Saturday, March 15, 2008

It all begins when one cell enters another cell and stays there. What begins as a gourmandizing encounter becomes a love affair. Lynn Margulis refers to the relationship that ensues between the two previously free-moving bodies as symbiotic. In fantasy, the relationship is that of mother and child, the original corporate body, the genuine two-in-one. The child is to the mother as the nucleus is to the cell; the two are interdependent and inseparable; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Now, is it mother and child or is it father and penis?

Prokarotes do no relate to each other as nucleus and container. In a microcosmic world nothing is inside anything else. Each encounter is a consumate encounter; nothing is left over. There is no center because there is no gravity; the relationship between the cells is lateral, not verticle. In short, the microcosm is timeless. In a timeless world the human family does not exist.

The time/space continuum is the nuclear world. But there is, O Monks, a world without nucleus. The human experience includes both worlds; human consciousness is nuclear, as the human unconscious is non-nuclear. We find the unconscious process in our wit, our slips of the tongue, our diseases, and our dreams.


Friday, March 14, 2008

There is no human mother or father who is not a child; there is no original combined-parent. The unconscious microcosm is not a parent; the primal scene is a preconscious fantasy. When the light of consciousness switches on the whole family is just there, mom, pop, and the kids. The family is the engine of production; the dynamic relationship between the genders and the generations is the play itself.

The unconscious process generates nothing; its movements are all lateral. The generator, the gentital organ, the gen does not incorporate the unconscious process, rather, through mutual incorporation between the members of the genital organization, the genital body seals itself off from the unconscious process. Consciouness is an immune system.

Our knowledge of the unconscious process comes to us only with great resistance; the movement of consciousness is a resistance movement. The tribal circle describes the mothering womb; the hidden agenda is to remain unborn. "The exodus is an initiation; the wandering is a rite of passage from Troy to New Troy, from England to New England. From the mother to the mother; we are getting nowhere." Love's Body. 41. There are things we do not want to know.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Freud describes the unconscious process as being primary and the pre-conscious/conscious process as being secondary. Consciousness involves an operation performed upon an already existing process; a primal process. The body of consciousness is a video camera moving through a liquid medium, like a fish. The body of consciousness translates the liquid as earth, air, water, and fire; the analogical is digitalized.

The primary unconscious process neither begins nor ends, it just morphs. The secondary conscious process begins and ends; wandering is translated as a journey; it began then and there and it ends here and now. The completeness, the wholeness of the conscious body is a span of time; birth and death. But the primal process keeps on dreaming before, during, and after that creation, that artifice, that story.

The unconscious microcosmic body is not an anti-body in relation to the conscious macrocosmic body. It is rather like the womb within which our hero either sleeps or wakes. The child is never actually outside the womb, he/she just thinks she/he is.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

If we are to take the human as a fantastic animal, which a strict empiricism demands, then human experience is both nuclear and non-nuclear, both conscious and unconscious. The whole body is more inclusive than consciousness perceives. The body of human experience is inclusive of an experience of story ( A fantastic nuclear system ) and dream ( A non-nuclear system ). Story is dream interpretation.

"The processes of the system Ucs are timeless; i.e. they are not ordered temporally, are not altered by the passage of time, in fact bear no relation to time at all. The time-relation also is bound up with the work of the system Cs." Collected Papers, Vol. IV. 119. The space of time is story space.

"With genetic exchange possible only during reproduction, we are locked into our species, our bodies, and our generation. As it is sometimes expressed in technical terms, we trade genes 'vertically' --- through generations --- wheras prokaryotes trade them 'horizontally' --- directly to their neighbors in the same generation. The result is that while genetically fluid bacteria are funtionally immortal, in eukaryotes, sex becomes linked with death." Microcosmos. 93. Sex and death and rock and roll.

The third and fourth dimensions are the same dimension; to percieve depth is to perceive time. A four-dimensional system creates volume, a difference between inside and outside. The difference is a polar difference and time is the polar shift, the charge of desire spiraling inward and outward simultaneously, and in this ambivalence the volume is perpetuated, or, maintained. The human story is four-dimensional.



Monday, March 10, 2008

There is to me a striking analogy between the microcosmos composed of bacteria and the unconscious mental process presented in Freud's writings. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan have written a book titled, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years Of Microbial Evolution, in which I read a revealing passage comparing the only two types of living cells on earth, prokaryotes, or, cells without a nucleus, and eukaryotes, or, nucleated cells.

"People and other eukaryotes are like solids frozen a specific genetic mold, whereas the mobile, inter-changing suite of bacterial genes is akin to a liquid or gas. If the genetic properties of the microcosm were applied to larger creatures, we would have a science-fiction world in which green plants could share genes for photosynthesis with nearby mushrooms, or where people could exude perfumes of grow ivory by picking up genes from a rose of a walrus." 89.

Hum, sounds like a dream. Freud writes: "The kernal of the system Ucs consists of instinct-presentations whose aim is to discharge their cathexis; that is to say, they are wish impulses. These instinctual impulses are co-ordinate with one another, exist independently side by side, and are exempt from mutual contradiction." And this: "Intensity of cathexis is mobile in a far greater degree in this than in the other systems. By the process of displacement one idea may surrender to another the whole volume of its cathexis; by that of condensation it may appropriate the whole cathexis of several other ideas." Collected Papers, Vol. IV. 119.

The microcosm and the unconscious are non-nuclear systems; the macrocosm and consciousness are nuclear systems. The puzzle that remains is relationship between the two.