No matter what he tried there remained a structural flaw in enunciation so the the burden was never lifted, the connection never made. Not that he was always trying to do so, mostly he enjoyed the advantages that he could extract from this plurality and its screens. But these would inevitably pale and deliver him back to his symptom. Then a painful passage would ensue whose sole advantage was that the predicament had emerged again into some kind of truth. His attunement to the voice freed from self-consciousness and perfectly pitched to the heart's timbre was extreme. He could hear it everywhere, just off-stage.

The processes of understanding that he employed were a part of the mechanism of the world. Knowing this did not dissolve loneliness but lent it a strange prescience. All of us alone and ecased in our solitary shells, each riding and being ridden by its system of a self. He sat alone and gazed through the window at the unfamiliar countryside. Bare hills beyond the edge of town, the headlights of trucks coming over the hill that raked the ground with long sweeps of dark, flecked, light.

It is all very well to recollect in tranquility, but this betrays whatever it was that prompted and suffered the emotion. Literature may be the worst way of analysing things because of its seductive mobilisation of distance. A certain set of discursive gestures is combined in endlessly new patterns suggestive of a freedom for novelty which is genuine enough, but no match for the reality it faces. Everything keeps escaping, and after all the traps have been set out for and on behalf of his desire, he keeps finding that they fail to close over what passes through them. This is not his experience, rather he is the way this experience is expressed.

So much can be subsumed under attempts at rigidly designating the self. From a little distance it seems an absurd project. What motivates it but a desperate immortality project? If I can be universally and uniquely designated then I am necessary, and hence I must exceed the moment in some way, in enough of a way to... But there may be something entirely different going on: clear seeing is always available to me in its unquestionable simplicity and directness, but does it entail a knowledge and hence a one who knows? The knowledge is always subject to doubt and inhabits the order of challenge and supercession, and its knower inherits this fragility. Seeing does not entail a distinct seer. This is hard to grasp, and our attempts at designation only try to bridge an impassable gulf.

What was it he found himself doing? Inviting experiences of being thrown into an infinite regress, of being reduced to silence for the sake of the tiny metaphysical frisson which attaches to them. He was suspicious of the motives which drew a slack mind like his own to a system of such adamantine rigour, and sceptical of his suspicions. There must be a recognition at the heart of it, not just admiration of uncompromising logic. If so, it was, he concluded, in the irony it turned againt the will that claimed to be in search of liberation. In all strictness, no such will could exist, no matter how time and time again he was impressed by its embodiments, by their glamour and lordly self-justification in breaking any and every taboo

Without a tincture of discontent the slides come up near blank, as if they have been over-exposed and only vague outlines appear of the matter in which thought and being are to be brought together. It is perhaps an effect of the promesse be bonheur which seduces awareness into a sweet and facile worldliness. But then, these very intermittences of the self contain what is most worthy of question, just because it is independent of the all too common findings of discontent. There is something of detective work in this, and so a search for a culprit. Is it being that is at fault, or myself as its bogus agent?

Heaps of things do not embody the idea of things in tension, but its contrary, things having collapsed out of tension. This is most often seen in the heaps of disjecta left out in the street for collection. These are objects or broken fragments of objects which are in the terminal phases of their furnishing of the human world. After this they will be included in and suffer the vicissitudes of larger, buried or merely surveyed heaps of refuse. At the end of being components of structures of human meaning, of being parts of the inner shells in which these psychic molluscs spend their hours of retreat. Having served their turn, theirs is now the strange fading afterlife of garbage.

Where matter appears most dense there is the least of being because the coordinations are simplest and most rule-bound. Think of the peculair sense of self there is in things looked at from right up close to the naked eye, the tiny intimate space of the pillow when you are in bed, or even the space behind your closed eyes, and of how this instantly evaporates when you open your eyes and gaze out at space. But then you might be opening your eyes at night, waking from sleep or walking about in the dark world. For a moment the priority of this living darkness is acknowledged, and you understand that the day is only projected over the night and that it is never the other way around.

