Whatever experience is, it entails an implicit and complete account of itself. In so far as part of such an account may be, or become, explicit it is incomplete and subject to challenge and repudiation, but any such repudiation always means an expansion of the field that must be acknowledged to belong to this account. This is the strange principle at the heart of experience and the basis for all dialectics and practices of expansion of perspective, for the very life of the mind, but it is hard to express clearly. It is also subject to a skeptical doubt which can draw on some empirical support. Thus some would say that the principle of conservatism that constrains experience to neglect contradicting evidence that falls outside of a very narrow working region is a more fundamental characteristic of it. But even such neglect is an active position, something defended because it is known that, and where, defense is needed, and acknowledging this is enough. It ought to be, perhaps, that there is a dialogic reconciliation of all diverse points of view, but this only needs to be so in principle, in practice it may always be too soon, or that there are disproportionate forces in play to realistically bring it about. Perhaps another way of saying it is that experience is always embedded in something, and what it is embedded in is, in fractal fashion, also exactly experience, and so on, indefinitely.

Draw a triangle with thinking, feeling and willing at the corners, call them the powers of the mind or of consciousness. Now embed this triangle upside down in a larger triangle, or so that a new outward-facing triangle is drawn on each edge. Each of the three new triangles representing a combination of two of the three powers. The good, the true and the beautiful which are the goals, purposes or ideals of the mind are described by these pairs. Thus the good is in the combination of feeling and willing, where feeling is understood as the perception of value, say as positive or negative, as enhancing or diminishing life. When this is combined with the power of action, when it is the guide of action, then we have the striving for the good. Again, thinking and willing yield the true, understood as what we strive towards using our power of resolving in clarity. Lastly, the beautiful combines thinking and feeling, and is disinterested, having no component of the will admixed with it. It is disinterested contemplation against the ideal of combining clarity and value. This may have a certain elegance, but there is a further dimension not included which distinguished between higher and lower ideals. The combination of will and value takes in both the worlds of business (what is money but a concrete form of value?) and of ethics, the two outward preoccupations that define what Matthew Arnold called 'Hebraism' with all its virtues and excesses. Similarly Arnold's 'Hellenism', the ideals of 'sweetness and light' which embraces beauty and truth respectively, has its higher and lower forms, 'bathos' and the 'sublime', science and philosophy respectively. This combinatoire for what it is worth, enables you to make some interesting connections.

The 'thatness' of experience is also a project. No need to call it pure, since it is at the same time pervasive and anonymous to the point of utter oblivion and devastatingly monumental, alone. Perhaps nothing more is intended by all the existentialist palaver about Being. The principle of particularity cannot be particular and neither can it be general. It is orthogonal to every 'what' - quite simply. So what? So what! The whatness is the content of all intentions, it pursues its way in further unfoldings of intention, dazzlements of what, but couldn't move a single step without this unmeanable difference, we seem to already know but can only mean to mean. Inside of every word we use because already inside of every thought - what is most inside to us, altogether us, is outside to it, and still us. Like a tiny hole that goes right down to the core, you can only mean to mean, more and more lightly, more and more dépouillé, until knowing nothing, you drop through.

A state of mind is taken to be the element of experience that belongs in the first-person mode, but this is not to say that all of experience can be contained in the first-person, or even that the first-person is an entirely coherent idea. Think of it rather as arising within an evolving project, so that the notion of an invariant deep-subject, the possessor of such states, represents a stage in the relationship between the known and the unknown, between light and darkness. It may seem to be the vanguard in the resolution of a dialectic but this is not to say that it is able to contain the truth towards which that process is striving, a way indeed of drawing the striving itself into the foreground. This is not to devalue the first-person technics of the subject, but to see what can be revealed by regarding it as a special case rather than as an essence.

