How am I to refer to that forgotten experience, that experience which preceded myself? All of this reading/writing began after I became myself, after I saw myself reflected in the mirror. How am I to read/write that experience which preceded the experience of becoming a reader/writer? Whatever I may read into it or write about it, distorts it.

The source of writing is writing itself; it is not born from what preceded it. Learning to read and write translates one experience into another, it overcodes the experience preceding it. It is like plugging the dream into an interpretive machine. The interpretation replaces the dream with itself; it situates the dream with respect to itself.

Each technology that the body of experience plugs into incorporates it; you are what you eat. Reading/writing is technology. Through all the unpluggings and repluggings the body of experience remains inaccessible to the technology. The body of knowledge is always and only a translation of the body of experience; consciousness casts the body of experience into unconsciousness.

Perhaps it is the memory of birth that is the source of our human fear of death. What we fear is separation. What I desire is containment; I desire to be contained and protected from something outside my sphere. I live inside a protective bubble; the bubble is my mother, or, the other. To separate from my bubble is to lose myself; to lose my mother or the other is to lose myself.

In paradise the bubble is free; after the fall you have to work for it, you have to construct it and maintain it. I was expelled from the garden of my delight, and now I must plant and weed, and protect my garden from the chaos that is always just beyond the border, just beyond my bubble. Myfamily is mybubble in reality; the family of man; the species is familial. We are all mother/father/sister/brother.

Death is separation from myfamily, another fall from another bubble; the catastrophe repeated. Do I fall into another bubble or do I, this time, fall into the wilderness outside all bubbles?

The connection precedes the separation; it's Eros, then Thanatos. Eros is the god of symbiosis, the desire of two bodies to live together, one inside the other such that they constitute a "genuine two-in-one." This joining, this entering and holding, occurs in the midst of bodies that remain unjoined. These two that constitute a corporate one, were, previous to their joining, two of many. There is, oh Monks, a living body composed of many who are not united, a body with no center, and thus no horizon. What is the experience of this living body? Show me the face you had before you were conceived.

The two bodies that are joined in love are stuck together till death do them part. A body of experience that is a manyness is shrunk down to a body of experience that is a foursome. Desire is confined to moving in and out, expelling and being expelled. Desire is caught in a feedback loop. The impersonal representation of the oedipus complex is the nuclear cell.

We are always forming unions, abandoning them, and forming new unions, always coupling, always copulating. Eros is Thanatos; join and separate, join and separate, until . . . . Paradise leads inevitably to the fall as conception leads to birth. The fall from paradise is traumatic, one never gets over the wound, and yet there is this compulsion to repeat it. The way out is the way in is the way out and the way forward is the way backward is the way forward.

The family fantasy obfuscates the memory of the birth trauma. Every mother and father are survivors of the catastrophe; they lived through it long enough to reproduce it; the new born infant is the sacrifice to the fantasy. We would not repeat it if the trauma were not hidden. The family body and by extension the collective human body is a substitute for the womb. There is no way back to the original; you must survive long enough to perpetuate the substitute; support your Alma mater.

Step right up; I have what you want. Well not exactly, but we are talking reality here. I can only say it is a fucking good facsimile. Oh yeah, it is temporary; you will need to come back and see me again, and bring some coin. I need a sacrifice to keep the product coming. The real thing is a substitute, but it's the only game in town.

It begins with conception; conception leads to perception; show me the money. The fetus cannot remain in the womb of its conception; it must come out of the water and into the cosmos; the pre-natal situation is the prefiguration, the prehistory. The crime has already been committed, the debt is already due. Birth follows conception like day follows night; "Night is first of all."

A bi-sexual union implies a separation of the sexes; paradise is a crime against the reality principle; separation pays the debt incurred in the original union. It is an entry and embrace that sets the play in motion.

Somewhere in Synergetics Buckminster Fuller writes, " humans are born absolutely ignorant." But ignorance is still experience. The new born body of experience remembers a timeless space within which there was no need to know; memory precedes knowledge. We can only know this space in its absence. The surgery has always already been performed.

What was that experience like, that separation from mybody? What was it like to be pushed through the birth canal, tightly confined yet being expelled? What was the experience of emerging from the dark warmth of water, through a tunnel and then bursting above the surface of the water and out into the light gasping for air? To play the game, to be in the play, I must forget the experience of its beginning.

Birth is a traumatic experience, an experience that we have covered in a shroud of fantasy. The fantasy is the attempt to heal the wound, to end the anxiety. The attempt is to re-create the situation as it was before birth but in reality. But the object never heals the wound; the anxiety remains. The reality principle demands the separation of the "genuine two-in-one." The reality principle demands anxiety. I live with it.