7.

Explorations

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 Fishear (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 extremely impactful macrological expression of the interestablishment is the ecumenon, which could also be called the ecume-enon, although this does not capture the way in which the ecumenon is a domain of ruptures, of conflicts. However, what has fundamental importance are the incursions, the emplacements from the Outside, the partial and full expressions of metamorphics.

*

Fanny and Alexander is a reeffectuation of the formation of intent (or abstract machine) of Shakespeare. However, it would be wrong to give too much emphasis to this line of development, in the same way as it would be wrong to give too much emphasis to the works of Deleuze and Guattari, in that the culmination of the processes involved in the 1980 - 1982 incursion is across a gap, and consists of a series of works of metamorphics with a high-point in the form of Donner's 1991 book Being-in-Dreaming.

    Shakespeare goes 2500 years into the past in order to reach the Future. And he reaches out from the island on which he is writing toward the exteriority of the whole planet, in a process of re-dreaming that consists of creating lenses for seeing the nature of the world, and in particular the nature of human existence. But he does this in a way where he is trapped on one side of a system which is divided into art on one side, and philosophy/science on the other, so that a main level very little has happened, even though on a further level there has been a momentous Departure - the Arkadian vantage has somehow stumbled awake in Warwickshire.

     The plays of Shakespeare open up a view of the unknown in the direction of the south-outside. The view is of the world as sublime-and-eerie, where this is achieved not just through drawing on the form of ancient Greek plays, but by including figures from the oneiric worlds of Ancient Greece along with other 'anomalous' figures, in a way where, although there is no impression of Shakespeare advocating for the existence of the entities of the classical pantheon, there is an impression that collectively Prospero, Ariel, Puck, and the female equivalent of Prospero, Medea (who is  included for a short moment, described gathering herbs as a cure for an old man) are figures who indicate an aspect of the world at the level of the transcendental-empirical.

    

     So far in this book issues have been raised in relation to to two 'assemblages' within the human world - one which involves dreamings, and one which involves music. Starting from Shakespeare, but then moving forward, what follows is an account which approaches these from a wide vantage which has a focus on specific terrains and social contexts. At the outset Warwickshire and London will be approached from the northwest, and then the northwest will become a focus in itself, but in a way where it is taken up in connection with its exterior domains.

    *

     There is a relatively local sequence of events which spans around four hundred and fifty years, starting in the twelfth century, and which 'ends' with an event, in the form of the works of Shakespeare, that in fact belongs to a far wider line of development. The difference here could not be more fundamental. 

    The starting-point is Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the King's of Britain, and it is also the world of myths and folk stories from which aspects of this work are partly derived. Once a religion-centred zone of the ecumenon has gone into full effect what remain are epic and 'spectacular' stories which often appear to be distorted, garbled forms of lucidly anomalous tales, and this is true whether it involves myths descending from social worlds in Wales or myths handed down from pre-Athenian Greece (Geoffrey of Monmouth's text draws on myths from both of these areas).

   The History of the Kings of Britain is at the crucial level a territorial (and territorialising) construct, which draws on actual histories to give creedence to territorial 'glory tales' which in different ways are so melodramatic and libidinally charged that it becomes striking that this oneiric emplacement could be taken up as history. The book narrates how Brutus, a Trojan in the time after the fall of Troy, has a dream where the goddess Diana comes to him and tells him to go to Britain and create a kingdom there, and later it tells how 'King Arthur' is born of a spell which gives his father the appearance of his mother's husband, and how he goes on to defeat the Roman Empire, and then returns from the continent to fight a battle against his nephew, who has seduced his wife - before being taken by boat, on the verge of death, to a mysterious island far to the west where women with magical powers will tend to him.

This was just the beginning of centuries of development of the story in both England and France. The original territorial focus was often in abeyance - or displaced - during this process of development, and the new, immensely more complex forms of the story (and its component narratives) tended simultaneously to be sensationalist hero tales and paratexts of Christianity, with one mode or the other often being strongly emphasised in different places within the new texts.

    In these stories women tend to be either passive paragons of beauty, or somewhat sinister practitioners of anomalous knowledge. It is true that for men a new relation to women is set out (courtly love), but women as objects of love tend to be the largely empty, non-active point around which this is developed. And as ambiguous or 'dark' figures they are often no more than sensationalist plot devices.

