This blog is a three-part book 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 book is 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).
Part One: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Part Two: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Part Three: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 50)
We are surrounded and are comprehensively suffused by a spheroambient world – an energosphere: the energosphere that is the body without organs. Pre-eminent within this world of forces is the planet on which and within which we live. Our encounter with the planet is wrap-around or multi-sensory (haptic), and it is also internal, most noticeably in that we are continually breathing its atmosphere.
Within the human
world that is spread out within the planet the body without organs has
exceptionally striking aspects, and perhaps the one that is initially most
striking of all is the oneirosphere, consisting as it does of abtract-oneiric
perception of the world, dreamings up of the future (dreams are exceptionally
powerful, in that they are the virtual-real that transforms the actual), dreams
in sleep, and, in general, all kinds of daydreams, myths, fictions, hallucinations,
trance-experiences, reveries, sexual fantasies, scientific and non-scientific
narratives about the history of the world, memory worlds, and religions (religions are blocked and suppressive dreamings).
In different ways
the body without organs of the human world is also inseparably a domain of intent
(inseparable from dreaming up of the future) and a domain of accounts of the
nature of the world (the verosphere, which is inseparable in that the most
fundamental aspect of dreaming is that it is abstract-perception; that is, it
consists of outsights).
The term the “body without organs” is a continual
reminder that a human being or group when taken as a zone of intent and
dreaming is not being understood in relation to a delusory supplementary
dimension of ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ that exists on a higher level from bodies, but
is being understood precisely as an energy formation, but where energy is being
understood in a deeper and wider sense than the conventional one. It is also,
and perhaps more importantly, a perpetual reminder both that you continually
reach the abstract by always returning to bodies, and that in engaging with human-individual and human-group bodies these worlds must be seen not just in terms
of intent and dreaming, but also in terms of their modes of encounter or
contact, and in terms of their forms of corporeality and of libido.
The other
‘approach’ here is therefore not by way of the immanent, and interfused spheres
of the oneirophere, the planet, individuals etc. It is by way of becomings, or
forms of transformational encounter. The becomings of a human being are their
loves: and it seems the loves of human beings are only very minimally
understood.
Humans have a
desperate need to wake the becomings which have a brightness, a blissful love
and serenity - no matter how faint or fugitive the feelings might initially be.
And in waking these becomings there is nothing as important as a shift toward a
sustained, multi-faculty awareness of women, and toward a sustained multi-faculty awareness of the planet, in
relation to its sky, its terrains, its animals, and its plants.
Running south
through the terrain, there is a river.
With any supposed
“dreaming-into-visibility” – and with any philosophical account - of the nature
of the world it is always necessary to ask two initial questions. The first is:
how much brightness and delight does it have? And the second is the more
obvious one: to what extent is it a world of outsights?
But these are only a beginning: in relation to critique it
must be asked if it makes a claim to be the absolute, final story (an immediate
indication that this is a blocked, or suppressive dreaming), and if some mode
of suppressive power is immanently involved - threat-bearing, moralising
judgement; melancholy, transcendence metaphysics (“this world is really a place
of sadness: the sublime is only fully encountered in the world of the
afterlife”); disguised pornography; the “kudos” or “hero” gravity of success
through violent destruction of enemies; the suppressive “realism” of “this is the way the
world is, and it’s not very pleasant – we just have to get on with it, because
there is no other way of living.”
However, these “critique” considerations – vital as they are
– are not enough. The fundamental test is to consider the brightness of the
dreaming at a deeper and wider level, so that the question is: to what extent
is there a current of Love-and-Freedom running through this dreaming? Which is
to ask, as we have seen, to what extent does this dreaming have a fundamental connection to women, to the planet, and to the abstract?”
This concerns seeing
women as journeyers into the transcendentally unknown; it concerns seeing the
planet as part of the same profoundly unknown plane of intent-and-energy as
human beings; and it concerns seeing the zones engaged by mathematics and
science as only tiny, relatively less important (and dangerously
attention-trapping) areas of the world of the abstract, so that the new, most
recurrently engaged zones of the abstract are intent, wider realities (the
transcendental), love, freedom, lucidity, and dreamings.
It will be apparent
that the current in question does not really run through the work of Spinoza,
or that, more specifically, there is only an aspect of it in effect within his
work. The fact that there is only a single plane of substance for Spinoza is a
fundamental achievement of abstract-perception (even though the planet is not
foregrounded within his work). But the mathematical-geometrical is kept as the
explicit model for philosophical knowledge (the embodied mode in relation to
knowledge, however, is that of systems of expressions of abstract-perception
which are not in any way directly related to mathematics). And more tellingly,
women are either largely absent from his work (as with the Ethics), or are constructed as intellectually inferior to men (A Political Treatise).
And this is not a
difference of degree, which would mean the current was to some extent in
effect: this absence at the level of the overall world of the intent of the
account – the affects that will go intrinsically into effect in taking up the
work, as opposed to those that might perhaps arrive to augment it – is in fact
found in the philosophy when taken up as a system of outsights. For Spinozism
there is just Substance – there is just deus
sive natura – instead of there being an eerie-sublime tremendum with a
force running through it in the form of impersonal intent, or Love-and-Freedom.
It can be seen
that in certain ways Shakespeare got further than Spinoza, and that there is a
sense in which the current intrinsically runs through his work. There is the
brightness, the delight; there are the outsights. And he goes as far as he can, without being burned at the stake as a heretic, with depicting women as journeyers into the transcendentally unknown (as with the sorceress-healer in the “in
such a night as this” passage in The Merchant of Venice), a process which
evidently is also taking place, more indirectly, through bringing the female
back into the divine-beings dimension of oneiro-metaphysics (Iris, Ceres,
Hecate, Hymen, Juno – and it is important to remember that it is as appropriate
to see Ariel as female as to see her/him as male).
Spinozism is a
momentous element of an escape-modality, but an element that nonetheless needs
to be augmented for it to work. Whereas with Shakespeare if you turn his work
so that what shows most courage is in the foreground the current will be found
to be directly in effect – profoundly though in some ways minimally - within
the system of dreamings (in the sense
that women, the planet and the abstract have all been brought to the
forefront). And dreamers’ speech is often at its most powerful when it is at
its most minimal: given the world of anomalous, fluidly corporeal entities that
Shakespeare invokes it is a very short step from “we are such stuff as dreams
are made on” to the eerie corporeality of a materialist understanding of “we
are a dream within a dream” (so that the forest and Athens in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream would all along be on the same plane of oneiric/corporeal substance as the human and non-human
characters).
*
It is the summer of 1995. I am living in Leamington, with my
girlfriend, Tess, in a top-floor flat on a slightly run-down street in the
centre of the town: the flat is a few hundred yards south of the river Leam,
and through its westward windows it looks toward the railway station.
There is no doubt
that I have moved toward women, but the extent to which I have moved toward the
planet is as yet still very minimal. The movement toward women is about the
fact that Tess and myself were reciprocally very intensely in love at the start
of the relationship, two years before, and that this state has never really
been left behind – it is the place to which we keep returning. But although
this fact is fundamental, what is as important is that we have lived together
as perceptual and philosophical explorers (because we were attempting to perceive
wider levels of reality this is true no matter how much self-indulgence might
have been involved on occasion in the taking of drugs): an exploration that for
two years has been taking place with the assistance of music, philosophy, hallucinogens,
dance and films. Tess has a very high level of intellectual curiosity, and she
is exceptionally courageous.
And there is also
the fact that a primary influence for all of the last two years has been the
Patti Smith of the album Horses. Instead of the guiding poetic-visionary being
Artaud, it is Patti Smith: I have been swept away by an event from later in the
twentieth century, an event that has taken up what was made possible by the
breakthrough of pop-rock modernism, and an event in which the voice is explicitly
that of another female explorer into the transcendentally unknown. Furthermore,
I had only just discovered Horses when I met Tess, and she feels about it the
way I do – we have travelled together in this direction for two years (her description of
what happened when she listened to the song “Horses” for the first time, while
on LSD, was that she felt she had gone through the ‘mirror in the hallway’ at
the start of the track and had spent the rest of the trip in a fundamentally
different reality whose primary elements were coming from Patti Smith’s album).