Continuous with the notion held by some that since human experience is something (some thing) instantiated in a physical structure operating according to known laws, it will soon be possible to 'upload the connectome', together with a bunch of other biological and environmental differentials, into another medium which will then become the matrix for that experience, with the difference that the path to be followed henceforth by the experiencer will no longer be contingent, or will only be contingent in a non-contingent way - continuous with this, our hypothetical complete theory of consciousness will enable us to extrapolate all possible future paths of experience from any clearly defined starting point. In either case it would be possible to run unlimitedly many alternative scenarios, and on condition that they each resolved to some uniform end-point, say a 'good death', to compare them and find which of them offered the optimal solution in terms of the internal criterion of a life well-lived, (or the external consensus criterion for that matter, since they are bound to differ.) One can imagine then that for each fully defined experience as a starting point, which would naturally involve a full specification of the experiencer, there would be a best possible resolution. It might, for example, involve the convergence of the life trajectory into an ascending spiral of wisdom and initiation, so that one died as a sage-king. This best possible resolution would exist like the solution to a set of equations, and it would necessarily encode the series of precisely calibrated external events required to catalyse the desired sequence of internal realisations. The question now is, what would happen if the inescapable evidence that this was all a simulation were among the external events that were encountered along the way? Would this destroy the optimality, or alternatively, does the assumption of optimality mean that such a realisation would have to necessarily be included among that set of precisely calibrated initiations? Curiously, the result of this thought experiment seems to point to the second as the only acceptable alternative. If there is an authentic resolution of experience, it must be so independently of whether experience is metaphysically original or a simulation. And even if there is in fact no such resolution, no optimality, it still points to something very peculiar about experience.

So, what if we did have a complete theory of consciousness? We could encode a situation in a time point, T, taken to be present and submitting it to our theory we could draw forth a mapping in appropriate terms of the multi-layered state of consciousness: what is central, what peripheral, the temporal scales of the various components and the details of their loose interrelations, the adjustments in action potentials for both deliberate and non-deliberate actions, as well as potential responses, and so on. What about pain? Or suffering? Say that our model was one of a suffering subject and perhaps this suffering is connected in some way to the situation we have just simulated. Suffering is keenly felt in consciousness, surely that can't be disputed, so it would have to emerge in our projection of the conscious state as the tipping of a certain value beyond a certain threshold, and the associated rearrangement of certain structures. As far as our theory was concerned, purely as the working out of mathematical entailments, there would be nothing to distinguish this painful or suffering state from any other. Yes, of course we would see that the action potentials associated with the desire to do something to reverse the painful situation would also be elevated (and there are some philosophers who would assert that the state of suffering itself is nothing more than this - an overwhelming and ineffectual desire of a 'mind'-system to change its own state) but these too would be merely other systematic consequences of the same set of hypotheses. There is nowhere in this where the ethical substance associated with a consciousness in pain could arise, except of course within that consciousness and hence again carrying no weight from our perspective as subjects of the (complete) theory of consciousness. From our position, assuming we decided to take on the fact that there was indeed a relative reality inescapably associated with that pain-filled consciousness - and there is no unsentimental reason why we ought to take this attitude -, we might satisfy our consciences by tracing out a plausible path of neutralisation which would deliver our hypothetical subject with the least amount of intermediate pain to a state in which it could no longer experience any more pain, in other words a purely mathematical euthanasia.  

Say that here was a complete scientific and naturalistic solution to the problem of consciousness, what might it look like? There are a number of basic forms it could take. The first, on analogy with theories in physics, would be a comprehensive mathematical description of the phenomenon, one perhaps involving new kinds of mathematics. Such a theory might leave the exact nature of the phenomenon unexplained while furnishing accurate predictions both of what would be required of physical structures so that they could instantiate consciousness, and given such a structure what its 'subjective experience' would be. The theory to be complete would need to contain rich enough rules for the transformation between structure and experience, so that that given any consciousness-instatiating-structure we could tell precisely what its experience would be, and given any sufficiently plausible description of an experiential state we would know how to construct a structure which would 'have' that experience in the appropriate context. Under the first alternative all of this would be on paper and be expressed via symbolic relations without regard to the practical realisability of any of the proposed structures. Indeed, such a theory might be able to answer such questions as to the minimal structure required to instantiate a given comprehensiveness and intensity of consciousness, or about what kinds of consciousness are possible, as for example whether there is a clear distinction between simple consciousness and self-consciousness. A second form that such a theory could take might be that it consisted only of structural prescriptions, rules of transformation, and experiential descriptions, as above, but without the underlying mathematical unification. In other words the problem would be 'solved' by the extension of purely empirical research into AI agents, and in which the experiential component was defined by a sort of modified Turing test. An experiential description of the structure's interactive behaviour would prove to be the only satisfactorily concise one available. The third form of such a theory would be like the second, only as applied to our own brains. In this case the emphasis would fall on the rules of transformation, which would be expected to be detailed and comprehensive and verifiable by validated interventions in both directions. If the first alternative is experience physics, and the second is experience mechanics, the third is experience engineering. All three alternatives seem absurd, but it is hard to pin down exactly where.    

