Tired Desire

Elliptical Birdsong

Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 2:11

WHEN in a dream, we find ourselves taken by certain convictions that, upon awaking, seem perfectly ridiculous. We may insist on throwing an elephant over the moon, or swimming on clouds, or stuffing a car in a postbox; all laughably absurd when articulated in the light of wakefulness, but absolutely, unquestionably important within the logic immanent to the dream.

Something lingers, oneiric, in the corner of your open eye. Perhaps illusory; perhaps real. If it were illusory, that would ensure the reality of our world as we see it, but still provide a troubling excess, a question mark that now hangs over your ability to understand the world. If it were real, the intuition would be emboldened: perhaps it is not just us, but the whole world, that remains a dream. What is it, after all, that beckons us to awaken from our slumber? How do we perceive the faint ringing of an unwanted alarm clock, the mellifluous tones of a loved one who rose before us, the sprite call of birdsong wafting through summer’s early breeze, passing into a bedroom window thrown open? We receive them as little hints, slight clues, even riddles, that persist in irritating our dreaming selves, putting us off the content and focus of our dream, trying to draw us away from the object of our concern. We have to throw an elephant over the moon—that clanging bell in the distance, from that cathedral spire, must quiet down as we focus on our task. But it loudens, and loudens, until it is turning us from one state to another, our focus switching and concern for the job loosening. And… what was it? We were just trying to do something, something important…. But whatsoever was it? And now we feel the fullness of our self rush back into our slumbersome mind, and we recall that we are—and always have been—a living, conscious person, with a specific identity and set of definite memories, and after a few blinks that whole fatuous dream has been forgotten in entirety.

But has it? Perhaps its content has been all but lost—well, you remember the moon, the pretty moon, which returns to your memory almost in spitting image when you see it waxing gibbous that night—but something more elusive seems to persist throughout the waking day. Some protean, amorphous wraith, slipping between forms like the smoothest thespian, assuming first the posture of a dreadful driver who cuts across you, before throwing off this vesture to boast the disquieting frame of an irate boss insisting you better your performance, then donning the cap of a frail coffee mug, whose handle snaps from overuse to cast the piping beverage on your trousers. And then, and then, and then. Form after form after form. Something always off, something changed, some slight discrepancy between what is and what should be—a discrepancy that calls in all things, burgeons over the years, and grows into a discontentment that knows no shape or name, but at last speaks not to one particular failure or inadequacy, but to some great vacuity in life itself.

See the wraith; follow his shadow. Homer relates how Menelaus was forced to grab Proteus, to wrestle with him, to hold onto him as he darted between a thousand forms, and to thereby see him clearly. How does this begin? Well—right there, within the dream. When you hear the clanging bell, head on into the town, listen and look closely. Be brave enough to leave the elephant behind. Most, it is almost a platitude to say, do not spend much time with their own being. Usually we are kept well at bay by the coy distance supplied by an invisible fear, and so formulate quotidian distractions whose apparent lack of significance exonerate them from possible inquisition. When we play video games, we don’t feel the need to justify why we find them so comforting; we are buying into the illusion of an alternative reality, and are perfectly aware of this. But the sheer weight of emotional lifting done by turning on the Playstation, or sitting down with the Sudoku and a pipe, or scrolling mindlessly through Instagram, or watching the latest BBC true crime drama over steaming dinner trays, is frankly staggering for those who are willing to pay attention to themselves. These are so often subtle respites from subtle burdens, momentary islands to which we cling in order to more efficiently ignore the unnamed feeling behind the forgotten thought. At this point, it is a Herculean feat just to notice. Perhaps in the midst of the trivial distraction there will be a slight tinge of weight, a silhouette gilding the outer boundaries of the feeling, offering a slight murmur to suggest that what is won from our distraction is not so much pleasure as refuge.

