21.

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

Explorations: Zone Horizon  (1 - 18)

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

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

The Island                                                                                                    7

     It was around twelve years since he had first started seeing the island. It was eight years since he had first seen Tanya there. And now in the last few years the new enigmatic presence, the woman spinning round on the beach, or drawing in the sand – the woman he had always seen from the cliffs.

      The island. A long line of sea-cliffs, above a series of beaches, with three steep paths – as he discovered later – leading to a shelf of trees and rocks a mile deep and ten miles wide. Above this, the huge bulk of the flat-topped mountain, filled with the tunnels of the labyrinth.

  He had been thrown over something – a barrier. He had been trying to get across, and then something like a huge wave arrived, and caught him, and then he was over the barrier, and was seeing the island. After that if his energy-level was high enough he was very likely to visit this recondite zone of experience, with its unknown ontological status, and its attribute, while he was there, of seeming more real than his ordinary life.

     At the beginning he would always be on the island at twilight. He would find himself standing in the waves, or on the beach, under the white sky of the island’s dusk, with the coloured light of three stars breaking through the whiteness, from three, widely-separated places in the sky. The violet star; the green star; the red star -which was low in the sky, just above the horizon. He was also there at night – and he had never stopped going there at night – seeing the electrically lucid awareness-filaments of the cosmos all around him, and running through him. But at that time he had not realised this was the island at night, and nor had he begun to suspect that the compelling points of colour in its twilight sky could be something even more extraordinary than suns.

      Later he found that his visits to the island always started around midday, or in the morning when the sun was already high. This was a vital change. For the purposes of exploration it did not work to be on the island in proximity to night, because your attention could be drawn in the other direction. At night the island did not really exist as something separate from what was around it (but then of course nor did anything else).

       In the course of many visits during the first few years he explored the land at the top of the cliffs, and he discovered the three clusters of houses, whose buildings grew out of terrains of rocks like organic extensions of the planet’s surface. He also discovered the entrances to the labyrinth.

    The cliff-top terrain was a tangled world of huge limestone rocks and rock promontories – a step-plateau of Mediterranean trees, such as evergreen oaks;  of orchids and lily-like flowers in open spaces of grass and gnarled, whitish stones, that sometimes had a tiny stream meandering through them. It was an endlessly intriguing, charismatic place a mile wide and ten miles long: a genuine vastness of natural rock gardens, and sculpture-like rock barriers and protuberances whose glades were often hauntingly beautiful, as if he was seeing a place that was really a doorway to another world.

      The largest and most extraordinary of the three clusters of buildings was the one in the centre of the shelf of land – the one which had a mosaic of a bird in flight on a wall in a room of one of its houses.

      One day, as he was arriving at this group of buildings he saw a woman standing – a long way off - on the terrace of an overgrown orchard. She waved to him, and called out his name, and he realised that it was Meg, a woman who he had met several months before. But something that struck him afterwards was that as she called out, she had brought a foot down firmly on the ground, in a gesture he did not recognise, a mixture perhaps of excited encouragement and frustration at something.  He went quickly down the hill, and having gone through the buildings, and up some steps to the terrace, he discovered that Meg was no longer there, and was nowhere in sight.

   The beginning of his visits to the island was associated in his mind with two other aspects of his life. The first was the appearance of a kind of detached awareness that everyone in the world was caught up in a -deeply obscured life-and-death struggle – a struggle to escape from a deadening force-field of ordinary, conventional reality. The second was the arrival in his life of Meg, and in particular of a blissful serenity that later he would come to realise was the result of seeing the world while he was in love with her, rather than it being a state that was connected to an amorous, sexual relationship – in fact, the opposite, in that it would have been rapidly destroyed by such a relationship.

    He was very far from this realisation on the day he saw her at the central plateau buildings, and when he could not find her he felt dejected and perturbed, but in a way where the intensity of the distress seemed to be beyond anything he could articulate. It was as if at the level of feeling he was understanding something that was very distressing, but had no ability to focus what he understood.

    It was an hour later. He was walking up some steps that led onto a roof that was opposite where he had seen Meg. He knew it was possible to walk across to the top of the next building, and that from there you could walk to the point where the second roof arrived at the slope of the hill. As he reached the top of the roof he was pre-occupied, but his eyes went straight to the terrace, and there was a woman standing there – she was not Meg – who in that unfocused second had the quality of being surprised at her surroundings, as if she was bemused and a little shocked to find herself there. And then that impression was gone.

