23.

    Explorations



This blog is a three-part book in the process of being written, in the form of initial drafts of the sections, posted in the intended order, a project for which the overall name is Explorations. The book is a continuation from Hidden Valleys, Haunted by the Future (Zero Books - 2015), and also from On Vanishing Land, an audio-essay made by myself and Mark Fisher (released by Hyperdub/Flatlines on 26th July, 2019 - https://hyperdub.net).





Part One: Zone Horizon   (1 - 18)

Part Two: The Second Sphere of Action   (19 - 30)

Part Three: Through the Forest, the River  (31 - 50) 

    





   She had got up early to walk to the top of the mountain. It was now midday, and she was in the pine-forest on the summit, walking toward the highest area, that looked south above a wall of cliffs. It was late July – the university term had ended, and she and her friends were staying in her house in the Sayan mountains. She was a lecturer in literature, working at a small Russian university, and she was part Siberian Russian, and part English, having spent her childhood in Warwick and Abakan.

   Looking at the forest caused her to feel – yet again – her closeness to the ways of viewing the world that could be discerned within the indigenous Siberian cultures: the emphasis on the sky as a view toward the sacred, and the earth also, but in a different way; the emphasis on dreams, and on the attaining of trance-states; the emphasis on music and dance; the emphasis on becoming-woman displayed by the male shaman recurrently living as a woman, irrespective of his sexual orientation. She was now walking more slowly. In the very bright, warm sunlight the forest began to take on a sublime, iconic quality, as if in some sense every view was now a view into all the forests of the world. She started to think about Shakespeare’s forests – about the forests of his stories, and the forests he had probably explored in Warwickshire. Who did he meet? 

    And now, of course those forests were gone – the Forest of Arden had been completely destroyed, with not even large remnant woodlands, as with the extensive woodlands of other similar areas with poor soil, such as Kent and Sussex. The northwest of Warwickshire was now haunted by the ghost of a forest, she mused – because of the intensity of Shakespeare’s work there was a permanent disjunction there between the Warwickshire forest in the oneiric, ethereal dimension of England, and the fields and commuter villages of the actual.

   One summer in Warwickshire she had walked all across the county, exploring its hidden areas, and visiting the places from which poets and writers of fiction had originated. In thinking about this, she now found she was superimposing the question of shamanism with the map of Warwickshire dreamers. Shakespeare, the planet-wide breakthrough; Thomas Mallory and Tolkien, the creators of religious paratexts - their work to a great extent was suppression-shamanism, with its melancholy,  and disguised sexist attitudes. Philip Larkin, with his botched becoming-woman, who had traded a genuine journey toward women for a life of deeply cunning multiple seductions, and who had traded the escape from ordinary reality for tiny, constrained apertures of lucidity, and of ultra-polished writing.

    She had arrived at the view – Sayan mountains and forests spread out beneath an immensity of  sky and sunlight. 

     And Mathew Arnold, she thought, smiling. Faintly sensing the sublime was there – and looking as far as the nomad terrains of Sohrab and Rustum, and the Roma culture of The Scholar Gypsy – and then collapsing completely into the life of a repressive civil servant. Then Auden – more collapsed shamamism, but much less influential than Tolkien: the work from before the collapse filled with a brightness that is missing from what follows. And the wildly radical dreamer, George Eliot, who nonetheless did not see the secret suppression-sorcery within Feuerbach, who was an anti-religion thinker, but who was a Hegelian, and who was therefore embroiled in a hidden pious delusion of the overall development of “the spirit.” Mary Ann Evans, swept up in fact by an ambient delusory source of optimism, and impelled therefore to write stories of the grinding of ordinary reality, broken only by tragedy.

     And somehow all of this is beneath an oneiric sky in the form of the serene, escape-toward-wider-realities sorcery of Shakespeare – the forest, the bank where the wild thyme blows… The forest is gone, but it is still there. And there is a sense in which, because it is gone, it is even more present. In that people don’t know where it was, in the more fertile, south and eastern parts of the county the dreamers who hear of it are likely to think it used to be also in those areas, covering these terrains in their minds with a forest that in fact never existed in Shakespeare' time.

     And to the northwest it is perhaps particularly important to leap toward the sublime: there is perhaps a conformist, zealous-pious industry and melancholy that has replaced the forest, a something that impels toward the false outside that is ceated by religion, and toward gravity in all its forms.  A gravity that could kill, in the same way as the forest was killed. Tolkien and Auden were infected, but left. Nick Drake left, but when he returned to Tanworth-in-Arden... Easy to imagine the same thing having happened to Christine McVie, or Steve Winwood - but they also left. Birmingham, a city fortunate enough to be haunted by the forest it destroyed, but only fortunate if you go in some sense toward the forest, the "beyond" of ordinary reality.

