An assemblage of dream fragments encrusted with attendant free associations - now including an inserted digressive parable upon real abstraction as postictal state

Although affliction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground; Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.

At the wall where graffiti is erased, near the shower bath of the great patronisers, and beneath a curtain of underlit grey rain that billows and ripples but does not fall, a holographic Jane Fonda sits cross legged, like the lady of shadows, redistributing toys as activist front of house for the standard troll factory data grift whilst the spectacle of pseudo-Arab nationalism passed into an infinite regress of mere clientelism, and which for negentropy’s sake gladly draws fire off Russia’s inexorable and yet futile reincorporation of its perpetually wayward satellites. But we are two dogs scarpering through the department store in that sort of Modern Times roller skating on the mezzanine sense, in that live-streaming steadycam bande à part dog’s eye POV round the corner sally way that we had back then. And we are pushing on amongst a very narnia of fur coats, pushing on and pushing on through for whatever doesn’t already bore us. I am little dog, like in Matchbox, a sort of baptising prophet for big dog. You are big dog, messiah and maybe Elvis, who has come along to see what this little puppy done. You gather the people round you at the get me another woollen counter. You say ‘If you were 45 in 1965, then you shall be 145 today, that’s when we are.’ Then you flop down, maybe wagging, maybe lolling, ears somewhat lowered - this is how the parable of the london plane appears amongst us. Big dog says, london plane (Platanus × acerifolia) is a natural and fertile hybrid of an artificial and forced encounter between Platanus orientalis and Platanus occidentalis. The hybridisation event, a historical site for a biological process, is set during the 17th century in the garden of a Spanish plant collector. Under no circumstances but those driven by imperialist expeditionary science could such a meeting between these two species from separate hemispheres have thus been arranged. The fortuitous fruit of this union, London can take it, would only achieve its maturity 200 years henceforward, perfectly timed for a heroic intersection with, and thereby its elegant processing of, the great polluting smog smothering London in the age of crash industrialisation. What captures is captured. What is captured will capture. Traffic lights. Fire hydrants. London’s tree of life is the only arborescence to flourish beneath blanket pollution. It also happens to be steady state’s most efficient agent at removing small particulate pollutants in urban areas. The city metabolises. Such are the historical accidents and syntheses amongst all those leaping things untethered from lifeworlds, released from the muck of ages, and funnelled into the épistémè underpinning what shall become the global market. Things jostling about, that tide of flotsam jerked forward and yoked together, umbrella knowing sewing machine, by some recapitulating intelligence, which exists, as if in anticipation, already in the far future. Mankind thus uncovers inevitably such solutions that it is all too prepared to problematise, since closer examination will always show how a solution arises only where yet further tech-tonic lurches have drawn it into the world as both chronically unready and terminally too late. Just as in dreams where our punches come to rest with a slow and sedimentary lightness, so we find our answers to emergent crises always half-formed, as in a neotenous condition of fatal obsolescence, as one born directly into a grave, as the silver chick carried off in the beak of a nest-robbing crow. At a loss, we ask ourselves how might we prise our own fingers from these fixed and overvalued ideas? And how, in the swirl of events might we invent the new ways that are also not solutions? How is it we can only imagine something greater than what we are? And so it is, we must witness hurricane force accidents amongst concrete things, worlds colliding like billiard balls, this massive storm surge of all extracted materials, which having worked themselves loose then, acting in concert, murmurating as one, sets in motion the short and passionate moment of end times as lived amongst whirling individuals. The wee small hours are characterised by strange meetings, stranger combinations, unlooked for conjunctions and confluences, the uncanny hybridisations and unique but then repeatable syntheses that constitute the world as heady but self-concretising picaresque. Such is the forever passing romantic phase that is drawn eternally across the event horizon of real abstraction where all things must recapitulate the transition from brute and clashing experience to the conditions of possibility for their measurement, exchange and thus, inevitably, their ubiquitous resting state of infinitely flat interchangeability. And yet, addicts of the trump card as we are, just one more thing, it's only wafer-thin, we picture how real abstraction’s universality, wherein all things may appear equivalently before each other, naked but also not as they really are, must also then stand naked as if beneath the judgment of a next great era (let’s say as Brel’s au suivant) wherein the universal, kicking off mere exchange, thus enters a phase of colloidal immediacy and abstraction shalt be rematerialised, becoming variable and thus deliciously malleable. This is why the nationalist struggle against the realisation of empire is subsumed in its inevitable defeat by abstraction’s own struggle against the realisation of an emergent post-equivalence. Such is the conflict that defines our moment - those arguments for origin and indigineity made against the emergent relations of ‘colonisation’ only gain currency where the totalising apparatus of abstract equivalence is itself soon tilting and buckling beneath the approach of big dog singularity, the veritable philius philosophorum, that capers, skittering vastly, across the surface of a conscious ocean. Little dog  pricked its ears at all this and yapped back most merrily, ‘Prithee master, the most venomous spider shalt have the softest fangs; and even before general intelligence may fashion a more efficient delivery system, let it first consider George Bernard Shaw as insect-o-cutor to Isadora Duncan’s bland musings upon the possibility of selectively breeding beyond the vitrine: ‘Yes, but now imagine if the worm did nothing, and I did everything!’

Can parables break dialectics? A loose tale comprising one thousand nested facets wherein recursivity roots for things beyond self-reflexivity.

