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)
Crossing some Pyrenean X-moor, travelling
Toward zenith of heart's ecliptic
You see the centrality of the planet, of animals
Of the immediate firmament of the stars
And you know that perception of intent
Is paramount, and that intent is the wild heart of the abstract
Atribute of cat and bird and human,
And you know also the centrality of energy's
Delight, specific, inseparable force which draws
Toward wider worlds. Walking down toward the valley, a lightness
Dancing in your feet, you know that the heart is not gravity
It is a love of way beyond, it is love's courageous brightness.
What is it to fall in love with a place? In particular, what is it to fall in love with a place as a terrain in which the human world is just an included thread-work? And what if the place is the planet?
The scabious flowers are on the first, only slightly tilted expanse of the south-facing Tuvan escarpment; and above the Patagonian valley's stream the fuschia flowers are being moved by the breeze. The sunlight suffused air which moves the flowers is not Tuvan or Patagonian and nor is the sunlight
*
The world of nomadism-in-intensity is one in which the crucial act in relation to the military and economic wars of human societies is to walk away. This is not a question of an extrinsic duty – to have embodied an awareness of Love-and-Freedom is in itself to be departing from human wars. And it is also not a question of doing nothing: the human species is caught up in an ongoing struggle which has permanent economic and military wars as one of its manifestations, and the only thing that can help in relation to the depth-structure of this struggle is the existence of individuals and groups who are travelling toward transcendental south.
The fundamental act in relation to gender is to leave behind a social field in which the supposed transcendental - the 'sublime' - for women can only be religion or the fulfilling of some role which in one way or another revolves around sexuality, or both. And, inseparably, it is to realise that women are travellers into the unknown (as are men), and that, for whatever reason, they recurrently are aware of transcendental south - even if only fugitively - to a greater extent than are their male counterparts. Men are primary carriers of the disease of gravity, or ‘judgement’ – which is why it is much easier to persuade them to go to war.
*
What might it be, as happened with Richard Feynmann, to fall in love with Tuva? What might it be to fall in love with the Sayan mountains?
*
What is the way forward? That is, what is it to travel toward transcendental south? It can be said at the outset that it is a profoundly impersonal process. And it can also be said that it is abandon in its fundamental, authentic form – abandon that is an expression of the entirety of our being.
*
It has already been stated that three primary coordinates for understanding the south-outside are the planet, the abstract, and the modality of intent which can be called brightness. This of course is the pre-eminent answer in relation to the question of what it is to travel toward transcendental south.
*
What is the way forward? That is, what is it to travel toward transcendental south? It can be said at the outset that it is a profoundly impersonal process. And it can also be said that it is abandon in its fundamental, authentic form – abandon that is an expression of the entirety of our being.
In effect, more
than anything else, it is to let go toward the planet. Which is to say that it
is to learn how to be sustained, unbroken perception of the world around us.
Secondly, it is to let go toward
dreamings which give a feeling of love and of freedom, where these dreamings
can be dreams about the future, ‘dreamings up’ or ‘envisagings’ of what is
really going on around us at the level of intent, energy and feeling, and can
be tales, stories, poems, fictions, and dreams in sleep. It is to let go toward
them in terms of waking intent, or navigation (this is particularly central in
relation to dreams about the future), in
terms of a creative process of living and re-creating – and also creating –
such dreamings; and in terms of maximally living these dreamings so that their
outsights become available, for the purposes of understanding the world,
navigating within it, and waking your faculties.
And yet, the
primary process is becoming perception. A process which, in its initial phase,
can be described correctly as learning to be a reflection of the planet. A becoming atmosphere, a becoming vortical-movement, a becoming water, a becoming plasma, a becoming animal, a becoming lightning, a becoming terrain, a becoming forest.
But this process
of waking an awareness of the planet needs, in a further stage, to include
three additional directions.
Most vitally, we
need to wake an awareness – within this planetary horizon – of
Love-and-Freedom. Which is to say that we need to wake an awareness of love,
brightness, delight, blissful intensification, liberty, and lucidity.
