Words like little bricks or stones laid down one after another to build a ramshackle heap not resembling anything much at all except a vague intention, a vague imitation of an imitation of an incomprehensible altar to an unknown god. Uneven, unskilled brickwork, manufactured things salvaged from wrecks, used many times before, remembering grander structures from which they've been stolen, structures from another age, built by ill-fated giants, and now roughly packed together by a child. Many-purposed words bearing a dark history it is in the hesitant style with which they are placed, such myopia, the way they are laid against broken intention that speaks without saying anything, only that the same voice be heard, the signature in the act itself withdrawing whispering of words like little bricks or stones, a child's hand lifting and dropping into place one by one in an empty field at sunset drained of colour but for the weight, the feel, the soothing clack as they fall amongst each other. In the empty field.

Experience happens in Time, so that happening, experience and Time are all names for that same thing, but Time is in consciousness which does not happen, and is not experienced. Happening is foreign to consciousness. As if consciousness is imperfectly expressed by experience, which strives to express it, is the striving to express it; experience is in love with consciousness, naked of all names. Experience is thus a striving for the condition of consciousness wherein there is no striving. Because it happens there is that in which it happens - only it ought to be said the other way around but that words fail the reversed expression, consciousness beyond being, happ, hap, ha!

What is an identity that there should be a fear of losing it? Something for which your documents, cards and keys are an analogue, so a set of token or anchors in overlapping symbolic and social maps which you take to be more real than you are, since they lend you the membership that you need to have. Identity is in the colours and stamps that decorate the document that stands for you, that registers your standing. Take them away and you lose your reference points, you become impoverished, grey, anonymous, depersonalised, lacking in vital connections. The machinery of your personality will then lose any triggers of activation and you'll run down like an exhausted device. It is a purely social thing, this identity, it's your title to be in the game. All of this seems very superficial, as if all you know of identity is an assumed role; even your authenticity is assumed, it is what you play when you play in the serious games. Loss of identity seems to be an evil the prospect of which is never entirely banished, and while you can have secret doubts about your own identity you don't doubt those of others. You even concur in admiring so-called strong identities. Hard to see in all of this that what you call your identity is entirely your own product, that whatever you are without identity is what it is without mediation and has contracted and emptied itself in order to play these inane games in a world of mirrors and shadows. 

Whatever you are looking for you won't find it; merely because you are looking for it, and so already have some notion in mind of what it is that is sought, and you can't find what you already put there, can't be your own tutor. Like every idea it is already triangulated in your big map of the world, the dream-like place where you spend so much time uselessly puttering, it is a sort of mirage built out of words. And what else do you do? Knock down houses of words with hammers made of words, and occasionally build new houses out of hammers. It might be a smart game, but it's beside the point. Still, even if the instrument is made of wind it was your hand holding it before blowing away. You were up to something, and even if your intentions were absurd, something moved. Where did you get the idea of something impersonal, consciousness, totality, language? Who taught you to mouth those words? Acting smart, but there's nothing more personal than appealing to the impersonal, and from there it's just an abyss, gets more and more personal, past shame, past words, past triangles.

Hearing, seeing, feeling, thinking, but missing some element of wonder, everything is just as it is, arising and sinking into itself without portent or strangeness, returning a flat note when struck, windowless in the ground floor of the soul. It doesn't matter who or for whom, and you wouldn't think to notice or remark but for a habit of looking. As if it could go on forever, neither bad nor good, the responses coming like clockwork, easily filled and then giving way to the next, anonymous, efficient, without residue. A peculiar intimacy, quiet and unobtrusive, but wholly without warmth, or devilry. Stay indoors, watch without hope or expectation. This too is it in all its secret fullness.

Tell a story, but the story doesn't matter so much as the telling of it. Tell the story for the sake of the telling which is always outside the story, and never completely transparent in its motivations. So often the telling is precisely so as to clarify the motivations, to prove the very telling, and in this way quietly admitting that they aren't clear and can never be clear as long as they rely on such telling, in the moment and gone with the moment. To begin you have to assemble a narrator strong enough to give consistency to the relation of telling and tale, or alternatively to make the telling out of the very inconsistency of the two which turns out to be a far less radical gesture than would appear. Telling and tale see-saw or swap places without changing the nature of the game. But here there is no story and no telling, only a sort of overture that doesn't open onto anything, as if the orchestra is endlessly tuning up, and all you hear are fragments you half recognise, washed out tones from a dozen different pieces none of which are what you came to hear.

