He had already started taking photographs of ordinary scenes and the objects in them, but whose true subject matter was the moment in which they were taken, when he had a sort of half-dream which explained them further. He had been dozing on a bus in the pre-dawn and he saw a pair of hands holding a thick stack of printed photographs not much larger than playing cards and displaying them one by one, each being held up for a few seconds, after which the uppermost one was slid aside and moved to the bottom. He was not the owner of the hands but was only the seeing mind to whom they were being shown. As each new card was revealed the awareness of the picture became the awareness in the picture, the mind came to itself by way of the features of the picture. The "I" was the life in the picture for a few moments, then came back to the act of seeing only a rectangle of paper held before a pair of eyes. Mind was nothing in itself and hence could animate each scene purely by way of the external relations of features which in this way acquired an inwardness which manifested it, mind. It was a little like the way that a set of sounds and their relationships in time are heard only as an expressive musical phrase, inhabited by feeling, which is instantly abolished to give way to another. The return was not to the things, but to the nature of mind, more evident in dream than waking.

"Don't pick it up, it will bite you." But still he picked it up again and again and was bitten again and again. The elements of the trap were assembled out of whatever garbage was lying nearest at hand and it would have been a mistake to try to understand it by scrutinising these rather arbitrary, and quite ordinary, elements. Instead, what could be admired was the extraordinary cunning with which each of these traps had been put together, so that he was unable to think his way out of them. The principle was simple, deflect the efforts dedicated to getting out into tangling the victim further within; and indeed the more self-sufficient the mind took itself to be the more predictable the repertoire of moves it would make. The artifex and the victim were one and the same, but living in different times, working on different scales, producing different products.

It was extraordinary how fast the system could change its quality, from dark to light, from light to heavy, from warm to chilled, from frozen to flowing. It was strung up tightly, with every part connected to many other parts, so that a ripple in one place might propagate into a wild throbbing in another. It was like the web of a mad spider, only there was no spider, only a web pretending to have one, and pretending to be desperate to keep up an illusion that was fooling no one. But when a wave came and washed over it, and all the lines became heavy with damp and dragged on their moorings, what a groaning there was, so that you'd think the whole world was coming to an end.

There was a certain collection of ideas or patterns for ideas that formed his repertoire of deliberate actions and responses, his tool-kit, and so defined the range of moves that he would accept as expressions of his freedom. He could recognise himself in them as if seen from the outside, as if there was someone watching who could pick him out of any crowd. Against these there was a stylised set of predicaments arising out of an equally characteristic set of desires and imperatives, these expressed his unfreedom, and he would also think of them as the world's moves. This was because they were largely affected by chance events and transient states of objective affairs, and were most often results of or responses to his own ventures. His ideas attempted to anticipate the events, and the events were as much or more coloured by his own inadvertent contributions as by chance meanings. This interlocking system was never seen as working well, rather, his ideas were disorganised and imprecise, the world endlessly cunning in its provocations. The not working well was itself an idea, and he was thoroughly in thrall to it.

So much revolved around feelings of connection, but the issues were so tangled up that he could never make any sense out of them, even after the needs slowly fell away like the receding of a tide, leaving the shoals and scattered wreckage finally exposed. Was it an end or a means, was a symmetry of needs at play or a strong asymmetry, was it existential, anamnesic or mimetic, were strong emotions an integral part of it or an epiphenomenon, were his transports prompted by something real and mutual or entirely imagined, was it ennobling or debasing, an adventure or an escape? He could never say, every position seemed to be the final truth at some time. It was like finding himself in a large house with long corridors and rooms where he wandered mostly alone and where the other would continually appear in odd directions, coming towards him, entering just as he left or leaving just as he entered, or blocking a way, or seen from a window walking mysteriously across the surrounding park. Most disturbing of all were the rooms where he encountered other versions of himself, ones that he thought he'd left behind, but which had gone on living, alone and unseen, nurturing their own obscure treasures,  unchanged and unappeased.

He was struck by certain things, by how much the same..., by how different..., by how he'd misunderstood..., by how his understanding of that other had subtly shifted..., by how he always, or never... It was the striking rather than the thing that struck, and which took place in an eternal fringe zone, a recurrent place that was not a place, in a time that was not a time. It was a movement towards a distant satisfaction, but by the same token was far from satisfying. Of this alert unnerving sharpness, this unbalance that was oddly stabilised, like certain mannerist paintings,  where the added factor that brings them back to alignment with themselves is not in the picture but in the viewer, of this, he wondered whether it was after all the true taste of life, of those moments when the subject fleetingly catches his own eye in a mirror.

