48.

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) 







       

Erdinet                                 

                    

                                                                                                   Justin Barton                                    

Andaar lived in the north of Mongon-Tuvek. He worked for a horse-lord whose name was Kaigan, a man who had three herds of horses, and an exceptional ability both as breeder of horses and as herdsman.

The three herds went high into the upland prairies and mountains in late spring and early autumn; they sheltered in narrow valleys in winter; and they travelled widely in the river lowlands during the summer. And with them went the forty five members of Kaigan’s household, generally in three separate places , but in summer always congregating in one place for a few weeks or months. 

Andaar rode in the horse-races which took place in summer. And he had learned to play the flute, an instrument which, along with the drum, was firmly established within the lives of his ger-dwelling people. The sound of a flute would often go out into a sunlit silence that surrounded a group of the circular nomad tent-houses, rising and falling, flowing as serenely as the smoke drifting up from the central, circular holes in the roofs of the gers.

Kaigan’s strengths were that he was perceptive, and that, drawing on wide reserves of knowledge, he knew how to look after his horses, even in the most difficult conditions. His weakness was that he was obsessively vindictive in relation to disobedience. 

It had been a long, and extremely harsh winter. Snow had turned to heavy rain in mid April, and then snow had returned. Andaar was walking with Kaigan to a dell where a mare was giving birth. They were walking on a low slab-like hill, which was a mixture of trees and grassland, and which had an escarpment to the south, The new pine-needles on the larch trees were a vivid green in the sunlight. Before they went into the dell there was a glimpse of a wide horizon to the south: low mountains beyond a fifteen mile expanse of river plain, a cluster of ten or twelve gers a few miles to the southwest.

The mare was dying. She had licked the tiny foal clean, but she was now close to death.

The foal was black with a white blaze across all of its forehead. It was nuzzling against its mother, trying to get milk from her teats. It was smaller than most foals, indicating that it had been born early – and this meant that its chances of survival were reduced.

“This was a fine horse, “ said Kaigan “but she was too old to have another foal. Her sire was one of the fastest horses this valley has seen.”

At that point, they heard mens’ voices calling urgently.

“There must be deer in the mountain valleys”  said Kaigan. He set off up the slope,

 "Don’t try to save the foal" he said. “In a spring like this there is no option.”

He turned round and glared at Andaar.

“Is this understood?”

“Yes,” said Andaar.

But he could not abandon the foal. He could not do it, even though he knew Kaigan was remorseless in avenging disobedience. After a while, he set off up the opposite side of the dell, carrying it in his arms. Everything seemed unusually bright, and there was a feeling of a very large motion taking place, one that was too big see. He put this experience to one side, thinking that all he was risking was broken teeth, and the loss of his job. He was twenty two years old, and had a misguided feeling that he could disentangle himself from any liability.

     He hid the foal in a small wooden enclosure. His sister, Karakat, was visiting, and she had a wild, reckless nature, and a dislike of Kaigan, and he knew that she would help him take it to his home ger-terrain, eighty miles to the south: he would go with his sister on his annual visit to his home. And somehow the foal would go with them.

      As he had thought, Karakat was willing to take on the adventure. Between them they fed the foal over the next few days, and because the weather had turned milder it survived.

  It was a very difficult journey: they had to travel at night, and the foal, which he had named Kestrel, had to be carried most of the time, in a large piece of fabric stretched between the two of them. It was the first part of the journey which was hardest, not only because they had to go fast, to get away from areas where there might be Kaigain’s herders, but also because they had to take mountain and upland routes to minimise the chances of an encounter. When they were finally able to sleep, at dawn, he and his sister were shaking with tiredness and exertion.

When they arrived home, they told their family what they had done, and his father became furious, and hit him very hard on the shoulder, several times, leaving bruises that lasted for days.  But there was a mare who had lost her foal who could suckle Kestrel, and in time it was likely to become crucial that there was no-one beyond the family who could know that this mare had not given birth to the newcomer. Although he did not look like the offspring of the mare, and did not much resemble any of their breeding stallions, throwbacks across several generations happened fairly often, and, in any case, the mare could somehow have encountered a stallion from another herd.

   He and Karakat had only travelled at night, and had camped in high places, but they decided that if someone had seen them in the areas close to their own they would say that they had found the foal motherless in some low mountains fifty miles to the north, and that, later, if no-one spoke about seeing them, they would say the mare was the mother.

   Despite this, their mother did not distance herself from his father’s wrath.

   “Even if it’s at night,” she said “If you walk for seventy miles you are always seen by someone.”

*

 After ten days he returned to Kaigan’s household. There was a lot of rain in early August, followed by a pattern of rain showers every few days. He spent nearly eight weeks with a horse-herd that had been taken to the very highest grazing lands, on the southern slopes of the mountain summits. This was possible because the tiny streams in the summit terrains had water in them. Northward of these slopes – either at around the same altitude, or a little higher -  there were wide expanses of summit forest, spread out across land which in part was a plateau, and in part was a system of deep valleys, and rocky ridges – with higher summits beyond. Along with four other men and eight dogs his main job was to guard the horses, but every three days his task was to hunt in the forest. He was the youngest and the strongest of the five men, and it settled into a rota of his companions going in pairs and Andaar going on his own.

    He loved the forests. He would go to the very highest places in the morning, and make new songs, using voice and flute. At these times he became clearer about some of the central aspects of his life.

   The following spring it was two years since he had started to work for Kaigan, and as was his right, by custom, he told Kaigan that he wished to return to his home area because he wanted to study with a flute player who lived in that area, a flute-player who was already the teacher of his sister.

   Part of the custom was that there should be an acceptable reason, and this reason was sufficient. But there was a moment of silence in which Kaigan gave him a shrewd look.

“I know you came here because you were following Merabek, he said, and she is probably more likely to appear again here!”  Kaigan laughed.  “But if you feel you will win her love with your flute-playing, then maybe the choice is wise!”

Merabek was an itinerant felt-maker and woodsmith, who, with her father, travelled around the country bartering work for food and other necessities, over-wintering in different areas. Kaigan was right about his reason for coming to the area, and it could not be said that Kaigan was entirely wrong about his motivation for becoming a musician.

   The moment had too much danger for him to get involved in a bantering response.

   He smiled, and bowed slightly, aware that he was blushing as a result of the tacit admission. But then he completed the improvisational process that was the ceremony. Both parts of what he said were true, but it was the second part which was true on every level.

    “It has been an honour to work for you, and I am very fortunate that I have learned from you about the care of horses.”

*

   When he returned to his home area he went to see Kestrel. The horse was no longer a foal but was not yet fully grown. His black coat was lustrous, and there was already a strikingly muscular and energetic quality about him. It was clear that Kestrel was a very intelligent horse, and that his temperament was both friendly and adventurous. 

  

   

The flute player, Das-Mir, lived in Tangal, an area twenty miles to the southwest. He was a medicine-singer as well as a being a performing-musician and flute-maker.

The musician was near his ger, cleaning the injured hoof of one of his goats. Das-Mir said nothing when Andaar explained why he was there, but carried on with his task. This man was famous for a lot of things along with his ability as a musician and medicine-singer. One of these was an ability to predict the weather, and another was a capacity for silence which in others would have been construed as rudeness.

   Eventually, pointing to a stool, the man said ‘play for me.’

He played several songs, some of which involved alternation between flute and voice. Das-Mir’s face remained expressionless.

At the end Andaar performed a song of his own, which was about the mountain-forests in which he had lived when he had been tending Kaigan’s herd of horses. Like many Mongon-Tuvek songs, this started with flute, continued as voice, and then ended with a return to flute.

The man grunted, nodding.

“You are not much of a musician, and your voice does not have breadth, but you love the forests.”

The man shook his head from side to side, and this was the first of many occasions when he felt Das-Mir was troubled by his presence.

“I can’t help you solve the problem of your life. But I will teach you.”

He did not give much thought to Das-Mir’s cryptic statement. This was a time when his life seemed to become more focused and centred, even though, from time to time, events took place which unsettled him, either through fear about the future, or through the impact of a sublime feeling, whether this was love in the form of longing, or was a yearning for adventure, for wider horizons.

    In the early Autumm he met a woman called Zhana, who lived in a terrain fifty miles to the west. The following spring, when he could meet her again, they became lovers, and the joy he felt at this time existed alongside a pleasant feeling that his life was settling itself into a form where he could move forward.

   The relationship with Zhana also survived one of the times when he became less sure of the direction his life was taking.

    Toward the end of the summer Merabek and her father, Buyan, came to the valley. Merabek was slender and attractive, and was both poised and intensely intelligent. There was a focused, sparkling quality about her as she sat making the tools which had been commissioned by his group of families.

    She told him she was in a relationship with a man, named Ardin, who was a wheelwright like her father, and that he was now travelling with them some of the time. She told him this because he had commented on a fine, hand-sized carving of a horse which was in her ger.  Ardin was a sculptor as well as a wheelwright, and the carving was a gift from him.

   He discovered that nothing had changed, and that he still loved Merabek.

    Zhana knew about Merabek, in relation to his past, and she sensed that his feelings had not altered. They quarrelled, but a few days later they made up. After all, Merabek was herself in a relationship, and would soon have left the valley.

     A striking result of this situation, was that on the one occasion when he spent some time with Merabek – a few days before her departure – they were able to talk together about their experiences of the world in a way that was unconstrained by the fixations of courtship. They spoke as friends, despite there being a current of affection between them that was something more than friendship, and this meant the conversation was able to travel far and wide. The intensity of this exchange haunted him, but it would be a long time before he realised that what had been quietly sublime about this conversation was to a great extent something beyond their relationship.

      He focused himself onto his music and flute-making, but simultaneously onto his work as a herdsman. And sometimes he would go to find Kestrel, to see how he was developing. He could already see that he would be an exceptional horse.

   The young horse would  come over to Andaar, but after a few minutes he would canter rapidly away, impatient to be more fully in motion, and perhaps playfully impatient with Andaar for not being in motion.

     It was clear that he was extremely sure-footed, which was a good thing because he would continually go up into precipitous places, and then find it hard it harder to return.

   “More of a goat than a kestrel” Andaar’s mother would say.

  *

   Two years passed, and his relationship with Zhana came to an end, as a result of her becoming aware that he did not want to make a stronger commitment. He took refuge in his flute-playing, and in his dreams about Merabek.

   Kestrel grew to maturity. He was slightly taller than the average Mongon-Tuvek horse, and was very strong, with a burst of speed that was breathtakingly fast.

   It was early June, and there had been nothing but bright warm days for three weeks. He was out riding Kestrel, in an upland area of prairie meadow to the east. He had just arrived at a small stream, and Kestrel was drinking. He dismounted to fill his water bottle.

    He saw a woman walking toward him, half a mile away. He realised it was his aunt Sildsetseg. Twenty years earlier she had married a man who came from a place called Erdinet, five hundred miles to the northwest, on the edge of the Sayan mountains.

   Erdinet had acquired a reputation as an occasional source of innovations and inventions, and as somewhere which was slightly enigmatic because of the high level of physical skill which was occasionally displayed by its inhabitants . When not making up fables about it, people tended to say that the innovations and the physical discipline would be a necessity because of the extremely hard winters.  

    His aunt travelled to see her family every three or four years. He had already heard that she was visiting one of her brothers, who lived forty miles to the east.   

    To his surprise, his aunt greeted Kestrel, with a kind of slight, nodding bow. She then did the same toward him, smiling. As his aunt, she would never have bowed to him, but this bow was because she had used the gesture with Kestrel.

    They sat down on some flat-topped rocks near the stream. She asked about the family, and to his surprise he discovered that she knew nothing about events over the last few years, and thought that he was still working for Kaigan.

    He told her about the family – about Karakat getting married, and the fact that she now had a two year old son, and had just given birth to a baby daughter. He also told her about Karakat’s ability as a musician and flute-maker. His sister had started studying with Das-Mir four years before he had. And then he told her about his own playing and song-writing, feeling awkward because he did want his aunt to think that he was being drawn by envy to follow in his sister’s footsteps.

   His aunt looked at the flute which was sticking up out of his bag.

 “Play something” she said.

  He refused, smiling.

“No, you must play,” said Sildsetseg, with a laughing but somehow very emphatic quality about the word ‘must.’

  He played the song about the mountain forests.

   At the end his aunt nodded, smiling broadly.

“Yes, “ she said “Wonderful.”  And then, after this, he felt she was peering into him – he had a disconcerting insight that he had unlocked the door to this look, with his song, as if, without knowing, he had given her permission.

   She then stood up and executed a series of dance movements which were like nothing he had ever seen before. All very fluid and masterful, initially they were fierce like the movements of a bird of prey, and then they became softer, like the movement of long grass in the wind, in midsummer.

   And then she stopped, and looked at him pointedly. He had the impression that she had been teaching him something, that was not just about dance, but he did not know what it could be.

    Kestrel was grazing by the stream, a hundred yards away. His aunt had sat down again, and was looking at him. He was aware that she was seeing the horse as an enigma.

   ‘He is an exceptionally fine horse’ she said.

   Although he and his family had been trying not to increase the number of people who knew about Kestrel, he felt it was impossible to dissemble, and in any case he wanted to discuss what had happened with his aunt. He told the story.

    At the end his aunt asked a few questions about details, which he answered.

   There was a pause. There was the sound of Kestrel grazing. Above a grassy area on the the opposite bank there was a cloud of small, violet-blue butterflies.

   “You have taken a step away” said Sildsetseg. “If you go any further, make sure you bring Kestrel with you. I think he may have more sense than you do.”

   A diffuse feeling of unease increased in him in the course of the summer. He missed  Zhana, and now that the impact of recriminations had faded he was left only with his affection for her, and his knowledge that he had made her unhappy.

   And the situation with Kestrel was perturbing. He could not race him, because this would draw attention. But anyone who saw him would wonder why he was not being entered in races.

    At one point he asked his aunt about Erdinet, not for the first time. She gave some details about the terrains, and about the families who lived there, and told some stories about recent events.  And she insisted that, despite the stories that were told, there was nothing particularly special about Erdinet.

  “It’s a good ger-terrain, and there are some good people there, but it's just a ger-terrain like any other”

   

*

There were some big thunderstorms, and then the summer continued as week after week of hot sunshine.

In early August Merabek and her father arrived. He asked her if she was now married, and she said no, but then said she felt there was a way in which her relationship was a marriage.

 I don’t think marriages are held together by promises, the way people think. I think they are held together by something that both of the people have to arrive at.”

What is that? he asked.

“An implacable intent.”

He managed to misinterpret everything Merabek said to him. And when she agreed to go for a ride in the high uplands to the west, he was convinced that she loved him, and was prepared to end her relationship.

   Part of the upland was a wide terrain of prairie meadows with two tall crags, which stood up from it, a mile apart. One of these crags had a flat top with trees. In the opposite direction there was an escarpment leading up to a low rocky plateau, which was lower than the tops of the crags. There were springs on the edge of this escarpment which meant the area was accessible to herds, and there had been a big storm two days before, but there was no-one around. The place was a wide terrain of crickets, wild flowers and occasional pine trees, the trees increasing in number to the point where they became forest in the area below the crags.

   He told Merabek that he loved her, and had always loved her.

   They were sitting on the grass, six feet apart.

    Merabek settled herself on the grass, her spine straight, and a perturbed look in her eyes.

    “As you know, I am with Aydin. And my implacable intent is that I am with Aydin”

   And none of what I will say is a comparison. Aydin and I have gone through a lot together, and we have come through it – and we are travelling together in the practical sense, which is an advantage. But what is fundamental is that we have embarked – the boat has gone.

   He tried to argue that what he and Merabek were together was something special,  that should not be destroyed. But he was aware of the intensity of Merabek’s look, and of the unanswerable force of her initial statement, and he faltered.

There was a silence, and then Merabek started to speak again.

“You don’t completely fit together,” she said, “which is good – which is why you are worth knowing. There is a wild energy in you that is awake”

“I know that at a very deep level you think that if a woman you love loves you, then all of your problems will be solved. But for those in contact wild energy, if this happens it is then that, eventually, all of their problems come to the forefront.

Maybe -somehow -  our lives will one day end up travelling alongside in the same direction. I would like this. This is not to hold out hope of what you want. I would like you to be my ally, to be my comrade.

Merabek stood up, a pained look on her face.

“Your throwing us away” he said.

Merabek shook her head.

“The opposite.” 

She got onto her horse and rode off, starting at a walk, and then after a few moments moving to a canter.

He wanted to chase after her and change her impression of him, but Kestrel came and nuzzled him, and he had a moment of clarity, seeing that to chase after her could only make the impression worse. Later he would reflect that if they had been lovers and a disagreement had ended in this way he would have failed to meet the challenge and would have gone after her.

   He felt that he wanted to cry out with anguish, but that in some way it was not possible. Then he felt an inertia, as if a very heavy weight was pressing down on him.

 But looking around him he became aware of something unusual. When he and Merabek had been talking there had been no-one around on the upland.  But now in three different directions he could see herders, between a mile and a mile and a half in the distance, and he had not seen any of them arriving. He had an inexplicable feeling that the place where he had just been was not the same upland.