Dream is the only metaphor for so distrait a condition. It is happening, or happeningness, that's what makes it experience, but only as sliding planes splitting and overlapping with a different experiencer inscribed lightly on each one in ink that rapidly fades. Something watery or vaporous about it, endlessly rocking. It is only somewhat real in the other dimension where one observer sees another observer go by or is seen by such another as he himself goes by, and there's a hint of the verticality that can't be put together, assembled or completed to a word, out of any of these fragments or collection of them, pedaling thoughtfully to their soft doom. Feeling and thought blended into cloudscapes shot with sunset colours or the yellows and browns of smoke, torn without gaps, submitted to desire, gently disowned.

The challenge for complex theories is to demonstrate the genesis of structure. The dilemma is that if structure is taken to be purely nominal, inheriting its stubborn appearance only from extraneous interests, then it will be too easy to modify and so provide no point of leverage against those interests. Or alternatively if it is genuinely rigid, or derived from genuinely rigid substructures, from laws of being, then you have not only failed to explain its origin other than through metaphysics, but have lost the prospect of being able to modify it according to your deferred desire. A complex theory must weave its way between these alternatives, taking mathematics as its model, whereby derived structures can be functionally rigid but nonetheless subject to complex and open-ended processes of reconfiguring whereby they are superseded by by other quite different but in their turn equally rigid structures. In other words these all represent elaborate ways of attempting to reconcile freedom and necessity which must seem to simultaneously take both sides. The way things are is illegitimate, but this cry is uttered in terms of the very same laws which seem to determine the way things are. And this only seems to be a contradiction if you imagine that contradiction is not already the sublation of of a deeper and incurable disjunction at the heart of being. This is perhaps the most darkened form of the vision of unity.

Periods of opacity unaccountably follow on from and are followed by periods of transparency but the one who finds himself in these successively seems to stay the same even as he finds himself unable to comprehend his own memories and conclusions from former times. In obscurity shadows descend over the connections, the very modes of connection of things, meaning that things taken as identical resemble themselves only in name. In transparency you intimate or even see the relations between things, which dissolves their materiality, and even that of the constitutive relations which dissolve in turn into relations of relations, so that the very provenance of words, their metaphysical etymology, is exposed without paradox. The philosophies belonging to these different regimes are untranslateable between them, they have different logics, different rhetorics. It is like saying that the philosophy of Summer bears no resemblance to the philosophy of Winter, or that of evening to that of morning, and more that they are mutually irrelevant. You, the subject fail to be definable in either of them, but in different ways, which is bedeviling because this failure can never be accepted or resolved in the terms in which it presents itself and nags at you for solution, urges you to look elsewhere, to the past or the future say, to nascent certainties or the cool rush of their implosion.   

Lacanians seem to preen on being the ones to assert that there is no sexual relation, just as Buddhists take their stand on the assertion that there is no self, and indeed that there is nowhere to stand, but the former is meaningless unless expressing the promise of sexual relations beyond the failure of 'the sexual relation', just as the latter would present the prospect of experience without the presumption of an experiencer, or the experience of no experience. What exactly is the sexual relation that the Lacanians are denying? Who believes in it? Some fantasy along these lines seems to pervade the culture in rituals and entertainment, but it could as well be argued that all or most of these appearances really express the continually renewed discovery that despite their being no set pattern for human relations, people still find each other and fall in love. And again, isn't the very pursuit of spiritual materialism the performative expression of the realisation that there is nothing material on which the spirit can endure?

Knowledge means getting behind appearances by deriving the principles that give rise to them. But knowledge is itself an appearance and for every unmasking there is a knower behind the scene, implicit in the very act. A phenomenology that attempts to save the appearances is therefore not an optional addition to knowledge - doomed and best abandoned - but a necessary horizon of any stab at knowing or exposing any reality or field of being or experience. As much as you mean to exclude yourself from the picture, making or assuming the picture is contaminated by its performativity. So the phenomenology that accompanies knowledge as its horizon is equally its ground and is not itself a knowledge. What is it then? The objective's failure to be objective just as much as the subjective's failure to be subjective, and the impossibility of mapping these two failures onto each other.

