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the other way. Theorists call this characteristic sign of bifurcation land, hysteresis. It is generally known that sudden healing changes of the first born again experience can arrive magically fast whereas a run at it a second time, another born again state after the loss of the first one, comes, if at all, with much more effort and difficulty. Members of Alcoholic’s Anonymous know that getting on the AA wagon the first time may be quick, joyful and easy. Getting back on this wagon after a fall is much more painfully slow and demanding, analogous to the Carmalite monk; St. John’s lost faith engendered suffering of the Dark Night of the Soul.

Viewing the instabilities and extremes near the boundary of a bifurcation brings inquiries and advice about why a rational compromise, some form of disciplined moderation, would not be more desirable. It turns out that in this parameter regime, the in-between state is intrinsically inaccessible. The pocket in the S shaped fold of the upper manifold cannot be attained, at least for very long, by varying the values of the two parameters. However, if one increases the number of controls, it might be possible to stabilize a small island in a parametric sea of instabilities. In an application of this strategy, Smith College and Harvard Professors James Callahan and Jerome Sashin used a geometric representation of the difficult to stabilize region of normal weight on a double cusp manifold representing the behaviors of patients with eating disorders with both anorexia nervosa and bulimia. They varied five controls to stabilize a very small result area representing normal eating by varying the control values for ability to verbalize feelings, to imagine solutions, to defend against anxiety with unconscious forgetting called repression, to make contact with realistic rationality and to modulate feelings with say exercise, meditative practice or psychopharmaceuticals.

My experiences with the so-called borderline personality, with the tendency toward sudden and global personality change, from Sunday school teacher to Harlot in the space of a breath, has been both sexually exciting and personally ruinous for me in my life. I could feel the instabilities in these dwellers of the bifurcation pockets and my heart raced at the promise of mutually unconsidered impulses, the blurring of orificial identities, the experiments with sexual roles and modes and the incipiency of collapse into regressive mud play. Most of all, I anticipated that their

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