This blog is a three-part book in the process of being written, in the form of initial drafts of the sections, posted in the intended order, a project for which the overall name is Explorations. The book is a continuation from Hidden Valleys, Haunted by the Future (Zero Books - 2015), and also from On Vanishing Land, an audio-essay made by myself and Mark Fisher (released by Hyperdub/Flatlines on 26th July, 2019 - https://hyperdub.net).
Part One: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Part Two: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Part Three: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 50)
The town is a crescent of white walls, spread out above the bay in afternoon sunlight. A flute is being played, from somewhere further down the hill. Sunlight, flowering bougainvillea, the white-painted houses, the sound of the flute.
Cargill seems perturbed - he is looking in the direction of the sound. I realise he has gone white. He had been his normal self when he had met me on the pier, Cargill Ferguson, agitator-in-chief for the new anthropology, but now he seems haunted, unsure of what to do next. He had just told me that everything had started when he found the fragment of papyrus which contained the phrase "it came from out of the tar pits." But, now, turning away, he does not continue, and we walk in silence.
I have come to Kalthos because he has told me he has made a discovery. And the night before, in Corinth, there was the dream about the woman fleeing from the island four thousand years ago. I have got off the ferry, but it is as if I am still on that other boat, in the dream.
We are in an open space of sheep-cropped grass surrounded by gnarled olive trees, and there is small cottage with a verandah - behind it is the archaeological dig where Cargill has been working for the last year. We are sitting at a table which has a vine-trellis above it, and I look down at a map which shows the forests in the area around Piltriquitron in Patagonia - the mountain is in the centre of the map, and most of the forests are on the left, to the west.
I look up at Cargill and say to him
"But how can you tell me? You're dead"
And he looks back, looking distressed.
"Yes," he says, "But i'm not dead in you."
And after this everything comes at once, but with Cargill's voice alongside it. What I am seeing is the island four thousand years ago, and somehow the whole planet at the same time.
"They called it the melos, and sometimes they called it the harmon. It started when they went into trance-states while looking at the tar pits. But it was just one of eight entities, all around the planet. The myrmidons were here already, but these other entities were new, and far more dangerous.
Everyone was re-focused onto the direction of ecstatic, serene reverence - the direction of religion and mellifluous sound, sound posing as the sound of the sacred. This frequency was deadly not so much because it was suffused with delusion, as because it suppressed people in a way where they were prone to outbursts of outrage and anger. The two new frequencies were deluded reverence and rage, and the entity was parasitic on these energies. In particular, rage. Many of the people of the town were wiped out in a massacre."
"All around the planet the female and male practitioners of the anomalous were taken up over a threshold in the struggle against the invaders. But their adversaries were at such a high level of development that victory was also a catastrophe. An adjustment was made across the human world so that people were shifted toward reason, and away from lucidity and an awareness of the anomalous. And they lured the melos and the other entities into the subterranean realm of the shadow-beings, the bright-dark world of the sequestra palaces. The entities were permanently trapped there, but so were the practitioners of the anomalous - thousands of them, from all around the planet."
"The myrmidons remain, but now people have even less ability to perceive energy-parasites, which, crude as they may be, are still functioning from a higher level, striking at us from the transcendental. And the adjustment was not beneficial - it simply served at a specific moment to keep people away from a vulnerable mid-point between two attractors. And most important of all the affect-trap of reverence, sweetness, the mellifluous and rage has not been evaded: on the contrary, it is definitive of the majority of the human world."
"This is a collapsed escape-dimension. We escape through silence and spheroambient space, and through having enough love and courage to become the warrior explorers we have been along."
I am standing in the boat. Kalthos is behind me, faint on the horizon. They have all gone, those who I loved most - all of them. They have all been lost in the bright-dark palaces. Maybe one day a mariner will come back. But I can't look in this direction. I must look toward the sky, I must become and dream the sky.
And now I am waking in the house, disorientated, the dream fading away - sunlight slanting through the dining-room window.
*
Focusing on matter we discover zones of consistency or regularity, and we tend to see these zones in terms of matter blindly 'obeying' physical laws, or underlying principles (which we have been clever enough to discover). But even when we set out to see only zones of consistency pertaining to the world of matter, with no extrinsic 'laws' which are obeyed by the material components, we have still done nothing to challenge the dogmatic image of the world. This is because we see the zones of consistency of dreaming and abstraction (and all the other zones of consistency of 'the mind') as fundamentally separate, in a way where the separation is embodied at the level of what we think, and of what we are not prepared to think.
Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in relation to dreams, and 'dreamings'. If you concentrate, for instance, on the generally very narrow set of dreams in sleep which consist of lucid glimpses, or sustained views, toward rarely perceived aspects of the world, and which simultaneously consist of a serene, sublime, impersonal feeling, then this question can be considered: why could these experiences not be communications into us on the part of zones of the material world - for instance, in some way on the part of focused or semi-focused aspects of the planet? Could it not just be that words are a prejudice on the part of human beings concerning communication, and that the reason why the spheroambient material world appears not to be communicating with us is because we do not speak a sufficiently intelligent language? - because we do not speak the language of virtual-real spaces, of dreams? And perhaps we are re-energised each night by hours of successful communication which we are not capable of remembering. This is not about stating any of these things as facts, but is more about the problem of why it is that we never ask any of these questions. In relation to dreams (and in relation to all the other aspects of the abstract) we need to get beyond the dogmatic image the world. Could not what would here normally be called the unconscious in fact be the forces of a profoundly lucid, conscious sphere in the form of the all-around-you or spheroambient World of matter/energy?
*
1960 - pop-rock is about to be the fundamental zone within a gigantic resurgence of modernism. It will in fact carry the main weight of this new, pervasive, across-all-social-strata modernism, and will be capable of producing the illusion that it can sweep everyone away into the Future. A sense of the immense hidden potentials of the human world is about to arrive, and the reason why pop-rock will be able to produce the illusion is it will successfully shoulder a large part of a process of dismantling an area of deferential, repressive and authoritarian attitudes.
Meanwhile, in 1968's Difference and Repetition, as Deleuze stumbles desperately into the concluding zone of its time-fixated labyrinth there is a writer of fictions alongside the three philosophers who are primarily accompanying him by this point (Nietzsche and Spinoza, together with Kant, the creator of the labyrinth) and this writer is Shakespeare, in that a philosophical reading of Hamlet has become fundamental to Deleuze's account of what he describes as a 'third time,' beyond the suppressed and suppressive 'times' of habit and memory.
For Larkin the struggle is over almost as soon as it has begun. In the early 1940s he takes on two challenges: firstly, writing poetry which continues from Yeats and from the Auden of Look Stranger, and secondly, writing lucidly about sexuality in a way which continues from the work of D.H.Lawrence. The integrity involved in taking on the problem of sexuality - and, specifically, the issue of his own very heterosexual becoming-woman - is genuinely remarkable, but the collapse of this attempt is worse than just the writing of sad or bleak poems, in that it is a transmission and creation of deleterious, diminutivising sexual modalities. Without a high degree of accompanying focus on other, more straightforwardly Southward zones of the transcendental a process of looking toward the unknown in the direction of sexuality leads to very disturbing developments. And Larkin is not pulled to one side into the outside of ordinary reality (as with Angela Carter and Burroughs), but instead collapses and produces diminutivising, 'scurrilous' and dark/bleak writings, becoming a poet who not only upholds ordinary reality but who refines its intrinsic viruses.
In 1943 Larkin writes what is perhaps simultaneously his best and his worst poem, a poem which is aware of the dimension of becomings, and of the primary doorway to this dimension which exists within perception:
I see a girl dragged by the wrists
Across a dazzling field of snow,
And there is nothing in me that resists.
Once it would not be so;
Once I would choke with powerless jealousies
But now I seem devoid of subtlety,
As simple as the things I see,
Being no more, no less than two weak eyes.
There is snow everywhere
Snow in one blinding light.
Even snow smudged in her hair
As she laughs and struggles, and pretends to fight
And still I have no regret;
Nothing so wild, nothing so glad as she
Rears up in me,
And would not though I watched an hour yet.
[...] Perhaps what I desired
- That long and sickly hope, someday to be
As she is - gave a flicker and expired;
For the first time I'm content to see
What poor mortar and bricks
I have to build with, knowing that I can
Never in seventy years be more a man
Than now - a sack of meal upon two sticks.
So I walk on. [...]
[...]two old ragged men
Clearing the drifts with shovels and a spade [...]
Now they express
All that's content to wear a worn-out coat,
All actions done in patient hopelessness,
All that ignores the silences of death,
Thinking no further than the hand can hold,
All that grows old,
Yet works on uselessly with shortened breath.
Damn all explanatory rhymes!
To be that girl! - but that's impossible [...]
Writing these thoughts is courageous, but identification with a girl being dragged by the wrists gives the impression that Larkin's struggle is over as it begins. From here he goes on to be a writer of borderline-erotic novellas about young women at boarding schools and colleges (using the pseudonym of Brunette Coleman), then a writer of two novels which each has a young woman as central figure (Jill, A Girl in Winter), and lastly a writer of poetry whose 'scurrilous' or 'creepy' aspect is so carefully disguised as integrity that it is enshrined within the canon of western literature. Larkin has the courage to become a poet of sexuality, but the attempt is a failure which has deleterious effects. He tells his friends that what is complicated about his sexuality involves him being in some sense 'lesbian,' but he fails to find a way of focusing his attention not only toward women, but simultaneously toward planetary - and abstract - zones of the transcendental that would have helped him solve the initial problem. The Break with the Past is taking place, with the shift toward a focus on iconic social and technological elements, and, afraid of going in any direction that could be construed as 'of the past,' Larkin is unable to get beyond the suppressive, power-fixated modality that lurks within sexuality.
It needs to be pointed out that Larkin is at the forefront of a process in which the diminutive 'girl' becomes the primary, and libidinalised word for 'young woman.' He gives the term girl 'literary gravitas' with A Girl in Winter, and although he expresses the need, while writing this book, to turn his 'north ship' round and write an affirmative novel that would continue from Lawrence, he in fact simply stops writing novels, and we are left with the dark transition from Women in Love to A Girl in Winter. The word girl is very fundamentally sexual, and although its 'youngness' charges it with delight, and playfulness and 'letting go' (abandon) it is primarily a kind of sexual trap, simply because it is a diminutive. Larkin of course goes on to be a womaniser - practicing deceitful multiple relationships with women - and another womaniser, John Lennon, will pick up the word girl and charge it up with more intensity to the point of flailingly making the idea an issue (and later it is as if Lennon wants to re-channel the libidinal power into the word 'woman'), but Larkin does not take the concept of 'girl' and problematise it, or take up the idea of women, or of becoming-woman and try to go further. Instead we are left with the obvious scurrilousness of phrases like 'the girls who you most want to tell pull your socks up / are the girls whose knickers you most want to pull down" and phrases which are so heavily disguised that they appear to be separate, like this one from the poem "The Whitsun Weddings":
girls, clutching their handbags tighter, stared
At a religious wounding.
And it is less than relevant to point out that Larkin was aware of something very dark within sexuality, as in his poem which concludes "stumbling up the breathless stair / to burst into fulfilment's desolate attic." (less than relevant because Larkin does not in fact do nearly enough to show/analyse the horror of the real-life incident being described). Similarly, it is not helpful to point out that he questions the zenith-points of sexuality in a way that runs wider than cases of sexual violence ("the wet spark comes, the bright-blown walls collapse / What ashen hills! / How leaden... / Birmingham magic all discredited"). The problem is that Larkin, as poet of sexuality, simply promulgates a deleterious way of being which is endemic within reality, but which, until this point, had never had a chance to be explicitly expressed within 'literature.' Larkin later gives an indication that the challenge provided by the first wave of widespread modernism has been taken up to a great extent by those who were young in the early 60s, but there is only an impression of a transmission of the challenge, together with a kind of sleazy, doggerel melancholy: there is no opening up of any sustained view toward wider realities. Alongside the faint attempt in this direction of the poem "High Windows" - with its opening lines "When I see a couple of kids/ and guess he's fucking her, and she's taking pills/ or wearing a diaphragm"- there is the 'refrain' of Annus Mirabilis, which, despite being trite and disingenuous, has a revealing aspect at the level of its cultural references:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
*
Both Larkin and Tolkien have come under the spell of the outside of ordinary reality, but it remains the case that pre-eminently their work is an expression of the functioning of the system of reason-revelation. In a specific, background sense which relates to its terrains there is something 'additional' in Tolkien's work, but overall it is far more suppressive than that of Larkin, in that it is suffused with religious/traditionalist perspectives and values. And nowhere is this more clear than it is in relation to Tolkien's female characters.
Tolkien works with tiny fragments and tracings of elements within modernism in order to give strength to his transmutation of Arthurianism (Valinor replacing Avalon etc) - in order to create his anti-modernist mythos. With his female characters the first point is that there are almost none of them, while the second is that the major female figures are idealised regal, or 'regal/mythical' beings (instead of the Lady of the Lake, there is the River Daughter, and instead of Guinevere there is Galadriel), but the crucial point in this context is that he includes one courageous, independent-minded (human) female character and then imprisons her within the false-opposition between physical fighting and becoming someone's wife. The point where Eowyn - who has never been part of the primary quest of the 'fellowship' within the tale - discovers her future husband, Faramir, and recants her desire to go and fight is perhaps the creepiest moment in the whole story.
And the wild joy, and adventurousness and dancing of female figures in the Ancient Greek spaces of the oneirosphere must at all costs be removed from this world, or edited down to a kind of dead 'trace': - it is Plato's mythical Greek past of Atlantis that is transposed into the mythos, as opposed to the mythical past drawn upon by Sophocles and Shakespeare, and although the ents are included the female tree-spirits have somehow been lost.
The dimensions of Tolkien's conservatism are the re-insertion of a transcendent (male) deity into fantasy literature (Eru Illuvatar); extreme and idealised gender traditionalism; the Catholicism of the landscape of good and evil; the Catholicism of anomalous knowledge being only available to non-humans who pertain to the pantheon space of angels / guardian angels (Feanor, Gandalf etc are not human); implied northwest-of-Eurasia racism (all the more powerful for being implied); royalist sacred-bloodline patriarchalism; and the religiose melancholism of the idea that across the millennia the glory and beauty of the world are declining (Tolkien is a counterpart of Hegel as well as Kant, and as counterpart of Hegel he tells the opposite story). There is no point in saying that Tolkien was gigantically talented at the level of his imagination - everything is a question of the damaging forces to which his imagination has succumbed.
