HOW LONG THE WAR has gone on is not known, not even to the subjects; its beginning is not remembered by the objects, who cannot remember anything at all, being objects. It began with the opening of metaphorical eyes on the subjects’ part, and the appearance before those eyes of the other, obdurate and irreducible—the object. The insult has never been forgiven on the one side, nor acknowledged by the other, which would maintain its entire innocence if it were capable of maintaining anything beyond its simple existence.

The subjects had, from the first, inherent advantages unknown to the objects (who knew nothing). The subjects had the ability to apprehend, above all; they also had communication, organization, administration, a chain of command more or less complete, with weak links of course but weak links that were known about at least and therefore perhaps less damaging. They could conceive of orders, and give them. The objects had only extension, multiplicity, and a large number of simple qualities—hardness, softness, color, and so on—which they could put forth more or less continuously in the presence of subjects. The objects had the advantage of numbers, however; there were far, far more of them, and they cared nothing for casualties.

The subjects also had the advantage of being the only ones who understood that a war was being waged, though in the end it is clear that this was not solely an advantage but in certain critical moments actually counted as a disadvantage, even a disaster. Most of the major setbacks of the subjects came just at those moments when their own knowledge, and the obdurate ignorance of the objects, was most apparent to them (to the subjects; the objects knew nothing of it either way). In fact it can be said that any attack of the subjects on the objects could be considered identical to a counterattack of the objects on the subjects.

The original strategy of the objects, metaphorically speaking (objects having no strategies as such), was divide and conquer. What was divided, however, was not the enemy, the subjects, but the objects themselves, in a continuous raid upon the subjects’ powers of discrimination, a bewildering (for the subjects) and terrifying (for the subjects) proliferation that could only be opposed by an equally continuous generation of new categories by the enemy. Subjects caught unawares could find themselves suddenly surrounded by crowds of discrete and well-furnished objects, whose numbers quickly rose to virtual infinity as the trapped subject shifted its consciousness here to there in rising panic. Grains of sand, items of scenery, vegetation parts, incoming waves, stars, inches, geometrical figures, tools, all had to be instantly forced into the right categories or at least into categories perceived as correct by the battling subject, whose consciousness rapidly filled, reaching toxic levels that could result in sudden loss of apprehension, and therefore reduction to object status, at least temporarily: a state referred to (by the subjects) as “pawn capture.”

The objects’ strategy had an advantage and a disadvantage, from the objects’ point of view, a point of view which certainly did not exist. The advantage was that only the subjects could perceive the objects’ strategy, and therefore in every encounter between subjects and objects the subjects became immediately (even anteriorly) involved in carrying it out. The disadvantage was the same as the advantage: every perception of the objects by the subjects, which could have been counted as a victory by the objects if they could have counted, was also counted as a victory by the subjects; the more objects there were perceived to be, the more of them could be considered (by the subjects) to have been captured.

For a very long time now the victory has hung in the balance as the two sides march and countermarch. But wars of attrition (which is essentially what the subjects were engaged in) can only end in one way, if the courage and application of the side engaged in the attrition of the other remains high—and this is the one thing the subjects can be sure of, that they will never, in effect can never, surrender, cease, or even pause for a moment in reducing further objects to cognition.

The objects, of course, don’t see it that way. No relentless production of new categories by the subjects can effectually reduce their numbers. The subjects may believe that very capacious categories—categories such as “all that stuff,” “things out there,” “this and everything like it,” “big things,” “matter,” and so on will eventually cause the objects to surrender willy-nilly (the only way in which they could surrender). But the objects do not, agree, in fact cannot. All that the objects can be said to know, or to behave as if they knew, which itself is a distinction that only the subjects can make—what the subjects in their dark watches and lonely trenches suspect that the objects really somehow do know in their unimaginable nonexistent hearts—is that the subjects’ categories are in fact only further objects. There is no end.

There is no end. Only the subjects understand this, as well as everything else that is understood. There will be, can be no final annihilation of the objects: that is the vow, the promise implicit in all the strategies and all the tactics of both sides. The war may go badly, has gone badly since the beginning for the objects on many fronts, but it will never be over: will not be over until the last subject finally closes its eyes in sleep or death, and knows no more.