   *

     In the fourteenth century an unknown poet who came from Cheshire (or possibly Staffordshire) wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The terrain of this poem has the singular feature that it only becomes specific in relation to one area, a place that is passed through on the way to the unspecified place where the main events of the story take place. Gawain has agreed to a challenge to receive an axe-blow to his neck, from the Green Knight, a mysterious being who has somehow survived being beheaded in the event that starts the tale, and having been set the initial challenge, with no clues, of finding the Green Knight, he is described as searching all across England. The poem then says he travelled

"as far as North Wales", and continues

The islands round Anglesey he held to his left,

crossing the fords along the high headlands

by the Holy Head, till he returned to the shore

by the wilds of the Wirral [...]

Thirty lines of travel-description later he finds the place which will turn out to be the house of the Green Knight (but by now he could be five hundred miles away).

       This has established the connection to the northwest, but the crucial moment in the poem is the point where the initiator of Gawain's quest-challenge reveals his true identity, and explains the source of the "enchantment" that somehow has allowed him to manifest himself as the Green Knight:

"Bertilak de Hautdesert I’m called in this land,

It’s all through her power, Morgan Le Fay, who lives in my house

and by well-studied arts has learned the knowledge

of wisdom, including many of the skills of Merlin,

for at one time she had dealings of love

with that powerful wizard, as all your knights know

          back at home,

      “Morgan the goddess”

is therefore what she is called.
There's nobody so grand
That she can't get them down"

*

   Across the domain of the extensions of the mythos the role of passive paragon is very moral/religious, with these being one aspect of the Christianising of the story, alongside the idea of the holy grail (this last element would become socio-politically important in the sixteenth, to the extent that for a while it was widely regarded as fact that Joseph of Arimathea had brought the holy grail to Britain).

    
    However, the genealogical starting-point, insofar as there is one, is very different from what follows. To be precise, the focus of the History of the Kings of Britain is a mythological raising of the status of the pre-Saxon 'Brittons' - or pan-British celts - at the expense of the Normans (who were colonial rulers at the time of writing, in that they spoke another language, and were based primarily in France). The book is an oneiric weapon which will stop at nothing - including a prophecy-dream about the goddess Diana - in order to heighten the kudos of the Brittons, and its relationship to Christianity is that of including very minimal references to Christian priests, together with a making-respectable by association, in the form of a preface which states it was copied from a book given to the author by 'Bishop Walter' of Oxford.

  

    In the fifteenth century the Tudur (or Tudor) family, from Anglesey, shift outwards from being a major influence in Welsh politics to achieving the feat of taking over the English throne. Around a century previously two prominent members of the Tudur family had fought with Owain Glyndwr against the English in the last attempt at Welsh independence. The family is an heir to generations of resistance against the plantaganet colonialists.

   But now something extraordinary has happened: forty years earlier a member of the family married the widow of the English king, and now his grandson, whose mother is a member of the Plantagenet dynasty, has a claim to the throne through his mother's side, while carrying the Welsh name through his father. The grandson, Henry ap Tudur, was born and brought up in West Wales, so because of his background, his name and his partial descent there is claimant to the English throne who at the very least is as much Welsh as English, and who can emphatically be represented as Welsh.

   After marching through mid-Wales and assembling an army which was part Welsh and part Lancastrian, Henry Tudor (grandson of Owain ap Tudur) pauses for a moment on a hill in Shropshire to wait for some final arrivals. In the recruitment-march through Wales the Welsh flag has been flown, and Henry has been portrayed as 'the man of destiny' who will redress centuries of oppression. Henry Tudur then goes on to defeat Richard the Third at  Bosworth.

    This was a small-scale seismic event in the domain of the ecumenon, and one that in fact would lead to a far more major rupture, so that it would end up being a precursor of an enduring rift at the level of religion, as opposed to territorial control. But it should be added that all of this is still just at the level of struggles in the ecumenon (and it is the nature of the ecumenon that there is always war taking place in it). It is in fact the final, concluding event in the sequence (beyond the other developments) which is the point where something momentous occurs.

    

     Henry calls his oldest son Arthur. The latest form of the Arthurian mythos is Mallory's prose re-telling, and Mallory moves Camelot to Winchester. Henry sends his wife to Winchester to give birth, evidently happy to raise a prince associated with a victory against a continental empire based in Rome. The crucial point at this stage is simply that, as a house-of-Tudor victor against the Plantagenets the new regime is very committed to mobilising the Brittonic mythos of the Arthurian tales.

