This blog is three books in the process of being written, in the form of initial drafts of the sections, posted in the intended order, a project for which the overall name is Explorations. The three books are a continuation from Hidden Valleys: Haunted by the Future (Zero Books - 2015), and also from On Vanishing Land, an audio-essay made by myself and Mark Fisher (released by Hyperdub/Flatlines on 26th July, 2019 - https://hyperdub.net).
Explorations: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Explorations: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 50)
Ultimately, everything concerns
the micropolitics of Departure. The micropolitics of departures and disappearances across
thresholds of existence - thresholds of waking, of becoming-active. Art is hopelessly mis-constructed unless it is
understood as providing outsights toward the escape-path, the second sphere of
action, the body without organs, and the ongoing disaster within the human
world – but, of course, most crucially, the escape-path. All of these outsights
are views toward the transcendental-empirical, but the question of the primary focus
is vital: if attention is turned toward the human disaster then there is a
danger of entrapment either within the ‘tragic,’ or the ‘gothic.’
How to create fantasy
stories, stories of the anomalous, of the transcendental-empirical, which as such are a sustained act of thought in the sense that they are an expression
of lucidity? Examples here are Hamlet,
The Tempest, Picnic at Hanging Rock (book and film), Stalker, The King of Elfland’s
Daughter, The Left Hand of Darkness,
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor
Hoffmann, Fanny and Alexander.
And the second, and
fundamental issue is how to create stories which are both cutting-edge and
trans-temporal in their importance, but in a way where this validity primarily comes
from them being an engagement with aspects of the transcendental-empirical
other than the tragic and the gothic, and in particular, from them being an
engagement with the first, second and sixth aspects of the
transcendental-empirical (Section 34) – the second sphere of action, the body
without organs, and the escape-path.
*
To a large extent the previous section was concerned with a phase of my life, in 2003, when in a subtle sense I was failing to move substantially forward with the 'projects' or lines of development which were central for me at the time. These can be loosely delineated as writing fiction, travelling into areas beyond the 'urban,' and producing work which engaged philosophically with fictions (in film, TV, and literature) in relation to places which provided the subject or the settings for the fictions (at the outset this primarily was one place - London).
When everything started to change (see Section 34) there were different ways in which I began to do the travelling I had needed to do (I needed to be on my own; and I needed, as much as was possible, to be travelling in semi-wilderness and wilderness terrains - places whose striking aspects helped with becoming-perception, along with the helpful effect of being on my own, again in relation to a departure from the ceaseless flows of words).
And in relation to fictions I not only started to work, with Mark Fisher, on londonunderlondon, but I also (inseparably) started to be pre-eminently engaged in creating fictional worlds, as with the story that is the culmination of this audio-essay.
The impression is that, before we started to work on the actual sequencing/creation of the work there were two last lenses that were put into place, two ways of seeing which in particular were valuable for looking toward technology, cities, and the scurf spaces that surround and permeate cities. The lenses we already had in place were primarily those of Deleuze and Guattari, Virginia Woolf, Ballard, and Castaneda. We now added those of John Foxx's 1980 story "The Quiet Man" (together with other work by Foxx, in particular Systems of Romance, and the text of Cathedral Oceans), and P.J.Hammond's series Sapphire and Steel (and at the same time there was a largely non-deliberate way in which we put to one side the lenses of Lovecraft and Burroughs: the impression I have is that the two new ways of seeing provided a better view of what was most important about what could be seen by means of the work of the two other writers).
This did not immediately have any discernible effect on my production of fictional narratives: the story in londonunderlondon could be described as elements from 90s rave culture crossed with H.G.Wells (but this did not mean that the new optic had no immediate effect at all - the story 'The Quiet Man' is read in full in londondunderlondon, and in 2004 when Mark and I re-watched the fourth series of Sapphire and Steel we noticed the nursery rhyme that would be sampled to form the opening of the piece - "See-saw sacradown, that is the way to London town."). However, in the autumn of 2005 I wrote a story that was the precursor of the novel The Corridor, and this story had the working title "Disappearance." Mark and I then worked on it for two and a half years as the spoken-word basis for a new audio piece (bringing together music for it and recording all the parts, and stopping only at the point where we realised that we had not managed to direct/cast the acting performances we needed, on a budget of zero, for the project we had taken on). The idea was that music would be central to the piece, as with londonunderlondon, and that the listener would have an experience of finding themselves in the middle of something extremely enigmatic, getting tantalising glimpses into a very extraordinary world, a world that you would end up feeling was your own.
Disappearance
The piece is planetary in its focus because, even though there is a lot of emphasis on specific places there is no focus on countries, and there is an emphatically transnational quality to the characters, along with the presence within the text of the derelict-forested world, which evidently in itself is not part of the human social domain. As the text continues the names of characters (Stina, Ingor) start to come from areas around the Baltic, rather than from Britain; Gail talks about going to Canada; Davenant goes off to Carcasonne and does not come back. This is the transnational element, but the planetary horizon of this attribute is made explicit through the forest expanses of 'the Corridor.' And this leads, in turn, to the depth-level reason for the text being planetary, which is the fact that the emergent parallel world is seen as "a new dream of the planet."
The modality of the definitive terrain is finding expression within the writing because an idea intrinsic to it is that the individuals and groups within the story (as well as them existing within the planetary horizon) might all be involved in processes of crossing thresholds of existence, where these thresholds involve a movement toward perception of "a wider, deeper level of reality." This is even true of the sinister - or at best ambiguous - 'rogue entity' within the story: it is trying to 'break upwards' into a level of reality at a higher degree of intensity. I did not deliberately create this aspect in writing the piece, but there is a commonality between all of the beings - human and non-human - within the world of the story. The key element in this context is what is said in relation to the disappearance of the group that meet at the house in Bromley, but even the rogue entity becomes part of the field of expression that figures the modality.
The third observation is that in writing this story I have moved into the vicinity of the tale - taking the tale to be a story which has an anomalous element or elements, and which has a primacy of landscape and events in relation to development of characters. And here it can be said that a main influence is Sapphire and Steel, the stories of which are evidently - though in an unusual sense - quintessential tales, or ur-tales, in that there is a primacy of landscape and events, there are anomalous elements, and (very unusually) the two protagonists are not only given no psychological development but they are anomalous in themselves, in that they are not human. The rogue entity in "Disappearance" has clearly arrived in the story from the direction of Sapphire and Steel. It is true that everything to do with the entity having taken the form of 'the dog in the water' (for instance, it trying to bring about physical contact with humans) is not taken from the series, but the figure who Rebecca and Alan encounter could easily have walked straight across from the sixth series of P.J.Hammond's creation: the nonchalant, insouciant manner, the enigmatic clothes and the nursery rhymes mark out the figure as a close cousin of both 'Johnny Jack' and 'Silver' in the concluding series.
It can be seen that the tale can have many forms (and that these forms include gothic tales such as the stories of M.R.James), and that many of the works which are most valuable as lenses for seeing the world will be in a border area between tales and other kinds of story, or will include anomalous beings or aspects, but without them being tales at all. It can also be seen that what you include at the outset in terms of the anomalous is likely to be fundamental to the unfolding of the story (whether, in fact, it is a tale, a novel, or a play etc.), and simultaneously that it might make sense to stay close on some level to actual experiences in constructing the anomalous aspects, in order to avoid the nebulous and sometimes metaphysically deleterious expanses of horror-tales, and fantasy stories. Gothic 'warnings to the curious' and the different forms (implicit or explicit) of religious paratexts are the worst disasters here, but alongside these unhealthy outcomes there are the possible nebulous results of starting with fetched-from-far, beyond-experience anomalous elements, results that involve a failure on the part of the expressive field of the work to bring the definitive terrain into focus.
As I had thought he would, Mark liked the idea of the entity which is trying to break upwards into further levels of reality, and he liked the passage about the dog swimming in the water (a kind of micro-tale, which we were both thinking about in terms of the music we would put with it). I felt overall that my starting-points in relation to the anomalous (the rogue-entity, and the Corridor) were effective as philosophico-narrative initial elements, and that Sapphire and Steel and "The Quiet Man" had been valuable as lenses, and in a way where a part of what had been involved had been a process of me being brought more into contact with my own experiences.
Part of this is to say that I had found a way of including views toward zones which were in the direction of the gothic (zones which perhaps were as close to transcendental north as to transcendental south). But my attention was now increasingly being drawn toward zones which were either eerie-sublime or were in the fullest sense opposite the gothic, and insofar as the northward-outside was going to be involved in my writing, I knew that these darker anomalous views were going to have to be fine-tuned, so that they became more closely connected to my experiences, rather than less.
But to go back to the first of the three observations, it is necessary to orientate all of this account to an encounter with the novels of Ursula Le Guin that began at the time when I was writing the text being discussed, an encounter with the work of a very extraordinary writer of stories.
In January or February of 2006 I read The Lathe of Heaven, and there is a strange quality about the memory of this event: it produces an impression which is a bit like hearing thunder in the distance.
Le Guin had a direct or indirect involvement in most of the traditions on which I was drawing for my work: she was a writer of stories which looked toward the transcendental-empirical; she was a thinker in a way that was inseparably philosophical and political; she had a highly developed ability in relation to anthropology, connecting her work to Deleuze and Guattari, and to Castaneda; as a political thinker she thought in terms of micropolitcs and rhizomic social worlds as opposed to nation-states; she was a dreamer who had worked her way free of religion (she described herself as 'a consistent un-Christian;'), and she drew substantially on the ancient philosophy in Tao Te Ching; she was a writer who avoided becoming fixated on the gothic, on transcendental north.
I feel that Le Guin assisted me in terms of learning how to leap. Her works heartened me, gave me more courage to follow the lines of stories even if the leap had taken me a very long way out from my experience, and even if the direction seemed to be somewhere to the side of transcendental south - and in a complex way her stories gave me coordinates for an overall forward movement in relation to creating virtual-real worlds.
Whatever were the problems involved, I could see that a whole revolutionary line of thought within science fiction and speculative fiction had reached a kind of culminating point in The Lathe of Heaven. I could see that the accounts of the anomalous oneiric and cognitive modalities in the societies in The Left Hand of Darkness and The Word for World is Forest were an extraordinary effectuation of the liberated form of the anthropological optic. And I could also see that Le Guin had substantially heightened and augmented an entire fantasy tradition that went back through 19th century writers in the direction of shamanic tales, and that (in a world where the 1940s break with the past had radically lowered the kudos of this kind of writing, unless it was ultra-epic in form, and heavily threaded with the gothic) she had quietly done this in a way that was accessible to children as well as adults (leaving these books in danger of being perceived as not for adults at all, but as only for young adults and children).
*
As I brought together the elements of The Corridor and as I wrote it (the overall process lasted about six years) dozens of stories came to me, of many different kinds, and I wrote down a large number of them. Two of these should be included at this point. The ideas for both of them arrived before the beginning of the main process of writing the novel, and it is as if they both show an awareness, in two very different ways, of an 'attractor' in the form of the childrens' tale, and as if the gravitational field of this attractor is being avoided, or partly avoided. In attempting to move in the opposite direction from the gothic there are subtle things that can go wrong, and these stories belong to a precursor phase in which a process of attunement was taking place.
* * *
The Bowl
Everything is made more complicated by circumstances relating to the fact that most human beings don't focus themselves fully into the modality that is dominant in their time. For thousands of years it has been reason which has been dominant, with silent knowledge almost entirely lost as an actualised form: and those who are off to one side of the locked, productive form of reason are caught up in something that is a feature of this modality: its inherent tendency is not just to fall definitively short of grasping immanence, but is to be a modality of self-reflection, and, connectedly, to be intrinsically prey to the tyranny of subjectified moods, most specifically, self-importance, and its concomitants, resentment, jealous anger, self-pity etc. (it is only when reason is caught up into the full flight of successful production that this other aspect of the modality is kept in abeyance).
And the other aspect of the situation that complicates everything is that stories do not disappear as a form of production when individuals with no awareness of silent knowledge reach the full, focused form of reason: instead there can be a production of stories which are grim, deadened shadows or 'tracings' of stories which provide views of the transcendental - the system of reason-and-revelation is in fact very deeply embedded within the modality of reason. It is this which makes it clear why it is that Plato's dialogues are threaded with tales, and why it is that, if you have not been inculcated by a religion, its stories at a metaphysical level will appear to have something superficial and wrong about them, even after you have detached them from accompanying weaponry of specious rational arguments (in the modern, 'western' world, since the Break with the Past, in the 1940s, the production of stories on the part of this system has not stopped in relation to full-flight instances, but instead it now has a marked tendency toward religious-paratext fantasies that as such are dominated by primary aspects of religious stories).
Silent knowledge is therefore a focused faculty of perception together with a woken faculty of lucidity, with these in turn intrinsically being allied to liberated faculties of dreaming, feeling and navigation (and the modality can only be reached if the overall body has reached a high enough level of energy). And depth-level and wide-level understanding is silent knowledge in alliance with a liberated faculty of reason.
A few months after reading The Lathe of Heaven I read The Word for World is Forest, drawn towards it in part by the title, which seemed to connect very closely with my experiences at this time, and, in particular with the forests of the "Corridor" - the oneiric world into which I had been swept away. (I did not know at the time that the two Le Guin stories I had read first were both from around 1972). The second novel seems to be inspired - if not directly informed - by Le Guin's anthropological knowledge in describing the social worlds of the Athsheans, a forest-inhabiting people on a planet in another solar system: I was very struck by the description of the Athsheans' ability to go into a dreaming-awake state that they call 'dreaming,' and that intrinsically involves both the acquiring of knowledge, and the emergence of new ideas and valuable courses-of-action, for those who become skilled in relation to this faculty.
Between 2005 and 2008 I read a large number of novels, a process driven in part by a search for the outsights to be found in the works involved (so that on one level this was a phase of sustained abstract-oneiric research) - and a process assisted by the fact that for the first two years I was living without a house, and my living-room was to a great extent the cafes of the bookshops in central London (more and more space was taken up in my backpack with the books that I bought). I read Margaret Atwood's Surfacing; I read Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood: I read three novels by Dunsany (The Charwoman's Shadow, The King of Elfland's Daughter and The Blessing of Pan); I read Robert Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus. And yet despite the intensity and brilliance of these books (in particular those by Atwood and Dunsany), it is the arrival of Le Guin's work which stands out in relation to this time. Everything in relation to her work grew slowly outward from an ultra-intense core in the form of the first two novels, and, without me giving any thought to it, the process kept going (often with gaps of several months, or a year), so that by 2008 I had read seven of her books. It was not that there was any one specific aspect of her novels that I was specifically aware of taking up as a lens: it was more that what was valuable ran through them very widely, and had a kind of quietly compelling intensity, which only occasionally broke out into something hyper-charged, as with the extreme sadness of what happens to the Athsheans in The Word for World is Forest. It was a sky coming into view, an atmosphere - a result of a dreamer writing in a way where she was recurrently lucid in her perceptions, and in a way where she was predominantly looking toward the Future - toward Love-and-Freedom. It was also true that in starting to read Le Guin's books there was a feeling of being in a current - a current that was affecting others around me (if only in the very simple sense that others might be likely to be intensely inspired by the stories). Having read The Lathe of Heaven, Mark got hold of a DVD of a film adaptation from the 1970s, and we watched this together. I mentioned the book to another friend, and he told me he loved it, and that not long before he had had a dream where he had been in Portland, Oregon, and the dream had been in some way connected with the story. Another friend told me that her boyfriend's mother had said to her that the Earthsea stories were her favourite books. And what was clear was that in relation to my own encounter with these virtual-real worlds the current of inspiration and outsights had that sublime quality of the movement toward transcendental-south, a quality which always in some way includes an awareness of unnerving elements that relate to the opposite direction. As if you could look over your shoulder, in the forest, and get a view of the Shing.
What was slowly becoming discernible was that Le Guin had an exceptionally intense, but - in certain specific ways - unfocused awareness of the escape-path (the sixth and most vital aspect of the transcendental), and that she had a very extraordinary, and recurrently highly focused ability to see the ongoing human disaster. Right at the centre of her awareness of the escape-path was the faculty of dreaming, but alongside this was the planet, as another element or attribute of the current leading away from ordinary reality. (and it needs to be said that the ongoing disaster is shown with sustained and startling lucidity, using highly innovative but fully effective oneiric strategies).To be precise about what was problematic, everything had a tendency to be diffuse, and it was both the case that there were crucial gaps, and that what was very clear at one stage could be obscured later: for these reasons I did not find a lens that I could valuably take up in relation to specific zones of the world, the way I had done, for instance in relation to technology as it appears within Sapphire and Steel. But this was abstract-oneiric thought at an extremely high level, and I have no doubt that - in a way it is not easy to delineate - as I started to write The Corridor I was in fact being profoundly assisted by the lens of everything I had read by Le Guin, and that in particular I was being assisted by the breadth of her openness, in relation to the cosmos, and by the depth of her openness, in relation to the body without organs (in that she has a tendency to think that dreams - the virtual-real - give birth to the actual, she has escaped from the dogmatic image of the world). And I also have no doubt that I was being helped by Le Guin's use of 'everyday' prose as a way of describing the sublime, and as a way of indicating the other zones of the transcendental-empirical.
