When does anything happen? It always happens now. And so there is a succession of fresh nows, and since now cannot rest it is only in place after it is already past and gone. But on closer inspection the past is only now as well, it inhabits a region of the now as 'former-now', the dowager now with its own palace. Thus the now which at first seemed to be a pure mathematical point is actually revealed as a capacious space which somehow both stands still and flows, and the now is a point inside the now. This is an infinite regression, certainly, but of a special kind, or perhaps only an idea of one which once having been tried out can't be shaken off. The deeper one looks into it the more there is this fury of ideas, of implicit theorising. In this respect the now works like the I. There is an I inside the I endlessly, just as there is a now inside the now. Not because there really is, but because thought experiences the same short-circuit when it come into proximity of these ideas. There can't be two such nodal points, two singular points, both on the inside of the inside. They must be equivalent, and hence interchangeable or translatable, which means that all the phenomenology that belongs to one must belong to the other, but possibly rotated to that it is unrecognisable at first. The subjectivity of the I and the objectivity of the now are the same surface viewed from different sides.

The words 'I' and 'now' point to the same vanishing point in our thought. If you start out with a world-story woven together with I-statements and affirmations, or I-performances, and then start to inquire about these utterances you soon find that while most of the nouns and verbs refer to things that can be indicated - or rather which can be further indicated, because the way that something is distinguished by indication retains some mystery, as if it needs to be distinguished before being distinguished - the I part does not share in any such public accessibility. When you say 'I went here and there, I did this and that, I'm telling you this and that, and this and that were done to me, etc.' do you perhaps mean to say that the term 'I' could be replaced by your body in each instance? 'My body went here and there, did this and that... etc.' invites the retort, 'and what were you doing while all this was going on?' So is it your mind you mean? The same problem arises. People express as much separation from the performances of their minds and from their bodies, either negative as varieties of disappointment or positive as varieties of pride. The obsolete term 'soul' expressing a kind of materialisation of the enduring core of subjectivity perhaps does better, although it is not the same as the 'I'-subject, since you can say, 'I did that and my soul shrank back in horror.' In fact you can act so as to destroy or injure your soul, which makes soul a kind of subtle body, the body you wear in eternity, if eternity is understood as not after time but orthogonal to it. While the soul and the self are not synonymous the connection between the two is necessary as distinct from the contingent connection of self with mind and body. You can exchange bodies but you can't exchange souls, hence the currency of souls in transactions with the devil. On the other hand it might be asserted that the sense of 'I' - both as the meaning of the term and as the feeling of 'I'-ness - is a by-product or artefact of language. This may not however account for the perceived mismatch or lack of fitness to purpose of the 'I' language, the sense that there is something uncomfortable about it, like wearing the wrong shoes. Like the word 'now' it works by failing to name anything.

So there you are sitting on the couch, drinking tea and occasionally putting down your cup and picking up a spiral-bound notebook and a blue plastic ball-point pen and writing some sentences in a compact but irregular hand. That's an external view and it does for many purposes but captures almost nothing of what it is like. Some writers have, in their own styles, attempted to unweave the tapestry, to display the complexity of the threadwork, when attention is given to it; how one meaning leads to another meaning, and how associations keep brimming over, glancing in from odd directions, drawing together the multiple times and places needed to frame each splinter of meaning, so that the present is only presence by way of an indefinite cloud of absences. This is experience already half-dissolved in the mind, in the activity of experiencing, which is a way of understanding the process that both defines and veils an experiencer, who, never satisfied, can keep asking for further explications, for more novels, phenomenology, cognitive science, and further experiences to feather his nest. It is the distillation of experience into essences, which rather than converging into each of the distinct petals of some extraordinary geometric flower, spread their ever unfolding richness over the mansions of an endless Golgonooza.

It ought to be more strange the way that experience can be constrained to an awkward push and pull in the domain of a subject held open by a weave of personifications and the imperatives they bear with them, to respond, to acknowledge, to be right with, to pivot, to overcome and so on. The business of life is also a sort of weather, a sort of music, and when this becomes apparent you go inside and shut the door. It's not something to make too much of, as if you need to reach a point of equilibrium, or to put the two sides into dialogue, to adduce some important conclusion workable for both parties. Let each get on with what it needs to do. The way it happens is the same, regardless, and this is what begs to be uncovered. It may be like this now but it wasn't a moment ago; it is the place of its own event, here, but where was the placing, on what background? What terms can get at the process, the advent? Are there stages? What sort of time, what logic of succession is needed to allow a sketch or a schematisation of all this to be filled out? What does experience look like? What is the size of life?

