

Experience can be inventoried. There is bodily feeling, which includes all forms of perception, there are thoughts and there is will in the form of attention and the direction of attention. There are also memories and imaginations which seem to consist of imitations or displaced repetitions of experience or of parts of experience, and there is a large quantum of spontaneous noise, of voices and dreamlike imaginary occasions that well up like static on a radio. Furthermore there are relations of these elements, which seem to be inferred thoughts that seek to express complicated inter-dependencies behind the succession of events in attention. Thought is this incessant process of inference, weaving disparates together and instantly filling any apparent gaps or discontinuities. Separate elements are those which can be attended to at once, but most of these seem to already consist of amalgamations of references to other parts. The sense of 'I' is centred on bodily feeling, but is also rooted in a web of relations between feeling and other elements. All of the solidity and constancy of the 'I' is in reality a constant work of diversion of attention along almost repeating paths, a work which calls upon thought and feeling and memory in a particularly prioritised fashion. This is the kind of process which is normalised at the cost of a certain critical meta-stability of emotional feeling. The normality masks the strange fact that none of these sub-processes can 'see' anything at all, but all depend on a seeing that is unseen. Only the sense of wonder, of astonishment at this complete unknowing, moves within this play against this play.
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