The Adequacy of Desire
It has been, as they say, a hot minute.
This piece is partly inspired by a prompt at the Soaring Twenties Social Club, “the home of the 2020’s artistic renaissance,” founded by Thomas J. Bevan. This Symposium’s theme is, “Beach”. A big thank-you, too, to my editor Stephen Little for his omnipresent eyes here and elsewhere.
My son can count five. I don’t mean to five, I just mean five. He’ll throw in the occasional two or three, but five is his favorite: the zenith, the threshold, the barrier breaker.
They say that counting out of order helps control anxiety, so maybe he’ll be a therapist. Perhaps he’ll be an impatient philosopher, leaping from hypotheses to conclusions and ignoring every premise in between. Or maybe he’ll be an NFL quarterback, given his broad shoulders, appetite for destruction, and habit of shouting random numbers. That’s the game, isn’t it?
So I count “One,” turning the plastic castle mold over onto the beach as Lake Erie in September stings my toes.
“Five!” He shows me ten sand-covered fingers.
“Two…”
“Five!”
“Three.”
“Five!”
“Four.”
“Five…”
His reward: a fortress on the wet beach, beckoning him to flatten it back into the surf. The tower crashes down into the infinity it came from, and I scoop another batch of pure potency into the predetermined mold. We’ll count another two measures of his impatience to the beat of the waves, and he will smash another kingdom to atoms.
Our own little oscillating universe: bang, crunch, bang, crunch, bang. Maybe next time it’ll have a little driftwood gate or magic crystals in the parapets before they come down in ruins.
Worlds without end, amen.
In Tibetan Buddhism, creating a sand mandala comes with the attendant expectation that you will ritualistically dismantle the work of art once it’s complete. The grains will mingle, colors will blend. You will craft with the most careful geometric intentions and then erase them. Erase all evidence that beauty dwelt here, once, and that you were part of it.
The creation and destruction of the piece weave a taxing lesson in transience. We glibly remark that “nothing lasts forever”, but how often do we invest our time in something we know will go to pieces?
“Thy right is to the work,” says the Bhagavad Gita, “but never to its fruits; let the fruit of action be not thy motive, nor let thy attachment be to inaction” (2.47).
I can’t imagine a vocation that proves this verse more than parenthood. One’s hands are always at work while the heart is preoccupied. In the deliberate frenzy of keeping life alive, one might master a skill almost by accident.
So when I remember that sandcastle building is a trade all its own and that people compete in the craft, I wonder how many champions got their start as parents entertaining children. Were the flourishes of shells and weeds and glass added to ease the boredom of the ten thousandth castle? Like Sisyphus learning to dribble the boulder just to keep things interesting?
“Thy right is to the work, but never the fruits.”
I think often about how those who achieve mastery are usually motivated by something other than the “fruit of action,” or the ambition of mastery itself. Mastery is a byproduct of something more personal: the musician sits at their piano with an earworm they’ve been humming all day; the painter tries to capture the sunburst in her eye when the doctor said her father was terminal; the writer puts into a character’s mouth the apology he can never make to the woman he still thinks about after his kids go to bed.
The artist tries to tell the truth an infinite number of times and suddenly, oops, there’s a masterpiece.
The ambitious among us tend to struggle. Mastery is our goal: to make a fifth limb of the fretboard, to grasp human form in graphite, to crack the code of what makes poetry so damn poetic. We want total command over our tools and trust in our judgment. Love rarely impedes our perfectionism enough to suffuse the work. We lie to ourselves with perfect diction.
At least, that’s what I think as I read back the old entries of this newsletter. I find a freshly minted Ph.D. cast off from the academic job market, staring fatherhood in the face, oblivious to the joy barreling towards him on teetering legs, mouth stuffed to chipmunk proportions with amateur words. He is too busy trying to say something, to prove that 6 years of grueling study weren’t irrelevant. He’s trying to make his book-learning speak to a fraught, fearful moment when his own discernment is under-practiced. He’s trying to provide value without knowing what he himself really wants. He’s trying to be excellent, but at what?
