Desire Paths

This is a piece from the Are.na Annual 2025, which is now available.

Raegan Bird: What’s the first desire path you remember, or even just the first walking route that you took regularly?

Mariah Barden Jones: My mom’s neighborhood and the house I grew up in is about six blocks back from the beach. My mom, my sister, and I would follow this same route to the beach: first four blocks through the neighborhood and then, we would duck under the Rudee Inlet Bridge before coming out in a parking lot across from the boardwalk. The Rudee Inlet Bridge is a path now with “murals” and stuff, but when we were little we just had to FULL SEND and launch our beach cruisers down this rocky little cliff and immediately up a rocky little hill next to the part of the inlet where fisherman like to clean their catch. How about you? 

Raegan: Growing up in Virginia Beach sounds like a movie… The first neighborhood desire path that I remember upset us all when it got paved. It was an empty lot between two houses where we would meet and play, but if you followed it back through the woods and this big field, you got to a playground. When the city paved a path from the street to the park, it ruined a lot of our games and the walk back to the park wasn’t as fun anymore.   

What did it feel like when the Inlet Bridge path became paved? Did you see it? Were you there? Or did you come back to find the change? 

Mariah: We had kind of the same problem — so many of the things we liked in our neighborhood when we were little were of this sort of faux-clandestine nature? Our parents knew where we were going when we said we were going to “the woods” (what we called basically any lot on our block that was still trees and scrub) or to walk around the houses being built. But it was the idea that our parents didn’t really know where exactly we were and what we were doing back there in that sort of pseudo-secret space… They knew roughly where we were but they didn’t know about our forts. They didn’t know about our games, or what we were talking about. About the secrets we were telling each other. A place where we could be deranged little girls collecting dead bugs or convincing each other to eat flowers and leaves or screaming and running in a game with self-authored rules that we took too seriously. Going to a playground was not the same thing and, honestly, not as fun.  

Anyway, I think the path got paved when I was in high school or early college. And I think it happened in winter so it felt like it just appeared that way one summer. The murals were corny. I’m going to show a pic of what it was pre-mural versus what it looks like currently.

Why do you feel like, as a child, a desire path becoming “official” made it lose its luster? Do you still feel that way, do you think? 

Raegan: Starting point being childhood feels right. I love asking about that. I feel like a lot of the best stories come from people’s childhood because there is sort of an understanding that it is you but isn’t you anymore and the things you remember seem to be really telling and foundational. This is such a beautiful image, eating flowers and whatnot. 

Also I’m switching tabs right now so I’m not watching you, so don’t feel nervous. My other tab is “animal dream symbolism.” I was searching “goldfinches” because a friend of ours, Kayla Jean, had a dream that a “charm” (that’s what a flock of them is called) of goldfinches was sitting in a tree looking over us. One sec, Vic [my hound dog] is screaming at the mailman now.

Mariah: Why does a field getting paved over and turned into a playground make it so boring! It’s so Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi,” right? Like, ok they really did “pave paradise and put up a parking lot.”

Raegan: I think it’s because it can’t change! There is only one option then. We wanted the flexibility to change what we did there. To come to a blank slate. With desire paths I think part of the fun is that they can eventually grow over, too. If you stop going there and others stop going there, it won’t be there anymore. The path is only there because someone keeps going. This feels connected to creative processes and projects, how it can be good to step away from things but if you are gone for too long you might not remember how to get back. Are you making anything right now? Also, what are you listening to?

Mariah: I’m listening to Brat, lol, and, honestly, the most recent thing I’ve finished is painting a side table. 

I was also in Rounded Hum, a one-night show on the summer solstice organized by my friends, Lowe Fehn and Ian Donegan at Secret Flowers, a local Richmond, VA flower studio. But we were in a heat wave and literally none of my substrates would fully cure and it had to sit in front of the A/C unit for literal days and it still melted. My Gorilla Glue wouldn’t set, my polymer clay kept warping. I’m telling myself it’s ok, it was a time-based piece and actually a commentary on the climate crisis. But also I’m a double-Virgo so I hate myself for submitting a piece that was falling apart in a way that I hadn’t wanted it to. I’m also working on an essay for my friend Raegan about the synchronous firefly event I attended with my mom, aunt, and uncle at Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina. 

It’s actually kind of nuts because when thinking about desire paths in the literal city planning way, I always thought the paving over of desire paths was cool, like some populist triumph… ok, I recognize populist is a loaded term, maybe I mean democratic. I’ve always thought that it was a cool methodology to wait and let the public decide what’s the best route before expending the labor and materials. Even cows make desire paths, slime mold can teach us the most efficient pathways — I thought of paving as a monument to learning from nature. That technology is anything. Any tool is technology, even if it’s just the same path the cats cut through to get to other people’s backyards. But I think I like the revegetation better.

