Billions and billions...

I wrote here, perhaps a few months ago, that if I were to ask myself what I wanted, I wouldn't have a definitive answer.

I don't know the degree to which that's changed, but I have been thinking lately about the nature of wanting. Or to put it more properly, of desire.

Ours is a weird society in some ways. When the Sept. 11 attacks hit, I remember being shocked (and appalled) that our president was asking us to pull together and...shop. Fight terrorists by spending money.

That just never made any sense to me. And it didn't to a lot of other people, either, judging by the social indicators (on which it was, at the time, my job to report). People were wanting to hunker down with loved ones and think about the deeper meanings of their lives. The acquisition of more stuff held, for once, not much magic or comfort.

I suppose it makes a little more sense to be exhorting us to spend money during a serious-seeming economic downturn, but still I get unnerved when I see things like this. And no, I couldn't bear to watch the video.

I have to say, I think that in our society a lot of the true function and meaning of desire (and by that I mean Desire, writ large) has been distorted, transmuted wrongly into a lust for material goods.

I'm not the only, first, or even 2,000th person to notice this, and yet it really does persist. It's as if that's what's at the center of our cultural identity: a yearning for stuff.

That can't be right. I mean, even as I wrote the words on the page, it just looked ridiculous - more like a child's arrangement of alphabet blocks than a real sentence. It's so wrong I can hardly even begin to explain why it's wrong.

It occurs to me, from the depths of my own, rather different, swirling storm of desires, that Desire as a basic human quality (it feels like it's not quite an emotion, more of a verb than that) has a proper function in a human life. I don't know what it is, exactly, but there is a sense in which a strong yearning for something - maybe anything - feels like a yearning for everything. For truth, to look into the night sky and see there the world - many worlds, an impossible measure of unknown creatures, looking back at me.

I won't ever know what they are saying - maybe when I am dead and melt once more into that dark soup - but somehow to look up and feel the cold burning of the question feels like a good thing. And when it comes to desiring other people, well, it's maybe a hotter question, but there hangs some truth there, too, in the heaviness of it. The feeling of it weighing down my steps and reading meaning that may or may not be there in gestures, in smiles, in smells.

Am I wrong, or is there some kind of poetry in that? There is, at least, no question that I am alive.