I recently read Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt, which later become the film Carol. Highsmith wrote of desire in such a way I’ve never read before - so beautifully raw and painful - especially one so societally restricted as in that felt between her two main characters, Therese and Carol. I was particularly interested, though, in what was not explicitly written for us, as readers. The main character, Therese, writes letters to Carol that she doesn’t plan on ever really sending. The reader does not know what these letters contain; we can only obliquely guess at what they say.
Throughout the novel, Therese is found having “had spent her dinner hour writing something, a kind of letter to Carol that she hadn’t mailed and didn’t intend to.” Not only does Carol not know what these letters contain, neither do we, despite the novel being a novel of ideas, fluctuating between view points and harping upon truthful strings of desire. We know what Therese wants, and that is Carol: “there was not a moment when she did not see Carol in her mind, and all she saw, she seemed to see through Carol.” We are privy to thoughts - but not certain ones.
In the novel, the core truth of love is just a mention, not because it is unimportant, but because it is far too deep and painful and vast of a feeling to ever truly put into words. It is a mass, a black hole, such an unspoken, unspeakable truth that it cannot be described. Love is just a mention because it is everything. And so Highsmith allocates these unspoken words into the space of unsent letters, enveloped away into our imagination. Highsmith refers again and again to these letters, which are nothing to us because we do not know it, but are simultaneously everything to us because we do not know it, and so we can imagine anything.
Love, in reality, seems to trace a similar shape. To not fully know and to seek knowing is desire. We want what we do not have, and we want to endlessly trace the line of becoming to know. These pockets of such true desire cannot be written, only obliquely mentioned. It is this kind of oblique ellipse, as in math - an oval, tiptoed and circled with desire, endlessly inching but never quite coalescing, never quite waning into a fullness of similitude.
Anne Carson, in her work Eros the Bittersweet, writes of desire as being hinged upon not having something. Carson writes: "If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole. When I desire you a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me. So reasons the lover at the edge of eros. The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness.”
A wholeness we didn’t realize we were lacking in suddenly denotes a hole, something needing to be filled now that this other-focused possibility arises. Desire depends upon wanting something that is not there. Desire is a lack, a flailing arc towards and away from this lack simultaneously. It is searching a void, a hope in what was once an emptiness, nil - deep-sea diving in a black hole.
David Bottoms in “Slow Nights in the Bass Boat” writes - “Out of your yearning the silence shapes a name”.
If desire is lack, and thus an inventive reaching towards, then desire is imagination, a creation - the person we desire exists tangibly in our minds or in letters written in diners that we never send. It is these unspoken thoughts and creations, secreted in our minds, that propel us across the silence between the ‘I’ and ‘you’ in the sentence ‘I love you’.
Therese’s unreadable letters recur, again and again, in The Price of Salt. A literary ekphrasis of sorts - a piece of art within another piece of art, but undescribed. A letter in and of itself is an epistolary form, therefore meant to bridge the gap between two people. Letters trace a similar movement to desire - they are in arc, a movement across space, to connect, however fragile, the space between two points or beings. In Highsmith’s novel, there is not just Therese’s secret letters; nor is there just Therese’s secret desire - there are Danny’s letters and desires, there are Richard’s sorrowful soliloquies of love, and there are letters from Abby and from Miss Robichekv riddled with addled yearning.
With desire, there is the realization that something - someone - is missing. We want to fill it, to bring them closer - i.e., desire. Even when we are closest, humans are still ultimately separated by boundaries of skin and by the walls of our mind. When Therese and Carol finally come together, “all the length of their bodies touched, fitting as if something had prearranged it.” We press into each other, seeking to be subsumed, turned into one. Even with them, we want - and want can feel very much like a need. I want - not just to know your whole body, but to know what it is like under your skin. To not just be me seeing you, but to be you, seeing me. I want your mind to print out a slip of paper every minute, like a fortune telling machine, telling me exactly what you’re thinking.
In totality, desire is to want something lacking. Desire is the verb, the action, the yearning arc and reaching movement towards what is lacking. One of my favorite paragraphs from the novel is when Therese is lying with Carol, and words seem to become bodies, love becomes space and this very kind of movement through space I have been writing of - “I love you, Therese wanted to say again, and then the words were erased by the tingling and terrifying pleasure that spread in waves from Carol’s lips over her neck, her shoulders, that rushed suddenly the length of her body… her body too seemed to vanish in widening circles that leaped further and further, beyond where thought could follow…. a thousand memories and moments, words, the first darling… a thousand memories of Carol’s face… flashed like the tail of a comet across her brain. And now it was pale blue distance and space, and expanding space in which she took flight suddenly like a long arrow. The arrow seemed to cross an impossibly wide abyss with ease, seemed to arc on and on in space, and not quite stop.”
