To create a cultural object is to create a double of the self. One projects one's bodily energies into a creation intended to become part of the “immortal body politic.” One employs one’s libido to write and publish a “book” that is purchased by libraries. One’s name appears on and in the book. You are the “author.” A part of the substance of the self is contained within the book. One imagines that one’s bodily substance “lives on.” The book in the library is part of the cellular structure of the body politic.

The book that one has written as a representation of one’s self—the externalization of one’s bodily energies--become part of the "dream body of culture." One has projected one’s self and its energies into a cultural object, which one hopes will “live on” as part of the national megalith. One’s book (as a symbol of one’s body) has become a block in the pyramid.

To create a cultural act or object is to act to fantasize that one's body will “live on” as a piece of the immortal dream body. Unlike your own body (that is in the process of disintegrating), one’s book will be preserved eternally. If academics have libraries, baseball players have “record books” and the “hall of fame.” The energies of a “big leaguer” are transformed into a “hit” or “home-run” (a physical act) that in turn is transformed into a “box score” that in turn transmogrifies into a “lifetime record” for the player.

The baseball umpire said, “All men die, but the record lives.” The record is the “history” of what has been accomplished--transformation of one’s life-energies into a statistic. Political historians also use statistics to remember: “Nine-million were killed and twenty-one million injured in the First World War.” “Six-million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.” “Fifty-million people were killed in the Second World War.” As baseball historians (and the public) remember those men who have produced the most hits or home-runs, so do political historians measure the significance of events in terms of the number of people who have been killed.

That which historians write about is that which they hope will be “remembered.” To remember an event that occurred in the past is to keep it alive in the present, to generate the fantasy that this event still exists. History is grounded in the fantasy that what one writes about continues to exist. It is as if the events have not died yet. They are “preserved in the history book,” and it takes create imagination to realize that what is written about is dead and gone. To say this is sacrilegious, that is, to be an infidel among scholars who live within the “dream of history.”