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Deborah J. Brasket

~ Living on the Edge of the Wild

Deborah J. Brasket

Tag Archives: human nature

“Some Tragic Falling Off” into Difference and Desire

19 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by deborahbrasket in Creative Nonfiction, Culture, Human Consciousness, Poetry

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

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

800px-John_William_Waterhouse_-_Echo_and_Narcissus_-_Google_Art_ProjectI’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”

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Unwanted Solicitor, or Failing to See Humanity Behind the Hand

10 Tuesday Sep 2013

Posted by deborahbrasket in Art, Culture, Poetry

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

heart and hand, human nature, humanity, poetry, Unwanted solicitor

Ismael_Nery_-_Nu_no_Cabide,_c__1927 Wiki Commons
Unwanted Solicitor, or
Failing to see Humanity Behind the Hand

by Deborah J. Brasket

He stood there, a youth from poorer quarters,
Eyes wide and wary, flecked with glints uncertain.

His face was full and rich and filled my doorway;
Beyond–the grass, the street–they filled my eyes.

Words that stumbled forward fell to cement.
“I’m sorry, I can’t help,” I calmly lied.

I saw his eyes dull, his face turn narrow
I closed the door, my heart, my hand to him.

I watched him as he walked to other doorways,
To plead his practiced words to polished “no’s”.

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After sailing around the world in a small boat for six years, I came to appreciate how tiny and insignificant we humans appear in our natural and untamed surroundings, living always on the edge of the wild, into which we are embedded even while being that thing which sets us apart. Now living again on the edge of the wild in a home that borders a nature preserve, I am re-exploring what it means to be human in a more than human world.

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