This blog is three books in the process of being written, in the form of initial drafts of the sections, posted in the intended order, a project for which the overall name is Explorations. The three books are a continuation from Hidden Valleys: Haunted by the Future (Zero Books - 2015), and also from On Vanishing Land, an audio-essay made by myself and Mark Fisher (released by Hyperdub/Flatlines on 26th July, 2019 - https://hyperdub.net).
Explorations: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Explorations: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 49)
Something that is fundamental about A Thousand Plateaus is that
it assesses the human sphere in relation to its formations of intent.
It can be seen that values are something different from
formations of intent, because they can be stated but not embodied, whereas a
formation of intent concerns what is embodied – what is done as a whole, that is, at the level of overall actions as well as at the level of affiliations and expressed aims. But the full force of what is taking
place in A Thousand Plateaus is only really understood if the comprehensiveness
of the project is perceived.
The book critiques the territories of the states in the name
of a global perspective, a perspective which is not so much ‘international’ as
anthropological and planetary (the idea of the international is far too trapped
in the viewpoint of the states – far too prejudiced against the nomads, and the
other non-state social formations). But A
Thousand Plateaus also has the courage to do two other things: it assesses
the religions as suppressive formations of intent, and it simultaneously assesses the social modality of the romantic
love-couple as a form of suppression of
the same kind, in that its genuine leap forward is always more than wiped-out
by the collapse of the two-person mission (it should be added that this conjugal, or 'passional' love-couple modality is not at all the same as being in love - it is the clone or 'reactive twin' by which being in love tends almost always to be progressively replaced).
And what starts to become vividly apparent, in reading this
book, is that the three critiques are not at all equal. It becomes clear that
in fact religion is a supplementary device for dominating women, imposing familialism,
and for maintaining and extending territories. It needs very much to be said that
the initiators and institutionalisers of religions ‘botch the leap’ of
deterritorialisation (the leap of Love-and-Freedom), and create
suppression-systems for whole human populations: but this in the end is not at all
the crucial issue. What is vital is the fact that women are prevented from
becoming explorers of the unknown, and are propelled toward the couple and the familial (and also
men, though it is women who have the greatest pressure placed upon them), and simultaneously it is the fact that both women and men are inculcated with a secret profound
territorialism, which is produced by the system of reason-revelation: this
takes the form of conjoined abstract and oneiric worlds being laid across the
world of the planet’s territories (people are caught like small creatures in a
deadly cage-experiment, emotionally and physically moved by being Chinese, or Russian,
or English, or American; with additional tendencies to see themselves as
western heirs to ancient Greek democracy and ‘rationality,’ or eastern heirs to
philosophies and disciplines of ‘balance,’ etc). Religion is in fact just a supplementary
tool for making people settle down into couples, families and territories: the
real intensity (and the obscured struggle) is at the level of alliances
between human beings for the purposes of a planetary journey into the unknown –
it is love in the form of explorer-traveller alliances, and in
the form of love for the wider realities of the World. The heresies of religion
are at a certain level a distraction-system blocking an awareness of the heresies which in reality are the directions of escape toward the Future – the heresy of placing
the journey toward Love-and-Freedom above the romantic love-couple and the
conventional family (and of recognising that becoming-woman is the vital escape-doorway for
both men and women), and the heresy of seeing the world of the modern state as suffused by fascism.
In 1996, through reading A Thousand Plateaus, I arrived at a point where I was so startled by the world of formations of intent I was perceiving that it seemed I was seeing a new dimension at right angles to everything that I had been grasping until then. A moment later I saw that what I was looking towards was space (in that it was a world of co-emplacement of formations, of forces), and that part of the specificity of what was taking place was a leaving behind of conventional philosophy's fixation on the line of time - so that it was western philosophy that was turning at right angles, looking at last toward a space of co-emplaced and interfused intent-formations.
But what at depth was taking place was that I was now starting to see a body without organs in the form of human intent-worlds: one which had the gravity of suppressive formations within its trans-establishment region, and which had different modalities of brightness in effect in zones which were beyond (or in a liminal relation with) the trans-establishment. And it was clear that this was the place where Futural ways of existing were being created and sustained, and where reactive, ultimately deadly values were being upheld and modified. This was the place where dreams were being created, promulgated and modified - and there is nothing more powerful than dreams (they are a crucial part of the cutting-edge of the virtual-real, and if they are to be seen as non-being, then it is necessary to affirm what is said in Tao Te Ching - "being is born of non-being."). Human beings are swayed by a well-constructed dreaming far more than by abstractions, and this is not because human beings are irrational, but because there is lucidity involved in effective construction of dreamings, and more than anything else, because dreams of this kind contain a higher degree of the abstract than do worlds of philosophical or scientific abstractions, in that they consist of compositions of space-worlds of intent, and intent is abstract, not concrete.
But there was another way in which space was opening up. From 1996 onwards my horizon started to include zones of production of thought and dreaming which were at a higher level than anything I had encountered previously, and which were fundamentally non-western: and these zones had a profound connection with terrains on the planet.
There were now two primary terrains in relation to a woken, deterritorialised philosophy (one capable of lucidity, and dreaming - one capable of producing maps for travelling into wider realities). The first of these was the area stretching from northern China into Mongolia and Tuva. The second - and most important - was the terrain extending from Mexico through the isthmus of Central America and into the jungle regions of Venezuela and Brazil. And these zones are not just connected by association with bodies of writing: they are places whose planetary, non-human expanses are components of metamorphosis, whether through an encounter at the level of the actual, or at the level of the virtual. They do not just constitute a setting: to take two terrain-worlds within these zones, they are the affect of the Mexican desert, the affect of the taiga forest in the Sayan mountains.
It can be seen that this has nothing to do with the state, and everything to do with the planet, and, crucially, with the zones of the planet that are beyond human urban spaces. A question of a planetary power of metamorphosis, where what is vital is that you have the planet as horizon and dreaming (rather than having the dreaming of a state, or of the western world, etc), and a question of reaching the point where you see human worlds as a kind of darkly haunted zone forming a part of the planet and of the worlds beyond it. Walking into the countryside from a town becomes a way of making contact with the planet, and then of turning around to see the town as also planetary. From 1996 space was therefore opening up in the sense that I was being deterritorialised beyond the western world, and beyond the human (therefore leaving the state very far behind) in a process that was about walking through Warwickshire countryside at the same time as it was about re-perceiving the world from the new vantages of Mongolian steppe and Mexican desert.
And now, at last, there were women everywhere - women who were explorers of the transcendentally unknown. This was at the level of authors, and at the level of the figures within the books. Florinda Donner, Taisha Abelar and Carol Tiggs were the authors - but in relation to the virtual-real women out-numbered men across all of the expanse of this westward and southwestward world of metamorphics (it is not just that there are more women than men in the books of the three women writers: it is that the same is true in relation to Castaneda's books when taken as a whole).
But not only this - there was also the escape-group, and the escape-group understood very precisely both in relation to the difference between the countryside and the city, and to the issue of becomings.(Deleuze and Guattari give an exceptionally valuable account of becomings in A Thousand Plateaus, but, despite the fact that they give a name to them, the really crucial, in-depth work of explicating them is done by Donner/Abelar/Castaneda, using a more comprehensive and effective set of concepts, and employing narrative exemplification as well as abstract accounts).
In 1995 I had been astonished and entranced by the lucidity and power of The Waves, returning to this novel after having read it ten years before (and I had loved it when I had read it the first time - I just had not known how to go forward with it). This experience was another precursor of the change or transition toward which I was moving (there is a sense in which the European tradition of proto-metamorphics culminates in the achieved metamorphics that is found within A Thousand Plateaus and The Waves). In The Waves there is the escape-group (only partially woken), there is the centrality of women (with Rhoda as traveller into the unknown) and there is the exceptionally intense emphasis on the countryside - on the planetary worlds beyond the cities - in the form of the place by the sea that is described at the start of each chapter (see Section 30).
It is important to see that the eventual emergence within me of a faculty of dreaming (which, it should be added, is inseparable from the micropolitical faculty of dreaming up other ways of living) took the form of dreamings about escape-groups, and was not only intrinsically associated with women as explorer-travellers, but was at the same time very profoundly associated - on more than one level - with the countryside. There is nothing indeterminate about the associations in question here: and it is worth noticing that the transcendental terrain that was opening up in front of me was at this stage coming into focus independently of the work of Donner/Abelar/Castaneda (I did not start to encounter their books until the very end of this phase).
With Tess (and because of Tess) I moved to Leamington, and almost immediately I started having dreams (in sleep) about a group living in the countryside (and in the most vivid and detailed of these dreams the central figure of the group was a woman). Not long after these dreams began, I went for a walk along the canal into the edge of the countryside, and dreamed up a story about an escape group, where the individuals were living in a city: but when, a day later, i returned to the story, to my surprise its transition to the point where there was a striking spatial world - a terrain - was about a place in the middle of an area of wilderness coastline, and in this 'locale' the only figure was a woman who was trying to solve a vertical (three-dimensional) maze, in the form of a 1000 foot sculpture with a labyrinth cut within it (these experiences are all described in Sections 24 and 25). And in 1999 I went to Harbury Lake - to the scurfland, Tarkovskian 'zone' that I discovered to the southeast of Leamington - and the idea arrived for the story "Ktarizon: Deep Water": this story is about about a group of women and men who live far in the future and in a city on another planet, and who are struggling to break through into a wider and deeper level of reality by going 'fugue-diving' (see the end of Section 18) on an area of semi-desert coast which is far from the nearest city.
In relation to the countryside, it is important to see that although the link with the emergent idea of the escape-group is very clear, and although the movement out of the city into Leamington (which to the east has the countryside running right into it, alongside its river) seems to have been involved in the waking of the faculty of dreaming, this does not mean at all that Warwickshire was fundamentally important as such - it does not mean, in particular, that the Warwickshire of the oneirosphere had some explicit direct importance (Shakespeare's awareness of the southward unknown could only be an inspiring thought, when it happened to arrive - but it was perhaps even necessary to forget about Shakespeare's virtual-real worlds). What was in question was women and men as explorer-travelers, the escape-group, and the countryside and wilderness areas beyond the expanses of the urban: and the non-urban very definitely did not need to be Warwickshire, and did not even need to be on the Earth (the place in the initial dreams-in-sleep was Yorkshire, the coastline with the vertical labyrinth was futural, and was somewhere indeterminate that was perhaps reminiscent of Australia, and the wilderness in "Ktarizon: Deep Water" was on another planet).
*
A fixation on the line of time is definitive of the trapped and suppressive form of reason which dominates within the human world: and the other aspect of this modality of reason is fixation on systematicity. Concentrating attention on the space of the planet around you - in processes of unbroken, mutlti-sense perception - is a primary way out of this double-aspect fixation, but alongside this, it is also necessary to employ abstract-perception to see the surrounding space of formations of intent within the human world. These formations consist to a very great extent of the production and re-production of stories (of many different kinds: 'artistic', shamanic, philosophical, religious, scientific etc.) Here, despite the line of the narrative, the movement is back into space, though at the level of the virtual-real. And here it is necessary to discard stories which have an intrinsic gravity, and lack of openness to other views: stories which are expressive of a reaction against the world, either through being judgemental against those who dont believe the supposed true story, or through seeing the formations of the 'natural' world as 'mere matter.' (the planet viewed as merely an intricate chunk of stuff, in comparison with human thought, on its envisaged different level). The complete system of reason-revelation consists of the two aspects of fixated reason, together with the lack-of-openness, and judgemental gravity of religious, pseudo-philosophical and 'scientifistic' stories.
In writing A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari have reached space, despite the fact that they still have residual tendencies to fixate on the line of time at the 'micro-temporal' level. They have reached space in that they are describing a world of co-emplaced affects, assemblages, abstract machines, regimes, etc.(and within this space of the transcendental-empirical they can even faintly see the formation of intent that is the escape group, calling it the nomad machine of deterritorialisation). At the level of critique, an indication they have arrived at space is that they have left behind the Hegelian story of the development or unfolding of the human world: everything is now visible as a space of contingent outcomes - the system of reason-revelation is deadly, and is not simply going to be naturally 'worked out' through the unfolding of the human spirit, or through a series of techo-material-human contradictions and their superceding solutions. It could all go either way:
"the stakes here are indeed the negative and the positive in the absolute: the earth girded, encompassed, overcoded, conjugated as the object of a mortuary and suicidal organisation surrounding it on all sides, or the earth consolidated, connected with the Cosmos, brought into the Cosmos following lines of creation that cut across it as so many becomings..." [p.510, Athlone, 1987].
The suppressive processes against which humans are struggling always "reterritorilise on the most deterritorialised element." Dreaming is reterritorialised as hero and romance tales, and as religion (with only tragedy generally standing out as a breaking open of a - limited, and negatively focused - view toward the transcendental). Reason is reterritorialised as organisational/financial structures governing and deadening peoples' lives, and as empirico-mathematical accounts of the world. And being 'in love' is reterritorialised as the institutions and myth-systems (fictions, astrology, religion) of the settled-down couple, as opposed to the couple as an expression of love for the world (as an explorer-traveller flight into the south of the unknown). These processes do not make up parts of a forward movement; they progressively crush, and when major changes occur they take new forms: it is a struggle that does not have the improvement of the human race inscribed within it.
*
The time-contours we envisage when we think, for instance, about several decades of time have no direct correlate in relation to our encounters with the world. Whereas, if we envisage a space several miles across, the contours we envisage do have direct correlates (this difference is part of the reason why time in this sense can initially seem so exciting). But we are looking for the depth in the wrong place: if you imagine the social world of an island with a few hundred human inhabitants, what starts to come into focus is a space of formations of intent, and it is then that you begin to envisage the fundamental depth. It is true that space here is also time, but time now can become perceptible as like thought, or dreaming, and not like a line in any way (to see it as a line is a 'fending-off' on the part of the control-mind). And more importantly, space now becomes the atmospheric spheroambience in which the human formations of intent are located: space becomes atmospheres, sometimes heartening, sometimes ominous, sometimes sublime (etc.). Writers of tales know this: they know we need to get to interacting forces as formations of intent, and inseparably, they know we need to get to the power of spaces. It is only very rarely that philosophy follows the writers of anomalous fictions and wakes the right, lucid form of attention in relation to space. And it is probably equally rare that radical politics leaves behind its processes of 'finding' signs of the coming 'Big Change,' and of projecting new overall forms of organisation, and sets out to concentrate primarily on the spheroambient - immediate - world around it, so that the seeing of the Future (and therefore of achievable futures for groups) can emerge from an effectuated encounter with the world. Stopping thinking in order to wake a perceptually and libidinally focused lucidity as the fundamental micropoloitical act.
*
It can be asked, at what point did I become a "partisan of time?" And, connectedly, at what point was my engagement with the worlds of anomalous tales pushed into the background? It can also be asked, how did I avoid becoming a partisan of the supplimentary dimensions of concepts and of subjectivity/phenomenology? (given that I was studying philosophy these were zones of semi-formal systematicity which were insistent as supposedly valuable directions). (and certainly, it should be said in advance, I did not avoid them through some special quality of perspicacity). And lastly, there is the question: is the residual tendency of A Thousand Plateaus to fixate micro-temporally on the line of time still profoundly vitiating?
(To clarify: it is obviously the case both that the world consists of formations of space-time, and that there are perspectives within this world into zones which are to be described as the aspect of the present which is the 'past,' but what is fundamental is to start from worlds of co-emplacement of formations of intent/energy (focusing therefore on space, and avoiding any imposition of a line of time, so that there is an openness to time being seen as like thought, or dreaming), and to avoid a fixation on history in general, as well as rejecting specious historical accounts which claim to show what the human world is supposedly dialectically moving towards in the future).
In the spring of 1984 I went for an interview at Coleg Harlech, to try to get onto a two year residential course which gave a university entrance qualification. I was, to say the very least, astonished by both Coleg Harlech, and Harlech itself. The day after the interview, when I was cycling to Blaenau Ffestiniog to catch a train, in order to get back to Yorkshire, I arrived at the specific thought that I had fallen in love with a place. And I was not being melodramatic - this was genuinely what had happened. Coleg Harlech itself was an inspired, well-equipped socialist venture that had started out in the 1920s, and had reached the point of having a large, beautiful library, an impressive teaching-and-administration building, a ten-story residential block, and an attached theatre - it was a kind of shockingly unsung 'legend,' (and all the more likely to remain unsung over the border in England, because it never used an English version of its name). And Harlech itself was an inspiring place through its own attributes (a small, friendly, stone-built town on top of a hill), but was in fact overwhelmingly attractive by virtue of its surroundings - it overlooked a curved, five-mile beach of white sand, and had a clear view both of Mount Snowdon to the north (with forested hills in the middle distance), and to the Llyn Peninsula to the west.
On a wall in the library there was a poster with a poem on it by Idris Davies:
Do you remember 1926? That summer of soups and speeches,
The sunlight on the idle wheels and deserted crossing,
And the laughter and the cursing in the moonlit streets?
Do you remember 1926? The slogans and the penny concerts,
The jazz-bands and the moorland picnics,
And the slanderous tongues of famous cities?
Do you remember 1926? The great dream and the swift disaster,
The fanatic and the traitor, and more than all,
The bravery of the simple, faithful folk?
'Ay, ay, we remember 1926,' said Dai and Shinkin,
As they stood on the kerb in Charing Cross Road,
'And we shall remember 1926 until our blood is dry.'
Reading this poem was a breath of fresh air. Or, to be more precise, all of Coleg Harlech was for me a breath of fresh air, and the poem was quintessentially part of Coleg Harlech. In a new, more focused way I was arriving at a perspective on the world that was from outside the central zones of the establishment. The poem could not have been more obviously about the now as well as 1926, given that the miners' strike was taking place (and given that Coleg Harlech was still in effect what it had always been - a place which functioned primarily to give working class people a second chance of getting into university). I was with the people at the moorland picnics, and in being with them, I was with the entire sunlit perspective of those who saw, in some way, the grinding, horrific, disaster of the human world, and who at the same time saw the beauty of the world beyond it.
And somewhere on the train journey from Llandudno to Chester I had a genuinely visceral realisation. I realised that now - in contrast to how things had been before - even the thought of listening to BBC Radio 4 gave me a slight, physical feeling of revulsion (my home didn't have a TV at the time, so the TV equivalent was not involved). To use the language that came to my mind on the train, I felt I had 'acquired an aversion' to Radio 4, the BBC's flagship news, documentary and entertainment channel on radio (and this was what had happened). Everything concerned the tone of the presenters' voices and a perceived overall lack of intense delight, and of courage in relation to radical, unconventional perspectives. I was seeing now what Radio 4 was - there was an immense breadth of coverage masking a lack of genuine, courageous openness (or, as I would put it now, it was a kind of grey, unnoticed 'clone' of openness). It was not that there was no valuable information (far from it), or coverage of important issues; and if I had been told that "Do you remember 1926?" had been broadcast on several occasions on the station, this would have made no difference. It was the mild, urbane, slightly neurotic tone to which I objected, as a micro-expression of the lack of delight, together with the conjoined lack of bravery in relation to non-conventional views that was also constitutive at the macrological level of the content. I didn't want to listen to the channel any longer, and this aversion has never entirely gone away. As a result of falling in love with Coleg Harlech (and Harlech) I had acquired a lasting response of discomfort in relation to Radio 4.
The academic and social world of Coleg Harlech was - taken as a whole - a little closer to the Future, but it is worth thinking about the 'break' involved in going there, and about the exact nature of the continuity at the level of 'dreamings.'
At the start of 1984 I had been trying to develop a fictional world for around a year. I was doing almost no writing, and felt generally that I was not getting very far with it, but the processes of 'dreaming it up' seemed on some level to be an improvement on the worlds on which I had been working during the two years before this. It was as if I had managed to claw my way back to a source of inspiration that had been in effect for me at the end of the 70s. There was a slightly 'lacklustre' quality about the whole venture, and yet - the quality of the air I was breathing was better.
The terrain was a parallel world of grassy hills and high moorlands, and there were two central characters. A boy growing up near a village, who was learning to use a throwing-weapon in the form of a small metal disc, three inches across, and a woman who would occasionally appear, on horseback, to give him instruction in using this weapon. Everything was sunlit, and also everything was quotidian - the boy's job was looking after sheep, and his family were sheep-herders. Everything that is, apart from the woman, who belonged to another social formation. This - non-industrial - parallel word had a group of people defending it, called the Gardions, and the woman belonged to this group - sometimes she would be in a group of eight or nine Gardions, all on horseback. They were defending the towns and herders of their world from malevolent, marauding creatures which would sometimes appear, and from some more comprehensive threat from 'dark' forces, but in creating the story I never - for whatever reason - went far beyond the initial set-up of the boy and the woman. The boy was a warrior apprentice, but he was also an apprentice in something that went beyond fighting. The woman had a bird that went everywhere with her - it was blue in colour, and was maybe around the size of a jay - and she was able to displace herself so that she could see through the eyes of this bird. The quotidian aspect somehow permeated even this, in that the woman had an ordinary, warm, friendly quality, and her ability with the bird was simply a skill which could be acquired, but nonetheless it would be correct to say that the boy was the apprentice of a sorceress.
The main influence here was Stephen Donaldson's The Illearth War, and the other two books in the trilogy in which The Illearth War is the second volume. I had read this trilogy in 1979, and for a some time afterwards my story-worlds had been deeply influenced by it. However, around 1981 I read The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, and underwent a change in relation to my 'dreamings.' However, although I was immensely impressed by these books, they did not fill my mind with departures in the form of images of sublime terrains in the way that the books of Donaldson had done (terrains in some way inspired by the source-material, but different, and with a striking feeling that was inseparable from the terrain, and from faint elements of a new story). I explored the Tolkien worlds, but without my really being aware of it, my imagination as a story-writer was not directly swept away by them: instead, it was during these years that my virtual-real worlds became more bleakly wintry, more fragmented and faltering, and more melancholy. (It is also worth thinking about the fact that it was at this time, around 1982, that I had a science fiction dream where I was a member of a group of four people on a space station who were under attack from zombie futural selves, selves who had found a way of coming back in time to attack us - it ended with a terrifying view along a corridor, down which our futural selves were shambling toward us). For all the extraordinary power, and occasional exceptional beauty of Tolkien's worlds it remains the case that this mythos is suffused with the metaphysical melancholy and reactionary conservatism of this writer's catholicism. And by 1983, perhaps aware of something unhealthy at work, I had simply left the books behind, and my ongoing story-worlds had simply re-connected themselves to other inspirations: most of the aspects of the world of the 'Gardions' were traceable to Donaldson, but it should be added that there was probably also some influence from the books of Anne McCaffrey.
By the spring of 1984 I had been reading 'classic' and more recent novels for several years, getting them from the local library in Malton, in North Yorkshire. So I was not lacking in other perspectives, beyond those of the writers of fantasy fiction. I had read The Mayor of Casterbridge, Pride and Prejudice, Women in Love, David Copperfield, Midnight's Children, Tristram Shandy, and many others. I loved all these novels, and at the level of thought, I had been struck by the anti-conventionality radicalism of Birkin in Women in Love (and this internationalist voice from beyond the establishment was no doubt part of what made me so open to the Marxist/socialist inspiration in effect at Coleg Harlech). But these books did not make me start out toward trying to write a novel in the usual sense of the term: without thinking about it, I kept getting images of striking, 'sublime' terrains, and the stories that came with them were about 'other worlds,' and it was this thread of inspiration that I followed, however unrewarding and frustrating the process might feel sometimes feel, when I attempted to work out plots, or write down scenes. It is only from the point of view of the literary establishment that Lawrence trumps Donaldson: if I had had a literature-reading, middle-class peer group at this time things might have been different (I probably would not have withstood the ridicule that would have been one likely response). But I was working at jobs in shops and factories, and I was far more likely in fact to meet people who were readers of popular modernism than to meet devotees of the classic realist novel. And so there was now an intense contrast or counterpoint between the novels I was reading and the story-worlds that I was still creating.
And in terms of the time of Hegelianism I was still barely thinking along these lines at all. Sometimes the future would open up as the future of mainstream science fiction, but the worlds involved could be as dystopian as they were utopian, and the fact that I had a strong tendency toward left-wing radicalism did not mean that my imagination had been swept up into a futural story of the natural unfolding of progress (where the story could be with or without intervention from revolutions). I remember listening, in 1983, to a programme about John Lennon, and afterwards thinking about the sphere of politics (in a way that may not have had much to do with the programme), arriving at the thought that it should be obvious to everyone that there should be fundamental equality in relation to gender, colour, ethnicity and class. But this creditable realisation did not entail that my time-horizon had been transformed (it is worth remembering that Imagine does not have the quality of zealous conviction about the future that can be displayed by political activists - it is far more active than that). I was still much more likely to think through space than through time.
In the transition-phase before going to Coleg Harlech mountains became involved at the level of the virtual-real. And so did forests, although in both cases (in very different ways) there is a a quality of the thought involved being somewhat alien in relation of the main zones of thought that were taking place at the time.
At some point in the summer of 1984 I had a dream where I was standing on top of Snowdon (a place I had never been), and where I was looking west, with vapour trails running east-west across the sky. A nuclear war was taking place, and was wiping out large areas of England. In the dream I knew that I had reached a safe place - a place that was beyond the main areas affected by the disaster. There was a perturbing and yet serene intensity about this dream, as if something momentous was being perceived, although at the time it remained enigmatic. I felt that it was not an indication from my unconscious that a nuclear war was coming, but this rejection of an empirical/anticipatory reading left me with nothing: it certainly did not begin to respond to the sublime atmosphere of the dream, an atmosphere that in part was about being high up in mountains.
I can see now that this was a 'planetary view.' I was not just on the top of Snowdon: in fact the dream was a view of the massif of Snowdon, and both of the sea beyond this massif, and of the sky. There were no humans in the view: instead there was the human world, and specifically the dream was a lens which in a somewhat distorted way was revealing a place that was closer to the Future, and which was also, inseparably, revealing the ongoing human disaster (the empirical - intercontintental war - was a lens for the transcendental). I think I perhaps incoately sensed this when from time to time I remembered the dream, looking toward Snowdon at Harlech, but at the surface-level the dream could always be seen as a bit of cold-war paranoia, with an attached sublime quality that in not focusing on it could be seen as just an expression of a desire for safety, or, if focused upon, would leave a feeling of something more. I had managed to escape into a place that was a fraction closer to the Future - or where the Future had not yet receded to the extent it had elsewhere - and it was only very occasionally that I would get a faint impression that as the escape was beginning I had experienced something that could be described as an 'eerie cry' - an enigmatic, jolting incursion into a silence.
The interview at Coleg Harlech was on a Monday, and I had to travel on a Sunday from near to the east coast of Yorkshire to the coast of North Wales, and Sunday was a day when the local train services were not operating in the vicinity of the college. I arranged to stay in the hall of residence for two nights, and my solution to the problem of the outward journey was to cycle the twenty five miles to York, setting out at 4 in the morning, take trains to Llandudno via Manchester, and then cycle the remaining forty miles, going across the mountain pass between Betws y Coed and Blauau Ffestiniog (this all seemed normal and enjoyable to me, rather than seeming like an ordeal: my only concern was that on the Sunday evening I would be tired and might make a bad impression).
Between Manchester and Llandudno I tried to get some sleep. And a new image-world suggested itself as a way of getting me to slip into a dream (for many years I had had different image-worlds that I used in this way - I had never given it any thought: it was just something I did, and they changed as new ones suggested themselves). The image was of a steep-sided hill surrounded and covered in forest, but where this hill was entirely filled with the rooms of a derelict, subterranean town, with windows looking out onto foliage. The image was initially indeterminate between ancient-mythical and modern, in that there was a quality of industrial-dereliction at one point, but it settled as having a sunlit, 'elf-city' quality, with an atmosphere of the more 'edgy' forest terrains within Tolkien's elf-mythos. There was a somewhat haunted feeling to the city, as if its inhabitants might be there all along, but not visible, or as if their return might in some way be perturbing. I liked this image-world, though it was a fraction too intense for me to go to sleep as a result of 'dreaming' it, and it felt as if it was a setting for a story, in a way where the possibility of creating a narrative along these lines seemed interesting.
But this world into which the image settled (as opposed to the modern, derelict-forested version) feels now as if it was a place from which Tolkien had started - and, specifically, as if it was a last arrival of something I had primarily left behind; an ur-oneiric element that still had some power to attract, but only for a very short time. Because - without thinking about it - I never returned to this image-world, either for the purposes of going to sleep, or to expand upon it: it remained a one-off, something that in fact was subsequently inimical to my imagination. After experiencing the Coleg Harlech milieu this story-world had been rendered uninspiring. In the course of two days I acquired a distance from Radio 4, and definitively left behind Tolkien, a very recurrently deleterious - unhealthy - zone within the worlds of anomalous dreamings I had been inhabiting.
My life in the fullest sense was turning a corner - and it was an indication of the nature of this change that on the evening after the interview I went to a performance of Twelfth Night at the theatre attached to the college, and immensely enjoyed the play, feeling surprised that the Elizabethan language was not a barrier. A girl who had also just been interviewed had decided to go to the performance, and had suggested we go together: the feeling at this point (after years of lack of direction and loneliness and dead-end jobs) was that a transition to a fundamental journey had taken place - at last I was travelling toward worlds of insights, toward creativity, toward women.
