IMAGE
The rhizome, as found in nature and as developed conceptually by Deleuze and Guattari, remains near and intimate to me--not only intellectually, but also in the way that it shapes my orientation to and with the world in an everyday sense. The rhizome presents a topography that extends potential and possibility: subjective multiplicity; non-hierarchical logics; connectivity; recursivity. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari note: "The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available--always n - 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at n - 1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed. Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass. We get the distinct feeling that we will convince no one unless we enumerate certain approximate characteristics of the rhizome" (6-7). I believe the rhizome helps model electracy, and that its potential as a concept could also help generate practice that is conducive to the proper goals of electracy and well-being.
FIGURE
Simply put, Arthur Rimbaud was not simply a genius; he was a revolutionary. When still a teenager, Rimbaud began illuminating the world of poetry, forever changing the poetic landscape in the most radical sense. But Rimbaud not only wrote poetry; he lived poetry. Rimbaud's incredible thirst for life, experience, pleasure, sense, etc. puts him in a unique category of writers for me (a category which also includes Henry Miller [who wrote a book on Rimbaud] and William Blake). I model myself not after Rimbaud, but after the practices he and the best poets, writers, artists have adopted: to truly live, first and foremost. If you ever get the chance, see Total Eclipse. Leonardo DiCaprio actually brilliantly recreates Rimbaud.
MOTTO
"New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth." --Yeats
I read this not as a nihilistic indictment of truth or epistemology; I read this as an affirmation of potentiality, dreaming, creativity. In other words: truth only in dreams. The creative act as the most primal practice of truth generation. This is also why I am so drawn to Deleuze and Guattari, and their creative turn in philosophy (philosophy as the creation of new concepts): art and literature generate concepts inasmuch as philosophy, and these concepts guide our dreaming forward, and beyond. My motto might also indicate why I have a graphical representation of Yeats' gyre system on my arm (see: Yeats' A Vision).
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