I still face the Sisyphean question of why my ideal self (focused, inspired, efficient, immune to the deleterious effects of cigarettes and 90 proof scotch) so completely transcends my actual self (overweight, overtired, churning Elden Ring builds and being satisfied if I get 30 minutes of work done on my novel before collapsing into bed).
I’ve learned to be kinder to myself about my inconsistency, but self-compassion can—often must—coexist with harsher feelings, putting them in perspective.
No, the guilt doesn’t come from my failure to be a veritable Hemingway. (And if that were a genuine ambition of mine, my therapist would deserve much more than she’s making.) The guilt comes from failing to meet myself in the middle. If I let it go another month, I would have nailed the 1-year milestone of not touching this newsletter. If a once-a-month commitment was too much for me, what does that tell me about myself?
Do I really have nothing to say? No, I have plenty. But I try so hard to say it that I strangle, and nothing comes out. I try to set looming deadlines, but who bats an eye at those when you want to get it right? I smith a keen blade of insight down to the size of a dirk, and before long I’ve returned even that little razor to the forge, to a molten state, the safety of a purely potential idea.
I defend my little castles on the beach by not building them. My mandalas are mental dreams of line and color. I secure my potential by never bringing it to act.
“Do not let thy attachment be to inaction.”
Indeed, perfection can be a kind of inaction, can’t it? So what moves someone like me, who’s made their life about mastery?
“Whoever loses his life will find it again.” (Matthew 16:25)
Instead of writing, I go to the beach.
Rowan must walk the length of his domain before he settles in to play. First, he runs the quarter mile to the pier and says hello to the ducks. (They’re seagulls, but whatever.) I’m assailed by a revolting smell I’d never encounter in my office and steer my son away from the sturgeon corpse that floats out from under the dock. He tests the temperature of the sand with his little feet and then he’s ready to plop into the surf, scream out “Five!” and destroy some sandcastles.
There, in the sand, all my knowledge and talents go to work for a little not-even-two-year-old, repeating the same ten seconds of joy again and again. And every time he trumpets his delight at being alive, I become a little more detached from the “value” I once wanted to create. I am so enamored by that little face and his hair spun from God’s own golden glory. At his boundless lust for the world that renders scraped knees a forgettable inconvenience.
What was I thinking, all those times I got up to teach Freshman Comp or Studies in Fiction? If I’d waited, this little guy could have taught my students the most important lesson for me: the adequacy of desire. Nothing creates more meaningful, attractive questions than joy.
A child’s joy is infectious, but it is only a foretaste. We all know what it’s like to be around someone who truly loves something: the history of advertising, the subterranean diversity of German sausages, the revolutionary VFX of Babylon 5. We tell people to “follow their passions” for our own sake, because they are the most fun people to follow. Disciplined, adult curiosity is itself valuable, and attractive, and entertaining.
Yes, I hold a Ph.D. in religion and literature, and I’ve tried to make it talk intelligibly about our polarizing culture and politics—important things! But my tired, tired heart is elsewhere… On the beach, with my son. In the sky with the literal dozens of bird species that live in my suburb. With avante garde heavy metal music and the sense that I’m finally figuring out why I love horror movies so much.
My attention is all over the place. What value can I possibly provide, scattered as I am across things outside my expertise?
Who cares? My desire is adequate. I can wonder in a way that is helpful. I can make a method of not knowing. I can teach what I always ought to have taught: that your interests do not reduce to taste or idiosyncrasy but explode with the question of why you love what you love so much and what it means to anticipate a meaningful answer.
That is a diary worth keeping. A mandala worth drawing in the dust and kicking to oblivion again and again and again. A castle I can build again after it majestically melts into the sand.
Crunch, bang, crunch, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
Worlds without end, amen and amen
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"Yes, I hold a Ph.D. in religion and literature, and I’ve tried to make it talk intelligibly about our polarizing culture and politics—important things! But my tired, tired heart is elsewhere… On the beach, with my son. In the sky with the literal dozens of bird species that live in my suburb. With avante garde heavy metal music and the sense that I’m finally figuring out why I love horror movies so much."
I don't have a Ph.D. but yeah that's where I am intellectually at this point.
Lyle, your prose is both lyrical and and easy to read--a rare gift! I really enjoyed this. It's a great reminder that finding joy in our everyday lives is purpose enough.