I am reading A Thousand Plateaus (a book in which Deleuze and Guattari go
explicitly and fundamentally toward women) in counterpoint with living with
Tess, and in counterpoint with the Patti Smith of 1975.
Tess, in turn, has
introduced me to something else from 1975 - the film adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s
Picnic at Hanging Rock. We watched it at some point in the winter of 1994-1995,
and I was intensely struck by this profound view toward female exploration. And also, it was at around this time that we
reached a scarcely noticed escape-point through taking LSD and speed, a place or
state which involved a double becoming-woman. At the height of the experience (in
the flat, probably around dawn) we found ourselves envisaging that we were two
women who were originally from somewhere outside the western world, and who were
employed doing menial work, on their own, cleaning in some large luxurious
interior, in the early morning (imagine for instance that they were indigenous
Australians or South Americans). But this was just the starting-point – the women
were visionaries, disguised percievers of the wider and deeper nature of the
world (and there was nothing sexual about the experience – it seems that men
have reached a vital threshold of becoming-woman when they can have an
experience as a woman without it being noticeable that they are a woman). The “dreaming” into which
Tess and myself entered worked through us speaking to each other, as these two
women, but in a way which almost immediately became a process where we spoke
together in alternating clauses (around five to ten words in length), often
completing long, complex sentences, on the rhythm (a slow but steady rhythm,
that was not to be broken). The shared, or collaborative thought-process was
metaphysical in a wide-and-deep sense, and at the same time consisted of social
and psychological insights about the dominant and suppressive western mindset,
and about another, more encompassing way of seeing the world. As the process went on
the people who were speaking remained the same, but the place where we had been
(and still in some sense “were”) was replaced by the oneiric and abstract
worlds that were involved in the flow of anomalous, lucid speech. The other
thing that happened was that as it continued the process acquired “melodic”
shifts, as well as the rhythm, in that the pitch of each block of speech, as a whole,
was altered, so that melodic rises and falls occurred across sequences of
clauses. It seems relevant to point out that the only form of language I have
heard of which is similar to this is the shamanic speech (used in exhanges between shamen/sorcerers, and in initiation rituals) of the Yanomami people in the jungles
of Venezuela and Brazil, about which neither Tess nor myself knew anything (it would not be until around 2002 that I would start to learn about the shamanic
social worlds of the Yanomami).
It feels as if Tess and myself had something that could be described as an “appointment with the outside,” and that this most fundamentally involved – along with experiences like the one just described – an actual movement to somewhere beyond towns and cities where the planetary outside would be more intensely encountered. Most fundamentally in part because we needed the sobriety that would arrive as a result of this movement, but primarily because we needed the becomings.
I was not mature enough to have a relationship as extraordinary as the one with Tess. And even though we found an – unlikely – way of keeping our appointment with the outside this was not enough to save the relationship: we broke up a little over two years after it began. After this I was left to continue the movement forward that to a great extent had begun with Tess. A specific phase of movement toward the south-outside which involved both a deepening insistence of the problem of human groups, and an increasing awareness of a more encompassing intellectual modality, a mode of intelligence that was more about perception, action, becomings and dreamings (and more about reaching the silence involved in becoming perception) than it was about speech, and about systems of concepts.
It feels as if Tess and myself had something that could be described as an “appointment with the outside,” and that this most fundamentally involved – along with experiences like the one just described – an actual movement to somewhere beyond towns and cities where the planetary outside would be more intensely encountered. Most fundamentally in part because we needed the sobriety that would arrive as a result of this movement, but primarily because we needed the becomings.
In the year before
meeting Tess my faculty of feeling had been in effect in pointing me toward women,
toward dreamings, and toward a southward escape-route out of the city in which
I was living. Intense, dreamy flashes of feeling were involved in all three
instances – a feeling of love and joy, together with diffuse, fugitive images of
sublime horizons. I cannot take a great deal of credit for the primary aspect
of the fact that I succeeded in going toward women (in that for a man who loves
women it is not an achievement, in terms of maintaining focus, to
start a relationship with a woman, even with a woman with a high level of
courage and integrity), and I had failed completely to act in relation to
dreamings, and in relation to living somewhere that was more in contact with
the countryside. I remained in Coventry, and I saw the 1992 phase of re-reading my
fantasy novels as having been mostly procrastination, not perceiving that
something vital was being glimpsed, despite the fact that to a great extent it had been procrastination.
I was not mature enough to have a relationship as extraordinary as the one with Tess. And even though we found an – unlikely – way of keeping our appointment with the outside this was not enough to save the relationship: we broke up a little over two years after it began. After this I was left to continue the movement forward that to a great extent had begun with Tess. A specific phase of movement toward the south-outside which involved both a deepening insistence of the problem of human groups, and an increasing awareness of a more encompassing intellectual modality, a mode of intelligence that was more about perception, action, becomings and dreamings (and more about reaching the silence involved in becoming perception) than it was about speech, and about systems of concepts.
The oneiric-real –
or virtual-real – is not less real than the actual. In the middle of the song ‘Horses’ (full title “Land: Horses; Land of a Thousand Dances; La
Mer (de)”) there is the point where it opens out to its fullest extent,
beginning with the phrase “In the night, in the eye of the forest.” For both
Tess and myself this forest and what was encountered there – the horse, the sea
of possibilities – were fundamental, recurring elements of our experience at
this time. The place in Patti Smith’s dreaming is in fact a view toward the
second sphere of action, the state of awareness where everything has become
more focused: where the planet, animals and the female are in the foreground,
and where a transcendental, impersonally positive direction is perceptible. By
the mid 90s the wild, high-energy songs had mostly collapsed away from having
visionary lyrics (dance tracks at this time generally did not have a developed “dreaming,”
but instead just used words to produce glimpses) but the fragment of 1975 to
which we were recurrently listening (and dancing) while on LSD had a momentous
outsight within its dreaming – a view toward the place that Tess and I were
trying to reach.
There is a sense
in which we had reached the place each time we were hearing the song at this level
of openness – we had reached the eye of the forest, where it feels as if you
are seeing through an eye that appears to be more the eye of the planet than
your own, and where it is clear you are now seeing through the eye of the
forest of your whole being, as opposed to the eye of the control mind (“you
have to lose control”). But such moments are fugitive, and it remained the case
that Tess and myself were being drawn to the physical outside of the world of
towns and cities – because it is in fact easiest to reach the second sphere of
action in a place where the planetary is more insistent: in a semi-wilderness,
or a wilderness, or in the countryside beyond the urban.
Men and women do
not have quite the same relationship to wilderness terrains, in that because
fear is valuable in focusing awareness, it is not generally necessary for a
woman to go off on her own for days into a wilderness: for women just living to
some extent on their own in a house on the edge of (or in the middle of) some
semi-wilderness area would seem to be all that is necessary to set up the
conditions for an escape into the second sphere of action. But despite this
difference, and despite the fact that we had access only to countryside, there
is no doubt that, if in 1994 Tess and myself had stopped taking drugs and
started recurrently going for long walks in the countryside (and had started
finding anomalous countryside “zones” like Harbury Lake) we would both have
been propelled a substantial distance in the direction of the south-outside. We
were feeling the “pull” of something (and there is an extent to which – earlier
- Tess had acted in relation to this feeling, by getting us out of Coventry),
but we were not responding in any way. On one level our idea of how to reach
the outside was correct. For the last year, it had been to take drugs at the
flat, or take drugs and dance at the Q Club in Birmingham – an extremely good
jungle/techno venue that did nights that lasted until 6am – or at a festival event (we had been to the
1995 Tribal Gathering). But on its own this strategy was incomplete, and was fundamentally
flawed, in that it was going to lead in the end only to a collapse.
