It is only war that keeps the corporate body from disintegrating; the integrated body is a body at war with itself. Norman writes: "There is only one psyche, in relation to which all conflict is endopsychic, all war intestine. The external enemy is (part of) ourselves, projected; our own badness, banished. The only defense against an internal danger is to make it an external danger; then we can fight it; and are ready to fight it, since we have succeeded in deceiving ourselves into thinking it is no longer us." Love's Body. 162.

The conflict is all in the family, a conflict between genders and between generations. The genital organization of the body is the body as organized conflict. The corporate body disintegrates when the conflict ends. I believe it was William James who once said, "Society would rot without war." Politics is civilized warfare; the physician does not cure disease, but rather maintains it as long as humanly possible. Politicians do not want to resolve the conflict; they live on it.

Does anybody really want the conflict to end?

The "biological organism" is abstracted from an abstraction. Abstraction is repression. The dream is never absent, rather, it is just beyond the horizon of waking consciousness. The whole corporate body is simultaneously composing and decomposing; one hemisphere is blinded by the light. To be conscious, that is, to "see by the light of day," is to be unconscious of the dark. Repression, or, abstraction is a response to the fear of the world of darkness. We are, all of us in the play, afraid of the dark.

The Hero''s mother speaks: "Child,/how could you cross alive into this gloom/at the world's end?---No sight for living eyes; great currents run between, desolate waters,/the Ocean first, where no man goes a journey/without ship's timber under him." The Odyssey.

It is the contest, the agon, the drama that is the history of Western Civilization, that is the immune system, the tribal circle, that protects the people from the night. The enemy is a scapegoat, or, a co-conspirator; the war is the defense.

I am awake, seated at my desk, looking out the window as the sun is rising over Harris Creek. There are identities between that world that is conjured when I read a work of fiction, and the real world in which I find myself sitting and reading. Both worlds are storied, both contain characters enacting a drama. The difference is that the imagined world is not the world in which I eat, shit, and fuck. My experience of reality is one of being in the play, rather than imagining it.

Upon awakening the drama is absorbed by the perceptual body, a body conceived in four dimensions. Then, upon falling into sleep, the drama drains from the real body back into the dream from which it emerged with the rising of the sun. The dream, like the world of fiction, is unreal. You see what can happen to a story when the author falls asleep?

Images continuously exist; stories and reality come and go. The real body, the body that I call my own, is mortal in the same sense that light is mortal. There is no light in the absence of the dark.

I am sitting at my desk before this liquid crystal writing machine, watching the geese as they traverse a patch of ice still clinging to the surface of Harris Creek. They walk as I would walk were I treading on thin ice. I wonder what would be the effect of removing the author from the play; no one off-stage, behind the scene.

Thomas Pynchon is as close to anonymous as an author could be. One is forced to read his books, as if he were them. What if we took it a step further, and erased the name? What if all the books were authorless and all the readers nameless?

Quinten Tarantino's Resevoir Dogs is an exploration of the violence of naming; the violence begins with the naming. The creation of the name precipitates the destruction of the name. But is it possible to read or write without naming? Is there any such thing as a non-violent story? Perhaps the corporate project, the ego project is the project of naming.

Solitude is a relative experience; one is never alone. Each of us is at minimum a family; we are each of us bi-sexual and bi-generational. There is the masculine me, the feminine me, the childish me and the parental me. In my solitude I constitute my own little family, a family that exists "inside" me, and not in the world "outside" me. I find myself in two worlds.

The difference between my experience of my internal family and my experience of my external family is that what is separated in the external family is unified in the internal family. I am a member of an external family and I am an internal family; I am that which I am a member of. Identity depends upon membership and to lose your membership is to lose your identity. That is at the heart of the fear. For me a question remains. Can I exist without an identity?

Why is it that the event that cannot happen is simultaneously the telos of desire and the greatest fear? “I never could accept the first step of the Genesis story: ‘In the beginning the earth was without form and void.’ That primary tabula rasa would have set a formidable problem in thermodynamics for the next billion years. Perhaps the earth never was any more a tabula rasa than is, a human zygote --- a fertilized egg.” Gregory Bateson, Mind And Nature. 5. Atonement is a conceptual impossibility; two is the minimum. If the egg is not fertile there is no egg. So why then “Holy Dread”?

Desire is ambivalent; systematic structure is asymmetrical. The elimination of the ambivalence is the elimination of desire--- equilibrium---the elimination of structure. It’s always and only attraction/repulsion, always and only genital, or, bi-sexual. It’s not Nirvana or Karmic Wheel, but a double helix. The dream is a fertile egg and waking is a tethered eye.