The first major indication of a potential for a micropolitical Departure is in the opening pages of City of Illusions, where the group living in the clearing in the forest is a micro-world which has succeeded in staying away from (and probably initially in escaping from) the ongoing disaster of the global social fabric of the Earth at the time of the story (thousands of years in the future). This micro-society remains the primary social line of flight throughout the novel, and its intensity is substantially heightened by the fact that, inseparably, Le Guin has embodied a momentous departure in writing the book, in that she has left behind both sides of the system of reason-and-revelation: she has left behind Chistianity in the direction of the philosophy/pragmatics of Tao Te Ching, and the other very striking feature of the escape-community (along with the presence of this text), is the 'patterning board,' which as a divinatory device involves a 'technics' and a modality of the intellect that together relate to a domain of knowledge that is beyond the domain with which the system of reason-and-revelation is connected (this is not to affirm divination as anything other than a high-level form of anticipation, but its presence here is fundamental, nonetheless). And thinking across the whole functioning of the system in the context of Le Guin's natal zone of the interestablishment, it is important to see that the novel both rejects the Christianity of the Hegelian 'progress' interpretation of the human world (in the novel there has been a collapse a thousand years before - humans have been decimated and parasitised by a highly intelligent but monstrously dominatory - control-fixated - alien species), and simultaneously completely discards the idea of the USA having a world-historical mission as prime-creator of progress (the USA has been forgotten - people see themselves as belonging to the human species and to their micro-society, and the most inspired group depicted has none of the aspects of Americanism, in that for them the crucial book is Tao Te Ching).
In Le Guin's writing there is a cumulative figuring of the definitive terrain. The planetary is foregrounded both through the non-state wilderness spaces (the forests in City of Illusions, The Beginning Place (etc); the arctic wilderness in The Left Hand of Darkness), and also through the multiplication of planets (for instance, in that Urras in The Dispossessed and Gethen in The Left Hand of Darkness to a great extent are lenses for looking at human societies on Earth, and in that we know no other planets of this kind, these planets become ways of looking at the Earth). And the world of the waking of the faculties (which is the correlate of the planet for the definitive terrain) builds from the novels of the second half of the 60s - where this primarily involves lucidity, problem-solving (dreaming-lucidity-reason), choice-making, and becomings at the level of multiple selves, and double (female-and-male) gender modalities - to the point in the early 70s when the faculty of dreaming comes decisively to the forefront, in The Lathe of Heaven and The Word for World is Forest.
However, in 2007 I read The Beginning Place (1980) and I felt that something had gone wrong, deep within the modality of the production of Le Guin's novels - a kind of collapse of alterity, and a sliding back toward a technological and social-enlightenment Hegelianism (it is not that the ongoing human disaster can never be brought to an end, it is that an envisaging of the end has to be intellectually earned by something more than the ideas of the ansible and of a United Nations of planets: it is possible to imagine the reactionaries of reason-and-revelation breathing a sigh of relief at the point where Le Guin invokes ansible and Ekumen - this can be easily incorporated, and City of Illusions can be allowed to fall into obscurity). By 1980 the eerie in Le Guin's writing has been far in the background for nearly a decade, and the attempt to get back to it in The Beginning Place seems more like Le Guin talking about the eerie, as opposed to her creating something that would go alongside the moment in City of Illusions when Falk looks over his shoulder and sees that the Shing sailboat has disappeared. But, perhaps most important of all, questions of the female, the libidinal and the 'libidinal-eerie' have not been moved forward since The Left Hand of Darkness (1968). Le Guin is a female traveller into the unknown, but she holds back in relation to exploring the female and the libidinal (1978's The Eye of the Heron is in many ways a powerful book - it is the point where she at last has a female protagonist, but the book's culminating exploration is almost entirely in space, and questions of the libidinal, and of the other dimensions of travelling in intensity are completely or predominantly absent). Irene and Hugh becoming lovers - at the end of The Beginning Place - does not move forward the idea of what it is to be a 'lover,' and the alterity that might have helped is now fading away (the same has to be said about the lovers in The Pathways of Desire, a 1978 novella which attempts to go further than The Lathe of Heaven, but which in the end feels as if it has primarily taken the form of a very explicit, thematised collapse of alterity).
And then - at some time in the summer of 2007 I read Being-in-Dreaming. This was an exceptionally powerful return of philosophy: and my impersonal process of receiving tutelary assistance from women had, in reading this book, crossed a crucial threshold.
The philosophical lineage to which this book belongs is one which involves dialogue and narrative/narratives in a very closely related form. It includes Hume's Dialogue (although this is primarily critique, so it does not get very far), and in a grim sense it includes the dialogues of Plato - grim in the sense that these primarily are suppressive products of the system of reason-and-revelation.
What is necessary in reading this book is of course to afford it what is afforded to Plato: the putting-to-one side of empirical issues concerning narrative. The question of whether Socrates said what is attributed to him is the same as the question of the empirical status of the statements attributed to the women who Donner writes about in her book, and anything that can be viewed as potentially belonging in some sense to the world of fictional narratives should be treated in the same way as Plato's 'myth of ur', his story about Atlantis, and his tale about the ring of Gyges. We have been inculcated by the system of reason-and-revelation into accepting Plato as philosophy, but despite the lucidity and the non-suppressive rationality of Donner, we have been predisposed to see her work as not belonging to philosophy.
There are two fundamental points to be made about this book. The first is that everything is explicitly about the waking of an ability to perceive the abstract - where the abstract is intent, energy, dreaming, abstractions, feeling, and the aspects of the transcendental-empirical (notice the difference from Plato, where departing from the cave involves going into the deeper cave that is the idea of seeing the 'forms'). The second is that the book as a whole functions to provide a view toward the second sphere of action, and toward the path of Departure that leads out of ordinary reality.
In Being-in-Dreaming Donner describes two visits to a large house in a remote area in a desert region of northern Mexico. The people who she meets - and by whom she is taught - in this house are predominantly women. The journeys to the house are from the U.S.A., but the border-crossing comes to be explicitly presented not as a movement from one country to another, but from ordinary reality to another, less constricted reality. An aspect of this is that the house is described consistently as being in 'the desert' and the culture of modern, western-world Mexico is not used in any way as a means of describing its surroundings. All of this is central to the fact that the book provides a clear, sustained view toward the second sphere of action. And the foregrounding of the female in this sphere is present through women being the beginning, the vast majority of the middle, and all of the end of the tutelary process which the book describes. The house and the area around it exist over a border into the Future, and have a degree of similarity to the community in the forest at the start of Cities of Illusion: such a world is an intensive nomadism, a modality of flight (flight from ordinary reality, flight from the Shing) which has become so effective as a nomadism that there is a permanent base as a component of the ongoing process of travelling into wider realities.
In that the book's terrain is planetary and everything within the book concerns, on one level, the waking of the faculties, the world of Being-in-Dreaming is the definitive terrain. But the definitive terrain only appears (initially) to be separate from the second sphere of action: the human faculty which in many ways is most fundamental is the faculty of becomings, and, as Deleuze and Guattari have pointed out, becoming-woman is pre-eminent amongst the becomings, for women as well as for men. The book shows Donner encountering (and, as such, entering into becoming with) four women who are all travellers into the unknown - women who have broken free from the all-too-male biases, modalities and expectations of a male-dominated ordinary reality.
The writing of this book is one side of a culmination that has alongside it Taisha Abelar's The Sorcerers' Crossing: A Woman's Journey (an equally lucid book about the same house, and the same escape-group), a culmination of a process which started with Donner's Shabono, and with Castaneda's The Eagle's Gift. Shabono is the point where Donner starts writing about the process of moving into wider realities, in particular in relation to women (she continues, five years later, with The Witch's Dream), and The Eagle's Gift is where the escape-group in Mexico and the second sphere of action are brought into focus in Castaneda's work, and, inseparably, is the point in his books where women come into foreground in the sense that the account shifts to a description of him being taught by women.
In relation to works which open up a view toward the escape-path the wider story is, firstly, that over the last three thousand years such works have largely consisted either of abstraction or of narrative, and there has also been a modality of collapse (a form of suppression) which has combined abstraction and stories. The writer (or writers) of Tao Te Ching wrote at a time when there was a greater awareness that powerful stories give views toward the Outside (and when the concept of art would not have functioned in the same way in relation to such tales), and the writing unfolds with a quality of constraint, including no stories within it, and only one or two moments which suggest that they could be the beginning of a story (it is almost as if it was written under duress, and under subtle socio-religious pressure - which fits with the story that a customs officer demanded it in return for the author being allowed to leave the country). When Shakespeare wrote his plays, two thousand years later, a shift into philosophy, even if it had been as cryptically expressed as Tao Te Ching, would undoubtedly have got him killed, whereas the high-wealth zone of the artistic assemblage had been configured as a renaissance kudos-zone, and art as a concept had been constructed along the abstractly de-validating lines of entertainment, fanciful imagination and catharsis. And Plato had used a pernicious, fixated strategy of abstraction, while both including inserted stories and embedding the dialogues in stories that go beyond the exchanges, as with the walk into the countryside outside of Athens in The Republic (it is instructive to see what Shakespeare does, in contrast, with the idea of walking into the countryside outside Athens).
It is in the second half of the twentieth century that there is a momentous fusion between abstraction and narrative, and this fusion is primarily the books of Donner, Abelar and Castaneda. This moment is an extraordinary breath of fresh air, mostly because the fusion is exceptionally effective as a way of revealing the transcendental-empirical (and, in particular, the body without organs, the escape-path, and the second sphere of action), but also, secondarily, because it is entirely unconnected to the oneiric fixation-zone of Ancient Greece (a domain which in fact is a fixation zone primarily because of Sophocles) and simultaneously has no need to fight its way past the pernicious accretions that have battened themselves onto Tao Te Ching. In different ways, both Abelar and Castaneda draw to a small extent upon the ancient Chinese tradition in relation to the abstract (so that a connection to this tradition is shared between these writers and Ursula Le Guin), but their works do not have to negotiate with the world of its misinterpretations.
It was the summer of 2007, and I was sitting on a bench in a train station, re-reading Being-in-Dreaming. There was a point when I received a sudden impression of my life having been moved forward - of an increase of lucidity, of brightness. And the feeling is not separable from a change that had taken place in my life in the form of the beginning of my relationship with my partner, Maysa - I was now travelling toward Maysa, and on the level of the abstract maps I was studying I was pre-eminently a student of Donner and Abelar. I also remember feeling that it was striking that at almost exactly the same time Mark and myself had embarked upon very intense relationships: the feeling was of a current being involved - some impersonal force within the world that was weaving a pattern (but this was not - and is not - an idea of destiny or 'fate:' the threads would be as much a part of this force as the unseen fingers).
For around three years I read the books of Donner and Abelar more or less continuously, rotating - in no particular order - through Being-in-Dreaming, The Sorcerer's Crossing, The Witch's Dream, and Shabono. In 2009, a few months after moving into a house with Maysa, I started to write The Corridor. I had been reading books about Departure (books that in the fullest sense were an expression of a micropolitics of escape and of escape-groups) and now I started to write a book of this kind myself, not knowing how large a project had begun. It seems now that a sustained process of tutelary assistance from women had been involved in this beginning, and that in an unnoticed way this process had begun with reading the books of Ursula Le Guin: as Le Guin says at the end of The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, a work which is part essay and part story, and is about escaping from a reality which consists of forms of happiness constructed all along on something monstrous: "They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness [...] But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas." Beyond the deluded and delusory happiness of the city of ordinary existence, the joy of the nomads, the joy of travelling into wider spheres of reality.
* * *
*
To a large extent the previous section was concerned with a phase of my life, in 2003, when in a subtle sense I was failing to move substantially forward with the 'projects' or lines of development which were central for me at the time. These can be loosely delineated as writing fiction, travelling into areas beyond the 'urban,' and producing work which engaged philosophically with fictions (in film, TV, and literature) in relation to places which provided the subject or the settings for the fictions (at the outset this primarily was one place - London).
When everything started to change (see Section 34) there were different ways in which I began to do the travelling I had needed to do (I needed to be on my own; and I needed, as much as was possible, to be travelling in semi-wilderness and wilderness terrains - places whose striking aspects helped with becoming-perception, along with the helpful effect of being on my own, again in relation to a departure from the ceaseless flows of words).
And in relation to fictions I not only started to work, with Mark Fisher, on londonunderlondon, but I also (inseparably) started to be pre-eminently engaged in creating fictional worlds, as with the story that is the culmination of this audio-essay.
The impression is that, before we started to work on the actual sequencing/creation of the work there were two last lenses that were put into place, two ways of seeing which in particular were valuable for looking toward technology, cities, and the scurf spaces that surround and permeate cities. The lenses we already had in place were primarily those of Deleuze and Guattari, Virginia Woolf, Ballard, and Castaneda. We now added those of John Foxx's 1980 story "The Quiet Man" (together with other work by Foxx, in particular Systems of Romance, and the text of Cathedral Oceans), and P.J.Hammond's series Sapphire and Steel (and at the same time there was a largely non-deliberate way in which we put to one side the lenses of Lovecraft and Burroughs: the impression I have is that the two new ways of seeing provided a better view of what was most important about what could be seen by means of the work of the two other writers).
This did not immediately have any discernible effect on my production of fictional narratives: the story in londonunderlondon could be described as elements from 90s rave culture crossed with H.G.Wells (but this did not mean that the new optic had no immediate effect at all - the story 'The Quiet Man' is read in full in londondunderlondon, and in 2004 when Mark and I re-watched the fourth series of Sapphire and Steel we noticed the nursery rhyme that would be sampled to form the opening of the piece - "See-saw sacradown, that is the way to London town."). However, in the autumn of 2005 I wrote a story that was the precursor of the novel The Corridor, and this story had the working title "Disappearance." Mark and I then worked on it for two and a half years as the spoken-word basis for a new audio piece (bringing together music for it and recording all the parts, and stopping only at the point where we realised that we had not managed to direct/cast the acting performances we needed, on a budget of zero, for the project we had taken on). The idea was that music would be central to the piece, as with londonunderlondon, and that the listener would have an experience of finding themselves in the middle of something extremely enigmatic, getting tantalising glimpses into a very extraordinary world, a world that you would end up feeling was your own.
Disappearance
Davenant The Ashton group were something
very unusual. They sold drugs – mostly acid and grass – in quite a large-scale
way, but they also saw themselves as an alternative community, a kind of
side-exit to the future. Jess used to say ‘we’re an escape zone, a group
escape’. And maybe this wouldn’t be that interesting, if it wasn’t for the fact
that they did escape. Around 1976 they started dropping out of sight.
Somehow Jess had managed to rent a massively dilapidated mansion in Warwickshire.
And it seems the whole group slowly shifted itself to a new location. Shortly
before this there was a big bust up within the group, and three people left,
leaving six behind. However, when Mike – Mike, who’d helped them set up their
recording studio in the house in Kentish
Town
Mike’s big line about it is “It’s hard to
tell whether they were just having a laugh, or whether they were breaking through
the fabric of reality”.
It was Mike who they told about sound
shadows – though it sounds as if to them it was just one more thing. And it was
Mike who went back to the house years later, in the mid 80s, and found there
was no-one there. I was asking him about Jess, and about all of them, at that
time, and he told me that no-one had a forwarding address. …Two stages of a
Disappearance.
Davenant “There’s more to disappearing than
meets the eye”
Gail -
There was this time when John Davenant was talking about the Ashton group, and he
said “It’s what’s going on now that interests me” And then he said “I think
there’s a kind of parallel emergence about to happen”
Davenant
“And I think we need to be involved. Maybe we need to be involved to
make sure it happens”.
Alan
It was round about that time that everyone started having dreams about a
derelict London London
We think there has been a parallel
emergence. Another world alongside this one – if you want, another dream
on the part of the planet and some of its inhabitants. It started not long
after – maybe immediately after – the Bromley sound shadows experiment.
We think maybe it isn’t stable
– it could collapse back.
There’s
something ‘haunting’ the Chislehurst II World War Research base – and the Aeon
Plasma research unit next-door. Maybe something broke through when the
emergence occurred – maybe it’s now trying to break across to the other world,
and is waiting, trying to build up enough energy, at one of the navel points of
the emergence.
Davenant A sound shadows wall is not
that complex, although there are two whole aspects to it…
To create a sound shadows wall you make a
dense drone track with a wide range of different sonic frequencies co-existing
at each point in the track. This is the sonic wall on which the shadows will
appear, as it were… You then record something – a voice, a dog barking, a
chant, a song, whatever – and taking this recording you use sound-cancelling,
and simple comparatively based reductions, to create a second shadowed drone track which has the
frequencies of the new recording cut out
from it.
Finally, the
second aspect of the wall is that it is made up of micro speakers, and there is
a fringe of speakers, an oval shaped sonic periphery, which plays the original
unshadowed track…
Davenant “Why am I searching for them? To
travel further out into the world, deeper into reality. And maybe mostly
because I want to see Jess again…
Rebecca …It’s to do with Catherine, and something
that happened to me a couple of months ago…
Catherine says she cant
remember any of her dreams, and that she hasn’t been able to remember any of
them since the time when she was dreaming about a forested, derelict London ALL
the time back in May. She nearly remembers, and what she’s dreaming is very
intense, but then she forgets. She says she feels happy in a way, but at the
same time she feels disconcerted. And she said she felt she was off to the side
of her own life, as if her real life was going on elsewhere.
