Hermitage on Harris Creek

2010-04-25T06:44:00.004-04:00

Sitting here in an early Sunday morning verdure of Spring on Harris Creek, the word "leaving" forms on my mind's lips. It has a double meaning, as in departing from and remaining in a place. When I take my leave, I will leave something here. I am remembering a book titled The City of the Dead, in which the dead occupy a place on the border of the wilderness so long as there is someone alive who remembers them. The living keep the dead in limbo until Judgement Day. That is the day when everyone leaves and none is left behind; that is the day the bubble bursts.

It is not easy to be rid of Oedipus. There is within the body of experience a desire to be rid of memory; to be rid of the chain. There is desire to escape the city and flee into the wilderness. But that desire finds itself confronted by the fear of that same wilderness and it is not a fear that is subject to "overcoming."

In Anti-Oedipus and a thousand plateaus Deleuze and Guattari speak of "lines of flight," of "becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible." In my slow and torturous reading of these books I am getting some new sense of the wilderness and of how one might experiment in re-entry.

2010-04-23T05:52:00.002-04:00

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.

2010-04-19T09:11:00.006-04:00

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?

2010-04-19T07:28:00.001-04:00

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.

2010-04-18T10:13:00.004-04:00

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.

2010-04-18T08:27:00.001-04:00

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.

2010-04-16T07:19:00.002-04:00

Let this be a warning to any reader who might stumble upon these writings: They are quackery. Empiricism is "ignorant and unscientific practice; quackery." Philosophically speaking, it is "the theory which regards experience as the only source of knowledge." The person tapping out these words in a liquid crystal space fancies him/herself an empiricist.

How can quackery impart any knowledge? Only a philosophy of quackery would claim itself a source of knowledge. I am no philosopher, nor was meant to be. These writings merely record a body of reading, a body that begins and ends with reading. The body of reading writes itself, using mybody to tap on the keys. It is a particular practice, with a particular beginning and end. There is no general knowledge to be had.

This search for the meaning of mylife, is a particular practice; I do it for myself. At some point I became obsessed with the meaning of mybody of experience. These writings are recordings of that obsession, of that necessarily "ignorant and unscientific practice." The record, of course, is open to reading. Quackery is a performance.

2010-04-11T07:54:00.002-04:00

" Show me the face you had before you were born." Does that original body have a face? Or do the faces emerge in the separation? There is no single face; the minimum is two; face and about face. Faces supply the recognition necessary to fantastic knowledge. The players show their faces to each other; as they face each other they recognize themselves. Fantastic knowlege is a knowledge of faces. The task is to read the faces facing me, in order that I know myface. The character that I write for myself is a reflexion of the other face facing me.

It is a drop dead beautiful Sunday morning on Harris Creek.

2010-04-06T19:01:00.006-04:00

The object of human desire is not real, but rather fantastic. The fantastic object cannot be found in a real world; technology cannot fulfill mydesire. The fantastic desire is to have and hold the object and simultaneously to be had and held by the subject. As reality slips away, the world outside myself is animated; objects desire. As the experience of reality begins to slide toward fantasy the techniques of reality lose their efficacy and science falls back under the spell of magic.

Science like magic is an attempt at resolving the fundamental ambivalence of human desire. "You are what you eat." It is a sex-change operation. Who's on top? In genital relationship, he becomes her as she becomes him. A nuclear relationship is a genital relationship; desire turned back upon itself in self-perpetuating coitus; it is in and out until the end of time. Is death the end of time?

2010-04-06T06:00:00.004-04:00

Myexperience is limited. With the exception of one LSD trip, myexperience has cycled between a more or less normal or common waking experience and the dream. The LSD trip has left an impression upon me. Not the details of the experience, but the fact that for some period of time, that seemed to me interminable, the reality principle was slipping and sliding all over the place. The experience is the world, all else is abstraction.

Every human experience bespeaks a corresponding world, and none of them is totally real. Reality is law and order, a successful, ongoing repression of the possibilities of experience. It insists on a fixed, or, eternal set of rules. To say that the repression is successful, is to say that its form continues to perpetuate itself in the face of the continuous possiblities of chaos.

As human experience, reality is a matter of consensus. Here the law is not abstract; corpus delicti. A system of rewards and punishments performed upon the embodiedself enforces a stable reality; it is pleasure and pain, or, the carrot and the stick. The collective body, the group, or tribe, perform the enforcements and sufferings of the law. Both police and criminal are enforcing the law. And so it is with the profession of healing.

Despite all the effort to enforce the law, it continues in human experience to slip and slide, like every night when I lay myself down to dream, or, if I were to drop a little acid, or suddenly find myself in the land of schizophenia. What holds us, protects us, simultaneously confines us within a self-perpetuating identity. Somewhere in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari write, "we are so sick of ourselves." Could it be that I will grow sick of myself and die?

2010-04-05T07:04:00.002-04:00

Freud says that dreams fulfill human wishes. What is it that I wish for that cannot be experienced while I am awake? What is about mydesire that renders it incompatible with reality? It is as if I can only experience mydesire in the dark.

The desires that Freud is referring to are the libidinal desires that flow between the genders and the generations. Libidinal desire contradicts itself, always and only ambivalent. Attraction is simultaneously repulsion; love is simultaneously fear. It is this ambivalence which the law will not allow in the light of day. The reality principle is the principle of contradiction; a real person cannot be ambivalent. Make up your mind. Do you love your father or do you want to kill him?

In the light of day it is either/or; you're either a good person or a bad person, or, a good person going bad or a bad person going good. A good person is rewarded and a bad person punished; that is how the law keeps them apart. The law does not allow that all the people be judged good, nor does it allow that all be judged bad. What the law demands is that one group of people play the part of good people, while another group of people play the part of bad people. The courtroom is the field of play, the stage upon which the agon is performed and a judgment made upon winners and losers.

The contest temporarily resolves the ambivalence of human fantasy. As long as the contest is on-going, my ambivalence is held at bay, resisted, repressed. For the judgement to be made the contest must come to an end. As the light of the law sinks over the western horizon and the dark returns, so does the ambivalence of mydesire.

2010-04-03T07:37:00.003-04:00

The economy of the body of fantasy is libidinal. Insofar as politics is fantastic, political economy is libidinal. Libidinal economics is an economics of dissatisfaction; hunger is the fuel. Bucky remarks somewhere in Synergetcs that "nature never pauses at equilibrium." Neither does the fantasy of myembodiedself. Neither genders nor generations can ever, in reality, be equal; the agreement is, "we agree to disagree, as our mutual existence depends upon it."

What myemodiedself abhors is not a vacuum, but being full. When the body is full, the agents of dissatisfaction dissolve, and I am such an agent. My desire demands that some object of my desire is always and only missing; there is always that ultimate pleasure that I can't afford.

Money is time is libidinal desire. The flow of libidinal desire is polarized, it flows back and forth between poles, never pausing at full satisfaction, never achieving "end pleasure." The origin of the desire is in the absence of the object of desire. I desired my mother when she was not there; I had to find her, I had to grasp her outside mybody in the real world.

My real mother is a substitute for what I lost at birth. I did not experience hunger until I was separated from her. In time I discover my father and my sister; where there were two, now there are four substitutes for what I lost when when I fell from satisfaction. Economics begins with the human family.

2010-03-31T06:41:00.004-04:00

"Between an irresistible force and an immovable object." Desire flows; the reality principle is the resistance to the flow; repression is resistance to the flow of desire. To get real is to repress desire; there is no unrepressed reality. To create order in the midst of chaos is repress the pointless, directionless, wild flow of desire. What I fear is not the void, but rather the wilderness of desire. The human family is the systematic protection from the wilderness of desire.

The members of the human family depend upon each other to maintain and perpetuate the boundary between the family body and the wilderness. It is not something once done and then complete, but a continuous, on-going process, or, project. There are continuous breaches of the fractal boundary, the wilderness continuously intrudes.

The wilderness abides while the family comes and goes. The fantastic organs stop working and the person falls apart. The death of the person is the death of the family; the person is always "mommy-daddy-me." What stops, starts again, and what starts, stops again. How do I approach this wilderness from which I came, and which I now sense approaching me?

2010-03-30T06:05:00.004-04:00

The body of fantasy is somewhere between the flow of unconscious desire and the eternal principles of reality. The body of fantasy lacks the definition of the real body; the difference between inside and outside and before and after is blurred. All of the opposing pairs which, in reality are clearly distinguished, remain in fantasy ambiguous; the vision of the fantastic body lacks clarity. Within the body of fantasy the separation of mother and child remains incomplete; the umbilical cord remains uncut.

I can't get real; reality remains out there somewhere beyond my technological grasp, somewhere beyond the clarity of my vision. The knowledge of the eternal principles of reality does not make me me real. I can shrink the fantastic body down to the dimensions of myembodiedself, but no further. I remain as I was when I was born, a monster in a real world.

If my monstrosity is incurable, how am I to proceed when I awaken from the dream? If I am not working on healing my disease, what do I do with my disease? Well, for one thing, I do this.

2010-03-28T06:51:00.003-04:00

Identification is participation, or, incorporation; an exchange between desire and reality. A fantastic cosmos is the product of this exchange. An objective observer does not identify with its observations. To invest myself in the objects of my perception, is to give them mydesire. I experience varying degrees of identification with those objects of perception in that world outside myembodiedself.

How does an organism, or, a complex of nuclear cells become a mother? The organs are not simply conceptual organs, they are fantastic organs, and the human body that is the whole made up of the organs is not simply perceivable. Mother and child are images not concepts; fantasy arises in the exchange between thought and imagination. The real does not become imaginary, it is imaginary at the origin. A theater cannot evolve from a factory.

The human body is monstrous, " deviating from the natural order; unnatural," a body that hallucinates a self. The organs that make up the body of the monster are fantastic. The mouth, the anus, the penis, and the vagina are fantastic organs; genital organization is ego organization, the organization of myembodiedself, the monstrosity that is me.

2010-03-26T07:57:00.005-04:00

The fantasy was already here when I arrived; the community of persons was already here, outside my mother's womb. I fell down a rabbit hole, as I recall, and, plop, found myself in the middle of the play. The I who fell was my mother and me. When I found her out here in the fantasy my part in the play began.

According to Freud there is a period in that initial post-partum development when the organs of the fantasy are not yet unifed in such a way as to contitute a whole person. Each organ is pursuing its own pleasure; "polymorphous perversity." It is in relationship with the community of whole persons that these organs of fantasy can learn to co-operate and, like magic, produce something called a person.

