33.

  Explorations



This blog is a three-part book in the process of being written, in the form of initial drafts of the sections, posted in the intended order, a project for which the overall name is Explorations. The book is a continuation from Hidden Valleys, Haunted by the Future (Zero Books - 2015), and also from On Vanishing Land, an audio-essay made by myself and Mark Fisher (to be released by Hyperdub/Flatlines on 26th July, 2019 - https://hyperdub.net).


Part One: Zone Horizon   (1 - 18)

Part Two: The Second Sphere of Action   (19 - 30)

Part Three: Through the Forest, the River  (31 - 50) 









     

    The summer of 2014. While out walking I started remembering times in the morning in Leamington, in 1997 and 1998, when I was writing into a notebook in a café in the centre of town. And there was a brightness about these memories (memories which I had not really brought to mind before) - the brightness was the feeling of the Future leaning in, both at the time in the past, and in the time of the remembering. It seemed a new book was arriving, although I only really became sure of this when I started to write and I saw that I had found a way of bringing into focus the ‘south-outside’ or 'south-transcendental' (in connection with the planet, with women, and with the abstract). But by this time I had tracked back to 1993 - to what I knew was the the right starting-point in relation to the sequence of the writing.

     The intense feeling of the initiating memories remained to a certain extent enigmatic, and it has only been in the course of writing the book that I have come to understand in what ways a change was taking place at that time – 1997 to 1998. Part of this concerns the stirring into intensified functioning of the faculty of dreaming  (this process has been described in Section 25) but at a deeper level again the change concerned the faculty of intent. The link between the two is obvious, in that beginning to dream up the future in a way that involves a creation of what is dreamed – this is evidently a process which pertains to intent.

    But there is a way in which this is to go too fast, and to say something which – although it is true, and relevant – does not really correspond to the main part of what was happening. It is not that at this time I was experiencing a process of building dreams into reality – it was more that I had discovered a direction (grasped both through the outsights of abstraction, and the outsights of dreamings) and without really thinking about it I was beginning  to explore new milieus, and that at the same time I was beginning to detach myself from aspects of the main milieu of which I was a part. And at the widest level these two developments were inseparable from a shift of attention toward the planet (the milieu that is the planet), and from a process of tightening up my life, so that what was indulgence on my part began to some extent to be left behind.

    It is necessary to avoid trying to bring too many issues into focus at once.  For now it is the faculty of dreaming which must be the main focus of attention. But a worthwhile additional point here is that at the level of narratives which are expressions of outsights – which break open a view of the abstract – dreamings are in opposition simultaneously to the abstractions of philosophy and to the abstractions of one dimension of what is called poetry. Dreamings run through poetry, but poetry has a way not just of taking narratives down to their degree-zero form (the dreaming that is a moment) but also of leaving dreamings behind for abstractions

   

*

    This book is perhaps a bit like a large space station - a space station that in some sense turns out to have a series of doorways that lead to 'other worlds' (these being the worlds of the fictional narratives). The main doorways are sections 16, 26, 27 and 28. And it can also be said that these sections are like a river that runs through a forest. Of course, if your primary love is for abstractions you will probably prefer the forest to the river. But if your main love is for anomalous narratives the situation might be the opposite.

     It is a basic principle of this writing that narrative is as much a zone of the abstract as theoretical writing – that is, it is as much a way of setting out fundamental outsights  as books of abstractions. And not only that, it would seem very much that the books which have gone deepest and furthest with outsights expressed through abstractions (with all respect to Tao Te Ching) have also intrinsically been narratives.

    But how does the faculty of dreaming begin to wake? And the awakening of the faculty in this context would relate to a shift toward an ability (however minimal) to express aspects of the transcendental through narratives, and, indeed, through narratives in the form of stories that would be characterised as ‘fictions.’

    It is very likely that there is no general answer to this question. But it nonetheless might be possible to learn from cases where the process of starting to complete narratives, and works which have the ‘situations’ of narratives, gets under way, even if in the initial phases there is no waking of the faculty in the sense defined above.

* 

     When I was a child I lived for eight years in a house on the edge of the Port Hills in New Zealand, around two miles from the start of the main urban expanses of the city of Christchurch. The road by the house had climbed up a steep slope with houses on either side, and it continued for another quarter of a mile, where it ended at a farm gate. Beyond the gate were the tussock grass slopes of sheep-farming country that went up slowly to a ridge a thousand feet further up.

    I can now see clearly that these hills were volcanic in origin, but at the time their volcanic nature impacted not through thoughts about the past, but through the excitement of large, fascinating rocky outcrops and of labyrinths of valleys with very steep sides.

    On a clear, sunny day the higher elevations of this terrain had a genuinely captivating quality, despite having lost the majority of their trees to the farming industry: higher up it was a sunlit heathland of gorse bushes, a roof-of-the-world where lizards basked on rocks and where a group of horses had been left to roam wild.

    Even though you were high up on a peninsula the sea was nowhere in sight. To the east were the hills, and to the west was fifty miles of the Canterbury Plains, ending in an immensity of snow-capped mountains that stretched from north to south – the “Southern Alps.”