It's not as if there are no stories that could be told. Most of the time one or the other is being advanced, but where would you start, with facts or motives? And even having made that choice would not settle very much because so many different ways of taking up the threads would still remain to be chosen. Write as if you are penning a letter to a friend? Or imagine some situation where the opportunity existed to unburden yourself? Perhaps you don't know how much of a burden you are carrying until you start to release it. That would be to find what it is that needs to be said of its own accord. The storied life that you simply live not in addition to or beside anything else. You think that you are simply refraining from a banal endeavour until you try, and then the first thing you find is the story of the refraining, the unthought in the form of all your thoughts is simply what you refuse to put into words, and what leaks out with a vengeance in dreams. The truest stories are broken, your appetite for these fragments, even your own, is insatiable.

It is not to find some effective prism through which to draw understanding, such as experience, or life, or self, or consciousness, but to excavate the most exquisite forms of doubt. And again this has nothing to do with negativity or negation or unknowing, which are puzzles of being and have their place, but to allow the mists obscuring what must remain unknown in the face of every kind and colour of knowing to dissipate. It is a gentle process, a lightening of touch. The concept of knowing is a big rock that floats in your gaze eclipsing the knowing that can't be named, and the same goes for doubting, which brought into play is never the true doubt identical to its opposite. It seems as if every term has a double sense, horizontally differing in a significant way from every contiguous term and passing to it, while vertically all the terms are one and name the only inhuman, unexperienced matter.

Experience is overlapping, nested and immediately recognised situations for the one you find yourself as. These differ in no essential way from the situations you arrive at in novels or films, distinguished only in degree and range of sensory involvment and in the type of nesting at play. What makes it the same is that whatever you are experiencing is not you, and also that what gives intent and direction to every situation is that it stakes something of what you are in an oblique but inescapable way. Life is that you don't know what you are, that you would complete yourself through experience when experience is the very thing that can never serve to do so. Every solution to the impasse of experience is conceived of as another occasion for experience. And it is not that it fails completely since it seems to take on different topological forms, flipping like a cat's cradle with more than a few variants. It is as if you are searching through all that experience can offer for the key to the whole system, the experience of the structure of experience which can't in fact be any kind of experience, but is the only possibility that answers to the noumenal mystery that you are as what has experience. If experience 'added up' in some grand way then this would be an absurd quest and you'd be better off striving for kingship, but it doesn't and instead there are these intimations of non-experience which don't pass away, which can't be dissolved in the wash and succession of situations no matter how dark or bright.

It doesn't make sense, that is, the sense of it doesn't make any thing only eats itself up, digests and repeats. Sense making won't give up, it twists itself into pretzels trying to take revenge, on what? On the simplicity that blithely dispenses with it. It claims to get the joke, insists it gets the joke, laughs loudly through gritted teeth and tries again, repeating the gestures from its glory days, playing hard to get, a third act or a forth. You can't get there from the sincere declarative tone with nothing to hide - or should that be nothing to Hyde? - but you keep wanting to make a show of it for the sake of good company. Actually, though, every body is asking the same question, you too, but mostly without knowing it. The whole thing is a question, as least that's one way you might frame it, it's what you actually do it for when you think your goals are more selfish, or when desire has run out on you. If you could add enough extra dimensions then it would make sense, or not exactly sense as you know it, but sense there; that's always the way, the unified field with no need for an enjoyer, smooth and unseeing, while here in the world you've chosen it's a hopeless and wonderfully knotted up tangle of apparently broken ends. Tone is everything, whether there's a crack or a firework, just as long as you don't make sense.

Purpose theorised as behaviour means the optimisation of a potential function, a sort of generalised utility. This may work more or less well as objective description, even if the theory needs to refract its notion of utility through evolutionary considerations which escape the individual, which escape anything the individual could rationally define in its own interest. Subjectively, however, purpose and utility turn into desire and enjoyment, and here the disparity, the décalage, between the two becomes glaring, even in self-reflection. You can't define enjoyment as the goal of your desire any more than you define desire as the seeking for enjoyment, but you also can't ignore the fact that they are deeply related, but in a way that evades exposure. Desire, enjoyment, and their disparity (which includes their occasional parity) are all equally complete embodiments of the subject. It's not that the subject bears a special relationship to the salient points of breakdown in the relations of these non-relatables, only that at those points it emerges in a doubled form as a non-object for reflection. Why would attention turn on itself since it knows no desire? There is nothing to motivate it, it can only ride the updrafts of desires that frustratedly seek their own forbidden objects. And every such object is more or less forbidden, there being no stable exchange between subjective and objective.

