30.

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 wind moves slowly across Harbury village, which is moored in sunlight on the largely flat expanse of its escarpment summit. The tiny, long-closed petrol station with its rusting Castrol sign produces an impression, for a moment, of a “sleepy rural backwater,” whereas of course the village is a highly successful commuter zone for the nearby towns and cities – it is a part of a cutting edge, not an area of decline.

     In the centre of the village, near to the church, is the Shakespeare Inn. And on a lane that leads into the countryside (with fields on one side) the last street is a cul de sac called Percival Drive.

   Harbury very effectively figures the world of the territorially English zone of the oneirosphere. There is a serene, selective engagement here - and a form of occluded contact - which in one way can be inspiring, as a partially focused modality of awareness (and if it is taken as a starting-point for an escape), but which at the deepest level is intrinsically connected to a blocking-system in relation to the outside.

    It is clear that on an initial level the primary places in the central terrain of this writing (Warwickshire and the areas around it) are Stratford-upon-Avon and Oxford. And Stratford-upon-Avon in particular, a fact which widens the focus toward London. Despite his name, with its generally unchallenged implication, the only direct evidence about Geoffrey of Monmouth being in a particular place indicates that he lived in or near Oxford (and he states in his dedication to the History of the Kings of Britain that the work is a translation of an ancient book given to him by Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford). 

    However, the aim of this section is not at all to culminate with an account of Shakespeare. Instead, insofar as Skakespeare is involved the primary aim is to go toward the south of the outside, and to go toward the oneirosphere.

   The wind blows across Harbury. But Harbury is suffused with the oneirosphere (and on a different level it is multiplicitously an element within it). And in the oneirosphere there is also a wind – and it is a real wind.

      *

      It is necessary to travel from around a thousand years ago to the present, and also to move, around 1870, in a long arc starting in Warwickshire and moving south and then east across low rural ‘uplands,’  ending in the heavily wooded terrains of the Weald and the South Downs. Despite the fact that this overall process will be like a widening spiral - a spiral which will eventually lead to the rest of the planet - the potentially stultifying effects of the focus on England and English history need to be offset, in advance, by a new way of thinking about the outside (a way of thinking about the outside that will also be preparatory for giving an account of the faculty of feeling). 

   

       In conversations there are many topics which can cause embarrassment. But it is crucial to notice that embarrassment is a subjectified emotion, and that this kind of response to a conversational theme is, again and again, the result of the fact that something extremely important is being discussed. Embarrassment is the feeling that things are getting out of hand, which is to say that it is a response on the part of the ‘control’ modality of the mind.

    If anyone begins, falteringly, to exemplify – to  discuss specific cases - on the basis of any of the following ideas they are likely under many circumstances to create intense embarrassment:

     The idea that being 'in love' and sexuality together make up a vital initial zone for philosophical thought.

     The idea that there is a form of knowledge which is more fundamental than what we call 'science,' and that it is the anomalous tales and descriptions given to us by writers from 'shamanic' traditions – as well as the tales of writers such as Shakespeare - which are the best starting-points for beginning to understand this knowledge.

     The idea that both women and men need to move toward a brightness that tends almost always to be best exemplified by women, where this process is most effectively describable as ‘becoming-woman.’

     The idea that the most intense drug-induced experiences recurrently provide very valuable perspectives on the world (despite the fact that the taking of drugs is not at all to be recommended).

     *

     We are standing on a low hill which is two miles to the northwest of Leamington, and we are looking south across a terrain of small fields and trees. The top of the Harbury escarpment is part of the horizon to the southeast, ten miles away. From east to west the horizon gives the impression of consisting of woodlands, but in fact most of the land is cultivated, stretched out in a patchwork of fields and villages that extends southward from the Avon, the river which is a mile away at the foot of the hill, although it is also largely out of sight amongst trees and undergrowth.

   It is the year 1160. Behind where we are standing there are very large areas of forest for fifty miles to the north, northwest, and northeast. The land gently but steadily rises, and the soil is less good than south of the river, so the terrain has been largely allowed to remain semi-wild – from a human point of view it is a place for foraging and hunting.

   To the southwest the top section of a Norman motte and bailey castle is faintly visible above the trees. And stretching in a wide arc from Warwick northeast and north is a seam of coal that comes to an end in the north of Warwickshire, thirty miles away. There is another – very large – seam of coal to the northwest, westward of the tiny hamlet of Birmingham (Birmingham was recorded at this time as having two ploughs, in comparison with the five ploughs possessed by Harbury). This other seam is what will create the name “the black country” – and as a grim summary, the surface and subterranean expanses of these northward areas contain a gigantic amount of combustible material. Before long the metal-workers will be setting up their forges in Birmingham, and the charcoal-burners will be appearing in the forests.