 Henry's first son dies as a young man, but the second son, the disturbing figure of Henry VIII (who immediately marries his dead brother's wife) then goes on to break with Roman Catholicism - for reasons connected on the surface to marriage and the need for an heir for the new dynasty - by breaking with Rome, and by simultaneously overthrowing the power of the monasteries. This was the main rupture in the ecumenon, and the romantically augmented, Christianised forms of Geoffrey's mythos 'kernel' are now suddenly the basis of a religious 'foundation story,' at a time when an improvement in overall historical scholarship was going to make it hard for such a story to take permanent hold at the head of a tradition.

    The unexpected result of all this is that Elizabeth becomes the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and a female state-mythos is generated ("Virgin Queen / Fairy Queen") as part of a process of coping with the metaphysical curses - and indictments in relation to religious and marital illegitimacy - that are emanating from Rome. This exists alongside a very explicitly deployed view that Rome had no right to call itself the true Church, because Joseph of Aramethea had brought the holy grail to Britain, and therefore Anglicanism was the true Church. An even more unexpected result is that the local zone of the inter-establishment ends up being happy to take up the works of a writer whose dreamings are to a great extent expressions of transcendental awareness. 


    The concluding event in the sequence is the work of Shakespeare. And it is not that Shakespeare is a development building on the Geoffrey of Monmouth tradition - on the contrary, he rejects this mythos - or that what is vital about his work is in any way to be understood as an attempt to defend the state in a new way. It is that everything has been broken open and placed in suspension in relation to socially foregrounded dreamings, and Shakespeare takes advantage of this vacuum: he finds a Futural pathway in ancient Greece, and he creates a new way of expressing outsights about the depth-level nature of the world. Everything in Shakespeare is in the undogmatic brightness, and in the evocations of exteriority-worlds that suggest the transcendental, and in the awareness of tragedy as a fundamental aspect running through the world. His work is abstract-perception which shows the transcendental in relation to the path of escape, and which shows it in relation to what is to be left behind.

    At the level of oneiric critique Shakespeare's contribution is to reduce - very substantially - the grim weight of the local-ecumenal traditions initiated by the History of the Kings of Britain. Shakespeare is having none of any of this, and he dismantles the fabric of the stories. The last line of Troilus and Cressida is the syphilitic Pandarus saying "I bequeath you my diseases" (as opposed to Troy bequeathing a British dynasty), and in King Lear the fool mocks the figure of Merlin (King Lear is based on a non-Arthurian story in the History, but the separating line is drawn not just from the Arthur mythos but from a cryptic Nostradamus-type work by Geoffrey of Monmouth's called "The Prophecies of Merlin"). But most vitally Shakespeare, a writer of "tales of the anomalous", simply ignores the whole mythos, and creates a new oneiric hinterland for Britain that is indeterminately in ancient Greece and Warwickshire. 

    Shakespeare's work functions to dispel a baleful, debilitating influence, but it is global in its importance, rather than being a local intervention. And it even breaks open a view toward the figure of the female practitioner of anomalous knowledge. There is not just the faint suggestion in the form of the sorcerer's daughter, Miranda, but there is also the moonlit "in such a night" moment in The Merchant of Venice where Jessica brightly evokes the figure of the sorceress Medea, who helps an old man by transforming him, so that he is young again:

In such a night

Medea gathered the enchanted herbs

That did renew old Aeson

*

On a primary level Shakespeare, as perceiver of the transcendental-empirical, breaks open a view of the ongoing disaster within the human world. This was made possible through the existence of tragedy as a form, and through it not exceeding what would be acceptable within the time. The opposite of tragedy is neither comedy nor romance, and still less is it the collapsed domains of religion. It is the eerie-sublime worlds of freedom - and of joy - that exist outside of ordinary reality: it is an awareness of the planet and the abstract that takes the form of a waking of lucidity and love which is simultaneously an exploration of the world.

      Shakespeare goes east, and again east, in order to point towards the impersonally and blissfully idyllic somewhere else of the place of exteriority. The forest outside of Athens is emphatically given a planetary extension in terms of the terrain of its inhabitants, but the crucial direction here is east:

His mother was a votress of my order

And, in the spiced Indian air, by night,

Full often has she gossip'd by my side; 

And sat with me on Neptune's yellow sands

Marking the embarked traders on the flood.

