He wanted to write about way things happen and go on happening, so soft and frictionless, peaceful and insufficient, to cut into the rind of it, and how he always found himself in the aftermath of turbid passions at the start or at the end of another day. The mind as an active organ was, he found, a weak and treacherous agent beside the passive mind forever brushed by events that leave sensations dying fall, like distant traces through the mist. It could not be a simple matter for the brain to amalgamate this before me into tree and this tree to the tree seen, or maybe not quite seen, the day before and so on through all its changes with the seasons and the light. If he could watch it at its work of building a world, of building an observer of a world and of himself, out of all this generic stuff, in, as they say, real time, so that he could say, 'Look there, that little circle of lights, that's the observer. See how I tickle it and it shakes me to the soul, strings out a long chain of other selves, subject-objects like a trick with mirrors, and I am all of them and none of them at once,' then the mind might be uprooted from its incessant wool-gathering and finally stand aghast in wonder.

The things seen, the play of attention in the visual field, the successive attractions of a colour then a shape, a sound, a smell, the feeling of the breeze on the skin, the weight of the body on this bench, the warmth of the air, inner sensations of body processes, the thoughts, their way of belonging to me, their peculiar mineness, the seeking, the intention to seek, and the realm in which this all takes place, and the sense that it is always foreclosed before I appear on the scene; and the absences as varied and rich and interdependent as the presences but in a different register - all of these phenomena seem to be marked by and to essentially belong to a division between objective and subjective poles, noemata and noeses, which is as unstable, dynamic and seemingly playful as the border between water and sand on a surf-washed beach. The contrasts, surprises and sheer creativity of these process seem to exceed any notion of what is possible in objectivity, but in fact it is nothing but objectivity, the dance of prakriti; what appeared to be noesis was only a parallax view of certain noema, just as is this current act of apprehension. But if all phenomena, including everything subjective, are mere objects, fleetingly salient noemata, this does not exactly do away with noesis, it merely indicates its unspeakable stature.

The distinction between the beautiful and the sublime can be carried over in a rough way to desire. Some desires, the beautiful ones, emerge from appetites, where an appetite is the aim to appropriate something already felt to be good, an adjunction in the positive sense, positive and inherently optional. If they are felt as increasing us they must be felt as increasing our freedom as well, since they lend us more of being in confirming it. Such appetites may lead to addictions, and hence to a negative kind of adjunction, a drastic loss of optionality, but to do so they must begin positively and in seeming to increase the self deform it into new and sinister figures. The other kind of desire is that whose effects famously described in Sappho 31, and cited by Longinus, is something that was never sought, but which destroys the self from the very outset. Here, what becomes compelling in the emotion is not anything gained through the process of experiencing it but its power to destroy the very nexus of gain and optionality, of the experience of an experiencer. Are the two modes of desire really all that different, one attacking frontally and the other from behind, or below? Each has its own way of being deadly, and each its own more or less subtle self-conceit.

In an album of old photographs he found a reminder of the hours, the days, the fading afternoon light, the lived duration of those trusting faces looking towards him through a tiny aperture of time as if he had an answer, being future, and certainly knowing some things and just as certainly not the essential. While others seemed as if reassured that nothing of themselves would be exposed behind the flat enigma of their eyes his own images had stayed open and unfinished. These were provisional selves defined by situations, friendships, acceptances that emerged from crossed paths and which would not be renewed. In every case he'd had to treat some assumption as if it were true, as if it were the truth. That seemed to be expected and he embraced it each time, with a sort of stubborn naïveté and with more or less of faith. Enough for the immediate occasion at any rate, enough to make it through to the next moment, but not for the gaze at the other end of time.

Accepting the division of the functions of the mind into buddhi, ahankara and manas we can say that each of them entails its own mode of being of the self of which it is the momentary expression. For buddhi this is certainty or necessity, for ahankara it is insistence and in manas it is elaboration and supplementation. Of the three it is ahankara that is the most relational, that unfolds in what we can identify as sexual patterns. One experiences another will directly through one's own will, but not just as a mode of opposition. Submission too is thus seen as a mode of insistence; it is as if the wills can dance with each other, can penetrate each other and so on. Or alternately, all the forms of sexualised play and of intercourse are the unfolding of the ways in which two wills can encounter and become entangled with each other. The perception of the world through will or ahankara is entirely different metaphysically than through the modes of understanding conditioned by the other modes, manas and buddhi. Will instantly recognises will, and orients itself accordingly, wisely or unwisely, even across species, suggesting a larger commonality. Does all will have the same fundamental character which expressed itself in different ways, or is there, say a masculine and a feminine will? Perhaps the difference is only in the range and freedom of tactical figures that can be assumed, small differences in disposition which lead to large differences in expression.

Ataraxia in the face of desire, as an amplifier of desire, or its opposite a sort of complete shattering surrender, are hyperboles of the desiring self, images of rare transcendence by which we can measure the failures by which we are insistently and inescapably ourselves. Certainty and insistence can also be distinguished as mental modes that simulate a self, by being, as it were, constants outside the system of the contents. Certainty, whether necessary or contingent hardly matters, is the notion attached to certain beliefs that they are true in any possible world, and so its burden is ultimately just this 'any possible world', a contentless and infinite reference. Certainty, arising as a feeling, is what makes such a reference to infinity possible, like the calls on God in the throws of desire. Insistence is a related but different thing, it is the quality of absolute particularity, a sort of equivalent to solipsism. It might be the ground of egoism - the practical belief in being an exception to every generality. Yes, we are all human and so morally equivalent, but I am the only one I can be sure exists. This insistent existence is incredibly insecure just because it is so formally undoubtable. In reality I am always at risk of being substituted in any or all of my relationships and I look for assurances that will abolish this scandalous omission on the side of being.

Desire is not driven by the optimisation of freedom of an enlarged self although something like this appears in the mirage that it projects. In the satisfaction of desire, however, there can be a kind of ecstasy which intimates that its source is in our original nature. There is a standing apart from the entire process of life as it has been experiences up to that point, leaving it intact but disengaged; we are disengaged from it, untouchable, all the polyphonic participation of the finite predicament is lifted into aesthetic enjoyment, where sensation is an end in itself. In such a state it is easy to feel as if we are more true, and generally there is no other, the other essential to eliciting the state having collapsed into the enlarged and mirage-like self. This fullness of satisfaction seems an immature and narcissistic form of religious experience. The resulting dialectic of desire thus circles around the origin of consciousness or of being as located in the mind. Formations come about, born of the surprising intensity of certain acts, which unfold their own kind of topology, laying out cardinal directions which relativise subject, object and mediation, developing thought which is more or less true to this formation and to its overturning. Formations succeed each other in endless variety and we assume that these are all states of the same self, never wholly given in any of them. The idea of the quest for this self arises, an infinite quest since there are only ever disparate fragments reflecting the endless reflexivity of the mind, like pieces of a puzzle that never add up. Each state has its own version of what the self is for it, versions immanent to the mental world, but projected into some impossible priority of self-reflection. Impossibility fascinates, fascination is identification, and identification is subjectification. As against this there is only the slow and difficult development of discrimination of mind from self.