    “Hey” she said.   

  

    There was an intense poised warmth about her smile, as she greeted him. She had a wide, very attractive face, with long wavy-to-curly brown hair that came down around here face. She was wearing a loose t-shirt, and an olive-coloured skirt that came down to a few inches above her knees.

“My name is Tanya - though everyone calls me Jess.”

He had been about to say the name “Tanya” as a greeting in response to what she had told me, but then he felt unsure that he would be using the right name.

"Which do you want to be called?”

“ Tanya.”

He told her his name was Robert, and that sometimes he would get called Rob or Robbie.

“I don’t really have any other name, but for a while I thought I would like to be called Kelvin, but I decided that was maybe a bit pretentious.”

There was a slight pause, before the woman responded.

“I don’t think its pretentious – it’s a good name for you. But there’s often something heavy about men’s names.”

She smiled, her eyes sparkling playfully at me, and I could see she was about to make a joke of some kind.

“Maybe you should try something less conventional.  Like … Kelly, or Kirsty…  You’d make a good Kirsty!”

His male pride was offended, but he did what he could to hide this, by joking in response.

“Are you saying I couldn’t get away with being a Selena or a Sylvana?”

She laughed. She was on the edge of saying something, but then she stopped herself. 

There was another slight pause, before she continued.

   “I think Kelvin is right for you – I think it’s one of your names. And it really reminds me of the way I once used to think I would like to be called Tanya Eldridge – Eldridge has the same sort of feel to it that Kelvin has – a kind of hidden lightness.”

    He was aware that she was speaking with a northern accent that had a striking warmth and musicality – a lovely way of speaking. Afterwards he would feel that the accent was from Lancashire or maybe from Cheshire.

“I’m guessing” he said, "that you don’t like being called Jessica."

She gave him a kind of warm but shrewd smile, as if she sensed that he was overcoming his wounded masculine feelings by dressing her in a feminine name.

“It’s a bit frilly, isn’t it?” she said. “A bit come-and-get-me.”

    He was feeling slightly faint, as a result of the effect the woman was having on him. She was both otherworldly-feminine and alluringly physical, and the combination created a sexual, amorous desire that was perturbingly intense.

   “Do you remember any of your visits here?”  She said this suddenly, as if she had perceived something about me.

“I mean, back in the ordinary world, do you remember them?”

“Yes,” he said, “mostly, I remember them, but I sometimes I forget parts of what happened that I only remember when I get back here.”

“You’re here in a very effective way” she said. “But - its quite an ordinary-world way of being.”

H did not how to respond to this.

“I think you need more brightness” she said. “And you need a greater ability to stand on your own, through having raised your level of energy. Right now you’re like a moth being pulled to a flame – and that inability to avoid crash-landing on brightness, and to avoid trying to subordinate it – that’s what makes males agressive. Their weakness makes them aggressive.”

He understood what she was saying, but he wanted to contest what she was asserting about his own case, and say that there was no chance of him crash-landing, or trying to subordinate her, but he knew this would sound like a knee-jerk denial, and the fact he was sensing she was now saying goodbye also helped to keep him from this reactive response.

“How do I get more brightness?” he said.

She smiled at him, her eyes twinkling. But she shook her head, giving me the strong impression she did not know how to answer this question.

Then she started looking around her. After a few seconds, she spoke again, talking quickly.

“I can feel I'm about to be pulled back – it’s as if I’ve exhausted myself, like I’ve been at full stretch.”

She was turning away – without saying goodbye.

He ran down the steps and then ran up to the terrace, and when he got to the top Tanya was fifty feet away on the opposite side of the orchard. She gave him a big, smiling wave – two motions of her arm from side to side, above her head, with the second motion seeming to be saying “this way.” And then she disappeared behind some trees.

   When he reached where she had been, he found there was a path leading up the hill through undergrowth in the direction of the labyrinth. He ran up it until he reached a view of the path ahead that extended several hundred yards – there was no sign of Tanya.

   He felt disconcerted by the meeting in a way that ran very deep. Because he was in love with Meg the degree of attraction – on every level – that Tanya had exerted upon him left him devastated in relation to his sense of unity. If he was in love with Meg he was not supposed to feel like this. But he did. In the end he tried nonsensically to reconcile the feelings by seeing Tanya as someone who he could not really love because she was at a level beyond him, and someone who would help him to reach Meg. He did not know that in a few months time he would meet Cara - an event which would be like the river-bed of his life being moved.

