A citizen of no place any more than where he found himself he was yet never entirely at home. If he were to travel to a different city most of this breach in identity might be resolved, the distance between his home territory and this other place providing a sufficient space to account for all the felt displacements. The only danger in such a case would arise from an encounter with someone from his home-town who would prove him to be a kind of impostor, at least in the sense that he welcomed the presumption by others that if he seemed not to belong here it was only because he truly belonged somewhere else. All of this pointed to the fragility of belonging. To belong is to believe that one is accepted as belonging by those who truly belong and to feel no incongruity between their believed acceptance and one's own sense of place. Or something like that, at any rate the sort of redoubled balancing act which can be collapsed by the smallest sliver of doubt. Even to have attempted to analyse belonging was enough of a doubt when it was not the sense of belonging that called for explanation but its negation. Indeed belonging and not belonging succeeded and comprised each other like layers of skin.    

To be in the stream of life is to be identified, or to coincide with purposeful action, and since such action, including thinking, valuing, desiring and movements of attention require enabling contexts these too are part of the stream, the continuous unfolding of discontinuity. The contexts are what is revealed in ordinary reflection and in them it appears as though personal and cultural understandings overlap, although in reality this distinction is itself purely contextual. The way we understand ourselves which is expressed in the discourses with which we assert ourselves in our world is an integral part of ourselves, and only appears, like a mirage, to float some way above the unthinking absorption in purposes. Recurrent themes in such understanding are thus anything but innocent products of self-scrutiny. Such, for example, is the notion that all significant distinctions can be reduced to pleasure and pain and that this polarity is itself a misrecognition of purely objective, say electro-chemical events. This idea, trading on an analogy with reduction in the physical sciences, attempts to express a satiety with and discrediting of more complex value systems. If not this then other more nuanced reframings of lived experience in the objectivist language of pseudo-science are the forms of contemporary nihilism. The destruction of residual belief in values may be a preparation for spiritual inquiry, but such is the appetite for disillusionment that it generally also destroys the possibility of it as well.

Feeling and emotion are different functions which are often confused with each other and with other interpersonal complexes such as sympathy and empathy. One idea is that a feeling is like the sound of a single musical note while an emotion is like a melody or a motif. This means that an emotion is always constituted by more than one feeling, and is something like a pattern of feelings. Feelings by themselves may be more or less finely discriminated but do not reach beyond themselves, do not appear to mean or motivate anything. Emotions, on the other hand, are not self-contained, if only in that they seem to demand a continuation, resolution or repetition. While a feeling as a sort of essence may be timeless, emotions are definite events in the flow of subjective time, in the stream of consciousness, bringing about a change of context which affects any feeling or emotion that succeeds them. Emotions have an energy of dynamism in them, they mean without meaning anything definite, or more precisely they seem to wish to mean something, a wish that is generally only met by another emotion, which again seeks to fulfil its desire for meaning. A feeling can be drawn into an emotion, become an inseparable part of it, even its focal point and so come to bear the energy of that emotion. The word feeling is ambiguously subjective and objective, referring either to an inner bodily sensation or to a sort of outer perception of texture and context. All of these observations are more or less in line with the musical analogy, but the analogy has trouble with the sense that the correlate of feeling is value, - as when we say that something feels right or wrong. Similarly, although emotions seem to require an anchoring in feeling it is difficult if not impossible to analyse an emotion into its constituent feelings. The relation of emotions to concrete feelings may also be very tenuous as is the emotions alluded to in the phrase 'emotional thinking'. It is emotions that seem to be built up from a palette of primary instances, such as anger, joy and so on, and these basic emotions do not readily resolve into feelings although they do coincide with strong valuations. To be emotionally detached is to have little or no emotion, while to feel something in a detached way is to feel it more reliably.

