Ongoing the succession of interrelated events originating both in your own mind and from your external worlds which prompt collection in quickly sketched situations, little scenarios you are aware of creating, almost spontaneously, to gather and orient diverse moments into matters on overlapping time scales, and which achieve the mood of initial approbation, the first moment, the first acknowledgment being a neutral kind of 'yes', out of which an emotional reaction is aroused, the emotion being initially not made by you but as if sent or delivered to you from an internal elsewhere. It is at this point that you enter in again with a decision as to whether to reinforce or dampen that emotion, to build it up in a loop of feeling, or ignore it, or reverse it into its opposite. It is in the regime of emotions that you support or repress or deny that the action of what seems to be your self is found. This ecology of emotion is what is most native and most contingent, what you learn about when you say that you know yourself through experience of life. It is what you stubbornly cultivate and try to modify according to ideas and ideals dragged in from various reflections. The more you get to know it the more contingent it seems - there's no clear reason to go one way rather than another, other than your lazy investment in the idea of its inevitability, of your prior existence.

It is always here complete, unstained and impossible to doubt, but you are the illusion of doubt and of having the Sisyphean task of bringing it about, as if this doubt is a uniqueness that can never resolve, but must resolve, the very disproof, the exception, of being. You work to bend the knowingness so that it passes through this aperture and delivers a stolen glory which justifies you outside the law. But whenever you seem to succeed the structure dissolves and the 'I am', the entangled knot of unique being melts into light. Like a face that is so familiar you lose all awareness of it and never look into its eyes, never discover that it was your first and only love, that the axis of the world passes through your heart, and always has, that you've never left Eden.

Nobody starts out saying 'I am', typically it is a realisation which dawns suddenly at age about three, that is, after there is already a well established sense of external being and some facility with language. Nevertheless, when you look at the awestruck gaze of an intelligent infant, even one that is newly born, it seems as if they are steeped in the sense of self-existence and that they are absorbing the world in which they find themselves into this prior sense. It is not so much 'thrownness', Geworfenheit, with its connotation of a sort of gnostic alienation, that is in play but something more integrated, more akin, connatural, a wonder, even a sort of love for the very thatness of what they see around them. The realisation of 'I am' which is embodied in that verbal formula is the sense that your own existence is also precisely that same thatness, in immediacy and without any sense or interpretation of alienation, without any metaphysical politicisation. On the other side the pure existence of things, the heidegerrian Vorhandenheit, has an enigmatic quality, a sense of being far more than it appears, of hidden depth, which is imported, transferred or projected from the unknown depths of the self, from mysteries of desire, say, which open up to us what lies beneath the verbal and rationalised formulas by which we locate ourselves in the human world.

What is immediately scandalous about Rimbaud's phrase is that it begins 'Je est', 'I is', with the 'I' claiming unelided third person being. 'Am' and 'is' are both primary utterances and they appear not to be interchangeable, to stand for incompatible faces or inflections of being, or non-commuting operators. You cannot imagine the dawn of being in the form of a pure 'is' since this word testifies to a witnessing, and so demands the prior and latent 'am' of the witness. But if 'am' is primary it also demands a prior and latent 'is', the being into which the 'I' emerges, the space that it witnesses, the validation or truth of its am-ness. In English the word 'am' has a further connotation, being the reverse of 'ma' the syllable which Ernest Jones regarded as the universal first syllable a baby utters and hence in most Indo-European languages identified with the mother, with 'mama'. It is also very similar to the Sanskrit mantra 'aum', or 'om', a syllable very well suited to chanting since it contains no hard sounds and can be drawn out for as long as one is able: 'aaauuummmm'. 'Am' is like 'in', is inward pointing, while 'is', or 'ist' or 'est' is like 'out', outward pointing. In a slightly obsolete slang 'I is' expresses a vaguely threatening future tense, as in 'I's a gonna (do something)', an assertion of agency, and certainly there is something of this portentious assertiveness in Rimbaud's phrase. Neither of these inflections of being can dispense with the other, but it seems as though the order in which they are applied makes a significant difference.