The community is the person; a whole person is made up of partial persons. Everything in reality is made of parts. Every real person is simultaneously a partial person; to be a whole person is to be part of a greater whole person. Once in the play there is no exit, through which a whole person can pass. To pass through the exit the person must fall apart. Thus, the play doesn't go on forever. At some point in the play the curtain comes down and the players and audience all go home to bed.

2010-03-23T08:53:00.005-04:00

Mybody and Myself are collaborators. The organism employs the desire of the mask, as the mask employs the organism to give it substance. Desire realized is nuclear energy; the real incorporates the fantasy. Nuclear energy fantasized is human desire; the fantasy incorporates the real. It is mutual cannibalism, or, symbiosis. The real, four-dimensional body, is not the origin of the fantastic body. The mask, or covering, and the structure it hangs on originate simultaneously. Human fantasy and the universe of reality, both, originate with a big bang.

A face is a mask that its wearer can't take off. The "organic thing", the real thing is faceless. A face is not perceived it is imagined. A human body is conceived with a face; the face is there at the origin, but inconceivable. The mask is superficial, two-dimensional; it covers the surface of the sphere. The faceless sphere is an abstraction; the abstract alone is real. In my experience the real has always been accompanied by the unreal.

2010-03-23T07:11:00.003-04:00

Mybody is real, myself is fantastic.

" Personality is persona, a mask. the world is a stage, the self a theatrical creation: 'The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, tho die: it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented.' The self does not belong to its possessor. ' He and his body merely provide the peg on which something of a collaborative manufacture will be hung for a time. The means for producing and maintaining selves do not reside inside the peg . . . . There will be a team of persons whose activity on stage in conjunction with available props will constitute the scene from which the performed character's self will emerge, and another team, the audience, whose interpretive activity will be necessary for this emergence.' " Love's Body. 90-91. Quoting: Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 252-253.

I arise in the thin air between other players, and an audience. By hanging myself on mybody I give myself substance, I realize the fantasy of myself; myself is a mask which covers mybody. Reality is mybody uncovered. " The means for producing and maintaining selves do not reside inside the peg. . . ." The fantasy does not emerge from the machinery of reality, rather the fantasy employs the machinery to provide the peg to hang itself on.

2010-03-22T06:11:00.002-04:00

With each rising from my bed of dreams I can link all those risings that preceded it. I remember yesterday's awakening which is separated from today's by last night's dream. I can, by focusing my awakened attention upon the task, look at each link in my chain of awakenings. I can remember only a certain number of links before the chain begins to blur. The chain of awakenings becomes a moving film strip and I remember only fragments of the film.

Between every remembered awakening there is a gap of forgetfulness. I cannot recall last night's dream let alone a film strip of past dreamings. Some people have a much greater capacity than I do to call their dreams up before them in the light of day, but this does not alter the fact that dreams resist remembrance. I cannot link them together as with the scenario of myself; I cannot remember myself from my dreams.

Sleep overcomes, it comes over mybody like the dream comes over myself. It is a covering that relaxes the demands of the reality principle. The womb is protection from reality. Dreaming is regression, a movement backward toward the origin of myembodiedself. Originally, I thought I was the world and the world was me and then, as things developed, I woke up and found myself in a real world.

2010-03-21T07:24:00.005-04:00

Like the tide I move in and out of wakefulness and dream. Every twenty-four hours this movement repeats itself. Each morning with the rising sun, I am reborn, born again from my mother's womb, carried out of the dream into the real world. Some desire that does not belong to me carries me out. Or is she pushing? Once out I must act; reality will not support passivity; the real world ain't your mama's womb. In reality the dreamer has to go to work.

I work because my mother has cast me out, or, because I felt that she was trying to smother me and I began working my way out of her now fatal embrace. Mybody and myself grow tired of work, and I begin to feel her pulling me back in. At some point of time within each twenty-four hour cycle, I cease working and fall back into the passivity of her embrace. No work is necessary to the dream.

We never completely separate from her who mothers us; we are tethered to mother's womb. Birth is always and only re-birth. The fantastic body is never fully realized; the fruits of my labor are temporary. We are homeless; there is no place to call home, neither in reality nor in the dream; we are compelled to keep moving, in and out.

2010-03-20T06:38:00.002-04:00

It is almost sunrise on Harris Creek, a hint of orange rising from the ink. The parents are the development of the child, an unfolding of what lay hidden in childish experience, a realization of that experience. The alchemist develops into the chemist; reality is what becomes of magic. What develops is, in time, enveloped, refolded, unrealized. Is the child the father of the man?

With conception the clock starts ticking, the development begins. Originally the child and parent constitute a "genuine two-in-one", the parental body containing the body of the child. Implied in this situation is the separation of the body of the child from that of the parent. It is birth, or, the separation of the child and the parent that introduces the reality principle. Mom and Dad speak for the real world; they were really already out there in it before I was born into it.

What God has separated, let no man join except by means of a legal fiction. It is the separation that resolves the ambiguity of the hemaphroditic pre-natal body of experience. The child cannot return to the womb, the mother cannot gather the child back in, and so the "separation situation" is the situation until death do them ... ?

2010-03-16T08:02:00.002-04:00

The body of educated discourse seems to be dominated by the cult of technology, the worship of technique, the worship of mechanics. Whatever can be located "outside" myembodiedself is subject to mechanical action, it is affected by what I do to it. The "outside" world is subject to mechanical control; mechanical man suffers fantasies of controlling him/herself. A purely mechanical person can put the reality principle to good use. A purely mechanical body is at home in a real world. But the fly in ointment, the ghost in the machine lies "inside" myembodiedself.

The unconscious is not subject to technology. The techniques applied to the world outside myembodiedself, extend only outward, they can realize the concept but not the fantasy. Mechanical man suffers no disease and fantasic man suffers no cure. Mechanical man, like montheistic man is an abstraction, an ideal; the human body is fantastic.

2010-03-15T08:29:00.002-04:00

The fantasy which drives the scientific method is the fantasy of the human as technology, the body as machine. What is the source of these machinations of mad science? It is the source of all human plotting and planning: the unconscious body. The real body is implicit the unconscious body; it arises from it, like an island from the sea. The unconscious body is a sea of desire.

To be a real body it must have an "inside" and an "outside" and a "before" and an "after". The real body of experience is born from the unconscious body of experience. The order of my identity arises from the chaos of non-identity. "Chaos was first of all...." Theogony. The real body does not replace the unconscious body, nor does it succeed in separating itself from the flow of unconscious desire. The mad machinery is floating in a sea of desire. The unconscious sea of desire abides, while real bodies come and go.

2010-03-14T07:21:00.002-04:00

It is interesting to observe that persons set out to de-personalize themselves, to experience themselves as machines. Science disenchants the world of human experience; science is anti-magic. The project is to surgically remove the fantasy from the body, to produce a human body free of fantasy. The project is utterly fantastic.

The scientist is not born, but built up brick by brick in the light of day. The creature that is born from the dark waters of the womb, out into the light of day is enchanted, soaked in fantasy; reality is born of fantasy. The creature remains fantastic, the project is never complete, the body is never healed of its disease. The fantasy behind the sceintific/technological method is the fantasy of cure.

Humans would fit in reality except for their fantasies; fantasy defies the reality principle. The structure of reality is confronted with the flow of the id. The ego/super-ego body is the battleground. Fantastic desires always exceed the bounndaries eternally set by reality. Buckminster Fuller says, "The eternal generalized principles alone are real." The remainder is fantastic. It is Sunday morning on Harris Creek and the authorities have thrown me an hour ahead of myself.

2010-03-13T07:08:00.002-05:00

The reality principle puts desire in a double-bind; in the disintegration of this principle lies the release of desire from the law that binds it. The reality principle binds desire by polarizing it. The reality principle asserts that all that exists is reality, that if the body of desire is to exist it must submit to the law of reality. Reality is a law, a concept, the effect of which is to confine the body of desire within the constraints of bi-polarity, or, bi-sexuality.

The source of the reality principle is the body of desire itself; desire constructs its own prison and then deconstructs it. The law is not eternal, it comes and goes while desire flows. It is in the midst of the disintegration of myself that the limits of reality can be seen. My real life is a contruction project that ends when the project falls down flat, or, goes up in smoke.

The person is a social project; built up as a community of persons, persons who are parts of one common whole person. A person is a real structure, constructed according to the law. At the nucleus of the community of persons is the human family; the bi-sexual parent and the bi-sexual child. In reality the minimum number of persons it takes to make a person is four: mother, father, daughter, son. These four persons exist only in the bi-polarity of their relationship to each other, each part of the family depends upon the others playing their parts, maintaining those ties that bind us together.

2010-03-11T08:36:00.003-05:00

The posture of myembodiedself toward the "outside" world that I inhabit is at once aggressive and defensive. The objects of my desire are located out there as well as the objects of my fear. I must grasp what I want and throw out what I don't want. The idea is grow through the eating of food while preventing the food from eating me; technology is the form of eating and defending against being eaten. To eat or be eaten, that is the question. But is there any question?

"Identification, introjection, incorporation, is eating. The oldest and truest language is that of the mouth: the oral basis of the ego. Even in seeing there is an active process of introjection: perception is a partaking of what is perceived (Fenichel); we become what we behold (Blake)." Loves's Body. 165.

It is the process of consumption that consumes us; in the process of eating we become food. It is only in the realization of our desire that our fear is realized. The boundary between myembodiedself and the "outside" world is the source of my ambivalent posture.

2010-03-06T08:18:00.003-05:00

" The real body. To be real, it must be bodily; and to be a body is to be eaten. The humiliation in incarnation: to become bread. To be eaten: to be consumed by sorrow, sickness, and death." Love's Body. 169. This then is the destiny of mybody, but there is this persistent fantasy that I will somehow enjoy the debacle; that myself and mybody are not identical.

Mybody and myself are not opposite poles of a unified pair, but rather analogs. I can look at mybody as a map of myself as a map of mybody. Myself gives mybody an aura of personality; mybody gives myself substance. Mybody extends myself into the real, that is, into a temporal three-dimensional space. Mybody is, as it were, the technology of myself.

I am unable to locate myself in this three-dimensional world except by attaching myself to mybody. The personality is composed of metaphors, not concepts; the person is fantastic. The person, him/herself, is two-dimensional, appearing on a flat page or a screen, or, perhaps lying on the surface of the body at times, and at other times becoming detached, and wandering off into the dream.

2010-03-05T07:03:00.002-05:00

To take a position is to take its opposite; the contestants become lovers, a married couple. Every avowal I make concerning myself is simultaneously a disavowal of my partner; at minimum there are always four of us. Woman is descriptive of the actual situation; man is inside his lover's womb; there is no man outside his womb, and there is no womb that does not contain a man. To be gendered is to be bi-gendered.

