i yearn in the most fascist way possible

first of all fuck the iliad. fuck it so hard. i read that entire thing. six hundred pages of men being absolute dickheads to each other over a woman they treated like a prize cow. and i hated every second of it. i hated the catalogue of ships. i hated the similes that went on for forty lines about lions and wolves and whatever the fuck else homer was obsessed with. i hated agamemnon. i hated achilles. i hated how achilles dragged hector's body around troy for twelve days because he was having a tantrum. i hated that i kept reading. i hated that when i finished it i sat there at 3am with the book on my chest and felt something so strange and so complete and so thoroughly unearned that i had to record a voice memo. i have the memo. i listened to it again last week. in the memo i say "i think this is the worst thing i have ever loved" and then i laugh for about thirty seconds and then i say "no wait actually i think this is the first thing i have ever loved that i didn't perform loving" and then it cuts off because i dropped my phone.^*1

here is the first thing: hatred is not the opposite of love. hatred is the opposite of indifference. hatred is the way you remain tethered to something you cannot resolve, cannot metabolize, cannot fold into the rest of your life without it changing the shape of everything else. i hated the iliad with the kind of hatred that demands total presence. i could not stop. the hatred was the rope and the rope was the only thing between me and the vacancy of not caring. not caring is the one condition i cannot survive.

here is the second thing: the fascists understood this. they understood that people do not want happiness. not comfort, not the slow and the negotiated and the livable. people want to be seized by something larger than themselves. people want to be flattened by that weight because being flattened is better than drifting in nothing. the fascists understood that the craving for meaning overwhelms the craving for safety, and so they manufactured meaning on an industrial scale. parades and rallies and uniforms and symbols. they turned yearning into liturgy. the liturgy was immaculate. it was the relief of being told exactly what to feel and when to feel it. the relief of not having to adjudicate your own desires. the relief of belonging to something with no fissures.

consider nuremberg. hundreds of thousands of people in perfect formation, torches and flags and speeches that went on for hours. the individual liquefying into the mass. you do not have to think. you just have to stand in the right place and raise your arm at the right time and let the collective will carry you forward. this is the craving to be absorbed into a structure so total there is no remainder. no doubt. no private self leaking through the seams. and the fascists were shrewd about time too: they never let the crisis resolve. the enemy was always at the gates. the nation was always on the precipice. yearning requires an object perpetually out of reach, and fascism manufactured that distance deliberately, kept the wanting raw and renewable, because a yearning that resolves becomes a citizen who thinks. they kept everyone in the continuous present. always becoming. never arrived.

this is also what the iliad is about, under the bronze and the epithets. achilles is given a choice: a long life that disappears or a short life that persists in what people will say. he chooses the short one. he chooses kleos, which is not glory you possess but glory that exists only in the future perfect tense, in what will have been said about you after you are gone. achilles does not want to live a life. he wants to have lived one that mattered. he chooses to inhabit a structure that will outlast him rather than a life that is merely his. and then he spends the entire epic inconsolable in his tent, dragging hector around the walls in a fury that has nowhere to go, because the structure he chose turned out to be a cage and the cage could not hold him the way he needed to be held. this is the most human thing in the poem. not the war. not the gods intervening. achilles choosing abstraction over presence, and then being annihilated by that choice from the inside.

mussolini understood the spectacle of inevitability. the march on rome was not about taking power, it was about making power look like weather. the blackshirts. the chanting. the moving as one. this is the fascist aesthetic: the erasure of contingency. the insistence that this is the way things must be, and if you disagree you are not just wrong, you are an obstruction. <Mark>the spanish falangists mixed this with catholicism and produced something genuinely deranged: death as beautiful sacrifice, suffering as purification, their own corpses as relics.</Mark> the logic of martyrdom and the logic of the rally are the same logic. both require you to dissolve the self into the cause. both promise that the dissolution will feel like transcendence.

and this is where the yearner lives. not in wanting something good or beautiful or even attainable. in wanting the structure itself. the synchronized movement. the moment the individual liquefies into something beyond the sum of its parts. the relief of not being yourself anymore. the yearning to be a shape instead of a person.

this is not a metaphor. this is the actual architecture of the feeling.

desire is specific. desire is rapacious. desire wants to consume and be done. desire is the throat of the wolf. yearning is something else entirely. yearning is diffuse, atmospheric, the humidity that enters your bones and never fully leaves. yearning is the ambient condition of your emotional life. yearning is what makes you read six hundred pages about men destroying each other and feel something you cannot name and would not know how to explain to anyone who asked. <Mark>yearning is what makes you record voice memos at 3am and laugh at your own words and never listen to them.</Mark> yearning refuses arrival. it lives in the imperfect tense, the ongoing, the not-yet, the never-quite. the tethering is the only shape the wanting can take.

here is the mechanism. the cage keeps you from falling. it tells you who you are and what you want and how to want it. it makes the wanting navigable. but the cage is also what kills you slowly. it turns you into a silhouette. it makes you forget you are a person, makes you forget the person you want is a person and not a projection, makes you forget achilles is a man and not a force of nature, makes you forget priam is a man and not a symbol of grief, makes you forget the iliad is about bodies and not about glory.

i am in the cage. i have always been in the cage. and the cage is beautiful. genuinely, terribly beautiful. the clean lines, the angles, the order, the relief of not having to arbitrate my own desires. the cage is nuremberg. the cage is the blackshirts. the cage is the thing that converts war into poetry and violence into art and grief into something that can be studied and argued over and loved.

