We are like fishes swimming in the sea of sense, bounded above by the superior element, but unable to breathe it pure or penetrate it. —William James, Pragmatism The many-angled houses of my sight are traced from an elusive diagram beyond compulsion, the intangible. And pieces of my eye are alien to marginal, entreating countrysides eclipsed by focus. New horizons crease the bounding ripples of my plunging stride, entrusting their surroundings to suspense: perspectives radiate integrity. This cosmos of elective habitats— exposed from every avenue in space by mirror-facet furniture—enjoins the recognition of assembled time. Self-evident to early innocence, inevitable through experience, the house subsists, a vein of future past. I pluck it from the course of evidence, contriving an abrupt eternity. The obverse of my action supplements descriptions of the obvious. The past itself is altered by my emphases. Coherence is a limit of decay accumulating in conspiracy: exploded infrastructure’s reticence to entertain my narrowing surmise. But persevering is an ecstasy, performative amnesia a cascade of interposing objects in the time of uniform extension. Here my eyes are equally material, aligned by fixed geometry to everything. The universe articulates my world and inner touch retreats from common sense. A crystal logic tessellates throughout the unsuspecting furrows of my brain. A mechanism’s receptivity encourages revisions to the web of circular relations. But a sense- capacity belies analogies to organizing patterns of the mind. Specific structures’ atrophied response desaturates, instead of puncturing, the total apprehension. Color-schemes diffuse into a slow dichotomy of blue and yellow. Stimulations keep their secret conversation from the reach of ganglia. Imaginary signs meander through identities of touch. Resemblance is procedural, a route. My hands anticipate entanglement with imitation. I enact myself. The recognition blurred along my limbs might haunt me into amputation’s long hiatus of exterior complaints. An insect compensates for absent legs by answering the same conundrum posed when walking as before, an interplay organic logic summons from itself. It rides melodic spontaneity. Somatic reflex is contextual, enchanting situations with conceit. An inner resonance prefigures sight. I’ll lose the world before I lose my eyes (or vice versa), echoing alone. My entourage of limbs is registered unconsciously. I’d often be surprised if tacit use were were disappointed by an absence or addition in the act. Embodiment imbues affordances. Capacities of use revolve around the competence implicit in my hand (although it may be severed from the wrist). My body wears a habit of itself. Time can’t erode an unaccomplished task or rectify an existential scar: the expectation of an answer yawns beneath the surface-tension novelty of memories in sorted parallax. I skim the sprawling edifice of time, an unknown knot of trivialities. My nervous system’s automatic script defaults me onto further avenues, however I envelop it with grief. Reflexes carry personality, like heartbeats sounding tributary veins. The past’s enameled dogmatism bleeds provisional coherence from the now. Emotion seals ambivalent events’ unmanageable connectivity (which only banishment can rectify). My senses run through tandem circuitry with data that observe their etiquette, absolving me from animal concern, suggesting exit through self-evidence. The faces on an autonomic clock wear theater masks throughout their histories. I think, therefore… (and if there’s someone else?) I answer to my physiology. My bodyparts are inescapable by virtue of partitions they impose: decapitations of ontology that never ricochet into themselves (a mirror doesn’t count, apparently). The touched and touching organs are distinct— insensate gristle and its poltergeist. I don’t rehearse a chain of custody (in proximate extremities) for pain. My foot hurts. Seeds of movement propagate intentions through my arm’s trajectory. My hands take up schematic space—conjoint, transposable coordinates that end the world’s mosaic singularity. Dynamically-composited for use, my self-locations taper from the poles I conjure up, like comet-trails through space. I’m always somewhere in the audience: a set piece, background, and the theater-dark. My prepositions tell their origins in tacit sense and oriented sight. Familiar gestures are concrete in scope, accomplished without access to the stage of abstract imitations and surprise. Intentions thread my fingers through the tools and pull them taskward, like the gravity of social nicety on attitude (I am whatever others think of me). I don’t think twice when, beckoning my friends, impatience wanes and waxes in my hands. The distance is conveyed without design until there’s no one to accost, and arms revert to mechanisms of intent. I conjure leylines and symbolic guides onto my fixed surroundings and pretend interior concerns into the world. Discovery implies intention: facts don’t carry explanations for themselves. Touch isn’t adequate for abstract space. A shifting catalogue of motion-points lacks speculative continuity. The systems of behavior, interlaced, applied with equal probability, render induction undecidable. One atrophied capacity belies the others’ understanding