   England has been invaded and conquered four times in the last 1000 years (three if you count the Angles, Saxons and Vikings as one invasion), and it has twice been turned into a colony – for hundreds of years by the Romans, and now for the last hundred years by the Normans. Twenty five miles to the northwest is the village of Mancetter, which is quite likely to be the place where Boudica made her last stand against the Romans – and if it was not there, it seems the battle would have taken place not far away, further to the east along ‘Watling Street.' The current colonisers still speak another language from the one spoken by those born in the villages of Warwickshire.

    At the level of 'big politics' things are not going at all well in Europe. The second crusade has just ended in disastrous defeats for the European armies. From the point of view of the Normans in England, Wales and Western France (the realm of the current English king extends all the way to the Pyrenees, because of his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine) the major success of the previous hundred years has been the colonising of most of the island of Britain.

    Down in Oxford (or wherever he was living), Geoffrey of Monmouth has therefore managed to speak to everyone, from the Celts and Anglo-Saxons to the Norman rulers, giving what is wrong about people (which consists to a great extent of fear and self-importance) exactly what it really wanted to hear, at the level of ‘national’ or territorial affiliation: Britain is Special – it is a magical, sublime terrain whose conquering success over neighbouring countries has long ago been foretold (this is an instance of the nationalist-religion counterpart of another process of the same kind which tells people there is a divine entity looking after them and that they will live forever after they die). Geoffrey territorialises people onto Britain (and also in the end onto Christianity as well) by enthralling them with narratives and descriptions, and does this in a way where he employs inspiring but religiously repressed elements that relate to women, the planet and the transcendental. And the readers (and listeners) believe that all the anomalous ‘grit’ is one more proof – along with the long, dull descriptions of military campaigns – that his writing is history rather than fiction. He was a cleric, and it would have been thought that he could not have made up all these intensely ‘pagan’ stories. For centuries The History of the Kings of Britain is credited as a true account. In a sufficiently cunning way the wrong side of people has been given what it wanted to hear – so it all must be true. There is the glowing, paragonising description of Britain; there is Arthur the hero who defeats the Romans; there is Merlin who assists; there is the Trojan foundation story.

    This is how the book begins:

     Britain, the best of islands, lies in the western ocean between France and Ireland; eight hundred miles long by two hundred miles wide, it supplies all human needs with its boundless productivity. Rich in metals of every kind, it has broad pastures and hills suitable for agriculture, in whose rich soil various crops can be harvested in their season. It has all kinds of wild beasts in its forests, and in its glades grow not only grasses suitable for rotating the pasture of animals, but flowers of various colours which attract bees to fly to them and gather honey. It has green meadows pleasantly situated beneath lofty mountains, where clear streams flow in silver rivulets and softly murmer, offering the assurance of gentle sleep to those who lie by their banks. Moreover, it is watered by lakes and streams, full of fish, and apart from the straits to the south, which allow one to sail to France, it stretches out, like three arms, three noble rivers, the Thames, the Severn and the Humber, on which foreign goods can be brought in by boat from every land.

    It is a few pages later that the book takes off as a foundation "account," when it describes how the Trojan Brutus (who is the grandson of Aeneas - who, in turn, in Greek and Roman stories is the child of of the goddess Aphrodite, and of a prince called Anchises) arrives with a fleet on an island in the Mediterranean named Leogetia, which "had long before been laid waste by raiding pirates and was now uninhabited." The fleet consists of a large group of Trojans who are being led by Brutus, and who are seeking a new country in which to live.

  

    Brutus sent three hundred armed men into the interior to find out what lived there; having met no one, they killed wild beasts of various kinds that they found in the glades and woods. They came to an abandoned city in which they discovered a temple to Diana. In it was a statue of the goddess which answered questions posed to it. [...] Brutus took the augur Gerio and twelve elders and visited the temple with everything necessary for a sacrifice. When they arrived, they bound garlands round their foreheads, and, at the temple's entrance, set up according to hallowed practice three altars to three gods, Jupiter, Mercury and Diana; to each they made a special offering. Brutus himself, standing before Diana's altar and holding in his hand a sacrificial goblet filled with wine and the blood of a white hind, raised his eyes to her statue and broke the silence as follows:

   'Mighty goddess of the forest, terror of woodland boars,

         you who can travel through celestial orbits

   and through the halls of death, unfold your earthly powers

           and say in which lands you wish us to dwell.

