Walking along a country path you approach a shallow pool from which the sound of an invisible frog is heard. As you draw close the frog falls silent. You stop, unmoving, breathing quietly, and await the resumption of the frog's steady croaking. If you wait long enough this may happen, but in that interval the frog's attention has been keener than yours, since having far less brain it is not likely to be distracted by a cloud of thoughts such as you carry with you. Whether the frog is 'conscious' or not is beside the point, this term, for us, being so contaminated with concepts arising from self-consciousness as to be inapplicable, and also, the frog being unlikely to have a recognisable analogue of our reticular activating system. Still, the interval of silence is pure attention in which the frog open-endedly awaits the resumption of its purposive action, an event which will follow on the adequate perception, or registration if 'perception' is too loaded a word, of an absence. Again, one must imagine the frog in its concealment as entirely cool, as much at its ease in suspending as it was in continuing its croaking, as if they are merely two sides of an activity by which it effortlessly and faithfully enacts its being in the world. Croaking or waiting to croak are two modalities of pure transcendental attention, an accomplishment not of the frog but of the life it embodies. Thus the frog is analogous, on a vastly different level of consciousness, to a monk sitting in meditation. There is something fundamental about this pure directedness without a direction which makes the details of the frog's life: the pool, the insects, vegetation, mates, rivals, predators, its biology and life-cycle - as much as those of the monk's life: a human consciousness, childhood, thought, language, renunciation, nostalgias and regrets, ideals and disillusionments, vows, teachers, fellow monks, work and play etc., merely peripheral colourings, more or less elaborate frames around a single reality.

 

In a lucid dream there can be a realisation that one is dreaming but no resulting curiosity about the dreamer, so much was attention engaged with the unfolding dream world. Only later in reflection on the strangeness of such an event is there a felt need to go back to the subject, to the 'I' behind the show, and the kind of realisation that is asked for in this, as if it is known to be already known and just in need or a small hint to be brought forth, is that the 'I' is responsible for, has brought off, the entire show. Here it is not just a matter of the visual field, as if I need to know that I painted it, that I own the vision the way a painter does, but the whole interlocking reality of it. We surely ought to know this about our dreams, at least on those rare occasions when we know we are dreaming, but we generally don't, such are the seductions of absorption in purposive action. It is a show that we just can't resist, junk TV for the pneumatic soul. What remains is a vague sense of psychic fact, the amount of objective reality we must admit responsibility for, once we have acknowledged that indeed we are responsible for some of it.

The basic process is to begin by embracing as much of all this as possible, loosening the boundaries, bracketing away all judgment, so that the mind feels at its furthest stretch of relaxed apprehension and acceptance. The next step is to introduce the sliver of a question, asking to whom all this is happening, to whom is it appearing, for whom is it? This produces a natural balancing move to the initial one, drawing the self out of latency and allowing a self-consciousness to gather in counterpoise to world-consciousness. When some sort of equilibrium is achieved or becomes conceivable, suggesting a higher and more integrated kind of balance, then the final move is made. This is simply to puncture the bubble by way of its self-conscious pole by applying the firm conviction that there is no consciousness of the self as subject, there can't be, such a possibility being contradictory since the subject can never be an object, no matter how subtle, serene and sattvic that object may appear. Again one might begin from this embodied consciousness and move to the state of pseudo-balance by admitting that this individual and his world in order to seem to be related but different entities must in fact be equal as appearances in consciousness. What is taken to be this consciousness over against an appearing world can only be a certain qualification of a consciousness that embraces both empirical subject and world, or if you want that they are equal as being both representations within a mind process and merely differ in having different roles to play in its dance. In any case consciousness (in the sense of appearance) is at least the entire set-up, and if there needs to be a further witnessing (consciousness as subject) behind that then this can only be empty in the strictest sense, more real than anything, and yet absolutely nothing at all. None of this should be in the least paradoxical.

