The world gets complicated, and therefore interesting, when I try to locate myself. My natural inclination is to say that I occupy my body, rather like the driver of a car, except in a much more intimate sense. I would say that I felt the pleasure and the pain of this vehicle that I occupy. In other words, in my experience, myself and my body are inseparable, but not identical.

I can imagine my body being born without me. Let's say I was thirty seconds late getting to the station. My skeleton, and organs and flesh all emerge into four dimensions, but I remain behind, in the station, imagining that I am panting. I imagine my body doing just fine without me, adapting and progessing through a space of time, without all the impediments, that I would present, were I there. I imagine my body moving through the real world, eating, fucking, reproducing other little bodies, and gradually, over some length of time, beginning to malfunction and breakdown, until finally it stops moving, and all the parts begin to decompose.

Wouldn't my body perform much better in a real world without me?

I imagine myself in a television show. My character in the show remembers himself living in a world before there were any television shows, but that memory is scripted by the television show. I remember living in a world before television, but now, it seems, that myself and that pre-television world were actually being televised; I just couldn't see it at the time. It has been a television show from the beginning.

Well naturally my character is shocked by the revelation. I have always thought there is something more to myself than an electric image flickering in some metatube. But I have to say that there is a certain resonance in the idea of the universe as television. I wonder what happens when the plug is pulled?

Stay tuned.

Every contest is covered with a veil of deceit. The lie is that winning equals living and losing equals dying. The participants in the contest incorporate the whole world within the confines of their self-made arena. The contest is the thing, but there is also, O Monks, the no-thing beyond the walls of the contest. There is a whole world of experience that is not confined within the family drama; there is a whole body beyond the corporate genital organization.

Is it a necessity that I experience my dying as losing a contest with an adversary, an enemy? And is it a necessity that I experience my living as that same contest? I can imagine a world without my penis but I can't conceive it. Dying then becomes an imaginal process; to move out of the contest is to move toward imagination. I am weary of the contest.

Incorporation is killing; to kill the other is to incorporate the other. Incorporation divides the other into food and shit; the part that is food becomes me, the other becomes shit.

"Killing is always inside the family (Oedipal). In the wisdom of primitive war, enemy blood is kindred blood; blood becomes kindred blood by being shed. Whatever is killed becomes the father. Head hunting. An enemy must be killed for a boy to grow up; a head must fall. The boy kills his father in the person of an enemy. And then the slain enemy becomes his guardian spirit; the enemy head (super-ego) presides over the house; love your enemy." Love's Body. 163.

There is no identity established except by killing. To kill the other is to divide the other into food and shit; this digestive process establishes the identity of the killer. "Hey now, all you killers, put your lights on...."

There is this perpetual struggle for control as a means of maintaining my identity. A wakeful, rational, four-dimensional body has to struggle against delerium. It as if all my waking energy were directed toward resisting the pull of some drain, as if all my words were written in resistance to the call of the silence. The drain ends at equilibrium.

The imagination of night-time's dream is still infected with conceptuality; sleep is not death, rather, sleep mocks death. The ego does not dissolve during sleep, it merely takes its waking world to Hades. The sleeping consciousness is a relaxation of the tension of wakeful consciousness; the rigid space of time becomes plastic as the perceptual body loses its grip on reality. It is during the dream time that the body recovers the energy to resurrect itself. But does this actually go on forever, or, does the cycle between waking and sleeping actually end at equilibrium?

At equilibrium there are no dimensions, nothing to measure. So, what's left?

Writing/reading is both the means of confinement and the means of escape. Having stories read to me as a child, provided me with an escape from what was being written on my body. Then later, when I learned to read, I discovered this solitary world that is a mere reflection of the world written on my body. This world of solitude is necessariy sealed off from the public; while in it one escapes the confinement of what is written on that public body.

Escape is temporary and dominated by the confinement of the public body. In my experience there has been no permanent escape. Is there another approach, or, retreat? Symbolism recognizes that the public body and the solitary body are co-terminus and everywhere contiguous. A symbolic writing/reading throws the solitary and the public together and thus creates another world of experience. It is the seal between the two worlds that symbolic language dissolves. In this other symbolic world the difference between fact and fiction is ambiguous.

It is a grey Sunday morning on Harris Creek, somewhere between the light and dark.