B U R N I N G and D E S I R E Desire as noun and verb connotes two different things, but they collapse into a degree of synchronicity through desire’s libidinal charge. To desire something places a status judgement of sorts. It posits something longed for but not within reach as the ultimate object, person or scenario. One can “desire fame and fortune” or the lonely person can proclaim they “desire love and affection”. This element of the linguistic rendering of tragedy, unrequited love or un-viability is what synchronises with the erotic surcharge of the noun desire. Coming similarly into effect, to gaze upon something or someone and want it “I desire them” is a feeling of burning that can never be truly realised without a fizzling flame extinguishing or explosive outcome. What is it to burn? In flames of either sorrow or desire? Burning, or to be burnt designates something somatically different to that which is “on fire” or “smoldering”, as something that can be either burning or burnt can be found existing in embers but extinguished. Something flaming can be burning, and something flaming can be burned; as too can someone. A proximity to flames alone or a burning object can allow a total engulfment to ensue, or can reflect levels of seriousness, urgency and dismissal of the potential burn. In situating desire, I refer to what has often been instituted as the primary inflection of social discourse on the need and necessity to form individual systematised pair-bonds within Western society even when at expense of real or deep communion. The apostle Paul states in 1st Corinthians 7:9 “For it is better to marry than to burn with desire”. Desire in this contextualisation is found within the purview of danger, which through marriage (a proper usage) can be used for a consolidation of sexual and social betterment: religious procurement, redemption and procreation. So then, outwith the customs of social norms (that conservatively is a union between cisgender man and woman), desire becomes sublimated as a deficiency, resulting in a form of sexual deviancy. Like the psychoanalytic frame of desire, both read and rendered, the egregiousness or devious forms of desire that are found to be outwith the gauge of traditional occurrences of desire (marriage) are parametred between boundaries, and in becoming acceptable, or tolerated by social majorities; the often permeable gates of desire (and those to be desired) can be entered, with risk.
Even when permission is granted, it is accepted that to enter is not to be requested, and that although allowed, it is something one should not do. Permission or trespassing of the supposed parameters of acceptability forms a breaking of etiquette, into the boundary marked by colour-lines, black and brown and rainbow alike, within which we find prescribed and maligned racial and sexual identities. Whilst actively avoiding those bodies and practices that are thought may do us as a society harm by association or by tangible realities, the enactment of avoidance actualises itself as the erasure of those bodies and forms of desires by means of a lack of inclusion. In this divestment, those removed or marginalised are often most at risk of social harm (the objects of desire to be consumed and received) as others, whilst their engagement as those designated risk-prone and risky are received predominantly in risk-oriented pleasure. As others, bodies are represented as voids, or subjects (constituted by their lacking of parity or similarity) which are all that is left within the destitute epicenters of what was the fire of desire. Voids are made up of specific constituent groups, all forming abject conditions for those whom reside within this boundary. Boundaries here act like fire cordons in that they keep the oft-desired and acceptable bodies safe, and those otherwise, out. Defined clearly, they are segregated. Desire in its sexual nature is situated as an uncontrolled subliminal urge, something opposed to an institutional order such as marriage. So in relating desire from it linguistic origins: In close relation to the Latin Passio (Perturbatio: confusion, disorder, disturbance, commotion, revolution, perturbation), and the Ancient Greek ( MingL: to suffer, to endure, to suffer at someone else’s hands). Acceptable desire in this formation makes sense with the foreword to Paul’s proclamation in Corinthians “For if they cannot control themselves”. Existing as desired can only be situated within the institution of Christian, or by extension a Western marriage, as the prescriptive formulation in which sexual agency although prohibitive is seen to extinguish the ever-burning flames of lust (though we know it does not). For those others whom may be desired within the canon: the whore, the idolaters, the ingrates, sodomites and heretics, their risk of corruption also designates them to the margins of the narrative arc. Whilst redeeming themselves from their previous malignancy of desire or desirability, whether through hermeticism or
imposed ostracisation is to suffer too for a greater good. The designation to desire is compounded with suffering and it cannot be removed from notions which incur and inflict suffering. Burning as the state in which desire exists forms hardships to be endured as a form sexual praxis. (One shall pair, or not / one shall incur/endure/exist / Or, otherwise reap rewards/loss / accept their lot) However, as the Latin (aedis) would imply, desire is fixed into or within a sedentary confine, a room, a hearth, a shrine or tomb. We could equally suggest by the way we exist within our own beings: a temple, a cage, a sedentary or static confine is a body. So as we talk about desire and specifically the burning of desire in relation to identity, we must talk about its incoherence or inability to be rendered outwith the physical, (what is an acceptable fixed desire?), and to what affect we can see burning as a metaphorical juncture to allude to the basic premise as to what actually constitutes desire. A slow burn and fast burn alike can amount to the same result on a body – physically in a tender mass of red skin, peeling and blistering, itself expelling a weeping. That form of harm is what we would entitle a cosmetic burn, whether it constitutes the form of 1st, 2nd or 3rd degree. There can be a frictional burn (a burn reciprocated between object and subject), an intentional burn (a branding or scar) or a pathological burn resulting in various vicissitudes or ailments including cancer. These forms of pathologies allude to a subjective change of bodily norms, ones which can be observed by others, or burns of an intimate nature in which one can feel harm or alteration to their original state. So in situating the ability to represent bodies as desired and desirable, particular modalities of attraction have to be formed - to strike a match, or to rub kindling, to start a fire. Desire is not just the fixation of the erotic capacity for a body, to enter into that warm confine, but the means in which it is allowed, expressed and ignited. In this instance, it has to be informed by other bodies in proximity to this incendiary fantasy, a source, a match or lighter. A source in this case is socialisation, as most people outwith middle to low income economic demographics within metropolitan areas will cite: I grew up within a white community (amongst other forms of identities that constitute social majorities), the source informs the ways in which a comprehension of what can constitute their desire affects their sexual preference. Similarly, without exposure, sexual commodification can occur when people