It is necessary to place ourselves, at midday, on the rocky hilltop immediately to the south of the centre of Harlech, and to look out across the sea toward the Llyn peninsula. It was on this peninsula, in July of 1984, that there was the largest onshore earthquake ever recorded in Britain (I was in Yorkshire at the time, so I did not experience it). There should be a sunlit clarity, but with a quality of extreme 'intensity' in the background. Equally, there should be a feeling of joy, but a joy tinged both with a charged sense of uncertainty about the ground beneath your feet, and, inseparably, with an impression of perceiving the fundamentally unknown out of the corner of your eye.
At Coleg Harlech I started a love affair with an area of academic knowledge that can be designated as philosophy, literature, and history. Because literature was part of this zone, there were already many elements within it which did not belong even indirectly within academia, but, as well as this, the starting-point ensured that, in terms of explicit political-pragmatic abstraction everything was always in the space of the non-dogmatic, socialist idea that there are other, much better ways of living than the forms of existence of capitalist society (which is to say that that these elements were relatively liminal in relation to the cities of the academic world).The starting-point was Shakespeare, and Charlotte Bronte, and Malcolm Lowry, and Yeats; and (with a zone of indeterminacy between the two) it was also Idris Davies' ""Do You Remember 1926?", and W.H.Auden's "Spain," and Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station, and E.P.Thompson's The Making of The English Working Class.
This transition did come with a double 'cost,' which was that certain writers of modern anomalous fictions were pushed tacitly into the background (that is, writers of more mainstream fantasy, science and horror fiction), and in the process of the transition I stopped attempting to write stories. But this was far more than counterbalanced by two developments. Firstly, the new fictions - in particular those of Shakespeare - were recurrently tales of the anomalous, and were, inseparably, profoundly valuable indicators of the transcendental. And secondly, I started on what was initially a quite sustained process of trying to express ideas and images (and feelings) through writing poems - and some of these poems had narrative elements.
Therefore, although I was in fact being drawn inexorably into the cities of academia, the initial leap to Coleg Harlech was indeed a movement into the Future. By the end of the two years of the course I was in certain ways further back into ordinary-reality than I had been in the first year, but this is not the issue directly in question. Coleg Harlech and Harlech were together an embodiment of immense expanses of what could be said to be the source of inspiration for fiction and poetry; I was living in a knowable group (almost everyone lived in the hall of residence), which, although it was acutely fractured, had a consensual warmth and tolerance, which meant that it was possible to benefit from very diverse viewpoints; across students and tutors there was almost always the view that another way of living was possible, where this would in some way be a departure from the grinding horror of capitalist social reality; and as well as studying works such as Hamlet and Jane Eyre and Women in Love, I was also doing what I had not had been doing before: whatever its value, and even if I was leaving stories behind, I was systematically producing creative work.
As well as this vantage initially being early summer, it is, in general, a daylight view. I was not inhabiting the night at this time: it is the daylight of the long views of the mountains and the ocean, but it is also the daylight of the routines of academia (I know I barely missed a single breakfast in the hall of residence during these two years: even if often what I was reading in the library was unconnected to my courses, my daylight-discipline was a solid tendency rather than just an aspiration). But it is whatever caused an unsettling disturbance or a shimmering of the sublime in this expanse of 'long perspectives of the known' that must now be recounted. That is, whatever involved a deepening of the perspectives, and whatever made the unknown seem like an all-around-you, enigma-suffused - and ruptural -aspect of the world (as opposed to it being a mere empirical unknown of unencountered variations of known forms and components, and of the 'yet to happen' unknown of the futural part of the line of time).
If you look to the left, and a little downward, there is the top of the Coleg Harlech hall of residence. Looking straight down, a sports centre and a playing field, and then, to the right, a straight road to the beach, running west, with houses around it; and to the north there is the main road, a school, and then a large, angular housing estate, made up of non-traditional white buildings (an expanse of modernism). The school is Ysgol Ardudwy, where for several years Philip Pullman has just been a pupil, travelling up from Llanbedr, a few miles to the south.
Beyond the sports centre, and alongside the road to the beach, there is a large white house, probably built in the previous twenty years: and, in the early summer of 1985, looking at this house as I walked past it gave me a feeling and an idea/story-world that took the form of the basis for a poem, which I wrote rapidly, without much subsequent revision. It can be seen that although going to Coleg Harlech was associated with a pause in my story-writing the process of writing stories in fact did not stop - it simply continued in a different channel:
Isolation
He was fifteen, and surprised to be there
In that vast white house, where his uncle
Was dying, dying of cancer, slowly
Like a god. He was surprised, but somehow
Very glad, to be there, in a world
So widely real, alive with sea-air, and sharp talk
Of life and death, with books, and with sunlight,
Sunlight on white walls.
Other guests
And visitors came and went like bright
Migratory birds - his uncle was famous - but he
The nephew, stayed, deposited,
At this place by the sea, like the sand
On the beach, drifting, slowly.
He moved through the house
And the tussocked coastland, keenly aware
Of the broadened skies. The ructions
At home seemed distant, and the quality
Of his loneliness had changed. There was discussion
Now, with visitors, with his dry, sardonic uncle,
And the company of his aunt,
His aunt, with her cool composure
And shining eyes.
He would sometimes sit and read
At the table in the kitchen, in the early morning,
With the book held wide, and a sun-flooded jar
Of ruby-coloured jam alongside
Striking at his mind with its brightness.
The house was fragrant with varnish
Spinning toward the sun, filled with sea-sound
And the song of birds. Sometimes it seemed
When he thought of his uncle, that the dying cells
Could be located somewhere in the house
Like a white rot, spreading through paint,
White through white, sliding,
Bringing dissolution.
One day the house would be his
And he could live there if he chose. He was heir
To life and death. On the beach, he would pass the sidelong crabs
With respect, but he had no fear of death,
He was caught in a dream of freedom,
At the bright centre of a world
So vast, so white.
What is this interiority that I have encountered - this house whose 'vastness,' despite being definitively tiny in comparison with the world, in some way faintly doubles the vastness of the world? ("that vast white house" / "a world so vast, so white"). The poem has an outside and an inside, and the inside is a place of 'prestige,' of some kind of undefined 'kudos' ("his uncle was famous"). When I wrote it I only had an atmospheric story-world directly in mind, but the poem works as a lens for looking toward an aspect of the trans-establishment, and this evidently is not an accident.
At Coleg Harlech I was setting out in the direction of academia, and simultaneously I was making an attempt to travel toward the world of the creation of literature, a world which in part also belongs to the trans-establishment. I was the newcomer (equivalent to the fifteen year old in the poem) for whom the situation was in some way familiar, but for whom there was still a striking quality of the new (although I had read fiction written by academics, I had been primarily drawn toward the worlds of the stories, as opposed to the world of writers, or to the domain of the knowledge-worlds - and prestige - of academia).
The world of the poem is one of energy, in the sense that the primary descriptive term for it is 'white.' The whiteness is everywhere, and is everything, and is haunted by something that arrives from sideways in the glare: "white through white sliding." It is also haunted by something that is trapping the protagonist, in that he is "caught in a dream of freedom." This is therefore an eerie whiteness, a whiteness that undermines the feeling of "at the bright centre" in the concluding lines, in that any egotism involved (as opposed to the fact that an individual corporeal perspective technically and non-virtuously functions as a central point) is in context to be seen as the result in some way of the boy being caught in an oneiric trap of believing in a metaphysical freedom separating him from natural forces.
And there is also a question about the gender of the whiteness. The boy in the poem can seem to be very adolescent-male, and, if only because he has no obvious feminine aspects, and seems to have a somewhat male, terrain-roaming 'bravado' about him, there is a sense in which this impression does remain in place. But it is the boy's aunt who is primarily associated with the whiteness, because of her "shining eyes." but also because the poem's primary trope of repetition is used only for the aunt and for the sunlight. And given the boy is described in terms of a brightness in the world (which is part of the world), and given also that the world is described as "so vast, so white," the poem ends in fact with the boy being described as an intense whiteness, and whiteness is a colour adopted in a symbolic/spiritual sense primarily by women rather than men. At this point it is worth taking up the poem, again, as a lens for looking toward the trans-establishment, and thinking about gender: the male here is predictably and horribly central and has a seemingly extreme level of kudos ("like a god"), but it is the uncle who in fact is dying. And meanwhile, who is the aunt? She is inconspicuous, but it is she who is more suffused by the energy; it is she who has the composure, and it is she who is not dying. What could perhaps be seen as a partial weakness of the poem when taken as a lens of this kind should maybe be left as a question-mark, or simply as the perception that women recurrently seem less addicted to 'kudos' than men (the aunt could also, for instance, be an academic or an artist: it is just that the fame seemingly pertains only to the uncle).
This is not at all to argue that this is an achieved poem (it is very rhythmically awkward). It is instead a question of seeing what can be seen through it, and seeing what is at work within it, despite its weaknesses. And there are two other issues which must be raised, before returning to the west-facing view from Harlech Rock, one of which is to do with time within the poem, and the other of which concerns the place it describes.
The poem gives an indication of the fact that I had acquired a philosophical problem - the problem of 'free will and determinism.' And it gives a first response to the problem:
He was caught in a dream of freedom.
A response which in fact is open-ended, and very positive, in that it suggests an actual freedom that would be the result of escaping from the trap. There is no pretence of having solved the problem, but merely the idea that the belief in free-will - in separation of human choice-making from the world of forces of the cosmos, of nature - might be a suppression of freedom.
I had acquired the problem because I had been told about it by someone who was studying philosophy. Everyone at Coleg Harlech studied two subjects, and mine were English Literature and History. But because the college was so small the 'walls' between the nine subjects it taught were extremely thin, and I heard a lot about what was being taught in other areas. And because - without giving the issue much thought - I viewed the study of literature as primarily the study of depth-level insights about the world, I was particularly interested in hearing about what was taking place in the philosophy courses, because the subject seemed to inseparable from the areas studied in English Literature.
But this problem of free-will-or-determinism was not something I dallied with as an intellectual 'curiosity.' Instead it had an intense, perturbing impact: I would forget about it, and then return to it, but when I thought about it the experience would be somewhere between a fascinated, enjoyable struggle and a complex anguish of thought. Although other issues were at a higher level of intensity and were more in the foreground, and although I was not officially studying philosophy, this problem became one of the most sustained intellectual processes of my two years in the college.
I was having a first struggle with the dogmatic image of the world, and for the first time was experiencing reason's fixation with the line of time as this fixation manifests itself in relation to metaphysics. Much later, as a result of beginning to engage with space as a world of co-emplaced forces (with simultaneous, reciprocal causality between them, as with a globular cluster of stars), the entire issue of causality from the past would come to appear as an incorrect overall framing of the problem, and the issue would be reconstructed on different lines, involving the perception that freedom is continually heightened by a primary focus on space (and involving time being seen as like worlds of thought, rather than as mechanistic progressions). But at this time, at Coleg Harlech, my conclusion was that my choice-making processes would have had a different pattern of outcomes if my first twenty one years had been different (for instance, if I had been to school, and had a different upbringing), or if my initial physical form had been different (or if both had been different), and given it was clear I had not chosen either the initial circumstances into which I had started out, or my initial physical form, the idea of free-will seemed dubious, at best. And my secondary conclusion was that, in any case, what I really wanted was to maximise my freedom to act (my freedom to create, love, explore, dream, perceive, understand), and to dissolve whatever was blocking the development of this form of freedom, and the issue of free-will was clearly irrelevant in connection with this process, or was even an obstruction. I was not particularly happy with this conclusion - in fact I sweated over it, generating the term 'attitudinal solution' for the kind of resolution I was arriving at, given that I had not in fact solved the originating problem. And of course I was in part unhappy because I was struggling with the dogmatic image of the world, and for this image (a key component of the control mind) if there was only nature then everything was a functioning of blind, mechanistic forces. I was coming to no precise conclusions, but I was refusing the idea of a supplimentary dimension of choice-making, separate from the world of natural forces, and this triggered the dogmatic image's idea of nature as blind, and only accidentally creative. The control mind does not want you to let go toward affirming the spheroambient and immanent world of natural forces as in fact the world of choice-making, because then you might begin to perceive the zones and aspects of the empirical-transcendental, and might begin to free yourself from both the dogmatic image of the world and the control mind itself.
The question of the space of the poem leads in directions which are very different.
At the level of human societies, it would not at all be right to say at all that it is not set in Wales (this was the place I had primarily in mind as I wrote it) but I was aware in writing it that the fact it could be anywhere in the world was a good thing, and I was not simply imposing England onto Wales in that the one element that evoked somewhere other than Wales was the the suggestion of tussock-grass ("tussocked coastland"), and this kind of grass is a feature of places like New Zealand, and not of England. Overall it is was no doubt a valuable situation that in Harlech I had an extra impulse to take me toward the trans-national or the planetary, as opposed to the poetry of the local world, because I knew that I could not easily invoke local names, in that they were names which existed within another cultural/linguistic world and therefore I did not know their meaning (I think the only time I used a local name was in a poem which had the refrain "On Harlech beach," and here I was directly naming a planetary element, as opposed to a cultural one).
The tonality of the poem is 'planetary' rather than social, suggesting forces beyond those of the human world: at sunrise the house is spinning toward the sun; the boy has been deposited at the house like the sand on the beach; the guests are like migratory birds. Though (perhaps along with whatever is spreading through the walls) the key beyond-the-human element is light and colour: it is a poem of the all-colours that is white light, and of one other colour - the depth-colour or transparency colour of light-suffused red.
*
The beginnings of answers are now being provided in relation to the questions that were asked at the start of this section - the questions concerning time and the faculty of dreaming. But the whole process of going back to the two years at Harlech is also an answering of other questions: it is a step back in order to go further. In fact, all of the primary issues of this book/blog are in effect here (including the question of 'the eerie northwest'): and of these the one that is by far the most important is that of the direction of Love-and-Freedom. In going to Coleg Harlech my life turned toward a process of acquiring knowledge, and, inseparably, toward a specific zone of the trans-establishment which, as such, is a domain of the functionings of a fixated, suppressive form of reason. But this was happening under circumstances where I kept getting faint glimpses of what it would be like to take the onward path toward both lucidity and dreaming (and to travel toward Love-and-Freedom is intrinsically to wake these two faculties).
The summer view from Harlech Rock should be explored for a moment. The first point is that it is a view of a place beyond mountains: and this is true both of the terrain immediately around you, and of the Llyn peninsula beyond the bay. It is a place with a fundamental vastness, and yet with an aspect of seclusion. It is like a valley, but one side of the valley is the sea. The second point is that the contours within the view to a very great extent are un-modified by humans. This is true of the silhouette of the peninsula, of the Snowdon range, of the ocean, of the rock you are standing on, and also of the beach and the huge area of dunes. Again, it is true of the erosion-facets of the steep, grassy cliffs to the south, and of the main horizon-line of the mountain running behind you, running upward from south to north: and beyond the bare rock on which the castle has been constructed the woodlands on the steep slope, although no doubt heavily managed, are also predominantly a space of contours which are not the result of a human plan.
As well as seeing it on a hot, dreamy day in summer, it can be envisaged on a frosty night in winter, with stars, and with the thought of the iron age hill fort at the top of the ridge behind you, two miles to the north and a thousand feet further up. It might begin to seem after a while that this is not an ordinary place, and that it it is a vantage from which the Outside is a little more visible than normal.
In going to Coleg Harlech I stopped attempting stories, but in a crucial sense what had been involved not only continued, but was taken over an upward-threshold, in that I started to produce work. (the existence of a poetry reading group - which met weekly in a pub, on a weekday evening - was no doubt extremely important for this continuation in a new channel). It was only really in the second year at the college that a process of suppression began to go into effect.
In the first year a sense of the world around me as unknown increased steadily through the autumn and early winter, and then held itself in place - in certain ways becoming even more intense with the arrival of spring, and then summer. A doorway - an opening - had appeared in front of me in a way where it was clearer than it had been before: and it would be more true to say that before this there had only been something like a window. This opening in fact related to issues that went far wider and deeper than a process of trying to become a writer, but an aspect of its appearance was that I now had a technique for writing which was about opening up to the unknown (it was a technique that I had instinctively been drawn towards - without thinking about it - in relation to writing anomalous or 'fantasy' tales, but I had failed to get it to work). This approach was the following: if images, ideas or words gave me an intense, enigmatic feeling - particularly a sublime feeling - I would set out to write a poem which drew upon the inchoate but inspiring starting-point. The unknown was here the source of the question: why does it give me this feeling? Why do I get this intense, sublime feeling from the sight of the Llyn Peninsula? Why do I get this beautiful, haunting feeling from the sight of the big white house on the road to the sea; or from transparent crimson? And the exploratory correlate of this process at the level of reading was that I focused-in on poems and lines within poems where I did not really understand what was being said (again, the unknown) but where the words gave me a powerful feeling.
However, the wider aspect of the opening was that the world around me was increasingly being experienced - no matter how faintly - as an enigmatic, spheroambient unknown, a place in which there might, for all I knew, be profoundly anomalous forces at work. And it is to be remembered at this point that in going to Coleg Harlech I was very much not leaving anomalous tales behind - the opposite, in fact. All through the first year I was studying Shakespeare's plays, and because of the sheer intensity of these works (and because no other individual writer was studied for a whole year) it seems right to say that I was 'met off the boat' by Shakespeare on arrival in Harlech in a way that goes completely beyond the initial accident of going to see Twelfth Night when I went to the college for the interview. And Shakespeare's plays were written facing the transcendentally unknown - were written facing the anomalous.
In November we studied Antony and Cleopatra, and I was very struck by the point where the soothsayer says
In nature's infinite book of secrecy
A little I can read.
Although I was unsure what to say about it, I felt this to be a crucial idea being expressed (it is important to see that the soothsayer sees the anomalous, but this is connected up with the idea of the natural, as opposed to the supernatural). And I was simultaneously struck by the point where two soldiers hear the music of spirits departing (spirits which are supposed in some way to have been accompanying and assisting Antony), a moment which serves no purpose at the level of the plot, and functions only to justify the soothsayer's earlier perception that Antony was being helped in this way.
My engagement with the transcendentally unknown had in fact been taken over an upward threshold: far from having moved away from 'fantasy' fiction I had moved toward engagement with a zone which was full of stories about the anomalous, while at the same time being held to be a paradigm of mainstream literature. And as a paradigm in this way, part of what was in question was insights about the world - and this meant that the process was now explicitly philosophical as well as imaginative. It seemed that on some level it was a question of learning to read 'an infinite book of secrecy.'
However, the full account of the 'opening' which had appeared is that alongside it - maybe you could say at right angles to it - had appeared another doorway: the direction of the academic study of literature and the world. I was very much drawn in this other direction as well, and without really being aware of the 'contradiction' involved - without being aware, that is, of the irony that literature academics in principle stay within the framework of ordinary-reality, whereas Shakespeare is not just pointing toward the 'tragic' and toward thought-provoking aspects of ordinary existence, but in fact is systematically hinting at areas of the transcendental other than that of tragedy. All I noticed at the time was that, in a way that was all the more powerful for it being quiet and enigmatic, Antony and Cleopatra was far more of a fantasy story than I had been expecting, and that my teacher - who I feel was in fact a good, inspirational teacher - never brought up this aspect of the play (and nor in fact did the writers of the essays that I read on the subject). The discourse all stayed on the level of tragic flaws, magnanimity, love and loyalty, and did not go near to the ocean of the anomalous (which of course also means that it had not really begun to talk about tragedy at the level of the transcendental, keeping it as merely a personal issue).
I did not attempt to articulate a perspective which was radically from outside those that were being offered to me - and nor did it occur to me that there was any need. It was interesting that there were more fantasy elements in literature than might be thought from a distance, but this thought was as far as it went in terms of an explicit taking-up of particular issues. But although I had nothing to say on the subject, and had a default tendency to take one of the customary views, this did not stop me from attempting to see the world through Shakespeare's works (and in the course of the year the anomalous kept appearing in other writers I was studying: Jane Eyre has a moment of apparent 'action at a distance;' there is a suggestion that the horses in The Rainbow are Spinozistic elements within some kind of planetary intelligence, etc.). As the days grew shorter - and as there was more darkness, with its tendency to conduct the mind toward the unknown, especially in a place like Harlech - I was encountering the world with what on one level was very much the 'daylight' modality of conventional academic views. This was not at all the visions-at-night modality (with its intrinsic tendency toward intense deterritorialisation) that I would become aware of several years later in Swansea. And yet, because of the ways in which I was engaging with the world (and because I had not yet been displaced to any great extent toward a fixation with the line of time) there was a subtle heightening in my experience. I was both attempting to use Shakespeare as a lens for seeing the world, and I was using another strategy of deterritorialisation in relation to thought, in that my writing and reading of poetry had started to concentrate on areas that were powerful but where whatever faint understanding I had was not initially at the point where I could put it into words, or where there was simply an intense feeling.
The oneirically charged intensity of that winter had another source - and one that in fact was probably even more powerful. Toward the end of the term I fell in love with a woman called Tara, who was studying Psychology and Welsh Studies, and embarked on a yearning almost-relationship which never quite crossed the threshold, partly through my own sheer ineptitude and inexperience, and also because we were not at all well suited to each other.
It should be said at this point that the two years at Coleg Harlech were far from 'successful' in terms of my attempts toward relationships with women. I was continually feeling an intense longing toward different women at the college, but I was still far too earnest, which in part is to say that I had an outsider's incapacity to use the playful irony that is an integral part of most courtships (this irony is a faked insouciance, but when it is done well it is a real proof of poise, and, afraid of saying anything negative, I didn't even have the beginnings of an ability to use this form of communication). Another inability was a failure to recognise the default modality of the dance of courtship/seduction: I felt that what my lust was telling was me was not what I should do, and that it was right in principle to leave instigation to the woman as much as possible: not knowing that the complete opposite was true of the default of the dance. Overall the man leads in this conventional modality, and he does indeed allow his lust to speak and instigate, but in the most, subtle, well-timed way possible.
But what is success? For a while I was deeply in love with Tara, and at this time she was responding to some extent to my advances; and we had some good times together. And I was spared the insecurity and jealousy that would have been the inevitable result of having an ill-matched relationship while living in the hall of residence: this ten story community was a melting-pot in which relationships came and went rapidly - perhaps the most all-round attractive, inspired woman in my year started a - well-matched - relationship in the first two weeks of the term, and she and her new partner instantly responded to the libidinal waves she was creating by leaving immediately and renting a small house in a village three miles away. And my intellectual confidence was far higher than my ability: I was recurrently in danger of ridicule, through well-founded or spurious but effective attacks (under normal circumstances I could generally hold my own, but if I had been insecure I am certain I would have ended up being very miserable under such circumstances).
As it was, the late autumn and winter was a shift to a situation which profoundly figured the second sphere of action. It was true that all of my tutors were men, but this was more than counterbalanced by my being in love with Tara (and as I recovered from the failure of the relationship it was still the case that I was surrounded by many women to whom I was attracted); there was a place around me that predominantly consisted of quiet expanses that to a great extent were straightforwardly planetary, rather than them being heavily formed/constructed by the human world; and I had been swept away into studying dreamings - with their intense engagement with intent - and therefore I was faced toward the abstract.
And now there was a quality of the unknown about everything - the tone had been set by the phrase 'nature's infinite book of secrecy.' Hovering on the edge of a relationship I was charged up with energy, and at the same time I was looking toward the transcendental. Everything became more extraordinary, and small, anomalous intensities became more noticeable: at one point I was in a shop in Porthmadog (a town ten miles to the north of Harlech), and found myself looking at the ruby depth-colour of a bottle of raspberry vinegar, struck by the intense beauty of this world of colour. And it should be noticed that in looking around me I was not necessarily always looking in the right direction, in looking toward the transcendental. Elements in the literature I was reading were central to this, but it was also the case that Tara had an intense love for the Arthurian mythos, and took very seriously the idea that its anomalous aspects were in some sense an expression of reality. And, unlike Shakespeare, Athurianism faces toward what it would be right to call 'transcendental west,' somewhere that is very definitely not the direction of Love-and-Freedom. I did not in fact start reading Arthurian stories (it is as if this decision, in leaving behind Tolkien, was implacable - it would have been an even more retrograde step than going back to Tolkien), but this other, westward direction was somewhere I was already recurrently facing through far more modernist writings. A poem which impressed me at this time was by the Welsh poet Gwyn Jones, and was called "The Meaning of Fuschias." I didn't understand it at depth, but it seemed to be about a man visiting a woman (a lover?, a sister?) in a mental hospital. (It is to be remembered that in mainstream literary modernism the primary anomalous misadventure of human existence is madness, and the affects of the gothic are therefore transmutated along these new lines).
I was very struck by two moments in the poem, the first of which seemed to be an attempt to enter into the mind of the woman
The cupboards of the trees, creaking,
Creaking.
The second was near the end (the poem was perhaps two pages in length), and seemed to be an attempt to see the whole space being encountered:
And you, and all our darkened suns
Possess me through the gateways of your tears.
These phrases ran on in my head. I repeated them: they were like light getting through. The same thing was happening with lines from Shakespeare, and also with lines from Dylan Thomas (with Thomas the colour of the light - insofar as it can be described in this way - was often a kind of 'solar green,' -as with the line 'fire green as grass', or 'the force that through the green fuse...'). But, to return to the initial point, one direction in which I was looking at this time was definitely a good distance to the west of south. Towards the end of this phase I discovered and memorised this poem by Yeats, a poem whose green is of a very different kind, and which looks west, while glimpsing north:
Your hooves have stamped at the black margins of the wood
Even where horrible green parrots call and swing
My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud
I knew that horse-play, knew it for a murderous thing
What wholesome sun has ripened is wholesome food to eat
And that alone. Yet I, being driven half insane
Because of some green wing, gathered old mummy wheat
In the mad abstract dark, and after ground it slowly, grain by grain.
But now I bring you full-flavoured wine, from out of a barrel found
Where seven Ephesian topers slept, and never knew
When Alexander's empire passed, they slept so sound.
Stretch out your limbs and sleep a long saturnian sleep
I have loved you better than my soul for all my words
And there is none so fit to keep a watch and keep
Unwearied eyes upon those horrible green birds.
The unknown had opened up a little, and being in love with Tara (despite her Arthurianism) was immeasurably valuable, and despite everything I was predominantly being guided by the love and delight that is quietly always implicit in Shakespeare (in the overall music of Shakespeare). And during this time I set out toward an ability to write poems. Which is to say that I started to make a sustained attempt to write poetry, as opposed to the continually faltering, minimal attempt to write anomalous tales that had preceded this. Within only a few months the process would start to be damaged by excessive abstraction, and by a fixation on the line of time (together to some extent with a fixation on interiority in form of the idea of the mind), and within five or six years it would have come to a complete halt. But for a short while an actual attempt was taking place.
If the following four poems (all written in the spring and summer of 1985) are taken together with the poem Isolation - which was written at the same time - the feeling is that I am unsettled in looking to the west, am darkly haunted by the north, and as yet do not know how to say anything much about my experiences of the south. I have a knowledge of summer, but I also know that romanticism in poetry is dead, and my lack of experience of sustained travelling in a southward direction means that in glancing toward the Future (as opposed to moments when I am looking north) I am unlikely to break the new rules of poetic realism.
Blizzard
The sky's steel chalice
Is a bowl where snowflakes sift
Swift paths to cold earth.
There are no names
For the spirits which seem turning
In the towers of the tall wind
They are slow and ravenous
Toothed like prowling wolves.
The air is hushed, devoid of birds.
Between one range of whitened hills
And the next, the vale's fecund soil
Is stretched tight, like racked flesh.
Now, wind rising, the vast dance
Of inhuman change seems audible.
It whirls, skirls above the subject land,
Every footstep another death.
Now, for those who listen
There is the touch of holocaust
Huge suffering. The huddled houses
Appear almost poised
On the edge of waking,
Hearing - but soon
The blizzard's grip will give
And the rain will come,
Will furnish, with its pale curtains
Against red-brick walls, red-tiled roofs.
Only the image of normal, quotidian pain.
Sea by Night
Waves are breaking
Over the cold and seething strand,
Sharp in the breach of silence.
Open window,
Shivering night
Shovels in the distance
Are gently shearing sand
On Harlech beach
They softly reach
To scatter grains of sound
That break upon a blunted mind
And softly stinging, sharp, unkind
Scrape limbo,
Wash inward sight
With the spray of harsh reality
That laves and loosens knuckled thoughts
And tries to teach
The waking with the fault -
And with the cleansing comes the salt -
On Harlech beach.
Haven in Winter
And long and down through the clocked corridors
On quiet carpets I carried my books and wondered
At soft spines of leather, and crisp, shining leaves.
The smoke of gold, bright and morning-windowed
Was the cold that warms the memory when you turn away to warmth
And often, more than often, I turned with that shining
And took the amber glow down the corridor within me,
The gently padding corridor, clocked and soft,
With windows only on snow and winter slumber
Of dark hot beech trees with frozen sparks of leaves
Still brightly hanging, and telling of last year's fire.
Warm and rich as buttered toast and jam
By a blazing mantled fire when snow is falling
Slow and deep, the corridors and passages I wondered long and then.
