Concern over future pain was not just seeking to spare himself from suffering but also from the bitterness of regret at at having failed to avert an avoidable suffering. This emotion would express itself in the form of anger at a past self because of its selfish preference for its own expedient profit over its responsibility to a later, a future self. From the perspective of the future self his entire existence ought to be in its service, and he could not deny this obligation since it responded to the same entitlement as he felt towards his current past. The past pleasure, or rather the otium of this present now, would have been used up by the time of the projected future and count for nothing in the face of the tortures being endured in that now. As for the case of current sufferings, these might even be thought of as clearing the way for future enjoyments, if he could imagine, and he was readily inclined to do this, the relief experienced when they were exhausted. In this way selves in time existed in a kind of sociality, or bound together in sticky bonds like a family. A current self might take credit for the achievements of a past self, without really knowing, that is, being able to fully remember, what went into them, and of course the same would apply, mutatis mutandis, to past humiliations. The internal space that separated him from himself in this way was thus akin to that which separated him from others, while at the same time being as different as intimate relationships are from other, more formal, kinds of social relations. The future selves in this structure seemed to have much more than imaginary reality. That they were inevitable gave them a flavour of necessity and hence a reality that was in some ways greater than that of the present, whose essence was contingency, and to this was added an enormous cultural momentum, the imperative to live towards the future. Similarly, he was more than the heir of his past, he was answerable for it and was therefore expected to be able to recreate it inwardly and expose its latencies if called upon. Proximal internal temporal relations were ones in which the identity between past, present and future selves was fully effective through these bonds of answerability and responsibility. There were also distal temporal relations defining an identity with a different, perhaps more literary, character.

In the confusion of reflexive terms, self, mind, I, me, consciousness, thought, subject, subjectivity, spirit, soul etc., some distinctions can be introduced based on the answers to such questions as, does it have attributes?, does it have a history?, is it extended in time or does it exist only in the now? These distinctions are purely hypothetical, or groundless in this context; they are speculative, mobilising an opposition of ideas in order to see if some small illumination results. Generally when 'I' is said or included as part of another intended meaning it points to a something with a history, something about which it makes sense to say that there is a puzzle about the persistence of personal identity. It is linked to a name, a marker for a formal identity and for a body as object in an acknowledged common world. But it is precisely this historical 'I' that seems to culminate in the present moment, in the little bubble of presence lasting a fraction of a second or a few seconds or even minutes that we call 'now', not an absolute illumination or clearing but one that dominates all past time and inherits all meanings, appropriates all mattering and is the pivot on which a vague and as yet unreal future rests. Looked at more closely this implied structure seems only a prejudice or meta-belief with obvious shortcomings. There have been an endless number of such momentary 'I's, each with the same belief in its definitive calendar moment, and there will be future ones which will erase any claim to reality of this one. As the actor and audience of experience all its reality is concentrated in one distinguished point, but reality to it must be precisely not the point but its rootedness in the all. The vivid spark of awakening to oneself in the moment must therefore be merely a reflection or declension of the necessarily unmanifest self.

There is currency in the images of those experiences which are taken to be most desirable, more than in these experiences themselves which are assigned little value if they are not presented as nameable, general and imaginable. It is not so much experiences that matter as recipes or maps of experiences built out of other such images and extended, connected, developed in various readily understood ways. In spite of this variation they are marked by a yearning for, an avidity towards, one of two ideals, an ideal of passionate participation, Dionysiac, rajasic fullness, and an ideal of detachment, subtle and cerebral, serene and vastly panoramic, Apollonian and sattvic. Within each of these directions formations appear to trump each other by being more perfect realisations of their respective ideal, pushing off from each other's shoulders; but a kind of trumping also takes place between the two directions involving first a rejection of the other, a reduction it to some pathetic caricature, an ignorant or frightened evasion of the only road to apotheosis. Both of these ideals are analogies of what is more properly seen as spiritual awakening, but they are analogies in the key of the experiencing self. They are projections into objectivity of something that is wholly subjective and therefore has no such projection by very definition. And this is precisely why they can be be endlessly detailed and elaborated, ever new, and indeed why they can seem to create the new itself, through shedding some of the dawn-like gold of their reflected light onto it.