Attention is attention to, but it also attention of (subjective genitive). If what it attends to has an unverifiable component of reality, of what can be bracketed without in any way affecting the flow of attentional living, then this is just a reflection of something assumed and unverifiable in what it is attention of, the implicit self, the unconscious burden of being that is carried along with. This self-notion is anchored in the body, the objective correlate of presence here and now, but the body does not have a special ontological status different from anything else that comes under attention to. You know you are there only because you can direct your attention towards the inner touch of your presence. Thus objective being is underwritten by subjective being which turns out to be nothing other than objective being inside out. Subjective being thus is empty, you don't carry it on your back, it is not even an illusion because there is no subject to be subjected to that illusion. Attention is complete in its object without any need to lean upon a subject such as could never serve in the non-existent role of ground. What then do you think it does? Only so that you can enjoy its modes of vanishing, all enjoyment being just the play of its initiated dissolution.

What could be better than staying in the flow? Self-consciousness is then diminished to almost zero. This doesn't preclude introspection, it's just that things keep moving, and the notion that consciousness can be employed to anchor being, and indeed that anchored being is preferable to flowing being, is scouted as an error in the right-operation of the apparatus, an anxious reflex like reaching for something solid that isn't there. There are so many other attentional parameters you can play with, narrowing or widening the valves, which produce all the music that there is, that you simply do not need to exist as a distinct subject, do not need the fiction of self-possession. Self-consciousness is then the marker of a misstep, of an error or incapacity in directing, helming, the flow. It's what your mind becomes entangled with when you have lost the plot. The flow itself, however is more a matter of being drawn than of being pushed, and what it is drawn towards are lakes of stillness, which are exactly where self-consciousness can arise in a way that is not limiting. Moments say, of retrospect and recapitulation, of attainment, of lyrical reflection - the self integrated within the economy of the mind's native creativity. Of all the objects in the garden only one is forbidden, and that is self-consciousness out of season, as something other than such punctuation in the flux. Is what is forbidden merely what is impossible? No there is something else which is forbidden but not impossible, and that is turning attention onto itself. If flow and self-consciousness both are the putting of difference to work, this is the work of pure indifference.

Only the dreamer has illusions and the dreamer can never wake up. The doubling of consciousness is such an illusion. If you make the interior observation which would be expressed by saying, 'I am conscious', you are submitting to a subtle doubling of consciousness, observing the observer and identifying the two points of view, one real and not believed in and one ideal and believed in. Whatever you believe in can only be an idea, belief being a concomitant of ideas, and ideas are only consciousness, but not as ideas. Make the observation that you are conscious, it's quickly done, and what have you observed? How did you know to place the terms so surely? Here in the place where you live, the habitual triangulation, an interpretation of certain fuzzy sensations moulded into a dream figure, verified, endearing, but utterly incapable of doing what you just did.

Inauthenticity is to triangulate by respect or reflection of the social other, while authenticity is triangulating by respect to an absolute other which might be God or the Law if you are a believer or death or history or your species if you are not. The point is that in either case you are triangulating, that is you are performing in a frame in which you appear as object of another gaze, and the situation is played that way. Whenever you philosophise, using linguistically deployed concepts to set down markers for realities to be tested or questioned, you are engaged in the same sort of process. If you are inauthentic then a challenge to your entitlement to the use of those material concepts will cause you to step back and take on the terms implicit in the criticism you imagine to be leveled against you, while if you are authentic then your entitlement is not so much rigid as free from anxiety, from the need to look over your own shoulder, but only because you are identified with the constituting perspective. But actually you are not entitled to use those concepts at all. All concepts are flawed, you already know that they can't be traded for Platonic values, but what is hidden is that the flaw passes through the very heart of what you refer to, in that same flawed way, as your subjectivity. The shame at being out of your depth is no part of this at all, since such shame or ridiculousness would be triangular. Try to imagine the same existential tremor but without any possibility of being reflected in a gaze or other perspective, doubt which peels away the whole mask.

