Social life requires something like a form of re-presentation, a defining of a field of operation and a symbolisation of the various agents included within its boundary, including the reflexive - something like this but on a level far upstream of the synaptic, since we can find effective optimisation strategies practised even by single celled organisms, to say nothing of what might be found in viruses. It is out of strategic purposefulness that we are endowed with a fundamental insincerity, and it is out of this that we must distill our notions, and practices (dare one say praxis!) of sincerity, cut to the shape of what we take to be our best selves. Presumably for a dog or a horse the issue doesn't arise and lovers of these animals are periodically scandalised when some blunt-speaking ethologist is reported in the news to have accused their darlings of a sophisticated form of opportunism. Dogs, however, wear their good faith with marvelous aplomb, as cats their selfishness. On the other hand it is simply part of the logic of life, and not the least cunning, that we should be for so long mistaken about the logic of life. What the mind grasps clearly and distinctly is for that very reason meant to be taken in just this way, to bar the way to what is unclear and indistinct, precisely for our own good - as long we understand the 'us' here in a suitably impersonal way. We occupy the space between the feeling and the sign of the feeling. If we couldn't write out cheques on our attentive feeling, indeed on our empathy, such as it is, even if limited pretty much to ourselves, then all our relationships would collapse. Indeed talk of cheques is asking too much, it is enough to offer payment by plastic.

If relationship, as a force oblique to their individual wills which draws two parties into the field of each other's recognition, is mediated by an exchange, by something passing from one to the other, or both ways, and generally more rarefied than a heart, then the substance of this exchange represents a certain commerce between souls. In the first place the exchange is of something immediately felt, of patent value, and only later, and this is where relationship proper begins, is it a promise and a faith. The analogy with money seems obvious, and although it is limited, it suggests all kinds of curious variations. One might contrast liquid with illiquid assets, spending one's capital with living from the interest, or consider rates of exchange, convertibility, or what it would mean to invest or to speculate in shares, in futures or in options. Most important is the fact that the conditional nature of the instruments of exchange means that two parties are never enough; where there is an exchange of acts of faith there must always be a third party, often in collective form, to guarantee, to witness, and to enforce the transaction. This is all aimed at social behaviour, and despite the colourful terminology that arises with money as being the most general of currencies, it seems natural to suppose that it is the economic register that was modelled upon it, as being very much the prior. None of this yet speaks to the ontological level that underpins currency itself. If in the words of the old song, 'you're nobody 'till somebody loves you', what is this mysterious and fragile market-making which transforms a nobody into a somebody?

The English word relationship seems to carry with it the notion of the relative freedom of the relata. Etymologically the word, formed from relation = re+ latio, means bringing back, being the past-participle of referre, or reference, as it were. It is one of that very large family of re- words, like reflect and recount, with their odd connotation of a doubling, or repetition. Relationship as a noun for the middle term leaves the two end terms in balance and essentially detached from each other; the relationship comes later and is attached on to them; it is an option and not constitutive of the matters or substances in relation. There is a certain appropriateness to this, but in the interpersonal context it misses a quality which is prominent in the German word Beziehung. At the basis of this form of two-ness there is a Zug, a ziehen, a pull or pulling, a drawing towards each other, or perhaps also a drawing away. The English words attraction/repulsion have some of this sense, but they generally refers to the initiation or ending of a certain kind of relationship, rather than its steady state. The draw, the traction, between two parties, suggests a symmetry, by default, as well as an involuntary character. Goethe's 'Elective Affinities', Die Wahlverwandtschaften, also seems a natural concept in a world where connections are understood as brought about by the forces aroused by complementary valences and exchanges (as we now say, of bosons). The Wahl, the election, or selective choice, cognate most likely with willen, to will, is also part of this complex, with its echoes in chemistry, which adds such phenomena as crystallisation, reaction, transformation, catalysis, exothery and endothermy etc. This energetic register provides an essential perspective on what we call relationships and assists in our efforts to understand just what it is that they relate.

