To be present is to be here on this occasion and to acknowledge it as one of a series of similar occasions that differ little enough so that they can seem as though they are repeating mirror images stretching into both the past and the future. Whether there is such a sequence or not the unit of experience is seen to have the character of such a doubly infinite extension. The moment takes its identity from this dissolution of its identity in a sequence of recurrences, and the sequences themselves become the matter of experience. The sequences succeed each other, even though each one is possessed of a kind of eternity in which it completes itself. They seem to have an integrity that resists alteration, resists negativity. That the essence of each moment is an unfathomable positivity is somehow identical to their quality of being both a mere instance and the infinite sequence of which they are such an instance. And yet there is no resistance to succession from memory or from expectation, no friction offered to mutability at all. What might otherwise have seemed a strategy to push death away by replacing finitude with infinity turns out to be best able to welcome it.

The start of a new project was its own Spring and always aroused hopes that it was his own nature finally unbound and ready to fill time's stage with a persistent and ever-deepening internality. But to fall in with a project was to fall in with a process and a process always has its arc. The work was to bend that arc into a rough circle or even a decent enough spiral by sheer will, or by sheer love of the past-continuous, the again and again quality of things. He could gorge on fine ideas but these would soon pass through his system and fall away into the past and irrelevance. He was aware of being old, his memory poor, his senses losing keenness, his desire almost dormant. But this also had its gift in the augmented sense of the once and once only quality of time against which strategies of repetition could only play a charming but losing game.

His photographs seemed to express a broader and more inclusive consciousness than his words, but not because of an essential difference between the media. His utterances seemed shallow incursions into a world of language with a range of capabilities that at best far exceeded anything he could come up with, and which could stand to his pictures as the pictures stood to his words. He was haunted by the tremendous contraction that seemed to follow each time he began to write. What had seemed a moment of intelligible and panoramic awareness, what had prompted the very attempt to write was instantly transformed into a surrender to the constraints of syntax and the logical articulation of meaning. A polyphonic writing was possible, but his was committedly monophonic, earnestly non-ironic in relation to the present moment, even if aware of the broader ironies inseparable from the passing of time. He was no fan of irony, but could not help feeling a gentle relief at the ironic note injected by his pictures, irony that was both structurally intrinsic and, occasionally as well, a deliberate wink back at his words.

He was a metastable structure of values and tested realities, of likelihoods and pathways mapped in a map of the world. It seemed firm enough, he'd dedicated a lot to the ecology, making it nice, well stocked with projects and rewards. And he was not alone; there were others around more or less present, and they were predictably unpredictable. But then at times there were things he only remembered, couldn't feel,  couldn't remember why he'd ever been interested in. They were just over there, or at least the door to them, or maybe more like the entrance to a subway car, he only had to show his ticket. It all became clear after he'd passed through and in the brief time while what was left behind spread out in a blur before disappearing. Was it the passage to the act or the act of passage, the implosion of mediation, that so shook him with its intimate violence and deposited him, incredulous, refreshed on the familiar shore?

Substance and subject are two polar terms that arise in the process of life making sense of itself. These are components which need to be presupposed in order for meaningful action to go forward. They could also be referred to as the properties (in the theatrical sense) and the protagonist, in order to emphasise how distinct their natures seem to be. And yet, while it is easy to distinguish them broadly in practise it is virtually impossible to do so in detail and up close. In experience they are merely two species of objectivity, with subject only somewhat mediated, as the necessarily implied entity that experiences, and perhaps best thought of as something to do with the brain. And so, if all there is are objectivities, subject can only be regarded as a necessary enabling effect, a sort of catalyst to the play of things in motion. An essential confusion remains as to whether subject is prior or posterior in experience and this leaves the way open to a reversal of the terms, so that it could be substance which owns the defining dynamic in experience and subject merely the name for the site or presence where this all takes place.

