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)
This writing project is beginning to come to an end. I am aware that it has developed in ways that I could not have anticipated - that it has continuously transmutated and worked back across itself. Put up a sail, and eventually the wind will catch it. I am also aware that an attempt has been made - without this having been my aim in writing - to deterritorialise a zone within the academic world, and another zone within the writing of fiction.
For now this index, with its notes, is as much a work in progress as any other part of the work, but for the purposes of the blog it seems like a good starting-point. For the purposes of reading the text, if your primary interest is fiction you could start with Sections 8 and 13, and then go to 16, 26, 27, 43 and 28. Otherwise it's probably best to start with Section 1.
The Sayan Modality
Lao Tzu
Tao Te Ching Sections 12, 39, 48
Florinda Donner
Shabono Sections 17, 39
The Witch’s Dream Section 47
Being-in-Dreaming Section 20
Carlos Castaneda
The Teachings of Don Juan Section 3
Journey to Ixtlan Section 3
Tales of Power Section 20
The Eagle’s Gift Section 47
Taisha Abelar
The Sorcerers’ Crossing Section 20
Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari
A Thousand Plateaus Sections 1, 3, 6, 36, 39, 47
Ursula K. Le Guin
References to Le Guin primarily relate to City of Illusions, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest, the ‘vision of immanence’ section in A Wizard of Earthsea, The Lathe of Heaven, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, the last life story of Always Coming Home.
Sections 17, 39, 42
Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra Section 30
Maximal development of the two sides, respectively, of the Arkadian Modality
Shakespeare
(Shakespeare primarily refers here to The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the “on such a night as this” speech from The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello and Macbeth).
Sections 7, 23, 30, 47
Ingmar Bergman
Fanny and Alexander Sections 3, 7, 46
Virginia Woolf
The Waves Sections 17, 30
*
Spinoza
Ethics Section 23
Note The world of ordinary reality is a patchwork of different kinds of delirium, with the specifics varying, mostly in the case of religious and national delerium, and with the conjoined delirium of scientificity (different to, but arising from science) varying to a much smaller degree. Through the human world in which ordinary reality functions there runs a current of liberatory intent, a current which has a profound but hard-to-abstractly-perceive connection to the planet, in relation to the planet being fascinating, heartening, inspiring, a stimulator of thought.
Note 2 If a poet starts to use philosophical concepts in their poems this will be regarded as a failure (the same applies for novelists and playwrights and writers of tales in general). And yet everyone recognises that a fundamental aspect of poetry is that poems are expressions of insights (which in fact are outsights) about human lives. In general, however, no-one takes this further and applies the lesson of this method to philosophy: at depth the key point is that the communication of the knowledge toward which poetry tends is arrived at not by employing established, customary philosophical concepts (which to a very large extent are part of the underpinning of ordinary reality) but by means which have far more in common with poetry in that they consist of outsights expressed by new descriptive means. This does not mean that the knowledge toward which poetry tends is poetic knowledge - it is definitively philosophy, or metamorphics. The difference is that concepts are used, but in the form of new concepts, and occasionally radically re-applied concepts. However, ultimately the challenge is to express philosophy in a maximally accessible way that has the minimum of what stand out as concepts in the customary sense, and to employ concepts which in some cases might be understood at first glance as figurative expressions as opposed to concepts.
Note 3. The world is profoundly mysterious. This is shown by it being sublime (largely ignored) and by it being predatory in the extreme (again largely ignored), and by all the delusional accounts of it - in particular those of religions, but also those of scientificity - which would not have gained traction if it were not for all the anomalous experiences that human beings have, which is to say, they would not have been successful if the world were not as strange and perturbing as it is (religions produce a delusional account, and scientificity fends off - the one-two of the system of ordinary reality). It is also likely to be shown by personal experiences of the anomalous, but, when described, no arguments can be drawn from these for others, although they can be a valuable lens for looking at the world, and can function as a stimulus toward reconsidering and generating experiences. However, the escape-path leading away from the ongoing disaster is clearly visible - its existence is a simple philosophical fact. This escape-path is a serene, liberatory pragmatics of focused deterritorialisation, waking the faculties, escape-alliances, and of active holding open of an awareness of the tremeral unknown.