Though bound together till death do us part, there is an irreducible gap between myself and mypartner. My identity is automatically a disavowal of that other to whom I am married. In order to position myself in time/space, I must disavow mypartner. Our identities depend upon the gaps between our positions; it is not possible for me to claim the penis and the vagina simultaneously; to say "I am a man" is to say "I am not a woman."

Identity is necessarily a mis-identification. The bond between the partners is in their mutual disavowal. Master and slave are conceived at once, they are bound together as mother and fetus are bound, as woman and man are bound, as inside and outside and before and after are bound. The situation is both funny and sad, every battle an embrace and every embrace a battle. The solution is in dissolution. There ain't no cure for love and war.

2010-02-19T07:28:00.003-05:00

An image lacks that critical third dimension. An image is unreal, ungraspable by depth perception. My perceived world is soaked in images that cannot be located on my conceptual map. Where in the world is myself? I cannot locate myself in the body as organism; I cannot locate myself in conceptual abstraction. Mybody is simultaneously imagined and conceived.

Mybody is a body of experience, an experience that is inclusive of perceptions and fantasies. A system that does not recognize the images of fantasy, is from the point of view of human experience, foolish. We are fooling ourselves if we think technique can heal the disease; our disease is fantastic.

A fantastic patient requires a fantastic doctor; conceptual knowledge is not enough. The therapist must understand the workings of human fantasy. Why does soma suffer the pleasures and pains of psyche? Perhaps mybody is, from conception, psychosomatic. It is the fantastic reality that mybody and myself are inseparable. Therapy is tricky business indeed.

2010-02-16T07:21:00.004-05:00

Equilibrium is the perfect balance, perfect symmetry. From any particular point of view, equilibium is the void. Points of view arise with asymmentry. The psychosomatic body is always out of balance; some parts of the whole are necessarily repressed; wherever four are gathered, someone has the upper hand. The desire that drives this asymmetrical machinery is the desire to gain the upper hand. " Winning is not everything, winning is the only thing." Vince Lombardi. Winners are healthy, wealthy, and wise; losers are dead.

Our identities arise in an asymmetry of desire, a body of desire that is out of balance, a body of dis-ease. The disease cannot be eliminated without eliminating the doctor and the patient, and it is the distinction that the two draw between themselves, that decieves the psychosomatic body into perpetuating itself. If I knew that there were no difference between the top and the bottom, would I climb the mountain?

It is all a matter of time and time is running out. The human species will die, as surely as I will die. All species will die, all solar systems. So, this psychosomatic body of experience, is not an experience of health, wealth, and wisdom, but rather an experience of health/sickness, wealth/poverty, and wisdom/foolishness. And then it ends. Is there a body in equilibrium?

2010-02-15T07:11:00.002-05:00

The relationship between psyche and soma is rather like the relationship between the dream and the waking state. The dream work proceeds by means of condensation and amplification whereas the waking work proceeds by separating and connecting. The difference is a third dimension. What my dreamscape lacks is a space of time. Psyche is not real; it as soma that psyche is realized.

That third dimension, that "value- added", introduces depth perception, a vertical relationship. The "Fall", as it turns out, is simultaneously the "Assent". The analytic is a raising of the dead. The dreamscape is superficial, two-dimensional; it covers the soma like a shroud. The shroud cannot be removed from the body anymore than the surface can be removed from the sphere. The shroud cannot be left hanging on a hook while the analyst does his thing. To ignore psyche is to distort the body of experience.

2010-02-13T06:21:00.005-05:00

"Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience of reality." My experience is psychosomatic, simultaneously embodied and disembodied, simultaneously myself and mybody. Whatever happens to myself, happens to mybody. Conceptually, myself and mybody are analagous. The body of experience is always and only psychosomatic.

The judgement of health or disease touches upon myself and mybody; there is no disease of mybody that is not a disease of myself. To abstract myself and mybody is convenient for physicians but it deceives the would be healer and the other who would be healed. When we are sick in body, we are sick in soul.

Is the human body of experience ever healed of its disease? Health or well-being is a relative state; it is always a question of maintaining the integrity of the organism as against a programed tendency toward disintegration. The desire to dissolve the body arises from the the body itself, it does not come from "outside." Desire is ambivalent, the situation is ambiguous, and the maintenance of myself and mybody is a subtle operation.

2010-02-01T07:55:00.003-05:00

Everything is slipping through my hands. Even if I was not losing my grip, it would be impossible to seal off the cracks. I'm trying to preserve these writings in the sand, building barriers against wind and water. I'm trying to preserve this vessel, taking more care now that the vessel has begun to show more than just slight cracks. The cracks are widening, and the vessel is beginning to leak.

God does not sustain his/her children; she/he eats them. The children eat, only to become food for the God. It is not unlike the fattening of the lamb; sacrifice, or "one for all, and all for one." The "whole that is greater than the sum of its parts", the hermaphrodite, is the sacrificial body.

" The real body. To be real, it must be bodily; and to be a body is to be eaten. The humiliation in incarnation; to become bread. to be eaten: to be consumed by sorrow, sickness, and death." Love's Body. 169. There is no time other than sacrificial time; there is no becoming that is not simultaneously unbecoming; the cracks begin when the vessel begins taking form.

2010-01-31T14:22:00.002-05:00

My name is Robert and I am addicted to everything. Addicts have to pay for what they get. I am addicted to everything that can be taken from me, like oxygen. Nothing is free. So here in this breathing I find capital. I am addicted to everything that allows me to remain myself, and for that one needs capital. If I do not pay my bill, the supply is cut off.

Suffering is loss; to lose something is to suffer. Everything in time is lost. To gain is pleasure; to lose is pain. This continuous finding and losing seems endless as experience, but there is this knowledge, this foreknowledge of an end. An end to beginnings and endings? But if there is no end then what is death? Is it capitalists all the way down?

What really is the use of complaining about the details. To whom is one complaining? The message of the post-modern human may be that no one is listening. " Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience of reality."

2010-01-20T07:55:00.006-05:00

I fantasize some experience before the fall into metaphor, before the conceptual machinery re-started. My dreams are windows into that world. They look out through glass, or some watery film, on a world unincorporated, a world with no boundaries. The dream is the borderland.

We are taken by the hand and led out of the darkness of night's womb, into the light of reality and they who lead us are the priests of reality. There is indeed a paranoia in this experience; the paranoid takes her/his fantasies seriously. I fantasize a malevolence in the teachers, in the spokespersons for the reality principle.

I am approaching a border to this experience. I do not know if it the same border that I crossed when this experience began. I cannot say that is was me who crossed that original border, but experience and metaphor tell me that there was a crossing. In this time/space where I now find myself, I find myself desiring to lose myself in metaphor. The metaphor is a borderland.

2010-01-18T07:26:00.009-05:00

And so what is this writing? It is analysis by metaphor, an attempt to see where I am, metaphorically speaking. I can only say that I fell into this world of words; exactly when and how is always a matter of reconstruction from within this womb of words. Analysis is a perceptual process, an envisioning in four dimensions; it organizes the unorganized. Metaphor resists this translation of the many into "the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts." Metaphor insists "Thou art That." In the world evoked by metaphor there is no one, only many; there is "nothing made of parts."

So what does the analyst do when he/she confronts the recalcitrant metaphor? Freud incorporates the world of metaphor into the world of perception. The reality principle asserts the dominance of perception. But dominance is not victory and Freud was pessimistic concerning any resolution to this war between reality and the human unconscious.

There is, in my experience, a resistance to this dominance of the reality principle, a resistance to the insistence that all experience is conceptually produced, to the faith that, in the absence of perception, there is only the void. Perhaps metaphor does not originate in the conceptual process but in imagination; perhaps imagination is original.

2010-01-17T07:21:00.003-05:00

I have no memory of experiencing transcendence. I have always, in my awakened state, inhabited a space of time. The geometry of my experience is synergetic, or, a geometry of narrative. Any experience of the other is, for me, a dream. Each morning I move from dream into narration, and each I night I return to dream. That is, insofar as I can recount it, the sum of my experience, and this very small sum is the subject/object of these investigations.

My awakening never feels pure; it seems always infected with dreaming. The desire to dream never vanishes, nor does the desire to tell the story; it is a question of dominance. But I know that this wheel of experience will, for me, cease to turn. I can only speculate, based upon the small sum of my experience, as to whether experience is, in the absence of the wheel.

2009-12-28T08:57:00.007-05:00

It is winter on Harris Creek. For me, winter is that time/space between the beginning of January and the end of February. As a space of habitation it fits the solitary reader like a fine leather glove. The cottage in which I sit reading is real; the cottage evoked by my reading is unreal. The real cottage is contructed, the unreal cottage is woven. Writing is woman's work.

The world evoked in reading covers the real world, it translates structure as texture. The clothes do make the man; absent a face, we have abstraction. The text is a tissue of half-truths and half-lies which covers the real body, lying upon its surface like a black widow's web. The abstract alone is real.

My identity is fantastic, woven on a loom of metaphor. That moment when I awakened to myself, that moment when I recognized myself as that face in the mirror, was also the moment I fell into her embrace, and I have found myself there ever since. The body that I call my own, this chair in which my body sits, looking at slowly turned pages, this stucture that keeps my body warm and dry, all of this is, in my experience, covered in fantasy. I cannot separate the fantasy from the reality. They seem to go together.

A beautiful sunrise this morning on Harris Creek.

2009-09-19T07:14:00.005-04:00

Redemption --- I awoke with the word on my mind's lips. And just now while reading Riven Rock I came across the word again. The sense is one of the uncanny, a hidden author, or, guide, presenting me with signs. My father, perhaps. Redemption comes with the paying of a debt, a debt which one owes upon entering the theater.

The debt is of the unpayable kind; all the debts incurred and payed along the way do not payoff the debt, nor is any payment final. The theater is founded on debt; in the absence of debt the edifice crumbles. Redemption, or, atonement is what must not happen if the play is to go on. The second coming, the pot of gold, lies just over the horizon. Debt dogs us, as we pursue that point on the horizon.

If my father and I are one, the gig is up; if my mother and I do not separate, the gig can't begin. How are the monkeys to do business in absence of credit and debt?

2009-09-01T07:06:00.003-04:00

Castration is dismemberment: it is what happens to all of us. It is only a question of time. The organized body unorganizes itself; at some point on the continuum desire turns back upon itself and begins destroying the creation. In aging we experience the destruction of ourselves; we begin falling apart. Phallic power is the power of integrity, the power to hold the members together. Old age is the loss of this power. Anti-Oedipus says, "We are so sick of ourselves."

