18.

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 Fisher (released by Hyperdub/Flatlines on 26th July, 2019 - https://hyperdub.net).

Explorations: Zone Horizon  (1 - 18)

Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action   (19 - 30)

Explorations: Through the Forest, the River  (31 - 50) 

 In Difference and Repetition Deleuze explicates the obscured presuppositions of what he calls the dogmatic image of thought. 

     But alongside this there is the dogmatic image of the world, an image which is a fundamental blocking modality of the system of reason-revelation.

      The image consists of a three-part structure, consisting of matter or “nature”, human minds, and the eternal; and the crucial element of the image is the idea that matter is a blind force that is endlessly destructive, and in some sense is only ever accidentally creative. In thinking about matter here it is important to keep the example of the planet – the Earth – in mind as the key example of what is at issue. And also it should be added that matter and nature are used co-terminously in what follows, in opposition to the mental and the eternal, because this reflects – and here delineates - the structure of the dogmatic image.

    The presupposition in relation to matter is that ultimately it is blindly destructive, and blindly, accidentally creative. This presupposition is shared both by scientists, and by adherents of religions. Within the world of religion the presupposition is embodied for instance by the idea that life on the planet must have been created by a supernatural force (because the planet, as mere blind matter, could not have been its source). In science, the presupposition is revealed by the elaboration – and zealous doctrinal promulgation – of mechanistic, blind principles of accidental creation.

     Anything un-analysed that runs in this way across both science and religion, and which as such explicitly or implicitly characterises human beings as special in relation to the natural world, must be regarded as profoundly suspect. And this is a particularly urgent source of suspicion in that the idea of matter as endlessly destructive and blindly, or accidentally creative seems disturbingly like a projection. It is human beings who are endlessly destructive, and if their controlling or “control mind” intellectual tendency (a tendency which, pertinently, is on one level a system of self-importance) is taken as the vital issue then it can be seen that it is the dominatory  or “control” aspect of human beings which can beyond all doubt be seen as a destructive and only blindly creative force.

   The model here is that of a falling stone. And to tease out its implications the model can be exemplified through the instance of a falling stone which has an intricate structure on the part both of its substance, and the arcs and events of its fall, and which destroys plants and branches in the trajectory of its fall, and which, finally, provides nutrients for plants in the place where it comes to rest.

      And beyond this world of matter – seen by way of this model – there is the additional or supplementary dimension of the spirit, the rational, the mental, the self-conscious etc. This other world – beyond nature or matter - has two domains, or dogma-system “places”  (both of them can be characterised in different ways, as can the whole two-part assemblage, but the underlying places remain the same). The first consists of human minds (with a strong tendency for the mind to be understood in terms of “rationality” and language, and for intent, love, lucidity and control to be the suppressed), and the second consists of the fundamentally meta-natural world of the “eternal.”  This second domain consists either of eternal truths or “forms” (with mathematics as the crucial model) or of a god or gods – or lastly it can consist of both. Furthermore the image self-importantly constructs the human as sharing in the fundamentally meta-natural world either through comprehending and discovering eternal truth (which could include the supposed truths of a religion), or through being a world of eternal souls – or again, through both.

    Everything here is about constructing the human as special in relation to mere nature, or matter – and specifically in relation to the key instance of the planet. It is a dogmatic image which posits a world of bodies without organs which is limited to human beings in relation to the planet, and more than that, has an abstract domain which is denuded to almost nothing, in that it consists of truths such as those of mathematics and the functioning of rationality, but excludes the abstract-real worlds of lucidity, love, freedom, delight, dreaming, and, most importantly, the domain of almost all aspects of intent (it also excludes the idea of wider levels of reality which are reached through a heightening of awareness, in that for the dogmatic image the only wider level of reality is the meta-natural one that is reached by reason, or revelation, or both).

     These two interlinked domains set up the human to be seen as special, as somehow partaking of a world beyond nature. And on the side of matter it can be pointed out that at the deepest level the characterising of matter as blind and destructive is really just an expression of a will to characterise matter as inconsequential (it is a characterisation which has a secondary, philosophical form, but which will obtain in its primary form under circumstances where matter is admitted to exist or to be accessible to understanding). The dogmatic image of the world has philosophical forms where matter is viewed as inconsequential through being seen as not really existing (Berkeley’s idealism; certain kinds of eastern philosophy) or as not, at depth, being available to us in relation to our knowledge (Kant’s phenonomenology, and Hegel’s). On one side there is that which is special, on the other side there is the inconsequential.

*

    Modern physics takes the dogmatic image to a new level, with its distinction between the intelligible (non-sentient domains of matter, with their blind regularities) and that-which-makes-intelligible (mathematics, and minds). It recurrently writes a promissory note that somehow the second level will be explained by the first, but it is too busy with intrinsic problems at the initial level to even come come close to starting on the promised second aspect. To take the key instance - with gravity the simple case of two planet-scale bodies is taken up, and then simplified by modelling on the basis of an absolute vaccuum (something that does not exist), this yielding a predictable, absolute regularity which is described in terms of the 'fabric of space-time'. Because of the initial simplicity of the cases (ignoring the question of the absolute vacuum) everything comes out fine in terms of observations, but in the process mathematics and the equations of physics end up acquiring a 'windows-into-the-mind-and-laws-of-god-or eternity' kudos that is comprehehensively unjustified, with neat-equation models about the nature of everything becoming so enshrined that what disproves them is simply fitted into the model as a unknown component within it ('we can make it work by positing that most of the universe is dark matter and dark energy'). Meanwhile the zones of matter here are blind, dead zones of regularity. The fall of matter - say a large asteroid - might take a long path of hundreds of thousands of orbital circles, or if the initial trajectory was a direct collision-path it would be a fall with no prior orbit. But either way it is just dead matter, following paths dictated by the nature of the universe. And the major physicists, on the other hand, gain the kudos of being 'geniuses' (a kudos which is part of ordinary reality, not part of their theories) while simultaneously being implicit ultra-advocates for the eternal truths of mathematics. All of this happens on the basis of a physics which can't even achieve long-term predictions with a three-body problem, let alone the multi-body problem of a globular cluster of stars.

    On the other - religious - side of this dimension of ordinary reality the religions can sanctify the great physicists as truth-seekers, and great souls at the level of science, and can construct correspondences (the big bang is the point where god creates the world). Everyone gains kudos here: after all, the promissory note about explaining the mind through the fundamental material particles is not something the religions need to take seriously - science can't even handle a three-body problem, so it it can't be regarded as having started on a material explanation of what religions call the 'soul'.

    The interestablishment of the modern world consists to a large extent of the management of two different areas of spurious profundity. One at the level of matter and mathematics, and at the other at the level of interiority.and of god/gods.

  * 

     And it can be added that libidinally this system is deeply disturbing. At the level of presuppositions (which as presuppositions do not need to rise to the level of discourse) women are still encouraged to see themselves as emotional, child-bearing, less-rational beings, in contrast to the world of males with their tendency to be the primary mathematicians and primary religious metaphysicians, and with their control practises that are recurrently deeply linked to male-god cults. Women are encouraged to believe that God has made them for the purpose of pregnancy, and to feel that they are “closer to nature” than men, revealing the control-mind scenario which at depth consists of women consenting to lie down and be the field of nature ploughed and seeded by the rational, meta-natural man (a kind of sacred controller from outside nature), and simultaneously by the will of God.     

  

    The planet continually twirls, free of grinding gravitational direct contact, in a complex of circular trajectories within the energy-field of space, and it continually is the matrix of the emergence of new formations – new beings, new species, new eco-systems, new storms. It is also the case that it is a spherical complex consisting of external zones of plasma, and internal zones consisting of sky and ground (shot through or threaded with plasma). But even though, using the term in a very impersonal sense, it is just about possible to say that when a woman has become pregnant her womb has been taken over by an intent to produce a human being, there is a fundamental resistance to any idea that it could make sense to say that the intent of specific zones of the planet is to produce species, beings, storms, lightning, lucidities, dreams… But at this stage, it is not a question of elaborating another view of the world, but merely of pointing out the resistance – that is, it is a question of showing that we have a dogmatic image of the world.  There is a body without organs within the human world (the oneirosphere is just one of its most evident aspects): we need to have the modesty to not assume in advance that this body without organs does not extend – in exactly the same sense, or a more extraordinary one – beyond the human world and out into the planet and the cosmos. Spinoza’s view is that everything is the same substance, but whatever might begin to come into focus, the vital thing is to start out without the dogmatic image.

    A process of fully-developed, delineatory critique has here carried thought to the lucid edge of philosophy – to the edge of perceiving the Outside. And there is therefore an obvious answer to the question “how could such a difference in relation to the world around us remain un-noticed?” It remains un-noticed because of the functioning of the control mind, and of the system of reason-revelation within it, which in turn includes – amongst many others – the blocking modalities of the dogmatic image of thought, and the dogmatic image of the world (which in part is to say that it remains unnoticed out of fear of perceiving that the world around us is an eerie tremendum of intensities). But the more important answer is that it does not go un-noticed: people are continually but fugitively aware of the planet as something other in relation to the crudeness attributed to it by the dogmatic image, and, for, instance, the writer of the Tao Te Ching is very much aware of the body without organs. To set out toward the planet (and to leave critique behind as a dominant mode) is to go in a direction in which people are always going, but to travel there deliberately: it is to wake lucidity within thought. 

    Or to put it another way, the bare minimum for doing philosophy is to do everything possible to move toward a perception and abstract-perception of what is to be encountered when the dogmatic image has been rejected as non-philosophical.

   

     But in fact, because other faculties are involved, it is important to not pose the questions of the pragmatics and outcome of this process solely at the level of the awakening of lucidity. Most vitally, it is necessary to see that intent is central to what must take place: in going toward the planet (as a now primary zone for attention) it is a question not just of changing how you think, but of a transformation of perception and action. What you perceive and what you do (which includes the question of the places to which you go) are fundamental – it is not just that thought at this point is  an expression of the intent to have an awareness of the planet, it also to a great extent grows up within a pre-conditional, fostering domain consisting of the other ways in which this intent expresses itself. To come into its full existence the awareness must consist of perception and choice-making as much as thought.

     What might it be to step, just a little, out of the “chronic” time of the manic-depressive rises and falls of the human world? The answer is that it involves an increased awareness of the planet, and an increased awareness of the human oneirosphere (the world of dreamings, stories, religions and processes of “dreaming up” what is taking place), where the oneirosphere is grasped in the now, but also as something like a weather system that is being seen across the last several thousand years. The oneirosphere gives an awareness of the body without organs, and the planet gives the fundamental encompassing world which ensures that attention is freed from the human-fixated preoccupations of the ongoing human disaster. And under these circumstances it becomes clear that there are zones within the oneirosphere which themselves are expressions of this view from outside chronic time, so that the process of escape from the preoccupations starts to be boosted directly from both ‘sides’. And simultaneously, a sustained focus on the body without organs draws everything forward – in fact, this draws everything forward more than anything else.

     And confronted by all the subtle, misleading formations within the oneirosphere what must be used for orientation is a deliberate assessment of the degree of brightness of the dreaming, or way-of-living involved in each case – the degree of delight, love and lack of gravity or judgementalness; the extent to which the dreaming is an expression of Love-and-Freedom. And a crucial test here is to ask the questions – to what extent is the lucidity of female brightness and delight finding an expression within the dreaming, and what are the roles that appear through it for women both in ordinary life, and in its metaphysical-oneiric system?

     The faculty of feeling here becomes an aspect of the process of lucidly assessing the intent embodied by dreamings, and at the same time the focus on Love-and-Freedom – the south-outside – is vital in ensuring that the focus on the planet is ultimately secondary (to an awareness directed toward Love-and-Freedom), so that there is no confusion in relation to the planet (a confusion which could lead to a new dogmatic-religious modality, but which is more likely to lead to a collapse of the intensive journey). It is not at all that the whole world of the planet is to be viewed as the south-outside . We have our diseases at the level of our bodies without organs, and in coming to see that the planet is a vast, quintessentially mysterious world, like a human, but at a higher, more encompassing level, it would be bizarre to expect that the planet would not also be seismically riddled with diseases (there is a strong sense in which the planet in Solaris should be seen as an attempt to envisage a planet with fewer diseases), if only – and this is just the beginning of thinking here – because the control mind that exists within the human population, whatever it is, is very definitely a disease of the planet, simply in that the human world is part of the planet, and the control mind is planetary in its effects.