but the cage is also what i cannot forgive in myself. it keeps me from the real. it makes me reach for the symbol instead of the person, the wanting instead of the thing wanted, the structure instead of the body inside the structure.

the thing about achilles is that he knew this and stayed anyway. chose the cage with full knowledge of the cost and then raged at the walls from the inside for the rest of his short life. he could not be priam. priam is the one who walks out of the structure entirely. priam goes to the enemy's tent in the dark, an old man with no weapons and nothing to offer except his grief, and he kneels and kisses the hands that killed his son. not as a symbol. not as a gesture. as a body in the presence of another body. he does not ask for justice or meaning or any of the abstracted goods that the war was supposedly being fought over. he asks for the corpse. he wants to bring his son home and wash him and bury him properly. priam has no use for kleos. priam has no use for the future perfect. priam exists entirely in the present tense, in the fact of his loss, and that is the most radical act in the entire epic.

simone weil had a name for what priam does. she called it attention. the act of waiting on the real without imposing your own interpretation, your own need, your own hunger onto it. not passive, not weak, but a kind of radical suspension of the self in order to let the thing in front of you be exactly what it is. weil thought attention was the highest form of love. she also starved herself to death in solidarity with occupied france, rationing her food to match what people in france were allowed to eat under german occupation, and she died of tuberculosis complicated by malnutrition in 1943. she was thirty-four. she wanted to suffer alongside the people she loved, to make her body into proof of her fidelity. and here is the problem: that is also purity. that is also the yearning for the clean act. that is also the self dissolving into the cause. weil practiced the purest possible form of attention and the purest possible form of sacrifice, and they were the same gesture, and they killed her. she was priam and she was the falangist martyr. the line between touching the real and making yourself into a symbol of touching the real is so thin you cannot see it until you have already crossed it.^*2

i cannot be priam. i am too far from the body, too fluent in abstraction, too practiced at converting the immediate into the theoretical. i am the one who turns the grocery store into the iliad. the stranger into the emblem. the wanting into the argument.

so here is the thing about the stranger who bought canned olives. i did not want them. i did not want to know them. i did not want coffee and conversation and the slow accumulation of someone's actual texture, their opinions i might find intolerable, their laugh that might grate on me by the third hour, their particular way of being in the world that would inevitably disappoint the version i had already assembled in my head. i did not want the relationship that would have to follow the wanting. i wanted the wanting itself. the shock of recognition. the thing that happens when you are not braced for it and something hits you in the chest and you understand you are still capable of being hit.

i wanted the shape of the desire, not its substance. the shape is mine. the shape is uncontaminated. the shape has never failed me because the shape has never been tested.

this is the fascism of it. not that i want to possess you or direct you or fold you into my ideology. i want to possess myself. to keep the wanting sealed in a container i can examine without having to live inside it. i want the desire to remain pristine because the alternative is wanting something that exists outside my control, wanting a real person who might refuse me, or worse, accept me, and then we would have to find out together whether the wanting survives contact with the thing wanted. it almost never does. i cannot afford to find that out.

and the worst part is that i know all of this. i can describe it with precision. i can write the essay. i am writing the essay. and in writing it i am doing the exact thing i am describing, which means this essay is itself a cage. i have taken the grocery store and the voice memo and the blackshirts and the dead philosopher and arranged them in formation. i have made them march. the structure of the argument is the argument. knowing is not an escape from the mechanism. knowing is just a more sophisticated expression of the same mechanism. i am controlling the analysis of my own condition the same way i control the desire. everything pinned in place. nothing permitted to overflow.^*3

this is what the fascists did. they built a structure and climbed inside it and called the enclosure liberation. freedom from ambiguity. freedom from doubt. freedom from the exhausting burden of your own personhood. but it was not freedom. it was the cage they needed because the outside was insupportable. the outside was the real. the ungovernable. the ambiguous. the flesh. the thing priam touched when he kissed those hands. the thing weil reached for and could not stop reaching for until it killed her. the thing achilles could not let himself want because he had already traded it for the future perfect.

the yearning is fascist because it is the yearning for the structure. the yearning is the opposite of fascist because it is the yearning for the real. these are not two different yearnings. they are the same yearning bifurcating along the same nerve.

there is one thing i cannot theorize. it is almost nothing. it is the weight of the book on my chest that night, not the book as object of study, not six hundred pages of bronze and kleos and men hollowed out by their own choices, but the actual physical mass of it pressing against my ribs. the thing that was present before i understood what i was feeling. before i started reaching for the language. i felt it for maybe four seconds before the interpretation arrived and took over, and then the four seconds were gone and the essay began. but the four seconds happened. the weight was real. that is the closest i have come to being priam. four seconds in the dark before the structure reassembled itself around me.

the yearning is achilles dragging the body. the yearning is priam kissing the hands. the yearning is weil measuring out her rations in a room in kent, making her deprivation exact. the yearning is the voice memo at 3am. the yearning is the stranger and the canned olives. the yearning is the iliad on my chest. the yearning is the four seconds before the essay started. the yearning is the hatred and the love and the cage and the outside of the cage and the cage again.

i am going to record another voice memo. i am going to talk about all of this. i am going to delete it.

i am never going to stop yearning.^*4