It is not really that Tolkien is disingenuous: it is that in accepting reactive values he is progressively taken over by the system of these values. The dancing and singing of the younger Tolkien's Luthien Tinuviel (already romanticised and northwesternised in relation to the wilder worlds of Ancient Greece) is progressively left behind within his work, so that it becomes a distant fragment of modernism energising the main, later space of the mythos. And then, in writing his trilogy, the glaze of modernism's anthropological aspect is added in the form of a tracing from Malinowski, with the account of a 'non-standard' socio-ritual economy of gifts, etc. Moreover, there is a displaced inclusion in Tolkien's work of an element which comes from the ur-modernist aspect of Schopenhauer, the idea that will is in some sense inseparable from the idea of music: this takes the form of the creation story in The Silmarillion, in which, prior to its effectuation as matter, the entire form and history of the world is dreamed by God and his angels in the form of a piece of music.
*
And then it's over - the deep, thirty-year collapse-phase comes to an end. Doris Lessing is writing again, and the Beatles take the non-mellifluous, pre-western power of rock beats in the direction of the becoming-woman involved in male-heterosexual love-songs, and start to let their hair grow long. Soon there will be women at the centre of the new world of rock-pop modernism, from Carole King to Donna Summer and Kate Bush. And although the pervasiveness and immediacy of influence in the equivalent new domain of writing is not the same (and though the initial space of modernism of writers such as Virginia Woolf is to a great extent intellectually suppressed along the lines detailed earlier) the breakthroughs in fiction are spectacular, and over time they may come to be recognised as far more momentous than what what took place in pop-rock. These breakthroughs can be indicated through the following names: Doris Lessing, Joan Lindsay, Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Marge Piercy.
Shakespeare's work has been largely unaffected by the Break with the Past (because it is too connected to the transcendental to be characterised as 'romantic'). And as Deleuze writes Difference and Repetition this group of lenses from four hundred years earlier is given a central role, precisely because tragedy is one of the problems with which he is trying to engage (tragedy relates to the third, fourth and fifth aspects of the transcendental (Section 19, Section 34)). Deleuze is right about the importance of this problem, and he is also right that beyond tragedy and comedy there is something else to which a name should be given which supersedes these terms, but the main success of the book in fact is elsewhere, and primarily what he does is point desperately toward Shakespeare.
The fundamental achievement of the book (as Deleuze realised later) is the point halfway where he partially emerges from the deadly Kantian trap in which he is struggling and writes "The Image of Thought." The failure of the book is Deleuze being fixated on time and on difference: and it is not really that Deleuze is wrong about difference, it is that it was necessary to start from intent and perception, and from zones of the world, such as the planet, the human body and groups. Watching Deleuze struggling his way through the subterranean labyrinth of his time-fixation is in many ways a disturbing spectacle, and the way in which it is not edifying is shown by him completely failing to take up the lens of the opening of Hamlet, and look through it, despite his claim that this is what he has done. Because there is indeed something rotten in the state of Denmark, and when Hamlet says the 'time is out of joint' at depth he is referring to a monstrous dislocation or dismemberment (fixated by Kant and the line of time Deleuze gives this phrase a sense which has no connection with the play).
Hamlet embodies a way of thinking which, when directed toward the libidinal micro-fabric of the human world (whether capitalism or pre-capitalism), leads to the idea that men have to a large extent been rendered dead by the forces of control, and that women are far more fundamentally alive (though they are embroiled with control), and that our task - as ever - is to reach the Future.
And the four hundred year struggle over Ancient Greece - which invokes a joy and dance and laughter of Ancient Greece as more profound and ancient than the world of the conflicts of Ancient Israel - is not in fact an indispensable element of a process of escape, and nor of course is a re-effectuation of Shakespeare. What in fact is needed is a fully effectuated anthropological philosophy. Which is to say that what is needed is all of the presents (and with this, all of the pasts) of an anthropological and genuinely global philosophy. Instead of needing to reach time, we need to reach space - and this, in turn, is to say that what we need to reach is the transcendental.
1968, in Warwickshire. A faint, futural coruscation across the skies of the human world, and therefore also across the human-perceived skies of Warwickshire. But this is the result of events which have very little connection to Shakespeare, and which have more to do with music and with developments in anthropology.
Pop-rock has gone a long way, very fast. However, it will not get much further (at the level of its visionary aspect the high-point will be Patti Smith's Horses). It is hampered by the fact that it is very hard for it to build lucid virtual-real worlds - dreamings - which break the conceptual lines of the collapsed escape-dimension (ordinary reality) and which would function to conduct people toward silence. (the charged, non-melifluous beats and rhythms have ignited the joy-transmitting, joy-suffused melodies of pop-rock's songs, but music has a lack of spatial breadth, and it has a tendency to keep people fixed on the line of time, without - generally speaking - the words having enough chance to take people toward space). Meanwhile, the primary, or 'establishment' form of anthropology has collapsed from the initial courage and openness of Frazer and has become either the blindness to dreamings of structuralism, or the disaster of figures such as Evans Pritchard, who as a Roman Catholic is definitively incapable of adopting the open-ended, many-tales-about-the-world perspective that is needed in relation to dreamings. He has been trapped by a blocked, suppressive dreaming (a patriarchal dreaming involving a male God and an avatar son, where this is supposed to be the fundamental story or ultimate perspective) which means that he is incapable of putting everything on one level in order to assess the views and value-systems involved (it is not only within the high-kudos or 'non-genre' zones of fiction that the conservatism of the forties and fifties is casting a long shadow). However, in the midst of this bleak terrain of conformist anthropology something new is emerging. Ursula Le Guin, the daughter of an anthropologist (and a thinker who draws very very deeply on this new tradition) is writing The Left Hand of Darkness, and Carlos Castaneda has just published his Ph.D thesis,The Teachings of Don Juan.
The escape-materials that are now starting to be emplaced into the liminal zones of the human world will now be of a very different kind from those placed into it four hundred years before by Shakespeare, and they will in fact be at a fundamentally higher level, because it is now possible to say more (the primary danger is simply the ridicule of the power-brokers of the trans-establishment: there is substantially less danger of being physically attacked). But the extent to which they are at a higher level will only start to become clear at the point where women begin to produce the new anthropological work - the crucial date being 1982, when Florinda Donner publishes Shabono.
Warwickshire remains a singular, ultra-intense zone within the oneirosphere, but this has almost nothing to do with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and is primarily connected to the original breakthrough. There will in fact be a re-effectuation of the Shakespeare abstract machine (a momentous event, in that it will be the first time it has happened), but this is fourteen years in the future and it will take place in Sweden. The old breakthrough is in fact being superseded - and this new Event will not take place in Britain, and most crucially it will happen in countries on the opposite side of the Atlantic. It will take place in Mexico, Venezuela and the USA - and to a lesser extent in Sweden and in France. The only thread connecting it to Shakespeare will be a project that will begin in 1979 on the island of Faro, and end in Uppsala, in 1982.
The most important initial fact about Donner's Shabono is that the book has at its centre the figure of a female explorer. The book is an account of a journey into a jungle terrain in the Orinoco region of Venezuela, and specifically, it is an account of a year spent living with a Yanomami community. The described exploration is therefore immediately double, in that it both involves the space of planetary terrains, and simultaneously a recondite space of the human world - recondite not only from the 'western-world' perspective, but also from the perspective of any society with a control-apparatus in the form of a 'state.' And yet - the fundamental exploration described within the book is of another kind again, and is the exploration which confronts each one of us as an immediate potential. This is the process of exploring the transcendental unknown: which is to say, the process of exploring anomalous and heightened experiences, whether in wakefulness or in dreams, in a way where, instead of the idea of the unconscious, there is the idea of the immanent and spheroambient unknown, an unknown which is planetary, and only secondarily human.
The fact this is a female explorer of the transcendentally unknown is momentous. It is a quiet, but genuinely immense breakthrough. There are features of the trap of ordinary reality in relation to which a female perspective is, to say the least, invaluable. And this book is both exceptionally lucid and consistently vivid and intense in relation to its depiction of a jungle-terrain and of a human world. The writing is an instance of what Woolf is describing when she says 'saturate every atom,' but overall it would have to be said that Shabono is one of the very few books that makes The Waves look like only a beginning. Rhoda's exploration in the direction of Africa has at last - fifty years later - been continued: only she has traveled west across the Atlantic, and has traveled into the equatorial heartlands of South America.
There are two central questions in Shabono, the question of shamanism and the question of women. And by the end of the book it is clear that these two questions are in the fullest sense inseparable. It is not that Donner affirms or validates any specific detail of the shamanic - or shapori - practices of the society she is describing, and still less is she affirming the gender structure of this social world, a world in which it is accepted, in fact, that a woman can become a practitioner of shamanism: far from affirming this structure the book embodies a comprehensive critique of pervasive modalities of this society which suppress women (modalities which of course have western-world counterparts which are just as damaging and pervasive). The way in which Shabono works is that of a fully effectuated anthropology: it overlays the Yanomami optic over that of supposedly 'modern' societies and confronts us with an unmistakable view of the transcendental (arrived at because in Yanomami societies to have an advanced level of knowledge is to have directly-acquired abstract and practical knowledge in relation to trance states and heightened states, these states recognised as occurring in relation to an immanent and planetary exteriority), and then it clearly shows that there is something more, a route forward taken by female and male practitioners of the anomalous.
Everything here is embodied in the selection of elements: there is no explicit critique or validation. What is described are events, the jungle, ways of telling tales, a different relationship to time; what is also described are the dreams and other heightened states of the anthropologist narrator of this story - who has gone there because a woman whose curing practices she has been studying in a town in northern Venezuela has suggested this would help her. The objectivity here is to place everything onto a plane of immanence so that the dreams of the anthropologist are also included, and so that no modality of judgement is employed in relation to this radically different society. The book clearly shows a society without an actualised interestablishment (Section 1, Explorations); in which there is not the machinic domain of 'work;' and in which, most crucially, a channel of delight and lucidity and playful openness to the Outside has been kept open to a far greater extent than in state societies. But in relation to women it shows a society in which girls generally become wives at puberty, in arranged marriages, and in which there is structural, intermittent raiding/low level warfare between Yanomami societies (each one has around two hundred people), where these raids are conducted by men, and where one aspect of the raids is the stealing of women. It is also the case that women are prevented, by firm but not-always-observed conventions, from having the skills necessary for existing on their own in the jungle beyond the shabono, and also in the same way (as a firm general rule, but with exceptions) from having the skills involved in becoming a shapori. Given these facts it is not surprising that no impression is given that this society is better than those, for instance, of the western world, but nor, however, is it indicated that this social-world is worse. The crucial, fact is rather that the society has a clearer view of something which exists beyond the fabric of ordinary-reality (which merely varies in form from the Yanomami world, to the world, to take some examples, of the states of the Americas).
Because although this society functions in a way which tends to prevent this from happening, it is an accepted fact within it that women can become practitioners of the anomalous - they can become shapori. The whole book turns around this fact: the beginning of the account is about how Donner nominally accepts an invitation to go hunting with some male friends, but then in fact stays at the western-world jungle outpost (a Catholic mission) to which she is flown, because she meets an old Yanomami woman called Angelica, who says she will take her to meet her tribe, the Iticoteri, who are deep in the jungle. This gives Donner the opportunity to do what she has been told she should do (by the curer, called Dona Mercedes, whose curing practices she has been studying). Everything unfolds from here: a starting-point which involves three women. Donner departs with Angelica who has now been joined by her son Milagros (whose father is a westerner): Angelica, who is old and frail, dies toward the end of the of the week-long journey to the shabono, and not long before the end of the book Donner is talking to Hayama the sister of Angelica. The entire topic of shapori practices has been one about which there has been a general refusal to speak, but Hayama now tells her that women can be shapori:
"Female shapori are strange creatures. Like men, they hunt with bow and arrows. They decorate their bodies with the spots and broken circles of a jaguar. They take epena and lure the hekuras into their chests with their songs. Women shapori have husbands who serve them. But if they have children they once again become ordinary women.."
"Angelica was a shapori, wasn't she?" I was unaware I had thought out loud. The thought came with the certainty of a revelation. I recalled the time Angelica had awakened me from a nightmare at the mission, the way her incomprehensible song had soothed me. It had not resembled the melodious song of the Iticoteri women but the monotonous chant of the shamans. Like them, Angelica seemed to possess two voices - one that originated from somewhere deep inside her, the other from her throat. I remembered the days of walking with Milagros and Angelica through the forest and how Angelica's remarks about the spirits of the forest lurking in the shadows - that I should always dance with them, but never let them become a burden - had enchanted me. I clearly visualised how Angelica had danced that morning - her arms raised above her head, her feet moving with quick jerky steps in the same manner that the Iticoteri men danced when in an epena trance. Until now I had never thought it in the least odd that Angelica, as opposed to the other Indian women at the mission, had considered it very natural for me to have come to hunt in the jungle.
Hayama's words words woke me from my musings. "Did my sister tell you she was a shapori?" A profound grief filled Hayama's eyes; tears gathered at their corners. The drops never rolled down her cheeks but lost themselves in a network of wrinkles.
"She never told me," I murmured, then lay down in my hammock. With one leg on the ground I pushed myself back and forth, adjusting the rhythm of my hammock to Hayama's so that the vine knots would squeak in unison.
"My sister was a shapori," Hayama said after a long silence. "I don't know what happened after she left our shabono. While she was with us she was a respected shapori [...]"
Given that this is a culminating moment in relation to the overall trajectory of Shabono, it can be seen that the questions of women and of shamanism have been brought closely together. And there are certain issues which must now be addressed to deepen an understanding of what is involved in this abstract nexus, all of which have a connection to the above passage. The first of these concerns the question of a many-tales-about-the-world perspective which focuses on the space of the planet, and radically refuses a dogmatic story about historical time; the second concerns the pragmatics of being a practitioner of the kinds of intense trance-states reached by yopo, or epena (see Section 34), and the pragmatics of prioritising perception and movement above pre-fabricated conceptual schemes with no fundamental planetary horizon or starting-point. The third concerns a different relationship to movement, dance, music and sound, in which there are other 'voices' than those of conventionally attractive and melodious modalities, where these other modes have a power to assist, wake, and, in general break people open out of the stupour of ordinary reality in the direction of joy and lucidity. The fourth concerns the questions of becoming-woman, and of becoming-explorer, and leads of course to the following question - how denuded and primitive is the 'modern' world if, within it, we are unable to perceive the figure of the female explorer of the transcendental?
