The Wandering Path of Desire

Hello and welcome to Ducks of the World Tree, the podcast that waddles across the manicured lawns of suburbia, flaps wildly in front of a speeding Tesla, and then dives deep into the tepid waters of some kind of pompous drainage ditch masquerading as a natural water feature.

In today’s tales of neurodivergent, animist wanderings through end stage capitalism, we’re talking about ADHD, and the fracturing of the self, and desire, and we’ll prolly take at least a few dark alley sidequests.

So, I started writing this episode months ago, and a lot of shit happened.

One, because America hates actual healthcare, I couldn’t get my ADHD meds for several months. And if you’ve ever wondered what kind of effect that has on a person, well, have I got a brief but colorful narrative for you.

Basically I couldn’t sit still long enough to type much of anything, whatever I did write was jumbled and unintelligible, and the issues with task initiation and task switching that I always have, even when my meds are perfect were like… fuckin’… just no. I was totally disabled.

So cool.

Simultaneously, all the pillars of my life crumbled. Like all the things that I was doing that made me, me started to implode around me. So compounding my medical distress, I was having what amounted to an identity crisis, a lot of heartbreak, general disappointment, existential fracturing…

And because I am very much an ADHDer, I’m already really existentially fractured. I’ve lived in/worked in/traveled through/ridden my bike through/lived on an off grid farm in like 16 countries. I’ve got degrees in Latin and Ancient Greek (which I remember almost none of) and I’ve studied Old Norse, Old English, modern Korean, Chinese (both traditional and simplified character sets), Spanish, Norwegian and Swedish, modern Icelandic all to at least an A2 level, a couple into B1 and C1 territory. I’ve won contests of poetry and painting, had music gigs in a couple countries, and promptly lost interest in doing the thing at all. I’ve lost interest in more hobbies, degrees, and certifications than most people have ever even had.

Which brings me back to what I initially wanted to talk about.

Desire.

What do you want?

On the surface, that seems like a fairly straightforward question. But it isn’t.

What do you want economically for yourself? What do you want in terms of what will make you happiest? Can you draw the venn diagram of what-I-like and what-I-can-get-paid-for and get any overlap?

What do you want for the planet? For future generations? For the trees and critters of the forest and field? For the seas?

What do you want for dinner?

I think maybe I bit off a little more than I can chew.

…

I want to take a little detour now through the concept of multiple souls, because I think it’s a really useful theoretical lens through which to really interrogate desire, the self, a fractured identity and neurodivergence.

Quick background info lecture mode:

Various cultures throughout the history of the world have posited that human beings (and other beings) have multiple souls. In Chinese Daoism, you have at least the hun2 and po4 if not also several other function-specific souls. Many shamanistic cultures have a belief that a separate “free soul” or a “wander soul” is what goes off to the other world when the shaman is journeying. Indigenous groups as diverse as the Inuit and the Bakongo hold a variety of beliefs regarding multiple souls. And in pre-christian, Germanic-speaking Europe, we surmise, based on the textual evidence found in translations of the bible into Gothic and the Heliand in Old Saxon as well as other texts, that Germanic-speaking pagans also held complex beliefs about multiple souls – or at the very least, they had distinct words for different aspects of their minds, emotions, and personalities and in the context of translation, it sure looks like they’re thinking of them as separate souls.

Winifred Hodge Rose has spent something like 25 years researching Gothic, Old Norse, Saxon, Old High German, Old English… I’m forgetting some, but you get the idea… and really drawing out the idea of multiple souls, what each soul’s character might be, and so on. If this idea makes you happy and excited, and this sidebar sparks joy, search for her books.

If you’re wanting me to get on with things, just focus on this:

The Will and The Wish, the Mod and the Hugr, are two different ideas for speakers of the old Germanic languages. One soul can want one thing, and the other soul can want something totally different. Your Will, and your Wish can be pulling you in different directions.

If you take it as a metaphor, great. That works as a way of getting the inner workings of the mind out on the page so you can understand them and maybe do something about them.

But I think it works better if, for a moment, you take it literally. Because that really describes what internal conflict feels like. It feels like one of your souls, one of your selves, is determined to do one thing, another soul, another self is determined to do something else, and your meat-sack-midgard-ship of a body is going to break apart.

…

I feel like I should take another dark-alley-aside here to tell you that I often have double or triple vision with respect to these things. I can simultaneously hold a materialist, atheist perspective, an animist, multiple souls, shamanistic perspective, move back and forth between taking all this very literally and very metaphorically without any problem. That’s just who I am. I am large. I contain multitudes.

So while I think the most useful and probably the most true default framework for thinking about life on Earth should be animistic – that everything has its own mind and will, and pantheistic – that the universe is a manifestation of the divine. And I think it’s quite likely that not only do we have a spiritual reality that infuses all the meat, our multiple souls are literally separate spirit beings within us. At the same time, I’m like… anti-orthodox. Metaphor is also powerful and helpful.