    The only clear, practical result of the encounter was that beyond doubt a direction had been pointed out. The path from the orchard led to one of the entrances to the labyrinth.

     In the months that followed he discovered there were three entrances, excluding places where you could climb up to one its walkways. The other two entrances were each near to one of the other clusters of buildings, which he had named the River Buildings and the Spiral Buildings, because of art-works he had found in them (in the River Buildings two of the houses had stone, cartographic carvings on a wall – each different from the other – showing a river system culminating in a delta, near the ceiling; and in the Spiral Buildings there was a suspended vortical sculpture, made of wire, in the largest of the rooms). He discovered that the two entrances from the River and Bird Buildings led very rapidly to the same walkway.

     It was never really quite true to say that it was a labyrinth.  It was more that unknown parts of it might possibly take the form of a maze extending into the mountain, and that the part which was known had something in common with labyrinths. The part he knew was a towering series of long, overgrown walkways – small trees sprouting from them, and vines climbing everywhere - connected by staircases.  Each of the three entrances led to a staircase, cut out of the rock, that took you up to a first walkway.

      Passages opened up laterally from these walkways, and with just one exception, these passages revealed nothing but a few feet of stone and scattered leaves. These doorways were relatively rare. You would walk along a sequence of sunlit colonnades, sometimes pushing aside thick curtains or walls of vegetation, and on each walkway there would be nothing but the four foot high stone balustrade, and the hanging vines and small trees. Once, near the beginning he had walked along fifteen or sixteen terraces, without encountering a single opening, and then he was working his way around a huge elder tree, when he realised that to his left there was a gap leading into darkness.

   The first real discovery that came from exploring the maze of walkways came one day when he was  on the far south of the mountain several hundred feet above the  tongue of land that extended for a mile beyond the River Buildings. He had just walked along a connecting rope bridge, made of extremely thick ropes, with planking made of steel struts two inches wide, set six inches apart. The new walkway sinuously followed the gentle curves of the rock face – a two hundred foot long undulation made of an emptiness that had barely been disturbed by plants. He immediately saw that two thirds of the way along its length there was a doorway.

    Reaching the opening he looked into the darkness, and went a few steps forward, looking at a big vein of whitish-grey quartz running diagonally through the rock along the right hand wall. Then suddenly he realised that he could see a patch of light at the end of the tunnel. Walking very carefully forwards after about a hundred yards he began to feel that the view was of rock in sunlight, but he could not get the perspective, with the view at one point looking like an expanse of a distant mountain. He was walking trailing his right hand on the wall alongside him, which meant there probably had not been a passageway on that side, the direction of the main bulk of the mountain.

    In the last seconds before reaching the entrance he was aware he was hearing the sea, and then he emerged onto a small platform, and he was seeing a spectacular view. The platform projected ten feet into a gigantic cleft which ran the full length and height of the island. On both sides the cliff walls were effectively vertical , although both at different points very gradually bulged into titanic overhangs, and toward the tops they had long vertical gaps whose depth was impossible to guess.

    At the base of the cliffs there was a thin channel of ocean that gave him the impression that it was very deep, and which might or not be continuous because a few miles away there was a buttress of rock that blocked the view. However, the line of the channel was really just a pointer toward the vanishing point - and to what was above it.

   Above the protruding area of rock – which was only a couple of hundred feet high – there was a view of water at the far end of the channel which in turn became an immensely tall sliver of sky, a delicately towering thin-ness of light, unbroken from this angle by the cliffs.

   But not unbroken. The cleft – three thousand feet high -  was an enigmatic and spectacular place. On either side there were walkways of the labyrinth, fewer in number, with much fewer plants, but somehow all the more striking for being features of this gigantic abyss. But as well – the sliver of light at the end of the cleft was both broken and semi-broken by two awe-inspiring aspects of the cleft’s terrain which were surely extensions of this double labyrinth.

    Very high up, and about five miles away, there was a bridge. It was a slender, very flat span that was probably made of wood, and which was supported by ropes. But this was not all: a thousand feet lower down – but still very high -  there was a second very similar structure. Only this was what appeared to be a nearly-bridge: it was a bridge with a central gap comprising perhaps a quarter of what would have been the span. Only it looked purpose-built rather than broken. Its two arches were both attached with suspension ropes which went to the very ends of the projecting sections, and its proportions suggested completeness, rather than symmetrical damage.