What is constant is the taking things for granted, the good faith in doing so, the feeling of being right, of being basic, - where right and basic are understood to be equivalent designations - of inhabiting a self-evident reality assembled out of the elements most ready to hand; the framing is constant and not the actual contents chosen, which vary tremendously without our noticing it. The persona both understands and presents itself as a free response, as the always and only most reasonable response given the events as they appear to it, but it is unwilling or unable to question these events, to see them as factitious constructions of its own and of the collective imagination. To do so would apparently defeat its purpose. This is the source of much of the comedy and the tragedy of life, indeed of our incorrigible  presumption that when we express something we will be understood. Although others, with their evidently absurd presumptions may appear ridiculous, we are at the same time assured of a sympathetic response, since, being the same kind of egoities as us, they are sure to know the same vexations, to immediately feel their force. This is of course far from the case since those same others are also, with their histories and predispositions, events in our world as we are in theirs. The illusion of free will is thus equivalent to the basis of the persona and of its presumption of perfect self-expression. The robustness of the latter in the face of endless absurdities is understandable on the basis of its pragmatic advantages over its negation, and this contributes to the persistence of the former.

A persona is the expression of an integrated system of perceptions and valuations, a selection of salient matters in the world and a sense of their interrelations and of how these impinge on the good or ill fortune of a central character. When I am in a certain persona the world takes on a corresponding look, but this way that it looks is in service to a set of valuations all of which lead back to me, although some may seem to be highly objective. The facts are fitted to the person as much as the person to the facts. Valuations follow along lines of causality: if I value or fear A, then if I believe that B causes A then I will value or fear B accordingly. Relations of causality are part of the perception of things and arise from my understanding of the world, but only via plausible reasoning which is flexible and of limited consequence. The network of valuations is thus allied with a causal map of the world, and since these two need only be roughly consistent with each other, their alliance, prompting short-cuts and compromises, can riddle each of them individually with clashes and contradictions. Inconsistencies in the world of a persona do little to weaken that persona. A persona needs a world it can star in but it cares less than it says about the reality of that world. All of this misses perhaps the most important thing, that a persona is an expression, it is a projection of intent, an enactment for others, a projection of force into the world of others. What it projects, what it speaks, is just another such integrated system of perceptions and valuations etc., but there is no requirement that this be cognate with its reflection to itself, its internal narrative. Its nature is not to know, therefore it can't be accused of failing to know itself - the closest it comes and the closest it need come is to express itself in the key of self-knowledge.

The combining of two separate but near points of view in space enables us to infer depth and to gain a sense of the relative location of the viewer, or subject, outside of and continguous with the objective field. In a similar way the combining of two or more presentations of the same consciousness in time ought to provide a sense of the hyperspace from which the transcendental subject, central but unmanifest like the viewer in a perspective, looks - but it is something other than looking which is in play here - out on a life-world. This doesn't seem to happen much outside of certain rare works of literature, and part of the reason may lie in the fact that the point of view in time is always mediated by a persona, and our personae, because there are always many of them, are too variable and poorly integrated for us to be able to align their different visions. Our best seeking, best thinking, best knowing are jealously guarded the property of a single subpersonality, but what we are as the mask of a transcendental self is an unruly politics of subpersonalities. Although at any one time most of them are below the rostrum of waking consciousness they are in fact always active since they are needed to interpret the manifold signallings of the world which are each tuned to a register best read by a single matching egoity - an egoity which is far from believing that its purpose is merely to be an interpreter in the service of the currently dominant character. Any talk of the process of identification needs to take into account this necessary splitting of human personhood.