The blackness behind his closed eyelids became like a free fall into blue-black depths, the phosphorescences that had once made a sort of three-dimensional screen in front of his face had faded with the reflexes that sustained them, of which they were the nervous traces. These had been an excitement and an anxiety, an echo of a stage-fright, an expectation of a time to gratify all wishes, and hence a validation of the one who wished, the wisher, wrapped up in himself and his space of enjoyment. For him all the lives that could still have been his, the books of experience he would pile up, so endlessly variegated and marvellous with their landscapes that he would absorb into his pulp like so many poems. But it turned out that living meant something entirely different, it was the experience of the collapse of possibility through choice. To choose was to choose recurrence, to choose that which ought to recur and then to surrender all his chaotic desire into it, to bury it. The experience of time was not the gathering of vintages but this collapse. All the phases were nothing more, be they of anticipation, initiation, consummation, withdrawal, retrospect, return, as if it were a process that recurred, that kept its anonymity and left you none the wiser. But if instead it were the coming loose of the bonds of identification, the internal cancellation of projects, of the project of projects, the opening of that deeper space, then one minute of such awareness would be worth more than ten years of mere experiences, no matter how superb they might still be.

At times a sort of sad and valedictory feeling would come over him, as if he were done with life, or were soon to be done with it. Taking a brief survey of his surroundings he would say to himself that yes, he could bear to part with this all, and he would stoically master the wave of beauty and depth that descended on his world at these words. He'd entered into life in the most ordinary, most open-eyed way, and played his various acts, burned up or at least singed all the desires that drove him into a hardened belief in it, now few seemed to remain. If the world now seemed slightly removed it was because the questions it was able to answer for him, and to raise, and to keep raising, had subsided. He had not willed this, except perhaps in his latest commitment to neutral observation, but there was a decided cooling and he felt that he'd suddenly grown old. It seemed as though there were a great many worlds in his past and that he would rarely be reborn in the same one, so many that they were mostly nameless. Had attained a degree of neutrality? How could that possibly be determined? Neutrality was only relative, but then it was impossible to know the face it was directed towards. Or perhaps it was a change in the sense of time, the image or version of himself translated into the future in a cloudy aura of possible fulfilments was not there to lend its drive to the onward flow. It had been replaced by something inward and backward-looking, scenes from childhood, lost or forgotten portions of being which when restored seem to have never been absent, to have only been unnoticed, forming part of the very flavour of the standing now.

Whatever this process is it is not inside thought, but thought and its thinker are inside of it. Thought, however, cannot keep from modelling it because thought operates via subjectivisation, turning experience into the experience of a someone, never seen but always present, in a private objective world. And that someone is no mere observer of its own identifications, it suffers and exults and suffers again as the turbulent systems of reality and hope on which it depends clash with each other as they seek to maintain their own equilibrium in responding to ever changing conditions. These systems are not itself but its identification and for aeons it knows nothing else. To fall right into it, to experience it up close and messy, its immense appetite and law-like inescapability, the bad faith of all imaginary transcendence, is to go on and on until belief starts to be exhausted.

'Eyes' forming within the flux function like a circular reflector or transformation surface so that the macrocosm outside the boundary is perfectly reflected inside it. The infinity of the outside is an ultimate horizon common to all its points of view, but on the inside its reflection is a single point, the impossible origin point at zero, a point distinguished only in its relation to the transformation which itself is not distinguished in its own space. The transformation surface in this metaphor is transformed onto itself, not in an invariant manner, but with one or two isolated fixed points relative to given direction of attention. If we can imagine such a formation in a space of events as illuminated by, or conceived in, a centreless consciousness then it invites the phenomenology of a self, of self-consciousness, without this being intrinsic to that consciousness. This is one way of trying to understand the precipitation of a self as a virtual centre or subject of experience with a peculiarly inviolable constancy. Another version might liken it to a moire pattern formed when two centreless patterned fields are superimposed. This again might be related to the tension perceived in a dissonant chord which seems to pull towards a resolution. These analogies do not present a picture of how this world might come about in a world of pure unobserved objectivity, if the latter were not a absurdity, but rather seek to jar something lose in our unreflectively assumed metaphysics.

