Explorations: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Explorations: Through the Forest, the River (31 -50)
It was her – on the far side of the forest clearing,
with a Querechua woman. The two women turned rapidly and went into the forest.
It was Teresa.
I was second in command in a company of two hundred men,
tasked with finding pockets of resistance. In the century and a half since the
Spanish Crown had taken the territory, as far as and including the Andes, the Conquistador
army-units had learned how to travel in dense forest, and this was not the near-impassable
jungle that grew in the headwater terrains beyond the mountains.
As the company moved along the path I was in a state of disorientation.
There was a sense in which I had joined the army to find Teresa, but was
this what I wanted?
We had lived in Saresto, in the south.
Once Teresa said to me:
“Sometimes in spring or early summer I see for a moment a
place where there are wild fruit-trees, an idyllic place to the north on a
hill, and I see a path, with sun glittering on the sand. I can’t see anything
clearly, and its over in a second, and its nowhere I’ve ever been, but I feel
that all of the decisions I take should somehow have the feeling of joy that
comes with that moment.”
She loved Querechua stories, and she thought about them to
an extent which frightened me. Once she said “I wonder if when we place their
tales in writing we destroy them.” And another time -“Maybe a tale is a
fragment of a reality too intense for us to accept it.” When she disappeared at
the same time as the Querechua man, Naviin, this for everyone was the heresy of
which her family and mine had come to feel she was capable.
Naviin was a maker of musical instruments, and was famous in
the region amongst the Querechua, and other peoples. Both Teresa and Naavin had
been missing for eight years.
Having travelled through the forest for three miles we saw
the compound with its double stockade of tall, interlocked stakes. At the
entrance there was a small group, and I felt certain one of them was Naviin.
They went through the gate, and the gate closed.
The stockade compound was on a mound cleared of trees with
an area of grass and bushes around it, about a hundred yards from stockade-wall
to forest. It was defensible, and the sun had now set, so we made no attempt to
attack. We placed an unbroken ring of sentries and fires on the edge of the
forest, and set soldiers to patrol this forest-edge circumference.
After night had arrived a song started from inside the fort,
many voices were singing. An aching, keening song that rose toward a kind of
alien serenity. I heard the poise of it, and in somehow becoming attuned to
this serene quality, despite myself I was moved.
Afterwards there were scutterings of notes, plucked strings,
and strange chime sounds. There was silence, and then scattered notes. The men
became frightened, and started whispering about malign spells they believed
could be used by the Querechua. After a while I realised the music came at the
same time as gusts of wind, and although for me this made it seem less eerie,
the discovery that it was a wind-harp did not seem to calm everyone.
The night was lit up with fireflies, the big ones up in the
trees, and the small ones hovering near to the ground.
At dawn I shouted out toward the compound in the two native
languages I knew. No answer came of any kind.
Everyone had been told that we believed the tribe had a
Spanish woman held as a captive. After ten minutes, with no sign of a
surrender, a long fusillade was fired and then sixty men charged at the gate. I
went with them – the ring surrounding the stockade had been left intact, to
prevent an escape attempt.
The gate gave way very rapidly. And surprised by the lack of
arrows a small group knocked down a second gate, and then we were in the
central compound. I was sweating profusely – and was terrified that Teresa
would be killed. In that moment I knew I had reached a maximum separation
between my actions and who I really was.
The search was thorough in the extreme.
I stood looking at the tall, six foot high wind-harp
instrument, with its strings and chimes, and rotating tines that struck the
strings. It was made of wood, and had Naviin’s signature geometrical motif
running up it from base to top.
In the centre of the open space of the inner stockade there
was a very wide wooden disk on six supports, a kind of hand-adzed table. On it,
drawn in sand, were twenty seven bird-figures, each was a pair of wings a few
inches across.
There was bird-song and insect cries, the sun was rising
over the canopy of the forest.
One by one the groups reported. For an hour I also searched.