Idealism has about it the smell of a solipsistic defence against the one's dependence on the body and on others, its refined logic which devastates false identifications also masks a child's peevish and magical wish for absolute dominion. There is an egoistic or positive form of it known in the jargon as 'create your own reality' or as being possessed of a 'reality distortion field', perhaps not dissimilar to what Keats called the 'egotistical sublime', as well as a mystical or negative form, which consoles the self by a negation that carries it off entirely together with the pesky other, but always leaves a moment or two of undivided sovereignty between the two abolishings. It is a tautology that everything we can know must be in mind, since mind is just a name for the knowing - although a misleading one in its suggestion that the functioning must belong to a corresponding organ - but it is also contingently true, at least up to now, that knowing is a dependency of life, and thus is always already situated in relation to birth, development, flourishing, reproduction, decline and death. And all of these depend crucially on others, except possibly death. Life has its own imperatives in which solipsism does not figure, and while it may at times seem permissive, it knows how to enforce them. So, is mind nothing more than the spoiled child of life?

The various version of the rhetoric-persuasion, inauthentic-authentic, secondary-primary, sentimental-naive, low-high, split-integral, persona-self etc., polarity - which are not by any means equivalent, but are echoes and analogies of each other - are all subject to a series of dialectical twists which pretty much destroys the sense of the polarity - and would do so but that that it keeps returning in fresh forms. One twist is that there is nothing more inauthentic than the desire to be authentic, so that it turns out that the desire to be inauthentic is the only authentic desire, and all the more so if that very desire for inauthenticity is itself inauthentic. It's clear enough where this leads, but the logic is not easily escaped, even if we wanted to, which is doubtful. Another is that the entire polarity with all its ramifications, its entire caste system, actually exists within the first member of each series, the putatively secondary one. This means that not only is it possible to deconstruct the polarity by claiming that its entire existence is as an appearance within its so-called secondary member - which therefore must be as little secondary as it is primary - but also that the edifying spiritual profit to be derived from keeping faith with the primary moment can be reproduced, as culture, by a less ascetic and demanding faith, indeed an entirely richer one, given to some encapsulated naive moments within the sentimental, cf. the profundity of film buffs or of foodies. There is no successful persona that is not an ironic or downright unserious disavowal of a deep self, just as there no good insider that doesn't instantly identify, by way of a positive overflow of fellow-feeling, with the most outside of outsiders. 

An experience, my experience, experience in the sense of Erlebnisse - if such a thing could be isolated it would be a sort of figure in the flow of lived time, a ripple or a pattern of ripples in subjective space, in a network of such ripples, but not known or understood as such, emerging as a belonging of an assumed self that is also entirely in time, and by that ownership proving the existence of that self, enacting its assumption forwards and without reflection - rather than being the opposite, the experience proved, because positively gained, an Erfahrung, of a self-certainty, known as a contingent mode of a presencing inclusive of its own ground, independent of experience. Most of life seemed to him to consist of the former, ventures at being, curated and fed into endless circuits of visibility, exposure and interrelation so rapid that it seemed to take the place of knowledge, seemed to be the very thing meant by knowledge. There was a void in such life that could only be filled by another gaze, the seeing not seeing until being seen by a gaze itself seen... The self needing to be held aloft in the abyss, certainly not by a great Other, but by a similar self, by a legion of such selves holding each other up, and similar in only one essential respect, that they share in the same repudiation of that Other.

The imagination works overtime synthesising and weaving together the elements of experience so that it can double over raw experience, distancing it and replacing it with an illusory world in which the cardinal directions that orient being are merely provisional markers, differential appearances subject to, and even inviting, revision. In other words the post-modern world in which we find ourselves inextricably trapped is the very character of the imagination writ large. Can we dig down beneath this, undo the semiotic and aestheticising mind? If our accession to the social, to alterity in this specially mediated form which promises us everything and only everything that we have desired, were the result of agreeing to a faustian contract, so much belief given for so many enriching adventures, so much distraction from our necessary end, so much promise that the real can be domesticated or overcome, then we could hurl in its face its failure to achieve any of these. Not that such a repudiation would be of much significance at the level of all those easily seen-through and merely digressive productions that elicit and enhance desire, but rather of those critical and sublime works which evince deep correlations between the creative soul and metaphysical reality.