 *

A week later he rode to Tangal. Five days earlier Buyan and Merabek had left. Merabek had said that they would meet Aydin in Maravd, a renowned ger-place three hundred miles to the south, and that after this the three of them would travel together. And she told him that her father was talking about ‘widening of the circle’ of their journeys, a movement into new places that would be easier because of the presence of Aydin. At this point Buyan had arrived, having overheard what his daughter was saying.

“Before long I will be too old” he said.

He was riding on Kestrel. His unsettled and frustrated state of mind had led to him ignoring his rule that people beyond his family should not be allowed to see the horse. He had a reckless, foolish idea that breaking this rule would force him to change the pattern of his life.

In Tan-gal he was challenged to a race by Belek, a young man who had a fast horse which came from an area near Maravd that was famed for its swift horses. Belek was a man whose insecurity expressed itself as an exuberant, slightly mocking confidence.

    He let Belek get a long way ahead, but with a mile to go he found that he could not let Belek win. The joy of riding Kestrel was too much for him. He let Kestrel gallop at his full speed, and won the race, in front of twenty young men and women, by three horse-lengths.

   The sustained burst of speed had been perceived by everyone – it was this which took everyone’s attention, not the distance which measured the victory at the finishing line.

He bowed to Belek.

Belek bowed back. But there was resentment in his eyes, which he was trying to pretend was laughter.

“You have learned to give your horse potions I expect. And I expect it will die of them.”

The phrase “I expect it will die of them” seemed to hang in the air, and its meaning seemed to change like curdling milk. He was aware that Belek was narrowing his eyes suspiciously in looking at Kestrel.

As he left to ride back to his home he had a feeling that he and Kestrel were now cursed, or that they always had been, only the curse was now waking.

In the following days he decided that the next spring he and Kestrel would leave – they would travel into the lands south and west of the Targai mountains. He could see no choice other than to live as an itinerant musician and flute-maker, and as herdsman-for-hire in the winter months.

   When Belek had asked about Kestrel’s parentage, before the race, he had casually replied that he was unusual within his family’s herds, and it was either that he was a throwback, or that the mare had met a stallion from another herd. But given the result of the race he knew that Belek would not accept this story. He kept thinking about Kaigan saying “If anyone disobeys me they are either a fool or a rival, and either way they must be taught a lesson”.

    It was a relief when the snows and hard frosts began, in early October. In winter weather it was harder to travel, but, most crucially, if Kaigan was to travel to his family’s lands he would need several men with him, and herdsman could not be spared when horses and other animals had to be protected from wolves.

    In February he heard what he had been expecting, although the precise details of what he heard could not have been anticipated. The first of the rumours he was told about was that he had stolen a foal in an area that was to the south of Kaigan’s ger-terrains, and that his association with Kaigan had in some way allowed him to get away with it. The second was that the foal had been given as a reward, by Kaigan, for carrying out an act of violence of some kind.

    Whether anyone believed such stories was irrelevant, and he was glad that he had made his preparations for leaving.

   There was an inevitability about his decision to go to Maravd, and in a way that involved many reasons.  He wanted to find out if Aydin had been waiting for Merabek.  But he also very much wanted to learn overtone singing from two singers who lived there, whose names were Kuskas and Oyu-Mar. And, if his family were questioned, it was a destination which carried so much plausibility that it was likely to be accepted as truth. Maravd was a place where a festival took place in midsummer, and the Maravd horse-race was the most famous in this area of Mongon-Tuvek.

   He told Das-Mir about his plan, and he also mentioned it to other people in the Tangal area. Before he left he told Karakat he had done this, so she would not feel she was betraying him if she was compelled to say where he had gone. He could not help her with the danger of being forced to tell the story of Kestrel’s origin. But he knew that Kaigan was committed to maintaining a front of acting with justice, and this entailed that his sister could not pay a penance because she had not disobeyed him.

    He and Kestrel departed in mid April, and the route he chose went in an arc to the west, and went over a lower part of the Targai mountains (relative to the central range), before continuing southeast to Maravd. A more direct route would have been almost impossible at this time of year, and to avoid the mountains would have made the journey at least a week longer.

   In fact to cross even a lower range of the Targai in late April was extremely dangerous. But there was a southwest wind which did not veer north or east, and Kestrel was both strong and hardy, and although at the pass the cold was fierce, they crossed the summit snow-terrains in sunlight and at speed. Afterwards, unless the mind was focused on the nature of the crossing, it was easy to have an impression that it had not been dangerous at all.

   When they arrived in the Maravd ger-place it was ready for the festival. There were three very large tents in the centre which would function as both market-tents and as places for feasting and performances. And in a wide area of flat grassland, near a meandering river, there were already around sixty gers.

    He was directed to a ger near the river when he asked about Kuskas and Oyu-Mar. They were not there, and he went and sat by the river. He would have preferred at that moment to be on his own, but Kestrel drew peoples’ attention and everyone wanted to know if he would race the horse. He said he was a musician, and that he did not want someone else to ride Kestrel, partly because, he said, the horse been badly injured not long before. This was enough, and he managed to turn the conversation to his good impressions of Maravd. After a while he became aware that an old couple were stroking Kestrel. He was nudged by one of his companions.

    As he hurriedly stood up up Oyu-Mar had turned to come toward him, and Kuskas followed a moment later. They greeted him warmly and said they were happy to teach him. He had an adequate quantity of money with him, but they would accept only the most minimal payment for the use of an additional ger – which would be put up the next morning – and for their tuition.

    Oyu-Mar had eyes which seemed to go right through him, but almost absently, as if she was detached from what she saw. She could be very warm and playful, and she was always insightful in relation to important issues, but often she was silent. In contrast Kuskas spoke a lot – in particular about the musicial traditions of Mongon-Tuvek, but also about his travels – and other experiences - when he had been younger. It was easy to be lulled into an impression that he was hearing only nostalgia and the preoccupations of a musician. But then Andaar would be drawn into speaking and instead of the old man waiting to return to his reflections he would be aware that Kuskas was listening into the depths of what he was saying with a shrewdness which was not that of someone who indulges in nostalgia or self-importance.

   They treated him like a son, and yet at the same he felt they saw him as an enigma, and perhaps even a worrying enigma. He could feel that a source of this side of their attitude to him was the presence of Kestrel, but he sensed that, more than this, the source was their ability to read him.

    It was a very great joy to learn overtone singing from not one master but two. He felt exceptionally fortunate.

    And yet the compelling nature of this experience made it harder for him to think about leaving. After two weeks he had asked seven or eight people about Merabek and Buyan, and he knew with certainty that they had met Aydin and all three had left together a few days after Buyan and Merabek had arrived. Some said they had been going south, and some said west, but no-one knew their destination.

    He woke up one morning out of a nightmare. In the dream he had been trapped inside a metal cage inside the branches of a fallen tree, and he had heard a bell-like sound in the distance which within the dream meant that something was coming to kill him.

    He should have left at this point, but overtone singing was not easy to leave behind, and in the hot days of midsummer it was easy to fall into the trap of thinking that perhaps he had overestimated the danger from Kaigan.

   Having begun to feel that he should stay for the next month, he slid a stage further by agreeing to ride in the race. 

    The horse-lord of Maravd was a poised, sharply-focused man called Balak, and one day he said to Andaar.

   “Ride your horse in the race. It would be an honour for us for you to compete.”

   Balak’s genuine manner overwhelmed his defences. He had been intending, if this happened, to say he had promised his father not to race again. But he had been reassured by apparent safety to the point where he was not sufficiently ready to deflect the offer with a lie.

    Afterwards he reproached himself bitterly, while trying to dissemble about this state. However, it was clear that Oyu-Mar could see what was taking place.

The next day he was walking back after checking on Kestrel, and met Oyu-Mar, who was repairing a drum outside her ger.

“I think you’re as much a song as you are a singer, she said “but I wonder if this is not a song you should be?”

He smilingly shook his head. And Oyu-Mar returned to working on the drum.

On the morning of the race he walked with Kestrel to a place where there was a trough which was fed by the river. It was a warm day, but not hot, and there was a slight breeze. The sky was a terrain of blue that was dotted almost everywhere with small clouds.

    He set off to walk with Kestrel to the starting line for the race. Then, with a shock of recognition he saw that the figure riding towards him was one of Kaigan’s men. He was called Tur-Maran.

    Composing himself to seem unperturbed he gave the man a warm greeting.

"Tur-Maran! Are you well?"

   The man said ‘Andaar’ in response, and nodded, but there was iron in his face. He rode past.

  When he arrived at the starting line he recognised four more of Kaigan’s men, all with the same iron faces.

    He was frightened about what might have happened to Karakat.

    Looking around he saw no sign of Kaigan. And then he saw that Tur-Maran was one of the riders in the race.

    He realised that this meant that, if he won the race, it would be hard for them to do anything until he was a long way from Maravd.  An attack would be constructed as resentment, and their story would be disbelieved. And whether or not he won he would hope that they got drunk. He would not drink himself, and would leave before dawn. If he tried to get protection from Balak he would lose his freedom, and the protection would be very minimal – an attack would come before long. From the point when he had agreed  to take part, it had been clear that, for the sake of his family, he must ensure he was not amongst the first four horses over the line. But the terrain had now changed.

     It was six days later. He and Kestrel had travelled southeast, and then east, and they were high in forested mountains of a southward area of the main range of the Targai, on a rounded summit, with steep slopes and sheer cliffs to the left. He had failed to evade his pursuers. Kestrel’s exceptional speed had won the race, and, as he had hoped, Kaigan’s men had drunk too much. But he had only opened up a temporary gap. The tracking skills of the men were too highly-developed, and a failure on their part was likely to be construed by Kaigan as disobedience.

They were coming from behind and from the right, and now he saw a man in front, two hundred yards away, his bow raised.

He swung to the left, and Kestrel showed cat-like balance and agility in descending the first fifty yards. And then he heard a bow-string and heard Kestrel scream in pain – there was an arrow lodged deep in his right flank. And then, skittering down the slope, Kestrel regained his balance, but there was nothing but a scree slope above a cliff – Kestrel raced across this, to a place where there were trees above the same precipice. Showing astonishing skill Kestrel crossed twenty feet of steep grass-and-earth, but there was another twang of a bow, and the arrow had gone into Kestrel’s leg, a foot away from the first one. This time Kestrel did not scream, but he stumbled and fell to the right. Andaar was thrown off and rolled toward two young pine trees – he managed to grab the nearest of the trees.

    But Kestrel’s fall took him straight onto steep scree beyond the grass. He turned to try to hold himself with his fore hooves, snorting and furiously twisting himself round to thrust his hooves straight down into the slope, but even this was not enough – the surface was too unstable and his momentum was too great, and he was swept over the edge of the cliff.

   Twenty minutes later he had a bleeding head injury, and was on the edge of a concussion-collapse, as a result of a fall while hurtling down a steep slope beyond the cliff.

   He was alongside Kestrel’s contorted and bleeding body. He had reached a place of sadness that was not like any place he had experienced before.

   When the five men arrived he did not care what happened to him. He did not attempt to defend himself, but sat on one leg, with his arms resting on his other knee, facing the dead horse. After a while he turned round, and the men had gone.

     Soon after this the concussion impacted on him, and he passed out.

      Kestrel was speaking to him with images and with words. He saw a fiddle with a slightly tapering sounding-box, and three strings, and the top carved as a horse’s head, and he saw the arc of a small bow, and Kestrel said “use my tail to make the strings, and to string the bow to play the fiddle.” Then Kestrel was standing in front of him, and he neighed loudly, and there was sunlight and an expanse of grassland - but then this was gone, as if everything had been struck by a black pervasive lightning, and there was an unfathomable anguish that felt like being inside a hurtling vertical avalanche that never hit the ground, and then the anguish and the avalanche were dissolving, dissipating into the air.

*

It was a very arduous return journey. He was injured (the wound on his head did not heal properly) and he was consumed with regret about his actions. He realised he had lost any feeling of Kestrel having been on a different level from him – and the change at this point only heightened his distress. At one point he became ill, and he was nursed to health by a family who lived twenty miles north of the mountains.

When he arrived in his home-terrains he sought out his sister’s gers.

His family had been visited by Kaigan and by eight of his men. His father had been beaten, although the injuries had not been serious. Karakat had told them about Kestrel, and had told them that it was common knowledge that her brother had gone with Kestrel to Maravd. Kaigan had been extremely threatening toward her, as if he had been frustrated that he could not humiliate her further, but he had got the main thing he wanted, and he and his men had left.

    After he had told the full story of his journey and of Kestrel’s death, there was a point when Karakat spoke into a silence, looking at his gaunt face:

    “And how are you?”

There was a pause, as he brought to mind the journey from the Targai mountains.

  “I think I don’t even know who I am, or what I am.”

  “That is how I feel all the time,” said Karakat.

With Das-Mir’s help he made the fiddle the had seen in the dream. The fiddle was strung with hairs from Kestrel’s tail, and so was the bow. As he worked on the carving of Kestrel’s head – a process which took many weeks – he brought Kestrel to mind, and somehow in the process there were others with him, Karakat, Merabek, Sidsetseg, Das-Mir - and also Aydin, who he had never met. He was aware of his solidarity with the wood-carver Aydin, and he felt Aydin’s role as object of jealousy and rival melt away, like snow in warm sunlight. He would not carve Kestrel’s head in the spirit of a love-breaking rival: in his mind he urged Merabek and Aydin toward each other, to protect each other.

    It was April when he played the completed instrument to Das-Mir. He had shown it to him before playing it, and the old man had said –

 “You were busy during the winter.”

 When he finished playing there was a silence.

   Das-Mir had been looking toward the sky to the south, and now he looked at the horse-head fiddle. He was nodding, his wrinkled cheeks broken into a slight but sustained smile. His eyes shone.

   It was now June. He had come to the conclusion that Kaigan had let the matter rest. In his telling of the story in Tangal he had refused to speak against Kaigan, and had said that each community had its rules, to get through the winters and the droughts, and if there was a feeling from outside that a rule was wrong then that was something over which they as outsiders could not preside. He kept to himself his feeling that Kaigan was practising a subtle form of sadism.

   What made him feel it was over was the recognition that if Kaigan had not by this time attacked him as a result of the fiddle – and as a result of his story – it would be an effective strategy for him to claim that it was his administering of justice which had led to the creation of the instrument.

 It was mid-morning. He walked the four hundred yards to the three gers of his sister and her family. Her husband had died the winter before, as a result of a fall on an icy path, and his sister’s immediate household was now her two children, and her second cousin, Bayar.

   Bayar was with some horses, a quarter of a mile away. He waved to her, and she gave him a bright wave in return.

     He went into the nearest of the gers. Karakat had nearly finished making a fiddle to the same design as his. She was a better woodsmith than he was: he knew that this would be a wonderful instrument.

    “They are making them in Tangal,” she said. This is the beginning  of an instrument, isn’t it?”

    He nodded, and smiled.

    In the long silence that followed he had a feeling that he was not in a ger at all, but that he was surrounded by the wide June sky, scuttering with butterflies, birds flying high, circling, or flying across.

      “You’re leaving, aren’t you?” asked Karakat.

    “Yes” he said.  Then, after a pause, he added.

    “I’m sorry I raced Kestrel.”

    Karakat smiled.

   “You were – caught in the wrong current.” she said. “It was like a song that secretly needed changing, and by accident you started singing it. You started living it.”

“I should have changed it, even though I’d started it,” he said.

He could hear his sister’s children coming toward the ger, from the direction of the stream.

“I guess you’ll be back at some point, like Sildsetseg.”

“Yes,” he said.

He loved Karakat. He felt sure that before long she would be the main healer and medicine-singer of the valley. 

*

   He was on a hill, looking down toward a river. There were dark clouds to the west, but they were passing northwards, and would maybe only bring a few drops of rain.

He had travelled for four hundred and fifty miles, a long journey on foot. It was now five weeks past the longest day. In only seven or eight weeks the frosts would be leaving an inch of ice on the puddles.

Beyond the river was a terrain of rocky hills which was mostly covered in forest. To the northeast it merged with the Sayan mountains which extended across all of the northern horizon, from the higher eastern peaks to the western summits across which the rainclouds were passing. He knew that beyond the forested hills there was a very wide upland prairie-forest with a lake several miles across. And north of this there was a valley stretching into the Sayan range, and eventually you would come to a ger-place that was sheltered from the winds, and whose valley-floor was tilted south, toward the line of the sun. This was the main ger-place of Erdinet.

    When he arrived at the river he saw that it could not be crossed. He knew there were stepping stones, but they were not visible beneath the muddy water.

    He sat by a small wooden shelter, and for a long time he played the horse-head fiddle. Venus became visible in a clear sky.