Because
all along I was seeing toward the planet and the second sphere of action in
listening to ‘Horses’ it is worth thinking about the precise way in which I dreamed
or envisaged the forest in the song. I saw it as lowland, deciduous forest in
an area not far from the sea that was on a warmer – more southerly - latidude
than England: and specifically I always saw it as in a Moroccan region of what
can correctly be called the South Mediterranean (therefore, in Africa), but in
a Morocco with a lowland, coastal forest in its northernmost area (a deciduous forest
that was growing on an uninhabited, fertile headland that was perhaps ten miles
across, and projecting perhaps fifteen miles into the ocean). I had maybe been
taken in my mind toward Africa by the phrase “Arabian stallions lapping into
seahorses” and maybe also by the
momentarily refrained phrase “Go Rimbaud,” but I think it was North Morocco because
the song starts out from a nexus of libidinal thought and dreaming that comes from
William Burroughs (although it then completely leaves behind this
starting-point, transcending it), and also because Morocco is due south of England,
in a region that is on the same latidude as the ur-modernist depth-time
terrains of “arcadian” Ancient Greece. The place I was envisaging was very
emphatically not in the distant past, but on the other hand it was not Morocco,
and nor was it a Europe transposed into Morocco: it was modern, and most
fundamentally of all it was planetary – as opposed to it being seen in terms of
it belonging to a human territory or ‘state’ -, but at the same time it had
something in some ways in common with the pre-Christian and pre-Islamic worlds
of classical times (and it can be pointed out that Morocco was once part of the
North Mediterranean, in that it was part of the Roman empire). And it can be
seen that the encounter with the female horse (“a mare, black and shining…”) is
a transcendentalising of horses - and of
the female - such that the horse is a view toward the positive direction that
exists within the transcendentally unknown; and in turn it can be seen that this has slightly more in
common with ancient Greek stories of encounters in forests with goddesses (who
could take the form of animals) than it does with stories from the religious oneiric
systems that arrived later.
This was the view
toward the sublime: which is to say that this was the Futural – virtual-real – element that was at work in our lives, a
production of the Future that we were not in fact helping to go into full
effect, even though we were being affected by its presence. And which is also
to say that this was the appointment with the outside that we had been failing to keep
(and not much would have been necessary to keep it – some persistent,
intelligent explorations into the Warwickshire countryside around Leamington
would have been enough).
(Enough for what?
Enough for the beginning of a deliberate movement toward the planet that would
also be the beginning of an intensified awareness of the faculty of feeling.)
A few months into
the relationship – in February of 1994 – we had made what now appears as a
first attempt to “ground” ourselves in this way (to reach the abstract, you
have to start with bodies – in this case, the planet). We had begun living
together in October, and after several months of recurrent and very intense
explorations – taking place with the help of psychotropics and philosophical
conversations – we suddenly arrived at a yearning to go off to a beautiful area of
countryside, and do some walking. We decided, at the start of a week to go to
the lake district that weekend, and we booked a hotel at the head of Great
Langdale. We set off on Friday morning.
All through the week there had been a forecast of snow, and
on the train from the main north-south line to Windermere there was heavy snow
falling continuously. In Windermere the snow was so heavy that the buses had been stopped. Myself and Tess decided to walk to Ambleside in the
snow – we walked two or three miles and then got a lift from one of the very
few cars on the road. In Ambleside there was no way of getting further (it was
a blizzard, and the hotel was eight miles further up into the mountains), so we
spent the night at a guest house.
The next day the
snow had stopped, and the wind had turned to the south, bringing a thaw that
melted the fall of snow everywhere, except on the tops of the mountains.
The following two days were mostly cloudy, with some rain, but the last morning
– the day we were supposed to leave – the weather had changed again, and there
was a clear blue sky, and perfect, mountain-air visibility. We decided to stay
one more night at the hotel, and – having made an unsuccessful attempt to get
up a mountain the first day (when we had been stopped because of heavy rain) we
now headed to a gentle ridge leading to the peak of a mountain, called Long
Top, at the head of the dale. I remember that in the valley, before the ascent,
I was struck by the way in which, in the bright sunlight, I was seeing the
veins on the leaves of the trees. I was also very much aware that, although I
had visited the Lake District seven or eight times, and had walked up several
mountains, I had never at any stage seen the range in perfect visibility.
There was
partially melted, but re-frozen snow for the final few hundred metres of the
route to the top. However, the large, tilted expanses of glassy snow had “steps”
cut into them because hikers had been walking across the terrain over the weekend.
I think what we did was not easy – certainly it was dangerous, and required
concentration – but because of the walkways cut into the snow it was not that
hard. I remember somewhat disbelieving glances from two or three people who we
passed, who had crampons and ice-picks. But we had been swept away into the act
of climbing the mountain, and in the entirely perfect weather conditions – and given
the fortuitous snow-paths that gave us access – we did not think at any point
about stopping. In part, serendipity is the skill of reaching out for your
luck, when it is in the form of a potential, and therefore of making your luck
happen (this was a line of thought developed by Tess and myself, around this
time, in the course of an LSD conversation).
Hundreds of feet below us were snow covered
expanses of mountain that were reflecting the sun. Opposite the mountain to the
west – and very close – was Sca Fell Pike; to the east, was Helvellyn, and the
Langdale Pikes; and back to the west beyond Sca Fell there was the sea.
We did not stop –
beyond a saddle of mountain-top was Bow Fell, and we decided we would also go up
this peak. My memory of this part of the walk is that when we stopped – half-way
– to have some food, we realised that neither of us wanted a cigarette, even
though at this time we were both regular smokers.
When we reached
the top of Bow Fell there was not much light left. It was still bright sunlight,
and the view was as astonishing as ever, or more so, given the greater height,
and the fact the sun was beginning to set, but it was obvious we would have to
move fast to reach flat ground before it got dark. It required a lot of focus to get down the mountain and a fair amount of balance: we recurrently used the technique of sliding - standing up - on patches of icy snow. By the time we reached the base of the valley it was nearly dark - but we were now safe, and we were unscathed. (We then went to drink in the hotel bar).
You could say that we had proved ourselves capable of winter, but that we had not in any way tried ourselves in relation to summer - in relation to the planet as a dreamy, trance-inducing world of atmospheres and of sublime, ethereal-seeming terrains. The mountains had possessed the quality of physical challenges, rather than any haunting quality of being places that could sweep you into a solar trance, let alone the quality of being 'a dream within a dream'. They were still a little too "scenic" (notice the existence of the concept of 'winter playground') and not sufficiently planetary: at the level of abstract perception what we were seeing was too connected to the idea of "the Lake District," and not connected enough to an awareness of the planet. We had shown some courage - the kind of audacity that we were showing a lot in our practices in relation to psychotropics. But what we desperately needed now was sobriety (the fact that intense activity destroyed the power of indulgent, addictive behaviour had been revealed by the lack of a desire for nicotine on the mountain-top) and, most crucially, what we needed was a deliberate movement toward the south of the transcendental.
We were both dreamers in a world which is now primarily run by makers of circumstances (at depth it is not really run by either "side," and in fact everyone is both), and this meant that in starting to break free along the lines of our affinity there was already a greater degree of difficulty ahead of us in relation to avoiding a collapse. Without sobriety and an awareness of transcendental-south our relationship was just topsoil that would soon be ploughed back in by the 'control' or 'interiority' forces at work within the human world (a process that occurs at all levels, from couples, to the workforces of cities, as with the workers of Detroit).
Around eight months after this we left Coventry. At the same time Tess began a postgraduate course, and a transition was made, on her part, toward a more disciplined mode of existence, a shift which was valuable for me, in relation to my own struggle with self-indulgent behaviour. But despite there being another element at work, a very strong impression has been left that the move to a place that was a little closer to countryside terrains was a fundamental change. There was a greater brightness about the new environment – a feeling of better air – that seems to have been conducive to reaching sobriety and lucidity, both through a turning of attention toward transcendental south, and also through bringing forays in other directions to a point of crisis where a new strength could begin to emerge.
Around eight months after this we left Coventry. At the same time Tess began a postgraduate course, and a transition was made, on her part, toward a more disciplined mode of existence, a shift which was valuable for me, in relation to my own struggle with self-indulgent behaviour. But despite there being another element at work, a very strong impression has been left that the move to a place that was a little closer to countryside terrains was a fundamental change. There was a greater brightness about the new environment – a feeling of better air – that seems to have been conducive to reaching sobriety and lucidity, both through a turning of attention toward transcendental south, and also through bringing forays in other directions to a point of crisis where a new strength could begin to emerge.
