I’m just in the tidy up phase of marking. It’s a thin state, like butter scraped over too much bread. It leaves me nostalgic for the dreamt figures of childhood, Hollywood cinema and processed, probably non-vegan, food. But instead I’m just going to dwell in a post of Kristina Chew’s:

Did you (if you are the parent of an autistic child) feel that, on learning of your child’s diagnosis, the world turned upside down—-like this?

But take a look again at that map.

It is the same world—same countries, and continents, and oceans; same names, just from a different perspective. I like how the water (the Indian Ocean, the South Atlantic Ocean) is on top—-water being the major element it is for my son Charlie.

And I’m thankful to be Charlie’s mother and to have been given the chance to learn to see the world from another point of view. Maps can be read in more ways than meets the eye.

And of that which it reminds me, the bit where Jean-Luc Nancy had me in Being Singular Plural:

“Strangeness” refers to the fact that each singularity is another access to the world. At the point where we would expect “something,” a substance or a procedure, a principle or an end, a signification, there is nothing but the manner, the turn of the other acess, which conceals itself in the very gesture wherein it offers itself to us - and whose concealing is the turning itself. In the singularity that he exposes, each child that is born has already concealed the access that he is “for himself” and in which he will conceal himself “within himself,” just as he will one day hide under the final expression of a dead face. This is why we scrutinize these faces with such curiosity, in search of identification, looking to see whom the child looks like, and to see if death looks like itself. What we are looking for there, like in the photographs, is not an image; it is an access.

Is this not what interests us or touches us in “literature” and in “the arts”? What else interests us about the disjunction of the among themselves, by which they are what they are as arts: plural singulars? What else are they but the exposition of an access concealed in its own opening, an access that is, then “inimitable,” untransportable, untranslatable because it forms, each time, an absolute point of translation, transmission, or transition of the origin into origin. What counts in art, what makes art art (and what makes humans the artisits of the world, that is, those who expose the world or world), is neither the “beautiful” nor the “sublime”; it is neither “purposiveness without purpose” nor “judgement of taste”; it is neither “sensible manifestation” nor the “putting into work of truth.” Undoubtedly, it is all that, but in another way: it is access to the scattered origin in its very scattering; it is the plural touching of the singular origin. This is what “the imitation of nature” has always meant. Art always has to do with cosmogony, but it exposes cosmogony for what it is: necessarily plural, diffracted, discreet, a touch of colour or tone, an agile turn of phrase or folded mass, a radiance, a scent, a song, or a suspended movement, exactly because it is the birth of a world ( and not the construction of a system). A world is always as many worlds as it takes to make a world.

We only have access to ourselves - and to the world. It is only ever a question of the following: full access is there, access to the whole of the origin. This is called “finitude” in Heideggerian terminology. But it has become clear since that “finitude” signifies the infinite singularity of meaning, the infinite singularity of access to truth. Finitude is the origin; that is, it is an infinity of origins. “Origin” does not signify that from which the world comes, but rather the coming of each presence of the world, each time singular.