Came spring, and the fading crimson bindings brightened
Like the robin, and disappeared among the leaves
That burst bright into vital green. Only to dry and fade
So quickly. The wood in the darkening grate burns out,
The ashes it leaves grows gold, and their greyness
Is the daylight of a wet June day without shelter.
The crackling of a dying fire grows louder like the clocks
Of the warm lamplit corridors that amplified their music
Into harsh news of parting, and the hard glaring stares
And spaces of the world beyond a dream.
The long dream of haven's doorway and of coloured perfect warmth
Beneath the blanket of the snow's wide eaves.
And long and down through the clocked corridors
On quiet carpets I carried my books and wondered
At soft spines of leather, and crisp, shining leaves.
The Lovers
Like a tight fist of love
The lovers are holding flowers, and wandering back
From the meadow.
They are as strong as expanding ice
And as enviable
As the lark that flies
Above a boring picnic.
For all their weaknesses, these poems show an awareness that there is something wrong within the world, while at the same time showing a degree of attunement to an enigmatic beauty within it. They are a beginning, in both the overall sense that I am starting to 'listen' toward the world, and also - in relation to the last poem - in the sense that I am moving towards an attempt to think dispassionately about love relationships. (which is not at all a question of being intrinsically negative toward them, but is instead a question of seeing them as whole, and as a force within their social environment).
However, in the second year at the college, there is no doubt that the line of time began to take up my attention. Instead of the spheroambient unknown there was now, more and more, the line of historical time, with its social and natural known (past and present), and its futural unknown. And many factors conducted me toward this fixation, some of them social, some oneiric-poetic, some straightforwardly historico-political.
The idea of transformations-to-come was everywhere, and on an initial level this was fundamentally valuable (it involved the idea of an other, better way of living - an idea which is intrinsic to a greater proximity of the Future). The fact that socialism was the prevalent value-system and dreamed horizon at the college was what was so valuable about it as a milieu, and yet there was still a cost in relation to the fixation on the line of time, in that this fixation creates a kind of grave clone of openness (you are open to the known of the human disaster, and you are open to the projective chronological unknown of the future, but you are no longer fully open to the spheroambient unknown of the world around you). It also involves a passivity, and a secret, Hegelian presupposition - in that the crucial actor is now history, and this actor is believed to have a good will: "inevitably people will eventually come to their senses." Coleg Harlech was split into those who were macro-politically focused, and those whose engagement with the world was more philosophical, artistic and micropolitical, and at the same time the people who were intensely engaged along the lines of molar politics were split between those who wanted a Wales separate from England, and those who did not: and yet the overall, dreamed horizon across all of these students tended almost always to be socialism (the separatists wanted a politically separate, but socialist Wales, etc.). The dream was inspiring, and all the more inspiring for being without precise contours in terms of principles of organisation (there was no dogma of the ideal 'republic', or anything approaching such a dogma), and yet the dream - which at its core concerned reaching into the present to find what was at a higher level of intensity within it - came with the deadly problem of the cloning of openness through fixation on the line of time.
At the level of what I was studying there were many different ways in which I was being conducted toward time. Everything connected up: Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano was there explicitly alongside the process of studying the Spanish Civil War; Tolstoy was a window into the events that led up to the Russian Revolution. And for the first time I encountered a poem which was powerfully oneiric, and yet explicitly political - W.H.Auden's poem "Spain."
The fundamental value of what was taking place was that I was starting to see the outline of the transestablishment. In reading about the Spanish Civil War I began to realise that the states of the 'western' world are not so much against fascism, as against any fascistic states that cause them problems (otherwise Franco would have been deposed, and there would be no alliances with fascistic dictatorships). But this shift toward a deeper understanding was associated with a shutting down of an overall movement toward the transcendental, and in particular toward the south of the outside.
In studying European drama from Ibsen and Chekhov to John Bond, together with the novels of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, there was not enough to maintain the view toward the unknown that had been broken open in the first year by Shakespeare, Charlotte Bronte and D.H.Lawrence. Everything started to come together onto a line: a line that projected out toward a transformation somewhere off in the future (and a line which in the primary sense was of the same kind as the line that was already involved in the question of free-will and determinism).
During that second year I felt that somehow things had faded a little. This was an overall impression, but I also wrote fewer poems, and felt that my writing had become worse, rather than better. But on sunny days when I looked out toward the Llyn Peninsula I recurrently received a serene, powerful feeling that came with an image of an area of high, beautiful hills which were somewhere in Eastern Europe (perhaps in Russia or Poland, but in any case, they were not somewhere I had been). The poem I wrote on the basis of this starting-point makes me feel that space and the planetary had somehow broken through again (though under different circumstances) and it also makes me feel that I was continuing a process of trying to answer the question of where a love relationship 'goes.'
The Tilsit Hill
We're a long way now from the Tilsit Hill
In another country, far away
From the wide and lonely place where once
We wondered for a day.
We've learned so many things since then,
We've seen the cruel knives
That take the weakest and the best,
We've slowly lived our lives.
We've learned the reasons for the deaths
Of people that we knew
We've learned of rents and mortgages,
Of payments overdue.
We've lived within a widened world
And seen with clearer sight
Though the world has shrunk to a tiny ball
And colours have paled to white.
Its a long time now since the day we stood
On the height of the Tilsit Hill
When the summer trees, and the seas of grass
Were brave with light, and still.
There was birdsong, and the faint sound
Of our young, unhurried breath.
The hill was vast and perfect
For the flooding sun was death.
I didn't feel happy about the jolting rhythm and simple rhyme scheme of this poem, but something had 'got through' in the process of exploring the image and feeling, and I did not think about trying to re-write it. There was a sense in which I did not fully understand the ending (though it felt right), and therefore there was no point in trying to re-write it, even if I thought I had taken a kind of 'retrograde' step in terms of the poem's form.
It is clear that the poem has a line of historical time, as well as the personal time of the couple, and that what insists into and through this is space, and an expanse of the planet that is to a large extent outside the human world - as if in writing it I was trying to 'ground' myself again in the space around the human world, instead of being fixated upon this world, both along the line of history, and across a de-contextualised and nebuoulsly spatialised breadth. It is also clear that I had found something in looking oneirically toward love relationships: that is, the kind of relationship that can last for sixty or seventy decades (there is nothing naive or romantic in finding something positive within the sphere of such relationships - they exist, and recurrently a deep-seated love is involved in them, whatever their problems might have been). And it is worth pointing out that after Coleg Harlech I wrote fewer and fewer poems, in a process that ended in the first year of my Warwick degree, when I wrote another poem which was about a relationship of this kind, a poem which started out as a disinterested experiment in using the structure of spring/summer/autumn/winter, and then acquired an unexpected intensity, a pathos. After this I wrote no more poems for many years - this line of creativity simply terminated. It was if I had discovered something that I was travelling towards, but I did not want it to be like that. I wanted this relationship, but 'in flight,' as opposed to this relationship in its 'settled down' form, with its sedentary-life yearning for a direction that had been left behind, on the Tilsit Hill.
At Coleg Harlech I continued reading anomalous tales, and not just in the form of Shakespeare's plays, though to a great extent I left behind the line of contemporary fantasy/sci-fi/horror that I had been following before. I read - and intensely enjoyed - two works that are liminal in relation to what is conventionally called 'literature' - the collection of stories The Book of Sand, by Borges, and Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan. But there was no spark triggered from these in terms of writing stories: a shift had taken place toward studying literature/philosophy/history, and before long even the thread of narratives-within-poems had disappeared.
However, the final point that must be made about these two years at Harlech is that something was happening in terms of story-worlds that could be said to belong to the space of anomalous tales, only in a way where there was no writing involved, and no thought that the process was one which would take a written or even a spoken form.
Before going to sleep a new, very recurrent 'dreaming' that would come to me was the idea that I was escaping from a repressive, disastrously dangerous society (with a chance of some kind of pursuit from agents of this society) and was in a countryside or semi-wilderness area not far from a city, and that I found a partially or extremely derelict path which had been created for unknown reasons, but which was going up into the hills into which I was travelling. The hills were forested, with open grassland areas, and were stacked up in ranges, each broad-topped range higher than the last, and with slightly lower areas, several miles across, between each new range - horizon, after horizon, range after range. Everything was sunlit, and after a while the path had gone, and my aim, as well as to go further away, and higher up - across one escarpment-threshold after another - was to veer slightly to the side in relation to the direction in which the path had been going, and then to follow an unpredictable path in case there was a pursuit. But the affect was not one of fear: after several thresholds had been crossed the affect was of joy and of 'solar trance' (a feeling of freedom, and of the beauty of these sunlit uplands) - and the fear of the pursuit had been transmutated into the joy of the thought that I had got away.
*
It was the winter of the second year of my undergraduate degree (1990-1991), and I had just walked the mile from my flat to the new bookshop that had recently been opened in the centre of Coventry. The door to the shop was about thirty yards away from the Lady Godiva statue, and the store formed one corner of a new shopping mall that had been constructed on one part of the highest area of the city's hill, and which had to some extent incorporated the statue as a kind of figurehead in front of the arch leading to its main concourse.
Standing in the shop, the book I started reading was William Gibson's 1982 collection of short stories, Burning Chrome, and the story I read was "Hinterlands."
This story is about a future world where a point has been discovered in the solar system where, under specific circumstances, spaceships will disappear, to reappear months or years later, having spent the intervening time in other, undetermined zones/dimensions of the cosmos. The first astronaut to whom this happens, by accident, is a Russian cosmonaut called Olga, who comes back holding an alien sea-shell. Later, a French astronaut returns with a "twelve-centimetre ring of magnetically coded steel" whose information is a cure for cancer. However, Olga returns insane, to the extent of being unable to communicate anything about what happened, and the French astronaut is dead when he is found: in relation to the human beings who undertake it the journey is always in one sense or another a fatal one. At the point where they are found the astronauts are either permanently insane, or have killed themselves.
The additional aspects of the situation with this 'line of communication' are, firstly, that all recording instruments come back blank (which suggests that the journey might be to a dimension of the cosmos with different physical principles), and, secondly, that there is no certainty about a spaceship disappearing, apart from the fact that spaceships with more than one human occupant are never 'taken.' (in the context, the fact that the number of observers is a factor functions to point toward the quantum level of the physical world, which, again, connects with the idea of a dimension involving other modalities of matter/energy).
The human race has constructed a huge, centrifugal-force space station at the singular point ("an eighth of the way out toward the orbit of Mars") at which the spaceships disappear, and this station has an artificial gravity mockup of an idyllic Earth terrain, in an attempt to keep the astronauts sane when they return. And the attempt to hold the returning astronauts in a state of sanity has even been extended to the point where their ship is placed alongside a fake ship in this mockup of a 'paradisal' wilderness, and where the person who goes into the ship pretends to be a fellow astronaut who is on, or has just returned from, another mission into the unknown. These 'actors' are astronauts whose ships did not disappear when they went to the departure-point, and who not only have been carefully matched so as to be maximally attractive to the returning travellers, but have also been given an arsenal of different psychotropic substances to help them in their attempt to assist people who in some cases, in fact, have enough composure and intellectual focus to find extremely elaborate, difficult ways of killing themselves, such as reprogramming machines (the drugs have been provided on the basis that an 'alternative culture' atmosphere will be more conducive to sanity than any set up which has the urgent, clinical tonality of a military investigation). And yet, despite all these efforts, there has been no success of any kind. The returnees either find ingenious ways of killing themselves, or descend immediately into one some form of extreme, comatose insanity. The human race has discovered a line of communication, of contact (the French call it le metro, the subway, the Russians call it 'the river', and the Americans call it the Highway), but they can't get anything back from it other than dead or insane astronauts, and occasional alien artifacts and objects.
In reading this story I reached a distant view of the body without organs. An inference which it suggested to me (and this is not an idiosyncratic or against-the-grain reading) was that the reason why the returning astronauts all went mad was that they were returning from a state of bliss so great that the collapse back across a downward threshold was too horrific for them to withstand it. And the idea that came with this was even darker, and was the thought that it might not just be a question of this dimension being substantially less good than the one visited by the astronauts, but that the world of ordinary human reality was in some fundamental sense horrific or disastrous all along. This left the thought that the space or dimension of the cosmos that we standardly encounter (the one studied by science), might be a kind of horror-infested, generally empty antechamber into which beings further up into reality do not attempt to communicate, because of a lack of any ability on our part to understand them, and perhaps also because of the infestation - whatever this is.
But the hinterlands - the worlds behind or beyond this one - would therefore be everywhere around us, a spheroambient Future. And given that they would consist of another dimension of the cosmos, they would also be immanent to each one of us, transecting us, and on some virtual level, suffusing us (the problem would simply therefore be one of actualising something that is already permanently though fugitively in effect at the level of the body without organs). To state this overall perspective in another way, the alien sea-shell found by Olga Tovyevski is all along pointing toward the ocean of the body without organs: a kind of white, vertical ocean, a white wall into which those who collapse into schizophrenia travel a short distance, and then return into the disarray of insanity, as opposed to passing into or through the wall and then continuing; or learning how to pass into it and return with experience that functions to heighten awareness, and to assist toward a waking of the intellectual faculties that would be a return into the wall - into the Future. The Frenchman who brings back something immensely valuable but who collapses would therefore be Antonin Artaud (on a slightly different level Olga points toward Tarkovsky's Stalker and towards Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic). And the Future has of course been there all along - "at the edge of the Highway every human language unravels in your hands - except perhaps the language of the shaman..." (the Future is the bliss of travelling into wider realities; the bliss of desubjectified micro-modalities of existence, at the level of encounters, becomings and faculties, and at the inseparable level of the energy-fields of the body). The white wall of the body without organs, and the immanent, non-Hegelian future are of course fundamental to the project that reached its culmination in France at the same time as the writing of "Hinterlands" - the two books of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, whose authors refer to themselves and other explorers-into-the-wall by saying 'we sorcerers,' and who go back to the 1930s and 1940s not just for the works of Artaud but also for the works of Virginia Woolf. Beyond ordinary reality is the vertical wall of the Futural ocean which Woolf is pointing towards in writing The Waves.
I had received a glimpse, but this glimpse was to a great extent a profoundly inchoate view, and despite the strength of the starting-point in relation to the reading of the story, it was as if after this point I had been using an additional lens, and one that made something latent - and therefore contestable - in the piece connect up with the story's explicit powerful aspects (so I didn't even have a conventionally stable textual basis). I had worked with my lenses, and succeeded, but this did not mean that I knew how to explain either what I had done, or what I had seen.
I had read the story because I had asked Nick Land what philosophy books it would be valuable for me to read, and, with intense enthusiasm, he had said I should read Gibson. I very much agreed with the widened definition of philosophy that this implied, and I was evidently being told that there were valuable perspectives within Gibson's books. And this recommendation was an aspect of a return to the foreground of the 'stories of the anomalous' that I had been reading from long before I started officially studying literature (along with other aspects in the form of Nick's other engagements with sci fi and horror, and of an openness to tales of the anomalous that was in effect quite widely within the Warwick philosophy milieu).
A part of the affect at this time was therefore that it was good to have some company, at last, in exploring this very extraordinary space of writing. I had not yet returned to attempts to write along these lines, but I was now back to following this tradition, and to thinking by means of its works as a main aspect of what I was doing.
However, this makes it slightly ironic that, in reading Gibson, from the very beginning the direction which I began to see was not the one in which Nick was looking. There is a humour that comes from what took place: Nick had enthused to me about Gibson in a context where the body without organs was a crucial concept, and had probably even applied this concept to Gibson's works, and then I had gone off and used the additional lens of the idea of the body without organs in looking through the lens of the story "Hinterlands." And instead of arriving at the view that the domain of mathematics (and particularly computation in the form of cyberspace) was in every way fundamental, I had arrived at a view toward the south - or fundamental aspect - of the body without organs in a way where this view did not even explicitly include either mathematics or cyberspace.
This is a windswept crossroads we are looking at: or rather, it is two windswept crossroads, and one with an additional spatial aspect. In a sense the lenses I was using were both from 1980-1982 (the first crossroads). And this was a time when there was both a Futural incursion, and a collapse in which new, obfuscating developments occurred, such as the appearance of stories in which developments in computer technologies were the momentous, driving aspect of all human development, stories which in these cases could foster the partisan-of-time passivity and confusion of a 'techno-Hegelianism' (we are all heading inevitably toward a glorious techno-metamorphosis, although it might still take a few decades...). Gibson at this time was looking back to writers who were listening into the cosmic silence around us, and wondering about it (writers like the Strugatsky brothers, but also the other pairing from this earlier time of Kubrick and Clarke), but he was also looking in the direction explored by the novella which Vinge had just written, the direction, that is, of cyberspace (as Gibson will call it) and of the idea of a coming technological singularity in which artificial intelligence leaves human intelligence behind. "Hinterlands" was written facing in the first direction, and the story "Burning Chrome" was was written facing in the second, though it is in Neuromancer that all aspects of the second line of thought really go into effect. It is of course a prejudice that the second direction is better than the first, and it is evidently true that taking up the question of cyberspace and the technological singularity does not supplant the process of thinking about the Fermi paradox (which in effect is the question, why do we appear to be on our own?). In fact, the end of Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy is a return to the listening-toward-the-cosmos perspective of "Hinterlands."
The second crossroads is an exceptionally tiny, localised event, that aquired its force primarily through the double impacting, at the level of the oneirosphere, of the first one. And the contingency was that, because I knew the meaning of the word 'hinter' in German, from the outset i read hinterlands as 'behind-lands' and, specifically, as the body without organs (the other lens). The idea of the body without organs then became the inference-idea of a desubjectified bliss into which the explorers in the story escape. After this, the Hegelian idea proposed by the story that human beings within its world are a cargo cult (so that, by suggestion, there is a bright centre of ultra-high development, and human beings occupy a hinterland) became a kind of irrelevance, negated by the idea of the language of shamans holding firm as the language of science collapsed. The implied upward progression from tribe-in-hinterland to the bright 'centre' or foreground-land of alien-intelligence vanished in the face of an idea of a hinterland which was beyond us, but at the same time was us, virtually, all along, making us into people trying to wake up as the alien beings we had always been.
If in Harlech I had set out, in some sense, to cross 'the cities,' then by the winter of 1991 I had been struggling in their labyrinth for several years (cities here relates to actual cities, but at depth it relates to the cities of the micropolitical, political, religious, technological and knowledge institutions of the transestablishment).
When I first arrived in Coventry, in 1989, there was no quality bookshop in the centre of the city, other than the tiny alternative bookstore, called the "Wedge" which was jammed into a long very narrow second floor, above a predominantly-vegetarian cafe(it was a quality bookshop in the sense that if someone for instance wanted an academic book this was the only shop in the town-centre where they might find it). It was here that, after having been told about it a few weeks before, I found a second hand copy of Operators and Things.
The very centre of the city is the place where a castle used to be, on a rise slightly above the site of the old cathedral (the new cathedral is at right angles, facing north, a little further down the slope): only the castle was mislaid around four hundred years, and in a process that seems partially undocumented was partly replaced by a half-timbered guildhall. The very highest point of the hill is now occupied by the Cathedral Lanes shopping mall, making the city's hilltop centre a point of tension between a triumph of capitalism and a series of adjoining symbols of medievalism and religion. A strange turbulent space in which a whole castle has disappeared, a cathedral has been replaced and turned to one side, and in which the statue of Lady Godiva has been turned at right angles from facing south to facing west, so that the orientation of the statue fits with the approach to the shopping mall - a capitalist heraldic symbolism. The Wedge bookshop was itself only about fifty yards from the highest point of the hill, and was both incongruous and anachronistic alongside ancient, ponderously civic buildings like the town-hall: it was a descendant or relative of 1968's Compendium in London, and itself disappeared not long after this time. In contrast, the bookshop in which I read "Hinterlands" had just opened a few weeks before - it was Dillons, and was an 'offshoot' of the early 80s appearance and rapid expansion of Waterstones. It was the same in style as Waterstones shops, and of course, the shop became a Waterstones - and this has now been replaced by a bar-and-restaurant.
In short, the hilltop is a medieval place where a shopping mall has literally taken the highest ground, a place where, even though there has been a gigantic amount of change, there are ruins and fragments and mythic symbols from earlier phases jammed in everywhere. It is easy to imagine Steel from Sapphire and Steel wandering disapprovingly amongst all the anachronisms and saying "these human beings - how they clutter their lives." And lastly, it should be added that a bookshop is suffused with a world of exteriorities: it is a systematic attempt to get people to go through doorways into the virtual-real - the verosphere, the oneirosphere.
Because the bookshop itself, and the kind of bookshop was new (unless you lived in London, or Oxford, etc.), walking into it a felt a bit like walking into the future. It is evidently the case that nothing much can be said about what happened that day - I got an inchoate, though intense view toward the south-outside through using an additional lens along with the lens of "Hinterlands." And yet - there is something about this whole multiplicitous nexus which remains striking. I had gone into the centre of the city, and found a strange interiority which was also an exteriority, and this had led to the claustrophic Gibson space station (with its artificial paradise) into which the ships of the dead and insane astronauts are towed. And two years later I would start reading Operators and Things in the Wedge, with its world of ultra-urbane Operators, who, as well as being deeply negative about the countryside, exist in an interior realm - whatever outsights they might occasionally provide - which in some sense is within Barbara O'Brien, while giving the impression that they are out in the world. Disturbing flashes of faked exteriorities, but somehow all connected to a flash-perception of the south of the body-without-organs, of the Future that is continuously there, beyond the grim deterioration-tunnel of chronological time. It is clear that I had to get out of Coventry, and, much more importantly, out of the interiority, but it is also apparent that in some sense (perhaps only a trivial one) the very middle of this fraught, tangled city helped me. In the language of P.J.Hammond - of Sapphire and Steel - it almost feels as if the 'time-break' was there, on the hill in the centre of Coventry.
*
What can be said is that in reading Hinterlands a kind of crack opened in ordinary reality - a crack with the specific aspect of looking towards a bliss associated with extreme danger, as opposed to self-indulgence. And what is also clearly discernible is that the main, fundamental break in fact took place three years later.
The events which form the starting-point of this book (Sections 2,3,4,5 and 6) are not in any way directly connected to Hinterlands, or the work of Gibson. In going to Leamington and getting speed and LSD, and then taking a combination of these, on my own, in my flat in Coventry, I was not thinking about any of Gibson's ideas about journeys into the transcendentally unknown, whether in the three novels and two stories that make up the Neuromancer mythos, or in Hinterlands.
This in fact was the full, absolute form of the 'time-break.' Around the middle of the night (Section 4) I reached the point where the experience was of sensing that the material expanses around me - spatial expanses - were in fact worlds of joy, and where the feeling I received was in the strongest sense like the feeling of listening to charged, exceptionally beautiful music - but in a way where there was no discernible change involved. Which is to say that I reached the bliss of space: a multiplicitous place of worlds, which, even though it is correct to say that everything is space-time, was experienced as a co-emplacement of expanses (the expanses, like myself, were perceived as worlds of joy - of delight - and everything was both spatial worlds and worlds of feeling, in a way where I had no awareness at all of a line of time).
The second aspect of the time-break (Section 6) was in a sense more superficial, in that I became aware, later in the night, that I had been jolted into a different speed of time (of temporal synthesis) in that fast music had become slow, and slow music had become barely like music (or at least had become so slow that it seemed unlike pop-rock). The primary form of the two breaks was a shift toward an impression that I was surrounded by a profoundly unknown world of forces (forces that were both spatial expanses, and zones of feeling) and that time was a kind of fluid abyss of transformation, where the amount of experience you had was relative to your speed of functioning, so that, if, for instance, the Earth was a sentient entity with a higher rate of synthesis, it might had had days of experience while I had experienced only a minute.
But it was the spheroambient abyss of the spatium that impacted upon me most intensely. Although it feels in every way crucial that my problem of time was changed from a problem of free-will and determinism to a problem of speeds of functioning (and that the problem of freedom became the problem of freeing oneself from what prevents perception of the world) what was by far the most important shift was that of my attention starting to be moved toward the body without organs, and away from the line of time.
Overall, the events of that night were a complex turning-point, and to a great extent in ways which either are separate from those that have just been described, or which involve a widening of questions of exteriority. At the level of the virtual-real the experience was about spaces beyond the city, and was about being in love - while at the same time being about the abstract arriving through fictions and songs as well as through philosophy. A part of me was still in Leamington with the woman I had met earlier and toward whom I felt intensely attracted. And as the night went on there were more and more ways in which the affect of being in love became involved in the experience, and more and more virtual-real views of the countryside, including an intrinsically planetary view of a very large sunlit terrain with lines stretching up from the planet's surface and into the sky - the planet viewed as like a plasma ball, with filaments of the unknown stretching out into the cosmos. At its most intense the night was on one level an encounter - in some sense - with the body without organs in the form of the spaces of my flat, but at the same time it was transected by the woman who I had met in Leamington, and by serene, planetary expanses of countryside. The body without organs extends around the whole extent of the directions of the transcendental, but this was a view toward transcendental-south - not just because I was seeing a material, non-subjectified joy, but also because Futural dreams were involved. I needed to go toward a courageous woman who actively wanted to travel into the unknown, and I needed to go toward an awareness of the planet which would be assisted by leaving the city. It is as if at the heart of the experience I was getting a view of the 'place' to which I needed to go. An impression that is created in part by the fact that nothing in my experience over the next two years reminds me of this serene, brightly expansive affect-world until I arrive at the time when Tess and I were living in Leamington.
*
(It was when I was living in Leamington, in the winter or spring of 1996, that I had the dream about the group living in the countryside, where a member of the group had died, or in some way had been lost, and that I afterwards arrived at the the thought that perhaps the full beginning of tragedy is the point where such events take place. It seems likely that the dream was in part inspired by my having recently seen Picnic at Hanging Rock (where Sarah is the figure who does not achieve the escape), but even if this is not the case - given I do not remember the order of the events - it is definitely true that Picnic at Hanging Rock became a primary source in relation to this new way of thinking about tragedy.
A few months afterwards I read some of Sophocles's plays, and was struck by the way in which the 'abstract machine' of tragedy had gone into effect in Ancient Greece, and then had reappeared - the same, but different - in Elizabethan England. But the transformed idea in relation to tragedy did not go away. With the help of two female writers of fiction - Joan Lindsay and Virginia Woolf - I was beginning to sense an extension of tragedy into a different domain, but, more than this, I was inseparably beginning to be aware of something else completely.
I was beginning to sense the positive, or sublime terrains of the transcendental, of the immanently transcendent (transcendent in the specific, natural-world sense of being constitutively involved within ordinary reality and of functioning from a level beyond it). Under immense pressure from the trans-establishment tragedy had been all that had been possible. It was oneiric critique, creating the sad situation where the figure of 'the artist' (as seer of tragedy) could exist alongside the figure of the priest. But the ongoing human disaster and the control mind were merely the negative instances of the transcendental. And the artist in this sense was in fact a role within the establishment - the genuinely revolutionary figure was the woman or man who could see the sublime-transcendental, and this figure was intrinsically a traveller into the (southward) unknown, and not an artist.
I had been deposited in Leamington alongside the oceanic 'wall' of the bright transcendental, and had been left reading A Thousand Plateaus in a process that very centrally involved an attempt to solve the question of political pragmatics. There was the rhizome of creative, deterritorialising alliances, and there was the idea of micropolitics, and there was the obviously lucid rejection of the state as a social form (because a state not only cannot defeat capitalism, but is in fact a component of capitalism), together with the idea that if you lived in a city you should inhabit it like a nomad. But, in fact, it was the women writers who suffused me with the crucial idea. And this crucial idea was of course the escape-group (led by Miranda in Picnic at Hanging Rock, and almost-led by Rhoda and Louis in The Waves - the tragedy of The Waves is that the group fails to form). This was the solution to the problem of micropolitics, of an immanence politics. It is necessary to travel as a multiplicity into the second sphere of action - to travel into the unknown in the direction of Love-and-Freedom.
But nothing more could be said about the group: the travelling was relatively knowable, but not the internal consistency of the escape-group. I could describe the travelling, and it is true that an individual is a multiplicity (so travel as a group was in this sense a known), but I could not describe the organising of the group the way, for instance, I could describe the organising of a party. What I had seen at the level of the virtual-real was an indication without certainty: it was therefore a view toward Love-and-Freedom (in that the travelling - the threshold-crossings toward a further sphere of action - could be verified at the level of the individual as multiplicity), but the group remained only an indication without any firm basis. All that was clearly visible was, firstly, the zones of a human-world and animal-world body without organs (extended all around the planet), and, secondly, the direction of Love-and-Freedom. But this, of course, was enough).
*
The overwhelming impression I now receive about the autumn of 1995 is that I had commenced an escape. I was engaging very intensely with A Thousand Plateaus, and simultaneously there were new perspectives which were opening up (such as The Waves and Picnic at Hanging Rock, and also Solaris, another film I saw at this time). All of this concerned a movement away from ordinary reality, but it was also an escape from a risky and somewhat indulgent phase of deterritorialisation which had been going on for around two years, and which for a year had involved both myself and Tess (I had been prodigiously lucky to meet Tess on every level, including at the level of the overall form of the deterritorialisation, and now it was vital that she had brought a new discipline into the situation by getting onto an MA at Birmingham University). The deterritorialisation had been the waking of the visions-at-night modality whose existence I had sensed when I was living in Swansea, and as such had been a very valuable development, only it had involved an often very unfocused use of drugs (in fact, such deterritorialisation does not require drugs, and as a general principle is far better without them).
