I went down and looked through the remains at the bottom of an hourglass but I found that things didn't always align themselves in theory. The eyes blurt out strange things; they see the stages of things out of their corners where floaters skid out of reach. A bunch of birds that must have passed overhead appear as quick arrows pointing their shadows downward as they cross the window. Such is attention. The code is merely an index and stands in relation to the message as a dictionary to a crossword puzzle. Joyful, nor scared of its own library. The dictionary is our life. It is in the nature of the indexical to point to itself, and in pointing to mark the taking place of language by taking its place -- there. And still it points beyond itself. There really is no single person to point to as the cause of this circus of meaning's desertion. The work is antiphonal, unsleeving, cut and spliced out of whole cloth, eclipsed in and as language. The object that we point to is the point of reference that the word refers us to. But just because it can vanish without a trace doesn't mean that reference is superfluous. Even if the point I'm making is pointless, the point of making it is not. The pointing remains in language, and doesn't quite pass beyond its own insistence upon making its points of arrival and departure the same. The sign itself is a shifter: values are variables, and shifty characters too. The appearance of meaning is neither attached nor detached but persists as the medium of transference. The point is not merely to isolate particulars, but to reparticularize universals. Have at them with equal force. This is not "my" imagination, but the power of imagination qua imagination. Thinking is what it means; thinking is that "being" as meaning. Knowledge is not a thing but a force. "To get it" is to rub out objects and erase their inscriptions so that the pink stubble reminds us that the pencil has two ends. The end is what it means. To be, or not to.