Every response begins in spontaneity and then is revealed as belonging to some personage modelled out of debris of memory and habits of thought and parts of yet other half-remembered personages. The tenor was often of a character put upon by tides of feeling he'd not seen coming, and by a cascade of events too fast for him to put in any order. A character justifying himself for injured innocence or in an avowed conspiracy of mischief, like a charming villain's aside, and best of all the combinations of innocence and villainy. Sometimes everybody seemed to be talking in these ways, casting lights on themselves or oblique reflections on others. Only a minimum of self-consciousness was needed to reveal the façades in a succeeding moment, after the action was over, but still clearly enough that you are led to look behind this exhausted mask to the next and deeper mask. A character belongs to a play and the plays get more elemental as you go deeper down, like the dramas reverting to myth. Up here everything is mediated by interpreted possibilities, appearing random while enriched by knowledge and precedent, but there those primal selves acted with extraordinary simplicity and fatality. What you are cannot be separated from those events, those crimes and sacrifices, those lives inexplicably saved and lost, your linear time never gets free of their eternal present, and those who were with you then are still with you now, even if they appear to be the most absurdly hesitant and innocuous beneficiaries of their crimes.

Experience can be seen as a succession of moments each with its predominating quality, drawn out of detached contemplation (sattva), active reactivity (raja), and dull submersion in pure feeling (tamas). The succession of qualities, their intertwining, never ceasing, a triple streaming, now fast, now slow, now smooth, now eddying, and always unpredictable. Where he appeared in this flow, as the apparent subject, was something else again. In some respects he seemed to lag the flow, to be always one step behind, as though it took time to consolidate an identification with a certain subjective character, and by the time it was achieved the conditions had moved on. In other respects he could only knowingly identify with the contemplative and sometimes the active moments and so was entirely at sea when the predominating quality was dullness or a purely negative reactivity. Yet another understanding of this process was that his identification was always out of phase with the changing qualities, a phase difference that also differed with the respective quality, and that these differences contributed to the dynamism of the process according to some ghastly differential equation. Since the subject is phenomenally absent and the qualities constitute phenomenality itself, there can never be a simple identification of one with the other. The subject quality is always the one that's just been, or about to be, and the little gap that never closes it so puzzling to the mind that it produces the idea of thrownness.

The other in their stubborn irreducibility pushes back at me and limits my value or power. Their attention encapsulates me within bounds that I learn to identify with. Believing myself to be just so much and no more, to be the being delimited by this objective and public body. The other mirrors back to me the knowledge that I am my body, and I take this in a more severe sense than is meant when I view them as being only their body, since less is unknown in here. The idea of the other becomes the source of all kinds of problems that need to be solved, with half-achieved victories, with a realm of ongoing intrigue and mystery, with deliberations which draw me in to strong emotions and metabolic changes. At least four of the deadly sins are social in this sense, pride, envy, anger and lust, so that, as consciousness of sin is directed towards myself and my inability to control my own mind, the problematic is turned inwards, the nub of darkness comes to reside in my own depths. This is progress of a sort, the other is now what remains after all projections are owned.

Inquiring into my own actions and responses I can always find context and motivation through introspection. While the precise causes of a past action can never be separated out from a host of plausible variants, the inner logic that determines immediate actions, including thoughts and feelings, from an understanding of the current situation is transparent and forms the first datum of any subsequent self-interpretation. So while it can be said that we are a mystery to ourselves this is in a quite different sense from that in which others are a mystery to us. I am not other to myself, being ineluctably distinguished from minds known only externally, however others and their reading of my contexts and motivations exert a tremendous influence on my self-understanding, in many cases more than that which arises from isolated reflection; so that it could be said that others are integral to myself. The world in which I find myself is first a space, and so is constituted by systems of separation. But these separations only function as such if they are at same time connections, and if the division into these dual functions is itself confused. How did things get to be out there, separated in time or space or in the subtler dimensions where thought has its being? Separation ought to behave like a form of belief, but when we try to undo it as act, to walk back the belief, we only add another layer. Easier to believe it is all real, unless you have once experienced its wholly unexpected and absurdly obvious collapse.