He was always feeling something in excess of where he was in the plot, and struggle and strategise as he might he could never get this thing under control so as to only the feel the kind of detached and reflective feelings that were provoked by a work of art. No, his life was decidedly not artistic, not in any way, and he would plunge into the mental noise of it under any pretext rather than remain quietly in his room, holding on to his untested freedom. But it was unbearable, after all this time to have remained so unresisting of every solicitation, and yet isolated and anachronistic, self-excluded. There was a craving for something more than the shadows and no truer faith than that which lived in such craving. Deep in his heart he believed in the world just as a child believes in the world of his loving parents, and it was this belief, always a few steps behind the dagger-point of the now, that kept him losing its war against reality.

His quirks had by this time assumed a fixed quality and had taken on the status of constellations in his heavens, they were faces of destiny and by that measure all baleful, but that didn't prevent him from as often worshipping himself in their image, as cowering under their lashes. The understanding of such accretions in the self could fall under the cultural headings either of impurity or of sin, and they could be seen accordingly as released by death or forever fixed by it. He suspected that ultimately one did not get to choose one's metaphor. The fact that one is grasping something does not make the object real, only the act of grasping, but in the psychic sphere this act is not a holding which must grow fatigued and release itself, but more like that of a plant which invests its life in the form it takes, hardening rather than tiring, but nevertheless remaining alive and in act. To understand evil as sin was the way of his culture and retained a deeper hold on his imagination than any other, but this understanding itself seemed to him to be no more than an impurity of mind.

In the realm of the doer where actions must be chosen and consequences guessed at, the distinctions arrived at come together in a moral universe. Every act produces a chain of consequences both intentional and unintentional, but this distinction counts for little in determining the length and bearing of such a chain. Whether one follows one's own lights or relies on those handed down by the race, what one has learned, the intelligence one has acquired, determines the figure one cuts in this world. Everyone has a possession in such a life, but as something given and so effectively only on loan, which is why it matters what is done with it. This moral subject is something like a soul, and it is foolish to try to reduce it to a mental formation beyond good and evil. Its guilt or innocence are real at a level deeper than the speculative intellect.

Marking the separation of the capacity for feeling from the content of feeling need not imply a metaphysical dualism, only a phenomenological one, as long as the latter is understood to have a necessarily transcendental counterpart. The capacity for feeling in this understanding has no limits and can be presumed to be infinite in both the positive and negative directions, with the range of feeling enabled by our bodily constitution occupying only a small sub-interval of that range. It's no surprise that embodied feeling follows a logarithmic law in relation to stimulus, which are transduced into signals in a tree-like structure. New levels of the tree activate when preceding levels are filled up, and so we can imagine a state of maximum content of feeling, almost never experienced, when all such levels are activated. In this case an increase in stimulus could produce no increase in feeling. This would be torture, but only by way of sensory modalities. There are other kinds of feeling however, such as emotional feeling and self-feeling, and other subtle kinds that are hard to name, feelings whose object is inward and which are incited in complex ways by some whole of experience. What kind of limits exist for this kind of feeling? Are they subject to their own version of Fechner's law? Is the sense of self Fechnerian? Everything suggests that this is not the case and that intensities of both positive and negative feeling infinitely beyond the ordinary human range are conceivable, could exist in possible beings with which we shared the same capacity for feeling. This is because there is nothing inherent in the notion of the capacity for feeling that could serve as a limit, unless that capacity itself were embedded in another kind of knowing which would simply take over from feeling when the latter was fulfilled. Here fulfillment would not mean a maximum of intensity but the completion of the self-awareness adumbrated in its particular mode of feeling. Perhaps this is just to say that the inward directed feelings, despite being experienced as essentially embodied are only feelings by analogy.

