So this is all you had in you? It was so much less than you thought. You lived on the interest of a non-existent capital, on the idea of such a capital. More precisely, you never managed to complete a thought, but seized threads from just beyond the horizon and dangled them in as if they had been torn from something closer in. Why the need for such a charade? Thoughts on gazing through the window of a moving vehicle on a bleak and chill morning. Out of love, and the pleasure in disowning yourself. The recovery of a lyric subject that has never been in place and rendering a world in deliberate tones - surprising, the odd places where you feel at home.

 

The nature of consciousness is such that it can only be determined by itself. If this is so then it must face two ways, towards an inwardness where it seems to know itself and towards an outwardness where it seems to be alienated from itself. Every moment of consciousness has an inner and an outer determinant, and both of these are intrinsic to it. It is as much a mistake to take it to be only the inwardness as it is to take the outwardness for a reality beyond consciousness, even if in common language the term consciousness is taken with a bias towards the inward side. What you feel and perceive seems to be determined by the outside and the revelation of the degree to which it is determined by elements like belief and expectation which are credited to the subjective ledger is always a surprise. Similarly desire and valuation seem to be expressions of the inward and we are unnerved by the discovery of the degree to which they are determined by unconscious and entirely objective factors. Notions about the self are what establish the dual entry bookkeeping that we use to make sense of experience, but these themselves are merely formations in consciousness and so subject to complete revision in the light of new paradigms. What you are could never be bounded by the subjective, since the boundary is arbitrary, but must be the unthinkable totality of consciousness, for which this experiencing self is only an instrument.

The waking self is a nexus of motives and orientations which belong as much to the system of its world as to that of its self. That you can so easily slip into dreaming when the tension is relaxed and the weave loosened shows how fragile and contingent this apparent continuity is. It is as if other stories are going on in hundreds of adjacent rooms and you suddenly open your eyes in a different one without any sense of disjunction, there is no pop, but there you are in the middle of a different tale, with a different world about you just as familiar as this one. The point is how easy the transition is made - the same self contains each world as naturally as any other - what makes it yours has nothing to do with the ongoing story. As if what is you is something like a tape-head regardless of what tape it happens to be reading. The stories differ only in their qualities of realism, in the degree to which they can convince the dreamed protagonist that where he finds himself is the only world, the reference world against which all others are to be measured, the power of its metaphors for dreaming. Everything is subject to fiction, that is what you learn from fiction, without ever quite believing it.

So much of experience consists of the thoughts that give an account of experience. This is so common that you don't stop to notice how strange it is. The whole scheme of the world you've worked up so artfully is only that, it isn't the world itself, it isn't the actuality of what brings about experience. It's all done with thoughts, and if you make a show of skepticism about what some thoughts seem to imply, you take for granted the very nature of thought, that it consists of these transient perturbations of what exactly? Nothing could be simpler than a thought, it weighs nothing at all, floats up out of unknown depths and bursts softly like a bubble, it is phosphorescent and sheds its light both ways, towards its object and its thinker, linking the two together - and in this sense that whatever it might be a thought of, it seems to be a little piece of the real, seems to possess a depth beyond the field of its object. It works because it is believed, but the ground of its belief is only a part of itself. A thought is pure map, but since it provides the very idea of territory we take it for illuminating the territory in its reflexive glow, rather than only distinguishing it by its shadow.

Dissociation is the antagonist of desire, or perhaps it is the other way around? Dissociation is falling into witnessing but with a sense of passivity and a loss of feeling, so that the actions originate only with the other. The scene assumes a sort of hyper-reality driven by an incomprehensible power external to the self in which witnessing is born. Suddenly you are detached and helplessly watching what happens, it is a kind of horror but there is a certain accompanying satisfaction, you have discovered your own subjectivity in subjection. Desire is an integrated and embodied state, a concentration of agency but ruled by a kind of urgency which submerges witnessing. Surely the ideal would be to be fully witnessing your own desire, to be only an amalgam of the two? Hence the notion of reintegration through desire, the merging of two heterogeneous forms of satisfaction. 

Mind is a thought, whether you say that it is what you have or what you are. So much of thought goes into providing a setting for ongoing thinking, a setting made of nothing but thoughts. You imagine that there is something that needs to be made clear, you worship logic which is an acquisition of thought to yield further thoughts. And the hindrances to understanding, how complex and refined they grow, only more notions piled on top of notions. It is not logic which yields the impossibility of hindrances. You can't be freed from the house of thought by adding more storeys. You are part of the furniture, why not go out by the same way that you went in leaving yourself behind?