Occasionally a tide of romantic feelings would break in on him, as if they were embodiments of recovered memories of histories that had played out in some parallel dimensional past. These were purely feelings and for all their transient purchase on him, and their necessarily elaborated story-lines, their musical logic, they could not easily be translated into words. It is as if a wound in the world has been opened, a sort of heart wound, continually bleeding. It is his own heart but also the world's heart. It is an objective and immemorial wound, always ready to be re-opened, and somehow he and this other, this anima, were touched by it. Their story, seemingly a happy story, one to go on from, had revealed itself, by its own private happiness, by its seeming to be the very thing to staunch it, as the story of this wound. The feeling of it, the reverberation of the violation in it, stayed with them, and only by being together again, body to body, mouth to mouth, holding tight, could they soothe or solace its recurrent pain, but without healing it - perhaps even cutting deeper into it. And it was only with her that this was possible, only through the dual being they fleetingly made up in the flesh, like the perfect fitting together of two broken parts. Through this generalised grief and certainty of solace he could drop all restraints against her sorrows, his own sorrows and those of the world. There was a more than discursive certainty in the logic of these feelings, and more than deserved appropriateness to the pairing, chosen out of all other possibilities, which they made, and yet the whole thing was massively contingent, a product of accidental circumstances and even more so of accidents of consciousness as wildly fleeting as the patterns of foam on the side of a breaking wave.  

It might start with your finding a set of ideas that you find attractive, which means that they evoke a resonance with remembered thoughts and experiences, with questions that were left unanswered but latent after some past transition in knowledge, some ordinary initiation or awakening which contributed to bringing about life as you know it, this life. And so something lights up, at least a flickering light appears over a usually dark mental landscape, or more accurately a metaphysical landscape, which means all of what you take to be real, what must also be real if what you are certain is real - yourself, others, time, death and so on - is to fully be what it is. This landscape is far larger than you thought it was, although you seem to have known that about it once and forgotten that it was so, and at last you feel as if you can breathe, except that it's over in a flash. And it is the ideas that prompted this that become important to you and not what you saw, not the strange event of being in a landscape at the same time as you're sitting in a diner, or on a bus, or lying in bed, and anyway the landscape in those ideas is so much larger even than the one you glimpsed - if less real, by definition - that they draw forth something more than agreement, namely belief. But belief, however strong, is not the same thing at all, it is more like a ticket, for a ride, an entertainment, an elaborate digression, a life story, that at best only brings you back to the place where you left off, rich in experience, but unchanged.

How real is it, the entire system of the protected self, or rather the self that appears as the stake in the system of protection? What is it to function as if from a self in contrast to just functioning? Is there something that is picked up, taken on, believed, adopted, or worn like a mask; and where was the choice, the chooser, when it seems just one more thing handed on with language and all its associated baggage? Or is it picked up, not really irresistible but inevitable in an idle way like a dollar you've suddenly noticed by your feet in the street, or was it passed to you with a certain fanfare, something whose importance was in the eye of the giver and which you'd have as soon refused, except you needed to stay on their good side? Born out of love and out of blood, it is a kind of gravitational pull towards safety, protection, barriers, strategic distinctions which might be designed to look as though they are only concerned with pushing further out when they are really drawing in anything they can get hold of. Is it a bad thing, in itself or necessarily, an unbalanced assault on the elegance of the entire space? It was clearly an intervention of some sort and once begun it needed to play itself out. It had an irreducible or untranslatable character and would be solved on its own terms or not at all. And every question that it raised was part of this character, but the questions were not irreducible or untranslatable, in fact their only possible resolution was not in an answer but in a happy series of translations, a series of progressively better specified questions, the last of which was void.

He found it odd that he seemed to have a distinctive flavour, although it was also a general flavour, the flavour of someone like himself. He remembered noting as a child when visiting relatives or school-friends that their houses always had a particular smell, and that it was the very smell of which they were oblivious. As he walked through the rooms or sat and drank a glass of orangeade in the kitchen he was struck by the way that the objects in their houses shared a special physiognomy, again something that belonged to these others as others. And after that it was immediately clear that his own house had a smell of which he was almost always unaware, and that his things had their own strange face, their own way of being exposed to happenstance which was not apparent to him in his life with them. It was at the level of taste and smell, and that pathos of physiognomy that identity was most keenly felt. Back then his own sensory identity would be most salient on returning home, especially after a holiday or a school camp, and now that it had become less tied to specific places and things this sense of a flavour remained linked to the idea of return, of returning to the self. It was sweet and bitter by turns, containing an immense nostalgia for animal life and an intimacy with mucky things and an inexorable reminder of the finiteness of life.

