To Crave & To Have: A Thing & Its Shadow

Tags

desire, loss, Marilynne Robinson, Metaphysics, personal, Philosophy, quote

Photo by Edward Steichen

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing–the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. — Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1980)

I wonder, is this true?

Certainly, sometimes the thing we’ve craved, once held in hand, does not live up to what was rounded out in exquisite detail when beheld in mind. Nor does the thing in hand last quite as long, if the thing we crave is not an object we can possess.

But is the thing in hand a mere shadow of the thing we craved for?

Is the matter-object we hold for but a moment in our hand less substantial than the ideal we crave and can bring to mind at moment’s notice and hold onto forever?

Sometimes I like to think so. I like to think those we’ve lost that are dear are as close as our thoughts of them fleshed out by memory and imagination. By a pure, keenly-honed desire to have and hold. Desire as sharp and hot as a welder’s flame.

I like to think that all I love and long for–that deeply felt-sense of them–is never lost. It’s shadow-substance may come and go and disappear as things do in a world of constant change. But its essence, the thing-in-itself that ever was, remains.

Brighter, clearer, than when held in hand.

Sweeter, purer than before.

The clean, keen edge of it never lost. Never wavering.

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Loss & Desire, and the Search for Something More, in Life & Literature

Tags

amwriting, desire, life, literature, loss, Novel, poetry, writing, writing process

These are the themes that run through so much of what I’m compelled to write about. No doubt because they are the great themes running through all the arts, through myth, religion, psychology–through life itself.

The poem below captures that so eloquently.

Meditation at Lagunitas

By Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

So much here resonates with me:

• how “each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea,”
• how each particular presence is “some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light,”
• how “a word is elegy to what it signifies,”
• how “desire is full of endless distances,”
• including “the moments when body is as numinous as words.”

I wrote a series of blog posts several years ago about how these themes are developed in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and Lacan’s Mirror State, starting with Some Tragic Falling Off into Difference and Desire.

I wrote in Our Quest for Wholeness:

Writers of fiction know that to create a compelling story that keeps readers turning pages we must:

• Create a protagonist with an overarching need or desire (derived from some sense of loss, of being wounded, or incomplete)
• beset by constant conflict that intensifies and delays achievement of that desire (to gain what was lost, find healing or wholeness)
• until that need or desire is eventually realized (or not), but either way,
  leaving the protagonist in a better place (happier, wiser, more whole) than where she had been before the story began,
• having learned something important or significant about herself, the world she lives in, or what it means to be human.

What drives the story and develops the character is a quest to return to wholeness, to regain what was lost. But what is regained is never simply what was lost, but “something more.” Some new realization– wisdom chiseled from the hard knocks and setbacks of a difficult journey, insights into human nature that will light her path moving forward.

Perhaps we find these stories so compelling because they parallel our own psychic development from the womb to maturity and beyond.

I should not have been surprised when rereading and editing my novel to find these themes repeated in each character’s journey from loss and desire to the search for “something more.”

But I was surprised. Perhaps even as we all are surprised to find it running through our own personal history and journeys. We are so close to it that even while we know it is there, we miss it in the particularity of the moment, in the ordinary humdrum of each day. We have to step back, way back, to see it, the path behind and before us. Even then, which fork will we take next? Which way will our lives unfold? It’s all part of the mystery of being, even being ourselves.

I’ll be exploring this more in future blog posts.

Music is More Feeling than Sound

Tags

art, creativity, desire, feel deeply, music, poetry, Science, The Jazz of Physics, truth, Wallace Stevens

Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing circa 1786 William Blake 1757-1827 Presented by Alfred A. de Pass in memory of his wife Ethel 1910 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N02686

From “Peter Quince at the Clavier” by Wallace Stevens.

Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
On my spirit make a music too.

Music is feeling, then, not sound
And thus it is that what I feel
Here in this room, desiring you

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk
Is music.

Time and again, I’ve found that something I’ve felt and have tried to articulate has already been beautifully captured in one of Stevens’ poems. My last blog post on music touched upon this, the sense that music is more feeling than sound–the way you feel as you play and the music moves through you,  and the way you feel as you listen to and are played upon by the music.

