I came to Freud's writings relatively late in my life as a reader. I was led to them by a book written by Norman O. Brown, titled Love's Body. In the multiple readings of this marvelous book, I read my way into another way of reading, different than the previous way. Reading Love's Body taught me how to read the conscious and unconscious process which constitutes any story that a human might tell. If you are not of two minds, you can't read Love's Body.

Freud' writings are an analysis of the human story, writ both large and small. Apes in clothing came to him, asking him to analyze the story they were about to tell him about this experience of being not an ape, but rather of being a character in someone's fantasy. Freud doesn't ask the patient to dsrobe. What Dr. Freud recovers in the fantasies of his patients is the hidden agenda, the unconsious process.

In my experience I am not now, nor have I ever been, an ape. I am not saying, that from some abstract point of view I might not appear to be an ape in clothing, or that such a point does not reflect reality, I am just saying that has not been my experience. I was born into a fantasy, and I am myself fantastic; a character in a story, and a writer/reader of that same story. The story is about more than consciousness will allow.

My experience is both rational and irrational, both conceptual and imaginal. These ways of experiencing have always been simultaneous, and I cannot say where one way is not the other way. The separation of these experiences is the process called abstraction. An empiricist is interested in the experience and is not fooled by the abstractions. The science of the abstract is not the science of the experience, and neither is the art of the abstract the art of the experience. Psychoanalytics is a science/art of human experience.

Physics emerges from the experience of a physicist. The physicist's experience did not begin with physics, it began in his/her mother's womb; that is where human experience always begins. Indeed, our budding physicist was totally ignorant of the laws of physics upon emerging from the womb into an experience of reality. The human experience of reality includes the experience of the unreal. The unreal experience is fantastic. It includes a cast of fictional characters called "Mother", "Father", "Daughter", "Son", and it includes a body made up a mouth, an anus, a penis/breast, and a vagina. The organs of desire simultaneously produce the experience of fantastic reality.

When imagination is subjected to the laws of reality, it becomes fantasy. A story that includes a king, a queen, a prince, and a princess is reality represented in images. The laws of the story are the laws of reality, and so the laws of Psyche' are mirrored by the laws of Physis. But there is, O Monks, an experience of the dissolving of the law.

Bright sunshine on Harris Creek this first Sunday morning in March. The rising has begun. Bulbs buried in Winter's womb have extended a part of themselves, through Mother's dense matter, out into the air and light; a part of the Narcissus remains underground, in the darkness of the womb. The human tragedy of Narcissus, lies in his unconsciousness of that part of his own body that remains unborn. Narcissus takes the part as the whole; pars pro toto.

Narcissus is "a man of letters." It is from the womb of the human voice that Narcissus seeks deliverance; Narcissus mistakes his own voice as the voice of another. Narcissus marks that part of the story in which our hero discovers himself in the mirror.

"He did not know what he was looking at, but was fired by the sight, and excited by the very illusion that deceived his eyes. Poor foolish boy, why vainly grasp at the fleeting image that eludes you? The thing that you are seeing does not exist: only turn aside and you will lose what you love. What you see is but the shadow cast by by your reflection; in itself it is nothing. It comes with you, and lasts while you are there; it will go when you go, if go you can." Ovid, Metamorphoses.

Here is the reader/writer, a reflection in the mirror, someone seen rather than heard or touched. Narcissus appears ghost-like from the left hemisphere of the brain. How to get out of a trap that I keep setting? " . . . it will go when you go, if go you can."