Lose yourself and find the unconscious world. Consciousness divides the living body; it excludes the unconscious. Integrity is always a question of excluding what doesn't fit. The posture of a man of integrity is one of self-defense. In the case of murder, self-defense is a defense. Death is castration.

Life does not depend on integrity; the living body does not depend upon the organs of reproduction, upon the organs of rememberance. Forget yourself and live a little.

2009-08-24T06:43:00.004-04:00

The "difference that makes a difference" is the difference between nuclear organization and anuclear processes. The relationship that constitutes the nuclear organism is biunivocal; a nuclear organism is a "genuine two-in-one." The processes that are excluded by the nuclear organism are polyvocal processes. Any system is an immune system and the immunity is from the unorganized many.

The unconscious body is the body unorganized, the "body-without-organs." Procaryotic cells, "the little people of the dream," do not organize themselves. Organizations are built with eucaryotic cells, cells with a nucleus. The nuclear cell is the origin of the species. Time begins when Jonah enters the whale and stays there.

A symbiotic relationship is a biunivocal relationship, a "genuine two-in-one," or, the "whole that is greater than the sum of its parts." When the spirochete enters the protist and stays there, a cosmos is formed within the chaosmos. The unconscious body has no parts, no members, no groups of any kind. It would be more accurate to say that the unconscious is a plurality of bodies and every encounter is consumate; the sex is always promiscuous.

2009-08-12T07:31:00.004-04:00

In Civilization And Its Discontents, Freud draws an analogy beteen the "Eternal City" Rome and the "sphere of the mind." He uses the analogy to illuminate his idea that in the development of the civilized person nothing is ever eliminated, but rather everything is present as in the archaeological layers of the site of the Eternal City. The primitive is not missing from the site of the civilized person, only buried beneath the surface of the present.

The development of the person leads to the death of the person. The logic of development is the logic of death in life. At each stage of development someone is buried. When the surface of the present vanishes the whole person is buried, the process of development ceases. The whole picture is only visible an instant before it vanishes. The person is a magician of disappearance.

There is an idea that this process of development is life itself, that there is no life without death in it. The idea is that the structure of the living body is spherical, the living body is a sphere, a synergetic structure with an "inside" and an "outside." I am an expanding bubble man, destined to pop. But there is, Oh Monks, another idea.

There is a body which lives on the surface of the spherical body, much like fleas on the dog. The superfical body has no knowledge of the sphere, no knowledge of a relationship between "inside" and "outside." This other body, or, the body of the "other," covers the surface of the sphere like a woven blanket, a living blanket. The network of relationships that compose this living blanket are all horizontal; there is no vertical dimension. I am thinking that Deleuze and Guattari are explorers of this superfical body.

2009-08-02T07:09:00.002-04:00

It is uncanny how many of these posts are tapped out on Sunday mornings, especially following a hiatus. It is Sunday morning on Harris Creek and I am in my sixty-fifth year, an "old man." Just as when I discovered myself as a bouncing baby boy, and then saw myself as a "young man", I cannot fix any specific time or place of this becoming old. There are gaps which memory cannot traverse. These identities are stacked in layers and only the top layer is exposed to the light of day. The baby boy and the young man lie buried in memory. "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there."

Each stage of myself buries an earlier stage, until the last stage. The final stage is the completion of the process; identification ceases. The process is the process of finding and losing myself. "I was found, but now I'm lost." The old man in the mirror is a loser; he losing the very idea of himself. What and where is the lost and found?

2009-05-05T07:09:00.005-04:00

It begins with breathing. "From the point of view of prana, breath, there exists nothing which is not food." Love's Body. 166. Breathing is eating and elimination; incoming and outgoing. I exist as a kind of by-product of the process. I am the man in the middle. First, the "world-mothering air", and then her milk, and then I learn to bite.

This movement, in and out, is coitus; genital intercourse is the form of eating/ being eaten. The mouth and the food are organs of incorporation; you become what you eat even as that which you eat becomes you. The genital body eats itself; autophagy.

There is, oh monks, a last breath; the process is terminal. In taking my last breath I lose consciousness of myself. But this conscious process, this eating/being eaten, this breathing in and out, does not operate in a vacuum. It operates within the other process, the unconscious process. Death is the reimursion of the body of consciousness into the unconscious body, the dissolution of the corporate organization back into "the body without organs."

2009-04-20T07:58:00.003-04:00

It all depends on a point-of-view. The difference between a good and a bad outcome is the difference of point-of-view. There is never just one point-of-view; the minimum is two. Zero is the fulcrum; the point at which there are no views. The points-of view emerge as positive and negative pairs, as in, +1 and -1. For every profit there is a loss. The idea of profiting all the way to heaven, is fantastic.

To have a point-of-view is to be in debt; a point-of-view is borrowed. My identity is on loan; it will be reclaimed at some as yet inderminant point in the future. The same is true of the body that I move in. To say that identity is borrowed is to say that its duration is finite. "What profit in the gains of the world, if the profiteer, lose his soul?" Something is lost at the beginning; to gain a point- of -view is to lose equilibrium.

Zero is the source and ground of the paired numbers. The unidentifiable is the source of paired indentities; identity is disequilibrius, the scale is always tipped. A positive and a negative point-of-view are irreconcilable. And so it is with the creditor and the debtor; the budget is never actually balanced; somebody always owes somebody. What is missing at ground-zero is the scale.

2009-04-16T06:50:00.004-04:00

God is dead, but technology lives; God has become Technology. Technology puts desire to the test; it separates real thought from wishful thinking. Real thought becomes manifest in four dimensions; reality thinking is practical thinking. When desire is realized it takes on a four-dimensional structure. Human fantasy is such a structure, as is the human body. To make wishful thinking real is to put it into practice.

In Synergetics, Buckminster Fuller refers to humans as "local universe technology." Humans put the universal principles of structuring in four dimensions into practice. Immanent to this practice, in my experience, is a fantasy structured as "mommy-daddy-me." Our identities, the ones we say "we really are", are the products of human fantasy. It is fantasy that provides the face. To focus on the technology is to lose sight of the face.

The human drama is real; technology is not the only knowledge. The physical sciences constitute the body of technology; the rest is left to students of metaphor.

2009-03-21T06:48:00.002-04:00

You are what you perceive. Once the light goes on, vision is constricted by a focus; some portion of the whole is plunged into darkness, into the unseen. This, as I see it, is the human dilemma; the desire is to speculate upon the whole, but speculation is necessarily specific. The desire remains perpetually unsatisfied; whatever you get is not what you really want. The motor is the lack.

To speculate is to enter a theater and stay there. No matter where you may fancy that you go, you remain within the theater, within the mise en scene. I would like to get up and walk out on this drama but when I pass through the door marked EXIT, I find myself still inside the theater. What makes me think that there is a world outside this theater that I am in? It is my dreams that make me think that.

The way out is through loss, through the loss of focus, the loss of the camera. It is not possible to speculate upon the whole; to experience the whole is to cease speculating. The speculator cannot be the source of this desire to turn off the light; she/he is the light. What then, is the source of this desire for oblivion?

2009-03-12T07:30:00.005-04:00

Every watcher is watched, each a player in some more encompassing play. The duality is irresolvable for the duration of play. This relationship between watching and being watched is what the play is about. The part of the spectator is not a passive part; this speculative vision lays a net of nuclear relationships upon the watched. It "over-codes" the unobserved.

Speculation is a development, an evolutionary outcome. We are not born spectators; we must learn the practice from our parents. The child evolves to parent; the parent originates as the child. The difference between parent and child is the difference between watching and being watched. There is a spectator at the baby's birth. The Father is already present; the watcher is already there, though nowhere to be seen. The child cannot watch except by putting on the cloak of parenthood.

The world's great monotheisms constitute symbolic representations of the evolution of the spectator, the great speculator, the author of the play. The reader/writer fancies her/himself a god. Writing is spermatic; reading is the egg.

2009-03-08T07:40:00.003-04:00

A spectator is an onlooker, one standing apart from the scene he/she is observing. The spectator is the one who sees what's going on; the participants haven't a clue. One cannot get a clear picture of the fray when a chair is being broken over one's head, or, some other one is saying nasty things about one's mother. Evidently, participation in the scene precludes insight. I go to an analyst seeking a speculator who can take a knowing look at the play I am in so that I might know what the hell I am doing.

The world's economic system is in collapse, a state of chaos and uncertaintly and there are many speculators lying buried in the rubble. They could not see the logic unfolding because they were participants in the fantasy. That is the problem with speculation: In reality there is no spectator who is not infected by participation, no ideal observer. God is dead.

2009-03-06T07:42:00.006-05:00

Blame it on the speculators. If you "look-up" the word "speculation" in the OED, you will discover a pattern of association of meanings. Spread out there on those facing pages of the dictionary, you will see forty-one words -- Pretend you are looking at my, now old, OED -- beginning with "specificate" and ending with "speculatory." If you turn back a page you will see that all of these "spec" words begin with the word "spece" and if you turn forward a page you will see that they end with the word "speculum". What you will see as you read through those words that begin with those four letters -- spec -- is that they all involve the faculty of sight. "Species" means "appearance, form, kind." The theory of the evolution of the species is speculation.

"Speculation" means "The faculty or power of seeing; sight, vision, esp. intelligent or comprehending vision." It also means "The action or practice of buying and selling goods, stocks and shares, etc., in order to profit by the rise or fall in market value, as distinct from regular trading or investment . . . ." Apparently, speculation can be a risky business.

There is a certain tension in the pattern of meaning that these "spec" words reveal; speculation may be specious, the reasoning fallacious. Apparently, looks can be deceiving and therein lies the risk inherent in speculation. As for the great King Akbar: "He knew that life was not to be trusted, the world was not to be relied upon." Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence.

2009-03-03T07:13:00.003-05:00

When I discovered books I discovered a place apart from my mother's words, my own place, a womb within which I am the beloved master. The book was a rabbit hole, and the reading was a fall into an ideal space of time. Independence is an ideal, a desire forbidden by reality. In my ideal world I create myself and the mise en scene.

Words spoken and heard alone do not permit a space in which history can unfold; there is no point of origin within the body of spoken language. All that is is the endless round from listening to speaking and back again. A book must have a beginning and an end. In the process of reading/writing Mother's world becomes Father's world; the Parents' world becomes the Child's world. This ideal world does not replace the real one; the ideal and the real are juxtaposed, but it is unclear where one begins and the other leaves off.

Does "history" arise from "nature" or is the reverse the case? In any case, since learning to read, I find myself of two minds, one real and one wishful thinking. As I see it right now, idealism is the motor of the wheel of necessity; they go together.

