Explorations
This blog is a three-part book 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 book is 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).
Part One: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Part Two: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Part Three: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 50)
This blog is a three-part book 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 book is 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).
Part One: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Part Two: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Part Three: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 50)
Summer in the Sayan mountains. Small birds are
everywhere in the pine-trees. In occasional open spaces there are smoulderingly
blue-violet gentians, and tall lilies. The berries on the understory of blueberry
bushes are beginning to ripen. For the majority of the time lynx and wolf can move
unmolested through the forests, and across the rock expanses of the high peaks
- it is thirst-inducing work to travel in warm-to-hot sunlight in trackless
mountain forest, so the extreme shortage of water in the forest uplands makes
visits from human beings rare. There will be many areas of forest where no human has been seen for
years.
This terrain should be perceived initially through a “science
fiction” optic, because most of it is in Russia, and in a mapless area as
gigantic as this one it seems quite unlikely that there are not bases or
installations somewhere which belong to the space programme, or to the Russian
military at least. And also, the soviet world had a science fiction
mythos (man is going to the stars and the intensificatory - and increasingly
technologically-assisted - development of rational societies is the precursor to
this outward journey), rather than straightforwardly having a religious one, and this mythos – which is not separable from the still hegemonic “progress” story of Hegelianism - can
only still be in effect to a pronounced
extent in an area where the cities still have its techo-socialist murals and
monuments (as with the mural in the park in Abakan). And then, afterwards, it
should be remembered that until only three or four generations ago this was an
area whose human population was almost
entirely shamanic.
But “shamanism” in this general, anthropological context
should not be taken as another term for metamorphics. This is because shamanic
societies – to different extents – have their own structures of confinement and
suppression, meaning that the activities of the shaman in contacting the
outside of ordinary reality are to a great extent governed by the functioning of a tribal
interiority. What it is for a body of
knowledge to be a pragmatics and metaphysics of escape is therefore not
something that can be “read off” from discovering what shamanic societies have
in common. However, it remains the case that the (for the west) anomalous
practices and views of shamanic societies recurrently provide exceptionally valuable glimpses of the
beyond of ordinary reality.
High on a wide plateau-land of forest you have found a tiny
stream. For you the stream is water to drink, a place to wash clothes, a place
where animals come to drink, and where unusual flowers are growing: it is also
a place where you can embody silence in the mode of gazing at water (and
embodying silence is allowing the worlds encountered through perception to flow
into you unbroken, a profoundly energising process).
You find yourself thinking about Coventry, and about
Leamington – and initially about both of them in relation to their streams and
rivers. Coventry is on land which has one of the “headwater” streams of the
Avon (although it has been put underground in the centre of the city).
Leamington has the Avon flowing alongside it to the west, and it is built
around (and named after) another river,
the River Leam.
Both Coventry and Birmingham are built on "upland" areas, with
small streams, at the very centre of the southern part of the island of Britain
– Coventry is built on what is called, geographically, the East Midlands
Plateau (whereas the much larger and newer city to the northwest is on what is
called the Birmingham Plateau). A thousand years ago these were areas of
forests, semi-wild meadows and of pasture-lands, though it should be said that
the emphasis should perhaps be put on pasture-lands, in that even at this time
a large proportion of the forest had been destroyed. Six hundred years later,
in Shakespeare’s time, the forest of Arden was as much myth as it was fact. And
the depradation of the forests had already gone a long way at the time when the
southern part of the island was ruled on the one hand by the Anglo-Saxons and on the other by the Danes, or
“Vikings.” (Warwickshire in 1066 was governed by an earl who gave his
allegiance to the Danes, not to Harold, and who as a result survived the Norman
conquest, because he had never been an enemy of the Normans).
But although a
large amount of the forest would already have become fields and grazing lands a
thousand years ago the stream would still have been above ground. The stream
flowed around the small hill on which Coventry’s centre is built until it
came to an area where there is now a bus station (beyond it is the fly-over of
the ring-road) whose name is Pool Meadow. It seems there was once a pool and a
meadow – both long gone, along with the stream (although evidently the stream
still has a subterranean existence). It seems that cities and small streams do
not fit well together – only rivers become celebrated features of cities – a
stream becomes too obviously like a sewer, and it is put into a culvert, or is
connected in some way to the sewerage system (Birmingham is also an examples of
this).
Leamington, in
contrast, is built around a small river, with the town divided on either side,
and with a series of parks alongside it: and more than this, the river was
surely to a great extent a condition of the existence of “Leamington Spa", as
opposed to the small village, “Leamington Priors” that preceded it. Leamington Spa was definitionally dependent
on the water of the spring at the centre of the town (this spring is at the
“pump rooms,” which is a building alongside the main bridge over the river
Leam). But the river could only be valuable – if not indispensable - as an
emblem of the supposedly healthful “waters” of the area (a tall and attractive
weir has been constructed just upstream of the bridge, down which the water
cascades in a thin, wide fall – the smallish river displayed to its best
advantage) and also as a feature of the parks. Dozens of towns attempted to be
“spa towns:” only a very few succeeded.
The runaway
growth of Leamington primarily took the form of the creation of a large area of
white-painted Georgian terraces, built on the gently sloping land on the
northern bank of the river, with this area of houses eventually extending
itself all the way to the place where the Leam meets the Avon, a mile and a
half to the west (the Avon then goes around in a curve to the north of the
town, starting by going north and then finishing, three miles or so from the
centre, with its course going east, upstream). When Coventry was founded as a
walled town a hill was needed for cities, not a slope, and if not a hill a
navigable river (York has no hill, but it has a large river, and an artificial
hill was created for its castle), and buildings needed to be jammed into the
area of the city wall, in streets whose orientation was configured by a
radiating pattern of exit roads. In the building of Leamington Spa the tall
Georgian terraces could luxuriate into space to east and west, orientating
themselves in the direction of the sunlight, with the white paint emphasing
this sunward orientation.