His favourite scenes were of shadows, clouds, heaps, reflections, flat compositions, angular, unbalanced and obstructed views. Compositions were fields of items in tension, and the way these functioned to anchor relations of acknowledgement was something he thought he already understood. Clouds belonged in the family of saliencies which was akin to this. Shadows and reflections were different and obstructions different again. The former were a matter of the layering of one space over another, the ambiguity and mixing of separate fields, of which one was generally three-dimensional and the the other flat. This contained an allusion to the illusory qualities of depth perception. Obstructions also had a demystificatory dimension - the sudden frustration of the entitlement to transparency and depth, the something-in-the-way that blocks the spontaneity of the viewer and causes them to become aware of their seeing, the invisible functioning that embraces their entire world. This is why obstruction is best when it is blank and blind, a piece of pure texture.

Amused detachment always seemed to him to be the biggest lie, one of the more pretentious strands of will puffing itself up so as to claim to be the chief or most essential one. In the night he could see that there is not the slightest difference in the way of it's tangledness time's knots between this one and any other project of desire. Where it differed was only in a certain respectability, a purely social value with little to offer beyond that sphere. Hence, his frequently repeated visits to the foul rag-and-bone shop.

The narrative of a dream produces a swift tide of emotion which carries him through an aperture out of its world and into wakefulness, into the anonymous hours before dawn. The dream world dissolves away but the emotions remain and seize upon whatever mental fuel they can find to stay alive. It is the other now who takes him apart, who forces his reaction and surrender. The other who always outplays him by anticipating him and by gaining the point of control before he even realises its possibility. He looks down at the broken remnants of his strategies and is invaded by the strange sweetness of defeat, in which in spite of himself, he is constrained to acknowledge an unavowed and liberating truth.

The basic relation of nodes in tension is that one becomes subject for and/or to the other one, and then, perhaps, this relation reverses. A2 serves in a certain relation to A1, and then A3 serves in that relation to A2. The asymmetry gives rise to the possibility of an infinite regress. A fixed starting point is never designated. This is a regress because if A2 is subject or self in relation to A1, the A2 is prior to, comes before A1. For A1 to appear A2 must have already been there. A selved space does not have any distinguished point, the asymmetric relation it hosts precludes this possibility. Further, it could be said that the subject term in the relation is a proxy, or metaphor, for the all. The subject is initially minuscule in relation to the object, initially just a tiny and overlooked point. It can stand for the all because it points out of the space. How is this possible when it seems to have exhausted itself in pointing to the object? It does so, but necessarily in a mode of freedom, it could potentially have pointed to any other object. It distinguishes the object and in so doing co-defines an entire field of objectivity; everything that can be an object is included, but the subject. This impossibility is why it points out of the space, and the impossibility does not arise as long as there is a belief in, or deferral to, the infinite regress.

The dimension of time, of time experienced as separation, is another virtual space in which contrasts crystallise into the sense of a self, of a selfed space - an abstract notion that better describes this kind of event. What is a selfed space? It is a space for distinctions, or seeming distinctions, which cause a strong mapping into a here and a there, a this and a that. These cease to be symmetric terms. A selfed space is a space of radically broken symmetry. The self is inferred as what breaks symmetry. Without it the parts would mirror each other perfectly none having any primacy, every movement of awareness cancelled by a contrary movement. The distinction between movement and stillness does not exist. But it is not that one suddenly notices an asymmetry in the field, the fundamental break is the realisation that all this is for someone - not for itself but for this unknown element that stands in for the all.

He considered his life, as primarily life and not as his. Life in this sense being a concept prior to any other reflexive concept he could discover. He was after all as much life as anyone else, and being with anyone else it was natural to see life playing out a tiny segment of its myriad possibilities and plural necessities in what seemed at first to be just their own game. They were both held in the now, but the now seemed merely the face of something more elusive, mistakenly taken to be determined by a line from past to future, or future to past. He wondered what that other dimension could be, but could find only hints, traces, bedevilling suggestions.

He realised that if what he was looking for was what was too obvious and too familiar to notice then far from having to rely on times when he felt inspired, when his language was straining at its leads, he needed to awaken in the dullest, least aroused times. Could there be such an intention? he wondered, or was it inevitable that the grey moth would stay hidden in the heart of all this apparent flatness. Something more subtle than intention was required, because the impulse to awaken could not be imported, it must already be present, the almost invisible trembling of the moth's folded wings.

