5.

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)




  

    There was something “contingent,” or maybe serendipitous and ephemerally-singular, about both of my starting-points that evening in relation to music and dreamings. Afterwards I would never go back, in any important sense, to either of these starting-points.

    If you bring a will to see the transcendental to speed, then speed will always take you to the point where you see it, and this can take place using oneiric and philosophical lenses that subsequently may well turn out to have, overall, only a relatively limited value in relation to this escape toward the abstract perception of the outside (all sorts of confusions can arise as a result of attributing the quality of the outcome to the music or fictional world that was a component in reaching the outside, although somehow on this occasion no confusion occurred afterwards).

    Initially that evening I took speed, in several quite large "intakes", intermittently over the space of several hours (I don’t think I had any fixed plan at all at the beginning to also take LSD), and the two external sources of inspiration that I initially chose (again without having had any plan at all) were not only more than adequate as starting-points, but were perhaps even well suited for the circumstances.

      With music I started by listening to a tape of REM’s Automatic for the People which I had “randomly” bought in a supermarket two days before (I didn’t really know REM apart from having heard one or two singles). In a process of zoning in toward dreamings and music at the highest available level of intensity three or four hours later (which is like a day when you are on speed) I would head outward and onward to The Beatles, having tried a few other records first. But at the beginning I listened to Automatic for the People, whose title I associated with the idea of automatic writing (this probably assisting me in the process of hearing beyond it into the outside – the outside which I was feeling as having helped to create it, as opposed to it being a message from a group of musicians).

     There is a lot of melancholy in REM, and melancholy as such is a kind of affectation – it is not the same as processes of giving a lucid expression to the background radiation of sadness of the world (for these processes he sadness is one more stimulus to break free toward the south-outside – “all those who have gone down in the fight would want you to Escape”). But the speed ensured that I was not going to be caught up in the melancholy, and that pre-eminently I was going to focus on the direction of the Love-and-Freedom that also exists within the world. Rapidly, I began listening to two tracks in particular – The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight, and Find the River. The chorus of the first of these tracks, which is by far the most up-tempo track on the album, I heard as both a wild shout of joy (which it is) and also as an entranced, tender love-song (which I “achieved” by a mis-hearing of the very slurred lyric as “coming in to waken her”).

      I had already reached a state of extraordinary joy – a joy that was charged with an energy that would intrinsically by-pass all forms of neurotic (energy-wasting) thinking and behaviour, and a joy that was suffused with the feeling of being in love. This feeling was arriving from the dreamed/superimposed image that now went across the chorus from the REM song, and it was also arriving from the encounter, only a few hours before, with the woman in Leamington. And furthermore it was arriving through a heightened connection that had now been established to the south-outside (because women are a primary aspect of the south-outside the affective quality of this connection could only be that of being in love, although it should immediately be added that the planet in the deepest sense is also an inspirer of love – an “object” of love). 

          Some of the time at this stage – when I was not sitting reading – I was dancing, in the form of simple torso-rotation, back-and-forward, and side-to-side movements. In general, and specifically with the The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight, the movements were fast, but some of the time they were mesmeric in the mode of a slower, swaying motion.  It is important to think of this dancing in terms of the trance-inducing power of swaying or smoothly "refraining" motions, and in terms of its tendency to attach my attention to the music, and to action, and to detach it from thought-processes that would have blocked the awakening of lucidity, of abstract perception. Overall, given that I did not have much ability at this time in relation to stopping internal dialogues, I had stumbled into a set of behaviours that was exemplary for the circumstances. Reading, listening to music and dancing were all ways of disabling my conventional, habituated thought-processes (ordinary-life thought processes that, unknown to me, insisted on the world being constructed as ordinary, even when they appeared to be deeply philosophical). Not only this, because I was deliberately setting out to see the world as energy, or as the body without organs – as something that was like a space of forms of music – my attention, freed up from neurosis, was also being given to the whole of the room, so that perception was a fourth element that was freeing me from constricted thought. The concentration on perception was vital – but it should be added that perhaps the most fundamental element was the dancing (which of course was inseparable from perception - and only in part because of the music – and was proprioceptive, a charged, blissful world of sensations of movement). The dancing at its different speeds, slow swaying, and smoothly fast ecstatic movements, was a distractor from dead thought that at the same time was more than this – it was an inducer and heightener of trance.

      What I dreamed “across the top” of the chorus of the Sindewinder Sleeps Tonight was a “small” and very beautiful envisaged world. The lyric “coming in to waken her” was a story of being in love with a woman who was asleep in my bed. There was an extraordinary tenderness and intensity about the love in this “dreaming.” The story was that of a new relationship, and it was suffused not only with a love and tenderness toward the sleeping woman, but with a sublime astonishment that the woman was actually asleep in my bed. And it had the authentic quality of the state at the beginning of being intensely in love when the thought of having sex, although intensely wonderful, and a source of the beauty of the experience, can have the sense of it slightly – concupiscently – missing the point of the place (the place of lovers) that astoundingly has been found. This was there in the fact that the dream was not about having sex, and in the fact that the woman and myself might have had sex, or might not have done, and it was irrelevant whether we had – all that mattered was that we were in love, and we had slept together (the dreamed world specifically left open what had happened, very much including sex virtually within it, but emphasising the irrelevance of actual sex to the state of being in love by not pinning itself down with the inclusion of a corporeal sexual act).

     But it should be added that the difference between the song and what I was envisaging was not one created by a hallucination, but was due to the fact that amphetamines allow you to be extremely free and creative in relation to the emergence of dreamings. In fact I could hear that Michael Stipe was singing something different from “Coming in to waken her” but once I was internally singing this new lyric it was possible to be unaware of the discrepancy: and simultaneously the unequivocal feeling was that the joy I could hear in the chorus and the words that were audible meant that the words must mean something like what I had envisaged. So it was possible to make the high-tempo rush of the chorus into an invocation and blissful affirmation of the dream finding expression for me through the words “coming in to waken her”. Disjunctions of this kind while on speed are not the result of a lack of clear perception (the REM lyric has been described as one of the most mis-heard lyrics ever): on the contrary they are the result of a practical clarity which is clear in the sense that it is free of the neurosis of the need for correct interpretation. The joy of the music spoke for itself, and I created a virtual world on the basis of this joy, rather than worrying about the song's words.