Our world is made by the imagination, the secondary imagination if you like since it is mostly an obedient imagination which installs us in a common world of forms. Even if we insist on the priority of a material world we may only immerse as much of the experiencing machinery as we can in this world of public causes and events and it never reaches as far as the crucial, the definitive, parts. Impulses travel up their nerves, disperse in their ganglia and then with all the credited and uncredited contributions of a post-production crew the magic transform is brought off and a world appears, and no-one can ever tell you how it was done. After all, who would they be telling, but the character, or rather one of the characters, upon the screen? This character has his own imagination, a more limited, very much looser, but no less extraordinary affair, and one of the things it tells him when he gives it the right kind of attention is that the two imaginations are really one. Thus it seems that the freedom, the fluid quality, the indefinite relations of subject and object that are natural to one ought to be just as natural to the other; and so he tries, he feels it his duty to try, to elevate the most serious of his concerns, his despairs, his sense of mortality, the falterings of desire, as nothing but creations of imagination, into its native element of freedom. The strangest thing is that this strategy succeeds, it succeeds splendidly, but it makes no difference at all to the despairs, the sense, the falterings - which go on as before - except to reveal the enormous joke of which they are a part.

"Now that we know all language lies." Indeed we do, but we since we still rely almost completely on language we do not yet know how to orient ourselves in this knowledge. To consider it as a tool is one approach, not entirely satisfactory because it displaces the realm of stable meanings to a hypothetical position outside of language: there is us and there are certain goals we seek consistent with our nature, for which language, or more broadly, the symbolic realm and our degree of power or influence in it are the sole means we can employ to realise them. The goal is always our entire freedom and so in this instance it is to clearly discriminate the ways that we are implicated in the symbolic realm without being merely a side-effect of it, as some would have it. The symbolic world is not isotropic, its density varies considerably with and around certain isolated points of great concentration which are not exactly points of contact with the real but purely symbolic structures that function as if they were. These are vortices of meaning wherein particular personal, existential or spiritual lines of tension cross and almost coincide with cultural and historical lines. Due to the reflexively infolded structure of the layers of symbolic meaning these vortices or thickenings of significance can be found to occur in more places than first appears. They are not like black holes sucking in both meanings and the subject who means but rather the opposite, like birth, death, love, man, woman, God, they are continually productive of divergent lines of significance even while seeming to be absolutely fixed in place.

Distinguish the idea of persona from that of self. Of the former, which corresponds to what is known in the culture as identity, we can say that it is both positive and purely tactical and situational - and therefore empty. It answers to a requirement for some positive thing where there is no reason, prior or posterior, to expect one to be found. But the persona is as much the persistent requirings of itself as the succession of insistent conjunctures that are put forward to assert their having been met. Its successes are often striking and we are endlessly indulgent of the parallax effect which makes them seem to arise from its mythically being founded in itself rather than a ruthless socially-mediated selection pressure - ruthless because the penalties it commands are peremptory and extreme. If there is one thing that readily focuses the mind it is the acquisition of a functional identity. The self then, by contrast, is negative and independent of circumstances, that is, not a thing, and therefore not engaged in the interlocking circles of causality that are the world in process. Neither is it a state or stage to be attained, but is perhaps nothing more than a name for the conscious assumption of the inner life. In Michelstaedter's terminology it is persuasion, and it is known from the beginning even if not manifest, since the persona is nothing but the pretence or the aspiration to an image of it.