*

  Around 1960 there is the beginning of a phase of intensity in many of the regions of the world which have been substantially affected by capitalism. It is the start of a dreamer's revolution that is inseparable from a gigantic expansion of the a new zone of the assemblage of dance and music, in the form of rock/pop. The writing, by Solomon Linda, of Mbube, is twenty five years in the past, but the driving-forward beat music which has come via the USA from Africa, has been steadily transforming post-war modernist culture (and in 1961 a cover of Linda's song will be a number one hit in the USA). In the UK, If you look back to the northwest for a moment in relation to the previous twenty years you find a larger presence of socialist radicalism, a radicalism which has an aspect of being a relatively much healthier companion of the grim oneiric conservatism of these decades. For this socialist radicalism - the tradition of Ewan McColl - everything was now a question of 'the people of destiny' in the form of the working classes: this, to say the least, is a massive improvement from a focus on kings, but in the absence of any effective line of escape, despite its distance from most traditionalist prejudiced values, it is also a domain haunted by gravity.

  In 1960 if you stay within the present in looking northwest in the UK you are looking toward the main part of the zone of emergence of the Beatles, along with Hamburg and, at a distance, the USA. In the USA Pete Seeger will soon be appalled as Bob Dylan goes from folk toward rock. And in the UK Ewan McColl will be reacting in the same way to the Beatles.

    

 Like Shakespeare, the Beatles go east. Here the ancientism is in connection with India, and also with Tibet. In 1967 the connections were straightforwardly with India, but the breakthrough moment - which was still very much at the cutting-edge of what was happening - had been Tomorrow Never Knows the year before. And this track in fact had come about in a way that was fully modernist, in that Lennon wrote it as a result of reading The Pychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a book which takes the Tibetan text as a metaphor for overcoming the self in the course of drug experiences. And as with the lightness of the Shakespeare of A Midsummer Night's Dream, there is the lightness of the choice of a Ringo Starr's phrase as the title.

     Here, again, there is the threshold-crossing: the idea of, in some sense, overcoming the ego - of in some way becoming perception in a letting go of self-importance and other subjectified affects. The micrological, micropolitical escape-direction has been adopted and a key necessity for the songs is that they not only avoid the gravity of systems of dogmas about politics (whether those of state politics or those of revolution) but also avoid the dogmas of systems of 'spirituality' or religion. There is a way in which a view is being opened up toward the Future, and it is Lennon who is most aware that songs about the micrological path across the threshold must be suffused with lightness, with a playful joy that is implacably beyond the disastrous gravity of religion. 

    In relation to the idea of the threshold-crossing, the pragmatics of this time were experiment on every level; experiment with drugs. And the values were love and freedom, with the freedom being embodied not just by the anti-traditionalism of rock and roll, but also by its new modality of experimentation. None of this was going to last very long, because taking hallucinogens as an aspect of a generalised pragmatics is a very bad idea, and because, given any weakness in the pragmatics, there are innumerable ways in which a collapse from openness can occur. But nonetheless, this was a view toward the Future. And at this point what Lennon finds to maintain the lightness is the specific kind of non-portentous surrealism that  is represented by the work of Lewis Carroll.

    Here the view across the threshold again involves a female figure disappearing - in "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" the figure is there, and then 'she's gone.' And in a shift into the maximal, non-dogmatic lightness of oneiric surrealism, the threshold is here rendered indeterminate.The second time what is said is 'you're gone': but there is no heavy-handed binary of over-the-threshold or not, because the song suggests the threshold is also a threshold between two forms of experience that you could alternate between, one in the form of ordinary reality, and another in the form a further mode of reality - the song suggests Lucy is a figure who alternates between the worlds (it is possible to go through the looking glass, and come back, and then return). The sheer playful lucidity of the song is what is striking. The name Lucy in the context of light and sky suggests a lucidity which is there to be reached, on the other side of the threshold. The use of playful oneiric surrealism prevents any grave, dogmatic account. And, in its opening up of a view across the threshold through a human figure, it is important to see that the figure is female. Up until now women in the songs of The Beatles had been objects of love, but here a human-shaped gap in ordinary reality appears and the female figure has taken new form. There is a sense of freedom-across-a-threshold, and it can be rightly said that the figure could still be an object love in the same way, but this would not make them the same kind of figure: and it is key that there is none of the melancholy and criticism of Ruby Tuesday.

