L is for Lust, Love and the Learning Curve

L

Remember that first aching sweep of passion?
Remember the gaping hole that opened up in your mind and devoured everything but whatever it was?
Remember how hard it is to recreate that feeling?  How you can't believe how absorbed you were?  What lengths you went to to find the object of desire?

Welcome to lust.  I've always been prone to it.

I'm not talking here about lust in the sexual sense.  I'm talking about those wild lusts that seem to be a form of insanity, as the longing to know, to find out to discover EVERYTHING is so compulsive.  Even if it isn't, technically, madness, it often feels like that in the aftermath. 

Take, for example, my own first, passionate lust object.  Ponies.  I was five. 

I drove my mother mad.  I behaved like a pony.  Walked like a pony, trotted and cantered like a pony, and was with difficulty restrained from eating my cereal straight from the bowl like a pony.  She drew the line when I started to whinney.  Drew the line and took a lot of time to make sure I met real ponies as often as possible.  Got me riding lessons.  Gradually found ways to make her slightly demented daughter find ways to integrate pony into her life.  I'm not sure I've completely forgiven her for not letting me keep one in our tiny back garden.  It didn't help that we had friends who did keep a pony in their back garden.  In a stable. 

It passed.  Or rather, the boundaries of the lust for all things equine expanded.  One day I found a book about racehorses with some superb photos in it.  Another lust was born. 

Hyperion (T Weston up).  1933 Derby winner and all around excellent genepool addition

Hyperion lead onward to an compulsive interest in racehorse pedigrees.  Books and books piled up.  I had (still have) card indexes detailing the bloodlines of every pattern race winner I could lay hands on.  Nothing and nobody got in the way of me and my race watching.  That lust became a long-term love and still lingers (although I no longer book Derby Day off to spend all morning scouring the Racing Post).

Then, aged 12, I read a book by Nigel Balchin.  The Borgia Testament.  Quite what it was doing on the bookshelf in the school library I don't know, but it got into my hands at just the wrong age.  Let others devote their passions and lusts and crushes towards the living.  Nothing but Cesare Borgia would do for me.

Cesare Borgia by Melone (contemporary)

I still think I showed quite good taste there.  I learned so much about 15th century Italy, the popes and the man himself that I could have gone on Mastermind.

I've generally been very lucky in my lusts.  What has happened is that the initial surge of NEED TO KNOW, NOW has evolved into a longer term interest.  I've kept all of them in some form or another and  they've continued to be an important part of my life.  And I've learned from them. 

One thing I learned is that the racehorse pedigrees, the pony obsession, and the fascination with Cesare and his world were inter-connected to some degree.  I need to find and understand the patterns.  It is part of how I operate and impacts on everything I do.  All that lust goes to a good cause in the end. 

I know I'm still quite capable of going head over heels into lust with something.  I'm looking at the two shelves of gaming material sitting on the shelf behind me.  That is lust alright.  Lust with a vengeance, because these were new systems with different ways of building worlds and how could I not want them?

Lust leading to love on a learning curve.  It's the kind of lust I need.