This blog is three books in the process of being written, in the form of initial drafts of the sections, posted in the intended order, a project for which the overall name is Explorations. The three books are a continuation from Hidden Valleys: Haunted by the Future (Zero Books - 2015), and also from On Vanishing Land, an audio-essay made by myself and Mark Fisher (released by Hyperdub/Flatlines on 26th July, 2019 - https://hyperdub.net).
Explorations: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Explorations: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 49)
There was something “contingent,” or maybe serendipitous and ephemerally-singular, about both of my starting-points that evening in relation to music and dreamings. Afterwards I would never go back, in any important sense, to either of these starting-points.
If you bring a will to see the transcendental to speed, then
speed will always take you to the point where you see it, and this can take
place using oneiric and philosophical lenses that subsequently may well turn
out to have, overall, only a relatively limited value in relation to this
escape toward the abstract perception of the outside (all sorts of confusions
can arise as a result of attributing the quality of the outcome to the music or
fictional world that was a component in reaching the outside, although somehow
on this occasion no confusion occurred afterwards).
Initially that evening I took speed, in several quite large "intakes", intermittently over the space of several hours (I don’t think I had
any fixed plan at all at the beginning to also take LSD), and the two external
sources of inspiration that I initially chose (again without having had any plan
at all) were not only more than adequate as starting-points, but were perhaps
even well suited for the circumstances.
With music I started by listening to a tape of REM’s
Automatic for the People which I had “randomly” bought in a supermarket two days before (I
didn’t really know REM apart from having heard one or two singles). In a
process of zoning in toward dreamings and music at the highest available level of intensity
three or four hours later (which is like a day when you are on speed) I would
head outward and onward to The Beatles, having tried a few other records first. But at the beginning I listened to Automatic for the People, whose title I
associated with the idea of automatic writing (this probably assisting me in
the process of hearing beyond it into the outside – the outside which I was
feeling as having helped to create it, as opposed to it being a message from a
group of musicians).
There is a lot of
melancholy in REM, and melancholy as such is a kind of affectation – it is not
the same as processes of giving a lucid expression to the background radiation
of sadness of the world (for these processes he sadness is one more stimulus
to break free toward the south-outside – “all those who have gone down in the
fight would want you to Escape”). But the speed ensured that I was not going to be caught up in the melancholy, and that pre-eminently
I was going to focus on the direction of the Love-and-Freedom that also exists
within the world. Rapidly, I began listening to two tracks in particular – The
Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight, and Find the River. The chorus of the first of these
tracks, which is by far the most up-tempo track on the album, I heard as both a
wild shout of joy (which it is) and also as an entranced, tender love-song
(which I “achieved” by a mis-hearing of the very slurred lyric as “coming in to
waken her”).
I had already
reached a state of extraordinary joy – a joy that was charged with an energy
that would intrinsically by-pass all
forms of neurotic (energy-wasting) thinking and behaviour, and a joy that was
suffused with the feeling of being in love. This feeling was arriving from the dreamed/superimposed
image that now went across the chorus from the REM song, and it was also arriving from the encounter, only a few hours before, with the woman in
Leamington. And furthermore it was arriving through a heightened connection that had
now been established to the south-outside (because women are a primary
aspect of the south-outside the affective quality of this connection could only
be that of being in love, although it should immediately be added that the
planet in the deepest sense is also an inspirer of love – an “object” of love).
Some of the
time at this stage – when I was not sitting reading – I was dancing, in the
form of simple torso-rotation, back-and-forward,
and side-to-side movements. In general, and specifically with the The Sidewinder Sleeps
Tonight, the movements were fast, but some of the time they were mesmeric in
the mode of a slower, swaying motion. It
is important to think of this dancing in terms of the trance-inducing power of swaying or smoothly "refraining" motions, and in terms of its tendency to attach my attention to the
music, and to action, and to detach it from thought-processes that would have
blocked the awakening of lucidity, of abstract perception. Overall, given that
I did not have much ability at this time in relation to stopping internal
dialogues, I had stumbled into a set of behaviours that was exemplary for the
circumstances. Reading, listening to music and dancing were all ways of
disabling my conventional, habituated thought-processes (ordinary-life thought
processes that, unknown to me, insisted on the world being constructed as
ordinary, even when they appeared to be deeply philosophical). Not only this,
because I was deliberately setting out to see the world as energy, or as the
body without organs – as something that was like a space of forms of music – my
attention, freed up from neurosis, was
also being given to the whole of the room, so that perception was a fourth
element that was freeing me from constricted thought. The concentration on
perception was vital – but it should be added that perhaps the most fundamental
element was the dancing (which of course was inseparable from perception - and
only in part because of the music – and was proprioceptive, a charged, blissful
world of sensations of movement). The dancing at its different speeds, slow
swaying, and smoothly fast ecstatic movements, was a distractor from dead
thought that at the same time was more than this – it was an inducer and
heightener of trance.