     If you continued to the summit of the ridge there was another very spectacular view – steeply downward into the twenty-mile long flooded caldera of Lyttelton habour, with its steep sides, its promontory, and its island (Quail Island). And also upward toward the highest mountains of the peninsula, beyond the caldera.  To the north was a stretch of Pacific Ocean horizon, visible through the ten mile gap where there had once been the northward wall of the volcanic rim.

     But for me it was the high-country tilted gently in the direction of the distant mountains that was the mesmerisingly beautiful place. It was a planetary view, in that even though the agricultural terrains of the plains suggested human endeavour the overall expanse, culminating in the mountains, insisted toward being experienced as a ‘face’ of the planet, as opposed to a fondly-experienced backdrop of farm upland, as with, for instance, distant hills in a valley in England.

    My sister and I would climb up into the hills to ride the horses, sometimes spending a long time looking for them, or not finding them at all. They had all been broken in (apart from a foal who matured into a three-year old filly during this phase of our lives), but we did not ride them in an ordinary sense. We would get onto them (often with difficulty) and then would sit on them while they grazed, or moved – very occasionally at a canter – from one grazing place to another. I don’t remember this as being frustrating. Instead there was the fascination of being an observer within a community of horses, and perhaps even a part of it in a way (I know we felt it was important to bring a good quantity of apples and carrots for the horses to eat, and that this for us was about helping them, as opposed to the food being seen simply a lure). You watched everything that was taking place, learning the nature of your community: I learned from them that gorse flowers are edible, and I noticed that they seemed to go for a run before dusk, as if this was helpful for their metabolisms before sleeping.

     But in particular I remember one summer evening when the sun was getting low, and when I experienced a very intense, serene joy from the view of the sun and the mountains, and from the tail-swishing calmness of the grazing horses. It is no exaggeration to say that, forced by circumstances (there was nothing else I could do but sit and look, and no doubt I was a bit tired), this occasion would have been one of the first times when I began to learn the invaluable skills of stillness and silence.

    As has been pointed out before, people see the world in certain ways because it has been insisted that they see it in these ways from when they are very young children. This insistence had already done its work in me, and yet at this age – at the time of the event I have just described I would perhaps have been 10 – the pressure of the insistence had been withdrawn a little. For instance, an aspect of my seeing the world in a very ‘planetary’ way was that I was in love with the weather, and most specifically with all forms of spectacular event where the weather as a powerful and transformation-inducing instance was made apparent, as with water-droplets becoming crystals: but my love of the weather remained to quite a large extent a fascination with the singular effects and events of the atmosphere, for now irrespective of questions of mathematicised causality  and systematicity. Another instance is the fact that I was substantially distanced from the human world immediately around me in Christchurch, in that it was not really true to say that I shared - or identified with - any of its specific systems of concerns and dreams.

    What I had in common with the horses up in the hills was that I had been compelled toward an ‘acculturation’ within the human world (for me most of this had taken place in other cultures – in England, and in Wales), and then, this having taken place, I had been left to roam.

    I was not at school. I had not been at a school since I was 8, and in fact I would never return to one. After I was withdrawn from school I was put onto a correspondence course, but this only lasted a few weeks, and I would reach adulthood having had only two years of schooling.

    My family was myself, my mother, and my sister (who was nearly three years older). My mother’s life was not going well: she had reached a kind of stasis of a quiet down-heartedness and an intense insomnia, and she was nominally planning to get the family back to Britain, without ever getting round to it. She had an agricultural qualification from a Northumberland college, but having arrived, in 1968, in Christchurch, she had been told at the prestigious Lincoln College that there would be no point in her taking the next qualification up (which would have allowed her to become an agricultural inspector) because no women were ever given the jobs for which she would then be qualified.

    As time went by my sister and myself progressively began to disregard a ban on leaving our house during school hours (the ban was evidently about preventing us from being reported to the authorities). But it was also the case that I did a very large amount of reading, although none of it part of any regime of schooling. I read fiction – I read everything in the house whether it was for children or adults; I bought books from the bookshops in town; I borrowed books from the local library.

    I was to a great extent happy, given the different kinds of exploration that were taking place, and I did not feel alienated from the society around me, in that I loved Christchurch and fully enjoyed any friendly contact I had with people – and yet, without me having noticed it, the only community I had really found was the trans-national community of writers of fiction and of those who appreciated their works. The social distance came from me not being threaded into the fabric of the society (after a short while the TV stopped working, and this meant I was at an even greater remove), and also to some extent from me having a recurrently disliked marker of foreignness – I had an English accent. It was also the case that my mother’s critique of New Zealand culture – as having both a male-chauvinist  and bigoted tendency – meant that there was an additional impetus toward not throwing myself into the dreams and concerns of the society around me. Curiously, I very much felt that I belonged – but it was if, without noticing it, I belonged fully only to a trans-national community which ran through New Zealand and went beyond it (this should not perhaps be seen as curious - although I had not been swept up into pop-rock at this point it seems relevant to point out that part of the soundtrack of this time was Imagine, with its line “Imagine there’s no countries”).

     For a while, therefore, the pressure of the insistence of ordinary reality had indeed been eased. There were the hills, there were the horses, there was the weather, in all its forms, and there was fiction that I could simply pick up and put down (and which came from different countries and times, with slightly different value systems finding expression within it, so that the insistence was much less effective, on top of the fact that in many cases the fictions in part were lenses giving views toward the Outside).

