Project Purple

Prologue

What is a rhizome?

Think of a slithering underground stem-think of plants, roots, radicals, crabgrass. Cockroaches, rats-the way they shelter, burrow, supply, move, overcome.

Think of worms in soft wood.

A virus can be rhizomorphic, too, in the way it creeps into the cells of a different species, undoing, changing, killing that which is unable to accept.

As an idea, a rhizome is nomad, one with no beginning and no end. It's underneath, pulsing, anticipating.

We consider ourselves tamers of ideas. We classify, we taxonomize, we try to make sense of our world. We tame the wild abundance of existing things in order for us to obtain meaning, to understand ideas, to build a system of distinctions between what we consider Sameness, that which is safe, and Otherness, that which is unsafe.

How does one take in an entirely new system of thought?

These distinctions are collapsing. The ground is giving way, and underneath a new system emerges.

To begin any understaning of the rhizome is to realize the infintility of our own systems of thought. We are like seeds, and then our shells crack, our insides come out, we change. To those who don't understand, it looks like complete destruction; it is death.

But we know better. And we know not to resist. It's for our own good.

Always waiting.

There are no positions, no hierarchy, no weak links in a rhizome. It is interdimensional. It is primordial. It is of a higher order. It is tumorous. It is mercilessness. There's no going back.

I can hear the boy screaming now because he's the first to figure it out; he's the first to see the fins in the water.

I'm a normal person. Just like you. But great changes are about to happen to me. Soon they will happen to you. Because it's almost here, and the rupture will be imperceptible-for the lucky ones.

Resistance is, really, pointless.

At inception, the rhizome disgusts us. The ideas are repugnant to us. They frighten us.

'Kill it. Kill it before it grows.' Because we are human.

But how do you kill something you can't see-though it is there, shadowing, billowing, vortexing with life? How do you kill something you can't hear-though it jangles, rustles, crackles-if you listen?

I will no longer fight. I wait for this enlightenment, and I can feel it creeping closer like twilight shadows-this notional mutant, this interdimensional freak that is us.

Because we are the worms in soft wood.

We are rhizome.

Team Leader; Pacific Rim, Marine Project B, December, 2017