ya, so...?

What is complexity
but that which one seeks
while relentlessly pursuing the unattainable.

Desire of desires.

Pulling out onto the road this morning,
ready for a typical drive to work
and completely awe-struck by the view.
White wall of clouds in retreat
towards the far side of the lake.
But near, and hovering along the shore,
an incredibly stunning mist
rising off the surface of the water
at least two stories high.

In another time line,
I turn the car around and head back home.
Park and walk to the water's edge.
Windchill minus 26.
So much snow on the ground to step through.
But above, unending blue.
Sun penetrating skin
and no rush of things to waste.
Incessant sound of water lapping against the rocks.
Rolling play of light along the surface of the waves.

Nothing but time stretched out like ice against the shore.

And

o

the eros of the effort
inherent in a walk across the street.
To sit on snowy steps that line the lake
while breathing in the icy air.
How it cuts the throat.
Just to watch the disappearing mist
while wrapped inside a red wool blanket.
Steaming thermos of spanish coffee close at hand
and Gilles Deleuze sitting to the right.
Philosopher of desire.
There for the same reason,
even if under-dressed and unconcerned.
Wearing shoes, not boots.

Remembering that my Deleuze is not Historic Deleuze
but the precise aggregate of my own chosing.
My toolbox of desire.

I would smile to remark outloud
that GD's parents could have given him a middle name
beginning with the letter O.
He would ignore my comment of course,
pulling his collar tight around his neck,
as if to say one never desires just one thing,
but instead desires an aggregate.
Insisting that desire always creates an ensemble.
Me + It.
The desire for a n y thing never just for an(y) object
inandof itself
but always wintered within the sandwiched context of selfandother.

Sliding his foot backandforth
across the same soft patch of snow.
Compressing it into a slick patch of ice,
he would add that there can be no desire
that doesn't flow into an assembly.
Shoving ungloved hands deep inside his pockets
he would slowly say
that this is what makes desire a constructive force.
Assemblies.

I'd pour more coffee,
listening for its splash.
Eyes fixed on the steam rising from his cup.
Brown steaming stream.
Not wanting to get into the whole Anti-Oedipus-desire-delire thing
fashioned by him together with Guattari.
He'd shrugandrepeat
that desire is nothing but the construction of an assemblage.
To say, "I desire this"
is to mix it up.
Desire as a process caught within the domain of a multiple.
Always sown within some collective sense.

With warm cup in hand,
I'd close my eyes and lift my face
to hear his voice.
He would sip and swallow,
pause to let it slide down his throat sweetandwarm.
Insisting that to assemble a desire requires four conditions.
A suitable state of things,
a style of enunciation to suit its expression,
a territory to speak from (that one must map)
and an engagement in the process of de-territorialization.
The crossing of borders to become-aggregates.

And while pulling up the red wool blanket,
I would note
how cold air erases the sound of gulls and geese.
How cold conjures stillness.
Much like the still notion of brown
always in need of a particular mix (of primary colours) to exist.
How brown requires three primary colours to percolate its event
and how this illustrates D's logic of sense.
His notion of events-as-corporeal-states-of-affairs.
That they grow from these kinds of mixtures
since no singular primary colour causes brown.
That when one primary colour is missing from the mix,
brown cannot exist.
And how the thrill of brown gets lost without its heterogeneity.
The stillness of its colour found within a multiplicity.
The event of it, a constantly infinite state of brown-ness
not described by temporalities.
Not expressed in past or future tenses
as having-browned or as brown-about-to-be.
But brown-ness as that perpetual state of becoming-brown.
Brown beyond all time.
Like the colour of hot coffee poured inside a silver cup.
Cooling under a January sky.

Exhaling fog,
to add that brown's ideation is incorporeal,
existing only on the surface of
language-mediated-by-cultureandtechnology.
But that the desire for its expression
is for the corporeal stateofmixtures
Not for the word brown but for actual brown.
And its liquid warmth.

Like wanting the warmthofthesun on a winter's day.
Knowing that what one really seeks
is the mix of selfwithinthesunandsippingunderred.
A personal geography
that somehow draws a fence around one's wishes.
As if mapping a region of self-with-other-things-contained
completes the wish.
To want for colour, for sun, for warmth, for music,
for any one / thing
means to include oneself within its composition.

Me in the cold air of it.
Painting little landscapes of desire-all-stirred-up.
Coffee in a cup outside.
And other gleaming time lines.

So I'd listen to Deleuze
until the air had cleared.
Until he would say outloud, "let's go".

All the while wondering
what it is about a winter mist
that conjures up complexity.