22.

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 - 49) 

 I wrote the following story around 2011. The initial idea for the previous story - The Island - came to me around 2000 or 2001, but most of the ideas and all of the writing are from 2014 to 2016. In certain ways these are the same story, but I include this second one because although it looks toward the same place it does so from a different perspective.

   

The Future: Yanomami tale

(approximately 3000 years ago)                                                                      4

He was on a long spirit-wakening walk in the eastern mountains when he met the three women in a jungle glade.

Two of the women had spears trained on him, and the tallest, oldest woman had an arrow pulled back in her bow.

There was a war party of at least eight men hunting for them, a war party with a shaman as its leader.

He agreed to help them by taking them to his tribe, wherever else they went afterwards. His tribe’s current house and orchards are forty miles away, across, dense mountainous jungle. The war party will turn back if they reach the safety of his tribe.

The tall woman is clearly a sorceress. All of her movements and all of her words reveal this, leaving no doubt. She is maybe in her early forties, twenty years older than him. She has her hair in a way he has never seen before - long, down on her shoulders, with tiny coloured threads twined into thin plaits here and there through the rest of the long, slightly wavy hair. Some of the threads are violet, some green, most of them are the colour of the sun. There is incredible warmth and generosity in her eyes

One of the other women is in her twenties, and is visibly pregnant, maybe seven months. The other woman is maybe sixteen. She has very lucid, intelligent features, and is smooth in her movements, but she has a hunted, terrified expression in her eyes, as if he she has seen the worst, and believes that it will return.

He reaches a new level of focus on the return journey. There had been a threshold he needed to cross, and the life and death situation propels him across it.

He holds the entire terrain firmly in his mind, plotting a shifting, recurrently doubling-back course, full of subterfuges. He feels nonetheless that the attack is likely to come, and he prepares himself by creating an implacable shield of nonchalant disbelief in the powers of the shaman who is hunting them.

By the time the warriors are about to attack they are on his home ground, and he finds a defensible place to camp, on a rocky outcrop.

They come at dawn, throwing themselves onto them through faint half-light, firing arrows.

The sorceress lets out a piercing, shockingly intense war-scream that she holds as a single sustained cry, astonishingly, as she starts to fight.

He is acutely aware of the actions of the shaman, a fierce sinuous sorcerer in the prime of his strength. The cocoon of disbelief works until the end of the fight. Then the man suddenly shows him a hideous object he has in his hand, an abomination whose nature he feels, rather than straightforwardly seeing it. Afterwards he can only remember having seen a tiny nebulous object that in some way he saw as an adult human who was neither alive nor dead.

The sorceress, who had just killed a warrior with her spear, spun round just in time, and let out another war-scream, even more piercing than the first, like the sound of a spirit eagle, dropping down in absolute fury to attack an enemy.

The death-trance is broken by the cry, and with his cocoon of disbelief back around him, he weaves furiously forward, jinks sideways at the last second, thrusts back the shaman’s dagger with a thrust using all the power of his back, and then stab’s the man in the heart.

Incredibly all four of them are alive, and they have only taken minor wounds. There had been nine warriors. The sorceress had killed two of them. The 16 year old girl, who is now shaking and sobbing uncontrollably, had killed one.

He had killed five warriors, and the shaman.

When they get back to his people he receives immense kudos for his actions. He has been a victor against the odds against a shamanic war party, and he has brought three women to the tribe. However, he knows that the main wellspring of the positive response is that he has shown he is both a shaman and a warrior, which everyone takes to be deeply auspicious for the tribe. The presence of a shaman warrior is felt by his people as a sign that a golden age is beginning.

The only disturbing aspect of the situation is the presence amongst them of a female shaman. Sorceresses are rare, and becoming increasingly uncommon, and they have an unsettling effect on people – they suggest a questioning of the entire way of existence of the tribe, and only in time is it possible to overcome this perturbing effect. Also a plain or ugly female shaman would be more acceptable –  an attractive sorceress troubles everyone’s certainties.

The men discuss whether their old shaman could marry her – it is known that a sorceress who has children effectively stops being a sorceress, unless some new intense circumstance intervenes.

After about a week the woman and the old shaman go into the forest to talk - to share knowledge.

When they return there is an intense shine in the old man’s eyes, but observant people also notice moments when he is sitting, staring into the distance, with a troubled look clouding his features.

A few days after this, he wakes, gets up, and look toward the hammocks of the area of the shabono where the three women have been living. They are empty, and going over, he discovers that their bags and weapons are gone.

He feels a deep pang, a nameless intense longing, which does not leave him for many weeks.

