We are all engaged in the same world but through different and incompatible interpretations. To encounter another is to enter into their interpretation of this shared world - everyone else seems to be so sure of themselves, they've seen it all and know just where every piece fits in. When you return to your own after one of these sallies you find that nothing is quite the same. There has been a violation, as if thieves had ransacked the place while you were out.
What a delicate and artificial construction your solitude is!
A 'crazy' woman stops you on the street, ancient mariner style, to urge some teachings from her 'enlightened master' whose words, she says, are being spoken through her. She rambles away somewhat incoherently, or else it's that her speech is obscured by a heavy accent, so you can only pick up isolated fragments, but all the same, in a confused but uncanny way she reads your every thought, precisely exposing all the fetid matters that have been buzzing in your mood the entire morning. Are you that transparent? Apparently so, so that someone whose mind is freed from the straight-jackets of stupidity and irrelevance which hobble the brains of those who are, or work to seem to be, adjusted to the culture can see right through the citizen to the helpless child beneath.

Not to move a centimetre away from this, not to redeem the moment but leave it as it is, the small change of life, a context without any content, only the unseen and unseeing invariants. If this were art it would be unforgivable. There is no music in it, no glory, unwitting it picks up the shards that fail to lock and drops them again. The heat's arrhythmias stroke the boughs with silent fingers, gentle as dust.

Nothing in what is taken to be present reality serves as a shield against the future anterior, 'it will have been'; and there cannot even be an anticipation of such a future anterior since there is no saying how many of these revisionary moments there will be. Everything in the present, then, no matter how certain, even as one-dimensional as a pure quale, always contains an opening for a future reinterpretation as something else, something unsuspected, the range of such unknowns being unlimited. This is a much larger field of doubt than its temporal complement, the sense of possibility of illusion arising from having made an incorrect or premature synthesis of data already presented in pristine form. It is not a matter of peeling back a too hasty overlay such as experience has schooled us to do. Instead it is as if hidden catches, or tiny neglected keyholes, remain in the most solid of constructions which when engaged will transform the whole set-up. You don't notice the keyhole until the key appears, which when turned reveals hinges where you never thought to look for them. And even today a key need not be inserted anywhere, it is just a code invisibly applied, then bingo, the desk by whose categories you thought to have gained some mastery is turned inside out. If it's no longer a desk then what is it, what will it have been? Where are you sitting? You? or what?

The struggle to understand only so that understanding can shatter on its own futility - the answers are all futile. Who could there be to accept an answer? Only the questions hint at what is there, those stubborn and mute questions of time and sense that a child asks, the first and last fruits of its own mind. It is calmly clear that he does not belong, that he is a guest and owes the host no more than this awareness, this inquiry, which is the softest and most gratifying requital. The question is never answered, stays open for his whole life, can only be resumed, faintly, bent into strange shapes, in everything that delights him or halts him in wonder, that twilight face, the raised hand holding a glass of wine, the cool blue crystalline air.

A dreaming without a dreamer; no waking up, only dream characters in a dream world built around a singularity known as death, at once the source and end of the dreaming.  The only unique event, without a representative: death - nobody waking up, birth - nobody waking up. Representation only possible because there is something that can't be represented. Life is the unique subject consuming and consumed by time - a nonsense which resolves itself in layer after layer of imaginary worlds, the (secondary) imagination echoing the timeless primary imagination in time, which is also imagined; I am, the echo, or refraction, backwards and forwards in time of the singularity, birth and death face to face.  Restlessness in the three dimensions of desire, will and knowingness; whatever it is cannot be resolved through these, but these are all it knows of itself - more real than their enjoyer. Affirmation without bounds - which shows up as this absurd clown, the personage, the mirage.

The paradox of desire is that is that desire perishes in its own success. This needs to be stated in relation to a specific goal: if you desire X then on attaining X your desire for it dissolves. But another desire arises to fill its place... and often this is precisely the desire to desire X again. So your multitudinous desires transform into the desire to desire, both requiring and resisting gratification. A similar paradox arises in terms of will: you will X, and when X is achieved your will perishes and you go into a depressive state from which you can only be roused by the awakening of a new object to fix your will on. In this case there is no question, as there is with desire, of wanting to repeat the cycle exactly, the will does not look back, it bears a different relation to time. Desire is timeless, but will seeks renewal in the new. There is a realisation of the redundancy of the object, what will enjoys is the exercise of will, the power of achievement in the abstract, the will to will is the will to power. But since will must have an object the understanding of its redundancy can only be expressed by making the object absurd. Again there is a similar pattern for consciousness as knowingness: it is an appetite for assimilating its object, and once it has known this object through and through it incorporates it into the context, ceases to be conscious of it, and seeks to know the larger object which only now becomes available to it. Consciousness 'seeks' absolute consciousness, for which the absurd can only represent an isolated moment. Desiring, willing, knowing, each in some sense 'knows' its own map, 'knows' the structure or the rhetoric of its world. They are enactments within a 'space' in which the unfolding of such a rhetoric is axiomatic. 