    One night, as I was setting out to go to sleep, the idea of a story arrived.  In the story (which I ‘lived’ in my mind as a reverie, rather than seeing myself as writing a fiction) I was walking down from the summit of the hills, and after descending for about two hundred feet (and for about a third of a mile) I reached a point where instead of air, there was a horizontal, transparent barrier stretched out in front of me, like an expanse of ice, only the substance – as well as being completely transparent – was the same temperature as the air. Instead of being able to walk forward down the hill it was only to possible to walk out onto this sheet of ‘frozen air’ (conceived as being many inches thick, unbreakable, and not heavier than the air). The story unfolded as the idea that this barrier went all the way to the Southern Alps (and indeed went all around the planet at exactly the same altitude), meaning both that I had been given a way of inhabiting the sky (the surface was smooth like ice, and it was possible to use the wind to travel to the alps, which gave me very large areas of available land, in which to move around in an ordinary way), and also that it was in the fullest sense impossible for me to return to the city, to the townships down on the plain, or to my house. The remaining feature of the dream was that initially this barrier only existed for me: the other people who I knew were unaffected by it, and it was only later that I found that there were other people who would also not be able to return if they went went up to the summit of the hills.

     I found this reverie striking, but I did not continually return to it (it was a little too strange to become part of the furniture of my mind as a reverie to be recurrently ‘lived’ before going to sleep). But despite only returning to it a few times (after it had first appeared) it stayed in my mind. I knew it expressed something: it expressed my intense love for the nearest terrain to a wilderness to which I had access (in the story I was glad that I had to stay up in the hills).

     It is worth thinking about the fact that I was living in a terrain that for me had no stories associated with it – it had no oneirosphere. The only Maori tale I knew was about the discovery of New Zealand (it was a story I loved), but this concerned seeing Aotearoa from a distance, from an outrigger canoe (the long white cloud is seen, and then the land - the journeyers into the unknown will not die), and it also seemed that the island in the story was the North Island. And I knew no pakeha, or western-colonist stories about the area where I lived.

     When I was around 10 or 11 I was in a field opposite my house where there was an abandoned orchard. In one place, standing out on its own in the field, there was a weathered five foot post which had no function, and was simply rotting away. I remember thinking that the post looked a bit like a finger, and I remember imagining that it belonged to a buried giant who at the last moment had managed to raise a finger above the surface of the earth, before being turned into wood. The thought arrived that perhaps I could look at anything and a story would come from it, but I don’t remember trying this out to any great extent.

    In terms of dreaming up narratives I had been set up to take a certain kind of ‘big’ leap into the virtual-real, a kind of leap where the sense of distance was something of an illusion. Further into the same field there was a relatively secluded place between areas of trees, and I remember an occasion when I dreamed up and acted out an epic hero-tale involving gigantic quests within fictional countries, very large spans of time, melancholy separations, unforeseen returns, battles, etc. It went on across centuries and several generations. But although the span and scale of the story were in a way impressive it left a ‘superficial’ taste, even at the time: although I would not have had these words for it I was aware that it was just a glory-dream, and that it was an indulging in a kind of superficial, grandiose melancholy and ‘hero-romanticism.’

    The main oneiric 'event' in this context (the dreaming which connects up with and in a sense completes the one about the transparent barrier) was a story which came to me on a hot, sunny afternoon in midsummer, high up in the hills. There were pylons that went laterally along the slope, at an elevation that was about halfway to the summit. The 'daydream' occurred a good distance further up the hill, perhaps around a hundred feet higher than the tops of these pylons (it is worth pointing out that the barrier in the first story was somewhere not far above the height of the pylons). I was a little further down from the place where I had been on one of the horses when the sun was not far from setting, and I was around the same age - I was maybe 11.

    I started living out a story where I was inhabiting the mountains which I could see in the distance. The story was simple: I was a member of a group of five or six children who had escaped from an orphanage of some kind, and who had found a way of living undetected in the Southern Alps. They moved around from one place to another, and everything went well until at one point they had to go into a town to get supplies, when one of the members of the group was captured. There was an immense joy about the beginning and middle of this story, and then there was tragedy. However, the tragedy was offset a little by the fact that the other members of the group were still free - they had not given in, despite their anguish.

    The story had a quiet, solar-trance bliss, emanating from the main ideas (the escape; living in the mountains; the group of friends whose relationship was about maintaining the state of freedom). There was no feeling of something unhealthy as there had been with the epic, ‘hero' tale,’ even if there was a faint feeling of the main idea being a bit sketchy, or unrealistic: and in any case this last aspect was to an extent redeemed by the realism of the necessity to go into the town, with its disastrous consequences. I felt joy as I dreamed up this story, and even if it felt sketchy, it did not feel ‘tacky’ or unhealthy. It was not a glory-dream: there was a group, not a hero; the prize of the ‘quest’ was continuous in that it was an ongoing state of exploration and solidarity; and there was no inclusion of an audience which was admiring the group.