Random mental activity, the sort of Brownian motions of everyday mentalese, organises itself around certain loose attractors consisting of positive or negative states, such as paranoia or smugness, which are able to maintain a stable frame for periods of time more or less on the scale of a day. These frames bring each a story or a family of stories with their sprouting elaborations into focus as well as a making a self appear in the form of a raised self-consciousness. This sort of pattern is cyclic, it attracts, holds out a vague mirage of truth, and leading nowhere, collapses back into noise. It functions like a local minimum, there is a dwelling but no power to pass to a further level of self-exposure. Neat, but the psychologising idea that something is being optimised, that strategies are mounted against intolerable unpleasure, suggests that it is a matter of filling an anxious void. Projecting back from this picture the real, or the veritable self, can only be pure terror. The struggle is to forge a bridgework in pure chaos, as against an infinite fall. If the self is the terror at the absence of a self, doesn't this still require a yet more prior perfection, a pleroma beyond any possible memory? As if one had stepped out seeking nothing but pure possibility, and then, the very idea of absence proving explosive, the whole world catastrophically followed.

It is clear that we share a great many basic emotions with animals, at least with other mammals, not merely individuaistic emotions, like anger, fear, anxiety, enjoyment or sense of well-being, but also many social emotions, such as trust and mistrust, friendliness and hate, as well as group feelings especially around hierarchy, and the kind of emotional adjustments one makes in accepting one's own position and associated possibilities of alliances, as well as its changes, the real or potential promotions or demotions in the dominance hierarchy or the pecking order. This makes it interesting to consider the emotions which when ascribed to even intelligent animals seem doubtful. For these emotions it would seem that they point either to self-awareness or to the knowledge of death, which in this context could be thought of as emotional modulators, since it is probably a question of a different combination of the same raw materials of feeling. Guilt, pride, euphoria or intense groundless happiness, are some examples that come to mind. Pride is a curious one, as some animals are superficially seen as proud and are even taken as symbols of pride, such as the peacock and the lion. These symbols may be quite appropriate, but this does not imply a pathetic fallacy or transference of the said emotion onto the animal. It seems to me that what is at stake here is at most emotions connected to hierarchy, but not pride since there is no corresponding despondency when their elevated position in their own group is overturned. They are modes of behaviour which suggest the emotion without being it, just as cats can enact arrogance too perfectly to actually be arrogant. Again, is it the awareness of death that when added to a purely hierarchic emotion, a sort of pre-pride, turns it into pride? Or is it a more developed sense of self and other, an additional reflexivity, as for example, the feeling of an elevated position in one's group, together with a sense of the group's elevated position relative to other groups?

In the network each node has a map of the network and a map of its own internal states. When the link between two nodes becomes active they attempt to align their network maps. If this succeeds then the strength and bandwidth of the link is increased, if it fails then it is weakened, and if it fails badly the link is strengthened but reversed in phase. If there is a positive alignment between network maps then a further alignment of internal maps, with appropriate phase changes, is attempted - corresponding effects also arise when a link is strengthened without agreement. The success or failure of this second manoeuvre affects the nature of the link in the same manner as the first. Any change in a link has effects on all the other nodes joined to the two ends, which may support the change or resist it; either way their own further links are also altered as a result. These changes are not immediate but come with a delay which varies with the quality of each link. Thus the network is always in action, reconfiguring itself as changes propagate through it. Once its structure is complicated enough, meaning that there are a sufficient number of different kinds of nodes, then its continual, but not necessarily continuous, dynamic is largely supported endogenously. The number of emergent phenomena, of group formation and dissolution, of invasion, colonisation, atomisation and so on is unlimited. These phenomena are marked by a sharp drop in complexity: one no longer needs N dimensions of phase space to understand the action, where N is a multiple of some power of the number of nodes, but just two or three or four. At this level an understanding of the process can be included in the map belonging to a single node. Such an understanding is nevertheless rare enough that it forms an isolating factor in the nodes in which it arises, making agreement between maps difficult and so weakening their links with all their immediate neighbours. This description of something we all understand very well is complicated only because it attempts to begin from simple premises.