    He stopped playing. He was aware now that there were two currents – or rivers - in the worlds of human beings. One was the river of ordinary existence, and the other was the river of freedom, of joy. And what was profoundly valuable in the first river was profoundly valuable in the second river, but it was in the second river that it focused itself as something sublime. But what gave value to something in the second current was not whether it simply belonged to the space of things which had a high level of ‘standing’ in the world – whether this was a love-relationship, or a customary practice, or a ger-place, or a song – but was whether it could transcend itself and reach a higher level through being part of the second river; it was whether it could travel in the direction of wider and deeper experiences, and of love-for-the-world. It was with a feeling of shock that he saw clearly that even in the absence of Aydin the relationship for which he had yearned with Merabek would not – if it had started during any one of the summers he had met her – have been able to travel in this direction.

   In the morning the tops of the stepping stones had started to appear.

    Not knowing quite why he did this, he turned to the southwest, and bowed his head for a moment, and then he did the same to the northeast. There were no clouds, and there was warmth in the sun already – the wind was from the south.

  The horse-head fiddle was safely stowed in his bag, wrapped in a roll of cloth. Moving with great care, he succeeded in crossing the river without falling in the water. He set off toward the forested hills to the east, walking toward Erdinet.

                                                                         ***

This story is drawn from – though it is not the same as – a tale which is told in Mongolia and Tuva about the invention of the horse-head fiddle.

2.



heat-vision

 


We are both looking toward the headlong calm of the river, and the tangled, overgrown garden. "When I came here to do the conservation research," says Gabriela, "a space opened up in my life. I had my work, but I was cut off from everyone. They were all two thousand miles away. And something emerged into the space - I willed a new side of myself into existence, I dreamed it up, and I made it real. I embodied it. It all seemed like a deprivation at the beginning, and then I realised it was an opportunity, and because I persevered with what I had dreamed up, eventually something came into existence within the gap."



"The nomadic and tribal societies all find themselves surrounded by a state society which is fundamentally dominant, and which destroys their dream of existence and their way of life. But conversely, for each one of us, whether indigenous in origin or not, if we dream and then actualise an effective, inspired form of existence, and a pragmatics of intensification, by drawing, in part, on what is valuable and lucid from across all of the nomadic and tribal worlds, then we find that it is we who are intrinsically at a supervenient level - in relation to the dominatory and destructive forces of the state societies." Gabriela Rodriguez



*


I am turning onto a mostly grassed-over dirt track that goes down a slope toward a semi-wilderness area around a river, and toward a single large house. The glacier-mantled peak of El Tronador is ten miles to the west, on my left, and the tiny clouds in the sky seem somehow to be attuned to the glitter of dust on the track. My long brownish-fair hair is being ruffled by a breeze, it is midday, and hot. The house will be empty. I have never been there before, and astonishingly it belongs to me. But what will I find there? And more importantly, where will this house take me? 

    The river is a few hundred yards away, running in a narrow curve of green, glacial meltwater whose turbid coldness seems improbable in the hot sunlight. On the near side a fringe of dwarf pampas grass, and then thickets of shrubs ended by a wall and an overgrown vegetable garden and orchard. On its shallow promontory the house is ramshackle and inviting, it is low but wide, and covered in trellises of bougainvillea, a lazy, dreamy sentinel that gives the impression of watching with a half-closed eye. I wonder if there is really no-one living there - who is watering the bougainvillea?

    I call out, and I receive an odd impression as I listen to the insects and birds that the house is really constructed out of silence, warm and strong. The sun, crossing at zenith above the northward mountains, is pounding down on me, and after a while a breeze raises a little dust and ruffles my hair like an abstracted admonition. I go to the door of the front porch, and after a while I find the right key, and open it. The porch is a dusty place, full of dried flowers in vases and dreamy blocks of mote-filled sunlight. Propped against a wall I find some big unused canvases. Behind them is a four-foot tall mirror. Hunkering down I see my appraising eyes and over-long nose, and looking at myself I realise I am not scared.

     None of the keys fit the lock of the inner door. I go round toward the the side of the house that faces the garden and orchard. Looking to the east I am aware that Lago Mascardi is only four miles in that direction, beyond a lowish, tree-covered ridge. For some reason I turn round to follow the line of the hill upward, onto the mountain. And my feeling of being perturbingly shut out from the house is transmutated into a yearning to see high, sublime forested places that might somehow exist in those mountains to the south. Out of the sussuration of the day's sounds I have an experience of hearing words, something like ‘the there’. I know now, for certain, that I have been in the sun too long, while walking to the house.

     Dusty, sunlit wild roses and blackberries are the main plants in the garden, but the remaining plants of a crazy-paving of vegetable patches are visible among the weeds. I go round the base of a raised verandah which has a tangle of plants growing above it for shade, including more bougainvillea. And then I am diverted away from the house by a wall with plum trees growing alongside. Returning, on the opposite side of the wall, I find a lower area, forty feet across, with isolated small rocks laid out across it. Some of the larger ones are near the westward side of the four foot high verandah. It would be possible, with skill, to jump from one to another, and to reach the verandah without touching the ground.

    I imagine kids finding the place, a girl and a boy, around 16. It becomes a heat-vision - the girl is a sparklingly feminine tomboy, wearing a loose, above-the-knee, violet-coloured skirt, the boy is a gawky dreamer who can't believe his luck. And then it changes and they could be my age, and they are laughing as if they are sharing something, and the woman says "if we cross without falling we'll be in the future" and it is like a dare, and she sets off to do it, and she does it, and the man follows and of course nearly falls, he is too aroused by the woman in her skirt. And then they whisk into the house - they have made it to the future. The woman is my antipodes, who I met, briefly, when I gave the talk at Oxford. And now I AM afraid. The house suddenly seems like a beacon of heat in a very cold world - I am afraid of something, and with this fear arrives a moment of apparent understanding, which a second later has vanished, leaving me with nothing.

    I re-tie my shoe-laces, feeling amused, and yet at the same time I feel certain that in some way this is absolutely for real. I am wearing a backpack, but I have done a lot of rock-jumping in places like dry riverbeds, and all the dancing can only have been helpful. I clear my head of the problem of the validity of what I am doing, and then I am looking at a sunlit space of rocks whose glittering of quartz is dreamily bright in the midday sunlight. Flat-topped, or rounded topped granite rocks, between them the ravines of dust and straggly plants. I select a path - and a few seconds of exhilaration later I am on the verandah.

   It is a place of cicada-sound, of the distant sound of the river, and of leaf-dappled sunlight falling on a wooden table and chairs, a spangled suffusion of light, not shade at all. Through a window I can see a dining room and kitchen - I undo the two locks of the door, and go inside. To the right is a big study, with a profusion of books, and beyond the long kitchen adjoining the dining room there is a passageway that leads to a bathroom and toilet. Everything is very beautifully and yet minimally furnished, often with striking, singular craft-objects. In different places there are three doors that lead to the rest of the house, all locked, and I do not have a key for any of them. On a sideboard in the dining room is a pile of photos of South American flowers, apart from the first, which, of all things, is of a bird's-eye primrose.

     I suspect this enigmatic flower of being a reenforcement of a comment by Cargill Ferguson about my way-of-being as a woman, an emphasis, as it turns out, from beyond the grave. I remember him having said to me once, when talking about rare wild flowers "you're a bird's eye primrose!" I am surprised by the way I feel offended again by this, even though I feel sure the house is a kind of palimpsest, which will be exceptionally hard to "read" - but both prim, and pink... And then I hear a bright burst of laughter against my self-importance, and it is the woman from Oxford, and I am aghast, because I have heard her voice whisper, laughing 'the eye of the bird!.' Too much time in the sun. I shake my head briskly, glad I am now in the house.

   I put my backpack down, thinking about the birds of prey I had seen earlier, on the walk to the house. They had looked like buzzards, or harriers, and had been perched in a tree a few hundred yards away. When I had come into sight around a corner of a road, they had flown away across the valley, rapidly gaining height. I go back outside. I had seen the switch to the electricity, but I did not want to turn it on - putting power into the parts of the house to which I did not have access. I look at the scrubby, dense forest on the mountain horizon to the north. And then I realise I should look at a higher-level - and roofed - extension of the verandah, to the right, reached by a sturdy, eight-foot ladder, the colour of driftwood.

    Having climbed this inviting stairway - which I realise is on a wooden block, but loose, so that I could pull it up behind me - I find myself in a plain space that seems to be all about the view of the tree-covered mountain and the river. There is a bench set back against the southward part of this 'belvedere', with the boards of short sections of wall to east and west, so that you would not be visible from any direction outside of your visual field. In a small, long box on the riverward side I find some wind chimes. I do not even pick these up, as I do not want to draw attention. I am a woman in an exceptionally unknown place - one which it seems has recurrently had uninvited, enigmatic visitors - and my nearest friends are eighty miles away. Sitting down I am aware of a slight, delightful swaying of the space. As if I am on the branch of a tree, or in a boat on a lake.

    I am lulled by the feeling of being in this inside-outside place, and my feeling of fear about the situation vanishes in the sunlight. And I sense the position and dimensions of this viewing platform have been designed to help you spread your attention to the whole span of the visual, and then to become perception. And then I reach a moment of spheroambient bliss, a moment of perceiving the world with my whole body. But after a second I am seeing the woman who I met in Oxford - and I see that the violet skirt she is wearing curved, delicate lines of broderie anglaise around its hem - and she smiles very warmly, but as she disappears I am overwhelmed by the awareness that for me in this situation the real danger is from this other, deeper direction of the unknown, which for a fugitive moment I know about in a profound sense of knowledge. And then I am left only with the word "warm-one," which seems to be a playful term of endearment, directed toward me, from the man from the heat-vision.

•   I get up, the green, gently turbulent loop of the river coming into view. Going down the ladder again I am confronted with the idea that the belvedere is a kind of doorway, or that it is a key to a doorway in the form of another hyperperceptual dimension of the house.But the clarity of these thougts fades with the memory of the experience that led to them, and i am left wondering if most of what is happening is fanciful, jealousy-inspired nonsense, and distorted wish-fulfillment.I walk down toward the river, feeling the need to steady myself.. The wild roses and blackberries must be introduced species, I think,unlike the dwarf pampas grass with its blonde, flag-like flowers. And beyond these flowers the glassy, opaque green-ness of the river, amongst its slews and abutments of rounded rocks and pebbles. The unmistakable green of the meltwaters of glaciers. 

Above me, just past the zenith, the sun is shouting a bliss of wild energy that I sense would go right through me if i knew how to let go and allow it to arrive.The turbulent calm of the river is full of light, and pulls my attenttion to the east, in the direction of the lake, but i draw my gaze back across the northward mountain horizon, and then turn round toward the valleys opposite side. Halfway up, the forest slopes are broken by a five mile line of vertical cliffs of some kind of dark rock, perhaps four hundred feet high. They are serene, impersonal, facing the light.Looking at the enigma of the house I sense that i must clean it and make it my own through light-hearted domestic activity - and that i must find the keys for the locked doors - because otherwise i will be too afraid to stay there when it gets dark.

   I walk back up the slope, and go up the short wooden steps to the verandah that i had lowered on the way down. After looking in a few other places i go into the pantry and look on the wall behind the opened door. There is a hook on the wall, with three keys on it. I go to the door from the kitchen, and the second key i try opens the lock. I am not prepared for what i find on the opposite side. In the three rooms downstairs an in the upstairs passages and bedrooms everything is about the singular beauty - and atmospheric, striking aspects - of the spaces and of the artworks and charged objects that quietly populate them, like stars within a vertical and horizontal expanse of sky, but everything is also much more than the sum of its parts. I am reminded of what a friend said about a place eighty miles to the south called Epuyen - saying that in the 70s it had seemed to be the centre of a ‘golden age’ of alliances with Mapuche culture, and of inspired environmentalism.

    But there is something transcendental here, as if what had taken place in the area to the south had in the end come northward and focused itself in the house through a long process of serendipitous events, and was now waiting to happen at a new level. It was like being lucky enough to see and feel a dream on the part of the planet, a dream, or yearning - visible through the result of actions of people who had perhaps not always understood what they were doing. Cargill had said “I have come to the conclusion that my house is more of a success than I am” There is the breathtaking collection of indigenous musical instruments in a downstairs room, and many of the artworks are influenced by indigenous art, or are doorway-objects from the magic of tribal worlds. But although this is integral to the effect of the spaces, the overall feeling or atmosphere is that the house is a secret support for a more-awake and planetary way of being and seeing that runs through all human worlds, even if it is more known and alive in the indigenous ones.

   I return to the dining room, and drink some water from my pack, knowing i have to distrust these ways in which i am being suffused by an impression of a preternatural aspect of the house. I am aware beyond all doubt that there is something exceptionally beautiful and striking about these spaces, but i feel i must turn the electricity on, and stop being moved by them - instead i must open shutters and sweep floors, and most of all must fill these rooms beyond the door with ordinary, causal, and categorising associations. I probably have slight heat-stroke, and maybe in a deep sense i am emotionally overwrought. I am aware that the house has become an ultra-charged symbol in connection with a long-dreamed-toward relationship that never happened - or, in fact, two such relationships, I think suddenly, with a frisson of shock, remembering the calamitous meeting in Oxford, and the woman who had made this encounter so disastrous.

   I pause at the window of the dining room, looking at the scrubby trees and bushes on the mountain. Thinking about it, I am not at all sure about the extent to which i care about the failure-to-happen of these relationships, and although I had been intending to go into housework-mode instead i go back to look at specific objects. In a corner of the living room a whorl mandala - with a spiral running through it - made of green, gold and violet pointillist dots. On a wall of an upstairs hallway a framed print of what seems to be the most breathtaking and positive painting by Matta that I have ever seen. I have willed the transcendental atmosphere of the rooms into the background - into the beyond that somehow I see in looking at the paintings. I experience them as a call from the sublime, as a window toward the next, wider level of reality.

    I come back downstairs and look again at the whorl mandala. It feels like a promise of some way of Being summer - and I turn away and start to open the shutters, feeling quite sensually alive as i let in the sunlight. I am unsure now whether i am dispelling my overwhelming dream-ecstasy about the house, or heightening it. I go into the dining room and close the door behind me. I turn the electricity on, and then i find the boiler and check that it is working. And as i start to clean the kitchen and dining room i think about James, and about how - long before Cargill had bequeathed it to me - i had had an amorous and more than amorous story about this house. A story or fond conjecture which i had held onto for five years, and which now - in particular after the conversation with Jose-Luis - seemed to have no connection with reality. But even if it it had all been a fanciful story in relation to James and myself, i could now imagine why, in emailing me about staying at the house, he had borrowed Helen Sandwell’s phrase about events which were now so long ago - “I think it was my time of the inconceivable.”

    James was part of the whole vague archipelago of small movements that had been called ”practical anthropology” - taking the name from the title of Cargill Ferguson’s book. And so was I, although i had always been appalled by people trying to pin me down with this name. But - here I was, heir to Cargill’s Patagonian house, and his anomalous museum of artefacts! I smiled. And then a moment later I heard what would be a shutter banging in the breeze in one of the rooms beyond the closed dining room door. I went and re-attached a shutter - which i had opened earlier - and came back wondering why it was that the only places I felt I would be happy to sleep were the dining room, or the study - or maybe the belvedere. Perhaps it was in part because the other spaces did in fact feel too much like a museum?

    I am scrubbing bird droppings from the verandah table. Strange to think that James probably sat at this table five years ago - which was, in turn, three years after the last time i saw him, when we took the mushrooms. Thinking about what Jose-Luis said, I feel that James had really just reflected back something sublime that i had told him, and had given me a false basis for the dream that some collective threshold had been crossed. And yet, Jose-Luis had made it clear that in some way something had happened, only it had never involved James, and it had collapsed. And suddenly i know that the main part of the house is not like a museum at all, and me not wanting to sleep there is because it in some sense is at too high a level of intensity. And then, a moment later, I am thinking, why were the three doors locked? 

  I move round the table to its far side, jolted by the enigma into an awareness of the heat and the dappled light. My body has become the pointer of a sun-dial, casting a shadow onto the table which shows the sun is now a long way west in the direction of Cerro Tronador. I look up toward the house, and then continue with cleaning the table. Cargill had told me that on two occasions there had been additions to the collection of musical instruments, from an unknown source, when he had arrived at the house for a summer visit. One of the group of anthropologists who had renovated the house, and who afterwards had kept a set of keys?  This seems the obvious solution, but the idea does not dispel my feeling that the agent or her husband had locked the doors in order to stop some more extraordinary dimension of reality from breaking through. I get the idea of the additional instruments winking into existence, and smile, even though i am feeling perturbed. I must get a grip - the locking of the doors will be just about security, a reminder to look after a valuable collection.  

A moment later, i remember that the door to the room with the musical instruments was open, when it presumably could have been locked. But I feel now that my imagination has got out of hand as a result of mild heatstroke and a very unusual situation. I go to the kitchen sink and splash cold water across my face and across the top of my head.. And then I go into the garden and pick a sprig from a large patch of mint i had seen growing near the verandah. Coming back I make a mint tea with this sprig and a tea bag from my backpack. While this is infusing I go and check all the lights are working in the downstairs rooms. Then I sit down with the tea at the dining room table. I feel the mint clearing my head, and I know I am now resolutely intending to see the house from an ordinary perspective.