The experience of one-ness in soul or in the deeper, prior consciousness is an insistent one, but I am not aware in any way of my identity with others, or with any particular other. How does such a thoroughgoing othering come about, so that even a 'significant' other remains a mystery, a provoking partner in a dyad entered into once and for all, a dyad in which from the very start optionality is relativised? One idea is that there is a dyadic process, a back and forth, a sort of directional dance that both seeks and flees from union, both delineates and dissolves the individuals in its course. This is a sort of dialectical approach and it has the virtue of making the very sense of opposition, the feeling of opposing and being opposed by an obdurate other into the germ of the consciousness of identity. It could be said that we never feel ourselves more keenly than when we are in opposition to an other and feeling the sharp bite of conflict, wrestling with an other, locked in intimate battle. Is this really the case? Driven by feeling and willing this follows the logic of desire, and for just this reason duality can be lost in a moment and we are dismayed to find ourselves fighting alone. We seek love instead, as the assurance that the other will always remain present, even when veiled, to give heat to our strife.

He could never get beyond the complexity of relationship with others. As long as there were others there would be this engendering of psychology as the ever changing fractal boundary between two realms. But psychology, he came to realise, is only a machine for creating more psychology and contains no understanding of what relationship is, although it is perhaps a symptom of it. What is at stake in relationship, it seemed to him, is union or fusion, and psychology is a ramifying set of fine distinctions aimed at foreclosing the possibility of this end. It may in fact be that the end is unachievable, but it makes a very big difference whether one takes this impossibility as axiomatic or not. It surprised him to observe that whenever this vanishing point of union was taken as reachable, even in a well-recognised virtuality, it was always treated as a sovereign good and clearly knowable as such. Even tales of doomed lovers where union spelt fatality backed this up, Paolo and Francesca damned but unsundered, Tristan and Isolde annihilated in their own nirvana. This was perhaps another and negative form of the idea of thrownness, the sense that we have been cut loose from an original unity to wander lost and solitary. And in dreams, how many times had he met the beloved face to face?

The record of things is a jumble of disconnected starts which rarely attains the level of significance it strives for. A lot of crazy stories come up, the mind is amazingly fecund in generating them, each with its own urgency, as if someone were responding and hence responsible, and someone else were standing just a little aside and considering the outcome. He wondered whether it was a matter of owning the protagonists, of finding the unifying threads in the narratives - surely not such a hard job;  since others appear generally so consistent, he must be consistent as well, just needing a little distance - or else a matter of wondering how all of this could have come about, how it came to fill his original face with so much colour and movement. These were the two poles of his inward reflection and he passed back and forth between them without noticing their inconsistencies - and their shared assumption, that somehow subject and object, self and not-self, were all tangled up in each other; that in the end as in the beginning they were so alike that there was nothing more natural than this confusion, hardly even a mistake.

What is strange in dreams is not that as the dreamer we find ourselves in a strange place but that we don't find the world we inhabit, the dream-world, at all strange until we wake up and reflect on it. If the sense of strangeness were to grow too strong then it would rouse us by activating an alert study of our surroundings - although in lucid dreams some degree of reality testing is compatible with continuing to dream. There is no sense of thrownness in dreams because there is an almost boundless ability to take things for granted. The dreamer is not the final representative of the dreaming mind, but merely its vehicle, the protagonist of the fiction it is weaving. The dreaming mind is aware of itself as the creator of its own dream experience, aware of itself in the role of author rather than as, or as well as, character. The character may be placed in a world that he struggles to make sense of, and one of the things that haunts him can be the peripheral awareness of the mind's work of scene setting, potentially appropriable, but which disappears every time just as he turns towards it. This is the source of the odd déjà vu vu like quality that can often infect dreams. In a dream thought the distinction between author and character, as two ways in which the meaning of a content gains embodiment, is fluid - and at a deeper level is non-existent. And it is why it is almost impossible to grasp a dream thought with the waking mind, precisely because the unconscious, or rather what the waking mind would refer to as unconscious thinking, is nothing at all like a language.