The beauty of the world is not something we merely come upon or that we are aware of fabricating from our own imaginative pleasure in delineating it. It is not as if we discover it but as if it discovers us. Beauty, although serenely self-contained - as it may be, and often is - also seems to be directed at us, to be an adumbration of a forgotten dimension of our being, and this is known in the ready joy that it evokes and that we call wonder. The beauty of a flower may be a specifically directed message to certain insects, a flag of pure attraction, but in eavesdropping on this communication we feel that there is something meant for us in there too, an undirected message of pure purposeless and unreserved being. What flowers in us is just the opposite of such simplicity and containment, the need to question this very fragile and evanescent persistence in so far as we suspect that it reflects our own fragile condition, and then to do something about it. In the same way the in social life of animals we can recognise all the essential feelings that 'make us human' but entirely lacking in the transcendental, and even more so the anti-transcendental. We have built cathedrals and cruise missiles, composed symphonies and scriptures out of the same few hormones and neurotransmitters as dogs use and cows. Knowing this we immediately take a position, barking or lowing contentedly as the case may be.

The mind only recognises what it relishes, the flash of new traces glimpsed on the wing and the arousal of a keener curiosity set baying to follow them until they fade in the sand, and they always fade in the sand. It is work, it is drama of a kind, it is the dignity of a quest, like any Holmes he can be roused from his pessimism and melancholia, slough off the shadows and go forth. Every mind has its vice, what it enjoys and does best, and so the shape, always the same, that it tries to give to everything that piques it. So here as usual the resolution must be conceived as the fulfilment of the quest, must come with matching motives and drama, must be ready to be credited to the investigator, the hungry networked subject, the name in the mind. The value of the treasure must be in the work expended to gain it. It is unbearable and perhaps untimely to consider this cupidity not only redundant but a positive obstacle. As if it only makes the nut harder to crack and always gets there before the latest nutcracker. Consider putting it away, putting yourself away, the nut might yield to the merest stroke, impossibly light, and when it goes it takes with it all your gourmandising, and you too.

While the world that we map is as if seen from nowhere, its only truth in living consciousness is not isotropic, but strongly oriented by a point which remains inaccessible to it. We think of this point as self and discover hints of its wonderful nature in the most subtle aesthetic sensations that come to us. How could we know them and respond to them if we weren't recognising them, if they did not bring us back recollections of lost wholeness? But is it lost, or merely prior, ever-present and in transient eclipse? Self, the most punctilious, absolute distinction, is thus like a tiny sphere containing infinite space, or a monad on whose surface Indra's net is flawlessly reflected. This serene and un-dialectical notion of being can only be disturbed by that apprehension of the other which is not drawn from us through speculation but forced from us by suffering. There is an infinite disjunction between I and you but also an infinite need for conciliation. Two infinites cannot balance and the self, utterly devoid of time and narrative is for just that reason when it enters into them, entirely without reserve.

 

There is this and only this and you cannot step out of it but you imagine something like stepping out when you call it experience and ask whose it is. There is no you on whom experience has descended and no outside for this to be the inside of, but someone calls himself 'I' and wonders how all this came to be, to be so familiar, to be his life, his adventure, his attempt to catch hold of the phenomenon in the act or of the the act in the phenomenon. What is consciousness but the ineradicable illusion that there a point outside? Or say that it is the utter indifference to such an illusion. It makes no difference, you sit breathing and thinking and here and now is just this body and the afternoon light slowly moving on the wall.