That he could begin to examine the scenarios which gave coherence to the desires that intermittently drove him showed how weak those desires had become, how almost optional. Naturally, when he looked at them up close there was nothing to see since no individual act or staging of an act could explain the strangely compulsive force that had made his desire seem to embody a certain deep truth about himself, as if to satisfy it was to return to an earlier and more real version of himself, one to whom he positively owed this service. Yet they had always operated in a kind of negation, an 'I know very well but...', because the only kind of compulsion he recognised was logical and desire had never made any sense. It was like having a disgraceful friend for whom he retained an inexplicable soft-spot, so that the only way to indulge Jekyll was to indulge a petted Hyde. If he needed to violate some code it could only be in an indirect way, in submission to energies he would only afterwards acknowledge as his own. Enough though, that he always kept an acquiescent margin in reserve, a sort of stash of doubt and will and rude sanity. While others may have seemed to be the undivided doctors of their own desires, able to deduce the particularities of their usages out of the general oversupply of certified wants, he had generally to rely on what he found himself doing to discover what it was that he'd wanted. But then such vague and hedged retrospectivity was a general condition and at times he too slipped into the role of doctor of desire to another without even noticing the shift.

Modernist literature opened a place for an extraordinary exploration of the layers of hidden meaning that necessarily lie behind even the simplest narrative presentation. To penetrate into the phenomenological and mythological preconditions of experience through such writing was to approach a different metaphysical face of the ordinary realities that were so often and so typically described, where time, space and identity functioned in a very different and indeed more blissful and integrated way. That the enterprise seems to have rapidly peaked and then decayed, leaving behind a handful of masterpieces, now like broken monuments in a desolate terrain, seems in retrospect to have been inevitable. For one thing, aspects of the collective culture, of the Western and European culture, that made these works possible, because readable, needed to be kept relatively steady, like an arrangement of lenses that enables a long vista to come into focus. When the lenses move in response to a clamour of different forces, in which feedback from the deepest vision is only one easily drowned out voice, then new and possibly wonderful patterns of light might be produced, but the conditions for the penetrative vision are lost. And certainly there were many such forces entitled to exert influence on what they understood as cultural production. It may also be argued that this vision went as far as it could go, since the yoking together art with something like spiritual practice was the combining of two incompatible and mutually cancelling drives. The religion that could be assembled out of the metaphysical disjunctions and ecstatic insights of the high modernists could only ever be an incomplete one, entirely lacking the prophetic ruthlessness or the ability to recruit submissive followers that could have elevated their texts into scripture. Nonetheless, it is a kind of miracle that these texts have remained for us. We can still see through them, but only into their world, not into ours.

The dreamer being so accepting of the strange logic of dreams shows that consciousness is fully at home in dreaming. This means that if consciousness is the basic fact out of which experience if built, it does not require memory beyond the shortest term, nor does it require reality-testing, or equivalently that its world be coherent relative to displacements of space, time and point of view, or other symmetries. The dreamer looms large but is not entirely indispensable, there can be self-effacing moments in dreams. That consciousness as freed of constraints in dreams almost always envelops a dreamer, or dream character, in self-consciousness seems to be a natural predilection, and these concomitant dreamers always have something stolidly infantile, or stubbornly naive, about them. From night-time dreams we can be left with the sense that the dream assembles itself out of scattered pieces of perceptual and kinaesthetic debris, that it arises from the action of the same mechanism, integral to consciousness, as that which leads us to discern pictures in random patterns. Again, in night-time dreaming, consciousness seem to be ignited out of a concentration of tension above a certain threshold in a way that lends credibility to the idea that the function of dreams is to keep us asleep. There is a different kind of dream experience that we can have when awake and fall into day-dreaming. Here the transition is sudden, the dream seems to have already been going on before we entered into it. Although the portal into the day-dream seemed to have been a coincidence of a waking thought and a dream image or event, the latter somehow symbolising or allegorising the former, the brief dream thread, if we can remember it as we suddenly "come to", bears no thematic relation to anything in waking life, seems utterly disconnected and nonsensical.  None of this should be any surprise, embodied consciousness for all its disingenuousness must be a highly complex and layered performance, and the obstacles to more than glimpsing all that goes on backstage is a part of its success.

