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                                                                                                   5.

                                                          

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, firing arrows, throwing themselves onto them through faint half-light. Because of the arrows it is not possible to stand until the last second.

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. He is aware of the remaining warriors fleeing into the forest.

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 is now shaking and sobbing uncontrollably. 

He had killed two 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.”  

                                           

                                                            *

      It is the start of the 1870s. The story can be told by starting from here.

      The Sayan modality of thought and existence is in the background - it is an element of the abstract-real of the human world, an occasionally faintly and fugitively perceived potential. Its expression into a book, in China, took place around two and a half thousand years before.

   In the Birth of Tragedy Nietszche makes contact with and tries to pose the problem of tragedy, but he does almost nothing to solve it, and says many things which create confusion, and prevent a proper setting up of the problem. A symptom of this failure is that there is not even a momentary engagement with Shakespeare's tragedies, although these works would have been by far the most valuable for the attempt to understand tragedy (see Sections 7 and 17).

   However, Nietzsche does arrive at the problem of the double and 'lobotimised' Arkadian modality, with its division into science/philosophy and art, and, having found the pair that is Sophocles and Socrates, he momentously sides with Sophocles. This is a fundamental beginning, and he never stops developing outsights that relate to this discovery.

     But what is involved here is not something that relates specifically to Greece - or to the Britain of Shakespeare. The Arkadian modality consists of a separating out into two very complex fields of denuded, contstrained engagement with the world (the worlds of the different 'art-forms' on the one hand, and the worlds of 'science/philosophy/social science' on the other), and socio-machinally it always exists with the variously blocked/suppressive, occluded, and downright delusional metaphysical systems of religions and - interconnectedly - of nation states. 

    To understand the Arkadian modality is to understand more than its two sides - it is always necessary to understand the religious and state metaphysics that function together with it, and another way of putting this is to say that within the interestablishment that is effect within individuals there is the system of reason-and-revelation, and it is this system that in fact is crucial for the Arkadian modality. Within this modality the disturbingly dark, suppressive role of the 'philosopher' is that of creator of subtle, distorting-but-effective 'justifications' of the metaphysics of the state and of religions - the so-called philosopher is here the functionary of the state, of traditionalism.

   It can be seen that the Arkadian modality is as much eastern as it is western - and as southern as it is northern - and it can also be seen that Nietzsche never stopped working on a critique of these 'state philosophers'.

   However, at the outset, in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche to a huge extent is under the sway of Schopenhauer and Wagner, and although lucidity keeps breaking through large sections of the book are a mass of complex confusions.

    It is correct to say that Shakepeare's tragedies point toward the interestablisment - with all its controlism and dark, reactive affects - that causes otherwise inspired, good-hearted people to erupt into actions that catastrophically bring about their own downfall. And it is also correct to say that in a more diffuse way Shakespeare's works point to the line of flight that leads from what is rotten within the Denmark of the human world.

    The sheer intensity of what Shakespeare achieves is a first flagging up of the question of tales, of anomalous narratives. It is an outer-edge expression of the art side of the Arkadian modality. 

    Perhaps because he felt in some way scalded by the degree to which he had been taken over by Schopenhauerian and Wagnerian delusions Nietzsche does not really return to the problem of tragedy (but a tendency to be seduced and fixated by 'dark metaphysical visions' - related indirectly to Shopenhauer - will go on to have a vitiating impact on his best work), but there is a way in which this is slightly less important than it seems, because he does go on to do something which is the immensely-more-important counterpart of understanding tragedy, in that he sets out, with a relatively high degree of success - particularly in the Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Joyful Science - to give an account of the line of flight that leads away from it. 

    And at the level of critique he does very lucid work in relation both to religion, and the dark workshop of support for religion on the part of state philosophers. And here he continues his work on what was definitively rotten within ancient Greek philosophy, concentrating on Plato, whose work has been both an instantiation of a key support element within the system of reason-and-revelation, and with its anomalous tales (the story of Ur, the story of the ring of Gyges, the story of Atlantis), and  profoundly misleading cave narrative (it is intent that you perceive when you escape from the cave, not what Plato inserts at this point) this work has also been variously a failed religion, a kind of semi-religion, and a germinal element for religion (Nietzsche is right to point out that Christianity is Platonism but without the mathematics and the reincarnation - and with the death of Socrates replaced by the death of Christ). 

    This is a second flagging up of tales, but here the tales have a disturbing gravity.

