The universe of his adventures was divided into a familiar half and an unfamiliar one, the canny and the uncanny. The things that fell out on his side or on whose side he was to be found and the other things over there, the other kind. The here and the there, ici, là, the two vowel sounds, different patterns of action and response in the body, or perhaps different bodies entirely. He was unable to recognise himself in the other, or to know whether its was a friendly, fraternal, otherness or a hostile one that he ought to fear. He could see their history going back a certain way, could follow it, but it remained separate, there was no reaching of a prior acquaintance, no con-nature. This was a constraint and it pointed to a fundamental consciousness dreaming life in a language of dreams. He explored landscapes, cities, houses, rooms made out of himself, yet always inhabited by something unreconcilable and unpredictable, protean in a way that he could not identify or mirror.

The light fiery texture, the intimate knowledge of diverse parts which characterises dream consciousness makes more salient the core of recognition, which is con-naître, being born together; two, or more, knowing each other from birth. To recognise this common birth also means to recognise ourselves, to awaken hugely, the lost knowledge restored. This is the essence, a massive restoration of what was only believed to have been lost. How moving are themes of reunion, like in A Winter's Tale. Life as an adventure initiated by a forgetting. It is glorious to forget who and what one is and to go forth into this newly created unknown, to meet what comes and to become what it makes of us.

Cosmological theory has made tremendous progress but still butts up against certain mysteries, such as what preceded the big-bang to which it can only answer with wild speculations, including the flat denial that ths question has any meaning at all. Similarly neurological-cognitive theories have made tremendous progress but still butt up against the nature and origin of consciousness, a mystery which has invited a range of wild speculations, including the flat denial that there is any mystery at all. It is hard not to wonder whether there is something behind this strange parallelism. It may have something to do with the limits of our way of formulating questions and seeking answers, in other words with the scientific approach to truth. Science has prided itself on its audacity at overturning mythologies and metaphysical taboos, but is it able to turn its gaze on its own mythologies and taboos?

Self-awareness which ought perhaps to seen as pure undeserved bounty instead has the nature of a project. It is going somewhere but the destination, which can be named as self, can only be inferred. In the action of awareness both subjectivity and objectivity are furthered, but as long as they remain, and as long as they remain distinct, the project cannot terminate, so in the limit they must mutually annihilate. The limit is also the reality of the process. Awareness may enter into the symbolic, but this is a premature synthesis of subject and object and the journey through it is long, the self striving to become meaning until it discovers its fundamental incompatibility with it. To become meaning would be to put the ground of the self outside the self, an eminently sociable aspiration. It would be a solution, but any solution merely limits the infinite fecundity of the question.

Objectivity seems to reach some sort of limit in the commodity which proclaims its mechanical manufacturedness and its being as merely one of an indefinite multiplicity. Objects of this kind, which surround us, never stand forth, are almost invisible, and yet are, in a way, absolute eschatological pointers. Even when they seem to be entirely subsumed by their banal functions, by the uses for which they will be destroyed and by their obedient service in projects and exchanges, they impress us by their sublime indifference. Objects of this kind are at their purest in retail virginity; from the moment they become owned they begin on a more or less rapid pathway, via the accumulation of intentional peculiarities, to annihilation, or rather to the extraordinary state of garbage. Objects which resist investment by self-consciousness form a frame or environment for those objects which by origin or by seduction have become the containers and preservers of subjective meaning, a middle realm of objects in use and at hand, and which always belong to someone or some few, objects whose essence can rightly be summarised in clothing. This subjective investment must be the chief thing since the entire realm of things can best be understood as an extended and digressive meditation on it.

