Saturday 20 June 2015

13.


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) 







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.





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There is a pervasive force in the world which can be called love-and-freedom (or impersonal intent).       (axiom 1)

    There are three initial coordinates that can be used for grasping the nature of this force. The first is the planet on which we live. The second is women, though to be more specific it is the female - the feminine. The third is the abstract. (axiom 2)


     The abstract here is the entire domain of everything which is not concrete, in the sense that it is not encountered by the first-level or empirical functioning of the senses. Love is not concrete, and the same is true of intent, of thought, of dreams, and of energy.


     At depth the world consists of feeling.       (axiom 3)


     The planet on which we live is therefore a world of feeling which is pervaded by currents of love-and-freedom, or impersonal intent. 




     Writing which is an expression of this force will be fundamentally about the abstract, and it will also be about the singular (most importantly it is likely to be centrally about the singular world that is the planet on which we live). It is also likely that it will recurrently use abstract terms - such as “love” – to refer to the entire range of the term: as when describing love, as opposed to the love of a singular individual.


     Writing of this kind will also have a fundamental tendency to be about women and the female, or to be an expression of the female, the feminine.


     The female here refers to a light-hearted and lucid brightness of spirit – which is also both a momentous capacity to dream a fundamentally transformed future into existence, and a supreme, adventurous capacity for letting go in the direction of (and for being an expression of) love-and-freedom, or impersonal intent. And, at the level of lucidity, it is a capacity for grasping the intent-worlds and productions-of-affects of beings and forces (modalities of being) within the sphere of immediacy - within the tremendum of intent and energy. The female is open to both women and men.    




     Every individual has the ability to open up their channel to love-and-freedom, or impersonal intent.


     For women - for unknown reasons - the channel or connecting link to this force is extremely strong, and so is their ability or open it up. But as with men they need to become aware of the need to clear – or clean – the connecting link.




    Two main elements of what blocks the channel are fear and self-importance.


     Self-importance is inseparable from self-pity (“how could they be doing this to me?”), and a primary aspect of fear is the desire to keep everything under control.


     The desire to keep everything under control has caused men to dominate and suppress women using metaphysical means as well as physical ones.




     Opening up the connecting link requires an ability to let go, and therefore the most fundamental expression of the desire to keep everything under control is the failure to let go in the direction of love-and-freedom. 


     Human beings are surrounded by the deeply-unknown. This spheroambient and transcendental unknown is a bright darkness that is only rarely acknowledged.


     But although the unknown surrounds human beings, there are areas of the unknown that over time can become known. These areas can be found by the feeling of vitality that is given by concentrating on them.


     One of these areas is the worlds of the becomings of individuals and groups (becomings are metamorphic, lucid-oneiric relationships). Another is the current-within-the-world that is love-and-freedom (this in the end is not really separable from the worlds of the becomings).


     Being able – even if only faintly or intermittently – to see the direction of love-and-freedom in relation to choices makes it possible to navigate in the unknown.




     Because there is such a deep connection between women and love-and-freedom becoming-woman is one of the most important becomings.


     The primary forms of becoming-woman are, firstly, being in the fullest sense in love with a woman; secondly, a desire to experience the states of bliss and brightness that are experienced by women, and thirdly, being inspired and ‘swept away’ by stories and fictional worlds - dreamings – in which there are women whose actions are expressive of love-and-freedom.


    Unfettered dreamings of this kind are where there are women who are "warrior-explorers" - women whose struggle is to express love-and-freedom to the maximum, and to travel to the maximum extent into the unknown. They are also dreamings where the unknown is not presided over – and suppressed - by male deities or male avatars; where it is not blocked off by a delusion which sees it as a space of the beyond-normal but supposedly known, concerning figures such as God, the gods, immortality, the superiority of inner existence, etc.




     There is no end to the unknown, and there is no end to the process of coming to know love-and-freedom. To travel toward love-and-freedom – or impersonal intent - is to travel into the unknown.


    Impersonal intent - love-and-freedom - is impersonal because, although it conducts toward love and freedom, it has the quality of an electrical current: its fundamental mode is to intensify for those who dedicatedly attempt to help themselves, and also to continually appear for those who do not; and its tonality, in being distantly tutelary, is the very opposite of the tonality of protestations of unconditional love. But in relation to potential and actual tutelary encounters it is not out of cruelty or dislike that individuals are less assisted, and that within an encounter there are no protestations of affection: it is that while individuals are ruled by the self - by self-importance - indications of love will make them less capable of being helped, rather than the opposite.