     Nietzsche largely misses Shakespeare, but in the end this does not matter much, given that he is aware of the line of flight. And it is important to see that the movement toward ancient Persia - through Zarathustra - is a valuable way of moving out beyond the contingent starting point of Greece. But this does not mean he achieves anything like a fusion of the two Arkadian sides, although he goes a long way in this direction. The whole project is trapped twice over by the line of time, an aspect of the reason element of the system of reason-and-revelation, in that Nietzsche fixates on eternal recurrence and also on a generalised or species metamorphosis, rather than on the pragmatics, faculties, affects and becomings - and immanence metaphysics - of groups and semi-groups individuals travelling on the escape-path, the line of flight.

    Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a third flagging up of anomalous tales.

     However it needs to be said that ultimately none of this is about Nietzsche or Shakespeare - it is about arriving at the point where the Sayan modality becomes visible. And it should also be said, in advance, that the question of tales is not a fundamental key, even though it is very valuable.

     It is useful at this stage to point out that the nation state is a fundamental part of the ongoing disaster of the modern world, alongside (or as a component-field within) the capitalist system. It is not just Lenin who realises this, in The State and Revolution, it is Nietzsche in This Spoke Zarathustra (see 'Of the New Idol,' Book 1) and it is Deleuze and Guattari in writing A Thousand Plateaus. In this last book the line of flight leading from tragedy is delineated and pointed toward (although with a lot of obfuscations and bolted-on confusions). 

    But now, in relation to the line of flight, a new modality of dreaming has arrived. The Sayan modality of thought and existence has appeared in the form of the books of Castaneda - and soon there will be the books of Donner and Abelar - and this has broken open an anthropological vantage that is explicitly planetary and is not an expression of only one side of a lobotomised modality. What Shakespeare emplaced within the world had an intense importance, but what has been emplaced by Donner, Castaneda and Abelar is at a fundamentally higher level of importance, in that it is an expression of the Sayan modality, an expression of metamorphics.  It is a zone of dreamings - it is a group of anomalous tales - but most specifically it is a world of outsights, diagrams and intensificatory catalysts whose systems of concepts form a pragmatics and an immanence metaphysics of the escape-path.

    The fact that there has been the new emergence of works of metamorphics does not at all mean that they will be emplaced in a way where they have a wide impact, or that they will be read to anything more than a miniscule extent - there is no significant niche for them, and no corresponding concept (Shakespeare's work was emplaced in a pre-existing 'place' called 'art' and did a lot to shape the current form of the concept). However, because they are referenced in a work partly authored by an established philosopher, and because Deleuze regarded this work as the high-point in his work as a philosopher, there is slightly more chance of the works finding/making a place for themselves.

   Everything comes down, most of all, to the effectiveness of the concepts involved in the accounts and in the pragmatics, which in part is to say that it comes down most of all to the outsights, and the guide-lines and diagrams for travelling along the path of flight.

   However it remains the case that the overarching dreamings consist of planet-focused and exteriority-focused tales of departure which are highly expressive of the planetary sublime, and the fact that recurrently the highly anomalous elements in the narratives seem very much to have a strong chance of being valid, at some level at least, means that the space of a proposable 'mythos,' where this domain is to a great extent crucial in the impact of the planetary sublime, cannot be separated from an 'ethos'.

   Throughout his work as a philosopher Deleuze is profoundly aware of anomalous tales, as with Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and with writers such as Kafka. His entrapment within Kantianism - in the sense of trying misguidedly to elaborate a philosophy of syntheses that would that would overcome Kantianism from within - finally comes to an end in writing A Thousand Plateaus (as he says himself in the intro to the Italian edition), but the constructivism of A Thousand Plateaus does not reach a full delineation of the outsight that philosophy is the creation of concepts: in What is Philosophy? he draws everyone into a kind of very high belvedere, and his previous tendency for a kind of 'micro-structuralism' of the concept, and a 'macro-structruralism' of institutionalised forms of engagement means he is set up to create a deceptive position from which inevitably - partly because of A Thousand Plateaus - you will eventually see the creation of concepts of the contemporary anthropology milieu from the central zones of the Americas, and also the concepts that were created in China for Tao Te Ching. Shortly before his death Deleuze characterised his work as timorous. He leaves it to the reader to encounter exteriority from the viewing-point.