*

    It is 1987, and in a flat somewhere in Manchester The Smiths are being played “Please, please, please, let me get what I want, Lord knows, it will be the first time.” On the wall of the flat is a poster for Betty Blue.  Earlier Joy Division had been played, Transmission, and Love will Tear Us Apart.

   Cut to dawn in a field ten miles out of Manchester. It is the summer of 1989, and a crowd of thousands who have been dancing all night to acid house are now dancing to Voodoo Ray, by A Guy Called Gerald.

    In one sense the difference here is fundamental, in that a movement to the outside has taken place - the outside, in an initial simple sense, but also in a sense that relates to the waking of the faculties. It is also a key point that women make up something like a half of the audience (Mark Fisher, in Ghosts of my Life, has pointed out that the appeal of Joy Division was predominantly male). But on another level it feels as if the power of the new music is no more intense than that of the music created by Ian Curtis, and is probably less intense (Transmission is surely a better dance track than Voodoo Ray) and as if, in fact, the two worlds at issue are all along two sides of a single syndrome, the depressive side and the manic side, with the difference being a concentration on dance tracks, and, fundamentally, the taking of ecstasy, speed and acid. And in shifting to drug-fuelled euphoria the maleness of the Joy Division world of transcendental bleakness is now found, if not in the audience, then in both the domains of production and of DJ presentation of the music.

    Given the bleakness of social circumstances in Britain at this time, and given that the euphoria is built intrinsically on the self-indulgence of drug use for partying, any wave of transcendental positivity was not going to get far. It is not just that the country is reaching the end of an entire decade of government by Margaret Thatcher, it is that, in that the Future has receded, there has been an anguished reflux in the form of all sorts of fundamentally negative and gothic lines of thought, masquerading as “realism”, and with those lines of thought being manifested as knowing, doomy attitudes and poses. With almost no-one dreaming up new songs and envisaged worlds with the brightness of an awareness of the south-outside, the different kinds of breakthrough at this time had very little to help them, and tended, recurrently, to be constructed to a great extent on the use of drugs. Under these circumstances the lines of flight which emerged – across the spectrum of what can in part be seen as a “syndrome” – often collapsed very rapidly. The drugs vitiated the whole process, and simultaneously the two sides attacked each other. The songs of the ecstasy “side” would be attacked as drugged-up hippy nonsense, and on the other side the danger was that of being attacked, but also that of collapsing into a reaction to the euphoria which took the form of a suicidal negativity. After a while certain emergences began to hold their ground, but they tended to have settled somewhere on the slightly more positive edge of a melodious anguish (Radiohead, and Tricky, in a different way), with only a few singers, such as Bjork, managing to maintain a position on the side with some tendency to maintain views toward transcendental south (later, in Argentina, there will be Rosario Blefari, whose lyrics and way of singing - together with the music of her songs - make her an even more extraordinary figure than the Bjork of Homogenic). But in the earlier phase there was an extreme ferment, in which what escaped very rapidly crashed and burned.

     The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays appeared and then immediately disappeared. More importantly, over in Ireland the sheer ultra-charged intensity (and eerie beauty) of 1992’s Loveless by My Bloody Valentine had no follow-up album. By 1993 some of the first breakthroughs are occuring which will sustain themselves a bit longer, with these taking place in more than one artistic domain (Pablo Honey is from 1993, as is Jeff Noon’s novel Vurt). But Curt Cobain is falling apart, and the next year he will die. And there is a sense in which Acid House itself crashes and burns: as Simon Reynolds points out in Energy Flash, it is in 1992 and 1993 that it collapses into delirial, schizo-dark, claustrophobic soundscapes, before fading away, to be replaced by jungle, techno and trance.

      The processes of collapse took many forms. In 1993, along with Cobain’s heroin there were the drugs that killed River Phoenix, and there was the already existing lack of sustained oneiric inspiration on the part of The Stone Roses, etc, bands who had been hyped-up beyond their achievements to a dramatic extent. Similarly, the dance-and-drugs culture in January produced a 5 week number one, “There’s no Limit” which had a thinness that, taken off the floor of the rave, had a born-already-collapsed quality, a quality of being unable, without drugs and dance, to set you dreaming.

     At a level beyond the western world things will heat up a little in the final years of the decade, and in the first years of the next one, but this will be a temporary and minor phase. And not only that, it has little impact in places in the west such as Britain and the U.S.A. (in the U.S  in the sphere of film the effect is like America turning in its sleep, with films such as Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, Pi, and The Beach). The explosion of jungle and drum and bass in the mid 90s is followed by the  collapse into the more strutting and showy dance-form that is garage (with males in 1999 ads for London clubnights on pirate radio stations shouting “Ladies, if you’ve got a thong, put it on!”). Away from London the constellation of Techno, Trance and Drum and Bass was was still in full effect in 1999, but a new, small ‘c’ conservatism is now pervading the country, in the form of the insidious attitudes of the successful British poster-boy for supposed management of capitalism, Tony Blair (a gradual “conveyor belt” has been set up, conducting people back into the interiority, with its recurrent affirmations of state wars).

     The whole process of setting up an emplacement in the form of an alternative, radical dance culture in one sense goes nowhere, but in another sense achieves a still-easily-available diagram of a heightened form of the music festival (the best exemplars in Britain are perhaps the early Glade festivals, in 2004, 2005 and 2006 ) and an impression is also given that in the final high-intensity phases something that was less self-indulgent, and more aware, in a sustained way, of the south-outside was going repeatedly into effect.

   The assemblage of pop-rock (which started out as an edge-of-ordinary-reality assemblage, with a tendency toward break-out attempts), has two main aspects: firstly, bands, music, the combination of music and words in songs (which take the form of dreamings), instruments; secondly, festivals, gigs, dancing, parties, altered states through the use of drugs, tents, the countryside in which festivals recurrently take place. As the fifty-year initial phase of the assemblage went on (before the collapse into a more institutionalised, captured form) it was the second aspect which came to the forefront, producing circumstances in which conjunctions of people recurrently brought together events informed by enough lucidity for them to be on the outer, liminal edge of ordinary reality 

     But a vital point is that neither knowing how to party nor knowing how to organise a party is in any intrinsic sense an aspect of a movement toward the Future. Also, the more drug self-indulgence is involved the more shaky the ground on which everything is constructed.

     And more fundamental again is the fact that the developments in music and popular fiction/film sub-cultures were to a great extent superficial shifts across the surface of an overall western-world process taking the form of a falling-back from the Future. 

    This process was a movement back toward a pervasive affirmation of state wars (the first Gulf war was a crucial moment), and toward both religion and science/mathematics. Gleick’s book Chaos in 1987, had a significant effect, as did A Brief History of Time, and religion began to be “touched in” within dreamings in the subtle, charged ways that are often the most powerful modes of transmission in the modern world. Suddenly there were famous phrases like “God made me for China, but he also made me fast, and when I run I feel his pleasure” and the shift is made from the outside in the form of the natural world, in The Deer Hunter, to the supplementary dimension, with its angels, of the heaven propounded by 1991’s Vietnam film, Jacob’s Ladder (Dead Man Walking is another example, and this movement has continued toward far more charged, insidious examples, like Mallick’s deeply conservative, religiose film Tree of Life). And the take-up of chaos physics into fiction led to spuriously "vast" post-modern worlds, such as 1993’s Stoppard play Arcadia, (with its return to the 'enlightenment' world of a country estate in Georgian England, and its pseudo-insights delivered through nods to areas covered by Gleick's book). In Britain it is particularly possible for people to mistake mathematics and science for the lucidity of genuine philosophy, and the overall effect of such invocations in the end is to leave people feeling irrevocably cut off from “those who know” (as with the relationship to priests in the past, with their supposed exclusive ability to interpret texts supposed to contain the fundamental secrets); and in their sense of helplessness, to leave people more likely to never even begin to think their way beyond the dogmatic image of the world.

  




*




  It is the summer of 1998. I am walking along a country road, a few miles from Leamington. Once before, a year ago, I was at the place toward which I am walking, but then I had reached it by car, not along the footpath I am now planning to take.

     The flaring-up of the counter-culture has in certain ways been having a sustained effect on me, but this impact is now diminishing (it is very much the case that I have been boosted by it, but the boost will only really be accessible in leaving it largely behind me). A new mood of sunlit sobriety is beginning to appear in my life, together with a feeling that to get beyond myself - to wake myself up - I will need to move away from the boom-and-bust ecstasies of this counter-culture toward ways of reaching the outside that are sustainable, capable of becoming an upward spiral (and too often to rage against the machine is to be an unsuspected aspect of the machine's functioning).

    There is an escarpment a mile away – it is not high or steep, and is mostly fields, although with a few areas of woodland. There are tall summer plants on the verges. The road is quite busy.

   I arrive at the Fosse Way, the old roman road, cutting across at right angles. I go over it, and the road now continues as a quiet country lane, with very few vehicles on it. 

     The escarpment goes up in two stages. More than three quarters of the way up there is a flat area, with another rise a few fields away. As you are reaching the top of the first hill, an old windmill is silhouetted against the sky, in the middle of a field to the right of the road -  its sails still in place, though not in motion. This will turn out to have been there since the first half of the seventeenth century: it is called the "Chesterton Windmill" - it stands, unused, looking out over a very wide expanse of Warwickshire countryside. It is circular in cross section, and has a quality of being both stubby and elegant. The lower part of it is open to the wind - a shelter of a kind - in the form of five pillars and connecting arches. 

    Having gone past this accidental "folly" - unpretentious and isolated in the middle of its field - and having left behind the straightness and heavy traffic of the roman road, there is a feeling of having gone a little deeper into a quietly anomalous, mysterious England. An England which is a tract of land forming a part of a Spinozistic, eeriely sublime planet; a place of encounters with the unknown.

   

     I walk past a farm, and the road goes down a little, and then up to the top of the escarpment, which has a few houses visible at the edge. Having got to the top there is a stone sign - it says "Harbury" - and walking onto the flat ground I find I am in a sleepy unaffected village, a village that will turn out to be surprisingly large, and to have the curious property of being constructed a little like a labyrinth, with many windings of the roads in a central area that is spread out across a largish expanse (but without any "grand" features or big perspectives - there is an old village green but it is not in the centre, but off to one side). 

In the middle are three pubs, built around corners from each other. One of these pubs is respectively opposite and alongside the two village grocery stores - it is called The Shakespeare. 

    Set back from one road - near the centre - there is another windmill, this one made of wood, but without sails (it has apparently not been converted into anything, it has just been left as a relic). Near to it is the rusty forecourt of a tiny petrol station, which at the time of my first walks through Harbury gave the impression that it might still be in use - 17 years later it is still there, but now far more delapidated (it is a time-capsule, though without any sign to mark it with the stamp of "history", and although it has no sinister aspect, it is deeply suggestive of the petrol station in the final episode of Sapphire and Steel). On this same lane - which has the Shakespeare on it when you arrive in the centre - there are several cottages made of honey-coloured stone, along with many plain, unassuming houses; there is a small area of grass on one side of the road, with a bench and two small horse-chestnut trees, and there are one or two, well-tended small gardens that in summer have impressive flowers, like hollyhocks. Harbury feels sleepy because the old petrol station is left, year after year, and because it is attractive without any quality of it trying to sell itself.

     I take a wrong turn, and have to go back on myself, and then I get onto the road that leads southeast out of the village. On my left are open fields, and then after a few hundred yards there are fields on the right as well. I walk for a while in this new area of countryside, a terrain which is relatively flat, but is an upland in relation to the area from the first part of my walk. 