…

Ok. So back to will and wish and desire.

What do you want? You probably have a lot of mutually exclusive answers to that. I know I do. The more honest I am, the more I see all these different aspects of my self that feel irreconcilable. It’s a fucking high school cafeteria inside my head and heart.

How can you share the one meat-ship that you have with all these selves? You only have this one timeline that you know about for sure. You can’t count on reincarnation or heaven. Nothing but death is like for-sure, definitely promised. So. For the time in between your mom and some maggots, what do you want?

(All praise be to Ani D for the mom and maggots line).

A lot of western, modern thinking is solipsistic – main character syndrome – you are the only subject, the only do-er, you’re the only one who matters, and you just march around doing what you want. You cut the forest down for money and don’t lose sleep because – they’re just TREES, they’re not subjects, they’re objects. They don’t have VALUE until you turn them into toilet paper, duh. YOU are the only subject, anyway, right? It’s kind of a lonely, sociopathic way of thinking.

But desire becomes complex if you are not the only subject. If you live in a world of subjects, desire becomes more of a negotiation, which I think is healthy – healthier than the typical western materialist perspective, anyway.

First, it’s like who even am I? Am I singular? Am I a community of souls or soul parts? Next, it’s like, what do I want vs. what do my friends and family want? My roommates? My romantic partners? What do they want? What does my future-self want vs. what does my now-self want? The world is filled with people who have soft bodies and delicate hearts. The way you act on your desires impacts them.

Here’s a line of thinking:

If I stay in America, my mom and dad will be happy. My friends and students and the kids I babysit will be happy. But I will be increasingly sad. Because the more time passes, the more I feel their plans and their desires have become a cage. Am I an individual? A community? Do I need to take my multiple souls to therapy? Am I a thread in a tapestry? I mean, it’s a lovely metaphor for thinking about ultimate reality and deity, but does it just make me feel trapped in the boots-on-concrete world? Am I just a selfish little contrarian turd? At what point does ones own unhappiness actually start poisoning the others in the vicinity?

“What do you desire” rapidly becomes an equation, not a number.

Second, if you include a billion billion other life forms, from trees to nudibranchs in your equation, it’s easy to feel paralyzed.

In many religious traditions, desire – and how we deal with desire – makes the world go ‘round. Desire can cause gods to arise, it’s the driver behind reincarnation, desire turns the wheel of samsara.

And if the Nordic story of the Fenriswolf is – at least on some level – a story about fairly ordinary desire becoming a murderous greed-monster because of the way people dealt with it then desire is also a central feature of the premodern Nordic storyworld.

The barest of bones of the myth is that Fenris was a huge wolf. The Aesir gods took him from his mother because of a prophecy, and when he got so big that he made the gods nervous, they tricked him into allowing himself to be bound with a magical rope. He wound up with a sword jammed in his mouth and his eternal drool makes a river called Hope.

At the end of the world, he breaks his bonds and kills the King of the Gods, Odin, who may represent wisdom (or maybe folly in this case) and along with his buddies, Fenris destroys pretty much everything. It’s a fairly dark story, as it comes to us. Tho, I suspect it’s been pretty jacked up by being filtered through the lens of medieval Christianity – but still. That’s the jist.

I see the wolf as a symbol of desire, or greed. In the beginning, it’s chill. The wolf, desire, is besties with a god named Tyr, who’s more or less a justice god. Things are under control. Fenris hasn’t done anything to the Aesir. He hasn’t gone against them, but he has gotten really big. As Desire becomes huge, they trick him, bind him, and essentially torture him with that sword jammed into the roof of his mouth because they’re scared of him. And in the end, they have created the monster they feared he would become.

Desire becomes monstrous when it is … tortured?

So, let’s consider that inner conflict, friction with the outside world, and desire itself is natural. It’s normal. How we acknowledge and deal with it all is of absolutely paramount importance. Straight up suppressing desires, ignoring desires… this can make them stronger, more powerful, and turn us into mutant murder greed monkeys. If greed becomes huge, it kills wisdom.

But indulging every desire is also a disaster, right? Isn’t that just overconsumption? Isn’t satisfying every desire literally the reason our ecosystems are collapsing as we speak?

Well, maybe. But that brings us back to the first question of what do we actually want?

If our anterior cingulate has been suppressed by a lifetime of doom scrolling and the mind-numbing torture of everyday capitalism – basically, if our brains are mush from working way too long in conditions that are way too stressful and unnatural and overstimulating for our hunter-gatherer bodies – all our otherwise normal desires may already be tortured into monster wolf greed and that’s why everything we do manifests as the overconsumption and violent, fear-based control that is killing us and killing the planet.