The dream character typically experiences an odd disconnection between intention and outcome, it is when he tries to intervene in the course of the dream events - after deliberation and with clearly defined purpose, with the typical good faith of such personages - that they carom wildly and he finds himself helplessly in need of an immediate response to their perverse animation. The dream in this way is attempting to mimic or simulate the most characteristic but hidden property of the stream of events in which our purpose-bound selves are located and ultimately form a part. How much of our time is spent in planning and strategising our interventions? We know the world well enough, and our projects are usually trivial enough that incoming events fall within an allowable distance of the target. Our errors cannot be corrected, but they can be accommodated by making adjustments in our judgements and perceptions, in the Bayesian network with which we carry on and assert our affinity with the world. The fact that this seems to work so tolerably well, however, proves nothing, it is merely one of the assumptions. Will is a fiction and in those instances where the consequences of our actions are entirely outside of expectations and we are forced to recollect our motives we find ourselves as much at a loss as any dream character. The affinity with the world dissolves in an instant and if we weren't in such a panic we would appreciate the return of its strangeness and wonder.

Preferring to be as undivided as possible he was drawn to being the one contained, but like many another restive containee he liked to nurse a grievance in parallel with the comfort that he drew from the arrangement. Since this amounted to a "disquieting dependence upon a personality that can never be seen in its entirety, and [which] is therefore not altogether credible or dependable" his thoughts would often run to scenarios of exposure and confrontation, proofs directed against nothing more in the end than his own made up images, or untimely prescience. The response that he told himself he wanted was for her to feel as he did, and with the same storm and stress. But since these emotions were specific to a complementary position that was not her own this result could not only never be assured, but was in fact the very thing he wanted most to avoid. Were it to occur it would collapse the entire structure which was where he was at home. Still, when he rehearsed the sense of injustice aroused by these baroque accusations he'd feel a thrum of pain in his heart and his breath would be constricted. As much as he resented the inexorable nature of the cycle of feelings he was subjected to he also loved it. It was a proof of his own existence, an almost biological subjectification, but even more than that it was a licence for every kind of childishness and mischief.

The mature mind seems like a mature polity, it contains the history of its own particular crooked path out of original chaos and dependency. It is marked by the truth of this path but it also established and rewrites the account of the succession of inconclusive wars, the trade-offs and compromises that have brought it to its current state of balance and adequacy. A state that is both more stable and more fragile, heavier but more capable of alteration than it appears. Looking back one might count the gains and the losses, but isn't there also a point somewhere late in childhood when one is aware, looking forward, of precisely this fated double move of gain and loss. The long anticipated adult world must have appeared attractive for its freedom and autonomy, or rather its mirage of these, and for its access a vast commons, so that one couldn't wait to plunge in. At the same time one was aware of the loss of the depth of the moment-filled time of childhood, the time of thick and magical moments. The bargain was simply to surrender one for the sake of the other. And inevitably, whether we threw it down or had it torn from us we have lost our title to that thick time of childhood, which is also the essence of a certain sort of intimacy. We are reluctant exiles, this is hardly an original thought, and would do almost anything to force our way, with all our absurd apparatus, back in.

There is the enjoyment and the being seen to be enjoying, they are like the use value and the exchange value of experiences. If these can be distinguished, and its not entirely certain that they can, then they certainly function within the same economy, they are at best Siamese twins. Enjoying something deeply, being deeply moved by a work of art, comes with a story, the account of our enjoyment which we put forth eagerly or enigmatically withhold, and what the word 'deep' here, or some equivalent term, signals, if it arises, is that this story will invoke the authentic self. It is much trickier than this because what is enjoyed is the story with its almost perfect approximation of that self - as at Mme Verdurin's for the Vinteuil Septet - or that the very nature of aesthetic enjoyment is mediation. One knows that the best story is the one of perfect authenticity, how you just came upon this thing and it spoke to you and knew immediately ...  And then it took over your life, it became a lifelong quest to go beyond any story to the thing itself, the artistic truth, or the truth of the will, as it glimmers behind the cherished experience. All of this distinguishes shades of depth and shallowness: if I feel my enjoyment is deep then I will think A's and B's is a case of merely being seen to enjoy and I will build my house on it, but if I meet C and am immediately impressed by his more immediate relation to the matter then my enjoyment is revealed as exchange value, something I just talked myself into and the house comes tumbling down - like Thomas Bernhard's poor pianist. One might think that the way out is to become the performer or the creator, but then the game just shifts. The creator can neither despise nor absolutely ignore their audience, although both have been tried, but they are also not called upon to be the embodiment of their art, they only need be its medium.

