But the moon, she has no fire; in her uncontainable avidity to be loved, she attracts at the cost of the being who gazes at her and becomes ensnared by her... And one senses that from this pasty light, in which the hemlock flower finds its ecstasy, there is but one step to poison. A poison that the flower sends to the stem that sustains it, a concentration of rancor toward that which does not yield even though it may bend, and which continues to sustain the being who adores the moon, submerged in her reflected light.
Clearings in the Forest, María Zambrano
Thrown into the world through the birth canal, the new being will yearn for the rest of its life to return to a mythical state of completeness to which it can never return. A dream stolen from death, which it will only fleetingly caress in ephemeral moments of fulfilment—if such moments are granted to it, perhaps under the gentle glow of a midday sun or lulled by the calm, rhythmic hum of the sea, indifferent, like the death itself, to the sorrows of the world and those who inhabit it.
Such impossibility, however, will not deter it from trying in every way possible and by all means within its reach, its anxiety coalescing into a vital longing to find and reappropriate another being to make it whole. A desire to love, or rather to be loved, that will strike it like an invocation—and for those who are always attentive, the paths are manifold—arising from the body's energy, which, seeking solace, summons the senses.
And thus, at the sight of a glance, a face, a playful smile, or the capricious trace of a silhouette on the horizon, the future lover, unaware of the call, is startled and stops, troubled by an unexpected revelation.
As days pass, the invocations multiply. For being energy, desire is avid and restless, and through its intervention, the pleasurable surprise turns into curiosity, an active and attentive search. The lover becomes a kind of detective, a Sherlock Holmes driven to scrutinize, in his passion for knowledge, more and more of the one who invoked his desire to love.
A passion that, in its extreme form, will shape what some call "amorous passion," a passion for knowledge that an attentive eye would discover to be flawed, blind, and absurdly human. For, despite being condemned to walk intertwined, love and desire are paradoxically eternal enemies.
An antagonistic rivalry that manifests in all lovers, in whom love calls for a reunion with other souls, rejoicing in the similarities and affinities that link them, while at the same time, the desire that fuels it aspires, with the greed of the flesh, to immediate fusion through the urgent intercession of the body. A strange paradox born of a love that binds by inquiring into what unites the lovers—bringing them near—and a desire that fuses by ignoring what differentiates them—tearing them apart.
A dual movement of advance and retreat that will subjugate the lovers, subjecting them to the steady and persistent pace of love—a reflection of the archaic, firm, and weary gait of souls—as well as to the blind nomad crossing monotonously over arid dunes, prone to the mirages of a discontinuous desire, blossoming oases that the desert sand raises in its delirium driven by his fierce wish to reach its destination.
But desire is clever; its wisdom comes from the body, and it remains anchored to the Earth. It knows that nothing new is sought, only what has already been known, and it stubbornly insists on transforming the beloved into a new object that satisfies its subjectivity and its thirst to be. And thus, in the beloved's new universe, it insists on finding only traces of what it has known before, giving rise to that strange innocence of the lover, so avid to know the beloved and so sagacious in its way of not knowing them—something later testified by those with their "I thought," "I believed," "They told me," "They deceived me," "They used me"—all oblivious to the sagacity of their own desire.
Driven by its amorous impetus—its passion for ignorance—to an insatiable dissection of the beloved (who, by the insistence of its own desire, must always remain necessarily unknown), desire will fiercely transmute the feverish inquiry of the detective into the possessive greed of the jailer, turning the lover into an avid cartographer claiming sovereignty over the beloved's territory.
A lover, no longer satisfied with the impact caused by the beauty of the newly glimpsed horizon—a space until then unknown and indifferent to their arrival—who will impose upon themselves, in their possessive delirium, the impossible task of colonizing it, henceforth promulgating the laws that will dictate the beloved's future.
A lover, captive to their desire of sovereignty, who will sow with their seigneurial passion the poisonous seed of a violent conflict between the lovers in their impulse to convert the beloved into the object of their own subjectivity.
Yet the greed to be loved is only calmed by madness, the idolatry of the being one loves. And so, the jailer will find in their inquisitorial and obsessive gaze their own addiction and their own prison. In their vain delirium to rewrite the soul of the beloved in the image of their own chimera—involuntarily condemned to exist solely in function of their prisoner—they will only succeed in drifting away from their truth, ending up as a mere wreck of themselves, a residual appendage of the being they guard and against whose ruthless seclusion they rebel.
The beloved, now the sole depositary of the ancient splendour of a fertile love turned into a desert, will yearn only for liberation, in some cases leading to romantic failure and the triumph of desire—ready to be embodied in a new body—in its impossible crusade to regain the dreamed-of completeness. Although, in others, love will rebel against remaining a mere instrument of the madness of desire, turning the fruitless search for a dreamed, lost past into the promise of a shared present of reciprocal discovery in their passion for knowledge—a love, in its eternal fragility, unnecessarily necessary.
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