For Deleuze & Guattari : “becoming occurs in concrete and material states-of-affairs that express impersonal forces in order to transform sensible forces that would otherwise remain insensible.” I ask myself: is becoming intrinsic to being in this world, either as animal or human? What makes me see me as human? What makes humans perceive cat as animal? Causes? Conditions?
What distinguish man from animal? Is it Perception? Is it Memory? Is it the intellect? Is it knowing?
In the Iliad homer describes death in the battlefield for both human & animal. The human description makes me think of some kind of heightened/ complex form of consciousness imbued with resistance perceiving that moment of death. In the animal description I’m left with the sensation that in such presence there is complete surrender. Deleuze argues that it is not humans but animals who know how to die. I Resound with Deleuze’s thoughts. I deeply admire animal instinctual wisdom. I have been living with a curious ever-present cat for about 9 years. He knows how to rest. He knows how to delineate boundaries by moving gracefully in space…I’m sure he will know how to die.
boy down the wrinkly way-charcoal on paper
Also, I like to think of becoming spontaneous as described in the book “The phenomenon of man” by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin : - “We are dealing with only one event, the orthogenesis of everything living towards a higher degree of immanent spontaneity. To write the true natural history of the world, we should need to be able to follow it from within. It would thus appear no longer as an interlocking succession of structural types replacing one another, but as an ascension of inner sap spreading out in a forest of consolidated instincts. Right at its base, the living world is constituted by consciousness clothed in flesh and bone. From the biosphere to the species is nothing but an immense ramification of psychism seeking for itself through different forms…”