Rebecca
I’ve been wanting to tell
Catherine about what happened, up on the hill, because it seemed to follow on
from what she’d told me in some way, but I haven’t had a chance. And in a way
the strange thing was that it felt more as if I was Catherine in the dream, not
me…
Gail That hill is only five miles away from the
Ashton group’s house. Their old place is down the valley to the south.
They found out recently that there
used to be an ancient white horse on the south side of that hill, like the one
in Wiltshire. A freaky megalith on one side of the hill, and a white horse on
the other.
Rebecca
I felt as if the whole place was … straining to hear … as if even the
stars were watching. The top of the hill seemed intensely silent, intensely aware.
I fell asleep, and I had this… incredible dream. It was strange, I dreamed I
was in the same place, but later in the summer, like September. But the main thing,
the incredible thing, was that I dreamed I was up on the hill – and there was
suddenly this astonishing feeling – because I remembered something – I
remembered that I’d been in another world. I’d been in another world
for a long time.
Gail
I felt there was something very positive about the Plasma Research
place… It was as if I was feeling an energy-current breaking through. Very
positive, but, but, … it was as if it
was crude, or minimal… very minimal energy. The house in Bromley had the real
thing – the thought of what had happened there – it was like feeling a new kind
of joy. The energy current at the house was like… love, and the future, and sex
as well – but the current at Chislehurst was like warmth when you’re cold,
and…bad sex.
But
… this is the important part … I feel the energy current at Chislehurst is just
an extrapolation, an event that is just an unfolding of this world – an
unfolding of the present. But what we think happened at the sound shadows house
– it feels like another world broke through there, as if the future alongside
us broke the barrier and came through. Those people had reached a level of
energy high enough to communicate with a world at a higher level of intensity,
and they crossed over, and became part of a co-existing future. The ultimate
energy-current, the ultimate escape.
Gail
And maybe one way in which this concurrent future can appear is as a
world with only a few humans surrounded by forests and derelict buildings,
apparently 500 years forward in time. Or maybe that’s a place between worlds,
or a place where you attune yourself, acclimatise yourself.
Alan There were these odd
stories about…animals being found trapped in the base.
In
the seventies the deepest part of the base was flooded for a while after a
freak storm. This included the acoustic chamber, the dome shaped, or near-dome
shaped room, with the door half way up. The story is that all through one day
the caretaker kept on hearing an animal swimming in the water. The lights were
out in the room, and the water was full of debris, but he became convinced
there was an animal there, swimming, that had fallen in, and couldn’t get out.
Apparently he kept on saying this afterwards – ‘there was an animal in the
water’. Eventually he waded down the steps a little with his torch, and he saw
a dog in the water, among the debris, apparently half-dead, but still paddling.
He managed to get hold of it and get it out. But apparently he dropped the
torch in the process, and when he picked it up again, the dog had disappeared.
What happened after that gets vague, but what you hear is that he ended up
running screaming out of the base. It’s known that he ended up in a mental
hospital for a while with a diagnosis of a schizophrenic episode, followed by
acute depression. He’s supposed to have said something about coming back into
the deep level corridor after the dog disappeared, and seeing a door where
there shouldn’t have been a door, and seeing the door opening… He’s also
supposed to have had a whole thing that there was another level to the base,
further down…
As you know, it was me and Rebecca who
looked round the base.
We
were in one of the underground parts, and it was … at the same time as the
caretaker was saying he’d meet us at the entrance, that we heard the man
talking, or – singing – in one of the rooms.
What I remember was him saying, or sort
of chanting something like
Mind
the gap, won’t mind me
Mind
the gap, won’t mind me
Rebecca I
heard him singing or talking, in one of the rooms at the end of the corridor.
Everything he said was slightly odd. It was as if he was –nonchalantly -
twisting everything. I remember him using a sort of high, jarring bird-like
voice, and singing something like
Pleeek-Plak
Future’s
coming back
Alan He had long, shaggy hair, and he was
wearing a faded dark jacket-coat kind of thing and a waistcoat, that looked as
if they ‘d drifted in from the nineteenth century, and… green drainpipe jeans.
He kept on playing with something that looked like a length of bird bone, with
tiny lights set into it. He said he worked for Aeon Plasma as a researcher, and
that he was also working part-time at the World War II base categorising
documents. After a while he wandered off singing
Ride
a cock horse to Banbury Cross
And then at one point, while Rebecca was
off in another room, he let me have a glimpse of whatever it was he had in his
left hand. It made me think of a bone of a bird of prey, and it had tiny red
lights set into it in a line. And he said, in a slightly slow, carnival way
“give – it – up – for – the – future!” And he reached out with the same hand to
shake my hand, my left hand. And I nearly did, and then I had some sort of odd
queasy reluctance, and I just shrugged and smiled. And I said, “What bit of the
future is that in your hand?”.
And
he smiled broadly, and said “Just a widget!”
Then
he wandered off to the far side of the room, as if he was offended.
And then… I carried on looking around, and
when I looked back he had gone…
And, as you know, the caretaker said there
was no such person at the base.
Alan
And afterwards I had this very… ugh - disturbing feeling that kept on
coming, and then going, over the next few hours. It reminded me at the time of
a poem – the feeling was like the feeling of the poem:
When
the green field comes off like a lid,
Revealing
what was much better hid –
Unpleasant:
And
look, behind you without a sound
The
woods have come up and are standing round
In
deadly crescent.
The
bolt is sliding in its groove;
Outside
the window is the black
Remover’s
van
And
now with sudden swift emergence
Come
the hooded women, the hump-backed surgeons
And
the Scissor Man.
[W.H.Auden - "The Two"]
Gail Maybe… it has been gathering
strength – increasing its strength over the years. Maybe when it was weaker it
was …an energy field that could only give the impression of being an animal.
The dog in the water… And maybe by now it can give the impression of being a
human. And my instinct is that it tries to get people to touch it, willingly,
and then somehow takes energy from them… A rogue entity that got lucky – it was
haunting a power-place, a power-place that became one of the focal points for
the emergence. And now maybe it’s trying
to break upwards into the reality at the higher level of intensity…
Alan We don’t know why Aeon Plasma was
closed. It was shut down for two weeks. And the rumour was that they were
investigating whether a by-product of one of their processes was the creation
of a hallucinogenic substance. And we heard from the caretaker that a
technician had got into a freaked state about things that had been happening,
and had started developing a theory about what he called a ‘plasma entity’ or a
‘plasma intruder’. It sounds as if people have been seeing things…
Rebecca John Davenant said that Callum and Jess had
found out about sound shadows when they were living near Felixstowe sometime
around 1970. They were living in a ramshackle place in the middle of nowhere,
and they somehow got to know this old radar and sonic technology specialist –
his name was something like Peter Eslin – who had worked at Bawdsey Radar base
with Watson Watt, and had worked at the Chislehurst base…
Its amazing round there – north of
Felixstowe – all concrete pillboxes, and
Neolithic burial circles, and rotting coastal defences, and …eldritch,
very quiet heathland… as if
the land is all out at sea…
Alan It seems as if they used both sound
shadows and light shadows, using the same wall. As you know, they’d set up a
spotlight at the far end of the room. It seems like that was their innovation –
what they added to the room. Sound shadows and light shadows on one wall. Maybe
they simply sat in front of the light, and went into a trance state. Maybe they
used mushrooms or LSD. Maybe they didn’t stay sitting down. Dancing with
shadows.
We don’t have much to go on . A few
texts and phone calls to us, before, and
one text after they had started. Later,
possibly three days later, they were seen in the evening on Casford Common
‘laughing and behaving strangely’. Casford Common, and that’s the last we know
of them.
They each created a character, an
intense persona, with a whole world of extraordinary interests and traits and
past experiences, and anomalous projects. And the aim was to play a game, as it
were – play the game that they had come together to use any means available or
discoverable to achieve a displacement from their ordinary forms of perception
and understanding.
They could use anything – drugs,
trance-states, frightening stories, music, the bizarre map they drew on the
walls, ceiling and floor in one of the rooms.
But, of course, what would be
the difference between this event and the real thing? No difference. Beyond
what they’d dreamed up for their characters, at depth, they were setting out to
break open their contact with the world.
The use of different personas
seems like a brilliant way of wiping all the default habits of their ordinary
ways of living. Maybe they were left only with the intensity, the openness, the
freedom, and were without the blocking mechanisms. They broke with their
habits, as just one element of an overall attempt to break through to a deeper,
wider level of reality.
They maybe also told stories from the
pasts they would have been creating as they went along. How to get at the
fundamental thing, the powerful insight, while talking about an event from your
past that never happened. Or, did it never happen? Who knows who we are, or
what’s happened to us? After all there’s an 8 hour gap in our memory every 24
hours…
Ingor
Well, I interviewed John Davenant last November, and then he went off to Carcassonne
Yeah…
I spent a whole week living in the house… and then Rebecca was there for the
last three days. It was, what was that
word? …eerie. It was eerie. And brilliant… and crazy. Thinking about how they’d
all just disappeared… The people out in their streets, in their suburban leaf world, leafy world… The sunshine out there, and this ordinary house where
they’d all… vanished.
And … eventually we got the sound shadows wall
working… And a thunderstorm started….
One of their notes in the sound shadows room…
they’ve said… I’ll read it –
“Voice
– if you use ordinary spoken voice, talk about the most intense things
possible, then listen to it in small sections, and as you listen to it stop
thinking and try to think of the WORLDS
from which the writing is coming, the WORLDS that are finding expression
through the writing…”
I’ve
been feeling like my life’s been ... turned sideways... I was staring at a wall
for some reason – the wall was the ordinary human world - and I couldnt move my
head – and then I’ve done it, and
there’s a door at the end of the corridor, and an amazing world beyond the
door...
Gail
…Yes, did I see Jess? … John Davenant thought I did… I went to see the Ashton
group’s old house, before I went back to Canada
I
said something about the time of year, and the woman said ... she said most
human lives never get beyond winter... And she said that getting beyond winter
is a journey into Now – she said, sometimes there’s a Click inside, or – this
is what she said - like a coin hits a
pavement, and everything stops, and you discover you’re in a desert... a
desert which is also a jungle...
Gail It was … a lagoon, in an overgrown
container terminal by the sea. Huge cliffs of containers, covered in vines,
small trees growing all over them, containers teetering out, buckled into each
other. And a lagoon, all silted up with sand, but with bright clear water. And
to start with there was this fox that had something tied round a paw. I thought
it was wire, but then it seemed to be string, like purple string… And then it
all became really clear – I was by the lagoon, and there was a woman standing
out in the water. There was a glitter from something in the water, and she reached
down and came up with this beautiful armband, an armband – it was a coil of
metal, very simple - it glittered in the sun and left me with the impression
of… lightning, more than of metal… And somebody was saying something
like
“
ITS FOCUSING NOW” or ITS FOCUSING NOW. Or both
Or
both… It woke me… In the dream I knew that the woman was Jess… And she was the
woman I’d seen in the road by the house…
[barely
audible in parts, slowed down, perforated, modified...]
Gail And then I was asleep again for a moment,
and there was this thing… I was in a house, but it felt as if it was the house
in Warwickshire, and a woman with a laughing voice said the words ‘sorceress-nomads’…
as if she was showing she understood something…. And a man laughed - it was as if
he was agreeing - and he said ‘sorceress-nomads of the Suffolk Steppe…’
Rebecca Catherine said she knows three
people that feel the same as her – calm
but unsettled, she said, and they can’t remember their dreams… There’s a friend
of hers in London who’s started obsessively collecting pictures of ruined overgrown
buildings, and postcards of the countryside…
Alan I have this feeling that hundreds of
people have been swept up in it.
I
think it followed lines of friendships, and people with an initial affinity for
space, not time…
Gail We all think the dreams are the real
clue. Forests, empty overgrown towns or
cities in the future. There was sunlight in all of the dreams, and a … a
hard-to-describe positive feeling, and some of us had the idea… that there were
pockets of people… My dream where I was
trying to walk toward a town that I knew was unchanged, and I knew there were
people living there…
Stina Yes,
I dreamed I was in a town, sunlight and empty streets, beautiful houses. But
i’d seen the town from a distance first – it was surrounded by trees, forested…
low hills... I felt there were people
around… And then at one point there was
a man in the street with me. I was looking at the sky above the houses, and I was feeling really happy, because i had
realised I was dreaming, and I was still dreaming. And then there was this man
alongside me, telling me things,
laughing… He said he’d been there at the beginning of it…
He
said other things I couldn’t remember…
He
said they call this world the Disaster, and they call the forested-derelict world
the Corridor.
…They
call the ordinary world the Disaster, and the emergence world the Corridor…
Gail We need to talk to Catherine. And we
should maybe go back up to the Ashton group’s house. And go to the hill with
the hidden white horse! I don’t think there’s a single source for the emergence
– I think there’s a lot of strands, but the Ashton group seems to be one of the
oldest…
*
The point of including this text is not at all to suggest that it has any particular merit in itself (it is in any case the basis for a work that was never made, as opposed to something that has been completed). On one level it is being quoted because it is precursor material for the novel The Corridor (Sections 16, 26,27,28,43), and also for the audio-essay On Vanishing Land. However, it is also being included because it indicates a stage in a process of a Departure that involved the whole of a life, and not just the development in relation to writing stories and to thought/philosophy.
The process of leaving behind my life - as it had previously been constituted - had begun in 2003, and had now moved me a long way into new modes of experience. When I had finished writing "Disappearance" I had been living without a house for most of two years. This very enjoyable phase would soon have come to an end, in that I was about to get a 'base' again, but there was a deep level at which I was not coming back. My life was still very much a tangled mess of unfinished developments and projects, but in coming back to the urban I was not coming back to an urbane existence where the planetary is far in the background, and where connections and directions are not pervasively chosen on the basis of creativity, and joy and the waking of the faculties.
When I arrived in the mountains of northern Spain, in August of 2005, I no longer had a house, and for two weeks I had been putting up and taking down my tent in a different area of woodland on the periphery of London, continuing to work as normal but with my possessions in storage in an attic a flat being rented by some friends, apart from those I could carry with me. By the time I arrived in Barcelona at the end of the three weeks of the holiday I had the main idea for what would eventually become the novel The Corridor (but which initially would become the audio-essay text, Disappearance), and in the FNAC bookshop in the centre of the city I started alternating between reading the beginnings of two novels, both of which involved enigmatic places in remote areas, and a further story-idea arrived which initially seemed unconnected. When I came back I continued to live without a house, and in the next three months I wrote a first draft of the audio-essay text.
It is now possible to summarise in relation to a large-scale process in which I started to write fiction, and most, specifically, in which I moved toward writing The Corridor.
In 1995 I moved from Coventry to Leamington, and in the two years afterwards I had a series of dreams about a house in the middle of a forest, where this house was a few miles away from Malton in North Yorkshire (later I would transpose this house to Suffolk, and it would become the primary location for the events for the events in the novel). In the spring of 1997 I went for a walk along the Leamington canal, walking away from the town, and an idea for a story arrived which concerned a human-world threshold crossing called 'the cusp,' and I made a first attempt to write down a story. In 1999 I went to Harbury Lake, and while sitting by the lake the idea arrived for the story Ktarizon: Deep Water (and then a year later when I stayed overnight at the lake the idea returned to me, and I started to work on the detail: this time I did not forget the project, and a few months later I finished the writing - the first time I had completed a story (Section 18)). In 2004 I went walking in the Pyrenees, and something that was as much a thought-experiment as a story was transformed into a full story-world. And in 2005 in the Sierra de la Demanda in northern Spain the main idea for The Corridor came to me, and then four days later, in a Barcelona bookshop I arrived at an idea which two years afterwards (after having appeared to be something separate from the main 'Corridor' line of thought) would become a crucial part of the novel - Carswell Hall in Somerset. And lastly, the final phase of getting crucial ideas for The Corridor was the arrival of the ideas of Miranda, the woman in green, and the man with shells sewn onto his coat, and these ideas primarily arrived on two occasions: the first was when I was on the top of a low but steep-sided mountain in western Mongolia, on a hot day in 2007, and the second was very early in the morning, after I had stayed overnight at Harbury Lake, in the summer of 2009.
The main issue here is a current of development that very clearly involves movements away from urban worlds, and a second issue (which is central in the current context) is the alteration that occurred in the phase from 2003 to 2005, an alteration that allowed an intensification of the underlying process. And before making three points about "Disappearance" (that together will provide a way forward) it should be pointed out that the alteration in question had taken me toward a more effective intellectual and creative alliance with Mark Fisher, clearing the space in which the work could be done. I moved toward a phase of working with Mark in a way that was similar to the valuable conversations with Nial Jinks from Scritti Politti (Section 35), during the last of which Nial showed me a copy of a book by Deleuze, saying he thought that this was the future. Only with Mark it could be said that the new elements were "The Quiet Man" / Sapphire and Steel, and two areas that were beyond the centre of London - Bromley, and coastal terrains of Suffolk extending north and west from Felixstowe (it can be seen that the focus on places also led away from the urban).
