A mirror shows different contents to each observer and each one takes what he sees to be the reality that is shown. Does the revelation necessarily designate, and so prove the existence, of the one to whom the contents are revealed? The question is part of a metaphysics of the making visible, of being as appearance and hence of the prior observing subject, as much as it also a part of the metaphysics of seeking. Appearances and questions arise and pass like clouds, the sky remains serene behind them, like a subject stripped of all accidents. But what if it is not the thoughts that arise and pass but the entire world of experience with all its contexts and references? Experience seems to be the play of the distance between subject and world. The unsuspected alternative is to understand this as a free-play without an other, as devoid of all oppositions and even contrasts, as too simple to even take place.

One idea is that experience is made out of contents. For example that the now is an ever-brimming-over of a melange of sensory contents each one of which forms a frame and context for every other one. If one is named the multipolar quality of the whole is briefly lost, there is a contraction of attention and flicker in the special quality of indefinite compresent plurality. This quality is one of vertical abundance, the vital intimation of an available deepening, whose realisation would involve a series of blindingly obvious but seen for the first time moments. Consciousness always takes up something already known, extracting it from latent fullness. Even the interpenetrating waves of the sense of now are illuminated out of a prior abyss, a larger and more capacious now, related perhaps, to a quite different time-like structure.

A buzz of conversations in a café, and floating over it a voice from a recording singing lyrics of love and loss. The prose and poetry of life running in parallel streams and not mingling. The live words overheard seem made up of gossip and technology talk, and experiences retailed with ephemeral urgency or self-conscious irony. The cocooning of cliques and pairs. What is it that is so eagerly manufactured in these places? A tangled knot of goals, a busy eddy in the current of a day. But then the simple utterance of the singer invokes the void at the edge of all these things, the fragile ground they rest on. The lyrics, however, were carefully composed, perhaps after a note scribbled down in a café, set to music, rehearsed and rearranged. The music ironises their meaning - at any moment this frieze of words could lose its portentous illusion of meaning and sink back into sheer ornament.

Figures in the dance, now facing each other for a few turns and then swept apart by the music to other partners or alone, watching the favoured one making remote figures, her eyes, the flash of a smile directed where, and then sweeping back, overshooting after the briefest touch, away again, you veer around and away. Alone with your thoughts in their own swirling, eyes too big, obedience to the dance, good grace, words that seemed to mean something repeated over and over until they can no longer hold any meaning, then fade into another beginning. And all of this to be repeated with new partners, new songs. The only tenderness, briefly in the half-dark, as between two sinners.

Psychology, not the discipline but the topology and causal escapement of inner states he found reliably unreliable. A machine in perfect order it nonetheless delivered unwelcome surprises; releases in one area were always accompanied by checks in two or three others. From the point of view of the thinker on the treadmill it all seemed hopelessly misaligned and he had the dismal feeling of being in some way responsible for it. From a different point of view all of  this indicated that the machine was doing its job perfectly, since its sole purpose, after taking in all of the data, was to make things seem almost perfectly real.

The subject-object is inferential, forget it. Take this thing, this glass of water in front of you. The sight of it the feel of it, picking it up and drinking from it, the knowledge of what to do with the glass, expectation filled in every way. No surprise to find it on the table, it was ready at hand, transparent to intention once recognised. It was placed by an attendant to announce a certain event, one in a known series of similar events. But then what sort of glass is it? Again, silently, you place the glass in its contexts, and gauge its congruence with the rest of the environment, with the class and type of cafe, this place and time in which you are at home. You move in a world of the known, perspectives effortlessly give way, one to the next. Things, like this glass, emerge out of the background and then recede back into it. How many concordances are needed to maintain the sense of seamlessness? More or less than you would expect?

He was dependent on doubt and wonder which could generally be discovered somewhere in his world, but on occasions these would disappear in a kind of white-out. At such times everything took on a simple, taken-for-granted quality, and while his perception would narrow on some small detail he would struggle as if enmired by its perfect naturalness and that of his relationship to it. Still, he believed that doubt and wonder possessed a deeper reality and expressed his unhindered essence more directly than the other state, in spite of the fact that they seemed active where the other was passive. Perhaps there was a difference between a passivity that was the true counterpart of activity and a passivity that was merely a defective form of it?

A few hours of sleep and then he woke from indifferent dreams feeling calm and blank. The heavy feelings he'd gone to sleep with were nowhere to be seen, and so he started searching for them. He began to make out a few threads. He didn't want those feelings to return, but he wanted to orient himself in a more extensive body and selfhood. The feelings, as if roused from their own sleep began to lumber back into formation with a kind of inevitability, as if they were merely part of the lie of the land. Their familiars, the thoughts streamed in to circle about them, stale birds, stuffed birds, frayed and leaking straw. Who could believe in them?

