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.