The odd idea of being planted somewhere inside a flowing of experience, an experience-world with a special sort of hole in it, a distinguished singularity at least as real - but in a puzzlingly different way - as the rest of it, certainly made of the same stuff only elusively twisted around. To experience is to have the idea of I-experiencing, and to wonder about this, to find it natural that this gives matter to think about, to elucidate. The position of the questioner is part of the pattern is as much experience as any of the rest of it. Whatever it is could never reveal itself skewered at the point of a question, delivered to a questioner. The questioner is what experience is made of it vary fabric and is not the pivot or point of the truth of experience.

There are only particulars; how can you know but for the universal of particularity? There are only universals, but they are ground up into the finest particles, as in Santayana's Realm of Essence; and how can you experience any such universal but by investing some momentary particular, making it blossom. Around and around it goes, and if you withhold a resolving universal, or a dumbfounding particular, then it spirals inward in tighter and tighter circles where the possibility arises that you can once and for all catch yourself in the act. You both know and don't know what you are doing - different knowings, different yous.

There is only this present moment and yet you seem to stand just aside from a flowing present and to subtend the succession of its moments in a mysterious gathering of transcendental unity, so that inner experience might become fact, might become the present. This defines your latent psychic milieu where you pursue a passionate destiny. We are all passionate destinies with friction aforethought. It requires an idea, a fundamental unity in diversity or diversity in unity, but all of this, the idea itself, is just an aspect of the present moment and bears no power of connection. It's how you handle that first thought, the transcendental unity can't do what it purports to do but falsifies  presence birthing it so that it can appear to do so. There is no unity in the present because nothing here and now that needs to be unified, not two because not one.

Is it the one consciousness taking on these various states, some broad and some narrow, some loose and some tight, some convex and some concave, some exploiting time, others being revenged upon by time, and so on; so that it must be that nothing about this consciousness is expressed in any particular state, no matter how light-filled or smug, since it would be just as perfectly expressed in a diametrically opposite state? Or is it that there is no consciousness, or no one consciousness only a succession of various states each of which suggests that it is the expression of a prior unity, of a vision, but only does so for quite contingent reasons, say because the particular phase-space of states that happens to be serially activated has acquired this cultural colouring, the sickly bruised beauty of sunset hues perhaps? Try as you might to come up with an answer to this question, a neat analytic solution, you are bound to fail. There may be an answer but if can't be revealed by any effort of yours, just because of the kind of scribble that you are. If it shows up it is in another direction and you would just be the poor hinge on which it turns.

To be conscious, to have the cacophony of thought subside to a low and fragmentary whispering, but still to have no experience, as if you have turned silent against yourself. A state to be denied because there is simply nothing to say of it. It seems as if it could go on forever like this, as if it is a basic state of being that lies beneath all other states. Mind is always just the way it is, not a transformation or rearrangement of a richer space in which certain elements have merely concealed themselves. Nowhere to look, neither inside nor outside. It is central, it is at every moment the complete expression of a nature with nothing lacking. What comes out is only equal to what goes in. It waits and it forgets, waiting, forgetting.

The phenomenon is never what it is, it overflows everything that defines it, overflows the totality of what defines it, including every reflection and sublation that can be added to it. The overflowing is itself a kind of phenomenon, or if not exactly a phenomenon since it is a protean cancellation of all attributes and relations, it is an essential component of the space of phenomena, of the core agreement or consent that phenomena appear. As such, although it suggests the idea of the subject as eternally detached witness inside experience, as the impossibility of all relations that is only an illusion of the subject, perhaps the primary of such illusions wherever they arises. If the subject could be pointed to it would be precisely what does not overflow, it would be the unique 'thing' that actually is exactly what it is. It quietly refuses any attribution that would lead to overflowing itself, the infinitely still point that can't be found because it can't be lost.

You know you are unworthy but it is your unworthiness that you must put aside, you know you are powerless and it is your powerlessness, your aimlessness, your weakness that you must strip yourself of. To pass through the needle's eye you must become very small, put off all stature, put off your very smallness. Enter where there is no support from anything known and anything yet unknown. In the silence which melts away your name and all propriety, you can no longer respond, but gently surrender yourself to response, as it was and is and will be.

All thought, all your experience takes place inside something, you can call it mind or being, or life, or self or 'I'. But these are themselves thoughts inside the same place, inside a prior thought. If you were to rediscover the primary thought what would it be? Not reached with words but what makes words possible, not a self but what makes selving function,what invests self-reference as what it is pr appears to be. Not something you model in thought, but something already known that you recognise thought as meaning, not inside or outside anything, not a place but what enables placing to place. Not known, the prototype of all knowing, the absolute particular that makes every universal able to be what it is. 