The stories change rapidly and the owner or subject or object of these stories changes accordingly, even when one of the themes of the story is his so very constant identity, because the stories are nothing but the weaving together of themes. What makes them stories is their accomplished aboutness. The frame of reference moves but the tale is always about the origin of co-ordinates which naturally seems to always be in the same place. If the state of the body, the breath, the inner face, the flexions and circulations, the physics of solids, liquids and gases, the kinetic and potential activations, is like the background music of life in time then most of the stories are invented on the spot in order to resolve this pre-existent music into some kind of sense, to carry it on and develop it so that it can be understood. And if a story doesn't arise then what about some real music? The important thing is to play on, play one. What is constant is the sense of some sort of predicament: every subject has one, is one, good or bad, and so they might as well belong to the same subject, the identical one who's always just opened his eyes, who always has so much to do, who is engaged with truth and whose truth escapes him, who deals with reality and whose real life is elsewhere.

If time is understood as analogous to a spatial dimension then it ought to be seen as going upwards. The present can then be seen as located at the top of the heap of our past days, and rising, carrying us with it as more lived time is folded up and collapsed beneath. The illusion of freedom goes only in one direction, there is a striking asymmetry, we can only breathe if we keep going higher.  We find ourselves growing dizzy with being raised, not by our own power but by a heedless engine, like going up in an elevator that won't stop. But then you emerge at one floor and it's another day, and then you are drawn back into that dark narrow chamber, everything grows dark for a while but for the phosphorescent numbers, and the motion makes you queasy, and then the door opens on another day, resembling, but actually perched on top of, the previous one, and revealed as more hastily built if you take a close look, incomplete and fragile. You pick your way to a window and look out and you can see how far there is to fall. The base of the building is unseen, blocked by your angle of vision. The fall is inevitable, the structure sways in the wind. In dreams, in the dark, the closed door could open anywhere, the entire past is at your disposal, all your errors, your bêtises ready to be joyfully repeated.

Dreams turned inside out, only this diffuse and lumbering pinkness of the body, in excess of the mind, in excess of everything. The tea is bitter, there is no path out of this, or deeper into it, everything is made of the same doughy stuff, call it imagination, call it what you will. The trading posts closed up tight, asleep like on a Sunday afternoon, and this muggy heat declaring itself the authentic zero degree. Only the eyes of the child are still open, accepting everything without presumptions, half-awake, cradled in a serviceable world, everything that was flowing, unpredictable and menacing is frozen in place, the music has stopped, the music is forgotten. He is submerged, almost drowned in experience, wrapped up in and assimilated by presence until nothing strange appears, nor could ever appear, ever again.

How deeply ingrained the habit of assuming that life is lived from the inside out, instead of being a phenomenon that only ripples and flies on a surface. That is all there is to the self, the culture of a direction, to explain it all as the adventures of an entity that expresses itself in actions and dialogue with a world, a sort of opera, music and all, a mysterious kernel unfolding, wondrous narcissus. The self is a progressive narrative, with all its motions in the direction of unity and freedom, of apotheosis and death, discarding evil for the greater glory of the good, awakening from the good for the greater penetration in evil. This love of telling tales arises as a natural way of interpreting the fact that being alive is felt as a sort of choice, the living part of it, a sort of affirmation, and most of all a sort of action. What am I but the determination of this, the choosing acting in response to the understanding of the very situation, also an act, also an understanding? This is why life makes a sort of sense, it unfolds, is continuous in a fragmentary and recurrent sort of way, loops, twists, rejoins itself in other roles, and can never coincide with itself. I can only attend to objectivities, but the attending is no objectivity, it's me! Let me bring it closer! The initiative springs from a something so close, so marvelously happy, who could doubt it, who could fail to go along with it? No one, no one at all, only necessary and complete disqualification from inexistence.