     The cosmos is predatory to the maximum, and the direction of the transcendental-empirical is the direction of maximal danger in relation to parasitic and predatory forces. (axiom 4)


     At the widest transcendental-empirical levels of the worlds of finite energy-formations - there are only instantiations within finite energy formations, though these levels are on a scale of magnitude immensely greater than that of human individuals and groups - it is not that these immensely-beyond-our-level formations are ‘looking after us’ or are always in a relationship to us which is similar to that of a human body's relationship with one of its cells: it is that these formations can have a vested interest in us having a chance of intensification because this thread of processes of escape will perpetuate the existence of our energy-formations, which are their food. (axiom 5)




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Sunday 14 June 2015

12.

 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) 
 






  In Britain there is a love for a classicist (here, this relates primarily to ancient Greece, but also to Roman antiquity). And very much in particular, there is a love for someone with classicist knowledge who uses it to tell magical tales. This goes back to Shakespeare, who helped in a territorial-oneiric struggle with the Rome of catholicism, by going further back in time and further east, to the sunlit, arcadian expanses of the ancient Greece of Sophocles. This love for classical antiquity expresses itself in relation to many forms of writing, from stories about teachers of classics (as with The Browning Version) to the poems of Keats, and from The Wind in the Willows (the chapter “the piper at the gates of dawn” is about a meeting with the god Pan) to Robert Graves’ I, Claudius. Again, it goes from the works of Lewis Carroll (who, along with classical references within the Alice books, wrote a seminal paper within philosophical logic that takes the form of a dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise) to C.S.Lewis’s Narnia books, and from T.S.Eliot’s The Wasteland, to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

   The underlying issue here is modernism (Shakespeare was a proto-modernist who in fact went back to ancient Greece to get help in the struggle against religion). This gives additional depth to the fact that the British feel far more instinctive warmth for a classicist than they do for a priest. Which does not mean that the British are not embroiled in religion (the most successful of the works just listed – The Lord of the Rings – is to a great extent a religious paratext); it just means that with their empiricist tradition they have a heightened preference for dreamings, as opposed to any form of abstraction that could be construed as dogma.

    But in this context, the question of modernism immediately leads to the question of directions on the planet – and to the question, initially, of east and west. The British have a deep tendency to dream the east, starting with the ancient Greece of Shakespeare, but going on through warm countries to the mountainous grasslands where Orlando is transformed into a woman, and to the India that draws the Beatles out of Europe into another zone of dreaming (and the Greek pantheon connects up in the oneirosphere to the Hindu pantheon, a connection made by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). However, it is another direction – the west – that has been taken up and re-enforced by the local zone of the interiority (and it is to be remembered that the interiority is as much military-territorial as it is religio-oneiric). Before Shakespeare the west had been the important direction within new state-adopted dreamings in Britain, in the form of the tales of the Arthurian mythos. And after tudor times the fact that this mythos will not go away (for instance Tennyson brings it back in the 19th century, and T.H.White in the 20th) will be compounded – and fundamentally eclipsed - by the rise to prominence of the USA. The earlier dreamings about the west (which in fact go all the way back to the ancient Greek story of Atlantis) may well all along have been boosted by tales of the actual west, from the Viking explorers for instance, but speculation about these connections is irrelevant in comparison with the issue of the emergence of a new zone of protestant fixation to the west.

     The fixation is revealed by pointing out that over the last five hundred years there have been two processes of expansion into immense continental hinterlands - one of which directly involved the terrain of Europe – that were in the contiguous domains of the planet in relation to Britain, but only one of them has been a focus of attention, and this was the one in fact which did not involve Europe’s terrain. Because the Russian expansion was Russian orthodox, and not protestant, and because, with people caught up in religious and pseudo-rational blocked-metaphysics, there is a lack of a Spinozistic love for the planet (one which sees its worlds – and overall world - as fundamentally on the same level as ours, and as including ours) the sublimely beautiful expanses of this other hinterland have been implacably suppressed – edited out - within western European and U.S. awareness, and within 'anglophone' awareness in particular.

