The smokescreen between need and desire.

Is need merely the purification of desire? I’m not speaking of the need that is the basest of human survival mechanisms like eating, drinking and cable television, or even the need we humans manage to put forth and justify as necessary to the upkeep of a modern existence, like owning a car so you don’t have to walk 12 miles to work or having a stove on which to cook your engineered and manufactured canned processed foodstuff. I’m talking need that rises from the little rituals we add to our lives which replace the hours of blank staring out the window that our forefathers called “Evening entertainment with the family”. As Brothers of the Briar there clearly are things we have need of to participate in this smoky affair, but at what point do we digress from reasonable accumulation to obvious excess? Or is it really an excess? Is it perhaps an expression of ourselves manifested insofar as our ability allows? In other words, am I bastardizing the basic human dilemma of need - the fulfilling of a biological instinct that is articulated in demand - by acting on my lust and gluttonously entering into grand consumption with the accumulation of fine pipes in the name of necessity?

As I look over my modest but more than adequate little collection I see timeless shapes perfectly executed by the great carving houses of Britain, artistic renditions of the classics carved by the artists of Pesaro, interpretive shapes turned by the hands and minds of the Danes. That is what I see but that is not all I see. I see holes. I see incompleteness and lack of expression and it metastasizes as an upwelling in my throat that flowers into a psychic vomiting of desire and pig greed. I can be a bit rough on myself at times, I know, but these feelings must be played out to come to either some sort of self-justification or reproach. I mean, you do have to live with yourself, you know? I know of men who fed their desires with cars or motor bikes or even with an accumulation of women friends and were still left with the empty feeling of being unsatisfied, even after the grand accumulation of those things they deemed necessary. So can collecting high grades satisfy the soul?

The French psychologist Jaques Lecan deduced that need, after running amuck in the neural pathways for a while, comes out to present itself as demand and demand has a double function, to articulate need and to act as the catalyst for desire. To take that one step further, Freud states that desire is an abstract and subjective psychic energy, a flow of forces that produces relations. “Rather than existing as a separate essence or principle, desire is experienced through personal interactions, collective social relations and a whole series of assemblages” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). So does our manifestation of desire become pure based on need? The answer, I believe, may lie in another abstract human trait, the expression of archetypal beauty through art.

Tolstoy wrote that “Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced, or is producing, the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously, or subsequently, receive the same artistic impressions”. This clearly can be a bridge out of the stigma of greed and excess and into an arena of communion through the inter-relational sharing of archetypal beauty. And what a relief that can be! I am not amassing a ridiculous collection of silly baubles but am coreographing an expression of beauty that is shared among men. And if my interpretation of A Negoita gourd or a Chonowitsch tulip fires some receptor in my brain that says “Uh,… Purty” and the observations of others end in the same feeling, given that we can relate those impressions similarly and collectively, then I think we’ve got ourselves an example of art as a vessel that serves both need and demand. At least that sounds like a plausible excuse for putting a nice collection together, and an excuse I believe I’ll hold to, thank you.

I recently had a short exchange with a friend over this very subject and he summarized an opposing theory, simplifying it very eloquently by referring to a passage from an ancient commentary on the book of Genesis. “They found a plain in Shinar because they were looking for a plain in Shinar”. He made the argument that “we miss what’s in front of our faces because it’s not what we’re looking for” and that “you projected a part of yourself into those things for the fun of recovering yourself in them”. I cannot disagree with that at all –in fact I quite like it- but I think that, circularly, I can take that observation back to my premise that finding a common beauty or connection in an object validates it as an artistic entity and qualifies the idea that, though surely any evidence would be grounded subjectively, the common value found in these things does increase the value of the objects in many ways and serves to validate their existence and the opinions of those who hold them in high regard. Thus, If I buy hand carved high grade pipes and discuss this niche with other enthusiasts, though I may have projected my own ideals of art onto the object and also allowed them to influence my perceptions of pipe art, I also serve to perpetuate the larger hobby as a whole by sharing this information, selling estate pipes and continuing the niche. This also can be taken a step further. If I had not bought, traded, and by-God lusted after these pipes, then perhaps my own pipe culture experience would not have been nearly so fruitful for me. If this is so, then it stands to reason that, yes, high grade pipes can in fact be seen as true needs to the enthusiast, and I’m sure that this will be of much relief to many of you!

Need creates demand which is satiated by art. How beautiful, these expressions in smoke. So go ahead! Gather up your fancy-shmancy pipes and proclaim their beauty from the rooftops. You’re in good company.