Another version of it is Rimbaud's 'Je est un autre' -  penetrating into the most intimate centre of consciousness, the very basement of yourself, you find that you can go still deeper, as if through a trapdoor, and that in doing so you lose connection with yourself, and you emerge in another life, an other's life of unrecognisable and a-human forces and dispositions. This is not unlike the psychoanalytic idea that the ego is a fragile segregation of unconscious processes, of primary processes which constitute a sublime and unrecognisable form of oceanic mind which continually threatens and tempts its fragile boundaries. All such notions seem to be pseudo-profundities bolstered by the charisma, the earnest craziness, of derangement. Where have you gone when you have descended to the basement of yourself, what have you changed by disordering your senses? You may have turned your errors on their heads but they remain just as much your errors. You are exactly as close and as far from yourself beneath surface as upon it, your very eagerness to report your coincident otherness shows that you are still playing the same game. What you've uncovered is the authority in the game, or at least one version of it, you've seduced with style. Who, again, is an other? ... I am! How different this all is from 'Thou art that.'

Does otherness resolve into sameness? The self and the other go down fighting, or locked in an embrace, they sink out of sight. And then does only one of them come up for air? Is there an intimate alienation, is intimacy itself an unsuspected alienation? One idea is that in some heightened and revelatory state you come to encounter the fundamental forces which underlie your physical existence: the will embodied in biology, in chemistry and in physics - and you find it to be fundamentally other, or indifferent to your contingent, embodied existence. This would be an internal sublime brought about through contemplation of the facts, the so-called laws of nature. But how do you recognise the otherness of the other? How do you know it's not a hallucination, a trick you are playing on yourself? That's why it is in the register of will, the will being an immediate experience of resistance of pushing against something outside, or being pushed from outside, something recalcitrant and ultimately fearsome. But to leap to the conclusion that the resistance arises from another will, that the outside is truly outside, is unwarranted unless you already know of such an other by some other means. The same problem would arise in the register of feeling. Is this Job's problem? The Other will let you know when it's good and ready. Put that aside for now and look in thought.

If you pick a word, any word, your own name will do, and say it over and over to yourself it soon turns into a pure meaningless materiality, like a piece of chewing gum that has lost its flavour, and you grow self-conscious realising how much you've invested in such nonsense, that the estrangement embraces all your language, which is made of words made of sounds and muscle-movements and intentions whose thick stuff fills your mouth and which you have personalised like ragged old toys. This is easy enough to do because it is easy to repeat words since they are objects you draw from your hoard with no apparent effort. But now try to pull the same trick on the thought by which you constitute your life from moment to moment, your continuously evolving agenda, your very politics and faith of being as you are and as you intend to be, with that fine balance of truth and dissimulation that you drive onward. You build and rebuild it on the fly, you respond, deflect, make your way, drawing the action from your life-hoard, seemingly afresh. It takes some effort to detach and to find yourself blindly dreaming it up in all its dimensions and fascinations, and it's not in your mouth that it turns into unflavoured mush but in consciousness itself, or in being, the most open of the most open, and you grow self-conscious there too, the same vague shame, being caught naked, weaving sense out of nonsense, the same you.

You go on as if all there is is this contingent process in which you figure as a partial agent, determined more than you determine, but determining just the same, enacting your element, you inimitable style. Actually there is no you to be found, and you don't care, you rarely bother to look, but only the congeries of partial agents, delivered to the scene so that they can say their one line, do their one action, plan something, sort something, seem to decide, receive a consequence, play the body like a band, scrutinise the residuals. The contingency is such a wonder, why pause to consider that behind it there must be something that is not contingent, the real, the necessary process behind the apprehended one? At times it seems as if there were two, the lived one in the midst of conditions and the absolute one that sets the conditions as if they were so many notes or sketches in an unchanging game out of time and space. But the trick is that they are identical, that's what you can't get your head around, what you'll never get your head around as long as you cling to the absurd idea that you have a head, that there could even be a question of a head.

