{"id":2170,"date":"2009-09-09T22:30:45","date_gmt":"2009-09-10T02:30:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=2170"},"modified":"2009-09-09T22:30:45","modified_gmt":"2009-09-10T02:30:45","slug":"mervyn-nicholson-desire-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/09\/09\/mervyn-nicholson-desire-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Mervyn Nicholson: Desire (2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\"BlakeGardenofLove\"<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThose who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained, and the restrainer or reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling.\u00a0 And being restrained, it by degrees becomes passive, till it is only the shadow of desire. . . . Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cEnough, or too much\u201d\u2014but never less than enough.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s Blake.\u00a0 That\u2019s Frye.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yes, Frye did refer to human beings as psychotic apes, contemplating the record of misery and horror that history displays.\u00a0 \u201cDesire\u201d in Frye, as in Blake, is of course not the same as the compulsion to hurt and control others\u2014\u201cto govern the unwilling\u201d\u2014which is a mental illness, not desire at all.\u00a0 Frye was not like Freud, especially on the issue of desire.\u00a0 It is ironic, Frye says, that Freud has become a prophet of eros\u2014ironic, because Freud was deeply pessimistic about human nature; he wanted, Moses-like, to hand down the law from his height of authority.\u00a0 Frye was not a pessimist of this type, at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s another thing that makes him so different<\/a>.\u00a0 Consistent with his profound valuation of desire, Frye was deeply committed to what goes with it, namely, an insistence on the value and meaning of life, confidence in the meaningfulness of existence, in fact in the divinity of life.\u00a0 There is something divine in human nature\u2014that\u2019s Frye.\u00a0 Indeed this divine aspect is manifested in our desires, in our wishes and their converse, our fears, and what we do about our fears and desires.\u00a0 Such a conviction is utterly at odds with poststructuralism, particularly in deconstruction, which floated on a sea of shallow, leisure-class pessimism.<\/p>\n

But then, on the topic of desire, Frye is unlike most of intellectual culture.\u00a0 Desire is almost universally devalued\u2014in religion (Christianity-Judaism-Islam is full of it), in philosophy, in psychology (certainly in the psychoanalytic tradition, which so many academics find irresistibly appealing), in economics\u2014you name it.\u00a0 Curiously, the one area that consistently respects desire is literature\u2014Frye\u2019s area.\u00a0 By contrast, the prevailing attitude is that human desire is a problem, often THE problem.\u00a0 \u201cGood\u201d is reflexively understood to mean \u201cobedience.\u201d\u00a0 (\u201cWere you good today?\u201d Mommy asks, meaning \u201cDid you do what you were told\u2014did you obey?\u201d)\u00a0 If people could only stick to obeying authority\u2014doing what they are told to do, wanting what they are told to want, and no more<\/em>\u2014they would be OK.\u00a0 Instead, they foolishly listen to desire.\u00a0 Ignorant desire then gets them into all kinds of problems and causes problems for those who obey.\u00a0 This is of course Freud\u2019s program: superego, with its \u201cDon\u2019t\u201d command, must replace \u201clibido.\u201d \u00a0\u201cThou shalt not,\u201d as Blake puts it in \u201cThe Garden of Love<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 Even in economics, supposedly about people doing what they want, scarcity is the ruling principle.\u00a0 There is not enough.\u00a0 Some people will have to do without.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In fact, this is a key reason why desire is so much distrusted: desire incites disobedience, chaos, disorder.\u00a0 Most of history shows us a tiny minority of the population in control of the rest of the population, who work for a living (as opposed to owning for a living).\u00a0 Unless those who do the work have their desires carefully pruned to fit the dominant arrangement, there is going to be trouble.\u00a0 There are a lot of reasons why desire is so distrusted, and it is not an accident that Blake is considered and considered himself a radical.<\/p>\n

Frye was not a radical quite in Blake\u2019s style, but there are plenty of radical currents in his thinking.\u00a0 You don\u2019t have to read far in his notebooks\u2014or his publications\u2014to find him saying radical things, things that have annoyed a lot of people.\u00a0 One of the most important things he says is to insist on the value of human desire.<\/p>\n

This partly explains, by the way, why he is so despised in the academy today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u201cThose who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained, and the restrainer or reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling.\u00a0 And being restrained, it by degrees becomes passive, till it is only the shadow of desire. . . . Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[14,75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blake","category-guest-bloggers"],"yoast_head":"\nMervyn Nicholson: Desire (2) - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/09\/09\/mervyn-nicholson-desire-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mervyn Nicholson: Desire (2) - The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u00a0 \u201cThose who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained, and the restrainer or reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling.\u00a0 And being restrained, it by degrees becomes passive, till it is only the shadow of desire. . . . 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