Why do we have boundless desires?

Consider these three short texts:

First, here’s the poem ‘Sister Cat’ by Frances Mayes:

‘Cat stands at the fridge,
Cries loudly for milk.
But I've filled her bowl.
Wild cat, I say, Sister,
Look, you have milk.
I clink my fingernail
Against the rim. Milk.
With down and liver,
A word I know she hears.
Her sad miaow. She runs
To me. She dips
In her whiskers but
Doesn't drink. As sometimes
I want the light on
When it is on. Or when
I saw the woman walking
toward my house and
I thought there's Frances.
Then looked in the car mirror
To be sure. She stalks
The room. She wants. Milk
Beyond milk. World beyond
This one, she cries.’

Next, here are a few lines from a 1976 interview Patti Smith gave in Stockholm, which were quoted in Rosalia’s incredible song ‘La Yugular’, from the third movement of Lux.

‘Seven heavens, big deal! I wanna see the eighth heaven, tenth heaven, thousandth heaven. You know, it's like... break on through the other side. It's just like going through one door. One door isn't enough. A million doors aren't enough.’












Finally, here is Kazuo Ishiguro explaining in a Faber Books interview last year the title of his novel Never Let Me Go:

‘I got it off the back of a vinyl album sleeve from an album by Bill Evans, a jazz standard, you know, from the 1950s, ‘Never Let Me Go’ - and at the time I didn't know what the tune or the song was like, but those words really appealed to me, never let me go, and I thought they were perfect for the story I was writing and I suppose the reason that phrase appealed to me is because it's an unreasonable request. If you said ‘hold on to me for a long time’, you know, that's okay, that's reasonable. ‘Never let me go’ I found poignant and moving because the person who makes such a request knows that that just cannot be delivered, it's beyond the gift of anybody, however much that person cares for you, to hold on to you forever. I think I've always been really drawn to that part of human beings that aspires for something they actually know logically is beyond reach… but there's a part that hopes and yearns for something… you know, to do with love, fulfillment, escape from loneliness. So Never Let Me Go to me was a great title. And yes, I know the song now, I can play it on piano now.’

OK, the object is a bit different in each case… the sister cat’s desire (projected onto it by Mayes?) for a ‘milk beyond milk’; Smith’s desire for endless heavens, realms of experience beyond the known or normal (which probably, for Rosalia, is an unending pursuit of God); Ishiguro’s characters’ desire for levels of love or closeness beyond what they know is logically possible. What these three desires have in common is their boundless? unsatisfiable? transcendental? nature.

Why do we have such desires? What is this phenomenon? How might we explain it?

1) Thinking in terms of evolutionary biology, we might think that we sometimes need boundless desire because of our desires’ tendency to be frustrated by the conditions of the world we live in. Maybe we sometimes long for so much more - indefinitely more - than we need because, in forlornly pursuing that, we might get at least what we need - whereas, if we’d just pursued what we needed, we would have fallen far short.

I think of the mantra ‘aim for the moon, and, if you miss, you’ll fall among the stars’.

I can imagine a businessman, at the end of his career, saying that, if he hadn’t started out with a boundless desire for business success, he wouldn’t have had the moderate success he did have. I can imagine there being a kind of truth to that too, presupposing an extremely competitive, demanding business environment. Whether I’d endorse the businessman’s overall approach to life is another question, of course.

Thinking generally of the goal of acquiring safety or power over our environment, I can believe that an aim-for-infinity-to-get-enough mindset is sometimes necessary, or at least sometimes works out - and especially was/did historically, when we (lacking our current technical and social-systematic means) could have far less control over our environment, and, correspondingly, when we were reined in by our environment such that we couldn’t do too much harm (to it, to other people or to ourselves) in pursuing these boundless desires.

The desire for love is, in part, a desire for safety. ‘Never let me go’ is an appeal for protection, right? As well as for constraint, interestingly. As well as, of course, for intimacy. In Ishiguro’s novel, the main characters know they will die young, 'donating' their organs, and in the meantime live oppressively limited lives - under such circumstances, faced with such helplessness, maybe that aim-for-infinity-to-get-enough mindset naturally comes more into play. Though, on a practical level, the characters are heartbreakingly modest in their aspirations for their time together - a ‘deferral’ of their donations is all they ever hope for, rather than an exemption, let alone an end to the system oppressing them; nor do they ever seem to consider trying to escape or fight. The expression ‘never let me go’ conveys passivity on the part of the speaker. It might easily be understood as purely rhetorical too. Of course a part of us can long to be never let go, even while we overall accept and comply with the limitations that prevent even modest improvement in that direction.