The novels and stories of Gibson had now faded into the distance. It was almost as if they had been distant from the very beginning, only with certain aspects standing out. There was Hinterlands, and I was very much aware that in some sense the Neuromancer trilogy ended with an escape-group departing for another world, irrespective of whether it was a 'recording' of another world within the Aleph (the undeniable power of the moment was slightly lessened by the fact Mona Lisa Overdrive sometimes had the quality of a sketch for a novel, rather than a novel itself, with this being particularly true of the final chapters). And I liked the thought about faculties of intelligence that was at work in the idea of the AIs Wintermute and Neuromancer needing to be brought together for a threshold to be crossed; and also the idea of Angie Mitchell's dreams being views of reality. However the blurring of cyberspace and dreams in the novels simply functioned in the end to make it clear that cyberspace was a lens showing you the oneirosphere, meaning that it was pretending to show you a wonder of the future while all along being itself a manifestation of what in reality it was helping to make visible - the shared 'hallucinations' of dreamings (dreams about the future, dreamings in the form of fictional worlds; the suppressive oneiric systems of religions, etc). And the distance from Gibson is shown by the fact that his work was not really involved at all within the phase of deterritorialisation. For instance, for myself and Tess it was not just in the background but was barely present at all -it also seems relevant that the fundamental figure during this time was the Patti Smith of Horses (ur-punk, as opposed to cyberpunk).
As a result of reading A Thousand Plateaus I was starting to see the world around me as a space of co-emplaced formations of intent (differentiated along the lines, on one side, of brightness, openness and creative affirmation, and, on the other, along the lines of gravity - of dogmatic or fixated judgementalism), and simultaneously as a space which - momentously - was both planetary and decisively inclusive of non-western, non-state social formations, in the sense that these were no longer dialectically refuted relics of the past, but instead were central in providing views of the way forward. The planet was now beginning to come into focus as a sublimely enigmatic space, spheroambiently around me, and the dogmatic, intrinsically variable 'hero function' in relation to the human world's future was being dissolved. Because states are captured components within capitalism, and because of capitalism's immense axiomatic flexibility (benefiting from its own crises), there is no sense in which the choice-making institutions of the states, or the world economy, are the hero-instances which are bringing about an end to the disaster, instances to which it would be possible to attach yourself for 'destiny-purposes,' either as a state activist, or as an advocate of some form of Marxist activism ("we can point out the contradictions, and we can help to push when the economy reaches the tipping-point"). (in other words, it is not the case either that the institutions of the states carry within them the system which will overthrow capitalism, or that economically capitalism is digging a hole from which it will not be able to escape). It was clear now that the vast population of the 'western-tribe' was caught up in a process of delusionally affirming what it had been collectively involved in creating, and that it was necessary to depart from the world-views of this tribe - to walk away from 'the cities.'
The process of walking away was one which consisted of an increase of my degree of focus in relation to the planet (a simple pragmatics of perception and defaults of thought), and an associated increase in my awareness of the planet as to a great extent the transcendental matrix of what was taking place within the human world. This on the one hand was happening through reading A Thousand Plateaus alongside works such as The Waves, but on the other hand - and more importantly - it was taking place through a shift toward going out into the spaces beyond the cities and towns, a shift which initially was like a tiny fissure, but which progressively changed to become a primary part of a southward doorway in the fabric of ordinary reality.
But the process of the departure also consisted both of a waking of the faculty of dreaming, and - to some extent - of the faculty of perception. Dreaming is here understood as a faculty which sees deeper-and-wider aspects of the world in relation to those ordinarily percieved, and - inseparably - both as a process of dreaming up Futural ways of living and a kind of 'hatch' through which Futural elements can arrive. And perception is understood as a capacity for sustained, unbroken encounters with the immediately surrounding world, a capacity which tends both toward the emergence of anomalous states of lucidity that can be called 'heightened awareness,' and toward 'haptic' perception (the correlate of the spheroambient world is focused multi-sense perception, in which space is actively encountered through the whole body, and the eyes are also part of the sense of touch). It would be right to say of this second faculty both that it consists of a charged, serenely powerful (libidinal) love for the world, and that its - stuttering, partial - emergence in me was the result both of the use of drugs (in the absence of the other means that would have been better), and of my having had the good fortune to shift successfully toward a process of moving consistently away from using drugs. One of Deleuze's best moments is where he analyses what is in question in relation to psychotropics as the "autonomous Desire-Perception system," saying in relation to this modality that it can be reached by means other than drugs, and saying this: "...desire directly investing perception is something very surprising, very beautiful, a sort of unknown land."
However, the waking of these faculties did not start to take place as a result of some deliberate intention or strategy on my part (and it should be added that during most of this phase very little was happening in relation to perception). The faculty of dreaming began to go into effect in the midst of circumstances which were improved in relation to how things had been in Coventry, but which also had a new form of turbulence and distress rising within them (and was no doubt partly emergent initially from a deep-seated, unfocused perception of an oncoming tragedy), and the way in which there was nothing deliberate involved is shown by the fact that it went into effect first in the form of a dream in sleep. The serene and simultaneously tragic dream about an escape-group living somewhere in the countryside, where a member of the group had in some way been lost.
It was therefore more a question of fugitive, extremely occasional breakthroughs taking place amidst a kind of struggle that was deeply chaotic, and not fully perceptible (a process of trying to open these eyes - wake these faculties - whose difficulty is shown by the fact that it is still taking place). The oncoming tragedy was the loss of Tess: the loss of an alliance that had genuinely consisted of a process of travelling into the unknown. And the struggle to achieve a degree of consistency in the movement forward was partly to do with the need to be detached from the fixations (though not the individuals) of the group-escape which had taken place - the CCRU. The CCRU was rotating in a trapped state, caused by it having broken into the outside in the wrong direction, a direction which had far too much to do with human numerical technologies, and anomalous Cthulhu-esque modalities of power, as well as having its own - accelerationist - futural projection , where the 'hero-instance' was capitalism itself, not as digger of its own grave, but as accelerating movement toward a threshold-crossing where the disaster of human subjectification would at last come to an end. ("all we need to do is assist capitalism in its movement toward the Singularity").
It is not surprising that when, in the spring of 1997, I started to write stories again, the story-world that arrived was that of a group of people in a futural world where 'the cusp' - a fundamental threshold-crossing of awareness - was slowly advancing toward planet Earth, subsuming, one by one, the space stations of the outer planets, and nor is it surprising that when two days later I returned to the idea I found myself writing about a woman travelling on her own in the middle of a wilderness, the human-world component of which was an isolated labyrinth, surrounded by nothing but planetary expanses (and it is important to see that there is a double jump toward sobriety here, in that at the outset I had smoked some grass, and was envisaging a group of people who were on drugs, and two days afterwards I was not being affected by a drug and was imagining a woman who was also sober). The intense brightness was in the second experience, with the initial idea of the cusp having somehow faded into the background, as something that in some way was not quite right. (and because of the cusp fading in this way as an inspiring idea I stopped writing the story - the idea of the threshold would have to re-appear in a new way). (It can be seen that I was leaving behind both the CCRU and Hinterlands, in that the cusp, as originally envisaged, was haunted by malign entities called 'cusp-demons,' which, as predators on human energy, created madness).
There was therefore the quietly disconcerting process of moving away from the ways of thinking that predominated in the CCRU (a process that was not deliberate, but was a perturbing - though often obscured - effect of going not towards the CCRU but towards A Thousand Plateaus). However, this was not the change that was a source of anguish, and of self-doubt about the direction in which I was moving. It was the breakdown of the relationship with Tess that was the intensely distressing aspect of that time.
This relationship was strong enough to continue as a 'semi-relationship' for many months after it had officially ended (where we would recurrently meet up several evenings every week), and it was also the case that, a few months before it was over, it had opened into the possibility of settling down and having children, something that Tess had wanted very much at this point, whereas I had felt that it was not the direction I wanted to take. Tess being such a genuinely extraordinary and inspiring woman meant that it was only my depth of experience (initially accidentally achieved) in trying to escape from ordinary reality that - by a tiny margin, I feel - made the difference: I very nearly took this other direction, and was therefore haunted by the virtual-real form of the relationship which existed alongside me; the road not taken. But at the deepest level what made the situation so sharply distressing was not this Tess on the un-taken road, but was the Tess whose dreamings and outsights (and courage) had drawn me forward in the course of the relationship. The alliance between us had been fundamental in the process of finding the escape-path - in fact it was Tess, who in the final phase had been involved more than anyone else in the discovery of this path (in a vital sense she had called me in this direction).
The movement forward continued, through all the difficulties of this phase. And it should be pointed out that the assistance coming from A Thousand Plateaus was not primarily the dissolving of a Hegelian modality in connection with interpretative projections into the future, but was to a great extent the positive process of bringing to the forefront the formations of intent of nomadic and non-western tribal societies, showing them to be worlds which provided views in the direction of the escape toward wider and deeper realities. So that, far from being superseded moments in a dialectic, they were shown to be crucial, co-existing worlds in which the Future was arriving. And the overall effect here - in bringing together shamanism and Spinoza, and in saying "we sorcerers" - was of re-focusing attention on the spheroambient, transcendental unknown (within which aspects of the transcendental unknown could become the known, at each stage). This left the chronic, chronological projection as not just critiqued, but as fundamentally replaced by the compelling encounter that all along had been required. Within the sphere of the transcendental unknown the direction of the Future could be discerned as the zone of the now that it had always been - as existence at higher and higher levels of intensity - making this new engagement both philosophical and micropolitical, at the same time as it was it was an eerie-sublime engagement with the unknown that was all around, and which was immanent as well as spheroambient.
These were the circumstances under which the faculty of dreaming began, stutteringly, to wake: a return to to the situation which to some extent had been in effect during the first year at Coleg Harlech. (Only, now in relation to writing - or maps of the transcendental, the anomalous - it was philosophy that was doing the primary work, as opposed to Shakespeare, the Brontes, Yeats, Lawrence). However, this took place in a way where there was pre-eminently a 'modern' aspect to almost everything. The only event which related directly to non-western worlds was the thought-guided process of envisaging (on the edge of sleep) which led to the detailed semi-trance experience where I imagined a meeting with an indigenous Australian shaman (notice that this was an oneiric experiment which acquired a momentum of its own, a process which is different from trying to write a story). Almost everything else that happened had no overt connection to these other social worlds, with most of the experiences being held together by the idea of groups setting out to escape from ordinary reality (where the groups involved did not resemble tribal/nomadic societies, and were far more reminiscent of the group of friends in The Waves).
In starting to write stories again the situation was very different from when I had stopped in 1983. The process was surrounded by others, which on the one hand were philosophical and micropolitical, and on the other were deliberate 'semi-trance' processes that did not at all take the form of elaborating a story-world for the purposes of writing. And what ran across everything was the question of groups - even the experience that took me to a virtual-real Australia began because I set out to envisage what it must be like to be flying in a V-formation of geese, flying south (the nomad group). However, this plane of consistency was not something to which I initially gave any thought. I was simply having different kinds of intense experience, as when, for instance, I arrived at the thought that the idea of groups at higher and higher levels of intensity was a fundamental starting point for both a pragmatics of philosophy and a micropolitics, and arrived simultaneously at the certainty of the existence of next-level groups whose mode of being was not that of ordinary reality.
In relation to perception very little was taking place that 'stood out' and demanded attention - very little that gave any strong indication of the "unknown land" which Deleuze talks about. However, I was struck by what happened when, on a rocky, sunlit mountain-top in Greece (in the summer of 1997) I accidentally hit upon a way of stopping thinking and perceiving: the resulting 'waking trance' was a powerful experience, in that it was both a joy that had oneiric aspects, and was simultaneously suffused with a feeling of affinity - which was not a process of thought - toward initiation practices within shamanic societies. And there was also - across all the time from the spring of 1997 onwards - a change in relation to colour, in that I became very intensely aware of the colours violet and green, both as depth-transparency colours, and as what can be called 'sun-colours' or 'solar-colours' (I had a dream at one point in which I saw a green sun), where 'sun-colours' in this instance would also relate to violet and green flames, and to these colours as they are seen with closed eyes immediately after looking at the sun. (whereas the Coleg Harlech phase of facing-the-unknown was marked by a heightened awareness of red, this later phase involved colours that were further up the intensity gradient of the spectrum, in that they are higher, or faster frequencies of light).
The pervasive 'transition-event' was in February of 1998. This ruptural transition (and re-attunement) had in fact been pre-figured by what had happened in 1993, but the earlier event had been the breakthrough of space - and a break in the ordinary modality of time - whereas this later experience was a breakthrough of impersonal intent, of intent to travel toward wider and deeper levels of reality.
First, there was the dream about a group of people crossing a threshold of awareness (Section 25), a dream which was on an immensely higher level of intensity than any dream I had experienced, and had a quality of sheer, ultra-intense reality which led to a persistent, visceral question during the following days about whether something had in fact happened to a group of people in the actual. This dream was a culmination of everything that had been happening in relation to the idea of 'escape-groups' over the preceding three years, and it left an impression of an irreducible validity: in that the idea of threshold-crossings of existence for small groups of people felt as if it was a genuine potential of the human world. And therefore the culmination aspect of the dream did not at all seem like a process where an idea for a story had been 'worked out.' Instead, it felt more as if for three years I had been in a current which, within the virtual-real, had been incrementally taking me forward out of a liminal zone of ordinary reality, and as if the current had just taken me beyond the liminal, into the Outside.
Secondly, there was the beginning, a week later, of my encounter with the works of Castaneda, in the form of me reading The Eagle's Gift, a book which is fundamentally about the escape-group as a potential of the human world, and a book which on every level assists toward an awareness of the intensive spatium, and toward an associated dissolving of fixatory impositions of a line of time.
(It was not the case, as one current arrived at another, that I could respond to the book being so starkly outlandish by putting it down and forgetting about it. Because of the culmination that had just take place it was clear that it was now necessary to understand and assess this new map of the transcendental (and the necessity was made even more apparent when I began to focus on the importance of Castaneda in A Thousand Plateaus - the process I was embarking on was the same as the one undertaken by Deleuze and Guattari in relation to Castaneda's earlier books). It was clear that this was the path I had to take, and soon it was also clear that this new path was very direct in its movement toward transcendental south).
The heart of the issue here is that in A Thousand Plateaus the idea of the rhizome is not quite given enough assistance from the idea of 'becoming-imperceptible,' (and from the account of groups in the crucial middle plateau in which this modality of becoming is also described), and the idea of becomings is not brought to the point where it is understood in terms of perception and dreaming. This is in part to say that in The Eagle's Gift the issues involved in becomings are set out in terms of a perceptual pragmatics that is primarily about engaging with spaces, not time. And it is also to say that in this book the pragmatics of disappearance into the background ('becoming-imperceptible', rather than being trapped within ordinary reality) is very much an explicit aspect, and is not alongside other thoughts that easily lead to an idea of pre-eminently working toward the rhizome at last manifesting itself - contingently - as a global libidinal revolution (though this might happen), but instead is explicitly about the micro-revolution of a group departing for the next level of reality (which in The Eagle's Gift is named 'the second attention').
The statement "We are perceivers" is very heavily emphasised in the works of Castaneda. It is of course the first principle of a transcendental empiricism, and - most importantly of all - of the pragmatics which is inseparable from this (lucid) modality of empiricism. And it is precisely as these principles that it appears within Castaneda's books.
The vital point in this context is that everything starts here from a pragmatics of unbroken perception, where this escape-pragmatics does not involve direct concentration on temporal succession. The ordinary-reality mind does not want to encounter worlds of co-existence, other than very minimally: when it is not blocking attention through non-functional thought processes it primarily functions by skimming across these worlds and constituting awareness of them as sequences of faint views laid out on a line of time. This is why the term that is used in The Eagle's Gift for the pragmatic strategy of sustaining perception is 'gazing.' You can start with gazing at mountains, small plants, rocks and shadows; you can move on to trees and water, and to insects, birds and animals; and then you can move on to the sky, fog, clouds, and the stars. This concept of 'gazing' is set up in terms of encountered worlds of co-existence, and in fact is ultimately about a multi-sense encounter with spheroambience (the entire sphere of what you are encountering), but it is kept separate from the idea of processes of concentrating on succession. On one of the few occasions in Castaneda's books when it is sound that is used as the prime focus for a sustaining of perception, it is a wrap-around world of insect and bird calls that is is the space being encountered, and the strategy of the process is firstly that of hearing the whole space of sounds, and is secondly that of hearing the gaps in the sounds, and of experiencing these gaps spatially: as opposed to hearing sequences or 'phrases' of sounds. It needs to be seen that there is no privileging of the sense of sight here, very especially as we normally understand this sense (the aim in fact is for the normal use of sight to be left behind). What is crucial is formations of co-existence, and because sight is so dominant in the human world, an emphasis needs to be given to sight which is about saturating it with focused, sustained co-perceptions, so that it is taken beyond itself. And when hearing is involved this must also be saturated spatially around the body (and simultaneously pushed to the point of hearing the co-existences of 'timbre-worlds' where the sonic-world involved is an affect or 'atmosphere' and does not consist of a series of points laid out on a line) - so that this sense is also pushed beyond itself, becoming spatialised in a way which leaves behind a fixation on locked-down and often single-source 'voice-lines' of human beings; of objects flapping in the wind; of clocks ticking etc.
All of this concerns aspects of the this pragmatics in its relation to perception and time. But the question of it being a pragmatics is in itself also important, and in a way which to a great extent is shown by its context. The two issues here are, firstly, that Castaneda's pragmatics has alongside it a transcendental empirical account of the world, which in fact goes fundamentally wider and deeper than that of A Thousand Plateaus, and, secondly, that many aspects of the transcendental empiricism of Deleuze and Guattari's book are actually entirely consistent with the Castaneda account, sometimes in the sense that they state the same thing in a slightly different way, and sometimes in the sense that they extend the account and provide a valuable new concept.
Everything becomes a question of an assessment in relation to pragmatics and accounts of the world, on the one hand, and to co-existence worlds and temporal succession, on the other. In A Thousand Plateaus everything is set out in greatest detail in the central "Becoming-Intense..." plateau, where becoming is shown to be at depth about the co-existence or 'between' of an encounter or alliance (clearly it is also about a metamorphosis), but where concentration on time robs the text of the chance to engage effectively either along the lines of a pragmatics of perception and dreaming (it is also necessary to show the centrality of dreaming to becomings), and simultaneously robs it of its chance to construct a more encompassing transcendental account (an account which evidently would function as an - immanent - driving force of the pragmatics). It would be right to say that a departure from anthropological structuralism is taking place (a departure which lucidly invokes, in passing, the importance of 'tales'). And it would also be right to say that the idea of haecceities (zones without subject or object, in which a human is a part of a terrain) is in a fundamental sense an outsight; but overall there is far too much residual Bergsonism in effect.
*
A wide expanse of sunlit heathland. A secret, hidden world - a nextdoor place, another dimension of the planet's immense Now. You are at the top of a grassy slope, with a long view. A woman is alongside you, on your right. You know that beyond low hills to your left there is the sea, and that somewhere there, by the sea, there is a house.
You are aware of the brightness and warmth and courageous lucidity of the woman - you can feel how she is reaching out into the day for the way forward. To be who you are is to yearn toward this woman. It is to yearn for the sparkling of her eyes - it is to yearn to travel with her, into the Future.
*
In a late interview Deleuze says, "The opposite of history is not the eternal, but becoming." And there is only one becoming whose explication can provide this proposed view, sideways from history. This is becoming-planet.
The most fundamental aspect of becoming-planet is perception. Each one of us is always encountering a zone or spherical 'face' of the planet. But the becoming begins to wake through the encounters recurrently being unbroken, so that only perception takes place. It is necessary to learn to be a sustained awareness of the place around you: to the point where eventually you feel you are the room and the air within it; to the point where you feel you are the city street and the sky, or the forest and the wind in the leaves of the trees.
However the starting-point is very simply to perceive, and to perceive a space. This space - or zone of co-existence - could be the shadows of some trees, or it could be the sky above a horizon, or a lake, or a cliff-face of a mountain. And the three senses with which it is best to start are sight, sound and touch: the process involves starting with a zone of encounter in relation to one of these channels, where the zone can be a specific element - as with looking at a stream - or can be an encounter across the whole space of the sense involved, as with listening to a whole space of sounds (for instance, listening to insects on a savannah on a hot day). The progression is this: firstly, start with sight (because this sense is most in need of being re-configured), and perceive across the whole zone involved, rather than allowing a focal point to be fixated upon (so that if perceiving the whole space in front you are focusing right across the breadth and depth, and, for instance, objects to the left and right are perceived to the same extent as objects directly in front of you). Secondly (and once you have crossed a threshold with the first phase), move on to sound, and both in a way where there is an avoidance of collapses onto a focal point, and in a way where awareness is fundamentally on a space or spatial simultaneity of sounds (ideally, a circumambient space). Thirdly, move on also to the permanently sheroambient spatiality of touch.
All of this is, in itself, a becoming-planet. But this process can be assisted by the adoption of 'planetary breathing,' (see Section 29), so that a specific function of the faculty of dreaming is included within it. Breathing comes to the forefront in starting to focus on touch, in that at this point a necessary active form of encounter with the planet is intrinsically part of the channel of this sense, in the form of inhaling and exhaling the planet's atmosphere. (it is best not to become obsessed with breathing, however, because this can simply lock attention back on the line of time, and simultaneously it can mess with the rhythm and immanently varying depth of the breaths being taken).
At the point of reaching touch, it is simply a question of going back to sight and adding something (something which is not cognitive, and which is certainly not conceptual). On the inbreath, imagine an immense wall of light to the direction of the equator - many miles high, and stretched out far to east and west - and then on the outbreath imagine that this wall of light advances rapidly (passing through you) and swings all the way round the planet to its starting position. And then repeat, on the inbreath.
*
In relation to the faculty of lucidity becoming-planet involves a complex, radical displacement of perception of the human world. From this perspective the world of human beings is visible in a way where it is best described as like two lines which transect the sphere of the planet. One of these lines is the control mind, a line which has a disturbing, insidious quality, giving the profound impression of being a disease of the planet, as well as it very evidently being a disease of the human world. The second line is the other force - the other mind.
From this perspective this second line pertains to the planet in that it - undeniably - consists of human modalities and individuals which are part of the world of the Earth, but in a way where the sense of inclusion is different by virtue of the fact that the planet is not seen as separate in substance from human beings (so that, in principle, it is not only possible that it is a domain of intent, but it could even be a world of intent at a higher level than that of human individuals and societies). It is also planetary in that in a very large number of ways this second human modality draws its inspiration and energy from contact with the spaces of the planet beyond the human world.
The other force is a joyful becoming-active, a desubjectified delight and lucid abandon. It is a brightness; a dance and an instinctive forbearance which is intrinsically beyond the righteous world of judgement, in all its disguised and undisguised forms. It is evidently the fundamental warrior ability, in relation to the struggle to escape from a collapsed form of reality: it is Love-and-Freedom. And there are three main coordinates for understanding it: the abstract, women - and the planet. It can be seen that the planet is a coordinate both because it is the element that is visible - so far as we can currently see - within which and as a part of which the other force exists, and also because it consists of becomings, and becoming-planet is the most fundamental of the becomings.
*
Becoming-planet goes into effect within the faculty of dreaming in many different ways. Anomalous narratives which have a planetary aspect are lenses which give views toward the planet as a zone of the outside of ordinary reality (the second sphere of action is a planetary world), and they are therefore transmissions of becoming-planet. This is true whether or not they are partly or entirely about wilderness or countryside terrains (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Surfacing, Black Moon, The Waves), or are about another planet, where the alien planet could be predominantly viewed 'as a whole' (Solaris), or could be viewed from the perspective of one of its terrains (The Eye of the Heron, The Word for World is Forest). And thinking from an active point of view (as opposed to the point of view of a reader), it is correct to say that processes which leave behind the dogmatic image of the world (Section 18) and which bring lucidity and imaginative leaps to the attempt to dream up what is happening at a planetary level will all to different degrees be informed by a sustained becoming-planet.
Again - to show different examples - there is the process of adopting the perspective of the planet's atmosphere that is set out in the final part of Section 18, a process which is not a narrative, but is a modality of spheroambient envisaging. There is also the breathing technique which has just been described (Section 29 for the more detailed account). But perhaps the most important examples concern dreaming in its connection with intent: and here everything concerns dreaming up the future in relation to the terrains of the planet.
The context here is given by the answer to the question "where am I/we from?" And the main question is "where am I/we going?". The answer to the first question is that individuals are not in any vital sense from a country: they are from and of the planet. And the answers to the second question are within the horizon of the fact that it is your own terrain in every direction, so that the constraints are only those of human laws and social attitudes (it can be seen that these are the nomads' answers in relation to the state (as Deleuze and Guattari say, the nomad is the person who does not move in relation to their connection to the planet)). Dream up a future in a distant valley: be an element of a field of the virtual-real which constructs the actual. It is necessary to be very focused in relation to such dreaming, and to hold in mind everything from weather and seasons to the weather of the human worlds that are in effect within the terrains being envisaged. The becoming-planet involved in this deterritorialised dreaming does not just involve a terrain but also involves its human territories.
*
It can be seen that becoming-planet is inseparable from the question of the 'nomadic.' But Deleuze and Guattari's concentration on the issues of nomadism's capture by the state (in the form of the captured 'war machine') is in many ways a distraction. Nomadism is of course a figure of the outside, but it is in a sense only a name for its 'degree zero': a name for a world of liminal spaces in relation to the transestablishment. Lucidity's becoming-planet can only fully wake if it sees the struggle between the control mind and the other force. The system of reason-revelation and of the subjectified, reactive states, and, beyond these, the worlds of metamorphics - the worlds of the impersonal force that is intensificatory-intent, or Love-and-Freedom.
*
Perception is what is fundamental in relation to becoming-planet. It is the vital or paramount channel of this becoming. But nonetheless it is hard to overemphasise the importance of the role of the faculty of dreaming.
There is the envisaging of places beyond the horizon, where the places are ones where the person envisaging has been, as when someone in a valley envisages the system of hills of which the valley is a part. There are the partly perception-based and partly indirect processes of envisaging, as when - to take an instance which is mostly indirect in nature - someone envisages the major flows, migrations, 'tourisms' and emigrations of the planet (air, water, continents, birds, humans, etc). There are the futural dreamings of another way of living which consists of a movement into wider and deeper realities. And there are processes of taking up the lenses of stories about the world so that the dreaming is effectuated and new aspects of the world are perceived.
And then there are the imaginative leaps which can lead to the creation of these lenses. What is seen by all the faculties is the starting-point, and most specifically this consists of transcendental features of the world being perceived or faintly discerned by lucidity: and the question that summarises the movement outward of the leap could be "given this is what is taking place, what on earth could be going on?" These leaps have the integrity of their starting-point, but taken as a whole they are a process of experimentation, a reaching into the dark. You keep making the leaps (perhaps drawing sometimes from dreams in sleep) and eventually elements can appear which make obscured aspects of the world visible, or more visible than they were before. Some stories may have flaws which vitiate the functioning of the lens, but over enough time elements can come together into stories where everythng inter-connectedly allows a seeing of aspects of the world. The wind of the impersonal force of oneiric seeing is what being sought. You put up a sail, you keep putting up a sail - and eventually the wind will catch it. This does not mean that the story will be straightforwardly 'true' (although it might turn out to be the case that it is far more true than was initially thought), but it means that at the very least it makes a zone of hard-to-see aspects of the world more visible. (see the afterword to The Corridor, included at the end of Section 34).
Starting from the transcendental you return to the transcendental, but now, having gone around an upward circuit of an abstract-oneiric spiral, you are able to see more than you could at the beginning. And in relation to lucidity and the planet the movement is most fundamentally about a heightening of the ability to see the other force, and also the ability to see the other force in its relationship with control.
It can be seen that the sections from The Corridor and the other stories (Sections 7; 13; last part of 18; 21; and 22) are all included within this writing for multiple reasons: they delineate a 'journey' that took place in intensive space, starting around 1998; they are examples of the functioning of the faculty of dreaming when it is attempting to free itself from the dogmatic image of the world; and they are views of the escape-path that can be taken out of ordinary reality - views of the other force, of Love-and-Freedom.
Deleuze and Guattari do not bring the question of becomings into focus - the way they could have done - by taking up the issue of the planet, and by taking the idea of becomings into the domain of the very visceral, and spheroambient spatiality of the planet as it is encountered by us. This is connected to the fact that they do not have an explicit account of the faculty of dreaming, and say very little directly about perception: and to understand our 'entering into composition' with the planet a clear awareness of these faculties was needed. Their rejection of the structure of subject-and-object is exemplary, and yet they are caught up in a secondary trap, a block created by the rejection. They don't follow through with the idea that dreamings all along are a locus of exteriority (though it is implicit in their work).
