What is the shape of desire? How does it come to take on a form?
The real power problem is to take control of our own desires, to actually give them forms that are good for ourselves – strategically, long-term. That is, how can we change the “what” of desire?
Does desire have to be linked to the possible, to an image, and therefore to the other, to lack?
Within the borders of a drugs effect, or a sexual experience, or a mystical/spiritual landscape, we experience desire as levels of intensities – not lack (Deleuze’s body-without-organs).
The “I” is lost.
The “I” afterall, was the constriction, the lack, the fact that I cannot be you, I cannot inhabit all positions, I am located here within an other-space as opposed to there. But when that I is abandoned, we have fluidity, creation. Creation changes the borders that create the I. The creative event starts out with some simple idea and transforms itself and participants simultaneously, exposing and leading out of the constrictions that at first enabled it. The contract is violated.
I want to violate the contract. I want freedom from the forms of the past that are constantly shackling the present (often by proclaiming to be the future). I want immersion. All the images and bodies and objects are so many parameters, but let them be modifiable. Instead, the contract constantly requires stability, preset desire channels. Little rivulets of titilation leech away desire. Constant bombardment of positions, of bodies, of others that I-could-be-but-I-am-not empower me to possibilities while ensuring my alienation and lack. It is a pornography.
How do we know when our desires are being fucked with? Does that question imply that there is a natural self, or a pure desire, out there somewhere beyond? What desires might I be willing to give up? What desires am I too scared to dissociate from the self? Would I be a man if I did not want…? Would I be me if I did not want (dissociate) an other?
Conversely, what desires am I too scared to associate with the self? Would I be me if I wanted…?
(And so we construct fantasies, parodies, invented and transferred desires. We have a million mechanisms to locate desire so that it will not fundamentally alter our own image. We must see our desire as legitimate, as good (or at least ok). We sense (and are told) of a danger…)
What do I want? What do S, Sh, D want? What if that dissociation is the constriction? Can I say instead what do we want? Well, writing about it – at least in this form, seems destined to always be a laundry list of (fictional) lacks and possibilities not attained. That is because there is no feedback, no ambiguity, no way in which the contract is violated to recreate the enabling/constricting parameters (the self/other). We are not experimenting together if I write in such a straightforward format. Maybe it is a good idea to self-reference and use stream-of-consciousness as Sh did. How can we open this up, lose the “I”, let it take on a life of its own and follow it?
I was reading about a Native American tribe, the Zunis, that has a curing society of clowns. The clowns actively work in that zone of discofort by taking on shamanic powers, by seeing themselves as indestructible. They inhabit/expose that uncomfortable zone of belief/disbelief, of that which structures desire. Their actions force one to look and laugh at one’s own borders. (Boundaries of Belief by Barbara Tedlock in I Become Part of It)
Again I created the absence. I am such a sexist. Positing the absent void other that I can never grasp, never fill. The blue sky womb here but greater, its immensity always beyond, and therefore to some degree always missed. And so it is past, the past I never lived and yet which enables my present. I am complicit. I killed mother because I live the way I live. Trampling. So many fetuses I could become.
And now I claim all of them. Desire spans across them like an invisible energy wave, reverberating like the taut cords that were cut. We are acting on the same impulse – one that runs between us. We have tapped the same root. We abandon the contract, the forms, the bodies. We suck from the same mother.