In desire you vividly picture the scene of your satisfaction, or rather such a scene flashes upon you, but not from elsewhere, rather as an elaboration of a distant and intimate promise, the very promise of life. It is more like a 'selfie' than a tableau from out of a narrative, but seen from the point of view of the other you carry with you, the witnessing self with whom you can never coincide. The you in the picture must be real and hence yet to come; desire stretches your longing out in front of you, but with the passing of time you come to the sad realisation that the occasion of this personage has already passed and that it somehow neglected to realise him. The mechanism of desire continues to work in the same way as ever but its promises are treacherously anachronistic, and strangely all the purer for that. With its stubborn faith worn down by common day, the pure and dreamlike essence of desire is revealed, grinning like a skull, your very own. In time you come to know the bitter element of time. Again, it might bring back a specific occasion, some fork you stood at once, all unknowingly, and you see how little choice you really had, how little you knew. But in the scenes that memory awakens in this way there is no consciousness, only irony. Consciousness is too fine and passes like water through the sieve of remembrance.

There is no hard problem of consciousness. This is because what it attempts to bring into focus does not have a solution, and hence could never have been a problem. Some might say it is not a problem because it is incorrectly posed, they will say that there is a solution, but to a somewhat different problem, and that that solution will resolve the muddle out of which this apparent problem arose. But what drove the conceiving of this problem was precisely the intuition that in principle no solution whatsoever could respond to what it is that drove the original question. When you have invested everything in a mighty problem-solver then everything had better be a problem, and so before you get down to solving or resolving it you must insist that any disquiet of the understanding is at heart nothing but a problem. So, is every disquiet of the understanding a problem? No, sometimes it is a mystery, and that means that an entirely different sort of engagement is demanded, all ingenuity to be put aside. The mystery can be lost sight of in the onrush of the triumphalism of problem solving, blind to its own confusion, but can never be overborne because it is prior to every question, is the hidden spark inside every question.

Life is a text, it proceeds by contrasts. Every position gained instantly begins to founder, to give way to the silent labour of its opposite. Luminous in its momentary glory it flows and chooses lines that orbit unutterable ideas whose shadows on the narrative plane are the myths that we consume and that subsume us in our benighted desirings. Everything that goes by contrasts is a text that flows, and that makes a half-understood sense in its squandered heart of returning. The self is what has no opposite - which is why it is so easy to mistake for consciousness, the unchanging register and presumptuous protagonist of change.

It ought to be clear that imagination is not ancillary to some presumed zero-degree of perception of reality. Isn't this just what so many works portentiously strive to demonstrate? How else would your world be articlated but by the flexible joints of imagination. It's only that the waking world is criss-crossed by so many social validations and material imperatives so that it gains a kind of rigidity which is mistaken for self-evidence. Examine it closely and the illusion soon comes apart and all the quicker if you are able to compare notes with anybody else. All these different subject-worlds are hugely variegated. Imagination is inherently multiple, it superposes different scales and temporalities, different ontologies, different metaphysics - you glimpse some of this in dreams - and they vary from person to person both in salience and in their propensity to interfere with each other. A geography of the imagination would be useful, as a good tourist you can visit anywhere, but the places you can make into a home are surprisingly limited. It's the prohibitions, the no-go zones that are of most interest since they seem to contradict its very spirit. Are these limitations themselves only creations of the imagination? What if they are? What if they're not?

Imagine finding yourself on the verge of death and that you must quickly make your last farewell to life. Your life's history does not flash by like a newsreel on fast-forward, but it is as if you suddenly respond by releasing a secret store of happiness in a few emblematic scenes unsullied by memory. What most of all you owed to this existence about to conclude, in full gratitude. All the things you think about, all the themes of your striving and attainment, or what you gave your heart's desire to or failed at, would be cast away in an instant, it would be what all of these concealed, the thoughtless simplicity of ordinary being, without any striving, embodied from the tips of your toes to the ends of your hair. Not any of the many hearths and beds you made your home in so that they faded beneath your notice, but the room behind them, their archetype, the place you were always trying to get back to in your dreams that was always here anyway. Cease from looking for it and it is here, only learn to recognise it, whenever.