      To point out that a lot of this suppression has been due to political factors is merely to point out that the interiority is fundamentally about the control of territories (the primary source of religions is the determination to control terrain, along with the determination to control women). When I was five years old, and living in southwest Wales (I lived in Haverford West for two years) I had a striking dream about the east: I think my mother had been telling me about communist Russia, and I dreamed that I was seeing a small area of a park in a Russian city, with nothing there but a park bench and a few trees. The dream was in monochrome, indicating something fundamentally denuded about what I was seeing, and the park bench gave me a feeling of desolation – a feeling of loneliness and a misery with a bleak thinness, as if there was not even enough energy for misery. My mother’s - presumably somewhat negative - portrayal of the eastern bloc would, I expect, have been the trigger for this experience, but the dream gives a suggestion of a kind of oneiric iron curtain sliding down, as if what was being put into place – by a dream - was the view that there was nothing worth dreaming in that direction. This dream leaves you wondering  about what forces are at work in our dreaming up the nature of the world, within both the sleeping and waking dimensions of our normal existence – it leaves you asking in relation to ordinary reality “whose dream is this, anyway?”

     The Rocky Mountains have been glowingly turned into a “sacred earth” terrain, unlike the mountains of the hinterland into which Russia expanded. There are many factors involved here (for instance, the eastern hinterland is along much colder latitudes than the western one). But it can be felt that this spectacular extension of Europe does not fit at all well with a certain triumphalist territorial dreaming-system pertaining to the west of Europe. It belongs to a country which is neither protestant nor catholic (the protestants are protesting against catholicism to transform it into protestantism, and both sides see the other as really, futurally, belonging to them). It opens up the horror of the destruction and suppression of the indigenous societies (a lot of effort has gone into fitting the American indigenous people into the USA's ‘sacred earth’ story, but here instead of a romanticising there is a convenient silence, so that Europe simply does not acknowledge its own brutality in this domain). But perhaps most fundamentally it opens up a profound closeness to the outside – a spectacular contiguity and zone of indiscernibility which is thousands of miles long. From the point of view of this zone of the interiority the USA has the great advantage that in the sunnier terrains over the southern border there is yet more of the west. Nothing could be further from the truth in the hinterland immensity of eastern Russia. Here, in the more sun-favoured areas to the south there is China, whose oneiric and abstract tradition is implacably and imperturbably non-western, and whose potential for modernist/ancientist lucidity cannot be quarantined within the space of the dead-tradition magical tales of ancient Greece. In China there is an unbroken line to that important text of metamorphics, Tao Te Ching, with its philosophical ultra-feminism (for both men and women becoming-woman is what is vital - "knowing the masculine, and nurturing the feminine." / "can you be female?"), and with its single proto-modernist story suggested within the space of the lucid abstraction, the story that reaches the Future through the past of that time, 2500 years ago – "there were once ‘ancient masters of Way,’ but something has gone wrong" (this preceding phrase is a "paraphrase" of the story, not a quotation) -


Ancient masters of Way
All subtle mystery and dark-enigma vision:
They were deep beyond knowing,

So deep beyond knowing
we can only describe their appearance.

[...]

perfectly simple, as if uncarved wood;
perfectly empty, as if open valleys,
and perfectly shadowy, as if murky water.

Who’s murky enough to settle slowly into pure clarity,
And who still enough to awaken slowly into life? 

[...]         (15)


With its profoundly female exponents of Way (those individuals who are systematically capable of letting go toward Love-and-Freedom, and of leaving the dogmas and fixations of the interiority) Tao Te Ching was a main starting point for the dreamings of Ursula Le Guin (who also made a translation) and is an outside of the west, which, far from having been superseded, is simply waiting for it, in the Future.