The momentous achievement of Shabono is that the book delineates a system of thought and action which is radically different from those of state societies. In relation to forms of knowledge and interpretation it becomes clear that if you start from shamanism, and from a socially embedded psychotropic as powerful as epena, you arrive at a very different place in relation to accounts of the world, and at a place which views everything in terms of the body without organs (most obviously, dreams, trance-experiences, etc), and which is always asking the question - what form of intent is animating a person? (in our terms this could be, is it the reactivity and gravity of Christianity or Islam? ; or, is it a love for the planet? or a love of animals? or a love of mountain forests? or a love of cats? or a love of Virginia Woolf and Shakespeare?). What is crucial, for starting to understand the difference, is that the Iticoteri do not have a priest-caste who are interpreters of books, and who preside over the false-profundity of 'big' stories about historical/genealogical time and the start of the world. On the contrary, the entire society, starting from the shapori, is aimed toward space, and toward visionary states that arrive through being in the present, and it not only treats 'historical' tales as things to be continuously re-created, but systematically avoids any pervasive structuring of thought and experience along an extrinsic line of time. Everything is fundamentally a knowledge and a pragmatics in relation to the zones, atrributes and forces of a planetary Now which includes the body without organs: a shapori must be a healer, a visionary in relation to a metaphysics and pragmatics of overall existence, and simultaneously a Sun-Tzu practitioner of warcraft in relation to recurrently hostile neighbouring tribes. And the false-profundity of historical ur-stories has no role to play in any of this. Time therefore has a very different role, as Donner points out in describing her eventual adoption of this other modality:
"Like the Iticoteri I had learned to live in the present. Time [...] was something to be used only at the moment. Once used, it sank back into itself and became an imperceptible part of my inner being."
(when I took epena at Harbury Lake (Section 34), before I had read Shabono, I had the experience that I was dancing somewhere in an area of countryside, or in a wide clearing in a forest, and the idea that came to me within the experience was that I was dancing alongside the beginning of time).
The Itoceteri have a different form of knowledge, in comparison to knowledge within modern state societies: their knowledge is fundamentally about forms of intent, both at the level of individuals, and at the level of trans-personal forms of intent (in our terms, this might be the form of intent of a specific way of being in love with the world, or of a specific religion etc). They do not have writing, and they do not have the form of knowledge that we call 'science.' The primary zone of encounter is the world of singularities of the planet, and is the body without organs: and the primary forms of linguistic expression are speech and songs. It is worth pointing out that Shabono was written at the end of a phase when there was substantially more chance of people making contact with it. In 1982 there had just been twenty years during which songs had been given an unprecedented level of importance in the 'western' world, and during which there had been a high degree of awareness that something was inadequate about science, and that another, more fundamentally valuable form of knowledge was possible.
This social formation has embedded practitioners of trance-states and anomalous forms of being into the very centre of its system. Everything here concerns perception and openness; everything concerns an improvisatory art and fluid pragmatics of encounter and intervention. In taking up the role of leader-healer-warrior-artist the shapori have done something very different from what is done by the functionaries of a priest-caste. The unknown here remains all around, rather than it being the unknown of the line of time, where this is supposed to have been overcome in the past, or by present initiates. Tales about the past are continually transformed, and when Donner asks a shaman about the creation of the world, the response is laughter and the question 'don't you know the world was created many times?' followed in turn by accounts of immense fires and floods, where these accounts start from the world, rather than from the idea of a nothing before the world. The shapori are not interested in imposing on people with the gravity of an ur-story that fakes a triumph over an unimportant adversary, and nor are they interested in creating a fake proof of the superiority of their tribe, and a fake proof of the heretical, 'evil' nature of social formations that do not adhere to their metaphysical position. Instead, they are pragmatist artists working with the forces of the present, encountering the spheroambient unknown of the World (as opposed to the line of time) through perception, dreams and trance-states. And encountering the unknown in this way ensures that the trapped form of reason does not take over their lives (reason in the form of engagement with formal systems and with all spatial and temporal systems that have groups of components that can effectively be grasped as discrete), so that lucidity can come to the forefront, and reason can be a faculty functioning alongside. The Iticoteri are distinct from state societies not just in relation to the priest-caste of religion, but also in relation to the counterpart priest-caste of reason.
However, it remains the case that these practitioners of the anomalous are embedded within ordinary reality. Tribal societies are not escape-groups: they are other zones of ordinary reality: formations which have incorporated the anomalous to a higher degree, but which are ordinary reality nonetheless. Although they have the immense advantage of having avoided a fixation on systematicity and the line of time this advantage does not in fact create a fundamental break. This is because, like state societies, they are centred upon reproduction, and because - again, like state societies - they have an inbuilt tendency to act upon a hostile, reactive attitude toward other societies. To a marked, specific degree they have effectuated lucidity, but their lucidity is still in the service of the control mind, with its intrinsic libidinal modalities and patterns of affects, and therefore it is not able to cross its crucial threshold of effectuation. It is not enough to have valuable insights, or to be intrinsically capable of improvisation, or to be able to create extraordinary, inspiring songs: if this had been enough pop-rock modernism would have broken open an irreparable gap in ordinary reality. Lucidity has to be in the service of an intent to travel toward love and freedom and wider realities, and this intent, as such, has to have rid itself of all control modalities, including the domination/submission modality that is such an insistent force within sexuality.
It would be wrong to conflate the figure of the shapori with the figure of the artist. This is because, as well as being metaphysician-visionaries, they are also warriors and healers. Instead, for instance, of setting out to produce sounds which might be regarded as 'beautiful' or 'melodious,' they have learned to produce streams of charged, atonal, ultra-calm sounds - sounds which are ultra-calm in that they evince an unperturbed state despite the fact that they are full of intensity. The affects involved here go from the soothing and inspiring to the awe-inspiring and fearsome - a whole atonal spectrum of the sublime (evidently a resource for those who are both healers and warriors).
There is also a very intense, and socially embedded relationship to the body without organs, such that forms of intent can appear within - and be communicated across - a localised oneirosphere taking the form of dreams, stories, and experiences created by an extremely powerful psychotropic, epena. The body without organs is the oneirosphere, and the world of forms of intent in the form of - and within - individual human beings and animals. It also, for the Iticoteri, is understood as extending in some sense into the world beyond humans at the level not just of animals, but of the entities called hekura, the 'forest spirits' which - whatever validity is taken to be involved here -, as forest spirits provide a planetary horizon for this zone of experience: jaguar spirit, hummingbird spirit, otter spirit (despite the unclear connection between animal species and the hekura associated with them, it remains the case that the horizon is planetary, and, moreover, these spirits are understood to live within the physical expanse of mountains). It can be seen that the dogmatic image of the world is not in effect here: a hekura is seen as capable of living within the 'chest' of a human, but in a way where you would not see if you cut open a body, any more than you would find a dream if you were operating on a brain with a scalpel: and the same - Spinozistic - view is taken in relation to the mountains in which hekuras are deemed to live - the planet and its mountains are seen as having a body without organs which is the same as the human body without organs within which dreams exist.
The great strength of this society is that within it there is the figure of the female explorer of the transcendentally unknown. But this figure is its outer limit -- it is the zone which, if it was fully actualised, would cause the society to cross its threshold, so that it would become an escape-group. For in fact, the weakness of the society is that everything is set up in advance so that female shapori almost never appear, despite the fact they are a known, accepted potential (it seems that, before Angelica, it was only a small number of generations since the previous time the Iticoteri had one). What prevents women from becoming shapori is, firstly, the fact that at puberty they tend to have marriages arranged for them, so that they are impelled into a life of raising children, and, secondly, the fact that this takes place within a society which also holds the fixed view that a woman who has had a child loses her powers as a shapori, if she had somehow managed to become one. Child-rearing is forced into the centre of womens' lives, and even if an individual woman decided that she did not believe the view about motherhood and shamanism, and decided that she wanted to become a shapori, she would be embarking on an exceptionally arduous journey in relation to taking yopo, and would be surrounded by people who would think that her attempt could not succeed.
Another part of the trap is that men are set up to go in a direction which is not quite the south-outside: these are territorial, warrior-raid societies, and an inbuilt fierceness and weapon-seeking forcefulness are involved in individuals being pulled to one side of transcendental south, in a process which keeps people focused on a lightness of spirit that is not quite what it needs to be, in that it has too much to do with control, and too little to do with Love-and-Freedom - a process which actualises becomings but holds them in a minimal state. Men go on a libidinal journey which it is indicated has a sexual aspect in relation to hekuras, in that within the epena trance-experiences hekuras can take the form of women, but these alliances - whatever they may be - do not in any way induce toward having relationships with women as fellow explorers of the unknown (the opposite in fact, in that the Iticoteri view is that hekuras in general do not like women, and for this society the man, as a shaman, must have alliances with hekuras). The successful shapori holds back in connection to his sexual relationship with his wife, and in particular recurrently holds back from coming, within the sexual act; and, inconspicuously, he also has occasional intercourse with many different women in the tribe (but again without coming), and here the account of this action given to Donner, by the woman Hayama, is that a shapori 'needs femaleness in his body.' It can be seen that becoming-woman has here been kept at a kind of grim degree zero: instead of it involving entering into becoming with women in the form of female travelers into the unknown it involves an intensification arrived at through treating the sexual delight of women as a simple reserve of energy to be accessed through intercourse.
There is a sense in which everything in Shabono takes place in a close relationship to two events. The first, on the outward journey, is the death of Angelica, a woman who had been a shapori, and who evidently in some sense has remained one.The second, on the return journey, is an event in which a shapori called Iramamowe gives Donner a pyschotropic because he believes she has hekuras within her and wants to take advantage of the trance state to lure these hekuras to him: The result is Donner going into a very long, psychotropically-induced trance, at the end of which Iramamowe feels that he has not only failed, but that if he had continued he might have lost his own hekuras to Donner.
The Iticoteri are retreating further and further into the rainforest in an attempt to stay away from the westerners - they appear here as an instance of the kind of 'hidden community' that is talked about in the radical milieus of the westernised areas of south and central America. And it feels as if Shabono indicates that their only chance is to overcome a tendency to suppress and underestimate female explorers of the transcendental. If this was achieved they could build upon what is an exceptionally high level of development for a zone of ordinary reality, a level which in certain crucial respects (in relation to the transcendental) is above that of state societies.
At the very end of the book Donner writes about the two westerners who live at the mission: Father Coriolano, who runs it, and Mr Barth, a diamond prospector who has given up prospecting, and settled down. These two men appear as contrasted liminal figures, and Donner expresses the idea that in some way the forest has exerted its power over them, in that they are in love with it, and 'are unable to go back to the world they had left behind.' Here there are the two poles of the system of reason-and-revelation, the two, contrasted aspects of empirical awareness, as opposed to transcendental awareness. Tolkien and Kant, or Tolkien and Larkin.
Shabono shows the path of Exploration - it gives a clear view toward the south-outside. It does this because it is an instance of fully effectuated anthropological philosophy. It sets out the primary intellectual, practical and libidinal aspects of a fundamentally different formation of ordinary reality, and in the process makes the Futural dimension of what is beyond ordinary reality visible.
However, having arrived in this forest - having crossed over toward the transcendental awareness evinced by figures as different as Donner and Shakespeare - it is necessary to 'follow through' with the project of avoiding smiling indulgently toward the views of the Yanomami, and ask the question, what are the hekuras? This can simply be the question 'what is the control mind?' (a question which shows its relevance to everyone), but it should also be to ask - what are we seeing when we look in the direction of the Deep Hotel?
* * *
1. Disappearances
of Literature
Operators and Things
The
cold has become so intense that the warmth has arrived in an unaccountable way.
The old daylight of 1950s Greyhound bus stations is very bright: everything has
filaments running through it of a kind of chilly manifestation of the
anomalous, but beyond this there is another form of the anomalous, which,
although equally impersonal, has a striking warmth.
Operators and Things has a
lucidity which establishes its importance, but which does not resolve the issue
of how it should be categorised. Its overall modality is that of an
intelligently reflective account of a disturbing, outlandish eruption from the
unconscious, in the form of a six month episode of schizophrenia. The
description of the shock and distress of this episode carries conviction to a
very high degree - and yet there are peripheral, minimal elements of the text
which leave the impression that the book is not quite what it appears to be, or
that the world is not quite what it appears to be, or both.
The book
is about a break, where at a fundamental level this break consists
of a complete cutting off of the flow of customary self-reflection and
customary internal verbalising (a cutting off which remains un-noticed during
the six months of the episode being described, and is only commented on within
the book after the description). Instead the default mental tonality is that of
someone trying to save their life as a result of being in immense danger - time
only to perceive, inspect what has been perceived, and to plan and effectuate
escape strategies (no time for pained self-reflection; no time for a rambling,
subjectified flow of internal verbalising).
Barbara O'Brien describes how,
one morning, she wakes up with three figures who look like “fuzzy ghosts”
at the foot of her bed, who tell her that there are two types of humans,
Operators, and Things; and that she is a 'Thing' whereas they are ‘Operators’
who are projecting images of themselves into her room (they are all male – the
two who will stay as part of the experience are called Nicky and Hinton, and in
the next few days these two will be joined by a third male Operator, called
Sharp). The brains of Operators have a different feature from those of Things.
An experiment is taking place, so that she is being allowed to know about
Operators. She is told that most Operators don't want this experiment to
happen. Over the next few days the schizophrenic episode becomes almost
entirely auditory (experienced as the operators projecting only voice as
opposed to voice-and-image), and becomes very intricate, but with a high degree
of internal consistency.
Primarily the Operators are a world of
urbane control behaviours: everything is matter-of-fact, and O’Brien is told
that Things have no right to be critical, because of their behaviour toward
animals and toward each other. O’Brien sets off on the road, using Greyhound
buses, with the aim of getting out of the reach of their ability to project
their thoughts into her.
Here the Departure - the process of
dropping out of sight, and of movement into a new milieu - takes place in a way
which is so bound up with a kind of cataclysmic change of mental state that it
is easy to give it very little attention. The experience is driven by
perturbing circumstances in a way where it is the complete opposite of what is
likely to come to mind if you envisage 'clearing off' to a whole other area or
environment.
The point of departure is an
unspecified town or city that that seems to be in the east or mid-west of the
USA. The terrain of the new milieu is the northwest and west, and a part of
Canada that is to the north of these areas.The specified approximate latitudes
in the USA are from California and Utah in the south to Montana and Washington
State in the north.
The process of the recovery from the
schizophrenic episode has three phases. The first is a phase, which seems to be
around three or four months into the experience, when figures start to appear
in the world of the Operators who show a degree of concern in relation to
O'Brien's plight, even if sometimes this is only in the sense that they are
against the experiment taking place, and want it brought to an end. This is the
time when she is living and travelling in the far northwest of the USA, and
when she briefly visits Canada. The first Operator figure who shows concern
along these lines is a female Operator called Mrs Dorraine (this is a very
faint indication of what will later be a major alteration) and the main initial
change is the appearance of a group of operators called the Lumberjacks, who
decide to go through a legal process to bring the experiment to an end.
The second phase begins after the
adjudication ends in a partial victory, and with the advice - which is accepted
- that O'Brien should now go to California to win the last stage of the legal
process. Now in California, living in a flat, she develops a bad pain in her
neck, and a sympathetic Operator called Grandma tells her to go to a doctor.
