To think a thought is not a detached smokers' consideration of it but a complete entering in, a letting go, as if going blindly into a tunnel; you are going to be thrown around and you don't know where you'll emerge, even if you know it perfectly well, since you've gone through this very same tunnel so many times before. Thinking in this sense is 'I'-ing, you can't separate yourself from it in act, but are additionally aware of not being able to do so, and so remain separate from it in spirit, that is virtually. This split is nothing new, it is in the very nature of the beast, part of its internal compass. It is the experience of being bound since only a freedom can be restricted; you are bound to think of yourself thinking in this way, the thought and the thought of the thought are one, and the thought itself is part of a complex - which means a tightly connected set of dispositions to a related set of thoughts circling around a black hole. You emerge from one, for a moment you can look around and breathe, and then you find yourself sucked into the entrance to another. It was believed a little while back, it seems, that something called irony could save you from this, that by also standing back and cooly commenting on your own absurdity you would be rescued from it. You were only saved from looking absurd, but at the price of surrendering completely to the hypothetical gaze that supposedly confirms this. The hypothesis of such a validating gaze, in the hall of mirrors we currently inhabit, was soon seen to be just another complex.