Consciousness and intelligence are indistinguishable, although this may in part be due to the inherent fuzziness of these concepts. A characteristic act is the seemingly spontaneous flash of sense-making in the minutest instant of an ongoing duration. This is a synthetic act and in order for it to come about the material that was synthesised is presumed to have been present in a prior moment, present as a field of tensions to be resolved. Generally, however, we are not aware of this prior history until after the act, the synthesis being the same as the noticing. Unless there is an alteration in the tensions there will be no consciousness, and any such alteration of tension appears as intelligence. Phenomena of this sort are the reason why the metaphor of energy is so commonly adopted for the goings on in the field of the spirit or mind. A rearrangement of a network of tensions means the migration of key difference from one part, or level, of the structure into another. Some are released some are newly polarised, but the aggregate effect is believed to be a gain. Intelligence is defined as the recipient of this inferred gain. In waking life it is collective and coherent, at least locally, in dream not at all so.

In the cascade of impressions and intentions, of captures and capitulations, that make up conscious living the subject's continuity is a speculation based on credit drawn from the dreamer. Multitudes of diverse layers simply coexist in the dreaming mind where they can interpenetrate and interweave their incommensurable temporalities, balancing accounts and throwing off dreams as a side-effect or diversion from the main work. Why is this often exhausting work required, to who's ultimate benefit is it carried out? It belongs to a process of life which is to the subject as the subject is to a fragment of thought, to a single idea. To ask what this thought is, what or who this 'I' is for which it appears, what this unbordered reflexivity means, is to again affirm a space tautly woven from tendons of dreaming and waking mind-stuff. Space and its categories is the master metaphor for every mode of self-forgetting.

At times he had insisted on there being discontinuities in experience but he did this ignorantly, since according to his notion these were to be found either everywhere or nowhere. It could be that the very texture of experience is punctuated by intervals of absolute darkness, as are the frames of a film, and that there is no need for there to be any similarity between consecutive frames, because in the case of experience each one includes within itself its own entire and virtual history. This idea may be consistent, but is certainly vacuous. Or else, shifting the metaphor to that of montage, no matter what unexpected succession arose this could never amount to discontinuity because the mind would invent a relationship. In fact, an outlandish montage merely flatters the viewer into thinking that the perfectly ordinary functions of either weaving together a synthetic meaning, or self-consciously failing to do so, distinguishes them, in their affinity with some sort of absolute modernity, from the herd whose habituated expectations are generally satisfied. The preference for discontinuity is therefore merely an aesthetic or stylistic one, and rests on a prior complacency about continuity in the subject. This is the same as saying that the subject's world is one of seamless ideality. The subject doesn't just happen upon this world, it is its very nature, and therefore it can never have direct experience. But for the subject, continuity and mediation always feel like failure, that too is its nature.

There is a dimension of consciousness that knows the dark, belongs to the dark, but has no way of asserting itself - but the metaphor 'dimension'is maddeningly inapt. Here and now, the act of thinking is effectively inclined towards the light, but feels, or feelingly knows, itself to be perched on the surface of a thick silence, a dense unspeakability. To say that this is, or these are the content of the dark is to mistakenly assume that the dark is simply an obscure analogue of the illumined. It is better approached through the logic in play. Conscious thoughts are present to their occasion and to each other, they are together in the light, their togetherness is the light, and they uncover, expose, disinter, whatever is not yet clear, they distinguish and trace form. What gathers the unspoken elements of the dark is entirely different, a belonging unbounded and unmutual.

When is the actor known but in reflection on the things done, and on how they formed out of the situations in which they occurred? The latter may be massively unfolded so that they pre-empt any questions of coherence, but the former being only an inference has little in the way of granularity and is inevitably riven by discontinuities. It is better therefore to look for the hidden but obvious things in the total presentation, broadening the terms so far as we can discover them. On one side these embrace the realist elements and on the other the oneiric. Awareness can become infected with light, with an ever-opening turning out of surface after surface, so that we forget our roots in the essentially dark, in what cannot be asserted because it cannot be known. Fascination dwells on the encounter of vague shapes in the dark, and secret places which draw us because of something, tragically, irremediably, missing in the day.

