But where was it all going? (26th September 2025). The words, and the promise of context shifting, hadn’t come to pass. It’s hard to commit oneself to a task when you think you know where it is going and where it will end – like you can already see the statement and its inverse from the start, and so there’s nothing to be discovered in its unfolding. You might as well keep it to yourself. At first I had imagined an autobiography like an empty mirror. I went through all my notebooks from years ago, the ones I kept during the earlier records, trying to collage memory. They weren’t as old as I thought -- it was too painful. Map stopped in its tracks. What it was back then couldn’t step out of the shadow of what it was now. That left me with the present – and I thought, if I just stuck with that, thinking less about ends, it would come easier. It would be about the points where they touch now; just like they say the present is all we have. And so at first there wouldn’t be a conscious structure; you’d cross that bridge when you came to it, by willed happenstance (which is not the same as waiting for the bridge to happen upon you).
A problem with the points where they touch is in their ordering. Above I called it ‘conscious’, so I’ll have to remember to keep these two bits together. I called it that because thoughts and images are of course already indexed by crossing systems before even we think we’ve taken a position on something. The problem, and the point, of free association is that it shows your crossings and binds – you are never speaking freely – structures keep you back. And so in this way, content agglomerates, but these structures are hidden – or, harder yet, always reforming, shifting knowledge’s aspects. I would liken it to standing up too quickly and getting double vision: and it is as if, behind reality, a second reality briefly comes unstuck and sits alongside it, and you suddenly realise that everything you thought you had understood about a thing was completely unfounded