Explorations
Explorations: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Explorations: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 50)
The bliss – an unalloyed rapture of movement, of oneiric outsights, of listening to music, and of awareness of the whole space of the room, in an intensifying modality of electrically coloured-and-linear anomalous perceptions – the bliss had lasted a very long time. The time had been marked out, but not ordinarily measured, in playings of songs – I played each exuberant love-song two or three times, before going on to the next – and each playing of a three-minute song was a sonic world I inhabited for a time that afterwards would have seemed much longer than this, because of the amount of perception and synesthetic-perception that had occurred. Much of the superimposition of fleeting and intricate coloured patterns across my visual field (with the quality of the coloured lines being made out of light or electricity, or plasma) was evidently an expression of the music into the visual – and was in fact experienced as a surface aspect of grasping the feeling and the intent of the songs.
It is necessary to see that extremely intense feelings (such as being in love - and in general this is a domain of feeling that has nothing to do with the relief-state of “happiness” or subjectified emotions such as jealousy or self-pity) have all along simultaneously been worlds of inchoate perception. That night I had been perceiving the space of the planet around me far more intensely than normal, and I had been perceiving Love-and-Freedom (a river that necessarily transects the planet, if only because humans and the other sentient beings we call animals are aspects of the planet). If we give attention to very intense positive feelings it becomes clear that they point out the direction towards which we need to escape, which is to say that, together with the intent and lucidity necessary to grasp them in this way, they are the Ariadne’s thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of ordinary, deadened reality.
Everything here concerns the unknown that is knowable – that is, the fundamentally unknown that nonetheless can cross a threshold of awareness and become the known. It is the Immensity of the outside that can be brought into focus by lucidity, and by a will to explore into the unknown.
I walked for a mile and a half, and then went back. But in stopping walking I felt vulnerable to the return of fear, so I went out again.
* * *
Everything here concerns the unknown that is knowable – that is, the fundamentally unknown that nonetheless can cross a threshold of awareness and become the known. It is the Immensity of the outside that can be brought into focus by lucidity, and by a will to explore into the unknown.
There is also the unknowable, an area detectable through the feeling of being drained (or detached from one’s energy) that is brought about through engaging with it [note], as when we attempt to grasp the inter-relations between the entirety of the instances or elements that press upon the human world from the Outside. The disastrous trap of Kantianism is to overlay the perspective toward the unknowable (the “noumenon”) across the fundamentally unknown that is knowable, and to produce the illusion that for knowledge there is only the interiority (constructing the human world as a solipsistic species-domain, cut off from depth-knowledge in relation to the planet around it). In Spinozistic terms, the unknowable is the world of the multi-attribute infinity that is Nature overall, whereas, there is also, beyond the ordinary reality of the interiority, the knowable unknown in the form of the insistent aspects and finite modalities and beings which are perceived by lucidity – which is to say that there are also the endless aspects and elements of the outside that lucidity can bring to the level of knowledge.
I was about to be propelled into focusing primarily on time (rather than going further out into a deepening awareness of space). And I was about to be thrown precipitously into a domain that was threatened and occasionally pervaded by terror. Because I thought – as a result of inexperience with states of intensified awareness, and with psychotropics – that more time had passed than actually had, I had taken a second tab of lsd, which was now going into effect on top of the first one, and on top of the remaining effects of the speed.
The effect of this decision was a shockingly perturbing transformation of the experience. However, in many ways it did not work out too badly. I was on the edge of an abyss of genuine, ultra-intense fear, and had to keep finding a way forward under difficult circumstances, but I found a means of keeping a degree of equanimity, and some extremely valuable events occurred in the process.
The shift to the new phase was the arrival of a non-localisable, anomalous sensation that something in me was burning, a sensation that was associated with surges or momentary “spikes” of a terror that had no thought straightforwardly associated with it (it was not that the terror took the form of the idea that my mind was burning). The burning-sensation was in itself extremely unpleasant in a physical, corporeal way: it was visceral - a horripilating, queasy sensation of a burning and smouldering taking place within my being. And it is only approximately true to say that it was non-localisable: it had a centre across the top and back of my head, but in a way where the feeling was experienced as being across my skull and scalp in a vague band of burning-sensation perceived as in an area both slightly above my skull, in the air, and slightly below it, in my brain.