He opened his windows and allowed the world in but at the same time as he was learning about it he moved to fill in the blank spaces, to pre-empt the narrative. It surprised him how easy it was to maintain a certain open and well-wishing air, which on being observed in another would immediately have raised his suspicions. He'd taken himself at his word as much as he took anyone else, but at the first sign of incongruity it was himself that he would turn on. And yet there was something good in all this, even if just of momentary acknowledgement, of meanings that could not be conveyed, of imaginary freedom, before the sashes slammed back down.

Music is an experience of process which as a shaping of time is entirely directional. It is pure movement without moving and we grasp it by letting it move us. It communicates, often very specifically and intimately, but we can't say what it is that it says. It can move in a variety of directions, horizontally, as when it seems to unfold a tale, vertically upward as when it seems to raise us to a higher sphere, and downward as when it seems to place us in an unmoving present of numbed intensity, as well as inwardly into infinitely subtle recollections and adumbrations. As a form of motion it bears a close and complex relationship to emotion. It can present an emotion when the occasion for it is otherwise absent and when it does so it is deemed beautiful or of positive aesthetic value. In general, such value is produced by displacements of the occasion of a feeling or sensation, as is notable even in the cults of the taste and smell. The basic element of music is not sensation, however, but difference and the relationship of different elements in a predefined field of differences, so that it is closer to speech than to flavour. It is a commentary on meaning from just outside of meaning, and may mock it or adore it, or more usually merely ironise it.

Process is directional, and directionality is asymmetry thought trough. If process is all of experience then subject and object arise as concepts distiguishing phases of this asymmetry, and their reversibility is only in principle. Still, they are never posited as being strictly determined by the process but have the mode of being of conventions. This is in a knowing intrinsic to the process and when driven further than is warranted yields the inflected notion of illusion or habitual ignorance; mountains not being mountains. When there is perception of an externality together with a positive fringe of awareness of the process of its constitution then there is an accompanying sense of beauty, the pleasure is an adumbration of the creative power residing on the conventionally subjective side, and of its identity with its creations; mountains just being mountains.

The primary difference resolves into something like a distinction of subject and object. This describes the way that an experiencing precipitates around a mark in the medium, which is no medium at all. Call it subject and object, because an experiencing requires an experiencer and an experienced. The whole is a unity of the three parts. It is what is here and now. The experiencing is a complex unity, prior, it has the principle of motion within it, it initiates. To say prior is not to mark a distinction on the same level. This way of speaking is alternative to a language of self reference, but has its own assumptions and limitations. It opens up a duality, subject and object are relative terms and can shift or reverse; what used to be the subject can be the object, and vice versa. This is not as simple as it sounds, and is not known in the fully precipitated elements, but is present in the peripheral awareness of process.

He remained, for all his study, something believed to be unknown where he ought to have known and known where he ought to have not known. One kind of knowing was modelled on what he saw in others and he was quick to fill in the absence by triangulating back from responses he encountered. A deal of imagination was required here, of the kind that fills in the details in dreams from a few vague indications. In this process he was all too likely to put more work into the fleshing out of the world than that into himself, whom he could keep posed as naively as in a child's drawing. His mistake was to begin inquiry from doubt instead of from the neutral state of not knowing. Doubt, as Descartes had shown, leads from repudiation to affirmation, a sort of push-pull too easily anticipated and misapplied. Doubt, as a tool used to develop knowledge, was far less innocent than it seemed since it begins by taking up a dominant attitude towards that which it intends to question and thus fails to recognise it.

By this time he'd learnt that there was a trustworthy logic to happenstance which would deliver to him the next step to be taken if only he was quiet enough to discern it. The pattern of his life once set would not change in unpredictable ways, but continue to circle around the same basic themes. These may have been quite contingent, but to be so as words in a larger discourse to which he was also entitled. It was easier to see this reassuring picture in the lives of others than his own, where it was often obscured by thoughts which arose from near-sighted views of events. These thought were also repetitions, but were centrifugal and tactical; where they seemed most to belong to him was where their greatest betrayal lay.