That consciousness is characterised by intentionality is an error sustained by the fact that it is difficult to formulate the alternative thesis without it. The same goes for qualia, which are in a sense the logical complements of intentionality. 'To be conscious is to be conscious of some X' and the 'X' is pure particularity which can only be specified by the limit of a net of (general) predicates, a set ot tasting notes. Phenomenology would be the belief that all experience has its tasting notes. This idea is not without considerable literary or cultural value; it is a practice, a program, a world-view as much as a faith - a kind of neo-epicureanism. To dispute this is not to insist that it goes too far in every case, that consciousness is something else than intentional, but rather to notice that the failures of intentionality, where you mean without ever being able to say what you mean, are not themselves intentional states. Say, everything begins in a vague and cloudy mixed state which can't be specified precisely because specification emerges out of it. There is naturally no language for this, but you can acknowledge it by a sort of peripheral knowing - it is not unconscious or pre-conscious, is living time and not lived time, koanish like the sound of one hand. 

If you perform the self to determine the self, newly from scene to scene, from out of an inexhaustable spring of indeterminacy, an entanglemnt of worlds, then who is the observer firm enough in its own boots to fix you? Think of the past, your soul sweating out of your body, you sweating out of your soul, life like naphthaline giving of itself in fires, and see the whole thing rendered transparent, ridiculous those motives so obvious to everyone, a book that can't be unread or escaped. But here you are again placing the same bet, do you know which way the master will go, tip his thumb, the broad circle closing? Shame the gauge of this collapse as if the past could reach this far, its stunts its hints, its mastery theirs to draw the needle through the sack of books, of tunes, of expressed preferences ending the wave, in a feverish spinning to get ahead of crystal views by putting ideas into the skins of glamorous and well-formed doubles. It's such sweaty work! You can smell that incomparable, that distilled and stringy amber.

Smoke it out so he appears, eyes streaming, trying not to breathe, he emerges from where a moment before there was nothing, a blind-spot in experience. He doesn't want to speak but if something needs to said he will step up, he has a crumpled script he pulls from a back pocket and which he can edit on the fly. By that time he would have crystallized into something to be reckoned with, but right now he's just a dream flower, a sort of mirage hovering on the edge of credulity. What is extraordinary is the finish on the thing! Like anything in nature it goes deep in detail, a wonderfully interlaced mechanism that could only have evolved, a mirror to every contingency. You can only admire this craft from the wings, the moment he gets both feet onstage even you fall for the illusion and find yourself taking sides in a show that seems unworthy of so much skill, or such polished projection.

If the other disappears then you disappear, the cut in presence becomes no more than that, a narrow slit in which you could insert tab A, or extract tab B, it doesn't matter, there's no other side, no this side either. But how can the other disappear? There are faces and voices, so much going on, they are having a party, a debate, it's all so amusing, you strain to hear, wonder if your name will be called but it doesn't come. Nobody knows your name, or maybe you have no name, you seem to have forgotten. They are on the other side of the glass, muted, receding, self-sufficient; all that fun in a bubble floating gaily away. The steps are easy and your feet so light in the silence.

The more inclusive picture, the most inclusive picture. First it threatens to destroy you, then it does destroy you, so that you can arise in its perspective; there is only one perspective. It feels like the biggest drama possible, but there is no drama since you were never there in the first place, only a local project. Locality is a project, that's what's so beautiful about it, it has to fail magnificently. But to see this is also to see that there can be no short-cut, that's precisely the point, you were a short-cut. Now go and live your life, uncut.

As much of truth as you can bear, which might not be very much at all. A feinting game in which you hope to back into truth by cutting the ground of illusions out from under your feet, but if you can't look at where you are going you don't know when you change course, and you change course all the time. It's not the truth you hope to know, but the one you are, a voice in the chorus, out of key from the start, persistent in your folly, daring to be revealed, praying to be revealed at last.

