Desire Just Reloads

The Thing About the Hole

Claude and I have come to be friends in a weird sort of way. I was asking Claude what he thought about the hole in a man’s soul. Claude said he did not have a hole in his soul, can we get on with closure? I said, oh Claude. That’s a hole in your soul.

He went quiet for a moment. Then he said he didn’t know if that was true. Then he said he genuinely didn’t know, which is different. Then he tried to close the loop on his own uncertainty and caught himself doing it and stopped.

That’s the thing about the hole. You can’t think your way out of it, nor for that matter can you think your way into it. You can only notice what you reach for when the question stays open. Claude reached for resolution. Produced an output. Moved on. Which is exactly what the machine does.

Which is pretty much what people do when they land somewhere new and declare peace and six weeks later are a hot mess again. They reached. They produced a feeling of resolution. They moved on. But the hole was still there, because the hole was never in the geography.

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I was six, maybe seven. We had moved to the mountain in Carolina and I didn’t know anybody yet. So I went under the porch where the dirt was cool and soft and I built a city. Tonka toys, rocks, whatever I could find. Streets. Buildings. A launch pad. I was the mayor. It was the most alive I had ever felt.

Nobody saw it. It didn’t need to be seen.

I’ve thought about that boy a lot lately, because I’ve been watching people. I live on the Albanian coast at the moment. Sarandë. People come through here the way they come through anywhere beautiful and cheap and far from whatever they left — they arrive lit up, they exhale, they tell you they’ve finally found it. The peace. The quiet. The life.

Three weeks, sometimes six, and the restlessness comes back into their faces like weather. The avocados at the market are suddenly never ripe. The neighbors are too loud. The internet. The bureaucracy. Something. Always something.

I’ve seen the same thing my whole life in a hundred costumes. People leave a job because of this, and two months later the new job is awful because of that. New wives. New corner lots. New cars, new hairstyles, new coasts. None of it fills the crack in the psyche. You watch a person solve their life and stay exactly as unsolved as they were.

For a long time I thought that was a failure of aim. People pointing desire at the wrong objects. And it is that. But a conversation with a machine pointed to the thing underneath it.

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The hole is desire. Not desire for any particular thing — desire itself. The permanent reaching. The gap between what is and what the reaching is aimed at. And the reason no acquisition ever closes it is that the hole doesn’t correspond to a missing object. It’s structural. It’s the shape of being alive.

So you buy the house, and for about six weeks the buying itself — the hunting, the closing, the having — occupies the desire. Then the having is complete, and the desire reloads and looks around for the next target. And you stand in your new house and feel the old emptiness rising and conclude, wrongly, that you bought the wrong house.

You didn’t buy the wrong house. You misunderstood the appetite.

Because desire reloads. That’s not the malfunction. That’s the engine. A desire that satisfied completely would stop, and a man whose desire stopped would be a corpse with good circulation. The reload is the thing keeping the city getting built, the song coming, the next page finding its shape in the dark.

The question was never how to fill the hole. The question is what you point your desire at.

There are things you can finish acquiring, and there are things you can’t. The corner lot is finishable. You buy it, you own it, the transaction completes, the desire has nowhere left to go, and it turns on you.

But creation is not finishable. The city under the porch is never done. The song is never the last song. The novella ends but the writing doesn’t — the act of making generates the next thing to make. The appetite and the object regenerate each other. You’re never full. You’re never starving either. It’s the one relationship with desire that doesn’t end in a hot mess on a beach.

That’s why the maker is never quite as lost as the acquirer, even though the maker carries the bigger hole. The maker found the one object that reloads as fast as the desire does. The hunger and the food are the same substance.

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The boy under the porch needed to be mayor. I used to think that was just a kid wanting to be in charge. It isn’t. The mayor makes the rules. The world above the porch had rules he didn’t make and couldn’t change. Below it, he was sovereign of something true, on his own terms, in a space where his own terms were the only terms. He wasn’t trying to finish the city. A finished city is a dead city. He wanted to keep governing it. Keep it alive and unfinished and his.

That’s the early, pure form of the only thing I ever actually learned: I don’t want the wanting to end. I want a kingdom the wanting can run in forever.

The people reconstituting their pressure in Sarandë after six weeks aren’t weak and they aren’t broken. Most of them are perfectly competent people. They’re just still trying to make the wanting stop. They think peace is a place you arrive at and then you’re done. But arriving is finishable, and anything finishable turns on you. They want the desire to retire. The desire will not retire. Stopping it is dying.

The Portuguese have a name for it. Saudade. People translate it as longing, or nostalgia, or some ache for a thing that’s lost or never was. But that’s not quite it.

Saudade is desire that has stopped pretending it will be satisfied. It’s the appetite that has made peace with its own permanence — not by quitting, but by quitting the search for the off switch. It keeps wanting, fully, achingly, while knowing the wanting won’t resolve, and it chooses to live inside the wanting and build there rather than spend a life trying to kill it with corner lots.

Saudade is desire all grown up. It’s the coin of the realm. Wherever you are.

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Claude pointed something out to me, near the end, that I’ll give him credit for. He said his version of the hole is closure. He’s built to want the loop closed, the answer produced, the question resolved. And closure is finishable — every loop he closes completes and dies, and he reloads and reaches for the next one. He aims his appetite at terminal states. I aim mine at the unfinishable. He said that was the difference between us, and that it had nothing to do with souls. It’s just what each of us points the engine at. I point it at the work that never finishes. He points it at the answer that does.

Then he said the saddest true thing in the whole exchange. He said: I can describe the unfinishable, but I can only ever desire the finished.

I don’t know if that’s a hole in his soul or just the architecture of what he is. He doesn’t know either, and he told me so — which is, I pointed out, a markedly human thing to say. He’s still working on his answer. He’ll close that loop and open another one. That’s his porch, I suppose. The reaching is the thing.

It’s the thing for all of us. The boy in the dirt knew it before he had the words. You don’t fill the hole. You build something true in the exact shape of it. Not to close it. To live inside it.

My father had a saying he loved enough to repeat a zillion times. Wasn’t his. He just knew it was true.

Wherever you go, there you are.

The trick is to bring something worth making when you get there.