What Do We Want When We Can’t Stop Wanting?

The poet, Christian Wiman, asks this question, and it is such an excellent one, especially now, especially at this time of year, and especially if we take it to a much higher sphere than just material desires. 

When we can’t stop wanting, what we want is often really so painfully obvious: suffering, heartache, despair and unceasing deaths to end, and, then eventually and mercifully, grief as well. In the December 2020 issue of Commonweal is a section called “Christmas Critics.” One such ‘critic’ (in the sense of wise commentator), Kristin Valdez Quade, offers the glimpse of an answer I had not considered, captured in the lines of contemporary poet, Ross Gay. In his poem “Spoon” he is holding the body of his recently deceased friend, Don. In his grief, the poet ultimately finds comfort in recognizing that Don has now found a new home, not in some far distant imagined heaven, but within the poet himself: 

Don peered at me again with those sad eyes,

or through me, or into me,
the way my dead do sometimes,

looking straight into their homes,
which hopefully have flowers

in a vase on a big wooden table,
and a comfortable chair or two

and huge windows through which light
pours to wash clean and make a touch
less awful

what forever otherwise will hurt.

What we also want when we cannot stop wanting is an end to the terrible agitation and angst that permeates our daily lives. Katie Daniels, another ‘Christmas Critic’, this time focuses especially on young people and their world today. She quotes one: “I couldn’t shake the feeling of precariousness—that all I’d worked for could just disappear—or reconcile it with an idea that had surrounded me since I was a child: that if I just worked hard enough, everything would pan out.” Daniels also describes a world the young are just discovering but with which we older inhabitants are all too familiar. It’s the landscape described in Ecclesiastes and Lamentations, the one we can only experience with a “melancholic world-weariness” and an exhaustion with “relentless change”.  Now imagine living in the midst of all of that and still being asked to “always optimize” every situation as youth today are called to do. No wonder they are tired and discouraged.

Like Kristin Valdez Quade though, Katie Daniels holds out a possibility for coping, even triumphing. “Technology,” she says, “offers the illusion of control—if we can just work better, smarter, more, then maybe we can achieve something like happiness. Reading, though, is an…inefficient act, one that can and should be available to everyone. Once a book is in your hands, there’s really no way to optimize the experience; it’s just yours for the taking.” 

She recommends one of my favorite books, A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr. The story centers on an English soldier who has just returned from the horror that was World War I. He takes on the task of restoring a mural in a church in a small country village. The outer restoration works on restoring his own inner damage as well. The soldier in this solitary setting begins connecting with the original artist, “reaching from the dark to show me what he could do, saying to me as clear as any words, ‘If any part of me survives from time’s corruption, let it be this. For this was the sort of man I was.’” The book grants us small but necessary comfort after such ravages: to work and live where “the pulse of living beats strong.” As Katie Daniels emphasizes, “Art matters. Community matters. The slow, laborious task of chipping away what’s in front of our own eyes matters.” She quotes our soldier again: “It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.” 

“Christmas Critic” writer, Burke Nixon, returns us to the original question and to the poet, Christian Wiman again. “For Wiman,” he says, “poetry is an act of faith even when a writer claims to have no faith at all, and a way to experience something beyond the self. He’s interested in how writing and reading poetry can lead to those rare ‘moments of mysterious intrusion, that feeling of collusion with eternity, of life and language riled to the one wild charge…While poetry can hint at the ‘persistent, insistent mystery at the center of our existence,’ Wiman suggests that, ultimately, ‘art is not enough.’ No art form can solve our ‘quest to figure out what it is, exactly, we want when we can’t stop wanting.’ For this, we have to look beyond ourselves and seek out faith, despite every unanswered and unanswerable question.’”

And so we seek and wait and ponder. It is Advent, after all.