There is writing which is deliberated on, carefully reshaped to gather up the available ideas and set them forth, half-creating them in the process, and then there is a freer kind of writing which ventures on and on, hurrying to bring out thoughts that have been latent in consciousness, picking through a jumble that has accumulated like waste, and caring little for quality or clarity, since these can be added in a later editing, if needed. Another rarer kind of writing, although it is not actually written, is in those strange poetic creations that are the occasional gift of dreams or dream-like states. These dream words seem elegant and compacted with diverse and illuminated meanings. They seem the artful containers of a plurality of meanings that couldn't otherwise be kept together. In the two modes of conscious composition the subliminal layer of meaning is either superficially known or not known at all, but dream words which have risen up from below, carry the richness of the depths with them by nature. Of course this is often in a form that does not survive the light of day for more than a few seconds. If one retains some memory of having formed these words it is that they were produced in a strange kind of blissful ease, half intentional and half given, free, but in such a different time and space that the usual idea of freedom no longer applies. Conscious intention casts a shadow, it always masks part of what it aims at. If an object is thematised in order to be grasped in its mode of arising, the intention betrays itself by leaning on the object in order to fix it. Even if intention is deliberately relaxed in order to allow the object to float up, the context of the intention goes before and, as it were, sets up the shot. In waking consciousness the object is approached from the top down, from the descriptive and instrumental layers of mind, so that it is placed before being known. The objectivation of dream consciousness is naturally the opposite of this. If the objectivities of the waking world correspond to the thrownness which can be said to characterise one of the essential ways we find ourselves in that world, it may be because of something we have knowingly surrendered in order to gain our citizenship there.

Naked speech, lyrical diction, the oddly arresting speech of the heart is also a rhetorical form, the style of language that expresses both the recognition of rhetoric and its deliberate abandonment, and that appears to seek to evoke an answering nakedness. There is a premium on this style, it produces an immediate response, seeming to underwrite its own authenticity, and it is an object of yearning and fear. Is it a reawakening of the wish to be in the place where one can be fully understood, where one can  be, as they say, fully oneself? Does this voice evoke an idea of surrendering the burden of pretending, because the mask is no longer needed, because it no longer serves any need? Or does it bring about a change in consciousness, a recollection of how you got here and why? Or is it merely the witness that you are in the presence of a true thing, that you have been worthy of this truth, that you have helped to bring it about - the true thing, no matter what its banal circumstances being something sacred? Consciousness which for all its kaleidoscopic variety, was hitherto taken to be made up of surfaces, like a series of pictures or cinematic images, but is granted now to possess a mysterious dimension of depth. This is the most imposing level of experience, something you engage with not by thought or appetite, but with will on the scale of life itself. And all of this shimmers behind even a facile authenticity, such as we are all such connoisseurs and knowing critics of.

It seemed to him that the heart had its metaphysics distinct from that of the mind. An immediacy of feeling-with presumed the irreducible difference between agents each of whom was an embodiment of optionality, and at the same time a non-optionality that was prior to every apparently wilful determination - and possibly even its target. Reduction was not a relevant category in this play, there could be no question of reducing the other to ourself, or of simplifying our relations. There is never a question of transforming the other, but of swaying them, at most of coercing them, or playing them into some sort of impasse. We would like to be a solipsist but are unable to; in spite of all our efforts we believe in others, and hope in them. The other first appears in specific identities, those myth figures, the mother, the father, brother, sister, dog, cat, and then as variants defined through selective negations. In the ontology of others we have a logic of positive entities in which both negation and representation have their full force. It is constitutive that this person does not belong to the family, or that W is not known to X, or that Y represents Z. It is knowing and not knowing that links people, but even more so actions and rules or permissions for actions. The units of relationship becoming more complex, bringing forth obligations and expectations, the need for continual reinterpretation. But relationship is not the heart, being perhaps no more than what elicits it in intermittent and inconsistent ways, enchants it for a time or provokes its opposition or its rage for destruction. And when the heart chooses to speak why does it always sound so alone?

For the idealist the self or absolute subject is the ground of all appearance and so necessarily of all reality. The alienation of the self from itself gives rise to experience, but is illusory, and hence experience has a direction and terminus in the self's restoration to itself. This kind of metaphysical scheme is nothing more than a mental projection which subtly objectifies that which can never be an object. The experience of consciousness in the mind is of some kind of self-referential system which functions just outside of pure contradiction through a cunning teleology of deferrals and disjunctions. We are convinced that there is some thing doing this, and that what we keep on just missing is actually there, and will show its face some day; but the essence of this doing is that it can't be an object, much less a thing, and certainly not a subject-thing. The sense of a self that arises is the product of a sleight of consciousness, but such a powerful trick could not be effective unless there were something it were playing off, an original and veridical knowing which while fully there is utterly out of reach of the mind's fecund profundities of self remystification. The purpose of philosophy is not to lead us to a grasping of what can't be grasped, but to delineate precisely the limit of any such grasping.