     The two aspects that were fundamental about the other track were the idea of “the river” that must be found, and the fact that the song has a very beautiful, liltingly powerful melody. The lyrics have the quality of “improv” singing, rather than polished song-poetry: but although they contain a strand of affectation, and have an awkwardness in their construction, none of this matters in relation to the song containing a vital view toward the outside, a view which arrives inextricably from both the music and the words. At the time I was distantly aware of Michael Stipe's “sensitive soul” affectation, but none of that distracted me – even the bits that were wrong had another aspect which went in the right direction.

     And everything in the song is about directions. There is the road of trapped, constrained human existence, and then there is the river.

Me, my thoughts are flower strewn

Ocean storm, bayberry moon

I have got leave to find my way.

Watch the road and memorise

The life that pass before my eyes

Nothing is going my way.

   

I have got to find the river

Bergamot and vetiver

Run through my head and fall away.

The song begins with these lyrics:

Hey now, little speedyhead

The read on the speedmeter says

You have to go to task in the city

Where people drown and people serve

Don’t be shy, your just deserve

Is only just light years to go.

Although I was interested in the possible reference to amphetamines, in identifying with Michael Stipe – as I envisaged it – talking to a female lover, I did not feel inspired by the diminutive involved in “hey now, little speedyhead”. It did not seem to be something that would be said to someone with whom you were in love. Despite it apparently being morning in the song, I did not connect this “scene” with the world of “coming in to waken her.” But what was important in Find the River was that the love finding expression in the song was love for an aspect of the world – for Love-and-Freedom, and for wider realities – and the weakness of the emphasis in relation to amorous love was hugely compensated for by a relationship of love toward the planet. There is a quality of affectation in Stipe turning himself into a kind of Ophelia beside a stream  “There is nothing left to throw / of ginger, lemon, indigo / coriander stem and rose of hay” but the becoming-woman involved in the song is nothing but good, and together with this becoming-woman the names of the flowers, taken in themselves,  create an emphatic quality of an amorous, “letting-go” relationship toward the beauty of the planetary world in which we live.

     Other things were happening that were part of the process of Escape, but nonetheless it is correct to say that through the two songs - with the assistance of speed - I had reached the bright-transcendental (an additional point that should be made is that The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight takes its title and opening musical phrase from the sublimely beautiful, and very charged song - from South Africa in 1939 - The Lion Sleeps Tonight). There was the river, and there was the jungle – in the background – of The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight, together with the intense dream of being in love ("coming in to waken her"). Love and women are fundamental for the escape from constricted, collapsed reality; the forest is all around us, despite it being hard to see; and there is a river in the forest.

*

Almost immediately after starting listening to the music I decided to read a passage from a book – a passage which to a great extent is about music. But it was not a book about aesthetics and music. It was a fantasy-tale novel that I had not looked at for ten years, and that I had only ever read once (in the weeks before I had thought at some point that there was a section from it that I should look at, although in a way where I was thinking in terms of the cultural history of music in fantasy fiction).

    

    In the story Bracken, who is a "solver" of ancient underground labyrinths, is in love with Rebecca (who is a healer, using herbs to cure people) but as a result of epic - and recurrently very violent - events, he has been drawn far away from Rebecca, and his home, to the Uffington downlands, where there is a "holy" place - a community of male priests or monks, alongside a sacred neolithic site. 

    The book is Duncton Wood, by William Horwood, and its characters are moles. Given the book is in some sense a "magical tale" this starting point is not an issue - in fact the real issue is that it is not magical enough (it is a significant fact that although "the holy moles" of Uffington are alongside the 2500 year old white horse, this message-from-the-Future geoglyph is never mentioned, in favour of a central importance of the sarsen stone megaliths that are nearby). The book was written in 1978, taking advantage of the opportunity opened up by the much more impressive - and very shamanic - Watership Down, from 1972. And far from being shamanic it is an epic hero-adventure and conventional romance that is heavily inflected by a religious mysticism (influenced on one level by eastern philosophy) that fundamentally is catholicism, or anglo-catholicism. 

    The passage is three quarters of the way through the book (the events of the last quarter will take place primarily in North Wales) and up until this point the book has been set in woodlands and pasturelands of lowland Oxfordshire (as opposed to the south-Oxfordshire upland of the downs above the village of Uffington). A sacred song is about to be sung by the holy moles of of Uffington, in a secret chamber which is beneath the sarsen stone tomb that is now called Waylands Smithy (this name comes from 2000 years after the tomb was made). The location of the chamber for this song is connected to the fact that the moles worship a divine force which they call "the Stone" (all standing stones are sacred for them). Bracken has accompanied a "scribe-mole" called Boswell to Uffington but he is not a member of the Uffington religious order, and cannot take part in the singing of the song. He is at a loose end, and he goes out onto the surface:    

"The weather was cold, wet, and messy, as grey sweeps of rain came across the vales below Uffington and swirled up the hill into the long, coarse grass into which Bracken emerged from the tunnels below.  

 He did not know what he was looking for but, as often in the past, he knew he would find it when he got there.

Then he heard a familiar and welcoming sound, the rushing of wind through bare beech-tree branches and twigs somewhere ahead."

As I started to read this passage I became aware of a kind of anomalous parallelism between what I was reading and what was happening to me. The protagonist in the book did not know what he was looking for, and he was about to go into a secret place in which he would experience the transcendental through music, and specifically through song. And the feeling of the parallelism was emergent also from the fact that the protagonist not only had a love for travelling into the unknown, but was both intensely in love - with Rebecca – and intensely inspired by the terrains of the planet.

