Lipton’s Journal/February 14, 1955/592

Last night on the train I discovered an important thing. I was so engrossed in talking and then in reading that when I looked out the window for the first time we were in Trenton, and what I saw on a neon sign above a factory was, “TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES.” And I pondered this, and realized that I had left make out of give and take and give and take and give.

So first I reestablished the progression to Take—Make—Give—Take—Make, etc. And then I realized that that was very partial. So I changed it to Take—Make—Give—Rest—Take—Make—etc. But in finding the word Rest—for indeed no matter what we give there is always the moment of neutral, of rest, of passivity before the more active take (Take understood as being more active than rest, total rest—has anyone yet remarked on the relative qualities and quantities of “passivity”?) So to make and to rest, to work and to play, fit and enriched the contradictions of Give and Take, (And is indeed the word of rest. A period is the enforced rest of society. A child speaks in rambling spirals, it says, and then and then and then and then. Sometimes it starts to stammer in resentment when we attempt to inflict too soon periodicity, start and stop upon it. So then I had it: Here is the dialectical progression of all process.

Rest—Take—Rest—Make—Rest—Give—Rest—Enter (the door, the portal)—Rest—Take—Rest—Make, etc.

I establish it as a quartet of Take Make Give Enter with a rest between each. But of course this is merely an attempt to set up more points on what is always a continuous (not discrete) curve. Life is a continuum, not a discontinum. But the illusion of separation comes from the time lag which is the social representation of rest. This I think is more adequate although of course incomplete—only infinity can express the total of the curve—than the Marxian dialectic which is two-poled rather than four-poled. I’ll get bisexuality into everything.