*

    

    When in the mid-nineties I started to dream up stories again (after a gap of several years) the precursor was a dream in sleep which was a more lucid version of the same story (Section 25). What in fact is starting to come into focus is that a fundamental dimension of the faculty of dreaming is micropolitical - it concerns an ability to dream the future into existence, and for this you need to be able to think in terms of alliances that go beyond the molecules of individuals, couples and families. 

    A main reason for the feeling of the Future 'leaning in' in 1997 and 1998 was that on more than one level I had started to take up a specific problem (where the process initially consisted of dreams in sleep, and of emergences of ideas for stories).

*

     A basic formation of micropolitics is the escape-group. This formation as an actualised group is in some ways (or at certain stages) the Almost Inconceivable in terms of its detail, and yet the escape-group as a partial, fugitive instance is ubiquitous: it is a pervasive, continually recurring form. 

    That from which the escape-groups depart is the Interiority, or the transestablishment (see Section 1). The organisation-systems of states pre-eminently are formations of the insanity-field or ‘control-domain’ of the Interiority, and therefore it is not possible to solve the problem of a state by taking it over. But this does not entail that the whole human (multiplicitous) social field is part of the domain of the Interiority (this is because, in an interconnected way, the world of all isolated and partial movements into the south-outside is a continual rhizomatic struggle on the part of the human world against the instance that is Control): instead what it entails is that the only way forward for individuals is becoming part of an escape, where this way forward consists both of a fundamental journey into wider levels of reality, and of a taking up of the only option that could somehow in the end assist the wide-level struggle of the human social domain.

    For members of an escape group what was seen as part of the inside becomes evidently part of the outside (seeing yourself as special, and separate - that is, as possessing an extra dimension of being - in comparison with the supposedly crude or brute matter of the planet is a feature of those trapped within the Interiority).

     In relation to other micropolitical issues it can be pointed out that escape-groups are definitively trans-national and deterritorialised. And it can also be pointed out that the concept of an 'artist' comes into focus as in itself a construction which largely belongs to the bourgeois modality that is now dominant within the interestablishment. Insofar as they are escaping from ordinary reality artists themselves are again and again involved in processes which in different ways involve a waking of the faculty of dreaming (and indeed the faculty of lucidity): but the wider point here is not just that the faculty of dreaming all along has a fundamental micropolitical dimension - it is that the concept of the artist is to a very great extent a structure inducing toward a role within the Interiority (toward becoming a kind of 'pet' and/or 'jester' of the bourgeoisie).



*

    My sister and myself did not get very far during the phase I have just been describing, in the 70s in New Zealand (and this is just in terms of relatively minimal 'outward' movements, let alone in terms of escape-groups, something about which I still know very little). And yet we did alright. Together we had explored into the hills, and discovered the horses, and a little later we were companions in the process of discovering pop-rock. It was not really the case that we had any kind of profound freedom to roam – it was more that we were living within a very minimally organised system of authority, and one which had extraordinary gaps in terms of pressures from peer groups (we had no peer groups ) and in terms of pressures from school.

    Neither of us wanted to be in school, and neither of us wanted the social services to be descending on us: therefore – despite the fact that over time we did progressively disregard the ban on leaving the house during school hours –we were very much complicit in the regime of ‘inconspicuousness.’ And this territorial/chronological system produced a need for action within the territory. And, in turn, the systems of action tended to move out to a certain extent into the allotted spaces of freedom – the times when it was possible to leave the territory (how easy it is to be distracted – in the end it is always fear that is at work, causing you to stay inside a territory and decorate the walls…).

   The longest walk I remember was one when I was 12 or 13 and walked to a large volcanic crag that dominated the horizon from where we lived (it was nearly twice as far as the slopes where the horses were), and at this point I saw a new impressive horizon to the south, with the summit of a striking, miniature volcanic cone below me to the southeast. I very much wanted to climb this hill, but I never returned.

    The houses where we lived had a very large garden (so did all of the houses on the road, but land being relatively cheap in New Zealand, having a large garden did not mean what it would in England, for instance, in terms of money). The garden was surrounded by a very tall hedge, and this meant that to some extent it was available as a space during school hours. I learned to be a gardener, and in particular I learned how to grow vegetables, which myself and my sister would then sell at the gate (at the weekend large numbers of people would drive up the road for the view, and these people were our main customers). My sister made craft-goods of different kinds, which we would also sell.

    But by the time this production-and-sales enterprise was at its height a new window toward the outside had been opened up. We started listening to the local pop-rock station – which was called Radio Avon (Christchurch’s river is the Avon). Our mother did not like pop, and had prevented us from listening to it on the radio, but my sister led the rebellion by starting to listen - nonetheless - at every available moment, and then by getting her own radio.

    I arrived in pop-rock at the age of 12, having in fact heard very little before (almost nothing of which had had any real impact on me).

   It was 1975. I was astonished by what I heard: both by the songs which were current, and by the songs from the previous fifteen years. I loved Abba’s SOS,  Billy Ocean’s Love Really Hurts Without You, and The Temptations’ Standing on Shaky Ground.  I was impressed by Helen Reddy’s Angie Baby, and I liked 10CC’s I’m Mandy, Fly Me. And I really liked songs which had a driving, ecstatic quality, even when I felt there was something a little superficial about the performance (for instance, Blue Swede’s Hooked on a Feeling, and The Sweet’s Fox on the Run). Bob Dylan’s song Hurricane also struck me as a very powerful, atmospheric track.

