I Want You

Working as a hospital orderly teaches you, among other things, that the human body is a temple lodged precariously between currents of quicksand and wind. Two disasters can happen to this temple: 1) a total movement, or 2) a total solidity.

Think of total movement as life-overload, in which the flow state that we lust after is courted to the point that it begins sleeping on our couch and using our credit cards. One of the most visionary moments in the recent disaster epic/Woody Harrison vehicle 2012 was when a tiny passenger jet took off to find the normally uncluttered Las Vegas air transformed into a maze of fire and falling buildings. This, my friends, is your body melting down. In my job, it means a patient can’t stop shitting, bleeding, throwing up, etc. If uncorrected, it leads to a disintegration that is simultaneously both larger and smaller: smaller in that cells burst and organs liquefy, larger in that the body itself expires. As any cholera sufferer will tell you, diarrhea can kill. Easily. All it takes is for your body to get so excited that it either forgets how, or loses the ability, to stop.

Solidity, on the other hand, is the body stopping too much, from fear or misunderstanding or even anger. It starts with a clench and runs to irritation. Alain (Emile De Chartier, secret philosophical godfather to both Sartre and Simone Weil) gives us a simple and helpful example:

“If you rub your eye when you have a gnat in it, or a bit of dust, it will bother you for two or three hours; just keep your two hands still and look at the end of your nose; soon the flow of tears will relieve your discomfort.” (On Happiness, p. 28)

Often, medicine will help us induce this composure; but a failure to do so will lead (again, in my rather messy professional experience) to constipation, nausea, fester and boil. At the hospital where I work, patients – no matter how serious their conditions – are strongly encouraged to exercise three times a day. For many, this means simply sitting in a chair for a half hour. Others do laps, their IVs trailing behind them like thin and worried butlers. But no matter how bad what they have is, the goal is the same: to get them moving again.


Any philosophy, religion or literature that ignores the body is doomed to wither into the prized pet of a decrepit coterie; that Christianity (along with all the other world religions) has not should clue us in to the rootedness of its wisdom – despite all popular and institutional prejudice. Read the Song of Songs, or Genesis, or even the Gospel of Luke again: desire is so pervasive in these books that we forget to look for it. Read Leviticus, in which an ungiving mesh of rituals and laws is laid over Israel like a lace tablecloth over a pool of blood. Then think of those stories in which this pattern is rent. You won’t have to think long: there are very, very many of them.

A study of any one sin reveals the similarity of all sins; but when it comes to physical desire, lust is where we start. What is it? In America today I see us talking about desire in one of two ways: either it is a) a poisonous bad thing to be avoided at all costs, or b) a life-giving, truth-affirming force that has the potential to break through your staid bourgeois comforts and let life in, man. But isn’t choosing between these two options like choosing between dysentery and paralysis? If we actually read the Bible, on the other hand, we find a world that is neither one nor the other: a world in which desire is like air or food, a necessary component of human life, desirous and terrible at the same time but then hey, what isn’t? Adam lusts after Eve, David lusts after Bathsheba, Christ lusts after Mary Magdalene, Judas lusts after Christ (er…I mean, Sam/Gollum lusts after Frodo!). Saying this, however, is a far cry from admitting that “anything goes”; if anything, what we begin to see is how the book of books can be understood as a study on how to avoid the comic/tragic exaggeration of desire, which I think we can safely call “lust”.

Maybe not safely – though I do maintain that the balance, no matter how precarious, is what we all really want, and that a sincere succumbing to desire or fear is more a misunderstanding of how we can achieve that balance, than a rejection of it. Lust, like pride, or envy, is an attempt to transcend – a willful and childish disregarding of proportion. It differs from desire in the same way that Anne Carson’s Socratic eros differs from the bad reading of her Lysian dilettante. Please excuse the parentheticals: despite Carson’s plainwater prose this shit is VERY difficult (for me at least), even after you’ve read the whole book:

“In Sokrates’ view, a true logos [a true written argument or work] has this in common with a real love affair, that it must be lived out in time. It is not the same backwards as forwards, it cannot be entered at any point, or frozen at its acme, or dismissed when fascination falters. A reader, like a bad lover, may feel he can zoom into his text at any point and pluck the fruit of its wisdom. A writer, like Lysias [villain and fool of the Phaedrus, the dialogue under discussion], may feel he can rearrange the limbs of the fiction on which he dotes with no regard for its life as an organism in time. So readers and writers dabble in the glamor of grammata without submitting themselves to wholesale erotic takeover or the change of self entailed in it. Like Odysseus bound to the mast of his ship, a reader may titillate himself with the siren song of knowledge and sail past intact. It is a kind of voyeurism, as we see when we watch Phaedrus [Robin to Sokrates’ Batman, at least here] seduced by the written word of Lysias. In Plato’s view, the Lysian text is as philosophic pornography when compared with the erotic logos of Sokrates.” (Eros the Bittersweet, p. 165)


This quote is a diamond: turn it in your hand and watch as thought fractures into new alignments. On this particular circuit, I am struck above all else by how Carson, while writing a book about erotic love, can make me feel that true eros (that is, for the purposes of our argument, true desire, rather than simple lust) must be committed, even when “fascination falters”. To me, this brings the very Greek-Greek eros much closer to the Christian-Greek agape, which is the word that appears in the gospels. The relevance of this swerve is as important for writers as it is for doctors. Life lusts after death in the same way that a page of any book, anywhere, longs to be blank again. The created object (body or book) is a temple perched between currents: like a sewer grate, it would cave in if too solid, be swept away if too flimsy. So all structures aspire to the harplike stringing between heaven and earth

How hard is it to remember this? Or, even better, how easy is it to forget this? Anyone who has found themselves compromised by lust will tell you how easy, and if you don't believe them, that's fine: just beware that the history of the human race is full of recorded examples of men and women who thought they were bodiless, pure wills. The mind can chose not to recognize consequence, if necessary; but the body is where consequence writes itself. Just look at a lifelong smoker. In artistic terms, this consequence is not something to be avoided: if anything, I think what Carson and the Bible both suggest (as much as an encyclopedia and a lake can suggest anything) is that it is precisely when we accept the consequences of our desire that we move out of the creationless desert of lust and into the creative kingdom of desire and satisfaction. The sin, then, is not in wishing to overstep boundaries (or even in overstepping boundaries), but in the way that we try to tell ourselves that everything is ok, everything is the same. We can do whatever we want. We can't do whatever we want, in life or art. But then, things would be stupefyingly boring and completely meaningless if we could.