Re-creational Magic

     From this world to the next; from utility to creation. Instead of words as market-place utilities, brand names to advertise established items, the creative words which make it new. Words made new again, as on the first day of creation; eternity's sunrise. Words used not to interpret the world but to change it; not to advertise this world but to find another. To pass from this world to the next; from ordinary to extraordinary language.
— Norman O. Brown, Love's Body, p. 234.

     We stumble on the truth. The truth always scandalous, a stumbling block; truth is where we stumble or fall down; in the rough ground, the anomalies; not in the explanations. Search the scripture till you find a stumbling block; look for the slips of the tongue; the lapsus linguae, the fortunate falls. The truth is in the error. We slip out from under the reality-principle, into the truth; when the control breaks down. By great good fortune, gratis, by grace; and not by our own work or will.
— Norman O. Brown, Ibid., p. 243-244.

     Meaning is not in things but in between; in the iridescence, the interplay; in interconnections; at the intersections, at the crossroads. Meaning is transitional as it is transitory; in the puns or bridges, the correspondence.
— Norman O. Brown, Ibid., p. 247.

     Psychoanalysis began as a further advance of civilized (scientific) objectivity; to expose remnants of primitive participation, to eliminate them; studying the world of dreams, of primitive magic, of madness, but not participating in dreams or magic, or madness. But the outcome of psychoanalysis is the discovery that magic and madness are everywhere, and dreams is what we are made of. The goal cannot be the elimination of magical thinking; or madness; the goal can only be conscious magic, or conscious madness; conscious mastery of these fires. And dreaming while awake.
— Norman O. Brown, Ibid., p. 254.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any — lifted from the no
of all nothing — human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
— E. E. Cummings, 100 Selected Poems, Grove Press, #95, p. 114.