Gilles Deleuze, The Fold

Assembling this menagerie I wonder just what it is I have collected (and in so assembling and annotating I am collecting, being that a collection isn't finished just because all the pieces are procured: arranging and rearranging bring a series back to life, as does contemplating. Just look at this scan again. In a future essay I could have just sent these out to forensic processing to extract and analyze their DNA and find the answer to my question, but instead the question is what there is echoing: whose hairs are these and how long and to what end are they preserved in this copy of The Fold that I had to recall from the library. Do they constitute a message to me or to the future? Perhaps there is a people who communicate exclusively through their hair: what sort of hair, from which body part it was extracted, how long of a cut, how slightly curled and how complicated its curve might be, the color and positioning both on the easel of the page spread and just where they occur in the progress of the book, and even do they seem to indicate a word: all these are potential variables and this could be read as code if we track that way. Everything can be read as code if our minds move in that direction.

If we look for meaning in our dailiness it won't be hard to find even as it's just a fiction. The delusional believe in signs and signals, sigils of larger narratives that contain our meaningless meanders. Does it provide equal measures of comfort and terror to think that we are being spied on evey moment? To believe we can see evidence of God's or gods' actions behind the screens of coffee grounds?

If you're wondering, the smaller one is maybe three quarters of an inch. It shows a bit more spring to it than does the other. Easy to imagine a bearded reader running his fingers through it and dislodging one or both. Beards are in short supply here in Arizona generally but if we were to track the likelihood of beardedness in readers of Deleuze I suspect the correlation would not be insignificant.