Is the belief accorded to ideas, the 'cre' that is given, a function of the original self? If it were it would belong to a mode of action of that self, an impure act, which must be ruled out. No, the weight of belief falls entirely on the side of the self that is believed in, not the self taken as doing the believing. The apparent self-reference, and all the attendant history of metaphysics belongs to that putative subject, as indeed does the very concept of an original self. This latter is taken to be what merely inhabits, or lights up, a self structure built on self-reference, and on degrees of belief in itself. It may be taken to gather or coagulate at the points where the functioning self is more exactly self-referential due to some sort of elective affinity. However essence is anything but self-referential. The error stems from the fact that the purest nodes of self-reference in the objective or ideal self are the ones that strive the most for ostension, for a showing of their own priority. Acts of self-reference are just those that would seek it, and all the more so because they necessarily fail, since they can only bring forth limited representatives of subject and object. Hence we believe that consciousness has something to do with self-reference, a natural error but an error just the same.

The distinction in experience between world and self is imposed; it is an idea that has been acquired, but not voluntarily since that would assume the acquiescence of a prior self. Experience becomes explicit by means of certain formations that develop within itself and these come to include what we later call the human which is a nexus of individual and collective appearances. Integral to this is a sort of reflexive modelling of experience by way of representations and functioning, and this has come to reflect the totality in terms of the self/world distinction, a move which served as a gateway into a vast realm of possibilities which would otherwise not have arisen. The unfolding of this distinction, the necessity or contingency of each concomitant branching, could only, if at all, be demonstrated in its objective aspect, but this is not even the half of it. The self torn out of and placed against its world is simply endowed with intentions, beliefs, thoughts, intuition, awe and abjection, and with the extraordinary notion that it is responsible for the entire show.

A patchwork of times, overlapping habitations like windowed cells in each of which he awoke to some arrangement of purposes and responses, and from each of which he could more or less make out the others, scattered away in every direction, strewn over hills, clumped in valleys, fading in the mist. A soothing image perhaps but belying the sense of being bustled from one to the next, the inexorable directionality, and the drop into darkness at the end. The mixture of familiarity and astonishment that ruled over the rapidly succeeding tableaux in dreams, not persons in scenes but personages in scenarios, was truer to this mutability than the complacency of the waking self with its feet squarely on the ground. His assumption was that it was himself that kept moving, kept waking up, kept discovering himself in new places, but there was no evidence whatsoever that he ever left whatever cell it was in which considered such questions, or any other, including this.

He could not shake the imagination of a state of perfect collectedness, one where no distinction remained between living and re-living, with every filiation functioning as a two-way channel, the centre everywhere. It seemed that it had once been his, and was his birthright, but had been lost so that it could now only be glimpsed in the heart of nostalgia and in the thoughtless enjoyments of others. Because he only knew it from the outside his striving to recover it entailed the effort to get outside of himself, to adopt a double perspective, a detached quasi-objectivity. This was far from impossible, but represented a civilised self-irony, verging on the comic, that was one of the ideals of the social groups with which he was identified. Finding the right listener he could spin out the misadventures of the impassioned little character that was himself and momentarily deflect its tragic desires into a serenely amused distributed intelligence of which he was, evidently, a full citizen. But where did such a listening exist? By what means was it betrayed?

Sometimes his dreams seemed like attempts to revisit some moment of a history, perhaps not really his own, to re-experience it for the first time. It was like the sense he had that death would always be too soon because life was always preliminary, a sketch, that it was only all there was time for in the moment, but to be returned to later on, definitely returned to. To know where he was and what he was doing there was a task, and failing the knowledge to complete the current setting, he had to be content with shorthand notations, cross-hatchings to cover the shadows, crude pixelations away from attention's centre. All of this would have meant little if there had not been rare occasions when experience was full and sufficient. These seemed entirely natural and yet were impossible to sustain. In fact he never tried to do so but but wilfully threw himself into self-alienation. In this he was allying himself with the way of the world, with the splendour of its divergence, its cunning at excess. His love for this delirium was unbounded.

