Becoming Arborescent

After the game, tradition holds that the players retire to their hotel rooms to soak in an ice tub. After the sauna, one steps out into the cold air or plunges into the frigid lake. After the excited dissolving of the muscles set into motion, they’re returned to a stillness and singularity of being by their being brought back to nothing. A car engine is turned off to let it cool, control rods are dropped in to prevent meltdown. Ice and snow have a crystalline, solid form, the highest degree of still individuality beyond the dissolving states of steam and water. Frozen again, the object returns from rhizomatic to arborescent form, constituted in solidity again.

A tree is nurtured to grow in a specific form. As an organic system, the structure produces from itself, taking inputs and converting them into continually greater expressions of its own system. Taking in the proper diet of sugars, minerals, solar energy, and water, the system grows from the ideal being encoded into its DNA that informs the continual reproduction of each part, remaining identical in form across all sizes.

This growth occurs safely only when this safety is secured by external force upon alien growings which may intrude upon the solidity of its being. Pruning is done in order to keep growth along a path contingent with the ideal encoded into the base of the form. The bonsai is kept in shape by cutting away, keeping it growing in proper directions by preventing the unchecked hypertrophy from causing mutationary deviation. The corpulence of a human form results from these mechanics, like kudzu vines, sucrose becoming an invasive species overgrowing the once firm structure of the body. This is the metaphoric quality of cancer. From the ideal form, a mutation occurs, an invasive other sprouting from within to grow out of it, a line of flight against the entire organism, taking the tree by its roots down to the miasma of the swampy ground.

All growth is kept in line by freezing. Free of motion, free of ability to draw these lines of flight, becomings are made into stable beings to be examined and dealt with. Motion of growth is halted in frigidity, processes of expansion, mutation, stopped before they can continue on. Cancer can be seen, separated, split from the main organism. Humans see the tree ripe for pruning as if it were a being, unable to comprehend the much wider timespans of plant-consciousness.

Sweat grows from within, the signs of life extruding through pores. When left to mingle with the products of becomings out into the world (accumulated dirt), it becomes a hypertrophied mass of contamination, life whose existence is not tolerated by the ordered hierarchy of the ideal form. Mutations occur by unchecked growth, the various cases of disease-ridden hoarders whose backs have become fused to their chairs, the skin and fabric dissolved away to make a unified mass of filth, the “life” worshipped by the followers of Nurgle. 

Upon the filth of bodily production, soap comes over as a murderous fire, burning away all manner of life that has bloomed beyond the bounds of acceptable existence. Dirt is first frozen, bonded with and entrapped within the soap particles carried along with the water. The soap leaves with water, its mass bonded with what must be shorn away, dead skin, bacteria, sweat, dirt, etc, sloughing off back into liquid form, excited to flow off the frozen body, stepping out of the bath in the perfection of a sculpture, momentarily free, momentarily arborescent, momentarily frozen.