Surely it begins with the conatus essendi, the striving or desire to be? But why strive if only persisting was intended? That doesn't provide a strong enough motor to run all this form; why after all, would mere persistence bother to invent experience? Whatever it is, what came out of it is experience, and experience of experience, and desire for experience and so on. Desire, of course is to be distinguished from striving. The latter easily goes with a kind of blindness, the kind that can send a tendril smashing through concrete. The former hallucinates, we are told, but that just means that it goes where it's sure it belongs, which means where it already is. But no longer being blind it no longer knows exactly where that is, or where it ought to be. The process of desire is to experience myself, more fully, more completely, and hence with no limits. This is circular and easily collapses on itself, but it also goes a lot further than any pleasure principle or mimetic desire, both of which seem to be limited versions or projections or simplifications of desire rather than the thing itself. It is glimpsed not in the desire to desire - which is again a projection - but as the desire of desire, the desire within desire. And it is easily mistaken for time but only because time is one of its first inventions. Desire itself did not have to be invented, it was in the nature of the original separation. Not because that in which it arose so loved itself that... but because of its very fascination with indifference.