The state of the body is the state of body in its environment. Body makes its world wherever it finds itself and the contents of thought blend seamless with all the other elements of the setting, whether nominally in or out of the body. This is why travelling separates us from currents of thought that have become habitual. At best we become aware of the futility of all those contents revealed as merely ecological, expressions of faith in the continuity of life, of its process wedded to its context. A change in the physical circumstances of life comes about, or is understood to come about, by way of physical causality, which is an immensely complex web of explanations relying on transparent but infinitesimal concatenations of things. The adjustments of mind contribute nothing to the causality and yet are the essential response to its productions. The mind, always more or less impossible, excretes thought in order to maintain itself in the midst of this determinedly mindless process.

We are aware of awareness as a bodily state, as belonging to the body. Alertness is the name for an entirely somatic dimension of awareness divorced from thought but which integrates an inner and an outer focus. Alertness is attention without a particular object but driven by that absence into a taut internal motion or opened intentionality. While thought seeks resolution in some way, alertness is as much prepared to explode as to quietly abolish or attenuate itself. The waking state contains an irreducible component of alertness which is not a specification of some more general form of awareness, rather, at least in the way it seems in experience, awareness is a specification and modification of alertness. It is as if we have learned to control the restless streaming of object location, the targeting, of alertness and to slow it down so that a second-order effect can take place and bring objects of thought and contemplation into existence. In all of this the somatic source of the original energy is not entirely forgotten but lives on as an infinitely rich and ever-changing fringe accompanying objectification and thought, lending it colour and shade.

His world was almost a world of purposeful action; almost in extent and almost in will. Purposive action was speculation in time, bringing about interwoven structures of varied span from the shortest to the longest, and forging an equivalence between inner time and outer time. Inner time was traversed by the idea of death and its anxiety which exceeded all will and purpose, and threw the entire speculation into a kind of ecstasy. Outer time knew nothing of this, being deathless, being continuous transformation, being both the notion of mere happening and that of posterity or recognition. The project was to subsume inner time in outer time, let it be an accident attached contingently to it, but in spite of this he could not free himself from the awareness that outer time was a construction of inner time, one of its first and most inevitable projects.

He could distinguish internal objects from external ones, and among external objects those with selves from those without. These distinctions were easily made and the margins of error were small but not vanishing. For each object there was a part believed to be intrinsic to it and the remainder was taken to be blended with qualities derived from himself. These qualities could be varied either by will or by way of changes that also affected strictly internal objects. The variations in objects consistent with variations in himself were brought together in the notion of a perspective. Other kinds of variations which included those external objects with selves suggested that perspectives had an objective existence, and that this was the definitive characteristic of all selves. This understanding opened strange abysses in his world, prior to it his sense of other selves was of an implicit intimacy, it consisted in his feeling into them as if they were the same.

Experience is an act or performance in which there is an alternation of augmentations and resolutions of intensity. The intensity defines the medium of meaning, the resolution of tension defines self-reference. Everything experienced as objectively known assumes this status because of the place it occupies in that circuit of the self which is the appearance of this act. The stuff of experience, the furniture of the world is this phenomenon of a return of the self to itself. But the self has no reality outside the performance, it is the means by which the structures resolve. Resolution borrowing the character of self-reference because of the prior transparency, the mere presencing which comes to seem as if it is a latent understanding, a pure act of self-presence which we miss-call consciousness. It is invoked as the subject, equally aptly by coarse textures of thought as by fine ones. In the former it is the kernel of anxious or melancholic self-concern, in the latter a detached enjoyment revelling in its superiority to its occasions.

His inner discourse seemed to require continual employment of the term 'self' in every one of widely various contexts, and yet he had no idea what it meant or even whether the question of a self made any sense. When that discourse was more reflective it took on the character of an effort to smoke out the understanding of self, justified by the rather shaky deduction that one must always already understand what one is referring to, and that to mention is to reference. To attempt to speak without using the term, or to delay its use, only led to an artificial syntax of the kind he would condemn as self-conscious. Otherwise his experience led to the idea that the self was merely an attribute of the occasion, where it functioned as a filter allowing just so much of this essential and central lucidity to shine through and become the energy behind the movement of thought. The selves could neither own experience nor be owned by it, but were discardable vessels or mechanisms, whose constant change invites barely a thought. Each one is so entirely taken up with whatever is currently present that the unsatisfied promises of a superceded self are of no concern. They earn the name of self only because of what they transmit or allow to manifest, the light itself being serenely invisible.