There was no-one in the compound.
I felt I was in the grip of an unfolding necessity, caught
within a role which the other, true side of myself found appalling. Would be destroyer.
And now, many years later – my role is witness; saddened,
repentant component of a tale.
When I went back to the table-like wooden disk the sand had
been scattered by the wind.
Nothing took place. Although we searched in vain, there was
evidently a tunnel, or they had slipped through the cordon of sentries. Teresa
and Naviin were never found and nor was anyone from that community. Everything was
burned to the ground. The company left, and I left with them, in the last
group.
It is many years later. Nothing happened. But beyond the
surface of the land and its people there is the thin thread of a necessity that
feels like fresh air in a confined space – this is what took me out of the
army, and led me to live as a herbalist in a town far from the one where I grew
up.
And sometimes I see that hill with wild fruit trees, and I
see the path with the glitter of sunlight on the sand.
*
A Doorway in Dreams
She would come to the lectern with a slightly angular,
diffident way of walking. She would be wearing a plain, tunic dress which somehow
made her slim figure outrageously attractive, and then she would talk about the
history of forests in fiction, in a way which was both inspired and scholarly, and
which transported him into a kind of sensual trance.
Astrid Melcroft. She was probably in her late twenties, she
had wavy fair hair that came down to around six inches below her shoulders, and
often looked as if she hadn’t had time to brush it properly, and the shine in
her eyes made him feel that he would turn his entire life inside out in order
to be with her.
Two goldfinches flew across the road in front of him, jolting
him out his reverie.
He was walking across an area of Wiltshire uplands. It was wold-country,
made up of grazing fields and fields for low-value crops, and with very few
trees. In terms of bio-diversity it was an area of devastation. The relative absence
of woodlands and of wide hedges meant that it was mostly a terrain of factory
production of animals, wool and feed-crops. But with less use of chemicals
birds like goldfinches could still live on the tiny scurf-zones of weed plants,
like the road verges.
He was an environmental scientist. He had just managed to
get a one-year, temporary job working for a council, starting in two months - but
he was thinking about returning to postgraduate work and trying to get a post
at a university. He now wanted to go in an interdisciplinary direction that
would include cultural studies, and he knew that Astrid Melcroft had brought
about this change. He had attended three of her lectures, had spoken to her for
a few minutes after one of them, and had watched recordings of her talks on
YouTube. He barely knew her, and it seemed she was transforming his life.
Ahead of him was a slight rise in the ground. He had five
miles left of a fifteen-mile cross-country walk. He was going to be house-sitting
for friends who were away on a summer holiday – the house was three miles from
the nearest village, and he was looking forward to a two-week escape from urban
terrains. He had taken a train and a bus, and had got off the bus earlier than
necessary in order to give himself a long walk on country lanes and footpaths.
It was a warm July day with only a few cirrostratus clouds, and no breeze.
He could now see that ahead of him the terrain dropped down a
little, before going up to another higher area less than a mile away, with two
trees in silhouette against the sky – they would be growing by the road. In the
middle distance there was a crossroads. A man was standing at it, looking at a
device he was holding – maybe a laptop.
The man was a bit less than average height, and as he came
closer he saw that he was wearing clean-cut casual clothes. He was maybe a
surveyor of some kind.
When he was around twenty feet away the man looked up. He
had shrewd eyes, in a face that looked as if it had been disfigured by an
accident. He seemed to be in his forties.
The man looked back toward what he was doing, and then
looked up again. Time to break the silence.
“Hi” he said, “beautiful day”. The customary extended
greeting of the countryside.
“Afternoon” the man responded. “Yes…it is” He looked at him
for a moment, and he seemed to do a double-take. His eyes narrowed, and then
widened with surprise.
“Don’t I know you?” he said. “Weren’t you working at …. ? He
paused, in the manner of someone trying to remember a name. “I was in IT there,
do you remember?”
This was unexpected. He was trying to work out if he recognised
the man, and didn’t want to offend him.