Lived time is subdivided into quanta, forming chains of corpuscles or monads, and there is a triggered progression of these like a heartbeat which refreshes the conscious state in a variable rhythm. Each unit begins in a concentrated flash of implicit content which then unfolds and extends itself, fading more or less quickly. While each such moment contains the entire present only one aspect of it is dominant, and in the succession of moments this salient feature changes according to the quality of experience. In an anxious state the moments are very short, their initial intensity is great but fades rapidly so that the discontinuity between successive moments, even if their content is hardly different, is amplified and lends a jarring quality to the experience - we are never at home in anxiety no matter how normal a state it might be. In a relaxed and pleasant state the moments seem lengthened, to fade slowly and to be gently resumed by the each following moment. The inherent pleasure of sustained consciousness in lengthened moments quite apart from their continuity explains the predilection for sad music, the sadness functioning here as an intensifier (of interest, of narrative, of sympathy...) which matches the consciousness in our listening to the slow time of the composition. Whether some such theory of the internal time consciousness, supplementary to Husserl perhaps, can be justified, it seems to be needed to explain the simplest of facts: that our experience is continually changing and in quite radical ways while still being unproblematically our experience, and that we can refer to it as our experience as if we were both in it, a part of it, and it were unfolding before us, for us.

The mind is a control mechanism in so far as what utility is for it is not simply a nourishing substance called happiness but a feeling of power or potency in relation to that large realm of matters in which it contributes only a fraction of the operative causes and a larger fraction, to its own perspective, of the effects. If there is a world in which the mind feels more or less sovereign there is also a world, more vital to its health, in which it finds a play of forces which influence its continued well-being, or are strongly believed to do so, and over which it has only a vague or indirect sway, and towards which its attitude must veer towards the propitiatory or the fantastic. This second world, no matter how much we might believe we have tamed it, is the world of anxiety, since lying on its horizon are the events we conceive of as decisive changes or destructions of our destiny - destiny itself, an inexorable causality affecting us from the outside, being a notion arising only in this world. If the dividing line between these worlds were kept clearly marked, with consolidation and stagnation on one side and conjugation and destruction on the other that would be fine, but like political parties that have long been rivals, their relations are marked by appropriations, defections, betrayals, denials, impersonations and falsifications.

Except on a very small number of occasions the attempt to redirect the purest form of attention produces no effect at all. If the whole frame yields to a thought and turns - and this can only be by accident and having no discernible connection to the content of the thought - then attention is no longer captured within the frame but opens to the space in which such a movement takes place, a space inconceivable in ordinary terms. At other times, no matter how deep, that is, intellectually refined, the inquiry is, it is not the deep focus of attention that changes but only that of an idea of attention. My ideas are like lenses I hold up before the dark gaze of deep attention, and it is these that I juggle and twist as I strive to gain a clear understanding. It is a fascinating but superficial exercise, which is hardly surprising since everything in the frame is fascination. How can there be attention without any idea of attention? Whatever it is is upstream of all worlds, but cannot be reached by proceeding in any known direction.

Questionings always fail, they don't get answers and besides, the questions they generate are necessarily the wrong questions, but what they usefully attempt is to position the subject differently with respect to the stream of experience, of life. The subject is thus taken to be a sort of retina or perfectly absorbent surface. The very opposite of a mirror, it is pure dark responsiveness without response, of which Valéry's implex would be the most refined projection on the cognitive/affective level. An analogy might be with a black hole in which the event horizon corresponds to consciousness. The subject is not consciousness, but the latter is the only evidence there is for its presence. The phenomena in appearance are a kind of functioning which could not come about in any other way but are not expressions of the pure subject any more than the plumes of energy - originating from quantum fluctuations - which surround it are expressions of a gravitational singularity. But then it seems as though it has a directionality, as if, like a surface, it faces in a certain way, as if it can swivel and alter the direction that it favours. This impression is partly an acknowledgement of a superficial dynamic, the extraordinarily frictionless quality of attention turning to face whatever any mental process opens before it, but on a deeper level the swivelling of the subject refers to a non-volitional conversion, also known as a metanoia, or a turning.

