desire paths

scenes traced in sand

Airborne to Morocco. Watching the sun set over the tall, dry grass. Feeling, through the window, a lightness, shining in between the gaps—onto me, flickering and fading out as the aircraft ascends.

From the tip of the wing of it, I see the shore. I see the More that I could be if I was, magically, this tall: high as the sky itself, hovering above the blue-green sea. Graced with a weightlessness and all the birdseye perspective I could ever need.

But I am here, in this economy, little-legroom seat. I am human and faulty. Often uncomfortable with the fact of my existence, and almost always thinking about it.

I do everything twice, if not multiple times: break up, forgive, get fed up, go soft. I get hungry, then ambitious, then defeated and then prodigious. It is exhausting, and precisely why I tend to end up here so often: at the window seat. Up, up, and out of touch. Far away from everything but me.

;

Driving through the red rock of the High Atlas Mountains, my eyes are scanning for desire paths. I am looking for proof of life in the limestone. For agency in eroded places.

In flashes, I am witnessing the passing of centuries. Of choices that were made, repeated, and cemented into the landscape. Evidence enough to get an exhale out of me— the length of my own significance.

My breath is paused at the bottom and then drawn up again, misting against the edges of the mountain and its iron-oxide layers. Folding over themselves. Looking inward.

It is brought to the cliff edges, and then held at the brink of crumbling. Cycled again in a seeming, though finite, endlessness.

Erosion is the forward motion of this landscape; decay is just a form of dynamism.

Dust unto dust.

I am taking in the glory of nothing. The eternal motion churns on as I waste my time, watching the dry sun beam down onto the earth-baked houses.

Little girls from the village sing from their respective windows, asking for biscuits. Barred in with intricate, wrought iron grilles, their voices are filtered through the aluminium— heated soft, spun into spirals, and then fixed on to the outside of their terracotta walls. Ironically, they are put in place as thermal breaks. Straw is packed into the clay for insulation.

In the valley, there is a spring. A spontaneous burst of green. A small, self-contained forest with trees whose leaves move wiser than me, dancing to the rhythm of the wind while I continue my ascent— moving against it.

The oasis is an inevitable impossibility. The result of melted snow making contact with arid land: a miracle that trickles in from the top of the mountain. It goes where it wishes, bringing life with it.

;

Jewelers abound in these towns, from the inner-city Medinas to the roadside stalls along the highway. They offer tea, wisdom, and “diplomatic pricing.” Trying to sell you something by selling themselves. Surrounded by treasures that exceed my shallow, consumer-level understanding.

They tell me of their motifs— the spiral of life, the 7-days necklace— but never their dreams. Never of leaving, or changing trades. Never of doubt or renunciation of where they came from or the obligations it entails.

We engage in an exchange of currency and flattery. Swindling each other, really.

I think of my position. My bounty of purchases: hollow copper bangles, a bracelet carved from wood, a hammer embellished ring. A traveller always in pursuit of ‘elsewhere,’ collecting shiny things, and calling it “cultural immersion.”

Wrists jingling, I sift through drop-shipped things. Trying to dig for the ‘authentic’, I draw the attention of the men at their stalls who make jokes about marriage. We both know it: they would never; I would never. Still, the laughter echoes in the souks.

The flirting is playful at first, but grows tedious by the tenth instance. The lines are repeated and rehearsed and my options are quickly exhausted: either lower my gaze, or observe only from outside the exchange.

I am Woman and Tourist—situationally ignorant, and conditioned toward vigilance. You can guess which applied to which.

My presence elicits the demand of performance: from them and myself. It asks the unknown to be made legible for foreign understanding.

I recognize the gesture, how my realization of it is reflexive. How I catch myself doing it, too: flattening and reducing.

We both read from different scripts, written by our relative histories. Play our parts: imperial and patriarchal. Negotiate our ironically similar conditions while standing on opposite sides of antique scales. Trying to measure a power imbalance neither of us can feel the full weight of.

