The Nature of Desire

Archetype of Desire

Okay, not a terribly geeky subject, but even geeks have longings, right? Actually, what inspired this post is a book I just read by young adult writer and gay novelist David Levithan. Or perhaps I should say, novelist David Levithan, who writes mainly for young adults and happens to be gay. Thus his book combines two realms of the geek world I inhabit: young adult fiction and science fiction. So where does desire come into the picture? Well, I suppose there is always the perennial geek question: Why does no one desire me? But that risks sounding whiny and self-pitying, so we move on to the more interesting and universal questions:  Whence comes desire? And how is desire related to love?

David Levithan

 Levithan's first novel, Boy Meets Boy (2003), took the standard teen love story and gave it a gay twist. Perhaps his most well-known book, a collaboration with Rachel Cohn, was Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2006), which was made into a mildly popular indie movie of the same name in 2008, starring Michael Cera and Kat Dennings as the eponymous leads. The book I just read, every day (2012), is science fiction, of a sort.

In every day, the protagonist, A, is a being who inhabits a different person's body every day, for exactly 24 hours, then moves on to another body without any control of where he/she/it will end up (this problem with pronouns is a major crux of the book, but more on that later). No explanation is given for A's condition, and A her/himself is ignorant of her/his parentage and origins.

The only rules governing A's condition seem to be:

1. A will end up within a certain geographical radius–no more than a four-hour drive–of the last body.

2. A will land in a body that approximates A's actual age; so, for instance, when A was an infant, (s)he ended up in infant bodies; now that (s)he's a teen, in teenage bodies.

3. The body inhabited by A will only vaguely remember the events of the missing day, and A can control what those memories will be to some extent.

4. A can access memories of the current body (s)he is inhabiting, as well as her/his own memories, and A possesses to a limited extent all the skills and knowledge of the body (s)he is inhabiting.

5. A is helpless to prevent the change of bodies, or to direct where (s)he'll next end up.

So, interesting premise, right? It's actually quite bewildering for the reader; A helps us out by titling each chapter with the number of the day in her/his life, and by introducing us to the body for the day, complete with physical description and personality traits.

Still, that's not what's interesting about the book. The trouble starts when A falls in love, and has to convince the object of her/his love, a teenage girl named Rhiannon, that (s)he is the same person with each new encounter. Now, I don't want to give too much away, so I'll break away from the plot of every day and talk about the problem in the abstract.

When we fall in love, we fall in love with both a personality and a body, with both soul and physicality. It is generally accepted that the shallower among us fall in love with appearance only, the deeper with their beloved's essence. Yet can we separate those so readily? Many tales recount the story of how a young woman has to look beyond her lover's hideous exterior to discover the beautiful soul within: Beaumont's "Beauty and the Beast," the Grimms' "The Frog Prince," or the Greek myth of Psyche, where she believes herself to be visited at night by a hideous serpent to whom she's been given as wife, when in reality it is the god of love himself, Eros.

There are also the stories of the monstrous or ugly men who cannot find love, despite their kind and virtuous natures: Quasimodo of Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's monster, Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac.

Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady

There are some stories with the roles reversed, though fewer: Geoffrey Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale," with the knight of King Arthur's court promising to marry the hag, the "loathly lady" who helps him solve the riddle that will save his life; the closely related 15th-century poem,  "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle," with a similar story; and a modern version, Stephen Sondheim's "Passion," with its sickly, homely heroine Fosca who with the force of her relentless love finally convinces the handsome soldier Giorgio to fall in love with her before literally dying of her passion.

What is the point of these stories? That the protagonists learn to see the inner beauty of their mate and thus learn to appreciate true love? No. In a few cases, they do indeed come to love their hideous partner; in others, they merely go through the motions of devotion (sharing food, a kiss, lying in the same bed together, going through with a marriage ceremony), but then the spell is broken (or, in the case of Eros, the truth revealed), and they are rewarded with the transformation of their partner into a beautiful form. In the less fantastical stories, the ugly guy doesn't get the girl (poor Quasimodo only gets to clasp Esmeralda in his arms after she's been hanged; Cyrano hears Roxane's avowal of love just before dying of blunt force trauma).The point seems to be that, while we shouldn't be quick to judge by outer appearance, the true reward for such selflessness is what we all secretly desire: beauty.

Innate desire or choice?

When we add sexuality into the mix, it gets far more complicated. Why do some of us gravitate toward one gender and not the other? The complicated answer seems to be that it's not completely genetic, and it's not completely choice. I won't go into the reams of research that have been done in the field of human sexuality, but reliable experts agree that homosexuality is not aberrant, as originally thought, but part of a natural spectrum of human desire, with approximately ten percent of the population at one end defining themselves as completely homosexual, the rest either as completely heterosexual or bisexual, though this last term is often what conflicted homosexuals use to describe themselves in order to avoid categorizing themselves as gay. Dr. Loren Olson, a blogger for Psychology Today, gives a much more nuanced picture of bisexuality than I can within this post. But there do seem to be people who can fall in love with a person's essence, regardless of gender or physical form.

So A's problem–or, actually, Rhiannon's problem–is how to keep love constant when the object of one's desire keeps changing bodies, from average to gorgeous to gangly to homely, from petite to huge, from Caucasian to African to Asian, from male to female to transgender. Rhiannon's primary struggle seems to be trying to figure out a gender for A, and she frustrates A by spending so much time fretting about it. For A, who has no body and thus no gender, it seems like a trivial concern; for Rhiannon, it's huge. She can bring herself to kiss or hold hands when A is an attractive or even average-looking teenage boy, but she has trouble when A is a sexy African-American girl. She loves A, but she can't always bring herself to desire the body that A is currently inhabiting.