Meanwhile around him the overall feeling is relief. There is regret that the two other women have been lost, but there is satisfaction that the disturbing presence of a sorceress is over. Some people bring out old nonsensical half-beliefs, saying that a sorceress in fact is an unnatural being, and generally is likely to bring trouble, because she is a man-woman, a being who has distorted her spirit-shape deleteriously in order to get shamanic powers.

Both he and the old shaman look on at these statements, shaking their heads slightly, knowing it would make no sense to engage in a full disagreement.

A few days after the womens’ disappearance the old shaman takes him into the forest, and tells him what he has learned.

“There has been a new, dangerous change in the house of dreaming.” He says. “ A defeat – the fight is still taking place, but the human world, as a whole, has been pushed back. We sensed this already, but now I can see it clearly.”

“The grey spirits have added more lines”

*

    It is eleven years later. A few months after the three women left, he had started a love relationship with an extraordinary, very beautiful, and very strong woman, and they had become man and wife. They have two children, a girl who is ten, and a boy who is eight.

Although his wife still loves him, at the same time she hates him. She hates the decline in his desire for her, and she hates that he is a shaman, and that there is a part of him which is beyond her, unless she was to wake herself (it would be more true to say that she is on exactly the same level as him, only she is not deliberately practicing what she intuitively knows). Her great dread is that he will meet a sorceress.

   Everyone expects that he will be the new leader and shaman of the tribe. Even those who should have been his rivals calmly hint at this – a development which would in fact be unusual both because his family is not a central lineage, and because it would be more normal to have a shaman and a leader, separately. He finds this situation disturbing, as if he is being impelled towards something that is wrong, unhealthy. He knows that the task of being leader will be difficult, and in a way, impossible. He is just one person, and he cannot transform the group, their collective will transcends his. They are all constitutively half-awake, and the blocks that keep them this way are dark-magic, tapped into all of their wildest, most beautiful energy. The jealous possessiveness of the men terrifies him, and in a different way the possessiveness of the women is equally terrifying. They have all been pushed back into lives of raising children, sexual relationships (overt or clandestine) and achieving success – kudos - in the different roles demarcated within the world of the tribe.

That morning he wakes in his hammock in their room of the communal house. He has a new song in his head, both tune and words, a very beautiful, cosmic song, full of the joy of sunlight, and shimmering with the bright  southward unknown, where the spirit walks when it frees itself from the tyranny of self-importance.

He tells his wife he has a new song, and quietly he sings it to her.

She says she does not like it.

He sets off hunting, on his own.

At the top of a hill, two miles away from the shabono, he meets the sorceress, standing in a glade – an old orchard, that has been recently cleared.

With her astonishing smile, she indicates he should sit. Before she sits down she places a long stick on the ground between them. They sit cross-legged, six feet apart.

"If, at the end, you cross the stick, then you will have left your old life forever behind you."

He looked without speaking, wanting to smile, because he admired her grace so much, but unable to, because of the shocking intensity of her words.

I will talk initially about the warrior dreamers’ state-of-being you reached when you saved me and my friends.

“We did it together” he says.

She nods, smiling,  and then continues.

I am not here to say thank you, or to express admiration, though I am in fact forever grateful to you. With a slight internal shudder – a positive shudder – he notices the emphasis she puts on the word ‘forever.'

What I have to say is - that state of intent that you reached, a deeply positive thing in itself, is part of what will now be used over the coming time to progressively crush women, to brutally suppress them, to make them feel vulnerable and inferior in relation to men. And of course the same male dominatory process will simultaneously be a brutal suppression of men, a blocking off of the doorways through which we can escape. That state of intent will be used along with male power-priests, and along with the projection of paternal male imago-spirits into an infinity above us, a faked infinity.

This is the unfolding of the ordinary-world dream within the house of dreaming.

You can go beyond it, if you choose. Whose dream is it?"

"I am part of a group of women and men, thirty of us, practitioners of heightened awareness, who live three hundred miles from here. We live in a beautiful, spirit-wakening place, and from this place you can see the future, you can travel into the future”

  There was a long silence, while he looked at the woman’s face, and sometimes at the trees above her, to the right. He was using his technique of looking at everything at once, rather than just what was in the middle of his field of vision. When he looked back at her, he was aware of the leaves moving in the breeze, completely aware of a toucan flying from left to right above their heads. And then, because it had to happen, he stared with full intensity into her eyes, receiving a look that shone with focus, and with quiet joy.

The woman stood up, and took a step back.

He stood up as well.

He was astonished to discover that he had already said goodbye to his wife. And his childrens' position in the tribe was strong enough. Later, he would come back, with extraordinary gifts for them, and to try to persuade them to leave. It would be better like this – better for them not be bathed in the terrible radiation of a decaying relationship. Better that he follow the true dream outward, and then return, when it was possible.

He walks across the stick. The woman gives him a vast, warm smile.

“You are one more they won’t get.”  

                                           

                                                            ***