It could be asked - why shift from writing fictions to writing works of 'hauntology'? (On Vanishing Land, Hidden Valleys, the current work). Evidently it must be said that narratives have not been left behind in this change, in that the overarching structure is of historical narrative conjoined with personal narrative. But the main response is that the escape-path can be made visible in many different ways (for instance, as it was made visible in my before-sleep 'dreaming' at Coleg Harlech, however faintly). And in making place the vital aspect of hauntological writing the shift was ultimately toward the planet, but in a way where, although the escape-path was visible, the planet was in certain ways a fundamental and deeply enigmatic unknown - so that the aim has been for something of the intensity of fiction to be drawn into non-fiction (in some sense we are haunted by Love-and-Freedom, but it feels as if in the same sense - and inseparably - we are also haunted by the planet). And lastly, fiction has of course not been left behind: it has been included in the form of the embedded tales, in a bringing-together that is best described as the work of a process of metamorphics, as opposed to a process either of art or of philosophy.
The issues of dreamings and of the planet will be central in the concluding sections of this book. An impersonal process of being 'swept away' began for me in the mid-90s in Warwickshire, and this process had everything to do with a heightening of awareness in relation to the planet, and was simultaneously a kind of 'revolution' or 'displacement' in relation to dreaming. A delineation of specific oneiric, trance and fiction-writing experiences is needed to give an understanding of the modality of intent involved in me being swept away: dreamings will therefore be the principle exemplification of the abstract in the course of the conclusion, along with one other primary instance, in the form of intent.
A further remaining issue is the need for a more detailed account in relation to the idea of the escape-group (an idea which is central to all of the stories). And this in turn connects up with the issue of processes of 'entering into composition' with women. How can women and men enter into processes of becoming with women so that lucidity can wake, and so that gravity (males are the primary carriers of the gravity virus) can at last be left behind? How can we become brightness so that escape-groups become possible?
In 1996, through reading A Thousand Plateaus, I arrived at a point where I was so startled by the world of formations of intent I was perceiving that it seemed I was seeing a new dimension at right angles to everything that I had been grasping until then. A moment later I saw that what I was looking towards was space (in that it was a world of co-emplacement of formations, of forces), and that part of the specificity of what was taking place was a leaving behind of conventional philosophy's fixation on the line of time - so that it was western philosophy that was turning at right angles, looking at last toward a space of co-emplaced and interfused intent-formations.
But what at depth was taking place was that I was now starting to see a body without organs in the form of human intent-worlds: one which had the gravity of suppressive formations within its trans-establishment region, and which had different modalities of brightness in effect in zones which were beyond (or in a liminal relation with) the trans-establishment. And it was clear that this was the place where Futural ways of existing were being created and sustained, and where reactive, ultimately deadly values were being upheld and modified. This was the place where dreams were being created, promulgated and modified - and there is nothing more powerful than dreams (they are a crucial part of the cutting-edge of the virtual-real, and if they are to be seen as non-being, then it is necessary to affirm what is said in Tao Te Ching - "being is born of non-being."). Human beings are swayed by a well-constructed dreaming far more than by abstractions, and this is not because human beings are irrational, but because there is lucidity involved in effective construction of dreamings, and more than anything else, because dreams of this kind contain a higher degree of the abstract than do worlds of philosophical or scientific abstractions, in that they consist of compositions of space-worlds of intent, and intent is abstract, not concrete.
But there was another way in which space was opening up. From 1996 onwards my horizon started to include zones of production of thought and dreaming which were at a higher level than anything I had encountered previously, and which were fundamentally non-western: and these zones had a profound connection with terrains on the planet.
There were now two primary terrains in relation to a woken, deterritorialised philosophy (one capable of lucidity, and dreaming - one capable of producing maps for travelling into wider realities). The first of these was the area stretching from northern China into Mongolia and Tuva. The second - and most important - was the terrain extending from Mexico through the isthmus of Central America and into the jungle regions of Venezuela and Brazil. And these zones are not just connected by association with bodies of writing: they are places whose planetary, non-human expanses are components of metamorphosis, whether through an encounter at the level of the actual, or at the level of the virtual. They do not just constitute a setting: to take two terrain-worlds within these zones, they are the affect of the Mexican desert, the affect of the taiga forest in the Sayan mountains.
It can be seen that this has nothing to do with the state, and everything to do with the planet, and, crucially, with the zones of the planet that are beyond human urban spaces. A question of a planetary power of metamorphosis, where what is vital is that you have the planet as horizon and dreaming (rather than having the dreaming of a state, or of the western world, etc), and a question of reaching the point where you see human worlds as a kind of darkly haunted zone forming a part of the planet and of the worlds beyond it. Walking into the countryside from a town becomes a way of making contact with the planet, and then of turning around to see the town as also planetary. From 1996 space was therefore opening up in the sense that I was being deterritorialised beyond the western world, and beyond the human (therefore leaving the state very far behind) in a process that was about walking through Warwickshire countryside at the same time as it was about re-perceiving the world from the new vantages of Mongolian steppe and Mexican desert.
And now, at last, there were women everywhere - women who were explorers of the transcendentally unknown. This was at the level of authors, and at the level of the figures within the books. Florinda Donner, Taisha Abelar and Carol Tiggs were the authors - but in relation to the virtual-real women out-numbered men across all of the expanse of this westward and southwestward world of metamorphics (it is not just that there are more women than men in the books of the three women writers: it is that the same is true in relation to Castaneda's books when taken as a whole).
But not only this - there was also the escape-group, and the escape-group understood very precisely both in relation to the difference between the countryside and the city, and to the issue of becomings.(Deleuze and Guattari give an exceptionally valuable account of becomings in A Thousand Plateaus, but, despite the fact that they give a name to them, the really crucial, in-depth work of explicating them is done by Donner/Abelar/Castaneda, using a more comprehensive and effective set of concepts, and employing narrative exemplification as well as abstract accounts).
In 1995 I had been astonished and entranced by the lucidity and power of The Waves, returning to this novel after having read it ten years before (and I had loved it when I had read it the first time - I just had not known how to go forward with it). This experience was another precursor of the change or transition toward which I was moving (there is a sense in which the European tradition of proto-metamorphics culminates in the achieved metamorphics that is found within A Thousand Plateaus and The Waves). In The Waves there is the escape-group (only partially woken), there is the centrality of women (with Rhoda as traveller into the unknown) and there is the exceptionally intense emphasis on the countryside - on the planetary worlds beyond the cities - in the form of the place by the sea that is described at the start of each chapter (see Section 30).
It is important to see that the eventual emergence within me of a faculty of dreaming (which, it should be added, is inseparable from the micropolitical faculty of dreaming up other ways of living) took the form of dreamings about escape-groups, and was not only intrinsically associated with women as explorer-travellers, but was at the same time very profoundly associated - on more than one level - with the countryside. There is nothing indeterminate about the associations in question here: and it is worth noticing that the transcendental terrain that was opening up in front of me was at this stage coming into focus independently of the work of Donner/Abelar/Castaneda (I did not start to encounter their books until the very end of this phase).
With Tess (and because of Tess) I moved to Leamington, and almost immediately I started having dreams (in sleep) about a group living in the countryside (and in the most vivid and detailed of these dreams the central figure of the group was a woman). Not long after these dreams began, I went for a walk along the canal into the edge of the countryside, and dreamed up a story about an escape group, where the individuals were living in a city: but when, a day later, i returned to the story, to my surprise its transition to the point where there was a striking spatial world - a terrain - was about a place in the middle of an area of wilderness coastline, and in this 'locale' the only figure was a woman who was trying to solve a vertical (three-dimensional) maze, in the form of a 1000 foot sculpture with a labyrinth cut within it (these experiences are all described in Sections 24 and 25). And in 1999 I went to Harbury Lake - to the scurfland, Tarkovskian 'zone' that I discovered to the southeast of Leamington - and the idea arrived for the story "Ktarizon: Deep Water": this story is about about a group of women and men who live far in the future and in a city on another planet, and who are struggling to break through into a wider and deeper level of reality by going 'fugue-diving' (see the end of Section 18) on an area of semi-desert coast which is far from the nearest city.
In relation to the countryside, it is important to see that although the link with the emergent idea of the escape-group is very clear, and although the movement out of the city into Leamington (which to the east has the countryside running right into it, alongside its river) seems to have been involved in the waking of the faculty of dreaming, this does not mean at all that Warwickshire was fundamentally important as such - it does not mean, in particular, that the Warwickshire of the oneirosphere had some explicit direct importance (Shakespeare's awareness of the southward unknown could only be an inspiring thought, when it happened to arrive - but it was perhaps even necessary to forget about Shakespeare's virtual-real worlds). What was in question was women and men as explorer-travelers, the escape-group, and the countryside and wilderness areas beyond the expanses of the urban: and the non-urban very definitely did not need to be Warwickshire, and did not even need to be on the Earth (the place in the initial dreams-in-sleep was Yorkshire, the coastline with the vertical labyrinth was futural, and was somewhere indeterminate that was perhaps reminiscent of Australia, and the wilderness in "Ktarizon: Deep Water" was on another planet).
*
A fixation on the line of time is definitive of the trapped and suppressive form of reason which dominates within the human world: and the other aspect of this modality of reason is fixation on systematicity. Concentrating attention on the space of the planet around you - in processes of unbroken, mutlti-sense perception - is a primary way out of this double-aspect fixation, but alongside this, it is also necessary to employ abstract-perception to see the surrounding space of formations of intent within the human world. These formations consist to a very great extent of the production and re-production of stories (of many different kinds: 'artistic', shamanic, philosophical, religious, scientific etc.) Here, despite the line of the narrative, the movement is back into space, though at the level of the virtual-real. And here it is necessary to discard stories which have an intrinsic gravity, and lack of openness to other views: stories which are expressive of a reaction against the world, either through being judgemental against those who dont believe the supposed true story, or through seeing the formations of the 'natural' world as 'mere matter.' (the planet viewed as merely an intricate chunk of stuff, in comparison with human thought, on its envisaged different level). The complete system of reason-revelation consists of the two aspects of fixated reason, together with the lack-of-openness, and judgemental gravity of religious, pseudo-philosophical and 'scientifistic' stories.
In writing A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari have reached space, despite the fact that they still have residual tendencies to fixate on the line of time at the 'micro-temporal' level. They have reached space in that they are describing a world of co-emplaced affects, assemblages, abstract machines, regimes, etc.(and within this space of the transcendental-empirical they can even faintly see the formation of intent that is the escape group, calling it the nomad machine of deterritorialisation). At the level of critique, an indication they have arrived at space is that they have left behind the Hegelian story of the development or unfolding of the human world: everything is now visible as a space of contingent outcomes - the system of reason-revelation is deadly, and is not simply going to be naturally 'worked out' through the unfolding of the human spirit, or through a series of techo-material-human contradictions and their superceding solutions. It could all go either way:
"the stakes here are indeed the negative and the positive in the absolute: the earth girded, encompassed, overcoded, conjugated as the object of a mortuary and suicidal organisation surrounding it on all sides, or the earth consolidated, connected with the Cosmos, brought into the Cosmos following lines of creation that cut across it as so many becomings..." [p.510, Athlone, 1987].
The suppressive processes against which humans are struggling always "reterritorilise on the most deterritorialised element." Dreaming is reterritorialised as hero and romance tales, and as religion (with only tragedy generally standing out as a breaking open of a - limited, and negatively focused - view toward the transcendental). Reason is reterritorialised as organisational/financial structures governing and deadening peoples' lives, and as empirico-mathematical accounts of the world. And being 'in love' is reterritorialised as the institutions and myth-systems (fictions, astrology, religion) of the settled-down couple, as opposed to the couple as an expression of love for the world (as an explorer-traveller flight into the south of the unknown). These processes do not make up parts of a forward movement; they progressively crush, and when major changes occur they take new forms: it is a struggle that does not have the improvement of the human race inscribed within it.
*
The time-contours we envisage when we think, for instance, about several decades of time have no direct correlate in relation to our encounters with the world. Whereas, if we envisage a space several miles across, the contours we envisage do have direct correlates (this difference is part of the reason why time in this sense can initially seem so exciting). But we are looking for the depth in the wrong place: if you imagine the social world of an island with a few hundred human inhabitants, what starts to come into focus is a space of formations of intent, and it is then that you begin to envisage the fundamental depth. It is true that space here is also time, but time now can become perceptible as like thought, or dreaming, and not like a line in any way (to see it as a line is a 'fending-off' on the part of the control-mind). And more importantly, space now becomes the atmospheric spheroambience in which the human formations of intent are located: space becomes atmospheres, sometimes heartening, sometimes ominous, sometimes sublime (etc.). Writers of tales know this: they know we need to get to interacting forces as formations of intent, and inseparably, they know we need to get to the power of spaces. It is only very rarely that philosophy follows the writers of anomalous fictions and wakes the right, lucid form of attention in relation to space. And it is probably equally rare that radical politics leaves behind its processes of 'finding' signs of the coming 'Big Change,' and of projecting new overall forms of organisation, and sets out to concentrate primarily on the spheroambient - immediate - world around it, so that the seeing of the Future (and therefore of achievable futures for groups) can emerge from an effectuated encounter with the world. Stopping thinking in order to wake a perceptually and libidinally focused lucidity as the fundamental micropoloitical act.
*
It can be asked, at what point did I become a "partisan of time?" And, connectedly, at what point was my engagement with the worlds of anomalous tales pushed into the background? It can also be asked, how did I avoid becoming a partisan of the supplimentary dimensions of concepts and of subjectivity/phenomenology? (given that I was studying philosophy these were zones of semi-formal systematicity which were insistent as supposedly valuable directions). (and certainly, it should be said in advance, I did not avoid them through some special quality of perspicacity). And lastly, there is the question: is the residual tendency of A Thousand Plateaus to fixate micro-temporally on the line of time still profoundly vitiating?
(To clarify: it is obviously the case both that the world consists of formations of space-time, and that there are perspectives within this world into zones which are to be described as the aspect of the present which is the 'past,' but what is fundamental is to start from worlds of co-emplacement of formations of intent/energy (focusing therefore on space, and avoiding any imposition of a line of time, so that there is an openness to time being seen as like thought, or dreaming), and to avoid a fixation on history in general, as well as rejecting specious historical accounts which claim to show what the human world is supposedly dialectically moving towards in the future).
In the spring of 1984 I went for an interview at Coleg Harlech, to try to get onto a two year residential course which gave a university entrance qualification. I was, to say the very least, astonished by both Coleg Harlech, and Harlech itself. The day after the interview, when I was cycling to Blaenau Ffestiniog to catch a train, in order to get back to Yorkshire, I arrived at the specific thought that I had fallen in love with a place. And I was not being melodramatic - this was genuinely what had happened. Coleg Harlech itself was an inspired, well-equipped socialist venture that had started out in the 1920s, and had reached the point of having a large, beautiful library, an impressive teaching-and-administration building, a ten-story residential block, and an attached theatre - it was a kind of shockingly unsung 'legend,' (and all the more likely to remain unsung over the border in England, because it never used an English version of its name). And Harlech itself was an inspiring place through its own attributes (a small, friendly, stone-built town on top of a hill), but was in fact overwhelmingly attractive by virtue of its surroundings - it overlooked a curved, five-mile beach of white sand, and had a clear view both of Mount Snowdon to the north (with forested hills in the middle distance), and to the Llyn Peninsula to the west.
On a wall in the library there was a poster with a poem on it by Idris Davies:
Do you remember 1926? That summer of soups and speeches,
The sunlight on the idle wheels and deserted crossing,
And the laughter and the cursing in the moonlit streets?
Do you remember 1926? The slogans and the penny concerts,
The jazz-bands and the moorland picnics,
And the slanderous tongues of famous cities?
Do you remember 1926? The great dream and the swift disaster,
The fanatic and the traitor, and more than all,
The bravery of the simple, faithful folk?
'Ay, ay, we remember 1926,' said Dai and Shinkin,
As they stood on the kerb in Charing Cross Road,
'And we shall remember 1926 until our blood is dry.'
Reading this poem was a breath of fresh air. Or, to be more precise, all of Coleg Harlech was for me a breath of fresh air, and the poem was quintessentially part of Coleg Harlech. In a new, more focused way I was arriving at a perspective on the world that was from outside the central zones of the establishment. The poem could not have been more obviously about the now as well as 1926, given that the miners' strike was taking place (and given that Coleg Harlech was still in effect what it had always been - a place which functioned primarily to give working class people a second chance of getting into university). I was with the people at the moorland picnics, and in being with them, I was with the entire sunlit perspective of those who saw, in some way, the grinding, horrific, disaster of the human world, and who at the same time saw the beauty of the world beyond it.
And somewhere on the train journey from Llandudno to Chester I had a genuinely visceral realisation. I realised that now - in contrast to how things had been before - even the thought of listening to BBC Radio 4 gave me a slight, physical feeling of revulsion (my home didn't have a TV at the time, so the TV equivalent was not involved). To use the language that came to my mind on the train, I felt I had 'acquired an aversion' to Radio 4, the BBC's flagship news, documentary and entertainment channel on radio (and this was what had happened). Everything concerned the tone of the presenters' voices and a perceived overall lack of intense delight, and of courage in relation to radical, unconventional perspectives. I was seeing now what Radio 4 was - there was an immense breadth of coverage masking a lack of genuine, courageous openness (or, as I would put it now, it was a kind of grey, unnoticed 'clone' of openness). It was not that there was no valuable information (far from it), or coverage of important issues; and if I had been told that "Do you remember 1926?" had been broadcast on several occasions on the station, this would have made no difference. It was the mild, urbane, slightly neurotic tone to which I objected, as a micro-expression of the lack of delight, together with the conjoined lack of bravery in relation to non-conventional views that was also constitutive at the macrological level of the content. I didn't want to listen to the channel any longer, and this aversion has never entirely gone away. As a result of falling in love with Coleg Harlech (and Harlech) I had acquired a lasting response of discomfort in relation to Radio 4.
The academic and social world of Coleg Harlech was - taken as a whole - a little closer to the Future, but it is worth thinking about the 'break' involved in going there, and about the exact nature of the continuity at the level of 'dreamings.'
At the start of 1984 I had been trying to develop a fictional world for around a year. I was doing almost no writing, and felt generally that I was not getting very far with it, but the processes of 'dreaming it up' seemed on some level to be an improvement on the worlds on which I had been working during the two years before this. It was as if I had managed to claw my way back to a source of inspiration that had been in effect for me at the end of the 70s. There was a slightly 'lacklustre' quality about the whole venture, and yet - the quality of the air I was breathing was better.
The terrain was a parallel world of grassy hills and high moorlands, and there were two central characters. A boy growing up near a village, who was learning to use a throwing-weapon in the form of a small metal disc, three inches across, and a woman who would occasionally appear, on horseback, to give him instruction in using this weapon. Everything was sunlit, and also everything was quotidian - the boy's job was looking after sheep, and his family were sheep-herders. Everything that is, apart from the woman, who belonged to another social formation. This - non-industrial - parallel word had a group of people defending it, called the Gardions, and the woman belonged to this group - sometimes she would be in a group of eight or nine Gardions, all on horseback. They were defending the towns and herders of their world from malevolent, marauding creatures which would sometimes appear, and from some more comprehensive threat from 'dark' forces, but in creating the story I never - for whatever reason - went far beyond the initial set-up of the boy and the woman. The boy was a warrior apprentice, but he was also an apprentice in something that went beyond fighting. The woman had a bird that went everywhere with her - it was blue in colour, and was maybe around the size of a jay - and she was able to displace herself so that she could see through the eyes of this bird. The quotidian aspect somehow permeated even this, in that the woman had an ordinary, warm, friendly quality, and her ability with the bird was simply a skill which could be acquired, but nonetheless it would be correct to say that the boy was the apprentice of a sorceress.
The main influence here was Stephen Donaldson's The Illearth War, and the other two books in the trilogy in which The Illearth War is the second volume. I had read this trilogy in 1979, and for a some time afterwards my story-worlds had been deeply influenced by it. However, around 1981 I read The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, and underwent a change in relation to my 'dreamings.' However, although I was immensely impressed by these books, they did not fill my mind with departures in the form of images of sublime terrains in the way that the books of Donaldson had done (terrains in some way inspired by the source-material, but different, and with a striking feeling that was inseparable from the terrain, and from faint elements of a new story). I explored the Tolkien worlds, but without my really being aware of it, my imagination as a story-writer was not directly swept away by them: instead, it was during these years that my virtual-real worlds became more bleakly wintry, more fragmented and faltering, and more melancholy. (It is also worth thinking about the fact that it was at this time, around 1982, that I had a science fiction dream where I was a member of a group of four people on a space station who were under attack from zombie futural selves, selves who had found a way of coming back in time to attack us - it ended with a terrifying view along a corridor, down which our futural selves were shambling toward us). For all the extraordinary power, and occasional exceptional beauty of Tolkien's worlds it remains the case that this mythos is suffused with the metaphysical melancholy and reactionary conservatism of this writer's catholicism. And by 1983, perhaps aware of something unhealthy at work, I had simply left the books behind, and my ongoing story-worlds had simply re-connected themselves to other inspirations: most of the aspects of the world of the 'Gardions' were traceable to Donaldson, but it should be added that there was probably also some influence from the books of Anne McCaffrey.
By the spring of 1984 I had been reading 'classic' and more recent novels for several years, getting them from the local library in Malton, in North Yorkshire. So I was not lacking in other perspectives, beyond those of the writers of fantasy fiction. I had read The Mayor of Casterbridge, Pride and Prejudice, Women in Love, David Copperfield, Midnight's Children, Tristram Shandy, and many others. I loved all these novels, and at the level of thought, I had been struck by the anti-conventionality radicalism of Birkin in Women in Love (and this internationalist voice from beyond the establishment was no doubt part of what made me so open to the Marxist/socialist inspiration in effect at Coleg Harlech). But these books did not make me start out toward trying to write a novel in the usual sense of the term: without thinking about it, I kept getting images of striking, 'sublime' terrains, and the stories that came with them were about 'other worlds,' and it was this thread of inspiration that I followed, however unrewarding and frustrating the process might feel sometimes feel, when I attempted to work out plots, or write down scenes. It is only from the point of view of the literary establishment that Lawrence trumps Donaldson: if I had had a literature-reading, middle-class peer group at this time things might have been different (I probably would not have withstood the ridicule that would have been one likely response). But I was working at jobs in shops and factories, and I was far more likely in fact to meet people who were readers of popular modernism than to meet devotees of the classic realist novel. And so there was now an intense contrast or counterpoint between the novels I was reading and the story-worlds that I was still creating.
And in terms of the time of Hegelianism I was still barely thinking along these lines at all. Sometimes the future would open up as the future of mainstream science fiction, but the worlds involved could be as dystopian as they were utopian, and the fact that I had a strong tendency toward left-wing radicalism did not mean that my imagination had been swept up into a futural story of the natural unfolding of progress (where the story could be with or without intervention from revolutions). I remember listening, in 1983, to a programme about John Lennon, and afterwards thinking about the sphere of politics (in a way that may not have had much to do with the programme), arriving at the thought that it should be obvious to everyone that there should be fundamental equality in relation to gender, colour, ethnicity and class. But this creditable realisation did not entail that my time-horizon had been transformed (it is worth remembering that Imagine does not have the quality of zealous conviction about the future that can be displayed by political activists - it is far more active than that). I was still much more likely to think through space than through time.
In the transition-phase before going to Coleg Harlech mountains became involved at the level of the virtual-real. And so did forests, although in both cases (in very different ways) there is a a quality of the thought involved being somewhat alien in relation of the main zones of thought that were taking place at the time.
At some point in the summer of 1984 I had a dream where I was standing on top of Snowdon (a place I had never been), and where I was looking west, with vapour trails running east-west across the sky. A nuclear war was taking place, and was wiping out large areas of England. In the dream I knew that I had reached a safe place - a place that was beyond the main areas affected by the disaster. There was a perturbing and yet serene intensity about this dream, as if something momentous was being perceived, although at the time it remained enigmatic. I felt that it was not an indication from my unconscious that a nuclear war was coming, but this rejection of an empirical/anticipatory reading left me with nothing: it certainly did not begin to respond to the sublime atmosphere of the dream, an atmosphere that in part was about being high up in mountains.
I can see now that this was a 'planetary view.' I was not just on the top of Snowdon: in fact the dream was a view of the massif of Snowdon, and both of the sea beyond this massif, and of the sky. There were no humans in the view: instead there was the human world, and specifically the dream was a lens which in a somewhat distorted way was revealing a place that was closer to the Future, and which was also, inseparably, revealing the ongoing human disaster (the empirical - intercontintental war - was a lens for the transcendental). I think I perhaps incoately sensed this when from time to time I remembered the dream, looking toward Snowdon at Harlech, but at the surface-level the dream could always be seen as a bit of cold-war paranoia, with an attached sublime quality that in not focusing on it could be seen as just an expression of a desire for safety, or, if focused upon, would leave a feeling of something more. I had managed to escape into a place that was a fraction closer to the Future - or where the Future had not yet receded to the extent it had elsewhere - and it was only very occasionally that I would get a faint impression that as the escape was beginning I had experienced something that could be described as an 'eerie cry' - an enigmatic, jolting incursion into a silence.
The interview at Coleg Harlech was on a Monday, and I had to travel on a Sunday from near to the east coast of Yorkshire to the coast of North Wales, and Sunday was a day when the local train services were not operating in the vicinity of the college. I arranged to stay in the hall of residence for two nights, and my solution to the problem of the outward journey was to cycle the twenty five miles to York, setting out at 4 in the morning, take trains to Llandudno via Manchester, and then cycle the remaining forty miles, going across the mountain pass between Betws y Coed and Blauau Ffestiniog (this all seemed normal and enjoyable to me, rather than seeming like an ordeal: my only concern was that on the Sunday evening I would be tired and might make a bad impression).
Between Manchester and Llandudno I tried to get some sleep. And a new image-world suggested itself as a way of getting me to slip into a dream (for many years I had had different image-worlds that I used in this way - I had never given it any thought: it was just something I did, and they changed as new ones suggested themselves). The image was of a steep-sided hill surrounded and covered in forest, but where this hill was entirely filled with the rooms of a derelict, subterranean town, with windows looking out onto foliage. The image was initially indeterminate between ancient-mythical and modern, in that there was a quality of industrial-dereliction at one point, but it settled as having a sunlit, 'elf-city' quality, with an atmosphere of the more 'edgy' forest terrains within Tolkien's elf-mythos. There was a somewhat haunted feeling to the city, as if its inhabitants might be there all along, but not visible, or as if their return might in some way be perturbing. I liked this image-world, though it was a fraction too intense for me to go to sleep as a result of 'dreaming' it, and it felt as if it was a setting for a story, in a way where the possibility of creating a narrative along these lines seemed interesting.
But this world into which the image settled (as opposed to the modern, derelict-forested version) feels now as if it was a place from which Tolkien had started - and, specifically, as if it was a last arrival of something I had primarily left behind; an ur-oneiric element that still had some power to attract, but only for a very short time. Because - without thinking about it - I never returned to this image-world, either for the purposes of going to sleep, or to expand upon it: it remained a one-off, something that in fact was subsequently inimical to my imagination. After experiencing the Coleg Harlech milieu this story-world had been rendered uninspiring. In the course of two days I acquired a distance from Radio 4, and definitively left behind Tolkien, a very recurrently deleterious - unhealthy - zone within the worlds of anomalous dreamings I had been inhabiting.
My life in the fullest sense was turning a corner - and it was an indication of the nature of this change that on the evening after the interview I went to a performance of Twelfth Night at the theatre attached to the college, and immensely enjoyed the play, feeling surprised that the Elizabethan language was not a barrier. A girl who had also just been interviewed had decided to go to the performance, and had suggested we go together: the feeling at this point (after years of lack of direction and loneliness and dead-end jobs) was that a transition to a fundamental journey had taken place - at last I was travelling toward worlds of insights, toward creativity, toward women.
It is necessary to place ourselves, at midday, on the rocky hilltop immediately to the south of the centre of Harlech, and to look out across the sea toward the Llyn peninsula. It was on this peninsula, in July of 1984, that there was the largest onshore earthquake ever recorded in Britain (I was in Yorkshire at the time, so I did not experience it). There should be a sunlit clarity, but with a quality of extreme 'intensity' in the background. Equally, there should be a feeling of joy, but a joy tinged both with a charged sense of uncertainty about the ground beneath your feet, and, inseparably, with an impression of perceiving the fundamentally unknown out of the corner of your eye.
At Coleg Harlech I started a love affair with an area of academic knowledge that can be designated as philosophy, literature, and history. Because literature was part of this zone, there were already many elements within it which did not belong even indirectly within academia, but, as well as this, the starting-point ensured that, in terms of explicit political-pragmatic abstraction everything was always in the space of the non-dogmatic, socialist idea that there are other, much better ways of living than the forms of existence of capitalist society (which is to say that that these elements were relatively liminal in relation to the cities of the academic world).The starting-point was Shakespeare, and Charlotte Bronte, and Malcolm Lowry, and Yeats; and (with a zone of indeterminacy between the two) it was also Idris Davies' ""Do You Remember 1926?", and W.H.Auden's "Spain," and Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station, and E.P.Thompson's The Making of The English Working Class.