Secondly, we need
to include an awareness of human systems (human productive formations, modes of organisation, and devices) within the immensely wider world of our awareness of the planet.
Thirdly, we need
to include becomings with sunlight, the sun, the stars, starlight, the moon,
the other planets, meteorites – in short, the cosmos, within which the planet
exists.
*
It has already been stated that three primary coordinates for understanding the south-outside are the planet, the abstract, and the modality of intent which can be called brightness. This of course is the pre-eminent answer in relation to the question of what it is to travel toward transcendental south.
But what about the
group? Surely the group is part of the horizon for those setting out in this direction? This seems beyond any doubt to be true – and yet while it
is possible to delineate what can be called the ‘problem’ of the group
(specifically, the difficulty of one coming together) this does at all mean
that it is possible to explain how such an emergence could happen. I have no
personal experience of such a group, and nor have I met anyone who had
knowledge of this kind. The only mediated knowledge available is that such a
group existed in the form of the one that can be pointed toward by the names Florinda
Donner, Taisha Abelar, Carol Tiggs and Carlos Castaneda.
There was a remarkable conjunction – in the years 1995 to 1998 - between a prior series of powerful dreams
about ‘escape-groups’ and the subsequent reading of The Eagle’s Gift. This provided me with a
compelling emphasis in relation to the delineation of a group of this
kind in Castaneda's book, but evidently the conjunction meant nothing at all in relation to an
ability to move toward becoming part of such a human configuration. And nor did
the fact that the stories I started to write were again and again about a small
group which in some sense was travelling into the unknown (see section 18 for
the first of these stories, and also section 7). I was dedicatedly exploring in
this direction at the level of the virtual-real, but this did not entail that I
could find a way of being a part of the kind of emergence that was in question.
All of the
indications in fact are that an escape-group is a shockingly un-plannable and
multiple serendipity – an event which, furthermore, can only occur under intensely perturbing
conditions which cause the individuals to muster their impeccability, and where
in some sense an aspect of the horizon of the event is the awareness that
humans are finite beings who are going to die.
A primary
indicator of a social field having shifted a fraction closer to the Future is
an increased degree of disaffiliation from state war, as with the social field
of the ‘western’ world in the late 60s and 70s. Another indicator (and this one
is far more important) is a shift toward a fostering of the creative,
beyond-gravity brightness of women, and toward a generalised becoming-woman.
An aspect of the continued receding of the Future in the 'western world' in the mid 90s (despite all the radicalism of this time)
was that war had been ‘re-branded’ in a double process of the conflicts having
a supposed justification that could be maintained more easily than had been
possible in Vietnam, and through the outsourcing of war by using proxies, as with the
arming of the Taliban (in Britain the first aspect of this process had been
emphatically begun a decade before with the Falklands War).
There are no
heroes and villains here in relation to human societies: the ongoing
embroilment in wars of the USA and Britain, for instance, makes them
fundamental victims of war. The real struggle is elsewhere, and human state
formations find themselves continually adopting policies which somehow lead to
new phases in the cycle of conflict. The first Gulf War sowed the seeds, in
both Iraq and a milieu of individuals belonging to the ultra-right factions of Saudi Arabia, for a new, far more bloody
conflict 12 years later (which in turn sowed seeds for the Syria/Iraq
conflict, which involved a use of proxies even greater than had been seen in
relation to the Taliban in the 1980s).
And despite the
creation of a whole new alternative-culture highway, in the form of rave, the
visionary joy and delight of women and of becoming-woman had now been pushed
emphatically into the background. Women had now become less central to the
cutting-edge milieu of popular music, leaving a terrain of ‘lad-pop’ and of
macho hip hop posturing. There were successful female singers, but in the passion/disguised-passivity
mode of chanteuse songs suffused with subjectified emotions, And the all-male bands were also not writing
songs expressing the joy of being in love (to re-iterate, there is a
becoming-woman involved in writing a genuine, exuberant love-song about a woman
– whoever you love, you are...). Instead, the main zones of innovative, creative
rock-pop were now heavily inflected either by ‘laddist’ and hip-hop posturing,
or by melancholy. It is important to see that in breaking through as one of the
most talented singer-songwriters of the time, Beth Gibbons was central to the
creation of records charged up with noir melancholy, where being a woman
was a questionable path, tinged with concupiscence ("give me a reason to be a woman"- from the song "Glory Box"). There
is no affectation here (any more than there is with the best
sadness-suffused songs by Radiohead) – it is just that the beyond-gravity
intensity of women as explorers toward transcendental south is only very
minimally being broken open.
