The denseness of the moment always seemed to him a sort of millefeuille in which he was continually sliding out from under himself. The high seriousness of one layer undermined by the childishness of the next which in turn fractured to reveal the crude emotion of a third, which in turn revealed nothing more than the recurrence of wants merely believed in, and so on and on. The point was that only the obstacle embodied particularity and recognition, and yet the obstacle was necessarily entirely generic. These were the trials of a self, the quintessentially social form of its ordeals being precisely what such a self is.

Experience is singular and yet our understanding of it is plural, assembled out of well-worn links and clues that have already been turned over a thousand times. The weariness that comes flooding in when the absurd project of overcoming plurality is put aside is one of life's timeless constituents. And the understanding that is expressed in such dualities as singular and plural, energy and weariness, that pits one of them against the other in a romantic quest for selfhood is just a child crying after the moon.

The self is really an afterthought, a retrospective construction out of the elements already present, and adding nothing to them, not even a hint of mystery. It is as essential as the origin in Cartesian coordinates, which originates nothing at all, and is at best a temporary and practical convention. A world is a product of differences, and so these differences cannot be members of the world, but only represented in it. There is, however, nothing prior to represent them and so they seem to represent themselves. This reflexivity is generally spoken of in the language of mind, or rather, the language of mind is the way in which we speak of this reflexivity.

Thought seems to be an element in a comprehensive structure whose logical underpinnings compel it towards an intrinsic goal called truth, no matter how imperfectly this is realised in each instance. Every thought is thus an assertion, but made with more or less of a degree of reserve. The reservation, no matter how dressed up as a dignity, marks the degree of thought's falling short of what it would be, of its reason for being. Desire provides a clue to what an unreserved thought would be like. Satisfaction is revealed as a more comprehensive name for truth, and reservation entirely fails of dignity.  

He identified two invariant and related qualities of experience. The first was shift, that he was never located where he had just taken himself to be, and the second was insecurity, meaning that there was an unassuageable thirst for such location which played itself out in a field of resemblances. Resemblances, echoing and repeating each other in endless multiplication, superceding and consuming each other in endless cancellation. And to this he felt constrained to add a further speculative complication: that a fixed quantum of faith or reality had to be divided amongst them, in a brutal zero-sum game.

Where does the bound quality that colours the 'malady of the quotidian' come from? It is insufficient to evoke a witnessing, since only violence can deform this ever-renewing event into scenic observation. If there were an experiencing self, the embodiment of the blank screen on which experience is displayed then the limits to pleasure or pain would be so vast that everything that belongs to this and here would be lost like a twig on the surface of a raging sea. And why this curious one-way time that so firmly holds us and bedevils us?

He knew he didn't exist and had never existed, which was quite something for a fictional character. When he met someone who smugly claimed that by knowing all the world's a stage etc., she was freed to be the author of her own play he laughed and said, "Never!" This knowledge would always arrive to get him out of a jam, but even if the fallout of its self-certainty lasted a little while it would inevitably turn into the theme of a further story, the story of someone who knew, or thought he knew something, who had a certain attribute, and who hence knew nothing at all. And like every fictional character, he would stumble into a fresh jam.

Old abandoned idols still harboured a peculiar venom. He was quick to revel in malice towards them when the occasion presented itself, but the slightest blatancy, the crossing of a line which would inevitably be crossed, turned this malice against himself. Why did he care? Each was a whole world in which at one time he thought he was at home, but his banishment was implicit from the start. Such a world is nothing more than the promise of never banishing, and hence a strategic mobilisation of cunning toxicities.

The cardinal points of the inner landscape. These are certain ideas which have a history and can be re-engaged at will  dependably producing a stream of related ideas usually containing something new which becomes added to that history. They are the mind's chief narratives, and they survive because they are believed in, or because something in them, which cannot yet be separated out is believed in. Their ability to be repeated is more important than their content since it implies the existence of a solid and invisible supporting structure. Nevertheless these points are only their content and this grows worn and then frays and dissolves; and then the supporting structure is seen to have been no more than a dream. All that remains is a dark sense of the space those structures would have inhabited, from where they would have drawn their reliability. 

As if subtle windows lined up, he suddenly seemed able to see much further, but it was not the depth that impressed him so much as the cut-off views to the side of those distant, newly-revealed apertures. These were once habitations, and in a sense they still are. They are still being lived but he is no longer a part of their life - and just happens to be viewing them from this particular draughty aperture, this place of no story, open and insufficient.