Feelings are telescopic in that versions of the same pattern fold over each other; these correspondences can be more or less latent. It is impossible to say how far this goes, and anyway, after a few versions is it really the same pattern? A pattern of patterns unfolding in time can appear to converge on some attractor or diverge away from one in endless digression, and any adverbial qualifier of motion can apply. Oddly these two directions of movement can not only succeed each other but can even seem to be taking place simultaneously.

His feelings seemed to him to be simple and rational responses to his predicament, which unfortunately happened to be neither a simple nor a rectifiable one. Still, he felt that if he could only make sense of the feelings, find the mode of expression which perfectly suited their weavings and doublings he would be able to put them at some distance from himself and this would be the first step towards a true understanding of the underlying  predicament. This was an impossible dream since the expression itself, as act, as intention and as understanding, was at the core of both feeling and predicament. To speak, no matter how privately is always an event in social space, despite the attempts to treat it as if it were merely a matter of being overheard. There are as many shapes to the interlocutor as to the self, but it cannot be reduced to the self. The circle of utterance catches on something unutterable and never contracts to a point.

Any visual composition with terms in relational tension is a transformation of the space defined by the doubling and differing of vowels. When there are just two of these the sense of them is bound up with the sexual awareness of early childhood. This is an immature understanding for which the meaning of the genitals is made strange by virtue of their different forms being linked to the entirely different but also mysterious difference of genders. Many notions which subsequently diverge greatly are packed together in this early experience. That a form may be a signature of another subjectivity, defined as a contiguous but unknown place of enjoyment, is an extraordinarily rich and ambiguous starting point for encountering the world.

It is not the vowel sounds themselves, they point to a difference that is both abstract and prior to the concrete, a difference upstream of conscious experience. The upstream is not necessarily prior in linear time but prior within each moment. Before the moment is fully embodied there is a partial moment that is conscious but incohate, fully present but unutterable. The space of these partial moments is vast and their time is miniscule. It is an infolded experience which may be unfolded in different ways when it presumable would give rise to very different fully conscious experiences, or become an element in very different kinds of flow. The basic vowel difference belongs to this realm. The vowel is a simple note that can be sounded for a long or a short period of time, and be inflected in various ways, and yet it is not a musical note but a condition of discursive meaning and has its entire existence in the semantic frame of language, while paradoxically still remaining pre-verbal; a baby's babble, and as such closely tied to the body, it is felt as a body formation, rather like a standing wave.

The fundamental distinction on which abstract form is based is a difference of vowels. This is a basic opposition - but less than an opposition - on which are built the constitutive differences that make a world. The vowel difference is varied in a myriad of ways and gathers up, like a hair-ball, all the later, primitive seeming, meanings and discursive distinctions. It also coexists with these and forms a part of the glue of the world. Everything is thus capable of joining in the original dance, the two vowel sounds, the basic motions, the founding cut, the sides not threatening each other but very close together, striving against themselves to be rejoined.

The barrage of cultural notions is dense in the strict sense that between any two adjacent images there is always a another image, embodying an allusion, reference, or association. It requires no special cleverness to be set-off by these, or even to narrate them; the culture supplies numerous voices in which to do so if we haven't yet developed our own, or couldn't be bothered. Absurd to speak of triangulating a self, outside of space and time, in all this miasma. Instead what attracts is what stimulates and arouses the dreaming mind. We can allow ourselves to be addressed by aesthetic form - emerging from rapid syntheses which bracket away facile connections - without questioning what manner of being it is that can so respond. 

Equalised world, the underside of things turned-out, with its own glow, subtle and warm, but barely perceptible. A release of tension which reveals a clutching in the images hitherto, as if they were possible habitations, thus a certain homesickness. The aim was not to re-enter the past but to recreate its space of possible images, its relish, its earliness. This would constitute the verification of an enduring plasticity, unacknowledged and unreachable in time. It was like the image of the writing-room; he imagined that once being seated there the matter would naturally unfold its hidden lines of fracture. An alignment would present itself, accidental but precious, so that the contributions of the scattered powers could finally be correctly ordered.

The world as opposed to the self in every turn of thought is still the world as it appears. It is and can only ever be 'my world'. This would be the most complete solipsism except that the self also is just a nexus of appearances in the world. The world simply appears, but the self is the action of the thought that 'it appears to me'. It appears out of the void, and he is one of the things that appear in it, or would be if he ever fully appeared. He is however, only inferred, not from pure thought, or the thought-act, but from opposition. Polarity, friction, struggle, conflict, and their ephemeral resolutions, these introduce an asymmetry and directedness into experience out of which the vital error of transcendence is born.

His thoughts could be more or less personal depending on factors which were felt to be impersonal even if largely somatic. The personal quality was formed out of the evanescent mobilisation of a huge bank of implicit assumptions and associations but it did not reveal these or even less reveal a nugget of something enduring inside them, it was simply a voice and a tone that emerged from this mass of potentials. The display could be quite convincing, naturally enough since exacting credibility was one of its conditions for survival, but this only obscured the fact that its relation to experience was entirely accidental. The confusion with experience, or with the experiencer, was certainly an error, but otherwise there was nothing scandalous about this contingency. It was generally much celebrated.