The doctor diagnoses an infected mastoid, an infection that involves the middle
ear (O'Brien is not in a position to refer to this, but there is now a
substantially confirmed but unexplained association between schizophrenia and
infections of the middle ear). After the treatment for the infection has begun
there is a concluding phase which consists, firstly, of the appearance of the
most sympathetic female figure, Hazel; secondly, of the emergence of what has
to be described as a philosophical tendency in relation to the problems
'Things' have with being trapped by habit patterns; and, and thirdly, and
culminatingly (in terms of the sequence of events), of a process where what the
Operators are doing consists of the winding down and termination of the
experiment.
The last phase consists of several
weeks when the voices of the Operators have stopped, but when ordinary
thought-processes have not begun again. For O'Brien the experience is of being
perception, without thought, but of there being occasional 'waves' of thought -
lucid, concise instructions of a practical kind, and abstract 'perceptions'
about the situation, and also inchoate but pragmatic impulsions, which are
pragmatic in the sense that they lead straight to a solution to a problem. O'Brien
calls the state of perception without thought 'the dry beach' and the thoughts
and solutions 'the waves'. The dry beach is like a calm immense antechamber
where the work is in some sense going on in another domain, and where O'Brien
only gets the products of the work, arriving fully-formed, with no prior
experience of a process of editing, focusing or amendment. A further aspect of
the dry beach is that it is dispassionate - it is a state of equanimity. This
is to say that it does not have the system of moods and emotional reactions of
ordinary reality: there is no fretful anguish or anxiety; no nervousness or
angry-defensive emotion in disagreements; and, to take a specific case, nor is
there any embarrassment/concern about the events of the preceding months.
The more you engage with this
work the more the initial high-impact aspect (the world of the Operators) is
displaced by another aspect - the dry beach, and the waves. It begins to seem,
in fact, that what you are seeing is a kind of ultra-focused functioning of a
fundamental - and generally obscured - alliance of faculties: calm, sustained
perception, working alongside lucidity. Along with the absence of subjectified,
reactive moods, the dry beach itself (as opposed to the waves) is defined by
the absence of two faculties: reason and language (and when the waves come they
recurrently involve language, but they also often consist of images, and
inchoate but pragmatic impulsions). The idea that emerges from this is that the
fundamental starting-point state for escaping from ordinary reality, with its
locked-down, suppressive system of faculties, is sustained perception, with an
absence of internal or external verbalising, and an absence of attempts to be
explanatory in relation to what is being encountered, or to categorise it.
It seems that an ur-state has been
taken across a threshold. The re-composing - or return to composure - of
O'Brien's mind seems to take the form of a re-setting that is made easy by the
months of fixated listening to the operators. Now the sustained perception is
of sound without the voices of the operators and is of the worlds encountered
by sight, and lucidity can take the opportunity to connect up with perception,
and create its own alliance with language.
the formula
A second aspect of the return from
'crisis' is the process of dropping out of sight - of full disappearance from
the initial milieu (it also seems important that the departure was a movement
into terrains that were beyond the urban, or which were far less urban than the
area from which the movement began). And it is during the phase when O'Brien is
in the 'sparely populated' northwest-USA areas that 'the formula' for smoothly
maintaining this disappearance is given to her by two friendly female operators
who, within the world of her ‘dreaming,’ are working in the kitchen of a hotel
where she is staying. They tell her she should write letters to her friends
("we'll help you phrase them" one of the women says), and the key
phrase, which appears in all of the letters dictated to her is:
I finally managed to get away from the
grind for a long rest. It's everyone's dream, but I really never expected to
make it come true.
When the schizophrenic episode comes to an end,
several months later, O'Brien discovers that she has left no indications of
what has taken place, and that no-one is questioning her. The account she had
given had sounded poised and convincing. And it is worth thinking about the
fact that there is something generic about the 'formula'. For most people going
off for weeks or months to some out-of-the-way remote terrain would be likely
to be a movement towards an interruption in the flow of
ordinary reality, whereas O'Brien makes a journey of this kind because she has
already been dragged into a dysfunctional break in this flow (she has been
drawn in a direction which is not that of the escape-route) and is trying to
bring this to an end. And yet the phrase would be valuable in both
situations.
O'Brien delineates the different ways
in which 'the waves' function. She also refers to them as 'Something,'
describing how this other modality of intelligence sends its 'waves' in the
form of full, concise sentences, but also uses 'pictures' as when an image of
something she needs to buy, but has forgotten, flashes into her head. But
although Something can use images it is also a world of abstract views and a
user of discursive language. The culmination of the final - post-Operators -
phase of O'Brien's experience is when she is seeing a psychoanalyst, with whom
'the waves' disagree in relation to his view that she is being adversely
affected by the lack of a 'sufficiently full' sex life. The psychoanalyst
indicates that the absence of this sex life is the basis of O'Brien's problems,
and the waves emphatically disagree with this position - "I sat through
the interviews almost like a third person, a translator of unconscious waves,
wondering which of the combatants would win, for the conversations could best
be described as fast sparring matches" . (O'Brien also points out that the
analyst, who is French, says that American men are bad lovers, and says she
should have had dozens of sexual relationships). The following section is the
conclusion of this part of the book, and it is quoted in full here to give an
impression of Something as an intellectual process:
The analyst had
urged me frequently to bring written reports of my dreams. I had explained when
he first made this request that I never dreamed, or if I did, that the dreams
always vanished completely before I awoke. The analyst always looked at me
suspiciously when I told him this and implied, not too subtly, that I was
holding back on my dreams for fear that they would disclose an interest in the
sufficiently full sex life. The night before I paid my last visit to the
analyst was a memorable one for I had the first dream of my life. After having
been asleep for a short time, I awoke with the dream flashing through my head.
I arose, turned on a light, found some paper and hastily wrote down an account
of the dream, after which I went back to bed and dreamless sleep. The next day
I brought the written report to the analyst's office and showed it to
him.
"I was sitting in a
restaurant," I had written, "talking to my dinner companion, a man
whom I had just discovered to be a racketeer. I was very annoyed, not because
he was a racketeer, but because I had also discovered that he was a third-rate
racketeer.”
I was quite elated at
having had a dream of any kind, even such a nondescript one as this, and I
waited enthusiastically for the interpretation. None came. The analyst rolled
his head as if he was going to charge, and then abruptly tightened his lips and
started talking about something else.
I had read Freud in my
early youth but had forgotten, consciously at least, most of what I had read.
It was months after I had left the analyst before I got around to reading Freud
again, whereupon I realised the significance of the dream. The interpretation
staggered me, for it would appear that unconsciously I had classified all
Freudians as racketeers and the analyst as a third-rate racketeer.
It occured to me as being surprisingly coincidental that I should have had
my only dream just prior to my last visit to the analyst's office and it
occurred to me, also, to wonder if Something had got in a last low smack at its
sparring partner before parting company.
*
What is
central to this book is the idea of urbane processes of control-behaviour
(O’Brien is told at one point that Things can be influenced primarily because
of their desire for money and power), where the worst forms of these processes
are associated with major social formations of the urban (city councils,
gangsters, law-courts, espionage etc.). In ‘getting away’ O’Brien is doing
something that is the opposite of a fearful, agonised stasis, but it is also the
case that her travelling to forested, rural areas seems to shift the tonality
so that an organisation appears which is to some extent interested in her
welfare – the non-urban Lumberjacks. And in the process women start to appear
who are within the world of the Operators, but without being power-broker
functionaries: such as Hazel, Grandma, and the female kitchen workers who tell
her what she should write to her friends.
In the world of Operators and Things the disappearance appears to assist
substantially in a re-routing of a profound movement that had its source
elsewhere - that had its own dynamic. The re-routing can be described as
'restorative,' but the idea of being 'restored' here obscures the fact that in
the concluding phase of the process another, more effective distribution of the
human faculties is brought into focus as a possibility, and in a way where it
is suggested, firstly, that a key human value in the modern world - sexuality –
might be seen differently from this other perspective and, secondly, that the
idea of sexuality as the key to dreams might be blocking an awareness of
nascent functionings of lucidity which can appear within dreaming. Within the
account ‘getting away’ starts out looking as if it is secondary to something
fundamental - a process of a turbulent 'break' in conventional mental
functioning, that seems to be following its own process, irrespective of the
environment - but at the end it looks crucial to a movement away from
turbulence that for a moment glimpses something beyond the normative
distribution of the faculties that underpins ordinary reality.
* * *
2. The Drowned World
The
cold has at last begun to decrease.
Ballard’s
radicalism in The Drowned World lies firstly in his perception
that the human world is a disaster taking place, rather than it consisting of
‘progress’, or of the Hegelian unfolding of the human spirit. For his overall
project this perception is a key element that drives theoretical allegiances -
he is a creator of entropic and thanotropic visions.
The second
aspect of the radicalism is the creation of a social fabric from which the
protagonist, Kerans, will simply walk away. The whole postwar social contract
is what is in question in relation to the establishment-serving Colonel Riggs,
and the equally deadened and disheartening figure of Strangman, the scoffing
adventurer-entrepreneur whose ventures are about success and imposition.
What
imparts the charge to the novel is the fact that Ballard has taken return to
the tropical conditions of the Jurassic as his way of envisaging a starkly
non-progress outcome in the onward development of the human world, and in the
process the planetary diagramming of intensification of lives is suddenly
exceptionally effective.
At one
point Kerans says of the direction of the equator – south in this instance –
that ‘there isn’t any other direction.’ The path leading away from the world of
the postwar contract has been given a name, and what is involved in this
characterisation is that the direction is that of heat, brightness, energy. And
in relation to the line of departure from the deadened forms of ordinary
reality this is indeed correct – it’s just that the novel barely gets any further.
It faintly suggests another mental state across a threshold from subjectified
existence, but the ideas of the ‘dry beach’ and ‘the waves’ in Operators and
Things in many ways went further than this.
The suggestion that there is some
‘archeopyschic’ way in which the planet is a kind of Spinozistic body, that
remembers the dinosaurs, and communicates these memories into the dreams of its
current human inhabitants, is a movement toward a new way of thinking (and
suggests an impersonal account of dreams where the content of the dreams is
understood as visionary and yet also as the functioning of an energetic current
arriving from an exterior, physical word), but Ballard open this up and then
refuses further exploration. And the culmination of the novel feels more like a
Samuel Beckett world than a discovery of an escape-path. Kerans’s companion on
the southward journey has gone blind because of the fierceness of the sunlight,
and also it seems from looking too much in the direction of the sun, and this
means that there is no outright or explicit departure from the
entropic/thanotropic line of thought. Ballard, the theorist of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, is
affirming Kerans’s departure, but is constructing it as merely a more
circuitous way of arriving at death than that of Riggs or Strangman.
And yet – even according to Ballard’s
thanotropic model, there is a greater intensity about this route, and the heat,
the sunlight, the jungle-terrains (which are not in themselves in any way
entropic as an outcome – the opposite) and the rejection of the
ordinary-reality milieu all combine to make the text into a lens that allows
you to look at the transcendental-empirical features of the current world, so
that the book then becomes abstract, freeing itself from any necessity to
maintain the dogma of libidinal entropy. The radicalism of the departure and
the power of the planetary image create a vantage from which what is perceived
has no connection to entropy and the ‘death drive.’ Written two years earlier,
the novella The Voices of Time is an
intricate delirium of collapse – a lockdown into an oppressive cosmic
melancholy – but it is as if the early 60s have permeated Ballard’s thinking
and The Drowned World has a doorway
open in the direction of the intensification that is referenced, for instance
as “the causeways of the sun,” and through this doorway fresh air arrives.
* * *
3. City of Illusions, The Ones Who Walk
Away From Omelas
In only
a few years the heat has increased to the first phase of a serene maximum.
Le Guin,
in writing City of Illusions, is
surrounded by a world where a predominant view of people in their twenties is
– it’s all going to change, and although it might be turbulent the
transformation will to an immense extent be for the better. Le
Guin writes exuberantly for readers open to the idea of depth-level
metamorphoses of the human world of global capitalism in the 1960s
(transformations stretching far deeper than the technological and
socio-economic spheres) and she has adopted a perspective which keeps her free
of Hegelian delusions about developments during the preceding half-decade. She
has liberated herself so that she is capable of taking on a vast challenge, and
she is hampered only by the sheer scale of the challenge, and by certain dour
fixations of attention that were tendencies of other writers who had
exemplified the optic which she has adopted.
Disappearances are
everywhere in the novel, along with its correlate ideas, though everything is
displaced - rendered in ways that bring other aspects of the story to the
forefront – or is either invoked very tangentially by allusion, or by a faint
suggestion of some kind. In the opening section the protagonist departs from a
community – who live in clearings within a forest - because there is a kind of
metamorphic threshold he needs to cross, but the contingent basis for this in
the story (the protagonist has been violently cut off from his memories, and
has created a new persona which is trying to reach circumstances that will
resolve the riddle of his amnesia) means that issues involved in the
contingency obscure the other aspects. The protagonist, whose name at the
start of the novel is Falk (his original name is Ramarren), is from a separate
species of humans which developed on another planet, and his memories have been
excised by the Shing, a humanoid species who have conquered the Earth in the
distant past. It is these facts which are in the foreground in the novel, but
as it progresses the issues of Departure are brought into focus.
The courage of the novel lies in the
fact that it is set many thousands of years in the future, in the terrain of
the USA, but where, firstly, no vestige remains on any level of the USA as a
state (even though the inhabitants of the novel’s world are perhaps more
reminiscent of Americans than they are of people from other contemporary
cultures), and, secondly, the
pre-eminent work of ancient wisdom in the social formations of this world is
what is called The Book of the Way –
a book which is a translation of Tao Te
Ching that has been preserved across many millennia. In writing City of Illusions Le Guin becomes the
inventor of philosophical science fiction.
The first key to Le Guin is that she
is an envisager of the Futural who is always simultaneously giving an account
of an aspect of the current form of the world. The second key is that she is a
thinker and dreamer of the faculties, who is aware that the Futural involves
the faculties being used in profoundly different ways. The third key is double:
it is that she has discovered that the ancient Chinese philosophy of The Book of the Way is one of the most
Futural domains available, and is aware that to a large extent the current
modalities and forms of incorporation of technology and cities are in a
fundamental sense damaging and deleterious.
In the social formation that
appears at the beginning of City of
Illusions the Futural is semi-actualised – it is on the edge of existence.
