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 Schopenhauer - 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 Dream 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 threshold, 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.

    Dreamings are at a higher level than reason, but in this context what is at the highest level of all is lucidity. And it is not enough for dreamings to be pervaded with embedded outsights - they need support through outsights expressed through the modality of concepts, where the writings or statements involved also involve an unfettered functioning of reason. What dreamings that are constitutively assisted by lucidity are up against is the assemblage of expressions of the system of reason-and-revelation, where in each ordinary-reality domain they are up against a key form regarding revelation - Christian, Islamic, Buddhist etc. This makes the situation exceptionally difficult, because the philosophers whose work justifies or supports the religious aspect of a domain of ordinary reality are fundamentally part of the problem. In the whole of the Judaeo-Christian domain (and in a way which also ultimately applies to the Islamic domain) key repressive philosophers are Plato, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger.

   A strange story... Nietzsche starts out with the impression that he has a lot of support for a philosophically assisted re-dreaming, with the directions of this perceived support being from the two 'sides', the oneiric and the philosophical. However, he rapidly discovers that he is very isolated, and that what he had initially perceived as providing support was to a large extent either antagonistic to his venture, or problematic to the extent of not being helpful.

   He rapidly leaves behind Wagnerism, and most of the deleterious, damaging aspects of Schopenhaurianism, and takes up the dreamings of Sophocles and Aeschylus and related aspects of the Ancient Greek oneiric world. Having tasted an oneiric semi-rebellion (which would increasingly become a non-rebellion religious paratext and dark, racist dreaming) he leaves behind the reactivity for largely bright, healthy domains that had also been vital for Shakespeare. But in going toward the dreamings of Ancient Greece, Nietzsche ends up being very isolated. It was the Hindi and Buddhistic domains of the east that had impacted on Schopenhauer, not the Sayan philosophy, and in the absence of Tao Te Ching Nietzsche has very little support at the level he needs.

    The move to Persia is evidently a good one - Ancient Greece would have come with two much encumbrance (part of it being encumbrance stemming from Nietzsche's earlier work), and would have seemed like an obsession or a crutch. And of course Persia is far more the European Alps and Switzerland/Germany, in the same way as Shakespeare's wood outside of Athens is more in England than it is in ancient Greece. But the historical aspect - the figure of Zoroaster as starting-point - is an indicator of a key aspect of what Nietzsche is doing. The re-dreaming takes place twice - once through Thus Spoke Zarathustra - and a second time through a philosopher-historian's re-dreaming (or new, more lucid account) of the history of the human world, a re-dreaming that runs through all of Nietzsche's works, including Zarathustra. And all of this must take place alongside the articulation of a new domain of concepts capable of expressing the outsights involved at the atemporal, tremeral level of the account of the world and of human existence. A large project, with many potential pitfalls. 

   A crucial problem is that Nietzsche has acquired a damaging predilection for dark, totalising views, a predilection that largely comes into his thinking from Schopenhauer. What is subtle is that such views recurrently have a partial validity, in that they apply to the ordinary reality of the ongoing disaster, as opposed to the liberatory intent, or love-and-freedom intent, that runs through individuals, and that in its fully effectuated form is the world of departures from the disaster. The ur-example is the 'wisdom' of Silenus ("best is to never have never been born, next best is to die soon"). The threads of this dark, totalising delusion go on to have an impact on Freud, in the form of the idea of the death drive, and are central to Nick Land's thought (and also, via Freud and Land, had an impact on Mark Fisher). It is not that the myrmidons of death do not in some sense exist, it is just that they relate to reactivity, controlism and the suppressive form of the faculties - the interestablishment - that is clamped on human individuals: there are also the explorer-travellers, who as individuals are best described as myriadons, and who move forward along the escape-path.

   For Nietzsche, and for subsequent thinkers, these views have a tendency to function as misleading 'not-afraid-of-the-truth' indicators of probity. And for Nietzsche aspects of what is involved tended to become tests or challenges for affirmation, where ultimately what was involved was a kind of deleterious or pathological modality of thought and feeling - one which is incorporated into the wider disfunctional idea that is the eternal recurrence.

   Will to power is at best an inadequate characterisation of the depth-level intent to explore the potentials of the world and human existence to the maximum, and ultimately it has to be regarded as inaccurate given that when under extreme circumstances there is no option but to sacrifice yourself for someone you love, this is not a reactive action.

    Thus Spoke Zarathustra in fact is to great extent free of dark, totalising views along these lines. There is even a feeling that in fundamental ways Nietzsche has extricated himself - and in fact this form of totalising is not the main problem in his thinking. The book is almost definitively the opposite of totalising in this sense. There is the line of departure figured by Zarathustra, there are those trying gravely to set out on the line of flight, there are the dancers who are aware and who are it while they dance, there is the spirit of gravity, but where this of course breaks up into many different forms, the actors of the spirit, the dwarf, the buffoon, etc.

