Folklores of Desire
What are the new dimensions of desire, seeking and sharing pleasure?
Where do I begin with desire? This soft, low hanging fruit of love’s great labour. When I close my eyes to feel its shape, it feels slippery, permeable and playful to the touch. Shapeshifting across bodies, it oscillates between the poetics of its flesh-ness and immateriality, becoming multiple and kaleidoscopic. What kind of fruit is this? And what wisdom does it carry?
When I look at the image (above) of the 6th century relic of the lotus headed fertility goddess ‘Lajja Gauri’, it encapsulates the completeness of Desire’s fullfilling essence. A feminine sensuality open and porous to the breath of the world. I feel an inexplicable tenderness climb over me, and all I want to do in the moment is to cave in with pining reverence to what her body has achieved. A single maiden, ripened under the sun of life’s unbashed longing to create, relate and transform irrevocably. Her lotus head signifies the death of her egoic identity. Her name and her face are erased by the faceless bliss of Desire that has consumed her. A flowering of unadulterated knowledge mediated by the sensuous.
Desire for deep intimacies can only be achieved through the vehicle of our bodies, entangling and reciprocating with the greater network of beings through a sharing of resources. As a feminine body, much of my adolescent years were spent in shameful repression of a yearning that eventually led to misunderstanding my own dimensions of desire and where they could propel me. When the body isn’t allowed to move through the gushing ebbs and flows of desire, how does one come to percieve their material subjectivities? Unless we don’t soften the boundaries between flesh and the unabashed life-force of a greater yearning, there will be no awakening and there will be no change. Patriarchal modernity refuses to be touched by the wisdom of sensuous knowledge, thus undermining the urgent need of feminine intervention in climate discussions, cultural revival and preservation, technological progress, educational policies etc. Linear, vertically driven ideas of ‘evolution’ and ‘progress’ will always fail to recognise life’s inherent, compelling desire to unfold through myriad relations and be transformed through them. The ecology of our relations runs antithetical to male-centric biases and the binaries of modernity’s sepratist myths.
The celebrated bio-philosopher Andreas Weber’s conception of ‘Erotic Ecology’ proposes a dismantling of miscontrued and limited perceptions of desire and places it in the wider (and wilder) lens of our ecological belonging.
Life is an erotic process. It is a desire to meet and metabolise Life. It longs to know itself in time and space through touch. Under the reality of desire’s true nature, when we trace the source of it’s thrilling energy, we lose the tendency to objectify our own bodies and those of others (both human and more-than-human), beginning to relate in more spacious ways.
In the words of Andreas Weber ‘matter is not outside of desire to meet life and touch life, but it is its vehicle, its joy and eventually its suffering’. To suffer in desire is to suffer together. This is how the ecology of relations work. We build worlds on the foundations of intimacy first. Our longing for contact, for connection, might be the single most important thing that will sustain us past this rubble of ‘necessary progress’ and political conquests. A new folklore of evolution where we are ever becoming new while otherwise perishing. The need to reclaim our desire is urgent. The need to soften under her widened and deepening breath is urgent.
Let us slow down and cave in to the sky of desire’s true calling, flowering and transmuting into faceless carriers of this sacred force.