The community in the forest (the central figure of which is Parth, who looks
after Falk when he is found, without memories) relates to some extent to the
idea of an 'escape-group' - or, to be more precise, it is a suggestion of a
movement out of sight on the part of a whole group. It is crucial for them that
they are out of sight and that they do nothing to alter this. The group
incorporates high-tech elements, rather than being incorporated by them, and
what is their most interesting technological device - the patterning board -
leads to the point where it wakes an intellectual faculty. To some extent they
are in a huddled-down state of stasis, because of the Shing, but as well as the
group being non-authoritarian and largely non-reactive in relation to the
outside they have a route, embedded in their micro-culture in the form of a
book, that leads to the outsights of philosophy in its transcendental-empirical
form. This modality of the Futural is not rescinded in Le Guin's work, but
instead is explored, taken to some extent across its threshold: it is there
again with the world of the Handara in The
Left Hand of Darkness; it is there in The
Word for World is Forest, and seventeen years later the communities of Always Coming Home are a direct
continuation of Le Guin’s attempt to bring this view into focus (in this
process there are ways in which she gets further away as she gets closer, but
there is an important breakthrough within Always
Coming Home).
What is daring about her
account of current society is that it takes what many people thought at that
time was the 'Futural' - the world of the drug-taking, alternative culture
radicals - and allows this to be glimpsed through the lens of the Shing, the
dominatory alien beings who in City of
Illusions are the central element of ordinary reality - beings with a
modality of poise and perspicuity that is close to that of the Futural, but
which at the same time is infinitely distant. This is startling and
impressive, to say the least. In The Left
Hand of Darkness the communist east is depicted, and in The Dispossesed the social forms of
Western Europe and the USA are seen through the lens of Urras, but in City of
Illusions it is the emergent counter-culture which comes faintly into view. The
name Ken Kenyek functions as a reference to Ken Kesey, and the location of the
city of the Shing, in the Rockies, makes more sense when Kesey's remote
mountain house is brought to mind. And the Shing are very closely asssociated
with halucinogens and other drugs (this is graphically emphasised by the figure
of the addicted child, Orry).
Le Guin does not go far with this,
because it would be inappropriate and misleading. She is showing that what she
can see within ordinary reality also applies to an aspect of the alternative
culture, but she leaves this element of the book as a kind of sketch - if she
had gone any deeper it would have been necessary to make the emphasis different
(what makes her choices effective at the level of detail involved is the fact
that the Shing must be capable of appearing to be plausible for those they
dominate, together with the fact that use of drugs as ‘truth-drugs,’ as
practised by the Shing on Falk/Ramarren, makes the dominating aliens
simultaneously a lens that looks toward the military, espionage and policing
institutions of the modern state). However, the vital point is that the
liberatory philosophy is not there in the Kesey/Leary
counter-culture of Le Guin’s time, which means that far from it being Futural
this counter-culture’s philosophy will only be dismantled and discredited, with
some of its elements becoming embedded as part of the problem, as aspects of
ordinary reality.
And if the Shing become in some way
abstract - something that relates to aspects of the human world, then what
about the trajectory of Falk? Having had his initial persona closed down - but
not destroyed - the community which in some sense has dropped out of sight has
the strength to give him a new persona. The book starts here - and at the level
of the abstract what can be said is that Falk sets out on a difficult journey
to “meet a blind Double approaching from the other side,” to use a phrase from
Deleuze and Guattari which they employ to indicate a journey that they think
everyone needs to undertake, paraphrasing the end The Story of the Abyss and the Telescope, by Pierette Fleutiaux.
It is lucidity, or
transcendental-empirical perception, that ultimately is in question in this
context: the double personality of Falk/Ramarren is important and
thought-provoking, but it is only an aspect of what is fundamental in relation to
City of Illusions. Ramarren comes
from an extraterrestrial culture which cognitively is defined in terms of
reaching further levels of awareness, and this ability is demonstrated in their
capacity to see the lies of the Shing (the key aspects of lucidity are an ability
to see the nature of worlds of intent and to see the nature of dreamings).
Over the next twenty years Le Guin will
travel a very long, and sometimes circuitous road in relation to her
exploration of the faculties (the process culminates in the last of the 'life
stories’ in Always Coming Home). But
what is startling, as she works her way past the tendency we all have to
construct intelligence along the lines of reason, is an unwavering ability to
see that there is something constitutively wrong with ordinary reality, and to
perceive that in relation to the differential between the 'cities' and the
'outlands' it is the worlds beyond the urban that are most closely affined to
the escape-path.
Because she can see these aspects of
the human world the figure of Departure acquires its specific, decisive
importance in her work. It is her lifting-across-the-crucial threshold of
Dostoyevsky, in her 1973 essay-story, The
Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, that is her most important contribution to
philosophico-political thought. This is science fiction crossing over into an
explicit functioning of lucidity, as opposed to the lucidity being in effect
within the oneiric.
In an otherwise idyllic, inspired
city one child is always suffering in a dungeon, and this suffering is -
through an unexplained process - intrinsic to the city, in that without the
suffering what is idyllic and inspired about the city would cease to exist.
Most people treat this is a grim, lamentable fact, and then get on with
ignoring it or forgetting it. But a few individuals do not forget, and
eventually they leave the city, and do not come back. The concluding phrase is
“…they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”
Here Le Guin returns her ticket to
the delusional 'things-will-be-immensely-improved' future of capitalism,
because, if it is capitalism, society
will still be founded upon suffering, and on far more than the suffering of a
single child. But the key issue is that Le Guin does not set up a simple social
model of the outside of capitalism - her ability to perceive the nature of
social formations is far too advanced for this, and she is too much of an
anthropologist to fool herself by setting up the process of envisaging in an
inadequate way. The problem runs deeper than capitalism - whether it is Annares
in The Dispossessed or the rural
community at the start of City of
Illusions, Le Guin can sense that the structures of these societies is not
enough to break people free from the controlling, indulgent modalities that are
inherent to the ordinary-reality distribution of the faculties. For this it is
necessary for the structure of a life to be a deliberate journey of exploration
and of waking the faculties, where any home-terrain is a component of the
journey (Le Guin is a science-fiction reader of Tao Te Ching – which all along is a transcendental-empirical text,
with no connection to religion – and knows the importance of the 3rd
century story about the book, which describes how, after writing it, the author
disappears over a mountain-pass that was on the border of China, and is not
seen again).
This is why Parth's community does
not recur as an element within City of
Illusions: the book concentrates on Falk's journey, and does not in any
sense revolve around its starting-point. But Parth – ‘path’ - is the reminder
that the journey does not need to be a journey in space in the sense of
travelling through terrains (although Le Guin does not take up this thought and
develop it - and because of the importance of a surrounding milieu it seems
likely she had an awareness that a crucial threshold is acquiring a 'base' or
'home-terrain' that in the fullest sense is an element of the movement along
the escape-route). The suggestion is that Parth’s micro-society has within it
what is needed for the threshold-crossing involved, but Le Guin is scrupulous
in ensuring that it is not understood as a view of the Futural. In the absence
of a clear view of a new mode of existence, she will not indicate that the
community which creates the Falk persona is in itself a journey of departure
from what she will later gesture toward with the name ‘Omelas’.
Whether you travel or stay in one
terrain, Le Guin is pointing out that the fundamental political act is
Departure. What is necessary is for everyone to leave for the Outlands that
exist beyond ordinary reality.
* * *
4. Picnic
at Hanging Rock
The heat has broken open a recondite view. There is
a midday brightness and a charged, fiercely dreamy intensity: on one level
there is sharp clarity, and on another level there is a hazy glare, a space of
inchoate perception. There is an unaccountable feeling that, at last, something is happening. A rarely
encountered process or mechanism has ticked forward, an expansion of the
mercury to the threshold level. For a moment, you are in the Future.
The 'foreground' or high-impact
disappearance in this book remains powerfully enigmatic and anomalous (with an
impersonal quality of the sublime) whether or not you include the excised final
chapter as an element for the lens that is produced through reading it. In the
central event, which takes place very early in the narrative, Miranda, Marion
and Greta all permanently disappear. The novel develops as the ramifications of
this event. However, looked at closely, the account of the consequences – extending across three-quarters of the
book, - seems less like a fading away of its main idea, and more like a subtle
amplification. Which is to say that there is more to disappearance in Picnic
at Hanging Rock.
At the
end of the novel Albert has decided to leave his conventional existence (which
in fact is a world of servitude, as a coachman) and depart for the north of
Australia. Albert is shown to be relaxed and confident in relation to this
departure, and the narrator of the novel says, as the last substantive
description of him:
The young coachman settling down into
the rocking chair after tea that Monday evening had no sense of having already
embarked on a long and fateful journey of no return.
The other
main character, after the disappearances at the beginning, is Michael, a shy,
socially awkward émigré to Australia who is a member of the English – and
Australian – ‘upper’ social echelons, and who has fallen in love with Miranda.
He and Albert come together to search for the missing women on the Rock, and
form a friendship: at the end they decide to travel north together, to see
areas of Australia that are further from constricted forms of existence than
are the countryside terrains in the vicinity of Melbourne. This journey in an exacerbated sense is tilted toward the
transcendentally unknown, and, whatever that will mean in practice, Lindsays’s
foretelling – that for Albert it will be a long and fateful journey of no
return – quietly leaves the mind of the reader to bring together the transcendentally
unknown with this statement, producing a world of virtual stories.
The
friendship between Michael and Albert breaks a social barrier. It is the
equivalent of the barrier between Greta, on the one hand, and Marion and
Miranda, on the other (in the final chapter which her editor persuaded her to
remove, Lindsay shows how, when Miranda and Marion – in a heightened state of
trance – meet the older woman who seems to be Greta they don’t recognise her as
their teacher but relate to her as an ally or comrade; as another human being
who is involved in the same process of exploration). Therefore, there are two
different exploration-groups in which social barriers have disappeared.
*
What is crucial about this novel is
that it embodies an affirmation of the Australian planetary terrain, as opposed
to the fabric of Australian society. This terrain is everywhere, but some
places have a greater power to make human beings aware of it. The picnic is a
micro-domain of society and Hanging Rock is the place that while the picnic
lasts includes this micro-domain - the departure from the picnic is a departure
toward an awareness of the terrain.
However, the Rock is also a specific,
singular place, a zone which inspires and entrances - a face of the wider
terrain. The object of love in the book, where the key event
takes place on Valentine's Day, is this place grasped as transcendental
unknown, and as the way forward, as the direction of the Future. On
arrival at the picnic grounds Miranda deftly opens the gate, and Mr Hussey
guides the five bay horses "out of the known dependable present into the
unknown future."
Lindsay's technique is very
subtle. The story is about a gap being opened in ordinary reality, through
which three individuals permanently depart. And back in ordinary reality this
event impacts as perturbations and disturbances that it has in some way
triggered, and in relation to which it seems the best response is to travel
toward the place where the gap occurred, or to places of the same kind, in a
spirit of openness and adventure. It is as if ordinary reality is too unhealthy
a place for people to know in what direction of the anomalous to look,
when there has been a perturbation. However, the key here is that the
description of the high-impact or foreground events develops in the form of a
series of delineations of attributes, differentiations, and erasures of
difference; together with a movement toward a new Departure, where these
together produce a powerful new perspective.
It
is crucial that the disappearance is indexed to perception and dreaming, to knowledge, and to an entranced, relaxed
spirit of exploration and adventure. The book brings together a delight in
multi-sense letting go to immediacy – to exteriority – with the impersonal,
objective stance of the lover of knowledge.
A lack of a strong libidinal embroilment in the kudos-worlds of society
is the other attribute – the future glamorous socialite, Irma, disappears on
the Rock, but then returns, unconscious, several days later.
It is women who disappear through the
gap in ordinary reality. Whatever it is that Greta McCraw becomes aware of - so
that she sets off, at speed, up the slope of the Rock - does not get through to
Michael or Albert, who are also at the picnic grounds at this point. There is a
suggestion of a facility for ‘trance-perception’ that has been ‘allowed
through’ for the women by social conditioning, but where this facility has been
blocked off for the men by the same system of conditioning (so that what is advantageous
about this for women would be an accidental outcome of men being conditioned to
be ‘controllers’ and of women being conditioned to ‘let go’).
However, when
Michael and Albert go up onto the Rock they do this not to encounter the place,
but to search for the missing women; and Michael has an affect of romantically
modulated anguish (both of them also are thinking that it might be the results
of a tragedy that they will find, if they succeed in their search), This means
that there is no comparison between the state of those who departed from the
picnic, and those who, several days later, are now searching for them. And when
Michael lets go in the form of falling asleep he wakes into a trance state
which seemingly is initially an open-eyed experience, and which then modulates into a dream that is connected
to the search: he wakes hearing a laughter that guides him in the direction he
needs to go in order to find Irma. The suggestion here is of another level or
dimension of reality, but putting the question of this other dimension to one
side, the impression given is that Michael is moving forward in the direction
of a threshold-crossing. When Greta in some way perceives something that causes
her to set off up the Rock, Michael experiences nothing; but later there is the
anomalous perception that guides him to Irma. In the distance there is the
Disappearance (whatever this threshold-crossing is), which it seems he could
reach reach if he could arrive at the same affective state (and this in turn
leads to the fact that Albert's and Michael’s journey to the north is described
as a journey of no return).
The connection to knowledge is
emphatic. On the one hand there is the academic or 'scholarly' aspect of Marion
Quade and Greta McCraw, and, on the other hand, Miranda is not only
associated with a kind of philosophical thought, but is shown to have a
high degree of practical knowledge, an acute fluency of motion. But, more than
this, she knows how to seize the moment, how to seize the day - a far more
extraordinary form of practical knowledge (one which is evidently as
intellectual as it is practical).
The association is not in any way with
mystical or religious views or attitudes. Everything becomes about perception
and a state on the edge of the oneiric, but this facultative alteration does
not on any level rescind the association with the different forms of knowledge.
On the contrary, there is an impersonal distance and objectivity about Marion's
statements, with nothing that goes against this modality.
But what could Miranda mean by
“everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place”? The events of
the story place this statement in a context which insists against a view which
takes it to be an affirmation of providential destiny.
The account Lindsay gives of the world
is one of natural, not-fully-perceived currents and earthquakes. A
serendipitous current in this context would be one where your own will is
directly involved, as with a group of improvising musicians where even a note
or timing that might normally be regarded as a mistake becomes a basis for an
innovative melody or rhythm. Miranda’s statement feels as if it is drawing upon
circumstances of this kind, as well as on a refusal to be offended by purposes other
than your own, or those of your species. The term ‘fateful’ acquires, on the
one hand, an ancient Greek quality that is simultaneously bound up with the
idea of anomalous, immanent processes (as with someone who falls in love and is
swept orthogonally away from ordinary reality), and, on the other hand, a
quality of an event that is momentous to the point of some kind of absolute or
fundamental transformation.
However,
the key issue in this context goes beyond what Miranda had meant in making this
statement. The book does not state that she says it on Hanging Rock – it is
stated, by Irma, that she used to say it. Instead what is crucial is that the
story suggests that the Departure was an event in which the underlying attitude
of the phrase was involved, an attitude that would ask, if a time has arrived
for a Departure that is an expression of a love for the world, then how could
it not be the right time?
