Solitude is the absence of society. A hermit is one who lives in that absence. Perhaps I am not a hermit, but I aspire to be in the absence of society. Is society an existential necessity? Or is there an asocial world, a world where the social structure does not exist, a protean world of undefined experience?

A social body is a "whole that is greater than the sum of its parts." It is a body of organs, which define a difference between "inside" and "outside". "You are either with us or against us." Here then, is the origin of social identity. "The distinction between self and not-self is made by the childish decision to claim all that the ego likes as 'mine' and to repudiate all that the ego dislikes as 'not-mine'." Norman O. Brown, Love's Body. 142. The whole social body is polarized. To identify myself with the good society, is to repudiate myself as the bad society. This seems to me to place the social body in a bit of a "double-bind."

And so here I sit this misty morning on Harris Creek, all bound up in the knot of myself, and trying to untie that knot through this writing.