of themselves: their purity is pathological. Without the pointing finger’s axioms, empiricism is impossible. Objectifying power is consciousness simpliciter, intentions interlaced. Even my reflexes are presupposed. Mistakes, derangements, seasonal complaints are Being penetrating me at will, despite the symbols I construct within (or else all madness is malingering). Acausal founder of significance, my vision, nature’s Spirit-gift, is ground embodying me, existential grist. Even the sublimation into form depends on concrete spontaneity. Reason consumes a litany of facts for every simile it consecrates: fur:cat::feathers:bird. Authentic subjects synthesize the now; syncretic phantoms wait outside of time. The sediments of conversation tinge a friendly word. Directions fill my limbs. An object speaks intention’s spawn in waves. A sentence shuffles world-scenery (unless imagination stacks the deck). Even geometry assumes a field of plastic illustrations, idioms to prove its isometric arguments. I wander landscape-physiognomies that speak me to myself and house my thoughts. They mark the stresses, turning happenstance to narrative by hidden prosody. I tell my numbers as a ritual, without resorting to arithmetic. A situation’s rainbow unifies sensation with its ideology. My consciousness is not a catalogue (it suffers chance involuntarily), nor is its function categorical (it undergoes exceptions and decay): dissociation billows from its core. I’m not inside, but I inhabit space. My total motion self-assembles arcs indifferently among alternatives, but I can think my innards into view. My constitution can amend itself. The body is a composition, flecks of time and gesture offering a life inseparable from its artisan. A tool, familiarized through habit, draws a farther boundary along the skin: perception by acquisitive degrees. Primordial reality exists, subsists without my intervention, but affective incarnation swells. They say: of pain and pleasure, nothing can be said. I’m one part undisclosed homunculus with outsized genitals and gendered smile, whose static leer interrogates events for satisfaction from unconscious planes— one body to another—constantly. Desire guarantees my history (which any impetus can commandeer, confusing coupled incapacities). I might lose speech without hypocrisy, like memories in an amnesiac, or flee intolerable circumstance for apathetic world-totality. By imitating slumber, I perform hypnosis on myself, invoke the god. The cure for sleep is passive vigilance; hysteria, complete epiphany. My nudity’s an ultimatum cast against observers. Open to the glare of alien intelligence, I must submit myself in abject modesty or dominate with animal disdain. But glamouring him into impotence, humiliation and captivity inspires contempt: he doesn’t signify. Ontology is sexual. I lose my body’s given structure when aroused. I never overcome the atmosphere diffusing like an odor from my loins and ferrying the metaphors of dream. A serpent is my penis typified (existence has erotic silhouettes). Freedom and instinct, even unto God, are actually indeterminate. Mankind is not a species, but a thought. And sexless men are inconceivable. My language is a late arrival, but its origins were overheard as facts. No one was speaking those primeval words. And when I talk with spontaneity, my mouth emits conditioned sentences. But words are more than envelopes for thought. Sense-bearing speech is recognition. God crates by name (apart from animals). If knowing’s more than fabulation, less than fragments of an ancient memory, then words engender meaning, gesturing from someone’s understanding to my own. I hear philosophy’s aesthetic mode, the consonance of thought within its speech. The orator and auditor are linked, allowing rhetoric to overrun their margins of reflection and assent. My words are always ready—at my back until I sound them out (and into place). Expression infiltrates me from the heart, embeds its signifying parasite with organs sensitive to argument’s ethereal dimensionality. The signifier overtakes its sign, an actor is abducted from the stage by discontinuous realities. Each quiet recollection dignifies a seething underworld of dialect. Cacophony pervades my inner life, diffusing into novel silences. I catch lascivious intent in smiles without an inventory of desire. I’m puppeted by anyone’s caress. (But only where the gestures presuppose my own capacities and attitude: a dog’s seduction is a simile; an insect’s pheromones are semaphore.) And words are also gestures, sing the world, conveying nothing other than themselves. There is no human nature. Every mood shares institution’s ambiguity. A name too-long repeated turns unreal. My actions are transfigured by degrees beyond themselves: behavior, gesture, speech. Air, hissing past the throat to tongue and teeth, transcends its literal embodiment like love emerging from within desire. My body narrows into thought, with all confusions and dichotomies intact. The world besieges subjectivity, a shipwreck rooted in the crashing waves. Blue coaxes me to understand its shape. I slow my breathing to the pace of sleep, align my mouth with an external lung, communing with the spirit of the air. The sky extends reciprocating light: blue, fathomlessly, where it thinks itself. I am the sky.