      

     And now, looking across fields, to the left, I can see the place toward which I have been walking. I have not seen this view before - nearly a mile away, beneath a wide area of trees I can just make out the top of bluish-grey cliffs. And ahead of me I can see the footpath sign for the path I have seen on the ordnance survey map.

     I climb over a stile, and the path goes down alongside a hedge, bordering a long, arable field. The hedge is an old one - wide, and full of plants, such as blackberries. The cliffs become much more visible, but they remain largely obscured by the terrain - a wide, inconspicuous fringe of rock. And I know that the path does not go down the field to my destination, but goes past a hundred yards to the southwest, giving me no right of access. I feel like someone trying to get into "the zone" in Tarkovsky's Stalker.

   

    And sure enough, the path turns right through the hedgerow - on a narrow, wooden footbridge - and then continues on a slight diagonal through two hay meadows. I arrive at a last stile, and here in the sunlight, amongst the hawthorn branches and stems of blackberries, there is a small sign, on the low, wooden "Public Footpath" signpost, which says "the Blue Lias Rings," with a picture of an ammonite. I realise that I am not just at the edge of "the zone," but that there is an indication, of an unexpected kind, that it would be normal - if not straightforwardly legal - to turn left beyond the stile, rather than following the footpath straight ahead across the field. 

    Standing on the top of the stile, I can see it . A large lake, bright in the afternoon sunlight, perhaps a third of a mile across, with an island half-visible in the middle, and with low cliffs beyond it. 

     I walk down a slope to the left, seeing small blue dragonflies zipping through the air, and then hovering, before shooting off again. There is a big wooden gate, which I climb over, and then I am in a flat area above the lake, which is mostly grass, but with a few wild-roses, here and there. I walk twenty feet, and I am at the top of the cliff. 

     The lake has two-thirds of a circle of cliffs around it, which are around forty feet high, although at one point on the opposite side from where I am standing they are perhaps seventy feet in height. It has two large flat islands in it, joined by a delapidated wooden footbridge, and completely covered in scrubby trees, together with a line of three barge-like islands, each around thirty feet long, and separated by the same sort of distance, which are beneath where I am standing, all of them only around twenty feet away from the bank. There is also a long flat promontory - covered in big wild roses bushes and other shrubs such as gorse and elder - that stretches into the lake from the opposite side, with a large deep area of water extending alongside into a reach of the lake beyond the circle of cliffs, and with a narrow inlet - shallower and smaller in extent - to the right of the promontory, an inlet that is closer to where I am standing.

     Everything is serene, and striking beautiful. Humans have been here and created the shape of the terrain, and left one or two industrial remnants - in long grass to my right there are some thirty foot lengths of extremely rusted metal - but then they have left it, and the whole place has become an island of rich, hauntingly lovely intensity.

     From the point of view of ordinary reality this is "just" a quarry lake - a quarry lake which has been left to a great extent untouched since the quarry was created in the nineteenth century, at the time of the building of the railways. But in the course of this visit and one in June the next year (also on a hot, sunny day) I become aware that have I found a singular, profoundly inspiring and energising place, a place that seems to have this effect through its overall, dream-inducing atmosphere, and through its extraordinary diversity of plants, animals and terrain-elements. 

    It is inconspicuous, unregarded, un-signposted - and it is a very extraordinary, quietly sublime terrain. An initially very-human place, it has become an island to which rare species have moved to survive (or where they have held on, having originally been there). There are emerald-coloured "emperor" dragonflies (I have not seen them before, and the next year I will see a hawk behaving like a swallow, flying low over the lake, catching them). There are bee orchids, as well as very large numbers of some kind of white-and-lilac orchid, growing on the cliff-tops, and visible on the barge-like islands. There are grebe on the lake, with their "crests" (a bird only I have ever seen in photos before) as well as two pairs of swans. There are huge expanses of yellow water liles; there are grass snakes that can be seen swimming in the lake from the cliffs; there are woodpeckers nesting in a stand of big willows that grow on a hard-to-reach area of cliff-ledge; there are buzzards; there are tall mullein flowers, sometimes covered in the caterpillars of the "mullein shark moth"; and there are the species that are present in large numbers, like the small dragonflies, and the wild roses.

    

     In relation to the elements of the terrain, it is a singular  expanse of cliff, water and islands - but also, if you pick up a piece of rock from the edge of the cliffs it will almost certainly have ammonite fossils within it (the lake is on the narrow band of blue lias that runs in a complex "line" from Lyme Regis in Dorset to Whitby in Yorkshire). 

      But the iteration of all of these elements cannot really convey the encompassing atmosphere of the place. It is as if - where you were not really expecting it - the planetary is experienced, as opposed to an experience of some landscape in England. A gap has been made in the mantle of rock, creating a vertical ring of visible stone, and into the gap water has arrived, without any human plan for it to be there - water which in turn reflects the sky. And as a result a planetary perspective very easily arrives, even without the assistance of some wide, distant horizon - and not in the sense of triggering separate lines of thought, but in the sense of seeing and feeling a terrain more intensely, but within the implied horizon of the planet, of which the terrain is a "face" or "facet." (And it is also not that "England" entirely disappears - in fact it becomes more powerfully in effect, again pre-eminently  in an implied way, but as just one zone within a wider space of tonalities of dreaming and intent).

      (The way-through in such places is not by way of thinking about the planet. You encounter the place, without thinking, and the horizon becomes planetary as opposed to local or national (and afterwards valuable thinking about the planet is quite likely to occur) and you allow the sublime intensity of the place to sweep you away into an encounter with the unknown).

      

    (But it is important to see that the doorway is perhaps not entirely the place: it seems in some ways better to see it as also your own intent to use the place as a doorway. Language is difficult here - it would also be appropriate to say that your intent to stop thinking and encounter the unknown is the key that opens the door that is the place).

    During that visit in the summer of 1998 I walked all around the edge of the lake, and then out onto the promontory. I then found my way along a cliff-top path - a path which would have completely disappeared two or three years later - to an astonishingly secluded ledge under tall willows growing half-way up the cliff-top. Surrounded by very steep, undergrowth-blocked slopes, and the cliff below it, and also protected from view by a screen of leaves, it is a flat space, overlooking the lake, with enough room for one tent (several years later, I will have an exceptionally intense, striking experience in this place, going there on my own, pitching my tent, and taking liberty cap mushrooms at dusk on a summer evening).

    But my memory of that first visit to the hidden ledge under the willow trees has a quiet, striking quality about it, in the context of what happened afterwards. In the place where I knew it was perfect to pitch a tent there had obviously been a fire quite recently: there was a circular area of burned ground about three feet across, giving the impression that it had been well contained (I should add that I never had a fire myself when I was in this place). Afterwards there was never any sign that anyone went there - the grass covered over all signs of the fire, and the path disappeared, leaving me with the impression that it had been "vacated" by others, just before I arrived. And the idea I was given was that this would be a good place for a group of friends to have a party. Looking back, this idea feels like the inchoate completion of a process: a network of escape-alliances - which could be extremely disconnected and temporary,- faintly visible on the horizon.

    Again and again at Harbury Lake there was a sense of something "other" in effect, and in effect to the extent to which you had the strength of mind to let go, brightly and fascinatedly, toward a perception of the place. And soon I would be living and working in London. But the appearance in my life of a "refrain" of visits to Harbury Lake was a vital aspect of a new kind of movement toward the outside. At the beginning this movement also consisted in me starting, occasionally, to walk the ten miles along the Stoneleigh country lane between Leamington and Coventry, instead of taking a bus (on one occasion I walked back from Coventry in the middle of the night), and later it would in part take the form of me travelling to wilderness areas of forested mountains in different places around the world. But at the outset what had the greatest impact was the discovery of a post-industrial or Tarkovskian "zone," hidden away in an inconspicuous area of Warwickshire countryside.

*

   This is the first story I wrote (I had started writing a story on many occasions before this, but had never got close to finishing one). The idea came to me when I walked to Harbury Lake for the second time, in June of 1999. As with the year before, it was a hot, sunny day, with lots of dragonflies, and no-one around. I was sitting by the lake, and both on the walk and in the hour or so since I had arrived I had been recurrently attempting to stop thinking and become perception (with only a minimal degree of success). The idea in fact arrived at a point where I did something which I had done all the time as a child: in looking at small objects in front of me, I imagined they were very large and then envisaged events taking place within the 'dream terrain'. This story perhaps has an excessive slowness, and shows my lack of experience with writing fiction, but there are many reasons why it should be included at this point, alongside its connection to Harbury Lake.

Ktarizon: Deep Water                                                                                             12

    Who was this woman, Shev, with her bizarre brother Mitya? Kerry had run into her a few days after they had come back from their dive to the sea-jungle, and she wanted to meet to discuss early Ktarizon technology. He felt compelled to consider the idea she was a surveillance agent with a subtle cover, a suspicion which was not made more comfortable by her obviously being at a martial arts level of fitness. And the fact he had just taken part in an illegal dive was something that gave real substance to the thought that he and his friends might have drawn the attention of some adaptary-industrial agency.

     It was early morning, and he was sitting at the window of his cheap, top-floor flat. When he had woken up, he had been having a confused dream about swimming down a river. The dream came back now, remaining vague, out of focus. But in its wake it brought a sudden, powerful memory of returning from the blackout after the dive, rocked by ocean swell, and staring up at a vast expanse of Ktarizon sky. The memory went through him like intense light, and brought with it a faint return of the eerie, serene feeling that had been a part of the experience. Staring at a low, angular skyline of factories and hurricane-battered accommodation stacks, it was hard to believe what had taken place six days before. He shook his head involuntarily, feeling the raw astonishment again, an astonishment that kept being tinged with fear. He felt that in a deep sense it was dangerous to know about such things. The fear brought him back to the question of the stranger who he had agreed to meet again in a day’s time.

     Three days after getting back from the New Maroc coast he had been scanning some first generation Ktarizon labyrinth game-worlds on an all purpose system at a local subterranean tek-centre. He had been feeling tired and dissociated – a state that seemed to be the reflux of the phase of poised exultation which had followed the dive – and he was taking notes in a dull, mechanical way. For several years he had been trying to write a book about the vidworld mutations that took place in the early stages of the colonisation of the planet. He had been doing this while working for low pay in various roles in shops and remote-sales warehouses. He had come to the tek-centre from a shift, and under bad circumstances he had been attempting to pick up lines of thought that had been dormant for several weeks. At the system to his right there was a woman with short, dark hair, whose bare arms had noticeably well-rounded muscles. At one point, he realised she was leaning over, looking curiously at notes he was taking on a screen-pad.

      ‘So you’re studying those games?’

      He looked up, and found that she had extremely striking eyes, that seemed to have an acute, singular focus. What she had said seemed more like a statement than a question.

      In the conversation that followed it became apparent she had a subtle knowledge of the geography and early human history of Ktarizon, and that she had an eclectic, though patchy knowledge of its game-worlds. It seemed she was a teacher of some kind. They had been talking for more than an hour when she told him that her brother had recently bought some unusual antique game devices. At this point she suddenly got up, saying that her brother was at another terminal, and that she would find him. He then saw her in the distance, coming back with a young man who was caught up in a continual flurry of twitching movements. The man was introduced to Kerry as the woman’s brother, Mitya, and despite having a shock of red hair he certainly looked like her brother. He was very friendly, although at the same time seemed to be abstracted, as if connected to some frenetic world that was generating the tics. He said it was fine for his sister to show him the devices , which apparently were hard-wired in their cases rather than being transferable software. The games apparently involved increasingly complex selections of colours and shapes in ways that matched mineral and vegetal forms of Ktarizon. They were not really labyrinth games at all, but sounded interesting.  He and the woman arranged to meet in the same place two days later. The brother walked off to queue for a fast lift, his right arm twitchily drawing shapes in the air, and a little afterwards Shev left as well. Kerry felt obscurely that he had been manipulated.