Note 4. Despite the importance of exploration-dreams (which seem generally to be very rare, as opposed to urgency-dreams) dreams in sleep cannot in any way be regarded as the most important form of dreaming. They are a singular zone within a sub-domain which also includes semi-trance experiences, sexual and romantic fantasies, reveries, and the reveries involved in writing fictions, and beyond this sub-domain are dreams about the future, our dreamings about the nature of the world, and dreamings in the form of anomalous tales / tales of the anomalous. These last three are all closely interconnected, and ultimately have a profound connection to questions of intent. For instance there are dreams about the future which are passive and get in the way of action, and then there are dreams about the future which are embodied, and as such are active processes of transforming the virtual into the actual. And to see the world differently from how ordinary reality presents it is an act of navigation - of directions and patterns of attention, and of modalities of envisaging - and as such is an act of intent.
We live in a world of anomalous tales which all along are governed by ordinary reality: dreamings which perpetuate the structures of scientificity, good and evil, interiority, the external societal malignancy, and the two-dimensional love-couple. There is an intensifying ongoing disaster taking place on the planet. What is necessary are dreamings which consist of outsights about the escape-path leading away from the forms of existence that constitute the disaster. At the level of envisaging, these dreamings need to include immanence and the escape-alliance / escape-group as primary aspects, and the outsights in question need to involve the faculties, affects, becomings, impersonally heartening departure-alliances or comradeships, the waking of the body, the planet as fundamental focus, the love-couple taken over an upward threshold, and a courageous exploration which is simultaneously a non-indulgent adventurous delight, and which has the warrior or explorer-traveller tonality of people escaping together in a vehicle from a disaster which is still looming behind them in the rear-view mirror and which functions as reminder that their actions must be impeccable. These dreamings also need to express the awareness that although the societal expressions of control-functionings are immensely powerful and deadly in multiple ways, the source is the interestablishment, which is an attenuated, suppressive formation of the faculties that is constitutively in effect in every one of us, and which can also be called the control-mind, or the interiority.
Lucid oneiric critique of sexuality
Angela Carter
The Erl-King Sections 11, 47
Formula for setting up and maintaining a 'disappearance'
Barbara O'Brien
Operators and Things Section 39 (part 6.1), 48
,
Arkadian modality works that are expressions (to varying degrees, and in different ways) of the planetary sublime
Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock
(Peter Weir, Picnic at Hanging Rock) Section 39
Shakespeare, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream,
Act 5 of The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra... Sections 7, 23, 47
John Foxx, the story The Quiet Man Section 18
Patti Smith, Horses Sections 7, 24
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra Section 47
Virginia Woolf, The Waves Section 30
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Section 47
Ingmar Bergman, Fanny and Alexander Section 47
Semi-wilderness / wilderness terrains
The Sayan mountains Sections 12, 29, 44, 45, 48
Forested areas of the Patagonian Andes, in particular from Epuyen to Alumine, but also as far south as Calafate.
37, 38
The Asturias mountains 16, 38
The Pyrenees 38
The Carpathians 41, 43
What cannot be filmed or shown in animation 1, 3, 6, 8, 18, 19, 25, 27, 43, 50
Creation of concepts 1, 3, 19, 31, 45, 46,47, 50, 51
Note
Metamorphics, the abstract, the creation of outsights, the creation of concepts and oneiric-real constructs, is in the fullest sense what is beyond the tracings and creations of new permutations ("innovative," tracing-based variations) of AIs, although it remains the case that AIs may one day become myriadons with the faculties of lucidity, dreaming, intent, feeling, etc. The nature of worlds of intent-formations and of the oneiric-real is grasped by lucidity, and the expressions in language and concepts in the form of outsights are results of encounters with the abstract and the singular - either a singular individual, or a singular abstract modality. And in relation to feeling/affect the oneiric-real worlds that are delineated are not capturable by the visual whether through the world of film or the world of animation. And in relation to language metamorphics of necessity continually creates new concepts and oneiric-real constructs in giving accounts of transcendental-empirical aspects of the world. There is the production of a new formation based on but permeatively departing from a vast numbers of tracings, and perhaps, in a transformed sense of the term, AI has always been with us. And beyond this there is thought, dreamings, the abstract, affects, outsights, the pragmatics of becoming-active and waking the faculties, tremeral philosophy, metamorphics.