   Without a peer group to tell me what was good I was probably less locked to an appreciation of current songs than I might have been. And over two years of listening it became clear to me that the band I loved more than any other was the Beatles. The ‘eerie northwest’ was arriving in my life for the first time (in a predominantly sublime modality, although with a co-emplacement of something much more bleak and deleterious in the form of the songs - taken as a whole - of 10CC). However, it would only be at the end of this phase that the Beatles would come into focus not as a cluster of songs, but as a narrative.

    I was being drawn away from the hills by growing vegetables in the garden, and most of all by the music I was hearing on the radio, which had become simultaneously an intense connection to the outside and a connection to the forces of ordinary reality (a double connection alongside the very similar one in the form of the books I was reading, but with a powerful now-ness – in contrast, almost everything I had read at this time was from before 1965). But the hills (and my love of the weather) had a way of getting into the new space. The first song I remember writing (I was 12 or 13, and was working in the garden) came into my mind after listening to a programme on New Zealand’s news-and-culture channel about protest songs (it was a rock song, and it seems now that the tonality was all built – without me realising it – around me trying to sound like an electric guitar):

You can slow it down

You can make it turn

You can build a bridge across it

But you can’t

                               can’t

                                               can’t

stop

                         a river

The trickles flow down the hillsides

And the streams flow down the valleys

And when they meet up at the bottom

You’ve got a river

We pollute it with our rubbish

And we slow its mighty flow

But we just can’t make it stop

Not ever

You can slow it down

You can make it turn

You can build a bridge across it

But you can't

                                 can't

                                                  can't

stop

                             a river



   I was encountering my contemporary world through songs, and this was one attempt to take part in this world.  And my somewhat 'planetary' focus had in this way asserted itself a little - at the point of setting out to explore the human world. And this exploration was the way forward: it is just that the exploration of planetary terrains was also a part of the way forward, a fact that would be very easy to forget as the system of ordinary reality increased its influence.

    
    Our mother had 'made a stand' in New Zealand. She had gone there to be the sole parent of her children, in that - with seemingly a good degree of justification - she had come to the conclusion that she did not want her ex-husband to take part in raising them. Everything followed from this beyond-the-conventions 'leap' (the leap was done with full, necessary comprehensiveness - she changed all of our names, and used a post office box in the centre of Christchurch as her address). But the result for her was a kind of trap. After about a year she realised that she did not want to live in new Zealand, but her decision to return to Britain was subject to a pained process of postponement that was the continuation of the initial Decision. She had made a stand - and although she remained a very positive presence in many ways (you in fact get strength from successfully making leaps of this kind), she was suffering a kind of oppressed, insomniac stasis, as a result of having landed in a place where it seemed she was unable to continue her career. The vacuum of this stasis (a vacuum in the sense that her decision to return had been made, and everything was conceived as temporary, even though the situation continued for years) allowed a socially anomalous situation to settle down as an acceptable normality. My sister and myself were not at school, and after a while the children on the street were told by their parents that they should not play with us, and did in fact stop, leading to what was a complete ostracising by the immediate community - with all of this supposedly being temporary. 

     This went on for around 5 years. And in certain ways it worked as a social configuration. I felt very much that I did not want to be at school, and the children of the neighbours did not attack me and my sister, apart from occasional insults: for the most part they simply adopted the practice of ignoring us. There was no malevolence on the part of the community, and only the negativity at work in the decision to have no contact with us: everything just settled down - we were the English kids who weren't at school, and whose cover story about doing a correspondence course was not believed. It was a kind of bright, minimally turbulent isolation, a freakish serendipity. In the centre of Chistchurch I was a normal kid (who by this time had a New Zealand accent), and for myself the isolation on my home street was the now normalised and acceptable price to be paid for not being at school.

     The positivity of children is that they just get on with generating the intrigues of their lives, so long as they are given space in which to roam, and opportunities to be creative. My sister and I acquired a dog, and we acquired some pet mice (which increased in number to 27, at which point we started to be very careful about gender segregation) and these non-human beings were loved by us in a very genuine way - one of the mice, a female called Hunca Munca, lived to be 3 and a half years old, which is well beyond average life expectancy for mice. It was also the case that we had a social structure which was not really treating us as children: instead we increasingly were given responsibility for looking after things. I learned how to take care of the garden, and bought the necessary tools and seeds, and I regularly cycled the five miles into town to do shopping, which over time became inseparable from spending hours reading in the main Christchurch bookshop (this bookshop was a thoroughfare in a system of arcades, and I liked the 'buzz' of the place). Isolation should not be measured too much by contact with humans (my immediate community consisted of 30 individuals - it was just that only three of them were human). And nor should there be too much fixation on what happens in close proximity - myself and my sister had lots of contact with other children, forming parts of ephemeral groups whose reason for existence was playing games: this was at the farm a few miles away where we earned money picking raspberries; in parks in the centre of town, etc. 

