Want/on

wan·ton [won-tn]
–adjective 1. done, shown, used, etc., maliciously or unjustifiably: a wanton attack; wanton cruelty.

Want is a complicated thing. We live lives saturated with want; yet concurrently, are told that having it would be bad for us. Does it lead to lives inevitably filled with frustration? Is unsatisfied want the definition of the modern condition? Is that what we are today--bundles of tormented nerve endings?

Or am I projecting all over this? Is the message of renunciation yet another feature of the fundamentalist hangover I've been carting around for fifteen years? Suffering is noble--asceticism is the path to enlightenment and virtue. A strong person is someone who can do without. Right? A strong person is the one who leaves the last cookie on the plate, the lilac shirt in the store, the dreams boxed up in the closet with the Christmas decorations.

I thought I'd dealt with this at seventeen, when I was dragged kicking and screaming from Christianity and still, perversely, for two years, convinced that my immortal soul was damned by it. I'd been taught growing up that witches were evil satan-worshipping handmaidens to the apocalypse, paving the way for the antichrist (sure to show up any day), who revelled in blood-soaked rituals at midnight. I still, at my conversion, believed it (how I managed to convert under the circumstances is a long story for another day, and one I've covered before).

And if you're going to hell anyway, why not deserve it?

2. deliberate and without motive or provocation; uncalled-for; headstrong; willful: Why jeopardize your career in such a wanton way?

Why not break into houses with troublemaking boys on a cold night, to carry away a trinket or two and have a snack? Why not climb into stolen vehicles and go for a ride? Why not make out with someone else's boyfriend? Why not say yes to the cute stranger at the club where I'd snuck in underage? Should I have been worried about jail? About pregnancy? About disease? I was going to hell.

These are not the two years I'm proudest of, and they seemed poised to continue indefinitely, had I not been introduced in a university class to the wiccan Rede: Do what you want, but harm none.

Harm none.

Up until that moment, I would have perceived the bare concept of wiccan ethics as a tragic farce, a helplessly self-deluding oxymoron. Wiccan ethics! Might as well talk about the ethics of stomping on puppy heads. But somehow it struck at the right moment from the right angle to chip out a tiny crack in the fundamentalist armour: I knew who I was, I knew what I was, but until then I was not capable of believing that it might not be a bad thing.

3. without regard for what is right, just, humane, etc.; careless; reckless: a wanton attacker of religious convictions.

Harm none.

I latched on to those words and never let go.

It took a long time before I even considered the words before the comma: "Do what you want."

What I wanted? Wanted? Certainly what I wanted--the very idea of wanting itself--was bad?

Isn't that why I was in environmental studies in the first place? Because unrestrained wanting and possessing were destroying the planet and making a mockery of human rights anywhere in the world where the population wasn't primarily white?

Wicca is a religion without texts, which is not to say that it is without books. There are books aplenty; but they are in the spirit of gentle encouragements or helpful suggestions, not pronouncements or commands. Very few writings on wicca have attained the status of text--that is, a piece of writing you can't wriggle away from and still claim to be practicing wicca. Once I'd wrapped my mind around the idea that maybe witches weren't all fang-toothed goat-fuckers, so perhaps I ought to read something about wicca written by an actual witch, and tracked down some books, I found there were only three: the Rede, the Threefold Law (essentially, karma with a kick), and the Charge of the Goddess.

I'll be the first to admit that all three were written in the mid-twentieth century by people who were probably stoned at the time, but regardless of their origins, they are texts. And the Charge made me squirm like a worm on a hook. Seriously, they had to be kidding?

"Sing, feast, dance, make music and love, all in My Presence, for Mine is the ecstasy of the spirit and Mine also is joy on earth..."

Which seemed to land me square back at reconciling "wiccan" and "ethics." I could, just barely, conceive of a morality in which revelry and extra-marital sex weren't wrong, but as religious obligation? And holy hell, you couldn't even just lie back and think of England. You had to enjoy it.

What had I gotten myself into?

4. sexually lawless or unrestrained; loose; lascivious; lewd: wanton behavior.

What did I do?

I ignored it. I hung my practice almost entirely on "harm none" and forgot, or tried to forget, about "wanting." I channeled wicca down the well-worn path of Christian asceticism and attempted to calculate each action in terms of its potential harm. The harm of the loss of pleasure did not factor into it, although the harm to third-world slave labour and the food web of the Pacific Salmon did (and still does, and should). It doesn't fit that well. If one focuses on the Rede, it almost works; but the Charge is too insistent in its hedonism:

"Let My worship be in the heart that rejoices, for all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals."

The Rede is much more slippery than it appears, even when one does focus only on avoiding harm (and I think the distinction between harm and hurt is critical--one can be harmed without being hurt, and hurt without being harmed). The complete avoidance of harm is in practice so impossible for any decision larger than "Shall I drink my tea now, or thirty minutes from now?" that one is left weighing the harm of this vs. the harm of that, the harm to me vs. the harm to him or to her, the harm in the near-term vs. the harm in the long-term. No wonder people like commandments; they are easier, much easier, compared to calculating complex equations based on imperfect knowledge all day every day.

But none of this excuses me for eliminating pleasure from the equation.

5. extravagantly or excessively luxurious, as a person, manner of living, or style.

My brain runs smoothly through the rut of renunciation largely from training: I was taught that our purpose here was to suffer nobly and die, hopefully in order to avoid suffering horribly for eternity. But it's slowly clicking over to the other track--very slowly, almost painfully, in bits and bursts of startled revelations.

Surely clean air and water are more important to our happiness than ten purses apiece and matching footwear? Surely a world without war is more likely to bring joy than is the personal transportation we all rely on, and the daily endless violations of human rights in other countries required to sustain it? Surely the point of all this environmentalism and human rights business is not simply because it's the right thing? Isn't it because they will increase human pleasure and happiness that they are the right things? Is that renunciation, or is it simply a recognition that the material items we have been taught are supposed to be pleasurable, in fact are not, and that they bring more harm than joy?

But, goddamn, it's hard to break a lifetime's habit of putting pleasure and the self last and act as if joy matters. On a large scale, I have no trouble intellectualizing all of these different thought processes and supporting the pursuit of joy for the Masses, unwashed and otherwise. But for me? OK, hang on: I have a nice house, I live comfortably, I have political rights, I'm not owned by anyone...so I shouldn't want anything. I run in mental circles, knowing that I don't want what I have but feeling that I should and trying to talk myself into it, until I get dizzy and fall over.

6. luxuriant, as vegetation.
7. Archaic. a. sportive or frolicsome, as children or young animals.

It's taken a long time--maybe too long--to realize that just because ninety-nine per cent of human beings alive today want what I have, doesn't mean I have to want it too. It doesn't make me wrong for not wanting it. That, perhaps, what's wrong is trying to force myself to want what I've been told I should want. To allow myself only small breaks from convention, small deviations from the mold.

b. having free play: wanton breezes; a wanton brook.

Have you ever felt as if you carried around inside you, cushioned deeply, a fragile singularity? As if somewhere below your heart there beat a different pulse, a slower one; and if you let it, if you stepped back and closed your eyes, it might become a universe? As if sometimes it were beating on the inside of your skin like a drum, so that you felt it might crack and split? And then who would you be?

The Charge ends: "I have been with you from the beginning, and I am That which is attained at the end of desire."

At the end of desire. What exists at the end of desire? If I followed desire down the rabbit-hole, would I find Wonderland? Or the destruction and despair we're warned of? Would it make me a monster? Or would I find, at the end of that thrumming string, the goddess waiting for me?

Posted by Andrea at March 7, 2007 6:46 AM under Witch

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