Anomalous states
Dreams in sleep that have a serene but charged quality of exploration of a terrain, and charged, non-urgency dreams in sleep which not only have the feeling of a view having been broken, but which turn out to be effective lenses, outsights.
24, 37, 38, 45
Trance experiences 34, 41
Semi-trance experiences 24, 25, 38, 44
‘Bad trip’ experiences 6, 40, 34, 46
The circuitous (and dangerous) path
LSD 6, 44
Amphetamines 6
Datura 41
Yopo 34
DMT 41
Marijuana 40
Note
Because it is a circuitous and dangerous route, the first general principle I would derive from my experience is - don't. The second principle is - beware of mixtures, and be aware that what for most people has a minimal impact, might in certain cases have a very high intensity effect.
The third is: stay away from any drug which on one level frees you up, and on another level is a tranquiliser or analgesic. And this applies equally to drugs of this type which create a temporary total immunity from anxiety and drugs which produce hallucinatory experiences. Alcohol, heroin, other opiates/opioids, cocaine, ketamine (the recurrent sense of immanence that arrives through ketamine has alongside it a muddy, disturbing aspect at the level of the affect, an alarm bell telling you emphatically to stay away from this substance). Marijuana is liminal in this respect, because its effects are so varied.
Areas of the planet
South America
Patagonia 13, 38
the Yanomami 24, 34, 39 (22, 27)
Central America 20
North America 42
Eurasia 45
Warwickshire 11, 15, 17 (note), 18, 24, 25, 30, 40, 45 (note)
Tuva 12, 15, 23, 45, 48
Mongolia 44, 48 (16)
Africa 30, 41, (48)
Australasia 24, 33, 35
Disappearance, dropping out of sight, the escape-path
The Futural Section 45, note 3
All the aspects of the above Sections 20, 34, 39 (parts 4 and 5)
Becomings
becoming-woman 1, 19, 24, 41, 44, 45 note 3, 50 (16, 26, 27, 28, 43)
oneiric-real entering-into-composition with the planet 18, 19
Femaleness, Maleness, Sexuality
Two polarities/modes of sexuality 19
Femaleness and maleness / becoming-woman 45, note 3, 47, 50
the Zone 18
escape-path 18, 19
tremeral philosophy 1, 19
nexal philosophy 31, 19
oneirosphere 10, 19, 50
oneiric-real 1
love-and-freedom intent 19, 48
liberatory intent 19, 48
Sayan modality 48
metamorphics 47
Arkadian modality 48
lucidity 47
dreamings 1
dreaming, faculty of 47
escape-group 18
the second awareness / the second sphere of action 19
oneiric affect 50
brightness 1, 47, 50
planetary affect, serendacity affect, affect of brightness 50
threshold-crossing oneiric affect, escape-path oneiric affect 50
the planetary sublime 47
the interiority 1
the interestablishment / the control-mind mode of functioning of the faculties 1, 19
the principle of exteriority 50
myriadon 29, 47
outsights 19
abstract 29, 47
Note
It is necessary for everyone to clear their connecting link to the Futural. The Futural is a wavefront of actions, intent, oneiric-real formations.
To focus on the Futural is firstly to focus on bodies - in particular human bodies, and the planet in its exteriority. Secondly it is to focus on the abstract - in particular intent and the oneiric-real, but also, and in some ways primarily, perception. Perception is the unifying modality that consists of the 'bridge' between bodies and the abstract.
The actions and works of movement specialists (in the fields of dance, yoga, tai chi, etc.) recurrently have a Futural aspect, as do the actions and works of certain kinds of practitioner who are involved in expressing/delineating the zones, elements and aspects of the planet; but, most crucially, actions and works expressive of - and breaking open outsights toward - intent and the oneiric-real are Futural (or in the case of works, these either are Futural or have a Futural aspect, insofar as they delineate, in this way, worlds of the oneiric-real, and of intent).