What I dreamed
“across the top” of the chorus of the Sindewinder Sleeps Tonight was a “small”
and very beautiful envisaged world. The lyric “coming in to waken her” was a
story of being in love with a woman who was asleep in my bed. There was an
extraordinary tenderness and intensity about the love in this “dreaming.” The
story was that of a new relationship, and it was suffused not only with a love
and tenderness toward the sleeping woman, but with a sublime astonishment that
the woman was actually asleep in my bed. And it had the authentic quality of
the state at the beginning of being intensely in love when the thought of
having sex, although intensely wonderful, and a source of the beauty of the
experience, can have the sense of it slightly – concupiscently – missing the
point of the place (the place of lovers) that astoundingly has been found. This
was there in the fact that the dream was not about having sex, and in the fact
that the woman and myself might have had sex, or might not have done, and it
was irrelevant whether we had – all that mattered was that we were in love, and
we had slept together (the dreamed world specifically left open what had
happened, very much including sex virtually within it, but emphasising the
irrelevance of actual sex to the state of being in love by not pinning itself
down with the inclusion of a corporeal sexual act).
But it should be
added that the difference between the song and what I was envisaging was not
one created by a hallucination, but was due to the fact that amphetamines allow
you to be extremely free and creative in relation to the emergence of
dreamings. In fact I could hear that
Michael Stipe was singing something different from “Coming in to waken her” but
once I was internally singing this new lyric it was possible to be unaware of
the discrepancy: and simultaneously the unequivocal feeling was that the joy I
could hear in the chorus and the words that were audible meant that the words
must mean something like what I had envisaged. So it was possible to make the
high-tempo rush of the chorus into an invocation and blissful affirmation of the
dream finding expression for me through the words “coming in to waken her”.
Disjunctions of this kind while on speed are not the result of a lack of clear
perception (the REM lyric has been described as one of the most mis-heard
lyrics ever): on the contrary they are the result of a practical clarity which
is clear in the sense that it is free of the neurosis of the need for correct
interpretation. The joy of the music spoke for itself, and I created a virtual
world on the basis of this joy, rather than worrying about the song's words.
The two aspects
that were fundamental about the other track were the idea of “the river” that
must be found, and the fact that the song has a very beautiful, liltingly
powerful melody. The lyrics have the quality of “improv” singing, rather than
polished song-poetry: but although they contain a strand of affectation, and
have an awkwardness in their construction, none of this matters in relation to
the song containing a vital view toward the outside, a view which arrives
inextricably from both the music and the words. At the time I was distantly
aware of Michael Stipe's “sensitive soul” affectation, but none of that distracted
me – even the bits that were wrong had another aspect which went in the right
direction.
And everything in
the song is about directions. There
is the road of trapped, constrained human existence, and then there is the river.
Me, my thoughts are flower strewn
Ocean storm, bayberry moon
I have got leave to find my way.
Watch the road and memorise
The life that pass before my eyes
Nothing is going my way.
I have got to find the
river
Bergamot and vetiver
Run through my head and fall
away.
The song begins with these lyrics:
Hey now,
little speedyhead
The read on
the speedmeter says
You have to
go to task in the city
Where people
drown and people serve
Don’t be
shy, your just deserve
Is only just
light years to go.
Although I
was interested in the possible reference to amphetamines, in identifying with
Michael Stipe – as I envisaged it – talking to a female lover, I did not feel
inspired by the diminutive involved in “hey now, little speedyhead”. It did not
seem to be something that would be said to someone with whom you were in love.
Despite it apparently being morning in the song, I did not connect this “scene”
with the world of “coming in to waken her.” But what was important in Find the
River was that the love finding expression in the song was love for an aspect
of the world – for Love-and-Freedom, and for wider realities – and the weakness
of the emphasis in relation to amorous love was hugely compensated for by a relationship
of love toward the planet. There is a quality of affectation in Stipe
turning himself into a kind of Ophelia beside a stream “There is nothing left to throw / of ginger,
lemon, indigo / coriander stem and rose of hay” but the becoming-woman involved
in the song is nothing but good, and together with this becoming-woman the
names of the flowers, taken in themselves,
create an emphatic quality of an amorous, “letting-go” relationship
toward the beauty of the planetary world in which we live.