Free will is simply the premise implied by the intelligibility of human action, even when there may be other reasons for thinking that the action may be constrained by other heteronomous factors. This position ought to exclude a lot of pointless divagations about freedom and agency, at the same time as being of no use at all for a liberatory politics. Heteronomy and constraint are of interest precisely because because they can be seen as extraordinary self-limitations of pure freedom, a freedom that has nothing to do with paradigms of agency. Where there is pure freedom any initial exercise of it will be catastrophic. This must be and yet, since this exercise is incapable of affecting that freedom in any way, and because there is never a first moment of anything, the catastrophe is both devastating and entirely virtual, relentlessly affirmative and empty and non-existent. Between those extremes all the absurdities of triumphing life dance.

In the old idealism it was enough to say that the creator geometrises, that the ratios of numbers supplies the foundational harmonies of the universe, and that space can be calibrated to platonic solids, and so on, and they would have seemed to be saying something like the moderns do with their uncanny aptness of mathematics for the physical world, with their mathematical universe, basic symmetries, simplicity the measure of truth and all that other. But the moderns are selective in the kinds of mathematics that are admissible. A modern idealism, to be as insistent on the primacy of mind might need to assign a cosmic role to the prime numbers, for example, something that we feel is otherwise quite unlikely to occur. How do we know this? How do we immediately recognise an uncanniness about certain parts of mathematics, so that if we encountered a listing of the primes in the signals emitted by a new kind of pulsar we would immediately know that we were in the presence of an alien intelligence? This seems immediately obvious, but the precise distinction, say between matter friendly and mind friendly mathematics, hard to frame. What if the continuum is overturned and physical reality thoroughly quantised, might there then be a role for number theory in new physics? And what about algebraic geometry in some new kind of string theory?

The self of the middle realm, the reflective, not too wise self of narrative and psyche, how he'd gazed at its antics and style, followed its turnings and elegant small victories in novels and music, its many deaths, not all good, but how he'd loved it. As a presence, however, it was always deficient. To fully exist it required a conversation, which meant that it was always displaced a little by its very nature, and perhaps a lot depending on conditions over which there was no control. His own unruly desires, like spoiled but loved children, kept tangling the warp; it was a mess, with strange holes that appeared in places after a period of neglect, or perhaps those periods were themselves the holes? Was this how it always was, how it had to be, with these tapestries, these screens, these nets? The spaces now seen through the holes seemed to have been there the entire time, patient, indifferent, vast.

Anything we recognise as an idea already presumes a whole world of ideas. You can aim at a pure perception and it is easy to see that whatever you find will always be an idea of such a perception, but the ideal component will seem eliminable, like a fuzzy fringe around the real thing. If ideas seem to have that wispy or gaseous quality this is only because they are faded by-products of conception, they are down-stream of the kind of high energy ideas that frame a world by way of fundamental distinctions. If there is nothing behind or around a distinction, or a characterisation, no fulcrum point from which to experience the freedom of their act, then they will seem adamantine and irreversible. The deep structure of the world as understood by the idealist has this quality of lawlike self-subjection. To assume the freedom inherent in fundamental ideas remains an impossible possibility - this is absolute freedom but there is no one to wield it.

Life moves with its own motion and we find ourselves in the midst of it, not thrown but emerging continually out of the very movements that carry it onward. We fall back into the process but are discontented and arise out of it again. The process is compact with understanding, shot through with different phases and densities of understanding. The primary activity is closer to conceiving than perceiving, not attention but the elaboration of an idea, an activity that always leads to another idea. And an artefact of this process is the questioner, a phase which retains enough of a constancy, of an invariance, or rather a power of recovery and adaption in the midst of changes, that it seems as if it might be a basis for some sort of reality, the essential reference point from which space and time can be measured. To be given a world, what a gift, unless we recall the world before the world.

