There must be some place other than the mind being its own pontoon. Very soon now I will ask for what is mine, for what has been mined from the beginning. Outside the mind minds only its own business. The brain is a gift wrapped in the box of the skull, but the brain isn't really inside the box. The box is filled with crinkly tissue paper to muffle the fact that it is not there. The sound of this paper as it's rifled through is consciousness -- unwrinkling itself into new wrinkles that can't be seen outside the box; can't be seen as signs of the activity of the brain which is not hidden beneath the paper. But in a strange way those wrinkles are reproduced. Those squiggly lines reduplicate the palimpsest of the brain without mimicking it exactly, for the thoughts that form there are clicking things, ticking them off. There's rust on the clock that prevents it from moving backward. But one only desires to escape what hatches directly from one's mind. I. One doesn't look directly into the sun, but the sun looks back. There are borders which define the disappearance of the invisible. They mark the absence of the object as it disappears. It glimpses itself only as it vanishes, leaving traces of what it might have been before the process of appearing had begun to distribute itself. The train horn whittles the wind. It begins to take shelter from a series of mounting oppositions. Reading resurfaces the words it comes up against when they resurface. The cannons are mute. Printed matter matters. The means justify the meanings. I cannot take orders. Ordering implies command and it is imperative not to genuflect before the mirror of what one does not know. Outside the rules are negated, and negation rules. Take out your ruler and hum a few bars. A box is one. One what? I sense that there is nothing in a word that is not as baroque as an Argand lamp. Once there was one in which whale oil quivered. I sense what it is when it corners itself -- it is that corner itself.