For the pursuit of validity to be an entirely congruent activity two things are required, one that the goal exists and can be determined to exist, that what claims to be valid really is so, and two that some essential connection can be found between the goal and the seeker. Taken together, these are impossible, if not meaningless demands, or rather, they may be individually consistent but mutually contradictory. The drive that motivates the seeker is a social and hence a mutable one. It can intend what is valid independently of its enabling contingencies only in an asymptotic sense. A process of sublimation of motives needs to be applied, and concretely this means a refinement of the social milieu that hosts the quest. A concomitant of this is that the spiritual element, the metaphysical self-revelation of the seeker must be purged away. The idiom of the refined social milieu comes to bear an uncanny resemblance to pure objectivity. Beginning at the other pole short-circuits this process, but the impasse it soon comes upon is essential and paralysing.

The hertiage of this moment is implicitly understood to be a life, someone's life, a life story of someone, a person in general, this person in particular. This is something rather positive, but since it is necessarily prior to all intelligent activity it is not questioned. As some people like to ritually acknowledge the 'traditional owners of the land' before each event, we might, leaving the connotations of traditional to one side, acknowledge the void as traditional precursor and enabler of the event of this consciousness and of the self-assured civilisation of which it is a product, and where this instance currently squats. We come and go, it remains. But what sound and fury we bring to the eternal silence, what a fever for validation.

He examined the persistent impression that he was engaged in a sort of dialogue with life, that his life was the progress of a two player-game between say himself and World, and that even if the two were unevenly matched there was a good reason to study the other player's moves, since they were responses to his own. Rather than hunting for error in this context for belief, he found he could use it to refract his scepticism, so that it produced differently angled and more unusual forms of illumination. It was a way to discover rarer breeds of doubt.

Taking the title from Hadrian's farewell to his soul was meant to suggest the quality of a soul freed from its anchor and wandering in vast and not especially friendly realms. The soul has to make its own way, again, after the hospitality of the Emperor's life has expired. Its trajectory is random in relation to any of the worlds it finds itself in. This is a different notion of soul, or self, to the Biblical, or Dantean, one to which we are accustomed where the experiences and affections of the life lived, its core loyalties and determining decisions are summarised and fixed in it at death. The Adriatic soul, to whom the condition of thrownness properly applies, may learn something from each sojourn in a life, but whatever this is it is mostly orthogonal to the defining verities of the life itself, whose terms of reference are, mutatis mutandis, comprehensively sublunar. Nonetheless, it has its own reminders, its fleeting summonings, its inexplicable epiphanies.

Experience is a whole, but it can be split into experiencer and experienced. This is only one of the ways it splits under the pressure of its internal excess. Each such split produces a pattern of related distinctions, ideas which may be subjected to rigourous development and resulting conflicts and compromises, reversals and submissions. Experience and thought are inseparable, thought being the general name given to the activity of the experiencer after this particular split has been effected. Thought is thus a name for the subjectivity of being. It is a symptomatic fact about inquiries of this kind that matters of the most astonishingly unlikely kind must be extracted from a medium of overwhelming self-evidence. In this respect they resemble the question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?'

His awkwardness could never be expunged. If it went into abeyance for a time then that became the event, but its possibility, derived from an axiomatic separation, remained central. The actuality was easily and inevitably rekindled from the slightest jar. The things he valued most were always conceived during intermittences when the outside had become merely formal and devoid of a determinative gaze, but to be carried through they needed to cross over into the world. Realization required the breaking of the barrier of solitude and was therefore always doomed to failure. Such failure, however bitter or disappointing, was always a liberation, since it returned him to himself and to the matter itself, unsullied, as it had been at the start.

Self-awareness evolves in intimate dialogue with the social world since it is a feature of  an essential mode of functioning by which we communicate with others and with the collectivity, and with ourselves, about status and intentions. Status here means both state of mind, feelings, body and so on, and more importantly, pecking-order. We learn much or most about ourselves in considering how acceptable we are to, and how favourably we are viewed by, others. But self-awareness also has a metaphysical component, or seems to, in that we believe that we exist to the degree that we are aware of ourselves. And thus it is that the two sides of self-awareness become confused and our existence becomes equivalent to our status, to our unique definability relative to some collective. Add to this the fact that the collective now extends vastly beyond the field of others with whom we interact or might conceivably interact, and opportunities for compounding the error are greatly multiplied.

His yearning consisted of feelings that rose up and demanded some sort of action, but never declared what that action ought to be, and imperiously refused to find any suggestions acceptable. It was a vaunting of his own sensibility as the only touchstone of reality, but specifically in regard to other minds whose differing sensibilities, which were his own, but alienated, haunted him. And it was a whirlwind of thoughts that effectively sealed this sensibility off from the world, except for bright, intense, shards. It was internal weather and he knew enough to keep still and endure it, and to more than just endure it.