Energy and the Object: Desire

Energy and the Object, in post-Spinozean form, explores the relationship between energy and the object in six sections:  Desire, Desire and Suffering, Energy, Objects and Subjects, Energy and the Object, A Practical Guide for Traders in Energy.  This is the first section.

1.      Desire

1.1.   Desire is at the center of God, nature, technology and art¾the four dimensions that comprise the human.

1.1.1.      Desire is at the center and circumference of these dimensions; the further one draws toward the middle¾corruption of desire in the forms of repression, moderation and stagnation.

1.1.2.      No human reaches the center or circumference, although occasionally some feel as if they have; the fullest descriptions or enactments of this feeling are what humans chiefly celebrate.

1.1.3.      The center and circumference are both desire’s purity, but the former is desire for desire and the latter desire for non-desire.  Both, however, are equally desire, and this equation unites what has classically been called the sinner and the saint.

1.1.3.1.            The sinner, who strives to live at desire’s center, is typically associated with life, although death is his shadow; the saint, who strives to live at desire’s circumference, is typically associated with death, and life is his shadow.

1.1.3.2.            Death and life are embedded in each other like a fruit and its seed; so desire’s two pure forms know each other like transgression and the law.

1.2.   Desire is amoral and without identity; these characteristics are both what draw humans toward it and away.

1.2.1.      While the draw toward and away are equal, and most are given to primarily moving away, with occasional and decreasing spurts toward the center and circumference, those whom we most celebrate are those drawn to desire’s amorality and namelessness.

1.2.2.      All are born amoral and nameless, ripe with raw desire; some are simply unable to move far from birth though they themselves may want to; desire itself holds them back.  This holding back is what humans celebrate, for it seems to them mysterious, though it is no more mysterious than what is called maturation; it is simply less common.

1.2.2.1.            Naturally, those who are withheld are those forced to encounter creation.

1.2.2.2.            These ones are often called creators, although all they do is describe their relationship to the birth they can’t escape.

1.2.3.      The artifacts that seduce away from desire offer the shadow of seduction for those who are disinclined to the stark light and darkness of its purer forms; these artifacts include alcohol, money, acquisitions, reputation and institutions.  These products are the children of the fear of desire; desire breaks them as easily as a hurricane does a tree.

1.2.4.      Desire’s attributes are the attributes of origins and apocalypses¾whirling masses of black light whose gravity pulls the universe in, and spits it out.

1.2.5.      Those who seek names are never those of the greatest desire, for to desire desire or its negation is to enter on a quest where names are worms; those of desire seek something else and this something else eternally sets names aside.

1.3.   The greatest desire is the greatest tension between the greatest impossibilities.

1.3.1.      If I could desire equally both absolute light and absolute darkness, both desire’s center and circumference, I would become desire.  But this is impossible and this impossibility is the substance of all our fantasies.  He who dwells equally in these fantasies and their impossibility is the one who dwells closest to absolute desire; but even this indwelling is nearly impossible and is, if achieved, just the shadow of divinity on earth.  As if God Himself were passing over like a cloud and the indwelling one born into the transient discoloration of its passing.

1.3.2.      To reduce tension is to reduce the dimensions that comprise the human which is to reduce the human.  God, technology, nature and art are all reduced by the promulgation of moderation and peace.  Each of these requires diversity and blood, the antitheses of peace.

1.3.2.1.            The greatest subjects of desire are not those who displace desire’s tension onto groups through war or institutions, but those who carry the tension in themselves and funnel it into the dimension they are called to.  They internalize war, live on its inner battlefield and reform the hidden vain sound and fury into human forms.

1.3.2.2.            Desire’s subjects create new forms of God, technology, nature and art; each new form requires a thousand or a million objects to maintain it, balancing the scales of flesh in time’s peculiar courtroom.

1.3.2.3.            Some would say that the human lives far from edges and centers; they would rename the human¾animal.  But isn’t everything defined by its distinctiveness and human distinctiveness by eros (tension) and thanatos (tension’s snapping).

1.4.   Desire is the God behind God, the form behind forms, the darkness preceding the division of night and day, the good below good and evil, the breath that sparks and the wind that kills.  Desire is the force that terminates God and stuffs nature into a monitor.  It does not care what it does or what it makes, as long as it is constantly doing and making.  Its products are relevant to humans, but irrelevant to desire; desire is constant movement, the process from which forms are born and to which they return.