This is, by all measures, a call to wake up. To realise that whenever we feel discomfort or unpleasantness, simply stuffing that sentiment down, suffocating it beneath daily doomscrolling will only cause us greater suffering. And yet it is not enough to merely call us ignorant of what is going on: it is also a wilful ignorance, something known primordially but also pushed away at first sight. We feel empty: we first have an aversion to this emptiness, and so flee from it (fear: our first mistake). We think our flight to Instagram will allow us to forget our pain for good (ignorance: our second). But, knowing that intuitively not to be true, we will it to be true, and so blindly attach ourselves to Instagram—and this is how addictions begin—in the hope that it actually does fill us up (our third: greed, or attachment). This, at least, is the pattern of the ‘three poisons’ (trivisha) of the mind; three clouding mental states (kleshas) which Buddhist doctrine identifies with the perpetuation of suffering (dukkha): ignorance (avidyā), attachment (raga), and aversion (dvesha). As the image goes: a pig, snake, and chicken, all chasing each others’ tails, running from each others’ teeth. All are running for something, and all are running from something. And the result on the surface is—to mix my Buddhist metaphors—a frothy, clouded, disturbed state of mind, a cartoonish spinning-limbs-and-dust-brawl that blurs all three actors into one.¹

The dream itself has a dull allure, of course. There is something right to this elephant, something about it that obviously demands our attention. Some impulse before the reason, from which—if we dream for long enough—the reason then emanates, and is cited post hoc as justification. Hence why there is perhaps no religious wisdom quite so universal to the world’s traditions yet quite so universally flouted. Empires rise and fall, the young wither and age, and each generation is convinced afresh of their personal ability to make themselves happy by grabbing the world, bringing it to heel, acquiring and mastering its myriad components, and so finally flushing away that cold heckle, that hyena laugh, never quite put out of earshot by any measure of success. We run for fear of being bitten, and we run toward what will make us safe. Surely this will fill me up? Surely this? …or, at last, surely this?

We might at first think we find this schema redeemed by the orientation of our disposition toward those things in life which are undeniably valuable. But time undoes all such hopes. I think especially of marriage, which for many is the centrepiece of a life, with very good reason—we are speaking here of love! And yet a quite uniquely devastating misery commonly accompanies matrimony; perhaps in part because of the height of its expectation. Finally the lonely years are through: no longer am I the small boy laughed at by the pretty girls in the playground. No longer am I the young girl ignored by the handsome boys in my class. I have love, I have one who vows to spend a life with me, and even wrote it down in contract, and put a diamond on their finger to show that they’re not having me on! I have proof that I am loved—look! Proof! And so we turn with open palms, as though showing our parents our artwork, looking finally for the completion of a full validation. But who are we talking to? Why are we already, even on the wedding night, turning away from what we have, toward some vague spectre to try and dispel some old, foul-smelling rumour? And why does this habit come to us so easy?

And so we become increasingly erratic. The years pass. We chase the beast before, run from the beast behind. Often our disposition toward our spouse shifts with the protean currents of daily interaction; in one instance we might find them distracting, at another we are entirely irritating, and then suddenly, in a burst of love—even from the casual emergence of a smile or turn of familiar phrase—we are reminded why they are so precious to us, and wonder how we may have forgotten this in our ignorant upset. And these Romantic vagrancies of the soul continue to compound the misery through memory. We become, in each state, engulfed by the full weight of our emotional history: in times of anger and frustration, especially, we seem to recollect every crime, minor and major, that they may have committed against us; every rash word given without regard for our feeling, every one of our unspoken desires they failed to appease. But in times of joy—particularly arising after the dust has settled on some great dispute—we glimpse the very reason we love at all, the beauty of it all to which, no matter how infrequent its arrival, our heart indisputably belongs. Yet then, for all the moving force of our revelation, we slip into regularity once more, and so returns the murky disdain, and so on our life marches in capricious tedium, at moments seizing us with the gust of a great decision yet insisting on the safety of securing all things as forever the same.

And through all of this volatile chasing, there is some great bolt of unconscious discontent, something perennially unheard and so horribly wronged, thundering through our mentality from the ancient of days, slowly rumbling beneath the visible, biding its time as decades come and go, garnering ever more tension with each passing, daily, forgotten word and petty conflict. Before, at last, our coat catches on a doorknob on some cold February morning in our mid-fifties, and suddenly we scream, cry, thump the wall, and rage against the dying of the day, a great eruption of cosmic anguish whose significance we so desperately need to see but which appears so humiliatingly absent. And there are no words for any of it, for its origin is before words, before memory, and all the reasons we have at our present disposal are contemptibly common, pathetically plain, none—not even their summation—sufficient to justify this crushing emptiness we feel and know. And then, we hear the keys turn in the lock behind us, and our spouse enters the room, their blithe contentment suddenly dulled by our fragile visage, obliged to marital duty. And we hate them for asking their questions, and we hate ourselves for dampening their happiness, and we hate language and thought for failing to give anything worth saying, and we hate their caring, considerate eyes which we know will either evaporate at the mention of a trivial reason or—worse—will pretend that they do understand, and hug you, and kiss you, and everything else you do not know why you hate, but which thoroughly and stomach-turningly repulses you.

