prelude

O Public O Private

In 1854, Henry David Thoreau wrote,

"Direct your eye inward and you'll find a thousand
regions in your mind yet undiscovered. Travel them
and be expert in home-cosmography."

When surmising the particular psychology of others, one should
always remember a Deleuzian sentiment, that "all people have
charm only through their madness". What Deleuze found most
charming in the discovery of someone else was the
idiosyncratic side of a person which revealed a little bit of
madness, that part which seemed, at least for a moment, unhinged.

Early November is an in-between season and always feels
as if something is lost to it, a certain ambiguity tolerated
in the forfeit of daylight hours, still green in the crunch
of frost bitten vegetation underfoot. As if something is
unsettled in the harsh winds that blow off the lake to promise
snow but never quite deliver it. A space of stolen sunlight,
of uncompromising greyness that seizes the many horizon lines that
take hold, both external and internal ones triggering memories that
inspire a little death of self, if only temporarily. This place,
this sense of place is profoundly geographied.

If those who love don't hold onto the residue of a life well-lived,
to keep it on the surface, just to be explored every once in a
while, who else will? Not to surrender to the kind of depression
that loss breeds; that kind slinks in so unexpectedly to wash
over those who let it in soft, warm waves of introspection.
The seduction of deep self-reflection is something else again.
To revisit life lessons so as to revise them. Until before long,
one is immersed in becoming what one thinks.

How the rediscovery of old images triggers a particular thought.

After any visit, afer dinner, we would sit. But at some point,
he would disappear into another room just long enough to retrieve
his infamous bag of ideosyncratic paraphenalia, objects he must
have kept for years, gadget king collector that he was. And upon
his return, would begin the ritual of covering his leather stool
with newsprints, emptying the contents of his bag on top and
then placing my shoes next to all of it. My shoes. Which he
inevitably gathered up from the hallway on his way back in.
Having witnessed him do this a hundred times, it was nonetheless
surprising each time to watch these habituated gestures
performed with utmost intensity. How he would silently polish
them til they shone then hold them up to the light for
inspection. Then looking satisfied and declaring, always in
the same tone, "And don't you ever forget. I love you."

My father.

As if each day of his later life was spent in active pursuit of
making amends for whatever past deeds he may have regretted.
And how, now, it becomes necessary to remember this about him,
to remember this in hope that perhaps I can be a little like him,
in the way he concluded his life. His regard for simple gestures
that, in the end, speak volumes.

But it is during the attempt to re-surface from this kind of
reflection, to ride the tide back home to the present moment
that one discovers exactly what the paradox of our becoming
is, that "everything happens at the border". In the overlap.
One gets out, one gets something out of it, only by re viewing
it from an edge. This happens by looking at each successive
wave of thought. To examine its folds. An angel is teaching me
this. That the events of our life grow out of these kinds of
small experiences, in the same way that crystals and rhizomes
grow out from their edges. The 'depth' that we re-emerge from
is ultimately only a movement in the opposite direction, a
lateral slide across the surface. Afterall,

"The ideational or the incorporeal can no longer be
anything other than an "effect", a surface, a condition of
language. (Deleuze, 1990)

Deleuze claims that any philosopher who creates a new concept
creates an event in thought which separates him/her from the
history of philosophy. In this way, one thinks horizontally.
This movement doesn't lead to an order of sameness, but to a
dis-order of differences, an instability which makes
comparisons difficult.

But metaphors survive.

For instance, within the medium of film, one perceives an
illusion of movement through the rapid-fire succession of still
photographs projected. A scientific phenomenon called
"persistence of vision" attests to the fact that the human eye
holds an image on the retina for a fraction of a second longer,
after the image has been removed from sight. The human eye fills
in the gap between two still images by equating successive
movement as actual motion. In this sense, we perceive the overlap of
two images as impersonal, objective experience. But its movement
is false and remains a personal subjective experience. This
describes a Deleuzian sense of becoming, where past and future
overlap like two transparent photographs in an ever-present now.
Like relationships of any kind, the pure infinitive of their
becoming is analogized by the celluloid language of film.

Lewis Carroll describes the conditions of Alice's becoming as a
perpetual state of change. How, at every moment she is something
else, where the hands of a clock move her forward and backward all
at once. It is the continuity of her existence that becomes the
paradox within the super-imposition of static image-events.
Aporetic layerings, one on top of another, like a pile of slides
stacked up on a light table. This overlap of static images is
synonymous with a becoming-philosophical. Its false repetition of
movement along a temporal continuum. Idea layered upon idea. Much
like the non-sensical play of words in Carroll's writing. A story
that evolves in folds and layerings. Surface slide of words.
Deleuze's philosophy presents the suggestion of a becoming that is
at once both personal and impersonal. Like death itself, personal
in its harsh present, "whose extreme horizon (is) the freedom to
die and to be able to risk oneself mortally" (Deleuze, 1990).

"The impersonality of dying no longer indicates only
the movement when I disappear outside myself, but
rather the moment when death loses itself in itself,
and also the figure which the most singular life takes on
in order to substitute itself for me." (Deleuze, 1990)

The illusion of death also lies in the overlay, in the gap between
the personality and the impersonality of its event, between what
is joined together and what is narrowly extended. Between what is
seen publically but nonetheless demands the respect of privacy.
The ethics of Deleuzian becoming (which includes becoming-death)
is one that is constantly becoming that which one is not. In the
sense that one lives a life to become-death. Surprisingly there
is an ethic of active joy in this. An ethic that accepts the
fate of death as the joyofflight. Perhaps a life well lived is
one in which one exists so fully, that in its fullness, one
gains an eternity in every moment. Where death is always an
ongoing extension of life. So in this way, one could say that
Deleuze has an obsession with the unlimited. That his life's
work was about becoming-unlimited.

And there is something in the way a stranger enters one's life,
quite unassumingly. The first casual gesture that almost goes
unnoticed, but not really. That moment when, without
understanding why, everything shifts and realigns.