The first observation to make about the audio-essay text is that it shows a high degree of 'becoming woman,' in the sense that there are many female voices (more female voices than male ones), and in the - more important - sense that by the end the voices of John Davenant, Alan and Gail are being supplanted by a focus on Jess as source of explanations, with the figures of Gail, Jess, Catherine and Stina occupying the foreground. There is a shift from a male figure who seems to be a kind of anthropologist/sound technology expert, to a figure who is a traveller into wider levels of reality, a figure who appears more in the text as female than male - the figure of the laughingly described 'sorceress-nomad.' And it can be added that this change within the text was paralleled by an ongoing shift that was intrinsic to my life at this time: it was during these years that I formed relationships with women that were all exceptionally 'tutelary,' but where not one of these relationships was tutelary in any deliberate, one-to-one sense. It was during the years around the time when I wrote this text that I met my partner Maysa; that I began friendships and intellectual-alliances with four very extraordinary women (some of whose voices appear in londonunderlondon); that I started to read the novels of Ursula Le Guin; and - a little after the other developments - that I at last embarked on reading the philosophical works of Florinda Donner, Carol Tiggs, and Taisha Abelar.
The second observation is double, or has two aspects: the text is planetary in terms of its primary focus, and, despite its many weaknesses, it is structured to some extent along the lines of what can be called the 'modality of the definitive terrain' - the modality of an exploration-nomadism consisting of waking the faculties and crossing thresholds of perception-of-the-world.
The point of including this text is not at all to suggest that it has any particular merit in itself (it is in any case the basis for a work that was never made, as opposed to something that has been completed). On one level it is being quoted because it is precursor material for the novel The Corridor (Sections 16, 26,27,28,43), and also for the audio-essay On Vanishing Land. However, it is also being included because it indicates a stage in a process of a Departure that involved the whole of a life, and not just the development in relation to writing stories and to thought/philosophy.
The process of leaving behind my life - as it had previously been constituted - had begun in 2003, and had now moved me a long way into new modes of experience. When I had finished writing "Disappearance" I had been living without a house for most of two years. This very enjoyable phase would soon have come to an end, in that I was about to get a 'base' again, but there was a deep level at which I was not coming back. My life was still very much a tangled mess of unfinished developments and projects, but in coming back to the urban I was not coming back to an urbane existence where the planetary is far in the background, and where connections and directions are not pervasively chosen on the basis of creativity, and joy and the waking of the faculties.
When I arrived in the mountains of northern Spain, in August of 2005, I no longer had a house, and for two weeks I had been putting up and taking down my tent in a different area of woodland on the periphery of London, continuing to work as normal but with my possessions in storage in an attic a flat being rented by some friends, apart from those I could carry with me. By the time I arrived in Barcelona at the end of the three weeks of the holiday I had the main idea for what would eventually become the novel The Corridor (but which initially would become the audio-essay text, Disappearance), and in the FNAC bookshop in the centre of the city I started alternating between reading the beginnings of two novels, both of which involved enigmatic places in remote areas, and a further story-idea arrived which initially seemed unconnected. When I came back I continued to live without a house, and in the next three months I wrote a first draft of the audio-essay text.
It is now possible to summarise in relation to a large-scale process in which I started to write fiction, and most, specifically, in which I moved toward writing The Corridor.
In 1995 I moved from Coventry to Leamington, and in the two years afterwards I had a series of dreams about a house in the middle of a forest, where this house was a few miles away from Malton in North Yorkshire (later I would transpose this house to Suffolk, and it would become the primary location for the events for the events in the novel). In the spring of 1997 I went for a walk along the Leamington canal, walking away from the town, and an idea for a story arrived which concerned a human-world threshold crossing called 'the cusp,' and I made a first attempt to write down a story. In 1999 I went to Harbury Lake, and while sitting by the lake the idea arrived for the story Ktarizon: Deep Water (and then a year later when I stayed overnight at the lake the idea returned to me, and I started to work on the detail: this time I did not forget the project, and a few months later I finished the writing - the first time I had completed a story (Section 18)). In 2004 I went walking in the Pyrenees, and something that was as much a thought-experiment as a story was transformed into a full story-world. And in 2005 in the Sierra de la Demanda in northern Spain the main idea for The Corridor came to me, and then four days later, in a Barcelona bookshop I arrived at an idea which two years afterwards (after having appeared to be something separate from the main 'Corridor' line of thought) would become a crucial part of the novel - Carswell Hall in Somerset. And lastly, the final phase of getting crucial ideas for The Corridor was the arrival of the ideas of Miranda, the woman in green, and the man with shells sewn onto his coat, and these ideas primarily arrived on two occasions: the first was when I was on the top of a low but steep-sided mountain in western Mongolia, on a hot day in 2007, and the second was very early in the morning, after I had stayed overnight at Harbury Lake, in the summer of 2009.
The main issue here is a current of development that very clearly involves movements away from urban worlds, and a second issue (which is central in the current context) is the alteration that occurred in the phase from 2003 to 2005, an alteration that allowed an intensification of the underlying process. And before making three points about "Disappearance" (that together will provide a way forward) it should be pointed out that the alteration in question had taken me toward a more effective intellectual and creative alliance with Mark Fisher, clearing the space in which the work could be done. I moved toward a phase of working with Mark in a way that was similar to the valuable conversations with Nial Jinks from Scritti Politti (Section 35), during the last of which Nial showed me a copy of a book by Deleuze, saying he thought that this was the future. Only with Mark it could be said that the new elements were "The Quiet Man" / Sapphire and Steel, and two areas that were beyond the centre of London - Bromley, and coastal terrains of Suffolk extending north and west from Felixstowe (it can be seen that the focus on places also led away from the urban).
The first observation to make about the audio-essay text is that it shows a high degree of 'becoming woman,' in the sense that there are many female voices (more female voices than male ones), and in the - more important - sense that by the end the voices of John Davenant, Alan and Gail are being supplanted by a focus on Jess as source of explanations, with the figures of Gail, Jess, Catherine and Stina occupying the foreground. There is a shift from a male figure who seems to be a kind of anthropologist/sound technology expert, to a figure who is a traveller into wider levels of reality, a figure who appears more in the text as female than male - the figure of the laughingly described 'sorceress-nomad.' And it can be added that this change within the text was paralleled by an ongoing shift that was intrinsic to my life at this time: it was during these years that I formed relationships with women that were all exceptionally 'tutelary,' but where not one of these relationships was tutelary in any deliberate, one-to-one sense. It was during the years around the time when I wrote this text that I met my partner Maysa; that I began friendships and intellectual-alliances with four very extraordinary women (some of whose voices appear in londonunderlondon); that I started to read the novels of Ursula Le Guin; and - a little after the other developments - that I at last embarked on reading the philosophical works of Florinda Donner, Carol Tiggs, and Taisha Abelar.
The second observation is double, or has two aspects: the text is planetary in terms of its primary focus, and, despite its many weaknesses, it is structured to some extent along the lines of what can be called the 'modality of the definitive terrain' - the modality of an exploration-nomadism consisting of waking the faculties and crossing thresholds of perception-of-the-world.
The piece is planetary in its focus because, even though there is a lot of emphasis on specific places there is no focus on countries, and there is an emphatically transnational quality to the characters, along with the presence within the text of the derelict-forested world, which evidently in itself is not part of the human social domain. As the text continues the names of characters (Stina, Ingor) start to come from areas around the Baltic, rather than from Britain; Gail talks about going to Canada; Davenant goes off to Carcasonne and does not come back. This is the transnational element, but the planetary horizon of this attribute is made explicit through the forest expanses of 'the Corridor.' And this leads, in turn, to the depth-level reason for the text being planetary, which is the fact that the emergent parallel world is seen as "a new dream of the planet."
The modality of the definitive terrain is finding expression within the writing because an idea intrinsic to it is that the individuals and groups within the story (as well as them existing within the planetary horizon) might all be involved in processes of crossing thresholds of existence, where these thresholds involve a movement toward perception of "a wider, deeper level of reality." This is even true of the sinister - or at best ambiguous - 'rogue entity' within the story: it is trying to 'break upwards' into a level of reality at a higher degree of intensity. I did not deliberately create this aspect in writing the piece, but there is a commonality between all of the beings - human and non-human - within the world of the story. The key element in this context is what is said in relation to the disappearance of the group that meet at the house in Bromley, but even the rogue entity becomes part of the field of expression that figures the modality.
The third observation is that in writing this story I have moved into the vicinity of the tale - taking the tale to be a story which has an anomalous element or elements, and which has a primacy of landscape and events in relation to development of characters. And here it can be said that a main influence is Sapphire and Steel, the stories of which are evidently - though in an unusual sense - quintessential tales, or ur-tales, in that there is a primacy of landscape and events, there are anomalous elements, and (very unusually) the two protagonists are not only given no psychological development but they are anomalous in themselves, in that they are not human. The rogue entity in "Disappearance" has clearly arrived in the story from the direction of Sapphire and Steel. It is true that everything to do with the entity having taken the form of 'the dog in the water' (for instance, it trying to bring about physical contact with humans) is not taken from the series, but the figure who Rebecca and Alan encounter could easily have walked straight across from the sixth series of P.J.Hammond's creation: the nonchalant, insouciant manner, the enigmatic clothes and the nursery rhymes mark out the figure as a close cousin of both 'Johnny Jack' and 'Silver' in the concluding series.
It can be seen that the tale can have many forms (and that these forms include gothic tales such as the stories of M.R.James), and that many of the works which are most valuable as lenses for seeing the world will be in a border area between tales and other kinds of story, or will include anomalous beings or aspects, but without them being tales at all. It can also be seen that what you include at the outset in terms of the anomalous is likely to be fundamental to the unfolding of the story (whether, in fact, it is a tale, a novel, or a play etc.), and simultaneously that it might make sense to stay close on some level to actual experiences in constructing the anomalous aspects, in order to avoid the nebulous and sometimes metaphysically deleterious expanses of horror-tales, and fantasy stories. Gothic 'warnings to the curious' and the different forms (implicit or explicit) of religious paratexts are the worst disasters here, but alongside these unhealthy outcomes there are the possible nebulous results of starting with fetched-from-far, beyond-experience anomalous elements, results that involve a failure on the part of the expressive field of the work to bring the definitive terrain into focus.
As I had thought he would, Mark liked the idea of the entity which is trying to break upwards into further levels of reality, and he liked the passage about the dog swimming in the water (a kind of micro-tale, which we were both thinking about in terms of the music we would put with it). I felt overall that my starting-points in relation to the anomalous (the rogue-entity, and the Corridor) were effective as philosophico-narrative initial elements, and that Sapphire and Steel and "The Quiet Man" had been valuable as lenses, and in a way where a part of what had been involved had been a process of me being brought more into contact with my own experiences.
Part of this is to say that I had found a way of including views toward zones which were in the direction of the gothic (zones which perhaps were as close to transcendental north as to transcendental south). But my attention was now increasingly being drawn toward zones which were either eerie-sublime or were in the fullest sense opposite the gothic, and insofar as the northward-outside was going to be involved in my writing, I knew that these darker anomalous views were going to have to be fine-tuned, so that they became more closely connected to my experiences, rather than less.
But to go back to the first of the three observations, it is necessary to orientate all of this account to an encounter with the novels of Ursula Le Guin that began at the time when I was writing the text being discussed, an encounter with the work of a very extraordinary writer of stories.
In January or February of 2006 I read The Lathe of Heaven, and there is a strange quality about the memory of this event: it produces an impression which is a bit like hearing thunder in the distance.
Le Guin had a direct or indirect involvement in most of the traditions on which I was drawing for my work: she was a writer of stories which looked toward the transcendental-empirical; she was a thinker in a way that was inseparably philosophical and political; she had a highly developed ability in relation to anthropology, connecting her work to Deleuze and Guattari, and to Castaneda; as a political thinker she thought in terms of micropolitcs and rhizomic social worlds as opposed to nation-states; she was a dreamer who had worked her way free of religion (she described herself as 'a consistent un-Christian;'), and she drew substantially on the ancient philosophy in Tao Te Ching; she was a writer who avoided becoming fixated on the gothic, on transcendental north.
I feel that Le Guin assisted me in terms of learning how to leap. Her works heartened me, gave me more courage to follow the lines of stories even if the leap had taken me a very long way out from my experience, and even if the direction seemed to be somewhere to the side of transcendental south - and in a complex way her stories gave me coordinates for an overall forward movement in relation to creating virtual-real worlds.
Whatever were the problems involved, I could see that a whole revolutionary line of thought within science fiction and speculative fiction had reached a kind of culminating point in The Lathe of Heaven. I could see that the accounts of the anomalous oneiric and cognitive modalities in the societies in The Left Hand of Darkness and The Word for World is Forest were an extraordinary effectuation of the liberated form of the anthropological optic. And I could also see that Le Guin had substantially heightened and augmented an entire fantasy tradition that went back through 19th century writers in the direction of shamanic tales, and that (in a world where the 1940s break with the past had radically lowered the kudos of this kind of writing, unless it was ultra-epic in form, and heavily threaded with the gothic) she had quietly done this in a way that was accessible to children as well as adults (leaving these books in danger of being perceived as not for adults at all, but as only for young adults and children).
*
As I brought together the elements of The Corridor and as I wrote it (the overall process lasted about six years) dozens of stories came to me, of many different kinds, and I wrote down a large number of them. Two of these should be included at this point. The ideas for both of them arrived before the beginning of the main process of writing the novel, and it is as if they both show an awareness, in two very different ways, of an 'attractor' in the form of the childrens' tale, and as if the gravitational field of this attractor is being avoided, or partly avoided. In attempting to move in the opposite direction from the gothic there are subtle things that can go wrong, and these stories belong to a precursor phase in which a process of attunement was taking place.
they will hear you
singing
I was ten years old when the diminutive warrior woman died in my arms. I
was in the wood beyond the market garden, and I buried her, using a spade, in a
glade of beech trees. When I came back the next day to mark her grave with a
stone, some creature had scooped into the soil, and it seemed her scar-covered
body had been taken. Sobbing, and frightened, I probed into the earth with a
stick and found no trace. I replaced the soil, and left the stone, a big grey
river pebble with a ring of quartz, on the ravaged grave - the only tribute I
could make.
After that, of course, I set out dedicatedly to forget all about what
had happened. This dedication was not in a sense deliberate, it was just that
the world would not allow it to be the case that the events had occurred, and I
did not want be treated as insane, or as a liar. The first phase of the
forgetting was me refusing to think about it, the second phase was the idea
that maybe it had all been a dream, and the third phase was the conviction that
it must have been a dream. It is only
now – now that I have acquired the habit of re-connecting myself with my most positive
experiences - that this steadfast act of forgetting has been rescinded.
I had always done a lot of singing, and I know my songs became more
pensive for a while, but it would not have been long before they returned to
being expressions of exuberance and amusement. For most of my life it has been
strictly unnoticed for me that I write songs – I have always regarded them as
spontaneous ‘nothings’ that come and then go.
The Brackens had been given to my mother by her father. It was a small,
ramshackle cottage, with a few acres of cultivated ground attached, near the
top of a low hill, in the “weald” area of Sussex. My father had a restaurant in
London, and he grew vegetables for it in the market garden. Every summer we
would go together to stay in the cottage.
That holiday the weather was sunny almost the entire time. My brother
had gone to Cornwall to stay with a friend. But I adored staying at The
Brackens, and even though I was on my own I don’t think I ever felt that I had
been left out.
I got into the habit of going into the woodland
at the foot of the vegetable garden, and doing something which I thought of as
‘daydreaming’. When I started, I was
living out stories – a girl’s romantic, epic worlds; ongoing, eerily beautiful adventures. But as it went on I would start this way, but
then, sometime later, I would find that I was waking up from an amazing dream
that I could not quite remember. The process became more - somnambulistic.
Although I’m not sure how much I moved around. It was more that I would be
standing, or sitting on my knees, semi-looking at a glade, or into some area of
undergrowth and woodland flowers, and I would be daydreaming – and then at some point maybe ten
minutes later, I would wake up from a dream.
What I remember is that I had been told that at a certain point that very
soon it would be vital for me to stand up back in the wood, and wake up. My
memories of the world in which I was told this remain hazy, as if they consist
primarily of feelings and knowledge of circumstances, rather than perceptions.
What I remember is that the people in this world were involved in a
life-and-death struggle, and that it was necessary for me to stand up, and wake up, when I was given the signal.
The signal came, and I responded by standing up, but at that point the
events in front of me were so compelling that, as I started to stand up, I kept
looking at what was happening. I had been told to wake up, as well as stand up,
and with an aspect of my vision I was seeing the trees and the forest floor,
but mostly I was seeing something else entirely. I raised myself up completely,
straightening my knees and back.
And then they were all there. Six beings from the other world, ten feet
away, facing me, and two invader entities with their backs to me, in between me
and the six beings, crouched, on the edge of an attack.
