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.