The noun want used to mean need. Want was life or death stuff, as in “the baby wants feeding.” Now, want has flipped 180 degrees to imply an arbitrary and even whimsical desire, unfettered by need, significance, or logic. At the same time, and perhaps even because our wanting has become so willful, human beings have grown insatiable. The more we get, it seems, the more we want, as though desire itself is the thing we cannot forgo. As though, even cocooned by layers of brimming superfluity, we must want or perish. Welcome to Blubberland.
Blubber is unused energy, neither good nor bad in itself but aquiver with potential. Blubber is whale oil for the lamps on long winter nights. It is the egg’s white, the fruit’s flesh, the yeasty bounce of a baby’s thigh designed to sustain life through cold and famine. Blubber is anything spare or surplus. It’s a gazebo, or the aedicule or porch that adds to a building nothing but graciousness; the purposeless energy of birdsong that is neither mating call nor warning call but pure, simple pleasure; the spare time in the day, or in the tribal calendar, that makes space for creative play. Blubber, in this sense, is the crack where the light gets in.
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