Voids, space. The essence of lacking. Emptiness and the desire to fill it, to cross it. The chasm created when we find an object of our desire and realize just how much our love individualizes us from them, and the distances - the infinite eons - we have to go before we are one with them. The sheer impossibility of it, but the human attempt to try, anyway.
But these voids - the space desire endlessly crosses - aren’t dark with nihilism or meaninglessness. They are voids like the stretch of our universe into infinity, heavy with stars and planets and “comets” and endless possibilities and vast, consuming space - “pale blue distance and space.” It is both the blurriness of their face because they are too close, and the swirling, blue, awesome hugeness of all space and time - it is somewhere between both, somehow both. This sense that this void, this unknowing, could be filled with anything, horrible and beautiful - that’s what desire is.
The future is like that - a big vast stretch of unknown, an emptiness that we daily work towards filling. Or try to - sometimes we get distracted in these beautiful configurations of space that conglomerate into a lover’s body.
But when Therese writes a letter to Carole that she will never send, and when Patricia Highsmith writes of Therese’s secret letter that she never fully divulges, we are given desire in it’s most total form. It is lacking, it is missing. It is empty and unwritten but it signals and points towards something.
Time in desire is a strange thing. Linearity melts into the body of another. I am with you in a room and time does not exist. Time with you is both endless and far too short; it will never be enough. Time takes on a physical tangibility that is something I need, something I try and grab on to.
Carson writes - “To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.”
We are no longer moving forward in time, but moving forward in space. We are two bodies of matter, longing to become one, in some way, in space. The axis of time is perhaps not gone, but forgotten.
Between Carol and Therese this is made clear: “Carol kissed her on the lips, and pleasure leaped in Therese again as if it were only a continuation of the moment when Carol had slipped her arm under her neck last night.” They travel across the country (through space), and the only marker of time is love, linearity forgone. “Once they came upon a little town they liked and spent the night there, without pajamas or toothbrushes, without past or future, and the night became another of those islands in time, suspended somewhere in the heart or in the memory, intact and absolute.”
At times in ‘Carol’, especially as the novel progresses, the lacuna of the secret love letters begins to reveal itself, and the novel quotes Therese’s inner novels of desire: “I feel I am in love with you, she had written, and it should be spring. I want the sun throbbing on my head like chords of music. I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.” (125). This written word, hidden and now revealed, versus the word of the novel - what is the difference? What lies in the space between the difference? Is that were love lies? Where we find desire and that movement towards, the yearning that makes itself?
“An inarticulate anxiety, a desire to know, know anything, for certain, had jammed itself in her throat so for a moment she felt she could hardly breathe… I don’t want to die yet without knowing you.”
The words of the letter come in like half-remembered melodies of a long ago song, distant but known and so true, and so quietly different, a current of abstract truth, a deja vu, an inner circuit, silently sliding beneath the lines of the novel.
“The phrases of some letter she had written to Carol and never mailed drifted across her mind as if to answer Richard. I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.” (153).
“‘You don’t understand,’ she said. She felt so very sure of herself. I will comb you like music caught in the heads of all the trees in the forest…” (154).
It is ultimately these hidden letters - found - that contribute to the downfall of their relationship, the societal nail in the coffin that forces the two lovers apart. It is the silence - once spoken, but in a bastardized way, taken and forced outwards by the wrong hands and the wrong voice - that separates Carol and Therese.
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Even at the end of the novel, there is a yearning, a searching, no full completion and finality. It ends with: “Therese walked toward her.” They lose each other, they dismay each other, and yet they keep turning back to one another, like water circling a drain or magnets held apart. It is this movement, this magnetic field, which is in and of itself both the engine and the actuality that is love.
Carson writes: “As you perceive the edge of yourself at the moment of desire, as you perceive the edges of words from moment to moment in reading (or writing), you are stirred to reach beyond perceptible edges - toward something else, something not yet grasped… The unknown must remain unknown or the novel ends. As all paradoxes are, in some way, paradoxes about paradoxes, so all Eros is, to some degree, desire for desire”.
But this searching, this desire of lack, is what drives us to seek, to write, to create, to meld with another. It causes change within us. We see the world anew. A sort of madness envelopes us, and we’re happy about this. We choose insanity, gleefully.
But it is the want that is important - the endless desire to be one, and the exact impossibility of that, that keeps us going. It is a hope, a writing into the future. A filling of the dark black room of the future with the pinpoints of possibility, with a gleam you could never quite catch in the mirror, but saw right away in your lovers eyes.
We are made to keep going against the dark nihilistic void, to keep hoping despite the obviousness of our situation - we are lost in space, and we don’t even know an inkling of anything to realize we are lost. And yet we believe that the impossible will be fulfilled. We endlessly desire. We circle and circle and come closer and closer; we get pulled out of the drain and yet we circle, again and again.
We hope, and it is not the impossible final result, but this - the hope of it, the arcing, the yearning towards - that most truly matters.