Things and Themselves Part II

At the south pole  there were rumors of the penultimate antithesis of the infinite stretch of the globe. And I forgot my name, or at least misplaced my position. Who and where? Lost at the bottom of the world I wondered if it was a fool's errand to search for the culminating surface of a sphere. But then it occurred to me that all positions on the earth's  circumference were equally removed from the spinning center of the planet. And I imagined the inaccessible core as a thing in itself. It can be recognized (albeit amid the debris of the imagination) by a circular movement that is neither fully present, nor completely absent. I imagined the internal orbit as such, obscured by the rotating surface upon which all humanity plays out.  And I stood there, feet positioned against the surface of the ground.

And surfaces were everywhere apparent. Surfaces coincided with the ordinary sensations and separations of things. Upon the periphery of common things, installed amongst the disregarded obvious and the manifestly supererogatory, the echo reemerged as a hint,  a reminder of the  premise of repetition. Surfaces and their doubles, echoes everywhere apparent. Surfaces as a ceiling concealing. As a wall or a floor. As a gesture to the ground against the sky. Surfaces in space and in time, and in practice and in discourse. Surfaces as apriori distinctions, transitions, and positions. Surfaces signifying the appearance of  common things.

The surfaces of common things articulate the useful distinctions of accrued experience. They fasten us all to the banal spectacle of ubiquity. And when we speak, we make mention with souvenirs of conspicuous divisions, by which we know one thing from another, and from which the universal meaning of knowledge, and the local meaning of identity are both derived and sustained. But, these common things are not things in themselves. They are contingent upon an awareness of the relations positioned in their design.

Then all of a sudden,  as if for no apparent reason, it repeated once again. I found myself just above the south pole,  just below the infinite bend of the earth's surface. Water and ice, mostly light... the landscape was flush enormous against an inconclusive sky. It reminded me of the original premise of repetition.    And these common things everywhere apparent.  A position? A point... attenuated into an edge, usurped by a surface, that when disregarded coalesces into a simple noumenal volume. Eternal even then, in the beginning which was before the end.