People share histories in conversation, their own and those they have come to know, those we create and tell of ourselves and those we pass on, suitably modified. The stories we have come to know in this way, with a strong prejudice in favour of low degrees of separation, form the basis of our generalisations and larger more abstract understanding of human nature, which in turn is the basis of our reception and assumption of new histories. Versions of this structure, often highly sophisticated, that we enjoy encountering in novels, have little impact on our own researches, except perhaps at an abstract methodological level. In attending to another's telling we model not only the instances they are describing but the context from which they present it. This latter may be highly opaque and the opacity more or less accounted for in our responsiveness. Our progress is in things known, but just as much in things known to be unknown. The unknowable can arouse a kind of transgressive enthusiasm, especially on realising that understanding is an optional component of engagement. Limited to understanding it prompts a move to the universal, a weak but somehow socially approved elevation of perspective. The strange thing is that our understanding of ourselves is subject to exactly the same vicissitudes.

Days live from the legacy of the dreams that precede them as if the night's dreaming is mother to the ensuing day. Dull days possess a deceptive simplicity, they are products of dreams that cling invisibly, unable to relinquish the dreamer, to release the imagination to the uses of the day. The mind is subdued, damped, soft and possibly sweet, until a peculiar reactivity is discovered. It was so collected, so sufficient to itself that it finds itself out of rhythm with everything else. Events appear both banal and strange, everything takes one by surprise, and the sheer disjunction of the real throws back a sense of hopeless misdirection which sets off ripples of despondency. Have you ever understood anything at all? Or worse still, have you never understood that you can understand nothing at all? In this way, through shame, one gradually and partially awakens, awakens to the effortless persistence of the dream.

A lot of explaining seems to go on, not very effective or well-thought out admittedly, but the point is to assume the position of explainer. The things that are closest to pointing the way out but fail to do so are the very ones that are most complicit with the recurrent bondage. Explanation is thus a reflex which bends the vectors of intent back towards the surface of biography, an imaginary point outside the self which serves the self. Watching with a taint of approval or disapproval, of pro or con. The action manufactures an unit of narrative, a tradeable unit. It is a little like mining bitcoins: a certain default mental process manufactures small corpuscles of self enabling narratives. The resulting narratives can be traded with real or imaginary others contributing to the natural circulation of sap within this region of the human aggregate. Whatever trajectories they mark out, whether they function in an analogue economy or a digital control system, they have one intended outcome and that is to affirm the priority of system over subject, to repeat the axiom of the subject's subjection.

In animal and insect life the physical body seems to be the embodiment and articulation of a single self. Built for mobility its members serve highly differentiated functions, they work, and work in a team. An appearance of freedom for this life is belied by the need to run around maintaining itself, its coherent purposes. In contrast, vegetative life is a diffuse armature on which an indefinite plurality of expressions can accumulate, flowers, fruits, leaves, branches, roots, tendrils and so forth. Any of these can seem to be a face of the plant, and so gain the appearance of an autonomous life-cycle of its own, although also, clearly, remaining merely a contingent dependent of the entire organism. There is no fixed number of leaves or branches, pruning is no more than an adventure. In fact the independence of mobile life is as illusory as the self of a flower or a twig, or much more so. The sense of dependence, of connectedness, of the branchings of a single life, becomes obvious at the level of soul. All earthly life is a tree in the cosmic garden, our life, a leaf or flower, drawing its shaping power from the generous sap and its identity from pure contingency.

The dreamer is a venturer, seeking something in some world. But then he stumbles on recurrences, meeting himself at the cross-roads and often enough to suggest a history and its subject, a soul journeying through reality and turned towards and away from the unrecognised truth. All of this in the dream whose layer upon layer seem to express a concern, no one's concern, to stay asleep. Situations are broken up and recycled, their painful and threatening sides made innocent, the whole thing allowed to unfold under that wider and paler sky, that enigmatically smiling knowingness. Experience is time traced in the intersection of two timelessnesses.

A self is a history and ecology of drives and desires whose details are immovable but utterly contingent. It is a potency of exercise that has evolved along the thread of inchoate presence passing through vastly complex cosmic and cultural formations. Every self can be thought of as the posing of a question, general in outline, distinctive in detail, that has arisen in this medium. The self takes all this personally, that is part of its most general and impersonal nature, and in developing its awareness it comes into opposition with the recognition that all its terms of reference are externally derived. The self is a wrestling with everything that enables it to be. The checks and resonances with which it strives to actualise itself link it fatally to its historicity. In so far as this mean that it must deeply doubt itself, just so does it touch on a strange certainty, a maddening centrality that resides in the heart of its vertiginous peripherality.

