The benevolent directive: Don't rupture another's illusion unless you're positive the alternative you offer is more worthwhile than that from which you're wrenching them.

So we are told by one Jonathan, not Keats, although Lethe is familiar.

Coming out of false consciousness is like being born, an originating trauma. We have all this talk of the breast and the gauzy filter of the mother who is other and differentiated. But what about the breath? The first one following enactment is to make a cry. The last one before plug-pulling is (I guess) to put a full stop endstop to that particular instantiation, that single inimitable wink of a star.

Perseverance keeps honor bright, we are told and left to work out the detail that perseverance connotes a harder toil and a darker path than does persistence. We can persist in believing that the government wants what’s best for us, that incentives don’t cause the world to revolve as it makes its orbit, one kind of circling in another, that this time is different. And that kind of belief, held out over a generation, will give a buffed sheen to persistence. But we persevere in the face of inevitable disruption, famine war plague and exile. Or they did, the forebears. We persevere in the face of a complacent stagnation, having run out of post- labels to attach to whatever this present moment is.

But if we persevere in clinging to systematic malapropism in how we make our what we do and what the small corner of the world in which we have a place is really like, then it’s just upended turtles kicking the air and stuck in their shells, the whole way down.

If-then gets us only so far. Not that prayer or lamentation or ritual maps the entire arc of an arrow slicing toward its target, though, either.

I am tempted to step back and just ruminate on stories, on latent connections, apophenia as a kind of homegrown affliction. Maybe not just tempted to - conditioned to , beholden by. imprisoned in.

Scheherazade might help, but we are not kings, and love is not in the offing.

Before whisking off to storyland, consider the possibility that thin experience - that historicized, simple ingestion of data and raw unmediated perception of sense - is already incoherent, a theory-impoverished fiction. We have thick experiences - some thicker and more nexus-inflected than other - but all thick, nonetheless.

Like Nabakov and the orchid specialist. Catch the drift or don’t, but the point is exhaustive explanation never becomes fully exhaustive just as the most robust, comprehensive understanding is itself always a leaky vessel. Something still sits outside, no matter how adeptly we deploy our skills no matter how felicitous our redescriptions.

But one might think, bugger all that prestidigitation and just consider song. Just consider how it makes you feel, as if how it made you feel isn’t bound up in structure and math as expressed in and through the imaginative expressions of gradations of talent, daimon, and genius.