This transition did come with a double 'cost,' which was that certain writers of modern anomalous fictions were pushed tacitly into the background (that is, writers of more mainstream fantasy, science and horror fiction), and in the process of the transition I stopped attempting to write stories. But this was far more than counterbalanced by two developments. Firstly, the new fictions - in particular those of Shakespeare - were recurrently tales of the anomalous, and were, inseparably, profoundly valuable indicators of the transcendental. And secondly, I started on what was initially a quite sustained process of trying to express ideas and images (and feelings) through writing poems - and some of these poems had narrative elements.
Therefore, although I was in fact being drawn inexorably into the cities of academia, the initial leap to Coleg Harlech was indeed a movement into the Future. By the end of the two years of the course I was in certain ways further back into ordinary-reality than I had been in the first year, but this is not the issue directly in question. Coleg Harlech and Harlech were together an embodiment of immense expanses of what could be said to be the source of inspiration for fiction and poetry; I was living in a knowable group (almost everyone lived in the hall of residence), which, although it was acutely fractured, had a consensual warmth and tolerance, which meant that it was possible to benefit from very diverse viewpoints; across students and tutors there was almost always the view that another way of living was possible, where this would in some way be a departure from the grinding horror of capitalist social reality; and as well as studying works such as Hamlet and Jane Eyre and Women in Love, I was also doing what I had not had been doing before: whatever its value, and even if I was leaving stories behind, I was systematically producing creative work.
As well as this vantage initially being early summer, it is, in general, a daylight view. I was not inhabiting the night at this time: it is the daylight of the long views of the mountains and the ocean, but it is also the daylight of the routines of academia (I know I barely missed a single breakfast in the hall of residence during these two years: even if often what I was reading in the library was unconnected to my courses, my daylight-discipline was a solid tendency rather than just an aspiration). But it is whatever caused an unsettling disturbance or a shimmering of the sublime in this expanse of 'long perspectives of the known' that must now be recounted. That is, whatever involved a deepening of the perspectives, and whatever made the unknown seem like an all-around-you, enigma-suffused - and ruptural -aspect of the world (as opposed to it being a mere empirical unknown of unencountered variations of known forms and components, and of the 'yet to happen' unknown of the futural part of the line of time).
If you look to the left, and a little downward, there is the top of the Coleg Harlech hall of residence. Looking straight down, a sports centre and a playing field, and then, to the right, a straight road to the beach, running west, with houses around it; and to the north there is the main road, a school, and then a large, angular housing estate, made up of non-traditional white buildings (an expanse of modernism). The school is Ysgol Ardudwy, where for several years Philip Pullman has just been a pupil, travelling up from Llanbedr, a few miles to the south.
Beyond the sports centre, and alongside the road to the beach, there is a large white house, probably built in the previous twenty years: and, in the early summer of 1985, looking at this house as I walked past it gave me a feeling and an idea/story-world that took the form of the basis for a poem, which I wrote rapidly, without much subsequent revision. It can be seen that although going to Coleg Harlech was associated with a pause in my story-writing the process of writing stories in fact did not stop - it simply continued in a different channel:
Isolation
He was fifteen, and surprised to be there
In that vast white house, where his uncle
Was dying, dying of cancer, slowly
Like a god. He was surprised, but somehow
Very glad, to be there, in a world
So widely real, alive with sea-air, and sharp talk
Of life and death, with books, and with sunlight,
Sunlight on white walls.
Other guests
And visitors came and went like bright
Migratory birds - his uncle was famous - but he
The nephew, stayed, deposited,
At this place by the sea, like the sand
On the beach, drifting, slowly.
He moved through the house
And the tussocked coastland, keenly aware
Of the broadened skies. The ructions
At home seemed distant, and the quality
Of his loneliness had changed. There was discussion
Now, with visitors, with his dry, sardonic uncle,
And the company of his aunt,
His aunt, with her cool composure
And shining eyes.
He would sometimes sit and read
At the table in the kitchen, in the early morning,
With the book held wide, and a sun-flooded jar
Of ruby-coloured jam alongside
Striking at his mind with its brightness.
The house was fragrant with varnish
Spinning toward the sun, filled with sea-sound
And the song of birds. Sometimes it seemed
When he thought of his uncle, that the dying cells
Could be located somewhere in the house
Like a white rot, spreading through paint,
White through white, sliding,
Bringing dissolution.
One day the house would be his
And he could live there if he chose. He was heir
To life and death. On the beach, he would pass the sidelong crabs
With respect, but he had no fear of death,
He was caught in a dream of freedom,
At the bright centre of a world
So vast, so white.
What is this interiority that I have encountered - this house whose 'vastness,' despite being definitively tiny in comparison with the world, in some way faintly doubles the vastness of the world? ("that vast white house" / "a world so vast, so white"). The poem has an outside and an inside, and the inside is a place of 'prestige,' of some kind of undefined 'kudos' ("his uncle was famous"). When I wrote it I only had an atmospheric story-world directly in mind, but the poem works as a lens for looking toward an aspect of the trans-establishment, and this evidently is not an accident.
At Coleg Harlech I was setting out in the direction of academia, and simultaneously I was making an attempt to travel toward the world of the creation of literature, a world which in part also belongs to the trans-establishment. I was the newcomer (equivalent to the fifteen year old in the poem) for whom the situation was in some way familiar, but for whom there was still a striking quality of the new (although I had read fiction written by academics, I had been primarily drawn toward the worlds of the stories, as opposed to the world of writers, or to the domain of the knowledge-worlds - and prestige - of academia).
The world of the poem is one of energy, in the sense that the primary descriptive term for it is 'white.' The whiteness is everywhere, and is everything, and is haunted by something that arrives from sideways in the glare: "white through white sliding." It is also haunted by something that is trapping the protagonist, in that he is "caught in a dream of freedom." This is therefore an eerie whiteness, a whiteness that undermines the feeling of "at the bright centre" in the concluding lines, in that any egotism involved (as opposed to the fact that an individual corporeal perspective technically and non-virtuously functions as a central point) is in context to be seen as the result in some way of the boy being caught in an oneiric trap of believing in a metaphysical freedom separating him from natural forces.
And there is also a question about the gender of the whiteness. The boy in the poem can seem to be very adolescent-male, and, if only because he has no obvious feminine aspects, and seems to have a somewhat male, terrain-roaming 'bravado' about him, there is a sense in which this impression does remain in place. But it is the boy's aunt who is primarily associated with the whiteness, because of her "shining eyes." but also because the poem's primary trope of repetition is used only for the aunt and for the sunlight. And given the boy is described in terms of a brightness in the world (which is part of the world), and given also that the world is described as "so vast, so white," the poem ends in fact with the boy being described as an intense whiteness, and whiteness is a colour adopted in a symbolic/spiritual sense primarily by women rather than men. At this point it is worth taking up the poem, again, as a lens for looking toward the trans-establishment, and thinking about gender: the male here is predictably and horribly central and has a seemingly extreme level of kudos ("like a god"), but it is the uncle who in fact is dying. And meanwhile, who is the aunt? She is inconspicuous, but it is she who is more suffused by the energy; it is she who has the composure, and it is she who is not dying. What could perhaps be seen as a partial weakness of the poem when taken as a lens of this kind should maybe be left as a question-mark, or simply as the perception that women recurrently seem less addicted to 'kudos' than men (the aunt could also, for instance, be an academic or an artist: it is just that the fame seemingly pertains only to the uncle).
This is not at all to argue that this is an achieved poem (it is very rhythmically awkward). It is instead a question of seeing what can be seen through it, and seeing what is at work within it, despite its weaknesses. And there are two other issues which must be raised, before returning to the west-facing view from Harlech Rock, one of which is to do with time within the poem, and the other of which concerns the place it describes.
The poem gives an indication of the fact that I had acquired a philosophical problem - the problem of 'free will and determinism.' And it gives a first response to the problem:
He was caught in a dream of freedom.
A response which in fact is open-ended, and very positive, in that it suggests an actual freedom that would be the result of escaping from the trap. There is no pretence of having solved the problem, but merely the idea that the belief in free-will - in separation of human choice-making from the world of forces of the cosmos, of nature - might be a suppression of freedom.
I had acquired the problem because I had been told about it by someone who was studying philosophy. Everyone at Coleg Harlech studied two subjects, and mine were English Literature and History. But because the college was so small the 'walls' between the nine subjects it taught were extremely thin, and I heard a lot about what was being taught in other areas. And because - without giving the issue much thought - I viewed the study of literature as primarily the study of depth-level insights about the world, I was particularly interested in hearing about what was taking place in the philosophy courses, because the subject seemed to inseparable from the areas studied in English Literature.
But this problem of free-will-or-determinism was not something I dallied with as an intellectual 'curiosity.' Instead it had an intense, perturbing impact: I would forget about it, and then return to it, but when I thought about it the experience would be somewhere between a fascinated, enjoyable struggle and a complex anguish of thought. Although other issues were at a higher level of intensity and were more in the foreground, and although I was not officially studying philosophy, this problem became one of the most sustained intellectual processes of my two years in the college.
I was having a first struggle with the dogmatic image of the world, and for the first time was experiencing reason's fixation with the line of time as this fixation manifests itself in relation to metaphysics. Much later, as a result of beginning to engage with space as a world of co-emplaced forces (with simultaneous, reciprocal causality between them, as with a globular cluster of stars), the entire issue of causality from the past would come to appear as an incorrect overall framing of the problem, and the issue would be reconstructed on different lines, involving the perception that freedom is continually heightened by a primary focus on space (and involving time being seen as like worlds of thought, rather than as mechanistic progressions). But at this time, at Coleg Harlech, my conclusion was that my choice-making processes would have had a different pattern of outcomes if my first twenty one years had been different (for instance, if I had been to school, and had a different upbringing), or if my initial physical form had been different (or if both had been different), and given it was clear I had not chosen either the initial circumstances into which I had started out, or my initial physical form, the idea of free-will seemed dubious, at best. And my secondary conclusion was that, in any case, what I really wanted was to maximise my freedom to act (my freedom to create, love, explore, dream, perceive, understand), and to dissolve whatever was blocking the development of this form of freedom, and the issue of free-will was clearly irrelevant in connection with this process, or was even an obstruction. I was not particularly happy with this conclusion - in fact I sweated over it, generating the term 'attitudinal solution' for the kind of resolution I was arriving at, given that I had not in fact solved the originating problem. And of course I was in part unhappy because I was struggling with the dogmatic image of the world, and for this image (a key component of the control mind) if there was only nature then everything was a functioning of blind, mechanistic forces. I was coming to no precise conclusions, but I was refusing the idea of a supplimentary dimension of choice-making, separate from the world of natural forces, and this triggered the dogmatic image's idea of nature as blind, and only accidentally creative. The control mind does not want you to let go toward affirming the spheroambient and immanent world of natural forces as in fact the world of choice-making, because then you might begin to perceive the zones and aspects of the empirical-transcendental, and might begin to free yourself from both the dogmatic image of the world and the control mind itself.
The question of the space of the poem leads in directions which are very different.
At the level of human societies, it would not at all be right to say at all that it is not set in Wales (this was the place I had primarily in mind as I wrote it) but I was aware in writing it that the fact it could be anywhere in the world was a good thing, and I was not simply imposing England onto Wales in that the one element that evoked somewhere other than Wales was the the suggestion of tussock-grass ("tussocked coastland"), and this kind of grass is a feature of places like New Zealand, and not of England. Overall it is was no doubt a valuable situation that in Harlech I had an extra impulse to take me toward the trans-national or the planetary, as opposed to the poetry of the local world, because I knew that I could not easily invoke local names, in that they were names which existed within another cultural/linguistic world and therefore I did not know their meaning (I think the only time I used a local name was in a poem which had the refrain "On Harlech beach," and here I was directly naming a planetary element, as opposed to a cultural one).
The tonality of the poem is 'planetary' rather than social, suggesting forces beyond those of the human world: at sunrise the house is spinning toward the sun; the boy has been deposited at the house like the sand on the beach; the guests are like migratory birds. Though (perhaps along with whatever is spreading through the walls) the key beyond-the-human element is light and colour: it is a poem of the all-colours that is white light, and of one other colour - the depth-colour or transparency colour of light-suffused red.
*
The beginnings of answers are now being provided in relation to the questions that were asked at the start of this section - the questions concerning time and the faculty of dreaming. But the whole process of going back to the two years at Harlech is also an answering of other questions: it is a step back in order to go further. In fact, all of the primary issues of this book/blog are in effect here (including the question of 'the eerie northwest'): and of these the one that is by far the most important is that of the direction of Love-and-Freedom. In going to Coleg Harlech my life turned toward a process of acquiring knowledge, and, inseparably, toward a specific zone of the trans-establishment which, as such, is a domain of the functionings of a fixated, suppressive form of reason. But this was happening under circumstances where I kept getting faint glimpses of what it would be like to take the onward path toward both lucidity and dreaming (and to travel toward Love-and-Freedom is intrinsically to wake these two faculties).
The summer view from Harlech Rock should be explored for a moment. The first point is that it is a view of a place beyond mountains: and this is true both of the terrain immediately around you, and of the Llyn peninsula beyond the bay. It is a place with a fundamental vastness, and yet with an aspect of seclusion. It is like a valley, but one side of the valley is the sea. The second point is that the contours within the view to a very great extent are un-modified by humans. This is true of the silhouette of the peninsula, of the Snowdon range, of the ocean, of the rock you are standing on, and also of the beach and the huge area of dunes. Again, it is true of the erosion-facets of the steep, grassy cliffs to the south, and of the main horizon-line of the mountain running behind you, running upward from south to north: and beyond the bare rock on which the castle has been constructed the woodlands on the steep slope, although no doubt heavily managed, are also predominantly a space of contours which are not the result of a human plan.
As well as seeing it on a hot, dreamy day in summer, it can be envisaged on a frosty night in winter, with stars, and with the thought of the iron age hill fort at the top of the ridge behind you, two miles to the north and a thousand feet further up. It might begin to seem after a while that this is not an ordinary place, and that it it is a vantage from which the Outside is a little more visible than normal.
In going to Coleg Harlech I stopped attempting stories, but in a crucial sense what had been involved not only continued, but was taken over an upward-threshold, in that I started to produce work. (the existence of a poetry reading group - which met weekly in a pub, on a weekday evening - was no doubt extremely important for this continuation in a new channel). It was only really in the second year at the college that a process of suppression began to go into effect.
In the first year a sense of the world around me as unknown increased steadily through the autumn and early winter, and then held itself in place - in certain ways becoming even more intense with the arrival of spring, and then summer. A doorway - an opening - had appeared in front of me in a way where it was clearer than it had been before: and it would be more true to say that before this there had only been something like a window. This opening in fact related to issues that went far wider and deeper than a process of trying to become a writer, but an aspect of its appearance was that I now had a technique for writing which was about opening up to the unknown (it was a technique that I had instinctively been drawn towards - without thinking about it - in relation to writing anomalous or 'fantasy' tales, but I had failed to get it to work). This approach was the following: if images, ideas or words gave me an intense, enigmatic feeling - particularly a sublime feeling - I would set out to write a poem which drew upon the inchoate but inspiring starting-point. The unknown was here the source of the question: why does it give me this feeling? Why do I get this intense, sublime feeling from the sight of the Llyn Peninsula? Why do I get this beautiful, haunting feeling from the sight of the big white house on the road to the sea; or from transparent crimson? And the exploratory correlate of this process at the level of reading was that I focused-in on poems and lines within poems where I did not really understand what was being said (again, the unknown) but where the words gave me a powerful feeling.
However, the wider aspect of the opening was that the world around me was increasingly being experienced - no matter how faintly - as an enigmatic, spheroambient unknown, a place in which there might, for all I knew, be profoundly anomalous forces at work. And it is to be remembered at this point that in going to Coleg Harlech I was very much not leaving anomalous tales behind - the opposite, in fact. All through the first year I was studying Shakespeare's plays, and because of the sheer intensity of these works (and because no other individual writer was studied for a whole year) it seems right to say that I was 'met off the boat' by Shakespeare on arrival in Harlech in a way that goes completely beyond the initial accident of going to see Twelfth Night when I went to the college for the interview. And Shakespeare's plays were written facing the transcendentally unknown - were written facing the anomalous.
In November we studied Antony and Cleopatra, and I was very struck by the point where the soothsayer says
In nature's infinite book of secrecy
A little I can read.
Although I was unsure what to say about it, I felt this to be a crucial idea being expressed (it is important to see that the soothsayer sees the anomalous, but this is connected up with the idea of the natural, as opposed to the supernatural). And I was simultaneously struck by the point where two soldiers hear the music of spirits departing (spirits which are supposed in some way to have been accompanying and assisting Antony), a moment which serves no purpose at the level of the plot, and functions only to justify the soothsayer's earlier perception that Antony was being helped in this way.
My engagement with the transcendentally unknown had in fact been taken over an upward threshold: far from having moved away from 'fantasy' fiction I had moved toward engagement with a zone which was full of stories about the anomalous, while at the same time being held to be a paradigm of mainstream literature. And as a paradigm in this way, part of what was in question was insights about the world - and this meant that the process was now explicitly philosophical as well as imaginative. It seemed that on some level it was a question of learning to read 'an infinite book of secrecy.'
However, the full account of the 'opening' which had appeared is that alongside it - maybe you could say at right angles to it - had appeared another doorway: the direction of the academic study of literature and the world. I was very much drawn in this other direction as well, and without really being aware of the 'contradiction' involved - without being aware, that is, of the irony that literature academics in principle stay within the framework of ordinary-reality, whereas Shakespeare is not just pointing toward the 'tragic' and toward thought-provoking aspects of ordinary existence, but in fact is systematically hinting at areas of the transcendental other than that of tragedy. All I noticed at the time was that, in a way that was all the more powerful for it being quiet and enigmatic, Antony and Cleopatra was far more of a fantasy story than I had been expecting, and that my teacher - who I feel was in fact a good, inspirational teacher - never brought up this aspect of the play (and nor in fact did the writers of the essays that I read on the subject). The discourse all stayed on the level of tragic flaws, magnanimity, love and loyalty, and did not go near to the ocean of the anomalous (which of course also means that it had not really begun to talk about tragedy at the level of the transcendental, keeping it as merely a personal issue).
I did not attempt to articulate a perspective which was radically from outside those that were being offered to me - and nor did it occur to me that there was any need. It was interesting that there were more fantasy elements in literature than might be thought from a distance, but this thought was as far as it went in terms of an explicit taking-up of particular issues. But although I had nothing to say on the subject, and had a default tendency to take one of the customary views, this did not stop me from attempting to see the world through Shakespeare's works (and in the course of the year the anomalous kept appearing in other writers I was studying: Jane Eyre has a moment of apparent 'action at a distance;' there is a suggestion that the horses in The Rainbow are Spinozistic elements within some kind of planetary intelligence, etc.). As the days grew shorter - and as there was more darkness, with its tendency to conduct the mind toward the unknown, especially in a place like Harlech - I was encountering the world with what on one level was very much the 'daylight' modality of conventional academic views. This was not at all the visions-at-night modality (with its intrinsic tendency toward intense deterritorialisation) that I would become aware of several years later in Swansea. And yet, because of the ways in which I was engaging with the world (and because I had not yet been displaced to any great extent toward a fixation with the line of time) there was a subtle heightening in my experience. I was both attempting to use Shakespeare as a lens for seeing the world, and I was using another strategy of deterritorialisation in relation to thought, in that my writing and reading of poetry had started to concentrate on areas that were powerful but where whatever faint understanding I had was not initially at the point where I could put it into words, or where there was simply an intense feeling.
The oneirically charged intensity of that winter had another source - and one that in fact was probably even more powerful. Toward the end of the term I fell in love with a woman called Tara, who was studying Psychology and Welsh Studies, and embarked on a yearning almost-relationship which never quite crossed the threshold, partly through my own sheer ineptitude and inexperience, and also because we were not at all well suited to each other.
It should be said at this point that the two years at Coleg Harlech were far from 'successful' in terms of my attempts toward relationships with women. I was continually feeling an intense longing toward different women at the college, but I was still far too earnest, which in part is to say that I had an outsider's incapacity to use the playful irony that is an integral part of most courtships (this irony is a faked insouciance, but when it is done well it is a real proof of poise, and, afraid of saying anything negative, I didn't even have the beginnings of an ability to use this form of communication). Another inability was a failure to recognise the default modality of the dance of courtship/seduction: I felt that what my lust was telling was me was not what I should do, and that it was right in principle to leave instigation to the woman as much as possible: not knowing that the complete opposite was true of the default of the dance. Overall the man leads in this conventional modality, and he does indeed allow his lust to speak and instigate, but in the most, subtle, well-timed way possible.
But what is success? For a while I was deeply in love with Tara, and at this time she was responding to some extent to my advances; and we had some good times together. And I was spared the insecurity and jealousy that would have been the inevitable result of having an ill-matched relationship while living in the hall of residence: this ten story community was a melting-pot in which relationships came and went rapidly - perhaps the most all-round attractive, inspired woman in my year started a - well-matched - relationship in the first two weeks of the term, and she and her new partner instantly responded to the libidinal waves she was creating by leaving immediately and renting a small house in a village three miles away. And my intellectual confidence was far higher than my ability: I was recurrently in danger of ridicule, through well-founded or spurious but effective attacks (under normal circumstances I could generally hold my own, but if I had been insecure I am certain I would have ended up being very miserable under such circumstances).
As it was, the late autumn and winter was a shift to a situation which profoundly figured the second sphere of action. It was true that all of my tutors were men, but this was more than counterbalanced by my being in love with Tara (and as I recovered from the failure of the relationship it was still the case that I was surrounded by many women to whom I was attracted); there was a place around me that predominantly consisted of quiet expanses that to a great extent were straightforwardly planetary, rather than them being heavily formed/constructed by the human world; and I had been swept away into studying dreamings - with their intense engagement with intent - and therefore I was faced toward the abstract.
And now there was a quality of the unknown about everything - the tone had been set by the phrase 'nature's infinite book of secrecy.' Hovering on the edge of a relationship I was charged up with energy, and at the same time I was looking toward the transcendental. Everything became more extraordinary, and small, anomalous intensities became more noticeable: at one point I was in a shop in Porthmadog (a town ten miles to the north of Harlech), and found myself looking at the ruby depth-colour of a bottle of raspberry vinegar, struck by the intense beauty of this world of colour. And it should be noticed that in looking around me I was not necessarily always looking in the right direction, in looking toward the transcendental. Elements in the literature I was reading were central to this, but it was also the case that Tara had an intense love for the Arthurian mythos, and took very seriously the idea that its anomalous aspects were in some sense an expression of reality. And, unlike Shakespeare, Athurianism faces toward what it would be right to call 'transcendental west,' somewhere that is very definitely not the direction of Love-and-Freedom. I did not in fact start reading Arthurian stories (it is as if this decision, in leaving behind Tolkien, was implacable - it would have been an even more retrograde step than going back to Tolkien), but this other, westward direction was somewhere I was already recurrently facing through far more modernist writings. A poem which impressed me at this time was by the Welsh poet Gwyn Jones, and was called "The Meaning of Fuschias." I didn't understand it at depth, but it seemed to be about a man visiting a woman (a lover?, a sister?) in a mental hospital. (It is to be remembered that in mainstream literary modernism the primary anomalous misadventure of human existence is madness, and the affects of the gothic are therefore transmutated along these new lines).
I was very struck by two moments in the poem, the first of which seemed to be an attempt to enter into the mind of the woman
The cupboards of the trees, creaking,
Creaking.
The second was near the end (the poem was perhaps two pages in length), and seemed to be an attempt to see the whole space being encountered:
And you, and all our darkened suns
Possess me through the gateways of your tears.
These phrases ran on in my head. I repeated them: they were like light getting through. The same thing was happening with lines from Shakespeare, and also with lines from Dylan Thomas (with Thomas the colour of the light - insofar as it can be described in this way - was often a kind of 'solar green,' -as with the line 'fire green as grass', or 'the force that through the green fuse...'). But, to return to the initial point, one direction in which I was looking at this time was definitely a good distance to the west of south. Towards the end of this phase I discovered and memorised this poem by Yeats, a poem whose green is of a very different kind, and which looks west, while glimpsing north:
Your hooves have stamped at the black margins of the wood
Even where horrible green parrots call and swing
My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud
I knew that horse-play, knew it for a murderous thing
What wholesome sun has ripened is wholesome food to eat
And that alone. Yet I, being driven half insane
Because of some green wing, gathered old mummy wheat
In the mad abstract dark, and after ground it slowly, grain by grain.
But now I bring you full-flavoured wine, from out of a barrel found
Where seven Ephesian topers slept, and never knew
When Alexander's empire passed, they slept so sound.
Stretch out your limbs and sleep a long saturnian sleep
I have loved you better than my soul for all my words
And there is none so fit to keep a watch and keep
Unwearied eyes upon those horrible green birds.
The unknown had opened up a little, and being in love with Tara (despite her Arthurianism) was immeasurably valuable, and despite everything I was predominantly being guided by the love and delight that is quietly always implicit in Shakespeare (in the overall music of Shakespeare). And during this time I set out toward an ability to write poems. Which is to say that I started to make a sustained attempt to write poetry, as opposed to the continually faltering, minimal attempt to write anomalous tales that had preceded this. Within only a few months the process would start to be damaged by excessive abstraction, and by a fixation on the line of time (together to some extent with a fixation on interiority in form of the idea of the mind), and within five or six years it would have come to a complete halt. But for a short while an actual attempt was taking place.
If the following four poems (all written in the spring and summer of 1985) are taken together with the poem Isolation - which was written at the same time - the feeling is that I am unsettled in looking to the west, am darkly haunted by the north, and as yet do not know how to say anything much about my experiences of the south. I have a knowledge of summer, but I also know that romanticism in poetry is dead, and my lack of experience of sustained travelling in a southward direction means that in glancing toward the Future (as opposed to moments when I am looking north) I am unlikely to break the new rules of poetic realism.
Blizzard
The sky's steel chalice
Is a bowl where snowflakes sift
Swift paths to cold earth.
There are no names
For the spirits which seem turning
In the towers of the tall wind
They are slow and ravenous
Toothed like prowling wolves.
The air is hushed, devoid of birds.
Between one range of whitened hills
And the next, the vale's fecund soil
Is stretched tight, like racked flesh.
Now, wind rising, the vast dance
Of inhuman change seems audible.
It whirls, skirls above the subject land,
Every footstep another death.
Now, for those who listen
There is the touch of holocaust
Huge suffering. The huddled houses
Appear almost poised
On the edge of waking,
Hearing - but soon
The blizzard's grip will give
And the rain will come,
Will furnish, with its pale curtains
Against red-brick walls, red-tiled roofs.
Only the image of normal, quotidian pain.
Sea by Night
Waves are breaking
Over the cold and seething strand,
Sharp in the breach of silence.
Open window,
Shivering night
Shovels in the distance
Are gently shearing sand
On Harlech beach
They softly reach
To scatter grains of sound
That break upon a blunted mind
And softly stinging, sharp, unkind
Scrape limbo,
Wash inward sight
With the spray of harsh reality
That laves and loosens knuckled thoughts
And tries to teach
The waking with the fault -
And with the cleansing comes the salt -
On Harlech beach.
Haven in Winter
And long and down through the clocked corridors
On quiet carpets I carried my books and wondered
At soft spines of leather, and crisp, shining leaves.
The smoke of gold, bright and morning-windowed
Was the cold that warms the memory when you turn away to warmth
And often, more than often, I turned with that shining
And took the amber glow down the corridor within me,
The gently padding corridor, clocked and soft,
With windows only on snow and winter slumber
Of dark hot beech trees with frozen sparks of leaves
Still brightly hanging, and telling of last year's fire.
Warm and rich as buttered toast and jam
By a blazing mantled fire when snow is falling
Slow and deep, the corridors and passages I wondered long and then.
Came spring, and the fading crimson bindings brightened
Like the robin, and disappeared among the leaves
That burst bright into vital green. Only to dry and fade
So quickly. The wood in the darkening grate burns out,
The ashes it leaves grows gold, and their greyness
Is the daylight of a wet June day without shelter.
The crackling of a dying fire grows louder like the clocks
Of the warm lamplit corridors that amplified their music
Into harsh news of parting, and the hard glaring stares
And spaces of the world beyond a dream.
The long dream of haven's doorway and of coloured perfect warmth
Beneath the blanket of the snow's wide eaves.
And long and down through the clocked corridors
On quiet carpets I carried my books and wondered
At soft spines of leather, and crisp, shining leaves.
The Lovers
Like a tight fist of love
The lovers are holding flowers, and wandering back
From the meadow.
They are as strong as expanding ice
And as enviable
As the lark that flies
Above a boring picnic.
For all their weaknesses, these poems show an awareness that there is something wrong within the world, while at the same time showing a degree of attunement to an enigmatic beauty within it. They are a beginning, in both the overall sense that I am starting to 'listen' toward the world, and also - in relation to the last poem - in the sense that I am moving towards an attempt to think dispassionately about love relationships. (which is not at all a question of being intrinsically negative toward them, but is instead a question of seeing them as whole, and as a force within their social environment).
However, in the second year at the college, there is no doubt that the line of time began to take up my attention. Instead of the spheroambient unknown there was now, more and more, the line of historical time, with its social and natural known (past and present), and its futural unknown. And many factors conducted me toward this fixation, some of them social, some oneiric-poetic, some straightforwardly historico-political.
