"Why was it he felt so perfectly attuned to winter, to its fatalistic expectation of the worst, then, when the worst came, its rustic heroisms and shouldering of burdens, improvised ingeniousness, constructive despair?" - Violet Trefusis, 'Pirates at Play'.

"In every single moment of life we are beings that will die, and each moment would be otherwise if this were not our innate condition, somehow operative within it. Just as we are not already fully present in the instant of our birth, but rather something of us is continually being born, so too we do not die only in our last instant." - Georg Simmel 1918 (tr. Andrews and Levine, 2010)

The same thoughts encountered again and again, the space not exactly mapped, since it has the dream-like way of unexpectedly returning on itself, but traversed this way and that, filled to the edges with old footprints, all the walls banged on, windows flown through, all the hollow spots tested. Apparently there is no way out but that the conviction that there is no exit may itself be the exit.

If the ideal is the extension of functions that serve life and living into taking themselves as their pure end, so that art is perception as an end in itself, science as practical causality and ontology freed from the need to be useful, and so on, then what results when the most basic reality function of all, the 'constitution' of other minds, of the self as both object and subject at once, is driven into autotelic purity?

Memory and desire, each in their own way were enlisted in the task of completing this ever-incomplete being half-surrendered to image and symbol. These now resign from their tasks, admitting failure and final indifference. The situation thus sharpens free of mediations and dialectics. Being is substance, known directly or not at all.

From the side the curve of the cheek is continued in that of the forehead then bends back again rising to the crown before falling smoothly and with greater curvature to where the neck joins. The process of life spreads outward, first in trees and bindings of nerves, muscle and ducts and then discovering purpose takes off from the body and roots itself into the world. The two curves are not continuous but are connected via the eye-socket's inlet, the delicate seeing organ recessed behind the bridge of the nose with its perfect arc. And following like a wave behind the endless outflow of purpose the mind foams and eddies, now vapourising, now turning back on itself driven by the same force and miraculously discovering a world already half-formed. In front of the cheek the turns and returns of nose, philtrum, upper and lower lip and that miniature echo of waist and hip, the chin, all so expressive. And life now lost in the world's infinite fascination.

Gaining ground the not of circumstances bettered by minimal rules to the occasion of hexagons directly in air the vantage point of calibre or calibrated or calumniated togetherness, avenue dark as heightened step in brilliance forgathered and silvered shoe forgotten wine drained on behalf of fire-engines and Tudor ecstasies falling down down to sand and Wintry sea.