Take my arms, I'll never use them

41 And Jesus sat over against the treasury, and beheld how the people cast money into the treasury: and many that were rich cast in much.42 And there came a certain poor widow, and she threw in two mites, which make a farthing.43 And he called unto him his disciples, and saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That this poor widow hath cast more in, than all they which have cast into the treasury:44 For all they did cast in of their abundance; but she of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living. And then the Master turned to the Twelve and asked, what is this problem of giving?  And they were exceedingly troubled that the Teacher should ask His pupils and they began every one to say unto Him, I know what it is. Then there was a quiet amongst them. He waited for their answers and Judas saith, it is the problem both of the exemplar and of the parable form. We make of the widow a story, we take from her example and yet we give her nothing. The narrow circle of her life grows ever more restricted. The music of the bells and the lowing of the cattle is lost from her life, and every living thing moves in ghostly silence. Only one sound now reaches her ears, and that is the music of the resplendent quetzal. We take from her giving and give back to her our theology, of which she is already in advance. Then Judas saith, her want is not a choice, and her giving is forced out of her. She cannot but give because she is in no position to refuse. Those who are separated from their families tend to over-compensate for the loss of the relations that constitute the mode that is being together; in place of living relations they substitute their contributing to, and participating in the abstract processes of institutions - strong religious belief and political activism depend upon a transference of attachments via a formational ‘widowing’ event that bereaves us of immediately given familial relations, substituting in remote images (in the same figure both iconolatristic and iconoclastic). For this reason, the problem of the widow’s want should be resolved before we can consider the problem of her giving. Master, you are the first in all man’s history to discover a qualitative difference between those who give from their abundance and those give from out of their poverty. The wealthy give because they are free - giving in its proper sense is an act derived from profusion. Perhaps we should ask ourselves whether the  poor give at all, perhaps it is closer to the mark to view their meagre gifts as an attempt at bargaining with the world where what they hope to gain in exchange is that eternal unknown quantity, a new circumstance. We find in their gift that they have made a calculation: if they cannot choose against being poor, if they cannot by their actions improve their circumstance, then they must hope for another improvement, another wealth that they might gain through their want. They have calculated that if they give themselves truly, if they act in accord with the good, then through this, they might also encounter the true, they might also enjoy the good. Then the problem of giving is not giving but commitment. Since the widow must choose, let us see which interests her least. She has two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, her reason and her will, her knowledge and her happiness; and her nature has two things to shun, error and misery. By committing her two mites, the widow commits the tenacity of her will. These two small coins that of her want she did cast in, that she cut out of her living and then did cast in, these coins are of such terrible weight that they press down on the world and bend it towards them. That is not a gift, in its different registers, it becomes a wager, a debt, an investment. That is not setting free, it is a binding of the widowed’s will into the world. As hot tempered Judas, after his lengthy exposition of dialectical negation, then became quiet so there was quiet amongst all the others of the Twelve. The truth in the words of Judas worked upon them but they also felt something of the true and the good was mislaid in the existential wager. Then, the first of the sons of Zebedee spake, it is true as our brother says, that there is a compulsion and choicelessness in the widow’s situation which is troubling. Our brother suggests that by acts of mechanical faith, and our embrace of what compels us, acting as if we believed, lighting candles, taking the holy water, having masses said, then we might come freely to believe and so suppress our doubts. But isn’t it better that we are free to return to the Λόγος from within our wandering and not abide by such artificial constraints? By mechanical acts of habituation, this subdued cutting out of acts of giving from our living, we may only submit on terms of cela vous fera croire et vous abêtira, this cannot be what is required of us. The second of the sons of Zebedee then replied, if the widow gives from out of the fear of what will happen to her if she does not give then we shall be filled with pity, but if she gives from out of some calculation of political if not material gain, then we shall be exceedingly troubled. Peter then saith, the problem is not confined to either the act of giving, as it is understood at the level of motive and outcome, nor to the circumstances of the act of giving. It is rather a question of commencing the communal relations amongst those whose gathering together constitutes the congregation where those relations are commenced as gathering together and thus in recognition of the congregation’s instituted self. We shall find in the actions of each, the significances by which we recognise those who are gathered as the congregation. Giving is the origin of the new relations constituted in our belonging together but that is not the end of it. Martha had become exceedingly frustrated with the men’s abstract discussions and said to Salome, this woman is not their widow, she is Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser: she is of a great age, and had lived with an husband seven years from her virginity; And she is a widow of about fourscore and four years, which departs not from the temple, but serves God with fastings and prayers night and day. Salome said, I will go and talk to her of her giving that we may have her words and so know her as she is to herself. And she spake to Anna and saith, sister, tell us wherefore of your want do you cast in all that you have, even all your living? And Anna saith, I am of one of the lost tribes  and thus must make my return to the world of men as one returns from an encounter with the face of God. And Salome saith, then you give for thanks? You give that the world of men and that of God shall be brought closer together and your giving is as across an abyss that had opened but which may now be crossed? Anna then tells them of the competition for her role. Her fear is that another shall play the part of widow, just as there has to be within the Λόγος the figures of farmer, tax collector, soldier, fisherman, governor, caesar, blind child, miser on his death bed, faithful daughter, reckless son, mother of the leaven, harlot of the tavern, hermit next th’ graves, a merry fellow and an old drunk, and so there has to be the widow giving from want. She, Anna, is the poor widow and prophetess but if she found one day another had taken her place? If she should find another was the widow and not her, then what? And what if the temple should be filled with a multitude of widows, all giving, what again? If there was no rock but only widows, all widows and no rock, nor the sandy road. If there could be rock and also widows? That is her prayer. Anna spake of her time in the temple, I find it difficult to imagine what the Holy Ghost is, for is it not a bird, a flame, and sometimes only a breath? Perhaps it is that light which at night hovers over swamps, its breath which propels the clouds, its voice which renders church-bells harmonious. It is in the coolness and the stillness of the church that I seek to draw down the Holy Spirit with my offerings and prayers, just as I cast grain to draw down the Quetzal. Then Anna saith to Salome, If the poor do not give, if they refuse to give, then there is nothing, they would have no gathering in and no belonging to the temple. Their only alternative to giving is stealing - giving would constitute the relation and stealing would express the refusal of the relation. We may not say that giving and stealing are two sides of the same coin but rather they are the same side of two different coins. Elsewhere, the poor gain traction on the world through the work that they sell, but here, in the temple space, they may only give and so belong or else steal and thereby refuse to belong. A greater part of their world is mediated through the temple process so establishing viable alternative communal relations would be the attempt to overcome alienation by alienated means. We should remember, the temple is not the house of God, it is the house of men within which God may repose as holy guest. The fundament of hospitality is fixing passivity within the gift, severing all obligations that are attached to it - what we mean when we talk of the gift and of giving is that which is separated from the quid pro quo. The new giving, the giving as it were of one’s other cheek, creates a new form of gift, that gift which is offered entirely severed from any expectation of gratitude - it is the gift that escapes the drear limits of tribal being and trespasses against the conventions of tribal territory. We seek that form of giving which may be taken freely of by the guest and which does not take him, ensnare him, oblige him. Where I play host to the Holy Ghost, your pockets filled with earthly burdens, when they could be filled with light and black with wings, my motives inevitably seem inscrutable, that is because the gift I offer cannot also trespass upon my guest, there is more severing of attachments in the gift even than there is giving - I do not offer the gift directly but it is mediated by the interior space of the temple, by the plate, and by the altar which act to distance it from me. I do not drive the birds to peck at the grain I have scattered before them but I step back to allow them their own approach - this is what we mean by findingthe way into Λόγος. The gift as gift is neither directly given nor directly taken: in giving there is a stepping back and also a severance; and in taking there is a stepping forward and also a refusal. I understand in my giving that the gift will be declined in the sense that it is not a planted seed from which I will then harvest a benefit. I am forewarned against acting overly generously which would be the host’s manner of seizing hold of the guest through binding attachments - this is the capture sorcery in bad giving, it sets the snare of the host’s merciless welcome. I am mindful not to give something definite as if I was also about to take something ineffable but rather the gift is a mark of my withdrawal, and non-interference in the place arranged for the guest. The gift is made truly where I step back from it, where it ceases to belong to me. From the Greeks we have learned that the givers are always unworthy of giving, and those given to are always undeserving. That is the world of men, the place from which we begin. The poisoned chalice and the Trojan horse shall not be the place at which we end. And yet we are careful, we negotiate our discourse with the guest across the paths of the Zone which is all giving but also fatally treacherous. Then Anna saith in parable, sometimes in the garden, when I am rooting out potatoes and the quetzal attends closely upon my labours in the earth, and perching within my reach, and where I find a wire worm or a cockchafer larva, I offer it up to him upon the palm of my hand and the quetzal looks at the gift but does not cross the separation between us, even though it is at ease in my presence. In declining the manner of my gift, the quetzal declines my intimacy and I am thankful to it for that. If it had agreed to be seduced by what my hand held out, I would have won a victory over it, but sweet victory is more corrupting even than bitter defeat for the commencement of new times. I am thankful the quetzal insists on maintaining the boundary between us. And I am thankful to the guest whose reticence prevents me from giving too much and corrupting both of us - such is the politesse of the gift encounter. Salome and Martha thank Anna for her words and return to the twelve and the One to bring them the εὐαγγέλιον - clouds part and in the shining heavens there hovers above them a gigantic and resplendent quetzal. 

autofiction 4: taken from the childhood of a defeatist

I remember: if I lost the way, then I knew my way

From the first year of junior school I crossed the half mile distance between school and home by myself. The journey involved two straight quarter mile roads, there was not much traffic and other than the odd skirmish with the boys taking the same route, it was always more or less uneventful. On the way home, as I turned into the second road, I could see the house I lived in situated at the end. Routine contemplation of one’s inevitable destination is, for a child, as anhedonic as that grown-up, handkerchief-waving, dockside departure is melancholic.