There seems to be a believing that is the eating of an endlessly cranking sausage called experience which in the tasting is a mental state much cared about, that undergoes kaleidoscopic involutions now open, now tight, now bitter now sweet, with an inner and an outer that keep changing places and overwhelming waves of flaour that leave no room for doubt that it is a happening to a you perfectly fitted to it, a sort of inescapable garlic, but somehow still askew and trying to get a fingers width outside. You shake one word loose by holding tightly to another word, as you seem to take it for granted that there is a definite sense to experience, which you don't really know anything about but others will recognise as you speak, although those others are themselves nowhere to be found, as if the way that it all works perfectly was not begging the question but actually gave it the certainty that it's not anyone's dream. But what you confidently call experience is not a sausage and could never pretend to be anything but the tasting having no past no future and most of all no present, and now that you look, no garlic either.

Feeling, thinking willing the three flavours inseparably blended in the brew of experience, of what in falling into consciousness brings about your realities. Feeling is every kind of perception, of passive synthesis, of affect, enjoyment, qualia or phenomenology. Thinking is every kind of symbolisation and representation, the mysterious twisted  and para-consistent structure that holds diverse ontological field in a single frame. Willing is every kind of doing, including all the parapraxes, the being-acted-through by unconscious contexts including the neurological and biological, and thus every form of fate and destiny exerting an influence in the moment. Willing, therefore, is largely unconscious, there is no one doing it, and in the same way there is no one behind the thinking making plans in a back room but the thinking itself - you can't find yourself at the near end of a thought. And you can't find yourself at the near end of a feeling either. If you look hard there you just find that the thing you think you are looking for is like a ball being tossed back and forth between the players so as to keep you off. And they do this perfectly, always a step ahead of you because they are you, and are in on the joke even if you seem not to be. So, what is all this stuff made of, what is the brew? Who is tasting it? It's such strange stuff! When you are in it it seems infinitely kaleidoscopic, but actually it is all of one flavour, like nothing in this world.

Thinking, feeling, doing, all at once or successively, the words are only gestures towards overlapping layers of being, which are not the whole thing at all. You can't fit them together, they are like incompatible puzzle pieces, and all that's been going on inconsequentially is just this doing of yourself, a habit you can't break, against a background of tremendous complacency, evaporated cares, a little sweet reminder of something neither wholly real nor wholly imaginary, that you toy with. It will surely explode and shatter this smoothness, but that is in the future, while now you can't get out from under it, you are enjoying it too much. You seem to know something you don't know at all, and it is enough to drop you into a warm bath, where you are happy to wallow foolishly and without defenses. Every else is just a position that you look on with a dull and ironic eye. Oh, where is the Palmer to come and smash you over the head and drive you out of here? 

Wanting to say how it is without changing anything is a kind of desire, but also a kind of worship. It is not enough to set things out, to unfold the latent plan, since the desire is accepted as explaining itself and you crystallise as the one who does this, as being named by that recurrent impulse, what brings you back to the task each day, pointing yourself in. If it is all in the mind what is the mind inside of? As if all of creation were worship, the angels shouting their praises of love and your awakening in a fibre of this immense chorus without knowing it, but taking it as your private silence, your own void, the echo taken to be the source. Even the most serene of desires is not invented but a gift that must be returned to its source in the heart of the heart of causeless being.

The subject without any context and the subject saturated with context are identical but not equivalent. There is a kind of short circuit between these two extremes the sparking of which is this experiencing here and now, which is both my experience and without any experiencer. Every moment is a discharge that does not lessen the energy that is consumed, it fades away in time, but all of time and eventuality are just mediating dimensions, ways in which it elects to pass through itself. The entire system of contexts is not an externality but only a thought form, or a condition of experience supplied by the overflow of the contextless subject. It is possible to marry or splice phenomenological and structural accounts in this way, so that the impasses inevitably reached in developing either approach are resolved in the other according to an elusive and compelling logic. As philosophy this is probably a futile exercise, but the aim is to point towards that in experience which is too close, to obvious, to be described or pointed out in any way at all.