At what point did the suspicion arise? There must be some moment in the story where the main character first detects in himself a suspicion that he is being deceived; that his parents and all the other grown-ups are not telling him the truth. Or, perhaps he was suspicious from the very beginning of the story, that is, in the imagination of the author, in which case there is no point within the story at which the suspicion first arises. So I cannot finally say whether I became suspicious at some point in my life, or, whether I was born suspicious.

If one is suspicious one must investigate, get to the bottom of things ( must be an anal characteristic ). The fantasy involves the idea that certain authorities are keeping certain information hidden, so as to deceive me. Paranoia is "seeing through." So the character is less like a detective and more like a mental patient who suspects that the staff and the all the doctors which constitute his asylum are crazy, but "crazy like a fox."

Social order is always and only confined to "the green zone." The whole is always and only a mess and there is no possibility whatsoever of the part incorporating the whole. A body of law implies an outlaw; you can't have one without the other. It is Saturn's Day on Harris Creek.

Every agenda implies a hidden agenda. Freud is the master of unfolding the hidden agenda. There are certain desires within the body as a whole that a part of the body denies. The "whole that is greater than the sum of its parts" is constrained by that net of social imperatives called morality. The idea is that the whole body is a body of wild, socially destructive desires, desires which must be bound up in a set of rules. The set of rules is what governs the whole wild body.

There is a resistance within the body as a whole to being governed, a desire to be free of the constraints of morality, the "chains of reason." This is the agenda which, if the corporate body is to persist in time/space must always be hidden. It is the wild body that the tribal circle keeps at bay; all of the body outside the sphere is hidden.

Denial is protection; I deny my desires in order to protect myself from the wild body. The wild body is the unconscious body; there is no protection. If you build a wall to keep it outside, you find it coming at you from inside. But build we must if the species is to survive.

Last night I saw the most extraordinary program on American Experience. The title was The Boy in the Bubble, a documentary of a boy, born without an immune system, who grew to the age of twelve confined to the interior of a plastic bubble that served as a substitute for the missing immune system. The work was a recording of "real" events, and yet I can't get over the sense of its being an absurdist film; the participants had so obviously been cast. The Bubble Boy's Mother is too good to be real, as are the Three Mad Scientists --- two men and a woman --- who conceive, construct, and finally desert the boy and the bubble.

A record of "real events" or not, for me the viewer/reader, the work was symbolic theater. The bubble is a substitute, a metaphor in relation to the immune system. Each of us is a bubble boy; the immune system is a substitute, a metaphor in relation to the bubble. The boy was conscious, and as he got older, painfully so, that he existed inside a bubble, separated by this thin transparent film, from the world outside the film. The people outside the bubble were all profoundly unconscious of their own bubbles.

Bubbles and immune systems are designed to prevent the disorganization of the organism, the collapse of the ego/super-ego. The organism is continuously under attack by germs whose penetration of the boundary, of that thin layer of skin, between inside and outside, dissolves the distinction. Insofar as I am real, I am the distinction.

Every reader needs a womb to read in; some enclosure of solitude which protects the reader, temporarily, from the consequences of the Reality Principle. Before your mother is your Mother, she is a womb. In the absence of this protected space there no space to read in; no place protected from the social gaze.

The Reality Principle is the Dominance Principle. The parent dominates the child in the same way that reality dominates the unreal; the same way that conceptual thought dominates imagination. Absent this domination the corporate body does not survive. The corporate body is the body of reality, a four-dimensional body, a body in which depth perception dominates imagination. And so it is that the body seeks refuge from the dominance of conceptuality, in a space sealed off from the Law, an imaginary space that is at once the reader and the womb. The dreamspace of sleep is one such space, and the space of reading/writing is another.

Why is dominance necessary? Why is it necessary that the species orginate and survive? Is imagination dependent upon a body of thought?