The discoveries we make in art seem to be discoveries of our own truths but just out of our reach. Even if it is beauty we seek this is known in satisfaction, a term that implies both deep ownness and integrity or trueness. But there are many other names and forms for the quarry that is sought, modalities of the same quest. In practice these truths are always attached to a personage, the complex figure of the artist, and always contain a swerve out of anything we would have recognised without being shown. In seeming to speak to us these elements call us forth into an identity which we grasp all the more avidly because it is graspable. It is an elective identity even if it becomes rigid and a compelling motive force in our actions. This is because the process by which it was chosen appears to be conscious and fully narratable, and because the self with whose truth it seems to shimmer is essentially free. This is a world where truth exists as tokens of truth and hence is a hierarchical world, as truths or tokens may be more or less true, more or less victims of the unintended swerve into an other alien truth.