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.
*
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)
* * *