There were certain lines that he feared crossing and so he always kept them in sight, but in a peripheral vision since it was also essential that he imagine he was crossing them. Life was a projection to him as much as it was lived, or rather it was lived in the projection as much as before it. When the two incompatable orders of reality came into contact there was never a question of which one would prevail. This was the stance of the experimentalist, but it entailed an ethical dimension that could never be transparent. There were different rules in different spheres and they all had to be adhered to, but those of the experimenter were no more than a set of excuses for breaking others as he found it convenient. These had little authority and could do nothing to dissolve the residues of past breaches.

Eternity is in love with the productions of time says the Blakean proverb of Hell; what he found was that reason with its timelessness was in love with contingency and that emotionality, in love with reason tries to masquerade as pure contingency, veiling the heart's reasons which are often all to easy to guess. Just as the stock market sees a contingency worthy of speculation distilled from a mass of emotional volatility, so, by a leap, he could see that in his own life many of his emotions were derivatives, contingent claims on other emotional ventures. The whole dance was designed to fascinate him, and succeeded in doing so most of the time.

His ready detachment from things and from human scenes placed him with the outsiders, an unexpectedly large band, but no community as he repeatedly found. In one phase these strive to use goodwill and denial to meld themselves back into society and many seem to succeed, more or less, even to the point of making a fashion statement of their own alienation. His efforts in this mode, eschewing such paradoxes, were less assertive and directed him towards certain attractive seeming archipelagos. The time he spent on them, however, was permeated with doubt as to his right to be there. All the kafkaesque nightmares could have been his, except he neither presumed himself innocent nor did he behave that way. His quiet and inevitable exile was always mutual, and finally he was as unable to blame himself as he was others, whether present or past, whether linked by accident or blood. There was no uncommunity, but there was an accomodation, never without its costs, to unaccomodatedness.

To experience as from a distinctive state was one thing, but to experience that state as an instance within a certain landscape, or geography, or taxonomy of states was another. It was a way to highlight some of the state's peculiar conditions, as in the way that a trough or local minimum has an inevitable character or even an inexorable one, when it is deep enough. Whenever there is talk of a sense of place, this refers to a widening by metaphor of the quality of homeliness, of the canny, and it embodies a aspect of ownness, and of inheritance as both privilege and burden. Certain states had this very character of belonging strongly to him, although not in a privative sense. By its nature a landscape is a public place, a human generality, but like being in an audience at a symphony, the experience was no less solitary. Again there was a sort of contingency, a thrown quality, as if an immemorial dice throw had landed him here, and in that act had become his truth, a truth so intimate that it was mostly rediscovered in the attempts to evade it. Here more than ever time was enfolded into the landscape and the climate, the time of forgotten origins and the time of recurrence in variation.

A peculiarly moving lyric seemed to him to be an analogy for an unburdening of the heart, and in this way a nostalgia for a lost state of truthfulness. He was always surprised to find how widely shared the compelling quality of these lyrics was. It was not a simple form of beauty but a difficult one, invested with a strenuousness of feeling, a moral quality, or rather a fulfilled need, that seemed rare by nature. It was also often an ephemeral thing whose whole complexion and power to move would change with the times. Deep truthfulness as a shared ideal was much more problematic than beauty, since truth is related to ideas and shared ideas are an index of error, truth being no business of the heart. It was "spilt religion" looking towards a parallel and invisible reality in which there are no secrets, in which all hearts are open ... but that's not all, in which there is judgement as well. The lyric was thus a plea and a prayer.

He could never get enough of the mundane paradises despite having woken from their false promises again and again. He would have liked to slow desire down so much that he could experience it with the freedom of a lucid dream. If he was still present in it he was not, as usually, too much present, and so the world showed him its normally hidden face, and it was like being inside the music. It was fire and flood, the elements of destruction and he would emerge from them reborn into a delicious stupor, time expanding in broken ripples after having been pinched to the agonising extreme. If there was a truth in this he knew that it was not his truth, but it was a glorious dead-end, pivotal and arresting.

Some values may be prompted by internal acts of estimation of where the good lies. Even if it is only a particular or instrumental good it is still understood to be in some relation to a universal idea of goodness and to derive some of its force from that. Our direct and prior relationship to the universal good being self-evident, or able to be made self-evident. Furthermore, these values can be corrected or changed on the same basis. A different source for value however is when it is an inference from what is seen to move people. This can be a mimetic estimation as when we are made aware of the effect of desire in others, or something less direct where we must draw conclusions from what is effective for others, as in pondering on what is is that they really want. Living amongst crowds of strangers in a modern city, all of us accessible to the same machinery with designs on our wants and opinions gives the second kind of source of values an overwhelming weight of authority, of obviousness. This authority is fundamentally alien, evident while not self-evident, but it is almost impossible to see it this way while still sharing in the enabling act of faith of the city and all its rewards.

