Desire as a Parasite

on biological plagiarism.

I am a host organism, thoroughly colonized by cravings I never invited in.

Blunt admission, but I have no other form of expression. Most people would recoil if they glimpsed the writhing mass of want that occupies the cavity where their autonomy used to live; all twisted and pulsing, feeding on the marrow of contentment. I explained to someone recently that desire operates like the most cunning of biological invaders, that it hijacks the very mechanisms we use to survive and perverts them into instruments of perpetual hunger. What I didn't mention during this bout of armchair evolutionary theory was how thoroughly I'd been consumed by my own specimen, how completely it had rewritten my genetic code.

The irony isn't lost on me that I'm describing parasitism while the parasite listens through my ears, thinks through my neurons, articulates through my tongue. We are locked in the most intimate form of biological plagiarism.

I understood satisfaction once, back when the world operated on simpler transactions. You develop a faith in fulfillment as a youngster, craving and satiation in neat cycles, where longing met leads to peace. Greatest con job in human history, this wanting business, especially when you're still computing on that naive level. Freud understood that civilization itself is built on sublimated desire, that every monument to human achievement is really just elaborate scaffolding around our most primitive hungers.

The Buddha called it tanha - thirst that can never be quenched. Christianity named it concupiscence - the wound that makes us reach for what cannot satisfy. The Greeks gave us pleonexia - the insatiable desire to have more. Every tradition that has bothered to examine human nature closely enough has identified this same foreign presence, this something that transforms survival into gluttony, connection into consumption and appreciation into acquisition.

To accept that everything we've constructed – art, love, progress – is merely the parasite's elaborate feeding apparatus is too grotesque a revelation to process. Which evolutionary accident hath this creature in my chest then? Can I excavate the moment of infection and cauterize the wound? Do I trace its lineage back to the first cellular mistake that taught matter to want more matter? Wherefore art thou, primordial appetite with which I share no kinship? Dost thou exist beyond the chemical theatrics of neurotransmitters? Art thou not merely evolutionary malware?

Haven't a clue. Point is I got infected somewhere along the way and I've been deteriorating since. Ask me what I need, and the answer gets brutally simple: exorcism. And when you're accustomed to that great delusion of agency, recognizing your status as livestock feels like ego death. I believed if you fed the beast moderately it wouldn't devour you whole, that's all. Portion out the sacrifices, never let it taste blood and you maintain some semblance of control. Christ! I rage at the altar of my own consumption, tear at the feeding tubes and realize that moderation, mindfulness, or meditation can't really save you from being prey and wanting's a parasite not worth hosting. See, I even tried deworming last week, but it appears the beast that lives in my chest has evolved beyond crude gluttony.

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I don't know how to starve it and feel the mockery of a satisfaction I will never achieve far too frequently. Consciousness is a contaminated vessel I could do without. I want no nourishment for anything. I don't want anyone to feast upon. I don't want to wander anywhere seeking sustenance. I'm desperately content with being left alone, entirely, to study the organism and dissect its reproductive cycle. I don't want precious metals I never craved. Anything you've ever possessed does not amuse me. I want sterility and I relish immunity. I need your hands, only if they can pull this thing out of me.

And on the laboratory table of corporeal examination and existence in the clinical sense, I catalog the symptoms of infestation. Yearning is celebrated among the infected, craving an honored tradition of the compromised. In that regard, I will chart the pathological course and document pure systemic failure instead. Complete expiration of the host organism. The void shan't intimidate a specimen as studied as mine. I laugh at the suggestion of fear as diagnostic criterion! This is all that I hath observed in the petri dish, that at the very nucleus of suffering is parasitic replication! Go there, to the site of infection and want no more.

The creature whispers that it is me, that we are symbiotic, that separation means death. But I have seen the scans, traced its arterial network, mapped its neural pathways. It is Other. It is invasion. It is the thing that turns survival into gluttony, connection into consumption, beauty into acquisition. And still as I study, it feeds. The laboratory of the self continues its impossible search into the nature of its own contamination, while the specimen observes the observer observing, in an infinite regression of parasitic awareness feeding on itself.

The joke, I'm beginning to suspect, may be on both of us.