    On one level everything here concerns “centres,” or points of fixation, both in relation to the oneirosphere (each religion creates the view that its story is the story) and in relation to terrains and territories. The Celtic Arthurian tradition aimed to set up a new central point in the west, displacing Rome (Arthur defeats Rome), and to an extent it succeeded, with anglican London (the centre to which T.S.Eliot emigrates – T.S.Eliot, with his Arthurianism in The Wasteland). Shakespeare “supported” the creation of a new centre, but only in a way where he subverts the blocked metaphysics involved: instead of going west, he goes southeast to ancient Greece, putting in place a new zone for dreaming, as opposed to a fixation point, and turning the abstract-oneiric field involved toward the Outside. A new centre then emerges on the opposite side of the atlantic (Washington, with a primary sacred terrain in the form of the Black Hills of Dakota and the Rockies). Tolkien subsequently is the oneiric reaction on the part of the western wing of the trans-establishment – a kind of white terror. Gondor in the Tolkien mythos is Rome (it is also England, but primarily it is Rome, hundreds of miles away in a much warmer climate to the southeast of the Shire, like Rome in relation to England). And to the east of Rome, instead of ancient Greece, there is an evil empire –instead of Arcadia, there is Mordor. Tolkien takes a little of the magic of ancient Greece through the “ents,” and through the phrase “dishevelled dryad loveliness” (used in relation to an area just to the east of Gondor) but he makes sure there are no female ents around, because tree nymphs would give far too much allure, and would return attention to ancient Greece. Tolkien turns everything back to the west (instead of Avalon there is Valinor) but as a catholic he keeps the chivalric-chauvinist “spiritual” conservatism of the medieval Arthurian tales, while stripping away all of the elements of the older mythos. Valinor is taken off the surface of the planet (though you sail west to get there) and put into another dimension, so that there is no danger of any confusion with the protestant project of the USA, and a revenge is taken against Wales, for having won out in an oneiric and physical war against the catholic plantagenets: Wales is simply removed from existence, to the west of the Shire there are some low, uninhabited hills, and then the sea…


    However, in the last analysis none of this concerns Britain, or east and west. It concerns Shakespeare, and more centrally it concerns what Shakespeare discovered, which was a vantage with a profound connection to the ancient Greece of Sophocles. But in indicating this vantage, Shakespeare is careful to open up a continuum that runs from England to India, and that in fact extends across the whole of the planet (Puck's terrain is the planet - "I'll put a girdle round about the earth / in forty minutes"). The place is not in any way the crucial aspect - what is crucial is the way of dreaming the world, and the aspects of the transcendental-empirical that are visible through the modality of dreaming, along with the way in which the unknown appears within it. And the key point is that ultimately where this leads is a way of seeing which has no specific connection to Ancient Greece - this is the ability to create dreamings which consist of outsights, and most of all it is a woken faculty of lucidity.

    With the modality of dreaming which Shakespeare discovers it makes no sense to locate its worlds  in Ancient Greece with any high degree of emphasis, because it concerns a way of oneirically looking toward the whole planet, in which the terrains around Athens are not in themselves special in some way in relation to the terrains of India or of northwest Europe; and it is also because there is a kind of deadly separation here: the Athens of Sophocles is also a point of emergence of a trapped form of reason (reason is a faculty which is required, but at the expense of lucidity it is disastrous - the sleep that is reason without lucidity breeds monsters).

     Shakespeare moves over this point of emergence without comment, because it is a question of re-dreaming - of getting back to Sophocles in order to go further, and of seeing the whole world through a faculty of dreaming informed by lucidity. And in relation to east and west he simultaneously refuses to open up any connection to the religion and religionised nationalism of the west-focused mythos of Arthurianism. 

    It can be seen that the west here relates to a religious and nationalist anti-vantage, an anti-vantage which also consists of an insidious form of gender-role suppressionism - and the vital point at this stage of the explication is that the details of the oneiric and actual forms of 'the west' are ultimately indicative of the overall abstract modality - an abstract modality which is here being grasped in terms its reactionary oneiric aspect, but which also includes a functioning of an attenuated but simultaneously hypertrophied form of reason (reason cut off from lucidity).

    In Shakespeare there is a joyful exteriority and there is tragedy as a dark, perturbing element of the human world. And a key aspect of his radicalism is that in A Midsummer Night's Dream he creates a view of an England presided over by Greek and Roman deities (Hecate, Cupid). But he does not re-dream along these lines in order to argue for the existence of these deities, any more than he is trying to convince the audience of the existence of Titania and Oberon. Instead it is a full - transcendental-empirical - openness toward the unknown that is in question, and to heighten this perspective he goes east to India, to a place where there was - and where there still is - an extant pantheonism. He goes further east in order to deepen the power of the form of dreaming which he has discovered.