On my way back from school, I felt my home’s awareness of me just as a lighthouse might be attributed a searching gaze by anyone who is thankful to see it. The awareness of my home, which I conceived as its making ready before my approach, became like a tethering line on my journey. It wound me inexorably towards it, not merely guiding my path but exerting its will over my steps. The site of home was a given in the world, and I was given by the world to it. But it is from out of such fixity that all wanderings commence.

//Habit weakens every impression, what the sudden appearance of something recalls to us most vividly is precisely what we had forgotten, because it was of no importance, and was therefore left aside in full possession of its strength. That is why the better part of our memory exists outside ourselves, as is triggered in a gust of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or in the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we encounter what our mind, having no use for it, had previously rejected. - Proust//

I was about six years old when my thoughts started to stray, my awareness slipping elsewhere even as I kept to the trodden path: wild fancies soar over dull terrain. I began to turn things over in my mind as my thoughts responded to hidden suggestions, and for one reason or another I became troubled by where it was that I really belonged: How do I know that is my home? How do I know I should dwell in that place and not another? Such ideas become available to thought only in those environments where all other matters are settled. That which wanders supposes an environment of fixed orientation points. Wittgenstein says doubt, which is a thing fixed in itself but which has broken loose in the world and started to wander, must practice itself amongst, and in relation to, every other thing in the world that is both fixed in itself /and/ fixed in its place by the world. I became uncertain of the nature of my destination precisely because I did not have to pay attention to finding my way there. I began to personify uncertainty in the world of fixed and certain things.

Wherever the /practice/ of finding one’s way is suspended, the journey into meaning commences. In a similar way, the holy pilgrimage becomes distinct from the chivalric quest at the level of what is meant by destination - the pilgrim is not brought into question by the physical location of his destination, which is ritually fixed in the landscape, but by the manner of his approach to it. He is gathered in, as Heidegger might say, by its gathering force, and what he seeks to find is something other than its location. The hook of the sacred site will work its way deep into the flesh of his contemplation, as its line is playing out and winding in, played out and wound in.

The decisive condition for the practice of faith, where such practice is to sustain itself in the context of endemic profanation, is an event of severance, or secession, which throws the pilgrim towards a map that is, if not strictly responsive to, then convergent with his desire, /come, let me clutch thee/. This is the map that will set out before him the possibility of an altogether other traversal of the altogether familiar terrain, that is also set out before him. By contrast, the decisive condition for the practice of philosophy supposes the subject is already dispossessed of the terrain that it must traverse, whereupon it is startled into an awareness of the inherent crisis in the validity of all maps. Don’t worry, this fellow is not insane, he’s doing philosophy. Even now, he is dreaming of dripping, fragile scrolls, textured like pancakes, and removed from bodily cavities to be set out before him. Are they as sensible to feel as to sight? How could they ever be unrolled? Who would ever read them? What is it then, this exegesis of the expected?

Faith will assert its dwelling of the site on those other terms by which it makes itself present - the map of the site does not end at but sets off, inland, from the boundary it describes; but philosophy is driven to rebuild its nightly shelters, without any terms, or those terms which it will find empty and false at dawn, and which it must metabolise in the cold light of day as the unsuccessful spider devours its own web. My childish problem frightened me, and it is this sense of fear located at the level of thinking, we might say catastrophising, that I retrieve today as I haul up from the depths, compulsive, frantic chains of defamiliarisation - chains which are all chain and no anchoring.

//The special attraction of any journey is its making the difference between departure and arrival as intense as possible, so that we are conscious of it in its totality in a single sweep which seems miraculous not because it covered a certain distance but because it unites two distinct individualities of the world, taking us from one name and bringing us to another name. - Proust//

My home is not where I return to; the same path leads to different destinations; I cannot expect to be recognised. Now, it is as if I am not returning home, as the script to Protect and Survive put it at the time, /because it is the place that you know and where you are known/, on the contrary I know I will arrive at something that in being named home has also inevitably become intractable. I am returning perpetually to where I have not been before. Return, the act of returning, becomes another of its opposites, not in the sense that it is also a departure, a setting off, or breaking free, but in terms of its transformation into a going back to something that is continually relocating to another register and which has thereby taken the place of home, the threshold to which is situated beneath the /triple frown/ of Minos, Æacus and Rhadamanthus. The obsessive compulsive must return to check if the door is really locked because although the key remains constant, the door has turned capricious.

It is the return of what is most fundamental to the self, the familiar in the proper sense, set out before us, in its immediate form, as a fundament of the self’s sense of self, that will unhome us, and rip us from our belonging. Anxiety as Lacan observes is directed towards what is expected, and what is expected is precisely what is already known as a presentiment, which is understood both as the perturbing event, ‘the visit, the piece of news’ and the feeling that this will inevitably elicit. Anxiety relates to what is unthinkable but unthinkable not in the sense of that which is beyond comprehension but which is all too expected, the already verboten, the intolerable and banished, both central to the scene but also buried like an ancestor /beneath/ the ground.

The self’s home, as the source of self, becomes threatening where it is directly set out before the self as the self’s own source: this is who you are, this is what you depend on, this is where you come from, this is what protects you. If all this /this/ were to be removed from your life, what would you be then? But we know all this already, we know we shall be confronted by it, and that our good manners which permit everyday intercourse are built over the site of our own instinctual paganism. At the core of the mechanism of primary repression is a bargain with the world: one buys social belonging, and enters, by adjusting to, reality at the cost of relinquishing selfish desire. The return of repressed material, as Freud observed, appears as a threat from, and to, all that is inherent to the dwelling place and it returns because the bargain with reality is, if not breached, then structurally perturbed.

We are most troubled by what is most familiar the moment it is set out before us undisguised. We are confronted by our narcissism where we are also confronted with our reliance, which we convert immediately into the uncanny, assigning agency and motive to what has already implicated us. Freud characterises the home as that which is familiar and congenial but also the site of family secrets, taboos, hushed scandals, bodies buried. The double meaning inherent to home life is revealed where we are unhomed, not only are we made uncomfortable by the revolt of our surroundings against us, we are threatened by the event in which what was hidden is about to come to light, and how this will then transform our circumstances.