Striking anomalous
experiences started to take place, events which recurrently did not occur while
directly affected by a psychotropic. I can see now that this process was in
fact one in which an awareness of a way forward was being broken open. And very much connected to this process was
the fact that shortly after the move to Leamington I watched Picnic at Hanging Rock for the first
time, at Tess’s instigation (she had seen it several years before). This film was a
new view toward the second sphere of action, and one that was particularly clear
about the centrality of women in this sphere, and about the comparative lower
importance both of technology and of attention to chronological time – the
gravely fixated Michael cannot escape, even though he spends the night on the mountain;
and the beginning of the escape from ordinary reality is achieved by Miranda
and her group with nothing but a dream-inducing place, and heightened,
sensually oneiric perception, in a
movement which begins with the clocks stopping at midday.
I am on a bus, with Tess, in the countryside
on the edge of Leamington, around half a mile from a bridge over the river Avon
– the journey is toward Warwick University. We have been living in Leamington
for around four months.
I look out of the
window and from nowhere I get an image of a sunlit, semi-desert valley in the
southwest of America or the northwest of Mexico. There are people who have come
to live in this place (they are perhaps the only people there) – and they are very lucid and inspired: the impression
is that they have a highly developed and highly active world of knowledge, including
technological knowledge. There is no sense of indulgence about these people –
instead there is a bright, focused joy; a heightened, and
philosophically attuned awareness of the world: they are not “rock and roll” –
they are the world, of lucid, blissful becomings that rock and roll tries to
reach. Everything is fundamentally atmosphere in relation to the image, and it
is the bright terrain, with a few trees in the middle of the valley, that in fact
is at the forefront – an exceptionally vivid sense of a place. The whole
experience only takes a second – it is a “flash.” I will have this experience twice more in the next few days - a split-second of the place, and the feeling, and the people - there and then gone.
An aspect of this image, or "momentary dreaming," is that it is indeterminate in relation to human terrains - it is planetary in the sense that the sunlit atmosphere of a specific semi-desert place is paramount, and in the sense that it could be either Mexico or the USA. There is a distinctly futural quality about this - in the sense that the atmosphere could be seen as being suggestive of a futuristic novel in which nation states for some reason have disappeared, perhaps as a result of some disaster (there is nothing cosy and utopian about the feeling that is a part of the image - it has a sublime quality, but it is not utopian). The context is that around a day before its first appearance I had had an exceptionally intense, though somewhat turbulent experience using LSD and speed, an experience that was one of my last explorations of this kind (my memory at this time is of a feeling that I could go no further by using psychoptropics in this way, an impression which I think was correct, and which I did begin to act upon). And I remember posing the question of the fleeting, but consistent image in relation to the idea of drug-associated "flash-backs" (I should add that I had not really had any experiences that seemed to relate to this term), and thinking, given the nature of the image - and given that it had no connection at all to anything that had taken place in the preceding trip - that the image felt as if it might be more accurately characterised as a "flash-forward."
An "instantaneous" - everything there at once - dreaming of this kind could perhaps be compared to a re-emergence of the virtual-real world that would arrive if you remembered reading a summary on the back of a strikingly and evocatively promising novel, which you had not yet read (where the initiated world is a fundamental achievement of the book, whatever the quality of the actual novel might turn out to be). But what is misleading about this description is that there were no words involved in the image, whether intrinsically, or at the level of lines of verbally-expressed thought that had triggered it (it arrived unconnected to preceding processes of thought). Across the three instances it had the quality of only being mediated by perception - which is to say that it had something in common with encounters with perceived objects (to which should be added that across the three instances it was both the case that no words were involved, and that the experiences had the consistency of a view toward a real object that is seen in the distance).
The only works I had read in 1995 which could be seen as having a faint connection to this envisaged world were the three Neuromancer novels, with their desert research-base /arcology cut into the rock of a plateau in Arizona. But I don't think I made any connection of this kind at the time, and at the crucial level there was no reason to make this connection. The Gibson arcology was a corporate terrain (in fact, in a sense, it was a prison for intellectual property in the form of scientists and inventors), and, not only this, the people in the instantaneous dreaming had none of the "noir" faux-cool two-dimensionality of Gibson's characters. This is not really a criticism of Gibson (it is more that to an extent Gibson's characters are an effective criticism of a showy thin-ness pertaining to most of modern social existence), but it remains the case that along these lines the image was not at all suggestive of the Neuromancer trilogy (it was too futural...).
In the end the main reason to make the comparison (apart from the terrain) lies in the way the human group was present within the image, but without any emphasis. It was almost as if I was aware of a population of a small number of individuals (the impression is of a number around twenty or thirty), but without the sense of a group being in any way foregrounded. In a way that is displaced completely from the southwest of the USA (it is not at all connected to the Arizona arcology) the whole Neuromancer sequence is about the formation of a group - Angie Mitchell is the central, crucial member of this group - which forms itself and escapes from ordinary reality, but Gibson under-emphasises this trajectory to a spectacular degree, despite it being the conclusion of the trilogy (this is also not a criticism). So in both cases the "escape-group" is there, but is somehow extremely distant.
It is clear
that a problem of human groups was beginning to come into focus (along with a problem of
the relationship between human beings and the planet) and that this process was
inseparable from a movement forward of the separate faculties of dreaming and of
feeling from out of states of very minimal effectiveness. And around this time (the first
few months of 1995) I had two other experiences that need to be recounted in
this context. The first was a dream in sleep, and the second was a point – at around
four in the morning – when some philosophical writing I was doing underwent a change so that
it became a little more attuned to the abstract (these two form a pair, in that
the dream is the only one I remember from this specific time, and the writing - two pages - are the only written record that remains from it).
In the dream I was
a member of a group of teenagers who were living in a run-down house that had a
large area of land around it, and which was somewhere in an area of countryside, in England (the house was perhaps on the edge of a small town). It was either a
long dream, or was in fact two dreams in the space of one night. The group in
the dream had somehow ended up living in the house – it was owned by one of
them, or several of them – and in some way they were managing to live there
without any supervision, or any interventions from parents or other 'authority' figures. There was
a specific, slightly ramshackle feeling of impeccabilty about them – they were
doing what was necessary to avoid attacks from the community around them. But
the fundamental aspect of the group was a shared feeling of intense joy – a feeling
of having crossed some threshold of awareness that entailed a very high degree of
creativity and understanding.
However, the second
phase of the dream was about the loss of one of the members of the group. A
girl had been lost in the specific sense that she had not only been physically
removed in some way but had been taken backward across the threshold so that she
could no longer fully remember what had been happening, and would therefore not
return (the inability to remember, combined with the fact that she was being coerced
were sufficient to ensure a kind of intensive “death,” or capitulation to
ordinary reality).
There was as a striking, singular grief at the end of the
dream – a feeling of tragedy that contrasted with the joy. And the sense of
brightness and lucidity made me think at the time about Nietszche’s midday ‘moment
of the shortest shadow’ and about the way in which the clocks stop at midday in
Picnic at Hanging Rock ( in this film
one of the girls – Irma – disappears, but then returns several days later,
unable to remember what had happened), which led me to “the moment of the
shortest shadow … incipit Zarathustra”,
and its paired phrase, relating to what happens when Zarathustra begins to
break himself free – “incipit tragedia.” I was left with the idea of a
paradoxical phase when people have partially crossed an initial threshold and are living momentously on the outside of ordinary reality, but where it would still
be possible to make a mistake, or suffer a misfortune, so that what had been fundamental about the entire
experience would be irretrievably forgotten (an idea of a different form or
dimension of tragedy, although one that also involves a ‘tragic flaw’).
The late-night experience
of writing (and of something new emerging within the writing) relates more to
an envisaging of what might happen when the threshold has been completely
crossed. The following includes the last sentences of the two pages, and includes the
point where the writing arrives somewhere though focusing on bodies, and on
groups (it is a straining of abstract-perception toward the horizon, and is not
much of an achievement, but it has the quality of being impersonal, and of
being without any indulgent pathos).
“There is always only
self-differentiation. There is self-differentiation at the level of
stratification/deterritorialisation, actual/virtual, striated space-time/smooth
space-time. These things each make up one thing, but the thing is split into
different levels/directions of intensity.
