The Time of Desire.

Mysticism · Kabbalah · Lacan · Genesis · Desire

The Time of Desire

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The human tragedy did not begin when Eve ate the forbidden fruit.

It began earlier, when Adam learned to name the world.

To name is to separate. This from that. Self from other. What is from what is not. With words we can speak of what has already gone, of what has yet to come, of what we shall never have. Language opens between us and the world a distance that nothing in the world can close.

Within that distance, desire begins to stir.

In the garden nothing was lacking. There were trees of every kind, water and food. But to need is one thing, to desire another. Hunger is stilled by eating; desire is not exhausted when we obtain what we want. Something always remains that no object can fill, because that "lack" is not born of what is absent from the world, but of the distance that language opens. We may hold something before our eyes and still desire in it something that is not there.

In the garden, that lack found a place. The tree from which they were not to eat became a monument to lack the very instant it was named as the only one forbidden. The story shows this with an almost innocent obscenity: the tree stood in plain sight, within reach of the hand. No physical distance kept it from them; only the one a sentence had traced upon the air.

The lack was not in the world. It was in being. 

Eve never hears the prohibition from the mouth of God. God had given it to Adam before she existed. Eve receives it from him, and when she repeats it before the serpent, something has changed: God had forbidden them to eat; Eve adds that they must not touch either. No one had forbidden her to touch; she forbids it herself. But what is it that she must not touch? The fruit, or what the fruit promises? The negation lets another desire show through: Eve did not only want to touch. She also longed to be touched. 

And it is precisely a voice from the other side of the law that touches her. The serpent gives her no command. It asks her a question, addresses her, invites her to speak. Before Eve touches the fruit, the serpent's word has already touched her desire. 

The serpent does not invent desire. It finds it open and makes it a promise. You shall not die. Your eyes shall be opened. You shall be as gods. But it brings in something more potent than the promise: the suspicion that God knows something they do not. If He forbids, it is because He is keeping something back. If He keeps it back, it is because He fears to lose it. And if He fears, He is no longer an unreachable God, but someone who can be equaled. 

The serpent does not offer a fruit. It offers to abolish the distance. To know what God knows, to see what God sees, to be what God is. All the light, at once. Nothing left to seek. Nothing left to desire.

Eve looks again, and now the fruit seems good for food, pleasant to the eyes, and to be desired to make one wise. The fruit had not changed. The gaze had.

What they desired was not the taste of the fruit, but what the fruit promised: to know what they did not yet know, to be what they were not yet. The fruit could be eaten. What it promised could not.

The serpent promised them that beyond the prohibition they would find complete knowledge, a light able to dispel every shadow. But knowledge has no final rung: every answer opens new questions.

There was another promise, perhaps more seductive: that they could have it all at once. The serpent did not merely offer them knowledge. It promised to spare them the time that learning demands. Eve wanted to cross in a single step the distance between what she was and what she longed to be.

And beneath both promises lay the deepest lie: that the lack could be closed, that something existed that could put an end to desire. Such a promise, when it seems within reach, does not soothe. It burns.

Eve ate, and then Adam. Their eyes were opened, just as the serpent had promised. But to open one's eyes is not the same as learning to see. The light came all at once, before they could understand what it revealed. And the first thing they discovered was their nakedness.

The serpent had promised that they would be as God. The first thing they discovered was what it meant not to be. They wanted to abolish the distance in a single bite, but they found something for which they were not prepared.

Too much light, too soon.

And they were afraid.

When God calls to him in the garden, Adam answers: I heard thy voice, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.

It is the first fear in the Bible. It does not come with death, but with light. They wanted to erase at a stroke the distance between what they were and what they desired to be. But their eyes were opened before they had learned to look. And the first thing to come was fear.

The Kabbalah tells a strange story about the origin of the world. It speaks of a lamp of darkness: a light so primal, so intense, that it blinded. That is why it was dark. From it springs all else and yet it cannot itself be known. So that something other than the infinite might exist, that light had to withdraw and leave a space within itself.

But when the light descended, the vessels meant to receive it could not bear such intensity and shattered. Not for want of light, but from excess. And the light returned to its source.

Yet not all the light returned. Some sparks remained trapped among the fragments, wrapped in husks that the Kabbalah calls klipot. Thus was born a darkness that was not the absence of light, but its captivity.

From that other side, where the sparks lay enclosed in the klipot and where what we would later call evil was germinating, the serpent spoke to Eve. Its promise had the brilliance of that first light, intense, blinding: to know all things, to be as God. But it offered her no path by which to reach it. It promised that she could possess it whole and at once, without measure, without waiting, without time.

And Eve, who had forbidden touching, stretched out her hand.

Was the fruit forbidden forever? The Bible leaves a clue. Further on, the same Bible commands that the fruit of a young tree not be eaten during its first three years. Not because the fruit is evil, but because it is not yet time. Perhaps the fruit of the garden was not forbidden forever either. Perhaps it was forbidden only for a time.

But what had to ripen was not the fruit. It was the vessel.

Here lies the time of desire. It is not the time we must wait to obtain what we want. No fruit can give us what we make it promise, and no waiting will change that. It is the time we need to learn how to receive, to find the right distance from what we desire. Neither so far that desire goes out, nor so near that the light consumes us.

To desire is not to draw near the object until every distance is erased. Distance is not merely an obstacle. It also shelters us: it lets us draw near without losing ourselves in what we desire.

Fear, anxiety, panic, even the vertigo of falling in love can warn us that this distance is narrowing. And with them comes urgency: to do something, to settle everything, to put an end to uncertainty. Sometimes we flee; at other times we rush headlong toward what we desire. Either way, we let the intensity of the moment decide for us. But not everything we feel demands an immediate response. Sometimes we need to pause, step back, and discover what it is that truly moves us.

There the question emerges. Not the serpent's, which already carried a hidden answer, but the one Eve never asked herself: what do I hope to find on the other side of the prohibition? A question able to remain open long enough that urgency does not decide for us.

To ask is not to renounce desire. It is to give desire time to reveal what we do not yet know of it.

But giving it time does not mean standing still, waiting for an answer. Desire goes on beating as long as we live: sometimes strongly, sometimes so faintly we can scarcely hear it. Only death stills it. It is not a matter of ceasing to desire, nor of waiting for it to subside, but of learning to keep pace with its pulse. Drawing near when it swells, withdrawing when it begins to burn, clinging to neither place. The right distance is not a fixed point. It is a rhythm, like that of breathing.

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The sin was not eating the fruit. It was eating it before its time. 

The vessel that would receive all the light at once breaks.

What remains to us is to learn to be crystal: to receive the light pulse by pulse, to discover how much of it we can hold without breaking, and to let it, as it passes through us, return transformed to the universe. The vessel does not ripen by waiting for the light. It ripens by learning to receive it.

That is the time of desire.