    The viewing point led to nowhere other than the view. It had no connections to other walkways.

     When he visited the island his efforts now centred on trying to reach either the bridge, or the semi-bridge. In particular he attempted to reach the lower of the two structures, because he could find no way of getting to the very high walkways that were opposite to the bridge.

    However, the main development during this time was an increasing feeling that he was not at all trying to solve a labyrinth, but that instead he was trying to solve the problem of maintaining his focus under disturbing circumstances.

      He had located lateral tunnels that he thought must be relatively close to the nearly-bridge. However, when he set out to walk down one of them the surrounding darkness very rapidly had an effect that was like closing your eyes when you are exceptionally tired. It didn’t really matter whether he was afraid or relaxed in the ambient darkness: the outcome was the same. There would be hypnogogic ‘slips’ of attention into some oneiric situation or line of thought, and then sooner or later he would fail to fend off one of these diversions – and his visit to the island would be over.

             It was four years later that he had found himself on the island’s main beach on what was initially an extremely hot, windless day.

      So much had changed. He had met Cara, and they had embarked on a relationship. It was clear that their life together was the fundamental voyage in terms of couple relationships, though its forward motion did not in any way directly resolve the issue of the island’s existence in his life. 

   He now almost never met up with Meg, although they were still in contact with each other. But he had a feeling that it was vital in every way that they had not, and would not, come together as a couple. It was as if a fundamental energy had never been dissipated, and as if they were walking distantly but in parallel, with an absolute necessity to not turn and walk towards each other.

  He was on his way across the sand to the middle cliff path, thinking about Meg, when he remembered something that had happened a moment before - a ‘transitional’ experience.  He felt slightly shocked: he had had many of these transitional events - all lasting only a few seconds – but nothing as real or extraordinary as this one.

    He had been lying on his side on the sand, and he had realised there was a woman in front of him – a young, very attractive woman who he did not recognise, and who immediately put a finger to her lips to tell him not to speak. She was standing ten feet away, and as he stood up she followed her initial gesture with a playful, twinkling smile. She had curly, and quite messy, light-brown hair, and she was wearing a dark green top and a grey skirt – with violet-coloured stitching around the hem - that projected a little from her hips and ended above her knees.

   He had noticed that the girl was now looking thoughtful about something, as if she had remembered an aspect of the situation that was perturbing. Smiling at him, as if she had to complete a thought, she turned round toward the sea, and then stood facing away from him, swinging herself slowly and meditatively from side to side, making her skirt swirl.

    At this point he noticed a big diagram on the sand beyond, which he felt she was studying, and as he started to move forward to look at it he was suddenly seeing it from above – it seemed to be two interlinked spirals, with each starting out through a line of gaps in the other – and then seamlessly he was looking at a more complex, but similar diagram, on a page of a book.

    All of this had only taken a few moments, and after a second of seeing the book’s page he had suddenly been near the sea on the beach, looking at the wide bulk of the island, and aware of the heat of the day and the fact the cliffs were half a mile away. He had at that point forgotten the transitional event – also unusual in that it had taken place on the beach, something that had only happened once or twice before  - and it was only now after walking almost all the way to the cliffs that it had come back to him.

     By the time he reached the Bird Buildings it was clear the weather was changing, a hazy sky had darkened, and rather than it feeling that clouds were drifting across, it felt that the whole sky above him was becoming a cloud. He stood for a moment where he had seen Meg standing, and very deliberately tried to put himself into her position at that moment, bringing to mind the welcoming, joyful sound of her voice. It was very clear that she had been beckoning him – and if that was so she had been beckoning him toward the labyrinth.

   As he reached the middle entrance. there were large drops of rain coming down.  At the second walkway the sound of torrential rain was immensely loud. Further up this sound grew less, even though the avalanche of rain alongside him had if anything grown heavier. In the humid air he climbed steadily up to the walkway which had a lateral tunnel branching off it in what he thought was the direction of the semi-bridge. The first lightning came three stair-flights lower down.. He counted two seconds, before a shocking, ground-shaking thunder-clap. He had seen the lightning’s flash, but not the lightning itself – he felt sure it had hit the top of the mountain.