*

  

Shakespeare’s initial secret is – it is always necessary to go to the outside. The outside of the zone of human habitation (go to the forest); the outside of the local, current religion.

But Shakespeare’s second secret (without which the first one would be worse than inadequate) is that it is necessary to go toward the south of the outside. Which is to say, it is necessary to go toward the planet, and toward intent - with the long-suppressed intent-modalities of women as a crucial world of intent.

There is a central pair of plays – The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream – and these form a cluster with a third play, As You Like It. The importance of As You Like It is firstly that it grounds the oneirosphere emergence in a specific place and in a specific lineage (the Forest of Arden, and the Arden lineage of Shakespeare’s mother, which goes back four hundred years to Thorkell, the extaordinary figure who was one of the very few Saxon earls to maintain his lands after the Norman conquest, because he had refused to support Harold (notice the Norse name)), and secondly – and even more significantly – is that it gives a very strong emphasis to an aspect of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is to say that at the very end of both “forest” plays a Romano-Greek goddess is invoked, Hecate in the Dream, and Hymen in As You Like It (at the end of As You Like It the figure of Hymen appears in order to marry the couples). There is also the same link to The Tempest, where three goddesses (and no gods) are included within the final phase of the play – Ceres, Iris and Juno.

     The crucial point here is that Shakespeare in going to the outside of Christianity is not advocating Romano-Greek (or Norse) pantheonism, but instead is breaking open a view toward the transcendental – toward that which wakes people. There is a greater brightness about the ancient Greek and Roman religious world – because it is far more female, and far more about the outside, and about dance, and music – and this means that it is immensely valuable to invoke it, but when, in the Dream and The Tempest Shakespeare creates something new he does not do this from within any religion, but instead dreams something fundamentally new, in that its inspiration is the transcendental, not the interiority. What he dreams is the world of the anomalous beings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and of Ariel, and the other “inorganic entities” of The Tempest. This world has elements that are superficially connected to the Norse and Ancient Greek worlds (the Dream is set in a forest near Athens, and Oberon and Titania’s sphere of beings can be compared to some extent to the realm of the Norse elves), but its fundamental aspects are dreamed up from zones that are not connected to religion – instead most specifically they are connected to the countryside and to its tales.

    And this central zone of brightness is connected up to elements within the wider body of work, in a way where the whole oneiric zone works together.

    Shakespeare continually depicts women who are in love – who have been taken out of themselves in the sense that they are much less entangled in the affectations and deadened roles of the interiority – and he does this in a way where he suggests that there is something more again, in that he problematizes amorous, romantic love. Furthermore, he not only presents women who are in love: his plays are full of women who are strong, courageous, and independent-minded (Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Rosalind in As You Like It). And it is crucial that in the plays where he dreams something new - as a central action of the play - it is the figure of the "goddess"  that he includes within these virtual-real worlds (Juno, Ceres, Iris).

    Attention is directed toward the planet by the island in The Tempest being indeterminately "elsewhere" (and through it being more of a terrain than a human territory), and by the continuum of forests that is created, stretching from Warwickshire, through the Ardennes forest in France, to Greece. And it is created inseparably through the "locus" of the spirit entities being the planet's natural world, and through Puck flying rapidly around the planet (his terrain is the planet as a whole). 

     And, in turn, the abstract is foregrounded not just by the intrinsic centrality of the oneiric (intrinsic, and also in the form of dreams about the future, of recounted dreams in sleep, and of the play within the play in Hamlet, etc) but also by the primary focus on intent. And, most specifically, intent in the form of love (and of being "in love"), and intent in the form of domination (Iago), and movement-toward-domination (Edgar in King Lear).

     The abstract in the form of abstraction - or outsights - is continually embodied within the plays (in the sense that it is oneirically enacted, with occasional explicit use of abstraction - as in "we are such stuff as dreams are made on"). And it is gestured toward as both the domain of actual thought, and as the domain in which thought falls short of an encounter with the transcendental - in which something takes place which is a failure of thought, a failure to wake. The first instance is found in Antony and Cleopatra, where the soothsayer says "In nature's infinite book of secrecy / A little I can read." The second instance is found in Hamlet - "there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio / than are dreamed of in your philosophy."