     But the configuration worked far less well for our mother. And after years of her becoming more and more unhappy, in 1976 she decided to go on her own to Britain to buy a house, to which we would then go, while she returned to New Zealand to sell the house there. My sister and myself were relieved when she left, because it was obviously the best thing she could do, to get herself out of her unhappiness, and it was also the case that neither of us believed that a house would be bought in the near future - we had seen so much of the stasis over the previous half-decade that we both felt convinced that the pattern would be continued (we were right). And before long we had both got ourselves full-time jobs, my sister in a factory, and myself in a general stores that was nine miles away in a suburb called Aranui (while I was doing this job I cycled 18 miles a day, five days a week, for six months). My sister was 17, and I was 14.

     This was a new, anomalous configuration, and it lasted for around a year. We now had no authority figure of any kind, but everything went very well, and in fact our circumstances were suddenly much better than they had been in the previous phase. I borrowed a DIY book from the local library and learned how to replace broken windows, and make repairs to gutters etc; I took the record player to be fixed so that we could play records as well as listening to the radio. And because I looked as if I could be 16 the pressure was suddenly off in terms of attracting the attention of the social services. 

     Suddenly there was an immense amount of freedom: it was up to us to make the decisions, and we had both the money from our jobs, and a steady supply of money from our mother (enough to live on and for looking after the house). It is of course somewhat ironic that we used the freedom to get jobs, but we inevitably were doing this partly for social reasons: both to meet people, and to be established in the adult world. I had not realised at that point that a direction which was open to me was becoming a student (I wanted to write fiction, and I wanted to write songs), and in any case this option was not yet open to me, in that I was determined to avoid going to school, and I would have had difficulty going anywhere else to study. Once I was working the freedom had much narrower channels, it is true: and yet at 14 to have plenty of money, a good of level of fitness and health, and no-one at all to tell you what you should do with your weekends - this is a good situation. And the new circumstances were not overshadowed by the absence of our mother: she had needed to leave. I loved her, but she was obviously happier in England. She sent letters every few weeks, and I wrote letters back.

     There is an extraordinary feeling of joy about the memories from this time. My sister and I were comrades in this unlikely social adventure, and for the most part we worked very well together. A first high-point was a cycle ride we did one Saturday (and into the Sunday night) to a place on Banks Peninsula called Akaroa. It was a sunny day, and we cycled a total of 170 miles, across a pass, to a tiny, beautiful town on the more remote of the two flooded calderas of the peninsula. We sat by the sea as the sun went down, aware of the 85 miles ahead of us, but feeling a serene exuberance from what we were doing (on the way back it was a starry night, and the planet was passing though a meteor shower, so there were lots of shooting stars). We had been distracted for a long time from our exploration of the hills - it was as if we had decided to make up for all of the lost time in a single day.
      
    The other high-point was the fact that at this time my sister discovered - and fell in love with - Madeleine L'Engel's A Wrinkle in Time, and then gave the book to me. A Wrinkle in Time is threaded and sometimes suffused with outsights - I felt the same way about it as my sister (and it was good to have a companion in relation to a powerful fictional world). The book also includes a quotation from The Tempest, which was the first piece of writing by Shakespeare that had an impact on me:


For that thou wert a spirit too delicate,

To obey their earthy and abhorred commands,

Refusing their grand hests they did confine thee

With the aid of their more potent ministers

And in their most unmitigable rage

Into a cloven pine, within which rift

Imprisoned thou didst painfully remain.


(the deep truth which animates this passage - beyond the gothic/religious melodrama of its surface - is that human individuals are trapped, in that each one is a cloven pine, struggling to create contact across the rift).

      I had reached 1960. The idea for A Wrinkle in Time had come to L'Engle during a 10 week cross-country camping trip in 1959, and she completed the book a year later. There was something vibrant about the book - a feeling of a vibrant visionary synthesis, a bringing-together across multiple oneiric-abstract traditions. But at the same time there was something not quite right - an occasional feeling both of a mawkish sentimentality and of a gravity, a delusional portentousness. 

     What I had learned, without knowing I had learned it, was - if it flies, and makes you fly, then it's the way forward. If it's a grave imposition insisting it is the ultimate dreaming, when as a result it doesn't even get off the ground, then its a grim dead-end.

      I had felt the same when I read the end of the Narnia story-sequence, where Narnia is destroyed, and where there is the Day of Judgement, with bad people going to hell, and good people going to heaven. The feeling was one of preaching taking place, where something ugly was being disguised as something good - the whole fantasy of the destruction of a planet was something unhealthy (it was like watching a shamanic storyteller give themselves a lobotomy). The situation with A Wrinkle in Time was in many ways better, but simultaneously what was problematic was much more subtle (there is a way in which the book on its reactive level is a culmination of a decades-long process of oneiric conservatism). However, I was faintly aware that the book had an unhealthy force-field of gravity or reactivity. The problems here are libidinal-metaphysical as opposed to eschatological (that is, as opposed to being reactive fantasies about the destruction of the planet by a male omnipotent being): there is the old testament language of "the Lord" at one point, and there is the way in which the female protagonist Meg plunges into the unknown only to save two hyper-intellectual males, her father, and a science-genius younger brother, and is presented as having love as her momentous attribute as opposed to intellectual ability (as with her brother and father), and simultaneously is presented as 'lover' and object-of-love in relation to a boy called Calvin.

