Jeremiad No. 73

What do you want?

I should …
No, what do you want?

Desire can be corrupted.  

One can imagine a world in which desire was pure.  Shameless and simple.   But this is an Eden to which we can't return.

If only we could be secure in the knowledge that what we wish for is something to strive for without compunction.  Then we would have direction for our will, our will would be a vector.  But will without compass is the splashing of a toddler in the tub.

When we don't know what to do, we let other people tell us what to do.

Our taste buds can be corrupted.  Presumably, they are designed to lead us toward nourishing food.  But we learn to enjoy the obvious, the immediate, the intense.  The salty and the sweet.  The vanishing of strict necessity, the abundance of toy food, triggers a kind of inflation.  And so the simple objects of our desire seem bland and unappealing.

So too the inclinations of our mind and soul, which turn, not toward what is soulful and big-hearted, but toward the delights of children -- children, though, with power and money and leisure enough to satisfy these cravings.  

Decadence is brakeless will, hurtling always toward only the most trivial of satisfactions.  Our appetites have magnitude yet our will has no direction but a pathetic falling-off from our best nature.

What do we want?  We want escape.  We want titillation.  We want the smother of a radically inoffensive existence.  We want to crawl back into the womb.

And the cultural product that defines us is surely pornography.  Millions of intellectually stunted and politically apathetic children-people in millions of homes across the land hidden away behind computers in the throes of limitless, generic sexual fantasy.  Who needs the Land of the Lotus-Eaters?  This is the "direction" our collective "will" takes.  But it's not even that; it's the repudiation of direction.

And then some of us may, almost by accident, wander out of Plato's Cave and wonder if there is something else we should be doing, some other purpose for our existence, some greater good, something we once heard somewhere about compassion and mercy and sacrifice.  Something about art and revolt, about leaving the world a better place than we found it, about speaking truth to power.  Shouldn't we be doing that? we ask.  But the face-off between desire and obligation usually has but one outcome.  It's only when obligation becomesdesire that we emerge from childhood.  And how does this happen?

Well, you might as well ask how to get past the angel with the flaming sword.