2009-02-23T06:23:00.002-05:00

I sit here this morning, high, sipping my coffee in the silence of my cell, as outside the sun is rising over Harris Creek; a monk who denies himself no pleasure. The womb and the tomb; these two are one. The pleasure evoked by this tapping, by this restraint of the flood of words, is the pleasure of being in the womb, of being protected from reality. The writing envelopes the body, protecting it from all that does not want it. Writing is like reefer.

To be contained is to be constrained. These sentences tapped out within this rectangle constrain the free flow of words; the words are imprisoned or entombed. And the words written are themselves prisons within prisons. It is the prison of words constrained that engenders me, the writer of words. My punishment is my pleasure.

2009-02-22T07:56:00.002-05:00

My prison is my pleasure. The penal system mimics the legal system. What I fear and loathe is the unrestrained, the unconstrained, an unchecked flow of shit, of sperm, of words. You see, my punishment is my pleasure. "Go to your room." I love my room; it protects me from unrestrained flows that would carry me away. Life in prison is seen as preferable to death; it is better to be painfully restrained than it is to lose all restraint.

My pleasures and my pains depend upon restraint, depend upon "No". To conceive a system from the flows of desire is to negate them, to act against them. Since all that is, is desire, I conclude that implicit in the flows of desire, is the desire to restrain. I am the product of the desire to constrain, but I experience here, in my sumptuous cell on Harris Creek, the desire to dissolve and flow out between the bars. I am simultaneously of two minds.

A life sentence ends with a period; death. The Capital Punishment is not avoided, only delayed. But my punishment is my pleasure. It is Sunday on Harris Creek.

2008-12-28T07:27:00.005-05:00

It is a silent Sunday morning on Harris Creek, grey, mild air, and drizzle. As I remember it, I did not begin here, seated at this desk, tapping out these words, and looking out on Harris Creek. But if I cease remembering and think about it, I see the origin as precisely here. The origin is the dynamic structure itself which introjects a past and projects a future. The origin is the working machine itself, the time/space or engendering machine. It started whirring the last time the light came on.

There exists a cosmic switch that turns the genital machine on and off. It is that point along the time/space contiuum where it discontinues. The engendering machine exists in relationship to an unengendered machine. There exists machinery which works perfectly well without parts.

The body of the gens, the genitalized body is a temporary body, a mortal body. In the death of that body is the life of the unengendered body.

WAKING UP

Daylight leaks in, and sluggishly I surface

from my own dreams into the common dream

and things assume again their proper places

and their accustomed shapes. Into this present

the Past intrudes, in all its dizzying range ---

the centuries-old habitts of migration

in birds and men, the armies in their legions

all fallen to the sword, and Rome and Carthage.

The trappings of my day also come back:

my voice, my face, my nervousness, my luck.

If only Death, that other waking-up,

would grant me time free of all memory

of my own name and all that I have been!

If only morning meant oblivion!

Jorge Luis Borges

2008-12-10T07:17:00.005-05:00

Human experience is paradoxical, marked by a Lacanian incompleteness and inconsistency. My awakened, conscious point of view is permeated by something uncanny, something that clouds my vision. Although it is not me I cannot escape it; it follows me everywhere I go, and no matter the time. To identify the body with a conscious point of view is the estrangement of the body, the alienation of the unconscious body; the body from which the body of consciousness arises each morning like an island from the sea becomes the alien body, the anti-body.

A stable structure of experience requires the estrangement of the body; identity arises in alienation. If the unconscious is not alien territory, there is no territory to map. But the territory that is mapped is not the alien territory; the aliens can invade from either inner or outer space. Stability is tenuous; collapse is imminent.

2008-11-24T06:11:00.005-05:00

It is difficult to fantasize a world without groups of any kind. The faces of the people seem, necessarily, to arise from some group. The smallest conceivable group is a couple, a couple in coitus. A group is a genuine two-in-one, a unity of division. "Show me the face you had before you were conceived." The group is a conceptual construct, a genital body.

In reality the minimum is four; the smallest perceivable group is a family of four. A four-dimensional group is necessarily, bi-sexual and bi-generational. The face of the person is simultaneously that of a woman/child/man/child. Faces are fantastic, images made up of parts; the face is a familial face. What of all the faceless ones?

"The faceless shall always be with you." There is a persistant facelessness in the face of the familial face, what Anti-Oedipus refers to as the "schiz-flow." It would appear that there are subjects among us, who when they look into the mirror do not see themselves looking back, subjects whose faces are cracked. "Broken flesh, broken mind, broken speech. Truth, a broken body: fragments, or aphorisms; as opposed to systematic form or methods. . . . Love's Body 188.

2008-11-16T07:43:00.003-05:00

There is never just one conscious experience; the minimum is two. An experience of dying is implied in the experience of living. The conscious body of experience is the explication of the implicit; the event named birth is non-simultaneous with the event named death. If the happenings of birth and death are abstractly simultaneous, there is no body of conscious experience; birth and death define the conceptual body of conscious experience.

The conscious body knows that it is going to die, but it does not know when. As Yeats explains in A Vision, there is no conscious experience of the points which constitute the limit called birth/death; consciousness is what lies between the points. It is the duration of consciousness that is problematic and open to question. What determines the limit of my endurance? Am I the master of my fate, or its slave?

My identity is a matter of time. It is constructed from time past, and deconstructed in time's slippage. Each sunrise I awaken, and rise up from the bed of dream and reconstruct myself. Absent a clock, I can't get out of bed. If I were to awaken to a world without clocks I would think I was still dreaming. In the absence of the ticking of the clock there is no way to measure the distance between inside and outside, no way to distinguish myself from the other.

2008-11-11T06:31:00.002-05:00

Psychoanalysis is the analytic of human fantasy. It attempts a knowledge of human experience. This body of psychoanalytic knowledge is conceived the same way all nuclear bodies are conceived, that is, in the relationship between genders and generations. The necessary elements are mother, son, father, daughter; the human family is a nuclear body; the body of human fantasy. It's all in the family, and therein lies the limit of psychoanalysis.

This relationship between genders and generations is a genital relationship and that is the subject of psychoanalysis. There is never just one subject, the mimimum is two; the man and the woman, the parent and the child, the analyst and the analysand. The human family constitutes the structure of the genitalized body, the nuclear body.

But there is a body without genital organs, a body without a nucleus, an unconscious body. This, of course, is the body that escapes the analysis. It is the body of the "little people", the microbial people, the people of dream. Our night-time dream is not the dream itself, but the dream subjected to the analyst hidden in the darkness, waiting for sunrise.

2008-11-08T06:18:00.005-05:00

During the fall and winter months, seated at my desk, I am treated to some glorious sunrises. The horizon lies just beyond some trees on the other side of Harris Creek. It is as if the beginning of the world was just a short boat ride and walk away from the room in which I sit and tap out these words. On this particular morning in November I am witness to such a sunrise.

There is a continuous discrepancy between my knowledge and my experience. I can say that I know what I know but I must say, " it is as if," when speaking my experience. I know the real sun is 93,000,000 miles out in space and that it is not rising from below some slightly curvilinear line of trees on the other side of Harris Creek, and yet that is actually the way it seems to me. There is something stubbornly Narcissistic about my experience; it is as if that rising sun belongs to me alone.

Human experience, it seems to me, never actually fits the facts. The experience is infected with fantasy, with wishes and fears that cannot be detected by an analysis of the facts. Knowledge of the facts is not knowledge of the fantasy, and the experience is always inclusive of fantasy. Wherein lies the glory of the sunrise?

2008-10-18T07:16:00.004-04:00

A nuclear cell constitutes a stable structure within the instability of a biosphere without a nucleus. According to Lynn Margulis, the nuclear cell originates with a union of two independent cells, a spirochete and a protist. Jonah enters the whale and stays there till death do them part. From the material of independence is contructed a structure of interdependence, a symbiotic organization, a marriage, and in time, a family.

Human experience is not fully confined to symbiotic organization. It is not just ego -super-ego, but rather, id - ego - super-ego. There is a portion of human experience that escapes the organization and that moreover seems to undermine, or unorganize that organization. Eros is the god of symbiotic organization, while the god of of the underground is Thanatos. The erotic union of the nucleus and the cell arises like an island from the sea of manyness. The human experience does not orginate with the division of some primordial one, but rather in the union of two in the midst of the many.

On the final page of Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud refers to the relationship of Eros/Thanatos as a struggle between immortal adversaries. It is not clear to me that, except from within the confines of the symbiotic stucture, or, from some point-of-view, that the relationship is a struggle. The struggle seems confined to the organization. The erotic union is the union of opposites; a polar relationship. There is no polartiy in that portion of the human body that remains ununionized. Waking human consciousness is a struggle; maintaining a nuclear identity is a struggle. The tendency is toward the many, toward the unconscious.

2008-10-17T06:45:00.004-04:00

To be done with Oedipus is to be done with the relationship between radiation and gravity. The family relationship is a nuclear relationship; genital organization is nuclear organization. The volume within which I sit and tap out these words is the product of forces in tension and so the person who fancies that his tapping is the source of the words.

The biosphere of Earth is composed of two different types of cells: there are cells with nuclei and cells without nuclei. The living biological body of Earth is a body composed of two, and only two, different cell structures. There are then two, and only two, possible relationships possible within the biosphere of planet Earth: There is a relationship between cells and a relationship between a nucleus and a cell. From my point of view, here and now, it is this difference that makes the difference between conscious and unconscious forms of thought.

The human body is a body within a body; the whole body is the biosphere. This awareness is what is manifesting itself in our collective experience. The human experience is an experience within an experience; the other that lies just beyond the borders of the immune system is alive and it is experience. The death of the nuclear organization is not the death of the whole body; the cells without a nucleus live on, oblivious to the tragedy, oblivious to the extinction of the species, oblivious to the lost family values, oblivious to castration.

Gential organization is nuclear organization; to live without genitals is to live without a nucleus, to not experience the separation of the body into two parts. The nuclear organization is alienated from the unnuclear body; it lives a life of its own. From the perspective of the nuclear organization, the body is the nuclear organization, and all of the body that lies beyond the nuclear organization is alien to the body. The immune system protects the people from the aliens.

The unconscious body is the unnuclear body, Lynn Margulis' Microcosm. The Oedipal complex is the conscious body, the nuclear organization, the time/space continuum. I am this complex, this organism , this person, but my experience includes the unconscious experience and as I approach death I begin to see myself as the "little man in the boat", navigating the alien waters, and my boat is leaking.

2008-10-02T07:59:00.005-04:00

It is a bright breezy morning on Harris Creek; Autumn is in the air, and in the light. I am reading some writings from a blog called Spurious on Lacanian psychoanalysis. The reading stimulates the writing. This reading/writing psychoanalytically is a transcendental function, an abstraction of thought forms from the field of subjective experience. The abstract stucture constitutes a relationship between conscious and unconscious thought forms.