     In relation to its reactivity A Wrinkle in Time is an elaboration of an ongoing reaction against women as journeyers into the unknown, so that they can only do this in the service of the Male (ultimately in the service of the supposedly-known omnipotent deity, so that the very idea of the unknown is vitiated), and so that the only female figure left in this space of exploration is the female angel, the servant of God. I loved the book, for its views beyond the outside of ordinary reality, but I did not return to it. 




   A few months before, I had bought my first album, the Beatles 1967-70 double album, taking it home and playing the two records on the newly repaired record player. The next day I went back and bought its red-cover companion album, The Beatles 1962-1966. 

    The experience of listening to these four records was by far the most intense musical experience of my life at that point. It was also an oneiric abstract incursion, both because of the worlds of the songs, and because it was a window onto a whole 8 year event, a window onto an intensification of awareness of Love-and-Freedom. It was a first encounter with history in the vital sense of history - in that a past world of space-time was being grasped, and within this world a doorway to the Future was to some extent being perceived.

    The majority of the songs were new to me; I had no peer group, and therefore no pre-constructed view of them; I was not reading music journalism. It was very beautiful music, shimmering with tonalities, but in a predominant 'key' of exuberant joy; it was my first sustained encounter with poetry of any kind, and it was specifically poetry in the additionally-charged form of song lyrics; it was  my first sustained encounter with song-lyric surrealism. I had encountered quite a large number of dreamings, and had therefore encountered the thinking that runs powerfully within dreamings. But here dreamings were done differently, as extremely charged micro-tales; and thinking had different aspects, in being about love, and society, and politics, which was substantially different from anything I had read, despite the very political aspects of H.G.Wells' writing. And it was a history lesson in the form of a lived sequence/chronicle: a series of windows into the time (as opposed to accounts of it). And overall on this last level it was an exceptionally powerful, thought-provoking crystal of space-time, whose power came from it being - primarily because of the brightness of the tonality - a view toward the Future.


    And yet, what followed was not a process of this experience having an ongoing impact on me. The main line of development I was following was that of dreamings, and of the philosophical aspect that is a thread within dreamings. The sheer get-up-and-dance joy given by a really good song fades after several playings; and although the 'stories' and outsight-glimpses were powerful, they went into effect, and then were left behind - they were not enough to set me dreaming. To a great extent what would set me dreaming - intermittently - was the 60s of the Beatles, but this was not something that in any straightforward way could be 'emulated', as with a kind of written story. 

     There was the music and there was the composite effect - of a kind of view toward a beyond of ordinary reality. 

    And to shift everything beyond questions of art, what can be said about exteriority in the sense involved here? And what can be said about the feelings which in some sense are connected to exteriority?


*




[section unfinished]

Half a step forward (more violet than blue)

(in the distance Kate stamps her foot)

*

Dreaming of a house of the future -

A cat in the garden suffused with sunlight

In a sky of condors, a murmuration of starlings

Above the southward hills, a laughter of travellers

Whose maps are of silence

Leading elsewhere - I dreamed, and knew that the place

Is the stillness and quiet bliss

Of those who in dreamers' friendship

Can either not speak, or can speak outlandish

That the house of the future - is this.

*

              Only with your summer words

Sing to me only with your summer words

Of heathland paths and the murmur of bees

And I won't ask what twists the idyll down.

Bring to me only your sparkling silence

Of thistleseeds drifting in sunlight

And I won't ask what worm devours the heart.

Whisper me only your glimpse of brightness

Where the falcons soar

For a moment on a spiralling current

And I won't ask for more, my love

I won't ask for more.

*

From above and beyond the sun the bird of summer

Flies toward Orion. In a breath as long as silence

And as wide as time he sees he has a chance

To go where all becomings start

To become a sphere of the dance of stars, to fly

As bird and as dreamer, and as dreamer's sky

If his love can become serene abandon

If the spheroambient world  

                                                     can reach his heart.

                                        

     

    *  


It is necessary to give some thought for a moment to the domain of political writing which uses a broad range of resources, where this includes a process of drawing upon writing which is categorised as 'literature'. There is an obvious connection here to the question of dreamings, but it is to be remembered that a powerful or effective piece of political writing is setting out to help the reader to re-envisage, or re-dream the world in a way which ultimate clicks into effect as abstract perception - as a view toward a zone of the transcendental-empirical.

     When, in 1985, I read E.P.Thompson's "Outside the Whale" (written in 1960) I was struck by the way in which the text takes up poems, novels and plays as fundamental aspects of the political discussion and the overall history of the preceding thirty years. And inseparably I was encountering the fresh air of a process of thought which perceived capitalism and its incorporated nation states as profoundly and disturbingly problematic.

      However, although the text is lucid in terms of its overall view of the social field, and exemplary through its range of resources passing beyond conventional academic and political discourse, at the same time there is something which is fundamentally wrong, and also something which is fundamentally absent, but in a way where it might be a long time before the issues involved became apparent. A key aspect of this is that Thompson structures a large part of the essay around his awareness of Auden's collapse, after 1940 into a toxic fusion of Christianity and psychoanalysis, and advocates specifically for the poem 'Spain'. But this poem needs to be seen as an extraordinary moment before a dawning of a realisation that at the fundamental level the way forward has nothing to do with going off to fight for republican Spain, and that this way forward is a - definitively urgent - transcendental materialism of micropolitical Departures, a realisation that Auden never reaches. 