In the natural world the reproductive process is not an end in itself but is at the service of a contingent history of evolutionary survival. If a particular species were to complete its own sexual relation then it would fall into a survival dead-end and could be wiped out by a change of environmental conditions, such as a new predator or parasite. Fitness can't be directly signaled because what is the most fit under all possible conditions can't be determined beforehand. Sexual signalling must therefore never be a perfect correspondence, never actually express a final state of things. It is in this sense that the peacock's tail could be seen as a symptom of the absence of a sexual relation in these birds. The females evolve to choose spectacular plumage as the males evolve to display it, so that it seems as though the aesthetic imperative of the plumage were employing the imperfectly matched preferences of both sexes for its own ends. In this sense the Lacanian axiom that there is no sexual relationship would simply be a restatement of the role of sexual selection in Darwinian evolution. This axiom is however posterior to another axiom which is perhaps more exclusively human, namely the non-existence of a relationship to death. And this non-relationship produces its own even more spectacular symptomatology, its own metaphysical peacock tails.

What you notice are the "big ideas, images and distorted facts", especially the former, the way they used to loom up at you from out of nowhere, like a drive-in movie screen next to a winding country road as you are driving in the night, the scene is large and then you were drawn into it so easily swept up in your fool's lightness, as if it were an original imperative that had suddenly remembered you. But that you can name it now already shows how much power it has lost, and soon you feel a kind of nostalgia, you've already said goodbye to all that immensity, to the sway of its authority, the ranting masquerading as value, and now its seen in its true stature, so much smaller than you'd ever imagined. All this from simply taking up the poor substance of subjectivity, as you uncover it, simplicity in the midst of banality and gently brushing away the dirt and adhering tendrils and then gently replacing it exactly where you found it. 

The imaginary inner space in which you are localised is the space of all accessible states, all the alternate states in which you might find yourself. The internal distances between such states depends on how vividly you can represent them and on how viable you judge the path from your present state to an alternate one to be. This means that you have a way of representing alternative-states-in-which-you-might-be, which could perhaps be thought of as counterfactuality: if conditions were otherwise this is how I would find myself. In addition there is a realism function which tells you whether the transition to a given state is possible and what the cost of such a transition is likely to be - cost being dependent on the sequence of transitional states. This is an imaginary space, but what it is filled with is representations of the self. Self really only exists as what makes sense of the idea of alternative or counterfactual states. It is thus a kind of logically required objectivity, an algebraisation of being. The subject as object is the algebraic marker which makes it possible to imagine your-'self' in a different state. The more you refrain from such logical objectivation the more perfectly you coincide with your present state, the more the very concept of things being different simply dissolves into unthinkability. It may be that the practical intellect functions by generating alternative scenarios, but there is no need to divide your subjective treasure among them.

One thing that evolutionary psychology makes clear is that the unconscious is not structured like a language. The linkage between phenomenology and structure or biology could only have been made via the intermediary of language, which is why the 'linguistic turn' was such an important hold out for a phenomenology that sought to outlive the subject. But how can you think of the homomorphisms revealed by evolutionary psychology, the upstream patterns that form desire and motivations, that deform the space of the subject, without turning the linguistic key? Language is merely a tenant in the house of being; how can you define its lease without language? You can't think it through, you can only ask of language that it direct you to what is beyond it, what it is that you can know without being able to express. And in what sense do you know it? Not entirely with the mind, but with the body, with the gut, with blood, and something more besides. You know it, have always known it, but you need to put the aside the relation of signifier and signified that belongs with language, put aside poetics, and encounter a deeper duality in unity, unity in duality.

Desire is a curvature of inner space, but inner space varies in its flexibility, capacity and dimensionality. You don't know where desires come from they are not transparent to self-awareness, and yet self-awareness inhabits them completely. Some motivations are felt as if they are alien visitors, others are so natural-seeming that you never think to question them. Some you surrender to others you worship. Curvatures arise, force without motion, tension and directedness, the drawing of things into a specific relation independent of thought. Inner space arises with desire, you don't know it unless it is curved, yet it is what you find yourself in. It is because you think that there is a single mechanism for all desires, the person being what makes it all hang together. You don't know you exist until there is something you want. What you think you are is the inner space in which you are. This is imaginary and yet it fills lifetimes. Everyone is so motivated, you find yourself in a world of complex motivations, a system. Whatever you can't see is hidden. Everyone is a question, their wants distort the space already curved. Your desires are not independent they are only the curvature of the space in which you think you are and which is actually what you are - the imaginary tensor of imaginary space.   