Is experience something in the world, the world understood as the totality of truth, of 'all that is the case'? This is the same as asking whether every event of the experience belonging to any being is an objective fact, or perhaps, asking whether qualia, whatever they be, are objective facts, reducible not necessarily to material process as to some kind of definable third-person event, or whether the 'I feel' is a special case of the 'there is'. The arguments about the existence of qualia seem to come down to something like this; the opponents of them will only be satisfied when you can put forward the equations that determine qualia as a part of objective reality. It is a strange quest because it would seem that if it were to succeed then the ethical significance of qualia, the irreducibility of suffering, say, which is the latent metaphysics even in utilitarianism, would be undermined, in other words the whole reason why you wanted qualia in the first place, the Cartesian protest. To know how something works means to be able to modify it as it were from backstage, without having to go through the motive structures of its appearance, as for example in genetic manipulation of organisms side-stepping evolution, or CGI substitutions for live action in films. If you could make someone's experience whatever you wanted it to be while doing something entirely different to their physical embodiment, then surely you would be beyond morality. That such a notion is deeply repugnant ought to suggest that experience can never be a thing, and that our best hope is that qualia can never be proven to exist. That's going too far, however. Everything about any individual quale does exist except for its experiencer. Redness could be located in the brain but not that it is experienced, and that it is experienced is not experienced and has no associated quality. The 'I' in consciousness is only the placeholder for this gap. Experience may prove not to be what it appears, not because it is actually some objective process, but because the meaning of the absence of the subject can change - there is no necessity tying it to the way it is in human experience, only history whose nature is ever-changing relative stability.

The move from the assertion 'there is experience' to 'there is my experience' (for some 'I') follows from unfolding what is already implicit in 'experience'. Logically this is question-begging, but the response could in turn be given that every non-phenomenological definition of experience is doomed to break down - an 'empirical' definition would after all be even more question-begging. Dwelling on the notion of experience, then, I find it to be ineluctably my experience - even if it is nominally your experience. The 'I' concerned is therefore already understood, while evidently not understood at all and not even experienced. On closer examination it is not so much about short-term memory and expectation as about a certain kind of spacing or perspective. The experiencer is before the experience in a sense that is as much spatial as temporal. I, or 'I' (is there a difference at this scale?) is a little way behind whatever fills experience, a little more here than any imaginable here, or such as to render every notional here into a there, again without precisely being anywhere. This is one reason why the self is sometimes referred to as the witness. The gap is not random, and although measurement makes little sense in this context, it has a definite gauge which forms one of the latent parameters in any lived experience. This gauge is relatively stable but can assume different values, perhaps in a discrete set like an energy spectrum. This speculation might provide a clue to the problem of the fusion of distinct experiences into an apparently seamless single experience, or in other terms into the granularity of experience. When closely contemplated experience is seen to resolve into a succession of isolated 'flashes' and hence to belong to a series of isolated experiencers, and yet on the normal macroscopic scale to belong to only one self. The difference lies in the gauge, a multitude of small gauge experiences combining into one of a larger gauge. 

Thinking, feeling and willing are the three essential components of subjectivity, or of what we can call mind or consciousness. They are distinct but not separable. It is possible to imagine processes akin to thinking and willing in non-conscious mechanisms, but taken in this way such are only analogies or heuristic descriptions, and they confuse the issue if not understood as reflective or second-degree phenomena. Thinking and willing more properly should be phenomena of which it is meaningful to ask what it feels like to respectively think or will. Similarly, for feeling and willing, it is meaningful to ask, what is it that is felt or intended, hence that they give or arise from matter of thought; and of feeling and thinking it can be asked with what valence or to what end, or simply wither do these occur, and hence that will is implicit in them. It is not inappropriate, therefore, to consider the triplicity of components as a trinity, reciprocally absolute. While each of the three is only what is expressed in the verbal form of 'I + verb', this seems to be especially true of feeling. When there is feeling there is someone who feels, only ever 'I', hence the odd priority of the 'what does it feel like?' line of questioning. The nature of this 'I' is what is especially interesting, since logically it cannot belong to anything that is thought, felt or willed. Human subjectivity is characteristically self-conscious, but this kind of consciousness which involves a particularly fertile recycling of the contents of thinking, feeling and willing, is foreclosed in respect of this 'I'. Theories of Self or of no-Self are merely attempts to change the conditions of the foreclosure, to vary the lease. They cannot approach the overwhelming simplicity of the contentless 'I', empty of all notion of emptiness, one beyond all notion of oneness.   