The mind seems like an aperture onto the soul's wisdom, but at the same time it is a purposeful urgency to prise itself open while being passively receptive of whatever momentary light might come through. Out of this impossible twist of demands it has constructed a metaphysical ideal or rather an ideal of metaphysics, in which it has a core task, namely the investigation of how this here now is and how it originates, how appearing appears. It petitions the soul in the name of this question in all its variant forms, and in the pious expectation that fidelity to this quest is an expression of its immanent identity with soul. As if the act of soul is to be master of this mystery. The absurdity and impossibility of the quest are what underwrite its virtue. The world seems wondrous as it is ensouled, as there arises in it the entire complex of phenomena which question it. The various selves are radii of this contemplation and the nugget of truth they each conceal is the transcript of the divine philosophising, written in letters of white fire within them.  

Something like desire arose and so he acted, and the action became the fulfilling of a desire that was shaped or invented by the action. He knew that if he prodded discursive mind enough then it would find something to wonder about, and desire would be the desire to wonder. Discursive mind was a given, but it was greatly assisted by writing, by the action of assembling some physical stuff correlative to his thoughts. It was a matter of kneading his mind as if it were bread dough, making it come alive with elasticity, ready to rise yet again after so many cycles, so many collapses. Mind flirting with soul, hoping to arouse its interest, its autonomous desire, to cause it to awaken and prise open its true-seeing eye. Mind existing only in the moment, engaged in a tireless and largely futile ancillary activity, driven by unreflective and unfree will, was placed in opposition to soul, with few states, more or less activated, more or less condescending.

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.

He could not tether himself to the high saliences he sometimes experienced, could not be sure of holding on to any ground once gained, and so he worked tirelessly to maintain passage. He was sure that if he stopped struggling he would be drawn into a deep oblivion weighed down by a history of acquiescences, short-cuts and easy surrenders. The soul might respond to a diet of spiritual delicacies and so he strove to extract them out of the muck in which they were usually planted. All this effort for the sake of a nobility that he didn't fully believe in, and which at certain moments disgusted him. Work meant value, and value a system of values, and this in turn meant compensations, equivalences, exchanges and an appetite for position. All the mechanisms of a market, of trafficking, reproduced in the realm of the soul where he'd thought to escape them.

The world seemed so fascinating with its micro-tones and subtle variegations that he often mistook it for his object. And then as time succeeded time the relish at discovering yet one more unsuspected twist in the very familiar would slowly give way to flatness, to a casting about in memory for a way of regaining all those splendid values such as he could imagine writing home about. Thoughts of such a writing home, or its cognates, would come to fill his mind, and even the world he'd started out with would be replaced by another filmy layer of mediation. His error was to have forgotten not merely his object but the function of the world in relation to it. The nature of this object was such that it could not grow stale, even though it was always identically the same. The entire interest of anything which momentarily appeared interesting was drawn from the promise that it might bring that sole object closer to the focus of attention. The trouble was that the object itself was pure disinterest; its promise was necessarily empty, nothing could be brought closer, nothing sent home.

It was hard to imagine that there could be any coming out of the hall of mirrors that was embodiment in a social being. Every feeling was doubled and redoubled, refracted through a myriad of lenses which themselves only existed as mirror images. This included the most subtle of inner touches by which he came to recognise himself as well as the most elaborated constructions of thought. As long as there was any kind of meaning there was an excess of meanings, and the presumption that was inherent in each of them was that they were shared somewhere, or had their true centre elsewhere, locations already registered, imagined, known without being known, like New York or Paris. Every phenomenon belonging to meaning as a concrete transform had its equivalent as an ontology, and entailed its expansion as a fable belonging to the beings it introduced. All of this was oppressive and he often felt persecuted and therefore justified in seeking escape. But how could he know which way led out when the only clues he could draw on were found by orienting himself in relation to others? And when escape itself was one of the commonest threads in the fables?

He had a notion of a second mind, an unconscious one that ran counter to the main current of his thoughts, a container for every half-conceived variant and over-ambitious synthesis that could not be openly avowed. It seemed to him that everyone he met had a similar mental configuration and that when they failed to fully comprehend their own acts and utterances this was due to their ignorance of the contribution of their second mind in every conscious assumption of position. To be able to give a thoroughly rational account of one's motivations was to him a sign of absence of election, although not a necessary one. Instead he imagined himself to live on particularly close terms with this second mind, so that he could choose to perceive by way of it. This was already the replacement of the outer world of distinct things, positively and negatively cooperating via blind externalities, with a world. Repeated experience made it clear that this world, this inland, had already been largely colonised, but in no way unequivocally. The energies here were always charged and spectacularly ambivalent. It went a long way in depth, and he had to admit that he had no idea how far.