The world is a continuous staging of enjoyment where nothing emerges into objecthood unless it has been made so by some cross-current. Before desire there is threat and before there can be threat there must be reliance and before reliance repetition, and before repetition absence, and before absence recurrence and so on. The knower or enjoyer is unknown and can only be imagined as something of the kind to take its place in this world, like others and their bodies. But are others ever a kind of object, are they ever finally and securely out there? Others can enter into our intimacy by inflicting pain and eliciting desire, but in pain and desire they are also forced out again, redoubling our solitude by their exile, however much they might possess the keys to assuage our passion. The experience of solitude might be like that of objecthood, not primary but dependent on cross-currents in some other medium, or perhaps the same medium, retaining the more general name of enjoyment without an enjoyer. The difference is between kinds of reflexivity and symmetry in the emergent patterns of relation. Where knowing, feeling, understanding mark our relations to objects, and where a certain symmetry  in engaging and disengaging prevails, in the yet richer relations to others the moves are determined by not knowing, not feeling and misunderstanding, by the inseparable and asymmetric play of solitude and togetherness, distance and closeness, and an entire polygonal geometry where numbers once and for all attain their fullest expression.

In the world we know, the only world we know, there are objective things and there are subjective things, there are experienced things and inferred things, and there are complex inter-relations between all these different modes of mattering. There is a tree and there is my seeing of the tree and your seeing of the tree and our conversation about what we each see, including each other, which conversation is an objective thing, made of words, sounds and silences, that references experienced and inferred subjective events in various ways. It is dizzying complex but it all seems to work and to be made up out of successive instants of time which are connected only by causal relations which are inexorable and wholly virtual. It seems to be an immense and stationary functioning, whether seen as a block universe, as prakriti, as brains in minds or minds in brains, or only mathematics, going on by itself; and within that totality there are certain marked subspaces which are conscious selves. These conscious selves are then entirely of the flesh of the world, and if their leading feature is taken to be intentionality this is only their sinew, entirely integral and exhausted by their special function within the whole. Every thing is included, but one, the mark, the original distinction, the necessary reference outside the system, which fails, spectacularly, but how could it have even failed, if not...

In referencing his own existence he acknowledged no contingent fact about himself but only what was necessary, namely the pure possibility of being. Even if he were to be annihilated, it was clear that the possibility of his restoration at a succeeding point of time could not be annihilated, the possibility of waking up again. This very possibility belonged to him in a special way, since if the same context of possibility of being were to yield up any other, formally equivalent self, this would not be himself and therefore the context of possibility could not have been identical. All the arguments equating self, as distinct from mind, to brain function, founder on this. It is harder than the hard problem. Any physicalist version of the self is by definition perfectly reproducible, but the self is not reproducible. There is only one self, can only be one self. He could arise again with an entire set of different characteristics, as a different mind, but the self can only be one, there are not two copies. If others truly exist and are not just dreamed figures, they must have exactly the same self, including the one reading this now. The only kind of plurality that is admissible is the one experienced in temporal seriality, all of whose mysteries are immanent mysteries.

In his notion of being or consciousness it was taken for granted that the ground of this being or knowing is within itself, that the foundation of what appeared as his reality was located in the deepest region of himself, of the me, and that the empirical or functional self is what it is through its derivation from the absolute self, or rather that any such absoluteness was an emanation from its very selfness. All of which is to say that he was peculiarly blind to the intuition of a transcendent ground, to the notion of his being as the creation of a creator. He was willing to sacrifice anything in the way of content, or consciousness as content, in favour of something like the place or the frame of possibility in which such a consciousness arises, and which he identified as self. While the experience of the infinitely vexing relations of self and other were consistent with this view, the experience of a God, breaking in, as He did for Job, was not. But he also knew this to be a superficial view, a hasty confusion of levels of experience, the paper currency of thought, or else true as intuition while untested at the level to which it referred.

He wondered if he were able to use words to put down meanings which were reliably transparent and repeatable, that naturally revealed their position in logical space and which could be returned to identically. Or again, whether he could present a meaning that fully belonged to him before being written down instead of one that was formed in the process of writing and had the quality of being just a little out of reach. He admired a style that was always ahead of itself, that seemed to take wild leaps and yet always land on its feet, but it was not the style that he needed for the task that he'd set himself. Instead rapid changes of focus and a short-sighted and tactical use of key words introduced a muddy quality to his reflections. To be present for him meant to be open to new and distracting undercurrents and this entailed remaining loyal to a kind of lowness of spirit. He found himself again and again in times that bore no distinctive markers, that were the continuation of a play of forces that had already been mutually conformed, so that no alteration in their course was imaginable, and he wondered what thoughts or words could unlock them. These were states of ineluctable presence, unnoticed and enclosed.