There is the understander and his works, an effort and an enterprise that endows values here and ignores their possibility there. His trying out of different ideas, ways of looking, his rattling at closed doors, testing locks, diligent attention to half-remembered openings is taken for granted, because what once yielded will yield again. The effort is close to home and a part of the daily routine of sifting what comes from the outside in search of clues; it creates a near and a far, an inside and an out, a spatialisation and saliences that hold that space open. But if there are saliences there are also their shadows, less interesting regions to be passed over in order to reach more interesting ones. If what he claims to be in search of were ever to be found then he would be the first thing to vanish, he and his entire world. And from exactly where he always found nothing of interest there would be a knowing; not an understander at all but the very knowing he always presumed upon, as if he had the least clue as to what it was he was always talking about.

He would take up the suggestions of a moment, seeming to care little about how he spent his substance. It was something quite detached from him, he had only to look back to see how over time every rule had been bent for the sake of a correction that certainly did not come. But now the game played itself out with little risk, there was not much at stake. Any new direction that emerged would first have to engage in endless revisions, make sense of all that past, all those afternoons and mornings, the mugs and gearsticks, the smells of salt, tea and tar, his eyes opening onto as many common days, pink, grey and blue. If there was a thing to be found it had surely already been stumbled over too many times, the opposite of nostalgia being only another and thinner nostalgia. In the event, the only surprise was how gently these suggestions, with all their flutter and rehearsed abstractions, could be laid aside.

Some among the many latent connections of ideas would flare up at times and yield a specious certainty. It would seem to him as if a conclusion could be drawn, a foundation established. These would stay fresh for a few days before revealing themselves as hollow shells.  But then the very process of failing again seemed worthwhile, at least proving that one was alive, and safely far from any conclusion, far from the estuary. The sense of failure, the bitterness that can be savoured in it is a potent reminder of the incompleteness of life, it differs in quality from happiness, but not in kind. It goes down to a certain depth, has the authentic salty taste of the alien thing one has been enlisted in. What he dreamed of was a critique of life itself. To him this was undoubtedly the basis of most religions, no matter which side they came down upon in the end, no matter how loudly the priests would insist that it was what came next that was important. Perhaps in this over-stuffed epoch everyone must come up with a critique of their own, proceeding from their own private and particular premises, from their own pre-dawn vigils.

Just to describe the way it is is the hardest thing. To go upstream, to turn around the lens of attention and see what is giving it, this origin of this world, creates a kind of dazzlement. It is rare to be able to make out any sort of structure or intelligibiilty in this white-out. If there is a who, a historical self or personage who could so it it would not be this one, too ordinary, too crooked, too compromised, sinful, dishonest, credulous, vain. The swimming back up the current is a task for genius, something that begins beyond where these capabilities leave off. And yet this is nothing if it is not my own possibility, a possibility that belongs entirely to this particularity. There is only the most particular, it belongs to everyone, and whatever the way it is reveals, it can be nothing beyond this, can have nothing depending on rare categories. Every form of specialness is a tottering abstraction built on other tottering abstractions, and so even with that version of particular that is defined by relation to it.

All knowing is knowing by identity, but knowing is forever coming upon the new. Latencies are exposed and we recognise them, immediately or after a little time. The total of what may be latent, the inner intelligence of experience, cannot be guessed. In science we see that current questions and ways of seeing things could not have been conceived in the past, when certain evidence and presuppositions were absent, but once these are given and the context is formed then the questions and ways of seeing become obvious, maybe even too much so. The same should apply to the inquiry which attempts to uncover the subjective pole, or indeed the subject itself. The machinery of thought is not well conformed to this task, and may in fact hinder it because of its categorical structure and logic, but this is no argument against the endeavour. One cannot know what form it might take, it is an exercise in abandonment of preconceptions, a radical abandonmnet, even an abandonment of abandonment, but in the light, to the light, as the light.