All of this is to say that mid-life crises begin at early ages. After the tea and cakes and ices, there appears a moment where the sheer futility of our desires comes to a desperate culmination, a point where we have burnt out in our chase of ephemera, and feel our knees finally buckle and fold under the weight of all wants, whether ‘fulfilled’ or unfulfilled. We have for so long been convinced that this or that desideratum will finally prove to be repletion, that it shall at last resolve our deep vacuity, chase away the ghosts, and imbue us with a lasting and unassailable peace. We must ask how long we can persuade ourselves of this illusion before its misery impels us to change. I remember well my contradictory motions toward Britain and America: when I was in the former for a given duration, I began to itch for freedom beyond the Atlantic, and the cherished friends far hence. But when I found myself amidst the lonely, small, Stateside hours, I yearned once more for the comforting familiarity of Albion; for the narrow country roads, for the poised annunciations and accents of BBC 2, for my parents: for home. But I have been back and forth enough times to have occur to me that most dangerous and delightful question: where am I actually going? There are only so many times I can respond to this question with ‘England’ or ‘America’—pronouncing each with a hallowed, eager reverence—before I realise that as the plane touches down in Heathrow or O’Hare, it remains equally and painfully unanswered.

The question is both dangerous and delightful by merit of its potential: it balances us on the paper-thin border between nihilism and religion; between a vacuity or fullness in terms of life’s meaning. The innumerable anxieties set before us arise in turn: what if I fail in my career ambition? What if I fail to meet the right partner in time to start a family? What if I never make the money that I always thought was necessary to be considered a success? And all these desires become asphyxiating spectres at the moment of their articulation, hardly dismissed by general reassurance of a prosperous future. But they also, crucially, remain metaphors for a broader question. Such conditions are precisely that—conditioned—and in another time I might well have borne the same anxieties in accordance with completely different conceptual framework. That wretched wraith might well slip on another suit, taunt us in another tongue. So again we hear the knocking, telling us to awake.

We must know that our misery is held in place by the force of misplaced necessity. Tensions burgeon in accordance with uncomfortable pressures; expecting infinite reward from finite sources. Can those poor objects even be condemned? Have they not done their best? Tries their hardest? Didn’t that marriage, that career, that achievement want to bring you happiness? They exhausted themselves, threw up their limited limbs with all the force they could; but you asked for a great deal more. Do we reproach the cow for its lack of lunar aviation? At heart this is the crucial question as to whether we will ever have what we want: whether we shall ever be complete. We would far rather resign ourselves to Sisyphean absurdity, the pursuit of an ignis fatuus, than confront the fact that nothing in the world will actually make us happy. We dance on a paper-thin ledge again. A not uncommon critique of religion is that it happens merely to be the means by which we cope with our fear of the dark. In many—perhaps most—cases, I am inclined to agree. After all, is the religious person doing anything different to the irreligious when they cling to a set of objects as thought they were immutable, unassailable, immortal? That these are ‘sacred’ objects makes little change. We grip our teddy bears tightly, we close our eyes and believe our parents will live forever. Siddhartha Gautama, scared of what he sees, returns within his resplendent palace and never ventures outside again.

But the bells are clanging, loudening, almost unavoidable now. Even Gautama cannot occlude them, covering his ears with a thousand silk pillows. You graduate from college. Your dog begins to hobble. You see wrinkles on your mother’s face which were not there last decade. Things are changing—horribly, relentlessly changing—and life marches onward with endless indifference. Whatever childhood was, whatever mysteries it revealed, are now mere spectres that haunt the current hour. Every present becomes a past that is better than this present. Everything here, whether happiness or sadness, is insufficient, because everything is always doused with an excess. Always, always more. Always something else, something missing. Something wrong. Corner of your eye; a heckle, a shifting movement, some eidolic figure. Life is measured out in coffee spoons and career promotions, in cricked necks at the desk chair and on-the-go Tesco meal deals. Still we are back with this elephant, its comforting familiarity. But still, after all these years, it has not left the ground.