   Bracken finds the secret chamber, and finds an opening high up in one of its walls. He hears the song, and is swept away by it:

“…his own voice seemed to join them and he was singing it, too, and it carried him even further as its sound echoed and re-echoed around the chamber about him and took him finally for a moment into the very silence of the Stone, where a mole is nothing but a part of the glimmers and rays of the silence itself, unseen. As he went there, he understood at last where he had been with Rebecca and why he would always search until he found it with her once more.” 

   I was reading the words of the whole passage (about four pages) with the deliberate attention of someone reading them out - the opposite of “skimming.” The task I had set myself – without giving any thought to it - was to read the passage with full, deliberate intensity, waking every nuance of each phrase and each word. And it was not at all that I thought everything in the passage was a view toward the outside – on the contrary, along with its opening up of the transcendental I was deeply aware of a bleak space of religious gravity and “piety.” But at the same time my intent was now to follow the parallelism to the full, and in adjusting the lens of the fiction in this way, the combination of the music in the room, and the idea of the bright-transcendental in the book, however confused it was, led to my perception and abstract-perception crossing a threshold. And once across the threshold the world of Duncton Wood had disappeared, had become irrelevant in relation to the immediacy of what I was encountering.

    It was entirely – and viscerally – clear to me that I had reached what in anthropological terms is called the sacred. I was in a state of continuous extreme joy, or bliss, and I was perceiving the world around me both as a space of energy-formations that had the beauty and consistency  of music, and as a space within which the human world was transected by a river of the bliss that is love, freedom and lucidity (the bliss that I was experiencing was a part of this river). 

   The passage from Duncton Wood had helped me as an oneiric-abstract lens. I could also see, in putting down this lens, the grave, “pious-constrictive” flaws it had: the affectations of religion in Duncton Wood were as visible to me as the affectations of melancholy sensitivity in Automatic for the People, but in both cases these issues were irrelevant. I did not become ensnared in processes of critique which would have prevented me from seeing the south-outside (the critique took place, but in processes of abstract perception that instantly expressed themselves as a moving on).

    What everything evidently turned around was the relationship of women to the sacred. And here the book I was reading both pointed out the fundamental direction, and simultaneously provided almost nothing that would help me to move forward. It had within it a female figure who was an effective, believable figure for envisaging the state of being in love, but it did this in a context of character-aspects and circumstances that together were libidinally and metaphysically repugnant. It is obviously relevant that all of the priests of this world were males, but the deeper issue is that the ambient male-religion impositionism – with its affectations in the form of what is called “piety” – surrounds a carefully constructed female figure whose love, vitality, beauty and capacity to be an adventurer are in every sense shackled to her being a partner to a male, and to her being a mother and a healer (the three aspects of the “nurturing” female). She is not allowed in any way to be a thinker who is waking lucidity in a metaphysical exploration (only males here can be spiritual thinkers) and nor is she allowed to be an adventurer whose journeys are a blissful exploration into the unknown (again, here only males begin to go in that direction - and they only begin, trapped by the delusions of an entrapment-metaphysics).

   In the male world of religious metaphysics (which is what has created the religions) what has mattered fundamentally in the creation of religions has all along been the ownership of the land, and the ownership of women. Secretly the questions of gods and of avatars primarily pertain to justificatory metaphysical ruses that ensure the continuation of systems of libidinal, oneiric and concrete domination - domination of women, and of planetary terrains. It is not that the sacred – the bliss that is Love-and-Freedom – does not exist (the fact that it exists explains, in part, why women can be trapped in this way): it is that the systems of religion allow only tiny gleams of the energy of Love-and-Freedom to break through, while at the same time they intrinsically shut down the ability to escape towards it.

     We were going in opposite directions. Duncton Wood was imposing anglo-catholicism over the ancient shamanic world of Britain. The adventure of the story was like a young male’s glory dreams of being in love, being a hero, and being on a titanic adventurous quest, but most damagingly the book was a space of "piety," and of the abstract-oneiric functioning of the interiority (the interiority, or trans-establishment, in Britain is profoundly anglo-catholic). 

     In relation to the treatment of women, and to the bleak gravity and constriction of religion, my critique was a swift moving on. Yes, music and silence were door-openers for reaching the bright-transcendental, and yes, women were central to the escape, but the male-dominated priest-piety was evidently a destructive imposition, and so was the romantic traditionalism of the book’s female paragon.

   But where did the book lead me in relation to the planet? Here, it was not so much that I stopped to perform a critique, as that something in Duncton Wood’s relationship to the countryside of Britain caused me to see a form of creative engagement that I had not fully perceived before: a form of creative engagement that was in fact liminally - but deeply - connected to the interiority.

     The book constructed a kind of evaluative and abstract map of terrains, determining zones not according to spatial features, but according to aesthetic-religious aspects. It was oneiric-abstract work engaging closely with the terrains of the island. Rural lowland Oxfordshire was a zone of quietly sublime areas of woodland, and the chalk downlands at the far south of the county were a place of a more powerful, insistent sublime affect, a place where the sacred was closer to the surface. And lastly, the mountains of north Wales (the place to which the three central characters go, after the events at Uffington) is a place where the sublime is very intense, but darkly turbulent, in that it has both an ambient associated bleakness and a singular primevally dark element (the hound of Gelert, a creature which, like the medieval “imps” is initially negative in nature, but which can be “turned” so that it becomes a force of good). This particular form of mapping did not strike any chord with me in the sense that everything was tied to religion (and having spent two years – relatively recently - living in the exceptionally beautiful terrain around Harlech in North Wales, I did not agree at all with the map in relation to north Wales).

    But at another level the book was about the plants, trees  and hill formations of the island of Britain (it is full of references to plants) and there is a real love in this. Here was the element that in itself was fully positive.

    I was leaving Duncton Wood behind, but something, briefly, was carried with me from it. By this time it was around a half hour since I had taken a tab of LSD, and the carried-forward element would soon be swept away completely by the awakening of other zones of awareness, but for now there was a glimpse of something. In leaving behind the deep underground chamber of the priest moles, what was I now seeing? Or who? .