In relation to what appear as physical objects it is us who are the contingent or variable element; even if the object is fleeting it is us, via our attention, who come and go. The relation prescribes the roles.
The difference, in order to be a difference, must be intelligible and therefore must arise in a field of intelligence. One might seek to gain insight into such a field, what is it, how does it work, why is it, and so on, but can such inquiry make any sense at all, since it would seek to penetrate into the unintelligible, the unknowing? Absurd hubris of the knowing reflex that feels that it is entitled to go anywhere, to reduce any question to its own terms of reference. Content yourself with special investigations into concrete matters, physical and mental, and the modes of their relations. There are then at least three distinct registers to consider.  First is the phenomenological descriptive, as when one carefully details, in an objective tone of voice the components of an event, the objective tone being the tone of greatest generality. Next the poetic allusive, as when the event in its specificity is located in an open-ended field of associations, allusions and meanings, and becomes freighted with subjective meanings; paradoxically, these communicate more directly than the objective. The third is the register of the miraculous, in which the object, any objects, conveys its particular and general quality of silence, beyond all meanings, beyond all need to communicate.

The thing as process, the mattering, or what O. calls the 'going-on'. These go on, they go, act, intervene. We only know of them through this intervention, in the world. To intervene equals to come between. The world is the plethora of comings and goings of matterings and it becomes richer as more matters arise in the gaps between established ones. So there appears to be more than one thing. There are, there must be gaps between things that matter, gaps that matter, mattering and mattering too. It seems that as much as matters come and go we also come and go in relation to certain fixed landmarks or a horizon. For a matter to become presence there must be two terms in relation, one fixed and one variable, one necessary and one contingent, but only, of course, relatively so. And conversely, when there is a relation of a constant and a variable term, or a necessary and a contingent one, then there is a presencing, some matter coming about.

Does this moment have assumptions? Of course. Then how to find them? But oughtn't you first to ask why, why bother to look for them? If this were resting on something in order to be kept safe from something else, then one might begin. An anxious beginning, but as least a place to start. That means that it locates itself in time, it recognises a sort of immanent succession that rather resembles causality: this moment being the efficient and substantial cause of the next one. So there is a past and a future, and the possibility of being mistaken, of being deceived, of deceiving oneself. And in this way there is a narrative in which this "one" is found, a narrative that stretches like a net over the whole show, providing a surface, and a set of coordinates, on which the features can be mapped to form a life-story. And so there is a reader of that story, who must be equally present to all the parts of it, a watcher outside of time, a "who", who gives meaning to the present moment as an instant in time, gives it presence, unites the music with a feeling in the belly, with the pressure of the chair, the view through the window, the glass of water, the position of the sun, the smell and taste of the day, the relationships of the fleeting with memory and expectation. And the feeling that something is missing from all of this delicious fulness, that the assumptions have not yet been perfectly grasped...  

In the theory of finance, and perhaps its practise, one often encounters the term, 'risk appetite', with the implication that since 'nothing ventured, nothing gained' the more one is willing to put at risk, the more one ultimately stands to gain. It is perhaps a worldly version of Christ's "whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it." The term, then, is not quite accurate since one could feed a pure risk appetite at a casino and be sure of ultimate ruin. You are to venture, to take on risk, only when there is good reason to believe that the odds are there to be beaten. In the theory of life the equivalent may be 'truth appetite'; how much of this commodity that mankind can bear so little of can you take? There may even be a casino of debased truths, but there are certainly truths it's worth losing your life for, you know, that kind that set you free.

Every perceived object can be reframed as a phase of an act of perception - every event viewed as a process, or more acutely as an adverb. This goes further than Heidegger's "It rains", to an "It does, rainingly", or "It does, in a thing-like way" - whatever the thing happens to show as. When we see things in this way, as active processes, the mode of vision does not stop at the surface of the thing, at its appearance, but pervades our latent sense of the being of the thing, and of its composition as a compresence of parts in a whole. We are reminded that objects loom in a strange way, always seeming to move either closer in or further away, to recompose or discompose. Once we are installed in this process-mode of perception the flip of perspective where subject and object swap places becomes easier. The indeterminacy of the subject position is rendered obvious.