1.4.1.      Humans tend to cling to products, but desire will wrench their fingers from the objects of their clinging, throw them in the sea and leave the humans spun and desperate.

1.4.2.      As the world is made of products¾an ever increasing number¾often humans can flop from one to one and mistake their flopping for desire.  It’s the laughter of desire, but desire is the sea.  Humans are pale images of desire’s totality and contradiction.

1.5.   Desire!  What is it but the chasm between time and sensation?

1.5.1.      The chasm

1.5.1.1.            Some would call this chasm Hell and avoid it at any price or fall forever in its teeth.

1.5.1.2.            Some would invert it and call it Heaven¾the heaven of humanity.

1.5.1.3.            To desire, these names and movements are the same; let humans invent and move.

1.5.2.      Time

1.5.2.1.            Desire once worked through God and nature in their presence and art and technology in their absence.

1.5.2.2.            As desire has stretched from its clockless origins, it has begun working through God and nature in their absence and art and technology in their presence.

1.5.2.3.            For time to function, both the workings of absence and presence are necessary; what each is attached to is irrelevant, as long as the attachments balance.

1.5.3.      Sensation

1.5.3.1.            Human orientation to desire has been evolving from its circumference to its center.  This is analogous to desire crossing the chasm from time to sensation and with this crossing, human perspective changing, for what is human perspective other than our relationship to desire?

1.5.3.2.            As desire crosses, time becomes something not natal and living but geriatric and prosthetic.

1.5.3.3.            Sensation becomes primary because all that is absent, all that is at desire’s circumference, is held solely in one place¾the surface of human flesh¾and the burden of this holding has become the burden of desire.  So the world is oriented to its burden and time fades to an autumn flower.

1.5.3.3.1.      The tool to deal with the human burden is technology, and technology’s spirit that sustains and destroys it is art.

1.5.3.3.2.      Humans peer through the thick lens of desire at sensation’s shore and think they see salvation.  Why not?  But when desire meets sensation, God and nature will have become a point so dense with absence that technology and art will have been forced to become almost all to compensate.

1.5.4.      Falling

1.5.4.1.            Desire is like the surface of the ocean, but without substance at its surface or below.  Desire is an ocean of nothingness.

1.5.4.2.            If humans give up on desire, they fall between the shores of time and sensation and present themselves to the chimera of forgetting.

1.6.   Desire does not change; only humans change in relation to desire.

1.6.1.      Desire’s manifestations ceaselessly change; this is why desire never changes.

1.6.2.      Humans could be said to be nothing other than manifestations of desire.

1.6.3.      Because desire is wrapped in humans like death in tombs, the only way for them to gain perspective on their fashion is to fall and see desire from below or, by a severe act of the imagination, use desire to see themselves on either shore¾time or sensation¾looking at desire from its origin or end.

1.6.4.      Using a substance (even a substanceless substance) to look at the same substance when the looker is comprised only of this substance is problematic.  This disorientation is at the root of confusion; we could call this root alienation or, more classically, sin.

1.6.4.1.            Only a human who becomes easeful with this root can be said to be most human, for this root is the human.

1.6.4.2.            Such ease does not remove the disorientation, confusion or alienation; it is simply ease with them, ease being the acknowledgement that they are necessary aspects of the human condition.  A human who claims to remove any of these dissatisfactions is false to humanity and itself, what in classical language was called a false prophet.

1.7.   We can think of desire not simply as the center and circumference of all human constituents, but as the constituent material of existence.

1.7.1.      This existence is not simply what is scientifically, misanthropically, shockingly or pleasantly called life (birth, comforts, survival, growth), but equally all that which is attached to life (disease, decay, termination, brutality, accident).  Desire, though it end life or make life look anathema to life, is for all and in all.

1.7.2.      The human soul is simply desire for everything and the greatest individual souls are closest to this impossibly contradictory plurality, though existence itself, ironically, indifferently and silently, forces even them, through its tools¾the finely meshed sieve of time, fate’s indestructible hammer¾to a single pathway, though this singularity is paved for them with more diverse materials than those who accept it early, blindly, naturally.