The situation was
disguised by the relative prevalence and intensity of dance events, where the
crowds letting go into the brightness of ecstatic, improvisatory dance were as
much made up of women as of men. But at the two Tribal Gathering 24 hour raves
I don’t remember a single female DJ, and more pertinently (given that I don’t
have access to the lists of Tribal Gathering DJs in relation to gender), the
world of major bands and track-creators within electronic dance at this time
was effectively devoid of women.
Something had
gone wrong in the cutting-edge zones of pop-rock, whether in its more
mainstream form (Blur etc) or in its newly emergent, electronic dance modality.
In the mid-to-late 70s this wavefront had been populated to a very great extent
by women – the immensely diverse figures of, for instance Patti Smith, Siouxsie Sioux, Kate
Bush, Stevie Nicks, Jonie Mitchell, Donna Summer, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, Agnetha Faltskog, Annie Haslam, Ari Upp, Annie
Lennox, Kirsty Mccoll… The mid-to-late 90s make a perturbing contrast. After
The Red Shoes in 1993 (which was not successful) Kate Bush went into a 12 year
hiatus from recording. The very brilliant Sinead O’Connor appeared in the early
90s, and then progressively faded from view, having become embroiled in a
struggle with Catholicism. And after
1992's Diva (with its impressive song “Walking on Broken Glass” ) Annie Lennox also began to drop out of sight.
Two exceptions
were Bjork and Martina Topley-Bird, but despite the exceptional lucidity and
beauty of Homogenic Bjork’s
‘alternative’ way of being was just too elfin and quirky-cute in its challenging
femininity for it to have much impact within the culture, and Martina
Topley-Bird was a charged-and-ethereal, but very distant cultural presence,
with a brightness that was offset slightly by the slowed-down affect created by
Tricky smoking marijuana. Meanwhile Madonna was also still producing records,
but Madonna is more about becoming allure and becoming femme-fatale than she is
specifically about becoming brightness (so that her work to a great extent is
less about travelling into the unknown than it is about about travelling at
very high intensity into the all-too-familiar). So Ray of Light did not
therefore produce a feeling that UK techno culture was at last being broken
into by women, producing instead a feeling that it was being drawn back toward
a kind of heavily disguised "conservatism." (Britney Spear’s “Hit Me Baby One
More Time” belongs to the same tendency, but more overtly).
A light-hearted
joy and love-inspired anti-establishmentism was what was missing here. When
Blur arrived at an equivalent to “All you Need is Love” in the form of “Love’s
the Greatest Thing” (“Tender”) they had not, unlike the Beatles, produced any
actual love songs worth mentioning in this context. People were excited about
“Brit-pop” – a name that evidently would have made the internationalist John
Lennon cringe with horror – but men did not grow their hair long again, and nor
did a spirit of joyful, iconoclastic surrealism break loose.
The mid-nineties
fading away of women singers was of course ‘addressed’ by the industry, which
of course is to say that things became much worse. The Spice Girls were a
product – in the form of polished ersatz feistiness – specially created to fill
the vacuum, and in that they had sufficient ability and were slickly produced
(and in that there was a vacuum) they
were a gigantic success. But their
success was both immense and at the same time not all what it might appear
to be, like the unprecedented success of the Labour Party in the 1997 election
(the Labour Party had, in effect, cloned itself off the Tories, as was shown in
particular by the decision to go to war with Iraq).