     And beyond this Sophoclean or Arkadian form of dreaming there is another, one which has been taken over a threshold because lucidity has been fully effectuated. The impression given by Shakespeare is that in crucial ways he has developed transcendental-empirical dreaming not just to a high degree, but to a point where it is hard to go further without the explicit functioning of the faculty of lucidity.


  
    It is necessary to take another point of reference, to go alongside Warwickshire. The place is not being chosen randomly, but this taking up of a new reference point is to be done in the name of the Outside, and with the aim of leaving behind all centres – all fixation points – in the direction of the planet, and in the direction of the world of energy and intent that is the cosmos.

    Stand on a hill a few miles to the south of Abakan, in Kharkassia, and look south to the Sayan Mountains. These mountains are exceptionally beautiful: they are covered in forests, and their jagged 10,000 foot summits (craggy peaks towering up out of tree-covered ridges) are spread across a gigantic area that spreads all around Tuva, and extends into the north of Mongolia.

    Behind you Abakan is an entirely European city (as European as a city in Arizona or Utah is American, despite the presence of the Navajo and Hopi cultures in the vicinity, in such cities in the USA). Its elegant wrought-iron railings and tree-lined avenues are suggestive not of Asia or of communism (although in one city-centre park there is a very fine soviet era mural, showing human beings in their relationship with the natural world, and with science) but of the Europe of Budapest and Prague, and of the Russian cultural/intellectual world that finds expression in the works of Tolstoy (the modernist liberalism of Tolstoy is kept quarantined by the west, as a kind of costumed historical zone, rather than being seen as a major element within modern-day Russia).

     You are therefore very much in Europe (in this cultural-descriptive context, to say that Abakan is in Asia is as appropriate as to say that the USA is “really” a part of an indigenous-culture continuum of North America). Furthermore, the latitude has nothing bleak or extreme about it. The Sayan Mountains are on the same latitude as England – they are far to the south in Siberia (Ulan Bator in Mongolia is a long way to the south of London).

     They are also around the same size as England.They are two areas or ranges of high mountains which are interlocked with each other – the Eastern Sayan and the Western Sayan – and that are covered in plateau-forests which are very rarely visited by humans.These are immense arcadias of pine-trees, meadows covered in gentians, sculptural craggy outcrops, blueberries, bears, deer, three foot tall violet-coloured lilies growing by tiny streams, eagles in daylight skies, and owls in the twilight.
.

     But these mountains are around – and form the majority of - Tuva to the east, west and north (and also to the south), and go into Mongolia, where there are some of the highest peaks. So what you are seeing, on the hill to the south of Abakan, is the beginnings of a terrain which is not part of Europe at all, and for two different reasons. Firstly because Mongolia is not in any sense part of Europe, and secondly because ethnic Tuvans – who form the vast majority of the population of Tuva – evidently do not regard themselves as European (on the contrary, their account of Tuva is that it is the centre of Asia, and there is a monument celebrating this designation in the capital, Kyzyl).  

     In a technical sense relating to human description systems these mountains have a mysterious aspect, in that maps are not easily available for them. It seems the Russian state has blocked their production (I was told in Stanford's map shop in Covent Garden that Siberia is the only area on the planet where there are whole ranges of mountains for which there are no published, generally available maps). All that was  available was an "air chart" - a sketch without contour lines, taken from satellite information and used by planes - for only one part of one of the two main areas of the Sayan mountains. And it is perhaps also interesting that I had no dreams about this area until 2007, and that when I did have a dream - where I was in an abandoned military base deep within a vast area of mountainous forest - it was one of the most extraordinary and enigmatic dreams I have ever experienced (I described this dream in section 12 of Hidden Valleys).


    But leave behind the world of arcadian daylight for a moment, with its tendency to be visual, and its tendency to leave us detached, appreciating the beauty of nature from an unnoticed stance of superiority and envisaged separation.

    Imagine it is night, and you are in a forest in the Sayan mountains. Imagine you are grasping that the planet around us consists of the same substance as you, and is an immense, mysterious Space that is suffused with inorganic (virtual-real) forces and worlds. Listen into the place where you are; see into the darkness of the forest around you by seeing and listening with your whole body. See what happens.



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