The Desire Not To Desire
Beeld: Sappho 1877 by Charles Mengin
Zazie Duinker explores the tension between desire and fulfilment, where winter stillness, Sappho’s poetics and the myth of Kairos converge. The essay asks whether love begins where desire is risked, and perhaps transformed.
It is currently snowing outside. My otherwise familiar environment has regained novelty, clad in a white blanket conveying the allure of the untouched. It’s like the meteorological counterpart to the turn of the year; a blank canvas begging us to sketch out our hopes, intentions and plans. I began to list mine, when one trumped all the others: not to desire.
I realised I don’t want to spend this year desiring. Simple. Long enough I’ve stayed at a safe distance from the objects of my desire, now I want to close that distance. I want things up close and personal. I want to lean into them. What might that look like? I make use of the hibernation this season grants to take a step back, zoom out and look at the contours of desire.
Instinctively, I turn to the past summer to guide these reflections. In the midst of winter this may seem somewhat misguided, but it’s only natural; I take after the trees. In the colder months, many trees enter into a period of dormancy. Take fruit trees: they take measures to preserve energy, and they conserve summer’s surplus sugars to brace the cold and charge for bud break come spring. I too now break into my sugar reserve and look back on the past summer. At that time, I got up together with the birds, around 05:00. The early mornings were still, a secluded opening in time before the inescapable presence of summer that would come with daytime.
I used this respite to consider the things that, rather than right there, lay elsewhere: dreams for the future, distant places, absent loved ones. ‘How do I relate to those things that are out of reach?’ In contemplating this, I ended up amidst the pages of Eros the Bittersweet. There, poet and classicist Anne Carson traces the conception of desire back to ancient Greece, in the shape of the god Eros, and exposes its oxymoronic essence. Eros, she says, is the perpetual reaching for the object of our desire. It is necessarily unsatisfied, because the moment the desired object is attained, the desire ceases and disappears like snow before the sun.
Carson cites numerous texts to construct this typification of eros as bittersweet. One of them is a poem by Sappho, that reads:
“As a sweet apple turns red on a high branch, high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot - well, no they didn’t forget - were not able to reach…”
The scene Sappho illustrates is a clear analogy for desire, as is the shape of the poem. Not only is the poem left incomplete, so is the singular sentence; it lingers in the dependent clause, never reaching the main clause. I remember reading this poem again and again, until the first rays began to creep in. Together with the sun arose the promise of a glistening day.
It was the height of summer, and everything was ripe and imposed itself on me. Plums and peaches and custard apples dangled seductively in front of my eyes. The sweetness was so eager to be relished, a climax of sugars on the inside pushing against the skin until it almost burst under the pressure. A build-up not unlike desire. A gentle bite would’ve been enough to release the sap.
Until last summer, I don’t think I had ever managed to get to that point. In my memory, summer had always been a melancholic season. A season of expectancy, laden with great imaginings that never came into being. It was disappointing, like the berries we’d eat that would hold the idea of summer but none of the taste. I don’t think I had ever really been able to taste the sweetness of summer fruit. Until last year. I bit into all of those fruits offering themselves to me so willingly. I sat on rocky shores by myself biting into one after the other, letting the juices trickle down my chin, my hands and onto my arms.
In light of the present, I recall a line written by Ross Feld in a letter exchange with the artist Phillip Guston, in January of 1978: “A happy and healthy new year to you both, a good, solid, big-bite year.” Big-bite year. The start of the year is typically pregnant with promise, laid out neatly on a timeline running to the end of the year. Yet you cannot set your teeth in promise, you cannot taste it. You have only the mouthwatering thought of it. But that is not enough for me, I am hungering for more.
As I sit gazing at the silent snowy streets outside, I grow restless. I want to sink my teeth into the fruit, and splatter the sap across the pristine snowlandscape. I don’t want to be stuck desiring. I want to love, I realise. So how do I stray from the phantasmatic trajectory of promise and take that big bite?
