"Conjugate Deterritorialized Flows" --Giles Deleuze

I have been wandering in the sands of a borderland desert, looking for water, desiring to quench, to quaff, to drink from a lost well, a hidden spring, a secret stream. I was lost. I am still walking the pages of the drylands, in the language of salt, of death, of fences, roads, trails, blisters, fear, hope. I turn the page to the next sign, the other paragraph, the distant mountains and I know on the other side, el otro lado, the ancestral flow mires itself in a genealogy so familiar to me, so ancient, and my mother, God rest her soul, remembers the journey north from Mexico, is a remembrance from whence I came. I fear not finding water but am more afraid of standing still in the safe havens of the American Fortress, the dream-social that parches my soul, dries my desires, dehydrates my wanting until I die, a death stood up against a cultural wall, an execution mandated, administered, by that which would keep me from moving.

I read across a century of desire that has been blocked, paved, dessicated, effaced, fenced, walled, enforced, and I have read into the texts, perusing line by line the performance of ideas, memes, cultural flotsam that has rolled across the sand, across the border like butterflies, like dried rolling leaves, brittle seedcases of genetic drift, flowing and returning, blossoming at the confluence of water and earth and air, heated by the sun, blasted to hardness, to archival footprints of books and trails that threaten death to those who cross, who walk, who transgress territorial imperatives. I will read John Van Dyke, Dr. W.J. McGee, Edward Abbey and Luis Alberto Urrea as they trace the flow across the frontier and attempt to map the travelers, to walk along the border of the abstract machine that runs straight as a razor across hundreds of mile of land that is named after the Devil, a Satanic line one can see from space, as I hover, will hover, have hovered, over the barrier between Mexico and the United States, in front of a computer, seeing nothing but lines on a screen. I am turning the pages of a book that has no end, no beginning, but starts when I walk, when I finally walk.


It is possible the text will emerge.


And from that possibility blossoms hope, my desire for a love of land, a desire to share the wonder, a wishing, longing to love the people who walk, who transgress, and wish them well on their journeys. I want to give them water when they are thirsty but I will read instead; in the text I may find conception as they, writing, walking, pine for redemption. While these writers languish in the books, archived in ink and paper, I read and ache for them, want for them, hope for them to find water. And that hope springs eternal.



This really happened:

I was standing on a desolate plain, surface gently rolling with tides of stones, dark against the light sand, a desert pavement treeless and paved with ancient volcanic ejecta, inscribed with countless trails made by gophers, tortoises, rabbits, humans, coyotes, shamans, and as always now in the California desert, cars. But I was in the open, exposed to the sun with no place to hide and I could see for miles to the low mountains near Paso Pichacho. It was silent, daylight streaming quiet as I looked across the landscape at the glitter of the stones in the sun. I heard the faint buzzing and as I turned to the east I could barely see the swirling gray living cloud as it bounced, flowed, meandered in the air at neck height across the plain, coming in my direction. I was wide open to anything that would come by; I felt like the tallest thing for miles, except for a very few dried out willows in a distant wash, or the occasional man-sized cholla or ocotillo. The swarm was coming my way.

The buzzing grew closer, but it still looked like a gray moving mist, a magic cloud swirling over the desert floor, and I stooped to my knees so as not to be the only thing for it to fly into on its journey over this Sacred Land, this Trail of Dreams near the Colorado River. I started to see individual bees as the cloud became more particularized, but their buzzing was foreign to me—they, it, was not interested in me. It was kind of like standing beside a moving train, a train that ignores one as it moves clacking down its tracks, and this swarm of bees, moving in the holy direction, southeast to northwest, Rattlesnake’s direction during the Creation, had much on its mind and it wasn’t me, and for that I was grateful. As the cloud passed over me scattered bees individually flew close to me, close enough for me to feel their wings, and for a moment I was engulfed in humming, and I felt watched, examined, momentarily under surveillance, as the swarm passed overhead, three feet above me and then the mist was passing to the northwest, its back to me, whom it had ignored, and I slowly stood up and watched it as the swirl of misty blackness, a living smoke, trailed away in the bright air to its destination.


I now understand that what I saw (and what I was) was an ontological instance, a kind of abstract machine.