Bloom

1/14/25

i

Desire is the attachment of a preference to a feeling. A question is implicit: what preference, and what feeling? I am trying to remember my first preference: surely it was that girl, in pre-school, named Sarah, Hebrew for princess, although she must have been neither, who was blonde, and then I knew before I knew the word knew that blonde was better than brunette: in my heart. Later on, I suppose, I had cola and knew it was better than water, and then much later on I turned my taste towards water. The body innately separates the senses, as northern peoples abhor spice somehow, as certain children loathe rough fabric and love linen. All to say that preference comes to the fold quickly, even quicker than language or wisdom, and in many cases seldom changes. Would it shock us, then, to grant that this intuition towards separating the senses and categorizing them is one that inheres to the gravest concerns, that of God or love or law or honor? Are we, with our most serious playthings, no greater than children, despite standing upon all our vaunted experience?

Religious and irreligious alike share a concern for being and becoming. Whether they situate it within a philosophical tradition that stretches from Heraclitus to Deleuze or know it by a cliche perpetuated via algorithm, they know that life is constituted by a burgeoning chain of events, seamless, and that they might traverse world and self, to go from self to other, from here to there, from shore to shore. And what bids the one to flee? The known to what is-not, nest to sky?

Remember your first flame: let us not speak of Love as it was not that. There, young but blossoming, into muscle or curves, stirring inside for the first time, burning at the thought of touch, imagined moments curving like her hips in your mind, longing to grace the surface, and all flowers soft like flesh in the hand and the sky, imbued with a dark blueness, as if never seen before: who am I? What is this place? Where did I come from, and where am I going? And with whom? The older we get the more seldom we speak aloud the secrets that haunt us: our eyes speak without script, but the questions burn the same, somehow, just as fire is the only thing that remains the same because its sameness lives in its difference.

What to desire, what to feel, to return to the beginning. Is there a right ordering of the senses, and how one approaches them? Should we lament our failures like stillborn children wrested broken from the rotten womb of our imagination? Is this life serious, or a play—but can we not play seriously?