     There is only nature here (there is a way in which Shakespeare is more of a Spinozist than Spinoza). The soothsayer sees into the wider and deeper aspects of nature, not into delusory supplimentary dimensions outside of it, and Hamlet's phrase on one level is to be seen as relating to earth and sky, and on another to different, immanent dimensions of one space of forces - whereas, he makes no mention of hell. The entire context is emphatic here: Shakespeare is not concerned with the beyond-nature constructs of "heaven" and "hell" but is invoking a single continuum of nature in which anomalous beings are not transcendent but exist within a forest of forces, the same as human beings.    

      And lastly, it is to be remembered that the world of energy-formations that surrounds an individual is also the abstract – it is just that it is recurrently also possible in some sense to perceive it along the lines of the concrete. It is easier to think about this in relation to encountered energy-formations in the form of human beings, where the perception is of the intent of the person, but in fact the circumambient world is always a storm of the arriving abstract (think of the wrap-around “sphere” of tactile sensation, and of the way in which the sensation is on one level spatialized and on another level is an intensity of contact: a feeling of a sharp stone beneath your bare foot is spatialized, but it is pre-eminently an intensity or feeling arising from a specific encounter with an energy formation).

    The strangeness of our situation is brought out well in relation to “memory:” worlds of the abstract are encountered, and – as if we are a space many millions of miles across – these worlds flow into us, as if they were space-ships or floating barges. For instance, we are walking in a forest, and a woman appears in the distance on a path that cuts across our own, and then a minute later she disappears, having walked out of sight. The woman, as an encountered zone of the abstract, flows into us: the arriving barge that is the woman – the zone of modulated energy that is an expression of her - does not take long to arrive, and once within us it is no longer the abstract in the form of an encountered zone, but is instead the abstract in the form of the extended, continued encounter that is called a memory. Songs flow into us, trees flow into us, rooms and terrains flow into us, people and animals flow into us – days flow into us. Each one of us is an immensity in which there is a stack of days that is many hundreds of days deep – the personal, singular antechamber of what Shakespeare calls “the dark backward and abysm of time.” But of course, there is - all along - only the present, in which the stack of days exists as an energetic element, and as a space of doorways through which we can travel (and also of deleterious elements that have been placed within us that we need to remove by seeing what they are, and by intending their inability to have any impact, and their dissolution as components of memory terrains).

     But given that we know very little about the surrounding depth-worlds of the abstract it is necessary to arrive at the true perception of the surrounding world, which sees it either as a glare, or as a darkness - and, even more importantly, it is necessary for each individual to explore all the ruptural, anomalous encounters that they have experienced, to see what can be brought into focus in these explorations of the ruptural zone, either in memory, or through a return, if possible and advisable, in the realm of the actual. This domain of encounters is the domain of the waking of faculties, and micro-faculties, and is the domain of thought, and of abstract-perception in its different forms. In Shakespeare people go off into the wilderness, or into some liminal zone or mode (such as sleep), and they have encounters there – encounters which rupture ordinary reality.

   And what remains to be said – and Shakespeare embodies this knowledge within what is emphasised across all his works – is that in going into the outside you have to choose the right direction. 

*

     There is a hill in summer: there are wild roses, large areas of grassland, hawthorn trees, flowering mullein - you are on the edge of an escarpment, and the hills continue to the south. 

Behind you, five miles away in the valley, there is the wide grey terrain of a city. You are aware it is part of a network of greyness, in the form of cities, and zones of ordinary reality in all forms and terrains, spread around the surface of the planet. This greyness is natural, perturbing, problematic. The greyness relates to something within the will of human beings, something which continually erupts as tragedy.

    You are also aware of another form of intent: a brightness, a capacity for inner silence, an openness, a laughter and delight, an ability to see intent and to express this seeing in the form of an always-new language - outlandish.

   This form of intent is found threaded within the towns and cities, but it makes sense to place it, in thought, in the areas beyond them, because those who have this form of intent are most likely to live in the outlands; because they are likely to have had this form of intent heightened and woken by visits to them; and because what is fundamental to it is a primary focus on the planet, and on its wilderness and countryside terrains, including the terrain of the sky. It makes sense to see these people as here, as opposed to in the cities and town, because this is their place - the place of exteriority.

    You become aware that ahead there is a wall of the transcendentally unknown: obscure, bright, perturbing, sublime, enigmatic. It is the wall of Sophocles's sphinx, of Shakespeare's Medea, of Puck, of Ariel, of Antony's daemon in Antony and Cleopatra. You get a sudden view that emerges from the depth-level feeling of the wall: a white sky above a horizon - a sky that is lightning, delight, audacity.

    You know you have to walk forward into the obscure bright alterity of this wall of the unknown. The task of the writer of tragedies is to make this happen - to bring you to the point where you walk forward, and keep walking.

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