Reading Thoughts and Notes
Desert Islands, Deleuze
The Spiral, Calvino
On paper

Summary
Desert Islands, Deleuze
In Desert Islands, Deleuze explores the concept of origins, beginnings, purity and mythology in conjunction through the geography of islands. He focuses on the processes that formed the island as a way of viewing their meaning to us, and how our own processes that take us to the islands relate to those geographical ones. For example, he notes that the islands can be formed from continents, or formed from the ocean itself, anew. Then he examines the deserted quality that humans attribute to islands and suggests this quality can only arise through human imputation, and further, only by humans who themselves embody the qualities of the deserted island: “Those people who come to the island indeed occupy and populate it; but in reality, were they sufficiently separate, sufficiently creative, they would give the island only a dynamic image of itself… through them they island would… become conscious of itself as deserted and unpeopled.” However, Deleuze proceeds to walk back this claim as he portrays the embodiment of desertedness as an unattainable ideal, and that thus, “[humans’] presence in face spoils its desertedness”. Thus, the ideal of fresh beginnings and beginning anew which we find in deserted islands is unattainable – mythological and recapitulated in literature which reflects our inevitable corruption of the purity of the deserted island. In our corrupted myths of islands, of origins and beginnings, we reveal the underlying reality that beginnings are only understood through reproduction.

Compelling Points
The Spiral, Calvino
Action can be reactive, but still instill individuality in the resulting changes
We are far more connected than we can perceive
Desert Islands, Deleuze
Life can only be understood as a process, involving reproductions, second beginnings
Origins are thus always a second origin (at least in terms of life, I think that at some point there is an original origin)
Literature is a reflection of the collective misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the world

Implications
If the object is an arbitrary separating hyperplane we draw in n-dimensional space such that when projected back to 3 dimensions it is a continuous, closed shape, then in this space is an artifact that embodies an entire history of interactions of the points within it with the points outside it. The artifact contains no previous boundaries between outside and inside, the only boundary is the hyperplane we have drawn now. Point X within the hyperplane now was neither within the hyperplane nor outside the hyperplane one second ago; the hyperplane does not persist through time except for the seconds in which we impute it and recalculate it.

But a paradox seems to arise. How, in an instant, can we understand the meaning of an object, a self, a thing, a boundary, an individual, if it can only be understood as a process? We live in finite moments wherein our understanding of ‘is and is not’ forms and decays. Do we have access to the infinite history of the process of selfhood when we make this instantaneous calculation? Or do we operate on the principle of Markov decision processes, that the current state embeds the and encompasses all this information we would need?