     He waited for a while outside the entrance to the lateral tunnel. There were two or three more lightning strikes, and then there was a gap filled with rain falling unabated into the hundreds of feet in front of him. He turned, and walked into the tunnel.

     As he walked he was thinking about the planet all around him which had given birth to the storm. While walking slowly forward, with his left arm in front of him, and the fingers of his right hand touching the wall, he somehow managed to adopt the spherical point of view of the planet. He could feel the stupendous energy-arrival of the sun ‘above’ him – with the stars touching his surface from every direction. He could feel tiny lumps of space-rock burning up as they arrived in the atmosphere, and the slowly moving sphere of the weather systems.  

    

     And then a moment – or a vast amount of time – later he was returning from having understood something fundamental.  The space behind him was very open and bright and had many sky-zones – immense transparent compartment-worlds the nature of which he could no longer remember. The tunnel  walls were lit up as if with  sunlight. And in front of him was the end of the tunnel, bright, but no more bright than what was around him.

     As he reached the walkway his vision returned to normal, and he was walking out of darkness into an abyss of sheer walls of rock, filled with rain, and capped with a graduated band of sky that went from dark cloud to the south to a narrow band of blue sky to the north. At zenith, very far above him, was the delicate span of the bridge. The nearly-bridge was only two hundred yards away, to his right, and a little above him.

    He had walked carefully forward and gripped the parapet with both hands before leaning out and looking up. For a moment the view of the two structures made him dizzy, but he cleared his head by stepping back from the parapet, and staring straight in front of him, while slowing down his breathing.

     He had an image suddenly of a woman in a room that seemed to be an office. He felt the place was a town in Shropshire, or the border area of mid Wales. There were three other people there, and the woman seemed to be a manager – she was explaining something. She was a little older than Tanya, and her long hair was black rather than brown. She was slim, with a very intelligent, lovely face and a quality of kindness and sensual vitality that he sensed she was masking with an air of laughing shrewdness and a slightly gruff way of speaking. She was wearing a plain but beautiful dress, but was also wearing the air of toughness to disguise her femininity. Listening to her he heard only her manner of speaking and her accent, which he realised came from Yorkshire, somewhere in the area of the North York Moors.

     Eventually he looked over to the structure nearby. Its two sections were made of bleached, greyish brown wood, suspended from ropes whose colour was very similar. The surface of the two parts was slightly convex, relative to the sky, which fitted with the much more convex supporting arch beneath. However, the main support appeared to come from the ropes, which were attached to a third, horizontal projection, above which the walking surfaces rose so that at their ends they were three feet higher than the furthest attachment point of the ropes.

     The nearly-bridge made him think of driftwood, because of its colour, and smoothed, scoured lines.

   As he looked he was walking to get closer. But now he found the walkway ended in a tunnel, continuing in the same direction, and leading perhaps toward a staircase that would take him up to the level of the semi-bridge.  He had worked out the height almost exactly, but he felt sure it was the next tunnel to the north on the next upward  that he needed – he knew this entrance, and had even attempted to go through it on two occasions a year ago.

   And then he saw Tanya walk out onto the far side of the nearly-bridge. She was wearing jeans and a white t-shirt, across which her hair was falling. He waved to her, and shouted that he was going to try to get closer.

    “No, don’t!” she called out.

     But he had already run into the tunnel, and he did not stop. After a short while he found the entrance to staircase, on the right. Moving very carefully, in complete darkness, he found that it was a single steep flight, on the far side of another flight of steps that went down. He set off, moving up the stairs, but as he did so he started thinking about Tanya, and the image instantly arrived of being on the far side of the nearly-bridge with her – and then his visit to the island was over.

    He was left with the distressing thought of Tanya waiting for him to appear, and with a sense of a compounded form of failure. It was not just that he should have maintained his focus – he should have listened when Tanya called out to him to stop.

    

    A new phase had begun, one that lasted several years. There was an urgency about his attempts to reach the nearly-bridge. He tried hard to clear his head before going through the tunnel he believed was opposite the structure, and he experimented all the time with different tunnels, different times of day, and different ways of trying to reproduce the state of mind he had reached when he had crossed to the cleft. But at the same time there was a new development, which often left him bewildered – unsure about what direction to take.

