Redemption --- I awoke with the word on my mind's lips. And just now while reading Riven Rock I came across the word again. The sense is one of the uncanny, a hidden author, or, guide, presenting me with signs. My father, perhaps. Redemption comes with the paying of a debt, a debt which one owes upon entering the theater.

The debt is of the unpayable kind; all the debts incurred and payed along the way do not payoff the debt, nor is any payment final. The theater is founded on debt; in the absence of debt the edifice crumbles. Redemption, or, atonement is what must not happen if the play is to go on. The second coming, the pot of gold, lies just over the horizon. Debt dogs us, as we pusue that point on the horizon.

If my father and I are one, the gig is up; if my mother and I do not separate, the gig can't begin. How are the monkeys to do business in absence of credit and debt?

Castration is dismemberment: it is what happens to all of us. It is only a question of time. The organized body unorganizes itself; at some point on the continuum desire turns back upon itself and begins destroying the creation. In aging we experience the destruction of ourselves; we begin falling apart. Phallic power is the power of integrity, the power to hold the members together. Old age is the loss of this power. Anti-Oedipus says, "We are so sick of ourselves."

Lose yourself and find the unconscious world. Consciousness divides the living body; it excludes the unconscious. Integrity is always a question of excluding what doesn't fit. The posture of a man of integrity is one of self-defense. In the case of murder, self-defense is a defense. Death is castration.

Life does not depend on integrity; the living body does not depend upon the organs of reproduction, upon the organs of rememberance. Forget yourself and live a little.

The "difference that makes a difference" is the difference between nuclear organization and anuclear processes. The relationship that constitutes the nuclear organism is biunivocal; a nuclear organism is a "genuine two-in-one." The processes that are excluded by the nuclear organism are polyvocal processes. Any system is an immune system and the immunity is from the unorganized many.

The unconscious body is the body unorganized, the "body-without-organs." Procaryotic cells, "the little people of the dream," do not organize themselves. Organizations are built with eucaryotic cells, cells with a nucleus. The nuclear cell is the origin of the species. Time begins when Jonah enters the whale and stays there.

A symbiotic relationship is a biunivocal relationship, a "genuine two-in-one," or, the "whole that is greater than the sum of its parts." When the spirochete enters the protist and stays there, a cosmos is formed within the chaosmos. The unconscious body has no parts, no members, no groups of any kind. It would be more accurate to say that the unconscious is a plurality of bodies and every encounter is consumate; the sex is always promiscuous.

In Civilization And Its Discontents, Freud draws an analogy beteen the "Eternal City" Rome and the "sphere of the mind." He uses the analogy to illuminate his idea that in the development of the civilized person nothing is ever eliminated, but rather everything is present as in the archaeological layers of the site of the Eternal City. The primitive is not missing from the site of the civilized person, only buried beneath the surface of the present.

The development of the person leads to the death of the person. The logic of development is the logic of death in life. At each stage of development someone is buried. When the surface of the present vanishes the whole person is buried, the process of development ceases. The whole picture is only visible an instant before it vanishes. The person is a magician of disappearance.

There is an idea that this process of development is life itself, that there is no life without death in it. The idea is that the structure of the living body is spherical, the living body is a sphere, a synergetic structure with an "inside" and an "outside." I am an expanding bubble man, destined to pop. But there is, Oh Monks, another idea.

There is a body which lives on the surface of the spherical body, much like fleas on the dog. The superfical body has no knowledge of the sphere, no knowledge of a relationship between "inside" and "outside." This other body, or, the body of the "other," covers the surface of the sphere like a woven blanket, a living blanket. The network of relationships that compose this living blanket are all horizontal; there is no vertical dimension. I am thinking that Deleuze and Guattari are explorers of this superfical body.

It is uncanny how many of these posts are tapped out on Sunday mornings, especially following a hiatus. It is Sunday morning on Harris Creek and I am in my sixty-fifth year, an "old man." Just as when I discovered myself as a bouncing baby boy, and then saw myself as a "young man", I cannot fix any specific time or place of this becoming old. There are gaps which memory cannot traverse. These identities are stacked in layers and only the top layer is exposed to the light of day. The baby boy and the young man lie buried in memory. "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there."

Each stage of myself buries an earlier stage, until the last stage. The final stage is the completion of the process; identification ceases. The process is the process of finding and losing myself. "I was found, but now I'm lost." The old man in the mirror is a loser; he losing the very idea of himself. What and where is the lost and found?

It begins with breathing. "From the point of view of prana, breath, there exists nothing which is not food." Love's Body. 166. Breathing is eating and elimination; incoming and outgoing. I exist as a kind of by-product of the process. I am the man in the middle. First, the "world-mothering air", and then her milk, and then I learn to bite.

This movement, in and out, is coitus; genital intercourse is the form of eating/ being eaten. The mouth and the food are organs of incorporation; you become what you eat even as that which you eat becomes you. The genital body eats itself; autophagy.

There is, oh monks, a last breath; the process is terminal. In taking my last breath I lose consciousness of myself. But this conscious process, this eating/being eaten, this breathing in and out, does not operate in a vacuum. It operates within the other process, the unconscious process. Death is the reimursion of the body of consciousness into the unconscious body, the dissolution of the corporate organization back into "the body without organs."

It all depends on a point-of-view. The difference between a good and a bad outcome is the difference of point-of-view. There is never just one point-of-view; the minimum is two. Zero is the fulcrum; the point at which there are no views. The points-of view emerge as positive and negative pairs, as in, +1 and -1. For every profit there is a loss. The idea of profiting all the way to heaven, is fantastic.

To have a point-of-view is to be in debt; a point-of-view is borrowed. My identity is on loan; it will be reclaimed at some as yet inderminant point in the future. The same is true of the body that I move in. To say that identity is borrowed is to say that its duration is finite. "What profit in the gains of the world, if the profiteer, lose his soul?" Something is lost at the beginning; to gain a point- of -view is to lose equilibrium.

Zero is the source and ground of the paired numbers. The unidentifiable is the source of paired indentities; identity is disequilibrius, the scale is always tipped. A positive and a negative point-of-view are irreconcilable. And so it is with the creditor and the debtor; the budget is never actually balanced; somebody always owes somebody. What is missing at ground-zero is the scale.