One ventures from the crowd. The fixation on the vain task has finally proven enough, the despair finally overwhelming, and so an indifference to death and life finally appears. The chase has worn them out. They seek not to avoid anything.

The instant we cease to look: clarity. The conquering of the chicken, aversion, who maniacally and blindly flees from anything that moves, perceiving all the world as threat. Even the religious one must make this transition. For all the talk of ‘liberation’ and ‘enlightenment’, we must know that at no stage in our lives will there be a moment where we have ‘resolved’ the thorny, sinuous damascenes of our inner worlds. We must realise that our desires are, truly, headed nowhere. There is nothing which will finally bring us that great something we want. That paper-thin border becomes wholly indiscernable. The one who has had enough of the dream and its illusions recants the world, wants nothing more to do with its many objects. The conquering of the snake, which seeks to bite no longer. And, at once with our clarity of mind, the conquering of this pig, no longer succumbing to the foolish task, no longer looking between the elephant and the moon with any real plans.

If one lives long enough ‘atop’ one’s being, surveying its plains for something other than the repletion provided in simply Being, suffering manifests by way of unassuaged lack, a terminal ingratitude whose chief symptom is a pervasive unhappiness. This is the ground of Lacanian theory, the belief that a horror vacui turns us away from confronting the overarching lack (manque) of the Real, and so encourages us to continue chasing the fatuous residue of jouissance in vacuous ephemera. One must first agree with Lacan to escape him: yes, nothing the subject pursues will complete them. But subsequently, the subject need not aim for completion. Completion is never an aim: it is a reality. Upon such a revelation, from this Lacanian, lacking ash, something entirely new may arise. To have razed the structure which priorly held one’s suffering in place is to have disclosed the possibility of a life without it.

But there is always a risk of becoming stuck in that frantic race again. That Lacan had the unconscious structured ‘like a language’ is apposite, because words are often our enemy. How do we avoid the chase? How do we avoid reifying our rest, and so secretly using it as a means to run again? I would counsel—perhaps to go beyond the typical advice for those in relationships to ‘communicate well’—a learned ability to fail to speak clearly, to mutter and babble and exaggerate and undersell, both to ourselves and (when appropriate) others. Thoughts are the apparel of feelings; thus sometimes they must be worn according to the impulsive passions, casting off the constraints of the semantic so as to burn intensely in an inebriate fury. Sometimes aesthetics must overwhelm practicality: sometimes we must dress in our finest winter coats, even on the sunniest days; sometimes we must strip down to trunks and flip-flops, even amidst the howling blizzard. Our justification? Because we feel like it. This is amongst the foremost causes of human unhappiness: people do not know how to under- or overdress their feelings. If one tailors one’s thoughts so as to fit each emotion with measured precision, at first our suave debonair may prove gratifying, but sooner or later we feel the tapered clothes chaffing and itching at our skin, and in time come to resent our dazzling finery and accoutrements, and perhaps one day even cry aloud and tear at our robes like Jacob. All this is to say: we must not seek to catch that wraith in his Sunday best, but sit back and let him switch his dress as he will.

An example: Alexei Karenin in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. At the character’s discovery of his wife’s infidelity, Tolstoy does an astounding job at communicating the sheer depth (that is, how far from the surface it is) of his true emotion for her. Karenin spends his time pondering with mechanical rigour about how his career and reputation may be affected by such adultery. It seems clear that his actual feelings for Anna have long been evaded by a turn to his career; that the latter has become a safehouse of bureaucratic tidiness and organised formality, an (apparently) unwavering exoskeleton to prop up a rigid frame whilst all those slippery, flaccid feelings inconveniently swan about within. And so he copes through that mocking, semi-sardonic tone which Anna herself comes to resent, and other habitual attempts to exalt himself above himself, to conform to that ideal of unimpeachable apathy, far from the slovenly sentiment that perhaps caused him to long and pine and even cry over her in the sophomore stages of their marriage.