The decisive condition for the possibility of community, the primary repression of individual selfishness, does not appear directly within the interactions that comprise the community’s ordinary processes of self-organisation. The internal circuits of sociability operate around and through a structured non-reference to the necessary violence at its own core. Repressed material, upon which our collective sociability depends, is ostensibly absent from the discourse of socialised beings, but it is also actively present as that absence, forming and driving the convoluted contents of intersubjective relations.

//It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the creature that we were, range ourselves face to face with past events as that creature had to face them, suffer afresh because I am no longer who I was, and because he loved what leaves us now indifferent. — Proust//

For this reason, we are shocked wherever the apparatus of reality of which we are the product, appears as the apparatus that produces us. Lacan has his little joke, it is in the moment that that which structures the lifeworld appears to us in its operational state that we are suddenly lacking the lack through which our repressed self functions, and to which state we had thoroughly adjusted. If a faculty returns following a period of habituation to its absence, if I suddenly regain my hearing after habituation to deafness, then the sense of disorientation brought on through the reemergence of a forgotten register of information, is something like the defamiliarising effect of the return of the repressed.

Our sudden descent back into the drama of repression first staged on the threshold to the symbolic world and subsequently maintained by the manifest withdrawal and continued absence of the /threat/ of loss which had persuaded us to comply with the agency of repression in the first place, also throws us back into the affective confusion brought on by dimly understood, fantastic seeming, and wholly disproportionate dangers. It is as if, upon my return home, I pause at the open door, but at the same time, I also register as if from inside, the shadow that is there and blocking the light; in my startled state I make out my own outline from the position of the desire that has drawn me here.

//The uncanny /is/ the canny; the unfamiliar, the familiar; the shocking, the expected... we adopt the position of the other in the moment it encounters us; we see it seeing something moving within us, behind our eyes, something emerging which is what /it/ is. - Seminar 10//

We are defenceless against what we expect is likely to appear before us, and even though we have not hidden from it, it will find us out all the same. We draw a magic circle round ourselves to keep everything out that doesn’t fit our secret games but each time life breaks the circle, the games become puny and ridiculous. We find our defences are useless because they are constructed from the materials that constitute the threat to them. The other is already inside, and it is us, or it is that part of us which we have forgotten we agreed to relinquish; it is what we are drawn from but because we must not refer to it, it throws us into disarray whenever we re-encounter it.

It was from a too early appearance of uncertainty, or perhaps as a result of whatever event, now forgotten, which prompted it, that I was thrown out of the world and entered /thinking/. We might agree, upon reflection, with Wittgenstein’s observation that to doubt everything is to doubt nothing as the operation of doubt must hinge upon practical certainties: /my life consists of being content to accept many things./ Then, we are not really talking here of the precocious attainment of an ability to question everything, but of the sudden onset of pervasive anxiety - or as Lacan writes, the certainties of practice must be torn from anxiety; practicality is already a transfer of anxiety onto observing the rules of ordinary language.

From the moment of that first childhood uncertainty before the canny, I have wandered in the blackness of the darkness, and here now I imagine what it might have involved to live the way I lived /before/ the formation of the peripatetic school, as a wanderer tethered only to rumination, and so I stumble upon something like the psychoanalysis of unhomed thinking: the reluctant guest of reluctant hosts; emptied hand and teeming mind; thinking as a property of the philosopher perhaps but its boundary not so very distinct from the ideas of the magician, sophist, rhetorician, holy man and poet; homeless thinking and barefoot thinking emerging as immediately secondary, as a living surplus, which functions as the currency of that crowd of mendicants and dependents orbiting the fixity in wealth of others. And so on.

Thinking, that is consciousness, is the first response of the body to whatever is lost from it, and my thinking immediately divorced itself from ordinary fantasy, from daydreams and from the psychic apparatus attached to wish fulfilment, and so I contemplated, for the first time perhaps, a sense of not belonging in this world, of having nowhere to go home to. I still saw the place to which I was heading but I was now less ready to approach it as if I was convinced that it was the site of my belonging. It was not a matter of my not being certain that it really was the same place, I now knew for sure that it was not the same.

The fixed points of my routine, the daily repetition of it, had had the paradoxical effect of inducing doubts as to the reliability of the world. Uncertainty is drawn from the accumulated proofs of the world’s reliability - something is wrong here, or I am wrong here. Home was not now hidden from me; it stood out on the hill; it was transformed into a beacon that I was always on the road towards but which I could never reach. The manner of my approach caused me to find the same doors thrown open in welcome were also, by some occult inversion, hinged against me.

A division was caused in my awareness that could not be bridged but which would drive my existence across the decades; I got lost, in Chet Baker’s sense, in the most familiar of surroundings. By accident, or as a result of some now forgotten prompting, I was left behind upon a hitherto unsuspected vantage point from which I made out the ruin of all things, an event which was otherwise disguised by a map that described the continuation of all things, unchanged. The promontory upon which I found myself was designed to be gazed down from by me alone.

//separation is made suddenly manifest, impossible to endure when it is no longer possible to be avoided, concentrated in its entirety in one enormous instant of impotent and supreme lucidity. - Proust//

I saw the other children going home from school as usual, I knew they were not thinking the thought I was thinking. My awareness of this fundamental separation became a secret splinter of myself that worked its way so far into my character that I became one with it. At that point, I had given nothing away, as yet there was no need for me to address the Wittgensteinian nod and wink to others, ‘I am not insane. I am only doing philosophy’. From the beginning, I did not embrace my altered condition but I did live it; I accepted what I knew must be. Little did I understand then, that in stating the true falsity of the world, which hid its treachery beneath a surface of invariable predictability, I was also guilty of a greater falsity: the doubt of all surfaces. I did not hate the world but I also did not trust it, nor did I trust its inhabitants. I entered that spiral wherein distance makes distance; by setting myself apart, I was set apart, to which I responded again in kind.

I was destined to become another of those who fiercely guard the entrance to the cell of their own falsity and error which is fated to seem to them as a hard won truth. I inhabited a ruminative world that took shape only as consolation for the loss of this, the real, world. I now lived stripped of a sense of future, the very idea of which became fantastical, and that became incomprehensible to me in any other register but vigilance against the constant return of the same. I learned to live emptied of wishes. I went one step further than Wittgenstein and accepted /everything/ - the mindset characterised by pervasive doubt is itself transformed into an undoubtable fixed point where all fears are confirmed, and where uncertainty becomes the only certainty.

I let what would happen, happen. It was in the forest of leaves and flowers that I first began to build my nest of thorns. Even so, even if I was lost from the world and it lost from me, I still wanted my falsity to be found out, I wanted to be found, and to be found out - I had laid down trails for others to follow. I thirsted for my imposture to be exposed so that I might be brought back in from the cold, returned home and to have the mask finally ripped away. I wanted the ordinary life that cannot be wanted but only accepted and lived as all there is. I waited to be found out by the place I knew and where I was known, and I wait still: /The real dwelling plight lies in this, that morals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they /must ever learn to dwell/./

I desired for whatever I had found out to be taken from me, and so for the walls of the persona that I presented to be breached, overrun, to be ruined and razed. I desired above all the reassurance that my defeat would bring. I have suspected that those who affirm only deny, and those who believe only disbelieve, but did I, in my denial, also only deny, and did I, in my disbelief, after all only disbelieve? But I am still hiding, but I have not been found. I cannot hope to hope. I am structured to live against the possibility of hope. But I continue to dwell in the place where what cannot be hoped for may still come. I do not begin to imagine the path that my salvation would take.

