What stance do we take to our own desires? And if we've removed our implanted desires, the desires, say, conditioned by family life and pathologies, by audio-visual culture, by education system, by porn, by music, what would be left? What would we be attracted to and interested in? Insofar as we have no control group, no alternate version of our lives within which to explore the interaction of our biology with different civilizations, we'll never know. We can't know. We are a nest of fates. We are formed by very specific forces.
I can't help but feel, however, that there are desires in the body, in our specific bodies, natural to us that run deeper than what's implanted, that there's a native fauna in the soul. I think psychologically speaking, in terms of our own metacognition, we're in the position of someone who buys a house which already has an extensive garden. Native species are mixed with exotic foreign plants. We have to make a decision which to dig up, which to cultivate—about what species are invasive or ugly (which might displace native plants), and which, conversely, create an aesthetic and ecological fusion of the highest order.
James Merrill:
I've been thinking a lot about how we are split selves (and are never fully present). The phone was a radical technology for many reasons, the cell phone, eventually the smart phone; it allowed us to live on two levels at once all the time. Your average New Yorker might be on a date, looking fabulous, actually quite happy with the date, mind you, having a good time—while simultaneously texting selfies to another date somewhere else, cropping out the person at the bar seat next to them. I don't think there's any younger person in the modern city—the phone-conditioned city—who hasn’t done something like this. It’s part of a much vaster trend of accepting and promoting fantasy and illusion as real. 1