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 - 50)
Earlier, in Leamington, I had encountered a woman who was a Warwick student in the third year of an English Literature BA - we had spoken for about an hour, perhaps a bit longer. She had very poised eyes, whose femininity was in the form of a perceptive, studious warmth. She came from an area of North Yorkshire for which I felt a strong affection, and she would have been around 21. I was waiting at the house for someone else – it was a chance meeting – but she seemed happy to talk.
My BA at Warwick
had been in Philosophy and Literature, and we also had the shared connection to
North Yorkshire. I remember talking about the area she came from, and the areas where I had lived in Yorkshire, and I think at the end we spoke about the English
Literature department, and the courses we had enjoyed. I know that we talked about books that we loved, and that we clicked in terms of having an affection for the same novels and plays. It is not an exaggeration to say that by the time I left the
house I was on the edge of being in love.
However, the
woman had a boyfriend, and the state at which I had arrived did not have the
tension of a need to make something happen. It had an element of frustration,
but under those circumstances there is always the hope that the obstacle will
disappear, and in the glow of amorous happiness it seems that only serendipity is needed, leaving the mind entirely
untroubled by a requirement to make plans. This intense state of “falling in
love” does not in fact last very long under such circumstances – which of course is not to say that its subsiding is
to be affirmed – but for the first evening at least the feeling is entirely
secure and self-propelling, continuously supported as it is by immediate,
undimmed memories (and perhaps it says something that I can still remember the woman’s eyes).
And this evening
was the evening. I was going to set
out to see what could be seen, using a
combination of speed and lsd. And although the nature of my motivation was
relatively good – in comparison to setting out to “have fun” – I feel certain
it was vital for what happened that I was on the edge of being in love. It is not enough to decide,
philosophically, to see the outside of ordinary reality. You also have to face in the right direction.
What I was about
to do is not at all to be “recommended.” The only general principle here is indeed
“don’t take drugs” (a principle that I have now put into practice). However it
must immediately be said that there is a fundamental validity and importance to
certain kinds of experiences created by taking psychotropics – experiences generally
also created by a technique for stopping internal verbalising, for "stopping the internal dialogue." It is just that
the dangerous work has already been done, and the necessary maps and diagrams
in relation to the thresholds of perception and abstract perception that are
in question have been meticulously and soberly drawn up. And in terms of the evening in 1993 it was in
fact the case that I had started to study these maps and diagrams (I had found
the anomalous, southward path, and I did not need to go rushing up a mountain
along a path in the wrong direction, in order to get the view).
The total number
of times I had taken either one of the two substances would have been around
seven or eight, with these occasions all, in different ways, having been in the
context of the graduate milieu of Warwick philosophy department. My aim this
evening was in a very strong sense philosophical – my intent was to use
psychotropics and music in a deliberate attempt to perceive the world as “the
body without organs,” (to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term for the outside) as
opposed to perceiving a world of concrete or material formations. Furthermore, there was no spirit of
generational “rebellion” in what I was doing. In the context of this generational axis, if anything was involved it was an awareness of death, rather than a rejection of values. In the summer my mother had died, and an effect of her death had been to make me feel that if I was going to go in this
direction I should do it properly. I felt very strongly – and I still feel this
– that my mother had thrown me a long way forward in the direction that leads away
from conventional, constricted forms of existence. And in relation to psychotropics
the feeling that I should not waste what I had been given (I should not die
before I died) had been at work in making me think that this route should
only be taken if I was setting out to make discoveries about the wider and deeper nature of the world.
These were very
good intentions to be bringing to the experience. But none of this means that I was doing the
right thing. To detail the ways in which I was lucky, and the extraordinary
experiences I had, carries the risk of giving the impression that on this
occasion it was somehow, as it turned out, the best route to take. This is not
my aim at all – but it remains the case, all necessary warnings having been
given, that the perspectives I reached are worth describing.
A jump forward for just a moment (the full account of what took place will appear later).
It is now around
midnight. I have been listening to music for hours, and I have been ultra-blissfully swept away into
the sense that, Spinozistically, there is no difference
between the inside and the outside. What I am sensing is that the air around me
in the room is also the joy of the music, and that the world of the planet is
the same kind of thing as is music, and is also joy.
To pull back from
this wider viewpoint, it is definitely – includedly - the case that what I am
sensing is that the whole human world fundamentally consists of feeling and intent. However,
it is not enough to get to this place, even though it is a very good start.
The abstract,
most fundamentally, is a world of wills. Subsuming and going beyond the
oneirosphere and the verosphere is the eerie (and sublime) tremendum of the volos. This is the sphere of wills, in their
essential-and-parasitised admixtures, and of intent, which is simply will
insofar it has not been implanted with a predatory external intention.