The self has deep roots, dissolve it as we may with philosophical doubts about how and why such an entity, matrix, or independently subsistent interspace for experience need be implicit, and it still comes surging back when the thumbscrews are applied.  Here physical suffering is not just a disjointed set of bounded discomforts such as might occur in a dentist's chair, but the reference back of such discomforts, of bodily malaise and the prospect of unpreventable and unbounded future pain, to a moral and responsible being. The triggers here are such as shame, regret, and guilt, emotions that are both private and social, that overlap any barrier between the two, and where the empathically imagined pain of the other is at least equal in gravity to one's own. One can imagine that the lens of self-consciousness can be adjusted between a close-up macro setting, where experience becomes Humean, constituted out of tiny disjointed and discrete bubbles, and a deep or a wide focus - two quite different alternatives - in which the experience is nominally human, and the subjectivity of the other or the over-all scene, or the group is given emphasis. The self hardly appears in close-up, its phenomenology in the cut-up world is only that of a bare transcendental unity, whereas in the other modes it is a non-optional implicate, although also an insoluble problem to be eternally nagged at, the problem of rightness, of faith, good or bad or mere, or indeed as it's become, of correctness.

The conundrums he made out of the ideas that recurred on him seemed far more personal than they were. These conundrums were nothing but performances of current ideas, not ideas as bare forms but as organisms, inheritances from the culture alive with the dream potency of contestation, inconclusiveness and unappeasement. He had believed in them, inhabited them, but they were only coterminous with life, a life that arose out of something, and which was to dissolve back into something, either way ungraspable and wholly other to life's forms of comprehension, its toy world of knowledge. Life seen this way is a self-reflexive structure, the transcendence which lends it purpose being only a necessary mirage of its own appetites. It is not in being, has not been gifted with being, in order that being may become aware of itself, to bring self-awareness to the absolute, or to fulfil some mission of praise or worship. Neither is it a bad dream, or the blossoming of an impurity or seed of doubt that fell into the pure, the non-dual, the pleromatic. Its meaning is only in itself, bounded by itself. Interrogation of this meaning is essential to it only as a part of what it is, but has no bearing on what precedes or follows it. Surely this is going too far, can't meaning be purely internal and yet still point beyond itself? Being may not privilege life but the challenge it has thrown to it has not yet been exhausted. Why else would there be death?

Every phenomenal thing arises against a horizon or background which logically precedes it. This background need not itself be phenomenal, but it defines an altered mode of phenomenality, a sort of presence so pure that it can only be regarded as absence - or in other terms which make clear the necessity for an associated act, it is the unfocalised behind the focalised. A phenomenal thing, or event, thus also implies an observer and as such requires a structure of observation. It is this pre-understood structure of the observer that corresponds to the horizon of the event, but they are not the same thing. Observers can pop in and out of existence since they are functions, not entities. That they seem to be, or to lean on, entities is only an aspect of how they function, the entities seeming to have some independent duration and the capacity to enter unchanged into various contexts or observational events. It is likely that no such entities exist anywhere and that the very idea of them is a misreading of the relativity of referencing and its dual temporality - that is, the need for the referencing act to have a different flow in time than the referenced event. If we think of an entity we think of it as being the object of some indefinite observation, and our own possible observation of that same entity as being a relationship to that other prior observation, or general observability. There are no relations of entities, there are only relations of observers. And the relations of observers are in far richer class than that formed by our imagined relations between things. The odd mirrorings that are inseparable from all perception are thus explained, as well as the nature of identity as pure selection - this one being chosen continuously out of all possibles.

So many people crowded together in a modern city that each of us has thousands of tiny interactions with strangers every day. Each of these others may be physically present in the street or seated next to us but mainly locates themselves in transitions between imaginary states and in multiple circles of memory and community in which they were, or are, more or less answerable, more or less acknowledged, or called on to acknowledge their own others who also have.... All of this is made comically concrete in the current epoch, in which so many carry around a small and fetid portal to their private worlds clutched in their hands. Often they converse with a remote friend oblivious to the fact that their words are overheard by the anonymous person beside them. The extraordinary overlapping complexity of social worlds places new burdens on the functions of identity. These must mediate transitions between ever more diverse contexts each requiring its own sensitivities and ecologies of value, and these in turn leave their traces or encrustations on the icon of self, the virtual core and stabiliser of these identities. What circulates are constructed artifacts of meaning, surpluses to the natural combinatorial dizziness of sign-systems that embody a uniquely human charisma and anxiously graded verticality. Even death can only be one more performance in this dance of memes, a self-conscious finale in which everything is revealed as built out of colourful toy bricks as these begin to topple and collapse, emptying every foyer and habitation.

