Sell Group presents 'SATISFACTION'
From Ikon
Desire
People in marketing are smart – they know how to exploit us – and they recognise how ready we are, how eager we are to be exploited. They know how to create anxiety – and anxiety is the key to the whole thing.
The advertisers want gaps and holes and they adjust their language and images accordingly to open us up. Good marketing exposes a gap and then works hard to create an anxiety about that gap. The last phase is of course to offer something that will fill the gap – the product.
When we buy (or buy into something) the anxiety disappears but the gap remains.
Wanting something is often better than having it – this statement might have more meaning than initially meets the eye
Freud would tell us that this is something to do with the oedipal complex. We all fall in love with our parents and experience great longing for relationship with them. We believe that they will fulfil all our needs. At the apex of this longing for them they bitterly disappoint us by refusing to play along with our desires. They leave us out. And the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips would remind us that the gift of being left out is what allows us to find our desires else where in the world.
If we succeed in wooing our parents, in having our wanting fulfilled our desire is stunted and circumscribed – we are stuck in the family.
Our parents in advertising want us very much to succumb to their oedipal charms – because once they have our desire then they can keep us with them forever – locked in.
What we have been looking at tonight is how beliefs and creeds and churches and ikons can masquerade as desire that kills desire and wanting itself.
To be satisfied is to miss the point.
‘Lack’ remains with us and we must learn to live with it. In fact maybe a good life might be when we can make most use of this lack to sustain openness and surprise to the wonder of being alive.
Desire has lack in its centre.
The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would say – ‘the realisation of desire does not consist in being fulfilled but in the reproduction of desire as such’
So the question is – ‘can we want without end’ – ‘can we engage with religious ideas, with life, with each other in a way that stimulates desire, sustaining desire and loves questions?’
We would like you to take some time and join with us in some discussion. Where have you been taken tonight? Is it worth talking about? Please join with us in talking to one another or if you have nothing to say, or want to say please – sit with your questions.
(Written & Performed by Chris Fry)
Nothing
When Pilate asked, “What is truth?” The man who stood bound and barely upright before him with swollen eyes and bloodied split lip said Nothing…
“What is truth?”
What Pilate got for an answer was the terrible gift of silence…
I have nothing. Nothing to sell.
What is to come Is not a commodity, Will not be Cannot be Packaged, marketed, advertised, pitched, branded, Bought or Sold. There will be no free binder with part one, No special offer for new subscribers, No interest free credit for 12 months, It cannot be charged to your account.
I have nothing. Nothing to say, Or at least, nothingworth saying…
What isto come Cannot be written. If I write – I write out of DISsatisfaction Every line, every Word, Is a striving, desperate attempt To uncover truth To express the real The authentic The meaningfilled And every stroke of the nib on the page is Failure.
I have nothing. Nothing to speak.
What is to come Cannot be said. Not uttered, Not mentioned. What is to come Lies deep beneath words In the place where there is only silence. The closest we can manage most of the time is A cry of despair A howl of pain A lover’s gasp The first breathe of air we draw And the last we exhale.
What is to come Cannot be explained Cannpt be systemised Formulated Or made doctrinally correct. It can only be done Like Justice Compassion Love…
What IS to come?
I do not know…
But something that is more like nothing Pulls Hope from me Drags me on when I would give up. For what is to come Is not an answer But a Possibility…
Blessed are you who are at the end of your rope For you know just how much you need, How priceless Hope really is
It is you Who see the man with swolleneye and bloodied lip For who he really is You, who have nothing, (Not even words…)
You, in your desperation, You will hear truth in that Terrible silence that is a gift…
You You who have Nothing, You who have Nothing to lose, You who expect Nothing, You who have felt The Loss And the cost. Who are empty Like a tomb You, who are a cup - Perpetually waiting… Waiting to be filled. You who are without Anymore words…
You are closer to something like truth Than you have ever been…
I have Nothing. Nothing to sell. Nothing but hope in Hope itself
Hope. And Silence.
Silence is a terrible gift. Nothing… is a gift.
(Written & Performed by Cary)
Author’s afterword: This piece returns to a theme I have explored time and again in ikon gatherings: hope in absence –finding life in spite of pain, particularly loss, and in spite of ourselves. The starting point came from Jon Hatch, who in discussion noted the idea that writers (and indeed all creative artists), can be seen to create out of dissatisfaction rather than satisfying fulfilment. We write another line or paint another painting because of what we have not yet said – that art is an attempt to express that which is just beyond our fingertips. But we keep coming back to try again. This resonated and so I took it away to see where that frustration took me. Since many of the other elements in the gathering were selling something, and prefiguring the gift we were to later offer those present, the authentic alternative appeared to be to have Nothing to sell, or to say. And of course, that inexpressibility is an echo of our idolatry in trying to pin down the unnameable name of the divine. This piece marries, and again, not for the first time, my own motifs with central images from Frederick Buechner’s “Telling the Truth: the Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairytale”, which has influenced and haunted me more than any othertheological text– particularly that of Pilate and Jesus meeting, and gospel,“as silence before it word”. See also, John D Caputo’s “The Weakness of God” – specifically, the notions of the “to come” and “hope in hope itself”. Beanneacht.
