It seemed to him, often enough, that he'd almost disappeared into his mere presence as a world, that by cutting short the mind's deviations into past and future he'd begun to touch something stable in which his identity could be allowed to melt away in a sort of fulfillment. The almost, the sort of, had to bear a lot of weight however, because all he'd done was to shift the bulk of the mechanism, its reliance on a self for a self for a self... below the horizon of awareness. The setup was unchanged, or perhaps even worse, since he'd added one more subtle layer of reflection over the rest. What showed this up better than anything was being with others, the replacement of oneness, of a sort, by twoness, or a more blatant plurality. The vocabulary to describe this was that of the food-chain, added to that of inconstancy, instability, subsumption, fragmentation; equivalently the language of the world, unmodified. This was an extraordinarily energetic and exhausting play, in which identity, truer to its roots, was pure virulence, and metaphysics an obsolete and ineffective tactic. The opposition was no longer between subject and object but between force and form.