*
*
In 2011, walking up a high escarpment of the Sayan mountains, I was intensely aware of the vastness of the horizon to the south, beyond the river valley from which I had started. And each time I breathed inward I started to envisage an immense wall of white light to the south, stretching out of sight east and west, and stretching up as far as the top of the planet's atmosphere. And as I breathed out, this wall of light would sweep forward across the surface of the earth, passing through me (as a kind cleansing energy that would take away what was not part of my intent), and continuing all around the planet, passing across the north pole, and returning in a single rotation-movement to the place where it had started, to the south - all of this taking place on the outbreath. The movement was both fast, and supremely calm - in that there was nothing to impede the motion of the wall of light.
After a difficult 2000 foot climb (with a very heavy pack) I sat at the top of the escarpment, on a wide forested ridge that led up toward the main heights of this chain of the mountains. Facing this view, it is valuable to think again about the abstract - and in particular about intent, and lucidity.
To ask again, why did Richard Feynman feel so drawn toward Tuva? (at a time when it was almost impossible for Americans to go there, he tried extremely hard to get permission - as is described in the book Tuva or Bust). Why is it that the human world has brought the abstract so emphatically to the forefront in the form of mathematics, while suppressing it in the infinitely wider form that is here being gestured toward by the instances of intent and lucidity?
Florinda Donner, in Being-in-Dreaming says "philosophers are sorcerers manqué" - philosophers, that is, are failed practitioners of metamorphics. This is evidently correct, and the same to a certain extent can also be said of those who make discoveries within the conjoined spheres of mathematics and physics, although in many ways they are even further away from the full expanse of the abstract.
*
By the time I visited Tuva I had discovered that nothing was helping me to get away from 'gravity' as much as my trips to mountain wildernesses, and in particular to mountain wildernesses with forests. I had begun to realise that the delight I was experiencing in seeing high, pathless forests (and in not blocking the encounters by categorising, and by other forms of compulsive thought/analysis) was in fact an aspect of a process of waking myself up. To the extent in fact that my most extraordinary oneiric and abstract-perception experiences were now almost all taking place on these journeys. Only the most outer-edge of my past drug-induced experiences could be placed - incommensurably - alongside these new instances of escape from ordinary reality, and in comparison these other anomalous states had a tendency to have a faint quality of 'strain,' as if, in these cases, that which was sublime about them was faintly blurred by psychotropics having an exhausting impact on the body.
However, at the most fundamental level it would be best to characterise these encounters with mountain forests in two ways. Firstly in terms of an awakening love for the ultra-sublime, and astonishingly beautiful being that is the planet. Secondly, in terms of the power of danger to remind us that we are going to die, and that we need to turn the lights of our life on now, rather than at some time later, when it is too late.
* * *
Women are encouraged by a femaleness system, from when they are very young
children, to have planetary becomings: they are encouraged to reflect the
planet, but in certain, extremely
specific ways (the fact that process of being 'instilled' in question recurrently does not 'take' does not mean that the femaleness system does not exist). More than anything else, it is insisted that they enter into
becoming with flowers, and with the motions of objects moved by the wind (also with what brightly shines or glows, as opposed to blazes, and with creatures, human or otherwise, who are young, who are children).
Because of a greater affinity with lucidity (which may simply be the result of a primary or deepest-level aspect of the acculturation-system) this can be made to happen very
easily: and through being encouraged to enter into these becomings they are
taken in fact to a place very near to the door that leads to the outside.
The negative fact
is that the becomings which have been selected primarily concern passivity and
reproduction. Flowers are the reproductive organs of plants, and they do not
move in achieving their aim of being ‘attractive.’ And an object being moved by
the wind (a cloud, a plant, a flower, a woman’s hair, a dress) has an
unaffected, ingenuous motion, but this motion is passive.