This poem is more about desire than music or feeling, however, or perhaps more about how desire plays out on a palette of color and sounds and rhythms. Stevens has been called a “musical imagist,” but he also notes the close correspondence between poetry and painting. In particular he’s known for his idea of the “Supreme Fiction”–how the mind/imagination “creates” reality.

When you read the poem posted in full below, you may not fully understand or appreciate all it implies as it references Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night Dream and relates the biblical story of Susanna and the Elders). But the feeling of the images–the sounds of the words and the colors and shapes of the images as they sweep through your mind–is dreamlike and moving in a way that speaks to some truth that lies just below consciousness. As dreams often do.

Music is like that too. We feel its “truth” although we may not be able to articulate it.

There’s a new book out called “The Jazz of Physics” by Dr. Stephon Alexander. He writes about how the structure of the universe is like a musical composition, both arising from a “pattern of vibration.” I haven’t read the book yet but a review in the New York Times by Dan Tepfer concludes with this quote: “[T]he reason why music has the ability to move us so deeply is that it is an auditory allusion to our basic connection to the universe.” Tepfer sums up: “This not only feels true; it is what musicians live for.”

Dr. Alexander may be on to something. One of the most beautiful verses in the Bible refers to the creation of the universe as “when the morning stars first sang together.”

We humans have been alluding to a powerful connection between music and the universe for a long, long time. Is it any wonder we feel music more deeply than sound?

Stevens’ poem in full.

Peter Quince at the Clavier
I
Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna:
Of a green evening, clear and warm,
She bathed in her still garden, while
The red-eyed elders, watching, felt
The basses of their beings throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.

II
In the green water, clear and warm,
Susanna lay.
She searched
The touch of springs,
And found
Concealed imaginings.
She sighed,
For so much melody.
Upon the bank, she stood
In the cool
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.
She walked upon the grass,
Still quavering.
The winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.
A breath upon her hand
Muted the night.
She turned–
A cymbal crashed,
And roaring horns.

III
Soon, with a noise like tambourines,
Came her attendant Byzantines.
They wondered why Susanna cried
Against the elders by her side;
And as they whispered, the refrain
Was like a willow swept by rain.
Anon, their lamps’ uplifted flame
Revealed Susanna and her shame.
And then, the simpering Byzantines,
Fled, with a noise like tambourines.

IV
Beauty is momentary in the mind —
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The body dies; the body’s beauty lives,
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of Winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden’s choral.
Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death’s ironic scrapings.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

 

“Some Tragic Falling Off” into Difference and Desire

Tags

desire, Duality, human nature, Jacques Lacan, loss, meaning of life, Milton, Philosophy, Psychology, Wordsworth

I’ve been thinking a lot about desire and loss lately and remembering a paper I wrote exploring this topic. It began with a quotation from Robert Hass’s poem “Meditation at Lagunitas” which I posted here last week. The poem begins this way:

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light.

All the old thinking and new thinking is not only about loss, but also about desire, about returning to that “first world of undivided light.” About regaining what was lost.

The quotation above is followed by this one:

“We are all inescapable dualists—for Lacanian, not Cartesian, reasons.” – Charles Alteri

It strikes me that these are the great themes that are explored over and over again in all great poetry, literature, art, religion, science, psychology, philosophy—is it not? Groping for “something more,” something just out of reach. Feeling a sense of loss, of incompleteness, and seeking what will make us whole.

My paper starts off this way:

If duality arises from difference, difference from separation, and separation is accompanied by a sense of loss and desire, then it could be said that duality, difference, and desire presuppose “some tragic falling off” from an original–mythical or otherwise–world of undivided wholeness.

Milton’s Paradise Lost, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and Jacques Lacan’s lectures on psychoanalysis all repeat at various levels this elemental theme of difference, loss and desire. What Milton treats at a cosmic and theological level, Wordsworth treats at a temporal and personal level, and Lacan treats linguistically and psychologically. In each, however, language is instrumental not only in the initiation of difference, but in the formulation of a desire which may turn it back toward a redemptive reunion.

The paper was written for academics, but the ideas explored are relevant for all of us, for writers in particular, and for anyone grasping at the meaning of life, or seeking a sense of wholeness.

I’ll be exploring this topic in the next few posts, and I hope you will join me. It’s a huge topic, with so many implications. I’d love to hear your ideas and insights.