As far as motives are concerned, if we speak of them in the register of values, is there anything like 'use value' in play or is it almost entirely 'exchange value', that is, socially determined value, or value mediated by social instincts? Even the most practical wants, such as for food and shelter, retain a largely social significance whenever they are expressed in a social setting, as for example with the beggars who have become so prominent in our city streets, whose entire presentation is so heavily coded. The idea of use value, which is that of the quantum of pure enjoyment in the gratification of a desire, seems to be a notion which functions as an essential component of the complex exchange, or symbolising, social value. As if the latter veils itself in the former. You need or choose to think that you are doing something because it pleases you, that you do it on your own account, so that you may better serve the ends of whatever social signification you are driven to enact, the latter being something that you cannot make sense of within the theory of the self that you retain. So it is with the powerful so-called 'ego drives'. Since there is no ego there cannot be any ego drives, but the incoherences in desire can appear to be resolved by returning on themselves so as to appear to be sui generis. It is all generis alterius, which is perhaps the same as to state the paradox that once you follow the clue found in mimetic desire you end up finding that the 'original' is only a certain moment of the mimetic.

You keep trying to describe it and never get it quite right but there is a basic set-up of the self, an almost unvarying sketch in the imagination of how you are as a being-in-the-world, a Dasein. Just as there is a body image in the mind, or more precisely two body images, the sensory figure and the motor figure, the afferent and the efferent, distinguishable but partially mapped onto each other, so there is an image of the mental self, also divided into the thinker and the observer and perhaps some other variants. What does it look like? Well, it has a front and a back at the very least, which means that it is not the sole possible observer of itself. The front may be small, bright and sharp, while the back is large, dark and cavernous. As the two sides of a single entity the front and back are coordinated in movement, when the front swings around to face where the back just was the back has also swung around to where the front just was, like a clown with a ladder. It is perhaps a clownish arrangement, there is something quite funny about how the two sides cooperate underminingly and undermine cooperatively, although there is little doubt that the front is the 'straight man' of this pair. But this is too much elaboration, the point is that this is a basic structure, or an implicit pattern out of which the structures of the knowing, living, acting being are formed. When you bring yourself to bear upon something you shape the actor-knower out of this pattern. It is the most natural thing to do since you learned to do it long before you could reflect, before there was a you, before anything like this structure itself had come about, and in most respects it works quite well. But when you begin to see that that's how it's done, that's how what you call your self, life, experience are accomplished, you are able to question the pattern itself, and for this inquiry its implicit presuppositions are fatal.    

