Meditation on Personal Connectivity

A passage from Deleuze and Guttari's A Thousand Plateaus (1987, Minn. Press, pg. 29) hits me:

"There is a desert. Again, it wouldn't make any sense to say that I am in the desert. It's a panoramic vision of the desert, and it's not a tragic or uninhabited desert. It's only a desert because of its ocher color and its blazing, shadowless sun. There is a teeming crowd in it, a swarm of bees, a rumble of soccer players, or a group of Tuareg. I am on the edge of the crowd, at the periphery; but I belong to it, I am attached to it by one of my extremities, a hand or foot. I know that the periphery is the only place I can be, that I would die if I let myself be drawn into the center of the fray, but just as ceertainly if I let go the crowd."

And somehow the dream feels right to me. It's a feeling I get when I walk in the wildlands anywhere, a feeling, a pull, to the network of earth/biome/spirit mixed with the individuality of my being, which more and more I think is an illusion. The "me" that I think I am, the one who writes this blog, who is the subject, I am coming to see is merely a point of connection to everything else, an instance of thought process in the dance of interconnected dances, processes, instances. When I walk in the desert or even on the sidewalk in the city, I know about the process that is me, walking, and I know that process is a fleeting moment, a moment when the cells of "my" body connect with concrete or stone or sand, when the chemicals in the air electrochemically network with the neurons attached to my nose and I smell smoke, in the fireplace on Madison Street or in the air around the campfire. But like Franny in her dream, I am schizophrenic: I am afraid to give up my Self, and I can't seem to let go and join the natural world, not really.

Because my leg hurts, and I have to quit smoking, and I need to work, and I have bills to pay, and I think I need to force myself to do right things, over and over, and I can't seem to do it by connecting to the universe but I can't do it if I don't connect to the All-in-All. And sometimes everything is outside of me, most of the time, and it is just me, inside my aching body, willing to feel everything but unable to feel anything without setting me, my individual mind, in the subject position: I feel, I need, I ache, I am angry, lonely, alone, just me.

And everything seems impossibly far away.




But then I'll read about someone else, or talk to a person on the bus, or go for a walk and pet a cat on its front lawn, in the sun, warm, glowing on my face and I feel the earth solid under me, comforting my feet, and the network substantiates itself in me once more, on the sidewalk, at the cat's front lawn, in the sun. Even in University Heights I can perceive the swarm of matter and evergy around me, pulsing with universal being, for a moment. In the desert that moment lasts longer, and stays in my soul--if it is really mine--for the next time. On a walk in the natural world, which is everything, whether its is in the Sierras or in the desert or in the neighborhood, we are all together most of the time.