[…] Everything is open,
contingent, everything is multiply self-differentiated. At absolute
deterritorialisation bodies melt, start to dance as metamorphosis, through metamorphosis and start to
swarm, to conjoin, forming new combinational transformations… A field of
space-time, of patterns of differentiation, shudders, and becomes predominantly
fluid, and leaps.”
I did this writing having smoked marijuana several hours before (however, although this particular event worked out well, I do not at all recommend marijuana for doing philosophy: in many ways it is a trickier ‘horse’ to ride than amphetamines, and in taking you to the outside it will generally take you in the wrong direction). And what was specific to what happened was that as I reached the point where I wrote the last two sentences I had a very intense, abstract experience of seeing a group of human individuals crossing a threshold, and disappearing, through an act of intent, into another, wider level of reality. Visually it was a bit like seeing a shape like a delta wing form itself out of individuals, with the wing-formation (the group) then leaping, catching a wind, and disappearing from sight – but there was a way in which it went deeper than the visual, taking place at a level of conjoined glimpses of understanding of the abstract, and at the level of feeling.
I did this writing having smoked marijuana several hours before (however, although this particular event worked out well, I do not at all recommend marijuana for doing philosophy: in many ways it is a trickier ‘horse’ to ride than amphetamines, and in taking you to the outside it will generally take you in the wrong direction). And what was specific to what happened was that as I reached the point where I wrote the last two sentences I had a very intense, abstract experience of seeing a group of human individuals crossing a threshold, and disappearing, through an act of intent, into another, wider level of reality. Visually it was a bit like seeing a shape like a delta wing form itself out of individuals, with the wing-formation (the group) then leaping, catching a wind, and disappearing from sight – but there was a way in which it went deeper than the visual, taking place at a level of conjoined glimpses of understanding of the abstract, and at the level of feeling.
Both of the
experiences being described (the dream and the process of writing) were
precursors for events that took place around two years later. It is clear that at
the earlier time - through the use of psychotropics over three years - I had
broken myself open to anomalous occurrences, whatever might be the value of
these events. But I also have the very strong impression that it was only once
I had started back on the path toward sobriety that I could really start to
benefit from having been temporarily broken open in this way.
Over the space of
a few months two years later I had a series of three dreams about a group of people living
in a house in the middle of woodland a few miles from Malton in North
Yorkshire. The area around Malton was somewhere I had lived (and was in a
strong sense an area I had fallen in love with) in the late 70s and early 80s. But almost nothing in the dreams had any connection to my experiences in the past. In the first dream the house was seen from above (from several hundred feet in the air, with a viewpoint of flying towards it), and was in an area of forest to the northwest of Malton, and in the later dreams it "settled" as being in woodland about four miles to the southwest, alongside a small lake - and the two areas of forest and the lake do not exist in non-dream reality. Equally, the group had a strikingly "futural" quality about them - in a quiet, but inspired and courageous way they were travellers into the unknown, and the atmosphere of the dream did not connect up with anything in my experiences, apart from the atmosphere of the terrain.
The group were led by a woman - they were led by her in some sense that was unspecific and very definitely to do with ability and affection as opposed to authoritarianism. This woman was perhaps in her fifties (although she had an intense quality of 'youngness'), and she was far more Virginia Woolf than William Gibson, even though what she was about was in a fundamental sense different from the world of, say, To the Lighthouse. This dream was sci-fi, in the sense that it involved other dimensions of reality, but it suggested strongly that the Future does not intrinsically have much to do with technology in the usual sense of the word: it suggested that the Future is a group of friends who live in - or alongside - a semi-wilderness or wilderness, and who do not belong to any state or tribe, but who belong instead to the planet, and to the cosmos.
I think it is correct to say that the most powerful available lens (at that time) in relation to my love for the planet was taken up in these dreams. This lens was then almost entirely depersonalised through stripping it of most elements that related directly to my own memories, and then was used for seeing toward a human possibility – the small group of individuals whose lives have become about travelling together into the Future. But it feels very much as if my ability to do this had been ignited by the fact that I had just started to fall in love with a countryside area in a way that in the end had no real equivalent other than my experience of falling in love, in the late 70s, with the area around Malton. It is only when you are intensely in love with the world that your past experiences of being intensely in love with the world become accessible. The first of the dreams took place after the initial visit to Harbury Lake in the summer of 1997. And it is noticeable that as well as the forests having appeared in the area around Malton, there is also a lake – a lake which was around the same size as the one near Harbury. The two virtual-real zones (the two zones of my past) entered into becoming with each other, and produced something entirely new: and not just the group, but also the area of forest.
There was a greater brightness about these dreams, and a greater serenity, in comparison in both cases with the precursor dream - and at the same time there was a more planetary aspect. The people were a lot older than the people in the dream from two years earlier, but at the same time they had the quality of being younger ('youngness' in this sense consists of being less entangled in gravity - in fear, judgement, and self-importance - and therefore of being at a higher level of energy and serenity). There was the 'lightness' of the initial, planet's eye view from above, together with the fact that the countryside was given a more extra-human, planetary aspect by the appearance of the forests. And there was a brightness in relation to the female element within the dream: in the earlier dream a girl had been dragged back into entrapment within ordinary reality, whereas in this dream the centre of the group was a woman who had a quality of having learned to embody both love and freedom.
The other experience in question here was of an entirely different order of magnitude - which is to say, at an entirely different level of intensity. In fact this event stands out as one of the most extraordinary and enigmatic experiences of my life.
It was February of 1998, and it was now 18 months since the end of the relationship with Tess. It was around 1am in the morning, and I had just walked home in a thunderstorm. For the previous few months I had been amorously drawn towards a woman called Sarah, and I had just realised that there was no depth to my yearning for her.The point where I had realised this was earlier in the evening when I had helped her by going out to get something she needed, and I had discovered that - while feeling nothing but goodwill toward her - I was now bringing to a close the attempt at a relationship.
I had walked home in heavy rain, singing a new song (mostly in my head, I think, as opposed to out loud) which had started to come into my mind - generated by the moment - at the start of the walk. It was a love song. I had been propelled toward my love for women (the song was about a woman, but I had no specific woman in mind). This un-fixated state of being in love with women - and of yearning to be in love with one woman - was a state I had not really experienced since the autumn of 1993 (it is correct to say that it is a state where the heart is awake, and yet free - although it is also possible for it to be free from fixation in other states). I got home, and recorded the song. And then I went up to bed.
That morning I had finished reading Cities of the Red Night. I had been impressed by it, and yet at the same time had been left with the usual vague impression, from reading Burroughs, that the world of the book was to a large extent a delirium generated by an entrapment of attention on domination and on the violence that exists within sexuality. I decided I would now start reading The Drowned World (a book I had not read before - at that point the only Ballard I had read was the early story collection, The Voices of Time).
I read the first few chapters of the book. I feel now that this transition from Burroughs to Ballard (I had read three or four of Burroughs's books, and it should be added that there was a lot of his writing in effect within the radical zones of the Warwick University philosophy milieu) can be described as a shift from transcendental west to transcendental east, and it feels as if a necessary adjustment was taking place, a kind of oneiric antidote. Ballard's fictions are in many ways less far into the outside than are those of Burroughs, but their degree of divergence from transcendental south is less extreme. The problems with Ballard are a kind of indulgent, science-metaphysics melancholy, together with a grandiloquent tendency to push toward a superficial surrealism (as if he is recurrently haunted by landscapes that are unusual and libidinally complex, but are not to any great extent expressions of lucidity). But at the same time his writing has an awareness of the Future - an awareness, even if it is faint and fugitive, of the south of the outside.
And this was no ordinary 'cut' of Ballard. It was arguably the best sections of The Drowned World, a book which might well be his best novel. It included the point where Kerans is asked why he knows that the man who has disappeared into the jungle has gone south, and responds "because there is no other direction." And it ended with the phrase about Kerans, Beatrice and Dr Bodkin, who are settling into separate states of eerie solar trance - "henceforth they would meet mostly in their dreams."
I stopped reading at this point. Lying on my back, I set out to stop thinking, and become perception, in a way that would somehow be at the level of intensity of what I had just been reading. That moment was like a beckoning - a bright, impersonal reaching out into the unknown: it was perception, and forgetting Ballard completely, it was a projection of attention toward the enigmatic energy-worlds of the sky beyond the house. Immediately I fell asleep.
