A bright orange sun rising over Harris Creek this morning. The geese seem especially glad to see and feel it.

The body that is, before and after the projector switch is on, is whole in the sense that it is not composed of parts. The whole body is the production of many producers; it is an autopoietic machine, a machine that produces itself. There is no product other than the production itself and there is no raw material. We are speaking here of the unconscious, or perhaps more aptly the aconscious, body of experience.

The macrocosm is a social body; the microcosm is an asocial body, a body without societies. The "little people" do not divide themselves into groups; you can eat and/or have sex with whoever you meet; no one is taboo, no one is included, and no one is excluded; there are neither genders nor generations. The macrocosm is a projection of the microcosm.

Well that is about enough for a Saturday morning. My social duties call me.

Symbolically speaking, the penis is the nucleus and the vagina is the cell that surrounds or contains the penis. The penis is the part bitten off and retained; genital organization is nuclear organization. The body that I call my own is not a whole body, but rather a part. So my conscious experience is partial. I am not a whole body, but a part, an organ that only constitutes a whole body, in coitus with another part.

The play is the whole body; the players are the parts, who in mutual manducation, perpetuate the play. But there is no experience of the play itself, no experience of wholeness. A corporate body is a legal fiction, defined by the beginning and the end of genital action. The " whole that is greater than the sum of its parts" is never experienced. Genital action reproduces genital action, that is to say, nuclear action is nuclear reaction.

When the story ends the body experiences its wholeness. When the genital action ceases, there are no parts to play; the players and play all disappear. The body is whole unless, or until, it is divided into parts.

The social body is a nuclear body; all the action is a nuclear reaction. The people establish a common identity by incorporating a common ancestor; the identity of each is established in the totem feast. The nucleus of the corporate body is a part bitten off and retained inside the body. The super-ego is the nucleus of the ego body. The social body is the ego body. To live in the absence of society is to live in the absence of the ego-structure, to live unconsciously.

There is, O Monks, an unconscious body from which the conscious body arises like an island from the sea. The awakened conscious body is a social body, which is to say a body that manifests a polar difference, a difference between "inside" and "outside." The asocial, non-nuclear, unconscious body does not manifest this difference. The unconscious body is a body without the organs of reproduction. Genital organization is social organization. The asocial and unconscious body is "polymorphously perverse," a sexual experience that is whole rather than partial.

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.