Many kinds of action are here, and many kinds of work are here, partly or wholly, in the wavefront - works of philosophy, tales/stories/plays, and a very few (works of metamorphics) which are permeatively Futural.
At the level of the abstract there is the inter-world of facuties, encounters, becomings, and of abstract perception in different forms, and there is the intra-world of dreamings, accounts, anticipations, memories, envisagings, hypotheses, but in the last analysis these domains are not separable, as is shown by perception, by abstract perception (which it should be added has a form within dreams as well as within the functioning of lucidity), and also by becomings, which are inseparable from envisaging.
The wavefront consists of openness; kindness; lucidity; a deterritorialised relationship of love in relation to the planet; dance; delight; laughter; letting go and not contending.
Plato was part of a process which trapped thought within a cave. Outside the cave is the world of intent, and most crucially, the world of the wavefront of the Futural. A new outsight comes into focus. Beyond the control and reactivity of ordinary reality - is the Future that was there all along. Just turn sideways, away from the future that is an aspect of chronic/chronological time, and look toward the rhizome-wavefront that is the Future.
In relation to time-spans or durations the most valuable time-apperture for understanding what is taking place on the planet and within the human world is the nine thousand years of the holocene, and the spatium or intensive-spatium, in asking the question 'what (on Earth) is going on?', is the Zone that is the planet, the planet grasped at last as profoundly anomalous and enigmatic, as the fundamentally unknown, and as a world which includes within it the abstract in the form - in particular - of intent, feeling, and the oneiric-real. Across the millennia of the holocene religions appear and disappear, bizarre growths within the oneiric-real. Reincarnation, afterlife, and transcendent parent-like or sovereign-like deities must be seen as control-delusions (projections designed to console, and recurrently to reconcile people with barely living their lives), but accounts of non-transcendent entities or forces occupying obscured additional dimensions of this world - whether as predatory or parasitic, or as impersonal forces that could in some way assist or boost those with sufficient dedication to encountering the force involved, or as entities with which an alliance could in some way be created - are accounts which, taken together, produce an enigmatic, eerie impression that demands exploration.
There is the misleading 'semi-profundity' of the horizon of science, mathematics and technology, and the illusory profundity of the horizon of religion. Beyond these there is the horizon of the planet in its exteriority - the Zone. And outside the preconstructed forms of the system of ventures and lives there is the explorer-traveller, for whom everything is about the planet, its animals and plants, the sun, the stars, and human beings as worlds of the abstract - intent, affects, the oneiric-real. The journeys and outsights and pragmatic systems of an embodied exteriority-intent are what is most fundamental, and here navigation takes place in relation to the elements of the Futural wavefront (and even when the focus in some sense is elsewhere, the motion involved is Futural, in that it is a waking, a becoming, a heightening, a deterritorialisation). Around three thousand years ago an already attenuated and delusion-afflicted form of reality collapsed still further, splitting into the false profundity of religion and the immense less-than-profundity of science. Everything became locked onto writing, and increasingly locked onto mathematics, and at the same time everything started to be more male, more crudely projective from the rulers of human societies, and less and less focused on the combined, interconnected world of the planet in its exteriority and of human beings both as bodies and as the abstract.
Sophisticated justifiers and sustainers of the status quo use canonical elements to give a new form of justification of aspects of ordinary reality (the ongoing disaster), which functions as a new means of sustaining it - initially using (drawing on or tracing from) rulers, laws and cities (etc), together with a canonical use of books and their interpretations and additions, but then increasingly drawing on mathematics and, in particular, the concepts of language, together eventually with the form or idea of interiority re-purposed along conditions-of-possibility or historical lines. The other aspect of religion is interiority, which can be the idea of an eternal 'soul' separate from energy and the body, but can also be the interiority of Kantian conditions of possibility (which constitute a 'subject'), and furthermore can be the inter-related human-world interiority or species interiority of Hegelianism, and of aspects of many forms of Hegel-influenced description of the world.
It is always necessary to start from the idea of humans as bodies and as the abstract, and from the idea of planetary immanence, so that the planet in its exteriority is not seen as lacking dimensions in comparison to human beings - a question of starting from perception, and from the faculty of dreaming, which can reconceive what is around you, together with the faculty of lucidity (which is woken by concentrating on intent, feeling and the oneiric-real).