Suppose someone really did pursue boundless love though. What would that look like? Maybe most of us can imagine, or recall experiencing at some point, a kind of unhinged pursuit of boundless love - someone unable to be alone, in need of constant reassurance, etc. And maybe we can in some sense forgive that behaviour, understanding that it’s rooted in existential dread and pathology. But it is fascinating and moving for me to imagine what a healthy, enlightened pursuit of boundless love (if such a pursuit is possible) might look like… I think, for one thing, it would mean never assuming that there isn’t any more potential for shared wonder and joy in a relationship. A healthy, enlightened pursuit of endless worlds, heavens, realms of experience might be similar: never assume you’ve seen, essentially, all there is to see. The dynamic in these cases, it seems to me, is less aim-for-infinity-to-get-enough and more aim-for-infinity-to-get-everything-we-can. I’m presupposing, in these cases, conditions of abundance, rather than scarcity. Abundance is not conceptually the same as limitlessness but it might be practically the same, for us. We’re so finite that even if the wonders of this world - or of a single loving relationship - are not infinite, they are for our purposes.

2) Returning to my original question of why we have boundless desires, another theory that occurs to me is that there actually is some transcendent world or state of being, and (more or less consciously) we long for it - and can maybe attain it, at least in moments. How then to conceptualise this transcendent world or state of being? I’m really not sure. I’ve not had an experience that I’m entirely comfortable describing as ‘transcendent’. I’ve sometimes thought that, if music were not a totally everyday thing, I would not hesitate or need prompting to describe it in such terms. Less often, other art forms have struck me in that way. Less often still, moments of direct intimacy with other people have. (I think, as I write that last sentence, of Tim Buckley, ‘the hours that ran wild, with the magic of our eyes’ - and I’m back to music.)

But are such experiences anything like what religious people mean when they speak of communion with God? Of course the arts, from Bach to Evelyn Waugh, have often been means of that communion, and ‘to love another person is to see the face of God’, as Jean Valjean and co. put it. Often when religious people explain to me their love of God, they sound to me like they’re expressing a love of life or the world and its many glories. (I think of the universe-surveying climatic lines of La Yugular, ‘Yo quepo en un haiku, Y un haiku ocupa un país’, etc.) A longing for a pantheistic God might blur into a longing for integration into some planetary or universal consciousness. And maybe both can be understood as blurring into a longing for something like the Platonic form of the good or the Hegelian Geist, to give the most obvious examples of philosophical visions of transcendence.

Maybe some monks somewhere have, through meditating, been in touch with this transcendent world or state of being - or particularly so. Maybe some people have got there through drugs. Maybe others have through running. And yeah, maybe we needn’t look high and far for our heaven, maybe we’re even mistaken in doing so. Maybe the right drink in the right moment, the right hug in the right moment, the right novelty in the right moment - maybe such experiences offer us as great a transcendence as any.

The three different above-quoted texts, with their three different boundless desires, suggest to me that the transcendent world or state of being can be pursued - and, perhaps elusively, attained - in diverse ways. And maybe this transcendent world or state of being is infinite, or, again, it’s as good as infinite for our purposes.

3) A third kind of answer to my original question of why we have boundless desires might be that we have them essentially out of immaturity or confusion. It’s problematic to demand of a person far more than they can possibly give (‘never let me go’). Does the cat enjoy real milk less, or not at all, because it longs for transcendental milk? If the light is on, isn’t it folly to want the light on? Alexander, like Patti Smith perhaps, wept when there were no more lands to conquer - there’s something childlike about that, right? The really wise person understands measure and proportion, and the right season for all things. The really wise person understands that there are hard limitations in life, and if you try to push past them, you gain nothing, you only suffer or do damage. Likewise, the really wise person understands that acceptance of limitations in one domain can often allow progress in another. Alexander just had to develop a slightly different (more mature, we might say) sense of conquering and/or of lands.

It seems to me that all three of these responses to the question of why we have boundless desires must have a lot of truth in them.

I’ve spoken here almost only of boundless desires we have as individuals, but there are also some obvious ones we engage in collectively. For instance,

- the capitalist pursuit of eternal economic growth
- the Olympic notion of faster, higher, stronger
- the scientific or scholastic pursuit of endlessly better understanding

In each case, is the boundless desire to be explained by our immaturity or confusion? Is it to be explained as a kind of necessary overcompensation, opening our arms as wide as possible just to have a chance of grabbing the little we need? Is it to be explained by some truly wonderful, out-of-this-world state that we might attain, even momentarily, in the pursuit? I really think I see elements of all three in all three. :)