Alongside linear time exists another time: that of Kairos. The youngest child of Chronos, the god of time who subjects us to repetition and continuity, Kairos is the brazen one, the one who disrupts that time. Also called the god of the opportune moment, he teaches attentiveness, open-mindedness and intuition to be able to recognize opportunities when they present themselves. The last part is significant. Earlier, I had begun to think: how could I pick and get to bite into the fruit without reaching for it? Put differently, is it possible to love without desire? Or is desire a necessary prelude to love?
Kairos does not exclude Chronos: together, they embody time’s two faces. It is not a matter of separating and choosing one or the other, but of keeping them in balance. We can move to Chronos’ rhythm, but remain sensitive to Kairos’ veerings. I indulge myself, and speculate about the possibility of not having to eliminate desire entirely, from the outset. Maybe I could enjoy its preliminary stage. After all, in the literal translation of the Greek glukupikron, which Sappho uses to typify eros, the two tastes are reversed to spell out sweetbitter. The sweetness precedes the bitterness, which only follows with unfulfillment.
At that point, however, Kairos may intervene. His arrival is unannounced, and thus precludes the possibility of reaching for him. If I welcome him, he just might change my modality from one of reaching to one of receiving.
The simplest way to find out if a fruit is ready to pick, is to feel whether it gives. If it’s ripe, it will want to give itself to you, if it’s not, it will resist. Like Kairos, nature here reminds us to be open and receptive. I wonder, how would Sappho’s poem go if it was written in this disposition? Instead of reaching, might it detail the high-up branch being persuaded by the wind to bend down? Might the apple come off its branch at the gentlest touch? Or might it drop to the ground?
Either way, might an opportune circumstance enable the apple picker to take a big, juicy bite? It would irrevocably change the poem, because unfurling the process of the bite has given it an ending. And with that, it has concluded desire. The poem has been transformed from one of desire into one of love. Unlike desire, easily roused and from there on continuously sustained, love comes at a cost: the sacrifice of desire.
It hardly seems a coincidence that the Greek kairos also refers to a “crucial, but vulnerable part of the body.” Numerous words to which it has ties showcase a sacrificial theme - such as kèr: death; keraïzein: to plunder, to slaughter; kèr: heart; kèrainein: to be anxious; keiein: to split; keirein: to cut. As the drama implied in these words reveals, the sacrifice seems tremendous.
The reason is because it’s a risk. What is the return? What is that thing, that love, that lies on the other side of sacrifice, and is it worth it? There is no way to guarantee this. Logically, the safe option is to stay put in an ignorant state of illusion: of the promise that never dies out, a star guaranteed to stand in the sky every time you look up. Dazzling. It holds a glimmer of the thing you want, but not the messy reality that the imagined is spared.
The one thing revealing this romance to be empty, however, is the omission of its sweetness. And that’s precisely the thing I want. But that requires taking the risk: sacrificing the safe distance of desire. For while desire may be risk-free, so far it has left me with nothing but a bitter taste in my mouth. In order to savour the sweetness, I realise I cannot get around being nothing short of one hundred percent honest in identifying the objects I truly desire, bridging the gap, and getting close to them. Only then do I create the necessary circumstances for these desires to manifest themselves.
So, in the name of this honesty, let me say out loud: I desire not to desire. I desire love. I am not satisfied with distance, I desire to bring things close, to touch them, to hold them. It seems scary to do so because these desires might not be met. However, I know that sustaining the desire out of this fear guarantees precisely the same outcome. Really, then, I have nothing to lose. So, instead of standing still in the middle of these desires, this year let me cross the lengths of them to where their contours become visible in the landscape. There, let me cross the border to where love dangles from the trees, and with my hand turned up receive the fruit in my open palm.
Zazie Duinker writes about art, philosophy and language. Recently, her love for language became coupled the development of a deep connection to nature that inspired an interest in the different modes of engagement that either of them prompt, from more cognitive to embodied. She currently explores this dynamic through lyrical, often personal essays and poetry.