Sunday, 17 January 2016



Try to start out from the simple given of your body and it is impossible to stop short of the entire phenomenon, the entire (one) without a second. To draw a boundary, saying on this side is my body and on that the world, is laughably absurd; where and how is the line being drawn? And the same goes for mind or space or reality and appearance, these can only be set apart provisionally, and it is within that strange providence that our lives play themselves out. If it could be said that a process was going on, then the working parts would begin to distinguish themselves and their workings, the whole folding over in itself again and again in unlimited complexity, as if that initial distinction could never find satisfaction, could never be assuaged, but had to go endlessly devouring itself. The resulting explosion of complexity is a centreless web, or more accurately a web whose every node is its centre. But to make the shapes we recognise something more is required, a secondary process built over this cosmic web and which mindlessly drives towards local minima, and hence generates form and stability, modes of recurrence. To be the experience of a subject is to be just such a constrained play of modes, patterns and recurrences, a life which exercises all available resources to the most remote, but in an oddly constrained and limited way. The secondary process is known as what it feels like. But the experience of a subject and what it feels like are nothing to the subject.

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