Other things were happening that were part of the process of Escape, but nonetheless it is correct to say that through the two songs - with the assistance of speed - I had reached the bright-transcendental (an additional point that should be made is that The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight takes its title and opening musical phrase from the sublimely beautiful, and very charged song - from South Africa in 1939 - The Lion Sleeps Tonight). There was the river, and there was the jungle – in the background – of The Sidewinder
Sleeps Tonight, together with the intense dream of being in love ("coming in to waken her"). Love and women are fundamental for the escape
from constricted, collapsed reality; the forest is all around us, despite it
being hard to see; and there is a river in the forest.
*
Almost immediately after starting listening to the music I
decided to read a passage from a book – a passage which to a great extent is about music. But it was not a book
about aesthetics and music. It was a fantasy-tale novel that I had not looked at for ten
years, and that I had only ever read once (in the weeks before I had thought at some point that there was a section from it that I should look at, although in a way where I was thinking in terms of the cultural history of music in fantasy fiction).
In the story Bracken, who is a "solver" of ancient underground labyrinths, is in love with Rebecca (who is a healer, using herbs to cure people) but as a result of epic - and recurrently very violent - events, he has been drawn far away from Rebecca, and his home, to the Uffington downlands, where there is a "holy" place - a community of male priests or monks, alongside a sacred neolithic site.
The book is Duncton Wood, by William Horwood, and its characters are moles. Given the book is in some sense a "magical tale" this starting point is not an issue - in fact the real issue is that it is not magical enough (it is a significant fact that although "the holy moles" of Uffington are alongside the 2500 year old white horse, this message-from-the-Future geoglyph is never mentioned, in favour of a central importance of the sarsen stone megaliths that are nearby). The book was written in 1978, taking advantage of the opportunity opened up by the much more impressive - and very shamanic - Watership Down, from 1972. And far from being shamanic it is an epic hero-adventure and conventional romance that is heavily inflected by a religious mysticism (influenced on one level by eastern philosophy) that fundamentally is catholicism, or anglo-catholicism.
The passage is three quarters of the way through the book (the events of the last quarter will take place primarily in North Wales) and up until this point the book has been set in woodlands and pasturelands of lowland Oxfordshire (as opposed to the south-Oxfordshire upland of the downs above the village of Uffington). A sacred song is about to be sung by the holy moles of of Uffington, in a secret chamber which is beneath the sarsen stone tomb that is now called Waylands Smithy (this name comes from 2000 years after the tomb was made). The location of the chamber for this song is connected to the fact that the moles worship a divine force which they call "the Stone" (all standing stones are sacred for them). Bracken has accompanied a "scribe-mole" called Boswell to Uffington but he is not a member of the Uffington religious order, and cannot take part in the singing of the song. He is at a loose end, and he goes out onto the surface:
"The weather was cold, wet, and messy, as grey sweeps of rain
came across the vales below Uffington and swirled up the hill into the long,
coarse grass into which Bracken emerged from the tunnels below.
He did not know what
he was looking for but, as often in the past, he knew he would find it when he
got there.
Then he heard a familiar and welcoming sound, the rushing of
wind through bare beech-tree branches and twigs somewhere ahead."
As I started to read this passage I became aware of a kind
of anomalous parallelism between what I was reading and what was happening to
me. The protagonist in the book did not know what he was looking for, and he
was about to go into a secret place in which he would experience the
transcendental through music, and specifically through song. And the feeling of
the parallelism was emergent also from the fact that the protagonist not only
had a love for travelling into the unknown, but was both intensely in love -
with Rebecca – and intensely inspired by the terrains of the
planet.
Bracken finds the secret chamber, and finds an opening high up in one of its walls. He hears the song, and is swept away by it:
“…his own voice seemed to join them and he was singing it, too, and it carried him even further as its sound echoed and re-echoed around the chamber about him and took him finally for a moment into the very silence of the Stone, where a mole is nothing but a part of the glimmers and rays of the silence itself, unseen. As he went there, he understood at last where he had been with Rebecca and why he would always search until he found it with her once more.”