My immediate decision was that I should go for a walk. The background idea was that the use of energy, and the calm, mesmerically ordinary affect and pace of walking would help me. This was a good decision: it is a valuable general principle – if feeling perturbed, go for a walk (it is always good to get outside...). I decided I should take a large bottle of water with me, as I was thirsty, and I could feel that my metabolism was in a heightened state, a feeling that was a normal bodily perception, connected to the sensation of needing to drink water.
But as I started to get ready to go out - I was walking along the hallway to the kitchen – a new experience occurred. For a moment I was somebody else. I was a philosophy tutor by whom I had been taught as an undergraduate, and who was a phenomenologist. I had a respect for this man, but I had a lack of affinity, and the experience seemed to be profoundly about this lack of affinity. For a moment I became his way of being – his way of moving, feeling, intending – and I experienced it as having a dampness, and a lugubriousness that was extremely disconcerting. And then, a moment later, instead of being him, I had the image of a small version of him in some way on – or in – my right shoulder, a bit like the image of an angel or devil that sits on your shoulder, but also both like a weight, and like a damaged or dysfunctional state of the shoulder muscles.
There was a witty quality about these two transitions (the whole experience only lasted three or four seconds, leaving just an unpleasant aftertaste, and the memory). The feeling was that something was being pointed out to me – specifically, the impression was that I was being alerted to the danger of becoming a certain kind of academic: someone who to some extent is aware of vital directions, but who is intellectually and volitionally trapped into a process of merely creating an occluded picture of things that pertain to these directions, instead of setting out to explore and metamorphose, and instead of producing systems of outsights (maps and diagrams for the purposes of escape). The dampness and lugubriousness were features of the will of the person – but it was not at all that this tutor was a bad example of this kind of academic, it was more that he was a relatively inspired individual, which just served to emphasise the disturbing quality of his situation. There was also a quality of biting caricature – a sense of an emphasising of an unhealthy state of will and mind in order to point it out.
The specificity of this tutor being a phenomenologist is worth thinking about. There is in fact a valuable methodology within areas such as anthropology which can be called phenomenological, and it takes the form of setting out a system of concepts – such as the concept of the sacred, or the concept of inorganic beings – without making any claim about whether or not the domain of concepts is a system of anomalous knowledge and without in any way shutting off the possibility of it being this kind of system (a system of outsights). It simply says, in effect, put your eye to these lenses, and see what can be brought into focus. But in philosophical phenomenology, in contrast, there is a shutting-off in advance (as supposedly impossible) of any awareness of features of the natural world of energy and intent (as opposed to the domain of appearances) such as Love-and-Freedom, the control mind, or becomings between bodies without organs. In particular, in seeing the world of intent, energy and libido (and the world of the planet, to take the central example) as domains to be studied only by science, if they are to be perceived in terms of interactions (not appearances), it condemns itself to a denuded tracing of elements that is determined by the principles of the interiority. In the interiority the outside in the form of surrounding worlds of feeling, intent and energy is what cannot – or must not – ever be perceived, and philosophical phenomenology stays trapped in this enclosure (“there is us as thinking human beings, and then beyond us there are objects, but we cannot know what they are”).
The first part of the double-transition experience was not only graphically pointing out a direction to be avoided – it was also a minimal opening up of the direction of becomings. For a moment I had embodied another perspective on the world – or rather I had reached the perspective from another body and another body without organs: another way of moving, and another way of intending, feeling and perceiving (insofar as they can be separated, lugubriousness pertained to the first, and dampness to the second). (The doorway was shown, although with no associated sense of where it could lead. In fact, in relation to an escape toward the south-outside, this is the world of all the becomings which together make up an entering into becoming with Brightness (the opposite of gravity, self-importance) - becoming-sky or becoming-atmosphere; becoming-animal; becoming-child; becoming-inconspicuous; becoming-woman; becoming-warrior, and as a whole an entering into becoming with Love-and-Freedom, and with those who travel into the unknown in the direction of the Future).
However, the tone of the experience was one of a disturbing, freakish intelligence, which was wittily attacking me using means hitherto inconceivable to me, and the sense of a division in me involving something with an impersonally aggressive will, together with the momentary dissociation where I had been someone else - these combined to leave me even more perturbed, as opposed to feeling in any way encouraged or intellectually assisted.
It was a cloudy, but clear night, without rain or mist. What marked the beginning of the walk was an experience of an exceptionally prolonged time-consciousness. I was walking steadilly "toward" a parked car thirtry yards away, and became lost in a long experience of thought and visual-field patterns, only to find that I was still walking toward the car, and had only covered half the distance. The walk continued in this way, threaded by occasional moments of increased anomalous sensations, and occasional surges of fear (I should say that I was not afraid of the night, or of people I might meet, even though I was in a city: the situation was too prepossesing for this kind of fear to have any effect), but marked out primarily by abstract-oneiric worlds of thinking and semi-associated visual effects which did not seem to fit with the space covered during the time.