The idea of transformations-to-come was everywhere, and on an initial level this was fundamentally valuable (it involved the idea of an other, better way of living - an idea which is intrinsic to a greater proximity of the Future). The fact that socialism was the prevalent value-system and dreamed horizon at the college was what was so valuable about it as a milieu, and yet there was still a cost in relation to the fixation on the line of time, in that this fixation creates a kind of grave clone of openness (you are open to the known of the human disaster, and you are open to the projective chronological unknown of the future, but you are no longer fully open to the spheroambient unknown of the world around you). It also involves a passivity, and a secret, Hegelian presupposition - in that the crucial actor is now history, and this actor is believed to have a good will: "inevitably people will eventually come to their senses." Coleg Harlech was split into those who were macro-politically focused, and those whose engagement with the world was more philosophical, artistic and micropolitical, and at the same time the people who were intensely engaged along the lines of molar politics were split between those who wanted a Wales separate from England, and those who did not: and yet the overall, dreamed horizon across all of these students tended almost always to be socialism (the separatists wanted a politically separate, but socialist Wales, etc.). The dream was inspiring, and all the more inspiring for being without precise contours in terms of principles of organisation (there was no dogma of the ideal 'republic', or anything approaching such a dogma), and yet the dream - which at its core concerned reaching into the present to find what was at a higher level of intensity within it - came with the deadly problem of the cloning of openness through fixation on the line of time.
At the level of what I was studying there were many different ways in which I was being conducted toward time. Everything connected up: Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano was there explicitly alongside the process of studying the Spanish Civil War; Tolstoy was a window into the events that led up to the Russian Revolution. And for the first time I encountered a poem which was powerfully oneiric, and yet explicitly political - W.H.Auden's poem "Spain."
The fundamental value of what was taking place was that I was starting to see the outline of the transestablishment. In reading about the Spanish Civil War I began to realise that the states of the 'western' world are not so much against fascism, as against any fascistic states that cause them problems (otherwise Franco would have been deposed, and there would be no alliances with fascistic dictatorships). But this shift toward a deeper understanding was associated with a shutting down of an overall movement toward the transcendental, and in particular toward the south of the outside.
In studying European drama from Ibsen and Chekhov to John Bond, together with the novels of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, there was not enough to maintain the view toward the unknown that had been broken open in the first year by Shakespeare, Charlotte Bronte and D.H.Lawrence. Everything started to come together onto a line: a line that projected out toward a transformation somewhere off in the future (and a line which in the primary sense was of the same kind as the line that was already involved in the question of free-will and determinism).
During that second year I felt that somehow things had faded a little. This was an overall impression, but I also wrote fewer poems, and felt that my writing had become worse, rather than better. But on sunny days when I looked out toward the Llyn Peninsula I recurrently received a serene, powerful feeling that came with an image of an area of high, beautiful hills which were somewhere in Eastern Europe (perhaps in Russia or Poland, but in any case, they were not somewhere I had been). The poem I wrote on the basis of this starting-point makes me feel that space and the planetary had somehow broken through again (though under different circumstances) and it also makes me feel that I was continuing a process of trying to answer the question of where a love relationship 'goes.'
The Tilsit Hill
We're a long way now from the Tilsit Hill
In another country, far away
From the wide and lonely place where once
We wondered for a day.
We've learned so many things since then,
We've seen the cruel knives
That take the weakest and the best,
We've slowly lived our lives.
We've learned the reasons for the deaths
Of people that we knew
We've learned of rents and mortgages,
Of payments overdue.
We've lived within a widened world
And seen with clearer sight
Though the world has shrunk to a tiny ball
And colours have paled to white.
Its a long time now since the day we stood
On the height of the Tilsit Hill
When the summer trees, and the seas of grass
Were brave with light, and still.
There was birdsong, and the faint sound
Of our young, unhurried breath.
The hill was vast and perfect
For the flooding sun was death.
I didn't feel happy about the jolting rhythm and simple rhyme scheme of this poem, but something had 'got through' in the process of exploring the image and feeling, and I did not think about trying to re-write it. There was a sense in which I did not fully understand the ending (though it felt right), and therefore there was no point in trying to re-write it, even if I thought I had taken a kind of 'retrograde' step in terms of the poem's form.
It is clear that the poem has a line of historical time, as well as the personal time of the couple, and that what insists into and through this is space, and an expanse of the planet that is to a large extent outside the human world - as if in writing it I was trying to 'ground' myself again in the space around the human world, instead of being fixated upon this world, both along the line of history, and across a de-contextualised and nebuoulsly spatialised breadth. It is also clear that I had found something in looking oneirically toward love relationships: that is, the kind of relationship that can last for sixty or seventy decades (there is nothing naive or romantic in finding something positive within the sphere of such relationships - they exist, and recurrently a deep-seated love is involved in them, whatever their problems might have been). And it is worth pointing out that after Coleg Harlech I wrote fewer and fewer poems, in a process that ended in the first year of my Warwick degree, when I wrote another poem which was about a relationship of this kind, a poem which started out as a disinterested experiment in using the structure of spring/summer/autumn/winter, and then acquired an unexpected intensity, a pathos. After this I wrote no more poems for many years - this line of creativity simply terminated. It was if I had discovered something that I was travelling towards, but I did not want it to be like that. I wanted this relationship, but 'in flight,' as opposed to this relationship in its 'settled down' form, with its sedentary-life yearning for a direction that had been left behind, on the Tilsit Hill.
At Coleg Harlech I continued reading anomalous tales, and not just in the form of Shakespeare's plays, though to a great extent I left behind the line of contemporary fantasy/sci-fi/horror that I had been following before. I read - and intensely enjoyed - two works that are liminal in relation to what is conventionally called 'literature' - the collection of stories The Book of Sand, by Borges, and Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan. But there was no spark triggered from these in terms of writing stories: a shift had taken place toward studying literature/philosophy/history, and before long even the thread of narratives-within-poems had disappeared.
However, the final point that must be made about these two years at Harlech is that something was happening in terms of story-worlds that could be said to belong to the space of anomalous tales, only in a way where there was no writing involved, and no thought that the process was one which would take a written or even a spoken form.
Before going to sleep a new, very recurrent 'dreaming' that would come to me was the idea that I was escaping from a repressive, disastrously dangerous society (with a chance of some kind of pursuit from agents of this society) and was in a countryside or semi-wilderness area not far from a city, and that I found a partially or extremely derelict path which had been created for unknown reasons, but which was going up into the hills into which I was travelling. The hills were forested, with open grassland areas, and were stacked up in ranges, each broad-topped range higher than the last, and with slightly lower areas, several miles across, between each new range - horizon, after horizon, range after range. Everything was sunlit, and after a while the path had gone, and my aim, as well as to go further away, and higher up - across one escarpment-threshold after another - was to veer slightly to the side in relation to the direction in which the path had been going, and then to follow an unpredictable path in case there was a pursuit. But the affect was not one of fear: after several thresholds had been crossed the affect was of joy and of 'solar trance' (a feeling of freedom, and of the beauty of these sunlit uplands) - and the fear of the pursuit had been transmutated into the joy of the thought that I had got away.
*
It was the winter of the second year of my undergraduate degree (1990-1991), and I had just walked the mile from my flat to the new bookshop that had recently been opened in the centre of Coventry. The door to the shop was about thirty yards away from the Lady Godiva statue, and the store formed one corner of a new shopping mall that had been constructed on one part of the highest area of the city's hill, and which had to some extent incorporated the statue as a kind of figurehead in front of the arch leading to its main concourse.
Standing in the shop, the book I started reading was William Gibson's 1982 collection of short stories, Burning Chrome, and the story I read was "Hinterlands."
This story is about a future world where a point has been discovered in the solar system where, under specific circumstances, spaceships will disappear, to reappear months or years later, having spent the intervening time in other, undetermined zones/dimensions of the cosmos. The first astronaut to whom this happens, by accident, is a Russian cosmonaut called Olga, who comes back holding an alien sea-shell. Later, a French astronaut returns with a "twelve-centimetre ring of magnetically coded steel" whose information is a cure for cancer. However, Olga returns insane, to the extent of being unable to communicate anything about what happened, and the French astronaut is dead when he is found: in relation to the human beings who undertake it the journey is always in one sense or another a fatal one. At the point where they are found the astronauts are either permanently insane, or have killed themselves.
The additional aspects of the situation with this 'line of communication' are, firstly, that all recording instruments come back blank (which suggests that the journey might be to a dimension of the cosmos with different physical principles), and, secondly, that there is no certainty about a spaceship disappearing, apart from the fact that spaceships with more than one human occupant are never 'taken.' (in the context, the fact that the number of observers is a factor functions to point toward the quantum level of the physical world, which, again, connects with the idea of a dimension involving other modalities of matter/energy).
The human race has constructed a huge, centrifugal-force space station at the singular point ("an eighth of the way out toward the orbit of Mars") at which the spaceships disappear, and this station has an artificial gravity mockup of an idyllic Earth terrain, in an attempt to keep the astronauts sane when they return. And the attempt to hold the returning astronauts in a state of sanity has even been extended to the point where their ship is placed alongside a fake ship in this mockup of a 'paradisal' wilderness, and where the person who goes into the ship pretends to be a fellow astronaut who is on, or has just returned from, another mission into the unknown. These 'actors' are astronauts whose ships did not disappear when they went to the departure-point, and who not only have been carefully matched so as to be maximally attractive to the returning travellers, but have also been given an arsenal of different psychotropic substances to help them in their attempt to assist people who in some cases, in fact, have enough composure and intellectual focus to find extremely elaborate, difficult ways of killing themselves, such as reprogramming machines (the drugs have been provided on the basis that an 'alternative culture' atmosphere will be more conducive to sanity than any set up which has the urgent, clinical tonality of a military investigation). And yet, despite all these efforts, there has been no success of any kind. The returnees either find ingenious ways of killing themselves, or descend immediately into one some form of extreme, comatose insanity. The human race has discovered a line of communication, of contact (the French call it le metro, the subway, the Russians call it 'the river', and the Americans call it the Highway), but they can't get anything back from it other than dead or insane astronauts, and occasional alien artifacts and objects.
In reading this story I reached a distant view of the body without organs. An inference which it suggested to me (and this is not an idiosyncratic or against-the-grain reading) was that the reason why the returning astronauts all went mad was that they were returning from a state of bliss so great that the collapse back across a downward threshold was too horrific for them to withstand it. And the idea that came with this was even darker, and was the thought that it might not just be a question of this dimension being substantially less good than the one visited by the astronauts, but that the world of ordinary human reality was in some fundamental sense horrific or disastrous all along. This left the thought that the space or dimension of the cosmos that we standardly encounter (the one studied by science), might be a kind of horror-infested, generally empty antechamber into which beings further up into reality do not attempt to communicate, because of a lack of any ability on our part to understand them, and perhaps also because of the infestation - whatever this is.
But the hinterlands - the worlds behind or beyond this one - would therefore be everywhere around us, a spheroambient Future. And given that they would consist of another dimension of the cosmos, they would also be immanent to each one of us, transecting us, and on some virtual level, suffusing us (the problem would simply therefore be one of actualising something that is already permanently though fugitively in effect at the level of the body without organs). To state this overall perspective in another way, the alien sea-shell found by Olga Tovyevski is all along pointing toward the ocean of the body without organs: a kind of white, vertical ocean, a white wall into which those who collapse into schizophrenia travel a short distance, and then return into the disarray of insanity, as opposed to passing into or through the wall and then continuing; or learning how to pass into it and return with experience that functions to heighten awareness, and to assist toward a waking of the intellectual faculties that would be a return into the wall - into the Future. The Frenchman who brings back something immensely valuable but who collapses would therefore be Antonin Artaud (on a slightly different level Olga points toward Tarkovsky's Stalker and towards Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic). And the Future has of course been there all along - "at the edge of the Highway every human language unravels in your hands - except perhaps the language of the shaman..." (the Future is the bliss of travelling into wider realities; the bliss of desubjectified micro-modalities of existence, at the level of encounters, becomings and faculties, and at the inseparable level of the energy-fields of the body). The white wall of the body without organs, and the immanent, non-Hegelian future are of course fundamental to the project that reached its culmination in France at the same time as the writing of "Hinterlands" - the two books of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, whose authors refer to themselves and other explorers-into-the-wall by saying 'we sorcerers,' and who go back to the 1930s and 1940s not just for the works of Artaud but also for the works of Virginia Woolf. Beyond ordinary reality is the vertical wall of the Futural ocean which Woolf is pointing towards in writing The Waves.
I had received a glimpse, but this glimpse was to a great extent a profoundly inchoate view, and despite the strength of the starting-point in relation to the reading of the story, it was as if after this point I had been using an additional lens, and one that made something latent - and therefore contestable - in the piece connect up with the story's explicit powerful aspects (so I didn't even have a conventionally stable textual basis). I had worked with my lenses, and succeeded, but this did not mean that I knew how to explain either what I had done, or what I had seen.
I had read the story because I had asked Nick Land what philosophy books it would be valuable for me to read, and, with intense enthusiasm, he had said I should read Gibson. I very much agreed with the widened definition of philosophy that this implied, and I was evidently being told that there were valuable perspectives within Gibson's books. And this recommendation was an aspect of a return to the foreground of the 'stories of the anomalous' that I had been reading from long before I started officially studying literature (along with other aspects in the form of Nick's other engagements with sci fi and horror, and of an openness to tales of the anomalous that was in effect quite widely within the Warwick philosophy milieu).
A part of the affect at this time was therefore that it was good to have some company, at last, in exploring this very extraordinary space of writing. I had not yet returned to attempts to write along these lines, but I was now back to following this tradition, and to thinking by means of its works as a main aspect of what I was doing.
However, this makes it slightly ironic that, in reading Gibson, from the very beginning the direction which I began to see was not the one in which Nick was looking. There is a humour that comes from what took place: Nick had enthused to me about Gibson in a context where the body without organs was a crucial concept, and had probably even applied this concept to Gibson's works, and then I had gone off and used the additional lens of the idea of the body without organs in looking through the lens of the story "Hinterlands." And instead of arriving at the view that the domain of mathematics (and particularly computation in the form of cyberspace) was in every way fundamental, I had arrived at a view toward the south - or fundamental aspect - of the body without organs in a way where this view did not even explicitly include either mathematics or cyberspace.
This is a windswept crossroads we are looking at: or rather, it is two windswept crossroads, and one with an additional spatial aspect. In a sense the lenses I was using were both from 1980-1982 (the first crossroads). And this was a time when there was both a Futural incursion, and a collapse in which new, obfuscating developments occurred, such as the appearance of stories in which developments in computer technologies were the momentous, driving aspect of all human development, stories which in these cases could foster the partisan-of-time passivity and confusion of a 'techno-Hegelianism' (we are all heading inevitably toward a glorious techno-metamorphosis, although it might still take a few decades...). Gibson at this time was looking back to writers who were listening into the cosmic silence around us, and wondering about it (writers like the Strugatsky brothers, but also the other pairing from this earlier time of Kubrick and Clarke), but he was also looking in the direction explored by the novella which Vinge had just written, the direction, that is, of cyberspace (as Gibson will call it) and of the idea of a coming technological singularity in which artificial intelligence leaves human intelligence behind. "Hinterlands" was written facing in the first direction, and the story "Burning Chrome" was was written facing in the second, though it is in Neuromancer that all aspects of the second line of thought really go into effect. It is of course a prejudice that the second direction is better than the first, and it is evidently true that taking up the question of cyberspace and the technological singularity does not supplant the process of thinking about the Fermi paradox (which in effect is the question, why do we appear to be on our own?). In fact, the end of Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy is a return to the listening-toward-the-cosmos perspective of "Hinterlands."
The second crossroads is an exceptionally tiny, localised event, that aquired its force primarily through the double impacting, at the level of the oneirosphere, of the first one. And the contingency was that, because I knew the meaning of the word 'hinter' in German, from the outset i read hinterlands as 'behind-lands' and, specifically, as the body without organs (the other lens). The idea of the body without organs then became the inference-idea of a desubjectified bliss into which the explorers in the story escape. After this, the Hegelian idea proposed by the story that human beings within its world are a cargo cult (so that, by suggestion, there is a bright centre of ultra-high development, and human beings occupy a hinterland) became a kind of irrelevance, negated by the idea of the language of shamans holding firm as the language of science collapsed. The implied upward progression from tribe-in-hinterland to the bright 'centre' or foreground-land of alien-intelligence vanished in the face of an idea of a hinterland which was beyond us, but at the same time was us, virtually, all along, making us into people trying to wake up as the alien beings we had always been.
If in Harlech I had set out, in some sense, to cross 'the cities,' then by the winter of 1991 I had been struggling in their labyrinth for several years (cities here relates to actual cities, but at depth it relates to the cities of the micropolitical, political, religious, technological and knowledge institutions of the transestablishment).
When I first arrived in Coventry, in 1989, there was no quality bookshop in the centre of the city, other than the tiny alternative bookstore, called the "Wedge" which was jammed into a long very narrow second floor, above a predominantly-vegetarian cafe(it was a quality bookshop in the sense that if someone for instance wanted an academic book this was the only shop in the town-centre where they might find it). It was here that, after having been told about it a few weeks before, I found a second hand copy of Operators and Things.
The very centre of the city is the place where a castle used to be, on a rise slightly above the site of the old cathedral (the new cathedral is at right angles, facing north, a little further down the slope): only the castle was mislaid around four hundred years, and in a process that seems partially undocumented was partly replaced by a half-timbered guildhall. The very highest point of the hill is now occupied by the Cathedral Lanes shopping mall, making the city's hilltop centre a point of tension between a triumph of capitalism and a series of adjoining symbols of medievalism and religion. A strange turbulent space in which a whole castle has disappeared, a cathedral has been replaced and turned to one side, and in which the statue of Lady Godiva has been turned at right angles from facing south to facing west, so that the orientation of the statue fits with the approach to the shopping mall - a capitalist heraldic symbolism. The Wedge bookshop was itself only about fifty yards from the highest point of the hill, and was both incongruous and anachronistic alongside ancient, ponderously civic buildings like the town-hall: it was a descendant or relative of 1968's Compendium in London, and itself disappeared not long after this time. In contrast, the bookshop in which I read "Hinterlands" had just opened a few weeks before - it was Dillons, and was an 'offshoot' of the early 80s appearance and rapid expansion of Waterstones. It was the same in style as Waterstones shops, and of course, the shop became a Waterstones - and this has now been replaced by a bar-and-restaurant.
In short, the hilltop is a medieval place where a shopping mall has literally taken the highest ground, a place where, even though there has been a gigantic amount of change, there are ruins and fragments and mythic symbols from earlier phases jammed in everywhere. It is easy to imagine Steel from Sapphire and Steel wandering disapprovingly amongst all the anachronisms and saying "these human beings - how they clutter their lives." And lastly, it should be added that a bookshop is suffused with a world of exteriorities: it is a systematic attempt to get people to go through doorways into the virtual-real - the verosphere, the oneirosphere.
Because the bookshop itself, and the kind of bookshop was new (unless you lived in London, or Oxford, etc.), walking into it a felt a bit like walking into the future. It is evidently the case that nothing much can be said about what happened that day - I got an inchoate, though intense view toward the south-outside through using an additional lens along with the lens of "Hinterlands." And yet - there is something about this whole multiplicitous nexus which remains striking. I had gone into the centre of the city, and found a strange interiority which was also an exteriority, and this had led to the claustrophic Gibson space station (with its artificial paradise) into which the ships of the dead and insane astronauts are towed. And two years later I would start reading Operators and Things in the Wedge, with its world of ultra-urbane Operators, who, as well as being deeply negative about the countryside, exist in an interior realm - whatever outsights they might occasionally provide - which in some sense is within Barbara O'Brien, while giving the impression that they are out in the world. Disturbing flashes of faked exteriorities, but somehow all connected to a flash-perception of the south of the body-without-organs, of the Future that is continuously there, beyond the grim deterioration-tunnel of chronological time. It is clear that I had to get out of Coventry, and, much more importantly, out of the interiority, but it is also apparent that in some sense (perhaps only a trivial one) the very middle of this fraught, tangled city helped me. In the language of P.J.Hammond - of Sapphire and Steel - it almost feels as if the 'time-break' was there, on the hill in the centre of Coventry.
*
What can be said is that in reading Hinterlands a kind of crack opened in ordinary reality - a crack with the specific aspect of looking towards a bliss associated with extreme danger, as opposed to self-indulgence. And what is also clearly discernible is that the main, fundamental break in fact took place three years later.
The events which form the starting-point of this book (Sections 2,3,4,5 and 6) are not in any way directly connected to Hinterlands, or the work of Gibson. In going to Leamington and getting speed and LSD, and then taking a combination of these, on my own, in my flat in Coventry, I was not thinking about any of Gibson's ideas about journeys into the transcendentally unknown, whether in the three novels and two stories that make up the Neuromancer mythos, or in Hinterlands.
This in fact was the full, absolute form of the 'time-break.' Around the middle of the night (Section 4) I reached the point where the experience was of sensing that the material expanses around me - spatial expanses - were in fact worlds of joy, and where the feeling I received was in the strongest sense like the feeling of listening to charged, exceptionally beautiful music - but in a way where there was no discernible change involved. Which is to say that I reached the bliss of space: a multiplicitous place of worlds, which, even though it is correct to say that everything is space-time, was experienced as a co-emplacement of expanses (the expanses, like myself, were perceived as worlds of joy - of delight - and everything was both spatial worlds and worlds of feeling, in a way where I had no awareness at all of a line of time).
The second aspect of the time-break (Section 6) was in a sense more superficial, in that I became aware, later in the night, that I had been jolted into a different speed of time (of temporal synthesis) in that fast music had become slow, and slow music had become barely like music (or at least had become so slow that it seemed unlike pop-rock). The primary form of the two breaks was a shift toward an impression that I was surrounded by a profoundly unknown world of forces (forces that were both spatial expanses, and zones of feeling) and that time was a kind of fluid abyss of transformation, where the amount of experience you had was relative to your speed of functioning, so that, if, for instance, the Earth was a sentient entity with a higher rate of synthesis, it might had had days of experience while I had experienced only a minute.
But it was the spheroambient abyss of the spatium that impacted upon me most intensely. Although it feels in every way crucial that my problem of time was changed from a problem of free-will and determinism to a problem of speeds of functioning (and that the problem of freedom became the problem of freeing oneself from what prevents perception of the world) what was by far the most important shift was that of my attention starting to be moved toward the body without organs, and away from the line of time.
Overall, the events of that night were a complex turning-point, and to a great extent in ways which either are separate from those that have just been described, or which involve a widening of questions of exteriority. At the level of the virtual-real the experience was about spaces beyond the city, and was about being in love - while at the same time being about the abstract arriving through fictions and songs as well as through philosophy. A part of me was still in Leamington with the woman I had met earlier and toward whom I felt intensely attracted. And as the night went on there were more and more ways in which the affect of being in love became involved in the experience, and more and more virtual-real views of the countryside, including an intrinsically planetary view of a very large sunlit terrain with lines stretching up from the planet's surface and into the sky - the planet viewed as like a plasma ball, with filaments of the unknown stretching out into the cosmos. At its most intense the night was on one level an encounter - in some sense - with the body without organs in the form of the spaces of my flat, but at the same time it was transected by the woman who I had met in Leamington, and by serene, planetary expanses of countryside. The body without organs extends around the whole extent of the directions of the transcendental, but this was a view toward transcendental-south - not just because I was seeing a material, non-subjectified joy, but also because Futural dreams were involved. I needed to go toward a courageous woman who actively wanted to travel into the unknown, and I needed to go toward an awareness of the planet which would be assisted by leaving the city. It is as if at the heart of the experience I was getting a view of the 'place' to which I needed to go. An impression that is created in part by the fact that nothing in my experience over the next two years reminds me of this serene, brightly expansive affect-world until I arrive at the time when Tess and I were living in Leamington.
*
(It was when I was living in Leamington, in the winter or spring of 1996, that I had the dream about the group living in the countryside, where a member of the group had died, or in some way had been lost, and that I afterwards arrived at the the thought that perhaps the full beginning of tragedy is the point where such events take place. It seems likely that the dream was in part inspired by my having recently seen Picnic at Hanging Rock (where Sarah is the figure who does not achieve the escape), but even if this is not the case - given I do not remember the order of the events - it is definitely true that Picnic at Hanging Rock became a primary source in relation to this new way of thinking about tragedy.
A few months afterwards I read some of Sophocles's plays, and was struck by the way in which the 'abstract machine' of tragedy had gone into effect in Ancient Greece, and then had reappeared - the same, but different - in Elizabethan England. But the transformed idea in relation to tragedy did not go away. With the help of two female writers of fiction - Joan Lindsay and Virginia Woolf - I was beginning to sense an extension of tragedy into a different domain, but, more than this, I was inseparably beginning to be aware of something else completely.
I was beginning to sense the positive, or sublime terrains of the transcendental, of the immanently transcendent (transcendent in the specific, natural-world sense of being constitutively involved within ordinary reality and of functioning from a level beyond it). Under immense pressure from the trans-establishment tragedy had been all that had been possible. It was oneiric critique, creating the sad situation where the figure of 'the artist' (as seer of tragedy) could exist alongside the figure of the priest. But the ongoing human disaster and the control mind were merely the negative instances of the transcendental. And the artist in this sense was in fact a role within the establishment - the genuinely revolutionary figure was the woman or man who could see the sublime-transcendental, and this figure was intrinsically a traveller into the (southward) unknown, and not an artist.
I had been deposited in Leamington alongside the oceanic 'wall' of the bright transcendental, and had been left reading A Thousand Plateaus in a process that very centrally involved an attempt to solve the question of political pragmatics. There was the rhizome of creative, deterritorialising alliances, and there was the idea of micropolitics, and there was the obviously lucid rejection of the state as a social form (because a state not only cannot defeat capitalism, but is in fact a component of capitalism), together with the idea that if you lived in a city you should inhabit it like a nomad. But, in fact, it was the women writers who suffused me with the crucial idea. And this crucial idea was of course the escape-group (led by Miranda in Picnic at Hanging Rock, and almost-led by Rhoda and Louis in The Waves - the tragedy of The Waves is that the group fails to form). This was the solution to the problem of micropolitics, of an immanence politics. It is necessary to travel as a multiplicity into the second sphere of action - to travel into the unknown in the direction of Love-and-Freedom.
But nothing more could be said about the group: the travelling was relatively knowable, but not the internal consistency of the escape-group. I could describe the travelling, and it is true that an individual is a multiplicity (so travel as a group was in this sense a known), but I could not describe the organising of the group the way, for instance, I could describe the organising of a party. What I had seen at the level of the virtual-real was an indication without certainty: it was therefore a view toward Love-and-Freedom (in that the travelling - the threshold-crossings toward a further sphere of action - could be verified at the level of the individual as multiplicity), but the group remained only an indication without any firm basis. All that was clearly visible was, firstly, the zones of a human-world and animal-world body without organs (extended all around the planet), and, secondly, the direction of Love-and-Freedom. But this, of course, was enough).
*
The overwhelming impression I now receive about the autumn of 1995 is that I had commenced an escape. I was engaging very intensely with A Thousand Plateaus, and simultaneously there were new perspectives which were opening up (such as The Waves and Picnic at Hanging Rock, and also Solaris, another film I saw at this time). All of this concerned a movement away from ordinary reality, but it was also an escape from a risky and somewhat indulgent phase of deterritorialisation which had been going on for around two years, and which for a year had involved both myself and Tess (I had been prodigiously lucky to meet Tess on every level, including at the level of the overall form of the deterritorialisation, and now it was vital that she had brought a new discipline into the situation by getting onto an MA at Birmingham University). The deterritorialisation had been the waking of the visions-at-night modality whose existence I had sensed when I was living in Swansea, and as such had been a very valuable development, only it had involved an often very unfocused use of drugs (in fact, such deterritorialisation does not require drugs, and as a general principle is far better without them).
The novels and stories of Gibson had now faded into the distance. It was almost as if they had been distant from the very beginning, only with certain aspects standing out. There was Hinterlands, and I was very much aware that in some sense the Neuromancer trilogy ended with an escape-group departing for another world, irrespective of whether it was a 'recording' of another world within the Aleph (the undeniable power of the moment was slightly lessened by the fact Mona Lisa Overdrive sometimes had the quality of a sketch for a novel, rather than a novel itself, with this being particularly true of the final chapters). And I liked the thought about faculties of intelligence that was at work in the idea of the AIs Wintermute and Neuromancer needing to be brought together for a threshold to be crossed; and also the idea of Angie Mitchell's dreams being views of reality. However the blurring of cyberspace and dreams in the novels simply functioned in the end to make it clear that cyberspace was a lens showing you the oneirosphere, meaning that it was pretending to show you a wonder of the future while all along being itself a manifestation of what in reality it was helping to make visible - the shared 'hallucinations' of dreamings (dreams about the future, dreamings in the form of fictional worlds; the suppressive oneiric systems of religions, etc). And the distance from Gibson is shown by the fact that his work was not really involved at all within the phase of deterritorialisation. For instance, for myself and Tess it was not just in the background but was barely present at all -it also seems relevant that the fundamental figure during this time was the Patti Smith of Horses (ur-punk, as opposed to cyberpunk).
