Lipton’s Journal/February 21, 1955/652

I have a feeling that the choices of homeostasis have to be seen dynamically rather than as an instantaneous statistical opting for the best alternative. The sup and the er war with one another, but they war in many ways. They have trench-warfare (depression); they have great advances and great retreats, breakthroughs, concessions (finally the life of the body is at stake and only the most powerful er or the most powerful sup will say, hang it all, kill the body). Very often the victory of a sup results in a relaxing of sup, and vice-versa. My sup against being a rebel relaxed when I made the concession of a good apartment, good clothes, and selling Naked. I’m no longer so covetous of celebrities because I haven’t alienated myself from them in the way I live. I can gratify the sup which says make money because the er now knows what to do with it—which it didn’t five years ago. And so forth.

What I also feel is that the sup and er carry on intelligence and counter-intelligence, and that they go in for feints and deceptions, so that one of the meanings of a test-situation is that one discovers, that is one’s sup or er discovers, that there were tricks up the other’s sleeve. Which is why we sometimes avoid test situations. The sup or er expends energy-anxiety to keep the other from knowing. er energy is lerve, sup energy is serve, or verve and serve. For example, my er was working for a long time in this journal by furnishing all kinds of hints and opening in my typing errors. But today is seems to me that I get nowhere investigating my typing errors. For example stiuation for situation which conveyed nothing to me, it merely distracted me from my thought.

So the sup has started to trick the er. But the er is very strong today, so it takes the trick and gives back counter-trick, perception. The examples of verve and serve energy expenditures on wasted objects is of course endless. But one of the tricks of er or sup is to indulge the other, catch it off-balance. Thus, the er tricks the sup in the case of a minister or priest by letting him rant and roar in the pulpit about the sin of sex. To his sup horror and his er glee he finds himself buggering a choir boy ten minutes later. His serve got too complacent, and wham went the verve, off to the races.

Now, I don’t think that there is an uncontrolled war except perhaps in psychosis. The ego which I prefer to call the Juggler decides which ball to keep in the air. The juggler’s aim is to keep the human as healthy as possible, and so he listens to his two advisers. The counsel from the sup and the council of the er. And they take many forms, they are respectively Judge and Highwayman, Pope and King, clerk and beggar, benevolent social modesty and roaring sadist (these two gentlemen the juggler accommodates with a sigh—Ah, well, malice again}.

And the need when one is developing to accept each emotion, each depression, each hour of energy and each hour of fatigue is that neither sup nor er can be denied, even when one is growing stronger—that is, becoming more consciously powerful. So, with the great expenditure of verve which goes into these journals, follows the depression of serve. But tomorrow or the day after when it comes I will accept it, I will relish in it instead of trying to overcome it by force. The more I accept my depression the faster I’m out of it, because depression like the elaboration of trenches thrives on resistance.

Each moment of existence the Juggler works, juggling a thousand things in the space of a heart-beat. But if we include the buried body decisions, then truly the work of the juggler in an instant is infinite.