Even if what we call consciousness takes its rise from feelings that accompany bodily tropisms this explains no more about it than the way that the feeling of the body provides an anchor for what must be by its nature far more fluid. This other thing remains nameless because it has no world, and indeed it is only through the intervention of bodily consciousness that a world first comes about, so that this latter forms the screen or the frame in which everything is projected. World here has to be understood as the necessary correlative of home, which is perhaps the more fundamental term. We can observe this in simple forms of life with little or no nervous organisation such as worms, ants and snails, and indeed what is a single celled organism but a kind of intentional microcosm? More complex worlds are built up in concentric layers but very strongly mapped one into the other so that although the layers may be distinguished it is impossible to locate any experience wholly within a single layer, or indeed in anything but all the layers at once, including those we do not yet have an inkling of. In this way we have the notion of different interpenetrating worlds, where each world represents, with its own drastic foreshortenings, the possibility of a projection of the unbounded totality. If the external world of objective but relative space and time is a particularly successful refraction of the world of bodily consciousness, achieved not without considerable if largely forgotten effort, like language, it is not the only possibility. The worlds that we inhabit in dreams seem to be located in precisely the opposite direction, relative to bodily feeling, as the outer world which they mirror and parody.

Bodily consciousness is depthless because in it there can be no spatial cues; the various modalities generated by the different ways that one felt content can relate to another, or run off in time, are themselves inner feelings of the same kind as the contents they govern. Feelings which join together simply form molecular feelings without calling forth a need for a space as the domain for their various plays of succession and recurrence. There is however another kind of inwardness that does demand spatiality, and this is of the kind in which the point of observation, normally latent and seeming absolutely constant, undergoes alteration. It may either be experienced as rapidly receding far back from where it was, being loosed from its anchor in the bodily sense of the head or of a tiny chamber just behind the eyes, and now - still a point, but free - rediscovering its native element in a vaster, darker, more living space behind the world, or else its punctilious character is shed and the centre of consciousness, the fundamental self-knowing seems of itself to be spatial. There is a realisation here that the ordinary experience of external space as much as its counterpart the experience of spaceless bodily feelings are stabilised by the notion of a pinhole view, of the witness assimilated to this aperture as if it were not merely the point of a passage from one mysterious mode of experience to another. The external idea of space and even its abstractions in mathematics are seem to only exist as metaphors or reductions of this living space.

The mind feels simple, as if it either outwardises or inwardises, doing one at a time, when actually it does both at the same time by mapping each onto the other, in incomplete ways. It makes partial maps of a field of partial maps, and if each envelops the other the inward does so more readily - which may be the only thing that defines it. But what again is inwardness like? It consists of parts which never exist side by side and so cannot accumulate into a totality, they are plural but the order in which they become salient matters. One inward element forms the fringe or horizon of another, horizonal elements are multiple and form significant combinations in which their individual contributions are merged; a chorus in other words, persistence of the chora no doubt. This chorus is in turn not differentiated from internal bodily feeling reaching back into a sort of active unconsciousness, or waking dreamless sleep. A bodily sensation can be the locus of attention and become spatialised in the perceived body, and this attention will fade leaving only the vital trace of that spatialisation. For the most part inner feeling is a sort of musical copresence in experience. It touches on the paradox that whenever we succeed in exposing what it going on in what appear to be most mindless, ordinary and distracted moments of life we come upon the richest, most poetic contents. Degree zero of waking consciousness, the ordinary unreflective on-goingness, is just this absorption in the music of the body - density without depth.

Most of the time his lucubrations fell into the basket of critique of life. He considered alternatives and made economic calculations, expressed his askanceness and pushed the show further along; it was the characteristic process of a persona, a distinctive inflection of the process of every such one in general. Limited in the power of fresh observation, mind over-drawn, seriously in debt to his brain, he would sink back into internal bodily feelings, being-here as animated stuff, thinning out to infinity. There was a whole subjective cosmos, an immediate and all encompassing gathering of the senses and their 'feeds', vast but at the same time minuscule and placeless. In this way the outer was naturalised upon the consoles, consolation and con-soul-ation, of the inner. Thought too, as much as it was abstract and universal, was just as much the experience of thought imprinting in the felt body, the screen behind every other screen. In this eversion spatialisation was so modified as to be almost abolished; while thinghood in one world was mutual exteriority, overlap, obstruction, invariance, cascades of containment, architectural in short, in the other it was compresence, indefiniteness, unlimited recursions of depthlessness, or musical, as music is understood to thaw and digest all architecture.

