Drool to Be Happy

Every time I think I am losing any academic competence, something good happens.
I mean, something like a scholarship or a nice email from a smart and scary professor happens. This time around something even better happened - I finally understood Deleuze.
Deleuze is a dead French philosopher. Ah, Gilles Deleuze.
Gil, I call him, for short.
I've been reading and writing about Gil for 4 years now.
I think that everything I wrote about Gil, up to this past week, was wrong.

Last week I was laying bed, Hugo drooling to sleep on my tummy, and as I drifted to sleep myself I thought, "Damnit, Gilles Deleuze might just be total nonsense. Maybe it is all baloney he just made up and nobody really understands it. Maybe Gil is the snuffalufagus of post-post-structuralism."
And at that blessed (I mean blessed in a strictly immanent, atheist sense) it kicked in.
I saw in my sleepy mind an image of a herd of elk.
And I recalled Gil's passage about nomadism and deterritorialization.
And the elk, smelling a bit like horses and a lot like dust, deterritorialized as they ran, as they moved, loud and warm, as one.
Which means I finally figured it out.

In no way does this mean I can explain it to anyone yet.
Wait another 3 years for that.

Inexplicably happy, I am now writing about it all. About pine beetles, lodgepole pines, the Chilcotin, MacBlo, moose, elk, trappers, loggers, tourists and trains.

And Hugo is still drooling. Happily.