Worrying at the endlessly evolving problem of life, we try to map the shape of our particular bondage, to find its limits, and perhaps its weak points. The tools are the same as those of novelists and memoirists: recurrent themes, accidents, reflections, the mysterious forces in attachments, the reverberations of history, and the instabilities resulting from too much self-consciousness, too much anticipation, too little memory. Things become buried, secreted, there are losses too hard to bear, and shameful victories; there is something to protect, us from them, them from us, complex alliances to balance, multiple selves are brought on to negotiate a many-layered world and its confusion of rewards and punishments. It never seems to get simpler, despite our longing for a wisdom that would reduce it all down a few basic operations, but as we understand more we find more variables that can't be ignored. There is no unreasonable effectiveness of some tool, say of psychoanalysis or spirituality, but only the vaguely dawning awareness that we have misunderstood the problem from the first, misunderstood it as a problem, created ourselves out of this misunderstanding, in a joyous affirmation of the zeitgeist, no matter how miserable it may have made us.

How absurd it seemed to to him the saying "I think, therefore I am" when it was only in wanting that he truly emerged into being, so that being itself was incidental to the want, to say nothing of how any act of thought or doubt must first be wished. When wanting fails, I think, and in order to apply thinking I must assume I am, so that being is in the register of residual desire, the part of desire unconsumed by satisfaction. Thinking may perhaps be loud or soft, clear or muddy, fast or slow, but is just as much thinking, whereas the degrees of wanting mark qualitative changes, from the merest inclination to an impossible totality of craving. Is it already an achievement of wanting to know what it is it wants? And has will then evolved only to be the instrument of want? Once there is the power to satisfy desire then it need not be exerted; it is now power that we want, a system a reassurance of how we stand in this world of objects, objects now standing apart and cooling down from the heat in which we'd moulded them. After this the structures that we build out of wanting and thinking become immensely complicated, comically agglutinated, immensely inefficient, surprisingly effective. We take pride in them but don't entirely believe in them as we want and expect others to reassure us about them, or as we put it, respect us. Virtue is to want something more than life. The goal of wanting is to be abolished, but we want to want, and the world is always ready to oblige, always prepared to twist us into the lineaments of unsatisfied desire, broken pride.

Another of his ideals was to live in a world of simple things. When a cup or a chair or a flame was nothing but a cup, a chair, a flame, then he would be a thing-like presence too, for whom that tiny world was then and there. But let him wonder, and fall silent before speaking the simple words, and it all became blurred as forms melted into each other and boundaries ceased to do their work. The object, this cup, becomes the experience of the cup, inseparable from the light, the smell, the heft, the time of day, the intentions triangulating attention and forethought. It was no older or newer than his body or his mind which it seemed he'd just woken to, or more, it was a part of that body or that mind, its cupness, felt as close and odd as any bone of his or its marrow. How can sight and hearing, touch, taste and smell, and the inner sense all work in service to the same worlding if they are not together in the root, an identity in difference, like the words making up a sentence? While the individual senses resolve their content into elements, pure patches of colour, pure tones and so on, this prior and never completed synthesis has no atoms, but is always full embodiment, always filled. And his thoughts about all this were not made of ideas, but of his swinging weight against the ground, the smells that filled his head with colours, his embattled will reweaving itself after endless overcomings.

To describe the texture of things, the aesthetics not of form or of content but of the givenness of the world was always the aim he had in mind, since he believed that the pure happenstance of events could be the subject of an infinite meticulousness of attention and subtlety in rendering. The language for this did not emerge out of a close focus on details, the notion of which was the result of a false analogy with the visual. Words must be preceded by the setting of a linguistic frame and this is not made up out of a palette or menu of disjunct possibilities, but rather out of long narrative lines, endlessly woven. It is out of these extended but largely latent narratives that the verbal resources of any analytic description will be forged. A complete narrative line seems to be extended over a long duration in time, the time of its unfolding, but at the same time is to be grasped in an original unity. A concrete idea when it is sufficiently clear is a complex which exists in a primary sense as a timeless unitary insight, while the apparently simple idea is an abstracted unit, the result of a long cumulative process of deliberate limitation. The dream-like complete world in a grain of sand is the true primary or simple idea. It is at home in a concrete continuum of such ideas rather than the discrete infinity of abstract units. In order to grasp it we must utilise a higher and more real intelligence than the instrumental one that dominates our waking life and its purposeful activities.