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Question: How do you use the term ‘caesura’?
Bion: I would like to have an idea of what this area is which is being delimited when you say “caesura”. I was saying just now that I think I can feel when I am in what I call a “capital city”, and that I feel New York is one. I don't care what the map says, or what is said by any other place; that is not what I am talking about. I wouldn't like to try to say what a capital city is. So when you ask me about the caesura – and indeed any of these words we use – every one of us needs to be aware of this thing which is the origin of the sensation that there is something around. When I say there is something around which I would call a ‘capital city’, it is no good suggesting I should go and look up the words in a dictionary or a guide book. There is no guide book to the domain or area we are talking about. What then is the ‘capital city’ of this caesura? What is the core of that? I have been asked this question, but I am trying to put to you that I cannot really tell you because I don't know how it is to be verbalized. Perhaps between us all we might be able to find an approximation to it, some method of indicating the focal point, the focus of a conic section. But that is again only another model; people have tried to give it various names like ‘spirit’, ‘soul’, ‘super-soul’, ‘id’, ‘ego’; they none of them get me very far.
O: Maybe a colloquial reference: ‘where it's at’, is as good as anything.
B: Yes. A phrase like that conveys something to me. This is what we are up against the whole time: How is this awareness to be communicated to somebody else? Where does this communication start, where is its origin, where or how is it initiated? Did the place initiate
the feeling that it is a capital city, or did the idea or some primordial thing, and a whole lot of those primordial things getting together, produce something for which the name ‘capital city’ had to be found? It is not the bricks and mortar, but the people in it; then