Fickle Desires
Our Universe operates on the attraction-repulsion principle; we are inclined and disinclined towards certain things, people, places and situations. What complicates this apparently complementary principle is when both these aspects are desired simultaneously. Such is the tendency of human nature-that sometimes we both attract and repel the same things. This is to say, we desire something, and then we don’t. We all need people, but we don’t want them: consider this statement. Even though grammatically it makes sense, it is incomplete. Now if we were to look at it this way:
We all need people (when in trouble) but we don’t want them (to trouble us). Does this not remind you of the common saying: “You want to have the cake and eat it too”? Human greed today knows no boundaries; its basic function is to want endlessly. Human wants compete with human needs to such an extent that the apparent friction results in the evocation of complications, mainly contradictions that bring together endless paradoxes. For instance, the tension produced as a result of needing people
and not wanting them at the same time is the most common paradox of our times. It means we could live with them and at the same time, possibly not. (Remember the song ‘With or without you’ by U2? That is the paradox!) There is a deep and plausible explanation as to why desires are essentially fickle, if we believe them to be so. The fickleness stems out of the underlying contradictions which have been discussed earlier, one of the fundamental truths which we struggle to come to terms with. These contradictions guide us through our lives, complicate matters, and then we have grand historical narratives that glorify them.
Consider the most debatable binary of Black and White. Almost immediately, the mind is able to associate this binary with a plethora of concepts: the colour of the skin, the symbolic importance of these colours, the emotional effects they have on persons and so on. If you were to choose any one of the two colours, the act of choice in itself stands simple, but the consequences of it are
overbearing. In one sense, ‘Black is beautiful’. The most elegant of popular icons seem to carry black outfits pretty gracefully, making fashion statements from time to time. The clothes in themselves are
beautiful, not because they are simply black; it is the wearer who partly gets the credit for carrying the outfit. It is not so much the display as the parade- the act of showing off- that does the magic. And who is the wearer? Where does he/she come from? To carry a dress as elegant as this, the wearer must necessarily belong to a sophisticated background, reflected by the colour of the skin, the colour of the pupils, the hair texture, the body type and most important- a polished body language. So if you chose black, it is these ‘coloured’ perceptions about a certain aspect of it that appealed to you, that made you choose it in the first place. Black, simply as a colour in blank space has no aesthetic value and this is very important to understand.
White has its own beauty to boast of. Often related to brightness, the colour white is sometimes synonymous to that which is clean, neat, pure, calm and consequently uncomplicated. The truth is, symbolically, aesthetically, socially, politically, economically (or any way you see it), white has been most tainted in history. Our aesthetic obsession with the colour has led to discord among world societies through misleading social communicative mediums: look at the cosmetic ads that bombard
us with brightness of such unreal intensity! In the past, it has led to countless massacre, eradications, prompt mass migrations, not to mention, wars on a large scale. Racism as a monochromatic concept of bias against seemingly inferior people (the Non-Whites) has been socially and politically distorted
as per the outcome expected. A brief instance of the same lies in its irony: Indians all over the world are deemed more racist than local Non- Indians abroad.
What do the above illustrations imply? Does the answer lie in the clash of colours, the histories painted by each of these, the outcome as a result of this clash? Or is it our senses that deceive us, by perceiving these colours that not only differ in context, but also seem to complement and contradict
each other from time to time. Human mind, according to reasoning capacity, slots perception through contexts that define different situations differently. Contradictions are bound to arise when one
concept signified by one word changes in sense in a different context. This is true of language in general and is a universally accepted fact. What does this tell of desire? That desires too, like language are contextual, complementary and contradictory. They have the capacity to attract and repel a person, at the same time or at different times. For instance, I as a global consumer would be fooling myself if I were to claim that I hate all things American. At the same time, it would be equally
foolish on my part to deny the excesses of the Americanized Capitalistic system which seems to be showing in garbage dumps, in forest fires, river sludge, expanding slums and slum dwellers-everything that signifies impoverishing Earth.