I’ve had the word “desire,” and nothing else in this entry since 7/26; today is 8/3. I keep thinking about the content, in terms of what to write, because desire has been a major aspect of my life for as far back as I can remember, as I suggested in one of the earlier essays. For example, an early defining moment occurred when I was in the fifth grade. That would have made me about eleven (1951). In fact, I used this incident in a lecture on Dante I gave, also long ago now, for one of our general studies courses, Religious and Historical Perspectives. The incident goes somewhat like this:
I had made an arrangement with another 5th grade young lady to meet her on Saturday afternoon at 4 at our grade school playground; the season, I think, was late summer. There should have been no problem keeping the appointment, except that my parents decided to go somewhere that Saturday afternoon as well. They assured me that we would be back well before 4. They drove; here and there; wherever parents drive; I watched the little clock in the car from the back seat, growing more and more anxious. We made it back home about 10 after 4, as I remember. I was angry with them, of course, and ran the two blocks to the school playground. It was Saturday afternoon; the playground was empty; absolutely no one there; I assumed she hadn’t waited. The lesson from the experience was, ha, that parents can’t be trusted! Actually, not true. What I really experienced was what I would understand later as a metaphysical emptiness. The girl, the object of my fairly innocent but intense, desire, was not there; the playground was empty, desolate. Even this many years later, I can still see the empty playground, and feel the desolation, the lack of fulfillment.
Of course, the irony of the experience was that she had forgotten, or hadn’t remembered our “date,” and had never been there at all that day. I don’t think I discovered that until several days later, however; in any case it didn’t change the nature of my experience that Saturday afternoon; she was, Mary, the prettiest girl in our school; I looked forward to meeting her there. What I experienced was desolation, what felt like absolute emptiness. That young boy that I was had just had a taste of the meaning of Hell. All I had to do was hold on to the anger against my parents, hold on to my emptiness, my disappointment.
Beauty was always at the heart of my desire, and I saw beauty everywhere. From early days I became a collector: I found beauty in match books; I saw beauty in beer cans; in hot wheels models, in coins, in rocks, in comic books, in book collections, in slick advertisements, especially in women’s magazines; however, the highest form of beauty was in the feminine form, whose meaning I began to understand fully only after I had found Dante's La Vita Nuova, his Divine Comedy, as well as St Augustine’s Confessions and the work of Charles Williams, especially his The Figure of Beatrice and his seven “supernatural thrillers,” such as All Hallow’s Eve.
Desire, as I understood it for a long while, was the intense longing for something tangible, primarily the woman whose love would be the epitome of fulfillment. I was a romantic at heart and very very ignorant, as anyone with any sense might see. Obviously, it took me a long while to figure out that what Augustine wrote in the Confessions was true: “our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” In a sense I knew it but also didn’t know it. To make my ignorance and behavior clear, I offer one incident.
We ate at a Lexington Green restaurant a very long time ago. On the way out to the parking lot, my wife and I found this quaint shop of beautiful and expensive items run by, as I remember, a fairly young oriental gentleman. I was not usually interested in such places, but we entered, and shopped. It wasn’t a large store and it disappeared long ago. What I found there, however, I still have. It was a sculpture of sorts, not a reproduction, as far as I could tell, but it was marvelous. Talk about desire and longing: at the heart of the sculpture was an image of feminine beauty, but it cost 150 dollars. We went home without it; I spent a week longing for it, even though I couldn’t really afford it. I had to have it. We went back the next weekend, and of course I bought it. The woman at the heart of the sculpture is a faun or nymph, and the sculpture thus images the three essential aspects of our nature: the animal, the lower aspect (her legs and feet); the human, a very human woman; and our longing for the divine, as she is looking up. There is also an image of a mirror in front of her suggesting self-knowledge, both looking into and reflection.
Most important for me is the notion of reflection. To simplify, for the man (myself especially), the woman, especially in her otherness, her femininity, her beauty and her goodness, reflects the divine source of her being (Milton put this insight throughout Paradise Lost, majestically, epically even); for the woman, I think, the man in his otherness, his masculinity, should reflect the beauty, goodness, and wisdom of the divine as well (also in PL, though his idea of the hierarchical meaning of the gender differences between male and female is essentially, er, mistaken).
Put another way, the man and woman are, or can be, images of the divine, and an image is that which, first, has substance in some tangible form (complicated to define here more precisely perhaps); the image exists in reality (my very feminine “creature” in the sculpture, for example); second, the image points to a reality beyond itself; third, and most important perhaps, the image participates in the reality to which it points. To see these three aspects in a text, read the first chapter of Charles Williams’ The Figure of Beatrice; read Paul Tillich’s discussion of image or symbol in The Dynamics of Faith; and Mary McDermott Shideler (spelling) also has a discussion regarding this subject, though I have forgotten where.
One final element that for me makes the meaning complete, for it focuses precisely what desire is truly all about. Desire always seeks satisfaction or fulfillment, one more thing to make the collection complete, as if I could take it into death with me; foolishness no matter how we look at it. Clearly there is only one reality that can satisfy our desire and longing completely, as the Psalmist discovered long long ago:
Psalm 63, the revised Grail edition: “O God, you are my God; at dawn I seek you;/for you my soul is thirsting./For you my flesh is pining,/like a dry, weary land without water./I have come before you in the sanctuary,/to behold your strength and your glory./Your loving mercy is better than life;/my lips will speak your praise./I will bless you all my life;/in your name I will lift up my hands./My soul shall be filled as/with a banquet;/with joyful lips, my mouth shall praise you.” (2-6). Or,
Psalm 42, the revised Grail edition: “Like the deer that yearns/for running streams,/so my soul is yearning/for you, my God./My soul is thirsting for God,/the living God;/when can I enter and appear/before the face of God.” (2-3).
As very wise thinkers have pointed out in times past, all our physical desires have means for satisfaction; hunger, thirst, sexual gratification, etc. Why would this desire for God be any different?