Modes of being in relation to a group of two or more other people are far more complex than can be described using second- or third-person categories. You might begin by asking whether you are part of the group or not, whether you are in or out? And what if you don't know, can't tell - the criteria are unclear but the distinction feels real enough. Say it is a triangle where each member has two second-person relations, then it is not just these two you need to consider, but the detail of their relation with each other, an additional third-person fact, and one which is almost entirely unknown. Then add a fourth, and the number of combinations grows astronomically. How well can you read any of these people? Even if you have a clear sense of what your present relations are with one of them you don't know how they will alter, what hidden sides they will reveal, as a result of the other interactions, some of which are in the open while others, most, are hidden. There is a tremendous amount of information being thrown about but you are aware only of a fraction of it, as well as all that you respond to without any awareness. Reading the relations is one thing while interpreting them is quite another. All of these factors in so far as they concern the others are necessarily vague so you retain them as a set of hypotheses and credences, which means that your own position which depends in part on your understanding of how you stand in relation to them is also represented as a field of possibilities. Every action, every further piece of behaviour represents a complex update of the entire network. Your internal state as well as those of the others contain not only present circumstances and the directly relevant histories, but also broader histories linked by association, by relevance to ways of understanding analogous situations that extend far beyond the persons involved. The effects of actions on these internal states are thus highly non-linear so that they cannot be interpolated from say, conversation or avowed dispositions. Everything is ambiguous, but perhaps least so where you think it most so, and vice versa.

If an alarm deep in your brain is triggered in the night, by something in a dream or a change in the body, then the waking mind is suddenly switched back on by the appropriate activating system. You are immediately brought back as thinker, and even after you have seen that there is no obvious cause for the original alarm you are stuck in a state of wakefulness for an indefinite period. But it is a special kind of wakefulness, highly alert but not fully present. Thoughts skitter weightlessly, they may be distressing and repetitive, or amusing and even rather insightful, or just hopelessly dull, or all at once, but even though you seem to be unwillingly committed to them, it is as if they are being thought by a mechanical duplicate of yourself. There is a part missing, certainly including the countervailing body-consciousness - what there is of it is also detached and untethered -, you know it is missing but you can't really point to what that missing part is. It is like a false alarm in a tall apartment building. Everybody has to evacuate the premises via the stairways, and then stand around for far too long until the emergency services arrive and certify that it is safe to return. You feel dislocated, but are strangely liable to speak to your neighbours for the one and only time. Afterwards when you have slept it off it seems dreamlike, you cannot precisely recall the duration of the event. So there you are in your bed, your mind buzzing like a trapped insect while you wait for some sort of all-clear. What will gradually flood back into you is a sense of well-being, an opiate like sweetness, and a reintegration of the self along lines of fracture that you are hardly aware exist.

You can be awake and thinking of something, that is, have your attention on some sequence of experiences which are unfolding according to your interest and intention, and then you can be aware that you are thinking about that thing, in effect thinking about your thinking. In the latter case your attention is almost wholly withdrawn from the original intentional stream and is now treating that stream itself as object. When does this occur? Generally when there is something unpleasant that is uninvitedly accompanying the original stream of thought. It might be that what seems to be determining the thought stream is mostly opaque and constraining, the element of optionality and space co-arising within the thought is attenuated to almost zero; you feel as though you are being held captive by that thought, which is also predictable and dull. But what is opaque, what forces you into a narrow and repetitive channel, what is dead about the thought, is also precisely yourself. Every thought, in the act of being thought, is volitional, and so if it feels constrained the pressure is felt precisely in that aspect of yourself whose nature it is to be free to choose. What is painful is to have your freedom overruled while still remaining your freedom, as if you are being wrestled by a stronger opponent and have not, or cannot surrender. And when that opponent is yourself, your own dead and unrelenting self, yourself as pure gravity, this is all the worse. And yet in this event another possibility appears, one that is far from obvious, so it might be missed again and again, which is the freedom to shift the focus awareness out of the stream and onto the stream. When this occurs there is a shift in the implicit sense of what you are as agency - a limited but significant expansion of freedom. You are still thinking, still within the same constellation of basic elements, but their balance has shifted. Perhaps it now becomes possible to move in and out of the thought. You gain a glimpse of the fact that what you are up to, what you are always up to in one way or another in every waking moment, is richer and more strange than you had suspected. Whatever the meaning of this rare but ordinary experience it is not easily understood. It ought not to be hastily theorised.  