The loamy clay of sleep seals your eyes, your ears with dream food, and you search your heart to see if those green eyes show something known before out of the revolving inevitability, the comedy of intentions, of the heart that goes through doors and climbs stairs like a brave. Something for the dawn, the ever-early moments you disavow as readily as the rain, the light through trees, angelic asphalt of fatherly hands, your own, that white clay and flower endless to say, endless to shape the sweet head, the sighs you inhale, slouching comedian of generations, and the other across the fast-dissolving shore.

Discovering a new truth causes everything you previously knew to rearrange itself, new patterns come into focus and old patterns dissolve. This is not like acquiring a new result for a growing body of knowledge and more like a complete reshaping of the world and of your place within it. It is referred to via the analogy of 'frames' in which truth is seen as relative to the chosen frame. This is not to say that the choice of frame is arbitrary; as long as the internal truth as grasped or imposed on you via the new frame is more compelling and inclusive, then there is no going back to the old one. Truth retains its primal force, but is no longer a matter of achieving a fuller correspondence with a fixed reality. It is clear, however, that a theory of frames is implicit in this experience, and that there is no predictable limit to possible reframings. You might hear of 'going meta' referring to the open possibility of a larger reframing than than what is currently accepted. It looks a lot like relativism, but it is not the same. Relativism is perhaps the flat interpretation of it. Truth is difficult to theorise in a manifestly perspectival cosmos, but it remains the one indispensable value. 

Knowledge is seeing the general principles that constitute the event, seeing the particular under the general, but knowing is encountering the event in as naked a particularity as possible. Strange duality of the root idea of cognition, knowing as you are known in the event or knowing as ancillary to the event, intimacy with things as against representing them - these are not aligned. There is an ethos of knowledge, but it is an outgrowth of a more encompassing ethical field of struggle and contradiction. You are already immersed in this ethical sphere so that your acts have meaning only in as much as they instance local categories or maxims. But the acts demanded of you are entirely particular - this thing that only you can do, here and now. The ethical sphere belongs to the human, not to you as such, birth and blood ask this of you for the sake of birth and blood. You must discover what your place is within it. Your desires and dispositions root you in it, but you see most clearly when you do not identify with assumed ethical passions, but see them as gifted to you, full of contradictory loves, so that you can assume them again.

Panpsychist, quantum based, pictures of reality don't work because they are dualist. Typically in these, the collapse of the wave function precipitates or expresses a quantum of consciousness, and these quanta aggregate via coherence into the macroscopic consciousness of humans and higher animals, etc. Nothing could be more absurd than such a notion of atoms of consciousness in its need to find the kind of thing that consciousness is. Apart from that it doesn't solve the measurement problem, it theorises the objective collapse of the wave function and so cannot account for the strange dependence of such collapse on the way in which the measurement is set up. All the talk of consciousness in this connection seems like a red herring, there is nothing about the subject or self, for whom consciousness..., when it is actually a matter of knowledge. The measurement problem and the phenomena of superposition are better seen as resulting from a consistently applied need to know basis in cognisance of the world. This actually works better with 'reality is a simulation' theory than with 'all is consciousness'. It might be like the infinity problem, with consciousness playing the role of infinity and knowledge that of the system of things from the ground up. Top-down doesn't work because the top is too far away to give any scale to the bottom. Admittedly 'knowledge' invites the question, 'who knows?', but at least knowledge is objective, it doesn't matter who in particular knows, modulo some internal transformations in point of view. One might urge panpsychists to keep their greasy hands off consciousness, if the attempt to grab hold of it weren't such a joke. 