    I was seeing someone else, explicitly alongside the philosopher. This figure was the poet or prose-poet of the countryside - a figure whose work was about transmitting a love for the planet, although in a way where (and this distinction was not in focus) recurrently the love could be mediated by the terminology of the territory (so that by implication it is "the land" - the specific "land - that is evoked rather than the work evoking the planet by means of the region).

    I had an image of an extremely beautiful area of hills, at twilight (they were somewhere on the Welsh borders, in Shropshire, Cheshire, or over the border in the northern areas of Wales that are beyond these counties). And suddenly I had an intense yearning to be such a prose-poet or poet (I think it was prose that was in my mind), and the intensity of the dream was strong partly because I envisaged that such a writer would be living with an amazing woman, with them living in an area of hills - or beautiful countryside - for which they would both feel a profound love.

    I did not see that such a figure, if they have no centrally deterritorialised aspect, is in fact all along a very high-kudos equivalent of the "state philosopher" - their work can be taken up and used by the interiority. Shakespeare to a great extent - an extent that is fundamental when properly perceived - gets around this by setting two of his most powerful - shamanic-modernist - works in places other than Britain - A Midsummer Night Dream is in Athens, and The Tempest is Far away in the Caribbean, or most convincingly, in the "east Indies", as they were called at that time (the presence of chess in the play is an indicator of India, the place of origin of the game).

   

    But although I was struck by this figure, I did not stay. I remember that at a certain point I suddenly had a glimpse of a sunlit expanse of Warwickshire countryside - as if seen from a hill - and as well as the hills and woodlands there were several tall black "lines" of energy (they were as wide as several houses) that stretched up from the ground - like static plasma lines, lines of plasma, but ones that stayed constant instead of instantly disappearing - and went out of sight into the upper atmosphere. The affect was that they were like the night - like a starlit, moonlit night - and were dark only in the sense that what was there was too unknown for me to see it other than as a darkness. This was of course a deterritorialised, planetary "vision" of one of the terrains of the island, and it swept away the residual bad air of the line of thought that had continued from Duncton Wood.

     In relation to music by this time I had dropped back thirty years from 1992, and this new music had a far clearer view toward the Future, a view which - it is a view from 1962 and 1963 - had probably been assisted by the use of amphetamines. I was now listening to the early Beatles.

     This was the highpoint of sheer sustained bliss. The songs were love songs. They had an exuberant brightness, a delicately intense feeling of love (“I want to hold your hand”), the becoming-woman that is an affect of genuine heterosexual male love songs (how can you not enter into becoming with those who you really love?) and a lack of male affectation in the form of “soulfulness.” I listened to (and danced to) each song three or four times, and then moved on to the next one.

     And for a moment at least, in another space of the body without organs of the room, there was a sunlit, sublime-eerie expanse of planetary Warwickshire.

     And the LSD was now beginning to have an effect – there was a new joy in the form of extraordinarily beautiful coloured patterns that now were appearing “in front of” the surfaces of the room, and which suffused my visual field if I closed my eyes. And it was not just a question of the visual as a “source” for the patterns. With my eyes closed it was clear the patterns were suffusing my whole perceptual and proprioceptive field – the body-shaped eye that I had been all along – and it was more easy to focus on the fact that a large proportion of the patterns were to some degree expressively related to the songs to which I was listening.   

  The night was about to enter a new phase, and one that would involve some very anomalous experiences, and some extreme psychological turbulence (to state again what I said in the previous section – I am emphatically not recommending that anyone should follow this example). 

                                                                        * * *

4.

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) 




    Earlier, in Leamington, I had encountered a woman who was a Warwick student in the third year of an English Literature BA - we had spoken for about an hour, perhaps a bit longer. She had very poised eyes, whose femininity was in the form of a perceptive, studious warmth. She came from an area of North Yorkshire for which I felt a strong affection, and she would have been around 21. I was waiting at the house for someone else – it was a chance meeting – but she seemed happy to talk.

     My BA at Warwick had been in Philosophy and Literature, and we also had the shared connection to North Yorkshire. I remember talking about the area she came from, and the areas where I had lived in Yorkshire, and I think at the end we spoke about the English Literature department, and the courses we had enjoyed. I know that we talked about books that we loved, and that we clicked in terms of having an affection for the same novels and plays. It is not an exaggeration to say that by the time I left the house I was on the edge of being in love.

     However, the woman had a boyfriend, and the state at which I had arrived did not have the tension of a need to make something happen. It had an element of frustration, but under those circumstances there is always the hope that the obstacle will disappear, and in the glow of amorous happiness it seems that only serendipity is needed, leaving the mind entirely untroubled by a requirement to make plans. This intense state of “falling in love” does not in fact last very long under such circumstances – which of course is not to say that its subsiding is to be affirmed – but for the first evening at least the feeling is entirely secure and self-propelling, continuously supported as it is by immediate, undimmed memories (and perhaps it says something that I can still remember the woman’s eyes).

     And this evening was the evening. I was going to set out to see what could be seen, using a combination of speed and lsd. And although the nature of my motivation was relatively good – in comparison to setting out to “have fun” – I feel certain it was vital for what happened that I was on the edge of being in love. It is not enough to decide, philosophically, to see the outside of ordinary reality. You also have to face in the right direction.

    What I was about to do is not at all to be “recommended.” The only general principle here is indeed “don’t take drugs” (a principle that I have now put into practice). However it must immediately be said that there is a fundamental validity and importance to certain kinds of experiences created by taking psychotropics – experiences generally also created by a technique for stopping internal verbalising, for "stopping the internal dialogue." It is just that the dangerous work has already been done, and the necessary maps and diagrams in relation to the thresholds of perception and abstract perception that are in question have been meticulously and soberly drawn up. And in terms of the evening in 1993 it was in fact the case that I had started to study these maps and diagrams (I had found the anomalous, southward path, and I did not need to go rushing up a mountain along a path in the wrong direction, in order to get the view).

