A Moment for Desire
Photo: Laura Flanders.
I’ve been thinking about moments. Under the heavy onslaught of the last year, the moments of relief I’ve felt in these last twelve months have felt slight. Resistance — I’ve seen lots of it — but it has felt flimsy against the heft of aircraft carriers in the Caribbean and heavy-tread bulldozers in Gaza. The heartfelt words on a million protest signs seem no match for the cruel men’s Projects and choice-crushing cuts.
What’s a raucous moment of resistance against official silence and the solidity of a prison wall? What’s the wash of a sense of solidarity against the prospect of crushed tundra or more concrete on a cajun marsh?
John Berger reminded me. Writing in 2006, the British art critic, writer, artist, and poet wrote that even as a powerful new economic and military global tyranny was being established, civil society was discovering new ways to rebel. As power consolidated, solidified, sedimented heavily into place, resistance was de-centralizing, reinventing, becoming less “authorized”, more self-reliant, and more cooperative.
In such times, he wrote, “moments” matter:
“Today the desire for justice is multitudinous. This is to say that struggles against injustice, struggles for survival, for self-respect, for human rights, should never be considered merely in terms of their immediate demands, their organizations, or their historical consequences. They cannot be reduced to “movements.””
A movement, he continued, is judged by its failure or success in achieving a certain goal. This ignores “the countless personal choices, encounters, illuminations, sacrifices, new desires, griefs and finally memories which the movement brought about.”
Are we changed by every protest, by every time we’ve taken a stand in public, risking the wrath of masked men, or reporters, or shopkeepers, or friends?
“The promise of a movement is its future victory,” wrote Berger. “The promises of the incidental moments are instantaneous.”
When we experience what he called “freedom in action” we experience our own setting-of-priorities:
“Not all desires lead to freedom, but freedom is the experience of a desire being acknowledged, chosen and pursued.”
What were we acknowledging in 2025 when we stood up for one another, for strangers against body-snatchers? For women and girls against rapists and traders? For trans kids and parents against those who’d sentence them to despair? What were we choosing when we bought the banned books at the resolute bookstores and returned them to the censorious libraries; when we thanked doctors for their vaccines, and indigenous healers for what they’ve shared? What did we learn when we defended the teachers who taught what anti-Arab and anti-Black racism is and does?
We pursued safe migrations and happy love-making, a free Palestine, affordable housing, truth-telling, climate caring, and candidates with consciences. We didn’t get them but we felt our desire for them. We won some.
Berger wrote repeatedly that the dead help the living. He died in 2017. The essay I’m quoting here was written almost twenty years ago. It’s helping me to pause amidst the onslaught and wonder. If it gave us nothing else, 2025 gave us moments in which we acknowledged and pursued our desires for a world fit to live in. What comes of that? What could?
Happy New Year.
*John Berger’s essay collection, “Hold Everything Dear; Dispatches on Survival and Resistance”, first published in 2007, was republished in 2025 by Verso.
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