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MYSELF It has not done so, but I could say your last sentence or ejaculation had obscured my train of thought. This, however, if it were true, would still not be adequate to achieve the function at which I am aiming. Some people can talk with such precision that the right audience could not fail to understand the communication. An obscure poet may, nevertheless, be expressing something in the shortest and most direct language known. Gerard Manley Hopkins is one example; Browning, in his poem ‘Sordello’, is, in Ezra Pound's opinion, another. I suggest a possibility of stimulating, in the listener who listens as he listens, mental activities that intervene between him and thoughts, the obscuring capacity of which is specific, not general.
BION Why wouldn't a simple, straightforward rigmarole do?
MYSELF It is imprecise, inexact, like throwing a pot of pitch at a painting to which the spectator objects. It is a macroscopic, macro-active phenomenon like all sensuously based activities. I am searching for something in the domain of the very small. To use an analogy, not the domain of wave mechanics, nor the domain of quanta. That is as near as anything I am likely to find to express to you the problem as I see it.
BION You are approaching the position at which Newton came into conflict with Berkeley.
MYSELF I am flattered that you use such illustrious names. I disavow, however, the appearance of kinship with them. You refer to Berkeley's attack on the Analyst in Newton's formulation of the ‘ghosts’ of increments? I have always been impressed by the language in which Berkeley clothed his attack. It is the language Freud might have used to describe a theory of anal eroticism. It impresses me
more still if I think of the statements of both men as signs of an emergent obtrusion which is contemporal, not sequential. The phenomena which I regard as conjoined and mental are more full of meaning if I conceive of them as contemporaneous. BION You do not regard them as historically