Sacred Acts of Desire
A paradox
The orb of iridescence is bright amongst the deafening silence. You are captivated by it as you watch it listlessly bobbing amongst the absolute darkness. It suddenly and playfully jiggles quickly before settling again. Now you are very curious. It is beautiful and ghostly, and seemingly beyond possibility.
You move in for a closer look, it seems to drift steadily back like a chased rainbow. You pause and contemplate it again, feeling anxious and unsettled yet entranced by its alien strangeness. The orb drives you ever more curiously to get closer, and closer. It doesn’t move back now, you can reach out and just, gently, touch it.
‘Hhawkh’, or some other ghastly onomatopoeia of air rushing out of your lungs, is the last sound you’ll make as what feels like fifteen butcher’s hooks punch through your soft solar plexus, and ten more like dragon’s talons down through your shoulder blades. Feeling your interstices fill with your own blood, the trance now a lifetime behind you, it all comes back with a rare clarity, ‘they said not to touch the orb.’
The Anglerfish is an ambush predator, a subsistence capitalist of desire, that waits patiently in the dark, dangling a beautifully iridescent orb, ready to punch holes in captivated fishes and swallow them up whole. We too, like the humble and unassuming little fishes, have desires that if fulfilled can have, for better or worse, drastic consequences for the course of our lives. And so, we hold things sacred to protect the course of life that we have chosen. But perhaps, it is the ordaining of the sacred that paradoxically creates the trouble to begin with.
Holding something as sacred is a promise to protect what is rare or significant, vows to a lover or soulmate, vows to culture, vows to our health. But enshrining something as sacrosanct, giving it supreme value, is what makes it vulnerable to acts of devaluation; it is a somewhat circular blessing to bestow.
Holding something sacrosanct makes what it denies ever more desirable because the inherent value of the sacred is placed above all else. After all, we do desire what we can’t have, can’t deny that. The value of these other things is denied through our sacred ignorance — through vows, rules, and fear — but, in secrecy, it is not lessened.
The paradox of sacredness, or naive sacredness, is that it prevents us from living a life full of the experiences that give us the knowledge about what is and isn’t sacred to us. Experience teaches us what is cheap desire and what is rare and valuable, or actually sacred. Experience actually teaches us that we can’t just accept that someone else’s “sacred” should be ours too.
However, the laws of what is sacred are often something that we are told we must obey based on sociocultural principles, rather than something we’re allowed to figure out for ourselves. Most of us that have figured out that rules are more like guidelines feel that living by them to the nth degree is a perfect soufflé of misery.
But what about on the other hand, as an obvious example, the misery that comes when your partner cheats on you? The ‘just a guideline’ argument doesn’t hold up there. It is gut-wrenchingly painful. Your partner touched the orb, but you got eaten because you protected your union as sacred, and they did not.
Time for some tough questions though. Sure, you both agreed and so there is no excuse for the betrayal, but would it have been so miserable if you hadn’t made your relationship so sacred from the beginning? If desire is cheap, then sacredness is very expensive. If sacredness doesn’t exist, then choice becomes free, and if this really is your soulmate then you will be chosen. Suddenly, the orb is free of the Anglerfish, free to be beautiful and desirable without the cost of blood.
It is painful when others break the rules because we have made rules in the first place, rather than allowing fluid understandings and open conversations. Rather than cheat, if your partner had come to you with an open conversation about their desire then you could have decided together if it was acceptable. If you say no, then they must choose what is more important to them, and there may be pain in that choice.
Of course, it is valid and ok to say no when someone wants to cross the sacred laws, but is it ok to say no every time? When we are consistently denied our desires then we shift into the realm of the sacred where the choice for cheap desire suddenly becomes very expensive but no less alluring.
But it’s now no longer about fulfilling a cheap desire of lust, it now represents desire for the beauty of the fluid human experience, perhaps the most sacred thing there is, and well, your ‘sacred’ relationship cluttered with power dynamics and closed communication is not going to compete with that. Maybe then, it is desire that is truly sacred because it is the expression of our imperfect humanity, rather than of a tiringly perfect dream.
Ultimately, we want to be the reason why someone else didn’t live a full life. It might seem absurd and obtuse to think of it that way, but that’s what it is. There are too many songs in the world about promising to be true to only you. An ego driven desire to be sacred, usually based on perhaps illogical sociocultural hand-me-downs that you may not have actually thought about very deeply, just accepted.
So, I urge you, first, lick the universe outside of your culture and find out what it is that you truly value. Don’t try to bend people that disagree, respect them by sharing and receiving ideas openly, and keep going. Think deeply about what you think is truly sacred and have open and honest conversations with the people that you want to share that with. Ask before you cross the line, because a dishonest chase for desire may feed the people you love to the fishes, and for what? You may not even like it, or at least, know that the satisfaction won’t last but the separation will, guaranteed. And lastly, stop denying another soul the opportunity to live just because you’re scared that they won’t come back, because that denial makes you the Anglerfish that has already ambushed and eaten them. Once someone has been eaten, they just want to be free.
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