The female being in the centre of the group was
incredibly beautiful. She was wearing
diaphanous green that seemed to lie across her body like sunlight or water. And
she was a lithe, supple world of intense energy – as if she was filled with
summer sunlight, or lightning. I knew she was the leader, and that the fight to
the death which was about to happen would be centred on her. She was pointing
her spear – which was a splinter of bright energy, more than a piece of metal -
with calm ferocity at the nearer of the two attackers, who I knew had been
lured there by me waking up. She and the other two human-like beings – they
were all about eighteen inches in height - were riding on creatures that were
like tall narrow faces, with long wings. I knew these beings were called troll-hawks.
Their features had a kind of lugubrious quality and gave the impression they
were made of something like grey dough, but at that moment there was a fierce
glitter of concentration in their eyes, and their wings were beating with
furious speed, as they held themselves just above the ground, wavering slightly
in height and direction all the time.
The creatures which I knew to be invader entities were five feet away from me, and the same
distance from the warriors they were confronting.
They were like nothing I have ever seen, and
there were moments when they gave the impression of being gaps in the world,
rather than things with substance.
They were black, but as they moved streaks of
livid orange flashed off their bodies, giving the them the impression of being
roiling lava, a lava so hot that it was a vapour. They were in the air, two
feet off the ground - beneath their bodies there was a movement too fast to be
seen, other than as the faintest of blurs.
It seemed that they had the attribute of extreme lightness, and that
they had wings that were moving at a terrifying speed. Their bodies were two and
a half feet long with small clawed arms at the front, and they were acutely
sinuous. They were no more than six
inches wide in the middle, and they tapered to a swept-back head with slit-like
flashing eyes - eyes that showed a disturbing level of intelligence - and to a
thin menacing tail that was evidently a weapon.
There seemed to be an amorphousness about them,
a property of them being blurred around the edges, but if you focused on their
bodies, and not on their eyes, it was more possible to see their contours.
Their eyes were by far the most disturbing thing about them.
One of them was about to attack the female
leader of the beings from the other world. The other, which was on the left and
nearer was alternating between looking at me, and looking at the six fighters.
There was a moment when it turned back away
from me.
I knew the attack was about to start.
I shouted with fury – NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
As I shouted I lunged forward with my upper
body, although it was a declaration of support, rather than any attempt to
fight the creatures. It was not even a feint, a pretend attack.
But it was enough.
There was a split second when both of the
entities started to turn back to me, and then, without any warning, they
changed direction – moving at immense speed they shot upwards into the sky and disappeared out of sight
above the trees.
The troll-hawk on my left – which was being ridden by a male fighter –
went up straightaway to the top of the tree canopy, and I saw the female
fighter on my left respond to what seemed to be an instruction to circle round
at ground level in the undergrowth beyond the edge of the glade.
The tiny woman got her troll-hawk to rotate slowly in a circle on the
spot, and then settled back in my direction.
She gave me a huge smile.
“It was vital that you stood up here, while still seeing us.” she said.
She smiled again, transmitting an immense, twinkling warmth.
I felt moved by the fact that I was being treated as an adult. It wasn’t
that I felt she thought I was an adult – I felt sure she knew I was just a young girl –, it was that she was talking
to me as someone who was in some sense on the same level, even if I did not
have the same abilities.
I was astonished by how beautiful she was. She embodied a delicate, fiery
beauty that was almost dazzling. Her hair was a subtle light green colour, and
it flowed down in wild curly waves onto her shoulders. She had a very pretty
face that shone with her feminine lightness, and – inseparably – with her
fierce, warrior intelligence.
Her clothes were diaphanous green, a skirt with
a violet coloured belt, and a top with loose sleeves. They were both made of
more than one layer of a very transparent gauzy fabric, revealing curves of her
slim and very lovely body. Across the front of her torso and running up her
shins were plates of a heavy fabric that seemed to be leather, and these were
attached with cords. I knew
instinctively that on one level her clothes were weapons – they were designed
to dazzle in combat, to distract attention, and to cast a glamour that would
confuse an attacker.
The two other troll-hawks, with their riders, had returned, and had
resumed their original positions to the left and right.
The male troll-hawk, on the left, spoke slowly and calmly.
“The dthagonarth have been in
higher dimensions. They are far more dangerous than we had realised. “
He looked at me with respect, with affection.
“The girl was an unknown for them. Her courage made them falter, because
such courage meant that they could not risk her being behind them, given she
was still unknown to them. Her courage is very great.”
“It is vital that we lured the dthagonarth
to this dimension. But it is unlikely we will survive our attack on them.”
At that moment we were all looking
toward each other, and then there was a kind of special click that seemed to be both about perceiving everything at a
sharper level, and about reaching out toward the other perspectives. For a
moment, I was all seven of us. I was the
tiny woman, I was the other woman warrior on the right, I was the man on my
left, I was the troll-hawk who had spoken, I was the other two troll-hawks. And
they were all me – we were a ring of beings. I felt so much in that moment – I
felt their warmth, their warrior poise, I felt the sensations of their very
different bodies, I felt their awareness that they might be about to die.
And then it was over. I knew – because I had
also known their thoughts – that there was no more time. It was too dangerous
to continue.
Suddenly they were all up at the height of
my head. The woman on the right looked at me with a nodding, bright smile which
seemed to be a positive comment on what had happened the moment before.
And the female leader
of the group called out -
“Come here every day at
this time, if you can!”
Then, in a rush of
swiftly beating wings, they were gone.
Three days later, I found her – the warrior
leader – in the same wide glade of beech trees. I feel she must have been
waiting in a tree, but when I first saw her she was limping towards me, ashen
faced, covered in wounds and bruises, and with a bandage made of moss strapped
across her chest.
“I am
so glad you have come,” she said,
shaking slightly as she spoke. “It has been a lonely wait, in this beautiful,
alien forest.”
I had knelt down in front of her to get my face
close to hers, and to hear her voice. Tears were already coming into my eyes.
When
she spoke again her words were calm.
“All
of my comrades are dead. And I am now dying. We followed the dthagonarth to the mountains you call the
Himalayas. They attempted to ambush us in a ruined monastery.
We killed the dthagonarth. They were advance scouts from a hostile world that
would have set out to envelop and enslave our realm.
There is no name light enough and fast enough in your language for who
we are. But let’s say that we are sirix.
Warrior sirix... We have learned how
to dream, and also how to fight what attacks us, how to defend our dreams.
A small warm light appeared in her hand. She reached out, and said ‘take
this’. I held out my palm, and the light disappeared into my hand, and I felt it go
into my body.
“You are the only survivor of the successful combat against the two
higher dimension dthagonarth.”
“You are my successor. You will visit our land in dreams, but it will be
a gigantic task for you to remember these visits, and an even greater task for
you to find a way of crossing to the realm while awake. Your warrior sirix comrades will be aware of you, and
will try to help, though there will be little they can do. They will long for
you to arrive in our realm, and they will sing your songs – they will hear you
singing. You are the new leader of the warrior sirix. You are the new sirix
queen.”
* * *
The Bowl
It was now three months later. Although she was having many extraordinary
dreams, in some of which she was Rebecca, nothing fundamentally new had
happened. She felt her whole life had been transformed, but she had not ‘met’
Katch again. Her friends’ lives seemed to have become much more stormy, and she
wondered if this was an indication of a change taking place. However, this was
speculation, rather than a confirmation of her experiences, and it was also
true that, despite her doing all she could to help them, the complexities of
their lives meant she now had less of their companionship. She was on her own.
*
It had started on a hot sunny day in the middle of June.
She had been thinking about her friends, Maggie and Conrad,
who had been missing for two months, on an anthropological trip to an area of
Amazon rainforest in the far west of
Brazil. It had been making her feel sad, and introspective. The area
where her friends were missing was dangerous, because of clashes between
indigenous people and miners, and she knew they could be in trouble – or could
have been killed.
She had decided to sort through the dusty collection of
pottery in the attic. The previous owners had left this collection in old
crates and chests, and her father had accepted its presence without feeling any
need to do anything about it. She felt the way her father probably had – the
objects were beautiful, and seemed to belong there, but none of them seemed to
be quite striking enough to be taken away from their attic slumber.
This time, near the bottom of a tea chest, she found a
large, indigo blue vase, wrapped in newspaper. She gave a little cry of
happiness when she saw it. There was a pool a few fields away which had orange
irises growing in it, and she knew immediately that she would pick some of
these flowers, and put them in the vase.
And then she saw the bowl. If it was a bowl.
It was at the very
bottom of the chest, wrapped in newspaper. It was circular, and made of a wood
with an intricate, fluid grain, that she felt was probably walnut. It was maybe
ten inches across, and a little less than that in height, and it seemed it was
about half an inch thick at every point. It looked as if it had been hand-made,
with an adze, or a tool of that kind. It was hard to tell, but it gave the
impression of being many years old.
However, what was striking about it was that its base was
rounded – it was made not to stand up, but to balance on the ‘point’ of its
roughly hemispherical surface. Putting it down on the dusty floorboards of the
attic, into a patch of sunlight coming through a dormer window, she felt it had
been designed more as a ‘spinning top’ than as a bowl. Idly, she spun it, and
watched it spinning lazily but fast, and for a very long time, in the bright
June sunlight, light coming from a sun at midsummer zenith.
She went downstairs carrying both the bowl and the vase in a
cardboard box. Two friends were arriving sometime in the mid-afternoon – it was
time to start getting ready.
*
When Kelly came into the living room she threw herself
happily into an armchair.
“I love this room” she said. “Its great to be back”. She
felt Kelly had got into the chair to have a view she remembered from last time,
not because she was tired – the last time she had visited there had been a
party at the house. Craig had arrived with her, and was upstairs in the
bathroom. She went into the kitchen, and took a jug of home-made juice from the
fridge.
As she came back into the living room, she saw Kelly
shudder. It seemed from her expression it was one of those inexplicable
shudders without any graspable cause.
“Someone just walked over my grave” said Kelly, laughing.
“That’s an amazing expression” said Craig, coming down the
stairs.
“Yes, it is” she said, smiling at Kelly, and thinking about
it, for the first time. She brought the phrase to mind to the point of seeing
how enigmatic it was, but she didn’t want to explore it – it seemed the wrong direction for a sunny,
midsummer day.
“Its weirdly time-slipped” said Craig – “its saying
something has just happened, in the future” He paused for a second.
“Its like its saying its you
who are in a grave”, she said “and someone gives you a jolt, someone comes and
wakes you -
“From the future” said Kelly, laughing, completing her
sentence in an unexpected way.
At the back of her mind she knew that Craig had been about
to develop a different thought, and that she had cut across him, but she felt
the exchange had ended well.
She suggested they go outside.
*
They were an odd group, she thought. But odd in a way that
defied any comment on the subject. Both Kelly and Craig were in relationships
which had run into trouble. Craig had now in fact officially split up with Sian,
though it sounded as if they were still spending a lot of time together, and
Kelly was going out with a man whose drinking and unhappiness were taking her
to the point of exhaustion. She could tell that Craig was attracted to Kelly, which
suited me, and seemed maybe to be agreeable to her.
Craig recurrently acted with a kind surreal playfulness, an
intellectual jaggedness. She liked his lightness, his readiness to laugh, and
she felt that if he could find a way of expressing his humour that had more
gentleness and warmth, he would become very attractive to women. But even then
she felt he would not be right for her, so it was good that he was focused more
on Kelly.
The patio had a view across a wide field to a low hill which
was mostly covered in trees on the facing slope – two long copses on the side
of the hill, with a gap in the middle where the horizon was the grassy line of
the hill. It gave the impression you
were looking out toward Warwickshire woodland, and you were of course, only
there was less of it than you might have thought. She loved that view – it made
her dream. Just before sitting down at the table on the patio, she remembered
what she had been intending to do.
*
She told them she had found something, and went and got the
bowl.
Craig took it, and spun it on the table, at her suggestion.
They watched it spin, fascinated by the smoothness and duration of its
spinning. It spun for an impressive amount of time, and when it stopped she was
struck by how it seemed to match the circular wooden table, which had also been
hand-finished. She had bought the table a year ago.
They talked about the bowl, and they talked about mutual
friends for a while, and then – in the middle of slight pause, while Kelly was holding the bowl in
her hands, and looking at it carefully - Craig suddenly gave an exclamation,
and he said he had remembered something he’d been intending to tell them.
A week ago he had heard a story from a woman who he had met
at a party. The woman had told him she wasn’t entirely prepared to vouch for
the truth of it, but that she thought it was probably true. What she had heard was that a few years before
a group of five or six friends had done a kind of psychological experiment.
They had met up and they had adopted different personas. The idea was to see
what happened if they lived for several days as different people, and if they
lived on the basis that their invented people had come together to reach a new,
wider level of reality. The personas they had dreamed up, in advance, were
extraordinary individuals, and the tales from their invented pasts were used in
the process of discussing strategies for crossing thresholds of awareness. However,
the other element of the story was that, after being together doing this for
four days, the entire group of people had some kind of life-altering momentous
experience, which apparently left them all changed for the better, but
incapable, on their own accounts, of expressing to people the nature of what
had happened.
“Why don’t we each
invent another self?” asked Craig, after they had discussed the story for a while.
“A person who we would be if we played a role-playing game like that, or just
someone else we would like to be…”
“Yes!” She said. And then the idea came.
“And why don’t we
spin the bowl, in turn, and say who we want to be while the bowl spins. We say what
comes into our minds while it spins!”
“It’s a great idea…” said Kelly.
“I think it should be someone who we could have been”. Said
Craig. “ You know – if we’d born under different circumstances. And then its
all you, but like different parts of you have been developed…woken up”
“Yes, lets do it!” said Kelly. “We can create other selves,
and then we can always decide when we want to be them.”
Craig looked at the sun. There looked to be at least three
quarters of an hour before it set.
“We can do it before the sun sets. Who goes first?”
“You!” she said, laughing.
“OK!” said Craig, biting his lip thoughtfully.
There was a long pause, maybe twenty seconds of silence.
Then Craig spun the bowl.
Again, silence, but
this time just for a moment.
“OK - I would be Gus Brollings. As a kid Gus would have
always had a studio in his house – his parents were music producers. He
travelled around the world living in different places with his parents.
Eventually his parents’ lives fall apart, and he ends up living on his own,
aged 15, in a house with cats, with five cats, a ramshackle house in the
outback in Australia, and a studio. Eventually he befriends an aborigine woman
who has a professional job in Perth, but who is also a shaman and a didgeridoo
player. She teaches him how to write tale-songs – song stories that take you
out from what she calls the first sphere of reality.
“Gus Brollings” repeated Craig. The bowl had almost stopped.
“Cat shaman - house-cat shaman, and writer of song stories”
The bowl stopped.
“Brilliant!” said Kelly.”Do you feel like you’re Gus now?”
“Maybe!” said Craig with a playful smile.
She enjoyed this exchange between Craig and Kelly, and she
was excited – a name had come to her, the name of the person she would be. And
she was aware that there was a bank of cloud that the sun would reach before
long, and she wanted them to finish while the sun was shining.
“Who’s next?” she said.
“Me” said Kelly. She had been staring at some tiny plants
with blue flowers that were growing out of a crack in the patio.
Kelly set the bowl in motion, and looked back at the plants,
and then looked at the horizon. She ran her hand nervously though her hair.
“I’d be Zoe Collins.
Zoe would be a maker of montages and a painter. She would have started out as a
child obsessively drawing small plants, tiny flowers and herbs. And then she
goes on to painting clouds. And then she finds a book of paintings of faces of
animals, and, and – and she learns how to get into a trance state just by
imagining looking at the world through the eyes of animals. And then she does
paintings which try to show the way the world is seen by particular animals,
like a jaguar in the forest. And then in the end she does sort of abstract sky
paintings which she says are parts of the sky being looked at by the planet.
And she has learned how to get into most of the states created by drugs, by
letting go, and concentrating on particular sets of things – objects, the day
around her, memories…”
The bowl had stopped.
“Hey Zoe!” she said, after nodding, with genuine
appreciation of what Kelly had just invented. “Zoe is such a great name. I want
to see your sky paintings”
“Its as if you get swept away by it” said Kelly, “I had no
idea I was going to say a lot of that!”
The sun was maybe a few minutes from the cloud bank.
“OK” she said. “I’ll do it”. She took a deep breath.
Then she reached out and gave the bowl a strong spin. For a
fraction of a second she thought it was going to go off the table, but then it
drifted back toward the centre.
“I would be – Rebecca Greenbridge. A woman who used to be in
a band who were successful for a while, but who dropped out of it, and went off
and travelled to south America and India, and who discovered secrets… She wears
either very beautiful clothes, that she often makes herself, or very inconspicuous
clothes.
The bowl was still spinning, held in a tiny, adzed
indentation of the table.
She didn’t want to waste the time.
“The people who only know her from the band call her Reb,
Reb Greenbridge, but her friends call her Rebecca. And her mother calls her
Beckie.
She has learned how to find amazing, magical places, like in
mountains, in forests…
The secrets she
has learned are about places, and about music, and silence - about how they can
be ... doorways, yes, how they can be doorways.”
The bowl stopped spinning.