     The total number of times I had taken either one of the two substances would have been around seven or eight, with these occasions all, in different ways, having been in the context of the graduate milieu of Warwick philosophy department. My aim this evening was in a very strong sense philosophical – my intent was to use psychotropics and music in a deliberate attempt to perceive the world as “the body without organs,” (to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term for the outside) as opposed to perceiving a world of concrete or material formations. Furthermore, there was no spirit of generational “rebellion” in what I was doing. In the context of this generational axis, if anything was involved it was an awareness of death, rather than a rejection of values. In the summer my mother had died, and an effect of her death had been to make me feel that if I was going to go in this direction I should do it properly. I felt very strongly – and I still feel this – that my mother had thrown me a long way forward in the direction that leads away from conventional, constricted forms of existence. And in relation to psychotropics the feeling that I should not waste what I had been given (I should not die before I died) had been at work in making me think that this route should only be taken if I was setting out to make discoveries about the wider and deeper nature of the world.

     These were very good intentions to be bringing to the experience.  But none of this means that I was doing the right thing. To detail the ways in which I was lucky, and the extraordinary experiences I had, carries the risk of giving the impression that on this occasion it was somehow, as it turned out, the best route to take. This is not my aim at all – but it remains the case, all necessary warnings having been given, that the perspectives I reached are worth describing.

   A jump forward for just a moment (the full account of what took place will appear later). 

   It is now around midnight. I have been listening to music for hours, and I have been ultra-blissfully swept away into the sense that, Spinozistically, there is no difference between the inside and the outside. What I am sensing is that the air around me in the room is also the joy of the music, and that the world of the planet is the same kind of thing as is music, and is also joy.

     To pull back from this wider viewpoint, it is definitely – includedly - the case that what I am sensing is that the whole human world fundamentally consists of feeling and intent. However, it is not enough to get to this place, even though it is a very good start. 

     The abstract, most fundamentally, is a world of wills. Subsuming and going beyond the oneirosphere and the verosphere is the eerie (and sublime) tremendum of the volos. This is the sphere of wills, in their essential-and-parasitised admixtures, and of intent, which is simply will insofar it has not been implanted with a predatory external intention.

   In relation to fiction and philosophy the question therefore becomes – to what extent is a particular work an expression of a love for love-and-freedom? And to what extent is it an expression of control-fixation, of desire-for-kudos, of desire to access, creatively, the power of socially established forms of blocked and constrictive dreaming? (the epic, shockingly delusory worlds of religion and reason). There is a continual production of paratexts or supplement-texts of religions, and in the same way there is an endless production of paratexts of the major formations within the world of reason (and together religion and reason socio-machinally form a single system – the system of reason-revelation).

   Furthermore, in relation to individuals and groups - and the whole circumambient world of the outside - the questions, again, are about the degree in each case of love, of desire-for-control, of desire-for-kudos, of openness to new experience, of fear, of being “in love,” of concupiscence, of being in love with love-and-freedom (that is to say, the degree of love-and-freedom).

    The form of abstract perception here is lucidity. It is lucidity which grasps that a direction is that of love-and-freedom. When this direction appears in front of you there can be a feeling like seeing sunlit hills in the morning in summer, a startlingly beautiful feeling that could come with a bright world of evocative, fleeting images. The direction involved is exceptionally likely to have no quality of being a direction of the glittering prizes – because it is the south-outside, and in most of its forms is too beyond-the-conventions for it to sit easily within the general human establishments, let alone the interiority. But lucidity is not distracted or confused by any of these – intrinsic and extrinsic – circumstances. A woken or deliberately functioning lucidity sees the direction when it appears.

    It is also a fully woken lucidity that can see, for instance, the difference between the blissful adventure of being in love, and the point where a combination of paragonising and diminutivising begins to appear. Women in particular are in desperate need of this ability – the sexually-charged diminutivising of, for instance, “your beautiful little waist” has a “little” within it which is just the beginning of a rising tide of implicit “aboveness” of male-with-highly-developed-reason above beauty-paragon female, with loveliness and intuitions, but with less-developed-reason (the horror, the horror…). The trap of the romantic closes, and as the man loses the libido of first-phase sexual interest toward the woman the energy for paragonising subsides, generally leaving only the increasing functioning of the infantilising tendency (as the man stops fucking the woman, he does not stop fucking her “in the head”). Lucidity again grasps the nature of what repeatedly follows in long-term heterosexual relationships. A deeply recurrent active/submissive complex of wills has the form of the man agreeing in effect to revolve around a family, but with the woman agreeing to have her life and her family revolve around the man’s life project (his creative/professional/metaphysical project). This recurrent ceding of the space of the abstract to the male is a disturbing collapse (one which is secretly libidinalised as a feminine submission, and is symbolised by the change of name that is still the rule within marriage). For women and for men there is of course everything right about a "becoming-child" as a becoming amongst the others, but it is a disaster when it is an entrapment element of a double process of reproduction and of confidence-destroying conjugalism.

    In the oneirosphere and the verosphere it is lucidity that can see the sexism, racism and shutting-down of the path to the south-outside of Tolkien's disguised catholicism, and that can see the deadly reason-fixated gravity of Kant's protestantism (the overcoding of language - and in particular the language of reason - onto thought; the horror of ethical judgement without love as the fundamental aspect of choice-making and without lucidity as its intellectual modality; the re-enforcement of normality with speculative theology; and the fending-off of perception and of abstract perception by an implicit overcoding of the unknowable across the transcendentally unknown, but knowable).

     

    

   Space here is world of co-emplaced wills, and time is like thought or dreaming – or will. It is only when you have included will that you are safe from the endemic, dominatory idea that the human dimension of the cosmos is unfolding along the lines of reason, or along the lines of a dialectical development of “spirit” – it is only then that you have included the wild, sublime energy of the volos, the tremendum. Being in love, and being in love with love-and-freedom are the two states that tell you most about the nature of time, along with two others – predation and parasitism. The cosmos is suffused with intent, and it is also suffused with forms of domination.