   From my backpack i get an envelope that contains details about the house and the land which forms the rest of the ‘estate.’ And i also take out a scholarly book about the Mapuche that I had bought in Buenos Aires. I fetch a Spanish dictionary from the study and read for a while, acutely aware of the inadequacy of my Spanish. Then, looking back at the envelope, i remember hearing about a studio in the house. Following a hunch i go upstairs to a short corridor with the tall doors of fitted cupboards along most of its length and see that the door at the end matches but is different. I pull the door open and find a spiral flight of stairs. 

    The bare-boards studio runs for most of the length and breadth of the house, and has  windows on its north, west and south sides. I go back down to my pack, and change into light, loose clothes, and then i return, and do chi kung and ju jitsu exercises. The attic studio is full of the light of the afternoon sun, and full of constellations of slowly dancing dust motes. I feel I have discovered a ship, a ship that is floating within an ocean of sunlight.

   I concentrate on reaching an awareness of my whole body, and on not letting any thoughts cloud my whole-body perception of the space around me. There are patches of sunlight on the floorboards, and there are the forested mountain slopes, and the ceiling is a lovely structure of wooden beams - and I am a delight of fluid curves of muscle tensions and serenities in the shape of a woman. As this goes on I start to get flashes of understanding. I know I am grounding myself in my love for this space, and in an awareness of my body, and I know I am straightening myself out, but in the direction of the intensity, not in the direction of ordinary reality, and i know this is who I am. And in relation to my attitude to the house over the years since I first heard of it, I suddenly have an image of the bird’s eye primrose, and the words “dreams are the most powerful things we know.”

   Afterwards, I pause, looking out of one of the northward windows at the mountain horizon. Then I go back down the spiral staircase, and then down to the study. I can see now that the house is either something exceptionally special in an ordinary sense, or that is special in an extra-ordinary, transcendental sense, and it is clear that either way there is a deep validity to me dreaming it as a place where people cross thresholds of awareness. I find I am looking at Practical Anthropology, which is on a shelf with a CD on top of it called Excursiones, by a band called Suarez - it is from five years ago, from 1999. To the right there are photocopied articles, jammed in between books about the indigenous peoples from the Venezuelan upland rainforests. I pull out one of the copies, and as I do this a piece of paper falls out. It has a sketched map of an area of mountains that is evidently to the south of the house, because a part of Lago Mascardi is marked on it at the top. It has a dotted line running south across it, which I assume marks a path, or a walkable route. I look at the photocopy. It is a short story by Kleist that I have heard of, but not read - it is called “The Marionette Theatre.”

   I don’t feel drawn toward reading this story, so I put it back on the shelf. But I leave the map with Excursiones on it as a paperweight, thinking that I should probably explore this route into the mountains. Then I turn away, and start to think about where I will sleep, and what I will do to make the situation as safe as possible. I am a woman alone in the middle of nowhere, and should there be any crazies around I have in effect set myself up for an attack. Having worked out which downstairs windows I could use for a rapid escape, I decide to set up a bookcase by the door to the living room so I could topple it over attackers. I start to feel reassured, and I go and sit in the belvedere, aware as I do this that I will sleep in the dining room.

   I realise that I find the thought of listening toward the rest of the house extremely perturbing. If I hear any sounds I will just have to imagine that the woman and man from the heat-vision are there in the other part of the house to protect me.

  

    It is strange that I am now envisaging this woman as a protective presence. I see her, with her swirling skirt and sparkling eyes, and I sense a background vacuousness or lack of vital focus about that maddening, dreamy sparkling, only now in my mind she is looking at me warmly and I sense a depth of focus I had not seen in Oxford. I had always felt the row about her with Seb had spoiled our chance of having a relationship, as if a tiny launch-window had been missed. But now I feel clearly what I have been feeling already - that too much of my desire for that relationship had been about having a baby. And after all, when Seb had got together with Emma hadn’t I almost immediately returned to dreaming about James? I laugh - maybe “mystic Megan,” as I had called her during the argument with Seb, had in some sense been protecting me all along…

     I get some nuts and some worse-for-wear biscuits from my pack, and then I return to the belvedere, listening to the calls of unfamiliar birds. The warmth of the day has now subsided - it is an early evening of bright stillness, punctuated by the birdcalls; the trees and pampas flowers seem to be holding themselves in postures of breathing-deep, not with the feeling of wistfulness that sometimes seems to come from trees and plants at the end of an afternoon of heat. The facing mountain seems to beam light at me, despite - or because of - the fact that some of its slopes are now in shadow. For a moment my gaze widens and I see the entire network of shadows in front of me become luminous, a grey brightness that is more opalescent than grey. And then this view is gone, and though I try for a while, I cannot get it back. I return to looking at the sunlight, aware that the sun will soon be behind the mountain. I am also aware that I must be active, practical - to avoid becoming maudlin, and to avoid the two kinds of fear to which I am being subjected, and to which I will be especially vulnerable when it gets dark.

   And then I get a flash of bright, white-violet midday, a blissful feeling of the outer edge so far of what it has been for me to be alive in the sublime adventure of the world. And I find I am thinking about Helen Sandwell, and about what happened to her in the Northern Territories in the 1930s when she had encountered an extraordinary shamanic group within a tribal social world, a group who had co-opted an ethnographer of Australian indiginous music, and who later disappeared, with the ethnographer, after an apparent attempt to take her with them. Wistfully, but with great conviction, she had told me “it was my time of the inconceivable.” 

     She had told me about her experience with the ethnographer on the top of a low peak in the Kalnoorie range when she had seen - with the help only of music and dawn twilight - the whole Western modern world as just a pale thread within a wider world of dreaming. She said she had wondered “whose dream was that?” And that had been just one part of a whole ‘waking-up’ of experiences, as she had put it. But she had become angry at the man for not loving her more than the dream of an escape to the dreamtime. And she had run and fallen, and concussed herself. And then there had been the eerie three month caesura, and she had come round in a hospital in Darwin remembering a second injury - running at speed into a branch - and something she could not hold onto about an attempt to persuade her to go with the group. Apart from this she could not remember anything about the three months, and she had never seen any of them again.

    I make some spiced rice, and put a tin of mackerel with it. I sit eating at the dining room table, alongside the torch and the candles, still lost in the reverie about Helen Sandwell. But this was conjecture and vague corroboration, nothing was fully in focus. Calling everything to mind again it is still clear that nothing is even close to certain. I have never for a moment doubted Helen’s sincerity, but in the 1940s she had for a time been diagnosed as borderline schizophrenic, so what could be said to be beyond question given that it could all be a kind of schizophrenic false memory after a concussion? The furthest point I had reached was in discovering that the ethnographer existed, and was reported to have died five years after the time of the events Helen described, on an expedition to the highlands of Papua New Guineau, after having lived for some time in Port Stanley. This fitted well, and maybe even suggested a faked death, an easy thing to do, surely, in the midst of the onset of the second world war. But this was conjecture and vague corroboration, nothing was fully in focus. And yet, there it was, seen in my mind at that moment both from those hills in Australia, and to the north of the house - the white, enigmatic wall of the Future, the Outside.


[section unfinished]


I stretch out my sleeping bag on the pullout bed. I have turned on a lamp in a corner of the room. And now I go to turn out the main light. As I do this I focus on a set of five copies of Le Petit Prince on a shelf, all in different languages. One of them is in Swedish, Lille Prinsen. I switch off the light, and get into the sleeping bag. For a moment I am hearing the title of Exupery's book pronounced in the distinctive, emphasised intonation of Svenska, a language with which I have some familiarity because of several holidays in Sweden. I adjust the pillow thinking that to outsiders the language can seem to have an almost eldritch quality. And then my mind inevitably wanders to the phrase 'the essential is invisible to the eyes,' and, listening to the silence around me, this phrase in turn suggests itself as a way of thinking about the house. My thoughts go straight to my Oxford encountress and chosen house-guardian. Aware that in fact she will have no connection - other than through me - to the 'essence' of the house, I nonetheless decide to think about what happened on the day when I gave the talk in Oxford, and when I had been hoping that Seb and I might embark on a relationship. Jealous annoyance will be a good antidote to fear of intruders and of the paranormal, and re-living the experience will no doubt help me get to sleep.

My talk was called “Dreams of Tuva” and I had set out to ensure that I was saying something new, rather than just re-hashing my book, or even worse, telling some anecdotes about it in a disguised promotion exercise. I had wanted to wear a violet dress I had just bought, but instead I was wearing jeans, and a white top, with a linen jacket that was a kind of crushed strawberry colour. My blonde-to-light-brown hair was looking good, and overall I had done what I could to look attractive for Seb, without slipping over into a glamourous look that would have distracted people from Tuva, and the question of dreams. It was a sunny day in midsummer, and even though the day was not very warm, and the windows of the lecture theatre were high up and didn’t let in much light, there was a serene summer atmosphere. Seb had arrived, as he had said he would, and the talk was well attended - the room was almost full. So at the end, when I had walked the tightrope of semi-improvisation - and when I had received a very warm, enthusiastic response from the audience - it seemed as if everything was auspicious for the meal with Seb, especially given the quietly but noticeably affectionate email exchanges over the previous weeks. 

But then at the end of the questions, and when most people had left, there was a group of about twenty people who were still there talking, and amongst them was a very enthusiastic woman, with a slightly 'new age' quality about her, who at this stage was saying some things which were quite inspired, and which certainly showed an unaffected appreciation for my talk. And now, remembering, I am aware of how the male academics were both condescending toward her, and were trying to flirt with her, all at once. And of course I suggested we should all go to a pub for a drink, and having seen the woman getting a dismissive response about something she had said, I made a point of talking to her on the way. So when we arrived at the pub - both myself and the woman, Megan, got something non-alcoholic, but Seb got a pint - I ended up sitting with the woman alongside me, and with Seb opposite across a small pub table. Which means that in a way it was all my fault.

The woman had long, brown, wavy hair that was cut so it came down around her face. She was quite attractive, and with her energies-and-dreams way of thinking, and her slightly flouncy skirt, and her pendant necklace, she was exactly the kind of woman who could always have been maddening for me in that kind of situation. A woman who is attractive and who has an ingenuously intelligent “spiritual-philosophical” discourse has a shockingly intense effect on a certain kind of intellectual man. He experiences the views he is encountering as pure alluring femininity, and as part of an instinctive attempt at a courtship ritual, he agrees with things which he would completely dismiss under other circumstances. But the situation was even worse than Seb agreeing with views which were nebulous or confused. As the conversation went on it shifted, and just as I was starting to get really annoyed, the woman started being not just ingenuous, but genuinely perceptive about difficult, important issues.

She had said something earlier in relation to astrology that had started to make me feel extremely frustrated with her. And then she began to talk about human beings as, in essence, energy and perception, and I argued with her about it, and as the argument went on I began to have an alarm bell ringing at the back of my mind, telling me that under other circumstances I would have agreed with some of the things she was saying. But the damage was done - even though I backed down from my disagreement. I felt annoyed with Seb, and later, when we were on our own in the Lebanese restaurant, our rapport did not quite return to how it had been. I had the impression (which later I did not trust) that I could see through him to something superficial and concupiscent, so when he made a pass at me I rejected him. Afterwards I knew for certain that if my mood had not been altered the evening would not have ended in this way. And that was it, Mystic Megan had leaned into our lives, and prevented our relationship.


But now my animosity fades, as if I have burnt off a last residue of distress in a flare of re-living the event. I feel comfortable, and distant from what happened, a feeling both that the relationship with Seb was a bad idea, and somehow that it had all happened to someone else. I turn onto my side, from lying on my back. I think about the verandah - and then the belvedere, and about sitting there facing the sound of the river, and the faintly seen expanses of the night mountain, lit by starlight. I feel how amazing it is that there are pumas in these mountains. For a moment I have the sensation, for the first time in many years, that the bed is spiralling upward. And I feel that the house is a large, beautiful cave that I have found, and that I am warm and safe, and can slip away into the beckoning other-world of sleep.

   *



    Initially I remember only the final part of the dream. I lie on my back, suffused with the feelings of the woman in the dream, and there is the name... Kalthos. When I sit up I stare toward the sunlight, bemused - and then the whole dream comes back.
    I am shocked by it - it is as if a tremor has gone through me. It is one of the most extraordinary dreams I have had. I sort out a very basic breakfast, with food from my pack, and I make coffee; and all the time I am re-living the dream. I feel it has validity in some way, but I don't give any creedence to any of its specifics. And sitting on the verandah, in dappled sunshine, the impression of the dream being a glimpse of a current in the human world stays with me. I am struck by Cargill being the main figure, and feel glad that the disturbing aspect of the dream is so impersonal - given I am living in Cargill's house. I decide the dream is maybe a view of something real at a depth-level of human history, but that it has taken the form of an ultracharged, dramatic expression. I shake my head, astonished. I decide to leave it to one side, and to do something very active, to focus myself. I am here to be in Patagonia, not to be lost in reveries about dreams. I will walk up onto the mountain, and then will descend from the summit in the direction of Pampa Linda. 

    I decide to walk around the house before I leave, to check all the windows are closed, and locked where possible. As I go to each of the windows I also look through it to see if I can see anyone around. Apart from a 4 x 4 travelling along the road, in the distance, there are no signs of human beings. In one of the first floor bedrooms I look inside the walk-in wardrobe. I had already done the same thing in the largest bedroom, and had found shirts and coats that I felt sure were Cargill's. In this wardrobe there are around a twenty items on the rack: dresses, coats and skirts of a woman whose age it is not easy to guess, apart from the surmise that she is neither very old, nor very young. A friend, a lover? A live-in nurse who for some reason has left some of her things? Toward the end of the rack I find a skirt that seems as if it might belong to a woman in her twenties and then with, a shiver-sensation on my spine, I see that it is the same kind of skirt as the one the woman had been wearing in the heat-vision when I arrived at the house. The shade of slightly pale violet seems the same, and it is wide, above-the-knee and made of a light fabric. It has very minimal lines of tiny broderie anglaise circular gaps around the four inches above the hem, and as the heat-vision replays in my head I see the woman wearing this skirt, and in the moment of re-living the experience I have the certainty that I saw the detail of the fabric the first time. The woman is jumping across the stones toward the verandah - I see the broderie anglaise lines of her skirt. A superimposed reverie which mild heatstroke has made momentarily vivid and detailed. And then a moment later I am no longer convinced, surely I have just projected back into the experience, reworking it?

    

I go downstream looking for a way across the river, and after about a mile I find a narrow, very rickety footbridge. As I set off up the slope, walking on a westward diagonal, I feel a distance from everything, as if the morning sunlight in some deeper sense is not reaching me - in some sense other than the direct light being blocked, as it is, by the bulk of the mountain. At one point I look down into the valley and there is just a promontory of scrubby trees where I was expecting to see the house. I know I must be disorientated by the walk downstream, but this seems inexplicable. I lose the view, as I crest a kind of false summit in very thick forest through which dappled sunlight is now arriving. For a moment I feel a kind of specific sensual brightness, and laughing delight - I have become the woman I had met in Oxford. And then I am back as myself, the breeze blowing my hair, and there is a view of the house on its river promontory - there must be another curve of the river further down - and somehow it feels as if the day has woken. Opposite me the titanic granite cliffs stretch for miles, a sublime chthonic interruption running through forest and mountain-slopes and blue sky, an opening toward a cosmos-attuned serenity that is inconceivable, and yet for a moment perceptible.

    I reach a vehicle track that seems to be used as much by horses, as by off-roaders, although not very much by either. I settle my face into a more acerbic look, and tie my hair back. After a while the path arrives at a small lake, with a cabin or shelter on the far bank. I am aware that there is always something slightly gothic about finding signs of human beings in a wilderness. When I reach the cabin - which is derelict, with no signs of recent use - I find there is a footpath to the left of it, going westward up the slope. Almost immediately I reach a rock which has a message painted on it - “no us un sendero.” I guess what this will mean. Between me and the tiny outpost ‘town’ of Pampa Linda there will be nothing but cliffs and precipitous vegetation gulches. As the cone and suspended-glacier plateau of El Tronador rises sublimely in front of me I am aware I am taking a very difficult route to the local shop. 

 I am now walking across a wide, relatively flat mountain-top of rocks and small, scrawny plants: here and there are patches of icy snow, tiny relatives of the immense glacier-system mantling the much higher mountain to the west. At one point I see three deer-like creatures disappearing from sight ahead of me. Could they be huemul? Looking up I see a condor curve-gliding on the air very high above me, and maybe a mile to the north. As I look around me I have a feeling-and-impression that is captivatingly intense, and eventually, as it leaves, becomes a phrase that is my attempt to hold on to what I have perhaps perceived - ‘This singular terrain of serene and perfect dreams.’ And then I am taking everything in again, and I am swept away and suffused by the beauty of this place. I want very much for someone to be with me, Seb, or someone else, even Mystic Megan!