At this
point everything becomes abstract. In that the story insists, lucidly, on
seeing the world as transcendentally unknown, it follows through with this to
the point of describing a decision about which it is not possible to speak in
detail. But in the process an abstract figure is created – both by the three
women who depart, and by the departure of Albert and Michael.
The fact
that the clocks stop at midday on Valentine’s Day is crucial. Stated at the
level of the pragmatics of being alive the point is – leave the oppressions of
ordinary reality in its current form, capitalism, traveling away in the
direction of the definitive terrain, which consists of the planet and the
waking of your abilities and faculties. But stated at the level of a more
explicit transcendental-empiricism the point is that you don’t leave as a
direct result of a rejection of ordinary existence, or as a result of the
gravity of an extrinsic principle of ‘duty’ – you leave as an expression of
love for the world, and for the adventure of travelling within it across
thresholds of reality.
*
* *
5. Surfacing
The
heat has remained at the height of its maximum for three years: it has remained
steady while the structures it has called into existence have almost always
been extremely unbalanced, precarious.
In 1972 ordinary reality has
just been jolted. It has not been threatened in the least, but
there has been a jolt that that has consisted of the appearance of a new
modality of ordinary reality in the form of an 'alternative' culture, or
'counterculture' - a kind of extension that is primarily, though not
exclusively, a world of people in their twenties and thirties, and of
teenagers.
A main
aspect of ordinary reality is that it consists of a damaging socio-machinic
collusion between religion and science (this produces the illusion of the human
world engaging with everything, while in fact in fundamental ways - relating to
transcendental-empirical knowledge - it is a non-engagement and delusional
reactivity that is constitutive of the ongoing disaster). Another aspect is a
core element (always a core, but taking different forms in different cultures
and milieus) in the form of some kind of unquestioning affirmation for women of
‘being-in-a-couple-relationship’ and of sexual intercourse as a central,
default value (at a fundamental level the situation is no different for men but
it is far more stark in relation to women). Exceptions are approved in advance
on religious grounds, but, whether expressed in mawkish religio-romantic terms
or the casual normative terms of either species necessity or
religion-associated tradition, or, again, in the terms of psychology, with its
theories of repression, the default is the high-intensity affirmation, for
women, of couple-relationships and sexual acts (whether with a male or a female
partner).
The role of both philosophy and
fiction is to leave behind religion and fixation-on-scientific-domains (there
is everything right with science in relation to its acquiring of knowledge) and
to concentrate on the powers of the terrains and zones that exist beyond
territories, and on the existing and semi-dormant faculties and affects of
human beings, where this is a movement
of attention toward the transcendental-empirical - bringing into focus the escape-path
- and toward the definitive terrain on which and within which the movement of
escape takes place. And the other tendency that must be left behind in this
process is an unthinking affirmation
in relation to the normatively enshrined world of sexual relationships, but one
where any critique is not moral, but instead involves questions of conservation
and heightening of energy, questions of freedom, and questions of obscured
forms of control and of damaging submission.
In Surfacing Atwood expresses a consistent, lucid distance from
Christianity (the book sees it as a kind of curious delirium), and in that,
firstly, science does not feature other than as what subtends the technology
that is wreaking havoc in the Canadian wilderness, and, secondly, the novel emphatically refuses to adopt an unthinking
affirmation of the enshrined-sexual, the book has cleared away a large
amount of what blocks a view of the escape-path.
In relation to sexuality, it is rare
that what is problematic about the main form of the ‘shrine’ is seen as clearly
as it is in this passage, when the narrator is lying awake listening to Anna
and David making love:
“Outside was the wind, trees moving in it, nothing
else. The yellow target from Anna's flashlight was on the ceiling; it
shifted, she was going into their room and I could hear them, Anna breathing, a
fast panic sound as though she was running; then her voice began, not like her
real voice but twisted as her face must have been, a desperate beggar's
whine, please, please. I put the pillow over my head, I didn't want
to listen, I wanted it to be through but it kept on, Shut up, I
whispered but she wouldn't. She was praying to herself, it was as if David
wasn't there at all. Jesus jesus oh yes please jesus. Then
something different, not a word but pure pain, clear as water, an animal’s at
the moment the trap closes.”
*
All of this gives the necessary
context for saying that Surfacing is about a time when ordinary reality has
been jolted, and to begin analysing this change by making the associated point
that it concerns a milieu where people have recurrently 'dropped out of sight'
in relation to their original lives, and where it is more likely that people
will have moved on and out of contact on more than one occasion.
The key to this is that the past has been in
certain ways disowned, even the relatively recent past: the rescinding of
adherence to tradition and of deliberate attachment to the attitudes and values
of the previous generation has created a situation where ‘having moved on’ and
the state of not using the personal past as a reference point in communication
are now normal:
My friends’ pasts are vague to me and
to each other also, any one of us could have amnesia for years the others
wouldn’t notice.
And at one point the – unnamed - narrator thinks
about her friends’ relationships to their parents:
They all disowned their parents long
ago, the way you are supposed to: Joe never mentions his mother and father,
Anna says hers were nothing people, and David calls his The Pigs
The narrator also says of Anna – “she’s my best
friend, my best woman friend; I’ve known her two months.”
Putting to one side, for a
moment, the perturbed quality of the narrator’s voice in this context, it can
be pointed out that there is a kind of freedom here, an opportunity to break
away from reactive values, and unhelpful assumptions, and from the
contingencies of personal experience in terms of how a person understands who
they are at depth: it is an opportunity to re-invent, free of expectations.
However - Surfacing shows that this freedom is not
going well. Ordinary reality has formed an extension where people are getting
into trouble in all the usual ways, but just with different aspects in the
foreground, and with a slightly different tonality. People have rushed away
from their parents, and the fact that freedom is closely associated with dogmas
of ‘sexual freedom’ (which men in particular are likely to use to justify
indulgent behaviour) means that the new zone of ordinary reality is in many
ways even more problematic. Very soon this will be like an abandoned picnic
area or campsite, one replaced by another: a historical curiosity with a span
of existence of around five years.
What is shocking about the
milieu portrayed in Surfacing is that
there is freedom, but almost nothing is being done with it. Furthermore what is
primarily taking place will bring about its collapse. It is as if there is an
affinity or openness in relation to the idea of 'a long and fateful journey of
no return' but in a way where there is no idea of how to set out on it - no
ability to wake creative, courageous action, and, in the process, to wake the
faculties. So that the result is a kind of slow decay into
indulgent drift. Within this milieu the severing of contact with parents is an
extrinsic, unrequired product of the disowning of traditional values - a kind
of dogmatic response to dogma. At depth, the 'no return' is intrinsically about
not returning to the sway of ordinary reality, as opposed to breaking off
contact with family: along with indulgence (misunderstood as freedom) the
ructions in relation to the past seem likely to be an aspect of the
'non-escape' which will ensure that, far from there being a Departure, there
will soon be a return to the more sedentary form of ordinary reality.
Circumstances in a sense are more
favourable, but in a way where, on a crucial level, everything is set up to
ensure that everyone looks away from the direction of the escape-path, and to
ensure that everyone is involved in processes that will take them progressively
further away from it.
And yet - the book does involve a
disappearance.
This is not the one that initiates the
events of the story - which is the disappearance of the female protagonist's
father. He has been living in a cabin on a forested island in a remote lake in
Quebec Province: he and his wife first came there thirty years before, and the
protagonist and her brother grew up on the island. After their children left he
and his wife continued to live on the island. A few years before the start of
the story the narrator's mother died of an illness, and now it is a summer at
the beginning of the 70s, and her father has disappeared. The body has not been
found - and the body is not found in the course of the book's events, although
for his daughter the lack of knowledge that he has died deepens toward
certainty. She is shown as having an attachment to her father, but without a
high degree of love. He is presented primarily as a kind of enigma - an enigma
that has a degree of depth, but is not very inspiring or heartening.
The house on the - otherwise
uninhabited - island has been empty for weeks. The narrator, her boyfriend, and
two friends have come to the island to discover what has happened.
There is summer sunlight, and
forested hills in the distance. There is an overgrown vegetable patch, and a
screendoor, its mesh in front of the main front door. There are jays in the
trees.
The absence of the father
doubles the absence of the traditional values and attitudes. He is not a
symbol: he is more of a furthest point of development of what has gone: he was
an academic (a botanist), and an advocate of what he constructed as 'rational'
or 'enlightenment' thought. There is a buzzing of flies in the silence. There
are the familiar smells and the familiar flaking paint. If you turn and look,
the sky above the hills to the south is bright - it is a white wall which suggests
an unsuspected world of potentials.
Whose memories/images are these
- or, to put it more strangely, whose are these worlds of the spatialised
abstract? The book is a lens, and very definitely has a power for opening
up outsights that exceed the details of the descriptions (and the foregoing
description was an attempt not to capture the affect of the book, but to use
the doubling in the book as a lens).
It is the central character of the
book who disappears. Just before the boat arrives to take everyone off the
island, the protagonist decides, in a state close to a 'breakdown,' to go off
into the forest, and, through a complex set of circumstances she succeeds in
her aim of being left on the island on her own. Her boyfriend and her friends
return to search for her the next day, and then, two days after this, her
boyfriend returns on his own. The disappearance is followed, at the level of the
narration, rather than being observed as a
disappearance.
The protagonist has opened up a gap. It
is not very wide, but the circumstances are sufficiently charged to make
perception preposessing rather than largely ignorable - the flow of ordinary
reality has been interrupted. And the situation in relation to her father and
her mother - she is now in the house on her own at night - means that her
senses are in the foreground, a listening and watching that supplants the flow
of internal verbalising, and that draws envisaging into the terrain of the
immediate, and without involvement in self-reflection.
The gap shows there is
something fundamentally more in relation to the potentials of
the faculties. The most crucial section in the novel is probably this:
The forest leaps upward, enormous, the way it
was before they cut it, columns of sunlight frozen; the boulders float, melt,
everything is made of water, even the rocks. [...]
The animals
have no need of speech, why talk when you are a word
I
lean against a tree, I am a tree leaning
I break out again into the bright sun
and crumple, head against the ground
I am not an animal
or a tree, I am the thing in which the animals move and grow, I am a place
I have to get up, I get up. Through the ground, break surface, I'm
standing now; separate again.
At the level of knowledge of intent, by the
end of the experience the protagonist has perceived that action is what is
vital (contrasted here with indulgently melancholy passivity as well as with
internal thought/self-reflection) and that she has been clinging to a delusion
of a depth-level state of being powerless, when in fact she does have the
ability to break incisively from pervasively debilitating
circumstances. The narrator disappears through a gap, and whatever happens
next, when she returns she has moved Forward.
* * *
6. Memoirs of a Survivor, The Story of
the Telescope and the Abyss, The Erl-King
The
heat, together with the collapse of the inadequate structures it has inspired,
is now creating conditions where there is an awareness of the escape-route, but
where attention is often drawn toward a primary focus on the ongoing disaster.
The charged brightness and warmth has subsided a little, remaining steady at a
slightly lower level. But this is not the reason for the collapse of the
structures, and people are generally not aware of the change - they have been
energised by fifteen years of intensity.
Each of these texts has a primary
focus that is maintained in a way that abstracts out other domains in order to
achieve a clear abstract perception - a following-and-analysis of a major
strand of human existential DNA. What unites them is that there is nothing
'epic' about them - no vast expanses of grandeur and adventure - together with,
firstly, the impression they all produce that the sublime (the escape-path) is
liminally within view for the writer, consistently impacting, and, secondly,
the fact that they all end with an absolute transformation/liberation, which,
although absolute, is left almost entirely undescribed.
The focus in Lessing's novel is the
micro-social, or the micro-political (but under the specific conditions of a
global breakdown in the functioning of the institutions of social
organisation). In Fleutiaux' novella the focus is prediction-centred societal
observation and dominatory societal control. Whereas the focus in Angela
Carter's The Erl King is the
libidinal at the level of the erotic (where the erotic has the two poles of
ecstatic consensual action/domination, and of escstatic consensual passive-activity/submission).
Lessing tries to look at the fabric of micro-social connections at the point
where top-down social control has definitively lapsed; Fleutiaux explores what
it is to be a functionary of a social field under conditions of rigid but 'quotidian'
social control; Carter explores control within the world of intensely charged
amorous/sexual relationships. All three writers conclude their works with a
fugitive, unfocused moment-of-escape, and in different, very subtle (and
elusive) ways all three books involve disappearance.
The Memoirs of a Survivor
A reader
is likely to feel that this story doesn't really work (Doris Lessing seems to
have thought this herself), but it recurrently attempts to open up a view of
the escape-path, and in the process it blows open a hole in the genre in which
the author has been writing for thirty years.
Doris
Lessing is a spectacular line of continuity from the pre-war writers, and most
importantly, from Virginia Woolf. Everything is done very differently in her
writing, and yet she is the continuation, making immediacy a space in which the
intellectual currents of a phase of ordinary reality become palpable, visceral
(The Golden Notebook is an immense achievement along these lines – a
spectacular aspect of the Change at the start the 60s).
In her
first novel, The Grass is Singing
(quotation from The Wasteland) she shows a woman caught in a deadly
trap, but a trap which on one – superficial - level is an ordinary domestic
situation within the fabric of its social world.
The trap
is indeed deadly. And Lessing is very much aware of ordinary reality as the
fabric of the ongoing disaster, where this both concerns the widest social
levels, and the ways in which individual lives are drifted implacably toward
different forms of oppression and capitulation by the libidinal micro-systems
of ordinary reality’s latest form, global capitalism.
Thirty
years after The Grass is Singing
Lessing is surrounded by the strikes and power cuts of mid-70’s Britain, and
the overall social turbulence of the times, and these become the basis for a
projection: she envisages a world in which a steady breakdown of state social
organisation is taking place, and where everything in the cities is descending
into chaos. The feeling that there is another, radically better way of living,
just out of sight (the feeling that is
heat or intensity in the human world) is still fully in effect within Lessing,
but now it is detached from any Hegelian idea of a grand, dialectical movement
of progress in global society.
A key
aspect of the social situation in The
Memoirs of a Survivor is that it is one where a new way of living must be
brought into existence, because there is no choice other than to do this, in
one way or another. As the London of the story descends into ruin, most people
decide to leave, forming groups which depart on foot; and those who stay
improvise new social modalities, in the form of temporary, local ‘fixes’ that
to some extent hold things together as the chaos increases. A straightforward
story here would have been to follow a group as they develop a new social
formation, but Lessing has become aware, not of the impossibility of telling a
story of this kind, but of the fact that the escape-path is at the level of the
transcendental-empirical, and that if the story stays within the empirical it
will just function to foster the delusion of a dialectical upward movement.