    But space is the way forward here. During the evening in 1993 I will be turned more and more toward space. And the same is true of what will take place over the next few years, in relation both to the abstract and the concrete. Described in relation to critique this is a necessary process because philosophy is fundamentally pervaded by a fixation on reason, and reason works primarily along the lines of time (its other primary zone of engagement is the inactive side of existence in the form of formal and semi-formal systems). Described positively the primary thing that is about to happen is a process of being turned toward the planet, and toward new kinds of relationships with women, relationships that will have a much stronger element of adventure, of love-and-freedom.

   But in the course of the evening - of the night - most specifically I will be turned, firstly, toward the space encountered in perception, and secondly, toward the planet as it appears within two different, but related, kinds of dreaming (the land, the country, the hills, the mountains), both of which will have as a fundamental element the amorous - that state which is called "being in love."

                                 

                                                                    * * *

    

3.

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) 

   The bus is going around a circuit-road through the undemonstrative modern buildings of Warwick University. The campus has a lot of areas of grass, and a few trees, including some cherry trees.

   The outside is circumambient – spheroambient – and what is more it suffuses all of the inside.

    1993, like every year, is a world of the planet (and the sun and the cosmos), and the human world is just a zone of elements spread out finely within the planet. The place through which the bus travels is pre-eminently the World of the planet, and then there is also the human world - an aspect of the planet. 

    The immediate point of saying this is to fend off, in advance, any confusion that could occur in pointing out that in 1993 the "western" zones of the human world are in a relative low-phase – relative to a long phase of higher intensity that lasted roughly from 1962 to 1982. It is valuable to see this differential, but it is necessary to hold in mind that the zones of the human world are always going up and down, and that at any time it is straightforwardly possible for individuals and groups to set out toward the higher-intensity – toward the Future – whether or not the overall human world is in a more high-intensity phase.

     In fact in 1993 there is a line of continuation - of sustained development - from an emergence in the earlier phase. This emergence was of a new, very highly-focused form of metamorphics, which can be defined as the pragmatics and metaphysics of metamorphosis, where metamorphosis concerns the process - consisting of becomings - of travelling into wider realities. 

The cherry trees are now one tree amongst hundreds of other kinds of tree, there are mountains in the distance, there are deserts with trees encroaching on them, the plains are covered in forests, there is an eerie sunlit dereliction threaded almost everywhere through the plains and coastlands, and here and there are clusters of houses where humans are living, often on the edge of the mountains. 

There is a distant sound of talking and of bright laughter, in which womens' voices predominate. There has been a walking-away, that began around twenty years earlier, and there is communication across the gap of that journey, in the form of something that is akin to occasional radio transmissions which are recorded and distributed: one transmission, then another, with the intensity increasing as the journey continues, and with the degree of immediate impact declining as the communication comes from further away from ordinary, deadened reality. Metamorphics is a focused transcendental awareness which expresses itself as much through pragmatics as through transcendental-empirical accounts of the world, and which, in mapping terrains of intent and energy (and in providing diagrams for heightened forms of existence) uses - always in different ways - concepts and oneiric (virtual-real) worlds which consist of transcendental-empirical outsights. The perspectives of metamorphics form the horizon of Shakespeare's works, so that a primary aspect of his plays and poems is an attempt to draw attention toward this horizon. Shakespeare's work relates to a place which is just beyond the edge of ordinary reality. In 1993 the walking-away has reached a point which is substantially more distant, but the occasional broadcasts continue, emplacing themselves as enigmatic beacons within the ongoing disaster. Beyond ordinary reality's Overlook Hotel there is a sunlit-and-starlit Planetary World from which these broadcasts arrive.

     I only have have a minimal ability to bring this Futural direction into focus. But although I can feel the difference in intensity from the earlier phase, it is also true that there is a kind of thin zone of higher intensity at this time, in the form of radical, alternative-culture perspectives, and I am starting to be aware that in some sense I am on kind of a raised terrain. In 1993 the local (western-society) human world is predominantly continuing a slow slide of capitulation to conventional values, but a liminal zone has appeared, a kind of platform from which it easier to see the Future. But even this raised terrain (which consists to a great extent of rave or "dance" milieus, but which also involves a philosophical element, and a thread of fiction, as with Noon's Vurt) is minimal in comparison to the heights of the long - twenty-year - plateau left behind in the early 80s. The key varying element here is the extent to which people feel that there is another, fundamentally better way of living, in comparison with ordinary capitalist reality. It is the feeling that, in a crucial direction of the unknown, there is a whole other form of existence that- however hard it might be to reach it - is at a higher level of lucidity, poise, and love-for-the-world than the world of conventional values. It is true that high-intensity phases are horribly suffused with forms of reactivity, suffering, and dogmatic mis-use of the heightened energy (they are the ongoing disaster, just like low-intensity phases, only with the difference that the Future is a little closer). But specifically what was left behind ten years before (something that is still deeply but quietly in effect, despite the collapse) was a conjunction-event, or a kind of multi-stranded incursion-event -  a incursion in which maps and diagrams were lodged within the overall human world, and were even lodged, to different degrees, within the central zones of the interiority. 

    It is necessary to delineate this conjunction-and-incursion in order to provide the context for 1993.

    It takes place during and around the years from 1980 to 1982, and at it has the four following primary elements, spread across several different areas of oneiro-abstract production: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982), Florinda Donner’s Shabono (1982), Carlos Castaneda’s The Eagle’s Gift (1981). 

   What these four works share is that they are all either works of metamorphics, or are works which have a very close degree of affinity with metamorphics. 1980 to 82 is like an energy-flare where diverse traditions are involved. It is an incursion of the transcendental-empirical.

    Many other works are part of the event, with varying degrees of affinity to metamorphics. Ursula Le Guin wrote Always Coming Home across five years, starting in 1980, and in particular her story, The Visionary, in this book, is part of the conjunction. The same is true of Octavia Butler's Wild Seed, from 1980. The conjunction-event is a point where anthropology becomes philosophical, and where the effective, required name for this form of philosophy is metamorphics.