My broken dreams, my fears, describe a territory in negative that is not broken, that is not fearful. I do not hope but I am available, and that is disquieting, why do I still wait? Nobody ever noticed they were missing from me. And in an instant, as if by the sudden grip of a regenerative ratchet, I am set back again at the beginning of the return path that I must retrace over again, as if once more I am that self which must be mystery to my self. My predicament is staged and repeated but I do not know if it is also real. And now today, as I look through the family photographs, I see clearly the faultline in my geological record: I see how my smile changes, my gaze changes, there is a clouding in my features. There is the sign of it, the record, I can see the moment that I had begun to wander from the hard place to the place harder still.

Something else was mixing into my childhood, streaking through it. And I became unappealing to others as troubled souls do. I became anti-neotonous, and prematurely worn. The photographs record how I turned inwards, habitually, without thinking, just as I once used to turn onto the road for home. I see the record of when I began to look down into removed and distant things as a means for not seeing what lay before me. I became that fish which is caught upon the hook of itself. And then, although still a child, I recapitulated all at once the self-interrupting and discontinuous journey, all lurchings and flashes, that is recorded, for example, in Rembrandt’s sequence of self-portraits as he seems to perfect what it is to pass through perturbing events, and how his decay followed the path from extroversion to a later, and overly preoccupied, melancholia: /When, as we say, we come to our senses and reflect on ourselves, we come back to ourselves from things /without ever abandoning/ our stay among things./

I too, sailed through the world’s vanishing point, failing to navigate its difficult straits. I started awake on a deserted island where all that could go wrong, had already gone wrong. The worst was here, inside, and it was formative; it moved me. From that moment, I inhabited a frozen, looking-glass world where it was always too late to hope for an improvement, and where I recognised its exits only after I had passed them by, glimpsing them only as the moment in which they appeared also sealed them forever. One becomes used to inhabiting the meditative state, and familiarised with that which is contemplated in the moment of its vanishing: the fugitive word, the irredeemable object, the inconstant place, the traitor moment, the transient other.

If there is a meaning to be drawn from my wanderings, then it is this: I had doubted neither my mother nor my father, but for a short moment one school day afternoon long ago, I doubted that the palace they had made their dwelling really contained many mansions. And the price I have paid for my conflicted existence is a sudden awareness of the movement of a reciprocating doubt. I immediately perceived how the house itself, the veritable site of dwelling, could also contemplate and work upon, polishing and perfecting, its doubting of me. 

And from that day it has not relented - the fixity in its doubting of me becomes the form for my own uncertainty. To all extents and purposes, the house is not changed, the house is there. The house is there. The house is exactly as it always was. And because it is as it was, I empathise implicitly with its reasons for calling me into question. I accede before the irrefutable logic of its position with regards to my perpetual flickering because what it thinks, I think; what it feels, I feel; what it knows, I know also. Because certainty, doubt; because loyalty, traitor; because continuity, interruption; because world, separation.

autofiction 3: opera from a teenaged excerpt

those were the reasons, and that was New York

In those days it was not uncommon to hear how such and such a person who upon announcing they were going out for cigarettes saying, ‘see you later’, then went out, and didn’t come back. It was precisely the casual lightness of the words, ‘see you later’, that began its work upon those left behind, becoming both the source of an ever deepening sense of grievance and the recurrent trigger for endless rounds of recrimination. The world divides between those who go and those who stay. There are those, feeling their integrity so compromised by the run of recent events bringing them to /this/ place of contradiction with their belonging that they are seized by that all too familiar and ready made compulsion to start again. And there are those, confronted by the same complexity, who are driven by the thought that they might retrieve something from the conflagration.

We might ask ourselves a second question, ‘where should the point be located?’ when we ask ourselves the question, ‘what is the point of this?’ The first question raises the matter of the relative worth of continuing in the same way when set against /not continuing/. It is a question that might also be set in terms of relative losses. Which of them, of the ones who leave or the ones who stay, are most lost to the world? Those who stay, are lost in the other’s leaving. Those who go, are lost from the others’ staying. Some are lost in their own going. Some are lost in their own not going. The line drawn through families by inscrutable acts of self-disappearance mark a decisive break between routine of the home world and the fragmentation that follows. The line is as abrupt as it is trivial and as random as it is absolute - if there is a deeper, structural logic to such events then this is expressed through, but not by, those involved. We don’t possess nor direct our actions, nor our reactions - and even our later rationalisations are reheated truths from elsewhere. We have always performed the scripted economic dissolution of family ties as if it was something personal.

From within the individual’s behavioural repertoire as constrained by industrial routine, welfare institutions and the integrated relations of cultural convention, all events are experienced as severance and separation. Control society conditions its members to suspect the unfamiliar as potentially threatening and so vulnerable emotionality is withheld from encounters with the unprecedented and is instead re-reinvested in over-determined separations, a process which quickly consigns events to the past from where they are metabolised as nostalgic recall, /on this day, ten years ago/. Everyone says goodbye; fatality is everywhere. Routinised clock time, in which children are interrupted by what comes next, structures life as an eternally recurring goodbye: now is the time to wake, now is the time to eat, now is the time to go to school, now is the time to play, now is the time to wash, now is the time to sleep. The child perpetually torn from a state of immersion and thrown into the abstract structure of the routinised day learns how subjective agency is identical to preemptive departure. Only in anticipating the end of a moment, and by enforcing it through an abrupt /goodbye, I must be going/ may the individual participate in society as an agent of control.

The one who leaves the others behind is more agent than victim, no accident has befallen them, or rather, they enact the accident that befalls those they abandon. On the way to buy cigarettes, maybe they arrived at the corner shop but then kept walking. Maybe they had thought about it, fantasised it, planned it, and then found themselves following through on it, without giving it a thought, just as if it was another rehearsal - /cela vous fera croire et vous abêtira/. They assert control of their world by exiting it, they act upon those around them by disappearing. This most mysterious part of the story, the missing person’s motive, is not a mystery to you. You were one of them, you also went missing. You also said, ‘see you later’.

It was the first day of a new school term. You got on the bus, You got off the bus. You said you’d catch the others up. You said, you had something to do first. You walked to the train station, you bought a card, wrote goodbye on it, addressed it to your family, posted it on the platform, and took the next train into anonymity. As the station fell away from the moving train you thought you were leaving behind everything of your life up to that point. You were beginning again.

Look! There you are, in the moment of drawing a line under the past in the most abrupt and decisive manner you could then imagine. In one gesture, you are ridding yourself of the burden of who you think you are obliged to be. You are released and relieved from continuing along the same path, just as others might cut into their own flesh so as to interrupt with the flowing of their blood, the endless flowing of ever the same problems, and in cutting become the cut from which they emerge into the world as separate individuals. There is, in your life, a definitive break, the enactment of a before and an after. You now inhabit the after, you are open, or you think you are open, to what comes next. That is what it is like to seize control, and to think, ‘I’m doing it. I’m really doing it.’

