"Why was it he felt so perfectly attuned to winter, to its fatalistic expectation of the worst, then, when the worst came, its rustic heroisms and shouldering of burdens, improvised ingeniousness, constructive despair?" - Violet Trefusis, 'Pirates at Play'.

"In every single moment of life we are beings that will die, and each moment would be otherwise if this were not our innate condition, somehow operative within it. Just as we are not already fully present in the instant of our birth, but rather something of us is continually being born, so too we do not die only in our last instant." - Georg Simmel 1918 (tr. Andrews and Levine, 2010)

The same thoughts encountered again and again, the space not exactly mapped, since it has the dream-like way of unexpectedly returning on itself, but traversed this way and that, filled to the edges with old footprints, all the walls banged on, windows flown through, all the hollow spots tested. Apparently there is no way out but that the conviction that there is no exit may itself be the exit.

If the ideal is the extension of functions that serve life and living into taking themselves as their pure end, so that art is perception as an end in itself, science as practical causality and ontology freed from the need to be useful, and so on, then what results when the most basic reality function of all, the 'constitution' of other minds, of the self as both object and subject at once, is driven into autotelic purity?

Memory and desire, each in their own way were enlisted in the task of completing this ever-incomplete being half-surrendered to image and symbol. These now resign from their tasks, admitting failure and final indifference. The situation thus sharpens free of mediations and dialectics. Being is substance, known directly or not at all.

From the side the curve of the cheek is continued in that of the forehead then bends back again rising to the crown before falling smoothly and with greater curvature to where the neck joins. The process of life spreads outward, first in trees and bindings of nerves, muscle and ducts and then discovering purpose takes off from the body and roots itself into the world. The two curves are not continuous but are connected via the eye-socket's inlet, the delicate seeing organ recessed behind the bridge of the nose with its perfect arc. And following like a wave behind the endless outflow of purpose the mind foams and eddies, now vapourising, now turning back on itself driven by the same force and miraculously discovering a world already half-formed. In front of the cheek the turns and returns of nose, philtrum, upper and lower lip and that miniature echo of waist and hip, the chin, all so expressive. And life now lost in the world's infinite fascination.

Gaining ground the not of circumstances bettered by minimal rules to the occasion of hexagons directly in air the vantage point of calibre or calibrated or calumniated togetherness, avenue dark as heightened step in brilliance forgathered and silvered shoe forgotten wine drained on behalf of fire-engines and Tudor ecstasies falling down down to sand and Wintry sea.

Describing movements, operations past the wet and descent of brown kindles mountains navigating the dry finishes in anfractuosities of mind falling no further into light and crowds beckoning Cleopatra's needle slashed on the upside any heart of steel cables murmuring beneath your seven collected delays the view of life.

Life is striving, desire, purposiveness, attainment, expression, the inevitable disappointment of which goals brings it ever closer to the absolute stasis and desirelessness of consciousness which as it dawns or penetrates its manifold urges, exposes and reverses its ruses, subverts all its ideals, and drives it mad.

There will be no nostalgia for the material plane, for the simple material acts of life, putting on a pair of shoes, going to bed dead tired, taking a shit, bruising a knee and all the rest, because these were always already lived in the realm of essence and constellated around another centre. The material, the bodily core of living felt like home only because it was the nearest reflection in the conditional reality in which your thought was (re)awakened to itself.

The ideal worlds in which you participate come to assume ever greater weight as compared to the embodied and always only present life-world that is taken to be the only one. Additionally, who or what you are in these worlds, if anyone can be anything at all, bears little relation to your more or less distinct identity in the empirical realisations of these worlds.

The world of and in experience is embodied and participatory and as such has its source in the birth of a single individual, but every content of experience belongs to life in general and is independent of that individual. You could even say that a large part of life consists of the individual's failed attempts to assert sovereignty over the life embodied in it. Ultimately, what is expressed in experience has as little to do with the individual's narrative as that narrative's claim on the origination of its own being.

Every form of understanding falls short, and it is know as falling short, is dispassionately criticised and put aside, as hopeless, as mere repetition, or as possibly promising and to be taken up again at a later time. There is deep dissatisfaction with the ability to come up with new forms, a frustration with known limitations, but the judgment continues, calmly immediate, testing, rejecting, as if it knows what is being looked for but is unable to clarify it, to bring it forward, to find the worthy vehicle.

The thought experiment of imagining that you and your whole world came into existence a few minutes ago with all memories n place makes the hidden assumption that your being is of the same kind as that of things, is ontic rather than ontological. It is enough to note that your present moment is not a point but a structure extending indefinitely backward and forward in time, in the very time that you createm which is time as it is.