“Do you mean … at Prestwick?”
“Yes!” said the man. “Incredible!”
He didn’t think he recognised him. Prestwick was a project
consultancy he had worked at for six months. There had been a small IT team
there – and maybe this man had been part of it. This was eight years ago – he
could have forgotten him, although it seemed unlikely.
“So your boss was … Helen?” he said, wondering if he had
remembered her name.
“Yes, he said that’s right, I worked with Helen! Amazing!”
He didn’t believe what the man was saying. He felt this was a
scam of some kind. But a confidence trickster on a country lane seemed unlikely
in the extreme.
“Yes … who were the other members of the team?” he asked,
forced into a kind of false reminiscence mode, to get confirmation of his
story.
“Oh, I’m not sure if I remember. I wasn’t there for long.”
The man gave him an approving look. The kind of look that
indicates a test has been passed.
“But let me show you this.”
He was holding out the wide, ultra-thin screen device he had
in his hand. It was a bit closer to a movie-screen rectangle than a laptop’s
proportions, but was around the same length. It seemed you held it horizontally.
He could see that it was showing a terrain of fields – probably the place in
which they were standing – seen from a few hundred feet above the ground.
He felt convinced that the man knew that his deceit had been
detected, and had moved on unconcerned, or even satisfied with what had
happened.
He wanted to walk away.
But he took the device. In the lower left corner of the
screen was the name Lumondris. The view was of the crossroads, with them
standing at it, from around a hundred feet up, but with the distance to the
ground decreasing. He turned round and looked up, to see the drone.
There was no drone.
“There’s no camera” said the man.
It must be satellite images, with AI, he thought.
The viewpoint was descending, on a rapid curve, coming
slightly nearer and rotating as it came down. He looked up again – nothing.
As the viewpoint dropped to six or seven feet above the
ground, and around ten feet way, he saw that the image included a woman who was
standing a few paces beyond them.
Her face seemed faintly familiar, as if he had known her a
long time ago - but her overall appearance gave him only the impression of a startlingly
intense first encounter. She was very attractive, and this, together with her
clothes, made her a striking, memorable figure.
She was wearing a grey skirt, that extended outward and
finished less than halfway down her thighs, and a charcoal-coloured jacket-like
top that had a strip of orange on the right, and a strip of green on the left.
Her hair was brown and wavy, and cut in a wide, shoulder length style that had
a tousled, very feminine quality. Her eyes conveyed sharp-edged intelligence
and a feeling of adventure - it was as if she was letting him know that she was
dressed for something like espionage, and not for a catwalk. She gave him a
sparkling smile of greeting, and came and hugged him. In the image he
reciprocated the hug.
He jolted back.
There was a pause, in which the man looked at him
questioningly, as if surprised by his reaction.
“Very impressive” he said, stumbling for words, and wanting
to get away. “A new technology”
“What did you see?” asked the man, who had come round to
face him, having been standing alongside.
“The superimposed figure is really … impressive, very well… rendered.”
“What superimposed figure?” Asked the man. He was peering at
him with slightly narrowed eyes – but the quizzical look had a playful quality
at the same time.
He followed the man’s eyes, and looked down at the screen.
The image was from the same viewpoint and now showed only himself
and the man.
There was another pause, while he looked around him for
clues about what could be happening.
“I assume you’re filming this for a TV show?”
The man looked offended.
“We’re a new company – Lumondris.” He pointed to the screen
– “we’re based over in Hay-on-Wye.”
At this point all he knew was that he had to get away. He
handed the screen-device back.
“Well, thank you for showing me it.” He said this with his
eyes deliberately indicating amused suspicion.
“Bye now” he said.
“Bye” said the man, smiling.
Very glad to be escaping from the encounter, he turned and
left.
He felt completely certain as he started walking that it had
been the beginning of a scam - that it hadn’t been a stunt for TV or the
internet. But in the middle of nowhere, on a country lane?