I was reading the
words of the whole passage (about four pages) with the deliberate attention of someone reading them out - the opposite
of “skimming.” The task I had set myself – without giving any thought to it -
was to read the passage with full, deliberate intensity, waking every nuance of
each phrase and each word. And it was not at all that I thought everything
in the passage was a view toward the outside – on the contrary, along with its
opening up of the transcendental I was deeply aware of a bleak space of
religious gravity and “piety.” But at the same time my intent was now to follow the parallelism to the full, and in adjusting the lens of the fiction in this way, the combination of the music in the room, and the idea of the bright-transcendental in the book, however confused it was, led to my perception and abstract-perception crossing a threshold. And once across the threshold the world of Duncton Wood had disappeared, had become irrelevant in relation to the immediacy of what I was encountering.
It was entirely – and viscerally – clear to me that I had
reached what in anthropological terms is called the sacred. I was in a state of continuous extreme joy, or bliss, and I was perceiving the world
around me both as a space of energy-formations that had the beauty and
consistency of music, and as a space within
which the human world was transected by a river of the bliss that is love, freedom
and lucidity (the bliss that I was experiencing was a part of this river).
The passage from Duncton Wood had helped me as an oneiric-abstract
lens. I could also see, in putting down this lens, the grave, “pious-constrictive” flaws it
had: the affectations of religion in Duncton
Wood were as visible to me as the affectations of melancholy sensitivity in
Automatic for the People, but in both cases these issues were irrelevant. I did
not become ensnared in processes of critique which would have prevented me from
seeing the south-outside (the critique took place, but in processes of abstract
perception that instantly expressed themselves as a moving on).
What everything evidently turned around was the relationship
of women to the sacred. And here the book I was reading both pointed out the
fundamental direction, and simultaneously provided almost nothing that would
help me to move forward. It had within it a female figure who was an effective,
believable figure for envisaging the state of being in love, but it did this in
a context of character-aspects and circumstances that together were libidinally and metaphysically repugnant.
It is obviously relevant that all of the priests of this world were males, but
the deeper issue is that the ambient male-religion impositionism – with its
affectations in the form of what is called “piety” – surrounds a carefully
constructed female figure whose love, vitality, beauty and capacity to be an
adventurer are in every sense shackled to her being a partner to a male, and to her being a mother
and a healer (the three aspects of the “nurturing” female). She is not allowed
in any way to be a thinker who is waking lucidity in a metaphysical exploration
(only males here can be spiritual thinkers) and nor is she allowed to be an
adventurer whose journeys are a blissful exploration into the unknown (again,
here only males begin to go in that direction - and they only begin, trapped by the delusions of an entrapment-metaphysics).
In the male world of religious metaphysics (which is what
has created the religions) what has mattered fundamentally in the creation of religions has all along been the
ownership of the land, and the ownership of women. Secretly the questions of
gods and of avatars primarily pertain to justificatory metaphysical ruses that
ensure the continuation of systems of libidinal, oneiric and concrete
domination - domination of women, and of planetary terrains. It is not that the
sacred – the bliss that is Love-and-Freedom – does not exist (the fact that it exists
explains, in part, why women can be trapped in this way): it is that the
systems of religion allow only tiny gleams of the energy of Love-and-Freedom to
break through, while at the same time they intrinsically shut down the ability
to escape towards it.
We were going in opposite directions. Duncton Wood was
imposing anglo-catholicism over the ancient shamanic world of Britain. The adventure of the story was like a young male’s glory dreams of being in love, being a
hero, and being on a titanic adventurous quest, but most damagingly the book was a space of "piety," and of the abstract-oneiric functioning of the interiority (the interiority, or trans-establishment, in Britain is profoundly anglo-catholic).
In relation to the treatment of women, and to the bleak gravity and constriction
of religion, my critique was a swift moving on. Yes, music and silence were
door-openers for reaching the bright-transcendental, and yes, women were
central to the escape, but the male-dominated priest-piety was evidently a
destructive imposition, and so was the romantic traditionalism of the book’s
female paragon.
But where did the book lead me in relation to the planet?
Here, it was not so much that I stopped to perform a critique, as that
something in Duncton Wood’s relationship to the countryside of Britain caused
me to see a form of creative engagement that I had not fully perceived before: a form of creative engagement that was in fact liminally - but deeply - connected
to the interiority.
The book constructed a kind of evaluative and abstract map
of terrains, determining zones not according to spatial features, but according
to aesthetic-religious aspects. It was oneiric-abstract work engaging closely
with the terrains of the island. Rural lowland Oxfordshire was a zone of
quietly sublime areas of woodland, and the chalk downlands at the far
south of the county were a place of a more powerful, insistent sublime affect, a
place where the sacred was closer to the surface. And lastly, the mountains of
north Wales (the place to which the three central characters go, after the
events at Uffington) is a place where the sublime is very intense, but darkly
turbulent, in that it has both an ambient associated bleakness and a singular
primevally dark element (the hound of Gelert, a creature which, like the
medieval “imps” is initially negative in nature, but which can be “turned” so
that it becomes a force of good). This particular form of mapping did not
strike any chord with me in the sense that everything was tied to religion (and having spent two years – relatively recently -
living in the exceptionally beautiful terrain around Harlech in North Wales, I
did not agree at all with the map in relation to north Wales).
