4- the fourth situation, perhaps its a hotel in mali,

the fourth situation, this current situation lies some way over there to the left. It is something on the desert plane, yellow and brown on the surface and slightly broken inside. Years have passed and what once appeared to be fragile is no longer fragile. Nothing appears to be broken any longer. Here then we are back in the desert. The desert has always been a mythopoetic thing, usually an apocalyptic style. To touch the desert is both too touch on how the anthropocene loves desertification and then sometimes as you sit beneath the canvas sunshades listening to the Tauregs playing desert blues resisting… But this is later, when we went back waving diplomatic passports and sipping coffee on a pop-up bar on the rock and sand. Beneath our ronin straw hats we looked conceptually consistent in our desert poetics, our schzioanalytical desire which was formed in the desert far to the north of Mali.. That it survived our walking out of the desert to the coast, the time spent away, then following people across Europe, and then work work work and then our return to this place is as remarkable and mysterious to us as it is to the waitress who is serving us coffee. Ludmilla stretches beside me revealing the gun in her shoulder holster, I smile at the waitress, and distract her so she doesn’t think to much about the woman beside me as she hides the gun and shoulder holster again. Wherever she goes I have realized she deterritorializes the socius, some people name the jungle, whilst she comes from the steppes, now she invokes the desert, bringing it to the gates of the city. In ancient days she would have been a Stygian warrior, riding her horse with a bow rather than the gun. For me at least she has become desire that roams nomadically. I used to wonder what i am to her but not any longer as I gave up trying to understand our relationship and instead just live it. The waitress leaves more coffee, mints and some local sweets, she says something in a local dialect that I can only understand at most 1 in 3 words to the other waitress and the man behind the bar. I understand she is laughing at us but have no idea why… The waitress is chatting to the barman, watching as Ludmilla puts her hand on my arm “I like that noise, do you think we could dance?” I know she is the wrong kind of nomad for the desert, more at home in the grassy northern steppes than the desert sands, but she is the only human I trust and desire, here we are again together under canvas, listening to music and the humans talking and as always am mystified at the smooth spaces we are passing through — because together we were conceived in the aesthetics and as an event of the desert. But how did it last after the event passed? Since that event and everything that followed we have become incapable of living in the stratified spaces we used to live in before, when we were solely agents of our different repressive state apparatuses.… But today listening to the music at the desert festival we nomads understand we represent how the the anthropocene loves desertification, the desert presents a mythical recreation of the world, our situation. And yet here we are in a tent sheltering from the desert that western romantics love., imagining depopulation, a deserted earth. […] Ludmilla is looking at him and thinking he is and always was, probably, a little mad. She thinks the realization that they cannot deal with heirarchies, centralization or even significance, identity and the overcoding that was their lives before they walked out of the desert together. These things are made, and became oppressive, and became the targets of the transformative projects that are our becoming nomadic. She sighs and reaches for her lemonade. I let him be mad and happy, emergent. How did this happen to us? my name, she would say ‘is Ludmilla’ and his name is Leaf… “Raise your hand, say your prayers the world is getting to an end…” (repeat). Someone is playing desert blues outside. All that’s left for us sitting here in the desert careful evaluation and cautious experiments. We need to talk, I have something to tell you, she says, she is looking at the waitress but speaking to me…