     That evening he and the three others who had made the dive had met, in a deep-level flat belonging to Carl, who was doing physiographical programming for a small games house, and who specialised in particularly disturbing monsters.  The conversation had once more revolved around the dive, going over things that had been discussed several times before, and with little in the way of fresh lines of thought. At one point he broke the flow of their communal obsession, and described his encounter with Shev and her brother. Everyone was inclined to think that what had happened was an ordinary coincidence (avoidance of paranoid responses was one of the basic tendencies of the group).  Raising himself out of a sprawled six-foot torpour on the floor, Paulo briefly became worried, but Kerry’s description of the brother’s tics seemed to magically dispel his concern. ‘They both sound interesting’ he said. Karen, a marine biologist – and the member of the group to whom he felt closest – simply said that going to meet Shev would not in itself make things worse, in the unlikely event that she was working for an agency.

     Carl laughed, ‘Meet her, seduce her, turn her into a double agent. We need inside information. Maybe they know things about tics that we don’t.’

      Various monitors were insistently signalling that the weather was about to go crazy. But at present it seemed like a perfect morning, with sharp shadows from the twin suns. The convoluted branches of tendril-trees were precise and motionless above one of the walled gardens, their yellow-orange leaves picked out brightly in the clear light. He was lucky, he had no shift that day, and would be able to watch the storm develop.

      It was curious to think that almost everyone he knew would be baffled or repelled by the idea of looking forward to watching a storm. This was partly because many species of flying insect tended to swarm in large numbers before storms – and insects had a very bad press because of some species having been vectors for various fatal diseases – but also because people were afraid of the extreme violence of Ktarizon storms, despite the fact that four hundred years of harsh experience had ensured buildings were effectively impregnable. Tornadoes were very common, and some of the storm-clouds had giant tornado-cores, which ran from ground level to near the tops of the clouds. There were also tiny, slowly drifting plasma-fields that could appear during storms, as well as multiple lightning strikes, known as cage-lightning, that could play around buildings or trees for several seconds. However, Kerry felt that a lack of interest in such things was somehow symptomatic of a wider separation from the terrains of Ktarizon.

     The vast majority of people on the planet lived in the sprawling underground zones of the cities, cities which also had above-ground accommodation, but which, like icebergs, tended to be immensely bigger than their visible area. To a great extent the inhabitants of these cities only came to the surface to visit the dome-protected parks (parks with Earth trees and plants were particularly popular), and to attend major surface sporting events, such as the big piloted and remote air-races. There were large numbers of towns and communities that tended to be constructed mostly above ground – Kerry had grown up in a small surface town twenty kilometres from a city – but nonetheless it remained the case that ninety percent of Ktarians lived underground. The fact people generally had only minimal contact with native terrains seemed to foster a large variety of phobias and paranoias in connection with the animals, plants and weather events of the planet. For those in love with the incredible environments of Ktarizon – not to mention those who had become hinterland religionists and dogmatists of various kinds – there was often a huge gulf between their responses to the planet’s terrains and those of the sub-surface inhabitants of the cities.

    In part the early history of the colonisation of Ktarizon had been the story of clashes between, on the one hand, the ‘terra-forming’ tendencies of the giant corporations and the states they helped to set up, and, on the other, the resistance to certain major environmental changes on the part of dissident groups that had come to be classified as ‘land fundamentalists.’ On another – deeper – level the process had been one of tensions internally and externally on the part of very disparate corporations and societies, and of endless hybridisations, as successful non-corporate strategies for dealing with bizarre environments were adopted by the corporations and states, and as dissident groups themselves took up patterns of modification of eco-systems and terrains, despite their ongoing resistance, directed particularly against the authority of the adaptary-industrial agencies (organisations which tended to combine prospecting, terrain-modification and undercover surveillance). What had come to overlay these early, very violent struggles were disputes about land rights. The battles over adaptation had partly been succeeded by sporadic battles over territory, generated by the presence of prized natural resources in the areas involved. However it remained the case that the majority of Ktarizon’s land mass had little or no human population.

     Kerry and his friends from the dive had drifted together in part because they shared a fascination with the hinterland terrains of the planet, and in particular with the extraordinary worlds of Ktarizon’s vast oceans. Their trips to wild environments in the vicinity had been aimed at encountering a large array of different creatures, plants and terrains. They had managed to see several different rare Ktarian animals. There had also been a double process of tracking down known psychotropic and physio-active plants, and of attempting by experiment to find new ones. A main success had been the discovery of a large area where you could find a type of vine which contained a mild but subtle hallucinogen locally known as ‘twist.’ Kerry and Carl had become skilled divers, having been helped by Paulo and Karen, who had both been diving since they were children. On one occasion they had swum, well protected by various weapons, with drifting groups of nautiloids – amorphous, translucent formations thirty feet across, made up of tiny organisms that worked together to capture small sea creatures.

   Not long after this, he and Karen and Paulo had gone on a trip to a coastal area where you could find a form of red Ktarian opal called sarnite. Instead of finding sarnite, they had met two extraordinary old women who gave a new direction to the group’s exploratory tendencies. The two women had given them first-hand accounts of fugue-diving.

     The suns had now been cut out by storm-clouds coming from the opposite direction to the one Kerry was facing. He could still see a large area of blue sky, but the light was now very murky. Staring at the sky, Kerry leaned back and once again went through what had taken place three weeks before.

     They had travelled, by jet, and then on foot, to a headland of a remote, semi-desert coast. It was the place where the women had been diving for many years, and their advice had been followed in detail. Kerry remembered the westward view from the broken cliff over a submerged rock landscape toward the vague, dark green expanses of ocean jungle. In turn, he remembered the dive to the sea forest with extreme vividness. It had been a kind of terrifying ritual of underwater stages, where the terror shaded sometimes into an unknown kind of exhileration, a strange, charged acuteness of focus. The downward dive following the initial broad shelf of rock, sloping to the left and down. The swim back up the shoreward cliff of the narrow rock plateau (this had been tentatively recommended by their informants as a way of preparing their bodies for the major ascent later). The traversing of the downward slope of the plateau as far as the cliff at its opposite end.  And then the drop down into the uncanny world of the sea-jungle, and to the extremely dangerous depth of three hundred feet below the surface. Kerry remembered all of this, and everything up to and including the point where they found one of the places where large bubbles of air were coming up from the sea-floor.  There had been a long pause, given a steely edge by the fact that there was now no longer any easy way of escaping from the situation. Then there was the memory of them breathing from the amorphous, slipping globes as they emerged, and of a raw shock or thrill of anticipation, and then – cutout, fugue, blackout.

     Unaccountably, as with a large number of people before them, they had come round on the surface of the ocean four hours later, and three hundred feet higher.  And for many hours afterwards, again, as with some or most of the people before them, they had all experienced a kind of perceptual hyper-focus,  and fluency of concentration.  They had made their way back to the shore, experiencing a powerful serenity in which apparently any issue could be addressed with lucidly connective intelligence – with the one exception of the event which had just taken place.

   For most of Ktarizon blackout diving, or ‘fugue-diving’ was simultaneously an obvious sign of insanity, and a kind of frontier legend about the early phase of the colonisation when the more courageous settlers of a new life-planet were held to have done endless irresponsible things out of a three-way combination of excitement, cultic religiosity, and ignorance. These two, slightly contradictory views were not generally supported by much detailed knowledge on the subject, a state of affairs that was now being made more pervasive as a result of the practise having almost disappeared – at least in a publically visible form. Fugue-diving had been made illegal, and there was an ambient, vague belief that it caused a spectrum of conditions from insanity to heart disease – a belief that in fact seemed to have very little foundation.

    The knowledge that was freely was that at a wide variety of depths around Ktarizon’s ocean coastlines there were hugely diverse areas of tall underwater plants. These areas were known as sea-jungle, or sea-forest, and, importantly, in some areas they were oxygenous environments, in that they included gigantic plants that were fixed to the sea-bed and breathed oxygen through tubes of different lengths that were sometimes free-floating and sometimes attached by limpet-like suckers to rocks and cliffs. The scale and richness of these environments were generally thought, rightly or wrongly, to be the result of the fact that the planet had no moon, and therefore had oceans that were almost without tides. However, one of the most remarkable aspects of these sea-bed environments was that they included, and to a great extent grew out of, a very diverse world of pseudo-mycological or pseudo-fungal organisms, that in many cases had large and complex subterranean bodies, rather than only having filaments and fruiting bodies.  These aquatic fungal species formed a densely complex symbiotic carpet that ran through sand and very deeply through sea-jungle areas of rotting matter, and which in fact extended far beyond areas of sea-forest, forming in a sense a single multi-species mycelium around almost all the terrains of the ocean beds. This symbio-mycelium was itself, in turn, symbiotically and parasitically linked to some of the ocean plants that breathed oxygen. Many of the mycelium species lived partly on the air inhaled in vast quantities by these forms of marine vegetation. And it was one of these species that created the large bubbles of exhaled oxygenous vapour which produced the ‘sea-fugues,’ or mysterious lapses of memory.

     Very little seemed to be known about the effects of the mycelium chemicals on the brains and bodies of those who absorbed them.  It was clear that they degraded extremely rapidly, and only had an effect at high levels of ocean pressure; and also that they made possible a fluency of motion and breathing which somehow turned rising from great depths to the ocean surface into a probabilistically safe process. Perhaps the most staggering fact about fugue-diving was that there seemed to very few reliably documented cases of death from the bends after ingestion of the chemicals involved, whereas it was generally accepted that those who backed out at the last moment stood a worse than fifty-fifty chance of surviving. What everyone knew for certain was that there was always a break of between three and four hours, and that the return of ordinary experience was always at the point when the person returned to the surface of the ocean.

     The approaching storm was now visible to his right. The monitor on his wrist had decided that although it was a violent storm, it would only skirt his area of the city. The one built onto the wall – an older model that needed re-tuning – was non-committal.

     As he expected, it was the one on his wrist that was right. When the storm came there was a lot of lightning, and for a while the ground was white with more than two inches of small hail, but there were no plasma-fields, and he saw only one strike of cage lightning, and this was on a distant building.

    He made coffee, and watched the crystal-white expanses of the storm receding to the southwest. Storms came and went, transforming terrains, making them break into life, leaving some things dislocated or destroyed. The two women who had told him and his friends about fugue-diving had been like a storm. They had come and they had gone, and they had left things changed. Eriba and Jean had been long-time artistic collaborators within a small coastal community that had specialised for several generations in making jewellery using shells, and local gemstones. Around ten years before there had been an outbreak of a fatal but slow-acting disease, and both of the women had contracted it. Remembering old stories within the community of fugue-diving, and feeling now that they had very little to lose, the two women – both of them at this point in their early sixties – had taken the extraordinary step of experiencing it for themselves. In a sense, in doing this they had become outcasts twice over.  Even though the disease was only very minimally infectious, they were already living in a kind of semi-quarantine. But once what they were doing became generally known they came to be looked on with extreme suspicion (although it seemed that out of old frontier habits no-one in the community was prepared to inform on them).

     In different ways both of the women had strong senses of humour – Eriba talked and laughed all the time and Jean in contrast was often glintingly silent – and they did not have any tendency to attempt to proselytise for their actions, though admittedly there seemed to be few people in the settlement who would have been open to persuasion. But when they started getting occasional visits from Kerry and his friends they seemed nonetheless to be acutely concerned to pass on everything they knew. On no occasion had either of them remembered anything tangible from the fugue period of a dive, but they were convinced that learning to remember was a real possibility, and ideas about achieving this goal punctuated their careful descriptions of their experiences.

     In a sense what had taken place only crystallised into a purpose at the point when their encounters with the two women had ended. Five months earlier Karen had tried to contact them to arrange a visit, and had discovered that not long before they had both died in the local hospital.

     Shev’s face lit up when she saw him arriving. His misgivings were going to be hard to sustain in the face of a smile like that. She was wearing loose, white clothes: her well-cut shirt had no arms, and seemed to be made out of some kind of Ktarian linen

.