This analysis, or, transcendental process occurs within the field of experience, the incarnate experience. The analysis begins within the field and as long as it endures, it overcodes the embodied experience itself; structuring it according to the dynamics of conscious/unconscious thought forms. The thought forms capture the body of experience, or rather a portion of it within the dynamic of conscious/unconscious thought. The analysis uncovers repression because it is repression.

The analysis constitutes an experience within the body of experience itself, a sealed vase, as it were, the four-dimensional analytical time/space. The body of experience is confined to the forms of thought. Desire is captured within subject/object relations. The body of desire is not the product of the analytical structure. The structure does not capture the whole body of desire, but rather is suspended in it.

2008-07-03T06:33:00.002-04:00

A polar relationship is one of exchange, a continuous polar shift. At some point along the continuum the man appears hung upside-down and turned inside-out. The man is continuously becoming the woman as the woman is becoming the man. In human experience, polarity is an exchange of genders and generations; a perpetual motion machine. What happens when the machine stops working?

The machine is fueled by time, and time is finite. The machine stops working when it runs out of time. There is a discontinuity at some point in the continuum. At that point of discontinuity there is equilibrium; ground zero. The discontinuous does exist, and it exists whenever the machine stops working. The tendency is toward equilibrium, a return to the earlier condition. Equilibrium is bliss.

The machine assembles itself from the discontiuous; the ground is bliss. The Karmic Wheel turns within Nirvana. Only as long as there is a desire to turn does the wheel exist. This genital desire is real, I cannot deny my own desire. But this desire is temporary; at some point on the horizon my desire will cease. At some point in the drama I will fall into bliss. It is a lovely July 3rd morning on Harris Creek.

2008-06-30T06:47:00.003-04:00

The experience of duplicity is an ego experience. Within the structure that is the ego experience, the minimum is two; the conceiving of time/space is at once the conceiving of fantasy. There are experiences within the ego experience that hint at or suggest the experience of unduplicity. I can see myself rising from the sea of unconsciousness, like a fortified island. My duplicitiouness is protected from the unduplicitous.

Myself and my body constitute a double; we go everywhere together, but we are not indentical. The heart of duplicity lies with the human family; two genders and two generations; inside and outside, and before and after. Each player incorporates the whole family structure; each of us is at a minimum, a family of four. There is me receeding and me emerging; there is me as mister inside and me as missus outside.

I am the person who inhabits the body; I live in it like we both live in this house. Myself and my body find both pleasure and pain in each other; I feel my body's pleasure /pain and it feels my own. I am like a ghost in a house that moves; like a crab swimming. I am the person inside the swimming crab. Myself and my submarine emerge from the water, like an island, or, a mirage.

2008-06-24T07:02:00.003-04:00

Marshall McLuhan defines technology as any extension of the human body, an enhancement of some bodily function within the body's environment. But the human body is not a concept within a purely conceptual time/space continuum, or, universe. The human body is inclusive of imagination; the human body is an image and a concept. The human body cannot perceive in the absence of imagination. This fact, which is obvious to human experience, is what the body of science denies. Why does the body deceive itself, as to the environment it is within?

Technology is an intrument of human fantasy; its purpose is fantastic. The fantastic goal is to realize the dream, to manufacture a real image. A fantastic goal is always self-contradictory, impossible of fulfillment; imagination and conceptuality contradict each other. What concepts do, images undo, and yet in human experience the two are inseparable, not unlike life and death.

Once the thinker abandons the abstraction of the "reality principle" the efficacy of the scientific method in its application to the human body begins to slip away. The principles of reality are not the exclusive rules of the game. In human experience, the real is always infected with the unreal. The body and it's environment are fantastic; the method is necessarily symbolic.

2008-06-23T06:45:00.003-04:00

The human experience of time and money is shrouded in fantasy; the impersonal is wearing the mask of personality. My own time and money are not impersonal abstractions; they are as vital as my body, or, my personality. The human experience is one of emotional motion, motion that produces pleasure and pain. A person feels what it is like to be a time machine. The mechanics are conceptual, the feelings are fantastic.

Money produces-distributes-consumes objects of human fantasy. The economic system of a society of people is the circulation system of their collective fantasy. Story, or narrative, is time personified, impersonal objects incorporated by personal fantasy. The people participate in the collective fantasy through the medium of money.

An analysis of the economic system of a given people, that is not simultaneously a psychoanalysis of the people's collective fantasy will fall short of understanding. Abstractions veil understanding of the fantastic situation. The human experience does not take place in the purely real world of purified conceptual thinking, but in a fantastic place, a place that is never wholly real.

2008-06-21T06:54:00.004-04:00

Summer has begun on Harris Creek. How much time is there between tax day and the beginning of summer? Cliches have a way of conveying deep meaning as in: "Time is money." The metaphor here is massively over-determined; all of human history may unwind from it. All of those virtual coins are bits of time, little tickets to the game of life.

Economics is time management, the production-distribution-consumtion of time. The virtual coins buy packages of "good time"; an empty pocket represents "bad time". Time, like money, is a limited possession of the person, or, the person is possessed by the limit of time and money. The person's ecomomic task is to manage the aquisition and expenditure of virtual coins, or bits of time. The person assumes that the number of coins, or bits of time that he/she possesses can be expanded by certain actions, and that inaction contracts the bits back to that bit which vanishes into the empty pocket. There is no ecomomics in the absence of the empty pocket.

Every person is virtually a little capitalist within the big capitalist system, each of us our own little corporation. Our capital lies in our genes, an inheritance from time past. Some enter the game with meagre capital, others with a bundle, but all leave with an empty pocket. It is time well spent that we desire to manufacture within the necessary limit of the game itself; to avoid the empty pocket for as many bits of time as we can; our limit is our destiny.

2008-04-15T06:40:00.002-04:00

Do I eat to live or live to eat? I remember my grandma advising me as a child, "Eat slowly, you can eat more." Eating at my grandmother's table was a great childhood pleasure, a sensual pleasure, not unlike those earlier pleasures from which I now felt separate and apart. I cannot remember sucking at my mother's breast. It is as if I were not there yet, as if I came along later.

There is a gap between those earliest infantile years, and the years that follow puberty, which Freud calls the "latency period." It is a period during which genital organization is superimposed upon polymorphous perversity. The infantile body of human experience is plugged into the time machine. This re-programing of the body of human experience creates a seal between the pre-historic experience, and the experience of history. I can't remember being unplugged, and sucking on a breast post plugging is not the same experience.

The infant is under the sway of the pleasure principle, more unconscious than conscious. It is only by looking back through the lens of waking consciousness that I can identify myself at my mother's breast. That infantile body is undeveloped, unorganized; a polymorphous body. To organize the body as the family body is to sever those connections to unconscious process, so as to make identity possible; to manufacture a point of view from a raw material that has none. The unreal is realized.

2008-04-09T06:13:00.005-04:00

Psychoanalysis has never been accepted into the scientific community. This makes sense, as the unconscious process is unscientific. Biology or physiology are technologies of human consciousness, tools or extensions of the waking body. These technologies are useless in relation to the unconscious process; they have no effect. The waking body, in effect, turns it back, on the pleasure principle and embraces the reality principle. If the process isn't rational, ignore it. But what is ignored is nevertheless experienced. The experience is political and politics is never wholly rational. Science is captive to politics, a tool of political process.

The fantasy hidden in the scientific method is the fantasy of purity, a spiritual fantasy. The goal is to expand the laboratory until it includes the whole territory, and thus eliminate the unconscious. The method is only efficascious when the reality principle dominates the pleasure principle, that is when the human experience of irrational desire is successfully repressed. Once a people have successfully repressed themselves, they seek to impose that repression on the whole human body, to give all those others the gift of successful repression, the gifts of science, democracy, and capitalism.

But can it actually be realized? Will a human ever be at home in reality?

2008-04-07T06:38:00.004-04:00

These words that are joined and separated between a series of beginnings and endings, with the comas, colons, and simicolons, the subject and the object, the past, present, and future, the active and the passive, record the conscious process. The body of writing records my waking lived experience. I have no record of that other lived experience, the dream. It is as if the recording machine is off as I sleep and the experience remains unrecorded until a re-awakening. To "write the dream down" is to superimpose a syntax upon the dream.

"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." Freud, Collected Papers. Vol. IV. 119. A sentence is a slice of time. The ordering process and the recording process are the same process; the unconscious process is unrecordable. Upon awakening, the dream is incorporated by conscious process, the memory of a dreamer who had the dream. The interpretation depends upon memory, or, time.

In the model of human experience that I am attempting in this writing, the unconscious process imagines, it does not think; conceptuality is the conscious process, a secondary process which superimposes itself upon imagination. This secondary process is temporal, and minimally four-dimensional; time/space represents human consciousness in the abstract. A sentence begins and ends; before and after there are only images.

2008-04-05T08:05:00.004-04:00

It is spring-time on Harris Creek, and one's thoughts naturally turn to love and hate; it is mating time. Our two resident swans have already done the deed and are preparing the nesting sight. She will sit on eggs that will not hatch, because some god has willed it so, and applied a magic potion to the eggs that conceals from the swans the fact that nothing is going to come of this. She will sit and he will cruise the creek attacking any intrusion of other swans, into that body of water that is their homeland. And those geese who for some reason refuse to return to Canada, are also in a mating mode and will become a particular mad preoccupation with his Royal Highness, the male swan.

The swans and geese are unconcerned with sharing this body of water outside the window of my hermitage, until this time of year, when warfare breaks out, just like clock work. His Royal Highness is not only in a protective mood, he also desires to kill the goslings who will, unlike his own heirs, perform an entry into his realm. I have observed this tragicomedy for many springs now, and only the details vary. The geese are not innocent victims, they actively harass the harried king. The pitched battles go on day after day, until such time as it becomes evident to the swans, that nothing has come of this and it is time to return to world they occupied before this madness began.

2008-04-03T06:43:00.005-04:00

"Let no man separate what God hath joined." The power to separate and join belongs to God alone, not man; man is subject to this process of separating and uniting, to this God, Thanatos/Eros. I am slave to this process, not master of it, a by-product, an after-image. The separation situation is the experience of the desire for unification; inferentially there is the desire to separate. Inferentially, the experience is always and only the desire for the opposite situation.

My birth is a casting out; I am what is cast out into the separation situation. Suddenly I feel the pang of separation and the hunger to re-unite, to return to the previous situation. In the separation situation desire is polarized, it meets itself in a feed-back loop. The actor who plays the part of Eros meets the actor who plays the part of Thanatos, "together for the first time on the same stage." The separation situation is a story, a dramatic confrontation between eating and shitting, and the purpose of the confrontation it to perpetuate itself. The play is the God, not the besotted actors.