What you believe is what you believe to be true. It pertains to the state of affairs independent of yourself, the total state of affairs. There is no state of affairs that describes you, you are not an affair but the actual or potential observer of affairs, and your relation to the state of affairs is self-evident. The implications of your relation or position in regard to what you believe are also self-evident. There are no internal grounds for doubting what you believe to be true; it belongs to the outermost of the frames of understanding that you possess. If there were a true frame beyond what you believed then that would be your truth and you would be detached from what you believe, and so you would not really believe it, but only be entertaining it. You can only believe that one state of affairs is true, every other pertinent state of affairs, including or included in that one, is either hypothetical or merely entertained. These other frames of belief are what you believe at other times, or what others believe or what you believe others to believe - all alternatives are hypothetical or merely entertained, they are present only for the sake of argument. What you believe is not explicit, not without internal contradiction and changes superficially from hour to hour. All of your passion is a direct expression of what you believe, and so you cannot think your way out of it, even if it causes you pain, since the only effective thought you have is based upon what you unreflectively hold to be true. While your beliefs are inexplicit, their effects like shadows cast are less so, and these can be blurred and moderated by creating a cloud of fictions around your beliefs. You never believe these fictions, but you can argue with them and so pretend to not entirely disbelieve them.

Thoughts, feelings, images, perceptions, memories, all of these are are names which attempt to differentiate the various intentional instances of experience, they are all movements, even when they produce no other change than a certain re-weighting of alternatives, a flicker in intent, the most elementary sign of life as already answerable. (To what, to whom?) They are all directed predispositions to actions, to minute changes of state issuing out of a generalised and virtual self-reference. They direct attention towards some further point, some adjacency of the current point, which is the inversely determined place in which the intentions are lodged as indifferent possibilities. So, in this simplistic view of what is going on, moment to moment, there is a differentiation of spaces, a space into which and a space from which. As long as these are viewed under the aspect of pure experience they can mean nothing more than themselves, their meaning is entirely exhausted by their being, they are utter transparency. It is only when another frame of objective meaning is placed over them, when they have to answer to possible responses and consequences, that they become opaque as representing approaches to an alienating certainty. If the field before you is small and limited the field behind you, the bulk of latent meanings you carry along is what stops you from passing through the needle's eye.  

The fact that the foundational principles on which mathematics is built have a purely ideal reality does not mean that they are not objective, nor especially that they can be understood perspicuously in all their consequences by the same mind that clearly posits them. This is pace arguments derived from the correspondences between mathematics and physical reality, the latter uncritically regarded as the benchmark for refractory otherness and hence true objecthood. If mathematics is a kind of empiricism the determining experiments are still required to be wholly ideal, that is, on the same footing as the original postulates, various fringe examples of hybrid proofs notwithstanding. The point of this is that just because something is mind-created or imaginary it does not follow that it can be dissolved or resolved by a gesture of the same kind as that which produced it, only somehow in the reverse direction. There may be something like the purely imaginary where to sketch something out and to erase it completely are of equal weight, but between that pole and something like mathematics where the consequences of a set of postulates can take centuries and the efforts of hundreds of minds to begin to clarify, there is a wide territory. The structures which condition the self surely belong somewhere in this interzone, but not any particular momentary instances of the self, which are readily revealed to be on the flimsy end of the spectrum.

The phenomenal self orbits the soul, that would be one way to put it. That self works so hard but in its inherent blindness can give no account of what it is driving at beyond the words that dramatise its momentary predicament. It bears no burden because it is weightless, but on occasion it stammers after the soul which it dimly perceives bottled up, obscure, in silence and in need. It follows an itinerary, this is noticed after a time, that it is always arriving at or departing from some more than half familiar place, that now it rushes and now it slows as under the effects of a predictable gravitation, it makes great arcs and swings around ever returning. Not ellipses or even figure-eights, but some more complex dance with imagined branches where it always makes the same choice. You feel that you are falling into truth but there is an obliqueness in your path so that you never get any closer to it than you did the time before, you sail past without even grazing its atmosphere. You are unable to count the dark centres that determine your course, but it has to be more than one because you go so erratically, because to you it resembles chaos. To the soul it must be simple, you'll never know, it must see you always on the shortest path, the least action, blindingly simple, but you don't possess the key to this. Instead you wonder if you are fleeing as a consequence of your own actions or those of others, and if of others, then of whose acts are they the consequence, right back to the first crime.

