Yearnings

Yearnings

Dec. 13, 2019

 

 

We all experience longing, especially around the “holidays.”

 

Who has not lived, and successfully managed to escape ever wanting a particular thing? Perhaps the sudden sounds of soppy, silly music and appearance of decorations exhorting us to be happy and buy everything in sight propel us into the murky, sentimental and elusive past. In any case, there is introspection.

 

And contrary to the once popular, super modernist film master Bunel (please do not forget the tilda on the “n!”) “The Obscure Object of Desire” is in truth usually not that obscure but quite identifiable, often in the simplest of ways: the universal quest at bottom always is a longing for immortality. Because upon achieving whatever it is that beckons, you invariably want the next thing.

 

As I pointed out to a class in an effort to get them to read and appreciate the Epic of Gilgamesh, the reason for the four thousand year old hero’s obsessive fear of death and ensuing quest for eternal life is simple: why do your homework if you know that one day you’re gonna die? Wouldn’t it be better not, thus making all your toil and efforts more meaningful as you meet each day? Gilgamesh, one of the earliest, recorded neurotics of stature in the western canon, concrete and literal of thought though he was, still can impress. It's the quest, of course!

 

So now that we’ve established the purpose of yearning- that of always seeking immortality- be it through shopping, food, drugs, screen time, human connections, exercise, gambling, constant travel or moving about, sugary confections or a potato chip addiction, I’ll share one of my own particular quests.

 

In the past I’ve wished to be a writer of towering import, as mesmerizing, precise, accurate and compelling as Dreiser and James, emotionally suspenseful and page-turning as Charlotte Bronte, brilliantly witty as Austen, enduring a chronicler of my times as Wharton, slick as Pynchon, poetic as Woolf, clever as Calvino and so much more. When people still eagerly are devouring my books a hundred years hence, they will be transported back into the cultural miasma of the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in bold colors! A labyrinth of pictographs my words have created propelling the readers' imaginations speeding through time and lusting for more of my work.

 

Was this really too much to ask for?

 

Well, now I’m not so sure. . . . In any case, there is the blog.

 

And your yearnings?