Longing. “To grow long”. As though the reach of the arm were extending, perhaps infinitely. Toward what exactly? Toward the ungraspable object of our desire. The yearning. The tension of the infinite reach. Longing is a spiritual feeling. Who knows, perhaps it is how we discover ourselves as spirit. We may sleepwalk through life, without dream, never awoken as such. Spirit is the gap between what we are and what we could become. The gap is emptiness. The gap is imagination. The gap is desire. Desire is the story of the hero who sets off on a journey and never finds what he is looking for yet returns profoundly changed. To long, however, is to have life knock on our door but to remain on the threshold in a state of bitter-sweet tension. But our hero did not know this. For him the object of his longing ought to be absolutely attainable. Yet, at the same time, he did not want to actually attain it but for it to remain out of reach, like Sappho’s lovely apple reddening on the highest branch. Our hero believed, naive as it sounds, that the object of his longing was, in fact, a reality that would one day fall into his lap. In other words, he did not want to believe there existed a gap at all. And yet, though he could not grasp the object he nevertheless began to write about it. In his notebooks, he called it the nameless city. Some people do not believe it exists. Nameless, I guess, because the object of our longing is always, in some sense, nameless. It was an island city. To reach it one had to cross the Sea of Dreams. A poetic image. A recognition, perhaps, that the nameless city did indeed belong to the world of the imagination and therefore the unconscious. He did not yet know of the existence of the unconscious. That boundless sea that is wholly other in us and therefore, like the source of our longings themselves, completely unknowable. But years later, its architecture would rise up like the discovery of a city lost beneath the waves. The nameless city. We go there in our dreams. A place where magic, myth and mystery still live. Tragic-looking figures. The River of Tears. The rich on one side, the poor on the other. Poets. Singing mermaids drawn up in the nets of the boat people. The priestesses of the Tower of the Moon. The Festival of the Rain. When it rains in the nameless city it might be raining all over the world. It will be a series of loosely connected vignettes. It will begin around the time of the murder of a revolutionary organiser of the workers. The young man quickly fills up his notebook but, nevertheless, keeps it in his pocket. He saves money for the long train journey and, in the late winter of that year, arrives in a rather unlovely port town. He stays in the rooming-house and, each night, shivers for the damp under covers that smell of stale cigarettes. Each morning he drinks weak coffee at the port and watches the hooded fishermen untangle their nets and throw the guts of their quarry to hordes of half-starved cats. In the evenings, he wanders the narrow streets beneath red-lit windows and washing that flutters in the breeze like a melancholic tune. He sits at his desk in his room and tries to write. But he makes no progress. Occasionally, he drinks among the sailors in the bars and smokes rolled-up cigarettes. Each day he follows the same routine. Now and again, he walks to the beach and gazes over the water and there – upon the horizon – the lights of the nameless city glow like sunken treasure. He aches for it. His soul sings a hymn of desire for it. But we can go no further. Our hero files his notebook, his draft, away in the drawer in frustration. And he tells himself it is now too late. We must be kind to our hero. To cross the Sea of Dreams, he must leave an old self behind on the shore. That means giving something up, and to give something up is to to be proundly wounded. And perhaps – who knows – the nameless city is not all he imagines it to be. That too means giving something up. Perhaps he might even encounter anguish, sorrow and grief there. He did not yet know the joy that comes with loss.
The following is an extract from the novel, The Gospel According to Luke, published here with the kind permission of its author, Luke Brierley. The paperback edition of Luke’s critically-acclaimed book was released earlier this year by Milkwood Books. OL