The sun had still not reached the cloud. But before they had time to say anything there
was a long cry, a bird-cry, splitting the day open. It was an eerie, calm
shriek, with a very complex timbre. A second or two after hearing it they all
knew that it was the call of a bird of prey.
*
Afterwards they all had the feeling that something had happened.
But there wasn’t much to be said. The bird of prey did not cry out again, which
made the coincidence feel more striking, but coincidences of that kind can’t be
talked about at any length – rapidly there is nothing that can be said that
doesn’t seem vacuous or repetitive. They all liked the different characters and
stories they had created, but none of them seemed to feel like exploring these
created ‘selves’ any further. After the sun had set, they went indoors.
They stayed up extremely late talking, with mostly only
joking references being made to what had happened. But, on the other hand,
no-one made any direct attempt to undermine the shared impression that there
had been an event, a real process of creation.
In the morning everyone was a little tired, from having had
only four or five hours sleep. Both Kelly
and Craig had to get back to London.
Standing by her car, Kelly brought up the subject of what
had happened, saying she felt it had been something special. “Maybe our other selves will be there waiting
for us, when we need them,” she said.
*
The following night she slept deeply for several hours, and
then she was awake for a while, listening to the first songs of blackbirds and
robins. When she got back to sleep, she had a dream.
She was in a house that was supposed to be where she had lived
as a child, only of course it wasn’t. There was a beautiful feeling about the
house, and it felt as if she was coming back as a young woman. On a shelf she
found a book, a book which in the dream she hadn’t seen in years. The book was,
as far as she knew, entirely a creation of the dream, but in the dream she was
not aware of any discrepancies. She was overjoyed to find it, and at the same
time moved almost to tears.
It was part of a series. The series was called South Sea
Island. They always began with an introduction, which started – “The island is
no longer there.” But this book was called The Blue Horses of Tanara. The words, endlessly
evocative for her – the image on the book of the mountain slope, the two
horses in the middle distance.
Ahhh, The
Blue Horses of Tanara, there was never
anything like this.
And then, in the dream, she was living the story. It flooded
back to her, all of it, all of its vast beauty, all of its events.
The central character of this story was a woman called Ketra.
She was a girl at the start of the story, living with her brother and her
parents in a mountain valley. Only, of course, she was not really a woman at
all – she was a horse, they were all horses. But they were horses who had
reached a higher level of intelligence and awareness as a species, and who made
shamanic art-works out of stones, and who were able sometimes to travel to
other dimensions.
*
As a girl she would go all the time to the stone-dreamers’
meadows, further up the valley, above the waterfall. The valley was a place of
metamorphosis, a place of transformations. She loved its serenity, and she
learned in time that you simply had to be the valley, and then it was up to you
where you placed the stones. Everywhere there were the dream-patterns, their
lines made of glittering white quartz, a stylised bird a hundred feet across
hovered on a steep slope - abstract patterns, on their own, or intricately joined.
One day for hours she watched a woman – who she knew was a
healer – make a design of three curved lines. She carried the stones in her mouth,
one by one, and placed them onto the sunlit rock with great care, nudging them
into place with her nose. Eventually the woman stepped back and looked.
She remembered that the air and the sunlight suddenly became
like the most beautiful music. The woman was no longer there, although this
seemed natural, unremarkable, and it also seemed natural that she was seeing
the place where the woman had been from the air, instead of from three hundred
yards away, on the ground. And then the shadows were different, it was late in
the afternoon, and the quartz lines were glinting enigmatically, in the empty
valley. That night, she met the woman in a dream, and she said
“Eventually you will remember what happened to you today.
But for now the important thing for you to remember is this – you will be a
healer.”
Not long afterwards, she was in the valley, and she found
herself placing a rock to make a small spiral she was seeing in her mind. There
were several other horses in the valley that day, and her brother was watching
her in the distance. She realised that there was no rule about when you could
start placing the stones – she had invented the idea that she needed
permission. When she had finished the spiral figure she looked up.
She saw that a human woman had appeared in the valley, and
was talking to her brother. That day was the beginning of the change – the end
of her childhood.
Her brother learned from the human woman about a community
in the hill-lands on the edge of the plains – a community of explorers. Not
long after, he left to join this community, despite the danger. The community
was closer to a human town which was controlled by the Carthac dominion.
Every few months her brother would visit them, and he would
share with her what he had learned, and she would share with him what she had
learned about healing.
And then one day she hears the alarm cries of birds from further
down the valley. It is a sunny morning, and the cries continue – calls of birds alerting each other to danger.
She listens carefully to the birds, letting herself go, becoming the birds
wheeling above the valley. She sees an area of rocks, as if from a little below
it on the valley floor, her eyes travel over the rocks from right to left, and
then when her eyes return to the centre there is a grey figure in grey clothes,
with black eyes, like dark gaps in smoke. Ketra sets off running. She knows suddenly
that her brother is in danger.
She sees her brother coming towards her, carrying the human
woman who is deathly pale, and covered in her own blood.
Her brother has a wound in his flank, an arrow wound, from
which the arrow has been removed.
“They were shadows” says her brother “but one of them was
flesh, and his arrows were poisoned”. He shudders.
The woman, although she is dying, does not give in to
anguish. Speaking brokenly in the language of horses she tells Ketra that most
of the people from her group, horses and humans, have survived the attack. And
she tells her that she, Ketra, is an inheritor of two traditions. The woman
dies.
Her brother rouses himself, as if shocked into action by the
woman’s death.
“The real fight is the struggle to break free,” he says – “to
break free in the direction of love.
Everything else is secondary, if you put it first you’ve been defeated.”
Her brother is about
to die. She throws herself into a healer’s awareness of his body. She is aware
that calming his heart will only be temporary, that the poison will kill him in
the end. She knows that if she gives all of her awareness to his heart, he will
go into a calm place for a few minutes, but she knows that this act will be
fatal for her – it will seal her into a joint death with her brother.
She cannot let him die – and she gives herself completely to
calming his heart. The decision has been taken – there is a kind of shocking,
acutely disturbing flash, and then she and her brother are together by the high
upland stream, surrounded by the patterns of white quartz stones. For minutes
on end her and her brother are together, the way they were when they were
children, in the stone-dreamers’ meadows of the uplands. And then a wave of shock hits them, and they
both die.
*
Then she sees the man, in front of her, holding the book
open at the last page. She is in a scrubby area of grassland, in mountains that
she knows are the Pyrenees. In the distance there are horses grazing.
The man is wearing scruffy, stylish black clothes. He has a wiry frame, and a very wide, pale
face, and curly shoulder length hair – she is aware that his face is too wide,
and that although he superficially appears to be human, he is not human at all.
He smiles at her. And suddenly she knows
that she is in the book he has in his hand. He shuts the book, with her in it,
and puts it in his pocket.
*
She woke up, feeling shocked by everything of what she had
just ‘happened’, and also feeling unable to dismiss the whole experience as
simply a dream. She felt there was a validity about it, a realness on some
level that she was unwilling to ignore.
Over the next few days she concentrated on finishing the new
set of designs. For years she had drawn first-level sketches for motifs, that
were used – or not used – by an interior design company in London. When she was
an art college student she had been befriended by a man who was now one of the
directors of this company. Over the years he had slowly passed from being in
love with her to simply employing her designs, which she sent on a ‘free-lance’
basis every few months. Although she did not receive much money for her work,
she was happy with an arrangement that gave her freedom – she had avoided being
an employee of the company working to deadlines on contracts. Usually she drew
on objects from nature for the ideas for her motifs, but sometimes she was
helped by abstract art, and occasionally by ancient designs. Recently a series
of very exclusive lamps had been created, using an abstract cloisonné design of
hers that had been inspired by the objects found at Sutton Hoo.
Her work went very smoothly, but at the same time she was
aware that the moment she put the work to one side she forgot all about
it. Almost every night she had dreams
that had connections with the Rebecca persona, or the world of the book she had
found in the dream. She would be looking for someone called Rebecca, or she
would be looking for the book, or she would have a dream about patterns made
out of quartz stones. Once she had a dream where she was in a steep-sided
mountain canyon where there had been a huge flood, and she was being stalked by
malevolent beings while trying to struggle through dead trees blocking the
river bed. And sometimes her work would be interrupted by a ‘flash’ of memory,
either of the evening with Craig and Kelly, or from the dream two nights
afterwards.
She was unused to work coming easily, and yet without a
strong involvement. She was deeply unsettled, and yet at the same time she was able
to be calmly creative. There were two obvious sources of the situation. One was
the fact that there was still no news about Maggie and Conrad. The other was
the dream, with its disturbing conclusion, and its continuations in the form of
new dreams, and daytime flashes.
The second set of circumstances was all connected to an
overall feeling that something was going
on. She felt that something was working its way through in her – that an
emergence of some new way of being was occurring. She didn’t want to tie this
thought down to the idea of a second self appearing - maybe the ‘game’ with the
bowl had been a trigger for a development about which she had no real clue.
As the days went by she discovered that she was feeling
heightened, that in some way the world around her seemed brighter – more real –
than it had before. There was a sparkling, lucid intensity about the sunlight, about
the Warwickshire countryside. But somehow a counterpart of this feeling was an
intuition that this situation would collapse if she went somewhere else. She felt that for now the advantage was
fragile - struggling for its existence - and that if she were to go to London,
or another city, she would collapse back to an ordinary state.
She started to look from all of her long perspectives. The work
she was doing, for instance, brought to her mind the question of what way of
life she wanted to adopt. She had trained as an Alexander technique specialist,
but somehow at the very end of her training she had felt unwilling, despite
loving the art of physical therapy she had acquired, to go ahead and become a
professional. Again, inspired by conversations with Maggie and Conrad a few
years ago she had thought about doing an anthropology degree, but then had
dropped the idea. And just before her parents split up, and left her to look
after the house, she had been thinking about finally getting a full-time job as
a designer, in order eventually to travel around the world, and maybe in the
process achieve the tiny but vast transformation from being a designer, to
being an artist.
She had an odd, unspoken feeling that was connected with the
fact that whenever she went in the direction of any form of professionalism or
technical knowledge everything began to lose its intensity: she felt that
anything really worthwhile – something for dreamers, for people trying to become free on every
level – only came into existence out of someone being utterly, magically in
love, with a woman, with a man, with the planet, with the world. Everything
else was successful, profitable geekery, which at best gave you helpful gadgets
and processes, of whatever kind. Something Conrad had said once appealed to her
very deeply - he had said “we’re
surrounded by endlessly mysterious singularities, whether the singularity is a
human, a cat, or a community - and ordinary knowledge only makes contact with a
tiny wavelength of the world”.
It wasn’t that she had a romantic tendency – she simply felt
that love was vital for dreaming your way forward.
Her mother had once said to her that married women whose
relationships had started well often ended up like widows, widows living with
their husband. She said they started being widows when they could no longer see
the man they fell in love with.
“And maybe it isn’t better if you were in love for a long
time, her mother had said. “maybe you are even more unhappy”
And she added “I was very
in love with your father”
It seemed that in love relationships people ended up
crash-landing on each other, and that the ongoing crash was the relationship.
She yearned for an intense alongsideness that was also a moving forward, but
she could feel the presence of this possibility rather than seeing it clearly.
*
The day she finished
her collection of designs she went for a long walk after sending them off. It
was a sunny day with a strong breeze. She found that, for the first time, she
was trying to imagine how this other self – Rebecca – would see the world. To
her surprise, she discovered that she was getting an experience of looking at
everything through more practical eyes than her own, and through a focused,
lucid warmth that was very striking. This imagined self had travelled a lot,
and had had a lot of very intense experiences.
She realised that
her thinking about the Rebecca persona had been influenced by the tone of the
world of the horses in the dream. The atmosphere of sadness in this world had
distracted her from envisaging the lightness and strength of Rebecca as she had
originally ‘seen’ her. She had been aware
of Rebecca’s warmth, but not these other attributes. In a similar but
contrasted way the thought of Rebecca having been in a rock band had made her
think of a slightly unfocused wildness, rather than an achieved lucidity.
Suddenly she had an insight that she had been indulging in
being sad and introspective about Maggie and Conrad. Her feelings of love and
fear were completely real, but it was how she responded that was problematic. She
saw clearly that if her friends had died they would have wanted her to treat
their deaths as one more reason to wake herself, and dream her life forward. Those who go down in the fight send their joy
to those who are still fighting. These words did not seem like her own.
They were filled with love, and with lightness – and yet at the same time they
were filled with an awareness of a pervasive sadness within the cosmos. She
suddenly had a new resolve about transforming her life
.
*
She phoned Craig, who seemed stressed. He was back together
with Sian, and he was being positive about it, but something in his voice made
her feel that it was not really working out. Just before the end of the
conversation she told him in a light-hearted way that her dreams had been
influenced by the idea of the new persona. She told him briefly about the dream
the night after he and Kelly went back to London.
Craig said that he had not been able to remember any dreams
at all, since the visit, though he said there had been gaps before in his remembering
of dreams. He told her that he kept remembering the cry of the bird of prey. He
said the memory had a good feeling about it.
Also he said he had been feeling a bit unsettled since the visit – ‘more
opened up to everything’ was one phrase he used.
After she said goodbye to Craig she phoned Kerry. She had
tried to phone her several times earlier in the evening, but had not been able
to get through.
Kerry had split up with her boyfriend, and had started a new
relationship. She was very happy, and talkative, though she said she could not
speak for long. She said she felt the visit to Warwickshire had helped her get
perspective on things. She told her that the night after getting back she had
had a dream which was all about being an ‘eye’ in a forest, a circular glade
that was looking up at the sky.
“I’d had a dream a bit like that a few weeks before, but yes
I think it was a Zoe dream, at the same time as you were having a Rebecca dream”
Since then Kelly had been having a lot of intense dreams,
some of them very positive, and some of them more turbulent, but she didn’t remember
anything else that could be connected with their invention of new personas.
*
That night she
dreamed she was in the bedroom again, believing again that she was returning to
what had been her room as a child. The book was where she had left it, lying on
the floor by the bookcase. She didn’t have to open it. Just looking at the
image was enough.
*
She had been up for a few hours, tasting herbs that grew on
the moist, shaded slopes on the northward side of the valley. As she had been
doing this she had been ‘reading’ the rocks, seeing what substances they
contained, and thinking about the cities of quartz which had been given time to
form long ago, as the rock cooled from being magma. A tiny zephyr ran across a
flat expanse of rock, taking her attention to the air. For some time she
focused on the currents gusting between the mountain slopes.
And then she heard the birds. Something was happening,
further down the valley. She was already attuned to the world around her, so
she could reach out toward the continuing danger calls of the birds, toward the
sky in which they were flying. And then the hideous flash-perception of the
grey figure amongst the rocks. She set off running.
This time she was acutely aware of the strength shown by the
woman. But instead of simply feeling tormented by the tragedy of the woman’s
death, she tried to attune herself to her kindness and poise - she tried to
receive the gift of her strength.
And this time when she displaced herself into an awareness
of her brother’s over-stressed heart, she only gave a little of her energy, she
did not throw all of herself into calming his heart. Instead she concentrated
on being his whole body, lying there convulsing, gasping, on the grass and
small stones of the valley. Her brother! How she loved him, he was dying in
agony! Her grief almost overwhelmed her, but she calmed herself, and focused on
his entire body, and then on his blood system, and his stomach.
And then she went after the poison. She had never done
anything like this, as she set out to do it she did not know even if it was
possible.
She became the intricate micro-molecular cloud of the
poison, a world of cells, and parts of cells that was also a dispersed,
blade-like nebula that consisted of elements whose intent happened to be deadly
for her brother. Reaching into the cloud of intent she became its parts, and
transformed them, persuaded them to metamorphose into something similar but
neutral for her brother’s body. She turned the blade of the nebula sideways,
away from her brother.
And then she herself had collapsed. She was a teeming,
pullulating world of dispersion, a dark spinning that seemed as if it might
never stop. Eventually, she saw the valley from hundreds of feet up, and her
ability to focus on this view increased in a way that was inseparable from a
sensation of being nudged and nuzzled in her face.
Finally, she opened her eyes, and found herself looking into
the eyes of her brother.
He whinnied his affection for her.
“Wild one” he said “you brought me back from the edge, I
don’t know how”.
They were alive, under an eerie vastness of mountains and
sky.
*
She was standing again with the man with the wide face, and
the curly black hair. Only this time it was him who suddenly was in the book.
She closed the book, and put it in her pocket.
*
It was the same place where she had been the previous time.
A wide area of grassland in mountains that she knew somehow were the Pyrenees
in Spain. She knew she was looking southwest.
Two hundred yards away, in front of her, to the right, there were five
horses. She was Rebecca, all of her past about to come completely into focus,
through Rebecca’s love of the Pyrenees.
The clothes she was wearing were Rebecca’s. They were
beautiful, expressing her personality in a striking way.
She knew that the room where she had found the book had been
Rebecca’s room as a child. All of Rebecca’s life was coming to her, but then,
just it started to become really clear, it was as if a gust of wind came from
an unexpected direction, and she was twirling around in blackness.
