^* In a late essay, “He Stuttered,” Gilles Deleuze also links line to trial, which marks the point at which one becomes a stranger in one’s own tongue, a foreigner who makes language convulse—cry, stutter, mumble, whimper, gasp. In the performative mode “the stuttering no longer affects preexisting words, but, rather, itself ushers in the words that it affects” (23). Deleuze’s work consistently favors the insouciant posture, the looseness and rapidity of the rhizome, always on the move. With Félix Guattari, Deleuze extends the fantasy to a very tropological America, consanguineous with This Compost. “There is a whole American ‘map’ in the West, where even the trees form rhizomes. America reversed the directions : it put its Orient in the West, as if it were precisely in America that the earth came full circle; its West is the edge of the East” (A Thousand Plateaus, 19)—Olson’s “last first place”—and ouroboros.