Song of Desire 2009

Silent Desire

Desire mourns over a lost world, a broken embrace and a vanished voice.
It observes that the reach of arms and the range of words do not suffice to touch upon the world.
It perceives friction and fissure between one’s own experiences and those of others.
It notices that inner and outer do not fully coincide.
The desirous outcry is, however, no mere ululation but a jubilation too.
In spite of its awareness of this incurable wound, desire consists in a strife for scarless recovery.
It is the disillusioned hope to bridge the abyss between man and world, the hopeful disillusion to surmount one’s (often self imposed) limitations.
Desire aspires to replace distance by intimacy, sole separation by reams of relations and isolation by freedom.
It yearns for a salient leap out of hidden obscurity and craves for a voice to break silence with. Hence, desire wishes to transform howl into song.
Yet, it is not unaware of the fact that this transformation can never be complete,
that a remnant of silence persists in every shout and that sight is always stained by a blind spot of diffuse distortion.
And still longing lasts. As a consequence, desire is a place both sinister and comforting, where pain and pleasure intersect,
where the tragic and the playful meet.

Emma de Vries