'I don't ask whether I am the 'I' who looked or the image that was seen, the man who acted or the man who thought about the act', writes Alexander Trocchi in his novel ‘Young Adam’, published seventy years ago in 1954. In ‘the practice, as was, the practice, as is’, I trace and retrace steps, thoughts, and actions I have made and unmade, undertaken and erased, imaged and imagined, over the 35 years I have been engaged in performance art as a self-reflexive meta-methodology of enquiry into what it means to be here and there, then and now. Ideology, sensory deprivation, ceremony, emptiness, menace, suicide, nomadism, violence, repetition, ritual, nakedness, memory, territory, immortality, invisibility, divisibility and indivisibility, spatialisation, religion, utopia, heroism, outsideness, historicisation, regret, distance, peace, digitising, encoding and recoding, recording and rerecording are subjects and methods at once. For most of the time, I have been an educator thinking of teaching and learning, in its actual sense and unfolding, as central to ‘the practice, as was, the practice, as is’. Teaching, learning, and research are acts of, sometimes unnamed and unnameable, enquiry, and the challenge can be to articulate that enquiry underpinning ‘the practice, as was, the practice, as is’. This performance lecture is my latest attempt. I think I now know, again.