The image of the woman in the short skirt was playing itself
in front of his eyes. The man must have been randomly trying out a pornography
scam. Get someone hooked – get them to pay money for more.
He felt a bit frightened, and he turned round. He had been
walking for only a few seconds.
There was no-one at the crossroads, and there was no-one
anywhere in sight.
He went from side to side on the road, to look at the
sight-lines, and then got over the fence on either side of the road, to get a clear
view into the fields on the far side of the crossroads. There didn’t seem to be
any place where the man could be hiding or hidden from view.
He didn’t want to go back – he didn’t want any further
interaction, so succeeding in finding the man hiding somewhere was not
something he wanted. But in any case there did not seem to be a place where he
could be, unless it was something very unusual, like a hole in the ground that
had been made so as to create the illusion.
Thinking about it, he felt it was likely he was being
filmed. So he turned around again, and set off at fast pace, feeling embarrassed
and annoyed by what had happened.
But as he continued
walking the initial feelings dissipated. Instead he began to feel that,
although it had been disconcerting, at least it had been an interesting experience
– something unusual and enigmatic. He expected that in a few days or weeks he
would find it posted online, and the enigma would be resolved into a high-tech
joke for the internet age, but even then – something unusual had happened.
It was hard to stop
thinking about it, and he was glad, after he had been walking for around two
miles, when he found the footpath he had been looking for.
It was on the right,
following the line of a hedge, going up a slight slope toward a beech-copse on
the horizon, a quarter of a mile away.
He felt pleased to
have got away from the road, but he realised that insofar as the experience had
a tendency to produce a kind of surveillance-paranoia there was no difference
between the road and the footpath. If a very high drone had been used to
produce the image he had seen – so high it was neither visible nor audible –
then a process of filming could still be taking place. But it seemed more
likely the image he had seen was mostly based on footage that had already been
shot, and that the real-time filming had been done from hidden ground-level
cameras.
He sat down by the
beech copse and did a search for Lumondris, and Hay-on-Wye, and found nothing
to corroborate the man’s story.
The house was a
mile and a half from the nearest village. It was set back from the road, and had
a south view across fields to slightly higher farmland two miles away. He knew
that it was a converted farm worker’s cottage – which of course was true of a
large proportion of the older houses in the area. In the shift toward factory
farming the countryside had not only been stripped of its insects and wild
plants, it had also had most of its farm labourers removed. The houses had been
re-invented as commuter homes, retirement houses, second homes in the
countryside – but beyond these re-purposed buildings the farming terrains
themselves were eerily depopulated. He knew from experience that you could
ignore footpaths and walk for miles along hedge-lines and across grazing-fields
without meeting anyone. You might see a farmer on a tractor two miles away, and
if anyone was disconcerted by your incursion you were too far away for them to
even think about intervening.
Once it was fully
dark he went out into the garden. Stars were visible in gaps in the clouds. A
dog was barking in the distance.
He realised that something which was disconcerting about
what had happened earlier was the first phase of the experience when the man
had claimed to recognise him. It was perturbing not so much in itself, but
because it didn’t really seem to fit with the idea of it being a filmed
practical joke for TV or internet.
He went back into
the house, and sat down at the kitchen table. He was thinking about something
Astrid Melcroft had said when she had been explaining what she referred to as
holistics. She had said that the central principle of holistics was the placing
to one side of the accounts and stories of science and religion, and a seeing
of the depth-level aspects of the world as the fundamentally unknown.
The next day he
got up late, and then went for a very long walk to clear his head. In the final
mile on the way back there was a heavy shower. There was no lightning, and he
continued walking, enjoying being out in the rain.
That night he had an exceptionally intense dream. He had
woken up from an earlier dream, had seen it was still dark, and had gone back
to sleep.
