In the beginning was desire (Redux)
This morning is the return to standard time, so we turn the clock back. The normal increment of turning back time is one hour. But the Book of Face reminds me of where I was one year ago when I wrote this piece. There is still desire driving me. The desire to do more, to be more, to do better. As Beckett reminded us in the previous post:“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Fail Better. Isn’t that an oxymoron? The marriage of two words to create a concept that is is both negative and positive. Kind of like electricity. Whatever the metaphor, the currency still has the power to shock. In daylight savings time we get to turn the clock back, and relive the moment. What if at 1:00 in the Sunday morning you did something more momentous than sleeping? What if you killed somebody. Would turning back the clock bring them back to life No, it doesn’t work that way. That is magical thinking. The marker is moved, but the murder remains. There is an opportunity to do something better than murder in the falsely constructed new hour, but there is still that dead body on the floor.
But we will play along with this fiction. We have gone back in time. Except it a year earlier and I just wrote a poem called In the beginning was desire.
In the beginning was desire
“There was a merciless gnawing in my chest, a queer silent labor was going on in there. I pictured a score of nice teeny-weeny animals that cocked their heads to one side and gnawed a bit, then cocked their heads to the other side and gnawed a bit, lay perfectly still for a moment, then began anew and bored their way in without a sound and without haste, leaving empty stretches behind them wherever they went.” Knut Hamsun, Hunger.
In the beginning was Desire
eternal wanting
A craving that comes wrapped in a God- shaped hole
A coming together of egg and sperms
Shooting sparks from embers of creation into Obsession
A flaming drive combusts,
Desires more, must burn more, has unquenchable wants.
That frontier drive when
God sent destiny to take more than was needed.
A drive to where, to what end?
We must get somewhere fast or burrow down,
and push to escape, to hide, to cover up these raw truths.
We have a revelation of unbridled ambitions,
Birthing an embarrassment of riches.
Herds of wild horses are shamed by their unbound privilege
Running free when loss is all around us
The shame drives the want inside.
So we hide behind the masks we make,
Masks that cover the faces that we wear just to get through a day,
Masks that dampen the sounds of the gnawing inside.
Our hidden beast that we feed scraps
is a manifestation of our extreme hunger
Even the very idea of hunger
is vast and mewling.
It becomes worse in what seems like endless night
You can’t sleep - sleep is denied tonight.
Is your mind overcome with visions that disturb your slumber?
No, just a download of useless details.
You are literally drowning in yourself
Crawling with this infestation of memory and observation.
At the core, the Queen is still.
Is she still alive? Is she sleeping?
The worker bees, ants, wings and legs
Moving together as one, now in the throws of death
Their craving of nectar is killing them.
They were programmed to collect, to build,
to serve and protect the Monarch.
She will survive for another day.
But the drones are doomed to be echoes of their former zeal.
They have reached their end.
There are no second acts for this group.
Their parts have been played and slowly,
Slowly, one by one, they stop moving.
Time doesn’t stop
Ever
Time is infinite and unknowable
When we are young there is so much time
And we grow
Expand our minds
Push further to the Horizons
We play in the glow of the double rainbow.
Sooner than we can imagine, there comes the day when more becomes too much,
And there is a reckoning.
But through great efforts, Even Heroic efforts,
Change happens- even when unwanted,
Change is forced.
Not through revolution but witness the building of a better monster
This time the creature will listen and learn.
Inside the creature, there are all the same old parts
Just shuffled and juggled, and glued in different ways.
Is the desire to create an improvement or is it an act of salvage?
Now what?
You have your damned restart
You get the best makeover money can buy.
You are expected to build a better person,
Expected to take the disparate parts
And heal and mold them into a new golem.
So you reflect, and review,
and slowly you become the new you,
The better you.
And while the transformation is fresh and not yet complete,
you can feel your bones growing back together
You can see the wounds are healing,
and you are learning to recognize a new person in the mirror.
You have changed.
On the surface,
You have changed
And now you think about what needs to change on the inside.
To make these outward changes take effect,
To makes the changes reflective of more than just another healing phase.
And you think about what and who you want to be
And once again
You are back at the beginning
You are back to want
And desire.