   But something else haunts the book, a confusion about affirmation that is tangentially connected to certain kinds of dark, totalising view. 

   The key is that the outsight involved in tragedy is about the interestablishment, which is held together, as the controlism it is, by the suppressive systems, including the system of reactive moods. In seeing the terrible sadness of inspired individuals recurrently being destroyed from within by this contingent flaw, there is an arrival of the background radiation of sadness of the world, and the joy intrinsic to this is only the joy of the outsight, the seeing of something within the world - and it is not joy at the destruction of the individuals as sign of inexhaustible, flowing, creative nature... 

   Nietzsche wants to say, if you affirm any moment, through seeing that everything is doing what it does, you affirm everything that led up to it, which, in terms of an overall view is relatively benign, although ulitimately its a redundancy,  and its elaboration into a ring is a dyfunctional development.. But this does not remove the background radiation of sadness - this concerns specific kinds of event, not everything at once - and there is no reactiveness in feeling the sadness of inspired individuals destroyed from within by their tremeral, but nonetheless contingent flaw. 

  Different things get called affirmation. At the overall level, it is better described as a seeing the nature of things that avoids reactive disgust (a parasite that kills is doing what it does), but at the specific level, affirmation is about affirmation of the outsight that breaks open the view of what brings about tragedy, it is not an affirmation of the person being destroyed - that is a kind of reason-construct nonsense.

   What it is that haunts Thus Spoke Zarathustra is very clear. And Nietzsche does not work out the problem with his idea of the 'ring' of eternal return. A construct of reason's line of time has become entangled with an affective and rational confusion-process in relation to tragedy.

   It remains the case that Nietzsche breaks open a view, even if occluded, toward the start of the escape-path. A focus on the planet, on animals, the beyond of the nation state, the beyond of gravity in all its forms, and overall on the human body, and dance, laughter, playfulness, creativeness, exploration - all of these are brought together in an effective way.

    Many aspects of the book occlude this view. The figure of Zarathustre is caught between hermit and teacher, and falls short, as a result, of the tremeral figure of the explorer-traveller, the practioner of exteriority intent. There are glimpses toward the path of metamorphics (the three metamorphoses of the spirit), but these glimpses are vitiated, firstly, by the absence of a female practitioner of metamorphosis, by the absence of groups, and by the absence of alliances for the purposes of escape, and secondly, by a tendency toward grand species-departure perspectives, which are not so much heartening as misleading, in that a pragmatics must emphasise the challenge of the micro-escape. The book to a large extent embodies lucidity, but it fails to create a map of the body/myriadon which shows the key faculties beyond reason (ultimately opposing reason to dance, in favour of dance, is more of a win for the blocked form of reason than it is a win for lucidity). Furthermore there are statements about women, and also, separately, about war, which at best are obfuscatory and at worst are damaging.

    In the absence of the map of the faculties, and the effective account of the interestablishment/controlism (which can indeed be called gravity) the grand species-perspective, and the figure of the Teacher combine to leave the impression that the task is to change the world, so that people can breathe a sigh of relief and get on with an interpretosis view/halucination of an avante-guard around them, and get on with trying to transform the world - a task which is doubly mis-guided because the task is to set out on the escape-path (this where there is purchase on a problem), and you will only create more confusion if you have not yet freed yourself from the interestablishment. And all of this is before arriving at the hypertrophied construct/neurosis of affirmation, and the fixation on the line of time, that together make up the ideas of eternal recurrence.

    For their part, Deleuze and Guarrari take Nietzsche's high-degree-of-validity re-dreaming of human history and widen it and deepen it, drawing on anthropological knowledge. But they are caught in a similar trap: the nomad war machine (which overthrows the state) takes the place of the idea of revolutionary communism, creating a new grand, species perspective which is about overthrowing capitalism (once again, the transformation of the world). There are many of the same crucial gaps as with Nietzsche, and although now there is, in fundamental ways, a better view of the starting-point of the view, what they embody is gigantically wide-ranging scholarly critique and heavy emphasis on the grand perspective, which together block the focus on the micrological pragmatics (elements of this pragmatics are scattered vaguely through the book, and it is gestured toward through the references to works of metamorphics) but overall the book is like a collapsed bridge, which could with difficulty be used, but which is unlikely to be grasped as what is - it is likely to function instead as a vantage for projects that adopt the overcome-the-ongoing-disaster project, and that (in the absence of an overcoming of the interstablishment through departure) will form part of the problem, not part of the solution.

    And metamorphics?   

     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 power, judgmental morality, and ritual. 