In the dream that followed everything was at the level of perception of intent, of feeling, and of abstract-perception. No part of it was visual - it was too intense to be visual.
I dreamed I was a member of a small group of people - both women and men, perhaps eight individuals - who were about to cross a fundamental threshold of awareness and action. We were receiving final instructions for this threshold-crossing in a process of "attunement" to a remote source of instructions - where within the dream I saw this process as being a bit like us tuning a radio to get a signal at maximum clarity. But the attunement in a wider sense was both to the source, and was us being attuned for the transition as a result of receiving the instructions.
A primary feature of the experience was that we were all each of the others as well as ourselves - each one of us was a group-circle of women and men, in the sense that we were experiencing the sensations and the quality-of-intent of the other individuals. But perhaps the most striking feature of all was that the feeling of contact and of awakening perception was an astonishing joy - it was a being-in-love that quite simply surpassed anything I had experienced. It was a bliss of encounter with the world and of relocation into other human beings that was the intensity of being-in-love at a new level, and which included sexuality within itself in that the intimacy of the contact with the women - I was experiencing what they were experiencing - was in itself a background, but ultra-powerful sexual act.
However, everything was a turning outwards, rather than a turning inwards (as if in fact - also - the sheer rapturous intensity of this inwards could only be woken by an impeccable focus on the beyond). All I know - in a way where the only aspects I can delineate as drivers of the feeling are the attunement in order to cross the threshold, and the experience of also being the women - is that in the final few moments I was at a level of bliss that was immensely higher than anything I had known before, in non-dream reality. There was no detail in terms of the other people: I knew them utterly, and as comrades in a spectacular, definitive sense, and yet, under the circumstances, this would not have been at all contradicted by my only having met them a few minutes before (there was a sense that I had in fact known them for much longer than this, but it was never foregrounded). It should also be added that there was no-one among them who appeared to be someone who I knew in ordinary reality - but the level of contact in the dream was so unprecedentedly intense (as if I was encountering people's essences, rather than their contingent, life-experience generated surfaces) that afterwards it seemed irrelevant to make this observation, in that it felt that, within the reality of the dream an individual could have been someone I knew from ordinary experiences without this ever having been apparent.
And then there were the last seconds. We were succeeding with the attunement - the feeling was Yes, we are actually going to do it! An upward-leaping, astonishing ecstasy. And then we had done it - ultra-bliss, ultra-ecstasy.
I am cut off from what follows. There is a Gap within the dream (a Gap with a before and an after), a fugue-space that is there like a block of night sky, a block in the form of inaccessibility.
And then, still dreaming, I am coming back from an experience which I only faintly remember. What I remember within the dream is that myself and the other members of the group have just been to somewhere else in the cosmos - in a place that is seen as south-by-southwest, and a little below the height of the midwinter ecliptic. We have just been with beings from this world, along with beings from two other far-distant worlds, the directions of these two being in areas of space that are 'below' me, that is, visible from the opposite side of the planet (however, despite the detail, there is a feeling in the dream that these three directions might in some way be other-dimensional locations, and might not be to do with outer space). We have all (the beings from the four worlds) just communicated with each other - and heightened each other - by sharing our ways of being, although the feeling is that my own group had been new to this form of communication, whereas this had not been the case with the beings from the other three worlds. There is an extraordinary feeling that something sublime has just been happening, but that it is simply too intense an experience for me to able to remember it.
There is a sudden scatter of experiences. In one of them I am looking from several hundred miles above the surface of the planet at an area of eastern Europe that includes the Carpathian mountains (it is a very positive, bright view of Hungary and Romania and areas around them, although it is much more about the terrains than it is about the human territories). In another of the experiences I am living in London and someone I do not recognise is about to attempt to kill me (they are in a state of extreme rage) - and I am hearing a kind of disembodied commentary that is doubting my ability to meet this challenge; to do whatever might be necessary to prevent myself from being killed (it is about whether I am prepared to fight defensively to the point where my actions could even lead to the death of the attacker).
I have never been able to place these two memories in sequence (and I believe there were other experiences which I do not remember). And another feature of them was that they did not involve a loss of memory of the other dream, but instead were experienced as in some sense continuations of it.
And as I woke from the dream and its after-dreams my experience before being fully awake was that I had just been to an absolute elsewhere. And in the process of waking my sense of the momentous nature of what I had experienced - and my sense of loss - was given a shockingly powerful, poignant expression, in that I had a song in my head that I was singing (I sang it just once, with the end coinciding with full wakefulness) whose words went to the tune of the "I wish I could be who you wanted" coda at the end of Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees":
I wish I could be
the ocean
I wish I could be
the ocean
I wish I could be
the ocean
all the time.
*
In the days afterwards I was left with a persistent feeling that something had taken place that had been like an eye opening - an eye which had then closed again. But it seemed that nothing had changed: there were no further dreams that were in any way similar, and there was nothing about me that was at all different, so therefore I largely just put the event to one side, as a very extraordinary experience, about which not much could be said.
*
By the summer of 1996 the new phase had been in effect for nearly a year. Tess had been doing a postgraduate course, and we had stopped partying all the time. My new pattern (one that only really came to an end a year later) was that I would use drugs roughly every week for reading philosophical books - primarily A Thousand Plateaus, and the drug was almost always speed - and then Tess and I would also use them more infrequently, either on our own, or (and this was now more the 'rule') when we were dancing at all-nighter events in Birmingham, or at festivals.
The use of amphetemaines for reading A Thousand Plateaus is very memorable, but although I think it was to a certain extent a way forward, I feel this strategy is highly problematic, on every level (which is definitely to say that it is not what I should have been doing).
The experience was one of - to some extent - understanding depth-level, transcendental aspects of the world - it was the often somewhat occluded or interrupted experience of seeing the abstract, through the abstraction-worlds of the book. And as this abstract-perception was occurring, I would always be seeing intricate, coloured - and recurrently highly dynamic - diagrams that were visual expressions of what I was understanding (these diagrams were very effective, and very beautiful, but I always emphatically felt at the time that the presence of this visual aspect was in every sense superficial in comparison with the process of understanding - the process of the continuous arrival of the 'outsights' ). However, speed works with what you give it, and my tendency was still to concentrate my attention too much on the line of time (rather than than on the spatium of energy and intent) and on top of that, my ability to hold on to what I had understood by constructing new concepts (or modifying old ones) was not at nearly a high enough level, so I would recurrently be left with a fatally inadequate or blocked understanding. And not only that, because of the exhilaration of the process knocking out an ability to maintain focus on a specific, urgent issue, it would often be a blocked understanding of something that I did not really need, at that point, to be exploring. Lastly, of course, it takes a lot out of you. Just at the point where you need to be holding onto - and bringing into focus - what you have been 'seeing' you are likely to be shattered by a come-down, so that consolidation is the very last thing that is possible.
It is worth pointing out that there are relatively low-level uses of speed that do not to any great extent involve comedowns, and that at least one mathematician - Paul Erdos - used speed continually for a very large number of years (perhaps decades). When Erdos (a very interesting, 'nomadic' figure, who travelled around from one collaborator to another) was challenged to give up amphetamines for a month, he did so, but then said to the person who challenged him 'I did it, but you have set mathematics back by a month'. And he also said of this month "Before when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." But Erdos is praised for the prodigious extent of his work (which is in number theory - pure mathematics) rather than for outer-edge, ground-breaking discoveries, and, more importantly, it is worth pausing to think about the difference between numerical abstraction and the abstract. Although such work is a route toward interesting zones (and in the modern world it is also a route toward success, though Erdos does not seem to have been driven by the desire for kudos), it is not at all clear, nonetheless, that in any sense it is a route toward wider realities. It seems more to be a highly creative side of a fixation on systematicity, the close counterpart of the fixation on time. What is it that wants us to be trapped within time and systematicity?
*
And suddenly Tess and I were in Greece. It was August, and very hot, and we were out in the countryside, a three hour bus journey away from the nearest city, Thessaloniki. A transition to the outside in a straightforward, ordinary sense: a sense which on one level is clearly only tangential to the question of the transcendental outside. And yet there is possibly no more important doorway.
