One or several animals
January 15 2026
I came across "pip o" one way or another out of an interest in children's art. it describes itself as a "knowledge hub" for child development and has begun an online children's art gallery. I think the website's graphics are so charming, and the director likes paul klee.
Pip o offers a workshop for elementary students in three sessions. The first, students draw themselves as an animal; the second, they draw their friends as animals; the third, they build a puppet theatre to make a world for their animals. When I have time I might make my own … I thought of "one or several wolves" from A Thousand Plateaus. maybe I should have thought of "becoming animal" but I haven't read that one yet. It's like this illustration of "one or several wolves" by happy sleepy, captioned, "what does it mean to love somebody?"
The part of A Thousand Plateaus that made the greatest impression on me, that produced in me an almost religious revelation, was this paragraph:
"Franny is listening to a program on wolves. I say to her, would you like to be a wolf? She answers haughtily, how stupid, you can't be one wolf, you're always eight or nine, six or seven. Not six or seven wolves all by yourself all at once, but one wolf among others, with five or six others … To soften the harshness of her response, Franny recounts a dream. 'There is a desert. Again, it wouldn't make any sense to say that I am in the desert. It's a panoramic vision of the desert, and it's not a tragic or uninhibited desert. It's only a desert because of its ocher color and its blazing, shadowless sun. There is a teeming crowd in it, a swam of bees, a rumble of soccer players, or a group of Tuareg. I am on the edge of the crowd, at the periphery: but I belong to it. I am attached to it by one of my extremities, a hand or foot. I know that the periphery is the only place I can be, that I would die if I let myself be drawn into the center of the fray, but just as certainly if I let go of the crowd. This is not an easy position to stay in, It is even very difficult to hold, for these beings are in constant motion and their movements are unpredictable and follow no rhythm. They swirl, go north, then suddenly east: none of the individuals in the crowd remains in the same place in relation to the others. So I too am in perpetual motion; all this demands a high level of tension, but it gives me a feeling of violent, almost vertiginous, happiness.' A very good schizo dream. To be fully a part of the crowd and at the same time completely outside it, removed from it: to be on the edge, to take a walk like Virginia Woolf."
I was excited to read that last sentence soon after reading Orlando for the first time, when I thought of Deleuze & Guattari’s schizophrenic during Orlando’s final walk.