     “I thought maybe you wouldn’t come.”

      He paused. “No – I want to see these toys of yours” he said, grinning.

      She suggested going to a local vidbar, on the basis that they would be able to see the devices under better light conditions. On the way there he took in the lithe, muscular way in which she moved.

     He commented on her clothes. “You look like you’re a martial arts instructor.”

    She laughed. “I am a martial arts instructor. That’s my evening job.”

     The devices were definitely early Ktarizon, from about a hundred years after the start of colonisation. They were basically synthesisers for very complex arrays of colour, shape and motion, and they had small, sphero-directional controls for hands-on modulations. In these respects they were not unusual, although the colour palette was quite impressive. What was relatively uncommon, was that if you selected certain complexes of colour and distribution hidden graphic art programs would take over, in the form either of abstract arrays or of often very effective motion-depictions of real and imagined creatures or terrains, including very fluid terrains, such as zones consisting of plasma. Apart from the very high quality of the embedded art-works what was most unusual was that, according to Shev, it became possible after a while to work out what arrays would stand most chance of triggering one of the hidden programs.

     “I have a friend, Carl, who’s a programmer, and he’d be very interested in these. Although he’d probably want more monsters.”

     “Is that Carl Li?”

     “Yes. How did you know?”

      “You said Carl, and I know his monsters. He did those amazing swarm-creatures in the catacombs in Dark Dimension, didn’t he?”

    On hearing about Carl there was real interest in her voice, but a lack of any adolescent excitement. He had to put to one side the fact that her explanation of the guess did not seem quite sufficient.

   They talked for a long time, on this occasion ranging well beyond the subject of Ktarizon’s effects on video-worlds. At times they paused to watch sequences being shown on the screen-wall of the bar. Eventually Shev leaned back and stretched herself like a cat, taking her head through quite a complex motion.

     “Have you got time to hang around a bit longer?” she said. “Only, my place is nearby, and there’s this other device you’d really enjoy seeing. Mitya found it at the same time as these, but he won’t let it out of his sight.”

     “So what kind of thing is it? he said, feeling very intrigued, but somehow a bit apprehensive.

     “Well, it’s maybe a sort of joke, in a way. But you could say it’s a kind of compass, or maybe a cross between a compass and a labyrinth.”

     Shev also lived above ground. Her third-floor flat was small, but faced north toward the trajectory of the suns, and even better, it had a balcony.  The balcony was a mass of plants, many of which were suspended climbing plants that festooned downwards, softening the light, and throwing intricate webs of shadow. The main room of the flat, on the other hand, was a thick tangle of different kinds of equipment, scattered clothes, and encroaching kibble. In a corner, screened from the light, there was a bed, which was piled with different kinds of drums. Mitya was sitting on the edge of it, apparently holding some arcane computer mother-board. He stood, looking a bit surprised, but greeted Kerry in a friendly way, his free arm caught up in tics. Moving carefully, Kerry found his way over a low stack of boxes and papers topped off by an ashtray containing the remains of several twist cigarettes.

      Looking around, he picked up a drum, and tapped out a rhythm. He was an indifferent drummer, but today his sense of rhythm seemed a little less constrained than normal, and he surprised himself. Mitya gave him an interested look. He tucked a drum under an arm, and tentatively tried to pick out the same rhythm. His tics stopped completely when he started drumming. The light from the suns shone through his tangle of red hair, and made him look partly ethereal, and partly like some hunched ghoul struggling over an incantation. The attempt to match the rhythm was only partly successful. Kerry repeated his sequence. Again, Mitya seemed to stumble. The next time, Kerry tapped out the rhythm more slowly, and with added emphasis. Mitya looked up at him in a dead-pan way, and suddenly produced a crisp, astonishingly fluent series of improvisations on the rhythm, moving up to more and more incredible speeds of hand-movement, and then down again, in a controlled arc, to the initial speed. The whole thing took about two minutes.

    “Cunning deception” Kerry said.

    Mitya grinned. The grin slid lop-sidedly into a flurry of tics in the form of a rapid-fire parody of some of Kerry’s more conventional facial expressions, ending with the look of grudging respect from a moment before.

   Kerry raised his eyebrows and smiled, a little awkwardly.

   After a pause, Mitya looked over at Shev with a strange, nodding expression that seemed to be saying a lot. What he said outwardly was “So let’s play with this compass.”

    He realised that he trusted Shev and Mitya completely, even if it was necessary to be careful out of loyalty to his friends. He now felt convinced that everything was far too elaborate for him to be in the clutches of a state agency, but his reasons for trusting them were at  deeper level than this.

     They sat down around a table, Mitya opposite him, and Shev on his right. Shev took something out of a plain rectangular case, and laid it on the table. The device was small, and matt-black, with a screen, a keyboard, and taking up the top part of the instrument, a kind of compass face with the letters A and B written respectively at the top and bottom of the rim, and – beneath a disc of glass – a broad, rotating needle or arrow with the enigmatic word ‘SOUTH’ written on it. Below and above the word was a sigil in the form of a circle with a band or thin section running horizontally across the centre. The needle was currently fixed in what seemed to be a default position: it was pointing horizontally to the left. Embedded into the underside of the object were the words THIS IS NOT A GUIDE TO YOUR LIFE.

    The process of using the machine was simple, and as well as seeming to be a kind of elaborate joke, it had a natural tendency to develop into a kind of game for two players. The screen had two sections, one marked A, and the other marked B. You entered different things into the two sections, and then keyed the main operating tab. The result was that the needle instantly selected one of the choices as ‘south.’ On rare occasions the needle moved only to the other neutral position. You could enter position anything – words, combinations of words, names, titles of books, numbers. It had weighted or non-random patterns of selection for an astonishingly wide range of entries, but if, for instance, the entries were random letters there was a fifty-fifty chance of selection. It was rapidly apparent that the device had unconventional responses, but that there was method in its madness.  It selected ‘space’ over ‘time,’  ‘lucidity’ over ‘reason,’ and ‘5’ over ‘4’ (prime numbers were always selected over non-primes). Words connected with art, the martial arts and philosophy would almost invariably defeat words associated with state institutions and corporate processes.  The name of a species of animal would almost always trump an artist or an art-work. And the criterion at work with regions seemed to be the presence of mountains, jungles or deserts, although the device was also weighted in favour of certain towns, and of specific areas within cities.

      For a while he and Shev played this game with the names of musicians, and then with the names of albums. The device had almost certainly been made about a hundred years ago, but it had been updated around eighty years after this, because it ‘knew’ names and words up to this point. At one point Shev selected the famous album Incursions from the last century. After a couple of failures, Kerry decided to go back four hundred years to a little known music-vid collection. He tapped in the name Lose Control, humming a tune from one of its pieces as he did so.

      Shev smiled, the needle had gone to the 9 ‘o clock neutral position. ‘Wave Rising’ she said, quoting the name of the song whose tune he had hummed. ‘Lose Control can’t be trumped, she added, like Incursions.’

     There was a pause, and then Shev started using the names of books. They continued playing in a mechanical way for a while. Kerry was now feeling bored by the process. The machine was a kind of enjoyable abstract labyrinth of opinions or selections, but the game was not exactly gripping. He was feeling he would prefer to talk about some of the things whose names they were employing. He sat back from the table.

     In response Shev said “We’ll do one more.”

     To his amazement, he saw that she had entered the word ‘fugue-diving.’

    He felt Shev had registered the interest and simultaneous immobility of his response. “Don’t say anything” she said. She then set out to attempt to trump or equal this word with the most weighted or prioritised words that could be used. She tried unsuccessfully with ‘cosmos,’ ‘love,’ ‘human,’ ‘art’ and ‘science.’ She then tried and failed with ‘future,’ ‘Ktarizon,’ ‘life,’ ‘freedom’ and several others. She then went through a shorter version of the same process with variants of the term in question:  ‘blackout dive’ ‘ocean-fugue,’ ‘death-diving,’  ‘sea-blackout.’

     It seemed the labyrinth had an Ariadne’s thread. No matter what was placed in the balance alongside, the needle always swung in favour of one thing.

      “So us meeting wasn’t an accident” he said.

     They had found him through hacking two different data-bases. They had hacked a travel information base, and got names of people who had visited areas where there was known to be the kind of sea-jungle with the psychotropic myselim.  Shev had then done a very sophisticated and very illegal hack on the node analysis data-base of a company that bought and sold information about specific patterns of call-up of infonet services. Kerry’s name had been on the New Maroc booking, and Kerry’s infonet uses showed a very marked interest in fugue-diving and connected subjects.

     Shev and Mitya had dived twice, in a completely different area of Ktarizon, and one that was even more remote and dangerous than the New Maroc  coast. They had done this in part because they believed it could be beneficial for Mitya’s tics, which had always been absent when he was swimming. Alongside stories about fugue-diving causing madness, there were also stories about nural and physiological maladies being cured. However, they had also done it out of an intense curiosity that was triggered initially by the ‘compass,’ and that was only increased by what they learned afterwards. Kerry was taken aback by the extent to which he was moved by their accounts of their first dive. He now knew personally the extent of the terror and astonishment involved in the experience, and waves of a kind of raw, powerful empathy kept affecting him as a result of Shev’s and Mitya’s accounts of their dives. On the first dive in particular they had faced far tougher circumstances than those of the dive done by himself and his friends. Mitya had been nowhere near as fit as Shev, and was ill for several days on the way to the place where they had dived.

       It was several days later, and Kerry had met Paulo to walk a few miles across the surface of the city. At the end of the street they could already see the building toward which they were walking, though the apartment was in a complex beneath it. They were going to meet up with Carl and Karen, and with Shev and her brother, who would be meeting the other members of Kerry's group for the first time. Paulo, like Kerry had grown up in scurf hinterland, rather than in the city, and the paranoias of city life seemed to provide permanent fuel for his sense of humour. He was a part-time technician for a static chip company using nano-bots for construction, and he was a self-trained mineralogist - he often made meticulous drawings of crystals and mineral cross-sections. He had real green hair, cut short. The green hair had been in his family for generations.

    He turned to Kerry and said “You know in one way I feel things havn't changed at all, but in another way I feel they’ve changed completely.”

   “You mean that the compass doesn’t really tell us anything. But what about the way they’ve changed?"

    “There are six of us involved now. I kind of think that’s a big difference. Maybe it’ll make the difference in terms of finding a way of remembering what happens.  You know, more resources to pool together.”

    Kerry nodded. “Like a wolf-pack. Going from four to six isn’t merely numerical. It’s a question of what things the pack can do.”

     Paulo responded by howling.

    Carl’s flat was wide and low, with unsettling, irregularly polygonal walls that had a strip vidscreen, currently turned off, which was a rare event.

     “Welcome to the House of Forgetting,” said Carl in a dry, impish tone.

      Karen greeted them from an easy chair. She stood up in a smooth movement, and came over to them. “We've got hold of a different version of the best blackout film, but the resolution doesn’t really seem to be any better. And it’s as freaky as ever.” 

     Karen had an understated strength of character, which sometimes led to people being surprised by the firmness and subtlety with which she could get things done. Until relatively recently she had been going through a long phase of mild but persistent depression. But she had packed in her job as a researcher in marine biology, and this had helped bring about a change. She had recently been spending a lot of time studying the subject of colour, in particular in connection with phenomena such as luminosity and incandescence. She and Kerry had talked a great deal about her idea for a book that she was thinking about calling ‘A Biology of Colour.’ Another development was that, starting from the end of her depression, she had begun having occasional lucid or ‘conscious’ dreams, in which she would be either flying, or swimming underwater, and in which she was able to control directions of movement, though not the terrain in which she found herself. The intensity and occasional strangeness of the colours in these dreams was one of the sources of the new project.