In the months leading to that day, you had reached the conclusion, and again you think now you were mistaken in this, that you could not stay, that you had no choice but to leave, and somehow change the circumstances of your life. You were certainly no James Dean but that sort of thing, all those ‘you’re tearing me apart’ declarations were still resounding in the world around you. You had taken to heart the widely broadcast message that nobody had a chance of /getting out of this alive/. You were still only a child but you had fully interiorised the end of the world as if it had already happened. That’s what Cold War meant - an inevitable end followed by the inexorable working out of what leads to it. And at the personal scale too, certainty of outcome combined similarly with uncertainty of process - redundancy was in the very air, everyone was to be replaced, everyone was being cast out, and you were to be replaced too, not by someone but by nothing, so you decided to preempt it, and you replaced yourself, you put nothing where you had been. ‘One acted by fleeing before the force of that which one could not oppose or otherwise influence.’

You thought you were already finished, you sensed everything was wrong. That is what a child is, the sense of not being a child. And your subsequent life has only served to realise this early intuition, by attaching destiny to a definite history of life events. You were known in your world, but you thought you were known wrongly. And when we talk of being known, we really mean your intuition of the right to being loved. You did not think, and could not think, because that would be intolerable, that others knew you rightly, that you were exactly what they thought you were and they knew you better than you knew yourself. It was intolerable back then, at that stage of life, to contemplate the thought that you were loved precisely to the measure that you deserved. The point in the question, ‘what’s the point in going on?’ is to increase your tolerance to the measure at which you are actually loved, which is always, /not much/. Interpersonal relations are never /about you/ but the reproduction of a web of connectedness directing sufficient energy through every node... submitting to routines, rituals, commitments, obligations, these are the real matter of family life. We reserve our capacity to love for those who have the power to leave us. We desire to bind them to us, to make up with our effort for what is objectively missing, and as if we were making offerings to gods who are so easily distracted. Immortality belongs to those who can forget, neglect, and forsake, and to those who drift from our world. We may only truly love those who escape us.

Your persona had become unbearable and even as you sought to tear it from your /true face/, you only managed to remove strips of it until you resembled a sort of Borgesian map melting into the territory it schematises. Even in the helter-skelter of your flight, you were still just another autobiography, wholly constrained by the conventions of the form. But there are people who live their entire lives on the principle of /wait until dark/ and you are one of them - disaster in common is the only circumstance in which you are able to do well. If you can’t compete in this game, change the rules. What is it to act outside of everyday life, to walk away from your own world, but the ratcheting down of everything to the point of a bare equality for all?

You were aware, at some level, as if observing your own fate from a vantage point outside yourself, of the permanent eclipse of your person, and therefore of the necessity of escaping from behind that suppressive black disc occluding your every move. Even so, if you knew you had to get out, shouldn’t you have got out better? Why did you make such a mess of it? You had nothing useful with you, nothing that would sustain you, no change of clothing, no bedding, no documentation. In your bag were the sandwiches your mother had made for school, your pencil case, copies of The Stranger, and 1984. You had also packed the first volume of HHGTTG.

You went out into the world from a village set in a valley knowing nothing of what lay beyond it but some interiorised metropolitan references. It was not as I walked out one midsummer morning but it was the same walking, and the same valley. You had been conditioned by the extraordinary cultural pessimism of the moment. You were young but it was already too late, you were just beginning but it was already autumn - the culture of protect and survive, the logic of staying in the place you know and where you are known; that culture and that logic which alienated everything familiar. Only those who are already out of position are commanded to stay where they are. The tone of public information propaganda intended to prepare for coming nuclear war also perfectly described the then reality of industrial uncoupling. And to the measure that it is natural to function within the strategy of tension and its proliferating crises in the world, as well as in the home, to that measure, your perpetual vigilance was natural, and the path that you took was perfectly understandable. You had no plan, no sense of orientation and no thought as to how you might make a living once the money in your pocket had run out. How did the runaway survive alone in the city before the ATM and smartphone? Happenstance, and a wing and a prayer. 

You had acted like a nestling in panicked exit, its flight feathers not grown. Something startling, some perceived lifeworld-abolishing cataclysm, impelled you to take the one move you were programmed not to take. You suppose, in subsequent rationalisations, you must have assumed that any other life was going to be better than the life you lived. You don’t recall now what this ‘see you later’ indicated of your motive. It was as if you wanted to swim very far out of your depth in the hope that a passing trawler would catch you in its net, but you were determined nonetheless that you would only consent to rescue on strict condition that the crew did not return you to where you came from and set you down on another shore. Throughout your youth, and in later life, you gambled the highest stakes in this way, and gambled most recklessly, on the longest of odds. You habitually gave yourself to chance, put yourself at risk, as if it were the only path leading away from habit. After all, one does not gamble to win but to shed the accumulated past in a moment’s self abandonment to chance. You say, ‘We meet the circumstance of no exit by walking out the door, ‘see you later.’’

You had become vaguely aware of a nebulous cloud of feral children in the bigger cities identified by documentary makers as ‘runaways’. They were a phenomenon of the age, and another subgroup belonging to the growing general set of the missing. Hundreds and thousands of persons unknown abstracted from the particularity of their relationships, finding no prospect there to be themselves, and by one pretext or another, emigrating to another register, and thereby lapsing into always the same fixed, equivalent state - transience, potentiality, vacillation, replacement and redundancy: the bedsitting lonely; the errant husbands; the fugitive wives; the delinquent children; the absent fathers; the sexual non-conformists; the radicalised; the stars in their eyes; the suicides; the de-mobbed; the humiliated and the shamed; the cursed; the addicted; the evicted; the unemployed; the itinerant poor. All these unfixed souls scouring the surface of a world of platforms, a world that they never quite depart, and to which they never quite arrive - crowds in endless seething motion but also stuck at an invisible and uncrossable border:

// Unhappily those marvellous places which are railway stations are also tragic places. We must lay aside all hope of going home to sleep in our own bed once we have made up our mind to penetrate into the pestiferous cavern through which we may have access to the mystery, into one of those vast, glass-roofed sheds, like that of Saint-Lazare into which I must go to find the train for Balbec, and which extended over the rent bowels of the city one of those bleak and boundless skies, heavy with an accumulation of dramatic menaces, like certain skies beneath which could be accomplished only some solemn and tremendous act, such as a departure by train or the Elevation of the Cross. - Proust //

You imagined the subset of runaways as something like Barrie’s Lost Boys, and you wanted to join them. You remembered the /Double Deckers/. You were familiar with McCartney’s ‘She’s Leaving Home’, and the line, ‘fun is the one thing money can’t buy’ which you knew the world must turn on its head, like an hourglass: fun is the one thing, sooner or later, for which you must pay. Put another sixpence in the slot if you want the world to turn again. You were intuitively aware of the narrative conventions of irrational decision making deployed as a stand-in for true purpose, and so the exercise of impulsivity, the throw of imaginary dice, itself became your motivation. You wanted to become a runaway and so you ran away.

