I continue to be amazed that I exist. Or that I seem to; the question is not settled to my satisfaction. It seems highly unlikely that what asks the question is made of matter, grey or not. The very fact our matter thinks makes its credentials as matter suspect. Maybe, like Samuel Johnson, I need to kick something to prove it exists. The problem is that what I am trying to kick is my own kicking foot. The hard and durable thing (Johnson’s rock) seems to set and satisfy its own criteria for existence. You could almost say my criterion for existence is otherness: if it does not think or feel, but is the object of thought and feeling, it exists. Fortunately, existence rubs off. I feel more real when I bump up against things and in this way become a thing for those things–the world’s world, another’s other. But this requires a bizarre imaginative excursion: myself as mud might see me, or water, or ink.

words by shelley jackson.
from http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/mainpages/new/july06/jackson.html