Everything is transmitted through this lens of the self, everything but the self. Its condition is indigence, what it wants is what can never be had, itself as other, other as itself, itself as world, world as itself, complete reconciliation and solace. The heart cries out to the head which can do nothing for it and in its frustration the spleen awakens, stretches, yawns and opens its gleeful eye. Everything is a return, solace and spleen, to childhood and beyond, those strange yearnings that seem so precious and so stupid, so personal as to be the very dignity of the person and so common as to be the song rattling in everyone's head. And you go through the dance once more with feeling, yielding to desire, denying desire, start with a hand and soon you're putting your whole self in, your whole self out.

The steps go something like this: From experience to the discovery of objectivity, then from objectivity to the discovery of functioning. Functioning is what underlies objectivity and as a category it subsumes it. What arises as objectivity is dissolved into functioning - it is not things as such, but their action. The next step is to the subject as the do-er of the functioning - it is inferred but not seen - thought of as necessary to provide or explain the coherence of functioning. It is the thing-in-itself but thought of from the point of view of functioning being taken as the truth of experience. Finally there is the necessary impossibility of the subject ever appearing. This is as far as it can go. The mind keeps on worrying at it, a self keeps on being inferred, speculated. The realisation that there cannot be a self as a subset of, or distinction in, functioning remains an asymptote, approach it and there is no more will to bring it about. All interest and purpose melts away, and would lead to a sort of nihilism if it wasn't soon realised that nihilism is a last redoubt of the separate subject. Rather see, with that annoyingly smug logic, that since purpose is no purpose therefore it is purpose.

A story from a dream: A man is walking trough a crowded city. He seems to have no destination, but from time to time he answers his cell-phone and a voice directs him to a rendezvous. For a while there is a sense of purpose in his steps, but he soon becomes distracted and again loses direction. Things keep dropping away. He stops at a café for a sandwich and a beer and after he leaves finds that he left his shoes under the table. His feet are bare, but he hardly noticed it. He goes back to look for them but doesn't find them. And so he goes on anyway only a little more uneasily. He acquires a package containing some books, holds on to it carefully, but loses that as well. He no longer has a cell-phone. There is nothing more to the story, it's as simple as that. Is it that he's dead but hasn't yet realised it, that he keeps trying to restore some kind of normality, but only ever half succeeds, or just fails completely but can't make himself accept that fact? Or is it just an abrupt summary of life, whose only truth is death? Things get more and more obvious as time goes by. His efforts are renewed, but they are never enough, they can only give back a diminished measure of what he put in. The sense of unease is numbed for a time but always returns.

To look with the eyes of desire is not to contemplate, or even to appreciate, it is to look with immediate judgement and so with a keener form of vision, one which structures the gaze with merciless efficiency. It is the perceptual analogue to the conceptual clarification that accompanies anger, and like anger must be felt both fully and freely to produce its effect. It is only the impersonal gaze that is capable of contemplation, of seeing each thing reposing in its own unique beauty - but being able to appreciate too broadly such a gaze lacks discrimination and the beauty it unearths all around is pale and sterile. The beauty that answers to desire is personal and exclusionary, as desire distinguishes what it wants and walls its delight away from rival desires, and as such it is scandalous to contemplation which would shrink back from desire's insistence on its privilege of enjoyment - would shrink back if it only could. Nevertheless the two can be reconciled in the contemplation of the desiring gaze, or more accurately in the impersonal assumption of the intensity of another's desire. This is a typical device of art and if immensely productive is of course in thoroughly bad faith. Who is this desiring other pretending to serve contemplation, who is this contemplator pretending to be at peace with desire?