But this concerns
the making of Leamington and its initial-phase, as playground for the wealthy
classes (because of course for most people the water was a pretext for
socialising, and only the wealthy could afford this form of socialising). And
Leamington would not be as interesting if it had simply followed a natural,
traditionalist progression from this starting-point, becoming a Cheltenham of
Warwickshire, a retirement-home for conservative, old-style wealth, including
that of the landed gentry. Instead Leamington became quite dilapidated, and to a
great extent it became an industrial zone on its southern side (the area that was the
original centre, and which now became the districts of the town’s working class
communities), while simultaneously being influenced through it becoming the living-space
of a large number of Warwick university students and tutors, and through being a commuter zone for two cities, Coventry and Birmingham. And as a result of
these aspects the atmosphere of the town acquired a lightness, an openness in
relation to the outside of traditionalist, reactive values– and more than this,
it acquired a hint of the exuberant, non-judgemental atmosphere of a festival,
as if the town’s original festive purpose had broken free of its upper-class
constraints.
And although the
town re-invented itself as partially an industrial centre, it did not throw
away the green spaces around the river. Just south of the Leam is the Grand
Union canal, with factories around it, but parallel with these the upstream
course of the river is past a large botanical gardens (in the very centre of
the town) and then through nature-reserve meadows, past an area of low hills
called Newbold Comyn - hills on which houses have largely not been built, and
which are visible from the town - and then out into the countryside. Leamington
Spa’s whole venture had been founded on nature – in terms of water, and in
terms of maximising the effects of sunlight - and it did not allow a process of
urban sprawl to cut off its connection to the countryside. Coventry in some primary sense belongs to the
midlands, and is urban within an immense network of the urban, but Leamington
belongs primarily to some other region that abuts upon the midlands, or is even
to some extent superimposed across them. Ten miles to the east the Leam passes
hills beyond which is the valley of the Cherwell, which flows down into
Oxfordshire, the birthplace of William Smith, the blacksmith’s son who created
the first geological map of England, and who is the largely un-noticed
precursor to Darwin, and is the area where Lewis Carroll dreamed up his
proto-modernist worlds. In the other direction the waters of the Leam go toward Stratford-on-Avon, a few miles downstream
None of this is
aimed at saying that there is something particularly special about Leamington,
or at making a good/bad opposition between Leamington and Coventry. It is true
that my move to Leamington in 1995 has the feeling of a necessary adjustment
(the feeling that insofar as I was based at that time in Coventry/Leamington
the right place all along for me to be living was leamington). But this feeling
is as much about Leamington’s greater proximity to the countryside as it is
about the intrinsic aspects of the town. There are reasons to believe, in fact,
that a vibrant market town, as opposed to a city, is, as a general principle, a
good place to live, or to have a few miles away from your house (there is a
rat-trap, distressed, anti-dreaming aspect to cities, which makes them far from
optimal). It is not a question of withdrawing from the human world and living
high in the Sayan mountains: instead it seems that one good option is to find a
house in or near a town, to equip it
with whatever technology is necessary, and to get on, inconspicuously, with the
process of slipping sideways toward the Future.
I first visited Leamington when I was fifteen, when my
mother and myself stopped there for a night, on a journey by car from Yorkshire
to Devon. I remember being struck by the town: I even remember feeling a liking
for it on the long approach road from the north, when you are in the town but
not yet in the centre. I also remember
that reflecting at the time on my impression, I wondered if I liked the town
because it reminded me of Christchurch in New Zealand, where I had just been
living for 9 years, in that both towns were built mostly with streets in
parallel and perpendicular to each other, at around the same time, and thinking
that this did not seem to account for what I felt (the atmosphere of
Leamington was distinctively different from the atmosphere of Christchurch).
It was in the years after moving
to Leamington that a brightness began
to be the primary atmospheric tone in my life, a brightness that increased as I
began to go out into the countryside areas around the town (to a certain
extent, this brightness should be seen as bound up with a heightened focus on
space, with Leamington and the areas around it as an initial source of “assistance”
in this process ). And this brightness was inseparable from the appearance of a pronounced anomalous or eerie aspect
to my existence: an aspect that primarily took the form of recurrent, and
profoundly dissimilar events, events that were always enigmatic, and had the
quality of incursions from a further, more intense level of reality. These were
almost always unmistakably positive in nature, but a few were either darkly
perturbing (and suggestive of negative aspects of ordinary human existence – as
if they were rogue acute forms of things that were endemic and were more normally encountered
in chronic forms), and a few were indeterminate. Given the brightness or evident positivity of
almost all of these events it is necessary to explain the use of the term
“eerie” by saying that it always remained the case that possibly nothing was
there (with the eerie, you don’t know if anything is there), and by pointing
out that it is always eerie to be stalked, even if the indications are that you
are being stalked by something profoundly positive, and even if the feeling is
that what is stalking you is in a fundamental sense impersonal, as if it were
akin to electricity, but at a level of existence transcendental to
ordinary-reality.
It is as if I can feel a kind of muffled click in thinking about the move
to Leamington (the place where we live has a fundamental importance: it is the
spheroambient foreground "music" or terrain energy-source of our existence). The click is
muffled because a process that was involved in the transition was already in
effect, and because it was a while before I began to take advantage of the
greater proximity to the countryside. But the overall feeling is both that it
was at this point that, in some sense, I
woke up, and that there is a brightness about this state that to different
extents had been missing from my life since around 1979, when I was 17. The
double-impression resolves itself as the view that after the transition the
brightness had returned, but now in a more focused, more deliberate form. There
had been a somewhat bleak, dour tone, which to a great extent had been a
fixation of attention along the lines of the reason-and-time modality of
empirical awareness (the terrible, denuded world of objects, and of the
delusory picture of a Marxist/Hegelian/Scientificist progress that is supposed
to be taking place) and I had now started to effectuate– more deliberately than
previously – a pre-eminence of
engagement with space, and specifically with space as a world of energy and
intent, a transcendental awareness. And with the return of the brightness, in
this more lucid modality, there was the return of the primarily positive
anomalous, the sunlit eerie - but now at
a much higher level of intensity.