   1970s and 1980s fiction was drawing quite substantially on anthropology for describing or pointing toward the line of flight, and in the case of Le Guin there was both anthropology and the Sayan philosophy of Tao Te Ching. And overall there was a tendency for the new anomalous tales to be about departures across a threshold, and domains of fundamental alterity alongside ordinary reality, but in a way where the 'imaginary' of Shakespeare has to a great extent been left behind (at the same time, in relation to tragedy Shakespeare remained fundamentally contemporary and without equal, and plays like The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream continued having an impact - it was just that the way of arriving at the line of flight had been changed for writers of tales). There were many different modes in effect here - the domain of anthropology was only one main aspect  of what was finding expression. The alterity could be a whole world, as in Woman on the Edge of Time, or A Tale of Wessex, or it could be a threshold you look toward without getting much of a view (The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas, Memoirs of a Survivor, the end of the Neuromancer trilogy). And in terms of diversity it is worth pointing out that both points where a tale appears momentarily in A Thousand Plateaus are instances of a departure across a threhold, beyond which the world is fundamentally different, and that the first has a sci fi aspect that borders on Lovecraft, and the second also has a sci fi quality but in a mode that is reminiscent of Kafka.

    The aspects of these stories together are a fourth flagging up of anomalous tales.

    There has always been a profoundly political/micropolitical aspect to the cutting-edge of anomalous tales that are characterised as science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction (from William Morris to China Mieville, and from Ursula Le Guin to Miyazaki). At depth this is because of the line of flight being in effect within these tales. And since the 1960s these domains of writing have both had a greater freedom and a simultaneous aspect of a kind of perturbed, sometimes flailing entrapment within the Arkadian modality, where stories of disappearance, and of other worlds at a higher level of existence (or simply of other worlds a higher level of alterity, of the anomalous) have come to be indicative of the problem (see the concluding part of Section 39, Disappearances of Literature). It is not at all that the writers involved are all attempting to solve the problem of giving an account of the line of flight - it is that the line of flight is having an impact on their work. 

     As has been seen, A Thousand Plateaus is also haunted by tales of dissappearance, of departure across a threshold - and Mark Fisher concludes his last two books by writing about stories centred on a disappearance (Robinson in Ruins in Ghosts of my Life, and Picnic at Hanging Rock in The Weird and the Eerie). 

     These facts are all purely indicative, in that ultimately what is in question are the concepts of the pragmatics and the metaphysics of metamorphics (and inseparably what is in question in the same way are the faculties, in particular lucidity and dreaming, that are beyond the dominant faculties of the interestablishment), but at the same time there is a holistic, fundamental value to seeing the direction in which they point.

     It is necessary to go back in time again, and to work from the other side of the divide within the Arkadian modality, in order to bring the line of flight into focus.

   In the second half of the nineteenth century an ability to see intent (most specifically of social formations, including socially emplaced dreamings) expresses itself into the domain of western philosophy. The works involved are tangled up in confusions, but for those who wish to follow the indications about how to focus the lens, they offer a way forward. The ability to see intent is lucidity (and it should be added that the faculty of lucidity is inseparable from the functioning of the faculty of feeling), and what is in question is an ability to bring into focus the transcendentally unknown that is knowable. 

 Lucidity can see the brightness of love-and-freedom, or liberatory intent, an intent which is a woken principle of exteriority, in that the modality of being is planet-focused, cosmos-focused, intent/energy focused, and myriadon-focused (where in relation to human bodies myriadon is the term for 'body' which grasps it as locus/nexus of faculties, affects, dreamings and becomings). And lucidity can see the terrible reactive affects of nation states, with their inside and outside, and often very subtle toxic dreamings; and inseparably from this, but going to the wider level, lucidity can see the controlism and facultative exclusions of the interestablisment in individuals, which is generator of tragedy, and which macrologically speaking is the basis of the ongoing disaster.

    Schopenhauer was a totalising, disastrously 'reversed' foreshadowing: in constructing all will as something to be escaped from through philosophical contemplation, he arrives at the point where seeing could happen but instead collapses the whole line of thought (contemplation, and paradigmatically Platonic contemplation, is good, and the source of what is wrong in the world is the will as such, as opposed to some modality of will). And he also starts off a whole form of mysticism in relation to music: in saying that the will expresses itself not only as representation, but as music, he gives music a special status which gets to the threshold where music can be perceived as expressive of affects, and of many other forces, but then locks down the special status with a totalising account (instead of a nebulous affirmation of music as generalised expression of a totalised will, the question in the space of thought involved is always 'what kind of intent within the human world is finding expression in this music, and is it a healthy or a deleterious, reactive intent?').