Insightful discussions about the nature of mind and subjective reality are a perennial feature of the culture demonstrating a high level of fascination with this topic. It is not merely one interesting subject amongst others, but one with the promise of providing a solution to all the rest, or at least to all the vast family of problems that ranges from epistemology to spirituality, the alpha and omega of questions if not those in between. Various paradigms are frequently put forward to explain consciousness, the phenomenon of phenomena, but few of these make a clear distinction between high levels of functional integration, complex but computable attributes of mind, and irreducibly subjective experience, sometimes called 'the feeling of what happens'. None of the functional explanations make sense without a notion that serves in the place of who-it-is-for, and we can observe the position of this term moving about like a piece on a chess-board as different configurations of ideas are ventured. What is more curious is the range of different structured activities that can serve as the basis for an allegory not so much of consciousness itself, of the one who, as of the inquiry into the meaning and significance of this one. Any pursuit that can be interpreted as a form of self-transcendence, art, of course, but sport, travel, food, the whole gamut of leisure affords occasions for these indirect invocations of the source of all value. This leads to a profoundly pagan this-worldliness, a horizontal transcendence, or excedence which purports to redeem any activity deprecated under the vertical kind, and which is perhaps no more than its inevitable, or satanic, counter-current.

There is a kind of malaise that we describe as being out of the flow, by contrast with a usual sense of ongoing-ness that does not require being named, although occasionally the quality of our involvement in our projects is so strikingly happy or apt that we are moved to reflect on it and to speak about being in the flow - but often in this latter case we do not accept this state as being exceptional and feel that there ought to be a way to make it our normal state when active, and indeed that this level of fulfilment is ours by right, a right as yet, in the course of a larger history in which we are embedded, only partly perceived. There is something in this of Heidegger's distinction between the modes he calls readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) and presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) but here the instrument that has failed or obstructed us is not a hammer, or even a computing device, but ourselves. To pursue the analogy, there is an instrumental character to our being-in-the world which reveals it to be both highly structured internally and articulated with the world in a manifold fashion by way of that structure. Its ceaseless activity is to be understood not in terms of projects but of processes. It has goals and purposes which fully engage it, but while on one side it is employed to carry them through on another its task is to take, or read, them in, to grasp certain of the goals made available to it and to assimilate them so that they become entirely coherent with its prior character. Once a goal has become my goal it is already in the way of being effected. When this process is working smoothly I do not exist, I only arise and become a locus of inquiry when it is hindered or broken. Because of this self-consciousness always has a bad conscience with respect to the world and its most audacious move is to reverse this, to deliberately disrupt world-acceptance, revealing it as something added on, like advertising, so that the tort is now the world's enveloping heedlessness.

There is a strange naked sadness beneath the surface of the world which is not unfelt but denied so that life can go on. It is not a product of suffering, or a reflection of its universality, of how many things there are that go against us and cut us down, so much as it arises from the pathos of happiness. We can push against pain, as private, inevitable and overwhelming as it can be - it was always the least we could have expected, having once taken the measure of the world - but happiness can catch us unprepared and open up heights that we dared not admit. Sheer undeserved happiness will make us tremble for the slenderness of our claim to it, but most of all it is its fragility, its vulnerable to the situation in which we came upon it, to the others who seemed to effect it, to the very human littleness of all it took, its forgetting of the necessary revenge of time on us for having wanted to linger, for dropping the mask of discontent. Once you have glimpsed it you see it everywhere, it fills every popular song, the poor brave paeans as well as the laments. Everybody must recognise it instantly, the exposed wound when the bandage is ripped away, so that you wonder if all this time you were the one fool who was blind to what endlessly stares everyone in the face.

