What kept me "grounded through out the Rhizome reading from Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus was and image of a rhizome, or rather my next-door neighbor's raspberry plants. Then towards the end of the reading when they began speaking of rhizomes including the best and the worst, I began to think of the space in my grandmother's garden that I had weeded of some rhizomic bulbs in order to make room for another rhizomic plant: Persian mint. Started from just two mint seedlings, the mint now covers over four feet of the garden.
Deleuse and Guattari say that "there is no diffreence between what a book talks about and how it is made" (407), namely the media is the message. Now that I think of an actual mint plant, or crabgrass spreading over a lawn, I can better visualize what the authors are saying. They are saying that books live in the dreamworld of Thomas Friedman, a flat world, in which one idea or emotion branches out and connects to another. Mature plants from an underground rhizome can be cut off and used to start another plant in a different place. Rhizomes are travelers; they are adaptable. I am still not quite sure how to apply the though of books as rhizomes but I know that rhizomes are what allows my mint to get so spread out, so horizontal. and so strong.
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