     The last point is that the apparent diminutive 'girl' is itself indeterminate in that the age of the figure is unknown (and perhaps in any case the physical form is just a surface appearance). This indeterminacy is part of what stops the term from having the same impact as the idea of flowers in The Owl Service: another other way in which this is prevented comes from the fact that the term is ideal for the avoidance of any religious tone - Lucy appears in some sense to be a guide to another level of reality, and this very fact dissolves the diminutive, and the term girl in this context suggests a brightness and lightness, as opposed to it suggesting the dogma-associated figure of a guardian angel.

     Through the spring of 1967 The Beatles hold open the view in the micropolitical, orthogonal direction, to a great extent through the joy and delight expressed by their music, and through lyrics such as 'living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see' and 'all you need is love'; but equally important was the way in which Lewis Caroll was drawn upon to create a new form of lightness in songs. It is playful, joyful oneirism, as much as it is surrealism, and it has a high level of lucidity. To a great extent this functions on its own to create a view across the threshold, but it also ensures that the suggestion of non-religious insights embedded in an ancient non-western tradition is given a beyond-dogmas lightness and intensity (modernism is a departure from religion, and the fact of a religion being non-western has its minimal, very risky importance only for people embroiled in western religions),

   The holding open of the orthogonal view opened up in Revolver has not only been successful, it has substantially increased the focus. Many other developments contribute to what now takes place, but the songs of The Beatles are central, and may even have been the fundamental catalyst. Something that can be called a 'rupture', is here, at this point. 

   This event is in fact to a great extent only a passing occurrence in the development of anthropological philosophy out of modernism (a development that will lead to it becoming so fully-fledged as to be recondite, and largely ingorable by the trans-establishment (an emplacement that will be both ignored and sedimented with misinterpretations). Furthermore, it is an extremely tiny divergence from ordinary reality. However, despite the divergence being minimal, and the pragmatics being flawed, it is sustained, in many ways solid in its effectiveness, and it is temporarily defended against dogma. The rupture happens, its ramifications go on for a short while - and then it will be as if nothing has happened.  But although it is only a there-and-then-gone seismic event belonging to a development that is the main object of study, it is worth thinking about its aspects.

     Ravi Shankar is invited to the Monterey Pop Festival in June of 1967, and the organisers afterwards say of the whole event 'we continued what the Beatles began.' It can be seen that the hippie trail to India is about to appear, and that The Beatles will be the first to travel along it, starting with their trip to North Wales two months later. But moving back from this point where everything starts to collapse, the question should be asked - working across all levels from music to ideas to new social modalities - what breakthroughs and transformations were involved in this rupture?; and how closely affined was it to the primary transformation of this time, in the form of modernism becoming anthropological philosophy?

In the autumn of 1993 - at the time of the experiences with which this book starts - I was in an unusual position in relation to the fictions which were foregrounded within my milieu at Warwick University. Central to these were the novels and stories of William Gibson and the tales of H.P.Lovecraft. With Gibson in particular there were aspects of the works that I found extremely impressive and thought-provoking, but at the same time I had a persistent feeling of a kind of thinness about the writing. And overall the texts that were a primary focus produced a feeling that something was not quite right: I was exceptionally glad to be in a milieu where speculative or 'anomalous-worlds' fictions were taken up as part of the process of studying, but in going off into the outside, I was half-aware that my milieu had gone in a dead-end direction that was to one side of where it should have been travelling.

    At that time I was working on the difficult process of trying to focus the lens of A Thousand Plateaus, a text which recurrently of taking up fictions in order to create a view of the transcendental-empirical. In order to understand it I read books by Deleuze such as Difference and Repetition, but fiction was insisting as an issue in multiple ways, and so it is not surprising that I ranged widely into this other vantage on the problems I was trying to solve, and in a process that simultaneously involved music, both in itself, and as a modality within which dreamings go into effect.

     I had already travelled a relatively large distance in terms of fictions about anomalous worlds. The point when I picked up Duncton Wood was part of a phase of two or three months when I revisited terrains I had travelled across ten or fifteen years before. In the years after this the process of exploring oneiric - and musico-oneiric - worlds continued in a way where the initial review of past reading was replaced by a concentration on new encounters in both domains, but in particular on a sustained focus on what I found, and what I had found already, which was at a high level in terms of its outsights and overall intensity (intensity here relates to powerful, nonsubjectified feelings such as joy and to the quality of being enigmatic and thought-provoking).