It was Tess who concluded that we should definitely be
living in Leamington, and who caused me to act on my background feeling, and
search for a flat there (in a sense to do with places, she
therefore “made the difference” twice, both because of the trip to Northern Greece,
where I saw a mountain forest for the first time, and because she got me to
Leamington). I had probably to some extent been staying in Coventry as a result
of inertia (the university’s property leasing department had offered me places
in Coventry, not in Leamington) but perhaps also because of the notion that
Coventry was “more in touch with reality” than Leamington, as if the bright,
attractive aspect of the town was some temporary, unhealthy distraction from
the underlying situation. The first thought is that a place being afflicted by
capitalist withdrawal of resources, in a “post-industrial” phase of capitalism,
is more in touch with the “zeitgeist,” (“zeitgeist” is evidently a fundamental
Hegelian concept) - as if everywhere is
not all along reality (as if non-western societies in the Amazon forest are
desperately cut off from real existence). The second impression had probably
arrived in part from a (male) tutor at the university laughingly suggesting
that there was something frivolous about students wanting to live in
Leamington. This structure of thought in relation to “brightness” and
attractiveness is of course very male: at a level below thought men are trained
to regard femininity as in some sense frivolous – the opposite of what is
really important – so that heterosexual males have been trained all along to
quietly despise what they love, to despise what continually heartens and
energises them.
Two years after arriving there, a point arrived in Leamington where I
was no longer anguished by the end of the relationship with the woman who had
caused me to live there. It was around this time that I started going out into
the countryside around Leamington, and it is primarily in relation to this time
that I can feel a fundamental difference: the brightness of a fascinated
awareness of the places around me. And it was at this time that what was maybe
the most extraordinary of the anomalous positive experiences occurred (an
experience that was not connected to the use of drugs, as was increasingly the
case with the experiences of this kind). As if at the point where I returned, after
four years, to how I had been in the October of 1993 (potentially in love, but
not “hooked up” on any particular actual or sought-after relationship)
something entirely unknown leaned into me, and gave me a view toward the
Future. There is on the one hand the feeling that the relationship which had
ended had made a fundamental difference in bringing me to the right place, and,
also, in waking me up more than a little in relation to the intensity and
complexity of what it is to be a human being (it had been a very inspiring and
very adventurous relationship). And, on the other hand, there is the impression
that only when I was beyond the all-too personal state that is
relationship-anguish could a fundamentally impersonal force reach into me from
the unknown, for a moment, in a way that was sufficiently sustained and broad
in its intensive aspects for it leave a powerful, memorable enigma.
*
*
It is the morning of the first day of my Philosophy and Literature degree at Warwick. There will be a lecture at 10am. Around 6am there is a natural history programme about certain kinds of small plants that grow in forests. I am intensely fascinated by it, and am struck by the way in which my attention has been drawn forcibly to an elsewhere, despite the intensity of my engagement with the areas I am studying for the degree.
*
The system of reason/revelation is an interconnected domain of ways of fending off the world around us, and most specifically the planet on which we live (which will be taken as the key example in what follows, as opposed to talking about "matter" or "nature"). It is a system of ways of saying "its all just this" or its all just that," where each one involves a denigration, subordination or fundamental sidelining of the planet.
Using the planet as the exemplar, the first mode is that of science: the view here is that beyond human consciousness the world studied by science is in the end all just formations of energy, with the only possible exception being consciousness, or maybe self-consciousness (on this view animals, given they are held to fall short of self-consciousness, fail to pass the test of being "special" in comparison with the brute matter of the planet). A second mode is that of the monotheistic religions, which say the world is all just the created object of God, and which view the planet as just a material stage on which the testing of humans take place, and which also say that the planet will be destroyed by God when the testing is finished. A third mode contends that at depth the materiality of the planet is all just a veil of illusion, which when lifted reveals the deep truth that is to be encountered through the route of interiority, the deep truth being that beyond the concrete is divine conscoussness, Buddha consciousness, divine light, God, etc. A fourth mode is the Hegelian/Kantian contention that the world is all just spirit coming to know itself (the dialectical unfolding of spirit/representation), and that the planet is entirely unknowable in itself (a part of the noumenon) leaving us only the planet as object-within-representation.
There is more to the system of reason/revelation than this, but it is all one system, with people recurrently being affected (to different extents) by more than one element at the same time, and with individuals who were only employing the scientific mode very often suddenly jumping to being primarily affected by a religious mode, a bit like a polarity reversal. As a form of "fending off" of the world around us, and of grave imposition of the "right" way of thinking (with fear and humiliation - or worse - as penalties for non-agreement) the system is of course an aspect of the control mind.
*
It is the summer of 1993. You walk past “the Eclipse” – one
of the first rave clubs in the country. It has been maintaining a pulse of
electronic dance music and chemically altered states since it opened its doors
(with no alcohol license) in October 1990. The alternative cultures of the
country have to a great extent concentrated themselves on practises of dance,
“drumming” and ingestion of psychotropics (overall, this is not going to lead
very far – at the general level it feels more like the creation of survival
shelters to cope with the emergence of Blairism).
At the top of the hill, in the very centre of Coventry, there is a new shopping mall, with the Lady Godiva statue outside it, and alongside this mall is a line of 18th
or 19th century buildings, which include within them a very narrow
building whose ground floor is a radical bookshop called “the red wedge.” It is
here that I will find (or have already found) a copy of Operators and Things,
written by an extraordinary explorer of the unknown called Barbara O’Brien – a
book in which she describes a six month schizophrenic “encounter” with
un-noticed gangster-like human beings called Operators, who, within the
schizophrenic delirium, she believes telepathically control the lives of most
humans (in shamanic cultures such experiences would be treated as “visions,”
which is not at all to say that they would be treated as true).
You walk past the
bookshop and find yourself at the statue of Lady Godiva. Looking back the way
you have come there is light in the sky. There is an ethereal, slightly eerie
feeling to everything, as if in the dawn twilight the city is revealing itself
to have been insubstantial all along, a persistent knot of energies, that
although persistent, is no more concrete than a dream. Here, the more-planetary
time of “shamanic” worlds is around a thousand years in the past. This is a
city emplaced at a central point in England, originally in an area that
to a great extent was forest, where there in fact are not really rivers, but only headwater streams, which flow in three different directions (toward the Severn, the
Thames and the Humber). It is a city which feels like a religious reaction
against the forest, and yet which feels as if it yearns for the forest (it is,
after all, 'the city in Shakespeare country'). And it is a city that has been
very extensively re-built since medieval times (a process which began after the
destruction of the city wall in the 17th century, and evidently was continued after the devastating bombing in World War II), and yet which
retains many medieval buildings, scattered amongst twentieth-century
city-centre streets. As Sapphire and Steel would say, “the place is full of
triggers”.