   I see a shotgun cartridge - what predatory or parasitic dream is dreaming humans so that the oneiric disease fevers them to the point where they kill animals for ‘sport’? And now I am reaching the edge of the mountain - a part of the tongue of the earth-brown glacier of Ventisquerrinegro is visible, and then the verdant expanse of the Pampa Linda valley. I have arrived here with death on my shoulder, but death now as advisor and challenger of those who are escaping from the horror, not as horror’s consequence. I feel that I could sit down and fall asleep, and then leap within a dream into the sky of the valley. And for a moment I have an image of dancing in a techno club in Brixton, but my eyes now start to search for the way down...

   It looks as if it will not be easy. The memory of dancing in the Brixton club recurs, as I set off up a slight slope to my right - but it is just an enigmatic flash-memory, and now is not the time to think about it. Soon I am at the highest point of the western, buttress-like face of the mountain, and, as I had been hoping, it seems as if the line of steep cliffs does not continue to the northwest. There is a tumbled, jagged ridge leading down, and a lot of pine-trees growing in steep gullies on either side. ‘My stairway’ I think, aware that in a short amount of time this may seem like an absurdly optimistic moment. I start down the slope, and after I have walked for about fifty feet I see a movement of falling whiteness - and I look up and realise that blocks of ice are falling, in a plume of crystals, a thousand feet downward from one of the suspended glaciers of El Tronador - and then the thunder-detonation arrives. I look at the ice-field and snow-covered peak which together form the summit of this shockingly beautiful mountain. I feel the planet has reminded me of what will happen if I fall.

   I start the descent, looking all the time for any kind of path, whether made by humans or animals. Before long the ridge drops down into a hundred foot precipice, but to my right there is a steep gulch of trees and vegetation. I take my bearings for the bridge I can see across the side-stream at the foot of the valley, and then I traverse, eventually rock-climbing across a twenty foot face. The holds are good, but the drop would be fatal. I spend an hour working my way down the gulch, and towards the end I have to use the stream as a way out, moving very carefully across wet rocks to a vegetation-shrouded pool above a final drop before flatter ground. Looking around me, I wonder if the last person here might have been a Mapuche, in the time before the devastation of their world by the westerners, a hundred years ago. I drink from the stream, and set out again, and, badly scratched, I reach the base of the steep section of the gully, having lowered myself down a thirty foot cliff using tangled festoons of vegetation as clumsy ropes, the most undignified form of climbing. My arms are covered in scratches, but apart from this I am uninjured. I must hurry to reach Pampa Linda before the shop closes.

The tiny township is a few scattered houses, a small shop, a cafe for the tourists, and a few hundred yards down the entrance road a small gendarmerie checkpoint-building, because of the border with Chile. As I walk the final half mile I can see the blue of the Argentinean flag above this building. The fields in and around the pueblo have horses in them, and above everything are the suspended glaciers and dark-coloured cliffs of El Tronador.

I find the things I need in the shop. The woman at the counter is friendly, but I get the impression she knows who I am, and when she asks me where I have walked from, I point to the direction, and say the views were incredible. And then I thank her profusely, and leave the shop.

To the right, in the distance, there is a woman with dark hair, standing by an off-road vehicle. She is looking back at me.

I turn to my left, crossing the gravel of the parking area for cars and tourist buses. I am aware that it is five or six miles walk back to the house, and I also have a feeling that I would prefer not to walk past the army checkpoint. Ahead of me a couple with a young baby are about to get into car. I ask for a lift, saying where my house is, and they seem genuinely glad to help. They are from Buonos Aires and they tell me that visiting Patagonia has been a dream for both of them for a long time. The baby is asleep to me left, and I congratulate them on doing the journey with a baby who is only a few months old. They ask me what I do, and when I tell them, they say they both graduated a year ago, and that they would like to get back to their studies, but for now it won't be possible. The woman deftly returns to talking about the beauty of Patagonia, and I wholeheartedly agree with her. Something about this couple moves me.

They drop me off at the top of the track leading down to the house, and wave as they drive off. I look back, in the direction of Pampa Linda, and see an off-road vehicle pulling up on the opposite side of the road. The woman I had seen earlier catches my attention with a wave and a smile, and gets out of the car.

"Hi" she says, "I'm Gabriela Fernandez - an old friend of Cargill." Her English is fluent, with only a slight Argentian accent.

"Holistic conservation" I say.

"Invisible Borders" she says, referring to my book about Tuvan and Mongolian forms of life.

I smile, and the woman is now crossing the road. She is wearing pale blue jeans and a moss green shirt.

"I guess holistic transformation is more what I have in mind". And then she laughs.

We say that it is good to meet each other, and there is a momentary pause.

"I came up here to meet you" says the woman "because I thought you might enjoy a conversation".

"I know you'll think I have an agenda, but it genuinely isn't like that - I thought it would be good to meet you, and that you might even find the things I can tell you useful."

This is intriguing, but maybe its meant to be intriguing, and probably she does have an agenda. And she could even be a con-artist who has done her research.

[section unfinished]

"There's something I like to think of as the five body problem" said Gabriela, looking out through the kitchen window, and then looking back at me, smiling.

"Like the three body problem in physics?"

In a way, but its a very different kind of problem. It's a problem of pragmatics, but its an existential problem - a transcendental problem.

Gabriela paused, then continued.

"The first body is the planet. And this in a way is the ultra-body. It encompasses you, and is the matrix out of which you emerged, and which is sustaining you. And as well as being an ultra-body it implies the existence of the sun, and to a smaller extent the existence of the moon. So its an ultra-body and in the end it's inseparable from other bodies - in particular the sun.

The sun is the second body, and again the sun is grasped simultaneously in relation to its exteriority - the galaxy, the solar system, the solar wind, the sphere of the sun's light.

The third body is the galaxy, with its stars that we see at night, and with its globe-clusters of suns rotating around it - part of it, and yet not part of its disc. Beyond this are other galaxies, and the cosmos.

The fourth body is the group, or the semi-group, or the loose nexus of alliances - even if this nexus has not yet appeared. What the individuals of this group or nexus have in common is that they are all - to some extent at least - trying to wake their lives, and discover the potentials of existence. Everything is held together here by affection, by a sober and yet joyful feeling of comradeship that comes from having left behind self-indulgence, and from having started to travel toward wider realities.

And the fifth body is you."

"There is a force or current within the world which can be called exteriority-intent. Its primary tonality in terms of action is an impersonal, joyful audacity, a courageous aventurousness, and its primary tonality in terms of giving attention to the world (the two aspects are not separable in the end) is a kind of sunlit, planetary serenity. There are many aspects to exteriority-intent, all interfused - it is an abstract structure, a world that you find in front of you, and that you walk into.

What is wrong with human beings does not like exteriority: it works with it in controlled ways, because of requiring energy, but it always attempts to expand a territory into the alterity or to increase its influence there - to subordinate it, to colonise it.

The first aspect of exteriority is a central focus on the planet, a focus which perceives the human world as like a mist spread out in the valleys, in many ways inspiring and sublime, but when seen in a bright enough light, clearly suffused with pollution. The second aspect is a perceptual focus on immediacy, and a concentration on the becoming-active of the body which takes the form of a heightening and conservation of energy and a waking of the faculties.

"And another aspect is an awareness of the outside of the domains of the nation-state" I say. "The forms of nomadism - the social micro-forms which have existed across the Americas, in Africa, Australia, Polynesia, everywhere... They are a bit more focused on the outside. Their paths of departure from control - from their own disaster - are a little easier to travel."

"Yes. Alongside us to our right there is a valley of time which is filled with a roiling of control, of self-importance, of reactivity, of gravity, of destruction, of the conflicts that are ordinary reality. It is serene and sunlit in the valley where we are."

I look around me, aware of the actual valley, encountered with the sphere of my senses.

"Maybe a crucial aspect of exteriority is that we are going to die"

Gabriela nods.

"Yes. Exteriority is preeminently focused on space. And time is primarily the futural line of the valleys, a travelling from one valley to the next, where the next is at a higher level of intensity.

But you're right, the keystone of exteriority is that we are finite beings who are going to die."

[section unfinished]

  

The Other Vantage

     A summit of the Sayan mountains. To the south, Tuva, Mongolia and China; to the northeast, eastern Siberia; to the east and southeast, North America and South America. 

    There is a profound need for an alternative abstract vantage on a planetary level, and one which has a historical depth which stretches across millenia. And most specifically what is needed is a transcendental-empirical vantage of this kind, where it is maximally effective in terms of displacing the biases and assumptions of the dominant abstract vantages which are currently in effect.

 

     The two dominant regions can respectively be abbreviated to the USA, Europe and the Middle East/ North Africa on the one hand, and, on the other, China and India.

 

      A main point of origin of the 'western' region's dominant vantage is the Nile delta (to quite a large extent this domain of the human world is living in post-Egyptian times). This vantage has Judaic, Christian and Islamic versions. However, there is another line of historical depth involved, which consists of the other main point of origin for this region, and the one which, of these two, perhaps has most reason to call itself the 'omphalos'. This other historical line can either be a supplementary line to one of the other variations (where the emphasis will be on figures such as Plato and Aristotle), or it can be a primary line - amongst many others lines - of a transcendental-empirical vantage, where the main figures of ancient Greece are Sophocles, Homer, Heraclitus, and the Stoics.

 

    The other region is bisected by the Himalayas, and is double: it does not have a zone of depth-lines that goes down to a single, small area that would be equivalent to the coasts of the far east of the Mediterranean. (Everything is multiplicitous here, but it would be correct to say that this region has two dominant vantages: one that includes and is largely centred upon the Hindi socio-cultural worlds of India, and one that includes China).

    A key point about these two regions (the Nile region and the Himalayas region) is that there is a differential that runs between them which consists of a greater emphasis on disciplines of the body (including dance disciplines, but with key examples in the form of tai chi, martial arts and yoga) on the one hand, and, on the other hand, future-projection gravity modalities where the projected future consists of the destruction of the planet - together with the rest of the cosmos - and of a world-concluding event in the form of transcendent judgement.

 

 

 

 

   The alternative abstract vantage has two primary zones. The first of these zones consists of India, central and eastern Siberia, Mongolia and China. The second consists of an area that extends from Amazonia and Peru to Mexico and to the USA - an area that can be called Central America.  But taken as a whole the vantage is the entirety of the terrains consisting of India, the southeast of mainland Asia, Japan, Eastern Siberia, North America and South America (topographically, one of its features is that is contains the highest mountains in the southern and northern hemispheres, and in terms of names which disable the optic of the nation state, after the Sayan Mountains at the the time of writing two of its best names are Tuva and Patagonia).

    

The first primary zone is the area pertaining to a nexus of elements:

 

The physical disciplines of India and China, such as Chi Gung, Yoga, Tai Chi and the Chinese martial arts. 

The book Tao Te Ching 

The story of Lao Tsu writing Tao Te Ching at a customs post, before leaving China. 

The nomadism of Mongolia, Tuva and Siberia. 

The shamanism of eastern Siberia. 

The second primary zone is the area pertaining to a nexus consisting of two main elements:

 The shamanism and nomadism of the (approximately) twenty thousand years since humans arrived in this region, together with the shamanism and transhumance / semi-nomadism of the current time. 

A small number of recently-written books consisting of sustained transcendental-empiricism which draws upon the area's shamanic systems of thought.

 If the lenses of these two zones are laid over each other, what becomes visible in relation to the simultaneous functioning of the two lenses?

1.  The escape-route; the way; the path leading toward wider realities. (and in a way where it is clear that this can always simultaneously be described as a force - the Other Force; Love-and-Freedom).

2.  The crucial importance of becoming-woman - for both men and women, a trans-faculty process of being 'in becoming' with women.

3.  A mind that is radically different from the mind of ordinary-reality, and which is an escape from what can be called the 'ego' or the 'self'. (the mind of ordinary-reality is here recognised as a world of indulgence, as well as a world of controlling and control-obsessed behaviour, and the worlds of customary 'learning,' taken as a whole, are perceived as having profoundly problematic aspects).

4.  The planet as fundamentally important, and as having, in some sense, a female aspect (in both domains of writing this female aspect is referenced in a definitively minimal way, as evidently a part of the horizon of the knowable, at this stage of knowledge).

5.  The body as fundamentally important.

6.  The existence of an energetic but non-extensive aspect within the world (with an unknown extent) consisting of what can be termed either the body-without-organs / bodies-without-organs, or the domain of intent, dreams, feeling, and thought.   

7. The embodied affirmation of forms of conciseness that consist of abstraction and of oneiric/figurative modalities. 

8. The recurrent fundamental importance of 'leaving' -  of moving on; of not staying to garner kudos; of not staying to insist/impose in relation to a viewpoint; of moving away and disappearing from sight.

(There are two primary aspects of of the additional expanses that can be seen from the second zone:

The second sphere of action

The semi-group - the nexus of individuals who are travelling into the unknown in the direction of Love-and-Freedom.   )

There is a crucial difference between the depth-line of the vantage, and the view seen from the vantage. Ultimately what is fundamental is the view from the vantage: however the depth-line also has a high level of importance.

The elements of the depth-line are the following:

1.    The journey into the Americas - and settlement of the Americas - that took place around 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. Here it is important that there are no technological features of Siberian shamanism that prevent its back-permeation to 30,000 years ago (the oldest musical instruments which have been found are from 40,000 years in the past), so that the tendency is for the image of the 'caveman' to be entirely undermined in connection with this spectacular adventure of exploration and migration. This does not mean that any assumption can be made about the peoples who undertook it, but it does mean that another 'spiritual and cultural modality' insists, as opposed to that of the club-wielding dweller-in-caves.

2.   The civilisations from 5000 years ago such as Norte Chico in what is now Peru and the Harrapa in what is now now Pakistan and northwest India: not because these involve cities, but because there are indications that these cultures were less based on war, and imposition of control by destruction, than the urban social formations which followed.

3.   The steppe/Siberian/Mongolian nomad (and transhumant) cultures of the last two and a half thousand years.

4.    Tao Te Ching, with its reference to a past tradition, which it refers to as 'ancient masters of way' (it is helpful to re-perceive this by replacing 'masters of way' with 'practitioners of metamorphics').

5.     The history of recurrent collapses of tyrannical mega-states in Central America. This suggests the functioning of a knowledge of what is wrong with state societies. This is a suggestion of an escape-route which was substantially in effect, but it does not at all entail that those on the path of departure were those who defeated the empires. It seems more likely that those on this escape-path lived a precarious existence, subject to recurrent destruction - but that their presence within the social fabric sowed seeds which were the undoing of the tyrannies.

6.   The works of Donner, Castaneda and Abelar. These must be seen as either direct expressions of an extant lineage of metamorphics, tracing its roots to the pre-Colombian era, or as an engagement with the anthropological worlds of the region expressing itself as a new modality of metamorphics. Because of the lucidity and validity of the works the suggestion here, in this second case, would very much be that a planetary unconscious has gone into effect producing visionary works of metaphysics and pragmatics. This leaves the idea that the works are more interesting if the second case applies, than they would be if they were the product of a pre-Colombian lineage.

    Characterised across all of its aspects this is the vantage of nomadism. It is the vantage of existence on the definitive terrain, which consists of the planet, and of individuals who are waking their faculties.

    The fact that the Sayan mountains are associated with nomadism in the customary sense is the beginnings of an explanation of why this terrain has been chosen as a focal point. The crucial point here is that nomadism in the conventional sense shares the aspect of deterritorialisation, in that the modality of the terrain-nomad involves existence on - and movement across - a terrain, as opposed to existence within a state territory. (This 'non-territorial' attribute is fundamental, but ultimately what is in question is always nomadism in intensity, as opposed to extensive nomadism).

   The first point about the Sayan mountains is that they are in the region which provides the most effective view on a primary aspect of the depth-line of the vantage. They are within - or at least alongside - the area from which humans set out, nomadically, on what is probably the most spectacular exploration into a new terrain that they have ever undertaken. And it is valuable to see this not only from the point of view of the start of the journey into the unknown, but also from a viewpoint which displaces the 'new world' not just into the terrain peopled by the nomads, but into the 'east' - a minor displacement in some ways, but one that is helpful in terms of seeing with fresh eyes.

    The reasons for the Sayan mountains in particular are these. 

    Firstly they are trans-territorial, in that they are both in Russia and in Asia, and, not only that, Tuva is both part of Russia, and characterises itself as the centre of Asia.

    Secondly, they are primarily a non-human domain, so that they maximally connect with the idea of terrain, as opposed to territory.

    Thirdly, the Sayan mountains are part of the Eastern Siberian region which is most closely associated with shamanism - the modality of knowledge that in its most developed form consists of metamorphics. 