If A has no body, can A even exist as the object of desire (okay, within the bounds of this novel, clearly, yes)? Doesn't the noun "object" imply physicality? Can one be physically attracted to an essence? If so, is this attraction to essence what we call romantic love? Or is love just the high-sounding name we give to desire, not possible without a physical entity to attach it to?

This novel made me ponder how much what I personally am attracted to depends on the body that houses it, and how much doesn't. So far, I haven't reached any profound conclusions, but the answer seems to be that it's far more tied to the physical package than the ideal me would like to admit. Can I transcend my human, evolutionary instinct to be drawn to physical beauty? Can I transcend my preference for the opposite sex? If I were to meet my own version of A, how would I react? Would I be able to feel romantic love independent of physical desire? It's a fascinating thought experiment, one that Levithan encourages us to perform.

The Joys of Living Vicariously

People always say you should actively live your own life, not passively experience life through others. It's such a commonly held belief that it is often regarded as an obvious fact, a truth universally acknowledged. I, of course, believe this as well–what sane person wouldn't?–but I also secretly love living my vicarious life. Like otaku, or bored housewives in suburbia, or the creepy, balding, middle-aged guys who live in their parents' basements and play video games all day, I have a hidden life that takes place in books, in films, on television, and online, and it is so much more exciting and vibrant than my day-to-day existence.

Don't be so shocked, Unknown Reader. The name GeekMom kind of gives it away, doesn't it? I'm geeky and nerdy, and we geeks and nerds don't often mix well with normal people. I say the wrong things, forget to acknowledge people, enthuse about the wrong topics, go in for a hug at the wrong moment, or flinch when other people hug me unexpectedly. I frequently embarrass my children with my odd behavior (Well, I do have a teenager and they're embarrassed even by normal parents, so that doesn't really count).

For instance, I keep up a running conversation with other cars on the road when I'm driving ("Oh, nice move, Mr. Toyota, thanks for pulling in front of me without signalling" "Hey, Lady, get off your cell phone–the light has changed and we're all waiting for you!" "La la la, I'm driving an SUV so I can take up half of your lane as well as my own!"), and this is a great embarrassment for my 10-year-old daughter. She turns to her friend and says, "Don't pay any attention to Mama. She always talks to other cars. I've learned to live with it." Then she gives a tiny sigh. Poor child, how she suffers!

Okay, end of digression. The truth is, I'm usually uncomfortable around normal people. I'm terrible at parties. When I was in high school and college, I used to hang out by the potato chip bowl (Why is there always a big bowl of potato chips at parties? Is it some sort of party requirement? Must remember to Google this), steadily eating one chip after another while successfully avoiding all conversation. Also, since I don't really like drinking much, I can't even use that to loosen up. Though I really needed a drink after all those salty chips.

As a fifty-year old divorcee who doesn't have full-time work and has primary custody of a pre-teen daughter and a teenage son, a dog, and several cats, my life is fairly routine. Not a lot of excitement there. So what is the solution to add a little zip to my life? Vicarious living! Hurrah!

My favorite source of vicarious living is books.  Charles Dickens is great for vicarious living, as are Michael Ondaatje, Kate Atkinson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling (the Harry Potter series--I haven't read The Casual Vacancy yet). For vicarious romance, however, nothing beats Jane Austen. That Mr. Darcy! That Captain Wentworth! Mr. Ferrars and Colonel Brandon! Swoon! (At this point, I have probably alienated all of my heterosexual male readers. Don't worry, guys, I'll talk about Star Trek and Doctor Who and Dune in a later post!)

The point is, I get all the thrill of romantic tension, the fluttery feelings, the doubts ("Does he love me?"), the triumphs ("He does!"), the promise of future bliss ("Reader, I married him." Yes, I know that's Bronte, not Austen, she remarked testily), and the warm afterglow as I close the book.

All that without the guy leaving his dirty socks on the bedroom floor, toothpaste globs in the bathroom sink, or the New York Times scattered all across the room, with the crossword half filled out, incorrectly, in pen. Not that Mr. Darcy would ever do any of those things! In any case, I've come to terms with the fact that all my ideal men were invented by women writers, and are thus unlikely to be found anywhere in the real world. So why not love as well as live vicariously?

Then, of course, there are movies. All Jane Austen novels have been made into movies (including some that probably shouldn't have been–does anyone really need a film version of Northanger Abbey?), and there are so many other worlds to disappear into. And there are television series. Wish you were involved in politics and great affairs of state? Watch "The West Wing"! Wish you were a spy? Watch "MI-5" ("Spooks" in the U.K.)! Wish you were brilliant and could solve baffling crimes? Watch "Sherlock"! Wish you were brilliant and could solve mysterious ailments? Watch "House"! Wish you descended from English nobility? Watch "Downton Abbey" or "Upstairs, Downstairs"! The ways of escaping your mundane existence are myriad. I won't even go into the Internet and vlog channels at this point, because my post is getting much too long, according to my blogging mentor, who thinks my paragraphs are too long as well. I'll save some thoughts for future posts. In the meantime, Mr. Darcy and I are meeting for coffee, so I have to go.