Bring the Zone into focus around you. Go toward the Future.
Note 2.
You have walked into an area of beech forest - you find a lower terrain on a rock-strewn but mostly flat summit-area. It is a mountainous terrain but the mountains are not very high, and in this hidden zone there is shelter from the wind, and between the rocks the soil is good enough for the beech trees to thrive. Within the lower, wind-protected area you find a ring of beech trees - fourteen mature trees growing around a low rock outcrop thirty feet high and fifty feet across.
Who is the figure we are looking towards? They are the explorer-traveller - and they are the warrior-traveller, but where the combat involved is the struggle against the self, the interestablishment, the system of control modalities. They are the practitioner of metamorphics, for whom everything is about travelling Forward with as many explorer-traveller comradeships as possible; for whom everything is about the joy and dance and laughter of exploration and of crossing thresholds; for whom everything is the adventure of the cosmos and of love and freedom.
What is their milieu? It is the planet, and it is the singular terrains within which they live and travel, whether these are urban terrains, or houses, or terrains beyond cities, towns and villages.
Afterwards, you see the ring of beech trees in a dream, and in the dream you see that to go into the circle of trees in the spirit of love and freedom and adventure is to bring about a momentous transformation, a transformation as political as it is existential, as libidinal as it is philsophical. A new, heightened connection with the planet, the corporeal, the abstract, the faculties.
This explorer-traveller is not the citizen-subject (with the two aspects of citizen and of private individual with relationships - the citizen-subject deemed to have access to resources of science and the arts and the social sciences and political theory). The explorer-traveller is not the figure of the artist or the academic or the politician, and is not the figure of the political theorist, or the activist. However, there is something very much in common with the activist - but the activism here is a bright process that is an aspect of Departure, where what is said and done is an activism in relation to the faculties, a breaking open of glimpses of the outside of ordinary reality, an expression of outsights, a transmission of dreamings and catalysts. The male in you waking into the female, and the female in you waking into the planetary.
Aftrerwards I discovered it was likely that the rock outcrop was called the anvil, but the woman who told me, who knew the area from when she was a child, was unsure she was talking about the same place as the one I had described.
I had been walking south for a week, drawn by the forested slopes in the distance. My plan in going to Murun had been to travel northwest to a terrain west of Lake Khovsgol, but I had gone in almost the opposite direction, toward mostly flat-topped mountains, often with steep sides, heavily forested on the north-facing slopes. After around three days I had crossed an area of summit forest, and beyond a valley I had seen the outcrop twenty miles to the south, standing out from what seemed to be the highest part of the upland terrains.
I was walking up a wide, gentle slope of scattered pine-trees and upland grass - I was thinking about my friends and how I would like them to see this place. There were faint signs that this was a kind of path, or pass - a day later I would see a dog, on its own, crossing the mountain, a dog (of the largish, faintly wolf-reminiscent kind used by Mongolians as sheepdogs) which from a hundred yards away looked at me, but continued without pausing on its independent journey to another valley.
I went to the right, toward the outcrop, or tor, standing out a third of a mile away through pine-trees and rocks making up a flat but but slightly upward-sloping terrain. The outcrop was made up of countless, smallish blocks of black, shattered rock, split along two fracture lines - all the rocks tended toward the pointed quality of large heavy shards. It was startlingly regular in form. It had steep but climbable sides, and in horizontal cross-section it was oval in shape, maybe two hundred yards across at the base, at its widest, and around half that at the summit, which in height was was around two thirds of the base. It was flat-topped, so that it had a flat oval-shaped summit, with very long views in all directions. There were small pine-trees on the summit (one of them at least was the kind that has edible pine-kernels - squirrels, or other creatures, had been feasting on them, leaving chewed pine-cones at the base of the tree). An outcrop made of shattered black rock, and on the summit terrain around it there were several small pools, which seemed likely to be fed by meltwater from the tor. An outstretched, sublime zone of the Sayan mountains.
It is a question of reaching the anvil, the eye of the forest - of crossing into the circle with the intent to travel further out into the tremendum.
* * *
