(no subject)
To see your own thoughts you would need an arbitrary, malleable, self-consistent medium that registered precise differences among different marks made. How does the thought mark the medium? Who the hell knows. But thought knows it's doing it when it experiences the marked medium and thinks, "Huh--seems like thought." Huh. Seems like me.
Does thought run into the trouble of misreading what isn't thought as though it were, occurrences of non-thought such as characteristic or accidental features of the medium in which the thought-seeming is experienced? Sure. The accidentals will probably be recognized as such after a while, for their membership in some recurrent repertoire of likely accidents or their unlikeness to remembered patterns of thought-seeming. But in a sense thought runs the risk of misreading the substance of the non-thought medium as though it were thought. What is characteristic of the substance but not of thought, if occurring wherever thought seeks it own image, might be treated by thought as characteristic of thought itself. Seeking to know itself, thought might lose as much as it finds.
Suppose, though, a medium that is not entirely self-consistent. It is enough like itself that thought experiences the same sorts of patterns in it, that feel so familiar as to be surely marks only of thought itself, though what takes the mark is not thought - nor of course is the mark itself thought. But in places it is different, is a slightly different medium, though one still markable by thought. Thought starts to know the differences in seeming. It starts to know that something is lost and something gained as the seemings shift. What is felt when either sort of seeming is experienced becomes memorable as something distinct from what is felt during just the one or just the other.
At this point thought becomes aware that the seeming cannot be trusted. Yet it also sees that something might abide in any seeming. It is hard to know just what without moving around. It moves around.
No medium is self-consistent. However, all that is required is enough of an element of consistency so as to be recognized as an element of consistency, in comparison to elements of inconsistency. Paintings, conversations, children, picture-words and sounds: none of them give us back ourselves quite plainly, or in codes completely decipherable by any single key. But they give us large tracts at once, and even more by what we see they do not give that others gave.
Our thoughts, too, are inconsistent. But we come to see just how, just where, how often, when not, when less, when more, when right, when wrong, when new. There is no stage that is not a mirror stage. The mirrors cut, but on a plane where they can also cut each other. What it once was like, if in us still, will be in one of them. Will be in lots of them, perhaps, in shinings, fragments, shadows. Our memory assembles them. Is this a limit, sad? Not at all. We make the it we might be in our memory, but if we are it still we will feel it, we know it will fit the marks because it makes them all again.
What it once was like will come again. (Even if it was never really like that.)
Does thought run into the trouble of misreading what isn't thought as though it were, occurrences of non-thought such as characteristic or accidental features of the medium in which the thought-seeming is experienced? Sure. The accidentals will probably be recognized as such after a while, for their membership in some recurrent repertoire of likely accidents or their unlikeness to remembered patterns of thought-seeming. But in a sense thought runs the risk of misreading the substance of the non-thought medium as though it were thought. What is characteristic of the substance but not of thought, if occurring wherever thought seeks it own image, might be treated by thought as characteristic of thought itself. Seeking to know itself, thought might lose as much as it finds.
Suppose, though, a medium that is not entirely self-consistent. It is enough like itself that thought experiences the same sorts of patterns in it, that feel so familiar as to be surely marks only of thought itself, though what takes the mark is not thought - nor of course is the mark itself thought. But in places it is different, is a slightly different medium, though one still markable by thought. Thought starts to know the differences in seeming. It starts to know that something is lost and something gained as the seemings shift. What is felt when either sort of seeming is experienced becomes memorable as something distinct from what is felt during just the one or just the other.
At this point thought becomes aware that the seeming cannot be trusted. Yet it also sees that something might abide in any seeming. It is hard to know just what without moving around. It moves around.
No medium is self-consistent. However, all that is required is enough of an element of consistency so as to be recognized as an element of consistency, in comparison to elements of inconsistency. Paintings, conversations, children, picture-words and sounds: none of them give us back ourselves quite plainly, or in codes completely decipherable by any single key. But they give us large tracts at once, and even more by what we see they do not give that others gave.
Our thoughts, too, are inconsistent. But we come to see just how, just where, how often, when not, when less, when more, when right, when wrong, when new. There is no stage that is not a mirror stage. The mirrors cut, but on a plane where they can also cut each other. What it once was like, if in us still, will be in one of them. Will be in lots of them, perhaps, in shinings, fragments, shadows. Our memory assembles them. Is this a limit, sad? Not at all. We make the it we might be in our memory, but if we are it still we will feel it, we know it will fit the marks because it makes them all again.
What it once was like will come again. (Even if it was never really like that.)