Flights: Fleeing With Graffiti

To walk under scaffolds or next to them.  To get close to them and to take distance and to get close again.  Ephemeral ceilings:  firm and trembling and always on the brink of disassembling.  To get close and to take distance.  To flee.  To flee, observed Deleuze in his Dialogues with Claire Parnet, “is not to renounce action: nothing is more active than a flight […] It is also to put to flight–not necessarily others, but to put something to flight, to put a system to flight as one bursts a tube” (36).

Open tubes seen from below in the midst of decay, plastic bags, peeling walls. Stairs and labyrinths through which to break oneself.   Deleuze used to say that “To leave, to escape, is to trace a line.  The highest aim of literature, according to Lawrence, is  ‘To leave, to leave, to escape…to cross the horizon, enter into another life…It is thus that Melville finds himself in the middle of the Pacific'” (36).   Street of Lavapiés:  scaffolds, Melville’s whale, stencils, graffiti, formerly occupied house:  migrations of  senses.  Tenuous objects, necessary precariousness in the middle of the global city and of the neighborhood that resists its gentrifying advance.  Street of Lavapiés: to take the velocity of  stencils and graffiti, to make maps: to flee. To flee, observed Deleuze, “is to trace a line lines, a whole cartography.  One only discovers worlds through a long, broken flight” (36).

Calle de Jesus y María, 15. Lavapiés, Madrid.  19 June 2016.

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