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.