   The book is cryptic, or consists of ultra-condensed abstract constructs, that can have a quality of riddles. But the only solutions that fit with what the books says about the results of having understood the statements are always solutions that concern what is grasped by lucidity, are solutions that pertain to metamorphics.

   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 the importance of 'non-knowing', in that it breaks open the outsight that scholarly knowledge in fundamental ways 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 texts is pre-eminently left behind for orientation purposes in travelling along the escape-path.

    And in these books there is the account of the fundamental nature of the abstract, and of the transformative, revolutionary nature of dreaming up the future at the micrological level; there is the map of the faculties, the placing of everything into the world of the planet in its exteriority, the account of how to stop the internal dialogue and perceive, and how to overcome self-importance, and there is the map of the stages in the form of getting beyond fear, clarity and power. And running through the works - because of the lucidity and the grasping of the planet and the human world as in fundamental ways the unknown - there is a steady, bright arrival of the planetary sublime. 

   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 form of thought and existence.

   Follow the Sayan path.

  

    

Note

Explorations began in October of 1993, and one sequence of events that started at this time reached its concluding phase many years later, in the years between 2003 and 2009. The next event in this series of experiences was in December of 1993.

I was at a small, very intense party. Everyone had taken psychotropics: some people had taken ecstasy, some had taken a combination of speed and LSD.

I had been in love with Caitlyn for several weeks, and I had been longing for the party. But I was showing signs of coming down with a virus of some kind, and as the party started I was feeling disconcerted by this, and held myself back as a result. Caitlyn started what would be an extremely short-lived relationship with a man called Alec, and as the party reached its height my symptoms had entirely disappeared and I became convinced that there was in fact nothing wrong with me. In the absence of symptoms and with people confirming that I seemed entirely well, I let go of the issue (the next day I would have a cold).

I was sitting with a woman called Jane. There was a kind of sublime, electrically charged, visionary atmosphere - the concerns and preoccupations with which I had arrived in the room seemed lost in some other, unconnected existence. After an intense and inspiring conversation, we started to kiss.

In that room, and with a very high degree of immediacy, I had become a kind of intense libidinal contradiction. The woman with whom I was in love, in a way that genuinely ran deep, was Caitlin, and she was fifteen feet away to my left. The woman who I was kissing, and for whom I was feeling a genuine love and intense amorousness (without an immediate foregrounding of lust) was Jane, a woman I did not have any strong affinity with. With Caitlin there was an intense feeling of love that had the quality of us being in some sense counterparts who were going - or at least looking - in the same direction, and the impression I have now is that with Caitlin there was a chance of us eventually reaching the metamorphics threshold, even under these circumstances of lack of knowledge, though in a way where the probability of this was extremely low. But with Jane I could fall in love with her, but barring some major change of circumstances, there would be no chance of us moving toward the path of Departure.

   The indications are that the bad trip Terror that I would experience for around two hours later that night was perhaps not only connected to an overdose of mind-altering substances while slightly unwell, but was also connected to the intensity of actual and potential personal relationships, with the energy involved being swept up into a dangerous ultra-intense affect, and with my dreaming up of who who I was, and of my future, together with what seems to have been a kind of depth-level awareness of intent, becoming a source of a kind of seismic affective event - an event that was a challenge to get past fear, and an eventual impetus toward the right love relationships (and away from indulgence) and also and very fundamentally an immediate impetus toward a solidifying and tightening-up of my determination to find a line of flight by means of the study and explorations taking place with my milieu, 

   It seems that in this experience, and in the one in October, a capacity was broken open - a capacity to be profoundly jolted by what was wrong in my life at depth (a capacity that would turn out not to require drugs for it to go into effect), and the impression I have is that after around ten or eleven experiences of the kind involved, and specifically after I had been pushed toward transforming my modalities of living and dreaming, this capacity disappeared. The later experiences made this strikingly more perceptible, but it is noticeable that in the first experience there was not only the point where I saw a kind of life-direction that involved a modality of life that was both a form of dreaming (a kind of writing) and a love-relationship, and that I felt there was something capitulatory and wrong about this direction, despite it having a kind of allure - and it is also noticeable that as the Terror arrived on that occasion, what was there at that point was an oneiric seeing of a kind of suppressed, collapsed existence that is recurrently found within the academic world.

          There is no doubt that an aspect of the experiences in December of 1993 was a decisive moment in a conduction that involved a milieu-project based in the Warwick University philosophy department - a Decision was taken which meant that I was going to take on the challenge of overcoming fear in the way that this challenge had appeared.

        What caused me to take this decision was the fact that the individuals within the milieu were genuinely trying to explore the depth-level nature of the world; it was my awareness that there was a way forward within what I was studying and that this area of study was central to the milieu; it was the fact that I wanted to have a relationship with Jane and didn't want to have placed myself outside the group of which she was a part, in terms of my attitude to mind-altering substances; and it was my instinct that it was right to accept the adventure, but to be more careful. But it was also the power of the earlier experience, a month before. 

