All My Changes Were There

SOMEWHERE IN THE AIR BETWEEN BOSTON AND CHICAGO, ABOARD AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 1571 — Waited until now to put down a few thoughts about desire that’ve been in my head. Airtravel seems to offer some good models — metaphors, even?

Neil Young sings help-less, help-less, help-less. I’ve felt that often lately. Feel at home at an airport — nomadic — lugging — restless, awaiting something certain.

Agamben & his latest book, Profanations, are on my mind. To see a photograph is to see how we are. Agamben sees an aspect of Judgment Day in it. To see how little control we have over our self, our persona, our person. We want that control; we want to create the image that others see; but, in fact, we control so little of that.

But we still create a persona. That still exists, even if it doesn’t do our bidding. It’s still our there, seeking, like a stray torpedo. Active. Hot. And what others fail to see in us we find in others. The object of desire is the self in the other. (Lacan? Kristeva?) To desire is to seek survival of the self, an existence of the self outside of the self. Quite helpless, indeed.

We are also without place. Like the airtraveler? Our spatial identity is lost. We know what we want and what we have but the transaction is a mystery. We have no control over it, no knowledge of it. We are guided by anonymous helpers. Our only action is to declare the desire; after that there are only strange faces and figures prepared to do the work of helping us fulfill it.

Other trips may differ but in the trip home the thrill lies not in the arrival but in the transit, in the last moments of anonymity, the last moments wherein we believe the illusion of controlling our persona(e). For it is always impossible to control our identity at home (or, put another way, if you feel you stand a chance of convincing someone you’re someone else, you aren’t home).

This explains why home can sometimes offer relief but never that burning hope of away. It is the place where we cease to want the image of self in the other because we know too well to believe we can fool anyone. Home is the death of desire.

To be home is to be known, and to be known is to remember every mistake and every rejection that has yet to be atoned. To be away, by contrast, is to consolidate the best parts of the self, to polish the mirror of the self in the hope that someone will catch her or his own eye in it.

To be home is to have the peace of acceptance for who you are; to be away is to feel the thrill of the possibility of being someone else, someone closer to he or she whom we wish we were.

In the air we remember each of these feelings. We know we are between states — what we are, what we might be — and are unsure where we will land. Desire is the only certainty, the mysterious passage between, the constant pull from present to future. Constant because to attain the object of desire (if we do attain it) is to attain only a token. Desire itself, the thrill of that confounding translation, is always in the act of wanting itself, not the getting. Once we get we are also gotten — i.e., known; we realize our selves.

We can certainly rationalize the peace of home, the acceptance of our real selves. We find ourselves choosing companions a little less vaporous than desire itself, despite the consequences. But can we ever forget desire? Will desire even play by the rules of rationalization, allow itself to be forced to the edges of the pale?

There is a town in north Ontario
Dream comfort memory to spare
In my mind I still need a place to go
All my changes were there

Blue blue windows behind the stars
Yellow moon on the rise
Big birds flying across the sky
Throwing shadows on our eyes

Leave us helpless helpless helpless
Well baby can you hear me now
Chains are locked and tied across my door
But baby baby sing with me somehow

It is the “there” that especially catches my attention. These magical sounds from The Last Waltz occuring in my head by some technology I will never understand as I rocket safely through the deadly atmosphere by another technology I will never understand. What is the place of change? This town he knows so well or the place he must yet go? The wellspring of home or the frontier of away? The secluded self or the one outside, for whom the song ventures out, from whom we desperately await some echo?

Or is it in the wind, in that rhapsodic organ of Garth Hudson? The stars that intercede before the windows of the sky, the birds that cut a swath in the moonlight; the reminders of our powerlessness, the hands of desire.

Is it not suicide to turn away from them?

4/23/08; around 10 a.m.

This is one in a series of posts (listed below) that seem to be feeding into the same idea and may become part of a larger personal essay.

Notes on the Ineffable 1: New York
Notes on the Ineffable 2a: In the Air
Notes on the Ineffable 2b: Chicago
Notes on the Ineffable 3: Literature