Ethan Christensen

That is the question.

Questions presuppose answers. Never would you bother to ask if certain I knew nothing. Would you turn to your fellow, who is both man and brother, look into his eyes — pale though they are in this setting-summer light — and ask of him the impossible? That he pen the next Epic in a language he doesn’t know? That he sum each and every grain of sand — start again, a wave just came — and strike him, should he miscount even one?

No, you wouldn’t, because he knows not another language, nor the arithmetic of the universe.

What do you want?

                lots of money and a new hybrid vehicle (so as to spend less on fuel) — and a new MacBook Pro (which can be had for as little as three grand, on sale) so that I might write better and for longer, thus becoming a better writer. And a fake office job and a big piss up to celebrate (something) and to do postgrad and to publish a book and a couple Ralph Lauren pinstripes that don’t untuck when I sit down. A rippling set of legs carved out at the Mt. Welly City Fitness (although the Snap franchise is so much flasher around there) — a pair of RM Williams boots and — with a new, better, mirrorless camera — to take lots of cool street photography, strutting around the city in said boots, to which I will edit the RAW files with my shiny new laptop and—

What do you want?

Psychoanalysts speak of ‘transference.’ The mouth betrays the mind; you claim one thing and you desire quite another. Start from the beginning is the therapist’s diving board. He ratchets the springs to fracture-point — the water twirls with a slick of oil. Your breath, warm and condensed as it passes wet-flesh lungs, takes the final drag before stringing together an answer. As your words unfurl, and you dive into that water, the pressure is momentum. Further your speech pulls you: your lungs constrict, the deeper and deeper you go on.

I have a feeling that What do you want for Christmas? works quite the same.

I will never know what my kidneys look like. I will never know the colour of my stomach acid or liver bile or bladder piss, in situ, before it’s expelled by a contortion of muscle. The colour taken by my blood before it strikes the UV-filtered light of a phlebotomist’s vial. The shape of my spleen — or what a spleen even does — for I cannot reach in and touch some operative, essential part of me, lest give a decent answer when you ask What do you want?

         to finally finish Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky and first a piano to do so — yes, I think, a nice one. Acoustic would be ideal, but a digital stand-mount is more practical when flatting; and, on that note, a nice new flat somewhere sunny, which, I think, will require a move north to Auckland. I want to run at least five kilometres without losing puff, to rekindle something with my ex, to bleach my hair, to hike somewhere beautiful, like the wondrous shots of this week’s OE to somewhere in Europe; to not let it get to me—

What do you want?

Desire is a survival instinct. What you think you want — even ‘wanting’ itself — is a psychosomatic bug in our evolutionary code. It is a sense of Lack, first felt in infancy, at the disjunction between needs — which we feel — and expression — which we (learn to) speak. Take a baby, hungry or cold or soiled, needing its mother. It does not have the means to express that need beyond wailing in despair. That baby, stupid and unevolved as it is, has no grasp on language, nor object relations, to locute the correct order of correct words that may draw his mother’s attention from the father. To bid her from other objects of desire and correct his currently shit-in diaper. Here, language floats just beyond the infant’s humble grasp. And here is created the first rift that will never be made whole again.

What do you want?

If the water and the pool to which a dive, headfirst, swells the last puff of oxygen my wet-breath lungs can hope to shape, stroking ever deeper to the core — the centre — of a primordial truth, which some Viennese cunt claims is all in vain, then I wish to feel the surf beaches of home ragdoll me like a front-loader washing machine. One of those public-laundromat, grunty beasts, of stainless steel and an amalgam slick of the powdered crust, hard water stains, coagulated skin cells and cum from the flocks of patrons before. For my lungs to compress in the water’s pressure as I dive through the summer-blue waves. To absorb kinetic energy, swollen in propulsion all the way from the horizon line — which is to say, from ‘Tangaroa knows where’ — so that I may feel, away from the comfort and targeted-advertorial carts of shit I probably don’t need, what it’s like to lose control.

What do you want?

Jacques Lacan (1981) and Jason Lingard (age unknown, but a very cool dude) walk into a bar.

What do they want?

Lacan, as they all do, imbues his psychoanalytic jargon with degrees of sexual imagery. Jouissance, literalised as ‘extreme satisfaction, even at the cost of morality,’ originates from the French ‘to come’ (as in, ejaculate). The signifier of Lack — what we metonymise as missing in our lives: the arbitrary objects we think will fill the void ripped open by our mother’s misguided, unknowable love — he coined the Phallus.

What do you want?

To express myself like Jason Lingard, which is to say, much better than this turgid spiel.

I want the night to open / I want to run in moonlight
I want to stalk the streets, moving slender and twink-like
I want to hunt / I want real POWER / I want my skin to glow
through black mesh / I want my piercings to twinkle like stars
under strobe lights / I want to be told I’m sexy and / I want free drinks
in exchange for my youth / I want to sweat / I want to be CRUSHED
I want love / I want all eyes on me / I want to FORGET

What do you want?

When I was a kid, I loved Santa. His white footprints on our slippery wood floors; his messy take at some cookies, milk, and at least one Steinlager. His sled marks and reindeer hoof-prints carved into our lawn. It was magic, and magic permits anything. In the lie of some Father Christmas lay the first glimpse of satisfaction. I figured — by his magic — he could make anything back at the North Pole. To construe books and DVDs and toys that weren’t manifest in Sylvia Park windows. One such treat, I remember writing on my felt-tipped Christmas list, was a DVD copy of Fergie’s latest concert. At that time — fuck it, still — I was enamoured by ‘Glamorous,’ as we’d watch on bunny-eared music channels. C4, it was called, on a little CRT.

What do you want?

If I gave an answer, would you listen? When Frankenstein’s creature presupposes his humanity — the illusion of talking the talk, if not stumbling the walk — the ineffable, though I think completely fuckable, Jacob Elordi realizes that they do not care, because he is ugly. You ask of your man, who is also your brother, ‘What do you want,’ like one may small-talk about the weather. I learnt to pity the fool, overstaying his word count, when asked ‘How’s it going?’ or ‘What are your plans next year?’

Do you want?

The magic of Santa, a Lacanian would say, represents the Phallus; the Christmas spirit — his creative omnipotence, his jolly sack of fantastical gifts, his inadvertent ability to circumnavigate the globe and bathe the children and families of the world in his rapturous, Coke-red glow — represents Jouissance.

What?

I want to enjoy my accomplishments without the belief that it was my obligation to achieve them.

I want the generations above to feel some ego death, through which enlightenment leads to the belief that any ‘I feel...’ is about as arbitrary as ‘I want…’

I want to have planted a tree 20 years ago, if not now.

Fuck that — to have invested in property at age eight.

I want a man whose underwear drawer is a mess. Full of holes, unfolded jetsam, gathered over the years like junk.

             and to not let it get to me.