The enacting will requires not so much a response as a responsiveness in a subjectivised, invisible other. The tension between the two poles is drawn into a plural field of related polarities among which the known and the unknown, the authentic and the deceptive are particularly prominenet. The play of these gives rise to a mysterious satisfaction, an enjoyment that is spread indefinitely among the nodes which emerge out of and fleetingly stabilise the shimmering field of tensions. There is a conversion of ethical and epistemological difference into the currency of divine and solipsistic delight.

His nostalgie de la boue. How delightful he found it to surrender to thoughtless descent into to the thicket of vying forces. Prismatic dartings back and forth of every kind of judgment and expectation, of envy, contempt, vague desires instantly checked, and a thicket of distracting identifications, all the things that were rightfully his, pieces of his puzzle, stories re-encountered and resumed after a long-seeming gap. All that urge and obduracy, he found it maddening as hell, but bracing in its simplifications. He was newly fascinated by the quintessential form of subject-object whose familiar form re-emerged out of the fog of banality.

The queasy familiarity of the hobble tailored out of the will itself including all its schemes to evade hobbling. It is owned and created by the same agency as it is set to bound, but for all that it cannot be undone; its operation is ruled by law and the experience of it is the experience of law. This is law in both the mathematical sense and the legal sense, a social law and a law of nature, impossible to break and incriminating to break, inviting and forbidding appeal. The law that must grind and that once launched cannot be stopped until it has achieved its end.

It is hard to pin down in the way it goes on because it seems to have two entirely distinct phases. One in which the self is a screen, or a filter, more or less permeable to some energy that originates outside, and the other in which it is a character in an interminable film-noir. One rejoices in possibilities and spins out its tale of affinity with the light, and the other, trapped in subterranean chambers is pursued by shadows of its own making. The first, given up to its own whims makes images but lacks romance, the second, oppressed by the law, peoples its world with dream characters but misses all lightness and good humour.

If there are things that are purely personal, matters of taste and responses keyed by our quirky individual histories, there are also elements that are aesthetic, but in a more local sense than is commonly understood. Aesthetic in this sense refers to deep feelings that arise in a receptivity to events and circumstances which exceed the limits of the individual; they are familial, social, kinship-based and even racial feelings and are known as such. These feelings fall short of the kind of universality that belong to beauty or truth, but are insistently directed towards others, towards the social commons, they are political in their very essence. Still, there is nothing that does not originate in the personal, and the most purely personal has its own unappeasable protest. The capture and neutralisation of the personal by the aesthetic is a long drawn-out story in which our sympathies are equally divided.

The lyrical voice in popular songs is pervaded by a sort of ethical substance. It combines a powerful but abstract demand with, a display of sensitivity, personality and intentionality strongly projected out into the world, but again aestheticised or virtualised. So powerful and yet so contained is the projection of personality that the aesthetics seem to be only a refracted form of it. In the more extreme reaches of this medium, patterning predominates and has broken the personal element into shards which can be endlessly rearranged in repeating forms that emphatically undo the conventionally personal and expose the mechanisms which underpin its appearance, and so demonstrate its illusory nature. Paradoxically, this performative deconstruction brings forth a new kind of personal-ness, a sort of holographic and frankly utopian one.

High up and to the side, a tiny cupboard that he found by stacking a chair on the sideboard and a box on the chair. He gingerly reached up and tugged at the white door, it was stiff but came open with a crack. Nothing inside but some dried up dusty stuff, might once have been a vegetable, and some torn scraps of paper. This little nest, high up in the body, the cell where he dwelt, the alternate place, the parallel time, that was never entirely erased.