Lessing knows that she cannot write a cheerful fantasy about a
threshold-crossing triggered by critique becoming pervasive, in the sense of
everyone becoming aware that ordinary reality is an ongoing disaster. A
perception of the disastrous does not in any way entail an ability to set out
along the escape-path.
A woman,
the unnamed narrator, is living in a flat in north London. Living with her is a
girl, Emily, who, in the midst of the social breakdown, has become – in an
undemonstrative way - her adoptive daughter, and who becomes a young woman in
the course of the novel; also living with her is Emily’s dog Hugo, who the
novel inconspicuously treats as another
central character. By the end of the novel there is a fourth individual,
Emily’s boyfriend Gerald, and these four form the crucial ‘core-zone’ of an escape-group.
The
narrator has a wall in her living-room, which, when she looks at it, dissolves
into reverie-views of enigmatic expanses, reverie-views which sometimes take
the form of experiences of walking in serene planetary expanses that, in terms
of their foreground, have an aspect of being gardens of cottages, with herbs
growing everywhere, or market gardens, always with no-one much around, and
sometimes with mountain in the distance – glimpses of the planetary sublime.
Often the reverie-views are of a very different kind – sometimes they are
oneiric-abstract glimpses which concern staying immanent with circumstances
(rather than imposing rigid, pre-created solutions), and a lot of the time they
are stifling, oppressive views of suppressed, subjectified forms of existence.
This is
a novel of immobility, with an overall tonality which is tilted profoundly
toward the oppressive, because of the nature of some of the reveries, and
because of the catastrophically grim, bleak circumstances in the world beyond
the house. But Lessing is following something through – she wants to point out
that there is another direction.
At the
end of the novel, at a point when the circumstances have become particularly
bad, the wall in the living room opens up, and everyone escapes through it.
Almost nothing is visible across the threshold-of-departure, in relation to the
overall world in which they are all escaping, but there is a female presence –
a female presence who had been described as a kind of ‘known absence’ in
relation to the earlier planetary terrains – leaving a multiple impression that
she could be an oneiric personification, in the mind of the narrator, of the
planet, or that she could be a kind of Futural double of the narrator, or a
female emissary from a parallel, neighbouring world at a higher level of
existence. Everything is unfocused, and presented as indescribable – the
attempt to describe the woman ends with “and all I can say – is nothing at
all.” (The only other point that can be made is that the dog, Hugo, in crossing
the threshold is clearly in the fullest sense a member of the escape-group, as
opposed to being a ‘pet’).
At the
level of narrative there is nothing particularly satisfying about this ending.
It is too starkly unfocused – it is a breaking open of a view, though where
almost nothing can be seen. However, on the level of thought it is immensely
striking: Lessing has created an equivalent of The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, and here the orthogonal view is
made possible by the creation of a gap in realism.
The
overall impression is that Lessing has gone very close to her own experience
(the figure of Emily is drawing upon her adoptive daughter Jenni Diski), and,
in particular, has started to bring into focus the fact that there is a kind of
dream (whether a dream in sleep, a reverie-dream, a story, or a dream about the
future) that is radically different from the vast majority of dreams. To be a
‘survivor’ is in part to have kept intact an awareness of this kind of dream,
and to be taking this awareness across a threshold (it is to have survived the
onslaughts of ordinary reality, and to be departing from it). “…the garden was
a network of water channels. And looking up and beyond the wall, I saw that the
water came from the mountains four or five miles away. There was snow on them,
although it was mid-summer, and this was melted snow-water, very cold, and
tasting of the air that blew across the mountains.”
This is
a disjointed, oppressed book, written by novelist who directly engaged with the
main intellectual currents of her phase of ordinary reality, and had to get
past them, but if you find the necessary angle it is a lens through which a
glimpse is visible of the planet-focused path leading away from ordinary
reality, and of the escape-group - the multiplicity - which moves forward along
this path.
The Story of the Abyss and the
Telescope
There are
platforms on the edge of an abyss, occupied by functionaries of a society,
whose role is to use telescopes in order to detect ‘infractions’ in behaviour
on the opposite side of the abyss. The infractions are the first signs of
developments seen in some way as unacceptable, though the functionaries inhabit
an ‘objective’ modality of detection and prediction, technicians or academics
of a society. An enacted judgement occurs elsewhere: when an infraction is
discovered, the Ray Telescope raises itself up behind them and sends out a
destructive beam which destroys whatever was involved in the ‘disordered’
behaviour.
Across
the abyss is a footbridge which sometimes creaks in the wind, but no-one gives
any attention to this footbridge.
The
protagonist of the story is a functionary who has a ‘long-view’ telescope,
which makes it possible to see profoundly incipient developments, where the
developments involved are further in the future, but also, inseparably to see
more detail, and to see more at a qualitative level. There are other
functionaries on the platform, but they all have short-view telescopes – the
principle is that there is only one long-viewer per platform. The first-person
protagonist (who is unnamed and also ungendered, in the sense that there is no
indication of gender) is haunted by having seen anomalous things, and things
that they did not want to be destroyed by the Ray Telescope, but if they go to
another platform the long-viewer there will only talk to them about technical
details concerning the use of the long-view telescopes.
Eventually
they start to be aware of the sound of the footbridge, and, leaving behind the
world of the telescopes, they set out along the walkway. They discover that on
the opposite side there are also platforms and telescopes, with functionaries
doing the same thing in reverse, and in the process of the discovery the whole
world of the abyss, the platforms and the telescopes disappears.
Pierette
Fleutiaux’s story conducts the reader toward the question of reason as it
functions within the blocked, denuded system of the faculties that is insisted
upon within the world of ordinary reality. This is a narrowly-focused reason,
without the assistance of lucidity, and caught up in processes of social
control. And it is reason in a form where it is tied to a system of judgement
and ‘correction’ (the Ray Telescope burns, cuts, separates – disconnecting things,
as well as destroying them in the more obvious sense).
It is
worth thinking about the inconspicuously libidinal social-machineries of
reviling and ridiculing people, and the correlate affects (in relation to cases
where the judgement has ‘impacted’) of feeling mortified, embarrassed or
humiliated. And it is also worth seeing that a pervasive functioning of this
machinery is one where that which judges and that which suffers the judgement
are both within the individual. All of which is to say that within ordinary reality
reason is in a very close alliance with an exceptionally dangerous system of
‘subjectified’ or ‘reactive’ affects (dangerous in the sense that they can
foreclose lines of thought, destroy confidence, and shut down vital processes
of development). The subjectified, judgmental world of moral outrage and
corresponding mortifications is an exceptionally damaging place, and without
the affection and clarity of lucidity, what is dis-passionate – beyond the
passions of ordinary reality – about reason is not strong enough on its own to
avoid its results being attached to the processes of subjectified Judgement.
Fleutiaux’s novella sees all this, and sees that it possible to depart –
to change modalities in a way which makes perception and action come to the
forefront in relation to a narrowly focused faculty of reason, with its
practices of observation and prediction.
The Erl-King
This story
very emphatically works, but it opens up a view toward a direction of the
outside which is alarmingly off to one side of the escape-path.
A young
woman walks into a wood. This is a wood consisting of worlds of intent and of
energy – it is an abstract wood, which is to say that it is the World in which
we all exist, but encountered in a way which is modulated by the direction in
which the young woman is drawn. In her “girlish and delicious loneliness” she
hears the sound of the Erl-King’s descending, bird-like refrain – a rising
note, and a falling note, played on a pipe, and she is drawn toward him.
The
Erl-King is an ultra-poised poised figure of Control, a collapse into control
so blithely perfect and alien in quality that he is described in terms of being
‘inhuman’. He is ultra-erotic sexuality in its form of the active, as opposed
to its counterpart form of the activity of yielding, and although he appears to
be extremely male he also sometimes appears to be female (he is described as
“an excellent housewife”), and in a libidinalised fantasy of her becoming the
size of a seed the woman imagines the Erl-King as like a queen in a fairy tale
who would swallow her and become pregnant with her. He is a world of practical
knowledge, living in his home deep in the woods, and intrinsic to him is an
awareness of greater depth to the world than is normally perceived, expressed
playfully and impenetrably as distorted allusions – a damagingly unfocused
awareness of the recondite.
The
effect of the Erl-King is a ‘diminutivising’ – a deadly making small, and
closing-off from freedom. The women who he draws toward him all eventually
become birds who he keeps in cages, in a process which he views as both sad and
natural (he sees this as sad and natural in the same way as someone who is
eating an animal they have raised on a farm can see this as sad and natural).
Now, when I go for walks, sometimes in the mornings when the frost has
put its shiny thumbprint on the undergrowth or sometimes, though less
frequently, yet more enticingly, when the cold darkness settles down, I always
go to the Erl-King, and he lays me down on his bed of rustling straw where I
lie at the mercy of his huge hands.
He is the tender butcher who showed me how the price of flesh is love;
Skin the rabbit, he says! Off come all my clothes. […]
If I strung that old fiddle with your hair we could waltz together to
the music as the exhausted daylight founders among the trees; we should have
better music than the shrill prothalamions of the larks stacked in their pretty
cages as the roof creaks with the freight of birds you’ve lured to it while we
engage in your profane mysteries under the leaves.
He strips me to my last nakedness, that underskin of mauve, pearlised
satin, like a skinned rabbit; then dresses me again in an embrace so lucid and
encompassing it might be made of water. And shakes over me dead leaves into the
stream I have become. […]
The candle flutters and goes out. His touch both consoles and devastates
me; I feel my heart pulse, then wither, naked as a stone on the roaring
mattress while the lovely, moony night slides through the window to dapple the
flanks of this innocent who makes cages to keep the sweet birds in. Eat me,
drink me; thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden, I go back and back to him to have
his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of water,
this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for
drowning.
The key
phrase is “the price of flesh is love.” The whole story functions to bring this
outsight into focus. It is – of course – not a last word of any kind in
relation to sexuality, but it is a vital outsight in relation to the
ultra-erotic as a modality of indulgence.
The end
of the story is a projection into the future in the mind of the young woman,
where she kills the Erl-King, and opens the cages, so that the birds escape
from them and turn back into girls “each with the crimson imprint of his
love-bite on their throats”.
“Erl-King” ‘is a figure of the
transcendental-empirical. And the counterpart figure is abandon in the form of
submission to power (as opposed to the creative-productive joy of abandon in
the direction of “love and lucidity and wider realities”). In this context to
say that Erl-King is a transcendental-empirical figure is in part to say that
Erl-King can also be a man who is sexually drawn to men or a woman who is
sexually drawn to women. In the fully developed form the constant is the depth
– the awareness to some extent of the recondite - where this depth and subtlety
is never lucidity at the crucial level. Beware Erl-King, he/she can do you
grievous harm.
The
disappearance here is a disappearance into the outside of ordinary reality, but
in the wrong direction. But to get beyond Erl-King and its counterpart modality
is an aspect of what it is to depart along the escape-path. The story gives
almost no indication of what might happen beyond the threshold-crossing
envisaged at the end (and it is even at the level of envisaging, rather than it
being a narrated event), so, as with Lessing’s novel and Fleutiaux’s story, the
fundamental disappearance is there at the very end, but apart from the –
momentous - difference between entrapment and freedom, very little can be seen
beyond the horizon of the threshold.
*
The
culminations of the three stories concentrate on different aspects of the
transition – of disappearance. Lessing’s novel looks out along the escape-path,
seeing faint outlines in an intense glare. Fleutiaux’s novella points out that
in setting out along it ordinary reality disappears, in that it will no longer
be possible to see it in the way in which it had been seen before (because this
way of seeing was distorted, delusory). Carter’s story shows that there are
other directions on the outside of ordinary reality, before turning, at the
last moment, to look along the escape-path.
This is a
summary of the three texts:
The direction of escape involves quiet
planetary spaces where plants and animals and terrains - and the female aspect
of the human world - are all in the foreground.
What is
necessary is action as opposed to observation, and the fundamental action is a
departure from the depth-level systems and structures of ordinary reality.
The cost
of indulgence in the socially pervasive cult of the amorous-erotic is not just
love, but is also freedom.
*
* *
7. A Thousand Plateaus
The heat has continued unabated for some
time, but there are signs it is coming to an end.
There is an immense steppe of grasslands
and mountains, and abutting upon it – stretching for hundreds of miles – there
is the tangled wall of the city. It is more of a single continually
reconstructed building than a city: a chaos of productions and alterations,
always seething with activity and threaded with conflicts, and simultaneously
always to a great extent derelict.
The worlds of the grasslands and mountains
are made of the same filaments of energy and awareness as the city, only with
different combinations and modalities.
A Thousand Plateaus partly structures one
of its chapters as a 'tale' - as a sketched fictional narrative, which uses a
method of 'quotation-montage' to arrive at its conclusion. A figure called
Professor Challenger gives a lecture, and at the end he metamorphoses and disappears.
There is,
however, another point in the book where the text leans momentarily into the
domain of fiction: the concluding sentence of the description of Fleutiaux's The Story of the Abyss and the Telescope
shifts to a paraphrase-retelling of the story's conclusion - “One day […] a
long-viewer […] will set out across a narrow passageway above the abyss, will
depart along the line of flight, having broken their telescope, to meet a blind
Double approaching from the other side.” Whatever are the complexities in
summarising Fleutiaux's novella, and Deleuze and Guattari's account of it, it
is correct to say that both of the tales that are semi-narrated by A
Thousand Plateaus are stories of disappearance.
This is not, however, an extrinsic or
tangential aspect of the text. A Thousand
Plateaus is a work of philosophy, but in a specific immanence-philosophy
form which can be characterised as metamorphics - the metaphysics and
pragmatics of departure from ordinary reality. This shows the way in which the
book is in some sense about disappearance, but even this does not indicate the
extent to which disappearance is central to it - the extent to which it
inspires and (in a positive sense) 'haunts' the work.
The ideas which A Thousand Plateaus explicates as crucial for departure are
deterritorialisation, becomings and the abstract (where the abstract relates to
a sphere that includes both energy and intent, so that the term is not
connected to the 'in the head' construct involved with the term abstraction).
The most crucial and innovative of the three ideas is that of becomings, and it
would be right to see the chapter which is about becomings as fundamental in
the book. This chapter is called “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal,
Becoming-Imperceptible;” and to this it should be added that Deleuze and
Guattari say that the highest-intensity becoming (and the one toward which the
other becomings lead) is ‘becoming imperceptible.’
'Becoming-imperceptible' is another
way of describing a disappearance. The main philosophical work done in this
context by Deleuze and Guattari is in relation to a different sense of the
term, but the ideas of 'disappearance over an upward threshold' and of a
valuable, liberatory process of dropping out of sight are also included,
quietly but emphatically. It feels very much that the section which is the
point of maximal intensity of the whole book is the one which includes the
phrase - "Becoming-imperceptible means many things."