recount their chance first encounter that appears to legitimise a set preference for a body: a holiday, a travelling salesman, a showcase and many more instances. In this space, without any interaction, the aesthetics ruling desire become tyrannous – bodies are reduced to their skins, genitals and hair. Fetishes or tomes. Like the burn cannot exist without an approximation of contact, there is no smoke without fire. This kind of burning reflects the risk of potential of engulfment, (Frollo’s attraction to Esmeralda in Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and the occurrence in this instance is not willed or will-full, but always imposed or exposed. Whilst thinking of exposure, it is useful to think of the significance of paper, and its relation to skin tone. Paper itself an as an ephemeral article exists in its intended form - but is equally at risk of changing or disappearing. A standard paper sheet is bleached, chlorinated and white, whilst those other sheets left untreated or natural are subject to greater change as its form (leaf) ages, the paper degrades (or burns), and it gets darker, or without intervention, it disintegrates. Society does not see all colours. We do, though, see whiteness in most of its forms: we see it in glossy magazines, music videos, films, and images fixed on large paper masses glued to billboards. Paper in common culture, comes in many staple forms such as the copier sheet, and the majority of them are white, but occasionally we see the disposable brown paper bag. Then paper extends itself beyond a solely material property, becoming a linguistic parallel to skin commonly through determinable terms as colour related suffixes or prefixes. Consequently, like politically incorrect usage of coloured, “brown” is to be used as a test marker determining ethnic as opposed to the white ethnos. It has to remain separate, or within the margins. White is pure, and can be decorated, find ways to ornament itself to entertain notions of absolute individualised difference, or perform a brown-like facade. The brown paper bag, flimsy but standardised, equates that as the deepest but also the most acceptable level of designating “an accultured ethnic body”. It is not too distant from that which the beloved white form may place upon themselves as a layer ornament or artifice. Brown is there, but does not last long, existing in the old leaf’s margin, the edge of a wet cardboard box or within some larger sense of relegation: the second hand book shop or refuse heap amongst the municipal dump. The trajectory of these brown objects when they are not archived is that they are susceptible to damage. A disposed of bible or Latin textbook degrades and eventually the brown margins; collapses and fails to remain attached. Some margins are seen, whilst others are not, with their contents to be confined, recycled or disposed of. If passion, an active stance or a belief (or a lack therefore of)
informs our emotional capacity to receive tenderness or seek pleasure, then why is that, and in what origins can we retrieve this? Passio is a Latin term used primarily in relation to Christ, where messianic narratives institute passion through the fulfilment of the spiritual and corporeal suffering. Continuing in ecclesiastic imagery and saintly narratives, passion is used somewhat differently, which means that narrative constructions of desire can never be truly divorced from the insinuation that to be desired, is too, the desire to suffer. Like as you may become saintly by appearing in St. Sebastian’s likeness, or becoming like Christ through eating his body, this desire to suffer for a lover – or largely just to be accepted/assumed – is to be consumed. In the consumption of bodily aesthetics, the lingering of the sexual dimension of bodies exists in all utterances, be it conversation, dialogue or argument. This situation is one in which fear, transcendence and erotic fixation all enmesh: big, small, hairy and smooth. Body parts drip with racialised and gendered decoration, and a hunger or thirst which can never be fulfilled becomes apparent. The one desiring states or purposefully avoids the words which may implicate them in such a state of pandemic suffering; they wish to reconcile but cannot, and in their inability to reconcile difference, passing yields a truth about an assimilationist politics. If ‘passio’ forms an enduring burn, it also forms a kind of behaviour pattern or gastro-reflux that cause schisms and complications from sustaining burns of this nature. The reluctance to disclose either attraction or aversion to that which is contemptible causes a sharp stabbing pain, a rumination, from some visceral epicentre from which there is no relief. Like Lot’s wife, under duress, the one desiring is instructed to “not look back/go back” because in doing so they shall suffer. For those who have assimilated can’t go back - perhaps they have hurt too many, or perhaps they are now unable to progress in their assimilative process they look back. Lot’s wife who was morphed into a pillar of salt, her body preserved, or like gravlax and other kinds of salty fleshy objects, consumed. Similarly, in a physical testament to grief, the one who looked back is rendered in eternal stasis – as the object of desire is consumed in flames, they are forever in mourning. Grief possesses a grip on the process and performance of mourning, an imposition as opposed to an act; the stricken is numb and unable to utter a sad cry, a lover’s
lament or pronouncement of belonging. In this silence or muzzling, the witness of the burn is hopeless and melancholic. This forms a part of the key feature of burning in those who desired, in receiving amenities from an inability to render sound. They lose parts of themselves, friends, family and communities, and this loss doesn’t occur solely to those who disavow or break union with their predecessors. As they assimilate, they move further afield drifting - things slip in and out of focus, and eventually out of their mouth. Yet those assimilated can now only follow the path before them, try to avoid being preserved or referenced to that which burns. Burning continues, and the fire burns on: burning out of cultural and linguistic inheritance, loss occurs at every point in which passing body turns, someone is told they are not that, they are not that kind of body. As the object of passion burns, their presence as the object in the production of lust remains, regardless of consequence or chance, further fanning desire’s flames. No discussion, no recourse, it might not be normal, but you weren’t given a choice. And whilst an individual’s desires may present themselves innocuously, one has to consider the larger effects. If being desired places one above another, creating an aesthetic currency upon which we trade, what is the larger effect of others, especially on those who have been badly burned by the flames?