If you combine quantum many-worlds ideas with the line of thinking that they were originally designed to eliminate, namely 'observation collapsing the wave function' you get the somehow both obvious and absurd idea that there is only one observer in the world in which you find yourself and that is necessarily you. It is a way of reconciling the faith in universal contingency with the odd necessity adhering to the cogito. Well, you might say, clearly I am the sole observer of my universe, but my universe is wholly imaginary, is merely an imprecise subjective projection of the real universe. And where is this real universe located, the one in which the event of imagining is really happening? Just where you think it is, only it is nothing like you think it is because it is full of other observers each of whom is seeing a different world, and in each of these other worlds there is a something resembling you cognising which exists as an objective fact or ongoing event, a happening, while only here in the world you actually inhabit does there appear to be no such (objective) fact. All of this grows progressively more incoherent the more you think about it. The problem seems to lie in taking your own experiencing as some kind of fact in a world. That is the way that we think about everything which is, and what could have any more title to existence than what says 'I am', or the prime imaginer in an infinite regress of positings.   

Perception, awareness, experience, all this time-bound existence has a bad conscience, as if it cannot entirely suppress the insufficiency of its answer, its response, to simple being. Experience is the time-hallowed attempt to solve being. It is one thing when it believes in its project, quite another when it dawns upon it that it is only rearranging the tokens of the problem. Insufficiency is what motivates the striving inseparable from existence - its productions are dazzling, but they fail to respond to the original question.

It starts out as the activity of a doer - no, that's not right, it starts out accompanied by the idea of an interested doer and by the idea of interest, and very big ideas these are since they have so much work to do and are so imbricated with other busy ideas. As time goes by these ideas fall away, they are working objects and they become exhausted and irrelevant, their connections fray through excessive repetition. Oddly the activity goes on in just the same way, better really, since the ideas added nothing to it. This is so strange, because it seemed so essential that there be some sort of personage, with all the paraphernalia of a need to distinguish himself, to justify himself, or whatever the drive appeared to be, to contain this thing. But it turned out just the other way, the personage is what gets in the way, what appropriates it and obscures it, as if it's agenda mattered, as if it were about some kind of important event. Oh, it is as tiresome as a symphony by Mahler!

Thought is a seeking of satisfaction within thought, which means a seeking of coincidence with itself. Thought is thus an embodied desire but the desire comes from outside of thought. Only if thought is conscious - in consciousness, as we imprecisely say - does it feel like a desire, does it express the striving to be complete in itself. Take away consciousness and thought falls into a passive heap, like words on a page with no reader. A book of philosophy does not philosophise, but what use is such a book if it does not prompt philosophising in the mind of a reader. Who or what is the reader, the thinker of the thought? It cannot read itself, but you might say that it reads its reader while it is being read. This is about the relation of thought to consciousness. Consciousness has no needs and yet it produces needs in thought or in experience, which are themselves nothing but consciousness. It doesn't take form but it is the forms which it takes as thought, forms which are always imperfect in that they strive for the condition of their sole condition. Push thought until its logic breaks down which forces it to pause so that something can flash before the eye of the mind, something that is the mind flashing before its own eyes. To say that consciousness is the substrate of thought is only a thought, far short of what it wants to say, so keep on pushing until it breaks, bending over itself to meet itself before it started. Thought is the infant babbling of the non-thought that is consciousness doing thinking. Consciousness coincides with itself in thought's failure to coincide with itself.

As if this big pearl-grey block, like a warm iceberg has drifted into your field and bobbed stupidly up against your nose. You can't see around it, you can't even focus on it, but you can't push it away either, it's too big, too heavy to budge, even if it seems weightless enough to float in space. Your habitual focus towards the distant object is cut off, towards anything as long as it is out there, out of reach, arousing the mind. This lump, whatever it is, slays the mind, thoughts can't get a grip on it, can't crack it or melt it. What is it? Maybe it is your brain? It is you, nausea without any nausea, as if that feeling of compelled absorption into your own stuff that belongs to nausea is there but without any of the negative feelings. You can't resist it, neither can you enjoy it, it just is, and it makes all the adventures of thought seem absurd and futile, they only go out of this so they can come back to this. Whatever it is you imagine discovering this is its very self and the whole scaffolding that creates values out of lack, out of questioning, falls away into absurdity. The goal but not as goal, never found because never lost.

The same wondering as in childhood brought you before the immense gulf of your own gaze, so that your heart trembled at the strange gift of presence, is here wrapped up in layer after layer of old results, old findings, so that the distinctive rustle of original mind is just a nagging discomfort belonging to nothing and nobody. If there had to be a thought then there had to be this cascading history of thoughts and false doings that moved you precisely in the direction of this strange substitution as if burrowing straight down into the crust, the gravity, of dream. You take hold of it trustingly and it leads you down. The same child is now thinking this old man's thoughts, buckling beneath the weight of them, their tarnished splendour, their shadows and infinite diffractions, their cracked husks.