I think that’s also maybe one of the reasons I also like websites as a medium. There’s an impermanence to it, a silent mutating, a hidden-ness?

Ok 1. What do you think re: what I said in that first paragraph (“it’s actually kind of nuts…”)? 2. What are you listening to and are you working on or playing with anything? 

Raegan: Re: “desire paths in the literal like city planning way,” I feel like this also makes so much sense but it seems like it could get tricky because desire, or the situations that people are responding to, are always changing. 

The permanence of publishing can feel scary. I was telling students this year that were feeling nervous about the finality of things, that there is a sort of mourning process to having a show or publish something, because in some ways it loses its potential (in other ways it gains it) but either way you don’t have control over it anymore and that is sort of terrifying. 

I love what you are talking about with websites. With print, most of the time you are always going to know — there will be a date or edition — but with the internet, it isn't always clear when the last update was. I love your side table, and that color. Right now I’m listening to Big Organ Sounds and Percussion #1 from my “humming” channel on Are.na. 

Your substrates not curing, this also feels related. A theme in desire paths, too. Illusion of control. That is something I have been thinking about this year, and something that I’m trying to work out in my novel in-progress. That you can have the clearest intention yet still have elements that keep your plan from coming to fruition. Or you can have a plan that in a million years you could never imagine happening and it does due to elements that are outside of your control — I’m working on that in another project with Nathan [Dragon], a collaborative novel, a bandit book about a couple that snaps after losing their child and goes on a nationwide robbing spree.

Mariah: Re: re: “desire paths in the literal like city planning way” — “...finality of things…” or even, to a lesser extent, once you’ve figured it out, it just becomes less interesting? I kind of fear I’m one of those people that always needs a little strife because once I figure out how to do something (use a material, express an idea, or even just live in different ways) or what I’m going to do (with that material, that idea, whatever), it’s like, ok, moving on… and I think maybe that’s also linked to my publishing fears, in a different way. It’s less that I’m mourning the completion of a project and more that, now this thing exists forever somewhere and what if I don’t mean it anymore?

I love the projects you’re working on… how are you guys writing your collaborative novel? The process, I mean. Is it like how we’re writing this — two people actively chatting in a Google Doc? Or writing alternating chapters? Sitting next to each other and writing together? Also, maybe if you need another project you could perhaps code a little website for my little hand-coded website publishing attempt/url art gallery clique? :) 

Raegan: Sorry, I started typing and then my mom reached for my hand and I held it for a long time. She got her nails done before the baby shower back in April and let them grow out since then. So now what used to be the full painted nail is just the tips. Instead of French Tips we are calling them “Iowa Tips,” à la Iowa Stubbornness.

Right now, the bandit book is set up somewhat similarly to this. We have a shared document that we will both add to everyday, notes and short scenes are starting to form. It’s something to raise together, for now, since we lost our son. We are practicing making compromises and whatnot because we are trying to create one voice with it. I’d love to premiere a little section of it for clique! I need to dig back into building websites, it's definitely a language and I haven’t spoken it in a few months so I’m feeling rusty about it. 

What sparked clique? And why do you think hand-coded websites are coming back?

Mariah: The times I felt the most wonder, the most camaraderie, was in that very beginning of my own internet use, when not everything was quite so monetized yet, quite so sleek and commercial, when you could stumble upon and look into little rooms built for themselves and find where you fit within them. Not all the rooms were spaces of beauty — the pro-ana, pro-mia Xangas and Tumblrs I would scroll after school, learning to chew ice and snap rubber bands — but all were sources of wonder, maybe even community, whether ever really intended to be seen by others or not. 

Why wouldn’t I make up a reason to give my friends another little line on their CV? clique is an opportunity to introduce friends to other friends, and show off work, show off how talented and funny and interesting my friends are, like a digital dinner party. I had considered it being a lot of other things at first — a collective, a print publication on a random publishing schedule, whatever, but ultimately this made the most sense for my interests and what I want to contribute as like “a platform” of sorts, I guess. 

But then, going back to juxtaposing that with websites, it’s like there’s this atemporality to the majority of web, this ahistory? Trend cycles move so fast and updates happen without announcement, except for this occasional degraded jpg. Entropy online can be so instant and remorseless but then you’ve got this fossil through an image in an old file format and the more it’s seen the more it decays. (I know this is a Hito Steryl thing but I do love to defend a poor image all the time.) The ahistory is sad but I think it feels like a safety, too. I can delete my Twitter account and lose all the thoughts I’ve had since I was like 17 and I love that. I know that the revegetation of a desire path is maybe more akin to tweeting through it and obliteration through accumulation but maybe deleting everything all at once is like … I don't know … throwing down some clover seed and walking away. 

Raegan: Or like tilling :-)