The Rhiz/ZoneThe Rhiz/Zone
Welcome to the interminably revised Rhiz/Zone. I'm changing stuff all the time, even as weSpikspeak. I hope you like it. Go Here (In the event that the right 'here" is there) for a more over-bearing account of whatsilliness I've wrought.
This is my personal web page and eccentric center. My name is Dean Spik and I slapped all this stuff up on the Web for no apparent reason. Just a click or two away you'll find humor, poetry, music and cheesy artless web pages. Don't be alarmed. I'm not going to say anything crazy. However, I should say something about rhizomes which inspired the name of this site as well as some of the content. Maybe. First and foremost, the term rhizome has a concrete everyday horto/CULTURAL definition and that definition is as follows a Rhizome (a noun) is a horizontal, usually underground, stem that often sends out roots and shoots from it's nodes. It apparently is derived from the Greek rhizoma, which means a mass of roots.
A mass of roots. That's the definition that I like best. I have very little experience with real live rhizomes. Most of what I know about rhizomes I have learned from their metaphoric existence as rendered by Giles Delueze and Felix Gautarri in their book A Thousand Plateaus. I really love the book. It offers an elegant, if unsettling picture, of humanity and the sun and the moon and the stars above. The book is about pretty much everything. It's mostly about philosophy I guess. At least that's where it will be found in the book store. Anyway, part of the book deals with the metaphor of the rhizome. To Deluze and Gauttari, a human being comes in two parts or facets. The first, and to my mind, the most interesting part is the rhizome. That is that we all exist as part of a multi-planar network of connections. We are connected to family and friends, to our occupations, and to the mass media. We are connected by our education's and by our relationship to the market. ( not to mention our connection to the grand conspiracy ) And these things are all tangled together. To be human means to fit every experience, be it intellectual or visceral, into this network of abstract and less abstract connections. And these networks are not stagnant. In fact we never stopped changing them, adding to them, breaking them up, forging new paths. The human life from beginning to end consists of this process and this process alone. We also tend to build trees. As you might guess from the quote on the opening page Delueze and Gauttari look askance at trees. These metaphorical trees are isolated hierarchical structures which exist in contrast with but not necessarily opposition to the metaphorical rhizome. Go here for a little blurb about the Tree versus rhizome war.
The second part of human beings is the strata. Strata are layers of rock the build up over the eons. Geologists can tell you strata is formed by the process stratification which builds up these layers. Human beings make part of themselves by this process of stratification. The other part you will remember is the rhizome. The strata humans build is what we hold on to and make our own as a result of our connection with the rhizomes. Strata is the flotsam and jetsam of a human life. It is also our habits and tendencies our tacit assumptions and perhaps our living breathing bodies. Delueze and Gautttari say we should rid ourselves of most of this strata and concentrate on expanding and improving the rhizome. We should only retain the bare minimum that allows us to get up in the morning and find the coffee pot.
Anyway, I read the book and ,later in an unconnected :), move I decided to make a web page. Since then that page has become an eclectic cheese assortment of a site. What else would one call such a thing but The Rhiz/Zone. I hope you like it. Thanks for you support
It is the nature of rhizomes to be connected: 
©copyright 1997, Dean Spik, for now, all guilt is deferred to the grand conspiracy!
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