Where does a mound begin? The question recalls the famous Sorites paradox, the “paradox of the heap,” posited by 4th century BCE paradox clout-god Eubulides of Melitus. If you take one grain of sand away, at what point does the heap cease to exist? If you keep adding grains, when does a scatter of particles become a mound? Or, my favorite example of the paradox, if you have a full head of hair, how many individual strands must be removed before the head is deemed bald? The paradox refuses neat boundaries. It reveals that what we call “a thing” is often only a threshold in a continuous process, a temporary plateau in a flow that never ends.
Recently I began reading Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, psychoanalysts and political philosophers active in France during the 70s and 80s. Among other awakenings in my worldview, their work has offered a reinforcement for my oft-tested, but deeply held, belief that a new world is possible. I first encountered anarchist theory and philosophy through Indigenous studies and thinkers across the Américas, and Deleuze and Guattari extend that same invitation: to imagine societies beyond hierarchy, beyond fixed categories. In Anti-Oedipus they argue that desire is not lack but production, writing that “desire produces reality. Every portion of desire, every machine, is a machine of production” (Anti-Oedipus). A mound is this desire made visible—accumulation as creation, not merely an absence seeking fulfillment.
[Sidenote: The anti-Oedipal claim that desire produces reality reads neatly into River’s motto, “do what you want.” But if late-stage capitalism in the imperialist core is any guide, we have to be discerning about what kinds of realities our desires reproduce and the limits of our agency within them. As Foucault reminds us, action is always an experiment, never guaranteed in its effects, and thus demands vigilance. To act on desire is not simply to affirm freedom but to remain wary of how our actions are taken up, re-coded, and folded back into systems of power.]
In A Thousand Plateaus, they develop the concept of the rhizome. “A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.” Mounds are rhizomatic in precisely this sense. They do not grow from a central trunk or radiate from a single origin. They are formed from countless small relations: grains layered on grains, sediments folding into one another. No hierarchy, no center, only multiplicities taking shape for a time before dispersing again.
When you start looking, mounds are apparent everywhere in our natural world. Desert dunes shift endlessly under the wind, never finished, never the same from one day to the next. Riverbeds collect stone and silt, building forms that reroute water, sculpting the land even as they erode. I once saw a different kind of mound at Hunts Point in the Bronx: a heap of trash rising above the sidewalk, layered with plastic, cardboard, and food scraps. Like dunes or riverbeds, it was shaped by accumulation and decay, a human-made sediment that rerouted rats and gulls instead of rivers. (Not all mounds are so grim, of course. Some come layered in rich dark chocolate and shredded coconut, wrapped in foil at the corner store.) From afar these mounds seem monumental, permanent. But up close they are fragile, provisional, and endlessly flexible. They remind us that what looks solid is always becoming otherwise.
Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that entropy (disorder, randomness, or chaos) can only increase. Yet, miraculously, out of this disorder arose the conditions for life, and despite our societal flailings, it continues to sustain us. Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy, accompanied by Philip Glass’s vibrant scores, renders this paradox visible. Koyaanisqatsi, based on the Hopi word for “life out of balance,” offers a sensual meditation on creation and collapse, order and chaos.
Looking beyond the limits of our terrestrial world, I am reminded of cosmologist Andrei Linde's 1980s theory of eternal inflation that describes the multiverse as millions of bubble-universes, each existing for only a fraction of time before dissolving back into infinity. "Inflationary cosmology suggests that our universe may be just one of many, eternally being born." Our universe, in this view, is like a mound of dust made when sweeping the floor. Formed arbitrarily in an instant, and gone the next.
If cosmology imagines universes bubbling in and out of existence, Indigenous philosophies offer a parallel on earth: worlds held together not by permanence but by constantly redefined relations of reciprocity. After several semesters of survey courses during undergrad that covered topics such as animism in the Lake Baikal region of SIberia and the Lakota idea of Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ (“All my Relations”), I first encountered these ways of living in the flesh in the Bolivian Andes, where the Quechua notion of ayllu frames community as a living web of reciprocity between people, land, water, animals, and ancestors. An ayllu is not a fixed unit but a shifting collective, bound by relations of care and responsibility that extend beyond the human. A mound (or our entire universe), too, can be read in this way: not an isolated object but a node in a larger mesh of flows, shaped by wind and water, by time and movement, and by human and nonhuman hands.
To think with mounds is to see both persistence and change, both monument and ruin. They teach that categories are porous, boundaries are thresholds, and structures are temporary. They remind us that societies, like sediments, can be rearranged, piled differently, and dreamed into new forms. In this light the mound becomes more than a topographic feature. The mound becomes a lesson in desire, a figure of the rhizome, and an ally to the ayllu—a reminder that another world is always possible, not as a utopia beyond reach, but as a mound already forming, grain by grain, beneath our feet.
Thank you, @river, for the prompt. And @anyone who reads this far, DM me if you want to discuss. Conversations create mounds (in the brain).