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.