from Desire Without (1)

In my early twenties I had a long period of extremely poor health from which I don’t believe I ever fully recovered. This sentence, while true, has always seemed to me to be the kind of sentence that would make a good opening line for a certain kind of book. A type of book I am fairly certain I don’t actually want to write. I think I want to write about this time in my life, yet in a completely different way. What this different way is I still don’t really know. It is a question I continue to wonder about, as we can assume I will be doing a great deal in the pages that follow. If you find such notions off-putting perhaps you might do yourself a favour by not reading any further. I of course am not doing myself any favours by recommending this course of action so soon, when this book has barely begun. I believe I have always had a tendency toward self-sabotage even though, as I’ve gotten older, I have also continuously worked to avoid it. As you might already suspect, I have not always been entirely successful in such matters.

There is a quote from Pier Paolo Pasolini I often think about: “If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.” And I am an unbeliever. But the world needs to change and I can’t help but feel that in the end it will be changed by people who believe, who possess a great deal of conviction. What these people who might someday change the world might actually believe is a question for which I don’t yet have an answer. (If we don’t want religious fanatics or fascists to provide this answer we will need to provide an equally potent answer of our own.) During that period in my mid-twenties when my health gave out I found myself searching for something to help get me through the ordeal and I did so mainly in reading. I read books of poetry that I now realize, only in retrospect, I was hoping might give me more to believe in. Hoping that such belief might serve as a counterweight to the daily chronic pain. I don’t think I ever quite found what I was looking for but the fact that, in my hour of need, my agnostic tendencies gave way to such a search is an insight that has never quite left me. When things take a turn for the worse there often arises some newfound desire for belief (or hope.) And in the world right now things are definitely taking a turn for the worse.

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Jacob Wren