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.