      Fourthly, they are exterior to the central regions of the two dominant vantages, standing outside of the main zones of reactive dreaming which correspond to the vantages. This is not because, in relation to one of these, they are a long way from the Nile Delta (the USA is a long way from the Nile Delta, but it is currently one of the two most powerful centres of the 'western' dominant vantage), and nor is it because (in relation to the part of the Sayan north of the Mongolian border) the dreamings of Russia/Russian orthodox religion do not currently have a very wide impact. It is because, situated alongside Mongolia, and confronting Russian authoritarianism, ethnic Tuvans have a relatively high degree of resistance to the reactive dream-systems of the colonists, and because the Mongolian Sayan are beyond this region of influence. Secondly, it is because the Sayan Mountains are a long way from the terrains which are standardly part of the dream-spaces of indigenous Chinese religion, and of Hinduism, and are on the far periphery of Buddhism. And here being peripheral does not indicate a higher level of intensity, but instead indicates a split between Buddhism and an outside of Buddhism in the form, to a large extent, of the vestiges of shamanic adherences and identification. These are relatively widespread in the Mongolian Sayan as well as being a main tradition in Tuva. And in the Krasnoyarsk Sayan region, north of the border with Tuva, there is almost no Buddhism.

    

   This vantage gives a different history - a history from the viewpoint of nomadism in the full sense. And as such it produces a genealogical critique of the world of the civitas - the worlds of the cities. (However, what is most important is the ahistorical view: the view that is the same whether the book functioning as a lens was written in the last few decades or two and a half thousand years ago). 

   The history is located on terrain, not on territory or 'countries'. It is centred on a specific, small-scale terrain, and its - temporally indeterminate - starting-point is the time just before human beings started to arrive in the Americas, so that the viewpoint relates to the planet as much as it relates to the human world (it therefore reminds of the need to suspend the dogmatic image of the world in relation to the planet). It is also centred on nomadism and on shamanism, with shamanism understood as consisting, in its developed form, of metamorphics.

    What can be straightforwardly seen is that there was the movement into the Americas. What can also be seen is the view from the texts - from around 2400 years ago, and from the second half of the 20th century.

      And then there is an impersonal silence in which civilisations and cities appear and then disappear; in which states become mounds covered with jungle, and in which writing is not taken up as a sacralised, records-of-the-centuries shiboleth. The Aztec state machine had only been in existence for two centuries, and saw itself as an inheritor to the Toltecs, who did not use writing. And the Incas were a new (and very recent) societal mega-formation, and, again, did not employ writing. It is as if the horror is being fended off on two levels that are not directly correlated: firstly at the level of dominatory social formations like the Maya (and the Aztecs and the Incas), and secondly at the level of writing, as a function which is deeply embroiled in the suppression-metaphysics of state societies.

       Cahokia, on the banks of the Mississipi, was the size of London in the 13th century, and only a few years later was just mounds in the grass (this was a hundred years before the arrival of the first Europeans). Its people had departed from it, it had been grassed over, and no tales of it are told - it was it seems the unspeakable.

     The possibility here is that those who overcame such cities had been assisted in some way by people who were on the escape-path of metamorphics, people who had transmitted an awareness that in a fundamental and disturbing sense these cities were not movements toward Love-and-Freedom. That they were movements in the direction of coercion, destruction and suppression - like capitalism. 

 

*     

 

     It is important to see the way in which this vantage opens up a distance from main aspects of customary forms of learning. Tao Te Ching is explicit on this subject, and a crucial aspect of the Castaneda/Donner/Abelar texts is that they do not reference philosophical works: instead the references are quotations from poems. The references within Castaneda's books to poems from around the world are what appear in the place of quotations from philosophical or anthropological works.

     It is to be remembered that the form of Tao Te Ching on one level can called 'poetry.' But the crucial idea here is not that of poetry but is that when what is finding expression is a combined functioning of lucidity and reason the result is that the writing is always a form of outlandish - the new-every-time language of nomadism.

    The books from the central area of the Americas also display a modality of lucid conciseness in relation to their philosophical formulas, but they do this in the context of the advantage of also being narrative accounts. Outlandish is new every time, but this is a fundamental expansion which allows lucidity and reason to work at a much higher level of effectiveness. And under these circumstances everything that is included is important.

     There are no references to Chinese texts, but there is a very small number of references to Chinese traditions of waking the body, and to Chinese ideas, and a brief account of how, several generations in the past, an emigree from China became a member of the lineage that is described in the books, and how this figure had a vital impact upon it. There is also a positive reference at one point to India.

     The inclusions and omissions are subtle but extremely emphatic. At the level of philosophy the western traditions are not included, with the exception of an extremely oblique, ultra-minimal reference to Marcus Aurelius, where the reference does not connect to any quotation.  Everything is referenced to the central area of the Americas, from Mexico to the jungle terrains of southern Venezuela, along with a subtle link that goes to China and India, but which references no text. Beyond this what is referenced - and quoted - is poetry: a poem by Jimenez from Spain, a poem by Dylan Thomas, a poem by Vallejo from Peru, a poem by Octavio Paz and Mexico. In relation to philosophy everything is kept within a zone that extends only as far as Asia. And beyond this there is poetry, alongside the achievements of the overall human world at the level of engineering (there is a reference to the immense achievements of humans as engineers, existing alongside the atrophy or collapse of their 'other side'; and separately there is a reference to the scientist/inventor/architect Buckminster Fuller).

     To give any sort of positive reference is to recommend, and there is no doubt at all about what is being said here. The vantage is exceptionally consistent in terms of its openness: it is open to the planet and its exteriority (the sun and the stars), but it is not open to what is deeply inflected by the suppression-systems of the ongoing human disaster.

      There is a depth-level consistent aspect to this refining to an effective zone of elements. Humans have fetishised language, and they have made a special place in this fetishisation for writing. Inseparably, they have fetished mathematics, with the recent change of polarity of the system of reason-and-revelation bringing mathematics to the forefront. A fetishation of this kind blocks any awareness of relative importance, and blocks the development of the other faculties (it also functions as a machine for producing a feeling of superiority in relation to the beings we call 'animals'). 

    Most crucially, the vantage in question involves a radical distancing and de-fetishising in relation to writing. 

    It is necessary to refine to a set of effective maps - a set of works consisting of outsights, and guidelines for travelling into wider realities. And more importantly, as the fundamental part of the process involved, it is necessary to effectuate the other faculties.

     In particular, it is necessary to start from the faculties of perception and dreaming.

    This is an effective way of moving forward. It is possible to work with the texts of this vantage, and leave to one side any process of close engagement with the texts of western philosophy. And, even if this specific strategy is not adopted, it is valuable to see the world from this viewpoint - a viewpoint which has discarded the valorisation of this sub-domain within writing. 

   But the texts of this vantage do not self-valorise as bodies of writing - it is more that they radically do the opposite of this. The spokesperson figures within the recent books - Don Juan, and the female figures such as Esperanza and Nelida in Being-in-Dreaming - are not advocates of writing as a crucial part of the way forward. The statement made about poetry - by the persona Don Juan - is that recurrently phrases or sections within poems get very close to saying what needs to be said, in that they embody a powerful, haunting awareness of something that is transcendental. But this statement does not come from a figure who is a writer, or who advocates writing, and Don Juan gives no affirmative statement about Castaneda's books (it is also the case that Castaneda does not refer back to his books, other than at the very end, in that he compiles, in the form of the book The Wheel of Time, a set of quotations from Don Juan - the non-writer - taken from all of the books, where this book includes statements made by Florinda Grau, another spokesperson figure who makes no mention of writing). It is stated that universities can function to prepare the mind in relation to concepts and theoretical systems, but what is here alongside - and at a higher level than - poetry is not writing but is the world of the acts and statements of those whose existence is about escaping to wider realities. 

    The crux of the thought is not that there is something especially pernicious about writing, but is that in setting out to escape from ordinary reality it is exceptionally problematic - and generally damaging - to give any emphasis to writing, because writing is more language, and the primary aim is reaching the point where you can stop internal verbalising - the internal dialogue - and reach inner silence, a state from which woken faculties can at last begin to go into sustained effect. The books do not spare themselves the force of this thought, in that even when books consist of outsights and effective diagrams, human indulgence - in terms of reading and not acting - can still entail that they can be elements of a trap.

    

*

  

   The two dominant vantages are two different modalities of existence within - and of maintaining - ordinary, collapsed reality. They are two, state-established expressions of the system of reason-and-revelation. The southeast Mediterranean vantage has more reactive/dogmatic delirium on the side of revelation, and the trans-Himalayan vantage has less reactive/dogmatic delirium, and has a stripped down Chinese form which has reduced the delirium to the Hegelianism of the idea of the global Destiny of China (the two modalities exist, in different forms, everywhere, but these are specific state-instititionalised forms). The Sayan vantage is something of an entirely different nature - it consists of departure from ordinary reality.

     

*

  

    In relation to philosophical texts the approach taken by Explorations has not been substantially different from the one which has just been outlined. The very small number of philosophical texts referenced - the main text amongst these has evidently been A Thousand Plateaus - are all books where there is a very strong current leading further out into the transcendental-empirical; books which are written in outlandish.

     The primary difference has been of a different kind, concerning the fact that a main focus of Explorations has been narrative, and, in general, has been the issue of 'dreamings'. In connection with the space of what is customarily called art, the affirmation of poetry has had a further affirmation placed alongside it - the affirmation of works which most centrally are narratives, such as The Waves, Hamlet, and "The Erl-King". 

      

    

     The question of dreamings/narratives has been central on several levels. The Sayan vantage concerns a new account of the development of the human world over the last twenty thousand years (and it will be noticed that all available resources have been used for breaking open this view, including concepts from A Thousand Plateaus, so that this section points toward a view that has no explicit connection to western philosophy, but in fact makes the view visible to a large extent with work from this other tradition).

      It needs to be said, of course, that this vantage could be given other names generated by other parts of the terrain. To call it the Patagonian vantage would name it according to the furthest extent of the journey that started with the crossing from Siberia to Alaska (and would connect it to a place which is trans-territorial).

     And the Sayan Vantage is a placeholder for a planetary view. An account that goes wider and deeper, and which ultimately, as with all these accounts, leads to what is fundamental - the view of the escape-route that leads further out into the World.

    We come from Africa. We should forget about the enclampment of the ancient Egyptian empire in the southwestern Mediterranean, and think about the arrival of humans at the Nile delta 100,000 years ago.

    Many of us upheld an impressive extensive-nomadism tradition in Australia for around sixty thousand years (nomadism in this form is not the escape-route, but it is a zone of the place from which the escape-route departs). 

   Over the last five thousand years, in the north and east of Eurasia, and across North and South America the collapse into the state-domination form of the sedentary was to a very great extent avoided, with the same avoidance being achieved across large areas of Africa. The worlds of sedentary-tribal, transhumant and extensive-nomadic societies have their own grim aspects, but it is in the state societies where the ongoing disaster reaches its most horrific form (when we stopped travelling with the herds rulers started to treat people like sheep, a process which has not come to an end, but has only become more disguised as the control-modality within the human world has acquired more powerful methods).

     

     

This section does not aim to set up any detailed account of the other transcendental-empirical vantage - the one with the historical depth-line which goes to the northern coastlands of the eastern Mediterranean (to Sophocles, Homer, Heraclitus...), and which has a ploblematic split into 'art' and 'philosophy.' It is true that Shakespeare's work is a key element in this vantage, but you would be better to keep the focal point of this vantage as the terrains to the north and east of the eastern Mediterranean. And more importantly, although the main elements of this vantage are now distributed across the terrains of the planet, this is not the reason for not working on it in detail. In terms of philosophy the path leads onward into the philosophy of the Sayan vantage, and in terms of literature the work is better taken up in a wider context.

  The question therefore is - what do you see if you overlay the viewpoints of both specific vantages?

It is necessary, for a moment to describe the aspects of the lens system which are in the foreground as a result of what has been added:

1.

accounts of constitutively different modalities of attention and action.

stories of decisive breaks or 'ruptures' in the course of a life, involving an upward threshold crossing.

stories of disappearances-across-a-threshold

stories of departures to a fundamentally different milieu.

stories of other worlds, immanently alongside this one.

2.

Stories of desert terrains, mountain terrains, forest terrains, scurfland terrains, sky terrains.

From one point of view it can be said that what is being seen is metamorphosis in its planetary context. But it is more correct to say that what is being seen is the second sphere of action, and is the threshold crossing to a transformed and heightened modality of attention and action that is the one which pertains to the second sphere of action; to existence on the definitive terrain.

     As well as consisting on one level of jolts and ruptures, the metamorphosis in the form of the threshold crossing to the initial (how the second sphere of action appears as it comes into focus) has two correlates:

sky spaces, wilderness spaces, hinterland spaces, scurfland spaces

the semi-group; the transformative lines of alliances

(with both of these it is possible for them to be substantially at the level of the virtual-real)

   A further point is that although the sea is a wilderness space it is de-emphasised here. It seems that recurrently the sea, in comparison with the sky and with hinterland terrains, is in some way less effective as a smooth space. 

     Although this writing - Explorations - is not attempting to give an account of the other transcendental-empirical vantage it seems that it must be seen as an expression of it, and as an attempt to bring its two sides together. However, most fundamentally the attempt is to make a kind of bridge - a new junction-point in the form of becomings - that goes from the Arkardian vantage to the Sayan vantage.

    A door is banging in the wind. There is a distant view of a tree-covered ridge through the window of the house. It is hot, and there is a scent of the jasmine that is blossoming around the window. Motes of dust are swirling in the sunlight.

    The people who own the house have gone off to another country, and they will not be back for months. The small bird on the window-sill looks at you with a glittering eye, hops forward along the ledge, and then flies off.

    When you look toward these spaces, the faculty of feeling will tell you what you need to know.

    *

  She was walking north along the gravel road, stands of pine-trees on either side, and mountains visible in the distance. Occasionally a car would go by, raising a cloud of dust. She kept expecting she would see someone she recognised in one of the cars, but she had travelled north by coach for thirty miles before starting out, so it was unlikely.

   After the meeting - and her revelation about Leandro's company - something in Ayelen's look had made her aware that she had gone too far. She had been right to intervene on behalf of the forests, but the timing and the circumstances had created antagonism. Leandro was just too popular, as well as being a major local employer. It was fortunate the arson attack had not killed anyone, and even though Leandro was probably not behind this, she felt sure that it was support for him which had been involved.

   Ayelen and Danilo would move the process forward: it had only been a fortuitous event which had given her the opportunity to intervene in the way she had. She was a designer and craftswoman who had become involved as an activist, but she needed to think about the details of the stance she would take in trying to protect the forests.

   She felt a kind of greyness behind her: the greyness of a set of difficult circumstances; of a place which had given her work, but which had not been where she wanted to live; a greyness that had consisted to a great extent of her frustration and anger.

   She had been planning this walk for the last two years. She would walk to Lago Alumine, going west to Pampa Linda at Lago Mascardi, and then going up along the border with Chile, before taking slightly easier routes for the last sixty kilometres of the journey. After this she might return to Buenos Aires, to earn some money. But thinking about the friends she had made the previous summer, who lived near Lago Alumine, she wondered if this area might really be her long-term destination as well.

  There were early lupins flowering, multi-coloured, on the grass verges, bright, but a little dusty.

    She could feel it ahead of her - it was there in the midday sunlight, and the light-suffused sky above the mountains on the horizon; it was there in the lupins and the pine-trees, and in the breeze gently swirling the dust on the road. A path leading outward, away from everything within herself that she needed to leave behind.

Note 1.

      Even near the top of Mickle Fell a dragonfly

     Skims the grass. The forest, suffused with zenith light,

     Spreads to the horizon, the woman’s path high 

     Above the drome’s grey mist. She has the future sight

     Is the uplands of the spirit, the nomad

     Travelling in existence to the next sun-green

     Threshold: she is the dreams you always had,

     The nomad-traveller-woman who is seen

     And then forgotten, and often travels most

     When she stays in one place. Embodying the bond

     Of comradeship, the love of wild roses, of the desert’s forest ghost

     She is delight’s bright courage, the love of way beyond.

     This flows from sky and earth, and re-living’s hidden streams

     We must forget our memories and wake our dreams.

 

 

When it is understood in terms of intensive nomadism, what are the aspects of the semi-group?

projects / project-alliances

exploration

waking the faculties / becoming active

applying the principle of Exteriority

     In relation to the sublime in human lives it is necessary to stop defining individuals in ways that are centred on who it is they sleep with, and, in general, on the primary, or interactively physical functioning of the reproductive organs, whether at the level of reproduction or the level of sexual acts (sexual acts here encompasses same-sex and heterosexual encounters). At the deepest level - the level which is fundamental - humans are explorers into wider realities. Couple relationships can find a place as units-of-escape within semi-groups primarily consisting of movements toward the Future. It is a major achievement to raise a family in an inspired way, and it is also a major achievement to be part of the creation of an inspired couple relationship, but what is fundamental in relation to the sublime is the movement into wider realities: without this movement individuals condemn themselves either to serial burning-down of relationships, or to a dampened, saddened continuity (for an individual there is no sovereign need for there to be a couple relationship in a process of escape, but if there is one it should be a filament that is bright with its own intensity and, most of all, with the intensity of the journey toward transcendental south). Everything here consists of becomings, not of subjectified stasis, and the two crucial becomings are becoming-planet, and becoming-woman. Becoming-woman is fundamental - if for no other reason - because the constitutive fabric of ordinary reality is profoundly biased toward knowledge and attitudes that are drawn from male experiences (which is to say that there is a set of biases pertaining to ordinary reality where the maleness involved goes far beyond sexual acts, going into the domain of attitudes, forms of knowledge, suppressive systems of the faculties, and processes of presenting female modalities in a negative light). And here it must be seen that - to arrive at the initial point, but in a specific way - becoming-woman must not be centred on sexuality, but must be focused on the entirety of female experience (for instance, this is one reason why it it is vital to read writers such as Virginia Woolf, Barbara O'Brien, Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Taisha Abelar, Margaret Atwood ...).