Here are links to the rest of the series:

Part II – Our Quest for Wholeness

Part III – A Poet’s “Sense Sublime”

Part IV – “Thou Art That”

Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass

Tags

beauty, desire, loss, meditation, Meditation at Lagunitas, Nature, poetry, Robert Hass

Meditation at Lagunitas

By Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Sated by Scent. A Quest

Tags

beauty, desire, Fragrance, Olfaction, Perfume, scent

Lately I’ve become obsessed by scent.  Perfume, to be more precise.  I seldom wear it and know little of it, which is why this obsession is so strange.

It all started with the quest to find the perfect perfume for my daughter’s bridal shower a few months ago.  I wanted something intimate and earthy, something that would literally become her.  A signature scent that would be all her own, by which she and others would identify her. It had to be perfect, like her–warm and rich and exciting, and deeply satisfying.  Something that made you want more.  That you would never forget and never forget wanting.

And in this quest I tumbled down a rabbit hole into a rich and sensual world where one single sense seldom privileged—smell—was given full rein to romp and roam and sate itself in scent.

We humans rarely give ourselves that pleasure.  We privilege sight, touch, sound, taste, and the feel of things.  Poor scent is a step-child to the other senses, neglected, forgotten.  Not so for other species where the sense of smell is primary with a full palette of colors and a symphony of sounds.

Often when I sit on our front patio overlooking the surrounding hills and valley below, my little dog sits with me, looking out as if as mesmerized by the beauty of the landscape as I am. She seems totally enraptured, her nose raised, nostrils quivering, her whole body trembling in delight.  But she’s reveling in smell not sight.  She’s drinking in that delicious flood of scents flowing uphill from the valley below.

I imagine her savoring each scent the way we savor each note when listening to a symphony, carried away by the trill of arpeggios, deep thundering drums, long sweet notes like violin strings, the soft low moans of cellos, blasting trumpets, cascading piano keys, all washing over her, tumbling together, fading away, like movements in a symphony of scent that I am deaf to.  How I envy her!

We’ve long known how smell and taste are intricately connected—in fact, we can distinguish far more flavors through smell alone—inhaling and exhaling—than we can by our tongues.

What’s new and interesting is how scientists are discovering a similar interconnection between smell and sound that gives rise to a new sensory perception quaintly coined “smound.”  If this new science bears out it will only confirm the old science.  In 1862, the perfumer G. W. Septimus Piesse noted how “Scents, like sounds, appear to influence the olfactory nerve in certain definite degrees,” and he developed an “octave of odour” to measure those scents.

Musical metaphors are used in describing perfumes, which are said to have three sets of “notes” that unfold over time, each interacting with the others to create a “harmonious scent accord.”

As I wandered along countless cosmetic counters in the search for the perfect perfume for my daughter, spraying sample scents on slips of paper and waving them in the air, or daubing them on my wrists and forearms and inner elbow, knowing how scents change when applied to skin, mixing with our natural pheromones and warm pulses, I was savoring those musical notes: light florals steeped with sandalwood floating on a musky base.  Amber and lotus blossoms with a hint of peach.  Cardamom married to rosewood.  Lavender and rosemary.  Vanilla and violets dampened by oak moss.

But there was more to the whole process than scent–the name had to be perfect too, evocative and mysterious, lyrical and alluring.  The shape of the bottle had to be sensual or simple, daring or dreamy, as fitted the fragrance and the name.  It all had to flow together.

I finally found it, amazingly. The perfect perfume for my perfect daughter.  She loves it, and her lover loves her in it. So I’m happy.  But still hungry.

Still wanting more. More of my own to daub on earlobe and wrist, to line along the window sill like colored glass or exotic orchids.  Scents to soothe and stir, arouse and savor.

I want to collect scents the way I do books.  To sit quietly, alluringly, on my shelf, its richness and beauty and promise in full display, just waiting, waiting, waiting, for the perfect moment when I take it in my hands and lift the stopper and let the initial scent rise, and all its sweet layering, lingering notes play over me again and again.

I want scent to light up every neuron in my body.  To flow through me, light and airy, like champagne bubbles. I want to hear it taste it see it feel it popping all about me.

I want, I want to be.  Sated in scent.