He had a sense of choosing in which the choice was between going along with the opportunities and suggestions that life delivered or refusing them in full awareness that he was doing so. There was, after all, no rule to the effect that he should always like or feel a readiness for what was presented to him on his way, but he had learned that any such refusal had consequences which were generally not to his liking. Nothing was ever predictable, either way. The actions suggested were always recognisable and so were generally understood as repetitions, but every time he ventured down the same path the journey was entirely different, expectation was defeated at every turn, often in humourous ways, but in ways which had little bearing on the general destination. In the past there was a sense that life might have an important message for him if he could only follow the clues to find it, but now it was only a matter of meanders and eddies, the purpose of the journey being just the journeying. And so did it really make any difference whether he chose or refused? It seemed not, and all the less so since he'd come to recognise that he himself was the journey.

The two monisms are idealism and materialism. Their difference in orientation may obscure a large area of commonality, beyond which they will diverge again. If materialism is pushed far enough it must alight upon absurdity, not merely that no further reasons can be given but that the final boundary of the knowable will only throw the inquiry into a divergent loop. If even the inquirer is finally understood in material terms then all of its real, or ownmost, questions must be forever unanswered, because unaskable. One can only retrace the entire trajectory and hope in vain for a different outcome. Idealism also abuts on absurdity but it allows for a dissolution of this in a transformation and reorientation of the knowing itself. The nature of the inquirer is understood to descend from the ultimate nature of things, but after passing through a certain number of knots which can in principle be undone, gone through in reverse. In either case the confrontation with absurdity is to be welcomed.

Believing itself to be in the world and coming to learn something about this world by way of the world's own discourses, the self goes in search of a unique definition of itself. It would like to logically triangulate itself over human meanings, over cultural realities, putting into play the tokens that mark crossings points between the desires it finds inside its body and those it finds outside it. To be uniquely defined, in a compact way seems to be a generally much desired, as for example to be a 'name'. It's hard to imagine such a definition achieving anything like the goal it sets for itself, and it would be laughable if not so common. The error it points to is in where we look to in order to acquire our notions of real being.

Suffering and art pose two challenges for idealism. The world is so full of cruel and senseless suffering, most of which is out of sight, suffering being neither of the day nor the night. It cannot be balanced against any other value and so it threatens any philosophical synthesis that tries to make a place for it, as much as it does any which ignores it. In idealism an individual consciousness is insignificant and insufficient in relation to the whole, but a suffering consciousness cannot be measured in terms of parts and wholes. The time of suffering cannot be redeemed by being dissolved in eternity, it has its own kind of absolute. The problem or art is just the opposite. Art invites an elevated consciousness, it thrives on a discernment equal to that of philosophy, yet it does not see the same things, does not validate the philosopher's vision. In some respects art parodies spiritual understanding, and in others it seems a humbler and more honest version, spirituality cut down to size. A franker and more transparent exaltation, it presumes that the world is irreducible to spirit, and that the difficult duality is maintained. With irony and a grounded engagement it feels itself adequate to assess philosophy, and its judgement is merciless.

The basic shape of experience does not change but the overall intensity and the relative intensities of its components does vary over a considerable range. It is difficult to pin down all of these components however, because only the same experiencing apparatus is available for doing so. The structure of experience is dimly legible to experience but only exists in relation to experience. To say that experience splits into subject and object, that stale old dichotomy, is to point out that it is external to itself. It is more or less focalised, but always out of a field that is too large to be grasped. The field is known in some way, however, since it largely determines the meaning and relations of the contents of experience. One name for the field is life, or 'my life' - most of what we know of experience by way of someone's life, but not just anyone, me! Experience is ungrounded, in that it does not justify, explain or give rise to itself, but grounding is an ever-present question for it. It knows that it is and it doesn't know what or why it is, or why it cares so much about these questions. The content is ever-changing but the invisible geometry within which that content arises is constant, or at least appears to be so relative to the contents. Experience seems known to itself less through the contents, those kaleidoscopic and flashing mirror images, than through the map of patterns of intensity known as a life-story.