I think it is correct to say that the most powerful available lens (at that time) in relation to my love for the planet was taken up in these dreams. This lens was then almost entirely depersonalised through stripping it of most elements that related directly to my own memories, and then was used for seeing toward a human possibility – the small group of individuals whose lives have become about travelling together into the Future. But it feels very much as if my ability to do this had been ignited by the fact that I had just started to fall in love with a countryside area in a way that in the end had no real equivalent other than my experience of falling in love, in the late 70s, with the area around Malton. It is only when you are intensely in love with the world that your past experiences of being intensely in love with the world become accessible. The first of the dreams took place after the initial visit to Harbury Lake in the summer of 1997. And it is noticeable that as well as the forests having appeared in the area around Malton, there is also a lake – a lake which was around the same size as the one near Harbury. The two virtual-real zones (the two zones of my past) entered into becoming with each other, and produced something entirely new: and not just the group, but also the area of forest.
There was a greater brightness about these dreams, and a greater serenity, in comparison in both cases with the precursor dream - and at the same time there was a more planetary aspect. The people were a lot older than the people in the dream from two years earlier, but at the same time they had the quality of being younger ('youngness' in this sense consists of being less entangled in gravity - in fear, judgement, and self-importance - and therefore of being at a higher level of energy and serenity). There was the 'lightness' of the initial, planet's eye view from above, together with the fact that the countryside was given a more extra-human, planetary aspect by the appearance of the forests. And there was a brightness in relation to the female element within the dream: in the earlier dream a girl had been dragged back into entrapment within ordinary reality, whereas in this dream the centre of the group was a woman who had a quality of having learned to embody both love and freedom.
The other experience in question here was of an entirely different order of magnitude - which is to say, at an entirely different level of intensity. In fact this event stands out as one of the most extraordinary and enigmatic experiences of my life.
It was February of 1998, and it was now 18 months since the end of the relationship with Tess. It was around 1am in the morning, and I had just walked home in a thunderstorm. For the previous few months I had been amorously drawn towards a woman called Sarah, and I had just realised that there was no depth to my yearning for her.The point where I had realised this was earlier in the evening when I had helped her by going out to get something she needed, and I had discovered that - while feeling nothing but goodwill toward her - I was now bringing to a close the attempt at a relationship.
I had walked home in heavy rain, singing a new song (mostly in my head, I think, as opposed to out loud) which had started to come into my mind - generated by the moment - at the start of the walk. It was a love song. I had been propelled toward my love for women (the song was about a woman, but I had no specific woman in mind). This un-fixated state of being in love with women - and of yearning to be in love with one woman - was a state I had not really experienced since the autumn of 1993 (it is correct to say that it is a state where the heart is awake, and yet free - although it is also possible for it to be free from fixation in other states). I got home, and recorded the song. And then I went up to bed.
That morning I had finished reading Cities of the Red Night. I had been impressed by it, and yet at the same time had been left with the usual vague impression, from reading Burroughs, that the world of the book was to a large extent a delirium generated by an entrapment of attention on domination and on the violence that exists within sexuality. I decided I would now start reading The Drowned World (a book I had not read before - at that point the only Ballard I had read was the early story collection, The Voices of Time).
I read the first few chapters of the book. I feel now that this transition from Burroughs to Ballard (I had read three or four of Burroughs's books, and it should be added that there was a lot of his writing in effect within the radical zones of the Warwick University philosophy milieu) can be described as a shift from transcendental west to transcendental east, and it feels as if a necessary adjustment was taking place, a kind of oneiric antidote. Ballard's fictions are in many ways less far into the outside than are those of Burroughs, but their degree of divergence from transcendental south is less extreme. The problems with Ballard are a kind of indulgent, science-metaphysics melancholy, together with a grandiloquent tendency to push toward a superficial surrealism (as if he is recurrently haunted by landscapes that are unusual and libidinally complex, but are not to any great extent expressions of lucidity). But at the same time his writing has an awareness of the Future - an awareness, even if it is faint and fugitive, of the south of the outside.
And this was no ordinary 'cut' of Ballard. It was arguably the best sections of The Drowned World, a book which might well be his best novel. It included the point where Kerans is asked why he knows that the man who has disappeared into the jungle has gone south, and responds "because there is no other direction." And it ended with the phrase about Kerans, Beatrice and Dr Bodkin, who are settling into separate states of eerie solar trance - "henceforth they would meet mostly in their dreams."
I stopped reading at this point. Lying on my back, I set out to stop thinking, and become perception, in a way that would somehow be at the level of intensity of what I had just been reading. That moment was like a beckoning - a bright, impersonal reaching out into the unknown: it was perception, and forgetting Ballard completely, it was a projection of attention toward the enigmatic energy-worlds of the sky beyond the house. Immediately I fell asleep.
In the dream that followed everything was at the level of perception of intent, of feeling, and of abstract-perception. No part of it was visual - it was too intense to be visual.
I dreamed I was a member of a small group of people - both women and men, perhaps eight individuals - who were about to cross a fundamental threshold of awareness and action. We were receiving final instructions for this threshold-crossing in a process of "attunement" to a remote source of instructions - where within the dream I saw this process as being a bit like us tuning a radio to get a signal at maximum clarity. But the attunement in a wider sense was both to the source, and was us being attuned for the transition as a result of receiving the instructions.
A primary feature of the experience was that we were all each of the others as well as ourselves - each one of us was a group-circle of women and men, in the sense that we were experiencing the sensations and the quality-of-intent of the other individuals. But perhaps the most striking feature of all was that the feeling of contact and of awakening perception was an astonishing joy - it was a being-in-love that quite simply surpassed anything I had experienced. It was a bliss of encounter with the world and of relocation into other human beings that was the intensity of being-in-love at a new level, and which included sexuality within itself in that the intimacy of the contact with the women - I was experiencing what they were experiencing - was in itself a background, but ultra-powerful sexual act.
However, everything was a turning outwards, rather than a turning inwards (as if in fact - also - the sheer rapturous intensity of this inwards could only be woken by an impeccable focus on the beyond). All I know - in a way where the only aspects I can delineate as drivers of the feeling are the attunement in order to cross the threshold, and the experience of also being the women - is that in the final few moments I was at a level of bliss that was immensely higher than anything I had known before, in non-dream reality. There was no detail in terms of the other people: I knew them utterly, and as comrades in a spectacular, definitive sense, and yet, under the circumstances, this would not have been at all contradicted by my only having met them a few minutes before (there was a sense that I had in fact known them for much longer than this, but it was never foregrounded). It should also be added that there was no-one among them who appeared to be someone who I knew in ordinary reality - but the level of contact in the dream was so unprecedentedly intense (as if I was encountering people's essences, rather than their contingent, life-experience generated surfaces) that afterwards it seemed irrelevant to make this observation, in that it felt that, within the reality of the dream an individual could have been someone I knew from ordinary experiences without this ever having been apparent.
And then there were the last seconds. We were succeeding with the attunement - the feeling was Yes, we are actually going to do it! An upward-leaping, astonishing ecstasy. And then we had done it - ultra-bliss, ultra-ecstasy.
I am cut off from what follows. There is a Gap within the dream (a Gap with a before and an after), a fugue-space that is there like a block of night sky, a block in the form of inaccessibility.
And then, still dreaming, I am coming back from an experience which I only faintly remember. What I remember within the dream is that myself and the other members of the group have just been to somewhere else in the cosmos - in a place that is seen as south-by-southwest, and a little below the height of the midwinter ecliptic. We have just been with beings from this world, along with beings from two other far-distant worlds, the directions of these two being in areas of space that are 'below' me, that is, visible from the opposite side of the planet (however, despite the detail, there is a feeling in the dream that these three directions might in some way be other-dimensional locations, and might not be to do with outer space). We have all (the beings from the four worlds) just communicated with each other - and heightened each other - by sharing our ways of being, although the feeling is that my own group had been new to this form of communication, whereas this had not been the case with the beings from the other three worlds. There is an extraordinary feeling that something sublime has just been happening, but that it is simply too intense an experience for me to able to remember it.
