In a symbolic sense, eating is equivalent to sexual intercourse; both are acts of mutual incorporation. The corporate body is a body in coitus, a synergetic body, a "whole that is greater than the sum of its parts." One part is always eating and one part is always being eaten; one part is always conceiving and one part is always being concieved. In the perception of the object is the incorporation of the subject; to kill is to be killed.

How to proceed in the midst of such a nightmare. Repression, or, the conscious identification with a part of the whole. For the action to proceed one actor must play the part of the one who eats and the other must play the part of the sacrificial victim. But the two parts are not, in actuality, apart; they constitute one body. Partial consciousness is necessarily unconscious of this fact. Within the corporate body desire hides from itself.

Harris Creek is frozen over this morning, a great silver-white reflector of the blinding light of our collective Sun God.

Energy-synergy is abstraction; desire is experience. Concepts devoid of emotion cannot describe experience. "Holy dread" is the experience of tensegrity, the experience of the process of incorporation. A nuclear system manifests emotion as well as concepts. The same may be said of the body without systems. It is the emotion that interests me; the abstract is only useful insofar as it elucidates my emotions. Why does my anal sphincter tighten when I think I have lost something?

Emotional polarity is "holy dread"; attraction and repulsion; love and fear. The emotional poles are experienced simultaneously. The nuclear body, the genital organization constitutes an emotional double-bind. Expression is repression and the slow return of the repressed. The current of desire than runs between the genders and between the generations is ambivalent. The Oedipus complex is an emotional tensegrity structure.

"By conventional arithmetic, one triangle plus one triangle equals two triangles. But in association as left helix and right helix, they form a six-edged tetrahedron of four triangular faces. This illustrates an interference of two events impinging at both ends of their actions to give us something very fundamental; a tetrahedron, a system, a division of Universe into inside and outside." Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking. 4.

The Oedipal triangle is in reality a Oedipal Tetrahedron. The human family is a system, a division of the whole cloth into inside and outside. The process is coded in the double helix of the human genome. Systematic conceptuality is a process, an operation, which divides the whole body into parts; the parts always come in pairs, a bi-sexual parent and a bi-sexual child. The corporate body, the conceptual body, is a polarized body, a body whose integrity depends upon tension, or, disequilibrium. Taboo expresses the experince; taboo means "holy dread".

So I will leave you (who?), this bright cold morning on Harris Creek, in the ambivalence of our social situation.

The division into genders is the division into generations. The difference between "inside" and "outside" is the difference between "past" and "future". What was inside will be outside; you become what you eat and since each part is incorporating the other the difference is perpetuated.

"Identification, introjection, incorporation, is eating. The oldest and truest language is that of the mouth: the oral basis of the ego. Even in seeing there is an active process of introjection: perception is partaking of what is perceived (Fenichel); we become what we behold (Blake)." Norman O. Brown, Love's Body. 165.

Eating is at once elimination; introjection is projection. To make space within for the good means spatting out the bad. A part is kept and a part is eliminated; its nothing but parts, nothing but roles in a family drama. What we call "life" is the process of extracting and extruding parts from the whole cloth. The process, however, is terminal, and that, my brothers and sisters, is the good news from Harris Creek this sun-filled Sunday in February.

It so happens that I have experienced that Proustian moment, when her face, emerges from the sea of faces. To fall in love, is to feel as if you have found your missing part. As long as we are not in love, some part is missing. The project is to remain in love until death do us part. But it is an illusion, isn't it? If we lower our gaze and look between our legs, we see that despite the marriage, a part is missing. Nothing is born of the married couple that is not partial.

Something missing --- a social body depends upon that. There is no difference between "inside" and "outside" or "past" and "future" unless some part is missing. If some part is not missing there are no parts. Hunger is the function of an empty stomach and it is precisely the empty tank that fuels the corporate project.

Love is a fall, a fall from the normal waking experience of my partiality. To remain in love would be to end my four dimensional experience. The fulfillment of my desire would be the death of me. In reality love, like hunger, is transitory. The desire that is the social body, the ego body, is a negation of fulfillment, of wholeness. We desire to eat rather than to be full. A Sunday sermon from Harris Creek.