 

Critique of life is quite different from phenomenology of life. The former is a creative style of venting, the distinctions it makes are clever and tactical, but haphazard, confined to the context, like sardonic jokes. It provides a sort of comfort, even if it is largely defensive, attitude formation to ward off death, nothingness, helplessness, and most of all dumbfoundedness, speechlessness, insignificance. Reading such works feels to be as satisfying as creating them, its readers feel a special sort of participation in the texts - although the writers may seem quite indifferent to them, having got them out of their system, until the next attack. Phenomenology is concerned with making the most functionally correct distinctions, cutting up the subjective-objective mass in just the right way. The observer in both of these modes is paradoxical since neither can fully accommodate the position from which their utterances are made, but critique can overcome this impossibility through irony, which in this case is an empty pseudo-consciousness. Phenomenology, however, must coexist with it, to the detriment, perhaps, of its style. Phenomenology, falling into an attitude becomes critique, hence in so far as it remains in the purity of its mode of reflection the operative distinction is between a thinking that goes against the current of life in relation to every thing that matters, and one going against it in relation to mattering tout court.

The succession of bodily and mental states seems both robust in its heedless onrush and sensitive to being steered by numerous subtle drivers, all of which which suggests that it is the expression of complex processes which blend thought and the unthought in necessarily unthinkable ways. A notional self, however, is always present, but to different degrees like the background music in a film, and when salient showing up in various relations to the headlong temporalisation: as agent or patient, as victim or perpetrator, judge or accused, sentimentalist or naïf, alazon or eiron, without any great consistency or felt need for consistency. As this self one does not so much do as behave. The attitudes taken to this panoramic but limited exposure of life, via a one-who-is-living, are essential attributes of the notional self in whatever band it happens to be currently arising, and they can be quite reflective and sophisticated, indeed spiritual, if that term names the crossing of a certain threshold of breadth. Still, this self is such as to feel that its reality and its duty relates to a mysterious something called happiness, and for all that it is able to do nothing to found such happiness or align it with its goals, there is a silent knowledge in happiness when it comes unsought which invites its easy surrender.

Under happiness life becomes dreamable; there is resistance of course, but this yields under pressure and in the most delightful way, the object is correlative to the subject but still endows it with torrents of unexpected new content of the same kind, so that this subject-self can remain in harmony with its world and keep going forward with no need to discover that this very world is a mere dream. The happiest dreams invite us to keep on dreaming. Of course this never lasts long, the shock is to find that there is a world out there that we desperately care about, and so the mind streams out through every sense and the centre of gravity takes firm root in the object. The crux was when we found ourselves caring so much about the actions or attitudes of the other after we'd been convinced that the only target of such care was ourselves. To retain the equilibrium of such a self we must care about it, but to do so we need to figure in some way as an object of care. It needs to have a character we can view as worthy, but a character is something staged and anything staged is made up out of borrowed elements, elements we only presume are our own, and anachronistically so, long after they have shown up as more proper to someone else. The world outside can strike us through the heart because it our own alienated self-love that makes it overwhelmingly real.

It is the whole life of the other that affects us when we come into contact, a life of which we know even less than of our own, and what we are aware of, the mirrorings, the cannibalisations, the thefts, the simulacra, all so drastically effective, are yet hardly real but occur as variations in our, and their, ever resumed, ever collapsing process of self creation, each inside our separate monads. This is literal contingency, to touch and be touched, a contingency that is essential to us as much to maintain what we have as to gain new ground, although it is always misunderstood when regarded as our own project, as if we ever possessed the dignity to own anything. If the living is made to seem, as it so often is, like the particular task within our gift then we ought to consider that we ourselves are one of life's scattershot responses to its own stubborn brief. We are a venture thrown out into the void by a blind desire to stake everything, even when we ourselves would stake next to nothing. And so the peculiarly excessive gravity, or planet, waves that affect us when we are drawn into close proximity with another.