Callahan, Gerald N. Lousy Sex. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2013. # Progressive Summary # Key Points # Resonances # Oppositions He identifies the sense of self with the immune system and the brain, and calls it the neuroimmune system. This system defines the self, and defends it. This seems to be rooted in the story of separation. How to reconcile it with the story of interbeing as told in [[The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible]], [[Reference Notes/Radical Wholeness]] and [[Reference Notes/New Self, New World]]? # Questions # Quotes > These are gifts from those who came before us, and they will be our gifts to those who follow. The gift of self and the power to defend it. But there is a curse as well, a curse laid upon the gift by the evil goddess of necessity. The curse states that in return for our precious selves and their defense, we must, at once, acquire the weapons for the destruction of those selves. And further, that any control we exert over these weapons is tenuous at best. Illusory at worst. > > The magic of immune development is nearly, if not completely, beyond our imagining. Here cells mask themselves in the raiment of others, perform real magic, and carve, from the plain stones of sperm and egg, a human being and its antithesis—the worm of self-destruction. At the same time, the complexity of neurological self speaks a tale so fanciful, so lurid, that we may never understand what separates the whole from the pieces, the firm from the infirm, the sane from the insane, or what takes human beings down any of the paths that we must follow. The gifts of imagination, courage, resolve, strength of will, and vision carry with them the inherent risks of depression, delusion, anxiety, insanity, and suicide—unavoidably. > > Within our nervous systems, of necessity, there are the seeds of psychoses. Within our immune systems, of necessity, there are the roots of self-destruction. Self, healthy self, depends absolutely on both systems and insists as well on the flaws. > Multiple sclerosis is about the purity of our two selves and about their flaws. It is the mystery in the middle of the pool. Among all the autoimmune diseases, multiple sclerosis is, at once, one of the most remarkable and one of the most sinister—because this disease works in between the two selves. But as it does that, as it pries the two selves apart, MS opens a window on the human self. > > Inside people with MS, the immune system believes the nervous system is the enemy. Because of that, the immune self lashes out at the nervous self. All the while, the nervous system is, of course, manning the controls of the immune system, orchestrating its own destruction. All the while the immune system is mucking with the dials and levers that regulate the ner- vous system. > > The immune system strips a neuron of its myelin. The nervous system, in its turn, raises the voltage. The immune system reaches a little deeper. And the whole thing ratchets up a notch. Self versus self. A state of being quite unlike any other.