CO:--/TP:--

I had everything wrong. It has been nearly a fortnight since I arrived and, in that time, I have managed to misunderstand most things as quickly and adeptly as I have been able to apply misunderstandings to practical, strategic use in maneuvering through this place. It may be true that we survive despite ourselves. But it is certainly true that I have only survived because of certain practices in which I claim no agency.

To begin, my terms were wrong. I have not arrived here any more than I left someplace else--although I most certainly was somewhere else before I was here. This place is instead a kind of reformulation of elsewhere--another place though the site was unchanged. My apartment, therefore, remained my apartment although the conditions which would have allowed a reckoning of that fact were non-existent. I have learned that I cannot rely on the continuous existence of things in creating a sense of place. Even more devastating was my instinct to feel belonging when I had only haphazardly built a sense of place.

To usefully talk of place we cannot talk of things but instead of powers. There were powers putting me in place which I could not have seen if I hadn't thought to look with the eye in the den of my eye. That eye, which I will call the den-eye, is situated in the ocular nerve and receives signal as it emits sign-sense. This sign-sense is mostly kept silent by the chattering mind, but enters in an alternate direction for the heart.

The silence, however, is crucial and we should talk about it more. The mind, always looking to gratify its efforts, imposes the probability of its system on everything it can get its eye (the non-den-eye) on. That eye, though blind, will say it sees. That eye, though blurred, will proclaim its clarity. That eye, though sharp, is often tangled in the mind's disarray.

This, when it has occurred, is when we have been silenced by our own mind.

The sight of the den-eye, however, does not go unseen. It is almost as if it redoubles in its rejection from the mind toward the heart, hitting a concentrated core with a complex energy. Sometimes it so forceful that it feels as if the heart might be depressed from its ordinary position, into the stomach or lower. The mere mention of the phenomenon is often enough to evoke its sensation, so common and ubiquitous is its presence.

But, like I said, to even begin to get my terms right I had to start seeing with the den-eye, receiving those imprints at their initial location--the mind.

I do not have here any thing that could be said to be me. This is to say that there is nothing here which is truly mine--which a stranger could see, smell, taste, touch, lick, eat, etc., and say, that is his. How then, could I have found the lineage of my building's location all the way to Max Links, progenitor-proprietor, if we can have no thing in our name?

It is because, I have found, representation is made of powers not of things. An image resonates in the mind as one identity or another, according many values along the way, until, like a cyclops in a cave, the giant stands bare against a kind of wall. We were, if you will permit it, in the cave without a name. And no amount of pronunciation would have gotten us any closer to identity--or place! Here, within the dark den of a dangerous, blood-thirsty giant! David, I have heard said, used a sling--but we do not believe in such things as things--so we must believe that David used a power of projection.

When I finally faced the single-eyed beast, it was not to strike him low, it was to know what kind of power could ripple through the den--could raise its hideous groan in response to my presence and, like the weakening waves pulling backward from the strand, respond to the sturdiness of an action; to say, "speak," and hear speech; to sit still and see movement everywhere and through everything.

There is, therefore, no such thing as "my arrival." If ever I arrived, it was in arriving, to which I am now assigning a temporal distance, "having arrived," while emitting and admitting that I am here, above the thing, the "having arrived;" atop like David on the beast.

For this reason, I have, for the moment, given up on the determining of coordinates or a time-point. The entire system of spaces and times will have to be reformulated to account for what has happened and is happening to me. But this is not to say that I have given up on receiving transmission from where I was--but rather that I have given up on wanting to get back. Not caring to trace the direction hitherto, I have need to know where I am. For now, at least, I have a mission to occupy my time. The body, which I found immediately after my last message, six days ago, has riven me from previous anxieties. This mystery, full of its own (albeit completely carnal) anxieties, has brought me to the edge of understanding where I am, and for what use.

But I will have to elaborate more on this at another time. I have reason to believe that I am now being read, although these readers are not here to help me--I have had no contact regarding previous messages. They are reading to collect information.