I know I can
Be what I wanna be
If I work hard at it
I’ll be where I wanna be
— Nas
Our lecturer once told us that the word ‘homeostasis’ was the wrong term to describe the constantly shifting efforts to maintain a stable system, such as the human body. He preferred the word homeodynamism. He wasn’t wrong.
The human body is always in a state of flux. Feedback loops keep every necessary vital in check. Diseases test the robustness of these systems. As it is always in flux, the body is ever in a state of becoming.
Before birth, the body is in a state of being born. After being born, the body is in a state of avoiding death. Logically, this state exists even before being born, as many foetuses don’t make it to the other side of the birth canal alive.
Through becoming, we embrace life’s central drive. Life is awash with desire. Hollywood makes trillions from desire: passion, anger, frustration, love, lust. Relationships form and falter because of desire. Nations grow because of desire. In fulfilling this urge, desire showcases where organisms reside.
Coordinate systems do little to show an organism’s position in the game of evolution. It has to be a point relative to another, relative to a desire. The desire to avoid annihilation. The desire to get a mate. The desire to avoid a predator. The organism, for this reason, is always in a state of becoming. Homeodynamism is a state of becoming.
Want from a point
To want is to acknowledge that one lacks. Sometimes, you don’t know you lack until you’re presented with a wonder that occupies your psyche, suffocating your attention with pleasant forms of desire. A crush is just that. Your system was busy minding its business, then along came a pulsing heart which stole yours.
It’s wanting to imagine how such a relationship would evolve to be. Not spectating from the sidelines, but experiencing it. What would it be like to have that guy or that lady by my side? How would the crew take it? What would his shlong feel like? Are her lips as luscious to touch as they appear?
To want is to become. To become is to satisfy a desire. Desire for more or desire to depart from. For a while, I have expressed a desire to live a life where I wake up, read, work out, write, read, work out, eat, and sleep. On repeat. Oh, and listen to music.
It emerges at an organismal level. Desire, like most emotions, is emergent. According to our current understanding of evolutionary biology, it would be a scientific error to claim genes have desires. And yet, we needed to imagine that they do for Dawkins ’ book, The Selfish Gene, to make sense. The need to anthropomorphize is innate in us. To make sense of biological phenomena, we need to picture how it relates to our most basic form — wanting.
It starts by being acutely aware of one’s state. It then graduates to chasing the next point, which we would want to be in. More than that, to experience it.
Before writing this piece, I was seated next to the matatu driver. In front of me was a Mercedes GLC. Nescafé brown. Gleaming in the mid-morning sun. Before noticing it, I was nodding off at every turn of our lanky public vehicle; after I saw it, my senses were sharply awakened. I wanted to have such a car. Blame it on my Luo roots.
Since organisms are moved with desire, we have no clear path for our evolution. Desire is an innate whim. We may never have the best understanding of why the cock-of-the-rock flexes its bright orange rostral feathers and how that effect may unruffle those of a female potential mating partner.
However, wanting is a proxy. To want is to imagine how your experience may be different from where you presently reside. I saw that GLC. I imagined what it would be like to have one. Wanting and experience are inseparable.
To show that it’s not my genes, I didn’t think it would be my 37th gene on my lagging strand that would love to drive the German machine. I was thinking about myself. My whole being. Want is wholesome.
Wanting and experiencing show a feature of consciousness that cannot be atomized. A gene-centered view speaks of the desire of a gene to replicate. Difficult as it may be to confirm or disconfirm this, our desire to be right pushes us to consider this possibility. This formed the basis for the gene-centred view of evolution.
The desire drives the scientist to formulate the hypothesis. It further stretches them to test it, and hope it doesn’t fail. The experience of formulating an idea that is consistent and robust across all possible and conceivable tests is a desire, a want from a point of view. In this case, wanting to make a profound scientific contribution and the accompanying acclaim for such a feat.
It is the whole organism that wants to experience the state it desires. Not my kidney. Not my left lateral cerebral ventricle. Not my Onuf’s nucleus. Heck, I don’t know how any of these look like inside my body. I have an idea of how they may look, but my own are no doubt different from yours. I want to know what it feels like to be inside a Merc, with loud hip-hop music playing in the background.
We like to think needs are distant from wants. However, taking the perspective of becoming, needs and wants are no different. As a whole organism, wanting to avoid danger is logically similar to the need to seek refuge. It’s a wholesome desire, experienced by the organism. More accurately, to want to be experienced by the organism. Becoming.
I doubt a system can have this desire if it lacks a boundary. A sense of self, separate from its external environment. Experience, which is the generally accepted description of a conscious feeling, is not possible without features of organizational closure. Cohesion of the elements synergizes to realize the feeling of wanting to take that girl out and probably see how she would fit in a red dress.
The absence of want correlates with the absence of a drive to live. Consider having achieved everything in life, but you have a phobia of clowns. Then, one evening, you spot one approaching you while stuck in traffic. You immediately leave your car and run for your life. That’s desire. Wholesome.
The lack of want diffuses the thrill life can otherwise have. A man with a dream is ever energized, even when obstacles abound. A lady with a goal is motivated, most of the time, because of the hurdles on her way. Dreams are the abstractions we imagine to experience, wants that we can bring to life. The distance between the dream and reality creates the drive that cannot be substituted with a 9-to-5.
To want is to live.
Nas gives a historical summary of what becoming did and continues to do:
Be — be–fore we came to this country
We were kings and queens, never porch monkeys
There was empires in Africa called Kush
Timbuktu, where every race came to get books
To learn from Black teachers, who taught Greeks and Romans
Asians, Arabs, and gave them gold, when
Gold was converted to money, it all changed
Money then became empowerment for Europeans
The Persian military invaded
They heard about the gold, the teachings, and everything sacred
Africa was almost robbed naked
Slavery was money, so they began making slave ships
Egypt was the place that Alexander The Great went
He was so shocked at the mountains with Black faces
Shot up they nose, to impose, what basically
Still goes on today, you see?
If the truth is told, the youth can grow
They learn to survive, until they gain control
Nobody says you have to be gangstas, hoes
Read more, learn more, change the globe
It still goes on today, you see?
What I’m trying to say is…
To live, we need to never stop wanting. We need to continue becoming. Those who retire feel a general sense of dread, not knowing what next to do with their lives. Hip-hop icons are releasing more albums, as their lives, I posit, have shifted from a state far from becoming.
To nudge themselves back into a state of becoming, they had to get back into the game. To feel like they are in a state of wanting, becoming, again.
May we never want.
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube
Interesting perspective
Initially dived in with the famous Kurt Vonnegut speech at the back of my mind.