   Everything here concerns the unknown and the depth-level knowable in a transcendental-empirical sense. It is the unknown of the spatium of forces that is the world, and in a way where the abstract as energy and affect, and, most  specifically the abstract as intent, is fundamental in relation to the encounter with the unknown. This is not the empirical unknown of time (as in, we don't know what will happen a year from now) or the empirical unknown of absence of data about an object (we don't know the chemical composition of X), but is the unknown of the spatium of energy and intent - the unknown of worlds of abstract dynamics. But this unknown is not the unknowable - it is the unknown which is knowable.  

     A work is a work of metamorphics if it constitutively assists in bringing zones or domains of the unknown in this sense to the point of being known: if in part it consists of accounts which can be  immediately validated, and of an effective pragmatics. There is no end to the unknown which is knowable, and the horizon is the unknown which is not knowable, in relation to which there is a point - just before this horizon, where expressing what has been perceived places the production of concepts under maximal pressure. Whatever else the work consists of is not an issue: the accounts which remain enigmatic can be placed to one side as either relating to the next levels on the unknown which is unknowable, or to the border before the limit point of the unknown which cannot be known.

   Metamorphics, defined in this way as a pragmatics and metaphysics of the intensification of existence, is not to be understood as something new - it is a fundamental human option. But this emergence of works of metamorphics goes back to the mid 1960s, and there are five figures who are central to the overall emergence - Florinda Donner, Carlos Castaneda, Taisha Abelar, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. And it is also important to see that the emergence is primarily the work of the first three writers, but also that at a crucial point it is profoundly supported by works from two other traditions - western philosophy, and the world of tales - of literature.

     In A Thousand Plateaus the support is explicit, in that Deleuze and Guattari point out in detail that in fundamental ways their metaphysical account of the world is the same as the one found in the works of Castaneda (and it is valuable to point out that in this book the idea of “abstract machines” is central, and that Donner, Abelar and Castaneda will later take up the term "abstract", and use it in the same way, as a term for the wider and deeper aspects of the world). A Thousand Plateaus is liminal: in part it is metamorphics, and it is very definitely the point where western philosophy leads to this other world of knowledge and exploration. And Fanny and Alexander is a re-effectuation of the Shakespeare abstract machine which consists to a great extent of transcendental-empirical perspectives, and which opens up the wider view of the transcendental-empirical unknown in part through the re-creation of Prospero as Uncle Isak.   

    It can be seen that the conjunction is more than a random alignment, because of the references to Castaneda in A Thousand Plateaus. But it is not possible to say much in relation to the idea of a crucial point in relation to the conjunction. The main point that can be made is that it is in The Eagle's Gift that women, as explorers of the unknown - as practitioners of the anomalous - come into the foreground (after this point they will always be in the foreground) and that this is the point where a female writer of works of metamorphics publishes her first book. There is a sense of a current here: in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari say that for both men and women a process of 'entering into becoming' with women (where becoming is depth-level learning) is the key to all the becomings. And in Fanny and Alexander the entire film shifts its focus steadily toward women. 

* 

    We have to escape from the cave of the interiority. Inside the cave the shadows on the walls we have been taking for reality are perceptions filtered and radically distorted by a constrictive mental functioning. When we manage, in moments of lucidity, to reach the outside, we perceive that we are surrounded by intent, feeling, energy and awareness – we are surrounded by the abstract. It is also clear that there is a momentously positive direction or current within the outside that can be called the south-outside, Love-and-Freedom, or impersonal intent (intent-toward-intensification).     

    Plato’s version of this story is to a great extent the opposite of what it appears to be. The issue is his valorising of mathematics, with its "forms" that provide the model for knowledge, and his associated failure to see the fundamental role of the senses in reaching and perceiving the abstract. Plato has taken what could be called a liberatory tale and has twisted it so that it becomes something disastrous: a primary aspect of the cave in which we are trapped is the way of thinking which Plato embodies.

   The questions become "what is a social-formation or individual at the level of intent?' What are the abstract dynamics or intent-dynamics of this form of dreaming, or this modality of thought?' 'In what way does this zone or formation hearten, inspire and energise?' 'Of what outsights and affects does the encounter with it consist, at the level of thought, dreams and feelings?'

    *. 

   

     The bus is at a bus stop where the student union is on the left and and the arts centre is on the right.

     It was at the arts centre, four months before, that Derrida gave a lecture about philosophy being in a state of mourning for Marxism. But while it is true that the inspirational problem of “there is a better way of living, and what exactly is it?” had been given an energising milieu by Marx’s best ideas, these ideas had not been at the centre of what had created the 20 year phase of higher intensity (it is true that a main current form of the trap of ordinary reality is being a wage slave; and, in a way that is not really connected to Marx's thought, that we are alienated from the means of waking our faculties, and of becoming-active). The primary shift of the early 60s was the appearance of a non-dogmatic brightness that suggested and indicated that there was a whole other way of living beyond reactionary, traditionalist values, and which primarily, in looking toward love and freedom, looked toward intent. This way of being became a deepening encounter with the transcendental-empirical unknown, and its constitutive open-minded brightness was something very different from the dialectical delusions and oppressive gravity of Marxist activism. 

   At depth any mourning of this kind was an inchoate sense of loss in relation to a time when it had been easier to get glimpses of the Future, through the idea of there being another way of living, beyond ordinary reality.

*

   At this time I have not read any of the books from the Donner/Castaneda/Abelar milieu. But the radical currents of the Warwick philosophy milieu within which I have lodged myself, together, and inseparably, with the currents of the charged counterculture of the mid 90s, are ensuring that melancholy of this kind is not something I am experiencing, despite my awareness of an overall drop in intensity since the 60s and 70s.

*

   On and around the bus it is the compelling, eerie Now of the planet, and of the World in which the planet exists. The bus has left the stop and is heading toward the exit from the campus.   

    I am relieved that no-one has got on who knows me (I have already been at Warwick for four years, doing a BA and an MA, and I know a lot of people). It is Friday evening, and I do not want to be caught up in having to turn down an invitation to go to a pub. 

