One of the prejudices of the present is that the past being dead has always been as good as dead. To the present the past seems worth less than nothing. This means that the present is unable to realise itself as present in the flow of time. Its relationship to the past is taken from memory and is hence mediated by an optional negation of itself. It is a superstructural relationship without necessity. One could after all lose all memories without the present as presence being affected. In the course of holding to a single sense of presence, however, we can experience the mystery of succession: this presence now is not the same as the one accessed by exactly the same inner gesture just a moment ago. Here we are experiencing, via short-term memory exactly the same displacement and negation as we discover when we reflect on long-term memories. And pushing the boundary of memory ever closer to the present we experience a unique and lively incompleteness that seems to destroy the very possibility of relation, the ground of induction as between pasts and futures. Whatever this is it seems to be urgently located in the now, in this very occasion. And yet there is nothing here but a great fatigue, and even a drifting in and out of a sleep-like state. Object lacking, subject merely sags down in its seat, unable to engage intention. Stuck in intermediation, unkeyed from liveliness, a dearth, a reduction. But actually an endlessly branching affinity with certain kinds of verbs and adverbs, and a static repulsion for the chaff of substantives.