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Wednesday, 3 May 2017



You try to force inspiration, but by definition inspiration is what can't and won't be forced. If there are no issues by which to gauge your discontent then there is nothing to find, and no way of telling whether you have found it. "There is nothing there!" What comes to mind is the old Freudian saw about the infant boy searching for the female penis, that which ought to belong to, be a part of, his mother or sister or playmate. It is part of his quest to understand his own origins. There must be something that can be seized, some index in physical space of the axis of the other's subjectivity, something that sticks out. But the search is disappointing, the absence of a result disquieting. That there is a mystery here is beyond doubt, but his means of investigating it are not up to the task. He may guess that he is looking in the wrong direction, but it's the only way he knows to look, the means must answer to the knowing that is sought. But there is a void, and he can only conclude that what was there has been removed. What remains is only a kind of within-ness, or so he later concludes, choosing to project a mysterious and beautiful unfolding, a mystical origin of the world. It is not exactly an absence you come upon but a flat presence, a kind of passivity without spur or salience. The apparatus of searching fails and perhaps you notice it for the first time, your uncanny self in Vorhandenheit.

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