    A few months after this - in the spring of 1994 - I listened to Patti Smith's album Horses for the first time, and this album became in the fullest sense central to the following two years. And by 1996 the terrain of the fictions with which I was engaging was very different. Virginia Woolf's The Waves was now in the foreground, and I had been very struck by Peter Weir's film of Joan Lindsay's eerie-sublime tale Picnic at Hanging Rock. 

     I was aware that Horses had the necessary dimensions to pose the problem of human existence, as well as including sharply intense outsights. It raised the problem of the group on the outside of ordinary reality ('I move in this here circle...'), of the obscured potentials of existence, of the struggle of dreamers to reach lucidity, of the power of the terrains beyond the urban, and of the charged and recurrently perturbing worlds of sexuality, and this in itself was an immense achievement. Through having these dimensions it was an impersonal, planetary space of the eerie-sublime. It had enough dimensions to bring the world to some extent into focus as profoundly eerie and sublimely beautiful.

    The crucial point in Horses is the arrival at "the eye of the forest". It is a view toward transcendental-south. As is the forest outside of Athens, and Hanging Rock, and the house by the sea at the start of each chapter in The Waves.

*

    It is possible to delineate two assemblages: the assemblage of dreamings and drama, and the assemblage of dance and music - and then, in turn, to delineate an assemblage of pop-rock dance and music, the disparate pop-rock assemblage of festivals, recordings, gigs, raves, playback devices, parties. The aim here is not only to leave behind the emphasis on the passivity of the idea of audience and artwork, but to move away from the confused and suppressive idea of art.

  What is in question here are processes of heightening and transformation - across upward facultative thresholds - of the entirety of human beings. The entirety in the sense of it involving the whole of the bodily entity that is a human being: both the virtual-real and the corporeal. Part of what is important about this delineation is that everything is included that would normally be seen as outside the analysis. But what shows the full intensity of this line of thought is that the assemblage of dreamings and drama includes dreams about the future. The whole virtual-real world of longings, futural dreams, and envisaged serenely practical forms of existence and exploration is therefore what is in question. Instead of the focus being the products that are art-works it is the processes of waking and deterritorialising individuals across the corporeal and virtual-real entirety of their existence.

*

 Starting from the summer of 1994, and continuing for around two years, there were many occasions on which I danced to songs from Patti Smith's Horses. This started with dancing in a flat in Glasgow with two friends, and then went on to a series of occasions, in a flat in Coventry, and then in Leamington, where I danced to the album with my girlfriend, Tess. These experiences all tended to be in the small hours of the morning, and generally involved LSD or speed, or both at the same time. Automatic for the People was not one of the albums involved, but Horses came into the foreground and stayed there (I have never stopped liking Automatic for the People, and it is interesting that Michael Stipe is a friend of Patti Smith's, but it is not on the same level as Horses). Despite the fact that at the start of this time I was swept up - with my girlfriend - and with a group of friends, into a love of drum and bass, techno and trance (and that we started going to raves and rave festivals like Tribal Gathering) Horses held on as a main, and somehow paramount element of my experiences of dancing during this time. This musical and oneiric world of 1975 was experienced as having an aspect that went beyond the dance music of the 1990s, and was experienced as tutelary in a depth-level sense of this term.

    There are only a few aspects of this specific exploratory process that will be described within Explorations, but the key point at this stage is that experiences of this kind pertain to  the worlds of the assemblages that have just been outlined. In one of their aspects these assemblages are suppressive, or have a charged neutrality that can be taken in different directions, but if you explore you can find a current within them that in fact is what they are at depth, before being clogged up with suppressive modalities, and this current can take you outward to somewhere else, to the eye of the forest.

    It can be seen therefore that what is in question is forms of existence, and modalities of intensification of lives, and that two key aspects of artworks and works of philosophy are outsights and the breaking open of problems at the level of existence. But the strangeness of the new way of thinking appears in taking the example of Horses (or it could be the example of A Thousand Plateaus) and asking 'what are the details and effectiveness of the pragmatics that is set out within the work?'. 

    And to exemplify problems at the level of existence it can be asked: how do humans become what they fundamentally are - explorers of the transcendentally unknown? Or, to ask this question in another way, how do they wake up in the direction of the brightness immanent to the lives of those who travel into wider realities?

    

* * *