There is a sudden scatter of experiences. In one of them I am looking from several hundred miles above the surface of the planet at an area of eastern Europe that includes the Carpathian mountains (it is a very positive, bright view of Hungary and Romania and areas around them, although it is much more about the terrains than it is about the human territories). In another of the experiences I am living in London and someone I do not recognise is about to attempt to kill me (they are in a state of extreme rage) - and I am hearing a kind of disembodied commentary that is doubting my ability to meet this challenge; to do whatever might be necessary to prevent myself from being killed (it is about whether I am prepared to fight defensively to the point where my actions could even lead to the death of the attacker).
I have never been able to place these two memories in sequence (and I believe there were other experiences which I do not remember). And another feature of them was that they did not involve a loss of memory of the other dream, but instead were experienced as in some sense continuations of it.
And as I woke from the dream and its after-dreams my experience before being fully awake was that I had just been to an absolute elsewhere. And in the process of waking my sense of the momentous nature of what I had experienced - and my sense of loss - was given a shockingly powerful, poignant expression, in that I had a song in my head that I was singing (I sang it just once, with the end coinciding with full wakefulness) whose words went to the tune of the "I wish I could be who you wanted" coda at the end of Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees":
I wish I could be
the ocean
I wish I could be
the ocean
I wish I could be
the ocean
all the time.
*
In the days afterwards I was left with a persistent feeling that something had taken place that had been like an eye opening - an eye which had then closed again. But it seemed that nothing had changed: there were no further dreams that were in any way similar, and there was nothing about me that was at all different, so therefore I largely just put the event to one side, as a very extraordinary experience, about which not much could be said.
*
By the summer of 1996 the new phase had been in effect for nearly a year. Tess had been doing a postgraduate course, and we had stopped partying all the time. My new pattern (one that only really came to an end a year later) was that I would use drugs roughly every week for reading philosophical books - primarily A Thousand Plateaus, and the drug was almost always speed - and then Tess and I would also use them more infrequently, either on our own, or (and this was now more the 'rule') when we were dancing at all-nighter events in Birmingham, or at festivals.
The use of amphetemaines for reading A Thousand Plateaus is very memorable, but although I think it was to a certain extent a way forward, I feel this strategy is highly problematic, on every level (which is definitely to say that it is not what I should have been doing).
The experience was one of - to some extent - understanding depth-level, transcendental aspects of the world - it was the often somewhat occluded or interrupted experience of seeing the abstract, through the abstraction-worlds of the book. And as this abstract-perception was occurring, I would always be seeing intricate, coloured - and recurrently highly dynamic - diagrams that were visual expressions of what I was understanding (these diagrams were very effective, and very beautiful, but I always emphatically felt at the time that the presence of this visual aspect was in every sense superficial in comparison with the process of understanding - the process of the continuous arrival of the 'outsights' ). However, speed works with what you give it, and my tendency was still to concentrate my attention too much on the line of time (rather than than on the spatium of energy and intent) and on top of that, my ability to hold on to what I had understood by constructing new concepts (or modifying old ones) was not at nearly a high enough level, so I would recurrently be left with a fatally inadequate or blocked understanding. And not only that, because of the exhilaration of the process knocking out an ability to maintain focus on a specific, urgent issue, it would often be a blocked understanding of something that I did not really need, at that point, to be exploring. Lastly, of course, it takes a lot out of you. Just at the point where you need to be holding onto - and bringing into focus - what you have been 'seeing' you are likely to be shattered by a come-down, so that consolidation is the very last thing that is possible.
It is worth pointing out that there are relatively low-level uses of speed that do not to any great extent involve comedowns, and that at least one mathematician - Paul Erdos - used speed continually for a very large number of years (perhaps decades). When Erdos (a very interesting, 'nomadic' figure, who travelled around from one collaborator to another) was challenged to give up amphetamines for a month, he did so, but then said to the person who challenged him 'I did it, but you have set mathematics back by a month'. And he also said of this month "Before when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." But Erdos is praised for the prodigious extent of his work (which is in number theory - pure mathematics) rather than for outer-edge, ground-breaking discoveries, and, more importantly, it is worth pausing to think about the difference between numerical abstraction and the abstract. Although such work is a route toward interesting zones (and in the modern world it is also a route toward success, though Erdos does not seem to have been driven by the desire for kudos), it is not at all clear, nonetheless, that in any sense it is a route toward wider realities. It seems more to be a highly creative side of a fixation on systematicity, the close counterpart of the fixation on time. What is it that wants us to be trapped within time and systematicity?
*
And suddenly Tess and I were in Greece. It was August, and very hot, and we were out in the countryside, a three hour bus journey away from the nearest city, Thessaloniki. A transition to the outside in a straightforward, ordinary sense: a sense which on one level is clearly only tangential to the question of the transcendental outside. And yet there is possibly no more important doorway.
To the northwest
was a spur of the mountain whose ridge flattened into a gently sloping, tall
foothill, whose long, wide top had a very large number of trees. Higher up it was an
area of forest, and then as the slope grew less steep there were glades visible
in what was still evidently a large zone of woodland. They were deciduous
trees - possibly a lot of them were Mediterranean oaks.
What I was not
prepared for was the feeling this view gave me. It made me yearn to be there, amongst
the trees, in the sunshine, and it gave me a quiet, but sublime feeling of joy.
The joy reminded me of moments involving beautiful, wild terrains in fantasy/sci-fi books, and it brought back to me of the feeling I would get in looking at certain covers
of these books. This feeling created by looking toward the mountain-terrain trees was
the same, but it had one extraordinary difference: it was possible to go to
this place at the level of the actual, and not just at the level of the
virtual-real. It would be possible, in fact, to take a tent and spend days
living in this place, or in another place like it, even further way from human
habitation.
At the time I was very struck by the feeling,
but didn’t give it much thought (it was an aesthetic curiosity, and we were
happy where we were, staying down by the beach – so going to this place never
even became a plan). At one point, we followed
a stream up a valley that led to the mountain, but we stayed by the stream and
never went up the additional thousand feet that would have taken us to the
forest.
And yet, even if
it was in a very minimal sense, we had kept our appointment.
I hadn’t
been anywhere near an area of mountain forest since I had been fourteen, twenty years
before, visiting the Southern Alps in New Zealand (and then it had been winter,
so even this experience is not really comparable). Over the next eleven years I
would find ways (initially apparently ‘by accident’, but later on very
deliberately) of getting into a whole series of semi-wilderness and wilderness forests,
in Romania, Morocco, Spain, Mongolia, Patagonia, Tuva…
And a year later,
in 1997, I was back in Greece, on the Peloponnsus Peninsula, in the area that is
called Arkadia.
I had walked
through a large area of trees on the side of a mountain, and found myself, in
the middle of the day, on a very long, flattish summit of a mountain, that
stretched for around two miles. The mountain-top was a labyrinth of convoluted,
smallish rocks, most of which were part of the main body of the rock, rather
than being boulders. The sea was to my left, and the sun was very hot, and I
decided I would go at maximum speed – moving toward the sun, north to south - across
the length of the mountain, jumping from rock to rock.
I reached a kind of solar
trance in doing this, a kind of ecstasy of movement, of glimpses of
understanding, and of dream ‘flashes’ of seeing places, including a place that
was supposed to be in southern Italy, according to what I knew in the split-second 'day-dream' (I
had never been to Italy). I had of course hit on a way of stopping thinking,
and of becoming perception (one that requires a lot of energy, and is a bit
dangerous), and I remember thinking that it was necessary that I complete this
act, and that the logic of this necessity was in some way the same as the logic
of the actions of shamanic initiations (but at this time I knew almost nothing
about shamanism, had read no books by Castaneda, or any similar writer, and
furthermore I had not even given much thought to the references to Castaneda in
A Thousand Plateaus).
It is true that –
again – I had not got far. And I had not got into a really large area of
forest any more than I had the year before (this had not been the plan in going
to stay in Arkadia - I was there serendipitously because a friend who came from Athens had
invited me to stay at a holiday home belonging to her mother, and I had known in
advance that the Pelopponesus mountains are much more arid than forested). But
I had received a first, faint glimpse of something transcendental. It is true
that we have discovered all the places on the planet, but it is not at all true that we
have discovered all the places to which these places can take us.
***