The body of the play is a genuine two-in-one, a corporate, incorporating body; a body-in-coitus; a hermaphrodite. It appears to the players that there are two separate bodies; the players identify themselves with one of the parts of the corporate whole, which is inclusive of both parts. Absent this identification of the participants with opposite parts, it appears the play can't go on. The whole experience is schizophrenic. " The crucified body, the crucified mind. The norm is not normality but schizophrenia, the split, broken , crucified mind." Love's Body. 186.

2008-03-31T07:12:00.004-04:00

The words were already here waiting for me, like my mother and father and sister. I do not think I knew the words before I came here, as I did not know those others. I came to know words as I came to know first the breast and then my mother; words came with these objects. The words that awaited me were written words, though spoken through the mouths of those others, they existed in a space outside them, and in a sense, the others were immersed in the words.

It is impossible for me to separate myself in relation to others from the artifice of words that we are all plugged into. But then there is the dream which dissolves the words into plastic symbolic images. Where do the words come from if not the dream? Where does the genital organization come from if not polymorphous perversity?

A book is a universe of words; a time/space continuum. A story or a history is composed of all those words existing between the front and back covers of a book, and there is no book without covers. The reading/writing may go on for a very long time, but finally the repressed returns. What returns is the unconscious process which is hidden between the covers of a book.

2008-03-29T06:35:00.002-04:00

The political question is, " Are you one of us, or one of them?' If that question is not asked, the body is unpolitical. The minimum number of parts is two; the whole exists only as the relation between the two parts. The whole exists only so long as it is divided into parts; Eros and Thanatos are inseparable; there is no love absent hate. A political body, a genital body arises from the relationship between love and hate. We love us and hate them.

The hidden agenda is to perpetuate the political process of loving and hating. The hidden agenda is not to heal the wound of separation but to perpetuate it. Killing is eating; to be killed is to be eaten. But love is also eating, and being eaten. The active desire to incorporate the other is eating, the passive desire to be incorporated is being eaten. " The hidden truth which makes peace: the identity of the killer and the victim." Love's Body. 164.

You become what you eat. The active partner is passified even as the passive partner is activated; enantiadromea, or this becoming that. It is not difficult to see the symbolic intimacy of killing and loving, but this intimacy is hidden from public view. Morality is at once a veil and motive force; the fantastic idea of victory over sin motivates the action and re-action. Bucky says synergetics means "toward oneness with a minimum of two." To achieve victory over sin is to lose yourself.

2008-03-26T06:42:00.004-04:00

How to establish and maintain an identity? Form a symbiotic relationship; find yourself a partner and set-up housekeeping. As long as the house remains intact, I can identify myself; the household protects me from delerium. The glue of the household is the covenant between the partners to identify themselves in common with a missing third part, the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

It is the nuclear action, or, action/re-action, that maintains the human family. The partners must practice mutual cannibalism to keep themselves together; it is in the exchange of genders and generations that identity is maintained; the operation is a co-operation, a sex exchange. This action/reaction is coitus; "if I become a husband/child and you become a wife/mother, we can seal ourself off from the delirium of all the nobodies."

In relation to the unconscious process, consciousness is imperial, a process of colonization; "Where there was id, ego shall be." The expansion of consciousness is at once a sealing of the border. The war on the ground is an internalization of the war against the unconscious. We have met the enemy, and it is our unconsciousness. Human beings kill each other to keep the light of consciousness alight.

2008-03-25T07:14:00.003-04:00

The unconscious process does not reveal any knowledge of objects in a world outside the dream; nor does it reveal any knowledge of an interior dreamer, somewhere behind the scene. The construct of a dreamer and a world in which he awakens is a construction of the conscious process. The latent thoughts upon which the dream process works are products of a secondary process; they can only be discovered upon awakening.

Freud refers to the dream itself, the manifest dream, as wish- fulfillment. The dream process fulfills a wish that could not be fulfilled during the preceeding day, out in the bright light of thought. There are wishes that are fobidden in reality, but fulfilled in the dream; the proof lies sleeping in a bed of thought. A sleeping thinker is inundated by the waters of the unconscious process and even in his/her waking there are breaches in the dike.

Thought is preoccupied with defense, with protecting the home-land, the borders. Thought depends upon certain wishes remaining perpetually unfulfilled. The body which is the immune system depends upon its distinction from the unconscious process. As human experience, the distinction is continuously subject to being swamped in wish-fulfillment. Prepare yourself, gird your loins, against the fulfillment of your desire.

2008-03-20T20:00:00.010-04:00

Condensation and displacement; the many as one, the one as many. This process cannot produce a stable structure; just entropic drains and energetic explosions, every conclusion over-determined. It is not possible to locate your self in the midst of the unconscious process; nothing is fixed, pinned down, just flux, plastic delirium. When the waking body of consciousness falls into sleep it falls into delirium.

When I lay me down to sleep, I enter another world of experience, connected to the upright waking world from which I layed myself down, but the usual rules rules of relationship do not apply. When I am awake and risen from my bed of sleep, I know the difference between myself and the world outside myself; when I am asleep I don't. When I perceive the risen sun, outside my hermitage, and my fingers tapping on these keys with little marks upon them, I know what time it is; when my eyes are closed and I cannot see the sun or my fingers I don't. It is as if, when I sleep, the laws of time/space are suspended.

Freud's theory is that the dream process is a wishing process, which operates upon the reality process so that the body can sleep. The dream process alters certain anxiety producing thoughts, remembered from the preceeding day, in such a way that the body does not awaken to action, it remains passive. The dream work passifies the real body. This wishing process takes the reality process, back into the mothering womb from which it is born and re-born. The source of reality is wish.

2008-03-20T06:02:00.002-04:00

Human economics is a fantastic system, a system that is rational and irrational at once. Money is not only a medium of exchange, it is also a symbol which the players respond to as if it were mother, or father, or child, or penis, or feces. Money is a sacred symbol; by magical and irrational means it intrudes into the rational. Money is the means by which the holder can re-create mother's womb, an artificial and temporary womb; separation not accepted.

I cannot fully enter the real and rational world as long as I cling to this fantasy that I am the child and husband of my mother. Drama is the intrusion of the unconscious into consciousness; all drama is family drama. To be fully real and rational, I must somehow forget who I fantasize I am.

It is desire for pleasure that drives the unconscious process and this desire is the source of fantasy. To be rid of the fantasy is to be rid of the desire for pleasure; to experience my penis as a plug and your vagina as a socket. I cannot find this desire to be rid of the desire for pleasure. The absence of pleasure is the absence of imagination.

2008-03-15T07:28:00.005-04:00

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.

2008-03-14T06:28:00.002-04:00

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.

2008-03-12T08:36:00.003-04:00

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.

2008-03-11T05:58:00.002-04:00

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.

2008-03-10T16:40:00.006-04:00

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.

2008-03-07T07:14:00.002-05:00

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.

2008-03-05T07:27:00.002-05:00

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.

2008-03-02T07:11:00.003-05:00

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."

2008-02-19T09:29:00.004-05:00

In the beginning of life outside the womb, the object of the child's affection is the breast; sucking on it provides both food and pleasure. It is through the action of a part, or, organ of the body that the body of organs returns to the earlier experience of the womb. Whereas, in the womb, the child is passive, in reality the child must engage an organ, to revive the earlier condition. Situated as it is, within the real world, the act provides only a hullucination of the experience of being in the womb itself.

Absent a breast, the mouth has nothing to suck on, and if the mouth has no object, the body is devoured by what surrounds it. In the absence of the womb, the breast is crucial to survival. In other words, the organs of the corporate body, operate to re-create in reality, an artificial womb. In reality, the breast and the mouth, are not parts of one and the same body, but are rather parts of separate bodies made up of separate parts. It is this fact that makes the re-creation an artifice.

The experience of being in a womb must be as close to bliss as a human being can have. Following birth, following the expulsion from the garden, it appears as if the goal is re-create the "genuine two-in-one" from separate parts. The effect is to perpetuate the artifice. In reality, there is no genuine return.

2008-02-15T08:01:00.002-05:00

"Any multi-cellular organism must, if it is to survive, contain a hard-wired bio-survival circuit, which very simply programs an either-or choice: GO FORWARD to the nourishing, the protective, or GO BACK, away from the threatening, the predatory." Prometheus Rising. 47,

The story begins with a desire to eat and a fear of being eaten. From the beginning of the story there are the child, the good mother, and the devouring bitch, or, perhaps the devouring bitch is the vengeful father in disguise. The game is to eat and avoid being eaten. This is the first frame of a film that ends in the frameless.

It is in the second frame that we see the child take up arms against that other who would eat him/her. It is in the second frame that the film becomes three-dimensional and in this three-dimensional fantasy we see that the child has aquired an appetite for the predator. "The second circuit, the emotional-territorial networks of the brain, is concerned entirely with power politics." Prometheus Rising. 63. In the second circuit is recorded the "primal crime", the conspiracy between the good mother and her sons, to kill the father and partake of his flesh in common. Eating the enemy is communal, is political.

2008-02-13T08:47:00.003-05:00

I just finished reading Robert Anton Wilson's book, Prometheus Rising. He makes a convincing case for technology, or, the spiritual project; more convincing than any case I might make against it. But nevertheless, having read his book, I remain here in my hermitage tapping out these words. He writes that reading is not enough, or, that reading books cannot get you where the spirit desires to go. At the end of each chapter of the book there are exercises which the reader is to perform if he/she is to experience the power of technology to transform the reader into a super-computer, or Superman.

I have always experienced a wave of ennui when presented with such technological tasks. For one who identifies him/herself with the reader, this feels like a temptation that will lure me out of the womb of the book and back into the reality from which I flee in reading. I am suspicious of the idea of the evolution of consciousness. The Promethean process is a process that begins with bio-computer circuit one and culminates in circuit eight. But what is, before and after the process? And if it is nothing but the process, then doesn't the culmination trigger the beginning again, again, again . . . . ? One climbs the mountain from base to peak, only to find that the peak is the base.

The idea is that death can be eliminated without eliminating the process. Except in the experience of dying, there is no memory of birth. A story without end is what a story is not.

2008-01-27T06:08:00.000-05:00

Awaiting sunrise on Harris Creek, darkness, with only the double image of the "Virginians" dock light. The human body awakens to a horizon, to a limit to perception. It is in the perception of a horizon that the real world is separated from the dream world. The clock begins ticking with the opening of the perceptual lens; two eyes is the minimum.

