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.