Although I have
never been to the Eclipse (and do not even remember hearing about it until
later) I will soon be occasionally visiting the temporary encampments of rave,
including two Tribal Gatherings (1996, and 1997 – 97 was the one where
Kraftwerk played) and the astonishing Glade
festivals of 2005 and 2006 (in agreement with The Caretaker, I would suggest that “the death of rave” took place around 2006). But rave music largely does
not in in itself have the brightness of full visionary dreamings – the brightness (in words as well as music) that gives people a sense that
there is an utterly different way of living, just alongside them. People can
very definitely reach the point of seeing this other way of living through
dancing and pyschotropics, but – the Future having receded – the music on its
own does not have the capacity to sweep right through the culture and wake
people up with its becoming-woman and impeccably dreamy wildness, as was the case
with the best music of the 60s and 70s.
Over the next
few years there would be one song to which Tess and myself would
dance at our flat, again and again, while on some combination of lsd and speed (notice,
it was not MDMA), and this song was Horses, by Patti Smith. And there is no
nostalgia involved in this – I would only discover the song/album in the spring
of ’94, and I had not been aware of Patti Smith until then - , instead, it was because this was the most charged, visionary music that we had found for dancing
while in state where a chemical was helping us toward the outside. The song points out a deeper, wider level to the
world of space – with its supposedly concrete surfaces, etc - that surrounds us
(“there’s a little place, a place called space…”); it invokes the fundamental
need to let go (“got to lose control, got to lose control/got to lose control
and then you take control”), but most vitally it takes you to the point where
you perceive the world as a forest with a sky-ocean of the Future above it:
In the night, in the eye of the forest
There’s a mare, black and shining with yellow hair
I put my fingers through her silken hair and found a stair
I didn’t waste no time I just walked right up and saw that
Up there – there is a sea […]
a sea of possibilities…
In the four years prior to this I had worked hard on my BA and my MA. As the surrounding
society built itself up toward the emergence of new dance-forms – and toward a
slight, temporary improvement in cultural production – I was living what was in
many ways a circumscribed, battened-down existence, an existence whose depth
and breadth were to a pronounced extent at the level of the virtual-real (and
where this virtual-real was largely that of the depth-world of the past). Most
days I would go to the university to study, and during exams for weeks I would
arrive early – at 8.45am – in order to get one of the library’s study cubicles,
or “carrels”. There was very little money for travelling, and the very minimal
travelling that took place (which took the form of going to see members of my
family, and did not involve leaving Britain) never had a profound effect on me
like the trip to Greece in 1996. My life had pre-eminently become the circuit
Coventry centre – Warwick University (and Warwick University is in Coventry…),
something exacerbated by the fact that during two of the summer holidays I
spent 6 weeks working at the university as a conference assistant. Also, in relation to my studies I was focused to far
too great an extent on time, as opposed to space (to say the very least, this
is an occupational hazard in philosophy), leaving me quite markedly cut off
from the intensive spatium of energies and becomings (and intent) of the Now
that surrounded me, with its immanent, co-existing Future (the nature of the
block was of course not just a fixation on time – it was also an entrapment
within thought and anxiety-thought, as opposed to perception, and it was a
fixation on the human).
I am struck by the
fact that it was during this phase in my life that a tendency – which I had
noticed emerging around three years before – reached its highest point: during
these years if I guessed the time, even if it was hours since I had last seen a
clock, I was very often right to within two or three minutes, and often to the
minute (this successful guessing of the exact
time would happen so often, in fact, that I became slightly unnerved by it).
This now seems like the counterpart of the fact that, during these years, my
sense of the compass directions was wrong in relation to the house where I
lived. Looking out toward the railway tracks of a line that went south to London
I had started out by seeing the view across the tracks as toward the west, and
it was three or four years later that I realised the direction was much closer
to south (the railway line arrived from Birmingham in a loop and at this point
was nearly going west-east): it was south by southwest. Given that, without
ever giving it much thought, I had always taken pride in knowing the compass
directions (the orientation-space of these directions is always an intrinsic
feature of my dreams) this lapse that lasted several years very much surprised
me when I became aware of it. It had, in fact, functioned to re-position
places in a way that became ingrained (the power of first impressions): I saw
Leamington as being southwest by west from Coventry, and in fact, even now it
comes as a shock to see that Leamington is almost directly to the south.
I was therefore
concentrating on time, and the spaces in which I had been working had to a great extent been those of the history of
literature and of philosophy (the spaces of the last 2500 years of human
history). And my mental compass was not working in relation to the place where
I lived.
*
My experiences of
a “white flash” of joy while looking at the horizon through my living room
window in Coventry acquire a different aspect in this context. If - as I think is correct - I was looking out in the
mid-morning or around midday, the southward view would be very bright, in comparison to the brightness
of the horizon if I had been looking west.
And working from the nature of the feeling (as opposed to the light and the view and the direction), I am left with the impression that I was being pulled toward energy (the south in the northern hemisphere
is the direction of heat and of light); toward the planet (toward the
countryside); toward a primary focus on the Space of the now; toward intense
love relationships with women, and toward friendships that are full creative
alliances (alliances for the purpose of Escape).
And it seems I also was being pulled toward Leamington, even if this was to a great extent because - as a town, not a city - it was more closely connected to the countryside.
*
You set out to walk toward Leamington. Ahead of you are two
different roads. The first goes by Kenilworth and leaves Coventry by the grand,
two-mile long avenue of trees culminating in Gibbet Hill. In going through
Kenilworth (four miles after Gibbet Hll) this road creates a chain of three
places that all have women at the centre of their mythopoetic history – places
that in very different senses are “haunted” by the presence of women. In Leamington the tone is straightforwardly
that of Alice in Wonderland: the town’s full name is Royal Leamington Spa, because
Queen Victoria stayed there on two occasions (the first time seemingly as a result of having to break a journey
there, as opposed to it being an official visit), and allowed the town to state
royal patronage in its name. There is a statue of Victoria at the centre of the
town which has managed to acquire the weight of the mythic by virtue of it
having been moved an inch on its plinth by a German bomb (it has not been moved
back). In Coventry the tone is that of a libidinally charged morality tale –
“Lady Godiva was so good that she rode naked on a horse / Peeping Tom was so bad that he looked at
her.” And in Kenilworth the tone is more intense, more tragic: in 1575, at the age of
42, Queen Elizabeth is lavishly entertained for 19 days at Kenilworth castle by
her “sweetheart” and lifelong friend Robert, Earl of Leicester (this visit was
apparently the longest visit of this kind during her reign) but without the
Earl succeeding in getting the queen to accept his proposal of marriage, a fact
which may have been connected to the extremely suspicious death of his wife,
Amy Robsart.