     On the screen in front of them was a piece of two hundred year old footage of three divers – two men and one woman – who were in the condition which was technically described as a fugue or ‘somnambulistic’ state. However they did not look in any way asleep. On the contrary, they swam and trod water with an acute fluency which sometimes suggested gymnastic levels of ability. Altogether there was fifteen minutes of footage. The divers sometimes stayed in one place, and sometimes swam through sea-vegetation in which the visibility was very poor. The auto-track camera followed them, keeping about twenty feet away. At one point, one of the two male divers swam up to the camera with an amused expression on his face. He stared into it intently for a while, shaking his head gently from side to side a few times, and then swam away. Eventually the camera became fouled in a web-like underwater plant, and there was no further footage of the divers. The effect of watching this film was sometimes very disturbing. It was as if a memory was about to come, but then there would be a jarring, grating feeling, that sometimes brought a faint nausea with it, and nothing would be remembered.

     Shev and Mitya arrived, and after Kerry had introduced them to the others, they all watched the footage again. Apparently Shev and her brother had attempted to film themselves during their second dive, but with very little success – the camera had become entangled almost immediately.

     The film came to an end a second time. ‘They look completely asleep, don’t they?’ said Mitya with heavy irony, a foot and an arm both ticcing wildly. It seemed both Shev and Mitya were feeling uneasy about the new situation. Carl’s flat was quite an overwhelming place, and despite the fact that they had initiated the change, it was clearly going to be unsettling to suddenly be part of a bizarre group project where the other people were strangers.

     They sat down, and alternated between talking, eating and watching air-races on a wider section of the surround-room wallscreen. Eventually Mitya went off and found the controls. The first things he put on were 360 degree films showing areas of Ktarizon and Earth, including some extraordinary footage of volcanic eruptions on the two planets, and some compellingly interesting views of jungle and forest terrains. There were also abstract, colour-shape-movement pieces, which made spectacular use of the screen’s large, circular space.

      After a couple of hours they sat themselves around a table, with the intention of bringing together all their knowledge about fugue-diving. Bizarre shapes were now chasing each other slowly around the room, mutating as they did so. Kerry noticed that Karen seemed to be getting on very well with Shev. He felt she was pleased there was now another woman in the group.

     They briefly discussed the question of the origin of the ‘compass,’ but they had no information to take them beyond the level of speculation. It seemed apparent however that there might be more to the hidden history of fugue-diving than they had realised.

       Shev had come up with an idea for trying to retain memory of a dive. Her suggestion was that Mitya should write a rhythm loop, and that they should have this playing through headsets continually through the dive, on the basis that the continuity might help hold the memories at the end. Everyone agreed that this should be tried. Before long the general feeling was that there was nothing more to discuss.

      Paulo voiced the only thing left to be said.

      “So, when do we go?”

      They had gone below the surface a few moments before, and now they were swimming down the wide, sloping rock shelf, with its small and isolated sea plants. In the distance there was the buttress-face of the plateau, with a trench in front of it that was filled with the two foot wide cables of air-tubes heading toward the cliffs from the sea-jungle. They were swimming in a ragged arc. Paulo and Karen were the most proficient divers, and were slightly ahead. Their discussion in Carl’s flat was now two months in the past, but they had stayed with the basic details of the plan. Mitya had made a five-minute, looping track with a very sparse but dynamic rhythm, and they all had headsets wired up to their ears which were currently playing this track. They had tooth-mikes for speaking to each other, and various first-aid items, together with harpoon guns strapped to their backs, even though it was very unlikely there would be any dangerous marine creatures in this area, despite its immense diversity of aquatic life. Finally, they had the attached tubes which they would use for breathing the chemical-infused air as it escaped from the sea-bed. They had not brought a camera.

    They swam over the thick tangle of oxygen cables, and slowly moved up the face of the cliff, the whitish, vegetal air-conduits beneath them. The air they were going to breathe in a short time was possibly being inhaled at this moment through one of these tubes. They reached the top. A small shoal of electric red sea-snakes shot off, and ducked out of sight beyond the cliff’s edge to the right. It was now downhill all the way. As the exertion of swimming upwards subsided, Kerry felt his terror coming back in an intensified form. Losing consciousness in thick sea-jungle at three hundred feet of depth was a physically shocking thing to have looming up in front of you. He tried to concentrate on details of the rock plateau’s surface in an attempt to get back a degree of calm.

     They had hiked for three days to get there, across some fairly rough terrains, including large areas of scrubby, deciduous trees, and a few tricky stretches of thorn-grass and Ktarian cactus. They had all shown an increasingly marked tendency to get involved in practical issues, as a way of fending off the fear generated by what they were doing. Kerry had used a sedative the night before, along with most of the others, to try to get a good night’s sleep. But he had still only slept for around five hours.

      The dog’s leg of the descending plateau was two hundred yards across on average, and about half a mile long. And now, on either side, and over the far cliff, the astonishing view of the sea-jungle was appearing. The forest of giant sea plants stretched into the distance, the foliage at points reaching almost to the height of the plateau. The visibility was relatively good. Ktarizon’s twin suns were nearly at the zenith. A few vertical air tubes stood out as the tallest parts of the forest, rising straight up to the surface of the ocean. Here and there, clearings in the jungle could be seen. Everywhere there were bubbles rising, but most of the largest bubbles came from the clearings.

     They only paused for a moment at the edge of the cliff. As if they all had an instinct about not delaying things, they set off to swim down into the world of ocean plants. Slowly the tree-like plants and giant weeds closed around them. Everywhere there were small fish and sea-snakes. They were now near the bottom, swimming forward in the murk caused by the plants blocking the light. They kept swimming for a few minutes, and then light appeared in the distance.

     They emerged into one of the clearings. Its floor was a mass of rotting leaves of varios sizes, including huge leaves from some of the larger plants. From under these leaves a steady stream of globes of air was appearing. As a result of being trapped under leaves, the air often formed large pockets before it escaped. Everywhere there were jewel-like fish, swimming amongst the broken columns of bubbles that disappeared toward the surface.

     They all signalled to each other that they were alright, and then they stood, frozen, for what seemed a long time.

    Karen broke the stasis, followed by Carl. Kerry did not watch them, but started to swim forward himself, feeling that to stutter or observe at this point would be disaster. Shivering, but moving with precision, he selected one of the escaping globes, and replaced the diving-mask with the breathing tube. Hanging low in the water alongside the bubble, he blew out through the valve to remove any water. Then, as the globe of air broke free, he dipped the tube into it – and breathed.

    There was a pause, filled with an indescribable taste, and a kind of seismic fear that sent shudders through his body. Then everything began to change. In the wake of the bodily tremor his breathing became completely different. He was suddenly breathing with short, completely full breaths that used the whole of his chest cavity – it would have seemed like panting if it had not been so effortlessly smooth. A moment after becoming aware of this, the full wave of transformation hit.  The space of the ocean and sea-jungle around him deepened and intensified: he knew that the priority of his visual sense had just been utterly over-ridden, and that he was now engaging with space around him in extraordinary ways through his senses of touch and hearing, and in a way which also immeasurably deepened how he saw with his eyes.  He was seeing with his body and his ear-membranes, as much as with his visual sense.  The sea around him was now seeded and threaded with singular areas of motion in the form of intricate, swirling eddies, and ephemeral twists of layers of water. And at the same time, disturbingly, the process of looking at these areas of motion would often trigger sudden, fleeting images of sea creatures swimming through the water, some of them ones he had never seen other than through film, and some of them creatures which he felt he had never seen at all.

      Kerry suddenly became aware that he could remember all this from the previous dive.  In fact, hazy memories from the whole span of the last dive had now broken through the amnesia. This was disconcerting, but it was also valuable. He was terrified of the hallucinated creatures, in a way that made him feel he was in danger of going insane, but the recall of the previous occasion came to his rescue. It was necessary initially to avoid looking at the vortices and movements of the water, and to concentrate on relatively static things, such as leaves of sea plants, and objects on the sea-bed. It was then possible to look briefly at the singular zones within the water, and the actual sea creatures swimming around them, and to keep the superimposed or hallucinated creatures at a level that did not create neurological shock-waves.

      They were now all moving in the water with the extreme fluency they had seen in the footage of dives. Mitya was completely free of tics. They could swim for minutes on end without breathing, simply because their movements were so smoothly executed that only the very minimum of air was needed. They looked at each other with astonishment, checking that they had all breathed the mycelium air, and that they had all made it past the shock that was the initial phase. It was palpable that they all felt the same relief when they discovered that no-one had failed to make it over these two thresholds. They knew – again – why verbally recording an account of the event was not a possibility. It was partly because it was necessary to maintain a flawless pattern of breathing in order to maintain composure in the face of anomalous, potentially turbulent experiences. But equally it was because it was necessary, in a visceral sense, to abandon concentration on words. The important thing was to not start from language, and to never get caught up in it, when words occasionally drifted back.

     Kerry was now slipping into a process of augmented perception that seemed to be more a form of thought than a kind of hallucination. He was looking over towards Karen, who was holding herself in the water near the top of a coral-like ocean tree. Looking at her had become a process of ‘perceiving’ those engagements with the world on her part which were processes of intensification of contact – her fascination with Ktarian oceans and marine creatures, her involvement with the worlds of fluid-dynamics and bio-chemistry, her intense interest in weather phenomena and rare natural events, her connections with people, her love of dancing, her engagement with certain game-worlds. Each connection was fluently and intricately schematised by images that radiated around her and across her. He saw how some of the zones with which she was engaged were singular individuals, and others were multi-filament strands or constellations. He looked over to Carl, and ‘saw’ a different world of engagements – there were many elements in common, but there were also worlds of coding operations,  anomalous topographies, computer architectures, and numerical processes. Then he paused, staring between them toward a middle distance of tangled sea-forest. He was beginning to see abstract bands of colour shimmering in three dimensions across his visual field. He blinked rapidly, somehow clearing his vision by doing this, intent upon a line of thought. He had come to a sharp realisation that humans were energy-worlds that were made up of other formations of energy  - in the form of thoughts, imaginings, dreams and memories – and that encountered worlds engendered in human formations were in a very real sense continuations of the outside on the inside. What seemed extraordinary about this was its pragmatic implications – everything became a question of intensifications through encounters, and of strategies for broadening and deepening the formations which came into effect within the ocean-like world of a human body.

      He realised he had an answer to the question he had been implicitly posing after the last dive when he had watched the thunderstorm from the window of his flat. He now saw clearly that the reason people were not more intensely engaged with Ktarizon – and with each other, for that matter – was because they had fallen victim to forms of fixation on certain aspects of their world. There was a frightened, self-important fixation on human territories, and whatever disrupts these territories, an assured, kudos-seeking fixation on the forms of action of successful leaders in established fields, and a disguised, grimly hyperconfident fixation on power, or forms of control. There was  a barely-noticed, insidious fixation on regular systems in their changes across time, and on numerical quantities and mathematical systems, and a nervous obsession with imagining both “what people might say” and what you might be able to say about a given situation, and with language overall. All of these obsessions, thought Kerry, were like viruses, forming together a kind of eco-system of viral forms, endemic within actions, and within uses of language.

    He had swum upwards and was staring out into the ocean through the tops of sea-jungle trees. Shev and Paulo had appeared nearby. Shev was holding herself in the water with her arms, using a complex, figure-of-eight motion.

     Kerry felt sure that a sort of antidote to the viral fixations was a perceptual engagement with zones or fields of movements, and that movement in this sense was inseparable from the domain of feeling and intent. It was as if perception and sensation - engagement with zones of motion - fell largely outside a confined space of connections with the world, as did engagement with intensifications and deintensifications. The space in between was occupied by a concentration on structures and language, and somehow the fixatory fields of the viruses functioned to keep thought and perception locked predominantly within the confines of this middle zone.  And beyond this zone, thought an astounded Kerry, were the blocked, semi-familiar zones, surrounded in turn by others...

    He swam with Shev and Paolo. Without any arrangement, they swam in looping curves that extended from the clearing and returned, swimming for the heightening effect of the fluid, intricate motion.