Take one last look at this food impaled on your fork, these pieces of lettuce, or bacon, or hard-boiled egg, or chunks of toasted bread. They are out there, someone stood behind a counter and handed you the plate and you carried it over here and sat down. Now, from this plate with its mass of pale-coloured stuff, a fully integrated, unapologetic part of the world's furniture, a paid-up member of objecthood, you have gathered up this fork-full, no less objective for all that the mass from which it was abstracted has for the last few hours and days been treated with the exclusive intention that it would end by being eaten, and you effect its disappearance into your mouth, where immediately, it goes dark, loses forever its visual identity and retains only a diffuse identity as a certain mass of flavour and texture. But these are now experienced by inward senses, those which belong to your tongue and your mouth, fully embodied and inhabited organs. They are made out of world-stuff but are also entirely your stuff, you stuff, their nature is unequivocally distinct from what is not-you. And the food now delivers a vivid pleasure, because you are hungry and your mouth and tongue are avid for intimacy with this stuff and waves of sensory pleasure arise through them, so that you begin to chew in order to open up the food more thoroughly, and you mingle it and dissolve it in spit which is a pure you stuff as long as it stays in your mouth, and the otherness of the food is crushed and spread against your taste-buds so that as much of it becomes taste-able as you can manage. And this goes on for a while and is far from complete before an irresistible impulse to swallow comes over you, to present this mass to your other more deeply buried and less articulate organs which clamour no less for their share in it; and the positive sense of it as any sort of distinct substance now disappears as it is cast into the internal abyss. Has it now become you? Absurd question. It simply no longer exists, it has given everything up in order to become pure satisfaction. That you will re-encounter it a little time ahead, transformed beyond recognition and that it will follow a simplified reverse trajectory and go back into objecthood, is at this moment the furthest thing from your mind.

When he tried to focus on what it was that elicited his longing he began to make out a certain face, an enigmatic female face, immemorial, and somehow also an image of himself, a broad face, s'fumato like a Leonardo, deeply familiar, a face he'd stared at in a night mirror many years ago, looking for himself and his transfiguration. What he was remembering was his mother's face as it filled his vision in the dawn of awareness, bending over him, not distinct from him, infinitely consoling.

He claimed repetition as his medium and his project, but the exact nature of repetition proved elusive. If there were such a thing as perfect repetition it would indicate one of two utterly opposed alternatives. Either there is a perfect liberation from situations, or we are shown, through its gaps and illusory hopes, the uncannily mechanical character of experience. But he saw that this is the wrong question, if only because there is no perfect repetition. Repetition was, he found, an attitude of will, a kind of focus, the point of which was not the identical but the different, an experience of the absolute contingency in each thing. But if this was always true, then repetition was valued merely as an expedient to minimise cognitive overhead.

The beginnings of dreams are always elusive because by the time we begin to recollect our dream-selves the story is already under way. It's not as if the observer is suddenly plunked down in the dream action, but the entire situation including the dream character is suddenly plunked down, and a situation, no matter how sketchy always includes its implicit pre-history. Every and any real or imaginary experience, and the smallest fragment of of such an experience contains this inseparable element of internal horizon. It is of the nature of lived time, as are the invisible seams, the jump-cuts.

This subject-object in its ecology, in a world of semblables, with its complex tensions between any two; a push and a pull prompted by enigmatic hints and proving to be of no ultimate significance; invert and repeat.  And then the thing that wants to be spoken, pain, tenderness, croce e delizia al cor, remains concealed except perhaps in dreams.

This is at best something that fills in some of the time before the beginning. Like an orchestra tuning-up except that there is no assurance that it will ever end. And yet there is a certain satisfaction in drawing these forms out of nowhere, giving fleeting structures to the gaping vacuity, making cuts and distinctions in it and tracing the lines of accidental fracture, without ever pretending that it has ceased being empty, or that it has ceased to gape.

He'd kept, it bothered him, and yet tickled him somewhat, he thought and he thought, he played the game, he'd say, he'd learned, he sought to normalise, he resented, it seemed sad to him, he always assumed, he was, he created, he always used to, he was considering, if he felt like it, he didn't pursue, he knew, he was all too, he had perhaps, thought, asked, he translated, he didn't realise, he took it, he met, he was sitting, he'd about settled, he couldn't believe, he went... But he was getting too far ahead of himself.

Diurnal life aspiring to the plasticity of dream butts against obdurate causality and the various treacheries of the promesse de bonheur, anticipating, outrunning, surrounding us. None of these are enough by themselves to shatter the dreaming mind which is always steeped in its esemplastic bliss. The cyclopean eye of the veritable dreamer may be slammed shut by day but its membrane is permeable to the strangest things.

The mysterious nature of sensory experience makes it seem at times like a series of signals or messages which pass through presence. Where do these messages originate and where do they go? Why is there such a peculiar freedom in dreams? At times the density and inescapability of the selfed world is uppermost. It is a recurrence, but why and for whom? The world becomes actual in a characteristic form of memory-mediated recurrence. Things cannot be repeated exactly, but they come with variations which in turn evoke earlier memories - another kind of consciousness is glimpsed, one that operates through time and not on its surface.

These pale-toned winter days with their slanted light, and the coolness of the air bearing  successive faint smells that enfold each locality in finely detailed allusions, flowers, animals, paint, frying pans...The squint inseparable from bright daylight, the sadness of evening. There is an intimacy to it, a kind of after-love, that wants to speak the first slow words that grow out the silence without denting it.

He used to feel at times as if his heart would burst, and out of it would emerge a sort of phantom of himself, a lightning flash of energy which would expand in a sphere, growing wider and more attenuated, until it was lost in the dark space of myriads of encircling eyes.

These were both failed dreams, each in its own way representing a possible path out the emotional mire he found himself in, recurrently and ineluctably. They were ventures, speculations in a sense, and they each went on for a time, seeming to teeter either way, and then exhausting themselves, finally yielding him nothing but a return to his starting point.

Things seen for the very first time are suddenly recognised, and the recognition immediately and retroactively constructs their history, as if they were always known and fit neatly in the map. As if they could have been found at any time by following the map you never knew was there.