He dreamed he was being shown around an immense subterranean
city. Everything had an abstract quality, with rooms appearing more like the
inside of three-dimensional geometrical forms than rooms as they are normally
perceived - but this visually minimal aspect was more than offset by the fact everything
seemed to consist of forms of intent and feeling, as opposed to a domain of
surfaces. And this extended to the person who was showing him the city, who was
a presence consisting of commentary and evaluations in the form of feelings, as
opposed to a figure who he saw.
He was shown many different rooms, in what he was told was
an ‘arcology’. Each room was a form of intent – a way of being, thinking, and
dreaming in relation to the world. He saw many of these rooms, but afterwards
he could remember very little.
Toward the end he was
in a room with a vertiginous quality that seemed to come from an awareness of
the intricacies, infrastructures and ritualised imaginings of reactive power in
the human world. The room had a half-lit, eerie, semi-sublime quality that made
him think of the novels of Mervyn Peake.
“Yes,” said the person he was with, “though you’re seeing it
through something it helped to produce, and to work up a whole dream-system, in
that way, you need to be on the outside, bringing in other, external elements.”
He was then swept sideways through a long, dark-blue conduit
or tunnel, and he was in a room where everything seemed to be about mathematics
and geometry, but in a way where both shape and colour were diagrammatically
involved. He was a point of intersecting axes, and he was seeing immense intricacies
of divisions and patterns of planes, as if he was inside a three-dimensional Mandelbrot
set which kept having planes inserted into it that transformed everything or
rendered limits visible on a horizon beyond the main part of the set.
“Erdos”, he said. “It makes me think of Paul Erdos.”
“Yes” was the response, “A good example - and this space was
taken a bit further by him.”
At this point he was aware of a gust of air blowing into the
room through the tunnel by which they had arrived, and he both heard and saw the
words
CONIC, CHRONIC, CLONIC, CHTHONIC
The being who was with him reacted to this as if it was some
kind of firework going off, and spoke from somewhere in the distance –
“Impressive.”
And then he was in a passageway in what seemed to be a very
old, large building, with a view of trees at the end. He walked out of the passageway,
into sunlight.
He was standing in an area that was a combination of
heathland and forest. There were silver birch trees, oak trees, ash trees.
He was at the start of a long, narrow glade that had gorse
bushes and bracken encroaching into it. The land went down and then went up
again after around a hundred and fifty yards – the horizon was a bit more than
twice that distance, and was a narrow gap between trees, a little higher than
where he was standing. Beyond this was the sky.
To the left, near the horizon, he could see the wall and
part of the roof of a house that was mostly hidden amongst trees. He could also
see smoke that he assumed was coming from a chimney.
He started to move forward.
He could see a woman in a red jersey, seemingly coming from
the house. She turned left, away from him, toward the gap in the trees.
And then everything became more abstract. He was still
moving forward, and he could see two lines or amorphous, cable-like filaments
extending in front of him to the horizon, one starting from just above his
head, and the other starting from below his feet, and it was as if he was at a lecture
being given by a woman who was explaining what he was seeing. The upper line was
intent and dreams, and the lower line was the body, and you had to boost the lines,
and in particular the lower one, and then they would come closer together and
start to fuse, and as a result of this the overall trajectory would start to
move upwards.
You boosted the
lines by discarding unnecessary elements in your life. He saw huge numbers of
these unneeded elements flying away and disappearing behind him, and the cable-filaments
now had very intricate, multi-spiral, flanged forms reminiscent of DNA helixes
– they were semi-transparent, glinting with violet light, with very clean-cut
fluid, spiralling lines, and he sensed that although the two were very
different they were complementary counterparts as two aspects of one energy
formation. As they came closer together, he saw that at the horizon there was a
vertical line going up and disappearing into the sky, and the woman who was
giving the talk used the term ‘Delta Heights’ but he didn’t understand what she
meant by this.
