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Friday, 12 August 2016



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.

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