But at another
level the book was about the plants, trees and hill formations of the island of Britain (it is full of references to plants) and there is a real love in this. Here was the element that in itself was fully positive.
I was leaving Duncton Wood behind, but something, briefly, was carried with me from it. By this time it was around a half hour since I had taken a tab of LSD, and the carried-forward element would soon be swept away completely by the awakening of other zones of awareness, but for now there was a glimpse of something. In leaving behind the deep underground chamber
of the priest moles, what was I now seeing? Or who? .
I was seeing
someone else, explicitly alongside the philosopher. This figure was the poet or prose-poet of the countryside - a figure whose work was about transmitting a love for the planet, although in a way where (and this distinction was not in focus) recurrently the love could be mediated by the terminology of the territory (so that by implication it is "the land" - the specific "land - that is evoked rather than the work evoking the planet by means of the region).
I had an image of an extremely beautiful area of hills, at twilight (they were somewhere on the Welsh borders, in Shropshire, Cheshire, or over the border in the northern areas of Wales that are beyond these counties). And suddenly I had an intense yearning to be such a prose-poet or poet (I think it was prose that was in my mind), and the intensity of the dream was strong partly because I envisaged that such a writer would be living with an amazing woman, with them living in an area of hills - or beautiful countryside - for which they would both feel a profound love.
I did not see that such a figure, if they have no centrally deterritorialised aspect, is in fact all along a very high-kudos equivalent of the "state philosopher" - their work can be taken up and used by the interiority (Shakespeare to a great extent - an extent that is fundamental when properly perceived - gets around this by setting two of his most powerful - shamanic-modernist - works in places other than Britain - A Midsummer Night Dream is in Athens, and The Tempest is Far away in the Caribbean, or most convincingly, in the "east Indies", as they were called at that time (the presence of chess in the play is an indicator of India, the place of origin of the game).
But although I was struck by this figure, I did not stay. I remember that at a certain point I suddenly had a glimpse of a sunlit expanse of Warwickshire countryside - as if seen from a hill - and as well as the hills and woodlands there were several tall black "lines" of energy (they were as wide as several houses) that stretched up from the ground - like static plasma lines, lines of plasma, but ones that stayed constant instead of instantly disappearing - and went out of sight into the upper atmosphere. The affect was that they were like the night - like a starlit, moonlit night - and were dark only in the sense that what was there was too unknown for me to see it other than as a darkness. This was of course a deterritorialised, planetary "vision" of one of the terrains of the island, and it swept away the residual bad air of the line of thought that had continued from Duncton Wood.
In relation to music by this time I had dropped back thirty years from 1992, and this new
music had a far clearer view toward the Future, a view which - it is a view from 1962 and 1963 - had probably been
assisted by the use of amphetamines. I was now listening to the early Beatles.
This was the
highpoint of sheer sustained bliss. The songs were love songs. They had an
exuberant brightness, a delicately
intense feeling of love (“I want to hold your hand”), the becoming-woman that is an
affect of genuine heterosexual male love songs (how can you not enter into
becoming with those who you really love?) and a lack of male affectation in the
form of “soulfulness.” I listened to (and danced to) each song three or four
times, and then moved on to the next one.
And for a moment at least, in another space
of the body without organs of the room, there was a sunlit, sublime-eerie expanse of planetary Warwickshire.
And the LSD was
now beginning to have an effect – there was a new joy in the form of
extraordinarily beautiful coloured patterns that now were appearing “in front
of” the surfaces of the room, and which suffused my visual field if I closed my
eyes. And it was not just a question of the visual as a “source” for the
patterns. With my eyes closed it was clear the patterns were suffusing my whole perceptual and proprioceptive field – the body-shaped eye that I had been all
along – and it was more easy to focus on the fact that a large proportion of
the patterns were to some degree expressively related to the songs to which I was
listening.
The night was about to enter a new phase, and one that would involve some very anomalous experiences, and some extreme psychological turbulence (to state again what I said in the previous section – I am emphatically not recommending that anyone should follow this example).
* * *
