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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

" 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.

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?

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?