     He would now always arrive on the island on a small beach opposite the River Buildings. From there he would take a path that went along the top of the cliffs, past two small beaches which had promontories separating them from each other, and from the wide beach opposite the Bird Buildings. And as he walked he would almost always see the woman from the transition experience, spinning slowly round on the sand on one of these beaches, or sometimes drawing diagrams, which often included spiral patterns. When he called out to her she would always wave in an absent, minimal way, that made him feel he must be invading her privacy, so after a while he stopped calling out. His decision to look at her, as he walked past toward the labyrinth, rather than attempt to interact, was settled provisionally as his response by the fact that on the three occasions when he tried to reach her – by walking round from one of the beaches at low tide – she had disappeared, leaving only her diagrams.

     The third time there were simply three spirals, all made of words, the sentences starting from the inside and going anti-clockwise outwards:

The ordinary-world mind attempts to dominate those who spin.

If it cannot fuck those who spin, and denigrate them as frivolous, the imposed mind will see spinning as something religious.

Imposed mind is bleak filaments in the brightness of the spinning planet.

      Eventually – a long time after deciding not to disturb the woman – a change arrived.

      A woman who had been a childhood friend of Cara's killed herself. Something about the story of this woman’s life, and the way in which she had died, had a profound effect on him. The jolt he experienced was about the sadness of what had happened to her, but it was also about the terrible plight of women, in particular, and of human beings in general.

    At the same time, his life suddenly became much more complicated in a way that had to do with love – with his relationships with women. He also had a persistent asthma attack, which somehow unnerved him, even though he was not badly ill.

   When he was better from the asthma he found himself back on the island.

    He was in the form of the woman from the beach, and he had just been twirling round, very slowly. He felt the bright sensations of this other, female body, and looked at himself for a moment. A breeze was moving his hair as he looked, and a pleasant unfamiliarness that was his right arm moved to bring some longish strands of hair in front of his eyes.

    He didn’t pause any longer. He set off straight away to get to the tunnel to the nearly-bridge. As he did so he clicked immediately into his ordinary body, although he sensed now that if he wanted he could immediately return to the other form. Walking through the tunnel an hour later, he concentrated on the space of air and rock around him, while thinking at the same time about what it was to be a woman in the strange libidinal tides and currents of the human world.

    He was aware that women are pervasively induced, from childhood, to glow toward people, and to defer toward people, in all sorts of subtle ways. He was also aware that it is insisted that they never do more than allow their lucidity to semi-wake, for glimpse-moments, so that with their sustained attention they always default back to what for both women and men is the lesser form of intelligence – reason. And it was clear that women were set  up to be trapped staring at the mirror of self-reflection, a process that was made even harder to escape because of the endemic fixation on female appearance in relation to both the body and clothing.

    A very strong attractive woman would always be paragonised, he realised, a process that he now saw was a disguised form of imposition. In saying “you are so beautiful” a man draws a woman toward him, insofar as she is likely to have been set up to want to hear this – and he could feel that deep within paragonising there was a process of diminutivising. The woman is induced to give herself up to the man, to be child-like delight submitting to the male. The woman therefore starts to revolve around the man, but because women are actually stronger than men, over time a sphere or core of practical issues generally emerges in relation to which the man revolves around the woman. Even though the relationship would consist most fundamentally of the love that develops from the passionate initial phase, this double submission – reciprocal submission, on two separate levels – would nonetheless be a definitive aspect of it. And if either person remembered that earlier – before the relationship, and its beginning - they had been experiencing the blissful adventure of travelling into the unknown, then this memory would probably be of no use, in that by this time they would be likely to have children, and would understandably feel, having taken up the immense creative task of raising chidren, that the challenge of this ultimate adventure was now for their children, and not for them.  And on and on, round and round, the same diversion away from the path of escape – the same passing on of the challenge.

     He reached the driftwood sunlight of the semi-bridge, in the form of the woman from the beach.

     Tanya was waiting for him. She nodded, as if to say “well done”.

     She was wearing a lilac-coloured top and jeans, and looked startlingly beautiful. He was aware that the love he felt for her was a constant, whether his body was that of a man or of a woman. But a moment later he realised he was back in his male form.

     They sat down opposite each other, at the very ends of the sides of the structure – which somehow gave him the impression they were designed for exactly this.