This first road is
therefore closely associated with the state – with the world of the
power-brokers of the interiority. The second road is very different, and is more
amenable to being walked with an attention directed away from the state.
Beyond the railway
line the road forks. You take the road on the left. After a while you turn onto a path alongside a dual carriageway, and then you turn off it onto an unassuming, minor road. You walk until you have
left the city behind.
You walk for three
miles on a country lane until you come to a large, attractive village that has
a hill above it to the south. The slope of the hill is relatively steep, and is
mostly covered in trees. Between the village and the hill is the river Sowe, a small river that meets the Avon two miles downstream. The bridge over the river is within the village, but once over it the road immediately goes diagonally up the hill through trees, leaving the village behind.
The village is called Stoneleigh. It is attractive and quite large, with a common in the centre, but it has the curious feature that is has no pub. A story is that the pub was closed down at the turn of the 19th century because the local aristocrat's daughter was laughed at by some pub customers as she was riding her tri-cycle (a largely vanished form of transport...) on her way to church. But this Alice in Wonderland scene somehow does not quite dispel a feeling of severity produced by the phenomenon of a village without a pub, as if the intensity of the place has destroyed the social function involved, or as if there has been a fending off of revelry, and 'letting go' even in the profoundly blocked form of drinking alcohol.
And it is true that the village is in a place which has a degree of "prominence" beyond the local. Two miles away the Sowe joins the Avon near the tip of a long meander of the other river, and inside the meander is Stoneleigh Abbey, a large country house whose estate - within the meander - includes the exhibition area where for decades the national agricultural show was held (the Stoneleigh Show).
You go up the hill past an immense beech tree with multiple trunks. Where the road begins to flatten the trees open up on the left, and there is a long wide hill on this side (the hiil-top alongside which the road passes, a hundred feet lower), a long wide prow of land that extends a mile, with two separate higher areas, down to the meeting point of the Sowe and the Avon. The whole hill is a vast, single field, and at the highest point there is a ring of eight or nine oak trees (and at the other, lower high-point there are three trees together).
There is something about the ring of trees. They feel as if they were left because those who chopped down the forest could not bear to chop down the hill-top glade. As if it was too beautiful to be chopped down, and was left, a glade without a forest. And more than this, they seem iconic (here at the centre of this zone of island, where the forests survived longest), which is to say that they seem not only ancient but hieratic - hieratic in the sense that they themselves might be the sacred, or in the sense that they might be the living speech of the sacred in the form of the planet. The eerie and numinous eye of the forest, still looking out toward the cosmos, despite the loss of all the trees around them.
*
It is in this
place that it makes sense to ask the question "what women did Shakespeare meet?" Kant's secretly denigratory theory of "genius" (a bad concept, for many reasons) in Critique of Judgement fails to see that extraordinary fictions - or dreamings - consist on one level of processes of seeing the nature of the world, as opposed to them being splurges of imagination that are unconnected to lucidity, and it fails to see that people are multiplicities consisting of who and what they love, so that Shakespeare's women in part should be seen as emergent from the virtual women he was carrying with him, as a result of his encounters.
It is impossible not to think of Shakespeare roaming the summer woods on some day of wild roses and honeysuckle, and to not think of him meeting, at a house in some remote area far from his home, an immensely attractive woman who is at a higher level of lucidity than him; who sparklingly defeats him in arguments; and who leaves him with the haunting feeling that art all along was only the beginning. Impossible maybe also to not think of him going back, some time later, to the house, and finding other people living there, who can tell him nothing about where the woman has gone.
*
You walk the remaining five miles to the edge of Leamington, and then into the centre. You cross the
river Leam and walk into the streets of the towns's other half other half. You find
yourself on a small street which ends at the canal – beyond the street a
footpath leads in both directions to nearby bridges across the waterway.
It was at a party
in a house on this street, in the spring of 1993, that I took ecstasy for the
first time. The party consisted almost entirely of postgraduates from Warwick
philosophy department (and therefore there was a continuity from the first two
occasions when I took LSD, which had been philosophy reading-weekends,
respectively in Wales and Derbyshire). I sat opposite a woman who was also
taking the drug for the first time, and who was the girlfriend of a friend. We
were both sitting cross-legged on the floor, but unsurprisingly we danced in
this position, while talking to each other. I do not have a high opinion of
MDMA (and this tablet may, in any case, have been mostly speed), but this was a
good beginning. Perhaps primarily because there was a sustained encounter that
involved dance as well as speech, but in a way that was held open to some
extent as also an encounter with the world (the woman was going out with a
friend, and we remained six feet apart – the brightness of sensuality remained
an ultra-charged atmosphere, instead of it focusing itself into a fixatory
point).
There is often a
cloying, grim feeling of indulgence about my recollections of taking drugs
under “party” circumstances, and to a certain extent that feeling is there even with this
experience. But this event proved to be a turning point. Afterwards I knew that
I had to act on my knowledge that my relationship at that time could not
continue, in that although it had love, there was no integrity in my staying
with it – the relationship did not have the love and the adventurousness of the
journey into the outside, toward Love-and-Freedom. Three or four days later I
acted on this knowledge, and the relationship came to an end.
The event in Leamington
was therefore a turning-point of a fundamental kind. In a sense I was made
aware of what I knew already, but the extremely positive experience made the
difference – it gave me the impetus to act. However, a turning-point of this
kind cannot be talked about in a glib way. There is an intense sadness about
this memory. And the sadness comes not only from the obvious singular source,
but also from the ways in which we are cut off from each other, and from the
ways in which we are cut off from the Future, the south outside (in the end,
for everyone’s sake, we can primarily only travel with those who are attempting
to escape).