The formalised streams of consciousness we hear from Karenin are to be contrasted to those of Joycean characters, belonging as they do to an author who perhaps embodies such linguistic freedom better than any other. It is not that we must come to disdain language and cognitive communication, nor protest grammar absolutely, for its restrictions are its very positivity. But we should know how to break its rules well; how to let our feelings speak even when they cannot use words. This should, for readers of my other pieces, ring some faint bells. Neither affirmation nor negation of the stringent regulations of grammar and semiotics, but a recognition that true mastery resides in a third (non-) position in which we are at continuous play with both.

Similarly, desires and aversions (and the degree of wisdom, or lack thereof, that governs them) are polyvalent, composite alloys, never pure in nature. Never is it the case that one desire corresponds neatly to one desideratum, bearing a clearly traceable line of causality. Indeed, it is perhaps something of a misnomer to use the term ‘desires’ as though referring to discrete and isolated ‘things’, as our movement toward the world is always a matter of ceaseless interior gathering and loosening; this or that bundle of recalled experiences configured in this or that arrangement so as to respond to this or that mixture of novelty and history in experience. To try and solve our problem by limiting ourselves to particular entities and identities is to return ourselves to it. To say effectively what upsets us about the pursuit of particular objects must allow for the possibility (even necessity) of breaking rules, spreading out, becoming indifferent to the conditioning elements of the dream, to the structures of language and the abstract readings of desire: being willing to move toward those clanging bells, not to accept the messaging which recommends you stay with the sedated population gathered around that elephant, encircling it in the chase and flight from those invisible beasts.

What do we discover in this indifference, this apatheia? Is it that we simply begin to cling to the bells themselves, in their particularity? Would we then be any different, any better off? Or is it rather something subtler, yet at once also thoroughly ubiquitous? What is discovered here is freedom. Not the voluntarist, consumerist ethic of modernity, which seeks to make us freer by expanding the ambit of the market, and the mindless variety of our choice. Rather, the freedom of the ascetic, the yogi, the arhat, is in beginning not with the pursuit of particular products—and so wagers his happiness on whether or not he acquires—but with a reflection on his inner relationship to those products, to all the aspects of the world that he has chased. And then, day by day, through arduous and agonising discipline, he undertakes the religious life, and begins to discover real freedom: not the expansion of the options to choose, but the cultivation of an indifference to those options. The cultivation of an inner security, an inner stillness, that becomes increasingly assured as it is teased out by frequent practice. And gradually that impulse to chase and flee begins to subside, and the belief that one needs to chase and flee dies with it, and so the ignorance of that great muddle fades in tandem.

We exchange Albert Camus for Gregory of Nyssa. In Camus, Sisyphus is taken by a perpetually unfulfilled desire, and so is tragic; Gregory takes the Christian to be under precisely the same conditions, and yet blessed. In this transition, nothing need change about our material conditions. Our life is usually still constituted by the same elements. But our relationship to them is fundamentally altered. We do not seek to catch and pin down what we follow, but undertake that journey in full and happy acceptance of its result, grateful for its occurrence, not its contingent remuneration. We let it stretch out beyond us eternally, and move on in pursuit. Not seeking to grasp, not seeking to hold. Just running, as though toward a sunset, whose horizon will never finally bring you to the spot; but whose chase rewards you with a thousand delightful sights of the same wondrous blaze. The amber hues come to rest now on the verdant glades of a rolling field, now the humble beauty of the red-brick rustic bungalow, now the tremulous, glimmering reflection of a placid lake. The sun is never in our hands. It is never between our teeth, as we hope the beast before us will be. But this is no misery. Neither are we any longer running from anything. We have clarity. There is nothing that heckles us anymore, no beast behind. We have seen through the wraith’s many vestments, and seen that chasing each of his forms is sheer vanity, hollow suffering. To make desire right is to be without need of its desideratum; it is to make it pure joy, sheer gratuity. That is, it makes its movement musical: it bears a rhythm, a dynamism, but it is not in a hurry. The song moves, yes—for stillness would be a deafening absence of sound—but it moves as a show of beauty, as the disclosure of something endlessly alluring, and endlessly peaceful. No longer the necessity of this chase. Just the sweet sound, and its gorgeous, gentle illumination of the road Home.

1. See The Teachings of the Buddha: In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pāli Canon, ed. Bhikkhu Bodhi (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications), 272.