That things behave in orderly and predictable ways is a reflection of the seeing and does not arise from the things themselves. When this predictability is analysed it yields deeper predictable structures as if in response to the questions put to it. Alternative accounts arise in different sites, from different trajectories of inquiry and engagement. These alternative accounts always skirt contradiction, instead when they appear to collide they bring about new interpretive frames i the inquiry, categories yielding to meta-categories etc. The world unfolds from the seeing, and is its reflection, its mirror image.

Appearance and Reality is too stark a duality. If Reality is what is not and can never be Appearance, Appearance is nevertheless a component of Reality and Real to that extent. Categorically there must be discrete levels, a sort of ontological spectrum between the two, and these, insofar as they are super-Appearances must be filled with living principles, with Soul in communion and communication.

Direct experience, first-hand, is a product of a complex interpretive process made on the basis of a personal context which varies from occasion to occasion. Another part of your knowledge is through inference, inductive or deductive with its grounds in hearsay, in authority, in imaginary but generally accepted entities and methods as much intuitive and aesthetic as logical. For a being whose essence is a knowingness you are mostly content with knowledge, if not counterfeit then the cognitive equivalent of paper money. The ideal of true knowledge remains something at best distant and yet to be attained, despite the sense of being not merely in the midst of it but identical with it.

There is the reality that is concealed and there is that which is unconcealed, but what is more interesting is the shadow reality that is both or is neither, or is indefinite as to whether it is one or the other.

Living nature has a quality of to-be-looked-at (as distinct from to-be-seen) independently of any gaze that is yet able to look at it, it is visually composed, and indeed this extends even to inanimate nature. We have learned that eyes have evolved many times and independently. At the same time there is that in nature which is concealed from any casual gaze and must be uncovered. All of this is prior to consciousness as we understand it. It is not that consciousness arises to meet this need to reality to be contemplated, but rather as an overflow of the intrinsic 'knowability', for want of a better word, of the real.

The act of judgment, the discrimination of value, begins as as a setting apart from the given, from the collective, but ends by drawing you back into a desire for alignment with the collective, through the utterance or the rehearsal of the discovered value. When the highest individual value is given to independence then judgment is self-defeating. A self that is entrapped in this way nonetheless suffers very little limitation of action, but it fights through every obstacle somehow from the wrong end.

In recent times the self has come to crystalise around the diaphanous concept of identity. This is partly a result and partly a reaction to the broad diffusion of the realisation that the self is both the ground of our 'being-here' and a constructed thing. But this realisation is only dimply grasped through a dense and chaotic pullulation of exactions against which some defense is needed. Light and darkness are mixed in new ways and new spectra and patterns emerge no different in kind from previous such spectra and ways.

The ordinary human state is that of being half-submerged in collective and ancestral consciousness, or more than half. It is individual only in appearance. Becoming an individual is a perilous journey that begins in this state, never strays too far from it, and is not necessary for what is regarded as a 'good life', is perhaps even a danger to it. Nevertheless there are some truths, some entire landscapes, that are only visible to the individual and at some cost.

The question is not 'what is consciousness?' but 'what is not-consciousness?', that is, what is its negation or negative? Naturally we think that the answer is inanimate stuff, dead matter, or 'rocks and stones and trees', but these of course are objects in consciousness, as is every other conceivable negative. Or you could frame it as 'what is the nothing behind consciousness, out of which it emerges and into which it returns'? The answer must go deeper that all worlds, living or dead.

If reality were a simulation then there would be one absolute hidden variable behind all phenomena, the clock-pulse of the simulating 'engine'. But this would only be true if the physical reality were primary and the subjects, or observers, the experiencers, or subject-windows were subprocesses as in any kind of up to the minute materialism - the synchronisation of which would be intractable The simulation would thus more likely be arranged in an idealist mode, that is, with weakly parallel processes for each observer, and the 'external' reality a sort of common nexus between them shading into fuzziness where required. But again, as soon as you have made this move the logical pull towards the idea of a simulation vanishes entirely.

The purpose and usefulness or otherwise of your various notions is within your own perspective the furtherance of various goal, direct or reactive, short or long term, more or less self-regarding etc., but as paradigms their significance is purely 'chemical', as adding just so much of a certain flavour, colour, potency or catalytic effect to compositions in which your intentions play no role at all, apart from said flavour or colour. Even as the hero of your own experience you are but a page or two in the book of experience as contemplated by an other eye.