He was waking up, and
at the last moment there was a phrase in his mind, a statement from the woman
who had been explaining the lines.
a doorway in dreams
He had never had a dream remotely like this before, and it
was not something he found it easy to ‘place’ in terms of finding a way of
thinking about it. For a long time he just worked on trying to hold onto as
much of the dream as possible.
He was inclined to see the first part of it as an oneiric
extrapolation from Astrid Melcroft’s idea about the central principle of
holistics. He had been unsettled by his meeting with the man at the crossroads,
and had dreamed up a subterranean city. The idea of ‘deep’ in the term
‘depth-levels’ would have made this an easy jump for the dreaming mind to make.
But what happened afterwards in the dream in different ways seemed to make too
much sense for it to be thought about in this way – with the very end of the
dream it was more that it was an intriguing and potentially valid diagram, as
opposed to some kind of crazy hypothesis.
That afternoon he received a text message from his friend
Joshua about a first conference on the part of a group of academics and
activists who were trying to develop an interdisciplinary approach to the
climate crisis. The last time he had heard about this conference nothing had
been finalised, and at that point he was without a job, and was unsure about
whether he would attend because of the cost.
His friend had sent him a list of twelve speakers. Astrid
Melcroft was one of the names.
“I think I’m on for or it” he said.
He was going to go. He would have to extend his overdraft,
but the new job would make that easy.
“Where will it be?” he added, in a second message.
After a few seconds the response arrived.
“Hay-on-Wye.”
The Libidinal Cosmos
All through the night the river – the bright, sunlit river - to the right of the tent, and in the morning, while thinking about the dream of the collapsed escape dimension, I believed the river was there. It was the other dream, in the background, the one I did not notice was a dream until I was about to open the tent.
And then I remembered that to the right of the tent was a grassy ridge leading to a small outcrop of rocks, facing the valley, sixty feet away. The river had somehow been there, flowing away off the edge of the mountain – superimposed into the space, instead of the ridge.
The previous day our Chinese friend Li Tsua had found three ancient bird-bone flutes, while working on an archaeological site which had not been expected to contain anything of this kind. This had left him perturbed, because when he revealed the discovery he would be in danger of having to admit that it had taken place in the company of two British archaeologists, thus compromising the secrecy of a major find.
Jessica is leaving her tent at the same time. Her eyes point something out to me.
Sitting on the rocky outcrop there is a woman. As we walk over to her, she gives us a very warm smile, the warmth somehow conveyed more through the eyes than the mouth. She is a friend of Li Tsua, and has come up from the village looking for us.
Li is shocked when he sees his friend. It is apparently a complete coincidence that she is there, on holiday in the mountains, writing a book which she says is about "dreams and skies."
She is called Mai Zheng. Li tells her about the bone flutes. He is pale, and looks as if he has had no sleep. He says what he had told us the day before – that the flutes could be 9000 years old.
She whistles, when she hears about what has happened, A whistle of surprise, that simultaneously sounds like the whistle of a bird.
She gives Li a long look, which he returns silently.
“Maybe they have come to you.” she says.
“And because your friends will not reveal the find, everyone will be satisfied – what is important is the flutes.”
Later she gives Li a feather, on whose pinion she has inscribed two signs – the sign for 'love' and the sign for 'courage.’ Then, with bright smiles for all of us, she is gone.
I have been in the forested northwest of Patagonia for three months, staying at a friend’s house, a house which is thirty miles from an excavation of a Tehuelche settlement. I have been seeing the collapsed escape dimension all the time, in my dreams, and in waking glimpses.
Tonight is a midsummer night, warm, with bright Andean stars, and with a gentle breeze.
I fall asleep, and later in the night I dream.
Again, I am there, its suppressive emplacements around me. But now there is a path that leads through undergrowth and into sunlight. I suddenly know that the collapsed escape dimension is the human world. It is clear that the disaster began around 9000 years ago, and that 6000 years later there was the full collapse.
I know I need to walk towards the rocky outcrop. Mai Zheng is waiting for me, around her the river pouring into the sky.
* * *