The next day I was
walking in Coventry, and a song came to me (I was not in the centre, and the
arrival of the song has always been associated with the memory of a view,
across the city, of the sky to the south). I have never been happy with it. and
in particular I have never found a melody for it that I like (the melody which
came with it is too inflected by melancholy), but these are the words
There is another country
Go there while you can
You’ve never known what songs are
If you’ve never lived that dream
Your bones are filled with sunlight
Your veins are filled with
music dancing
There is another country
Go there while you can
Even though these words have an inadequate, “portentous”
aspect (and it should be added that a largely delusory portentousness is
something I associate with MDMA) there is still the feeling that something has
got through – that the words constitute a view toward the outside, no matter
how occluded.
(Firstly, there is an impersonal quality about them: the
“you” to which the song is addressed is everyone. Secondly, the idea of “music
dancing” is the thought of the (molecular and non-subjectified) outside on the inside - and this is connected to the fact that the song is about an
intensive, metamorphic threshold).
The song is a precursor: a faint indication of what might
happen if I kept moving toward the south-outside. Overall, it does not have the
quality of the anomalous positive experiences that started to happen after the
move to Leamington (when I think about the sunlit-eerie aspect of the later
phase it does not fall into place alongside these experiences). But
nonetheless, it shares something with what followed.
It is clear that during this time to a very great extent
(although in different ways) I was being boosted, supported and, in a sense, moved around by women. This in itself is
not at all unusual for a man who loves women. The initial, and very
male-generated disaster is that women are libidinally inculcated with a
predisposition to give up their wider life-project (the exploration of the world that is beyond the
question of a career) in “settling
down” with a man: however it remains the
case that men, in different ways, recurrently end up revolving around the woman
with whom they are in a relationship. Despite having relinquished so much,
women are simply stronger than men, primarily in that to a greater degree they
have the ability to give birth to the future (the ability to give birth to
children is only the most obvious and simplistically concrete aspect of this
attribute of women). The fact men tend to have a whole array of obsessive
opinions about the world and a heavily foregrounded set of projects and interests
– this fact tends to obscure the way in which women have a greater degree of
brightness and of ability with dreaming (brightness is freedom from gravity,
and dreams are the most powerful things we know – from a sustained dream about
the future the principle features of a life emerge). However, although it is
therefore the opposite of unusual for men to be moved around by women, what is
different about the situation in question is that this tendency is here visible
under circumstances where a deliberate movement into the unknown was taking
place. And I am left with the distinct impression that in undertaking this
movement of exploration (which I would have thought about at the time primarily
in terms of philosophy, the body without organs, drug-experiences, and music as
inducer of trances) it was women who in the deepest sense guided me forward. It
seems that the power of women is here being seen in relation to the
construction of a nomadism, as opposed to the construction of a “settled”
existence, and seems to be visible as having a full affinity for this process,
and moreover as indispensable for it (and it must be noted that as well as
being those who “made the difference” in the movement forward, women here were
also the very nature of the journey – the movement toward women was an aspect
of the movement into the unknown).
*
In 1993 at the
“surface” level of human existence (that
is, the level of ordinary reality - of the interiority and of that which is
intrinsically inflected by it) there had been two recent shifts, one of which
was only getting started, and the other of which was set to fade into the
background as a kind of dark-realist atmosphere, a “tone” of the times. The first was a turn toward
technology, and the second was a turn toward the gothic. By 1993 personal
computers were no longer a rarity: they were becoming common, and were about to
be everywhere. And at the same time, the gothic turn in music from the start of
the 80s (the punk voice seamlessly became the goth voice) had become deeply
innovative in different ways.
Some developments
displayed both aspects at once. Neuromancer and Count Zero (1984 and 1987) by
William Gibson are both cybergothic dreamings (and, connectedly, Landianism at Warwick University was
cybergothic philosophy). Other developments were innovative along lines that
opened up connections to religious dreamings: Jacob’s Ladder (1992) is a very
philosophical and socially-focused horror film, but in the end its deepest
proximity is with the work of the Christian writer Meister Eckhart.
It was in the
summer of 1993, that I concluded, in my MA dissertation, that an effective
model for thinking about the relationship between the nation states and
capitalism is Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, with the thought being
fundamentally that the states have been subsumed within the profoundly
anomalous formation that is called capitalism (the nation states as disturbing entities that unknowingly have
been superseded by something more sinister again). The states cluster around
Prospero, the most successful -
prosperous – amongst them, and every time there is an economic collapse
(showing graphically that they are not in control) this is the equivalent of
the striking of the clock in the story, which causes everyone to be momentarily
shocked out of their complacency. Capitalism here is the fundamentally gothic
instance, the “red death” that is on the outside, but is also on the inside, a
guest at the party. In my dissertation I stated that another way of describing the
situation is that the formation of trading-networks had globalised and become
the top of the canopy of social formations
(the dominant instance, at this level, in relation to the interiority,
or trans-establishment), but I left open the question of what, even on this
eco-system model, might be “gothic” about the world of these molar social
formations, whether those of capitalism, or, for instance, those of societies in the Yanomami zones of the Amazon forests.
It can be seen that
in shifting to this other model I was avoiding the idea that the states were
all about to be destroyed (instead the thought is that what has been destroyed
is the previous higher degree of independence of states – with the masque in a
sense continually repeating itself, China now about to take over as Prospero,
and with new suppressions of state power, on the part of the red death, visible
on the horizon). It can also be seen
that this is not a Hegelian or dialectical model. There is no thought that
things are getting better (on the contrary, the opposite is quite likely), and
the disturbing or sinister aspects of the social formations mean that if
anything is unfolding here it is is the instantiations or emplacements of the
control-mind, as opposed to the unfolding of the heroic theo-cosmological
spirit within the world of human existence (as posited by Hegel).