Mostly he was left at the end of the day wondering if the day had really gone by, and he told himself that each moment must have been experienced so completely that it left no residue. What could the self-sustaining, self-recurring energy in a moment be, such that it that would lay down a marker to be returned to at some indefinite future point? It seemed that it was not so much a fear of not surviving, in which too much was already taken for granted, as what would cause the notion of survival to matter. So there needed to be something incomplete, an assurance that a contingent limitation was frustrating the inherent telos of the moment, its manifest essence or entelechy. The correct position from which to live or assume the moment had been obscured by the host of intentional frames by which his apprenticeship had been fostered, but it was there in the moment, naturally in the most obvious place. In the form of thought it was a wordless enquiry, a softly questioning glance, sympathetic, open, utterly unsparing. What commonly passed for thought was an arrest, a constriction in the throat of this openness, this interested disinterested gaze. If thought were allowed to go all the way it would be clear that there is only one thought, if even that, and not this multiplicity breaking out of the belief in  limits and taken to be the finite destiny of thought.

The energetic vortex is a field both of expression and of self-preservation, of preservation through expression and expression through preservation. As a form or clothing of the self it is constituted through appropriation and identification, but only in the ensemble. If an individual component or voice can be distinguished, it is known as divergent, as an objectivity in process, an image forming and deforming. One narrative of the dual thrust of the self as energy is that of an isolated entity set loose in a dangerous world. Such a self is in need of protection and love, where receiving love is an assurance of protection and giving love is a transcendence and affirming of protection. Knowledge of the causal roots and consequences of its isolation is a value that serves to expand the system of the self. Degree of expansion matters in this, and it is a dramatic gain if the subject is ready to stake itself on pure risk. This is a playing the game of life, played relative to that self-gathering energy, cancelling and reaffirming itself, aligning its essence with recurrence, with the glorious again. If expression is optional then self-preservation ought to be too. The reality of the world only appears to the outermost sheath of protection, protection from protection from protection, and so on. To collapse the sheaths is to be exposed to the open, to cease utterly from imagining death.

Feeling or thinking can be detached in mood when not coloured by positive or negative valuations. In this case there is merely a kind of contentment or willing of what is, which embraces the self, but in a weak way, since there is no reason why or why not such a state should persist. When the self is strongly implicated in valuations then will is correspondingly aroused so that it seems as if the language of energy provides the best description of the situation. The informal use of this concept derives from the phenomena of contagion and of signature or spectrum, whereby a node charged with a particular kind of energy - heat, sound, electromagnetism etc. - tends to induce the same kind of energy in neighbouring nodes. Thus the valuations with which the self is identified take on the character of a semi-autonomous energy field whose spectra can be resolved into a variety of proto-narratives embodying different forms and intensities of care. The subject of these narratives is merely a formal self, a who-ever, but they are rigidly aligned and filled or set alight by the energy field of which they are a part. Self is what puts fire into a formal structure without itself being fire; whatever can do this is a self, and once it is done it is almost impossible to distinguish self from the living resultant. To experience an other is to experience their energetic vortex, which can only be sensed from within one's own.