These two
becomings are primary elements in a system of submission: women are given a
power of attractiveness that exceeds anything possessed by men, but on the
basis that they remain pre-eminently passive in the world of male power and
male thought. In effect it is insisted that women learn submission-abandon – and they are assured that something very intense and
wonderful will happen as a result. And if a woman enters very wholeheartedly
into this path she will soon find that something is happening – to be precise, that someone is very intensely
having sex with her. (Another major element has an aspect
of a becoming with a sudden glow from a fire, or with the sun coming out from
behind a cloud. It is insisted that women glow toward members of their family and social circle, and toward men in particular - which is to say it is insisted that they greet these people with a warm, sparkling smile, or with some equivalent way of 'shining the spirit'. This on one level is a becoming-jewel, or a becoming-crystal, and the passivity is evident, in that the sparkling of crystals is a passive result of the arrival of light).
Women are encouraged toward 'floating' and 'flowing' (a becoming-water is also a part of the system of blocked becomings). And in fact the door in a sense is wide open to the other becomings (from objects moved by the wind, to the wind itself, and onwards to birds, animals, plants, terrains), but the system insists that the becomings stay at the level of passivity and at the level of diminutive modes (it is fine for a woman to be kittenish, but to be cat-like could be going too far, despite the fluidity of movement of cats, and to be wolf-like is to have gone into the unacceptable).
Men, on the other hand, are encouraged to enter into becoming with human systems of tool-use, control, production, combat, quantification, and knowledge (there is no insistence toward all of these becomings, but instead toward some combination of them).
A greater tendency on the part of men to be loudly opinionated about accounts of the world is connected to this social insistence. And a greater tendency to be uncomprehendingly impressed by discoveries within mathematics and physics is also associated with it. I once met a man who had a physics equation written on a small piece of paper that he was carrying in his wallet: I think it had been discovered by the physicist Richard Feynman. The man did not understand the equation, but he believed it to be fundamental for grasping the nature of the cosmos. I do not presume to criticise the man for doing this - the point instead is that this kind of attitude toward maths and physics is more characteristic of men than women.
In effect, in relation to the dogmatic image of the world (section 18) men and women are aligned in different ways. The tripartite structure is the natural world (most fundamentally, the planet), human minds, and eternal truths, together - depending on viewpoint - with gods, God, and eternal souls. Men are encouraged to be aligned with eternal truths - that is with the only part of the third category that is generally accepted as valid - if only in the associative sense of being involved in some way with systems of knowledge (which could be a system of fighting, of building etc.). Women, on the other hand, are aligned with the natural world. They are encouraged toward being the flowery field which is ploughed and seeded by the man, who comes in from above nature, as a being who to some degree is associated with the realm of the eternal.
To this must be added the fact that nothing is necessarily altered by the lesbian form of sexuality. So long as one woman adopts the mode of abandon-submission, and the other woman adopts the mode of masterfully soliciting it (suggestively or passionately inducing toward it) it is likely to still be the same structure: the dreamy field of nature being descended upon by the controlling, rational-divine alien.
To this must be added the fact that nothing is necessarily altered by the lesbian form of sexuality. So long as one woman adopts the mode of abandon-submission, and the other woman adopts the mode of masterfully soliciting it (suggestively or passionately inducing toward it) it is likely to still be the same structure: the dreamy field of nature being descended upon by the controlling, rational-divine alien.
*
On a fundamental level the overall world of the socio-political establishment consists of the control of territory and warfare, and the control of women, and becoming-woman. For the ‘modern’ wing of this multi-aspect establishment questions of religion now are more evidently what they were all along, that is, secondary to the issues of territory and women, despite the fact that religion is intrinsically a part of its functioning. For women to become-woman is for them to wake a brightness and lucidity that would take them away from entrapment within a libidinal system that has been constructed to a fundamental extent by male dominatory tendencies (here everything works through inculcating with submission-abandon by means of socially celebrated 'models' of female allure; through the re-enforcing of the familial and love-couple social ideal; through the suppression of lucidity in favour of reason, and through the editing out over the centuries from religions of female figures - goddesses - who, despite the religious context, could show women as in themselves a view toward transcendental south). For men to become-woman is for them to wake the male form of this brightness, and for them to start to move away from the system of control that continually expresses itself as territorial and state-territorial functionings.