He first came to see himself in the mirror of the other, but this was not a passive or objective mirror made of silver and glass but a living, variable, distracted and unreliable mirror. Having realised its other-subjective dimension he found that it was manipulable by his will, but only to a degree and with inconsistent results. To find the levers of the other subject he first had to mirror it internally. The power to do so was all his own, but elicited by the other, who now became an essential beacon point for his return to himself. This self-sufficiency was a construction that still required a going out from himself and into a world of conflict. If winning was one way to effect the return, losing was still another way, and superior in some respects because of the deeply sensuous apprehension of the other it brought with it.

It would be one thing to perfectly describe the emotional colouring of will, but quite another to render it. Our every act emerges from a will to persist in being and this will is colured by a history of love that reaches back to dim origins. There is no will without prior love, but love is both an active movement towards and a passive receiving of being. These take their various hues from relations with the other. There may have been only one other from the very start. It is at the origin of love and of hate and only after that of will and hence of all our enacting in or of the world, whether self-regarding or other-regarding. Every other that becomes significant to us takes on the inhertance of the original other. Towards it we take up various poses, we fit ourselves into versions for its understanding, seeking to make ourselves understandable not for our own sake but for that of the other. The currency is in archetypes, and we seem to know these before meeting with anyone who fills them.

When a set of ideas contains an origin story this entails a design on authority. These ideas would push aside other ideas and install their own particular frame. The payoff here is that it ought to give birth to new and startling productions which again impose themselves on our most passive faculties and so sanction the ideas that generate the field in the first place. This is how a paradigm is supposed to come about, a new and further development whether of truth, beauty or goodness. But what happens when the process itself becomes the paradigm? It seems to go into an accelerated vortex of generation in which the payoff loses all connection to utility and becomes itself one more swirling set of ideas.

Speech sounds produce wave patterns in the body which are felt in different places, depending on the sound. This provides a mapping between meanings and a kinaesthetic topology which sustains a basic dictinction between here and there. Some meanings are thus perceived as closer in than others, and hence more of the self. There may be other key locations, related to memory understood as having a layout, like a library or filing system, as well as to memories of places. This is an accompaniment to our own speaking, a semantic harmonics, and may be only imperfectly perceived in the speech of others. It is an explanatory idea which attempts to illuminate some phenomenology by invoking material differences, as if these were at a level prior to conceptuality, when it is only relative to a fully articulated world of ideas that such putatively primitive notions can arise.

Sometimes his story was of constraint followed by release, of constriction followed by space. This was a nice story, with arresting images, but no one to whom it happened could ever be found, much less a space that opened up. It was a persistent metaphor, but of what? Or maybe it was another modern verbal tick, this going on about space. What is meant by it? It concerns being present together, of states of affairs. Of elements. The character of a combination of elements when the elements themselves have been abstracted away, or the potentiality for parts or elements to combine after abstracting away the features by which they combine. Space itself must have parts, must provide the scheme of connection while remaining empty, must both frame and limit the mutual otherness of the things. It makes possible a face turned towards the other and another face turned away, and the relationship between the two.

When the understanding of the causes of events gives out and leaves a plurality of possibilities, and these possibilities are seen to occur to no pattern and to, in aggregates, exhibit behaviour consistent with a uniform probability distribution (measured via a copula, if required) then we call the events random. This is a simplified definition that includes coin-tosses and dice-throws, where the possibles form a clearly delimited set. In many other cases there is the quality of randomness without such a set, even in principle. In waking life, long sequences of events seem to take place as if we were in a two-player game with the cosmos. We choose an action out of the finite set of possibilities available to us in our situation and the cosmos responds with an experience and a modified situation out of which a new set of possible actions for us is produced. There is randomness on both sides, however only on our side is there a set of possibilities. Our acts presume meaning-for-us and are hence constrained by language in a broad sense, the cosmos, however, is unconstrained. We see patterns and turn these into stories, collapsing randomness for the sake of sheer narrativity, for love of the characters in the narratives.