The Lure
Nothing in the deep has ever had a reason to want light. The prey rises to it anyway. So did the boy.
A mile down, where the anglerfish lives, there is no light and there has never been any. Sunlight gives out somewhere in the first few hundred meters; below that is a dark so total that it is not really darkness in the sense we mean the word, which is only the absence of a light we expect to return. Down there nothing returns. The creatures that live in it were born in it, and their parents were, back and back, for longer than there have been eyes to be disappointed. Which raises a small problem that I cannot stop turning over. If a fish has spent its entire lineage in a place where light has never once appeared, it can have no reason—none, not learned, not inherited, not anywhere—to want light, or to associate it with food or safety or anything at all. Light, for such a creature, should mean precisely nothing.
And yet the anglerfish dangles its little lit lure into the black, and the prey comes.
It comes the way it is not supposed to be able to come, toward a thing it has no grounds to find attractive, and it is eaten. So what draws it? Not the value of the light, because the light has no value it could have learned. Not what the light promises, because down there light has never promised anything. The prey is not drawn by what the lure is. It is drawn by the lure’s drawing. Living its whole life in the dark, the small light must be something closer to magic to it—an appearance from nowhere, referring to nothing, pulling with a pull that comes before any reason and does not wait for one. I find I envy it a little, and fear for it more, because I think this is the truest picture of desire I have ever come across, and I think it is a picture of us.
We tell ourselves we want things for their qualities. We desire a person, a place, a life, and we can give you reasons—they are kind, it is beautiful, it would make us happy—and the reasons are real enough as far as they go. But the lure in the dark shows you what is underneath the reasons, which is that the reasons came second. The pull came first, with nothing in it, and the reasons were added afterward the way you narrate a dream on waking—assembling a plausible story for a thing that had already happened without one. Lacan had a cold little name for the thing that does this: not the object of desire but its cause, the lure that sets wanting in motion without ever being the thing wanted. You do not desire it for what it is. You desire because of it. It is the light, and you are the fish, and the whole machinery of justification you build around your wanting is just the story you tell on the way up toward the glow.
The trouble is where the glow leads.
The prey rises toward a light that is not food and was never food. It is bait. The light is the front end of a mouth, and to be drawn to it is to be drawn, precisely and only, to the thing that will end you. And here the deep-sea fish stops being a curiosity and starts being a myth I already knew, because there was a boy who did exactly this in the brightest place there is.
Icarus was warned. This is the part people forget, or rather the part they remember as a footnote when it is the whole of the thing: he was told. His father, who built the wings, told him plainly—not too high, the sun will melt the wax; not too low, the sea will weight the feathers—fly the middle line and you live. There was no ambiguity, no trick, no missing information. Icarus had the reason and the warning both, fully in hand, and he went up anyway, up toward the one light in the sky that could undo him, until the wax ran and the feathers loosed and he dropped out of the air into the water that took his name. What drove him? Not ignorance; he knew. Not even pride, quite, though we like to file it there because pride at least makes it his fault and keeps the rest of us safe from it. What drove him was the pull—the same pull, intensified past the point where staying alive could compete with it. The fish is drawn to the light that eats it. The boy is drawn to the light that melts him. The structure is identical. Only the direction is different: the fish rises through black water, the boy rises through bright air, and both are rising toward the bright thing that has no business drawing them and draws them anyway, all the way to the end.
This is the part of desire that frightened the analysts enough to give it its own name and set it apart from ordinary wanting—the pull that does not serve the pleasure of the one who feels it, that wants the thing not in spite of its being too much but because it is too much, that is drawn most strongly toward exactly what will dissolve the one doing the drawing. It is not a flaw in the system. It seems to be the system, run to its limit. We are built to be drawn, and the same machinery that draws us toward the lives we want will, if the light is bright enough, draw us straight up into the thing that ends us, narrating reasons the whole way, finding it, I would guess, the most natural motion in the world right up until the wax lets go.
So I keep coming back to the fish, and the word the note wanted, which was magic.
To the prey in the lightless deep, the lure is magical in the exact and literal sense: it appears from nowhere, it answers to nothing, it cannot be explained by anything in the animal’s world, and it draws with a force that needs no permission. That is not a bad description of how desire actually arrives in a life—not as a calculation, not even as a recognizable want, but as an enchantment, a small light in a large dark, pulling before we have any idea what it is or whether we should follow, and followed anyway, often past the point where following is good for us. We are, all of us, some of the time, the fish rising through the black toward the glow, and the boy rising through the blue toward the sun. The wonder and the danger turn out to be the same wonder and the same danger. To be drawn is to be alive. To be drawn is also, sometimes, to be eaten.
There was never any light down there. There was never supposed to be anything to want. And still the small light comes on in the black, and still the fish turns and rises toward it as though it had been waiting its whole life for exactly this—which, in a way that should unsettle us more than it does, it had. The capacity to be drawn was installed long before there was ever anything to draw it. The lure did not make the longing. It only, at last, gave the longing something bright enough to rise toward, and the rising felt, I have to imagine, like the most reasonable thing the creature had ever done.