more palatable, comprehensible, and familiar (i.e., the feel like home) so as not to feel this central, unique-to-you suffering (for, as Christopher Bollas says, just as each one of us, if we are able to develop our core self, develops our own “idiom of being,” so also each one of us has a core suffering that, at least at some point felt unbearable, that influences that particular, intimately personal idiom).
Horror, then, is a way of escaping the self by annihilating the self. Awe is similar (and, here, the French slang for an orgasm, a petite mort or “little death,” is revealing). Some might say that, quickly or slowly or both at different ways and different times, horror kills the self and awe fulfills the self (as though one has now climbed and then kicked away a ladder composed of the desires of the ego, id, and superego). However, I think things are more mixed-up and blurred together than that simple binary allows. I’m not sure why I object to this interpretation as much as I do… it feels off to me. Or, perhaps, it doesn’t feel fun enough. It seems too easy and, well, kind of boring. Plus, and maybe this is the heart of it, I actually want to hold onto the self and desire, too. I don’t want them to be kicked away (which is why, despite how it began, this post isn’t leading to some kind of Buddhist notion of the annihilation of the desiring self in order to live a life free of suffering). I want to want. I desire to desire. And I desire to think that this is good. For, as the Great Crosswaters Sea once said to me (against all relentless forms of asceticism): “life is a gift you have been given to rejoice within.” I don’t want to die—to myself, to my desires—I want to live and I want to rejoice.
But, wait, perhaps I am not giving awe its due here. The experience of awe does not annihilate the self—awe expands the self. It liberates the self from the constraints composed upon it by, not only desire but, everything that encourages us to think that our selves are only our selves and not, also, everything else. Awe allows me to experience myself as both one teeny-tiny part of the everything and also as “everything, everywhere, all at once.” Thus, desire persists but in a manner that is liberated from lack.
Or, well, almost.
For there is one thing that the everything lacks. That one thing is the nothing. The everything, by definition, lacks nothing. And when I isolate myself from others, when I pretend to be (and thereby actually become) a hard-bounded entity, a singularity, a subject, an ego, a monad, then I make myself nothing. But here’s the catch: there is glory to be found in this being nothing. It is no small feat to be nothing! It is neither bad nor immoral to be nothing. Why? Because it is nothing at all to be nothing! This, then, is part of what is wondrous about our temporal, material being in the here-and-now of all-of-this. We ourselves, in the core of ourselves, are the everything and the nothing simultaneously. Not all in the same way. Each one of us is finding our one particular manifestation of the everything and the nothing for our one particular moment. How remarkable!
But there is more. It is not the nothing in us that desires (for nothing knows no desire at all). Contra Lacan and more in line with Deleuze, desire does not arise from lack—desire arises from plenitude. For it is the everything that desires. And what can the everything possibly desire because it is the everything? The nothing! Everything desires nothing. Which is why, in our brief and fleeting moments of euphoria, wonder, and overwhelming awe, we experience ourselves not as insignificant but, even in the midst of our teeny-tininess, as fundamentally beloved. Part of you is everything. Part of you is nothing. And the nothing part of you is the part that is desired by the everything. The hardest truth about yourself, the place inside yourself you cannot go, the core self you try to hide from, the part of you whose suffering feels unbearable, this is the part of you most desired—which is to say most loved—by the everything.
If you don’t believe this, don’t worry: you can desire it. Before too long, your beliefs will follow along (as they always do).
In the mean time, when mysticism feels like obfuscation and any claims about reality (or, god forbid, spirituality) are treated as some kind of ideological overcoding or discursive sleight-of-hand, what can we say? Know thyself, perhaps. Yes, that is a good start. Better yet, know thyself otherwise, lest you never get to know thyself at all. Let go of the sufferings to which you have fled and to which you still cling, so that you can properly encounter your unbearable self and, in that way, discover your beloved self.
Still don’t believe me? That’s okay—just ask the nothing and the everything. They will reveal to you whatever it is you desire to know.
They already are.
xoxo
Dan