At a point around two miles into the second walk I began to feel sure that the burning-sensation terror was either not going to return, or that if it did it would be negligible. I walked back to the flat, taking a circular route, feeling intense relief that the storm had subsided.
But although the two initial phases of the night had ended, the experience was not over. When I returned to the flat I put on the record – The Beatles, 1962–1967 – which I had been playing two hours before.
I discovered that what had been relatively fast tracks were now experiencable only as slow: the “gaps” between the beats were just too long for the music to feel in any way like up-beat “rock” music. Going into the mode of experimentation and “verification” I decided to try a slow track. I changed the record, and put on Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. And this song did not seem like music at all – it was like a form of sonic art, with beats spaced very far apart from each other.
But it was not specifically that the impression was one of listening to a track at the wrong speed. That “distantly above” mode whereby you hear a sonic line of time behaving in the wrong way is something completely different from what was happening. Instead, the experience was that I was hearing so much of the sonic arrays – or spatial sonic multiplicities – in their ongoing transformations between the beats that by the time the next beat arrived too much time had elapsed for there to be any experience of hearing the sounds as music in the usual way. It was too slow – but by virtue of it being too wide and vast.
It can be seen therefore that this experience was most fundamentally about space, rather than time. We have been set up to do cursory scanning of sonic spatial multiplicities and of the continuum of their transformations. To reach with perception into the worlds of co-existent sounds (in this case voice and instruments) is to hear profound sonic-spatial arrays in metamorphosis and to no longer hear a fluctuating “line” of sonic time. And at this point it becomes clear that the amount of time we experience is all along dependent on the rate at which we perceive – on the intensity with which we are encountering the world. Which to put it crudely (and to ignore the effect of the control mind) is to say that we get the amount of time that corresponds to the focus and resolve we bring to the process of perception. And it is necessary to stop thinking about the metamorphoses of spatial worlds as being in any sense “lines” – there is a continuum, but it is a continuum of an Immensity of spatiality in metamorphosis. But just before leaving behind linearity as a model the last point that should be made is that it is not so much that we are crossing an infinite abyss of spatial metamorphosis (so that in principle there is always more depth to perceive, and always more time to experience in a minute) as that we are sliding eerily across an infinitely impacting Mountain of the arrival of spatial arrays in metamorphosis (the abyss turns itself inside out, and challenges us – ultra-intimately - to face its impersonal Immensity, revealing a fundamental source of the fear that is the control mind).
We lose awareness of the terrains that are space by taking the crude, frozen spatial element that is the line and overlaying it across metamorphosis in a fixation on time that is not a depth of engagement with it, but an entrapment onto this mode of engagement that resolutely – through imposing linearity – refuses to see time as the metamorphosis of the spatial.
Toward the end of the whole experience, as I was trying to get to sleep, I found that with eyes closed I was seeing a series of patterned surfaces that sometimes seemed to be made of coloured light, and sometimes were like bright, stone (or metal) plates intricately inlaid with geometrical shapes and delicate lines of metal or coloured crystal - phantasmagorias of a jeweler working in inlaid surfaces and occasionally inspired by circuit-boards patterns. Although some of these patterns were exceptionally beautiful I felt that they were in some way an irrelevance in comparison with the earlier experiences, with their own associated visual-field patterns.
Eventually I got to sleep (it would probably have been the early hours of Sunday morning). It would then have been around two days before my energy levels began to return to normal. During Sunday and Monday I would have crossed the desolate, bleak expanse of post-speed lack of energy, a state during which it is not possible to bring outsights into focus, and during which thoughts easily turn negative, so that the best strategy is perception (which could take the form of reading - or watching - something that does not require any real thought), and simple, low-effort action, such as cleaning and tidying. These are effective strategies for coping, but they should not be used to obscure the fact that speed has an exceptionally difficult, ugly “comedown.” However, possibly helped by the after-effects of the lsd - and by the fact that something so extraordinary had happened - I think it was not too bad a comedown on this occasion.
But I feel sure that by the following Wednesday I would have been back to my usual state. And I am also certain that on that Wednesday morning I would have set off, re-energised and suffused again with fascination about the world, to catch a bus, but this time not to go through the Warwickshire countryside to Leamington, but to go the three miles to Warwick University, to study in the library, and possibly to meet with other postgraduate philosophy students.