     The domain of what has been called 'art' consists on the one hand of joys, deterritorialisations and processes of waking the faculties; and on the other hand it consists of outsights about the nature of the world, and the pragmatics of escape (because it consists on one level of transcendental-empirical perceptions it is inseparable from philosophy, and the term philosophy is transmutated in the same change into the term metamorphics, in that metaphysics is here inseparable from pragmatics). And the intensification involved in this change is shown by the way in which everything shifts from the centrality of passivity to the centrality of activity, to the point where art becomes much more than it was before, and in certain respects becomes barely recognisable: to go to another country and adopt a different persona is the height of drama, and a maximal deterritorialisation toward a fluency of the body is the height of dance, but neither of these involves an audience which is appreciating  an 'artistic performance'. And the zone of production of sound that is called music not only now exists within a wider sphere of deterritorialisation of sound, but there is a further change where music comes into focus as grimly threaded with modalities that have been set up to be suffused with indulgent and subjectified affects: in particular, all of the damaging gravity of indulgent melancholy, pious anthemic grandeur, etc.

   We need to inhabit the tractable, valid problem (and dreaming) of the planet, our explorer-traveller friends, and of ourselves. There is the sphere of the planet, the 'sphere' or milieu of our allies in the process of escape (no matter how minimally interconnected this milieu might be), and, for each of us, the immediate sphere of what is, first and foremost, a zone of perception. We have to become perception; we have to wake our faculties and our alliances, and we have to focus pre-eminently on the terrain - and specific terrains - of the planet, as opposed to focusing on the territories of nation states or on overall systems of human organisation. The sublime of the shamanic/nomadic adventure now goes back tens of thousands of years, but far more fundamental is the spheroambient planet of which this past is an element. There is the immensity of the sky-terrains and surface-terrains of the planet, and then there is the strangeness of the ongoing disaster of the human world as an included domain of filaments - capitalism, and a small number of tribal worlds, but with the interestablishment everywhere. And then, running through the human world, and in different ways in effect within all the zones of this world, there is the current of Exteriority, of Love-and-Freedom. 

*

    Rise up a little above the surface of the planet. Below you there are slopes covered in pine-trees, and valleys threaded with small streams; maybe there are blackberries, wild roses, lupins, fuschias; on the horizon in the direction of the equator there are hills and mountains. Rise up a little further and experience the planet through feeling; a bright sphere of the unknown and yet intensely known – the atmosphere, and the more solid sphere within the atmosphere, and the surface of the more solid sphere, with the networks of its different plant and animals domains, many of which extend expansively into the atmosphere, through spores and through different forms of flight.

    Rise up still further into the rarified upper zones of the atmosphere, so that the expanses of cirrostratus clouds and the tops of the highest thunderstorms are far below you. And then let everything become warmly abstract: an abstract domain and problem in the form of the planet, understood as worlds of energy-formations. Explore its sunlit and starlit terrains by feeling into them; by experiencing them as feeling; by seeing the way they make you feel.

    The crucial distinction here is between a seeing of intent and a seeing of how things make you feel. With the non-animal expanses of the planet the knowledge of intent is not available, but what remains is in every way fundamental. The sunlit and starlit terrains of the planet hearten you, inspire you, breathe energy into you. They are fundamentally heartening.

 

     The interestablishment of the human world, wrapped spherically around the planet, is a grey perturbing expanse; a deleterious, muddy domain of control and reactivity, a domain of the functionings of interiority.

     The oneirosphere is also wrapped spherically around the planet, and it can be seen that it is profoundly connected to the verosphere of accounts of the world constructed as veridical and that in crucial ways it is inseparable from it.

    Feeling into these conjoined spheres it becomes clear that there is something there which is fundamentally outside the domain of the interestablishment. In relation to the verosphere and oneirosphere it shows up like bright light in certain zones, but in relation to the human world as a whole it is everywhere, at different levels of intensity.

    It is love-and-freedom intent, or liberatory intent; and at its most focused it is an immensely detailed liberatory pragmatics which can also be called metamorphics. In terms of the two spheres what in fact is most central to it is that it is a world of seeing, but inseparably it is a world of dreamings, in which the dreamings are threaded with the outsights of seeing, of lucidity.

    The functionings and products of reason are transecting aspects and included components, where the aspects and components are used in whatever ways they are needed, within the liberatory pragmatics.

    The issue of intent is the issue of directions – and most crucially it is the issue of travelling into wider realities. 

    However, before moving to this issue – of intent, and directions – it is important to stay a little longer in the affectively envisaged sphere of the planet.

    This affective envisaging is the space of an active engagement with the problem of what is going on in the human world, and of what is going on within the planet. (to move forward all means must be used here from analysis to dreaming up what could be taking place, in the form of oneiric hypotheses).

   It is also important to see that this is the human world grasped not as actor operating on an inert matter, or as intellectual subject inspecting objects from a higher level of being, but as a world included within the planet, where this world is continually affected by the planet, in the sense that it is continually heartened, energised and inspired by it, to the point where the impression is that the planet is continually filling the human world with dreams. This affective account of the human world has nothing to with the self-importance (control) machineries of the accounts of subject/object and of the-human-as-paramount-actor, and is the beginnings of a liberation of thought.

    Another aspect of the sphere is the perturbing domain of the interestablishment, which has the appearance of something which in some sense is extrinsic to the world of human beings, if only in the sense that it could be left behind, and that it would be good if it were left behind, in that it is a world of disguised and overt control modalities, of reactivity, of subjectified affects, and of the functionings of interiority.

    It can be seen that the world of the affective planetary sphere is profoundly enigmatic; it is a sphere of the unknown, which nonetheless in different ways can be explored. However there is one aspect of this sphere which is known from the outset. The beyond-the-human expanses of the planet continuously hearten and inspire the individuals of the human world.

   Love-and-freedom intent is accurately grasped by the faculty of feeling as joy, and as a charged, poised serenity. It is a breath of fresh air; both audacity and delight.

   But a detailed perception of love-and-freedom intent – liberatory intent - is achieved through lucidity delineating along the lines of the processes of decision-making, navigation.

    This modality of intent consists of the functioning of the principles of exteriority; a process of starting from the planet, from bodies, from faculties, from affects, from joy, from the transcendental-empirical as opposed to the empirical, from the world as opposed to language, and from the faculties - in particular - of lucidity, dreaming, perception, feeling and intent.

    But it can be added that an active, imaginative exploration into the unknown is intrinsic to this form of intent, and that becomings are fundamental to it. Furthermore, what is also intrinsic to it is a capacity for a focus on the singularities of the sphere of immediacy that is the domain of navigation, a sphere which has the affective sphere of the planet as a primary aspect of its horizon.

   

     In relation to the conjoined verosphere and oneirosphere the existence of bodies of work consisting of a liberatory pragmatics entails that writing is in the foreground from this perspective. However, properly speaking a liberatory pragmatics is a world of outsights and actions, rather than an array of books, and from the second perspective - of directions - writing and language as a whole have gone into the background.

     In this respect what is central within love-and-freedom intent is seeing and dreamings. Seeing (lucidity) consists of outsights, and dreamings, as well as being threaded with outsights, are spread across a virtual-real range from exploratory envisagings to generative dreams about the future. At the point of involvement of language the modality can be the concepts of abstraction (concepts here includes the concepts that have been called figures) or the delineations of narrative.

      Narrative can be tales (spoken or written) and can be drama, and drama now has a multitude of forms beyond the stage, forms in which the visual often is the expressive mode of the tale to a far greater extent than language. Dreamings are fundamentally pre-language, and they are now very widely instantiated in what are primarily non-language forms. The tale is the abstract core, expressible in multiple ways, and the tale is a dreaming.

      And drama has a core in the form of viewpoint-personae and persona deterritorialisation which entails that it is an aspect of philosophical works in the form of dialogues, and is a modality of waking the faculties. The core of drama on these levels is becomings guided by lucidity. 

     It can be seen that from this perspective of liberatory intent art fades into the background as well as language, although in fact what has taken place is a transformation toward the active and toward immediacy: drama becomes a zone of modalities-for-escape within the world of becomings, at the same time as dance becomes a zone of modalities-for-escape within the world of processes of waking the body.

     The tonality of liberatory intent is joy, but it also has a tonality of fierce impersonal combat, where the struggle is for freedom, and where what has to be overcome is the 'self' - in each case an individual-specific domain of functionings of interiority.

  Ordinary reality has tonalities that range across a span from the gravity of morality/religion and socio-political righteousness to the affects of subjectification. It also has outlier zones consisting of paratext becomings which are in the gravitational field of religions, and of accounts of the world which are in the gravitational field of the functionings of the socio-political field. These accounts in some cases see the social world as the unfolding of the spirit, and in some cases see it as an unfolding socio-technological deterioriation (or crisis) which must be met with specific authentic virtues (there is recurrently a kind of 'piety' involved which is on the edge of, or is bound up with religion), and with some kind of allegiance to something that is discerned as the best socio-political modality for responding to the deterioration/crisis (the modality could be a specific party, or democracy, or state communism, or a revolutionary struggle against the state and capitalism).  And although all along there is a best of these options in the form of democracy, this obscures the fact that the real struggle is over the horizon, and simultaneously is definitively close, relating to the transcendental-empirical, not the empirical. Everything here becomes about the Futural departures of liberatory intent, where the combat is a struggle to overcome interiority. The ongoing disaster is a transcendental-empirical process: it preceded global capitalism (global capitalism is its latest expression). And the way forward is the joy of travelling along the escape-path.

       Gravity, with all its tonalities (sententiousness, outrage, rage, affected humility, melancholy exhortation, exaltation of exemplars, mockery, piety, self-rightousness, self-pity, self-importance) is a modality within ordinary reality that is visible and yet has an aspect of being obscured (this is because the faculty which sees it is lucidity). Kudos is another aspect of ordinary reality, and one which in many ways is far more visible, although individuals very recurrently disavow it in relation to their own motivation. However, the power of ordinary reality is barely touched upon by these two instances: individuals who are influential and who are understood as providing answers to fundamental problems very recurrently speak in a way where the statements are not inflected by gravity or self-aggrandisement, and their poise and precision function (and this is the main issue) to draw attention into an area which does not include the transcendental-empirical:  furthermore the nature of poise in ordinary reality is that the individual has not overcome control (with its foreground or background tendency for outbursts of ugly affects), but, on the contrary, has simply been very successful in controlling their circumstances.

     Sexuality comes into focus here as the most powerful energy in the human sphere - not part, in fact, of the system of subjectified affects, but a force which on occasion can temporarily disable a part of this system. It also comes into focus as very recurrently disruptive and deleterious - deintensificatory - to the extent that a primary aspect has a quality of being in some depth-level sense an 'imposition,' but where, if it is 'met' in the right way, it has a further aspect of being an intensificatory force, an energising thread within liberatory intent.

        However, sexuality generally functions as a component alongside the system of subjectified moods - in the form of indulgent, deintensificatory behaviours. Along with self-importance the system of subjectified moods has fear as a primary aspect: it can be seen that control and reactivity relate to this system, in different ways. Reactivity is disfunctional fear in a very wide sense, and includes processes of unthinkingly attacking the object of fear. And control is a term for the whole domain of actions / territory-creation that is an expression of the system, and for the system itself, which also includes its anguishes and outbursts. In turn, the overall system of the functioning of interiority includes not only the system of subjectified moods, but also the systems of reason-and-revelation, and of ventures-and-lives.

Opposite all of this, the escape-path - the direction of love-and-freedom intent.

*    

How could it be that the idea of disappearance is at a sufficient level of reality for understanding the intent of a human life, and the overall plight of human beings?

    The transition involved in disappearance has now become a transition at the level of intent - the transition is a disappearance from ordinary reality. But in consisting of intent it consists of the functioning of a principle of Exteriority which concentrates on the planet beyond the human world, the perception of the (planetary) world immediately around you, and the worlds or modalities of the other faculties, where one of these worlds is a re-dreaming or re-envisaging of what is taking place on the planet - and of what has been taking place during the preceding millenia.

(In relation to the species of the planet disappearance is also a term for extinction, and in relation to human childhood development it can function as a name for the loss involved in instilling the mind-form of a subjectified human being, with its deadened arrangement of faculties, its reactive feelings, its dysfunctional self-reflection, and its embroilment in the destructive gravity of judgemental behaviours).

    At the level of joy and adventure and love-for-the-world everything is about waking up and moving forward, a process which can only be valuable to all involved. And at the level of the plight of the planet and of human beings, everything is about the realisation that it is not enough to advocate for the most socialist and environmentalist forms of government and to adopt and propagate green ways of living, and that it is necessary to set out - taking these forms of action with you - along the escape-path toward wider realities. It is important to remember that in the same way as most of self-reflection is not thought but is the blocking of thought, the gravity of the political is part of the problem, not part of the solution. We need to escape in the direction of the planet, moving away from the processes which are destroying it. However the affective modality of the departure - and what drives the movement forward - is not duty, or the anguish of a need to escape (although there is a very clear critique of the ongoing disaster - of ordinary reality). Instead, the departure consists of a love for the world, and, centrally, of a love for the planet, and in a way where ultimately the actions involved are not a question of duty.

   There is a whole interestablishment of modalities which together make up ordinary reality: an alliance of many zones, but primarily of religion; structural aspects of politics; business; law; and processes of production of technology and knowledge. There are kind acts taking place everywhere, but these are not constitutive of the interestablishment: instead they accidentally function to justify it. Processes/acts consisting of courage, love and radical creation or innovation are in the liminal space that is the start of the escape-path, and what is produced is continually being drawn back into the domain of control modalities (it is a fine thing to achieve something here, but what is of fundamental importance is to depart along the escape-path).

    To depart is to return your ticket to the projected Improved World of the interestablishment. Not because the world cannot improve, but because it will only improve if people depart - the projection is a delusion.

 

 

 

 

  *  

  

    Barbara O’ Brien’s formula for going off the radar – for dropping out of sight – is now under pressure. There is an increasing expectation that people should be contactable and should stay in contact, and that, if they are neither communicating or messagable, their location should be known. Ultimately these issues are superficial practical problems – there is always a solution if you have enough dedication to the task of getting away – but it is important to see both that someone in Barbara O’Brien’s situation would now find it harder to go through an equivalent transition or ‘metamorphosis,’ and that the weight of the expectations involved falls more onto women than onto men. 

     However, Barbara O'Brien's need to go out of sight was the result of a massive jolt having already taken place - one that had taken her in the wrong direction, but which gave her a chance of changing course and moving Forward. Her departure-trajectory will therefore generally not be a model to follow. It is worth seeing that the result of the initial jolt is that her situation is so extreme that the role of non-urban spaces in her successful alteration of course is caught up in an overdetermination, because of the complexity of the experience, though the turning-point phase is definitely when she is at the furthest remove from the urban, and during the phase when she is consolidating her ‘post-Operators’ state she spends most of her time in the local park. The key issue is that O’Brien’s trajectory is a return from extreme turbulence, which has taken her around an upward spiral of ‘normality’ to a point where it is then also possible to set out on a deliberate, poised departure from ordinary reality, and is the fact that what she has learned about going out of sight is a breakthrough of knowledge that has a fundamentally wider application.

 

    It is necessary to be as imaginative and ambitious as possible in looking for opportunities to get away. There are always potentials which are un-noticed or largely un-noticed: with a job there are often more opportunities for extended leave than might initially be thought, and sometimes there is an opportunity to leave the job, and depart for an indefinite amount of time.

    It can also be valuable to do something as simple as a walk from an urban terrain into the terrains beyond it, as with the walk that provided the basis for On Vanishing Land. 

    And sometimes it is possible to go off the radar - into an exteriority-terrain of some kind - for only a relatively short amount of time (the amount of time associated with the term 'holiday') and to discover that your intent is a kind of current that leads to experiences that give you glimpses of the escape-route, and which loosen the grip of ordinary reality on your life.

 

     Everything becomes a question of becoming sustained perception - suspending thought and processes of identification/categorisation - and also it becomes a question of seeing what dreams and stories arrive through the encounter with the terrain. Navigation becomes about going toward the most intense, striking, or enigmatic features, whether 'natural' or human-made. And when thought begins it should be about the singular modalities of what is encountered, and, when it is at its widest planetary extension, it should place the systems of the human world as an element within the planet. But it should be there only for a moment, and then there should be a return to the suspension of ordinary-reality modes (in the form of perception that goes toward something more like trance) and to navigation toward intensity that together will eventually lead toward jolts, toward valuable perturbations.