The scene of perfect transmission was a persistent dream of his, but it never corresponded to reality. He concluded that it would have required a particular singleness and absorption of consciousness, an innocence or wise naivety which had never been given to him. The perfectly contrived scene of intimacy was instead the occasion for the upwelling of a buzz of divergent thoughts. These might have seemed alienating, except that they were the augmentation rather than the disruption of the necessarily private self. Often the these thoughts were the very ones that had eluded him on an earlier occasion, like the solution to a difficult problem that had been nagging for days. But what struck him most was the exposure of the fiction on which intimacy was based, the flattening of its metaphysics, and because of the mechanical nature of the process of recall and resumption, this included intimacy with himself as well. Things arose with such pristine inconsequence, as if they could only say 'why not this?', that desire had to immediately start lying about them. So it was innocence after all.

In a random spread of things we see a face turned towards us, a face we recognise from some irrecoverable branching of the past. It was our past because it reminds us of home. Once we have seen that the sense of past is equivalent to the sense of home then there is nothing problematic in the idea of the past branching as well as the future. The randomness is perceived in perturbed repetitions or symmetries. We see this in the fascination with fire and with waves, with landscapes and clouds. The same phenomenon exists in caresses. The presence of the other felt in a caress, or our presence to the other imagined as expressed in our own caresses, results from a delicate pattern of variations on repetition which require a vocabulary of anticipations, transitions, acknowledgements, elicitings, withholdings and so on, in short the lexicon of music and of expressive subjectivity. It appears to be a communication, or more precisely a transmission, but in order to be validated as such we would need simultaneous access to two subjectivities. There is only every one, but there are such dramatic alterations brought about by arousal that the illusion is unbreakable. But then there is also that odd sense of home, being brought home, and why should not the distinction between self and other be entirely undone there?

To him every random arrangement of things had a distinct character, a special face, determined by, and for that very reason not determined by, something called a distribution, or by a further arrangement of distributions. Allowing himself a pun on that technical name there seemed to him a fundamental generosity in this concept. At each point of the space of the distribution an event may or may not occur, but the distribution inhabits the space in the same way, is equally at home everywhere. The distribution is indifferent to existence, yet is only expressed through the exclusion and selection embodied in existence - every particular being an instance of the distribution, and the instances part of an infinite family, indiscernible amongst themselves. He wondered if there was a future bias inherent in this idea. Was thinking of distributions a way of separating off the mysterious and irrevokable event of choosing? It was assumed that the past was unique, the cold ashes of choice, accomodating to distributions only in a formal, historical sense, "a perpetual possibility/Only in a world of speculation". Was there, he wondered, only one past that could precede this or any other present, or was the past as aleatory as the future?

The pleasure he took in demonstrations of randomness, in the fringes surrounding and separated the readily identified contents of the shared world. For example the patterns in the materials of clothing, simple patterns which break up into not quite regular configurations when looked at closely, patterns in skin and in bodies, spatial patterns never quite perfect instances of a type, pointillist fields. This breakdown of ideal form had once been taken to signal the terminal effects of the essential formlessness of matter on divine emanations, but now the mathematics of the universe was revealed precisely in the evanescent regularities of chance effects. And then there was the perception of randomness in time, splashing water, the flickering of a flame, the sounds of cars passing in the street, the complex play of predictability and innovation in music. He saw randomness as an essential component of beauty, and somewhat at odds with the beauty's centripetal insistence on its own integrity. The randomness hinted at an underlying freedom, more generous, more surrendered, more ecstatic than beauty itself.