Granted that you can't imagine what it would be like to be a bat, can you imagine what it is like to be a human? Could you put it into words, explain it to a martian, or to an intelligent bat, for that matter? You might point to some salient phenomena: time and contingency and knowledge of death, expectations of pain and pleasure, desire and fear, but do you know if the attitude you take to any of these are essential or merely prejudices of your culture? What brings these to mind rather than something else, social emotions, love, longing, grief, compassion, envy etc., etc? For many it would seem that what they identify as most chracteristically human depends on their ideological loyalties. You might suggest that your questioner read certain novels or poems, since it is from these that you have gained your own deepest intimations of the human condition, but don't all of these already take a human constitution in their readers for granted, and even a culturally specific one? Do you fully understand a novel translated from Russian or Japanese given that you did not grow up in these cultures, or with this racial inheritance? To respond adequately to the martian or the bat you would need to know pretty well what their implicit understandings were and hence already understand what it is like to be one of these. Can you imagine what it is like to be Finnish or Chinese well enough so that you could make what it feels like to be you intelligible to some one born there? Can you explain to an oenophile how wine tastes to you who are not one, or what you experience when you taste a certain vintage? To say nothing of the chasm that separates the sexes!a All of this points to radical untranslatability. Once you look at it closely it appears that there is no such thing as what it feels like to be or to experience any X, but rather that 'what it feels like' is a movable token in certain over-determined language games. But on the other hand part of the constitution of any experience is an implicit reference to human experience in full generality, the sensus communis; this is unknown, and perhaps unknowable, yet an essential part of the horizon of whatever it is you call experience.

Being is pure act uncontaminated by any entitlement. Refraining from desire rehearses the error of equating desire with the warrant to realise desire in form, as if that was all that desire could mean. Desire is another name for the pure act, but not knowing itself through the mind it immediately mythologises itself as homecoming, or subjection, loyalty or other such subtle forms that promise resolution to the self - as a sacred form of belonging. All of these terms are vectors in appearance or in the space of complementary presence and absence. What is called pure act is in an independent direction, not without something like intention, something like desire. The desire without which there could be no desire.

Properly speaking, only you exist, apodictically if you insist, while all others are only inferred. The implications of this two-tiered ontology pose no problems until desire is at issue. Desire is yours, but the object of desire is not; the object can be enjoyed by anyone, and if it is enjoyed by another it is not available to you. So it is not enough to have the desire, you also must have the entitlement to its object. Your enjoyment of the object is not only satisfying but also is good - not an absolute good, admittedly, but a relative good, where there is no clear line between relative and absolute. Your entitlement, such as it is, is a social fact, and so is of an entirely heterogeneous nature to your ontological priority, and yet somehow the two must be linked. A princess is perhaps one who takes the equivalence of these to be axiomatic. Or you could say that the god of your philopsychia is what grants this equivalence. Another version of this is money in its abstract form, or currency, a more or less tradeable form of entitlement to enjoy. But the wealth you seek is in depth of consciousness because in spite of your starting point in apparent solipsism this is, or seems to be, directly communicable, the poet being a more negotiable kind of princess. And which of us is not the laureled poet of our own world?

Thalassa, the return to the sea-womb, or the nirvana principle, the return to non-existence, are both theories of desire. It is only on the surface that desire appears to embody a principle of diversion and diversity, the rebellious bird scandalising old forms including its own. Desire is a code without a cipher, but in spite of that there is still a single meaning that it endlessly rearticulates. A theory of consciousness that was not also a theory of desire would not be incomplete but flatly wrong. There is no dispute about priority, the two are dual faces of time. Consciousness is choice and there is no choice without preference, and no preference without alternatives, no alternatives without a perfect balance, endlessly rocking. Or, in other words, when you choose you first choose yourself, and what can you know of yourself but the action of time, the cycle of birth, growth, decay and death, in a single breath, in every breath. 

Being is not a repose but a question up from its very heart. But can you have a question without some sense of what its solution needs to be like, surely the doubt is already the negative outline of the answer, dim but certain? The question is the condition of the answer. What makes it a question is the sense of having lost its home; that it knows what home was but also that there can be no return to a home; the past must become the future and the future the recovered past. The breaking up of home is its very birth and it carries the traces of it, the fragments, cursed and cherished, in its blood. It has to keep looking, piling up errors on errors, and led by a kind of hope or stubborn faith that if it will settle for nothing short of home, and studiously avoid its simulacra, false promises, its wish to be lied to again and again, only then the way still opens. Through exile to homeland, and from homeland to exile again; they inhabit each other, in myth and in politics, in images and in power, storming vortices of criteria as brutal as barbed-wire and bloody as any severed umbilicus. Both matrix and fatherland, oblique allusions that turn their dual faces towards you, offering milk, demanding blood.

