Navigating the topography of desire
- Apr 15, 2016
- 3 min read
Updated: Jan 1
मनुजस्स पमत्तचरिनो तन्हा वधाति मालुवा विया
सो पलावती हुराहुरम् फलं-इच्चं वा वनस्मि वानारो
(Craving grows like creeping vines in those chasing vain pursuits; And so, they rush from life to life like jungly monkeys seeking fruit.)
— Dhammapada, Verse 334.
Nous ne vivons jamais, mais nous espérons de vivre; et, nous disposant toujours à être heureux,
il est inévitable que nous ne le soyons jamais.
(We never live, but we hope to live; and always preparing ourselves to be happy, it is inevitable that we never become so.)
— Blaise Pascal, Pensées Sec. II, § 172
I can't get no satisfaction, ‘cause I try, and I try, and I try, and I try.
— Keith Richards, Out of Our Heads
What makes desire so insatiable? Why shouldn’t the words “I love you” suffice as a simple statement of fact? Instead, love must be experienced again and again, as if each gesture evaporates into some murky abyss of longing, like light spiraling around a black hole in the theory of relativity. Desire is strange stuff – unending, enthralling. Lacan, to say nothing of Nāgārjuna, reminds us that desire springs from a gap between our drives, or fears, and the language we use to name them. It resists satisfaction due to our inability adequately to articulate the forces that give rise to it. So we keep reaching after the things we think we want in an ever-fleeting search for new objects to stand in for this basic and fundamental lack.
Tracing that restless path, this piece explores the notion that such illusory presences – to wit, desires – are in fact an echo of absence, of disparity. This takes musical shape in the appearance of near unisons (in pitch, in time) spiraling around silent axis points. Pitches brush past each other microtonally, yielding strange presences – the beating of difference tones. Desire becomes audible, evoking the gap between thought and thing, a failed unity, the poetics of the near miss.
In this light, western music, too, can be heard as a history of unity deferred, when taken as the gradual escalation of manufactured desire. From the early modern codification of dissonance, and the concomitant demand for resolution, to its drastic intensification in works like Tristan und Isolde, the machinery of longing grows subtler, its satisfactions increasingly delayed. Likewise, we can see that the late Enlightenment, the historical era that saw the most intense expression of individual personal identity, coincides with the rise of thematic musical composition, such that musical themes become identities, stand-ins for the works in which they appear.
Id–entity: yet what is identity, really, apart from thinking, feeling and experiencing the world in its fullness? As Sartre puts it, the self is only there “in the corner of our eye” when we examine our own consciousness.
Feeling its way through the corridors of such thoughts, the quartet incessantly grasps at a phantom theme – a melody always present but never stated in a straightforward way. At times it flashes by so rapidly as to become a mere gesture, or else it stretches out glacially in time or in space, extending across the entire range of the ensemble. What’s more, the notes in this melodic thread are all drawn from the overtone series, so that every time we hear a string plucked or bowed, the phantom theme is there, “in the corner of our ear.”