The aim of what I was doing was clear. I was setting out to reach a focused understanding of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, and through this, a focused and pragmatic understanding of certain elements that are zones within - and aspects of - the intensive spatium of metamorphoses that is the World. And I was fortunate enough to have years of funding in front of me, to give me time to draw close to this goal. I was in fact taking the wrong path, but given my relatively self-indulgent and relatively adventurous temperament, and the drug-pervaded and intensely anti-establishment philosophical milieu immediately around me, it is not easy to envisage circumstances under which I would have taken the sober path along the valley toward the pass (perhaps a life-threatening accident or illness would have made this happen). But although I was now on a dangerous and circuitous path, it was still the case that this other path was going in the right direction.
*
There is no doubt that I had been very lucky on the night of the events which have just been described. Through many of its fundamental aspects A Thousand Plateaus has a capacity to break open a view of the river (this becomes explicit in the final page of the introduction). However, the good luck was that I had just arrived, a few hours before, at the first stage of being in love, but without any subjectified state of anxiety or insecurity being involved, because any immediate movement toward a relationship was not possible. This ensured that the exuberance was suffused with love: and everything followed from this, in that the openness was looking in the right direction. The idea of the world as a body without organs of intent-worlds and energy-formations was stopped from being something to think about, and made into an un-noticed, very effective process-modality of perception. You didn't think about it, you looked toward the world. The songs and the writing kept me away from the cognition of reason, and within the space of the abstract-oneiric, a place from which - with the help of sustained perception - lucidity can emerge. I saw the river through Find the River, but I had already been moving toward seeing it with a mis-hearing of The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight, and then the two songs functioned together. The impersonal exuberance of the experience meant that Find the River could not be inflected by any form of indulgent melancholy.
It was clear that the space beyond the urban worlds of human beings was fundamental in relation to the river. Everything came through viscerally as one bloc of perception. Serene, sunlit Warwickshire countryside with anomalous lines extending up from it into the atmosphere (therefore the terrain rendered planetary, non-territorial), the river in Automatic for the People (which is in opposition within the song to the city), the Wiltshire Downs of Duncton Wood. William Horwood's novel is in crucial ways a 1980 Tolkienesque collapse into religious paratext and hero/romantic glory-dream - but it didn't matter, I found a way of using it as a lens, and moved forward from it, taking a perspective that was valuable and putting everything else to one side. And as I was dancing, and experiencing the visual world as energy-formations which had the beauty of music, there was another dimension of exteriority in effect, in the form of sustained perception.
The river was abstract and in the deepest sense real: it was a fundamental force within the world. It was clear that love was a crucial aspect of it, and that in some way it was connected to - or was more easily encountered within - the worlds beyond urban terrains. The river was there, and then it was no longer visible, leaving me unaware of how much I had altered oneiric materials - of how much I had augmented and re-worked lenses so as to attain a clear view.
*
It is necessary to ask again, though in a sense that involves formations of existence - where is this? In Section 2 a form of this question was answered by going from the immediate terrain (Warwickshire) to the abstract, in the form of transcendental and empirical awareness. But this time the question starts from the abstract: where is this in relation to forms of thought and in relation to forms of existence taken in their entirety? It is true that it will be valuable, in answering this question to give an account of what was taking place at this time at Warwick University, but in fact the question - which involves a substantially wider domain than that of philosophy in its conventional sense - must primarily be at the level of the overall context concerning forms of existence (modalities of intent; modalities of thought), rather than being a summary of events in a university department.
At this point what can be said is that it was alongside the place - the form of existence -where there is knowledge of exteriority. Everything here involved the 'outside.' The worlds beyond the urban domains of cities and towns. The spheroambient world of exteriority encountered by perception. The 'Spinozistic' outside of what can be called the 'dogmatic image of the world.' The exteriority of the faculty of reason, in the form - in particular - of the faculty of dreaming, but also the faculties of lucidity and of feeling.The exteriority of the 'head' in the form of the body which dances (that body about which philosophy almost never talks). The impersonally bright exteriority of the pervasive and generally unperceived gravity/irony modality of 'maleness'. The outside of ordinary, deadened reality in the form of the river, the escape-path. It is a crucial moment in the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus when Deleuze and Guattari say "In short we think that one cannot write sufficiently in the name of an outside."
* * *