That there was this presence or that self or not, was all a part of the engrossing adventure of being himself. For all that it was an approach to disinterest, his interest in it became consuming, so that his awareness of how it was with the others around him would grow dim and distorted. The inevitable occurrence of a signal omission would bring his failure of empathy before him and he would feel deeply ashamed not so much of the inaccuracy of his sketches of others, since there was no standard of perfect fidelity here, but of the low dimensionality of the space he had assigned to them in his simulation of the world. If there was a freedom that he owed to himself then the proper expression of this should have been in the degrees of freedom he accorded in his relationships. To be exposed as having crudely schematised others revealed priorities that were incompatible with the freedom and disinterest that he affected. This was a purely internal source of shame that cut deeply and repeatedly without recourse to ethics, except perhaps in a vaguely Spinozan sense.

There seemed to be an affinity between deconstructive practices and sort of spiritual discipline because of their undoing of the transcendent underpinnings of stable identity. If the boundary of the classroom was easily breached then so was the boundary of the body and the self. The transcendent was replaced by an endless transcending. The self that was newly being dismantled and then reconstituted in the abyss of its immediate predecessor was always a demonic self, a sort of cutting-edge parasite or self-conscious eddy on the silent energy of the veritable self. There can be no definitive evidence of this latter, it doesn't enter into the game, but it is intimated in the experience of the sublime as larger and heavier than the world. It is not feeling or knowing but the original of feeling and knowing, what these functions strive towards but can never reach. To have some awareness of it is to understand that what has always been there, unchanged is impossible to know in the usual way since all such knowing derives from change. By contrast, this timeless presence that is not presence is complete identity, is one in an unimaginably concrete way. No question of identity is possible in the sense in which such a question, being the possibility of difference, or even the possibility of such a possibility, is at the origin of being. But how can there be talk of being aware of this essence before being? The adventurer in time, this animula vagula, cannot attain a truth that is by nature unattainable, yet it also cannot delimit the range or possibilities of its knowing. It is as little the author of its littleness and want of power as it is of their opposites. It cannot map its own trajectory or know the space through which it passes. It appears as what it is due to a certain declension over which it has no control, and it can neither tighten it nor release it - but neither can it resist such events should they arise.

Two things we don't commonly doubt are the matter experienced and the presence that experiences it, here. This way of describing them does not do justice to their original simplicity. We extend them into elaborate structures of world and subjectivity and then try to grasp the founding distinction using sophisticated concepts derived from these developments of it. In this way the order of things becomes confused, so that the subjective pole appears to be logically required as a consequence of the objective, and then, in a subsequent move, to perhaps not really be required at all. As an antidote to this, consider the 'I' as it was discovered in childhood prior to the assumption of a theory of being. Wasn't there a clear experience of an independent 'me' as the first reflection of the original 'I', all entirely free of paradigms of reflection, interpellation, mirror-stage or other catastrophe creations of the illusion of a subject? There was no stage or stadium, no panopticon, no model or event derived from a prior and overwhelming experience of intentional relations, of inter-subjectivity without a subject. All such theories, in their implicit forms even more so than in their explicit forms embody a profound, and perhaps original error. The kind of self produced by them is infinitely divisible and fluid, a self that can, in becoming self-conscious, 'identify as'. One is so used to this kind of self and its psychological appurtenances that no other seems possible, except as illusion. Instead the original discovery of subjective being needs to be recalled as something entirely different, as the unveiling of an event, in and out of time, more like the witness 'I', not as an abstraction but as an immense reality, one that flies in the face of all the delightful and grown-up theory that carefully dismantles the self.