The ideas of the objective and the causal seem to be so closely connected as to be almost identical. An objective explanation is a causal one, and even when some phenomena are said to be causeless, like certain unpredictable quantum events, this term refers to a break on only one side of the causal chain, and is notable, indeed measurable, only because the other side remains perfectly unbroken. Events are objective when they are locked into causal relations with other objectivities. But another view of this is that since cause has no clear definition it effectively emerges as nothing more than the linking factor internal to objectivity. The distinction of objective and subjective is thus prior. But in this case the idea of causality also arises in the relation between the subjective and the objective, and as going in both directions. I experience these sensations because of those events in the world around me - this is such a natural way of thinking as to be almost beneath comment, and yet on examination it appears strange, as hiding a mystery. But here the causal mechanism is taken to be mostly outside of the subjective realm, the latter being merely the terminus of a cascade of informational events. It is far stranger in the other direction. Here causality is the natural concept that arises from the experience, or the capability rather, of purposive action. I intend to do something and then I do it. Even if the awareness of the intention is out of synchronisation with the causal sequence as retrospectively inferred by neuroscientists, the fact is that something has gone from the inside to the outside. We have the idea of causation, where we ourselves are the cause, without any knowledge of how it comes about. We have no inner sense of how our will brings about action, absolutely none at all. We just do.

"In front of my eyes, in front of Albertine's, there had been not just the morning sunshine but that invisible, translucent yet changeable medium through which we looked, I at her actions, she at the importance of her own life: that is to say, those beliefs which we do not perceive but which are no more a pure vacuum than the air we breathe; they compose around us a changing atmosphere, sometimes excellent, often unbreathable, which we could usefully measure and note as carefully as the temperature, pressure and season, for each of our days has its individual character, physical and psychological." - Marcel Proust, The Prisonner, tr. by Carol Clark.
The odd persistence of the idea that the unfolding event of life consists of the projection of a state of affairs before the gaze of a subject, that every phenomenon, every ongoing experience has a stable and efficient objective basis to know which would be to know the missing and true face of that experience, and so of the experience of the other. The subjective is the awareness of functioning and the project of mapping this functioning, one of man's great dreams, has gone quite far so that there is no reason to think it will fail of its promise; but for the unbridgable gap, that the subjective is no state of affairs, that the life that breathes is not a function of the  air it consumes. And in the end, if it was, why would we bother, or be so driven, to care?

The aim of describing things just as they appear will always fall short because things don't just appear, are never just presented, and if this is how we take them to be at certain privileged times, so that painters might seem to have captured them just so, this is a result of factors outside of the putative presentation, and these moments of realism will turn out to have been brief epochs in a restless history of artifice. To say that something is simply present is also to imply that what it is present to is simple and distinct and unpresented, entirely and in principle outside of presentation - this is in the grammar of the term. Consider it then with different terms: often what appears is more correctly what is suffered. A sort of physiology or physiognomy of the sufferer is implicit in the event, a disposition felt but not entirely self-conscious. Looking back on the history of seeing things as they are we see a succession of dispositions which only have in common that each one presumes it has finally freed itself of the previous one. There is a palpable weight to dispositions which we both welcome and resist. To be influenced by someone, to find oneself drawn to share his or her point of view, may be more a result of the transfer of dispositions than of anything pointed out in the objective. Each conversation as it proceeds crystallises its own distinct world of meanings, more or less shared even if the partners disagree. We suffer in common, this is how we conceive shared objects, compassion is not a more urbane version of pity, but a communicational subcarrier of enormous speed and bandwidth.

There is a recurrent idea that what this is consists of two parts, an underlying layer or basis of reality and an overlay of beliefs and theories about that reality. According to this notion, the knowing, the knower and the known all have their place within the upper layer which is a region in which radical changes of the form of the known and of the perspective from which it is viewed are possible. The base is unknowable because it doesn't share in the common nature of the knowing, but it is indispensable in this way of thinking both because it provides a structuring orientation for the ideal layer, enables one set of formations to be more real than another without either of them being entirely real at all, and because at the core of the knower there is subjectivity which entirely escapes theorisation and hence change. As soon as it is stated in this way it becomes clear that the goal is to bring the subject into direct relation with reality, or back into such direct relation as if they had been sundered at some time; or indeed it is better to say that the subject could never have been separate from reality and that the illusion of this separation exists only in the layer of appearance and is due to the error of equating the apparent knower with the subject. Only in this way could the apparent knower seem to be in bondage and be sustained by the futile quest to escape it.