The protagonist I ought to be distinguished from the subject I. The former does not exist in the present, the latter is synonymous with presence. The former is then an object of a special sort, the locus of responsibilities, needs, actions, decisions and suffering, including all passive experiences. The two meanings are not merely accidentally expressed by the same word, there is a relationship between them which  makes the protagonist a special sort of object, and puts the subject at stake, but it is not an objective relationship in any way that can be understood. Personal reality is formed out of the resulting chains of associations, habits, entailments and heteronomous conjunctions. The protagonists world is one of feeling, and it reveals itself in layers, with hidden consistencies behind each emergent inconsistency and each consistency merely an alignment of deeper inconsistencies. The key components are passion and dispassion: love, fear and serenity - but the combinations are endless because feelings are effective for the subject only at a distance, whether of time or space or both. If the distance is small they seem to be feelings proper to the subject, if it is a little greater they seem to be feelings about the subject, and if it is greater still then they are events to which the subject is present, is audience. Whenever the feeling is not proper to the subject another, and proper, feeling is induced like a secondary wave or counter-current.

How odd that there should be inwardness when all our concepts lie on the surface of things and are objective faces, shinings, appearances. An idea with a vague reference such as energy, one that seems to pivot between feeling and seeing, which even in its most objective mode is divided into potential and kinetic, is required to extend the intuition. Thus inwardness as a self-gathering of energy as potential is feeling, and is the continuous registration of a centring, as seen in the organisation of patterns around a privileged point. And this extends into the composing of stories, even this story. But to say I'm here now writing these words, while true, also overshoots something more subtle for which there is only a trying to find words. I am acting, or energy is flowing, either way of expressing it, either choice of the key verb, divides it into certain parts in relation. But the lines of division that mark these parts are not in the nature of the thing, they don't match anything in the fluid and present reality. Switching to the past tense immediately saves the appearance, as if there is now a succession of frames, each containing a description of an action belonging to an I. These I's are not different although the frames are, their identity is prior as if they have boiled off from an invisible singularity, and are the fading embers of its dark heat. That it sits, that it writes, that it tries, that it hears, feels, sees, exceeds - where the it is the neutral marker of happening as in 'it's raining' - all of these belong to the self because the truth in them insists. They are not the clothing of the self but its expression. And it is only because it is inexpressible, and necessarily inexpressible, that it can continue to express with such punctilious insistence.

Musical lyrics in performance are the positive expression, not of an imaginary or merely virtual subject, but of a hypothetical subject, a publicly proposed subject, as if in an experiment in perception and response. They are able to provoke a joy that is independent of anything the lyrics might be about, of their propositional content or significance as imagined speech acts in a more of less troubled imaginary situation, unless, over-topping the immediate context, they are taken to be entirely about the possibilities of experiencing itself. Indeed the lyrics can achieve this effect even when they are not understood. Nevertheless they are taken to be authentic expressions of the state which they evoke, perhaps even defining the meaning of authenticity in this context. The joyous state is one where thought and symbol seem to freely determine each other. The dimension of mind which deals with objectivities merges with the dimension that deals with symbols. It is not the freedom of thought to determine it symbols or its freedom to be determined by them that is experienced but an adumbration of a deeper forgotten freedom into which the notional self and all its scaffolding of meaning and mattering quietly and delightfully resolves.

He believed that close attention to the repetitions of ordinary experiences was the pathway to original experience, and this all the more so as it flew in the face of the promotion of novelty in the surrounding culture. To treat this as deliberate paradox would have been a concession he refused to make. Repetition is never perfect, every round is entirely different, but by being distinguished from its predecessors only in minutiae it was easier to seize of the essence of its newness. No overhead goes to the placement and interpretation of a new context, so that the grammatical subdivision of being or of happening into verbal, nominal, adjectival, adverbial, and related phases could be delivered over to introspection. Repetition seemed to him a metaphor for timelessness or eternity but lodged within a strictly finite perceptual context. This meant that the elements that were fresh were subordinated to those which made this into one of a series, caused it to be identified as the series itself, existing in an abstract time, a time more forgiving, less heraclitean, than actual time. But part of the acknowledgement of repetition was the pathos of the desire, it was failed arrest, it was the best we could have done to stop time, the future anterior in the present, and so in its very failure it opening the door to something exquisitely fragile. Just because of the wanting of repetition and its failure the emergence of each moment out of lawless emptiness can be glimpsed.