    Prophesy a sure home where I can worship you forever,

         and where I can dedicate to you temples and choirs of virgins.'

After repeating this nine times and four times circling the altar, he poured the wine he held into its flames, lay down on the skin of the hind, which he had spread before the altar, and, closing his eyes, fell asleep at last. It was around the third hour of the night, when our repose is sweetest. Then the goddess seemed to stand before him and address him as follows:

     'Brutus, to the west, beyond the kingdoms of Gaul,

           lies an island of the ocean, surrounded by the sea;

     an island of the ocean, where giants once lived,

            but now it is deserted and waiting for your people.

     Sail to it, it will be your home for ever.

            It will furnish your children with a new Troy.

      From your descendants will arise kings, who

            Will be masters of the whole world.

Awakened by this vision, the Trojan leader did not know whether he had experienced a dream, or the goddess had, with her own voice, foretold the land to which he would sail. At length he called his companions and recounted what had happened to him as he slept. They were filled with joy, urging him to return to the ships and, as soon as the wind was favourable, to sail with all speed toward the west and seek the land promised by the goddess.




    A first point about Geoffrey's oneiric intervention is that the Arthurian story rapidly becomes a self-perpetuating, multi-author system of myths, so that by the time, four hundred years later, when most scholars rejected the book, it had long ago become largely irrelevant whether or not it was rejected, given that it had become a key component in a world of mythical narratives which could always be claimed to have a truth at a deeper level than that of history.

    The second point is the far more important one - and this is that Geoffrey has been carried away in the process of making the story powerful and gritty enough to be believed. In short, he has opened up the direction of the planet, of women, and of the transcendental (the transcendental in this immediate context is best described as the sublime and deeply anomalous unknown - a broader direction including within it the 'south outside' or 'south transcendental'). The perspective is deeply planetary - Geoffrey is an inventor of islands, and a describer of islands taken as a whole, with their streams whose murmuring "offers the assurance of gentle sleep." And as well as the transcendental being broken open through Diana, Merlin and the original of Morgan le Fay (Geoffrey is effectively the inventor of both Merlin and Morgan le Fay, a female, human figure who is entirely positive in his work) the female is pushed to the forefront in four different, crucial different ways in Geoffrey's writing when taken as a whole. Diana is the figure who causes Britain to be populated by the Trojans; Brutus is the great grandson of a goddess; the story of Cordelia and King Lear is told, in which Cordelia is the pre-eminent figure of wisdom and integrity; and in Geoffrey's poem Vita Merlini, the island of Avallon is the realm of nine "queen sisters," who are led by Morgan le Fay, and who are all described as practitioners of magic.

     Geoffrey leaves a door open. He has produced a deeply territorialising work which nonetheless has a current running through it which leads toward the southward outside. What happens when people start to be inspired by his work is not the issue (very soon figures such as the Lady of the Lake are created, and Morgan le Fay is rapidly turned into an ambivalent figure, as is the case with the Lady of the Lake in the first centuries of re-tellings). And nor is the final point quite that Shakespeare took Cordelia, and ignored everything else, knowing he had to do something fundamentally different. In this context it is that, although Shakespeare was right to ignore the Arthurian myth-worlds, Geoffrey was swept away in his writing to the extent that a view can appear in his work toward the place where Shakespeare goes.


    *

    Much later, around the middle of the 19^th century, what will start to come to the forefront in expressions of transcendental awareness is the second sphere of action. That is – a world which is largely without humans where women are in some sense at the centre of what takes place. This will take a multitude of forms, but over the years a strong tendency will be shown for these texts to open up profoundly anomalous and valuable perspectives without being in danger of seeming ‘romantico-magickal,’ or foolishly ‘outlandish.’ This is true of the opening sequences of the chapters in The Waves; it is true of Alice in Wonderland and Picnic at Hanging Rock and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and it is also true of Ballard’s story 'Now Wakes the Sea,' and his novel The Day of Creation.

   But it is worth noticing that Ballard encodes an older tradition into both of the works that have just been mentioned.  In the darkly and yet serenely enigmatic 'Now Wakes the Sea' the protagonist sees his wife for a moment as like ‘a pre-Raphaelite heroine in an Arthurian pose.’ And in The Day of Creation (which also involves an anomalous manifestation of water which is conjoined with an equally anomalous female presence) the central character is called Mallory, and names a river which unnacountably appears in an African desert ‘the Mallory’, before setting off up the river to try to destroy it at its source.

