Desire is hope in the confidence of possibility – a movement of allowance toward an anticipated as yet unseen connection.
When that confidence is challenged and hope wanes, desire can become demand, and allowance aggression – a struggle against fear, loss and depression. Therein lies a paradox: when desire becomes demand, it undermines confidence in possibilities beyond one’s force of will and effort. It narrows our capacity to freely imagine and clings to an over determined image of its object – an image of what was lost and not a sense of what could be possible. In effect, it loses sight of the true object of desire and embraces the fixed image of its absence.
The true object of desire is the possibility for realized mutuality.
Suffered beyond passing moments of fear and reconnection, such a program of fixed, entitled expectation can become a primary form of relating and attachment.
Such attachment can manifest as dominance or self-effacement in a relationship. In either manner of relating, there can be a progressive sense of unavailable possibility for realized mutuality.
In relationships these two forms of disenchantment, active and passive, are frequently partners in a painful relational dance of missteps and suffering.
In such relationships, fixed desire misdirects our innate drive for realized mutuality.
Desire is our capacity to imagine that guides our innate drive for relation. Though inseparable, desire and drive are distinct.
We can think of our drives as the bio-dialogically encoded individual and communal anticipations of our relational realities. The yearnings of our evolutionary history are filtered through the vicissitudes of many millennia of unique environmental, communal and family histories. Desire, continuously reimagined, is the vaguely and immediately imagined anticipations of our drives, carrying the images of possibility unique to our collective stories.
Given the quixotic realities of our complex and multifaceted histories, our drives, held within the imagining of our desires, are infiltrated with ambivalence and ambiguity; the scars and hopes of history on our yearnings towards possibility for relation.
Drives by their very nature are the force of life’s reaching. But caught in the lock down of hopeless images in the desire of lost possibility, the very life force of drives can be misdirected toward frustration and extinction.
Could this be the source of Freud’s “death drive” – life held captive by a vacuum?
Death and drive are oppositional and contradictory terms. Under the circumstance of wounded hope, a drive can be misdirected – but it is always a life force and therefore, inherently in search for possibility for relation.
Such misdirection stems from an injured capacity to imagine yet to be defined mutuality.
Finding ways to rediscover the capacity to imagine undefined possibilities is a pathway towards a reignited spark of hope.
For psychoanalytic thinkers such as Winnicott, Kristeva, Bion, Bollas and others, the way to this spark is through the rediscovery of our allowance for play.
Play in its dynamic essence lacks foreclosure. The capacity for play, which is inherently a dance with possibility, does not simply reside in us as individuals and communities. We reside in it: we are held and sustained in our capacities for play beyond our personal boundaries that are, in essence, the shared vitalities of our drives.
We are supported within a sea of possibility, always reaching for meeting, but never captured in any complete form meeting takes. The foundation of hope among us lies beyond any one of us. It is the vitality that is both within and supports us. In our communal lives, family or society, it is expressed and accessed often through the allowance of love and spontaneous joys of every day – as well as our rites, institutions and arts, all of which are spaces for hope to vibrate possibilities beyond the vicissitudes of circumstance.
When laughter leaves our daily lives and play and surprise cease to pulsate within the heart of our family and communal institutions, threats to our persons and communities erupt – often in innumerable varieties of violence.
There is a timeless dialectic and struggle for balance between possibilities for relations and their expressed forms.
In any field, profession, institution, social or personal form – including our own selves – when the music, mystery, uncertainty and celebration of play is stifled and fixed, then the so called ‘death drive’ begins to dance to a deadly silence – a charade of shadows and a decent into hopelessness. The pursuit of this unsustainable illusion, of dominance or submission, ends in inevitable collapse. As disastrous as that collapse could be, personally and communally, the timeless and unrelenting reality of possibility for relation seeks and finds the phoenix within the ruins.
This is the truth and paradox of resurrection – hope in the ultimate triumph of play.
***
With all its eyes
the natural world looks out
into the Open.
Only our eyes are turned backward
and surround plant , animal, child
like traps,
as they emerge into their freedom.
We know what is really out there
only from the animal’s gaze;
for we take the very young Child
and force it around,
so that it sees
Objects – not the Open,
which is so
deep in animals faces.
Always there is World
and never Nowhere without the No:
that pure Unseparated element
which one breathes
without desire and endlessly knows.
A child
may wander there for hours, through the timeless
stillness,
may get lost in it
and be shaken back.
Or someone dies and is it.
Forever turned toward objects,
we see in them
the mere reflection of the realm of freedom
which we have dimmed.
This is what fate means:
to be opposite
to be opposite and nothing else.
Forever.
The Eighth duino elegy.
Rainer Maria Rilke
There’s no one with intelligence
in our town
except the man over there
the one riding the stick horse.
He has keen, fiery insight
and vast dignity
like the night sky
but he conceals it
in the madness of child’s play
“What is this playing that you do?
Why do you hide your intelligence?”
“The people want to put me in charge.
The knowing I have doesn’t want that.
It wants to enjoy itself.
I am a plantation of sugar cane
and at the same time
I am eating its sweetness”.
“Chew quietly
your sweet sugar cane,
and stay playfully childish.
Your face will turn rosy
with illumination
like the redbud flowers.”
The Sheikh who played with children.
Rumi
© 2016 James Donnelly, DSW.LCSW
All rights reserved
South Garden Press, New York
For thoughts and comments, please e mail to: jdonnellydsw@gmail.com