So again in union there is this ambiguity between its being an internal and self-directed experience and an expansive, inclusive and boundless one. The boundaries merge into the world, but not us, the merging being only the manifest simplicity of natural inclusiveness. There is in this a pivot, point or bridge, that enables a transition to no-self, the undoing of separation, and this transition point is always at the 'I', both the subjective pole and the concrete, most embodied and most individualised self, now strangely free and detached from the defensive energetic investments of socialised individuality. Why should the 'I' be so pivotal? Perhaps because in development, it was the way in, the precondition for mattering in all its forms, or else perhaps it is a purely cultural thing since it's clear that the present of the self is also the historical present, and hence that the mode of its presence is historical - although the latter may also be the form of a fatal historical illusion. Another characteristic of union is that it is autonomously purposive in initiation and heteronomously purposive in performance, but unstably so, so that it embodies a movement towards a resolution which can only come about in a form of annihilation in which subjectivity and performativity are identical. It is an eclosion of sensory being centring on the felt body, but by the same token is the vividest metaphor for knowing.

Wanting to say that all this is what it is, just is; and so is at rest, complete and perfect in itself, because only what is directly presented is real, and if there is so much that is indirect, so much assumed to be at work off-stage to keep this up as it is, as it appears, then all this other stuff is not unpresented, but is mistaken presentations - in just the same way that certain bodily feelings can be mistaken for nostalgia or desire. Wanting to say all that, but not able to. The intensity of lived experience forces the notion of a polarity, more precisely a duality, such as subject and object, light and dark, visible and invisible, inside and outside, a duality fine enough that it can be woven into a container for our desires and more than desires, the necessary upheavals of our souls. How could the unit of anything lie there inert as a brick? It is already an operative process, a vector, a darting or a two-ness of independent parts willing their two-ness. The essence of reality is then seen to be ecstatic union, pure fuck, an essentially radiant and paradoxical yoking of one-ness and two-ness. The deep relationship of subject and object, of the visible and the invisible, of being and essence is know most purely in this metaphor as fuck. Absurd then to say that one precedes the other, but rather what we call essence, or being, in practice, is a half-enjoyed thing prematurely torn out of union, and made over to feed our insatiable and voyeuristic thought. Union is the utter obviousness of the coincidence of opposites, a movement that is both inward and outward, pure point and pure space, and it is, most completely, until it is not.

Various twists and turns of experience can be brought about by sustained inwardness; going into the 'I', the subjective pole, following the cue of a fullness of realisation that is implied by the variations that show up with the climate of a day, any day. None of these can change the basis of meaning in which knowing is known, understanding understood. Whether it's inward or outward hardly matters. There are some sketches, an idea of the thing, then a space is cleared and it starts to be built up, out of appearances and givens, expected and unexpected. The frame bends and distorts to fit the picture, the elements change to fit the frame, supporting or opposing each other, or element and frame change places, or double up, repeat, reverse, diverge, resolve. It is like music. It starts say from plucking a string, banging on a shell, or blowing through a hole; and you might exhaust yourself trying this in as many different ways as you can and it's still just plucking a string and banging on a shell and blowing through a hole. But then someone discovers music and opens a world of infinite complexity, and you fall into it, fascinated. It keeps getting better and better, Bach and Mozart and Brahms, none of which have anything more to do with plucking, banging, blowing, but with another reality, more real, very nearly absolute, or momentarily absolute, but in a way you can't quite know, but are on the verge of knowing. So the questioning keeps pushing further into the verge, refining the intricacy, swallowing more of the world into it, until the heavens open and there you find nothing but plucking, banging, blowing and the sound of the wind in the trees.

What is alive in each moment is a tiny spark of resistance to the subsumption and repetition that make up the weave of experience. This resistance, as a distinct and distinguished counter-current, can appear as if it is external to the flow but it is in fact what fuels it. It is consumed in the living. Like sex it is an illusion of transcendence, it exists to be aroused - there is nothing more natural to be aroused, it is arousal itself - and consumed. The figures of will are sculpted or moulded out of the relations of these two phases intrinsic to the moments generated in purposive action by the various modes of reflection - from self and from others, and reflections of reflections. Another version of the same pattern exists in living time, where the movement of time, which is just what time is, is driven by a being-out-of-time which is a phase of time, necessarily linked to a concomitant phase of falling-back-into-time. You could say that the essence of time is to seemingly stop to pose a question to which time as annulment of the question is the answer, the ungraspable totality of all of which is the flow of time. It is more radical, however, to think this in terms of the will with its leaning on futurity, because now there is no part of the self left over as remainder.

