The Greater Trumps: (10) Desire

The figure is in love with himself, or herself. It is hard to tell which, or even if there is one person, or if there are two. It is a convoluted fleshscape, saved from a pornographic fate by garlands of roses and the white cloth of purity. Purity? Yes, even Eros is portrayed as a cherub in white raiment - for the passion that is thinly veiled here is the purity of emotion, whose fire is a fountain of roses, whose drink is the blessing of music, and whose poetry flows like water.

Desire is not all bad. True, there are dangers here - thorns among the roses, barbed and painful. But it is also true that the intensity of passion is limited by its purity, its intent to communicate and not to harm. The desire here is not a base passion for self-fulfilment or material things; it is a passion for the benediction of touch, of talk, of familiarity and shared experience.

Desire here is Emotion, made pure. And it is also Passion, the intense expression of the emotion within. What is your passion? And does it draw its power from emotion? Or is it a paltry and enfeebled infatuation?

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It is an oddity of my education that when I read about Passion, I think of it theological and poetic terms. And of all the poets who most passionately limned passion, I remember Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ. Specifically, I remember his tour de force, 'The Wreck of the Deutschland'. Its seventh stanza is given below:

It dates from the day
Of his going in Galilee;
Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey;
Manger, maiden’s knee;
The dense and the driven Passion, and frightful sweat;
Thence the discharge of it, there its swelling to be,
Though felt before, though in high flood yet—
What none would have known of it, only the heart, being hard at bay...

It is hard going, to read and try to understand Hopkins's powerful lines. But it rewards the passionate reader with a passion of its own, paid out in the raw and perilous gold of pure emotion.