i read a lot of Gilles Deleuze a while back. he’s one of the big french post-structuralists along with Derrida and Foucault. i liked him more than those other guys. he felt free. his philosophy felt like water.
i reckon that his writings have influenced the way i see and understand the world, and therefore my understanding of God, in a pretty major way.
he talks about something called a ‘line of flight’. i picture this like the portholes that come out of people’s stomachs in Donnie Darko. its pretty similar. all of us are on lines of flight. our lives are like flight paths that over lap, cross, get in each other’s ways, maybe even crash into one another. but its the relationship between lines of people’s flights that matter, that are felt.
one way i maybe see the world is like this… all is difference. nothing makes much sense and is pretty messy, chaotic. the times when things do appear to make sense are like nodes in a sea of mixed up frequencies. a node might be having a coffee with my wife on saturday morning, going on a run when no one else is up, being with my family and my dog on a long cold walk. they’re events in time and space that we cling to, we cling to them to give our lives colour. these events/nodes make life. they are what is true.
It’s almost as if these nodes are what make life ‘messy’, and make it so that nothing makes sense. I think it’s not that nothing ’seems’ to make sense, I think it’s actually TRUE.
Can you recommend some books for begging to read Deleuze?
The whole ‘porthole’ idea from Donnie Darko is interesting – I mean, if you think of it like that, one could become extremely preoccupied with what the portholes are doing, where the nodes cross and what they’re doing.
Since you seem to have thought about this a lot, do you find yourself becoming preoccupied with searching for people’s nodes, or examining your own?