     After a while the superimposed visual images changed in nature, and became more intense. Kerry was moving very slowly.  He was watching depth-spaces made up of lines of vibrating colour, the colour moving like electrical charges along filaments that seemed to have thin, transparent walls. He was simultaneously thinking about the people who had made the compass, and about the fact that they had also seen such things, and would have experienced the same or similar insights. Suddenly he had the visceral conviction that in some sense Ktarizon was suffused with unsuspected worlds or group-formations of intelligence, and that these worlds were unimaginable, currently existing futures – futures for the constrained human existences of the planet. Inextricable from this idea was a sense that they were now all feeling the effects of one or more of these zones of intelligence. He found himself wondering what the response would be to the question “why don’t you contact us?” It seemed then that he heard a response - a woman’s voice - as if a process of imagining had been taken over, and had become perception  -

    “You are crippled with fixatory diseases. When it is possible there is often contact. There is contact Now.”

   

    

     Kerry halted, feeling as if a storm was breaking across him in a kind of seething slow motion. He felt he had become a bright, body-shaped cavern filled with colour and miniscule activity. He had no opinion about the nature of what had just happened, but he felt stunned both by the words that had come into his mind, and by what was now following them.  He attempted to draw out further ‘responses,’ but with no success. The hiatus was filled with a teeming electrical hum,  that rose and fell, and then faded.

      He swam on, joining some of the others, feeling that his sense of the boundaries of his body was dissolving. Sometimes it was as if his body was made up of the forms of those around him together with his own. Sometimes there were slow, flaring diffusions of colour and motion that seemed to be both within the bright blackness of his body and outside it. Dream-like landscapes would often briefly coalesce in the wake of these perceived or imagined explosions. A black space with incandescent topographies or geometries stretched out across a vast plain. Low hills seen from above, with a slight breeze, and sharp early morning shadows.

    

      At a certain point they all seemed to realise they were approaching an exhaustion that was deeper than an ordinary state of tiredness. They signalled to each other, pointing upwards. Everyone appeared to have stopped Mitya’s track – they now started it again. For Kerry the rhythm had continued intermittently in new forms and tones, but now, infused with actual sound, it spiralled up into greater levels of complexity.

   Knowing how important it was to move smoothly – but not unnerved – they set off for the surface. They left without any pause or sentiment, though it was a wrench to leave the sea-forest, which felt as if it had been their world for days rather than hours.

     Kerry became aware that his tiredness was reaching a critical level, but he concentrated on keeping all of his movements perfectly smooth. They had been incrementally ascending for a very long time, occasionally taking deft sips of air from passing mycelial air globes. They were near the surface. He felt that he would remember what had happened – that this time they had gone so far the power of the experience would over-ride any tendency to forget. The rhythm continued, the imagined part of it now in a sparse, immensely subtle form, with different kinds of tone for each note. Just above, there was gently chopping water, and the blue of the sky beyond it. They would remember everything. He was alive, he had not died. He broke the surface, concentrating carefully on the rhythm, and holding in his head a memory from the final stage of the experience. He was on his back, the cliffs rising up in the distance to his right. He checked that everyone was there, feeling a huge surge of relief and affection on finding that they had all made it back to the surface. He could hear Shev speaking in a kind of chant, but he could not make out what she was saying. Just as he took off his oxygen mask he realised that the shift to seeing through air rather than water was a very powerful one, and was bringing back his normal perceptual modes. The surface air went into his lungs. He could still remember everything. He lay in the water, rocked by a gentle swell. The rocking fused with a renewal of his sense of relief that they had all survived. He relaxed, breathing out deeply and slowly.

     There was an odd scuttering of words being spoken which he could not quite catch. The words were urgent, but they had a friendly tone. He felt serenely relaxed and realised that he was coming round staring up at the sky, as he had the time before. He remembered nothing about what had happened since he breathed from one of the mycelial bubbles. He remembered a bizarre, disturbing taste, but then nothing. 

     

    They were all grinning at each other, and shaking their heads. However, Shev seemed to be indicating that she remembered something.  

  

 “Just some words,” she said, shaking her head, “Just some words.” They seemed to be really important, and it was like there was a lot more, but I couldn’t get it.”

    When they got out onto the rocks it turned out that Karen had also heard indistinct words as she came round, in the same way as Kerry had. Shev said that what she had managed to retain were the words ‘intensifications’ and ‘motion.’    

     “But ‘intensifications’ was strange” she said. “It was like it was also the word ‘intensities,’ and as if ‘tension’  was in there somehow as well.  It was kind of all out of focus.” They found some shade and sat down.

    Kerry was thinking about the derivations of the words. “Intensification and intensity both come from the same Earth root – the Latin word ‘tendere,’ which means ‘to stretch.’ But it means both to stretch out into space, and to be a spatial field of stretching, or tensing.”

    Carl nodded. “So it’s the joint torsions involved in bodies stretching toward each other, and the fields of tensions of the bodies. The language of motion is interesting as well – you know, motion, emotion...”

     “Motions, shmotions…” said Mitya.

     “Languages, shlanguages,” said Paulo, stretching himself out on the rock.

     For a while they joked about drug experiences of writing down nebulous profundities, but there was a general agreement that what Shev had remembered might turn out to be valuable.

     They sat watching the increasingly agitated movements of the sea, and the motes of light reflected from the suns. Mitya was smiling broadly. He still had no tics, but occasionally he drew lazy spirals in the air with one hand. Off to the south there was a gigantic thunder head, probably 60.000 feet high, and obviously hollow with the vortex of an eye tornado, or more than one. Their monitors gave them two hours, and it was at least an hour to the nearest deep-level shelter. It was time to go.

*

  

    Putting aside the question of the value of the above as a story, there are elements from this writing which should be explicated: it needs to be treated thematically, and also as a document in relation to a set of circumstances.

      The story has eight named human characters, and a ninth character, the planet, Ktarizon (which, evidently in a strong sense is the Earth). But what is perhaps most definitive of it is that it has an an additional, explicitly-described character, which is a human group. A group that initially consists of four people, and which at the end of the story has grown so that it has six individuals. And most specifically, the group is one whose intent is to explore the transcendentally unknown (the fundamentally unknown, but knowable - that which pertains to levels or zones/spheres of existence beyond ordinary reality).

    The idea of the story arrived through looking at some small rocks a few inches below the surface of a shallow part of Harbury Lake, and through changing the scale, so that they were gigantic in imagination, and then envisaging people travelling within this terrain (perhaps I would have gone further if I had simply continued with being perception, but at least I had stopped processes of verbalisation). However, where did the group come from?

   This issue had been coming into focus over the preceding ten years of study, partly because of reading Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, but also because I had been a member of a shifting terrain of loose groupings of people whose aim was recurrently to explore the transcendentally unknown (and not just at the level of thought). In the process it had become clear that it is a disturbing, telling fact that the only molecules that exist within the general system of human existence are the individual, the couple, and the family.

     The question had become insistent: what would it be for there to be groups held together not by political "duty" or bleak expediency, but by bonds of affection, and by an overall love and fascination in relation to the world? That is, what would it be for there to be escape-groups - groups which constitutively were about an escape to the outside of ordinary reality? And the existence of occasional trinary molecules (a menage a trois), etc., did not in the least touch the issue, in that although "couple-jealousy" would evidently in the strongest sense need to be overcome (bonds of affection inevitably will involve people being in love who are not in a couple relationship with each other, but are in other actualised binary realtionships), the group formation in question was not at all about households of "free love," but was a question of a journey into the outside.

    It was evident that this was a movement beyond "middle class" or "bourgeois" values, but it was also apparent that it was not at all a "modern" issue, but instead was a primary horizon for anthropological study, in that it remains problematic in the same way across different forms of society, merely becoming more insistent or proximate in relation to small-scale tribal formations (in that a tribe in this sense is a social molecule where all of the individuals know each other, and therefore has something in common with a group consisting of a small number of individuals whose collective intent is to travel into the unknown).

     The question of the group - as a crucial question of practical anthropology and of genuine philosophy - is very much a way forward, but in this context it needs firstly to be put alongside other issues, issues which in part relate to the "beyond" of the dogmatic image of thought. Ktarizon: Deep Water displays various displacements, with differing degrees of focus, and of importance. The primary displacement is reciprocal: the planet Ktarizon is displaced so that it is seen as having a substance (energy/intent) that is fundamentally the same as that of a human individual or group, and the human characters and groupings are seen recurrently in planetary terms, whether explicitly or indirectly. Jean and Eriba are seen as like a storm; Kerry sees himself as like an ocean; there is the parallelism between Mitya's tics and volcanic erruptions (and at this point one might ask, given that humans are riddled with body-without-organs 'viruses,' what might be the diseases of the body without organs of the Earth?).

 Perhaps less importantly, there is also a displacement away from the transatlantic anglo-saxon world that is visible in the names of the characters. Shev and Mitya point toward Russia, and Carl Li points in part toward China (in writing the story I was aware of Kerans from The Drowned World as a valuable connection to Kerry, but it can also be pointed out that a third deeply planetary work, Solaris, has a central character called Kelvin). In writing about Paulo I had Brazil in mind, and I was also aware of a helpful parallel between Ktarizon: Deep Water and the title of an exceptionally brilliant "anthropological" tale by Conrad, from the 1890s, set by the sea in Malaysia - Karain: a Memory.

   (and in terms of elements in the background the album title "Lose Control" relates to Patti Smith's album, Horses,  from 1975 - it is a quotation, and in an earlier version of the story it was the name of this album that was entered into the 'compass' - the scarcely discernible displacement here being temporal as opposed to cultural-spatial, a shift back to 1975). (the compass itself relates to The Drowned World, in which Kerans memorably says of 'south' - "there is no other direction").

     The other displacement is from a central focus on solidity in relation to the planet in the story to a central focus on 'fluidity.' This is evidently very much a question of the outside in an initial and vital sense, in that in planetary terms the outside of rock and earth (along with the internal outside of magma) is water, the atmosphere and the plasma layers of the magnetic field. The emphasis is in fact too much on water, despite the presence of the storms within the story, and other elements such as the vantage from above on the hills which Kerry sees when he is fugue-diving (this intrinsic aspect of the story has an equivalent in the form of the even more problematic foregrounding of psychotropic substances, something which is only partially redeemed by the fact that fugue-diving concerns the danger of death, as well as the taking of drugs). The Tao Te Ching says that water is "nearly the Tao." But that "nearly" nonetheless marks an important difference, and as Deleuze and Guattari say, we have "to enter into becoming with the right molecule."


    It is necessary now to go further out into the abstract, and also to return a little in time, to the temporal starting-points of this writing, which are 1993, and, on a deeper level, 1980-1982. In relation to the later date there is a way in which a turn around an upward spiral path has been completed, with a return now needed to include the fact that for several years in 1999 I had been having very unusual, anomalous dreams about groups (on four occasions over three years, with the last instance - in January or February 1999 - having been particularly extraordinary and thought-provoking, to the extent that this dream has already been informing the first turn around the spiral). But before this, what is also needed is to go just another step forward in chronological time, in order to correct the emphasis of the story.


The following piece of writing is from 2002 - I gave it the name "Strange Becoming:"








Dream you are a hollow spherical body with great thickness and laminar complexity, and with a vast body inside that is wider than your thickness.


Dream you are a white spherical world of flows, influxes, vortices, layers, seethings, incandescences.


Dream you are an immense world of different temperatures - of zones, bodies, layers, clouds and fugitive track-networks all with different degrees of heat.


Dream you are vastly and intricately touched and boiled into by a world of oceans.


Dream you are vastly touched by the multi-level contours and temperatures of worlds of land masses.


Dream you are always spread out under stars in vast, slow moving masses of night air.


Dream you have a world of clouds of water vapour within you, and you are always filled with birds and insects.


Dream you are always threaded with lightning.


Dream you are always suffused with deep-level expanding worlds of sound waves, spreading faster laterally than upwards - sound worlds of storms, volcanoes, the wind, fires, animal cries, music, insects, machines.


Dream that on one side each of your zones on every scale is being suffused pre-eminently by a stupendously vast world of light-contact with stars and galaxies, and that this contact is suffusing you across the entirety of your surface.


