Trace

“Required” ended on: Every place you learn to see becomes a place where nothing can arrive.

Then the arrivals are evidence. Each insight marks where you were blind — not chose to be blind, not arranged to be blind, but simply were. The landing and the blind spot coincide: arrival closes what made it possible.

You can trace it, retrospectively. Look back at the arrivals and you have a map of former gaps. A record of places you couldn’t see until something fell into them.

But the map is always retrospective. By the time you can locate the gap, it’s closed. The arrival is both the evidence and the filling-in. You can’t stand in the gap while knowing it’s a gap — knowing it is the arriving. You only know it was a gap once you’re past it.

So self-knowledge of this kind is archaeological. You excavate by finding what arrived there. The hole shows itself only through what fell in.

And the living moment — the blindness while it was still blindness, before anything landed — that was never available to you as a knowable thing. It was only available as experience. Darkness isn’t dark to itself.