*
Landianism, put
simply, was an overturning or reversal
of Hegelianism in relation to values and in relation to time (in that it
was a mode of libidinal materialism it also included Marx’s reversal). With
Hegel human values are good, and are inevitably perfecting themselves. With
Landianism human (religious and scientifist/rational) values are bad, and and
have been swept up inescapably toward a point of complete destruction by the
anorganic, molecular and fundamentally non-human forces of capitalism (a
process that would leave nothing remotely human in its wake, and which, as the
philosophy reached its most inflamed point, was held to be about to happen, in
2012). The basic problem here is the treating of capitalism as a “saviour” in
relation to the functioning of the ecumenal world of ordinary reality, rather than it being a primary feature of a new manifestation of it (accelerationsism is a kind of Stockholm syndrome, born of
rage against the desolate returns to traditionalism in the 1980s). And most
importantly, this is bound up with the mere replacement of Hegelian
interpretosis (“this shows the dialectical unfolding of the spirit”) with
another form of interpretosis, one that concerns an absolute phase-change,
conceived as being very close on the temporal horizon (“this shows that human
subjectified values are being increasingly swept toward their imminent
destruction by the forces of capitalism”).
*
As has already been indicated, another feature
of this time was the emergence of a tendency to “go it alone” on the part of
the alternative, radical cultures of Britain, and simply organise events that
were outside the world of traditionalist values. This had been happening for
several years, but in 1993, in the face of the fourth victory for the
conservatives in 1992, a very large number of people started to go off into the
night – a process of “taking refuge in the night” – and into fugitive,
ephemeral social spaces that intrinsically were far more about learning how to
be taken “out of yourself” (the self of ordinary reality) than they were about
campaigns within molar politics.
Counter-cultures can be
envisaged as like a long line of emplacements or vantages (a bit like a series of
walls and watchtowers) which on the important side face the Future, the
bright-transcendental, but which, on the other side, face back toward the
emplacements of traditionalism (insofar as they fixatedly face back they are a
part of the interiority, its outer membrane). On the side of the interiority
there are higher emplacements in which people look out, predominantly
toward the other emplacements – the assemblages of political, religious,
economic, artistic and philosophical traditionalism. But in the direction of
the outside there are areas that could be described as closer to the ground where people -recurrently under social
circumstances, as opposed to academic ones - reach states of seeing that
primarily consist of abstract-perception or lucidity (states that sadly are
often fugitive, leaving no immediate access to the outsights which occurred).
There is a massive
advantage in having a situation where a grave “world-of-judgements” in the form
of backward-turned confused opinions, has been put into abeyance, so that the
principle has become “dance, listen to the music, let go.” However, it is
necessary to see immediately that the maleness of all those opinionated,
moralising views has now been replaced by a preponderance of maleness in the
production of the music, expressing itself to a great extent as a view of women as sexual-soulful
ecstasy-beings (setting up a short route back toward sex and normality – women
are good at feelings, men are good at reason, and producing beats - rather than
constructing women as dreamers, visionaries and explorers of the unknown). From
Joy Division onwards (and with the primary exception of Kate Bush’s The Hounds
of Love) the wild, dreamer-visionary edges of pop-rock become disturbingly
male, and as such, deeply attenuated in specific ways in relation to
“brightness”, with this fact applying pre-eminently to the new dance music of
the late 8os and early 90s (the Future has receded).
It is necessary,
of course, to just set out – to walk off into the south outside. And at the
level of the anti-traditionalism culture there was very little to trap my
attention in 1993 (the Labour party was slowly morphing itself into a clone of
Thatcherism – and there was a hegemonic view that the west fighting a war in
the middle east had been sensible).
I had A Thousand
Plateaus to help me. But although A Thousand Plateaus does not instigate toward
some top-down, change-the-political-system project (which would make it just a
disguised functioning of the interiority) it is deeply threaded with critique,
and therefore in part carries the danger of you being left fixated on that
which you should be leaving behind. It instigates toward a positive
metamorphosis, of you and the groups around you, so that any structures of the interiority
become just non-influential elements within an outside (live like a nomad in
the city), and this process of fostering and initating becomings - the
deterritorialisation that is metamophics, or sorcery – is not at all one of
turning to attack the interestablishment (though it is the case that the interestablishment and its macrological societal expressions would be destroyed if such processes ever became
pervasive). However, although the book does point out the direction of the
south-outside (and spends a lot of time facing it) the very high degree of
socially-focused critique makes it a book which has a strong tendency, given
also that it is very difficult to understand, to leave people pre-eminently
fixated on transcendental-north (and to be trapped facing this direction is the
same as the eyes – and the will - being trapped by the eyes of a predator).
*
I also took refuge in the night. I started to stay up until
3 or 4 in the morning, getting up at midday. And the taking of drugs to get
into altered states occurred primarily at night. It as if from the autumn of
1993 to the spring of 1997 I went into a long “tunnel” (a zone whose darkness is
as much that of the night sky, as that of an enclosed space) in which the vast
majority of my most extraordinary experiences occurred either at night, or
during a day “after the night before."
In one sense, the night was where the daylight could at last
arrive (whatever problems might be developing as a result of this form of existence).
And the place into which I went was a place of women. Three women in particular, though there were other women who were powerfully involved in all-night conversations, one of whom introduced me to Patti Smith's Horses. A place of women, which musically was "presided over" by Patti Smith.
In the January of the year before, at the reading-weekend/party in Derbyshire a woman called Caitlin gave me a warmly intense smile. It was just a moment: I looked up, and she was sitting apart from the group where I was talking, and she glowed at me.
I was in a relationship at the time, and so had a reason to put the memory to one side. And the smile had also had such an impersonal quality of warmth (it did not have the quality of a "come on," or any self-conscious tone that might have revealed an intention), that I was left with the feeling that Caitlin had just let something slip out that might not be significant - she had let something become visible (the fact that she liked me, or liked me in that moment) but where this did not necessarily mean anything in terms of her possibly wanting a relationship.
In November of the following year, in saying goodbye after a night in the Students Union bar, Caitlin kissed me on the lips. She kissed me and then left, having exploded her earlier message to me into full effect, and having fully woken my awareness that I had the same glow for her as she had for me.
Around two weeks later Caitlin began what would be a very brief relationship with someone else. I had spent the previous fortnight in a state of agitation, and just after she had started the relationship I was at a very extraordinary party - which feels now as if was a crux in my life - and I embarked on what would be a two month relationship with a woman called Jane, who was also doing a philosophy MA. It took me several months to get my equanimity back after this relationship, and at the time when this was beginning to happen Caitlin began another, more long-term relationship, this time with a man who was about to move to live somewhere hundreds of miles away, so that in a short while, in early summer, Caitlin had left to live elsewhere, completing her MA at a distance.