   Nietzsche brushes against the problem of tragedy, and moves on, but he then discovers the role of philosophy as functionary of state traditionalism - as creator of new, subtle forms of justification for the metaphysics emplaced within a state or domain of states, and most specifically as the creation of the points-of-connection, across the two sides, of the system of reason-and-revelation. At the same time he begins to wake the capacity to see intent. Hume had left an account with gaps in the world of knowledge in the form of positions, such as beliefs in gods, or a single god, which had been shown to be beyond proof or substantiation of any kind, and Kant constructs these positions as regulative ideas (positions that we need to believe in, to make sense of the world), and Kant then adds his blocking construct of representation-of-the-world / the noumenon, to both praise humans and leave them mystically haunted by a beyond which they cannot reach. Whereas in fact there is the transcendentally unknown that is knowable, and Nietzsche starts toward bringing zones of the tremerally unknown into focus, and as part of this process begins what Hume had not reached: he starts to perceive and describe the darkly reactive nature of the intent of religious metaphysical positions, of state metaphysics, and positions that, in general, block the encounter with exteriority. As with the terrible human interiority of the blocking construct of representation and noumenon, and as with the idea that the afterlife is everything - the real world - and that the planet with its animals and plant-terrain worlds, such as forests, is just a place of testing that can be disposed of on the day of judgement. And as with the idea that the body is irrelevant in comparison with the putative 'soul.' And as part of the same process he sees that the nation state has religions embedded within it, but also has its own semi-religion or para-religious modality, together with its own state-functionary philosophical arguments (eg. - the Prussian state, or the American state, is the world-historical unfolding of the cutting-edge of the spirit). Another form of blocking of exteriority.

 

   Nietzsche begins to bring into focus the line of flight, but he tangles everything up so intricately with eternal recurrence that he vitiates his achievement (eternal recurrence is a last fixatory modality of the line-of-time component of reason, and even the idea of the selective principle should have just been a moment of laughter - of 'that would be better than other principles!'). In general Nietzsche's thought is such a mess - there are so many confusions - that despite the breakthrough in connection with intent, there is no point in spending much time on it. But in trying to see the line of flight that leads from the ongoing disaster, and in coming to understand the lobotomised Arkadian modality (with its division into art and science/philosophy) it is important to consider for a moment Nietzsche's attempt to give an account of the line of flight, and to work in a way that is spread across both sides of the Arkadian mode, in his anomalous tale - and tale of the anomalous - Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

[section unfinished]

  Tao Te Ching provides outsights that give people a chance of departing from controlism, and from the domains of kudos, suppression and gravity of ordinary, collapsed reality, and it does this through pointing toward a specific mode of of intent - not contending/yielding, and detachment from kudos and fixation on power - and through concentration on the domains of focus of lucidity and dreaming (the domains of intent, affect, energy and the oneiric-real that it refers to as non-being), and, inseparably, on exteriority in a wide range of forms, from the planetary exteriority beyond the human world, to the exteriority of the worlds of human. potentials, capacities and areas of focus that are beyond what has kudos within the gravity-worlds of kudos, power, judgmental morality, and ritual.

   In focusing on non-being (intent, the oneiric-real, and the other zones/aspects of the abstract) and on the exteriority of the planet and of kudos worlds, it is also very precise and consistent about non-knowing, in that it breaks open the outsight that scholarly knowledge is part of the problem, not part of the solution. 

   The same is true of the works of Donner, Castaneda and Abelar - all that they draw upon in terms of texts is a handful of poems and the outsight is very explicitly broken open that ultimately, despite it recurrently being necessary for lodging yourself in the human world and for reaching the departure-point, the domain of academic knowledge must pre-eminently be left behind in travelling along the escape-path.

   We are surrounded by the sunlit and starlit planet, within which the human world is densely threaded with conflict and controlism (whether the controlism is explicit, or disguised and in abeyance in relation to its acute forms). The escape-path of metaphorphics is in front of us. And this writing, Explorations, is no different in relation to the world of scholarly or academic knowledge: there is the lobotomised world of the Arkadian modality, and then there is the world of the Sayan modality.

   Follow the Sayan path.

  

    

     

[section unfinished]

* * *