We are already tortured into Fenriswolves. And it’s the context of modernity, of capitalism, the lack of awe in the world around us, the long hours, the inflation, the stress. It makes us want weird shit, we act like mutant murder greed monkeys, because of the shitty context that we can’t escape.

We’re not fucked up because of an innate flaw.

Our souls, our inner selves, our hunter-gatherer animal – is all probably pretty healthy if given a healthy context.

So what do we actually want? If we were not already tortured out of shape, what desires are natural to us?

I don’t believe that we really want all the bullshit plastic shit. We don’t actually want super fancy cars or dumb expensive purses or whatever. In the context of modernity, we may be deluded into thinking that shit will bring happiness – but that kind of happy is fleeting. It’s like binge-eating. It makes us sick after a while.

I think that what we really want is freedom from anxiety. We want to be loved. We want connection, community, basic security, and because we’re thwarted at every turn, we become mutant murder greed monkeys. We become the Fenriswolf. We are the murderers of the gods, and the destroyers of wisdom.

Most of us just want a house. A nice, secure, healthy place to live. We want a family, happy kids, meaningful work, an extended family, community. When we imagine a perfect life, most of us, with a little prodding, a little push toward honesty… we imagine living near friends and family. Being able to hang out with our people. Leisure time. Cookouts. Playing sports with our friends.

We want to sit around with our kids and our friends and feel relaxed. We want to eat, play, make music, and enjoy being alive. Maybe go on an adventure and come back wiser?

And those of us with the ADHD, we’d make great explorers, fantastic traders – a trip down the Volga to trade furs with people whose language I can’t understand sounds PHENOMENAL! Let’s go! And in a preindustrial world, that would be really important. I would be an integral member of society serving an important function. Not an unemployed loser.

What I think we actually want is the premodern, preindustrial, small village, small scale gardening and hunter-gatherer existence that we’ve been robbed of. Our desires are in our genes. We can’t get rid of them. But in the modern world, we can’t satisfy our desires.

We can’t have a real tribe. Home ownership is out of the question for most of us at this point. We’re buffeted by corporate whims, on a sea of anxiety and price hikes and a system that actively works to make us frustrated and indebted at every turn – so that we will mindlessly consume to get a litttttttle drop of dopamine because our brains are basically mush.

Capitalism only works because capitalism makes most of us miserable and holy fuck we try to self-medicate – but our attempts wind up unsatisfactory – because the fancy bag or the fancy car were never it.

Fine, you say. Observing this problem is basic. We already know we live in a fucked up society and our desires are tortured out of shape. Fine. And we have internal friction either because multiple souls inhabit our bodies or because capitalism sucks or both. Whatever. 

So what do my souls desire? Beyond something that was imminently accessible to 100,000 years of humanity but which is utterly out of reach today. 

Have I, personally, become the Fenriswolf? Probably. Am I in the process, right now, of gnawing on the cracked femur of a god who gave his eye for wisdom? I mean, maybe?

And how do I back out of that?

How does anyone get out of this cage?

Remember, no one can sell you the cure.

No one can tell you what to do to heal and reconnect. I mean, you can get super into daoism or buddhism or Winifred Hodge Rose’s Heathen Soul Lore. Or you can ignore all that. You can join an intentional community on India’s east coast or build a hut deep in the forest on federal land. You can keep trudging along in suburbia. The possibilities are endless. Kind of.

I think any act of conscious defiance against consumerism and against the commodification (and toxification) of the total environment is a step in the right direction. Every moment you imagine the crepe myrtles on the firehouse lawn as beings with souls as unique and complex as your own, is a minute you retrieve some of your own crushed spirit. Every hour you spend chilling with your friends at the lake not buying anything, painting a picture, making music, doing anything creative is an hour you’re not buying more fucking plastic piece of crap. Every second you spend not engaged in the game of overconsumption is a a second you are shrinking – in a good way. You become less Greedwolf Wisdomkiller and more Overlarge but maybe dumb Pupper.

So what do you want? Really? I bet that you, like me, want loving kindness, connection, friendship. You want safety, community, — some amount of material comfort, sure, but do you actually give a shit about expensive shoes or bags or cars… or did you maybe think those things were going to make you more likable? More worthy of being seen, cared for?

If you have trouble with people, do others not like you because you’re not rich enough, or is it because you behave like an insufferable toddler because you’ve been running from your own pain all your life? Do you have the courage to confront yourself in the dark alleyways of your souls and answer that question honestly?

What do you actually want? And what are you willing to do to get it?

This has been your friendly neighborhood neurodivergent here to be awkward and say weird shit without ever actually digging up any substantial answers, just circling the great drain of our collective conundrum.

Until next time, flap good, waddle hard, swim deep.