In relation to 'becomings' (the
primary focus of the section) Deleuze and Guattari are referring to processes
of entering into becoming with - entering into composition with - encountered
forces and formations in the world which are imperceptible (in relation to the
forces or formations involved you would say that they inspire, transform,
teach, provoke thought, wake, assist, generate a metamorphosis). Becomings are
grounded in perception, but they go on from perception to be equally in-effect
within thought, envisaging, feeling, decision-making and action - they involve
all the faculties (however, it should be seen that what gives this section its
importance is the fact that here the analysis of becomings is explicitly about
perception).
What needs to be brought together
here is very simple. In this context the first crucial aspect of the world that
is imperceptible is intent - is the abstract as it is encountered in human
individuals and human formations (a formation can be a group, a society, an
institution or a myth-system). The crucial example is intent in the form of the
intent-world of an individual human (the abstract is, as Deleuze and Guattari
say, both the imperceptible, and simultaneously that which at a fundamental
level is perceived). And in terms of wider modalities which are encountered
within individuals the analysis is that for both men and women entering into
becoming with the intent-worlds of women is fundamental for waking becomings,
and for escaping toward wider realities (“…all becomings begin with and pass
through becoming-woman. It is the key to all the other becomings”).
The other crucial aspect of the
world that is largely imperceptible is the sky - is air, the atmosphere, the
air in and above the street, or in the room. What this leads towards is a
process of entering into becoming with the atmosphere - for instance, a process
of (tactile-spatial) envisaging, where you envisage that you are the
atmosphere, with starlight arriving in your upper layer, and with thunderstorms
close to the sphere of contact with the ground. A whole adopting of a deterritorialised
vantage in relation to the sky that you continually breathe through your lungs;
a nomad perspective that places you where you are - on the planet, not, at a
depth-level, within the territory of a country. And this becoming with the sky
must simultaneously leave open the Spinozistic possibility that the sky is not
in fact a world of substance that is dead/denuded/inert in comparison to us.
The aim here has been to show
that there are reasons for believing that becoming-imperceptible is the key
idea of A Thousand Plateaus, and to
point out that the idea (as opposed to the specific primary concept in relation
to becomings) does in fact explicitly include the sense of disappearance that
is in question. This charged nexus - the idea of becoming-imperceptible -
therefore must be placed alongside the two points in the book where the writing
goes momentarily toward the 'figural' mode of expressing outsights that is
employed by tales (a leaving behind of concepts for the abstract 'figures' of
fictions).
What is fundamental in A Thousand Plateaus is the account of becomings and of deterritorialisation,
together with the account of micropolitics at the points where it delineates
the 'escape-group,' creating the figure of a group-departure from ordinary
reality. The basic structure here is exactly right: it is a pragmatics of
becoming-active, and of waking the faculties, and it is a pragmatics of seeing
- and working with - the human world as an element of the planet (so that what
fundamentally you are working with, and navigating on/within, is the Terrain of
the planet).
These
lines of thought can be helpfully contrasted with the way in which A Thousand Plateaus was involved in the
philosophy of Warwick University in the 1990s, and also, interconnectedly, with
the early works of William Gibson.
In the
main Warwick-philosophy milieu at this time A
Thousand Plateaus functioned as a charged horizon or atmosphere, but this
does not in fact define what took place. The ideas which coalesced as the
primary philosophical strand of what became the CCRU (the group that has become
famous to some extent within cultural theory and within specific domains of
philosophy) were technology as ‘zeitgeist’ and accelerationism. Spinozism was
primarily employed to dismantle the customary division between human and
machine intelligence, and a key thought was that of the internet as
technosentience (without any detailed, effective thought about which faculty it
was which had been technologically externalised, or about what the wider forces
might be which are involved in this process).
The crux,
however, lies in the fact that the hypothetical/hyperfictional temporal
structure was ultimately that of a kind of 'techno-Hegelianism,' involving
supposedly exacerbatory interventions that would speed up - would be part of -
a depth-level, runaway movement toward a point where the human would cross a
threshold in which it would be unrecognisable, becoming, at this point,
interfused with artificial intelligence. This is a heady cocktail of sci-fi
philosophy, but what tends to be obscured is the theological (Hegelian)
structure, involving a movement toward an upward threshold, and an activity on
the part of individuals/micro-groups which all along is powerless to bring
about the projected/aimed-at millenarian grand outcome - creating activity that
masks a depth-level passivity (both because the entirety of the human world is
at a gigantically larger scale, and because its nature has not been
understood).
The CCRU was substantially more than
this core structure of thought, but within the structure what has been lost is
the planet with the human world as an element within it (instead a component of
the human world has become the future) and is the planet-centred process of
waking the faculties and of becoming-active.
In this context, it is
necessary to limit myself to one 'personal' observation, broken into two parts.
This observation will assist in relation to the comparison with A Thousand Plateaus, and with the
development of the idea of disappearance.
Around 1991 William Gibson's three Neuromancer novels (the Sprawl trilogy) started to be a major
coordinate for the thinking taking place within the Warwick milieu. There are
many aspects of these books which are very impressive, but as I started to read
them I had an impression - one that never completely went away - that I was
experiencing a drop in intensity.
There are several traditions of
writing that involve disappearance. There are, for instance, 'future fiction'
novels involving a departure into a chronological future which is understood to
be better, such as William Morris’s News
from Nowhere (Marge Piercy's Woman on
the Edge of Time is a high-point in this tradition, and Christopher
Priest's A Dream of Wessex is a
striking outlier, existing partly outside and partly within this tradition).
There are also 'strange tales' which involve a disappearance into another world
that is immanently 'alongside,' and that in some sense is more extraordinary -
for instance Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood, or, to take a partly-successful
exemplar from a large sequence of works by the author, The Illearth War by Stephen Donaldson (in relation to the most
powerful aspect of this form of writing, to write well here is to give an
account of the Futural, of the escape-route). However, the sequence of
works involved in connection with the Sprawl
trilogy is another one again, a specific 'epic' sequence that also includes
Kubrick's and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: a
Space Odyssey, Clarke's Childhood's
End, Gibson's story Hinterlands
and Greg Bear's Blood Music.
In Childshood's
End the departure-across-an-upward threshold is of the whole human species,
but in a way where there is a vastness that at the same time lacks depth: there
is the intensity of the idea, but bound together with a kind of chilly,
disturbingly unfocused quality. What makes the novel interesting is that
dreaming is taken up as a form of perception, with this being part of what is
central to the departure, and with technology displaced from its customary
central role in science fiction - but this strength does not stop the novel
from having a disjointed, grandiose aspect, an aspect that becomes grimly
foregrounded in the culmination of the story. In 2001: a Space Odyssey the story is more focused (a main difference
is that here it is an individual who departs across a metamorphic threshold).
Beyond this, Gibson's Hinterlands is
a kind of dark, 1982 counterpart or 'coda' in relation to the intensity of 1969
(astronauts are sent out to a specific point in the solar system, and they
disappear to somewhere else in the cosmos, but they all come back dead or
insane), and Blood Music has a Departure not of the human species, but
of a species of nano-beings initially brought into existence by humans (this is
probably the best of these 'epic' works, and it is worth seeing how, beyond a
thread of indulgent melancholy in the concluding chapter, the Futural in the
closing moment feels as if it was dreamed into existence not by a science
fiction writer, but by a transcendental-materialist Kierkegaard).
The second part of the personal
observation is that as Gibson began to fade into the background there was just
one aspect of the Neuromancer trilogy
that stayed with me - the ending of the last book, Mona Lisa Overdrive, and the idea of the ‘aleph’ that is central to
this ending.
The aleph is an object the size of a
hand that consists of software that is the basis for a gigantic 'cyberspace' or
'virtual-real' world that is unconnected to the cyberspace of the internet
within the trilogy. At the end of the novel a group of four of its characters,
including a woman, Angela Mitchell, have become beings within the aleph.
Outside of it those who had been alive in the first place are now all dead, but
inside of the aleph there is the virtual-real Earth, and a second virtual-real
world elsewhere in the galaxy, which has been constructed out of interstellar
communication between the two worlds. The conclusion is the group departing for
the other, alien world within the aleph. Overall, the tonality hovers between
the elegiac and sad, and the exhilaration of a journey into the radically other. It is the other
that is the horizon as the book ends, but there is a shiny, unchanging deadness
to aspects of the virtual-real within the aleph, leaving an ambiguity, a
feeling that the group in some sense has been trapped within a two-world
microcosm in which they are only a little better than zombies.
Gibson's worlds of cyberspace become
interesting at the point where you make them a way of looking toward the human
oneirosphere of dreams - the world of dreams about the future, fictions, myths,
dreams in sleep, accounts of the world, and scientific narratives, a world
which now includes expressions effectuated through the internet. This is to say
that the lens can work well, but not in the way that it is used within the
novels (cyberspace becomes the guidance-space and navigation-space - and
control-space - of dreamings).
And for a moment the trilogy
has a faint view of the escape-group. The earlier stories in this tradition
were locked to the alternative of the departure being either that of the
species of the individual, and also had a tendency to be disturbingly locked to
the figure of the male. Here the adventure of the group feels simultaneously as
if it might be an echo reverberating from a tragedy, and there is only one
female figure - but the concluding tonality, in the last sentences, is exhilaration,
and Angela Mitchell is the point of awareness / protagonist for this
end-moment. At Warwick university, and in the years afterwards, this image of a
departure felt like something important. I wasn’t interested in the way in
which the aleph was a reference to Borges’s story The Aleph (though this is possibly Borges’s best story), and nor
was I interested in the way in which the cyberspace capsule of the aleph opened
up a parallel with the Elysian Fields that are a background aspect of Greek
tragedy – I was interested in the group departure.
It was wintry and unfocused, but it
felt as if the end of the Sprawl
trilogy was a view toward something which the much higher intensity of A Thousand Plateaus also looks towards -
the escape-group. A Thousand Plateaus
does not in fact achieve much more in this respect, in a direct way, but it is
the ideas of becomings and of deterritorisations which make this book a far
more extraordinary vantage, along with the idea of ‘abstract machines,’ or of
formations of intent.
*
The blind
Double is blind because not yet fully effectuated, a persona with a capacity
for inner silence, and with a new formation of faculties - arriving as the
fundamental mode of existence that will subsume the functionings of the persona
of ordinary reality; approaching as you walk toward it.
* * *
8. Being-in-Dreaming
There is now a house, surrounded by
semi-desert. Generally there is no-one around. There are a few trees around the
house. Sometimes you hear the wind blowing across the chaparral.
The heat from the zones and terrains of the
planet arrives here without being partially relayed – as in ordinary reality –
through the conventional human world, with its ups and downs. The heat arrives
ceaselessly, day and night, a heartening, inspiring intensity.
There is an orchard, and a vegetable garden.
Somewhere far in the distance there are forested hills and mountains.
Being-in-Dreaming
is about a series of departures which take the form of a dropping out of sight,
where in general the length of time involved increases, over a sequence of five
departures. These departures involve journeys from the USA to rural or desert
areas of Mexico, but they also involve encounters with people with an other relationship-with-the-world,
one which appears to be at a higher level than that of ordinary reality, in
relation to the process of becoming-active and waking the faculties. This
different relationship-with-the-world is the crucial aspect of the book, and
yet it is clear that the terrains where the encountered individuals are living
are key to this relationship, because they help in fostering the
deterritorialised, planetary perspective that is at the heart of it.
The book also describes a
disappearance - a disappearance of a whole group, who are understood to have in
some sense crossed a further threshold of reality, referred to as “the third
attention.” However, as has been the practice throughout Outsights, this
disappearance will not be taken as the primary issue. Instead the focus will be
on the other relationship-with-the-world, and on the processes of dropping out
of sight, and of departure to another, radically different milieu.
In relation to ‘departure to another
milieu’ what matters in Being-in-Dreaming
is the deterritorialized vantage - and affect - of the house in the semi-desert
terrain. This world of exteriority is crucial, but it is also crucial as
abstract (find a world of exteriority). When the departure of
the 'escape-group' takes place it is an enigmatic absence not a drama: Florinda
Donner describes how she returns to the house, and no-one is there. The
culmination is a silence in which the terrain becomes more visible, and in the
silence there is also the echo of the other relationship-with-the-world, like
light-hearted laughter in the distance.
There is a structure here:
The task of waking the body.
The task of waking the faculties.
The recognition that human beings are explorers
into the transcendentally unknown, and that women in particular suffer from
having been socially conditioned to be sexual partners (as a central, defining
role) as opposed to them being travellers into wider realities.
The recognition that the faculty we must wake first
is the faculty of perception.
The idea that the world around us (the key instance
is the planet) is something like dreaming, feeling, intent or thought, as
opposed to it being inert, blind matter (to embody this idea is to overturn
what can be called ‘the dogmatic image of the world’).
The idea that there is a doorway within dreams in
the form of a faculty of dreaming, a complex faculty which consists of a
modality of perception.
*
Two aspects of Being-and-Dreaming perhaps stand out
most of all. The first is the affirmation that although we need departures to
external vantages, we also need an overall form of existence which does not
consist of "retreating from the world" (departures, and the process
of achieving a detachment from “the social order” have nothing to do with
reactiveness or retreat, let alone with some form of dogmatic 'asceticism').
The second is that we need to learn to assess the systems of the
dreams-of-the-future and directions-of-action that become the defining
'ventures' of a life: the questions being always - what, at depth, is the
intent of the system or institution, and in what ways does my self-indulgence
get attached to the kudos that is socially allotted by the directions involved?
What, at depth, is the intent of a religion; of amorous-and-sexual 'grand
romance;’ of a political or intellectual movement; of your own life as, for
instance, an artist or an academic; of a form of artistic expression? And to
what extent do they involve a disguised submissiveness or capitulation to
power, a reactive righteousness that is the opposite of openness, a
self-indulgence in relation to the deadening stimulant of kudos? To what extent
are such ventures not the joy and delight of transcendental
adventure; of waking the faculties in a process of travelling further into the
World? To ask these questions effectively is the beginning of thought that
escapes the presuppositions of ordinary reality: lucidity is the faculty of
perceiving intent and of perceiving the depth-level nature of dreams.
Knowledge of intent is here
referenced as knowledge of the abstract. And what is pointed out in Being-in-Dreaming
is that in ways which are as libidinal as they are intellectual women and men
are drawn by deleterious social forces to take up ways of being that prevent an
ability to see the abstract – that prevent an ability to see the flows of
energy and affect, to see intent within individuals and social forces and
dreamings.
The structure which has been
delineated is a formation of intent, an abstract machine. It is an abstract
machine of becoming-active, of travelling into wider realities.
* * *
