But there are movements of the mind like a headache without pain, nagging as a toothache: these are deformations of ego from within, slowly being forced as orthodontic braces guide the teeth, by elements not yet admitted to consciousness, that cast their grinding, the voice of a continent in flight, apparently to the stars, white noise--becoming sense. ...thoughts that don't yet carry the burden of a thousand repetitions, so light you must hold your breath beside them...

   "Skunkworks"

There are no atoms
indivisible at last to be broken to.
If i was once
the site and source of such resplendent fire
or, oak, stood riven
lit from a forking lode, then more i shall be.
Atoms into atom-shards
and into shards of shards, there is no ending,
no last dust
but may be made to walk and weep again.

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Empirical art history, which makes out the purposes of art to be so divergent, is like a physics that concludes gravity used to be weaker than it is now, because of the Dinosaurs. What changes is the set & setting, the means, and the prejudices to be overcome.

I think instead of blindness deafness is a better metaphor for the havoc wrought by egotism. Because deafness isolates whereas blindness makes dependent; deafness leaves you apparently still in the world, still able to get around and do things, it's not seen as such a disability...and the egotist does perceive well the world of matter, of things, though ignorant, as though deaf, to the subtle dynamic manifestations; finally, what the egotist is most deprived of, is world-silence, self-silence, union of these... His art if he has it is a form of shouting...no music of the spheres, he is the first to scoff; and never sings.

Personal and Collective Unconscious. Isn't what distinguishes these, a qualitative difference, oil/water, such that the ego can penetrate the first, but stops cold at the second? For the latter is the realm of form-genesis, and the ego is only another form-structure; in the personal unconscious all is change and transformation (ceaselessly: the sea) but never new, not the worldshaking novelty which the collective can unleash (and the myths say as much...), thrusting time into plateaus of complexity, and giving us the illusion of continual evolution... And going down, it's as if your bathyscape turns into a toy in the Marianas Trench, you return and find all the other selves like dolls, like stupid counterfeits of a real identity--but this is the essence of identity in fact--what more could it be? The ego postulates gods: ego which is real...which can make things new... And it's all a mistake. The interface is shiny like a mirror, so that you see (inevitably) shallows in the deep. Fish there, and submarines... What's really down there isn't a "what", hasn't eyes unless it be all Eye... (the myths say so) Mysticism is the science of seeing through mirrors, the language of mirrorback-black...

'It is unlikely that much more than a hundredth part of French literature of the Middle Ages has survived changing fashions.... the number of authors must have been immense in a time when the writer was his own editor, the poet his own reciter, the dramatist his own actor. In a certain sense, the printing press was a hindrance to the practice of letters. It exercised a selectivity and cast contempt on writing that had not succeeded in being printed. This situation still obtains [1900], but is attenuated by the low cost of mechanical typography. The invention that threatens us now--a home printing apparatus--would multiply by three or four times the number of new books, and we would find ourselves in the situation of the Middle Ages: everyone who is the least literate--and others, as is the case today--would venture his lucubration which he would pass out to his friends before offering it to the public.
   All progress ends by negating itself.' --Remy de Gourmont (tr Glenn S Burne)