In one way or another, both of us are eager to connect. But perhaps it begins and ends at a metal-work memento: handled, assessed, and priced. Taken on a plane and out of context. Foreign objects in each other’s hands.

;

Water, Earth, Fire, Wind. All of the elements, if you consider them.

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Today, I watched a Berber man make pigment out of saffron and indigo. He hovered the fragrant paper over an open flame— one hand on the canvas and another on the valve of the tank of propane —and performed alchemy in real time.

The colors deepened on the page; it smelled like creme brulée.

He said he had been at it for 20 years: painting, like this, with just these two pigments. Setting it aflame. Selling it. Always depicting the same images: his town, his people, his native script written in symbols.

I have never been able to render the world so literally. My artwork is all fragments, like this: untethered to anything but transience itself. Useless, but precious. I paint portals and orbs and doorways. Images I can get away with representing dreamily.

And when I write, I reach, lazily, for the ineffable things. I try to sit in the vague space of specificity: overlaying identity over divinity.

Abstraction is the only home I’ve ever known. Certainty, by circumstance, has always seemed like a philosophical fallacy to me.

But when he lit the natural pigments, it appeared as if there were shades that existed that I had never seen before. Possibility that glistened beyond the horizon of my imagination in a concrete way. A sort of beauty that didn’t have anything to do with me.

;

It is sunrise and I have eaten something that is making me feel fuzzy and hazy eyed and satisfied. Riding a camel under the influence of a mild, indiscriminate substance with my headphones in: listening to Erykah Badu, Alice Coltrane, and Jill Scott. Wading in the warm tone of their voices, cutting in and out, contrasting with the landscape, as smooth as skin.

One hand holds my dodgy adapter to the headphone jack at just the right angle, pinched between my index and pinky finger. The other is suspended, levitating above the handle bars. My movements mirror the curvature of the rhythmn, tracing the soft swells in my eyeline.

The edges of the dunes are impossibly thin. Crisp lines that smooth over into seamless diffusion. Beginnings that blend into endings, as the sand moves. Breathes. Ebbing and receding; nothing like a wave.

The images are reminiscent of a psychedelic state.

Which is to say, alive in some super-natural-natural way.

Horizon after horizon, the desert is endlessness expressed in singularity.

From shifting peak to shifting peak, you realize the eyes are unreliable. A mirage is a lovely lie. Perspective plays tricks with distance and relativity.

The wind blows from a wide open mouth, not hissing. Sand pricks at the skin in rapid intervals, dissolving dead skin.

The desert is a viscous thing—not violent, but sharp in its delivery.

I think:

What does this terrain have to teach me? What does this land seek to say?

Perhaps nothing.

But by understanding its nature, I may overlay my own, and grow closer to it.

What is it, anyway?

Bare sand? Absolute truth?

Isa says:

“The desert confronts you with yourself. It is wide and there is nothing to hide behind. I think that is what some people don’t like about it.”

;

Hills roll uninhibited. Seamless is the clipped green grass, the fertility that lines the crop fields. Perfect are the planes that concave softly into one another, like lovers.

There are patches dotted with wildflowers, and others with winding roads carved in.

I am making my way back into the mountains, finding firmer ground. Doing yoga on the roof of the blue city as they chant the evening prayer. Listening to the deep-throated moans and feeling a strange reverence for the religious expression.

A massive cloud mists over me, and underneath it, I am a single shade. I am cool-toned and level-headed. Finally, inside my body.

Everywhere I go, it is all I carry with me. All that I can know across culture and continents and landscapes is this: that my hips are tight but give into openness easily. That my back is flexible as ever, and getting stronger, and that I am beginning to see everything upside down with some degree of ease.

And although my mind is incessant and demanding and selfish, constantly vying for my attention, it is never where I am able to land.

It is the body that holds the embodied knowledge: in all its sensuality and ugliness.

It is the mind that transmits and insists upon an interpretation of it.

The paths between them chart the length of the world: in all that it is and isn’t.