     We are now in the year 1470. Birmingham is the third largest town in Warwickshire, and is already a major centre for the production of iron goods. In the absence of coke, the forges require charcoal.

      Twenty miles to the east is a manor called Newbold Revel. It is about five miles north of the River Avon, and it is fairly certain that Sir Thomas Malory came from here. The evidence is overwhelmingly that Malory’s life, before he became a writer, consisted to a very great extent of armed robbery and burglary, but, whatever is the truth of this, the man who wrote Le Morte D’Arthur was definitely in prison at the time when he wrote it.  And by this time the world of the Arthurian mythos has become pre-eminently a deeply disturbing, deintensificatory domain, so it seems unremarkable that its medieval summation is being composed by an exceptionally dubious figure in a prison in London.

    The mythos glorifies the sentimentalised love-couple and equally glorifies war (under a delusory surface of the stories being about ‘chivalry’), and now, through the incorporation, in French versions, of the story of the Holy Grail, it glorifies both Christianity, and the figure of the male, in particular through the spiritual paragon Sir Galahad. This means that it has become an oneiric system which fundamentally belongs to the interiority, and conducts toward it, producing an alluring but ultimately deadening ‘false outside’. The mythos consists of capitulatory glory dreams – all the success and adventure and romance fantasies that fit with the kudos-seeking nature of the control mind.

    Everyone during the previous three centuries has wanted to have a go at writing Arthurian stories (notice the difference from Shakespeare, where no-one starts trying to write new versions of his plays). The majority of the major new versions - and some of the most impressive, notably those of Chretien de Troyes - have been written in France, and there have also been influential stories written in Germanic countries, along with new stories written in Britain. 

     The crusades have been a long series of catastrophic defeats (which has now culminated in the fall of Constantinople, in 1453), and the creation of  sacred ‘grail terrains’ to the west is something that fits very well with the failure of Christianity to maintain even a foothold in the’ Holy Lands’). So the subsumption of the Arthurian story into Christianity has been heavily over-determined, in that from the point of view of the interiority it already urgently needed to be turned into a religious paratext, so as to get everyone away from all the sorceresses and shape-shifting.

    Even now it has a ‘line of escape’ within it. This is the fact that the wildernesses with their knights in an entranced, charged-serene state of courtly love wandering through them (wildernesses it which it would always be possible, for instance, to meet an enchantress "who uses her powers for good") are figurings of the second sphere of action, in that they are recurrently depopulated spaces with a centrality of the female, as with Morgan le Fay being the figure behind all the sorcery events in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

    But as the whole medieval phase of Arthurianism comes to an end it is not this aspect of the mythos which Malory emphasises. He writes the first English prose epic, and prose is in fact exceptionally well suited for the subtle, expansive writing in which powerful figurings of the second sphere of action can occur - but far from taking up the opportunity he concentrates almost entirely on the threefold success-matrix of courtly life, battles, and religious revelation, with no depiction of a wilderness even in the story of the Holy Grail. It is all dreams of success (military, romantic, social and religious) with a little illicit sex thrown in – all of it the interiority. And the process of giving what is wrong about people what it wants has reached a new level, so that what had previously been a glimpse toward the outside - in the form of anomalous events not assimilated within religion - is now a very occasional, uninteresting adjunct within a debilitating system of glory fantasies.

    The stories still have a potential, if an awareness of the outside is in effect, to be part of a movement leading toward the second sphere of action. But this is because of what was there already (the background aspects without which Malory could not have written within the mythos), not because of anything he brings to them. Malory is the point where the door is closed again - the second sphere of action is faintly visible here (which is what Ballard is pointing out) and then if you concentrate only on the elements of Malory's version of this world, it has ceased to be perceptible. Which is to say that pre-eminently, despite occasional anomalous elements, Malory's stories are not expressions of transcendental awareness. Instead they are expressions of the interiority, in its empirico-religious modality, such that they are predominantly ordinarily empirical in inspiration, and where they are not, the 'empirical' zone drawn upon for the writing is a religion, producing a faked outside within the story - rather than producing an awareness of the worlds of intent and energy which (immanently) surround us, beyond ordinary-reality.   