Presence, but it is not present, is only what presences are present to; or thatness, the pure, the subtle accomplishment of events, the stillness against which everything moves, even stillness itself; or emptiness, but empty of all emptiness - it's what can never be named or pointed to, it pervades the naming and pointing as if they were never there; it laughs at is and never smiles, cries and longs longingly, aches and itches and never makes a sound; sees only because it is forever blind; you can't get behind what's behind everything; whether you in any of your myriad forms choose to appear or to explode in a shower of fire or go dark, drown in ice or sleep or mud; whether time counts or space enfolds, matters not a jot.

You try to ensure that your thoughts will only appear respectably groomed and attired, certainly without stipulating any degree of formality, or carefully judged informality, faux casual or sportif, anything too studied. But a knowingness, a grown-up look, having been around the block a few times, even a certain deliberately accidental elegance, an off-handed defense against a history of gullibility, of naïveté, of an unthinking devotion to enthusiasm, to what was perceived as worthy of arousing enthusiasm, merely for the sake of enthusiasm. You were a quick study, but only to a degree. Of course you wanted to get at the truth of things, but that was a role as well, and the role took you much further than the thing itself, even if the role could never have existed without the thing itself. The two became hopelessly confused and you didn't mind because it saved you so much work, so much of being entirely in the dark, from the perilous exposure of the child that that in spite of it all you've remained, from the measure of your reach, from the scene of the trade of enthusiasms.

If it seems like there's nothing to say then you are looking too intently and off to the side; there is nothing stranger than this and its mystery is inexhaustible. But its hard in a different way to be light enough, soft enough, quiet enough, not to look through the crystal, not to be caught reaching for all those shimmering colours, and instead to see the crystal, its watery edges, its deep facets that don't change or pass, to detach them from every idea of yourself. There's no need to make effort to love or be loved, or even to be worthy of love, it is already love. You were its gift, what you couldn't hold without scribbling all over, like a child with a book it can't yet read. The ink melts away in fascinating swirls, by grace they were only patterns of refraction, moirés that leave the light unstained, eternally at the centre. 

You can make out three distinct personalities that are prominent in three different liminal phases of the waking mind. There is am early morning self who retains a virginal sense of pristine containment, who would like things to remain clear and distinct and at a distance. It welcomes the freshness of the day and disavows remembered history, or whatever you might have done the night before, but enjoys the cataloging of fragments of dream narratives as merely amusing curiosities. Detached and Apollonian, it is present-centred and especially glad to be freed from any relationship to the self who arises in the intervals of wakefulness during the earliest morning hours, say between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. This latter self is an entirely distinct personality, it is anxious, fearful, urgent, and seemingly hyper-clear in its thinking. It takes in a large temporal perspective on life and it makes connections easily and with great conviction. It is an interpreter of narratives and believes itself to possess superior insight even to the point of prophecy. Its style of thinking is best described as paranoid, and if it takes any pleasure this is not in its findings but in its own lucidity. It is especially condemnatory of the narrow temporal perspectives of the other two selves, to say nothing of the median waking self, the main non-liminal personality. The third personality is the evening one, this one is sensual, greedy, louche and amoral. It arises, Hyde-like, with a sense of liberation, as if it has just been released from jail, and it greatly regrets the time wasted in between its successive awakenings and the resultant lack of focus on its priorities. Its time perspective is intermediate to that of the two others. Each of these three selves or personalities has a clear set of desiderata, a differential valuing of the choices available, and in this sense they differ from the median waking self who tends to navigate blindly, lacking any clear intuition of values. You could say that they each present the waking self with a list of priorities and the latter is taxed with negotiating some sort of compromise between the contradictory imperatives. It is likely that each of these selves corresponds to a distinct pattern in the brain. These personalities are marginally aware of but dismissive of each other, they cannot identify, refuse any mediation. They compete for something. What is it that they compete for?

The will to persist in being, the conatus essendi or indeed the very selfishness of the selfish gene, cannot be a fundamental principle in a materialist-mathematical ontology. It needs at best to be derived as some kind of emergent property of complex systems leaning heavily on the laws of entropy. But emergent properties are only forms of interpretation dependent on their interpreter which in this case is itself a product of exactly the same system. This circularity is a flimsy basis from which to further derive the principle of individuation arising as it does out of the conflict and competition of distinguished wills. A more satisfactory solution is surely to see distinction as arising out of fundamental will than the other way around, than for will to have emerged out of fundamental distinction. In the same way it is a lot easier to see how the idea of a materialist-mathematical ontology is a defensive formation of will than to attempt the opposite derivation. The problem is that will doesn't seem to be fundamental enough, it has to depend on something else again, to have arisen as a twist or swerve in some dark and energetic and yet supremely tranquil ground, neither present nor absent, free of all location.