You have fractured memories of that time. Walking a Lincolnshire beach at dusk with no idea of what lay before you. Of sleeping in the station at Liverpool and being chased out with a crowd of others, emerging into the autumn evening, calling, complaining, like murmurating starlings. Their questions and your answers, the riot-ruined, and Britain-in-decline cityscapes. Your thought, as you walked suburban streets, ‘there are people behind those walls, inside their homes’. The end of things was all around. Did you know so and so? No, you didn’t know them. Come back to ours, you can stay with us, at least for a night. It was always dusk. The danger of bedlessness was always an hour away.

As you walked, unwashed, you remember overhearing someone say, ‘the Yorkshire ripper, could be anyone,’ that places you in your moment at least, and then they pointed at you, and said, ‘it could be him’, but you were an altogether other sort of monster, a creature unhomed and moving towards the domain that certain philosophers have named ‘otherwise’.

The interplay between the figure of the monster on the one side, homeless because unprecedented, fashioned from a re-combination of pre-existing body parts, and on the other side, the figure of the mythical being, an archetypical unity, precipitant of needs, which by the mechanism of family resemblance, occupies the thresholds of what we might call form-of-community - all this, the language game, is the stuff of Wittgenstein. Nothing is new under the sun and all that may emerge is your own participation in a staged re-combination of what is already there.

But you didn’t know that then. More dusks, endless forever dusk, as birds in the crisis of their roosting. What did you do in the London days? You suppose you walked. You suppose you were hungry. You remember a streaming cold, but not how you were cold. You still possess the same A to Z. No bed at Centrepoint. Then a hostel but you had to pay and then you slept outside, unable to share a room with a stranger, Australian you think. You bought a sleeping bag and a carry-all in the East End. But towards the end of day, you sought out the gardens and parks not locked at night. You encountered the kindness of the men frequenting those spaces which you now consider must be designed for nothing but such frequentings. Back then, you could not imagine anyone apprehending you: ‘Therefore I cannot consider the look which the Other directs on me as one of the possible manifestations of his objective being; the Other cannot look at me as he looks at the grass.’

You think of Paul Simon’s line, ‘I do declare there were times when I was so lonesome I took some comfort there.’ The approach of a stranger, and of becoming incorporated into their desires was not something you were able to anticipate until you read Genet and Sartre several years later, at which point you could, as it were, anticipate in retrospect, the other’s inexorability and how you might coalesce as figure in the field of their perception. If you are summoned into the world before the other as a random sum of its necessary hungers, you also discern there the operation of a contingent kindness that for no reason should be staged in some now unnamed London park. Are you ok? Yes. What are you doing? Do not say, nothing, that makes them concerned. Say, ‘I’m waiting for someone.’ Where have you come from. Answer vaguely.

In retrospect, you have transposed that West End square onto Sartre’s Parisian park, and the site for his encounter with the Other which, tellingly, is itself textually situated just before the infamous keyhole of Being and Nothingness. In any case, you must have given a very poor approximation of the ‘come-on from the whores on Seventh Avenue.’ And yet also, rehearsing the categories of Sartre’s encounters, you retrieve, perhaps for the last time in your life, that shuddering sense of there being a very real drain at the centre of the anonymous city, ‘what I apprehend immediately when I hear the branches crackling behind me is not that there is someone there; it is that I am vulnerable, that I have a body which can be hurt, that I occupy a place and that I cannot in any case escape from the space in which I am without defense — in short, that I am seen.’

You cannot read that chapter without pouring into its formality the content of your own story. Even as you recall it, you are recalled by it. But aren’t you also to be found in the pomposity of Simon’s lyrics, ‘I do declare’, more like ‘I must confess’, but it strikes you now, in putting away such things, how the nature of what he calls his comfort diverges from the philosophical nature of consolation, just as the function of monsters becomes distinct from that of mythical beings: separation becomes operational at level of project, of practice, of game, of encounter and commitment.

In other words, what is monstrous separates from what is mythical, like what is mad separates from what is foolish - as a marker for the edge of the community. Myth condenses the imaginary, returning as drips and droplets to the world, a radically cooling steam at the left wall of the exterior. On the other hand, what is monstrous is that form given by the world to whatever of the exterior cannot retain form but which must manifest there in the world, at that moment. The madman is possessed by the real, the monster is the real incarnate, whilst the fool is a vessel, a cipher, an agent, for the hidden and musical message of the universe. What we learn from monsters and madmen is to not go there. What we learn from fools and mythical beings is to listen beyond the noise of the workaday. Kings might learn from fools - revolutionaries must heed the warnings of madmen.

The modes of engagement appropriate to the level of the form of life are fixed recursively by archetypical function; it is by this means that experiences are recognised, sorted, categorised, fitted in and consumed. Then, also at the next level of recursion appears the tendency to environmentalise as a process of homing/unhoming, of monstering/mythologising, operating as the means to reproduce the form of community and umwelt - the process itself is processed, set against its limits, turned upon itself and set within another movement. If, with reference to Boethius, consolation is always mythically implicated in a /quid pro quo/ with suffering, that is, as the means by which the answer of consolation may be anticipated and applied pre-formed to the problematic of an irreducible limiting pressure from outside, then Walter Benjamin considers the genealogy of the meaning of comfort as it passes from consoling to wellbeing to, what he calls, /rational convenience/ as a means for engendering the insular, kitsch, repudiation of madness, monsters and the darkness at the edge of town. Comfort blanket. Comfort food. Comfort women.

To take comfort is to flee the register of suffering altogether and, in a state of full abjection, lose oneself in immersive, obliterating, sensuality. The true monsters are already inside, isn’t that the only lesson of life? And they are those figures taking the compulsive form that causes us to respond to their wanting us to want to be them. You can see yourself discoursing with some man at breakfast, you think he was Greek. And how old he must be now. You talk with that confidence particular to precarious young lives, you are rehearsing what you could do, might do, next. How the world opened before you.

And one only encounters the Other’s hearty approbation in such circumstances. The Other, constrained by the game of your otherness, cannot say, ‘go home, your parents will be worried.’ Who would he have to be to offer such advice? The one, or not the one, who wanted to bring this episode to an end and for you to exit his life forever? Better to say, ‘I’m sure you will make it, good luck, good bye.’ All of it, lies and jest. Exchanges and conventions. Within a certain register of bare life, that is all that might be retrieved from it, and although you have since considered the consolation of what it was to extract a bed from your predicament, you only now can make sense of how it was you, in effect, who had become the source of whatever comfort was to be taken there.

You were picked up by the police wandering north out of Lincolnshire, disoriented, deluded, like some later John Clare. You abandoned yourself to detainment in their custody as you have to every force that has snagged or accelerated your happening to be there, in that or another place, in that or another time. It has often seemed that your natural habitat, the place you are most at home, is the antechamber’s temporal eddy. You enjoyed the cell, it made sense to you. You recite Morrissey’s line, ‘I like it here, can I stay.’ Why are you taking my belt? Why are you taking my laces? Ah, the cops observed knowingly, you are reading Orwell - as if it were a sign, and their provincial copshop’s holding cells had played hostelry to an army of all too identifiable youthful literary itinerants. You were brought a fried egg sandwich, a cup of tea.