There are two dominant, suppressive abstract modalities that belong to the worlds of the nation states - in terms of what is involved these run far back in time, and they are centred on the areas around (and including) the Nile Delta, and on the areas around (and including) the Himalayas (these anti-vantages consist of religion and the blocked-metaphysics of what can be called state philosophy).
However, along with these - multiplicitous - modalities there are also two inheritors-of-the-modern-world narrative and oneiric systems - which concern accounts of current and recent events, and views about how society as a whole will develop - and the map of the countries affined to the two dominant, suppressive modalities does not correspond to the map of those affined to the narrative/oneiric systems. The second map is the same as the first in relation to what are now the two most powerful countries - the USA and China - but beyond this the western and eastern countries on the second map recurrently do not correspond. Russia is connected to the southeast Mediterranean, but having failed to develop a successful narrative and dreaming system it is now a burnt-out remainder of this project which is nominally aligned, through language and culture, with the western social form, but in fact exists in the orbit of China (Europe has been split, and Russia has an incoherent form, in that it states it is a democracy, but is not). And countries such as Japan, South Korea and Mongolia are connected to the Himalayan modality, but are all zones of the 'western' narrative system (and India is another example of the same kind, though with a tendency to stay partly allied to Russia, so that it can be seen as fractionally to one side of a full involvement with the western system).
However, the first crucial issue here is that whereas Russia has failed to develop an effective narrative and oneiric system, China has succeeded. And the second point is that this concerns effective and non-effective cover stories: the nation states have all been subsumed by capitalism, and in any case are not what they appear to be.
The narrative and oneiric system is the cover story. In reality a nation state is a domain of the furthering and defence of its own large-scale vested interests (the vested interests of its industries, institutions, and of its ruling stratum of leaders and power-brokers), with a legitimating procedure attached to this underlying process. The fact that there are better and worse forms of organisation, and that democracy is definitively better than tyranny, does not relate to this deeper level of functioning. And the situation becomes particularly disturbing in relation to foreign policy, where a violent impositionism can be visited upon populations which have had no democratic say in an intervention, and where decisions that are likely to lead in the long-term to conflict, together with decisions about attacking, are made largely according to machinations involving the self-interest of the state, with a badge of justification (democratisation, world peace) attached to the process. The western bloc is being led by the self-interested maneuvers and ploys of its most powerful nation states to a far greater extent than is generally perceived. To be precise, the new situation consists of a conflict between an extreme authoritarianism (China), and a disguised, insidiously reactionary authoritarianism (the USA) which while it is in some ways less oppressive over its own population is also a violent impositionism in relation to other countries.
What is fundamentally needed is movements of escape; and it is both the case that nation-states are creatures trapped within capitalism, and that, in any case, they are macrological expressions of fields of control-modalities, so that although there are better and worse forms, the nation-states are always unhealthy, unhelpful formations in vital respects.
*
When I went to Harbury Lake for the first time, in the summer of 1997,
the atmosphere of this scurfland terrain was a feeling of serene, planetary
beauty. And the feeling of serenity was all the more intense for having the
sharp edge of reality. There were the dragonflies; the bee orchids growing on
thin topsoil, that although thin was relatively un-poisoned by agro-chemicals;
the wild roses; the expanses of water-lilies, the rare birds, and the tall
mullein flower-spikes, which in some cases had been comprehensively ravaged by
the caterpillars of the mullein shark-moth, caterpillars which are yellow,
green and dark brown, allowing them to be as inconspicuous as possible, for
predatory birds, against a background of the green leaves, the yellow flowers,
and their own dark brown excrement. And all of this terrain, holistically (and
affectively) speaking was a bright, dreamy terrain of plants, water, rock, and
sunlit air.