In the course of our goings-on doubts about experience arise, these are typically the result of the reflections brought about by the collapse of illusions, whether these be simple perceptual illusions or illusions of the heart, mirages de bonheur. Perhaps they are not so much doubts or inconsistencies as folds, new layers added with the sense reversed. Experiences are real but there is a differential mine-ness attached to them. The fact of an experience can be admitted but it is only one of a spectrum of facts attached to a common place. The place where perceptions and presences come and go. These other presences which I can touch only tangentially, only glancingly, make this place what it is. Scenes into which I have already entered, and with the same sets of questions, and received the same sorts of answers. But they can only be entered once, the next time being a revision. Another instance of a general rule, like sex, which in its repetitions does not fail to generate a few moments of a fever of intensity, of utter certainty of firstness, of crazy hope, before dying into the banality of the same acts in the same dance, clumsily submissive to the coupler's will. And also the same amazement, the same reflexes of assumed awareness, prompted by the well-known cues, pointless to embroider. These patterns belong not only to personal but to collective, and known to be collective, memory.

Experience in so far as it is ordinarily lived, without the addition of a layer of reflection, consist of an interwoven series of themes, an overlapping succession of aboutnesses. Each succeeding moment is a movement or act in the project of some subject - some protagonist, some matter - and so is integrated with a narrative, even a sort of text. This gives experience a pre-understood quality, it is always within an already known frame which determines the way it should be taken and the context for its internal symbols and vanishing points. Life can seem like a series of genre paintings; this being an analogy more open to freedom of interpretation, to various kinds of pivotings, than the similar comparison with movie scenes, which already implies some degradation of value. We are in the paint in a way we could never be under a cameraman's eye. No demeaning of experience is implied, but for what might already be in experience. This mechanism is a desirable thing, not only because it seems an efficient organisation of mental forces, but because it retains the ability to be smoothly dialed up to the almost ecstatic. Against this there is the alternative of something genuinely original, original experience, not a picture of anything, and especially to be distinguished from a picture of original experience. How could such a possibility ever be realised, the notion is almost self-contradictory? There would be no categories subsuming the elements of the event and allowing for the connections between them, the conduits of sense moving energy from one to another. Each thing without an archetype, or resting as its own archetype. It's being here not via what it is but only that it is, an immediacy of being usually only conceded to the transcendental self. There is no witness to this, but for its necessity as implied by the somehow known secondariness of ordinary experience.

Introspection is a term used imprecisely for a number of different activities. In one of them there is a shift of objective attention from the world outside as given by outward directed senses, to the world inside as given by the senses directed towards the inside of the body. Sight and hearing are the dominant outward directed senses, while proprioception, which is akin to touch, and taste are the dominant inner feelings. The world inside the body is taken, however, to be a kind of space, related to but not identical with the perceived body, as an object in the outer world. The distinction of outer and inner is taken for granted, but also acknowledged as one of the early milestone achievements of the embodied mind; it is not regarded as an absolute distinction, it is naturalised not natural. It is possible to withdraw attention almost entirely, and temporarily, from the outer world and absorb it into the inner world, causing the microcosm to be mapped into all of virtual space. This begins with the feeling of the body but the feelings give rise to their own kinds of thoughts, thoughts which may have nothing to do with the body but which are expressed through its feelings the way that a lyric is expressed through the music of a song. Another sense of introspection is closer to pure thought. It is indirect in that it is not sensory or analogous to the sensory. It is when the implicit acknowledgement of the actions of the mind are made explicit in thought, by way of a kind of noticing, a calling out of what is in the margin of attention. This kind of introspection is inner speculation, it is creative and seems unlimited. It does not spatialise and lacks any metaphor for presence, or for the distinction of inner and outer. Therefore it does not support the search for an inner self, but rather is a natural seeking of real discriminations.

