After-thoughts are thoughts that occur after the completion of an act, and can be understood as additions, comments or replies.
There are two events that trigger my afterthoughts:
1. My neighbouring girl Leah, of two years old, knocked yesterday at our door and declared: ‘I am a cat’. After which she started to move on all fours and said ‘meow’.
2. The spontaneous response of my daughter, who decided on the spot that combinations of animals were a possibility too. Like the becoming of a turtle-bird, a very specific (unreal) animal to which she attributed specific kind of movements.
My two-year-old neighbour was merely imitating a cat, producing the same sound and adopting a stereotype movement. As I was observing her, it seemed to me that she was embodying a rather general and basic image of the cat. My daughter in contrast (and ten years older!) could engage with more flexible notions of the becoming of animal.
Could we, in the case of my two-year-old neighbour speak in Jungian terms of primordial images of the animal, the building up of archetypes that are rooted in the subconscious mind? Archetypes that lack solid content and that are closely connected to our instincts?
Here you find another example: the butterfly-man, a shape shifter that I encountered at the beach of Ijmuiden.
“Shape-shifting” is a tradition that exists in most native cultures. It’s the metamorphosis of a person into an animal or other form.
Shape shifting goes back to Greek mythology, and even to the prehistory (i.e. cave drawings have been found at Les Trois Frères in France that de- pict ancient beliefs in the concept).
I believe that shape shifting is triggered in transformational environments, for example the area in between land and sea or the tree line of mountains. These transitional zones require an adaptation of organisms.
What is crucial in the process of becoming, is that one does not attain a form but enters a zone of proximity where the human and non-human meet. In this process of dissolution, in which a singular and coherent identity is deconstructed, several in-between states may emerge. This is also referred to as shape shifting, i.e. the ability of a being or creature to transform its physical form or shape.
‘We believe in the existence of very special becomings - animal traversing human beings and sweeping them away, affecting the animal no less than the human’. (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005, p. 237)
The animal body implies “a series of assemblages between deterritorializing forces that are circulating on the edge of the human and the non- human, in order to make them indiscernible” (Beaulieu, 2011, p.7).
Take for example the Bajau people who live on the waters of Southeast Asia. Their bodies have evolved into ‘sea-dwelling beings’: research has found that the spleens of the Bajau people are 50% larger than an average human. As a result they can stay longer under water. The Bajau have also developed remarkable underwater vision. They trust more on vision than hearing (since ear- drums are often ruptured because of the pressure under water)
