Rosie Smith

“I want to say something else about desire. I really do not know what it is. I experience something which, sometimes, if I pull it apart, I cannot make reason of. The word seems to me to fall apart under the pull and drag of its commodified shapes, under the weight of our artifice and our conceit. It is sometimes impossible to tell what is real from what is manufactured. We live in a world filled with commodified images of desire. Desire clings to widgets, chairs, fridges, cars, perfumes, shoes, jackets, golf clubs, basketballs, telephones, water, soap powder, houses, neighbourhoods. Even god. It clings to an endless list of objects. It clings to the face of television sets and movie screens. It is glaciered in assigned objects, it is petrified in repetitive cliched gestures. Their repetition is tedious, the look and sound of them tedious. We become the repetition despite our best efforts. We become numb. And though against the impressive strength of this I can't hope to say all that desire might be, I wanted to talk about it not as it is sold to us but as one collects it, piece by piece, proceeding through a life. I wanted to say that life, if we are lucky, is a collection of aesthetic experiences as it is a collection of pratical experiences, which may be one and the same sometimes, and which if we are lucky we make a sense of. Making sense may be what desire is. Or, putting the senses back together.”
― Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return