A situation is named; this act of naming causes certain on-going phenomena to become more salient and their new prominence confirms the tacit implications of the name. The situation is thus further delineated. While the act of naming is remembered this works to keep the status of the named situation hypothetical or playful. The way that led in is clear and the way in is also the way out. However the more developed the structure becomes the more objective it becomes, and the name starts to take on the quality of something overheard, spoken in a decisive but more or less sympathetic judgement, by an utterly alien voice. The way in no longer seems so clear. He followed it all right, but maybe he had no choice, and so it certainly doesn't follow that the way out is still the same as the way in. What he thought was play was just the veil over an absence of will. Now the question of how to find the way out arises seriously for the first time. He needs to call on others with objective knowledge to guide his steps. He submits to becoming their object, to being translated into their idiom. This new situation is discovered to contain opportunities for gratification of wishes that were not previously suspected, but which are at least as original as the situation he started from. These entirely distract him. Like a child he weaves his identity in and out of splitting and othering.

"A mind stained by attachments and leaking is unwholesome..." he read in the book of an ancient master. He saw that a passivity dependent on favourable conditions was a mere pseudo-passivity which only added further layers of bad-faith to cherished attachments. It was surprising that a small gap could be wedged between himself and these long-standing tendencies, and with only a small distance the attachments became a laboratory of identifications. Any source of discomfort was seen to be an obstructed projection of a future happiness, which was itself posed as the more complete claim and attainment of a promised inheritance, or previously renounced delight. There was a polarity in which he found himself on one side but needed to be, but truly belonged, on the other side. Things were not how they ought to be, but the predicament in which this placed him was of precisely the scale of what he believed to be his volition, his capability of willed action. This action, however, was to proceed by stealth, by a declared intention opposite to its real intention. Above all the demand could not be surrendered, insistence was obdurate, even against his very own ideas of mediation or renunciation.

He was mistrustful of activity which he saw as an imperfect, a blemished form of passivity. He delayed necessary actions as long as possible and looked forward to the speedy restoration of quiescence. In fact the sole purpose he recognised in action was this restoration of what might better be described as idleness, otium. In this state, however, he remained at the mercy of what came down the pipe. Usually this was in the form of an excess or a deficiency, or a dissonance in the texture, and his actions were adjustment, control of feedback or containment of leakage. These required a clear sense of decorum, a knowledge of limits, an unreflective knowledge ready to hand. The cycle of action, the readjustment of the flow was more internal than external and might even involve the deliberate resistance to a current that was welling up from embodied feeling, a stubborn or active passivity. The more perfect quietness was the goal, paradoxical because it could not be pursued. In the active-passive duality it was clear that the latter was the container of the former, and of the very idea of duality itself.

He lived in a strange kind of isolation, the mainstays of which were the most local of percepts. These defined a frame in which his acts were a set of apotropaic manoeuvres, entirely response. Every instance was thus a sort of dice-throw, or rather, since there was no dice-thrower, and re-framing of the encounter as aleatory. All of this was affirmed in a meta-knowledge that was fitted to tacit acceptance. What was thought, and emerged as the thinking of a thinker, was dictated by the newly contingent frame, but the passivity in relation to the changes of frames was treated as simply nature.

Honesty seemed to be a value that could promise some relief from a confused bouncing between opposing states. In this he naively assumed that every state was built around a defence of some cherished illusion. That there was some naivety seemed certain, but it may have been rather in his notion of honesty. Either way his attempts at honesty only opened onto to further mess and confusion. He lived in a messy world and no clear distinction could be made between the inner and the outer. The endless disputes between superficially plausible and utterly incompatible positions, each wielding the badges of good-faith, was in the very atmosphere of the times. Honesty and truthfulness was claimed as an attribute, a matter of tone, of key, of gravity, and could be at the same time aesthetically satisfying and overbearing. This added up to very little; but what did remain was an unglamorous going on, a kind of proceeding without an agent or subject, and without reflection or looking back.

One way to see it was as consisting entirely of dramas, great and small, dramas nested within dramas. A drama has some kind of hero, some kind of predicament, a crisis, a point of choice, a resolution that restores the hero, perhaps in an altered form. Dramas require framing contexts which maintain the terms in more or less stability so that the drama can play out. But the relationship can also be seen in reverse; it is the dramas which allow the contexts to exist. In every form of distress as in every form of gladness there is something which has been taken to be real, something belonging to the context and which anchors the entire experience, and is secretly understood as its whole point. We see these realities overturned and overcome, see them resolved into unreal contingencies. It is a salutary realisation, but weakened since it always occurs on behalf of yet another reality, and as a process in time. The realisation is captured by the general assumption that everything is contained in a drama.

