(proper) desire

You looked away just once
as you leaned on the chip-shop counter,
and forty years were gone.

---Helen Dunmore 

Economists are wont to speak of wants as anything but 'given'. Can there, then, be any sense to thinking of desires as wrong or of them being too many, or too few? Forbidden desires, excessive and frivolous desires..what language do we have to reflect on them and think of sharper, 'higher' desires, ones more attune to who we really are?

ploughing the field...Adam Smith:
...


The moment of recognition, that leads to intimacy, a kind of understanding. To assume we always know what we desire, who we are, is a great conceit. We stumble through, imagining the lives we didn't live but might have. "If..."..."one day...". the clauses, north of the future, the winter soul, finding true north, as if passing downriver, sparkling, far from home but clear to us at last.


~~~

One day the Earth will be
just a blind space turning
night confused with day.
Under the vast Andes sky
It will no longer have mountains,
There'll be no more mountains,

not a rock or ravine.

 

Only a balcony will remain

Of all the world’s bulidings

and of all the human mappa mundi,
limitless sorrow.
In place of the late Atlantic Ocean,

a little saltiness in the air,
and a fish, flying and magical
with no knowledge of the sea.

Picture a car of the 1900s
(no raod for its wheels!)
and three young girls of that time

traveling through the fog

They'll peer through the door
thinking they're nearing Paris

when the odour of the sky

grips them by the throat

Instead of a forest

there'll be one bird singing,

which nobody will ever place

or prefer,or even hear
Except for God who listening out,
proclaims it a goldfinch.

---Jules Supervielle.