   The partly perceived escape-path has a horizon in the form of the unknown that is knowable, and this horizon is inseparable from the planet as the unknown. And if there is something very anomalous and in some way sublime haunting this direction, and the domains alongside it, can anything be perceived in relation to the darker dimension of the unknown that can be indicated by the names 'Erl-King,' 'the Shing' etc? (and if the Operators are understood in part as a message from the unconscious, then what aspect of the world is being indicated?). At this point all that can be said is that the presence within the human world of the control-tending mind-form of ordinary reality produces an impression of this world being like a tree afflicted by a blight that turns the tree's cellular production against itself.

   A question of seeing how the space communicates - where it takes you, as the closely perceived singular becomes the abstract. The derelict factory and the overgrown second world war ruins have a feeling of the sublime. Lit up in sunshine there is an oak-apple on the crumbling concrete.

 

 

*

 

 

    I have twice walked out of London - an enjoyable, day-long task. The first time was in the summer of 2000. At around 11pm I was walking through a village in the Chilterns, on my way to find somewhere to pitch my tent, in an area of fields and woodlands beyond the village. 

     In all of the houses I could see a TV screen. This gave me a chilling impression of being in the world of a 1970s B film, something like The Stepford Wives. In the year 2000 there were no smartphones: if someone were to do this walk now, they would be almost certain to have a screen in their pocket.

    What is in question is whether or not we should regard our seemingly safe, cheerful screen-worlds (the worlds of the screen, and the spaces in which we generally look at the screens) as in some ways the most dangerous forces we encounter. Technology is entirely a question of what can be incorporated into a process of travelling along the escape-path, and human inventions tend always, of course, to have very different aspects and applications. The 'throwaway' lightness of emails and texts can, under certain circumstances, be ideal for learning to write, and synthesisers are a powerful deterritorialisation of sound. And as well as there being the  extremely valuable 'nomadic' uses for computers and smartphones (so that the escape-path in effect involves the internet) if you imagine a base on the edge of a wilderness - used by a milieu of friends for creative work - it feels emphatically that it should have good quality devices of many kinds. However - what insists is that alongside, maybe half a mile further up a mountain, there should be another similar house which has none of this technology. From books to computers, and from bells to synthesisers, the issue is always to what extent the technology solidifies a libidinally charged distribution of the faculties that belongs to ordinary reality. On Vanishing Land is very clear about this: the whistle found in the M.R.James story is a reminder that you should think very carefully about the things you have picked up and are carrying around in your pocket. 

 

     Along with becoming sustained perception of the world around you, there is no aspect of the principle of Exteriority that is more important than going to the outside of urban terrains to the maximum extent, primarily in the actual, but also in the virtual. On Vanishing Land describes a departure from urban spaces (from London, then from Felixstowe), and the described movement in the actual also goes outward from the immediate to the planetary non-urban of the oceans on which the container ships travel and of the planet as a whole as it is experienced by the figure on the hill (“there is a white void of air beneath their feet”). In this context of the world being seen as more like ‘feeling’, the local atmosphere of an area of Suffolk coastland becomes an unknown space in which the unknown travels. A child has been sleeping in an unfamiliar room, in the early morning they look out of a window, and with a frisson of pleasure they take in the dawn street, the light, the air, the person on the way to work, the birds, the clouds. You are at a house surrounded by semi-desert or forested mountains, four or five practitioners of Departure are sitting around a table on a verandah, talking and laughing, the sunlight is dappled by a vine on the trellis above them, in the garden a bird hovers for a moment, then flies out of sight.

 

 

*

 

 

    There are three areas of exploration - three 'starting-point' zones - which need to be explored in conjunction with each other, and to which courage needs to be brought, not because these areas are frightening in themselves, but because without courage it is far less likely that there will be the high-intensity experiences that are particularly valuable for waking the faculties.

    Ultimately, the faculty which it is most important to wake is navigation, or decision-making, and the terrain which has primacy for navigation is the planet on which we live and travel: exploration in the sense involved here relates to a great extent to decision-making (even though the greatest attention at the outset must be given to perception, and to dreaming) and this is why the focus in this account is on different modalities of travelling.

 

 

                         the outlands

 

    This is a question, firstly, of visiting and travelling within semi-wildernesses, wildernesses, scurflands and areas of countryside, and, secondly, of breaking the grim flow of ordinary reality through becoming sustained perception, and through an overall process of waking the faculties. These two are parts of one process, because the terrains are likely to be recurrently more prepossessing than urban and household terrains, providing support for the task of becoming unbroken perception. But it is also because they simultaneously provide support for reaching a main aspect of the faculties of lucidity and dreaming - an embodied awareness that the human world as a whole is a problematic, out-of-control element that is preeminently within the planet, where the planet is understood as emphatically not on a lower level than the awareness of human beings. This is why On Vanishing Land invokes, in contradistinction to ordinary reality, another view in relation to humans and the planet: “There is a white void of air beneath their feet. This white void is the planet, it is beneath the figure on the hill, and all around them, they are a dream within a dream…"

    In turn, it can be seen that in this context the idea of breaking the flow of ordinary reality not only involves breaking the ceaseless flow of internal verbalising, self-reflection, and categorising/temporalising (temporalising involves not-perceiving in the form of superimposing a process of laying elements out along a line of time), but also straightforwardly involves breaking the flow of use of computers, social media, televisions, and all playback and recording devices. In fact, in terms of arrays of technological elements, it involves whatever differences and absences which are helpful for breaking the flow of ordinary reality: for instance a mirror evidently has a lot in common with a camera (the machinery of self-reflection does not just involve processes which are in the head).

    This can all lead to the thought: are not the outlands really at the level of the abstract, at the level of human intent and attitudes? (can't you just set things up the right way in a flat or house in a city, and learn to see and feel differently?). However, this ignores the fact that as a starting-point the beyond-the-urban terrains are likely to be far better at sweeping people away from the customary agreement about the nature of the world. It also ignores the fact that in travelling beyond the starting-point there is not just a set of attitudes, but instead there is an existence where attention is focused on the terrain that is the planet, a terrain which is more heartening, energising and inspiring when you go into zones beyond the spaces of the urban world. The astonishing, sublime wilderness of the sky is always there, whether you are in the middle of a city or on the top of a forested mountain, but the forested mountain has a greater power to sweep you away, in the direction of the Future.

 

      

      Lenses, diagrams, catalysts (fragments of a mirror)

 

   Between 2006 and 2011 I went twice to Mongolia, and once to Tuva, and one main  aspect of these journeys was a search for skilled practitioners of overtone singing. I was looking for musicians who would be prepared to teach me, not for professional teachers. I did not do this in the spirit of ethnomusicology, and to say that I was doing it as an ‘artist’ is also not quite adequate, because the word goes too fast over what is involved, and is too tied up with ideas of performance. In setting out to learn overtone singing I was looking for a form of vocal deterritorialisation with a high potential for expressiveness and for conduction toward heartened, intensified states.

 

 

 

a story

 

Many tens of thousands of years ago, in Africa, humans and animals together constructed a mirror in which it was possible to see other worlds. It was not a mirror as we now understand the term: in it were the reflections of other dimensions of reality, and of worlds in distant galaxies. Through looking into it, over time it became possible to see the other worlds without its assistance, and to communicate with beings who came from physically far-distant places. Many realised at this time that some of these other entities had helped them in the construction of the mirror.

    It was discovered that it was possible to travel to the most recondite confines of reality, and to distant galaxies. Perhaps as a result of an immoderate use of this ability, a group of humans made contact with beings inhabiting a region thousands of galaxies distant from the Earth. These beings were composed of a form of dark matter similar to plasma, and were energy and affect predators. On one level they were immensely sophisticated, striking from a higher level of reality than that of their prey, and on another level they consisted of a crude, two-dimensional form of existence. Having encountered humans, they came to the Earth, and installed themselves as elements within its nonorganic eco-system. They implanted living models of their mind into the minds of humans, shifting the human species toward control-behaviours, and toward possessiveness and strife.

    With the aid of the mirror many humans and animals escaped to other worlds. But because it was associated with the disaster which had befallen the planet, the mirror was destroyed: it was broken into countless tiny fragments. For a long time the area where it had been created was connected in peoples' minds with the memory of something bad, but then this memory was also lost.

   Not long after the arrival of the predators, and the destruction of the mirror, some of the humans who were less affected by the implanted mind came together. They did not want to take sides within the complex of struggles and violent conflicts which the human world had become, and some of them decided to travel into the regions of the planet beyond Africa. An old woman, who was the leader of a group which had chosen to stay and live within the Kalahari desert and the jungles of western Africa, said that they should all take fragments of the mirror with them. Remembering the bright time of the mirror, they went to the place where it had been, and took with them as many fragments as they could carry.

 

      The representatives of all the animals came together on the beach of a remote bay in eastern Africa. A message had come to them from the other worlds with which animals and humans had been in contact - worlds in other dimensions and in other parts of the cosmos. They had been told that for the most part contact would now no longer be possible, and that, although animals were less affected by the predators, they would now drop back to a lower level of awareness and forget the time of the mirror. They had come together to decide how to mitigate the disaster. One of their leaders, a female wolf from the Atlas mountains,said

"Out of affection, some of you horses will travel with the humans, and so will some of my kind, the prairie dogs and wolves."

"But us dogs and wolves are pack creatures, with a code of obeying a leader, and eventually we will be enslaved. And you horses are not quite wild enough to avoid enslavement."

"This is not enough."

After a long silence, the representative of a small species of cat came forward.

"We will go" said the cat. "Over time we will lose some of our independence, but we will not become enslaved, and we will be a link between humans and the planet."

 

    Small bands of humans, horses, dogs and cats set out into the west and south and north of Africa, and from the north of Africa some of the groups continued. The fragments of the mirror were taken with them, and, although those who set out in the end consisted as much of people strongly affected by the implanted mind as those less affected, including people who attacked the cats because they refused to be domesticated into slavery, the fragments of the mirror helped them in their journeys into Eurasia, and eventually into the Americas.

     Very early in the diaspora a large group, which had many mirror fragments, used small boats to cross from Indonesia to Australia. And in Australia for many tens of thousands of years the idea of the dreamtime was a faint memory of the time of the mirror.

 

    

 

   It seems there is an other distribution of the faculties, and it also seems that beyond around four thousand years into the past this other distribution was effectuated substantially more often than now (this would not in any way entail that things as a whole were better beyond this point, because it is the overall pattern of states of being, within a social field, that would be key for such an assessment, and because it is how this distribution is put into effect which is crucial). However, the chronological aspect should not be overemphasised: it is the nature of what you find that matters, and not whether it is ancient, or was originated in ancient times. What is crucial is an overall openness, followed in turn by an openness to the modalities found within nomadic and tribal societies, and then also by an openness in relation to the ancient past (and in fact openness in the last two cases must be a reversal of the customary 'primitivising' ways of thinking about the worlds involved).

    Everything here on one level concerns systems of action in relation to the human body, where the main coordinates for thinking about what is in question are deterritorialisation of the body, dance, health-intensifying techniques, and systems of becoming-active and of waking the faculties; and on another level it involves systems of philosophical thought. This can be illustrated by taking up a second mode of travelling: going to a country and finding someone who can teach some rare, singular modality, such as a more focused way of understanding the world; or a form of dance, or overtone singing, or a system/discipline of movement etc.

     This in part concerns intensificatory, or health-assisting techniques, but it also involves transcendental-empirical knowledge, and includes skills such as learning how to behave in relation to animals and how to exist/survive in specific wild terrains;  and, again, it includes a range of physical/artistic skills that extend through dance to acting.

    Track 08, copyright Justin Barton and Pete Wiseman:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/xeedy542oklygwyxr29il/08-Track-8.wma?rlkey=pata21q95dlvkwjcdwj9dfpoz&st=op566hw0&dl=0

     

 

   Becomings

 

      The idea of 'acting' leads to a third modality of travelling, one which opens up the idea of becomings along an additional axis. A valuable possibility is to travel as another version of yourself. Find your fascinations and interests which contingently have been in the background, and bring them into the foreground as coordinates for decision-making and for giving an account of yourself - a construction of a persona involving a substantially changed emphasis, as opposed to 'lying,' and one which, if it is constructed wisely, will lead to a wider way of being which is more true to who you are than the starting-point. Think, 'what objects would this person be carrying with them, and what would they be wearing?' and make adjustments: 'objects' have more power to help in focusing a new persona than we generally realise.

     The initial, and primary, aspect of becomings is entering into composition with other beings and other kinds of being. Because of a very subtle, depth-level suppression which has taken place within the human world, becoming-woman, as Deleuze and Guattari have pointed out, is the key becoming - the one that leads to all the other becomings (it should be added that being in love with a woman is a fundamental form of becoming-woman, but this state needs to be maintained as a desubjectified aspect of Departure, rather than it being collapsed into a thread of ordinary reality). The horizon becoming, however (the one which in a specific sense is involved simultaneously with the others) is entering into becoming with the planet, but where the sky - the atmosphere - of the planet is very much in the foreground. The virtual-real or 'envisaging' processes of becoming-sky or becoming-atmosphere are fundamental in the escape from ordinary reality, and are the central aspect of entering into composition with the planet (and because what is involved here is transcendental materialism it is valuable and directly relevant to remember that on one level entering into composition with the atmosphere is another name for breathing). 

    It will be noticed that the planet here reaches a crucial point of double-inscription. It starts out as the primary terrain of decision-making – of navigation – for the starting-points of exploration, and at the end appears as the ‘other side’ of the most encompassing of the human becomings.

 

 

Note:     Within the fundamental historical shift a primary movement is toward projecting from a male-dominated social field (women are betrayed at this point) in a delerium-about-control which blocks off the planet, and which inseparably locks attention onto human interiority (animals and the whole planet are betrayed at this second 'stage'). What follows, and then runs alongside, are human cognitive and organisational systems which are fixated on human societies and technologies, and which have a subtle righteousness and concealed lack of openness.

    Tribal and nomadic societies have their own systems of control and suppression, but they have a recurrent tendency to see animals as sublime, tutelary worlds of intent and awareness. The loss of this view of animals is a key indicator of a specific phase of the historical shift. The ongoing disaster deepened around four thousand years ago, and with the current destruction of habitats and species, together with people being taken still further away from transcendental-empirical knowledge, it is currently crossing a further downward threshold.

 

Note 2

 

       Speaking generally, technology is not less than we think it is, but more, although in a rather grim, disturbing sense of 'more' (an element of transcendental materialism is what can be called 'gothic' materialism). Like human beings, technology is of course an element of the planet - a part of nature - but the crucial point is that preponderantly it is a component of ordinary reality, and of the ongoing disaster within the human world. However, it is just a question of working out what it is valuable to take with you - and what can be valuably developed - in the process of travelling along the escape-path. And if you have been swept into a process of deterritorialisation in relation to it (one which might only be tangential to your overall process of departure) the internet, like the worlds of the cities, has a faint but striking quality of the sublime, which comes from it being a ruinous terrain - like the cities, it was born ruinous.

 

 

*

 

    In conclusion, it is possible to describe four features of touching the ground lightly, which is a primary, pervasive aspect of travelling along the escape-path.

 touching the ground lightly

   Firstly, this is an embodied tendency to be as careful as possible in relation to the planet. An affirmation of the planet which both consists of a minimal use of resources, and an exploration of new ways of cutting back the damage done by the footprint of a human existence.

  Secondly this is a heightening of the body, and a waking of the faculties. The attribute of touching the ground lightly is here the ‘obvious’ one, where this, in the context, is an indicator of a wider fluency.

  Thirdly, this is an avoidance of counter-productive disputes, whether with those whose position is centred on religion, or with those whose view is based on an empirico-rational stance. For instance, within the second domain of views there is a great amount that is shared, and here it is a question of working with what is in common. The absolute affirmations here are of environmentalism and of socialist values of kindness, knowledge and freedom, together with key elements of critique - Marx's critique of religion, and the overall critique of the depredations of capitalist/corporate power. But the affirmation beyond this - and the one where it is a question of avoiding counter-productive disputes - is of a radical socialism consisting not of overthrow or evolution of the state (which is trapped within capitalism) but of micro-departures from ordinary reality.

   Fourthly, and most importantly, this is a perceptual attention that is centred on the sky, and when indoors, on the air and light in front of you; so that when you are outside your attention is centred on a point just above the horizon, and what is primarily seen is the space of sky, and, by extension, the whole space of air in front of you. Seeing the sky and the clouds is primary, and if the space of air starts to be seen and felt/experienced as a space of light (so that in a room you might have the experience of being a room-shaped zone of gold-coloured light, and of a tactile contact with the walls) then this is a good development, so long as you don't get caught up in thinking about it. What is crucial is that what you were seeing as the figure - the solid objects - instead becomes the ground, the ground that it was all along. The figure is the sky: it is air and light. The ground is the solid objects. And our attention needs to touch the ground lightly. 

   The faculty we need to wake first is perception. And the second faculty we need to wake is dreaming.

 

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