Saturday evening, at about 8 pm, Kim, Fiona, and I had finished dinner and were sitting on the deck, getting ready for the final phase of the evening, when my phone rang. It was my eldest daughter, Mairead, calling from Japan, where it was already Father’s Day.

Perhaps some fathers, especially those interested in gardening receive rhizomes for Father’s Day, maybe irises to plant, or ginger, or asparagus. I have been interested in the works of Deleuze and Guattari, and particularly around the idea of rhizome as a philosophical and educational concept.

We ended up having an hour long discussion, covering all kinds of different ideas, a very rhizomatic discussion.

It is hard to say where to start, with everything so interconnected, and it probably doesn’t matter. Instead, I will provide a little context and then try to map out some of the rhizomatic discussion.

Mairead left for college when she was fourteen, heading off to Mary Baldwin College in Virginia. She explore several different majors and ultimately ended up getting a degree in history from University of Connecticut before heading off to teach English in Japan, and then enter graduate school there.

From time to time, we get the opportunity to talk about her studies, and this evening was a good example. She talked about a presentation she gave in her seminar which is being led by a professor very interested in Guattari. Mairead mentioned to him that I was interested in Guattari and he asked if I was a history professor or something like that. She said something like, no, he’s just weird that way. He said that he would like to meet me some time, and I hope that will work out.

I remembered meeting one of Mairead’s Asian Studies professors at Mary Baldwin. We had joke beforehand about how she should teach me a phrases to say to him, introducing myself, but instead of being a proper introduction, being the sort of phrase that someone might convince someone else to say, as a joke. So, Mairead taught me how to say “Hi. I’m weird” in Japanese. I didn’t know what she had actually taught me to say, but I figured it was a good thing to do, so I said it to the professor, who raised an eyebrow as I said it.

This evening, Mairead who only knew rudimentary Japanese at that time, told me that she might not have used the best word for “weird”. The word she taught me had connotations of “deep” and “mysterious”.

One of the ideas that came up in our discussion this evening was one that people who don’t speak multiple languages and travel circles where different languages might be spoken are unlikely to encounter, the decision of what language to talk in.

It seems there are many factors that go into this decision, in terms of the context of the discussion, the content, the participants, the goals, etc. I guess the closest I get to that is deciding, especially in my work role, whether to write something as an email, a tweet, a Facebook post, a blog post, or some other format. Perhaps it is something we all have to decide in terms of whether we call someone, text them, send them an email, a Facebook message, or many other options.

It made me think of a Group Relations conference I attended in Holland back in about 2000. It led to a brief digression to talk about Wilfred Bion, S. H. Foulkes, and Melanie Klein. We talked briefly about psychoanalysis, Object Relations, Group Relations, and Group Analytics. We did not digress as far as Jacques Lacan which could have brought us all the way back to Guattari.

The Group Relations conference was international and was supposed to be in English, but at one point, some of the participants rebelled and chose to speak in Dutch, leaving me and some of the other international speakers out, or “othered”.

I also spoke around recently listening to a recording of Evelyn Underhill’s 1911 book Mysticism. We went off on a brief tangent about Underhill, Tolkien, and hobbits. Evelyn Underhill did write to C.S. Lewis, who was a friend of Tolkien. It is curious to wonder if Tolkien knew Evelyn Underhill. I suspect he did.

Thinking about Underhill’s work, it is interesting to think about how our approaches to realism, idealism, pragmatism, etc shape our thoughts about the transcendent. It is even more interesting to think about this in terms of how the language we speak or choose to speak shapes our thinking. Mairead spoke of the choice on language in a multi-lingual setting as being automatic, and I thought of how Underhill spoke of some of the writings of the mystics as being automatic. A tangent we didn’t get off onto was Jackson Pollack and automatic painting or approaching Pollack from a context of Deleuze and Guattari

Mairead recounted writing a paper about some female Christian mystic back when she was in junior high school. We had a good discussion around women and mysticism. We talked about how this might relate to the education available to women in the middle ages, their relationship to the dominant power structures of the time, how it related to other forms of expression, particularly in the arts.

This led to an interesting discussion about the relationship between religions and power structures. We talked about the established church verses the counter-cultural church. Mairead spoke about a Buddhist friend who had visited the United States during one of the Gulf Wars and was shocked to find Christians that supported war, since there was a strong relationship between Christianity and pacifisms in Japan. This led to talking about Buddhists that were not pacifists in Japan, which may seem equally hard to fathom for American’s that have a strong association between Buddhism and pacifism.

Perhaps the interesting relationship isn’t between pacifism and specific religions, as it is between pacifism and how the religion relates to the power structures of the culture. Perhaps pacifism is more about a rejection of the use of violence by the dominant power structures to maintain power, and so established religions are less likely to be pacifist and counter-cultural religions are more likely to be pacifist.

It was particularly interesting to think about this in terms of the discussions about Islam, and particularly some of Donald Trump’s rhetoric, and Obama’s response.

We veered over to touching on R.G. Collingwood’s Idea of History as well as a discussion of one of Mairead’s classes where different professors come and lecture on different methods of research. It made me think of a class I took on Marx back in my college days, not the Marx of the Red Scare, but the Marx of Philosophy, History, Economics, Sociology, Political Science, and more. This provided another chance to return to the thought of Guattari, but instead, it was time to end to phone call and attend to other stuff.