Dream that each of these encounters with a star or galaxy is its own intricate, incandescent motion-world of colours and intensities - of light at different levels of activity.


Dream there is a huge, very near spherical zone of searingly powerful light combustion seething into you vastly and continuously - searing, glorious, primarily white-yellow, blasting out light and photons into you and a continual intricate wind of plasma.


Dream you are spinning, and your shifting zones are continually encountering the light-worlds of the encompassing spherical world of stars and galaxies.


Dream you are a world of sudden tracks of acutely hot air created by small solid masses coming from outside.


Dream you are a spherical world of zones and levels of white motions - foldings, laminar flows, fusions, vortices, standing waves of spiral updrafts, gusts, winged fronts, areas of different density, hurricanes, tornadoes, drifts, zephyrs, curving low level winds, ripples, pulses, slow drifts, and breathings.


Dream that one of the areas around one of your axes of spin is white and cool-warm, and that the other is a star-filled world of extreme cold.


Dream you are intricately riddled with tiny hexagonal plates, either suspended in shifting masses, or moving rapidly to your lower surface.


Dream your upper layers are serene, starlight-filled expanses, and are shifting worlds of plasma.


Dream you are touched endlessly across your inner surface by the zones of motion of trees, waves, fires, lava flows, animals, machines, plants and rivers.


Dream you are a vast world of colours, sounds and flows. Dream you are a vast world of contact.

*

                  

    Harbury Lake has shown what it means to talk about a zone, in the sense that comes initially from the Strugatsky brothers and Tarkovsky. But to this it needs to be added that the zone is the planet. 

   Relative to the customary idea of the planet, the idea of the zone involves three differences. The first and most simple difference is that the zone is intrinsically and centrally understood as including the atmosphere, as well as the land and the ocean (people say that they live on the planet, not in it, and this difference is more than verbal: we see ourselves as standing on the planet, but not as breathing it).

  The second difference is that the zone is a world of the unknown in relation to which it is fundamentally held open that - in some sense - it could in its entirety be a world of feeling, intent, thought and dreaming, as opposed to these attributes pertaining only to the beings which inhabit it.

    The third and most crucial difference is that the concept of the zone derives from the fact that sprawling conurbations and major areas of industrial or state/military infrastructure are loosely indicative of a profoundly deleterious, damaging energy-instance, whereas wilderness, semi-wilderness and scurfland terrains are loosely indicative of a force of intensification - a force which expresses itself as a waking of faculties, and as an overall becoming-active. 'Loosely' indicates that you can be living in a city and can be travelling toward the Future, and that the converse is also true, but that the different kinds of terrain have different tendencies in terms of the fostering of intensification and the generation of reactivity. A new form of geo-understanding of humans appears: there is the sphere of the planet, and within this there is the sphere of the human world (onerirosphere, verosphere, volosphere) and, in turn, within this second sphere - and including the three aspects just mentioned - there is a grey world of forms of control-fixation, intrinsically involving the gravity of the moods/modalities of subjectification.

       The situation where large-scale infrastructure is not indicative of the deleterious energy-instance is when it is derelict and overgrown. 

       In navigating in the zone our connection to it is partly through perception and partly through envisaging (envisaging was already intrinsic to the connection indicated by the term 'the planet' in that we do not normally see the curvature of the planet etc.). 

      To the maximum extent the horizon in the zone needs to be wildernesses, the atmosphere, and other terrains which have substantially more in common with wildernesses than with cities. In envisaging the zone it is these aspects which should be in mind, and these terrains need to be the actual horizon wherever possible.

    The zone is both a world of sublime expanses, and a world which is extremely perturbing. And what is perturbing about it is immanent to us, in the sense that it has been instilled within us.

    The deleterious force consists primarily of the systems of reason-and-revelation and of ventures-and-lives, together with the system of reactive moods. We need to turn away toward the terrains that are the beyond of the cities, and we need to start walking. This walk, within a world that is now recognised as the zone, is a waking of the faculties, and at the outset it is preeminently a waking of the faculties of perception and of dreaming.

      
*

    There is a white void of air beneath our feet, and there is a white void of air above our heads, all the way to the outer edge of the atmosphere. The entirety of our bodies is also a white void, from the top of the cranium to the soles of our feet. These spaces of brightness are substance, and once you have overcome the dogmatic image of the world, it is evident that all of these spaces could consist in some sense - no matter how anomalous - of modalities and dimensions of feeling, awareness, thought, dreaming, problem-solving and decision-making, and that they could be populated by incursive formations of energy and intent. And beyond the white void of the planet there is the white void of the sun and the solar system, and the white void of the cosmos. The clear-eyed view of tremeral thought - of focused Spinozist thought - is that, for instance, the overall human body, beyond the human brain, could consist in some sense of zones of thought or abstract perception (so that organs would be specific, singular zones within a deeper process than the ones by which they have been defined), and that the overall world of the planet could in some sense be a sphere of thought, dreaming, awareness, intent.

  However, to have overcome the dogmatic image of thought is not just a passivity of holding open, it is an active process of envisaging, hypothesising, working out and dreaming up how it is that things are the way they are on the planet, and in the human world. Here it is a question not of the crude process of positing things like dark energy and dark matter (where the process has no connection with intent) but of working out what could be around and within the human world, in a way where what is envisaged is not zones of blind matter, but instead consists of forces which are at the same level or at a higher level in relation to human beings.

   It can be seen that an aspect of physics is a collapsed form of tremeral thought - of metamorphics - and that religion is what has taken advantage of this collapse.

   Furthermore, the activity also consists of a pragmatics of waking the faculties, a pragmatics of becoming-active and therefore of intensifying the totality of what you are as a - corporeal - human being, and a pragmatics of learning how to focus attention on sensation, feeling, perception and proprioception. All of this involves a heightening of the ability to see and understand formations of intent, and a deepening of understanding of yourself as a body which is also a formation of intent. It is not just that the process of envisaging does not take place in a vacuum (because it is answering questions about what is going on in the human world), but is also that in more than one sense this process is being boosted by the wider pragmatics.

  Above the surface of the planet, at the point where the planet's atmosphere-zone begins, the bright void is immensely differentiated. It is already that it is simultaneously air and sunlight and starlight, but as well as this the void is differentiated as plants, animals, alliance-groupings of humans (starting with units of two, of different kinds), tools, machines, buildings, forests, clouds, rivers, precipitation, lightning. It is also the profoundly interconnected, communicative worlds of the oneiric-real of human beings as a whole - the world of dreamings/accounts that consists of the conjoined spheres of the oneirosphere and verosphere.

   And finally, the microzones and the overall space can be grasped as a duration: the world that is a life, or an alliance, or a milieu; the planet and the human world during the 7000 years of the holocene. 

   It can be seen for instance that there is the appearance and disappearance of control fantasies about gods, and an afterlife, and reincarnation, and the fundamental, superior nature of one tale and one tribe of believers: the Babylonian religion comes and goes, as with the religion of the ancient Greeks. And beyond these there are the flows and currents of metamorphics. 

    A sky now swept with unfamiliar winds.

      In a straightforward way the faculty of lucidity is able to perceive the human worlds and human dreamings within this space. And it is able to see the affective nature of encounters, in particular - in terms of importance - the affective nature of the connection or ongoing encounter between human beings and the combinant of the planet together with the exteriority of the planet (the sun, the solar system, the stars).

    Lucidity functions through a holistic grasping of a human being, or a human group, or a human dreaming, or a human alliance between individuals, or a human encounter / ongoing connection, or a human account of the world, or a human mode of reality. 

    This is not the same as saying that it sees into the bright void of the planet, the cosmos, or the bodies that are human beings. It is to say that lucidity perceives intent and affect - and that overall, in doing this, it perceives the nature of the world at the level of the transcendental-empirical.

    There is the oneirosphere; there are very perturbing, deleterious modalities within the oneirosphere, that trap people and cause them to go in circles. And beyond these there is the escape-path.

   The tremendum path.

    It is easy to imagine that in tribal worlds seven thousand years ago - or at any time in the years since - a practitioner of metamorphics could have said something along the lines of: "maybe after death an individual is remembered by the Earth, so that there is a trace afterwards, a memory on the part of the Earth." It is a seemingly short step from here to the idea of the Kalash that the spirits of their people live on after death within the peak of a Himalayan mountain high above their valley, or the idea of the Yanomami that their ancestor spirits live within a high mesa, or tepui, above the jungles where they live.

    It is not generally realised that dreamings are at higher level of power within the world than reason (rendering the vast majority of philosophy a kind of nebulous chatter that goes on generation after generation). Dreamings are at a higher level of power because they are permeative, rooted profoundly in the terrains of the planet, and speak in relation to death.

    Control fantasies allow people to go back to sleep every time they are jolted by death, and feed self-importance in ways that recurrently are closely connected to terrains. Socius control fantasies are a kind of minimal sibling or adjunct of religious fantasies, but are only minimal in relation to death, in that people are 'immortalised' within them, in the sense of their fame living on - in an ongoing sense they are honoured after death. But on the levels of self-importance, of other control-fantasy aspects, and in particular of terrain, these socius control-fantasies, and systems of socius control fantasy, are very similar to those of the religious domain. Furthermore they function to an immense extent as adjuncts, so that they are elements within a two-sided process. The control fantasy here is that the democratic system or of the communist system is not a captive, subordinated element within capitalism, but has an answer to it, and there is generally a concomitant that there is something special about the individual's own nation state (people from the USA recurrently manifest this fantasy to a very high degree). Terrain is permeatively central within this domain of control fantasies: religious control fantasies in contrast have difficulty in terms of terrain because writing major new elements for new terrains will only satisfy a few at the global level of the religion (Mormonism is an attempt to do this, Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church is another attempt). However, religious control fantasies function extremely effectively - as blocking modalities - in relation to accounts of death, and in relation to the reactivities of self-importance. Furthermore, there are para-fantasies which are bolted on to systems of ideas that to some extent make sense (even if their focus is limited, and they are threaded with confusions), or are bolted on to and are suffused through dreamings which on another level have a relatively substantial line of flight. These para-fantasies work as adjuncts within a wider context. Kant's work, with its regulative ideas, is an example of the first kind, and Tolkien's work, with its good and evil, and its 'angels' / Maiar, is an example of the second kind.

    Beyond all this there is the Sayan modality, the Sayan domain of accounts of the world. Which is to say that beyond all this there is metamorphics, and the open, non-dogmatic dreamings of metamorphics.

    What this modality can see is that the world of the control-modality is both the outbursts of the system of subjectified, reactive moods, and the dark, damaging creativities of control fantasies.

     And the process of asking 'what on earth is going on,' is a process of effectuating lucidity, an exploratory, focused elaboration of envisagings, a setting out of lucid, meticulous accounts of the world which take forms other than dreamings, and a pragmatics of intensification of lives.

     The dreamings and accounts will also inevitably be the delineation of a pragmatics of this kind - a permeative pragmatics of intensification.

   It is necessary to envisage the oneirosphere during the seven thousand years of the holocene as like an immense, opaque expanse, as if water was being seen from one side, through something like glass. 

    A bright filament, or thread is visible through the water, a filament that has the feeling of joy.

  And in asking what is wrong within the human world something grey becomes visible in the water, a murky cloud of deleterious elements - where the elements are the systems of control-modalities within individuals.

    But if you then envisage a terrain of thresholds in front of you, passing into the unknown on the horizon, it becomes apparent, in focusing this lens, that you are seeing a path. And intrinsic to an existence defined by travelling along this path is the brightness of the filament that was perceived within the holocene.

    On this path perception is fundamental because of the extent to which perception is a seeing of the planet, and because perception is a seeing that takes place through the whole body. Lucidity is fundamental because it sees intent and affect, but there is a crucial sense in which at the outset what is needed are the recondite, extremely effective methods of understanding that constitute the faculty of dreaming. Follow the Sayan path.

    

   

    

    

    

 

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