Just as you still feel the reverberations of past events so too you must feel the effects of future events without naturally any present knowledge of what they are. The consequences of a decision are hidden within the act, you do not choose them but you recognise them when they arise, as if they were in another knowing inaccessible but felt only as a certain colouring, light coming to you from further along the path. Nothing was unanticipated, much less that the anticipation was a real link to what had not yet been revealed. It is as if the timeless and complete book of your life exists alongside the temporalised, the serial edition of the same history or world-line. But then surely the luminescence of the event at the end of the mind is also here, bronze by gold, or chill blue, raking beneath the jumbled chaos of the day. Not a single thing can be without these two crossing beams from inexistence, one from birth and one from death.

A metaphysics consisting of a chain of being, such as that of the neo-Platonists and its various descendants and precursors, cannot reconcile the finite and the infinite. The finite in such a system has a series of ascending grades, and although these can go on and on to unlimited heights, the steps are all relative. The infinite or absolute cannot be the outcome of any number of such relative ascensions, It must stand strictly beyond all notions of beyondness. This means that next to the infinite there is no real difference between any two grades of relative elevation, and so the infinite cannot provide a scale in which the finite levels can be anchored. Humans may be between angels and animals, but in relation to God there is no difference between angels and the lowest creatures in so far as each is a vanishing fraction of Him. The God of Milton's or Dante's cosmos is effectively finite, you can triangulate His position with reference to the finite events that concern Him, and His infinitude is not so much evoked as marked by the idea of holiness, which is a sort of prohibition, a sacred taboo on looking too closely. For the mystics this corresponds to the notion of the unspeakable, of the systematic negative, of the piercing of the veil of time, space, being, thought. But again this renders finite reality shadowy and dreamlike and lacking in any gauge, any measure. In arithmetic you can start from zero and one and build up a potentially infinite system, but if you start from infinity you can never get to one, every operation with infinity only yields infinity. There is a flaw in understanding which cannot be understood.

There is no symmetry between (physical) pleasure and pain. There seems to be a distinct quality of pain (the pain quale) even though it can be experienced in different ways in different parts of the body. A toothache, a headache, a burn, a cramp etc., they can be sharp or dull, throbbing or stabbing, but it is as if the same essential pain is attacking you in different ways. It is associated with colours on the warm end of the spectrum, reds and yellows, diffuse or flashing, almost white perhaps. It is hard to think of a blue pain, although nausea, which is closely related to pain but not just a species of it, might be olive green. Pleasure, on the other hand seems to have no fixed quality, it is more a way of experiencing certain quite ordinary sensations, it might have no colour at all, but if it is associated with a colour that could be any colour at all. You can imagine a brown pleasure, think of chocolate or a good tawny port, or even a black pleasure, something like the memory of a deep sleep. Pleasure is mediated by positive states and often connected to certain neurotransmitters, like dopamine and serotonin, and other endorphins which suppress pain. Pain is thus treated as if it was a too direct coupling of the brain to external reality, while pleasure is mediation of any such coupling. Pleasure generally seems more diffuse, it spills over from its immediate site and causes every concurrent sensation to join in the feeling. Pain is single, coercing attention, while pleasure is symphonic. Sexual pleasure has the intensity of pain, feels as if it is unmediated and is often accompanied by pain-like groans, and yet is experienced as boundless pleasure without any distinct quality. No one can or seems to want to describe it in its aftermath. This might be just a piece of evolutionary trickery.   

The idea of a thing or state does not entail the reality of that thing or state, and while the reality of a state or thing might be reflected in experience there is no necessary resemblance between the idea and that reality. Descartes is right however in noting the one necessary exception to this: that experience is, means that the experiencing is knowingly real. Whatever is known is relative to a frame, except for the knowing itself, which is its own frame. Again it is as if to say that all arrows go one way, except that for there to be any arrows at all there must be one that goes the opposite way. Again this works not as a truth but as the sole criterion of truth, the spring from which all our rivers flow. As such the exception outweighs any and all phenomena that conforms to the rule. The audacity of this is so great that we employ every means at our disposal to systematically nullify it. And why not? Look what a fabulous world we have constructed out of that denial!