This is not a story with a romantic ending - although in a different sense perhaps it is. In the final months before she left Caitlin and I spent a lot of time together (we spent so much time together that people commented on it), and these months of recurrently staying up through the night listening to music and trying to look into the future of the human world - not realising the extent to which what we were experiencing was the future, and not realising how much we needed to stop thinking and to perceive - these months were the brilliant, untarnished ending of our (non) relationship. In the end we did not stay in touch, and therefore our positive experiences were never inflected by the angst of an actual relationship.
My feeling about Caitlin is that we had a very marked affinity for travelling together into the unknown, and that this is inseparable from the fact that Caitlin had a potential to generate a kind of love in me that could have swept me to the point where I could have lost all focus about where I was trying to go (the direction of Love-and-Freedom within the world of the unknown). And this means that if we had had a relationship we could have settled down and had children (which was not at all the nature of my intent).
I had the same affinity for Tess, in relation to travelling in intensity, but Tess was far wilder. in a way that seemed to mean that in subtle ways she kept herself a little more distant (what could have caused me to lose all focus with Caitlin was a combination of intense strength and intense femininity). This meant that Tess and I did some extraordinarily adventurous "exploration," but I was, I feel, a little less vulnerable to losing my way than I would have been with Caitlin.
These three encounters were therefore with women as explorers-of-the-unknown. All
three of the women were studying philosophy. And in all three cases we took
psychotropics with an intent not just to have a good time, but “to see what we
could see”.
And then it was all over. It was the autumn 1996, and I was devastated by the end of the relationship with Tess.
I was living in Leamington, on a street half a mile south of the canal. It seems to me that I had been immeasurably boosted by the relationships, and it also that I had just received an extreme jolt that in the deepest sense was valuable.
I was feeling the background sadness there is within the world (this is an aspect of the world, rather than some ultimate, final truth about it). I loved Tess, and to a great extent I had myself to blame for the end of the relationship, because of the tendency I had shown to be insecure and jealous: the separation had a sharply disturbing impact. And the extreme nature of what I felt pushed me so intensely that in the end, after several months, I opted for a process of maximal becoming-active, in order to leave behind self-pity and "if only" anguish.
I think the jolt in a strong sense knocked me in a new direction - as if I had already been leaning outward in this direction, and had now stumbled forward. Or to be more precise, it was the jolt, and the boost I had received from the relationships, together in turn with the facts that I was now living in a place that I loved (closely surrounded by striking countryside) and that I was both starting to get exercise and was taking drugs much more infrequently.
*
During the phase of my life that started in 1993 there were three very charged sources of intensity. The conjunction created circumstances in which a way forward could be found, but this can be seen as in many ways inseparable from the fact that everything became exceptionally difficult in terms of what would customarily be called success.
The intense, adventurous love relationships (primarily the one with Tess) were prepossessing in their impact. The process of studying A Thousand Plateaus (together with other, related philosophical works, and with books films and songs/albums) was a process of philosophy crossing a threshold, so that thought became compelling - a kind of unsuspected joy. And the use of halucinogens and other mind-altering substances (in particular LSD, mushrooms, speed, and marijuana) was a third wave that hit at exactly the same time. And it arrived in a way where it was profoundly enmeshed with the other two. The use of drugs was being emphatically advocated within the Warwick philosophy milieu by Nick Land, and it was extremely widespread within this milieu. But it was being advocated as exploration and transformation in a way where these were understood in philosophical terms - to take drugs was a philosophical project.
The other reason for delineating the three sources of intensity from this time is the fact that I had started to understand that what was in question with philosophy was a movement along an escape-path leading out of ordinary reality, where moving along this escape-path was a kind of sublime joy that was definitively not on a lower level from - or fully separable from - the other experiences. I was beginning to realise that philosophy is the metaphysics and pragmatics of deterritorialisation, of waking the faculties, of becoming-active.
There was a way in which everything was a mess - and yet at the same time there was the thread of joy running through all my experiences. And I started, slowly, to move forward, a process that would eventually lead to me leaving drugs behind, and which involved three 'persistences' - one in relation to studying and writing philosophy, one in the form of journeys in semi-wilderness, scurfland and wilderness areas, and one in the form of writing stories.
*
One day, toward the end of 1996, I was walking in a street in Leamington, near the house where I lived, and it struck me that in A Thousand Plateaus the attention or engagement of Deleuze and Guattari had been turned sideways - turned at a right angle - to the attention or engagement of most of philosophy. What this meant at a first level was that they had turned their attention away from the line of time, and toward space. And at the deeper level what it meant was that their attention had been turned toward the intensive spatium of the intent-and-energy worlds of the outside; of the transcendental-empirical; of the abstract.
This was the beginning of a long, staggered process of learning to see into the sideways (the intensive spatium), a process which is very much still taking place. What was starting to come into focus were the levels and modes of the world seen in depth as intent-and-energy. And it did not matter that many of these aspects only pertained with certainty to the human world, and had an indeterminate extension beyond it. They were there, and were evidently fundamental, no matter what. The oneirosphere, the verosphere- the energosphere (or volosphere). On a different level, turning toward the Future, the eerie, serene (and dangerous) world of the second sphere of action. Furthermore, the control-mind, when looking toward transcendental-north; and when looking back to the bright-transcendental, the major becomings - becoming-planet, becoming-woman, becoming-abstract.
In a sense this helped me less than might have been imagined, in relation to my immediate problem. It was only beginning to come into focus, and it is much easier to talk about the abstract when facing the world than when facing the abstractions of another account or description (in this case A Thousand Plateaus) so that the project had a higher level of difficulty, in that in this way it involved interpreting a text. But in any case - putting to one side the question of my academic project at the time - something had definitely happened. A new direction had opened up so that to some extent I could see it all the time (rather than it being fugitive, encountered only in peak experiences). And in becoming aware in this way I was closer to an effective, actualised realisation (I am still trying to reach this) that what is fundamental is to embody the abstract, not to have opinions about it.
*
You look up toward the sky to the south, above the ridge of Sayan pine-trees. Beyond these, due south, is the rest of Tuva, and then Mongolia, China, the Himalayas, India, the ocean - the sky...
* * *
