Human desire is ambivalent, which is to say bi-polar. The whole body of experience is ambivalent, one of attraction and repulsion, love and hate. The spiritual project is to cure the body of the disease of ambivalence, to make it possible for a subject to love an object without simultaneously hating it.

In Totem and Taboo Freud writes that "the psychic impulses of primitive man possesed a higher degree of ambivalence than is found at present among civilized human beings." Taboo is the manifestation of this profound conflict of desire; the taboo object is both "holy and unclean," both gold and shit. The fantasy of alchemy is to turn the shit into gold. The fantasy of chemistry is to turn desire into energy. Civilization manifests this fantasy. It is the fantasy of historical progess; "where there was id, let there be ego."


If I see that this wish to eliminate ambivalence is, in reality, impossible, how am I affected? If I read the signs to say that disease is incurable, do I, in reality, cease trying to discover the cure? Each morning I awaken here on Harris Creek, enmeshed in the fantasy of history, and I play the game, like a dog chasing his tail.