The Ghosts of Desire and the Arrows that Fly

"Contact with human creatures is given to us through the sense of perception. Contact with God is given to us through the sense of absence. Compared with absence, presence become more absent than absence."

--Simon Weil

How can we direct the way of our thoughts to manifest our love for God? If Simon Weil is correct in saying that our contact with God is given to us through the sense of absence, how can we make contact with something absent? But I think the key question is, What does it mean to desire God, let alone desire anybody?

When you love someone, do you not desire her presence in your life? In the least, do you not want to be sure that that person will always be there so you can love her and she can love you in return? That desire for someone's presence, I'm thinking of the death of a friend or family member, doesen't that make the person, now gone, seem more diffuse, more ever-present? You go into her room, the room she used to live and where you used to talk to one another, and it seems as if now that she's gone, her ghost pervades the room. She seem everywhere and nowhere. Your desire summons her, and although you never believed in ghosts, you know it's a symbol that was created for this very feeling, that ghosts really do exist, but not like in the movies. Your desires change your experience of the world, and these ghosts that are summoned by the desires of the mind, they'll change you.

Yes, desire! That's the word. Desire, which gives direction to the stream of your thoughts. Desire--so bodily, so phyisical, but so spiritual as well! Even with the desire to solve something as purely abstract as a math equation, the desire to suceed becomes bodily. You need to solve the problem, because a desire rebuked is a painful matter. Is not the failures and successes of desire one of the roots of suffering? A desire that strikes the mind is the first stage of way-making, but a desire poorly chosen can be the death of the soul.

Bob Dylan in his song "Dark Eyes" says:

"Oh, time is short and the days are sweet and passion rules the arrow that flies..."

Yes, time is short and life will nibble at your conscience, asking you time and time again--"How far are you aiming your arrows? Are they reaching as far as they can reach?" The arrow that flies? Is that not our idea that your mind moves in streams of forces, that your thoughts, moved by desire, have direction? Swept up by your desires, desires that you must freely choose, your mind, no, your whole existence moves itself through its two worlds--the physical world of people and things, and the mental world of attitudes and ideas. But in what direction should one's passion go?

Of course, people have different modes of passions. Some are passionate about collecting bottle caps, some (like me) are passionate about singing, and some are passionate about playing a sport. This is all fine, but there are passions that define the spectrum of life and death, that seem to contain all of the material world and charge it with meaning. To be passionate about playing baseball is perfectly healthy, but what if that passion contained all of life and death itself? Or what if you lived to passionately love another woman, a temptation that would surely befall me if that person filled my life with such peace and joy.

The author Robert Penn Warren, writing on Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, interpreted the death of Catherine as the discovery that "the attempt to find a substitute for universal meaning in the limited meaning of the personal relationship is doomed to failure." What happens to the soul of a man that finds that the limited meaning of a woman, baseball, singing, or whatever; what happens to this man when he finally realizes that this cannot be a substitute for a universal meaning? What Tragedy?

I make another statment to self--

"The purpose of my life is to find and live a passion that will give a purpose to my life."