You seek the end of seeking, but the end of seeking is only worth seeking if you are still seeking; if it were attained it would cease to be attainable. Everything in you that seeks views the end of seeking as the greatest possible catastrophe. But seeking is another name for experience, one which puts all emphasis on the fact that experience is never adequate to itself. This inadequacy can appear as an insistence on the inescapable dimension of self-transcendence, but only to one integrated enough for this notion to arise. It can just as well, and more easily, appear as pain, or the force of a gravity that denies even where you find yourself as if it were a already a false transcendence. Say that as long as there is experience there is a circular process in act, and you find yourself labouring in one of its channels, going up or going down, pitting your being into the fray beyond finite intention. To emerge from this it is not enough to identify with a favoured direction but only with the entire movement, which is precisely what can never be chosen.

Pure mood is as engaged as you can be. There might be a lot of self-coloured noise, perhaps a sort of dark confetti, but it does not cohere, so that no single reference point can appear. And this is perhaps because there is nothing resembling a sense of detachment, which would also be, by the paradox of a detachment that chooses, an operative ideal unity. Perhaps the phenomenal self has come undone and the diverse elements that are usually embraced under it find themselves drifting without direction or persistence in time, mere pulses of experience. An unconnected living moment is a dreadfully concrete thing, almost an unmediated state of matter - as matter is never something that just sits there, but is at the same time will in action. These pulses are like bursting pinpoints "de petites masses globuleuses, grosses comme des têtes d'épingles et garnies de cils tout autour. Une vibration les agite." Monads that have fallen out of harmony, éventrés, they expend themselves.  

A still mind on a Sunday afternoon, the movements are incessant but lead nowhere throwing out vague strands of second-hand thought. As if all the energy has drained away into the basement leaving only the elusive traces of a mysterious bitter-sweetness, a sort of nostalgia as if you have outlived yourself. Having seen this, that you are no more than this, that you can't raise a single word against it, can you ever go back? Something here is real but it isn't you. A strange blue abyss, like a twilight after making love, planets drifting apart, a mood no music and no wine can ever reach. Lights blinking on the other side of the bay, doors closing on empty rooms, the smell of cooking, intimations of mortality in memories of boyhood. If time was to be redeemed how much it would have to come for, how many islands so long adrift?

Space depends on the gap between subjects as observer and object observed, together with the idea of translation, or simply that the relation between two objects can be understood by projecting the view as if from one of them. If each intentional moment of experience is complete in itself embracing both subject and object then the putative gap is anything but a separation, is rather an element of experience fully as much as the noesis and the noema. There is an arrangement of complementary parts ample enough to embrace oneness and distinction. What is thought of as the witnessing function should therefore not be considered as a perspective generating point of observation. To see it this way is an illusion that is easy to fall into and perhaps as easy to fall out of, while hard or impossible to climb out of. The witnessing is the entire frame, can only be rightly thought of as a spatial consciousness. There is no space (as separation or yawning gulf between things, as the sense of teetering on the brink of a chasm) because there is spatial consciousness (the subject being a weird kind of fullness, pervasive in a dimension free from presence or absence.) And the same logic can be applied to time.

There is a shared world and a private world and they are sharply set off from each other although not separate. The private world is an opaquely bordered cell within the shared world, while the shared world is only a region, an outer suburb, of the private world, one that has been voluntarily but irrevocably traded to a common culture. Whatever you experience privately is relative to the person you are in a world of persons, but in that world your standing depends on the enigma you present of an unreachable inner world and its allusion to an impossible other knowing. You know this of your 'self' only because this is exactly how others appear to you. This is commonplace but inexhaustibly strange, so you forget how much you need to feign a sense of being at home in it, as if it were the only home you knew. It is as if in some barely remembered past there was only a single subject and you are searching for the narrow door that takes you back into it. It was divided by a single bar but the mere event of that simple division exploded into the most complex and interdependent foam of differences which is still only the complex and un-mappable movement of a single mirroring bar. There is only one thing happening. Your need to keep thinking is the movement of that bar as the impossibility of ever catching up with it. You never see the bar but experience it in the strange and shifting divisions of your world. In reality the bar is the thinking of the sole thinker of whom you are just a thought.