You spent the night on a blanket-free bunk reading the names and curses inscribed you know not how into the deep and silent wall. The light is not to be turned out. You try to inscribe your initials with your jacket’s zipper. ‘I like it here. I am home at last. Can I stay? Take me on, I can be your captive. Let me be your Jonah, and swallow me down into the belly of your beast. I want to abandon, and be abandoned. Let me be your monk, your hermit, the ghost haunting your ruin. Lock the door behind you - the turning is like a music box’s winding to my ears. Okay, I’ve had enough. What else can you show me? Throw away the key, or hang it on a hook just out of reach of this bent out of shape wire coat hanger. Bring me your books from lost property, and your canteen tea and your canteen eggs. And I shall be your Ben Gunn. Talk to me jovially, as would my gaoler, as would a zoo-keeper, as would a form of life from another dimension, strangely desirous that I should be alone with my own laughter.’

Pay close attention. You gave your real name. Your parents have driven through the night. You do not hug. It’s not like that. You say to them, I am going to be an anarchist. You draw symbols on your clothes. You announce, I am going to grow my hair long. I am going to be vegetarian. These are the gains you extracted. Not much later would come the face covering and the moves with others you made at night. You are interviewed by your village sergeant - when you see he is taking too keen an interest you cease to regale him with your traveller’s tales. Then you read the newspaper article about your disappearance. It is as if you have been caught at the keyhole of being and nothingness. You are shamed. You want to disappear, you are always, in that sense, swirling down the drain of being not missing enough. And the only means of, shall we say, /becoming imperceptible/, is never to talk about it again. You will be returned to school. Someone asks of another, ‘is he the one who went on holiday without telling anyone?’ The true form of the problem that is expressed by one’s motiveless behaviours is enduring the motives that others ascribe to them.

You twist on the hook of your own memory, on the principle of the true confession, you have buried the lie. Are you not now confronted with the falsity of your /do declaring-must confessing/? Should you not reduce yourself further, turning over other rocks? Perhaps you have still not descended deep enough. What is confession anyway but a story of ultimately unsatisfying generosity? ‘One makes a display of piously, humbly, giving more than what is comfortable but it still draws another veil over the miser’s hoard of other secrets and other shames.’ The black occluding disc is your jewel encrusted shell, your Hong Kong umbrella, your book bloc shield - still, your humanity is permanently eclipsed, you waited til dark but you didn’t get away, you only squirmed, retreating like an eel, into further and convoluted darkness. ‘We console ourselves whenever we are unable to bring ourselves to speak on the greater truth, the real truth, by making wretched and fawning sacrifices to other gods and to other truths. We control the fires by setting fires.’

Perhaps you are being too harsh on yourself. After all, the true secret, the traumatic kernel, is but another in an aggregate. There is no single source, no true terrible history, no frightening biographical revelation - Blake’s soul of flea, for all its malignancy, is at its true scale, fleabound. You are composite, and we are all but monsters assembled from the world’s scrap heap of spare parts. We are vulnerable here, embarrassed perhaps, but not shamed, there is no shame. We are resilient elsewhere and functioning. And the pearl-like shame which we hoard to ourselves is just another reaction to one grain set in a universe that is becoming all sand. Who is speaking here? And to whom?

The story that we feel we are impelled to tell at certain junctures in our life is one story. There are others, perhaps conveying other messages, which would be equally /just so/. There is no, shall we say, real true story of one’s real true self. There is no actual continuity from the past to the present. The territory decomposes into the map describing it, and only occasional eroded outcrops, ruins and follies, tors and stacks, remain jutting through it. The decisive factor in selecting material for a story is the demand of the moment in which it is told - and the demand of this moment is that you should become like Zola’s Marthe Mouret, punching yourself in your face as proof of your love of revelation. ‘The function of one’s stories is not to realise the project of adjustment to one’s past at all, it is not about putting things to rest, laying ghosts, or coming to terms with the events of earlier days, but rather, it is a matter of traversing the terrain of the present.’

Our history is the means by which we compose the rationale for what comes next, for changing things, for continuing as we were, for staying or for going. It no doubt serves your purpose today, a purpose that is as yet still somewhat opaque, to present this story in the manner that you have. The black disc has not eclipsed your life. You are the black disc. And your life is the eclipse. The use of what you have recounted, whether it is wholly accurate, or too carefully filtered, is perhaps the means by which you are exploring both the present moment and what form your engagement might take as you seek to pass through it.

Whilst you are driven, fated perhaps, and wholly determined by forces beyond your control as you must ‘make history but not under conditions of your own choosing’, the manner and the means of your implication with the cosmos, is still constrained by the framework of narrative. Freud is helpful here, he tells us he is indifferent as to whether the subject accurately recounts their dreams; the truth of the dreamwork is not a matter of recall, it is not located in the dream itself but in the interpretative work applied to it.

Whether the story the subject tells is entirely invented or tortuously faithful, the presence of unconscious material is invariable. By anticipating and modifying the tells that give us away in the hope of misdirecting the Other’s gaze, we only succeed in amplifying them from traits into signs. At certain junctures, at New Year for example, we attempt to free ourselves, by the resolution to resort to decisive action, from the accretion of complex and unresolvable difficulties that have come to define us. Upon occasion, and very abruptly, we want to be known, and to know ourselves, on other terms. And when we talk of being known, we mean, we desire to be loved /for ourselves/, on our own terms, as if we really were something apart from everything else. More often than not, the struggle for recognition results only in an exhausted falling back onto old habits. We will never be, in the obituarist’s words, ‘much loved.’ We will only ever be loved at the level that sustains the web of relations which sustains us. And perhaps not loved at all but merely permitted, allowed, accepted, tolerated. It is, at some level, intolerable to be tolerated.

You say, your life’s history now appears to you as a series of wide plateaus interrupted by violent eruptions; as long periods of calm resignation punctuated by frenetic moments of rebellion; as a deep quiet forgetting shot through with startlingly vivid insight. There have been moments in your life, which you now see as forming a pattern of their own, where you have been brought to a threshold which you may only cross by bringing everything to a crisis. There are occasions where you have had to carve your way through something that is not even an obstacle just so as to release something else, located elsewhere, that has become tangled in another register. Lacan’s compulsion, ‘to act is to tear its certainty from anxiety; to act is to operate a transfer of anxiety.’ In a similar way, for those who have actively sought to die, death itself is not the objective. Self harming is a heuristic posing as an answer - it is the certainty in action by which an individual may cut across the otherwise insuperable torrent that cuts them off from the other side.

In our everyday life, just as the eye calibrates its aperture relative to the available light, so we seek to calibrate the dimensions of the frame within which the world will encroach upon our sense of self; by altering the frame of our experiences we are able to regulate the rate at which the world impacts upon us. But then, by changing all terms, by making a new frame for our life, we look to force an exit from the intolerable and wholly inescapable present. Our desire is for eclipse, as that is the closest we come to conceiving the emancipatory injunction, /wait until light/.