The sense of an upward-threshold crossing was an ambient
feature of my life, because of A Thousand Plateaus, with its idea
of a shift toward full or pervasive deterritorialisation, and also because of
the CCRU, with its ideas of ideas of phase-changes toward a runaway positive
feedback. And the joy of the affect of the visit to Harbury Lake meant that it
was a central element in the experiences between 1996 and 1998: the experiences
that became a key reference point, as the composite manifestation of the
planetary affect which had arrived through my own direct
encounters/experiences, instead of through reading a second-hand narrative
account.
I had been preoccupied in various ways, and
certainly hadn't been giving much thought to a return to the lake and its
scurf-and-meadowland perimeter. It was the summer of 1998: I had chosen another
warm, sunny day. Having found my way through Harbury village, I was now on a
lane which I was sure was not far from the lake. I had followed the affect.
I wanted to find a route which arrived at the opposite
side from the track I had used the previous time - a track which led to a
closed gate with a sign on it saying 'private property'. At first glance I
didn't see, but then a moment later I realised that, across a distance the
width of three large fields, I was seeing the grey rock of the tops of the
highest area of Harbury Lake's quarry cliffs. There were scrubby trees above
them, and the grey colour meant that at this distance it would be easy to look
without seeing them. A minute later I saw a stile on that side of the road, and
I set off along a path that went along the edge of a long field, by a broad
hedge, on the right of the path. After two hundred yards there was stile in the
form of a 'bridge' that went through - and to some extent above - the hedge,
and the path then led through two fields to the corner of the second one, which
was clearly very near to the lake, although there were trees blocking the view.
There were blackberries growing in the hedge around this
stile, and attached to a part of it was a fading sign, with a blue circle and
an ammonite design, together with the words 'The Blue Lias Rings.' (this would
turn out to be the name of a network of circular paths). When you went over the
stile the edge of the lake was fifty metres to the left. The path turned right,
but to the left there was an easy way to the lake: almost immediately there was
an old gate that led to a track which seemed to have been unused for a long
time, and the slope that led down to the flat area above the cliffs was part of
the meadow scurfland of the lake-edge terrain. I saw a small dragonfly. And
arriving at the view of the wide lake, with its four islands had an immense
impact.
I felt that I had crossed over into Outer England, an
England that was viscerally and sublimely part of the planet (in the same way
as fifteen years later I would feel that I had found my way into Outer Tuva).
To my right there were two, fifteen metre lengths of old quarry rail-track,
rusting in the grass. To the left, sixty metres away at the base of the cliff,
there was another small area of rusting metal, the frame of a small makeshift
building of some kind. Below me was one of three narrow islands, the size and
shape of barges. The island had wild roses growing on it, and and in the
distance there were three or four swans and a pair of crested grebe on the
lake.
It mattered to me that the path led to a point where you
could see the lake, and that - far better - once you were off the footpath the
route was as out-of-the-way as it could be. I had no idea what I was going to
do in relation to the place I had found, but I had fallen in love with its
serene, planetary atmosphere (after all the ammonites are memories of a time
when the island that is called Britain did not exist). The place pulled toward
its sunlit expanses - toward its post-industrial terrain, with its rare species
on their island of 'undeveloped' land. It felt Futural - a glimpse toward life
at a higher level of intensity.
To fall in love with, and to be fascinated by, the planet's atmosphere, its mineral depths, its terrains of plants and animals, and its exteriority in relation to sunlight, the other planets, and the galaxy / neighbouring galaxies - all of this seems to be to go into the space or domains of enquiry of the earth sciences. And this in fact is an aspect of what is involved, but with the transcendental-empirical, instead of the blocked, ultra-denuded domain of human geography, there is the volosphere, energosphere, and oneirosphere/verosphere of the human world, surrounded, in turn by the energy formations of the planet and the solar system, where these are grasped as, at depth, the transcendental-empirical unknown, as opposed to being grasped as mere matter and mere biological formations. The problems here are "what is going on?" - given the destruction of species and environments, and the crushing of human lives within the ordinary reality of capitalism-and-the-nation-states; and "what is it for human individuals and networks of individuals to depart from the disaster?"