*
She was on a hill – a kind of saddle of grassy land between
a rock outcrop to her right and a low mountain on her left. There was forest on
either side, and – breathtakingly – there was forest in front of her. The view
was like no other she had ever seen. Stretching away to the south there were
three tangled ridges, one beyond the next – the last one was maybe twenty miles
away. All three of these ridges were covered in trees, and in fact almost all
of the land she could see was forest.
To her left there was a wide space of spinning, flickering
devices, all of them up on poles six or seven feet high, and here and there
amongst these machines – which all seemed to be wind powered, or solar powered – there were
sails of beautifully coloured fabrics with wonderful fluid patterns, attached
to two or more supports, billowing and fluttering in the wind, like the skirts
of dresses.
She went a short way
into this forest of devices and sails. Many
of the machines were screens with abstract patterns on them, that she sensed
were varying in relation to the wind, and probably to other things as well. She
found herself by a beautiful sail with fluttering lacy edges, being rippled by
the wind. She reached out and touched it, tenderly, loving the fluid curves of
the fabric’s motion in the mountain breeze.
She could hear someone singing, back in the direction she
had come from. It was a man’s voice. She returned onto the slightly higher
ground beyond the forest of sails and machines. And she saw that a man was walking
towards her, smiling, along the top of the hill.
The man had untidy fair hair and had a kind, slightly
abstracted look, as if he was seeing everything with a bit too much intensity.
He seemed to be in his thirties.
“My name is Katch - spelt with a K,” he said. “Katch” he repeated, with a gentle smile, as
if he was throwing his name to her. His accent was English, but as he continued
speaking there were moments when she heard an intonation that was more Welsh
than English.
“Our ordinary human world has a cult of metals, electricity,
fabrics, minerals, and of all forms of technology, and of intricate
concreteness. I have met you here so that these sculptures will help you to
feel at home.”
They stood facing each other. She was taking in his words,
wondering how to respond. She was wanting to say that she loved the fabric
sculptures, but his use of the word ‘cult’ made her pause for a moment.
“I dont really look like this, by the way. I’m not that
different I suppose, and I’m a human being just the same as you, but your
intense ability as a dreamer, which you have just fully woken, created this
form when you heard me singing, and I’ve adopted it for now”
He put his head on one side as smiled. It was somehow a very
feminine gesture, but it suited him, and managed to be masculine in some way,
at the same time.
“That’s kind of you!” she said, laughing. “And I love the
fabric sculptures, but I dont know if they make me feel at home. Maybe I dont
know how not-at-home I should be feeling.”
The man laughed. “I love the fabric sculptures as well” he
said. And then, he gestured around him, in a subtle gesture that seemed to take
in the air, the sunlight, the trees, and the mountains.
“You are more at home here than you are in your usual
circumstances”
She looked at him, and she suddenly had an intuition that he
knew in a deep way what it was to be a woman, that he knew what it was to be
elementally full of love and lucidity, and that he knew what it was to be
utterly swept away by femininity.
She found this very attractive, and she was now speechless,
and flushing, as a result of her awareness of what he could see in her. She
felt he was seeing her naked, but at the level of her feelings and desire. It
was almost too much.
And then he refocused his eyes in a way that seemed to
disrupt the current of what she had been feeling. It was as if he had breathed in
to speak, and then looked past her to clear his thoughts.
“Your friends in south America - ”
He looked at her, and his eyes told her in advance what he
was going to say.
“They died two months ago.”
The statement jolted her, hitting her with a wave of acute
sadness. She was sure what the man had said was true. She was on the edge of
tears, but instead of crying she threw herself into a focused awareness of everything
that was happening to her. It was at the point where she did this that her true
grief arrived. A grief that was beyond tears.
“Dont wake up yet”, said the man, scrutinising her, with intense
warmth in his eyes.
She listened to his words to steady herself.
“Energy from your friends came to you when they died. You
didn’t waste the boost they gave you, which is what we normally do. You
successfully doubled yourself. Rebecca is a part of you, who you have woken.”
“There isn’t much time left” he continued. “This is the
vital fact - what is systematically
blocked in us is our awareness of our love for our planet. And the planet is far
more than we imagine.”
She realised the man looked different now. He had a plain,
strong face, with short dark hair, and he looked as if he was in his forties. He
looked very poised and focused, and his face had a quality of being very happy,
and somehow sad at the same. She felt he had an immense capacity for delight,
and that he was liable sometimes to feel weary, as a result of a long struggle
in which he was involved.
“This is how I look,” he said.
“You look better like this” she replied.
He grinned, looking at her with his piercing warm eyes.
“The separate elements of the world of horses that you
dreamed all exist, and that world overall has an existence, but it exists as a
world primarily dreamed by you. To be
precise it was a dream lodged within a cloud-world - a subterranean cloud-world,
would perhaps be the best way of describing it”.
Then he gestured around him.
“This world exists,
in exactly the same way as the ordinary world exists”.
“What is this world?”
“It is a forest – and it’s a world that is more alive, and
as a result has more connections to other
worlds. Almost all human places are derelict here, and that’s part of the
reason for it being more alive than the ordinary world.”
The man pointed to the west.
“Aberystwyth is 10 miles in that direction, and it’s mostly
forest. Pretty much all of the towns and cities have reverted to trees. It is
nearly all forest in this world – but there are always likely to be some humans
around, passing through, or living here.”
“The...subterranean cloud-world. What kind of world is that?”
“It is not human. But those worlds belong to the planet as
much as this one, or the ordinary world. I think those worlds connect with us
primarily through our cults, because uncompromising love and exploration are
primarily seen by them as too dangerous. They connect with us through our cult
of materials and technology, our cult of sexuality and reproduction, our cult
of social kudos and control...”
The man suddenly set off at a run, laughing, toward some
pine trees that were growing a little further down the slope on a small rounded
outcrop projecting over the valley. She ran after him, aware of the sunlight,
and the pine-trees, which seemed very alive – she could almost feel them
drinking the light through their needles. When she was forty feet away, the man
turned and waved, and then he was gone down the slope.
She reached the outcrop and looked out and down. The view of
the sunlit hill ridges had a halcyon, wild beauty that was still almost too
bright for her to take in. And when she looked down she saw a wide shelf of
land halfway to the base of the valley, and underneath her, a glade two hundred
and fifty yards long and maybe a hundred and fifty wide. There were two or
three houses there, in what seemed to be a suntrap with higher ground to the
left and right. Smoke was coming up from a bonfire in what looked like a large
vegetable garden. She could see three people on an area of grass that extended
to the edge of the slope. One of them was spinning around, twirling in the
sunlight - she could hear a woman’s voice. A man was looking back at her, and
he was waving with both arms.
*
She opened her eyes, and looked at her room. There was a
strikingly beautiful melody playing in her head, a song she remembered hearing
on the radio maybe six months ago. She couldn’t remember the words, but they
were strong and happy and sad, like the mood of the man before he disappeared.
She went downstairs and searched the South American news.
She found a report that two British anthropologists had been found dead in
Brazil, apparently killed in a fight between miners and people living in the
threatened area of jungle.
She rang Maggie’s mother, who started crying when she heard
her voice. She had found out the previous evening, and had been about to phone
her. She spoke for half an hour, trying to hold back her tears for the sake of
Maggie’s mother, and desperately aware of how words end up sounding hollow when
you talk about death.
She would have liked to tell her about what had been
happening to her in the time since she found the bowl, and about what had just
happened, but of course she could not.
Afterwards she stood looking at the bowl, which was on its
own on the low table in the living room. Carefully, she spun the bowl, and sat
down in the armchair.
She felt numb and very alive. She wanted to talk - she
wanted to talk to Kelly and Craig, she wanted to talk to Katch, if he existed,
and she knew that she was choosing to believe that he was real. But she sensed
with an aching certainty that talking to Kelly or Craig would not help. If she
told them about her dream it would only seem like an introduction of something
self-aggrandising and mystical, as if she was using the fact that her friends
had died to explain in detail that she had a special source of knowledge. And
after all, given how long her friends had been missing, there was nothing very
remarkable from a conventional perspective about her having a dream where she
was told that her friends had died. But of course, she would phone them anyway,
and eventually she would find a way of telling them everything – it was the gift to them that she
felt very clearly was called for by the circumstances. Maybe they also –
The bowl had stopped spinning. She was surrounded by the
warm, seethingly calm glare of the unknown which she had been accustomed to
think of as the world. The first time the bowl had helped her to wake another
self. She was alive, unlike Conrad, unlike Maggie, and it seemed she was on an
extraordinary journey. But this time she felt the bowl had taught her the
extent to which, for now, it was a solitary journey. She was on her own.
* * *
In this section, and in Sections 38 and 39, a primary aim has been to show two aspects of the world that are involved in relation to the escape-path:: the planet, and the abstract, with the abstract being shown centrally through 'dreamings' (stories, dreams in sleep, dreams about the future, processes of imagination, states of semi-trance, reveries). The other primary aim has been to show the third aspect - brightness (it can be seen that this third aspect is now coming to the forefront).
A key initial point in relation to the first two aspects is that in the interfused development that has been described (a progression that started around 1995) the aspects were central both in processes of production, and in relation to the produced. Waking the faculty of dreaming took place through a process of re-directing attention toward the planet beyond the human world (which involved actual re-locations in terms of where I was living, and involved journeys into scurf and wilderness areas), and re-directing it equally toward dreams; and the products in the form of stories were very substantially about the planet and about dreamings, in their different forms. In the stories that have just been included dreams/reveries are fundamental, and the planetary is either thematically fundamental ("The Bowl") or is the emphasised locus or horizon (in "they will hear you singing" the place of the story is only tangentially the human world: the story is spread between an area of woodland in the southeast of Britain, and a derelict monastery in the Himalayas).
However, in order to move toward showing the three aspects as one movement (and toward explicating the abstract more widely) it is necessary to widen the focus a little. Another aim of this book has been the elaboration of a map of the faculties, with a particular emphasis on the faculty of dreaming (it is not at all that this faculty is more important say, than lucidity or navigation, but that in getting beyond the tyranny of a fixated modality of reason dreaming is a vital component of passage). And a further aim, again (one that has become a central element in the last few sections) has been an account of two threshold-crossings in relation to overcoming suppressive forces: the first being the process of overcoming fear (Sections 34 and 40), and the second being the process of overcoming the delusory 'clarity' of the trapped, unassisted form of reason, in a process of waking both dreaming and lucidity. These two threshold-crossings are described by Deleuze and Guattari in Micropolitics and Segmentarity (A Thousand Plateaus, chapter 9), drawing the analysis of human development and the main terminology from Castaneda's first book, The Teachings of Don Juan (though it should be pointed out that Deleuze had been explicitly warning against the delusory form of clarity since writing Difference and Repetition in 1968).
It can be seen that across the entirety of these aims (as set out in the preceding three paragraphs) the faculty of dreaming is receiving a very marked emphasis. It is not only that it has been shown to be crucial in coming to understand the abstract, it is that it is also at the centre of the account of the definitive terrain (which is the second sphere of action, but understood in relation to its key elements - the planet and the faculties), and it is simultaneously being shown to be a component of passage (a vital stage) in getting beyond delusory clarity in the direction of lucidity.
After reading The Lathe of Heaven I told Mark about how impressed I was by it, and not long afterwards he also read it. Mark's application of this novel's depiction of a continually re-constructed past (and present) is to be found in Capitalist Realism. However it is important to point out that, when Mark read the novel, he said that he had found the following passage very striking - it is a passage in which the central character, George Orr, is on a heavily packed commuter train going under the Willamette River in Portland:
"To cross a river, ford it, wade it, swim it, use boat, ferry, bridge, airplane, to go upriver, to go downriver in the ceaseless renewal and beginning of current: all that makes sense. But in going under a river something is involved which is, in the central meaning of the word, perverse. There are roads in the mind and outside it the mere elaborateness of which shows plainly that, to have got into this, a wrong turning must have been taken way back."
"There are roads in the mind...." "a wrong turning must have been taken way back." In reading this passage in the context of the idea of the continual re-construction of past and present, it is possible to arrive at the following questions. Have we, as a species, taken a road thousands of years ago which has led us away from the faculties of dreaming, lucidity, navigation and perception, and which has left us trapped within the confines of a crippled, fixated form of reason? And are rare, pervasively lucid stories (such as those of Le Guin) continually reminding us of the world that for now is not really thinkable - the world seen from the road we did not take?
The outsight involved here is the one that is broken open in two sections of Castaneda's The Power of Silence: it is the view that human beings have two primary modalities of existence-and-knowledge, and that one of these has been to a great extent lost, in its fully actualised form - the modern one is described as 'reason' and the older one is described as 'silent knowledge.' And the elaborated form of this idea is that depth-level and wide-level understanding (understanding of both the transcendental-empirical and the empirical) is the result pre-eminently of being able to shift to the modality of silent knowledge, but simultaneously is the result of being able to move back and forth from silent knowledge to reason, and then back to silent knowledge.
A key initial point in relation to the first two aspects is that in the interfused development that has been described (a progression that started around 1995) the aspects were central both in processes of production, and in relation to the produced. Waking the faculty of dreaming took place through a process of re-directing attention toward the planet beyond the human world (which involved actual re-locations in terms of where I was living, and involved journeys into scurf and wilderness areas), and re-directing it equally toward dreams; and the products in the form of stories were very substantially about the planet and about dreamings, in their different forms. In the stories that have just been included dreams/reveries are fundamental, and the planetary is either thematically fundamental ("The Bowl") or is the emphasised locus or horizon (in "they will hear you singing" the place of the story is only tangentially the human world: the story is spread between an area of woodland in the southeast of Britain, and a derelict monastery in the Himalayas).
However, in order to move toward showing the three aspects as one movement (and toward explicating the abstract more widely) it is necessary to widen the focus a little. Another aim of this book has been the elaboration of a map of the faculties, with a particular emphasis on the faculty of dreaming (it is not at all that this faculty is more important say, than lucidity or navigation, but that in getting beyond the tyranny of a fixated modality of reason dreaming is a vital component of passage). And a further aim, again (one that has become a central element in the last few sections) has been an account of two threshold-crossings in relation to overcoming suppressive forces: the first being the process of overcoming fear (Sections 34 and 40), and the second being the process of overcoming the delusory 'clarity' of the trapped, unassisted form of reason, in a process of waking both dreaming and lucidity. These two threshold-crossings are described by Deleuze and Guattari in Micropolitics and Segmentarity (A Thousand Plateaus, chapter 9), drawing the analysis of human development and the main terminology from Castaneda's first book, The Teachings of Don Juan (though it should be pointed out that Deleuze had been explicitly warning against the delusory form of clarity since writing Difference and Repetition in 1968).
It can be seen that across the entirety of these aims (as set out in the preceding three paragraphs) the faculty of dreaming is receiving a very marked emphasis. It is not only that it has been shown to be crucial in coming to understand the abstract, it is that it is also at the centre of the account of the definitive terrain (which is the second sphere of action, but understood in relation to its key elements - the planet and the faculties), and it is simultaneously being shown to be a component of passage (a vital stage) in getting beyond delusory clarity in the direction of lucidity.
After reading The Lathe of Heaven I told Mark about how impressed I was by it, and not long afterwards he also read it. Mark's application of this novel's depiction of a continually re-constructed past (and present) is to be found in Capitalist Realism. However it is important to point out that, when Mark read the novel, he said that he had found the following passage very striking - it is a passage in which the central character, George Orr, is on a heavily packed commuter train going under the Willamette River in Portland:
"To cross a river, ford it, wade it, swim it, use boat, ferry, bridge, airplane, to go upriver, to go downriver in the ceaseless renewal and beginning of current: all that makes sense. But in going under a river something is involved which is, in the central meaning of the word, perverse. There are roads in the mind and outside it the mere elaborateness of which shows plainly that, to have got into this, a wrong turning must have been taken way back."
"There are roads in the mind...." "a wrong turning must have been taken way back." In reading this passage in the context of the idea of the continual re-construction of past and present, it is possible to arrive at the following questions. Have we, as a species, taken a road thousands of years ago which has led us away from the faculties of dreaming, lucidity, navigation and perception, and which has left us trapped within the confines of a crippled, fixated form of reason? And are rare, pervasively lucid stories (such as those of Le Guin) continually reminding us of the world that for now is not really thinkable - the world seen from the road we did not take?
The outsight involved here is the one that is broken open in two sections of Castaneda's The Power of Silence: it is the view that human beings have two primary modalities of existence-and-knowledge, and that one of these has been to a great extent lost, in its fully actualised form - the modern one is described as 'reason' and the older one is described as 'silent knowledge.' And the elaborated form of this idea is that depth-level and wide-level understanding (understanding of both the transcendental-empirical and the empirical) is the result pre-eminently of being able to shift to the modality of silent knowledge, but simultaneously is the result of being able to move back and forth from silent knowledge to reason, and then back to silent knowledge.
Everything is made more complicated by circumstances relating to the fact that most human beings don't focus themselves fully into the modality that is dominant in their time. For thousands of years it has been reason which has been dominant, with silent knowledge almost entirely lost as an actualised form: and those who are off to one side of the locked, productive form of reason are caught up in something that is a feature of this modality: its inherent tendency is not just to fall definitively short of grasping immanence, but is to be a modality of self-reflection, and, connectedly, to be intrinsically prey to the tyranny of subjectified moods, most specifically, self-importance, and its concomitants, resentment, jealous anger, self-pity etc. (it is only when reason is caught up into the full flight of successful production that this other aspect of the modality is kept in abeyance).
