Another Rhizome, Anyone? (Dandelife)

Critics have suggested that eliterature will be rhizomatic. Maybe I'm the only one who wasn't getting this or appreciating the significance of it, but a rhizome is made of lines. Examining the botanical image will make for an analogous point with regard to text:

• If one examines the root system of a fungal mat, those lines seem pretty chaotic individually, though some higher order seems to exist. (I can't find an adequate picture online, believe it or not, so I'll present this skyview of Paris as being slightly too regular and quadratic.
• The rhizomes of photosynthetic plants like strawberries, however, move primarily soil-to-sun and sun-to-soil. Here the linearity gets clearer: (this root-system has been pulled out and has abnormal lesions, but you can see in the upper left how the smaller rootlets form runners across what we tend to think of as individual plants). These are the rhizomes that relate most conspicuously to Deleuze and Guattari's famous formulations in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Note that lines exist although these are incompletely discreet. The roots have -- dare I say it? -- closure ensured by the cellulose walls. (And Paris has curbs which are at least moderately well respected). They're not entirely discreet, it's true (as in the upper left. But the activity within the walls happens with direction, with line. The line is incompletely hermetic.

Now, strawberries not uprooted, viewed from the side, would show a pattern that I can stylize like so (if you'll pardon the clunky graphics):

| | | | | | | | |
| |/| | | | |/| |
|/| | |\| | | | |\
| | |\| |_|_| | |
| | | | | | | |\|/

Now, if one extends that across the field and views from farther off, one has a line of lines (albeit neither line stands totally discrete):

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

Now, back to text -- let's read.

Reading sentences, one holds the meanings of words in abeyance until one comes to a period, then assembles the words to make a single meaning. Then, crucially, one forgets the individual parts of the sentence, nore or less, freeing one's mind to go on to the next sentence.

For now, call each sentence a strawberry root.

As one reads a paragraph, one assembles the assembled meanings of each sentence-line-root:

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

At the end of each paragraph, more or less, one puts together the assembled meanings, forgetting, more or less, the individually assembled sentences. (One could map this more specifically. For instance, we assume each fresh sentence to require a new predicate, but by default, we assume the same noun. That's why we can continue to form sentences with pronouns.)

Then, to read an essay, would do the same operation with the assembled meanings of paragraphs:

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||<return/>
\ / \\
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||<return/>
| / \ \ \
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||<return/>
\ / \\
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||<return/>
| / \ \ \
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||<return/><kaput/>

And so forth. One winds up with a nuanced representation of the text, but unless one's eidetic, not with the entirety of the text in memory.

If the text happens to be narrative, the latter lines probably force a re-evaluation of the former.

Now, one consequence of this is that lines are absolutely required for this processing -- that is, the line is the relation between two elements, and if they don't relate, the text doesn't jump and shiver. But the incomplete discretion of the individual lines allows for lines of lines, so that the text operates together.

Now, as all that relates to Dandelife or to hypertext, what I'd conclude is that while the individual reading should be able to jump from line to line, and create lines that zig and zag through the mat, the dominant linearity of the substructure of the mat itself must remain intact.

The web needs lines though they must cross. In this particular case, the discreteness of the lines one from another (one Dandelife narrator cannot know the circumstances of all others) forces the linear structure to remain, and readers make a line of those discrete-ish lines.