As a result of reading A Thousand Plateaus I was starting to see the world around me as a space of co-emplaced formations of intent (differentiated along the lines, on one side, of brightness, openness and creative affirmation, and, on the other, along the lines of gravity - of dogmatic or fixated judgementalism), and simultaneously as a space which - momentously - was both planetary and decisively inclusive of non-western, non-state social formations, in the sense that these were no longer dialectically refuted relics of the past, but instead were central in providing views of the way forward. The planet was now beginning to come into focus as a sublimely enigmatic space, spheroambiently around me, and the dogmatic, intrinsically variable 'hero function' in relation to the human world's future was being dissolved. Because states are captured components within capitalism, and because of capitalism's immense axiomatic flexibility (benefiting from its own crises), there is no sense in which the choice-making institutions of the states, or the world economy, are the hero-instances which are bringing about an end to the disaster, instances to which it would be possible to attach yourself for 'destiny-purposes,' either as a state activist, or as an advocate of some form of Marxist activism ("we can point out the contradictions, and we can help to push when the economy reaches the tipping-point"). (in other words, it is not the case either that the institutions of the states carry within them the system which will overthrow capitalism, or that economically capitalism is digging a hole from which it will not be able to escape). It was clear now that the vast population of the 'western-tribe' was caught up in a process of delusionally affirming what it had been collectively involved in creating, and that it was necessary to depart from the world-views of this tribe - to walk away from 'the cities.'
The process of walking away was one which consisted of an increase of my degree of focus in relation to the planet (a simple pragmatics of perception and defaults of thought), and an associated increase in my awareness of the planet as to a great extent the transcendental matrix of what was taking place within the human world. This on the one hand was happening through reading A Thousand Plateaus alongside works such as The Waves, but on the other hand - and more importantly - it was taking place through a shift toward going out into the spaces beyond the cities and towns, a shift which initially was like a tiny fissure, but which progressively changed to become a primary part of a southward doorway in the fabric of ordinary reality.
But the process of the departure also consisted both of a waking of the faculty of dreaming, and - to some extent - of the faculty of perception. Dreaming is here understood as a faculty which sees deeper-and-wider aspects of the world in relation to those ordinarily percieved, and - inseparably - both as a process of dreaming up Futural ways of living and a kind of 'hatch' through which Futural elements can arrive. And perception is understood as a capacity for sustained, unbroken encounters with the immediately surrounding world, a capacity which tends both toward the emergence of anomalous states of lucidity that can be called 'heightened awareness,' and toward 'haptic' perception (the correlate of the spheroambient world is focused multi-sense perception, in which space is actively encountered through the whole body, and the eyes are also part of the sense of touch). It would be right to say of this second faculty both that it consists of a charged, serenely powerful (libidinal) love for the world, and that its - stuttering, partial - emergence in me was the result both of the use of drugs (in the absence of the other means that would have been better), and of my having had the good fortune to shift successfully toward a process of moving consistently away from using drugs. One of Deleuze's best moments is where he analyses what is in question in relation to psychotropics as the "autonomous Desire-Perception system," saying in relation to this modality that it can be reached by means other than drugs, and saying this: "...desire directly investing perception is something very surprising, very beautiful, a sort of unknown land."
However, the waking of these faculties did not start to take place as a result of some deliberate intention or strategy on my part (and it should be added that during most of this phase very little was happening in relation to perception). The faculty of dreaming began to go into effect in the midst of circumstances which were improved in relation to how things had been in Coventry, but which also had a new form of turbulence and distress rising within them (and was no doubt partly emergent initially from a deep-seated, unfocused perception of an oncoming tragedy), and the way in which there was nothing deliberate involved is shown by the fact that it went into effect first in the form of a dream in sleep. The serene and simultaneously tragic dream about an escape-group living somewhere in the countryside, where a member of the group had in some way been lost.
It was therefore more a question of fugitive, extremely occasional breakthroughs taking place amidst a kind of struggle that was deeply chaotic, and not fully perceptible (a process of trying to open these eyes - wake these faculties - whose difficulty is shown by the fact that it is still taking place). The oncoming tragedy was the loss of Tess: the loss of an alliance that had genuinely consisted of a process of travelling into the unknown. And the struggle to achieve a degree of consistency in the movement forward was partly to do with the need to be detached from the fixations (though not the individuals) of the group-escape which had taken place - the CCRU. The CCRU was rotating in a trapped state, caused by it having broken into the outside in the wrong direction, a direction which had far too much to do with human numerical technologies, and anomalous Cthulhu-esque modalities of power, as well as having its own - accelerationist - futural projection , where the 'hero-instance' was capitalism itself, not as digger of its own grave, but as accelerating movement toward a threshold-crossing where the disaster of human subjectification would at last come to an end. ("all we need to do is assist capitalism in its movement toward the Singularity").
It is not surprising that when, in the spring of 1997, I started to write stories again, the story-world that arrived was that of a group of people in a futural world where 'the cusp' - a fundamental threshold-crossing of awareness - was slowly advancing toward planet Earth, subsuming, one by one, the space stations of the outer planets, and nor is it surprising that when two days later I returned to the idea I found myself writing about a woman travelling on her own in the middle of a wilderness, the human-world component of which was an isolated labyrinth, surrounded by nothing but planetary expanses (and it is important to see that there is a double jump toward sobriety here, in that at the outset I had smoked some grass, and was envisaging a group of people who were on drugs, and two days afterwards I was not being affected by a drug and was imagining a woman who was also sober). The intense brightness was in the second experience, with the initial idea of the cusp having somehow faded into the background, as something that in some way was not quite right. (and because of the cusp fading in this way as an inspiring idea I stopped writing the story - the idea of the threshold would have to re-appear in a new way). (It can be seen that I was leaving behind both the CCRU and Hinterlands, in that the cusp, as originally envisaged, was haunted by malign entities called 'cusp-demons,' which, as predators on human energy, created madness).
There was therefore the quietly disconcerting process of moving away from the ways of thinking that predominated in the CCRU (a process that was not deliberate, but was a perturbing - though often obscured - effect of going not towards the CCRU but towards A Thousand Plateaus). However, this was not the change that was a source of anguish, and of self-doubt about the direction in which I was moving. It was the breakdown of the relationship with Tess that was the intensely distressing aspect of that time.
This relationship was strong enough to continue as a 'semi-relationship' for many months after it had officially ended (where we would recurrently meet up several evenings every week), and it was also the case that, a few months before it was over, it had opened into the possibility of settling down and having children, something that Tess had wanted very much at this point, whereas I had felt that it was not the direction I wanted to take. Tess being such a genuinely extraordinary and inspiring woman meant that it was only my depth of experience (initially accidentally achieved) in trying to escape from ordinary reality that - by a tiny margin, I feel - made the difference: I very nearly took this other direction, and was therefore haunted by the virtual-real form of the relationship which existed alongside me; the road not taken. But at the deepest level what made the situation so sharply distressing was not this Tess on the un-taken road, but was the Tess whose dreamings and outsights (and courage) had drawn me forward in the course of the relationship. The alliance between us had been fundamental in the process of finding the escape-path - in fact it was Tess, who in the final phase had been involved more than anyone else in the discovery of this path (in a vital sense she had called me in this direction).
The movement forward continued, through all the difficulties of this phase. And it should be pointed out that the assistance coming from A Thousand Plateaus was not primarily the dissolving of a Hegelian modality in connection with interpretative projections into the future, but was to a great extent the positive process of bringing to the forefront the formations of intent of nomadic and non-western tribal societies, showing them to be worlds which provided views in the direction of the escape toward wider and deeper realities. So that, far from being superseded moments in a dialectic, they were shown to be crucial, co-existing worlds in which the Future was arriving. And the overall effect here - in bringing together shamanism and Spinoza, and in saying "we sorcerers" - was of re-focusing attention on the spheroambient, transcendental unknown (within which aspects of the transcendental unknown could become the known, at each stage). This left the chronic, chronological projection as not just critiqued, but as fundamentally replaced by the compelling encounter that all along had been required. Within the sphere of the transcendental unknown the direction of the Future could be discerned as the zone of the now that it had always been - as existence at higher and higher levels of intensity - making this new engagement both philosophical and micropolitical, at the same time as it was it was an eerie-sublime engagement with the unknown that was all around, and which was immanent as well as spheroambient.
These were the circumstances under which the faculty of dreaming began, stutteringly, to wake: a return to to the situation which to some extent had been in effect during the first year at Coleg Harlech. (Only, now in relation to writing - or maps of the transcendental, the anomalous - it was philosophy that was doing the primary work, as opposed to Shakespeare, the Brontes, Yeats, Lawrence). However, this took place in a way where there was pre-eminently a 'modern' aspect to almost everything. The only event which related directly to non-western worlds was the thought-guided process of envisaging (on the edge of sleep) which led to the detailed semi-trance experience where I imagined a meeting with an indigenous Australian shaman (notice that this was an oneiric experiment which acquired a momentum of its own, a process which is different from trying to write a story). Almost everything else that happened had no overt connection to these other social worlds, with most of the experiences being held together by the idea of groups setting out to escape from ordinary reality (where the groups involved did not resemble tribal/nomadic societies, and were far more reminiscent of the group of friends in The Waves).
In starting to write stories again the situation was very different from when I had stopped in 1983. The process was surrounded by others, which on the one hand were philosophical and micropolitical, and on the other were deliberate 'semi-trance' processes that did not at all take the form of elaborating a story-world for the purposes of writing. And what ran across everything was the question of groups - even the experience that took me to a virtual-real Australia began because I set out to envisage what it must be like to be flying in a V-formation of geese, flying south (the nomad group). However, this plane of consistency was not something to which I initially gave any thought. I was simply having different kinds of intense experience, as when, for instance, I arrived at the thought that the idea of groups at higher and higher levels of intensity was a fundamental starting point for both a pragmatics of philosophy and a micropolitics, and arrived simultaneously at the certainty of the existence of next-level groups whose mode of being was not that of ordinary reality.
In relation to perception very little was taking place that 'stood out' and demanded attention - very little that gave any strong indication of the "unknown land" which Deleuze talks about. However, I was struck by what happened when, on a rocky, sunlit mountain-top in Greece (in the summer of 1997) I accidentally hit upon a way of stopping thinking and perceiving: the resulting 'waking trance' was a powerful experience, in that it was both a joy that had oneiric aspects, and was simultaneously suffused with a feeling of affinity - which was not a process of thought - toward initiation practices within shamanic societies. And there was also - across all the time from the spring of 1997 onwards - a change in relation to colour, in that I became very intensely aware of the colours violet and green, both as depth-transparency colours, and as what can be called 'sun-colours' or 'solar-colours' (I had a dream at one point in which I saw a green sun), where 'sun-colours' in this instance would also relate to violet and green flames, and to these colours as they are seen with closed eyes immediately after looking at the sun. (whereas the Coleg Harlech phase of facing-the-unknown was marked by a heightened awareness of red, this later phase involved colours that were further up the intensity gradient of the spectrum, in that they are higher, or faster frequencies of light).
The pervasive 'transition-event' was in February of 1998. This ruptural transition (and re-attunement) had in fact been pre-figured by what had happened in 1993, but the earlier event had been the breakthrough of space - and a break in the ordinary modality of time - whereas this later experience was a breakthrough of impersonal intent, of intent to travel toward wider and deeper levels of reality.
First, there was the dream about a group of people crossing a threshold of awareness (Section 25), a dream which was on an immensely higher level of intensity than any dream I had experienced, and had a quality of sheer, ultra-intense reality which led to a persistent, visceral question during the following days about whether something had in fact happened to a group of people in the actual. This dream was a culmination of everything that had been happening in relation to the idea of 'escape-groups' over the preceding three years, and it left an impression of an irreducible validity: in that the idea of threshold-crossings of existence for small groups of people felt as if it was a genuine potential of the human world. And therefore the culmination aspect of the dream did not at all seem like a process where an idea for a story had been 'worked out.' Instead, it felt more as if for three years I had been in a current which, within the virtual-real, had been incrementally taking me forward out of a liminal zone of ordinary reality, and as if the current had just taken me beyond the liminal, into the Outside.
Secondly, there was the beginning, a week later, of my encounter with the works of Castaneda, in the form of me reading The Eagle's Gift, a book which is fundamentally about the escape-group as a potential of the human world, and a book which on every level assists toward an awareness of the intensive spatium, and toward an associated dissolving of fixatory impositions of a line of time.
(It was not the case, as one current arrived at another, that I could respond to the book being so starkly outlandish by putting it down and forgetting about it. Because of the culmination that had just take place it was clear that it was now necessary to understand and assess this new map of the transcendental (and the necessity was made even more apparent when I began to focus on the importance of Castaneda in A Thousand Plateaus - the process I was embarking on was the same as the one undertaken by Deleuze and Guattari in relation to Castaneda's earlier books). It was clear that this was the path I had to take, and soon it was also clear that this new path was very direct in its movement toward transcendental south).
The heart of the issue here is that in A Thousand Plateaus the idea of the rhizome is not quite given enough assistance from the idea of 'becoming-imperceptible,' (and from the account of groups in the crucial middle plateau in which this modality of becoming is also described), and the idea of becomings is not brought to the point where it is understood in terms of perception and dreaming. This is in part to say that in The Eagle's Gift the issues involved in becomings are set out in terms of a perceptual pragmatics that is primarily about engaging with spaces, not time. And it is also to say that in this book the pragmatics of disappearance into the background ('becoming-imperceptible', rather than being trapped within ordinary reality) is very much an explicit aspect, and is not alongside other thoughts that easily lead to an idea of pre-eminently working toward the rhizome at last manifesting itself - contingently - as a global libidinal revolution (though this might happen), but instead is explicitly about the micro-revolution of a group departing for the next level of reality (which in The Eagle's Gift is named 'the second attention').
The statement "We are perceivers" is very heavily emphasised in the works of Castaneda. It is of course the first principle of a transcendental empiricism, and - most importantly of all - of the pragmatics which is inseparable from this (lucid) modality of empiricism. And it is precisely as these principles that it appears within Castaneda's books.
The vital point in this context is that everything starts here from a pragmatics of unbroken perception, where this escape-pragmatics does not involve direct concentration on temporal succession. The ordinary-reality mind does not want to encounter worlds of co-existence, other than very minimally: when it is not blocking attention through non-functional thought processes it primarily functions by skimming across these worlds and constituting awareness of them as sequences of faint views laid out on a line of time. This is why the term that is used in The Eagle's Gift for the pragmatic strategy of sustaining perception is 'gazing.' You can start with gazing at mountains, small plants, rocks and shadows; you can move on to trees and water, and to insects, birds and animals; and then you can move on to the sky, fog, clouds, and the stars. This concept of 'gazing' is set up in terms of encountered worlds of co-existence, and in fact is ultimately about a multi-sense encounter with spheroambience (the entire sphere of what you are encountering), but it is kept separate from the idea of processes of concentrating on succession. On one of the few occasions in Castaneda's books when it is sound that is used as the prime focus for a sustaining of perception, it is a wrap-around world of insect and bird calls that is is the space being encountered, and the strategy of the process is firstly that of hearing the whole space of sounds, and is secondly that of hearing the gaps in the sounds, and of experiencing these gaps spatially: as opposed to hearing sequences or 'phrases' of sounds. It needs to be seen that there is no privileging of the sense of sight here, very especially as we normally understand this sense (the aim in fact is for the normal use of sight to be left behind). What is crucial is formations of co-existence, and because sight is so dominant in the human world, an emphasis needs to be given to sight which is about saturating it with focused, sustained co-perceptions, so that it is taken beyond itself. And when hearing is involved this must also be saturated spatially around the body (and simultaneously pushed to the point of hearing the co-existences of 'timbre-worlds' where the sonic-world involved is an affect or 'atmosphere' and does not consist of a series of points laid out on a line) - so that this sense is also pushed beyond itself, becoming spatialised in a way which leaves behind a fixation on locked-down and often single-source 'voice-lines' of human beings; of objects flapping in the wind; of clocks ticking etc.
All of this concerns aspects of the this pragmatics in its relation to perception and time. But the question of it being a pragmatics is in itself also important, and in a way which to a great extent is shown by its context. The two issues here are, firstly, that Castaneda's pragmatics has alongside it a transcendental empirical account of the world, which in fact goes fundamentally wider and deeper than that of A Thousand Plateaus, and, secondly, that many aspects of the transcendental empiricism of Deleuze and Guattari's book are actually entirely consistent with the Castaneda account, sometimes in the sense that they state the same thing in a slightly different way, and sometimes in the sense that they extend the account and provide a valuable new concept.
Everything becomes a question of an assessment in relation to pragmatics and accounts of the world, on the one hand, and to co-existence worlds and temporal succession, on the other. In A Thousand Plateaus everything is set out in greatest detail in the central "Becoming-Intense..." plateau, where becoming is shown to be at depth about the co-existence or 'between' of an encounter or alliance (clearly it is also about a metamorphosis), but where concentration on time robs the text of the chance to engage effectively either along the lines of a pragmatics of perception and dreaming (it is also necessary to show the centrality of dreaming to becomings), and simultaneously robs it of its chance to construct a more encompassing transcendental account (an account which evidently would function as an - immanent - driving force of the pragmatics). It would be right to say that a departure from anthropological structuralism is taking place (a departure which lucidly invokes, in passing, the importance of 'tales'). And it would also be right to say that the idea of haecceities (zones without subject or object, in which a human is a part of a terrain) is in a fundamental sense an outsight; but overall there is far too much residual Bergsonism in effect.
*
A wide expanse of sunlit heathland. A secret, hidden world - a nextdoor place, another dimension of the planet's immense Now. You are at the top of a grassy slope, with a long view. A woman is alongside you, on your right. You know that beyond low hills to your left there is the sea, and that somewhere there, by the sea, there is a house.
You are aware of the brightness and warmth and courageous lucidity of the woman - you can feel how she is reaching out into the day for the way forward. To be who you are is to yearn toward this woman. It is to yearn for the sparkling of her eyes - it is to yearn to travel with her, into the Future.
*
In a late interview Deleuze says, "The opposite of history is not the eternal, but becoming." And there is only one becoming whose explication can provide this proposed view, sideways from history. This is becoming-planet.
The most fundamental aspect of becoming-planet is perception. Each one of us is always encountering a zone or spherical 'face' of the planet. But the becoming begins to wake through the encounters recurrently being unbroken, so that only perception takes place. It is necessary to learn to be a sustained awareness of the place around you: to the point where eventually you feel you are the room and the air within it; to the point where you feel you are the city street and the sky, or the forest and the wind in the leaves of the trees.
However the starting-point is very simply to perceive, and to perceive a space. This space - or zone of co-existence - could be the shadows of some trees, or it could be the sky above a horizon, or a lake, or a cliff-face of a mountain. And the three senses with which it is best to start are sight, sound and touch: the process involves starting with a zone of encounter in relation to one of these channels, where the zone can be a specific element - as with looking at a stream - or can be an encounter across the whole space of the sense involved, as with listening to a whole space of sounds (for instance, listening to insects on a savannah on a hot day). The progression is this: firstly, start with sight (because this sense is most in need of being re-configured), and perceive across the whole zone involved, rather than allowing a focal point to be fixated upon (so that if perceiving the whole space in front you are focusing right across the breadth and depth, and, for instance, objects to the left and right are perceived to the same extent as objects directly in front of you). Secondly (and once you have crossed a threshold with the first phase), move on to sound, and both in a way where there is an avoidance of collapses onto a focal point, and in a way where awareness is fundamentally on a space or spatial simultaneity of sounds (ideally, a circumambient space). Thirdly, move on also to the permanently sheroambient spatiality of touch.
All of this is, in itself, a becoming-planet. But this process can be assisted by the adoption of 'planetary breathing,' (see Section 29), so that a specific function of the faculty of dreaming is included within it. Breathing comes to the forefront in starting to focus on touch, in that at this point a necessary active form of encounter with the planet is intrinsically part of the channel of this sense, in the form of inhaling and exhaling the planet's atmosphere. (it is best not to become obsessed with breathing, however, because this can simply lock attention back on the line of time, and simultaneously it can mess with the rhythm and immanently varying depth of the breaths being taken).
At the point of reaching touch, it is simply a question of going back to sight and adding something (something which is not cognitive, and which is certainly not conceptual). On the inbreath, imagine an immense wall of light to the direction of the equator - many miles high, and stretched out far to east and west - and then on the outbreath imagine that this wall of light advances rapidly (passing through you) and swings all the way round the planet to its starting position. And then repeat, on the inbreath.
*
In relation to the faculty of lucidity becoming-planet involves a complex, radical displacement of perception of the human world. From this perspective the world of human beings is visible in a way where it is best described as like two lines which transect the sphere of the planet. One of these lines is the control mind, a line which has a disturbing, insidious quality, giving the profound impression of being a disease of the planet, as well as it very evidently being a disease of the human world. The second line is the other force - the other mind.
From this perspective this second line pertains to the planet in that it - undeniably - consists of human modalities and individuals which are part of the world of the Earth, but in a way where the sense of inclusion is different by virtue of the fact that the planet is not seen as separate in substance from human beings (so that, in principle, it is not only possible that it is a domain of intent, but it could even be a world of intent at a higher level than that of human individuals and societies). It is also planetary in that in a very large number of ways this second human modality draws its inspiration and energy from contact with the spaces of the planet beyond the human world.
The other force is a joyful becoming-active, a desubjectified delight and lucid abandon. It is a brightness; a dance and an instinctive forbearance which is intrinsically beyond the righteous world of judgement, in all its disguised and undisguised forms. It is evidently the fundamental warrior ability, in relation to the struggle to escape from a collapsed form of reality: it is Love-and-Freedom. And there are three main coordinates for understanding it: the abstract, women - and the planet. It can be seen that the planet is a coordinate both because it is the element that is visible - so far as we can currently see - within which and as a part of which the other force exists, and also because it consists of becomings, and becoming-planet is the most fundamental of the becomings.
*
Becoming-planet goes into effect within the faculty of dreaming in many different ways. Anomalous narratives which have a planetary aspect are lenses which give views toward the planet as a zone of the outside of ordinary reality (the second sphere of action is a planetary world), and they are therefore transmissions of becoming-planet. This is true whether or not they are partly or entirely about wilderness or countryside terrains (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Surfacing, Black Moon, The Waves), or are about another planet, where the alien planet could be predominantly viewed 'as a whole' (Solaris), or could be viewed from the perspective of one of its terrains (The Eye of the Heron, The Word for World is Forest). And thinking from an active point of view (as opposed to the point of view of a reader), it is correct to say that processes which leave behind the dogmatic image of the world (Section 18) and which bring lucidity and imaginative leaps to the attempt to dream up what is happening at a planetary level will all to different degrees be informed by a sustained becoming-planet.
Again - to show different examples - there is the process of adopting the perspective of the planet's atmosphere that is set out in the final part of Section 18, a process which is not a narrative, but is a modality of spheroambient envisaging. There is also the breathing technique which has just been described (Section 29 for the more detailed account). But perhaps the most important examples concern dreaming in its connection with intent: and here everything concerns dreaming up the future in relation to the terrains of the planet.
The context here is given by the answer to the question "where am I/we from?" And the main question is "where am I/we going?". The answer to the first question is that individuals are not in any vital sense from a country: they are from and of the planet. And the answers to the second question are within the horizon of the fact that it is your own terrain in every direction, so that the constraints are only those of human laws and social attitudes (it can be seen that these are the nomads' answers in relation to the state (as Deleuze and Guattari say, the nomad is the person who does not move in relation to their connection to the planet)). Dream up a future in a distant valley: be an element of a field of the virtual-real which constructs the actual. It is necessary to be very focused in relation to such dreaming, and to hold in mind everything from weather and seasons to the weather of the human worlds that are in effect within the terrains being envisaged. The becoming-planet involved in this deterritorialised dreaming does not just involve a terrain but also involves its human territories.
*
It can be seen that becoming-planet is inseparable from the question of the 'nomadic.' But Deleuze and Guattari's concentration on the issues of nomadism's capture by the state (in the form of the captured 'war machine') is in many ways a distraction. Nomadism is of course a figure of the outside, but it is in a sense only a name for its 'degree zero': a name for a world of liminal spaces in relation to the transestablishment. Lucidity's becoming-planet can only fully wake if it sees the struggle between the control mind and the other force. The system of reason-revelation and of the subjectified, reactive states, and, beyond these, the worlds of metamorphics - the worlds of the impersonal force that is intensificatory-intent, or Love-and-Freedom.
*
Perception is what is fundamental in relation to becoming-planet. It is the vital or paramount channel of this becoming. But nonetheless it is hard to overemphasise the importance of the role of the faculty of dreaming.
There is the envisaging of places beyond the horizon, where the places are ones where the person envisaging has been, as when someone in a valley envisages the system of hills of which the valley is a part. There are the partly perception-based and partly indirect processes of envisaging, as when - to take an instance which is mostly indirect in nature - someone envisages the major flows, migrations, 'tourisms' and emigrations of the planet (air, water, continents, birds, humans, etc). There are the futural dreamings of another way of living which consists of a movement into wider and deeper realities. And there are processes of taking up the lenses of stories about the world so that the dreaming is effectuated and new aspects of the world are perceived.
And then there are the imaginative leaps which can lead to the creation of these lenses. What is seen by all the faculties is the starting-point, and most specifically this consists of transcendental features of the world being perceived or faintly discerned by lucidity: and the question that summarises the movement outward of the leap could be "given this is what is taking place, what on earth could be going on?" These leaps have the integrity of their starting-point, but taken as a whole they are a process of experimentation, a reaching into the dark. You keep making the leaps (perhaps drawing sometimes from dreams in sleep) and eventually elements can appear which make obscured aspects of the world visible, or more visible than they were before. Some stories may have flaws which vitiate the functioning of the lens, but over enough time elements can come together into stories where everythng inter-connectedly allows a seeing of aspects of the world. The wind of the impersonal force of oneiric seeing is what being sought. You put up a sail, you keep putting up a sail - and eventually the wind will catch it. This does not mean that the story will be straightforwardly 'true' (although it might turn out to be the case that it is far more true than was initially thought), but it means that at the very least it makes a zone of hard-to-see aspects of the world more visible. (see the afterword to The Corridor, included at the end of Section 34).
Starting from the transcendental you return to the transcendental, but now, having gone around an upward circuit of an abstract-oneiric spiral, you are able to see more than you could at the beginning. And in relation to lucidity and the planet the movement is most fundamentally about a heightening of the ability to see the other force, and also the ability to see the other force in its relationship with control.
It can be seen that the sections from The Corridor and the other stories (Sections 7; 13; last part of 18; 21; and 22) are all included within this writing for multiple reasons: they delineate a 'journey' that took place in intensive space, starting around 1998; they are examples of the functioning of the faculty of dreaming when it is attempting to free itself from the dogmatic image of the world; and they are views of the escape-path that can be taken out of ordinary reality - views of the other force, of Love-and-Freedom.
Deleuze and Guattari do not bring the question of becomings into focus - the way they could have done - by taking up the issue of the planet, and by taking the idea of becomings into the domain of the very visceral, and spheroambient spatiality of the planet as it is encountered by us. This is connected to the fact that they do not have an explicit account of the faculty of dreaming, and say very little directly about perception: and to understand our 'entering into composition' with the planet a clear awareness of these faculties was needed. Their rejection of the structure of subject-and-object is exemplary, and yet they are caught up in a secondary trap, a block created by the rejection. They don't follow through with the idea that dreamings all along are a locus of exteriority (though it is implicit in their work).
It could be asked - why shift from writing fictions to writing works of 'hauntology'? (On Vanishing Land, Hidden Valleys, the current work). Evidently it must be said that narratives have not been left behind in this change, in that the overarching structure is of historical narrative conjoined with personal narrative. But the main response is that the escape-path can be made visible in many different ways (for instance, as it was made visible in my before-sleep 'dreaming' at Coleg Harlech, however faintly). And in making place the vital aspect of hauntological writing the shift was ultimately toward the planet, but in a way where, although the escape-path was visible, the planet was in certain ways a fundamental and deeply enigmatic unknown - so that the aim has been for something of the intensity of fiction to be drawn into non-fiction (in some sense we are haunted by Love-and-Freedom, but it feels as if in the same sense - and inseparably - we are also haunted by the planet). And lastly, fiction has of course not been left behind: it has been included in the form of the embedded tales, in a bringing-together that is best described as the work of a process of metamorphics, as opposed to a process either of art or of philosophy.
The issues of dreamings and of the planet will be central in the concluding sections of this book. An impersonal process of being 'swept away' began for me in the mid-90s in Warwickshire, and this process had everything to do with a heightening of awareness in relation to the planet, and was simultaneously a kind of 'revolution' or 'displacement' in relation to dreaming. A delineation of specific oneiric, trance and fiction-writing experiences is needed to give an understanding of the modality of intent involved in me being swept away: dreamings will therefore be the principle exemplification of the abstract in the course of the conclusion, along with one other primary instance, in the form of intent.
A further remaining issue is the need for a more detailed account in relation to the idea of the escape-group (an idea which is central to all of the stories). And this in turn connects up with the issue of processes of 'entering into composition' with women. How can women and men enter into processes of becoming with women so that lucidity can wake, and so that gravity (males are the primary carriers of the gravity virus) can at last be left behind? How can we become brightness so that escape-groups become possible?
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