[Communique: 08.15.02]

There is a desert. Again, it wouldn't make any sense to say that I am in the desert. It's a panoramic vision of the desert, and it's not a tragic or uninhabited desert. It's only a desert because of its ocher color and its blazing, shadowless sun. There is a teeming crowd in it...

Deleuze & Guattari, A THOUSAND PLATEAUS

I am working on The Desert. The words come. I do not know if they are the right ones. I am trying to write an Oliveira painting. I am trying to show my mother what I mean by fantasy.

The silver city beckons. It writes me love letters. I am carrying the fried chicken we didn't eat in Chicago, the taste of salt on the Pacific, the sweet grass they gave us at the Blackfeet museum... Did they see our guilt? We were trying so hard not to be White... I am carrying the tears dripped from mountain glaciers, the purple flowers at dawn, the nuzzling bison, the flame cloud in the north, and the knife that I lost. I am carrying red Arizona clay in a Ziploc bag. I am carrying exhaustion and rest, friends and family, beef jerky and avocadoes. I am carrying some responsibility like a pack on my shoulders, and trying to make a balance of it. I am trying to forgive myself without getting lazy.

The wheels outside are turning. Rainforests wither. My country is going to invade Iraq. Many thousands will suffer and die. There is little that I can do, yet I must do something. To write a book -- it is such a small thing, by those standards. But in one life, it is large. If I could forgive myself for not saving the world, and allow myself to do just this one thing, and then the next, and then the next...

A little blue boy opens his mouth and shows me the universe. A man sacrifices himself to redeem the world. A mother refuses to sacrifice her son. A spider plays a joke on the world. A rabbit plays a joke on a wolf. A god pees in the sky and turns it yellow. A woman arrives in a desert.

Of these, only the last one is mine. But it is mine.