As imperceptible as the onset of sleep there was the assumption of certain roles, in nightly dreams or waking dreams. Once a situation was given the need for defence required no further defence. This provided a sense of constancy greater than that of the objective world, since that world always appeared in answer to the needs of the situation. A set of insecurities would seem the very measure of reality and the past would be instantly reconfigured as the history of the associated defences and their seasons of success and failure. His need was to see himself as distinctive and definable point in cultural space. What did that mean, finally? That there was a positive articulation between his idea of himself and an idea that he projected into his simulation of a generic mind belonging to a notion of otherness he called his culture. It was through this simulation that he was vulnerable, because he had to keep updating for it to stay congruent with the idea of the world around him. His place, by definition, was itself generic, so that any semblable could occupy it; the point was that he be the very original of all these possible copies. Because of the way that he understood himself there was every chance that an other semblable would prove more real than himself, ad hence that he would be revealed as mere copy, or phoney. Indeed it was a virtual certainty given what stuff he was made of. What saved him from despair was that this certainty was on another level where a good part of him also happened to dwell.

There were all kinds of mechanisms made out of reflections and motives and definitions and subjective ironies that defined a momentary predicament of the self, and which seemed to explain much about the texture of experience and the tensors of desire that gave it shape. If experience failed to coincide with itself there was at least a developing theory of the deficiencies and some consensus on how to meet them. Of course, since this all this theory merely doubled for temporalisation there was no way it could ever deliver on its promises, but the point was only ever the promises and never what was promised. It was enough to keep him busy and glued to the moment. The notions were revised too often and too conveniently to represent any reality and at times they would reach an impasse and collapse into thin air. That it was experience itself which was questionable and not it variations was a notion too large for him to take on.

Some of his idea of the spiritual came from the experience of different registers of experience, as between a high and a low, an expanded or a contracted, a sinful and a redeemed. The sense of the self as moving between these gave rise to the idea of a distinctive direction, of a spiritualisation or elevation and its reverse. The basic metaphysics may be the same all along this track, there being the same entities in the same sorts of relations, and therefore the languages of the different registers would share many of the same terms, but otherwise they were utterly unlike in perspective and colouring. What interested him was the phenomenology of the changes, especially the descent. This was the sense of an expanded self with a strong sense of harmony with its environment deliberately squeezing itself into the world of a narrower self. This seemed an essential movement of compassion, but was at the same time a grotesque reversal of the natural order with a peculiarly fascinating but unpleasant aesthetic.

Tempestuous moods that set him against the world were also what tied him most to it, or to his idea of the world. Every motive he found which could be traced back some way into its origins was either to affect his perception of the world's perception of himself or his perception of his perception of the world in itself. Pathways that appeared to be reflexive thus always took a detour through an otherness that was recalcitrant, representative of the outside and yet wholly imaginary. If there was some solace in spinning out theories about this auto-contamination and its essential disquiet, it was that they gave him yet another mode in which to feel a quiet solidarity with yet another imaginary quarter of the world. But there were some solidarities that he had no desire to question, that he was far more at ease with than he was with himself. His love had its boundaries although he was unable to draw them, and there were things he wholeheartedly affirmed without caring why.

He could say or at least acknowledge everything he could experience distinctively, but this amounted to a derisively small fraction of what was going on. His embodiment was a deeper affair than he could be conscious of and he was always trying to catch up with whatever he could learn of it from dreams or random encounters, or by wrestling his thought into worldly ironies of anticipation. This was not so much about control or even misunderstanding but about the ineradicable bias towards treating every situation with the same set of tools, a model of the world mediating consciousness or of consciousness mediating the world. He was always fooled by the thing or the absence of the thing, and could never grasp the extraordinary variability of the context. His bumbling directness would cock its head and look to dreams.

There are so many windows to this cell, perhaps it is all windows with nothing properly inside. And are the windows for looking out from or for appearing in to others who are looking in? If this distinction melts away then the system becomes unstable and you can work yourself into a great funk. Of course that's not the only thing it can do, you only need to look out the window to verify the immense number of modes it can take on, bright or dark or parti-coloured, more or less accommodated, but this implosion, painful as it, is one of the most revealing, as it hammers the whole structure home.