'Even If I End Up in Shatters'
Can desire still somehow be good for you even when, on paper, it’s obviously bad?
I referred last time to having built up a store of “mini-essays that are undercooked.” Actually, I think some of them are cooked just the right amount for what I want this Substack to be: experimental, tentative, a sort of notepad for in-progress thinking. The real problem is that, no matter how hard I try to talk myself out of it, I’m still hesitant to throw them up on the internet for just anyone to read.
I’ve decided on a temporary solution: instead of just burying them in the drafts, I’m going to put them behind the paywall for some semi-privacy. If you want to read this stuff enough to pay for it, I’m all for it! But heads up that you may be seeing, for the first time, posts for which you’ll have to subscribe to get the juicy part.
(If you really want to read it and can’t afford it, email or message me and I will comp you, but you better at least be a free subscriber. I automatically comp anyone whose work I mention if they are already on the list.)
So here is our first subscriber-only post, which started as a Valentine’s Day-themed links-of-the-week post and morphed into a notepad for another piece I was writing. If you enjoy and want more of this kind of thing, I’d love to hear from you in the comments or by email.
Last month there was that thing on The Dirt, widely derided but which everyone secretly loved, about whether or not you would rather desire or be desired. The responses, many from well-known writers and journalists, were split about evenly, the same result my own Instagram poll arrived at. Yes, in a way it’s a dumb exercise, because the obvious correct answer is that they are best together as that rare, precious thing called mutual desire, and that either can be absolute torture without the other. As many of the respondents pointed out, it’s a maddening question because desiring someone you cannot have can literally make you go insane, while being the innocent object of someone else’s craziness can be weird, uncomfortable, even miserable.
But I liked the way that puzzling over the question tends to make you second-guess your own initial position. For me it came down to: if you must choose one or the other, and either is possibly an intense type of suffering, which way would you rather suffer? Like several of the respondents, I chose to desire, even though it is probably the more painful of the two, because it is the experience over which I am the author and therefore have narrative control, meaning I get to decide what it means to me. The person I love cannot stop me from loving them and deriving meaning from it even if they cut me out of their life. And also because the very fact that desiring is a more wretched type of suffering means that it is potentially more elevating, more transformative, than being the passive recipient of someone else’s desire.
Which is, I think, the question that puzzles, that the following essays address: is the craziness worth it? Can it add up to more than destruction? Can desire still somehow be good for you even when, on paper, it’s obviously bad?
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