Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible

 

(VII of Swords / X of Cups)

Inhabit the in-between spaces, the borderlands. Step outside of the center and become-animal. Experience the Other as an extension of yourself. Take control of your powers and cause disruptions, form new alliances. Make magic. Make love. Smash the State.

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(From Deleuze and Guattari's Thousand Plateaus, "Memories of a Sorcerer II"):

...There is an entire politics of becomings-animal, as well as a politics of sorcery, which is elaborated in assemblages that are neither those of the family nor of religion nor of the State. Instead, they express minoritarian groups, or groups that are oppressed, prohibited, in revolt, or always on the fringe of recognized institutions, groups all the more secret for being extrinsic, in other words, anomic. If becoming-animal takes the form of a Temptation, and of monsters arounsed in the imagination by the demon, it is because it is accompanied, at its origin as in its undertaking, by a rupture with the central institutions that have established themselves or seek to become established...

...The politics of becoming-animal remains, of course, extremely ambiguous. For societies, even primitive societies, have always appropriated these becomings in order to break them, reduce them to relations of totemic or symbolic correspondence. States have always appropriated the war machine in the form of national armies that strictly limit the becoming of the warrior. The Church has always burned sorcerers, or reintegrated anchorites into the toned-down image of a series of saints who only remaining relation to animals is strangely familiar, domestic. Families have always warded off the demonic Alliance gnawing at them, in order to regulate alliances among themselves as they see fit. We have seen sorcerers serve as leaders, rally to the cause of despotism, create the countersorcery of exorcism, pass over to the side of the family and descent. But this spells the death of the sorcerer, and also the death of becoming. We have seen becoming spawn nothing more than a big domestic dog, as in Henry Miller's damnation ("it would be better to feign, to pretend to be an animal, a dog for example, and catch the bone thrown to me from time to time") or Fitzgerald's ("I will try to be a correct animal though, and if you throw me a bone with enough meat on it I may even lick your hand"). Invert Faust's formula: So that is what it was, the form of the traveling scholar? A mere poodle?

AND ALSO!

(From Tiqqun's "Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl")

...The stranglehold of Spectacle over the public expression of desires, the biopolitical monopoly on all medical power-knowledge, the restrains place on all deviance by an army ever better equipped with psychiatrists, coaches, and other benevolent "facilitators," the aesthetico-police booking of each individual according to her/his biological determinations, the ever more imperative and detailed surveillance of behavior, the proscription by common accord against "violence," all this enters into the anthropological project, or rather the anthropotechnical project of Empire. It is a matter of profiling citizens...

...The vanquished in this war are not so much citizens as those who, denying its reality, have capitulated from the outset: what THEY allow the vanquished, in the guise of "existence," is now nothing by a lifelong struggle to render oneself compatible with Empire. But for the others, for us, every gesture, every desire, every affect encounters, at some distance, the need to annihilate Empire and its citizens. A question of letting passions breath in their fullness.

"The fact is that consciousness is by nature the locus of an illusion. Its nature is such that it registers effects, but it knows nothing of causes. The order of causes is defined by this: each body in extension, each idea or each mind in thought are constituted by the characteristic relations that subsume the parts of that body, the parts of that idea. When a body "encounters" another body, or an idea another idea, it happens that the two relations sometimes combine to form a more powerful whole, and sometimes one decomposes the other, destroying the cohesion of its parts. And this is what is prodigious in the body and the mind alike, these sets of living parts that enter into composition with decompose one another according to complex laws. The order of causes is therefore an order of composition and decomposition of relations, which infinitely affects all of nature. But as conscious beings, we never apprehend anything but the effects of these compositions and decompositions: we experience joy when a body encounters ours and enters into composition with it, and sadness when, on the contrary, a body or an idea threaten our own coherence."

- Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy

(And the Hanged Man asks, "Well, which is it going to be?")

Last night I dreamt that I woke up one morning and went out to my car only to find a bear sitting in the back seat. At first, I was afraid - the bear was large and imposing.

Then Bear (for that was the bear's name, he being not so much an individual bear, but rather, bear-ness itself) spoke: He told me that he had wandered from his home (Yellowstone State Park) along the rivers and through the forests during the night and when he awoke in the morning, he found himself in the city. The city was not where Bear wanted to be. He had gone too far in the darkness and now, here he was, stuck in a place in which he did not make sense and did not belong.

And so I agreed to help Bear get home.

That was the dream and a point of departure for my own attempt at returning to belonging and making sense.

Here, we have the Knight of Wands.

Wands are creative/intuitive and the Knight of Wands symbolizes putting an idea (likely creative or challenging to existing modes of being) into action. Both Bear and Knight of Wands represent bravery, courage and self confidence.

They urge us to channel our intuition and to open ourselves up. Trust in your ability to change course. The time for introspective hibernation is over, now we must re-awaken, rub the sleep from our eyes and make an inspired move without over-thinking it. Act first, think later. No more letting the winds blow us where they will.

Perhaps we, too have been wandering in the darkness only to find ourselves far away from where we want to be. Bear and the Knight of Wands join forces to help deliver us back to the place we belong.