Once the eyes have opened, there is a tendency toward closing; energy is required to resist this closing of the perceptual lens. Delirium is an entropic drain, and the body's grip on reality is always tenuous. The lens closes periodically and the body slips into the downward spiral of delirium. A day is a lifetime.

Nirvana is a world without wheels, a world without spheres. But can the clock actually cease ticking? Doesn't Nirvana imply a karmic wheel? Ah, I am just beginning to see the light on Harris Creek.

2008-01-26T07:41:00.000-05:00

The concept of energy is abstracted from the experience of desire. The desire is to incorporate the other. The act of incorporation is the act of copulation.

"Eating is the form of the fall. The woman gave me and I did eat. Eating is the form of sex. Copulation is oral copulation; when the Aranda ask each other, 'Have you eaten?' they mean 'Have you had intercourse?'" Love's Body. 166.

The desire to incorporate is the source of the ordering of the dream body. When hunger stirs, the body awakens. The dream body is satiate; it is full, and thus free of the desire to eat. But hunger is just sleeping; the satiety of the body implies a hunger. Upon awakening that hunger is explicit.

Every story begins with an awakening and every story ends with a fall into sleep. The story unfolds within the dream and refolds into the dream; the dream contains the story. Hunger is a response to the perception of an empty space within the body. Eating perpetuates the empty space; it is only in the dissipation of the desire to eat that the empty space is once again full.

2008-01-22T06:57:00.000-05:00

The story writes itself; a story is a collective enterprise, a social production. The story depends upon groups; evolution depends upon species. If the many are not divided into groups, there is no time machine. Dreaming tends toward manyness, toward the dissolution of all boundaries between the people, and between the people and the world.

The dream people are not members of any group; everyone is an orphan and gender is inderminate. The dream is delirium.

"Contrary to what is taken for granted in the lunatic state called normalcy or common sense, the distinction between self and external world is not an immutable fact, but an artificial construction. It is a boundary line; like all boundaries not natural but conventional; like all boundaries, based on love and hate." Love's Body. 142.

The answer to the question," How is a time machine constructed?", is the answer to the question, "How is a group constructed?" According to the evidence of our own experience, there is within the dream body, an implicit desire to awaken, and this desire to awaken from delirium is the source of the story.

2008-01-16T07:38:00.000-05:00

It is a bright cold January morning on Harris Creek. It is a new year, a year that is yet to be lived, a chapter that is yet to be written and read. As I sit here in my hermitage in my sixty-third chapter, it seems to me that the proceeding chapter marked a turning point in the story. My protagonist is now clearly seen as an "old man." The author and the audience see him that way, and that is the way he sees himself; "it is written."

At some point in the story the dynamic shifts from composition to decomposition; from construction to deconstruction. One can resist the shift and focus on maintennance and reconstruction projects, or one can turn one's focus upon the disintegration, upon the inevitable. It is this turning of his eye that turns the man into the old man. "I grow old . . . I grow old . . . / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."

An old man is a useless man. He just sits in shade and watches the useful, watches and remembers. There is no future for an old man; his future has become his past. The chapters that proceed the turning point can, in an old man's eye, be re-written/re-read by the light of the moon. This recollection in reflection is something only an old man can do.

2007-12-13T07:28:00.000-05:00

The purpose of the corporate body is to reproduce itself; every production is a reproduction. Conceptually, the body is a code for making this from that. It is the body of language that repeats the story. "It ain't the meat, it's the motion." The code is the process that organizes the unorganized, and it is that process which is marked by a beginning and an end. What about the unorganized? Is the unorganized experience an experience of chaos, or, is the fear of the unorganized, reproduced through the generations, the genetic code.

The conceptual machine is reproduced in dialectics, or, incorporation, or , eating, or, fucking. It is the dynamic of the relationship between the genders and the generations, that reproduces, the species body. But this reproduction is happening surrounded and permeated by the unorganized, the entropic shithouse. The machine does not produce itself from the void, it produces itself from the shit. The unorganized is "that."

It would appear that it is an ambivalence of desire with regard to shit, that fuels the fantastic machine; it is this ambivalence which is reproduced by the relationship between the parts which make up the whole machine. To dismantle the parts is to stop the machinery. There is, Oh Monks, a desire to dismantle, a desire to turn the machine off.

2007-12-10T07:35:00.000-05:00

Harris Creek is silver this foggy Monday morning in December and the garden is falling into Winter. The funny thing is that once I began to think about myself I could not remember what it felt like when I didn't. There is the experience itself and there is the experience of watching the experience itself. I cannot say when I first became a watcher, but now, in those hours when I am awake, it seems as if the watcher has always been here. It is not as if my childhood has vanished but it is confined to a space that is separated from the space in which I here and now find myself.

The watcher's world unfolds in the process of reading/writing, which is surperimposed upon the process of participation. There is the fantasy itself, and the reading/writing of the fantasy; there is the original and the recording. The participant proceeds the watcher.

Reading/writing alters the experience of the corporate body; there is a bifurcation, a separation of the stream of experience into two streams which flow in parallel, each to each, one real, and one unreal. As the childish participant learns to read/write the body of experience divides itself into parallel worlds; the real one, and the one up on the silver screen.

Once the body enters the theater, there is no turning back, no re-unification, short of disease or insanity. The watcher takes his/her recorder everywhere she/he goes. The watcher is a development in a fanastic experience which begins at conception and ends at death. The world of the watcher is an analog world.

But now as I tap these words into cyber-space, there is a new superimposition upon my already superimposed body. The watcher is being digitilized. Evidently, this is a new development. Stay tuned.

2007-12-05T06:28:00.000-05:00

"The joy of victory and the agony of defeat." The winner is raised up and the loser is cast down. Our awakened experience is marked by a desire for victory and a fear of defeat. The human experience is indeed in the form of a game; the outcome is always in doubt because the contest is not settled until the end of time. The best one can hope for is to have the upper hand when the clock expires. There are,of course, games within the game.

The joy of victory is the joy of domination; the agony of defeat is the agony of being dominated. The winners and losers are never apart, and that taints every joy, the sight of the losers and the fear of becoming one. The winners and the losers constitute one corporate body; it is the contest that unites them; master and slave incorporate each other. The desire to dominate is the desire to be dominated; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

You see, Oh Monks, every joyous victory is dogged by a desire for the agony of defeat. "The poor shall always be with you." Until time runs out and the game ends.

2007-12-01T06:42:00.001-05:00

Another drop-dead gorgeous sunrise on Harris Creek this morning. The geese have been huddled, waiting, and now seem relieved that it happened again. Jesus says, "I am in the world, but not of it." The geese are of the natural world; I am in it but not of it. The writer of words is unnatural.

The person is not identical with the four-dimensional body. You can't actually measure a face, that is, the measurements do not reveal the person. When I think about it, I find it extremely difficult to locate myself in this world in which I find myself. I am not inside my body, but neither am I outside it. Nevertheless, in my experience so far, we go everywhere together. The best idea that I can come up with is that myself and mybody are analogs.

The person is fantastic, made out of metaphors, not matter. The body that is of nature is a numerical construct, the person is a construct of words. Metaphors are not a by-product of mathematics, the person is not a by product of the brain. From the beginning, there are two bodies of language, which in the process of mutual incorporation, constitute the "experience of reality." As experience, the real and the fantastic are inseparable.

2007-11-30T08:03:00.000-05:00

It is in the relationship between imagination and conceptuality that the human species originates; absent that relationship there is nothing human about species. Human experience originates in fantasy; the extra-fantastic world of Science Man is an abstraction. Science Man says, "This is the way the world is, free of fantasy." But Science Man has never experienced that world; it is just his ideal.

Science Man is like a head sticking out of the sand in which the rest of the body lies buried. Like his Father, Religious Man, he mistakes a part for the whole. Conceptual thought does not reveal the body of human experience, it just incorporates it; it can only reveal itself; "blinded by the light."

Symbolic language reveals what conceptual language conceals: the part of the body buried in the sand. " Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience of reality." Soren Kierkegaard. And an experience of reality is always and only fantastic. Why does the body hide from itself?

2007-11-29T07:11:00.000-05:00

How is it that a natural animal comes to perform unnatural acts? And how is it that one species of all the species on Earth is culpable? These are questions that present themselves to me in the solitude of my hermitage. This tapping in the early morning is the way in which I turn them over in my mouth, without ever actually swallowing them or spitting them out.

The public pronouncement is that humans are responsible for the warming of the planet Earth. The human species is just one species that has evolved since the origin of species, since the beginning of the process of speciation. Humans are not responsible for evolution, they are, rather, a product of it. Isn't the whole process natural? Aren't humans just as natural as they can be?

As Science Man tells the story, humans are natural creatures and every act that a human performs is a natural act. The body of Science Man's "nature" is a corporate body; nature is the inferentially largest organism. The organism is a conceptual structure that evolves over time, a structure that maintains itself in opposition to the forces of disorganization. There is no crime or punishment here; there is no morality, no responsibility, no drama.

Unfortunately, or, fortunately, depending on guilt or innocence, the human organism finds itself plugged into an unnatural machine called language. The drama is artifice an artificial representation of natural evolution, starring the human species. At some point in the time-line of natural evolution, one conceptual organism, fell into history, into a body of metaphors. Metaphors are unnatural.

The human experience is partially unnatural; guilt and innocence are artifical constructs and so the guilty party is also artifical. The artifice does not evolve from the natural body, images do not evolve from concepts, rather, in the case of humans, the natural and the artifical constitute one corporate body, a "genuine two-in-one." The animal is human when it incorporates metaphor.

2007-11-24T07:02:00.000-05:00

The sun is rising over Harris Creek on this still and silent Sunday morning in November. Sundays are for sermonizing. As long as I am a member I am not whole. The member is always and only a part in the whole, never the whole itself. To identify myself with a part is to experience lack, to be always and only becoming whole, always and only incomplete, searching for the missing part that would make me whole. There is no experince of wholeness within that whole body that is "greater than the sum of its parts" because it is not whole, not fully evolved, until the end of time, until the conceptual process ceases. The body is whole when it stops dividing itself into groups.

Death is not a return to the conceptual womb, death is not sleep. Death is the end of the conceptual process itself and in that ending the body is whole. The only path to wholeness is through dying. It is our own wholeness that simultaneously attracts and repels us. We can't experience wholeness until we cease to identify ourselves with a part, but it is precisely this identity to which we cling, because we desire it.

Wholeness cannot be made through any technique whatsoever. Technology is a conceptual process; so is biology. The conceptual process is, ipso facto, divisive; divisive, and reproductive of a whole divided into parts. The purpose of the players is to keep the show on the road and the purpose of the tellers and listeners, writers and readers, is to keep the story from dissolving. The purpose is to hold wholeness at bay; it is a resistance movement.