    “You found a way of being comfortable as a woman through sadness” said Tanya. “You’ve done it – you’ve overcome the tendency to be sexuality, which is not at all being comfortable if it’s not an element of being in love – it’s opening yourself up as prey to virtual-real forces. But being a woman through primarily being tuned to sadness is only the beginning. You have to be primarily love, rather than sadness. But without love being submission, and generally without it being apparent that that is what you are – because otherwise there will be males storming in on you from every direction.”

She laughed.

   “However, the brilliant thing about love is that it is too intense for most virtual-real forces to cope with.”

   There was a pause, filled with the sparkling of Tanya’s eyes. He was having difficulty thinking about what she had said. He had realised that what Tanya possessed was womanliness – a lovely and intensely alluring womanliness that made the idea “girl” seem immature, and made the idea “femininity” seem inadequate.  All he could think about was telling her how much he loved her.

   And then Tanya shook her head at him, in a rapid gesture that obviously meant there was something wrong with how he was responding, to her, and that I needed to concentrate . She looked over my shoulder for a moment, and then looked back into my eyes, as if peering into them, to find something.

   “You need to reach the uttermost of sexual ecstasy at both poles of yourself, and in the process at each pole you will see through sexuality to a kind of negative element within it – something a bit like a parasite – but you will only really see through sexuality when you have done this on both sides of yourself. You have already done it with your male self – you now need to do it with your female self. You could do it by imagining being a woman and having sex with me, where I am in the form of a man. As you would put it, the virtual-real is not less real than the actual – and, as you have suspected, in fundamental ways it is more real.”  

 

   Tanya looked over toward the strip of sky to the south, and then looked back at him.

    “I have a feeling” she said “that we may not meet again for a long time. And I certainly think that we will not meet again here. Us meeting here is something that became contingently possible for a while – something that was valuable for both of us.

    I think this is the place where you learn to encounter the feminine-ethereal without compulsively trying to have sex with the woman who possesses it, and where you learn to take instructions from women at the deepest, most important level.

  

   He felt devastated by her talking about not meeting again for a long time. He spoke, falteringly.

“I think there is a way in which – I’m in love with you.”

He instantly felt mortified by the awkwardness of his words, but to his surprise Tanya’s response was immediate and heartfelt.

   “And there is very definitely a way in which I am in love with you. But all this is not what it seems."

   I’m guessing for instance – and this is not about moralising – that you are in a relationship with a woman, and that you have an absolute commitment to this relationship."

  He nodded, and then felt this was not sufficient.

“Yes, I am.”

 “And I’ll also guess that you were not in a relationship when we first met. You felt different then – like a man who was on his own.”

   Again he nodded. He wanted to ask her about her the basis for this guess, but he was having difficulty with bringing ideas to the point where he could speak.

   “The key thing is that I know you feel that if you could only get over here and put your arms around me everything would be solved – all of the problems of our lives would be gone. And this just means you’re not thinking straight. The obvious point is that you’d be thinking as you did it that it doesn’t really matter what you do here - because this is another dimension of reality - whereas deep down you would know that, because of the intensity of this world, being in love with a woman here is more important.”

   “But all of that is superficial in comparison with the main issue. If when we first met we had arranged to meet each other in the ordinary world and had started a relationship, then all of what has taken place since would never have happened, and in all probability you would not have seen this world again. It was only by not having a relationship that everything has spiralled upward. And that’s the general principle – everything is heightened on every level by maintaining the state of being in love, or of reciprocal, intense affection, but where this is done though there not being a crash-landing in the form of a relationship.” 

   “To become men, men have to become women. And to become women - women also have to become women. And you have to stop hoping and fondly believing, and get on with exploring, and envisaging  – get on with dreaming up the way forward. Hoping will kill you.”

   Tanya laughed, and smiled at him.

   He knew suddenly that in a moment the island would be gone, and with it the certainty of its reality. He threw himself into seeing the wall of rock and the opposite part of the semi-bridge, as well as Tanya, and into thinking about the things that Tanya had just told him.

  A door on a hot day  banging in a breeze, in a large house somewhere in a valley in mountains where the climate was hot and sunny in summer, and where there were forests on most of the mountain slopes. A feeling of a fundamental adventure that had started a few months before, a sublime joy consisting of travelling, as part of a group, into an inconceivable immensity of the unknown.

   Everything was breaking up. The view of the island was disappearing. But he heard Tanya’s voice laughingly saying some words -

   “Bright highways of the continuum!”

                                                                   * * *