At first sight it would seem that the recently popular theory in neuroscience called Predictive Coding is merely catching up with insights long-known in the phenomenology of Husserl - such as the essential interplay for cognition of retentions and protentions and of a nested hierarchy of horizons - and also with the Merleau-Pontyian insistence on the functional integration of perception, proprioception and interioception. In this case however the apparent isomorphism between descriptions from the inside and from the outside mask a much deeper divergence. Even in its anti-transcendental formulation, phenomenology takes knowledge and freedom as paradigmatic, while the neuroscientific accounts, which can be unified under some such least-action principle as the minimisation of free energy actually tend to explain the internal hypotheses of freedom and knowledge as approximations which can in principle never attain full precision. This difference goes to the very heart of the meaning of subjective experience. If such a thing as qualia, say, or some other avatars of pure subjectivity, exist then surely their  minimal function is to underpin phenomenology. But if phenomenology is never what it thinks it is, this function may well be redundant.

"...negative feelings in biosystems are not a mere mirror image of positive feelings, because there is a much higher sense of urgency for change involved in states of suffering, and because it occurs in combination with the phenomenal qualities of losing control and coherence of the phenomenal self—and that this is what makes conscious suffering a very distinct class of states, not just the negative version of happiness." - T. Metzinger. This "fundamental asymmetry between suffering and joy" seems true enough, but it is also the case that there is a truth value that is not precisely in suffering but contiguous with it and perhaps only accessible by way of it, which outweighs the values associated with joy and other positive or ego syntonic states. You must tread carefully in this, but it seems that the systematic organisation on behalf of the phenomenal self, which is much of what we call experience (understood as being inextricable from our generative theories of experience) functions as a veil which conceals the noumenal self, the real subject. But suffering generally doesn't take us anywhere, since whatever portion of our analytic intellect remains accessible is given over to finding ways out of that state, although often its efforts seem to have the reverse effect. The intellect bears an ambivalent, even an oedipal relation to suffering which it fails to understand. The possibility is there however, amid the storm, to train it upon the lie which we have hitherto spent our lives shoring up.

The phenomenological or first-person premise is that, while all experience is mediated, immediacy precedes mediation. If everything that is prior is immediate, then how could anything other than the immediate gain a point of entry, how could any mediation come about? We would in that case be suffocated by immediacy. For experience to be possible the prior must include what is not immediate, as in the way that we respond before we have any notion of being in response to anything, in just the way we are responding now. Thus the immediate is already a mediation, and indeed we are content to imagine that what we come to recognise as our lives started long before we were born; it is only that we expect it to end purely and simply on our watch. The purpose of birth is therefore so that we can be entirely present at our death, even and especially if we don't mean to be. The reality is bound to be a disappointment, the trick seems to be to rehearse it as thoroughly as possible, to go through it before the point at which there is no-one left to go through anything.  

Trace the knot of insufficiency so lightly so as not to betray your betrayal. What is pressing is all you have failed to say, with the same gesture that is both a reaching-out and a fending-off, a suspension at the moment you determined yourself by a substitution, a short-cut you felt so entitled to, your privilege of leaving the scene incomplete, you side-stepped and wrote your story over the top of that gap, which followed you everywhere assuming a face and a place where what was owed could never be forgotten but kept on whispering to you in the unease of every lucid hour and of streets and trees and the eyes of everyone you passed. So lop-sided, so inescapably hyphenated, you became the forgetting of what could never be forgotten, and the playful juggling with what was really a burden too heavy to carry or to deliver to the one to whom it was owed, who never stops looking at you with gentle and disappointed sadness and seeing what you've become, unforgiven and unforgiving.