In relation to
fiction and philosophy the question therefore becomes – to what extent is a particular work an expression of a love for love-and-freedom? And to what extent is it an
expression of control-fixation, of desire-for-kudos, of desire to access,
creatively, the power of socially established forms of blocked and constrictive
dreaming? (the epic, shockingly delusory worlds of religion and reason). There
is a continual production of paratexts or supplement-texts of religions, and in
the same way there is an endless production of paratexts of the major
formations within the world of reason (and together religion and reason
socio-machinally form a single system – the system of reason-revelation).
Furthermore, in
relation to individuals and groups - and the whole circumambient world of the
outside - the questions, again, are about the degree in each case of love, of
desire-for-control, of desire-for-kudos, of openness to new experience, of
fear, of being “in love,” of concupiscence, of being in love with
love-and-freedom (that is to say, the degree of love-and-freedom).
The form of
abstract perception here is lucidity. It is lucidity which grasps that a
direction is that of love-and-freedom. When this direction appears in front of
you there can be a feeling like seeing sunlit hills in the morning in summer, a
startlingly beautiful feeling that could come with a bright world of
evocative, fleeting images. The direction involved is exceptionally likely to
have no quality of being a direction of the glittering prizes – because it is
the south-outside, and in most of its forms is too beyond-the-conventions for
it to sit easily within the general human establishments, let alone the
interiority. But lucidity is not distracted or confused by any of these –
intrinsic and extrinsic – circumstances. A woken or deliberately functioning
lucidity sees the direction when it appears.
It is also a fully
woken lucidity that can see, for instance, the difference between the blissful adventure of
being in love, and the point where a combination of paragonising and
diminutivising begins to appear. Women in particular are in desperate need of
this ability – the sexually-charged diminutivising of, for instance, “your
beautiful little waist” has a “little” within it which is just the beginning of
a rising tide of implicit “aboveness” of male-with-highly-developed-reason above
beauty-paragon female, with loveliness and intuitions, but with
less-developed-reason (the horror, the horror…). The trap of the romantic
closes, and as the man loses the libido of first-phase sexual interest toward the
woman the energy for paragonising subsides, generally leaving only the
increasing functioning of the infantilising tendency (as the man stops fucking
the woman, he does not stop fucking her “in the head”). Lucidity again grasps
the nature of what repeatedly follows in long-term heterosexual relationships.
A deeply recurrent active/submissive complex of wills has the form of the man
agreeing in effect to revolve around a family, but with the woman agreeing to
have her life and her family revolve around the man’s life project (his
creative/professional/metaphysical project). This recurrent ceding of the space
of the abstract to the male is a disturbing collapse (one which is secretly
libidinalised as a feminine submission, and is symbolised by the change of name
that is still the rule within marriage). For women and for men there is of course everything right about a "becoming-child" as a becoming amongst the others, but it is a disaster when it is an entrapment element of a double process of reproduction and of confidence-destroying conjugalism.
In the oneirosphere and the verosphere it is lucidity that can see the sexism, racism and shutting-down of the path to the south-outside of Tolkien's disguised catholicism, and that can see the deadly reason-fixated gravity of Kant's protestantism (the overcoding of
language - and in particular the language of reason - onto thought; the horror of ethical judgement without love as the fundamental aspect of choice-making and without lucidity as its intellectual modality; the re-enforcement of normality with speculative theology; and the fending-off of perception and of abstract perception by an implicit
overcoding of the unknowable across the transcendentally unknown, but knowable).
Space here is world of co-emplaced wills, and time is like
thought or dreaming – or will. It is only when you have included will that you are
safe from the endemic, dominatory idea that the human dimension of the cosmos
is unfolding along the lines of reason, or along the lines of a dialectical
development of “spirit” – it is only then that you have included the wild,
sublime energy of the volos, the
tremendum. Being in love, and being in love with love-and-freedom are the two
states that tell you most about the nature of time, along with two others –
predation and parasitism. The cosmos is suffused with intent, and it is also
suffused with forms of domination.
But space is the way forward here. During the evening in 1993 I will be turned more and more toward space. And the same is true of what will take place over the next few years, in relation both to the abstract and the concrete. Described in relation to critique this is a necessary process because philosophy is fundamentally pervaded by a fixation on reason, and reason works primarily along the lines of time (its other primary zone of engagement is the inactive side of existence in the form of formal and semi-formal systems). Described positively the primary thing that is about to happen is a process of being turned toward the planet, and toward new kinds of relationships with women, relationships that will have a much stronger element of adventure, of love-and-freedom.
But in the course of the evening - of the night - most specifically I will be turned, firstly, toward the space encountered in perception, and secondly, toward the planet as it appears within two different, but related, kinds of dreaming (the land, the country, the hills, the mountains), both of which will have as a fundamental element the amorous - that state which is called "being in love."
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