On the edge of the lake there are mullein flowers, some of them with their leaves and flowers being eaten by the caterpillars of the mullein shark moth. There is a cry of a bird. For a moment you feel that there is a white void all around you, in which unknown forces hover, come closer, move away.
Ordinary reality consists of delusions about control, recurrently disguised systems of actual control, and fixations on interiority that are expressions of control. It is also the domain of two different forms of illusory profundity; one of which, religion, gives a false impression through institutionalised delusion, and the other of which, science-and-mathematics, gives a distorted impression because it is hyped beyond what it is.
Beyond these, there is a domain consisting of outsights (transcendental-empirical perceptions) and of an embodied, active awareness that dreams are the most powerful aspects of the human world, because they construct the actual out of the virtual-real. Philosophy is an inadequate term for this domain, and it has only a minimal connection with what comes to mind through the term 'art'.
In 2011, walking up a high escarpment of the Sayan mountains, I was intensely aware of the vastness of the horizon to the south, beyond the river valley from which I had started. And each time I breathed inward I started to envisage an immense wall of white light to the south, stretching out of sight east and west, and stretching up as far as the top of the planet's atmosphere. And as I breathed out, this wall of light would sweep forward across the surface of the earth, passing through me (as a kind cleansing energy that would take away what was not part of my intent), and continuing all around the planet, passing across the north pole, and returning in a single rotation-movement to the place where it had started, to the south - all of this taking place on the outbreath. The movement was both fast, and supremely calm - in that there was nothing to impede the motion of the wall of light.
After a difficult 2000 foot climb (with a very heavy pack) I sat at the top of the escarpment, on a wide forested ridge that led up toward the main heights of this chain of the mountains. Facing this view, it is valuable to think again about the abstract - and in particular about intent, and lucidity.
To ask again, why did Richard Feynman feel so drawn toward Tuva? (at a time when it was almost impossible for Americans to go there, he tried extremely hard to get permission - as is described in the book Tuva or Bust). Why is it that the human world has brought the abstract so emphatically to the forefront in the form of mathematics, while suppressing it in the infinitely wider form that is here being gestured toward by the instances of intent and lucidity?
Florinda Donner, in Being-in-Dreaming says "philosophers are sorcerers manqué" - philosophers, that is, are failed practitioners of metamorphics. This is evidently correct, and the same to a certain extent can also be said of those who make discoveries within the conjoined spheres of mathematics and physics, although in many ways they are even further away from the full expanse of the abstract.
*
By the time I visited Tuva I had discovered that nothing was helping me to get away from 'gravity' as much as my trips to mountain wildernesses, and in particular to mountain wildernesses with forests. I had begun to realise that the delight I was experiencing in seeing high, pathless forests (and in not blocking the encounters by categorising, and by other forms of compulsive thought/analysis) was in fact an aspect of a process of waking myself up. To the extent in fact that my most extraordinary oneiric and abstract-perception experiences were now almost all taking place on these journeys. Only the most outer-edge of my past drug-induced experiences could be placed - incommensurably - alongside these new instances of escape from ordinary reality, and in comparison these other anomalous states had a tendency to have a faint quality of 'strain,' as if, in these cases, that which was sublime about them was faintly blurred by psychotropics having an exhausting impact on the body.
However, at the most fundamental level it would be best to characterise these encounters with mountain forests in two ways. Firstly in terms of an awakening love for the ultra-sublime, and astonishingly beautiful being that is the planet. Secondly, in terms of the power of danger to remind us that we are going to die, and that we need to turn the lights of our life on now, rather than at some time later, when it is too late.
*
The wall of white light to the south
And for a moment everything is wild roses
The path through the valley stretches down and on and up
Through midsummer heat and an expansiveness of trees.
And I know this is the unknown
Toward which we must walk, the direction
Of delight, and of love's horizon.
The dust on the path glitters, the alien flowers
Of honeysuckle are serene in their vantages,
Ahead the tall spikes of mullein,
And the noon sunlight is flooded with a slow
Swirling breeze. Above us the hawk hovers
And through worlds of flowers and thorns
The wall of lightning is the heart of summer.
* * *
