50. ...And We Stare At The Sun, But We Never See Anything There

(Epistemic status: I hope for your sake that this whole post is near-incomprehensible to you. Nonetheless it'll make more sense if you've read "33. Your Heart Will Go On" and "37. Seven-ish Emotions From My Culture".)

(With thanks to Mutemath.)

There's a very specific emotion that you personally may not be able to feel. If you can, you'll know it after I've described it, and I feel for you. It's one of those things where (e.g.) you ask if anyone's ever been so hungry they were nauseous, and you get answers of either "yeah, I hate it when that happens" else "no, what the heck?!"s and horrified stares.

It goes like this, that nameless feeling: you think about something you love, or something you want very badly. Your mind's eye can't stop staring at it, unblinkingly. It's so beautiful, so real, so alive to you, but so far away. You're tearing up? Oh, no, you're tearing up, and something hurts deep in your chest. You're having trouble with, can't quite, peel your mental focus away from this thing, this exceptionally appealing concept or fantasy or goal; it hurts so very sweetly. You can't look at it directly, but you can't help but look at it directly; this thing which overstimulates parts of you that have atrophied or slept insensate for so long that they scream like pinched or awakening nerves; this thing which jangles against the sharp broken bits of your soul. You're crying now. Pursue the desire? Don't make you laugh, don't make you cry harder, don't give you that kind of false hope. Sooner try to phase your face through plate glass to speak to the dimly lit happy people on the other side; sooner try to turn back time or slip sideways into a brighter Everett branch; sooner try to pull the stars down with your fingers, starting with the Sun.

As I mentioned before, VSV speaks of "those who yearn" and the "ache for the impossible" in the same breath as desire, taking the hibiscus as a symbol of the reality of the fading, impermanent, and nonetheless beautiful; B calls it "all things sharp and shining" on their blog; MEG simply refers to it as "yearning for the impossible" and advocates cutting it out with a scalpel. I call it "staring into the sun", or sometimes "pressing your face against the glass", when the target desire is maybe even feasible in principle. You might experience this emotion without realizing it if you mysteriously tear up when thinking about goals that feel vulnerable or wildly unlikely to you; if you deny or especially trample on your heart as a matter of course, then you probably experience this emotion.

So what causes a person to feel this terrible bittersweet thing? RA's writing on grief and knots in one's heart provides something of a clue; this is one such knot, cousin to grief and to yearning. On my model, at least three things are required to cause this feeling. First, there must be a target of desire, and a separation from its fulfillment. The target can be a person, or a state of affairs, or an accomplishment; pretty much anything. Likewise, the reason for the separation can be any of a wide variety of things, from a lack of knowledge or resources to literal physical impossibility. Second, there must be a firm belief that you will not, actually, ever get the target of those desires, try as you might or act as effectively as you can; perhaps also that if you somehow by chance managed to reach it, it would be spoiled, or much worse than hoped, or quickly vanish again. Finally, there must be trauma around desire - torments in your past where something of true worth was dangled in front of you and snatched away, broken promises, fumbled bags and dates that have seared themselves into your heart. The overall effect is to cause you to desire something desperately while simultaneously rejecting, being afraid of that desire. Pulled between accepting desire and shunning desire, and unable to readily jump out of the system due to the hyper-appetitive nature of the target of desire, you generally get stuck until the feeling dies down on its own through ordinary internal mechanisms, or something outside you breaks you out of it. (I imagine that devoted Buddhists among others would be deeply confused, even contemptuously patronizing of this emotion as an obvious problem with a trivial-feeling solution. That's nice for them.)

Unfortunately, I don't have much advice for what to do about this feeling, but I do have a few takes. First, I think that it's a mistake to excise it altogether, though in some extreme cases the amputation might be necessary to save the patient. Whatever you long for is a part of you, as is the suffering of being so far away from it, and to slice it away is to slice away vital parts of your sensorium. But neither do I advocate radical acceptance and living with the yearning, watering it and letting it grow on its own terms. Feelings are for doing something with outside themselves, and for driving you to do those things that exalt your soul. JSW's writing on Wizard Power and the link between fantasy and planning provides another helpful signpost here: the link between Fantasy and Planning has not just been cut - both pieces of that vital linkage have themselves been rendered partially toxic. The hunger for Wizard Power was once loudly there, and then thwarted, inverted, turned back on itself. It was found to take up too many unjustified resources, maybe even went bankrupt, and was thus mothballed and perhaps even burned piecemeal for fuel. Maybe that's the answer? To go seek out Wizard Power once again in defiance of the feeling, carefully avoiding going mad staring at the sun in the process; seeking that power in ways that avoid impinging on that feeling and growing stronger, until one day it finishes scarring over and you cease to feel it much at all. It's a narrow path to walk, and one that calls for a measure of resilience and continued contact with desire.

That's the strange part of this feeling: it's not something most people feel, because most people don't have the traumas sufficiently severely, and of those who do, most of them have given up wanting. (Almost always a mistake, by my lights. The dead don't want, and they don't hurt, and know only that it is better to be alive.) That's what distinguishes this from grief - that "firm belief that you will never get the target of those desires" can be importantly mistaken and totally wrong, thrown up as a defense mechanism against the prospect of further trauma by an already-damaged and malfunctioning soul. You have to figure out for yourself whether the target of your desires is something possible and worthwhile for you to reach. So if this post spoke to something anguished in you, be about that figuring-out - and if you only dimly understood it, then be kinder to those in your life who stare tearfully at the sun; gently push their noses back down to earth, and help them seek Wizard Power to get the strength to one day dream once more of plucking the Sun from the sky like a ripe fruit.