    I have found a path, and I have found a direction (my current situation pertains in fact to movement along a dangerous and circuitous alternative route that leads in the end in the direction involved, if you "survive" it). Part of what  is central to me having found the path is that I am now studying A Thousand Plateaus for a Ph.D. The other main element is any tendency I have (and at this point the ability is only in effect to a minimal degree) to direct myself toward the process of becoming-active, a process that eventually necessarily leads to the becoming active of perception, and to the fostering of the silence in which abstract perception – lucidity – can at last begin to focus itself.

    I am not at all sufficiently aware that pre-eminently I need sobriety, and an implacable process of stripping-away indulgent behaviours. Most fundamentally the mountains across which the path leads are the barrier of self-importance, and of control-fixated behaviour (the embedded machineries of not letting go toward perception and action – toward Love-and-Freedom), a barrier that prevents the upward spiral of an accessing of energy. Having found a path does not mean at all that you will get far along it. Many years later, as I write this, I have still not got across the barrier. But my sobriety has increased a little, and I have reached the point where I can perceive that the primary domains or aspects for understanding the path in question are brightness, the planet and the abstract. 

                                                                        ***

2.

 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) 

   



     A flat in a city, in early autumn.The flat is near the top of a long, gentle slope, a mile from the city’s centre, and two or three miles from the city’s edge. The place is Coventry. It is 1993.

    Out in the surrounding – Warwickshire - countryside the leaves of the trees are still mostly green, and on the road-verges the annual micro-jungles of wild plants have not completely subsided. This countryside is to a great extent a denuded midlands terrain of industrial arable farming, with very few areas of woodland, although – as I will discover  - in areas of hills to the south and west there are some exceptionally beautiful places (some of which are terrains where an industrial-revolution development of some kind has become derelict, creating an island on which huge numbers of wild species congregate).

     It is early evening, though still daylight. I am on a bus travelling through countryside from Leamington Spa to Coventry. The bus has just crossed the river Avon, and is now going around a roundabout above a dual carriageway, before going into Kenilworth (Leamington  is fifteen miles south from Coventry, and Kenilworth is roughly half way between).

     In relation to the oneirosphere, where is this terrain?

     An effective initial answer is that it consists of a fault-line region between Shakespeare  on the one side, and on the other side, George Eliot and Philip Larkin. George Eliot came from Nuneaton, ten miles north of Coventry, Larkin came from Coventry, and Shakespeare’s place of origin is fifteen miles southwest from Leamington. To the northeast of this divide – two different modes of extremely intelligent, visionary bleakness. To the southwest – eerie expanses of brightness.

    To understand this difference properly it is necessary to explicate two different kinds of “awareness” or abstract perception: empirical awareness and transcendental awareness. For Shakespeare, George Eliot and Philip Larkin the real difference across the divide involves a different distribution (such that a different form of awareness is central) but for now it is the two instances that must be brought into focus (a process that will lead to a proper understanding of the oneirosphere as a dimension of the abstract).

     The empirical is a "line-world" of dead time - of chronic time: the time in which transformations of matter occur, predictably or not, and in which the human world pulls knowledge into existence, so that the unknown is thought in terms of a human actor and in terms of the future as locus of discoveries on the part of the method-applying actor. For empirical attention the only fundamental actors are human beings and the overall human world, and the unknown is pre-eminently a question of the future (the “space” in which progress will – or will not – happen, in which predicted and unpredicted events will occur, and in which new discoveries and social developments will take place).

     The transcendental – by initial emphasis - is the world of space, but space as a terrain of co-emplaced intents, co-emplaced forces and co-emplaced zones of the unknown: here the unknown is all around you, perhaps in some cases looking toward you. This forest of intents and forces is well-modelled, as Shakespeare discovered, if you start from the ancient Greek zone of the oneirosphere, with its many different anomalous forces existing alongside the forces of the ordinary-reality side of human existence, all involved in subtle struggles and alliances with each other (Shakespeare’s achievement is to take this eerie arcadia, but not be governed by its elements, with their religious piety, so that he fills it up with Puck and the other inorganic entities, beings from his local zone of  the oneirosphere).

      The background issue here is that you can take anything as a lens or “model” for seeing the world: even a straight line. In its crippled form reason takes a straight line, and sets out from there, on a very constricted and damaging path. In contrast lucidity takes a forest of forces and formations of intent, and initiates a process of a deepening abstract perception of the world. And time here is no longer dead, geometry time. Our failure to be Spinozists must be overcome in relation to the vastnesses of intent and energy (substance) that surround us: the only effective models for time are thought and dreaming.

    Shakespeare includes what is necessary, using a subtle minimum of elements. There are forests and hinterlands beyond the human world, and these places are populated with anomalous beings (Puck, Ariel etc) whose actions have an impact upon humans (the human is not the only actor). The unknown is all around us, and it is not unknown in a sense that is less profound than the unknown of the human world - on the contrary, the suggestion is that it is more profound, through it having more brightness, more freedom from the the grim, judgemental  world of “gravity”. And for Shakespeare everything revolves around questions of love, freedom from constraint, and dominatory power - which is to say that everything is about spaces of intent (but spaces of intent in the horizon of the cosmos, not in the horizon of the human).

     For George Eliot and Larkin there are no hinterlands. In their very different ways they have both been swept away into the post-Hegelian world of psychology and sociology, in which the only real objects of (a denuded) transcendental awareness are human love and creativity.Their immense pseudo-integrity (for most of its span a genuine integrity, but which fails at the fundamental point) does not direct itself toward the planet, and its other non-human beings; it does not direct itself sufficiently toward the brightness of femininity and a depth-understanding of the libidinal (with all due respect for figures such as Dorothea Brooke), and it also does not direct itself sufficiently toward the abstract, in that it does not engage with space as a circumambient and eerie world of the unknown (unknown overall, but always with elements that can become the known) - a world of forces, and of formations of intent.

     The bus has just passed the ruins of Kenilworth castle, and is now in countryside again. It will soon be going round the campus of Warwick University, on the outskirts of Coventry. I am a postgraduate philosophy student at the university, but today I am not going to get off the bus at the campus.

     I am looking out at the fields and the cloudy, early-evening sky. Something is about to happen. Something is very definitely about to happen.

                                                                               * * *