Chapter 41. Book I: The Dream. A Memoir of the Future

ALICE It sounds like a mutual admiration society.

MAN It does raise the suspicion that you come together for that purpose.

ROSEMARY How is this to be avoided?

MYSELF A long time ago, when Alice and Roland came together, they did it for the purpose of forming just such a society for mutual admiration. Later –

ALICE Later! It seemed more like a society for mutual hatred and recrimination.

MYSELF You have expressed it well. You and Rosemary seemed, though not officially conjoined, to come together –

MAN – in a somewhat ambiguous relationship.

MYSELF Terms like ‘mistress’ and ‘maid’, ‘husband’ and ‘wife’, are all ‘sensuously’ meaningful, and in the domain of sensuous relationships A + B can be meaningful in a macroscopic way. Even relationships which can be mathematically expressed, as the ‘pure’ mathematician says they are in pure mathematics, become sensuous.

BION Is that not saying that the mere fact of being able to formulate the relationship A + B makes it a macroscopic relationship? But does it? Is it more true to say that we are so used to formulating statements only when they are macroscopic that we instantaneously assume that what is formulated must, by the fact of formulation, be macroscopic?

MYSELF The converse is thought to be true: that if we cannot formulate it, ‘it’ must be ultra- or infra-sensuous; that concepts that are ‘empty’ and intuitions that are ‘blind’ must lack completion, and that the ‘completion’ which is not ‘complete’, or is ‘unfulfilled’, nevertheless exists. ♀ has ♂, and ♂ has ♀. In short, ♀ # [apart from]

♂ cannot be stable. It is the function of a discipline, any discipline, to fill or complete; it is the ‘job’ of the link or synapse to join; it may be apart from a substitute used as a ‘link’, but no substitute can do what the link does. Addiction in place of ‘marriage O’ or ‘divorce O’ fails; sooner or later any substitute for the real thing is bound to fail through instability.