The distinction between self and other-self is more fundamental for making a world than subject and object. The other here has at least the same freedom to act as I have and motives which are entirely opaque, since that is precisely what its otherness consists in. Its actions need not mirror mine in any way, its freedom is an assumption that I cannot help making in the face of its inscrutability. The essence here is uncontrol, complete frustration of the enterprise of rendering myself absolute; but if the other reveals itself in its directedness towards me the field of possibilities expands to embrace new ecstasies.

Subject and object as poles in experience are precipitates of a certain saturated field of tensions. Or if precipitation is an inadequate metaphor say that they congeal or condense out of this field, in any case they arise as relatively stable in relation to their matrix. As a process this is a peripheral element in experience and one of the things that art can do is to bring it closer to the foreground of awareness without its becoming an object, which is impossible. When this happens a great amount of satisfaction and even a sense of power or sublimity is felt. Another analogy might be the electric field induced in a circuit when it enters into a stronger field; it is the same field, but now expressed as a difference that that does something. What is being expressed here, the field or the circuit? And what if the circuit is known to be itself constituted out of nothing but (congealed) electric fields?

Certain encounters filled with delicacy and unexpected windows onto another life charmed him and made him feel less alone. Later, invaded by an univited and unreliable lucidity these would recur on him as a stumbling of destinies, the trespass of one propriety on another. Beneath a veneer of knowingness a maximal blindness, and beneath that blindness a maximal exposure to the light; this was the harsh and madly sought for reality beneath the ideal of knowing and being known.

The event could suddenly take on the character of being too thick or too thin, and this was distasteful not only in regard to the content but as evincing a fear of, or a fear for, the self with its ability to painlessly implode and leave behind only a working shadow in its role. On the other hand the perceived uncertainty could be the prelude to a relinquishing of the will, a delicious and necessary irresponsibility. The moment this second possibility arose he would experience a pulsation in the body, a chilling excitement, which marked the irreversible transition into the regime of injury and innovation.

He was unable to tell whether he more resembled the driver or the passenger. His condition, as he rediscovered it, was indelibly that of the driver, feeling himself to be lost in a vast maze of ways and with scant guidance but for the memory of choices made before, or a blind trust that his vehicle knew its own way, and still having to supply a needed twist of the wheel in each moment. The question remained what point could any of this have if it was not for the sake of the passenger, who sad nothing, did nothing, but was pregnant with possibility? The passenger, relaxed and idly taking in the view from the window, belonged to the point of arrival which when reached would explain the entire mystery of the journey, the point at which he, the driver with all his notes and scribbled maps, would merge back into the passenger with barely a ripple.

He'd started to observe that more and more events in his life were taking on the quality of failed landmarks in time. He could hold the present in the centre of his attention and sense its illumination, but in spite of this it retained a slippery quality, something that didn't change no matter what freight it was to deliver to one of his tellings. The way that these occasions seemed to already be over before they'd started lent them a melancholy but also a comforting greyness. It was, he used to say, like no longer being in love.

For some of the time he experienced being in the body as a sort of choice, while at other times he felt released and choice became irrelevant. It was not, he concluded, the adventures of a mind in a body in a world but a series of changes in focalisation. These could produce the most subtle alterations in the quality of being, gifts that seemed invite his appreciation, as well as assaults by dissonances that threw him into turbulent disphoria.

In the latency after physical stress as experienced during exercise the internal senses are absorbed, monitoring the recovery of homeostasis in preparation for the next round of effort. The normal brain-centred self-consciousness is suspended and replaced by a transitional process whose boundaries are familiar even as they embrace states that would be intolerable if maintained. This is gratifying like every form of thoughtlessness.

A focalisation and a project and a readiness, a blend of motivation and injunction, this is the peculiar burden of the self made more or less prominent by the body's degree of cooperation. All of this is borrowed from the situation, from the cultural and historical moment; and if there is a concomitant drive that purports to be the expression of pure individuality this is only an aspiration, a claim meaningless without the context, but embodying the very essence of the matter within it. Like the gates of the Law, the culture is only, and was ever only, there for you.

The enacting will requires not so much a response as a responsiveness in a subjectivised, invisible other. The tension between the two poles is drawn into a plural field of related polarities among which the known and the unknown, the authentic and the deceptive are particularly prominenet. The play of these gives rise to a mysterious satisfaction, an enjoyment that is spread indefinitely among the nodes which emerge out of and fleetingly stabilise the shimmering field of tensions. There is a conversion of ethical and epistemological difference into the currency of divine and solipsistic delight.