#3 wherein ray bradbuy, ben harper, and freud smoke a doobie (or a are-you-just-happy-to-see-me)

“It was a pleasure to burn.” I’m reminded of a Ben Harper concert I attended at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, and the delicious, sweet aroma wafting over the crowd like incense when “Burn One Down” was played. This is a personal idiosyncrasy. Surely. What’s not idiosyncratic, however, is the abrupt use of “It” without a noun antecedent. A world of possibility opens up; the mind races to narrow down the prospects. Despite the ambiguity, we are given one blessed certainty: pleasure. Now who can’t relate to that? Lastly, I can’t resist a fast & loose Freudian riff, purely associative. Everyone knows about the id / ego / super ego business. What you might not know is that these terms are poor translations. In the original, Freud gives us das Es / das Ich / das Über Ich. A more faithful translation yields it / I / over I. So there you have it. What? “It.” And the purpose of “It”  in Freudian theory is, yep, you guessed right, the blind pursuit of pleasure.

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