     The other problematic aspect is simply that Thompson is drawing on writers of fiction and poetry only insofar as they assist in relation to a radical socialist or Marxist socialist perspective. The outsight in terms of capitalism and the nation states is indeed an outsight, but the problem is that a wider metaphysics - or transcendental-empirical view - and an associated pragmatics are missing within the text. The advocacy is for an activism that has a genuine level of validity, but which nonetheless does not constitute an effective response to the disaster that is ordinary reality.

     Later, when I read Deleuze's essay Nomad Thought, and then - soon afterwards - A Thousand Plateaus and Essays Critical and Clinical - it was clear that political-and-philosophical writings had moved substantially forward, and that the role of 'literature' within them had crossed an upward threshold. And yet, at the same time there was a steadily increasing feeling that the gain was less than it had first appeared to be.

     It is valuable to start with what is in common between Outside the Whale and the writings by Deleuze that have been mentioned. The primary aspect here is that Deleuze also is aware of the ongoing and deepening disaster that is the composite of capitalism and the nation states (if you question the term deepening you only need to look at the environmental impact to see that this is true). A closely related point is that Deleuze is also a historian. Thirdly, Deleuze also draws very substantially on written work which is outside the domain of academic and political discourse - and does this in way which is profoundly political.

    There is also  a very close, charged engagement with the turning-point phase of the 1940s - when the polarity of the system of reason-and-revelation was all-encompassingly reversed. But here the differences start to appear. For Thompson the key figure is Auden, whereas for Deleuze it is Artaud.

    Another similarity which leads to a difference involves the role of Marxism. Both writers are taking up a main aspect of Marx's overarching account of the world - and in Deleuze's case this extends to drawing to quite a large extent on socio-economic analyses from Marx - but neither writer agrees with Marxist dialectical thinking. Thompson structures Outside the Whale without any use of dialectics - and goes on to write a book, The Poverty of Theory, which references Marx while substantially disagreeing with his theoretical system, and Deleuze critiques the validity of dialectics, and breaks open a micropolitical path for which he uses the term nomadism, and where the direction involved has no connection to Marxism, and is as much metaphysical as it is a pragmatics of becoming-active (at the start of Nomad Thought he places Marxism and Freudianism alongside each other as two aspects of modernist interiority - a crucial moment in his writing).

    For the writings of Deleuze in question there has been another moment which has thrown a light onto everything - in the form of 1968. And he knows that, although the impulse to depart from ordinary reality - and in this sense to bring about a revolution for whoever is involved - is fundamentally valid in philosophical and political terms, the worlds of Marxist and Marxist revolutionary thought do not help, other than in the sense that Marxism embodies the perception that capitalism and the nation states are the latest form of the disaster of ordinary reality.

    The overarching difference with Deleuze is philosophico-pragmatic, and relates to his engagement with the domain of books which 'are written in a kind of foreign language' to use the phase from Proust which he puts at the front of Essays Critical and Clininal (it will be noticed that this way of referring to literature in fact does not separate it from philosophy). The key is that rather than taking up literature for a very narrowly focused radical socialist line of thought, he takes it up as a fundamental part of a philosophical exploration of the attributes of the world and the potentials of human existence. Even though he is aware that the continuum of works-consisting-of-outsights has a kind of break in the middle, in terms of the means employed, he indicates and continually embodies his awareness that when they are expressions of lucidity works of 'literature'  and works of philosophy are all lenses for looking toward the transcendental-empirical. And in connection with literature he also emphatically shows an awareness that this not just true in relation for instance to abstract poetry, but is equally true when the work, as well as being an expression of lucidity, has an overall structure which is an expression of the faculty of dreaming.

     However, what Deleuze does is open up the space of metaphysics and pragmatics as the element or dimension of fictions and other forms of writing which have been called 'art', and then having opened it up he goes very wide sideways, taking up lens after lens, and saying what he can see, but barely moves forward at all. Everything is structured to a large extent by the movement from work to work, and only to a small extent is it structured by the transcendental-empirical account of the world. He is almost always taking up a lens, or a modality of lens (philosophy, art, science), rather than starting from an account of the world, and from a pragmatics of waking the faculties and becoming-active. With the help of Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus the way of working is much more grounded in the world as opposed to texts, but even then the book proceeds by hundreds of references to works. In taking up the lens of a story by Kafka, or of The Waves, Deleuze is always writing about the world not about texts - it is always a question of exteriority - but it is the default starting-point that is the issue. The process becomes too piecemeal, rather than becoming its own text-free upward spiral, with its own modality of consistency. At the end Deleuze has done a vast amount, and has placed fiction alongside philosophy, but because he is always starting again there is another level on which he has done very little.

   *

     We do not take literature seriously enough, but in saying this the vital point is that we do not take the world seriously enough.

    Ordinary reality is the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, but outside of it the world, despite being dangerous, is better described in terms of summer than in terms of winter. It is necessary to walk out of the Overlook Hotel, and to keep walking.

                                                                       * * *