And the other aspect of the situation that complicates everything is that stories do not disappear as a form of production when individuals with no awareness of silent knowledge reach the full, focused form of reason: instead there can be a production of stories which are grim, deadened shadows or 'tracings' of stories which provide views of the transcendental - the system of reason-and-revelation is in fact very deeply embedded within the modality of reason. It is this which makes it clear why it is that Plato's dialogues are threaded with tales, and why it is that, if you have not been inculcated by a religion, its stories at a metaphysical level will appear to have something superficial and wrong about them, even after you have detached them from accompanying weaponry of specious rational arguments (in the modern, 'western' world, since the Break with the Past, in the 1940s, the production of stories on the part of this system has not stopped in relation to full-flight instances, but instead it now has a marked tendency toward religious-paratext fantasies that as such are dominated by primary aspects of religious stories).
Silent knowledge is therefore a focused faculty of perception together with a woken faculty of lucidity, with these in turn intrinsically being allied to liberated faculties of dreaming, feeling and navigation (and the modality can only be reached if the overall body has reached a high enough level of energy). And depth-level and wide-level understanding is silent knowledge in alliance with a liberated faculty of reason.
A few months after reading The Lathe of Heaven I read The Word for World is Forest, drawn towards it in part by the title, which seemed to connect very closely with my experiences at this time, and, in particular with the forests of the "Corridor" - the oneiric world into which I had been swept away. (I did not know at the time that the two Le Guin stories I had read first were both from around 1972). The second novel seems to be inspired - if not directly informed - by Le Guin's anthropological knowledge in describing the social worlds of the Athsheans, a forest-inhabiting people on a planet in another solar system: I was very struck by the description of the Athsheans' ability to go into a dreaming-awake state that they call 'dreaming,' and that intrinsically involves both the acquiring of knowledge, and the emergence of new ideas and valuable courses-of-action, for those who become skilled in relation to this faculty.
Between 2005 and 2008 I read a large number of novels, a process driven in part by a search for the outsights to be found in the works involved (so that on one level this was a phase of sustained abstract-oneiric research) - and a process assisted by the fact that for the first two years I was living without a house, and my living-room was to a great extent the cafes of the bookshops in central London (more and more space was taken up in my backpack with the books that I bought). I read Margaret Atwood's Surfacing; I read Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood: I read three novels by Dunsany (The Charwoman's Shadow, The King of Elfland's Daughter and The Blessing of Pan); I read Robert Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus. And yet despite the intensity and brilliance of these books (in particular those by Atwood and Dunsany), it is the arrival of Le Guin's work which stands out in relation to this time. Everything in relation to her work grew slowly outward from an ultra-intense core in the form of the first two novels, and, without me giving any thought to it, the process kept going (often with gaps of several months, or a year), so that by 2008 I had read seven of her books. It was not that there was any one specific aspect of her novels that I was specifically aware of taking up as a lens: it was more that what was valuable ran through them very widely, and had a kind of quietly compelling intensity, which only occasionally broke out into something hyper-charged, as with the extreme sadness of what happens to the Athsheans in The Word for World is Forest. It was a sky coming into view, an atmosphere - a result of a dreamer writing in a way where she was recurrently lucid in her perceptions, and in a way where she was predominantly looking toward the Future - toward Love-and-Freedom. It was also true that in starting to read Le Guin's books there was a feeling of being in a current - a current that was affecting others around me (if only in the very simple sense that others might be likely to be intensely inspired by the stories). Having read The Lathe of Heaven, Mark got hold of a DVD of a film adaptation from the 1970s, and we watched this together. I mentioned the book to another friend, and he told me he loved it, and that not long before he had had a dream where he had been in Portland, Oregon, and the dream had been in some way connected with the story. Another friend told me that her boyfriend's mother had said to her that the Earthsea stories were her favourite books. And what was clear was that in relation to my own encounter with these virtual-real worlds the current of inspiration and outsights had that sublime quality of the movement toward transcendental-south, a quality which always in some way includes an awareness of unnerving elements that relate to the opposite direction. As if you could look over your shoulder, in the forest, and get a view of the Shing.
What was slowly becoming discernible was that Le Guin had an exceptionally intense, but - in certain specific ways - unfocused awareness of the escape-path (the sixth and most vital aspect of the transcendental), and that she had a very extraordinary, and recurrently highly focused ability to see the ongoing human disaster. Right at the centre of her awareness of the escape-path was the faculty of dreaming, but alongside this was the planet, as another element or attribute of the current leading away from ordinary reality. (and it needs to be said that the ongoing disaster is shown with sustained and startling lucidity, using highly innovative but fully effective oneiric strategies).To be precise about what was problematic, everything had a tendency to be diffuse, and it was both the case that there were crucial gaps, and that what was very clear at one stage could be obscured later: for these reasons I did not find a lens that I could valuably take up in relation to specific zones of the world, the way I had done, for instance in relation to technology as it appears within Sapphire and Steel. But this was abstract-oneiric thought at an extremely high level, and I have no doubt that - in a way it is not easy to delineate - as I started to write The Corridor I was in fact being profoundly assisted by the lens of everything I had read by Le Guin, and that in particular I was being assisted by the breadth of her openness, in relation to the cosmos, and by the depth of her openness, in relation to the body without organs (in that she has a tendency to think that dreams - the virtual-real - give birth to the actual, she has escaped from the dogmatic image of the world). And I also have no doubt that I was being helped by Le Guin's use of 'everyday' prose as a way of describing the sublime, and as a way of indicating the other zones of the transcendental-empirical.
The first major indication of a potential for a micropolitical Departure is in the opening pages of City of Illusions, where the group living in the clearing in the forest is a micro-world which has succeeded in staying away from (and probably initially in escaping from) the ongoing disaster of the global social fabric of the Earth at the time of the story (thousands of years in the future). This micro-society remains the primary social line of flight throughout the novel, and its intensity is substantially heightened by the fact that, inseparably, Le Guin has embodied a momentous departure in writing the book, in that she has left behind both sides of the system of reason-and-revelation: she has left behind Chistianity in the direction of the philosophy/pragmatics of Tao Te Ching, and the other very striking feature of the escape-community (along with the presence of this text), is the 'patterning board,' which as a divinatory device involves a 'technics' and a modality of the intellect that together relate to a domain of knowledge that is beyond the domain with which the system of reason-and-revelation is connected (this is not to affirm divination as anything other than a high-level form of anticipation, but its presence here is fundamental, nonetheless). And thinking across the whole functioning of the system in the context of Le Guin's natal zone of the interestablishment, it is important to see that the novel both rejects the Christianity of the Hegelian 'progress' interpretation of the human world (in the novel there has been a collapse a thousand years before - humans have been decimated and parasitised by a highly intelligent but monstrously dominatory - control-fixated - alien species), and simultaneously completely discards the idea of the USA having a world-historical mission as prime-creator of progress (the USA has been forgotten - people see themselves as belonging to the human species and to their micro-society, and the most inspired group depicted has none of the aspects of Americanism, in that for them the crucial book is Tao Te Ching).
In Le Guin's writing there is a cumulative figuring of the definitive terrain. The planetary is foregrounded both through the non-state wilderness spaces (the forests in City of Illusions, The Beginning Place (etc); the arctic wilderness in The Left Hand of Darkness), and also through the multiplication of planets (for instance, in that Urras in The Dispossessed and Gethen in The Left Hand of Darkness to a great extent are lenses for looking at human societies on Earth, and in that we know no other planets of this kind, these planets become ways of looking at the Earth). And the world of the waking of the faculties (which is the correlate of the planet for the definitive terrain) builds from the novels of the second half of the 60s - where this primarily involves lucidity, problem-solving (dreaming-lucidity-reason), choice-making, and becomings at the level of multiple selves, and double (female-and-male) gender modalities - to the point in the early 70s when the faculty of dreaming comes decisively to the forefront, in The Lathe of Heaven and The Word for World is Forest.
However, in 2007 I read The Beginning Place (1980) and I felt that something had gone wrong, deep within the modality of the production of Le Guin's novels - a kind of collapse of alterity, and a sliding back toward a technological and social-enlightenment Hegelianism (it is not that the ongoing human disaster can never be brought to an end, it is that an envisaging of the end has to be intellectually earned by something more than the ideas of the ansible and of a United Nations of planets: it is possible to imagine the reactionaries of reason-and-revelation breathing a sigh of relief at the point where Le Guin invokes ansible and Ekumen - this can be easily incorporated, and City of Illusions can be allowed to fall into obscurity). By 1980 the eerie in Le Guin's writing has been far in the background for nearly a decade, and the attempt to get back to it in The Beginning Place seems more like Le Guin talking about the eerie, as opposed to her creating something that would go alongside the moment in City of Illusions when Falk looks over his shoulder and sees that the Shing sailboat has disappeared. But, perhaps most important of all, questions of the female, the libidinal and the 'libidinal-eerie' have not been moved forward since The Left Hand of Darkness (1968). Le Guin is a female traveller into the unknown, but she holds back in relation to exploring the female and the libidinal (1978's The Eye of the Heron is in many ways a powerful book - it is the point where she at last has a female protagonist, but the book's culminating exploration is almost entirely in space, and questions of the libidinal, and of the other dimensions of travelling in intensity are completely or predominantly absent). Irene and Hugh becoming lovers - at the end of The Beginning Place - does not move forward the idea of what it is to be a 'lover,' and the alterity that might have helped is now fading away (the same has to be said about the lovers in The Pathways of Desire, a 1978 novella which attempts to go further than The Lathe of Heaven, but which in the end feels as if it has primarily taken the form of a very explicit, thematised collapse of alterity).
And then - at some time in the summer of 2007 I read Being-in-Dreaming. This was an exceptionally powerful return of philosophy: and my impersonal process of receiving tutelary assistance from women had, in reading this book, crossed a crucial threshold.
The philosophical lineage to which this book belongs is one which involves dialogue and narrative/narratives in a very closely related form. It includes Hume's Dialogue (although this is primarily critique, so it does not get very far), and in a grim sense it includes the dialogues of Plato - grim in the sense that these primarily are suppressive products of the system of reason-and-revelation.
What is necessary in reading this book is of course to afford it what is afforded to Plato: the putting-to-one side of empirical issues concerning narrative. The question of whether Socrates said what is attributed to him is the same as the question of the empirical status of the statements attributed to the women who Donner writes about in her book, and anything that can be viewed as potentially belonging in some sense to the world of fictional narratives should be treated in the same way as Plato's 'myth of ur', his story about Atlantis, and his tale about the ring of Gyges. We have been inculcated by the system of reason-and-revelation into accepting Plato as philosophy, but despite the lucidity and the non-suppressive rationality of Donner, we have been predisposed to see her work as not belonging to philosophy.
There are two fundamental points to be made about this book. The first is that everything is explicitly about the waking of an ability to perceive the abstract - where the abstract is intent, energy, dreaming, abstractions, feeling, and the aspects of the transcendental-empirical (notice the difference from Plato, where departing from the cave involves going into the deeper cave that is the idea of seeing the 'forms'). The second is that the book as a whole functions to provide a view toward the second sphere of action, and toward the path of Departure that leads out of ordinary reality.
In Being-in-Dreaming Donner describes two visits to a large house in a remote area in a desert region of northern Mexico. The people who she meets - and by whom she is taught - in this house are predominantly women. The journeys to the house are from the U.S.A., but the border-crossing comes to be explicitly presented not as a movement from one country to another, but from ordinary reality to another, less constricted reality. An aspect of this is that the house is described consistently as being in 'the desert' and the culture of modern, western-world Mexico is not used in any way as a means of describing its surroundings. All of this is central to the fact that the book provides a clear, sustained view toward the second sphere of action. And the foregrounding of the female in this sphere is present through women being the beginning, the vast majority of the middle, and all of the end of the tutelary process which the book describes. The house and the area around it exist over a border into the Future, and have a degree of similarity to the community in the forest at the start of Cities of Illusion: such a world is an intensive nomadism, a modality of flight (flight from ordinary reality, flight from the Shing) which has become so effective as a nomadism that there is a permanent base as a component of the ongoing process of travelling into wider realities.
In that the book's terrain is planetary and everything within the book concerns, on one level, the waking of the faculties, the world of Being-in-Dreaming is the definitive terrain. But the definitive terrain only appears (initially) to be separate from the second sphere of action: the human faculty which in many ways is most fundamental is the faculty of becomings, and, as Deleuze and Guattari have pointed out, becoming-woman is pre-eminent amongst the becomings, for women as well as for men. The book shows Donner encountering (and, as such, entering into becoming with) four women who are all travellers into the unknown - women who have broken free from the all-too-male biases, modalities and expectations of a male-dominated ordinary reality.
The writing of this book is one side of a culmination that has alongside it Taisha Abelar's The Sorcerers' Crossing: A Woman's Journey (an equally lucid book about the same house, and the same escape-group), a culmination of a process which started with Donner's Shabono, and with Castaneda's The Eagle's Gift. Shabono is the point where Donner starts writing about the process of moving into wider realities, in particular in relation to women (she continues, five years later, with The Witch's Dream), and The Eagle's Gift is where the escape-group in Mexico and the second sphere of action are brought into focus in Castaneda's work, and, inseparably, is the point in his books where women come into foreground in the sense that the account shifts to a description of him being taught by women.
In relation to works which open up a view toward the escape-path the wider story is, firstly, that over the last three thousand years such works have largely consisted either of abstraction or of narrative, and there has also been a modality of collapse (a form of suppression) which has combined abstraction and stories. The writer (or writers) of Tao Te Ching wrote at a time when there was a greater awareness that powerful stories give views toward the Outside (and when the concept of art would not have functioned in the same way in relation to such tales), and the writing unfolds with a quality of constraint, including no stories within it, and only one or two moments which suggest that they could be the beginning of a story (it is almost as if it was written under duress, and under subtle socio-religious pressure - which fits with the story that a customs officer demanded it in return for the author being allowed to leave the country). When Shakespeare wrote his plays, two thousand years later, a shift into philosophy, even if it had been as cryptically expressed as Tao Te Ching, would undoubtedly have got him killed, whereas the high-wealth zone of the artistic assemblage had been configured as a renaissance kudos-zone, and art as a concept had been constructed along the abstractly de-validating lines of entertainment, fanciful imagination and catharsis. And Plato had used a pernicious, fixated strategy of abstraction, while both including inserted stories and embedding the dialogues in stories that go beyond the exchanges, as with the walk into the countryside outside of Athens in The Republic (it is instructive to see what Shakespeare does, in contrast, with the idea of walking into the countryside outside Athens).
It is in the second half of the twentieth century that there is a momentous fusion between abstraction and narrative, and this fusion is primarily the books of Donner, Abelar and Castaneda. This moment is an extraordinary breath of fresh air, mostly because the fusion is exceptionally effective as a way of revealing the transcendental-empirical (and, in particular, the body without organs, the escape-path, and the second sphere of action), but also, secondarily, because it is entirely unconnected to the oneiric fixation-zone of Ancient Greece (a domain which in fact is a fixation zone primarily because of Sophocles) and simultaneously has no need to fight its way past the pernicious accretions that have battened themselves onto Tao Te Ching. In different ways, both Abelar and Castaneda draw to a small extent upon the ancient Chinese tradition in relation to the abstract (so that a connection to this tradition is shared between these writers and Ursula Le Guin), but their works do not have to negotiate with the world of its misinterpretations.
It was the summer of 2007, and I was sitting on a bench in a train station, re-reading Being-in-Dreaming. There was a point when I received a sudden impression of my life having been moved forward - of an increase of lucidity, of brightness. And the feeling is not separable from a change that had taken place in my life in the form of the beginning of my relationship with my partner, Maysa - I was now travelling toward Maysa, and on the level of the abstract maps I was studying I was pre-eminently a student of Donner and Abelar. I also remember feeling that it was striking that at almost exactly the same time Mark and myself had embarked upon very intense relationships: the feeling was of a current being involved - some impersonal force within the world that was weaving a pattern (but this was not - and is not - an idea of destiny or 'fate:' the threads would be as much a part of this force as the unseen fingers).
For around three years I read the books of Donner and Abelar more or less continuously, rotating - in no particular order - through Being-in-Dreaming, The Sorcerer's Crossing, The Witch's Dream, and Shabono. In 2009, a few months after moving into a house with Maysa, I started to write The Corridor. I had been reading books about Departure (books that in the fullest sense were an expression of a micropolitics of escape and of escape-groups) and now I started to write a book of this kind myself, not knowing how large a project had begun. It seems now that a sustained process of tutelary assistance from women had been involved in this beginning, and that in an unnoticed way this process had begun with reading the books of Ursula Le Guin: as Le Guin says at the end of The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, a work which is part essay and part story, and is about escaping from a reality which consists of forms of happiness constructed all along on something monstrous: "They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness [...] But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas." Beyond the deluded and delusory happiness of the city of ordinary existence, the joy of the nomads, the joy of travelling into wider spheres of reality.
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