The independence of the 'I' as it is discovered by the developing brain in childhood seems to be the very secret of happiness. But this 'I' is not something in itself, it is a feeling of power, freedom, infinite possibility that is deeply rooted in the world in which it finds itself. It is not a goal but a starting point, the true beginning of the world, but it also seems to be a thing, a special, delightful and dazzling kind of thing. The discovery can last a mere moment or be sustained, in spite of temporary setbacks, for years. Each new milestone affords a welcome, if progressively weaker, revival of that sense of ever-earliness and natural right. The mediation of this sense is a painful process, there is no internal logic that points to the need for it; in fact just the opposite, the essence of it is unmediation. Power, freedom, the scope of possibilities must do as well as they can, and with the help of mother wit, make their peace with reality, with others, with the dismal science of indirection, delay and compromise. The thing, however, the special and dazzling thing is immune from all this, since it doesn't actually exist, or at least is nothing in the world. That is should nevertheless be touched, or seem so, is exquisite suffering, to be avoided and sought again and again.

Periods of flatness when you become merely the imitator of yourself as the one who could find significance in anything, beauty in the most random arrangements. This was a skill that was not strengthened by repetition, even though repetition itself and its production of over-familiarity was also just a phenomenon that could be regarded in its eternal essence. What better place could there be for realising the original in the core of the experience than in this world of repetition. It was a surrender of ambition, of projects and the straining after them, as if they were accretions, versions of purpose that you'd picked up because they were definite and because you could not understand your own indefinite purpose. But you can't quite let go of all that, the pole-stars of your will emerge, things you loved, thought fixed, then lost and then returned to. Home is where the question is. And the question is time, the mother of desire and imagining, of the father and mother minds, of the one who sets out on a journey in each moment and never comes back, and of the stranger who always comes back in his place.

A desire must imply a venturing and an uncertainty of outcome, must exist in a context where histories of success blossom alongside histories of failure. The protagonist of such stories is not the desire but a self whose degree of being is at stake, even if such a self is only constructed after the desire has appeared. It is a finite game, the aim of which is to win, to be finished and only then to freely choose a new game or not. It can only end with a win, if you lose then you go on playing, you can't let go of it especially now that a self is involved, your self! - but the nature of the game has changed, now you are playing not only for the original goal but to erase your former loss. In this way it comes to resemble an infinite game, a game whose aim is to keep playing. This is a deviation of desire and of the strategies that are employed to satisfy it. The notion of a strategy only comes up and receives attention after a string of losses. Winners have no strategy, they are their strategy, but only losers notice this. A strong motive for the inwardising turn is the idea of an inner game as the ultimate winning strategy. Every partial awakening brings with it two observations; that large amounts of the burden of the self can drop away without any resistance or drama, almost magically, and that what takes their place is a freedom and playfulness startlingly devoid of any quality of strangeness. This freedom seems close to winning and fertilises desire.

Knowing himself as unfree was to know himself as determined by constraints that he might have been able to change but hadn't. The unfreedom was not in regard to things believed to be entirely out of his control, but precisely to those which ought to have been freely determinable. It seemed as though any instance of what he referred to as heteronomy, if looked at closely enough, would reveal a deliberate handing over of his freedom to something he believed to be more powerful. This something, which was was never in view, was both an idol and a tormentor, but its power was shown in the fact that he didn't dare take back what he had once given. He was overborne not by threats but by by sheer charisma. What remained was just a fantasy of freedom which he was able to experience only via the treacherous mediations of art or by identification with fictional characters. The experience of heteronomy when sharp and painful enough should have been a goad to wake him up to the mechanism which maintained its effects, but it been turned into something else, a perverse kind of enjoyment, and therefore a kind of negative freedom, something to stamp with the mark of identity and insist upon.