    In thinking about the second experience the Decision is key, but within the experience, beyond the most intense stage in the onset of a struggle with Fear, all that can be seen is that I somehow knew some things about staying active under pressure, and, most of all, that I was extremely dedicated to having a relationship with a woman in a high intensity form which I knew was 'there' as a strong possibility - the form of relationship that is described as being intensely in love.

    The same dedication is visible in the November experience. But here there is far more than this: it was the semi-focused outsights, the singular, striking forms of perception, the anomalous oneiric lines of thought, and the joy (that was inseparable from dancing) of this earlier experience that together informed the Decision. This, along with the aspects of the milieu and my area of study that have just been delineated, gave the conduction a validity that meant I wasn't vulnerable to a perspective that would cause me to revise what I had decided.

   In the November experience I had started out locked to a focus on time, and had arrived unexpectedly at the threshold of an awareness of space.

   The planetary space of places or terrains which hearten, inspire.

    The space of multiplicitous formations of intent and energy, consisting of singularities and transecting modalities, where between the singularities there are variously the lines without contour of affects, attractions/impulsions, perceptions, becomings, faculties, loves, alliances, fascinations.

    These are not separate from each other. The first is space as it is encountered by the focused faculty of dreaming, and by the faculty of perception. The second is space as it is encountered by the woken faculty of reason, working in combination with the faculty of lucidity.

     The Corridor is an exploration of space in the first sense (the story evidently does not take place in England).

      An account of space in the second sense is a primary aspect of all of Explorations, including The Corridor. The key to this account is that there is a current of alterity that runs through the world. The space involved in this current is ultimately always smooth space, whatever are the inclusions and uses of striated space for those who are within and part of this current.

     But Deleuze and Guattari get diverted into a kind of (impressive, valid) rogue philosophy of science concentrating on 'nomad-science' aspects of the institutions/formations of science/engineering/construction. What is needed, instead, is the delineation of the outsights, faculties, thresholds and pragmatics of a movement forward within the current of alterity. Despite creating the term in this new sense, Deleuze and Guattari do not set out the space and the pragmatics of the line of flight: they do not delineate the modalities (the knowledge and the pragmatics) of the nomad escape-group, of metamorphics.

    And the first principle is: look toward the planet in a way where you not only see it as heartening and inspiring, but in a way where you actively see it as the fundamentally unknown (actively in the sense that you reach toward it in thought / oneiric thought). The second principle is: while maintaining a primary focus on the planet as a whole (and in particular its scurfland, semi-wilderness, wilderness and sky and sunlight/starlight terrains), bring into focus the way in which spread through the included planetary domain of the human world there is an ultra-permeative grey aspect that can be described as the functioning of the interestablishment within human individuals (together with the macrological expressions of this), and which can also be described as 'the drome.'

   It can been that in a particular terrain there are navigation decisions about what to do next, what direction to take, and how to move in that direction (and the world of what can be decided is indeterminately vast).

   And at the level of a life, in relation to navigation in immediacy and navigation for the upcoming months and years, the scale of what can be decided is at another level of immensity (taken in principle, it is a larger infinity). And what is key here is not only the fact that lives are in danger of progressing along well-worn, customary paths of ordinary reality, but most fundamentally is the fact that when an awareness of space wakes in terms of singularities, singular zones of singularities, and formations of intent, the crucial way of describing navigation is that it is a question at each point of going in the direction of what most heartens and inspires.

   And within one plane of immanence there are now the terrains and singular places of the planet, books, areas of study, ethos systems, dreamings, semi-groups, groups, individuals, animal species, individual animals, plants, art-works, forms of action, forms of creation, faculties, becomings, institutions, buildings, gers, forms of technology, devices, machines, rivers, the sun, stars,  fires, oceans, corporeal/plasma formations and interactions...

   An ethos system is an ethos world. And it needs to be added that although the discipline of avoiding indulgent behaviour is fundamental here, the terms ethical and moral are not keys for understanding what is involved: everything concerns ways of being, ways of living, ways of moving forward. Everything becomes tremeral, existential, an issue of joy and of love, an issue of waking your life - as opposed to the obeying of an imperative. The guide-line is - follow a path with heart. You go toward what heartens and inspires, the direction of love, lucidity and freedom - the direction of brightness.

    To be heartened is to be woken, and intrinsically includes being woken at the level of your capacity to express your love for the world. In asking the question posed by the guide-line idea a fundamental aspect of the question is that you are asking if the path is an expression of love for the world (as opposed for instance to self-indulgence or the seeking of kudos) and if it is not you will find that looking toward the path does not hearten you - because it is not a path with heart.

                                                                    ***

   

    

     

[section unfinished]

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