Consciousness as we know it is associated with a certain definite time-scale. All sorts of physiological matters of fact determine human scale, and within that there is a range at which attention can function, which takes into account the time taken for distinct events to register, the time between intention and act, the speed of thought and so on. If events arise on the empty screen of consciousness then the latter certainly has something like an ISO rating, a seemingly absurd consequence of such an intuition. It is possible to imagine a different consciousness that operates with a time-base either wildly faster or immensely slower than your own, but since it is well nigh impossible to imagine mutual recognition between two subjects at vastly different intrinsic speeds, let alone communication between them, this puts the whole idea in doubt. All of this goes to the question of whether there is any such 'thing' in the world as a consciousness, as would seem to be required by physicalism, even, and perhaps a fortiori, if it understood to be epiphenomenal or emergent. If consciousness can only exist in a narrow band of absolute scale this too raises interesting questions, and strengthens the case for its essentially social nature, that it doesn't just happen but requires some sort of internally mutual recognition.

The other is at its base a social experience as distinct from a pure intersubjectivity or existential encounter. Accepting the latter as basic would make paradigms of the type of master-slave or hostage or mimetic double, fundamental, and social relations the derived kinds of implicit and strategically ambiguous treaties needed to deal with such threatening imbalances. Isn't it simpler to take the various kinds of social situations as prior to the plays that emerge from them? What you identify first of all is the context of relations that you will have around some other, which then rapidly gains specificity as events take you down the tree of possibilities. There are places you have already visited and there are places you have only imagined, and ones you had never imagined but are forced to admit the existence of, since they are staring you in the face. The personifying logic of dreams is exactly the familiar world as seen side-on. For example there is no other without an immediately grasped gender onto which various posterior games will be grafted including, if necessary, a contract to act as if the genders were reversed. If you admit that the social interpellates you, in the voice of a quasi-other, then this voice cannot be neutral, it is either masculine or feminine, loud or soft, knowing or oblivious - and every alternative makes a difference. You don't get close to someone you get close to a clan or a clique or a club. And it isn't just you, its all the crowd you carry along with you.

You return the favour to someone who has assisted you, and your generosity is greater the more unrelated to you your helper is - at least that is what you do if you are as intuitively rational as a Norway rat. If you are human you might also consider being the first to act, to reward proleptically, perhaps on the basis of an imagined future favour, and you might make the inverse relationship between degree of relatedness and offered reward or self-sacrifice, even more salient, even less calculated, than the rat - you find yourself, in short, loving your enemy. A naturally politic but somewhat counter-intuitive impulse is taken to be evidence of beauty of soul, of a spirituality transcending mere rattish egoism. But such apparent egoism is an invention for the sake of authentic egoism. The character you are is a dispostional construction out of such imaginary scenarios - you get to feel nice things towards him, you learn the usefulness of applied dreaming and other kinds of literature. 

Experience is something like a memorandum, it is an incomplete event noted as 'to be returned to', except that you never quite return to it even if you manage to recollect it in tranquility. Or you could say that it consists of notes for a poem that you occasionally elaborate but never finish writing. It is marked so that when it is regained you can see it face to face. So all experience takes place in the dimension of meaning, orthogonal to that of time, but only so that it illuminates that dimension without freely proceeding along it; the kind of self you are, the experiencing self, not belonging to such an adventure. With respect to time, to the endless flow of instances this condition is understood by way of possibility. Without being perfectly understood in this way the operators 'there exists' and 'for all' and their various modal derivatives are intrinsic conditions of all experience. This means that the nature of what you call being or consciousness is wedded to that of possible experience, or in semantic terms to the set or class or topos of possible experiences. But here is the strange thing: this set or class or topos makes no distinction of self and not self. A possible experience is as much mine or yours or his or her (or even its!) possible experience as any other. Possibility is blind to identity.