*

   It is the year 1605. Since the battle of the Armada there has been a kind of high, solar plateau - a place in which the conditions were slightly more than normally favourable for dreaming the world more intensely into focus. Sophocles was a young man when the naval battle of Salamis occurred, the victory over the Persians which triggered the golden age of Athens: in the same way, Shakespeare was 24 when Elizabeth’s navy defeated the Spanish invasion fleet, in 1588. A global mercantile network is now being created – with all of its cargoes of stories about India, and enigmatic tropical islands – with Britain as a major node in the network. Simultaneously the re-birth of classical knowledge has not just been in existence and moving forward for more than a century: there is also the fact that the threat which to a great extent forced this re-awakening – the Ottoman Empire – has to an extent receded, which serves as a validation of the new  attitudes to knowledge, taken in opposition to medieval dogmatism.

   From the hill to the northwest of Leamington the top of the main tower of Warwick’s castle is just visible above the trees. To the north and northwest the depradations of the charcoal burners have continued – Birmingham is now a large and successful town, producing iron-goods and jewellery – but, nonetheless, for now there are still some quite large areas of forest. To the southwest, beyond Warwick, is the meandering downstream course of the river, as it flows in a wide valley between hills, and fifteen miles in this direction is Stratford-upon-Avon.

     This small market town has not just been the place of Shakespeare’s origin, before his departure for London, it has been, and is, the place to which Shakespeare continually returns, in that he lives here, as well as living - the majority of his time - in London and ‘on the road’ in the country houses and his plays are often staged. In 1596, in the time immediately after his work had started to be successful he bought what was one of the largest houses in Stratford – New House – as his home in the town. A sign that something extraordinary is taking place here is that almost nothing is now known about Shakespeare – which is to say that he evidently had the absence of self-importance necessary for being personally imperceptible, so that almost no trace has been left -, but it remains the case that the setting up of the home for Anne and his children, together with reports about him regularly returning there, make up a strong indication that he has been a recurrent presence in the town.  Also, for 6 years from 1610 up until his death he will live with Anne at New House, having left London behind him. Not only this, he powerfully  incorporates the area of the town into the oneiric domain of his work. Drawing on his family name “Arden,” – which can be traced to Thorkell of Arden who was a Saxon nobleman at the time of the Norman conquest, and to an Arden lineage prior to this – he makes the forest in As You Like It a place to be seen as in Warwickshire, more than in France, by using the name ‘the forest of Arden,’ as opposed to the forest of Ardennes. Which is to say that, far from repudiating his area of origin, he, firstly, has never really left  it; secondly, he will return to live there more-or-less permanently; and, thirdly, he has included it within his system of dreamings.

    Shakespeare opens up a doorway that leads to the south of the outside. In his plays women are brought fundamentally into the foreground (because of the strong, courageous women in his plays; because the women are recurrently in love; because of the natural-world, non-human female entities, and the references to anomalous female instances , such as Hecate). Simultaneously a modality of the abstract (the play) is taken over an upward threshold in a creation of virtual-real worlds which are intrinsically – as dreamings - full of powerful outsights about the nature of the world, while also having additional outsights expressed through the abstract in the form of abstractions. And the planet is brought to the foreground by extraordinary planetary ‘outlands’ or ‘hinterlands’  - the forest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the island in The Tempest, the heath in King Lear (and it is important to see that Shakespeare maintains a focus on the eerie-sublime planetary Now, in part through the complete avoidance of ‘chronic/chronological’ futural time, which at this point would have been the futural time of prophecy or human-world anticipation, with all the fake profundity of this projected ‘line of time’).

     Shakespeare does not go into the past to construct a glorifying foundation-myth for Britain. Instead he goes there to find the abstract modalities of Ancient Greek plays, and – fundamentally – to find a way of seeing the world that is at a higher level of intensity than the one that is prevalent in his own time. A central aspect of modernism is an awareness that something very extraordinary has been taking place in the distant past, beyond the current establishment-world of religion and ritual, and a fully woken modernism is an awareness that in the past there have been forms of human existence at a higher level of lucidity and effectiveness (for the purposes of travelling further out into reality) than those forms of existence which are visible in the present.

     These plays are an extraordinary breakthrough of modernism (in relation to work from distant centuries it is really only the Tao Te Ching that should be seen as going further, as a modernist incursion). Shakespeare does not take up the ancient world of goddesses and gods – and of anomalous beings in the forests – in order to establish or re-establish a religion: he does this to show that this lens for seeing the world is in fact much more effective than the lens being used in his own time. He therefore takes everybody into the past in order to get them into the present: as everyone knows the forest outside of Athens is a forest in Shakespearean England, and ultimately is always the forest of the current Now. And if you are properly in the present – using a non-dogmatic lens that allows you to focus on the eerie-sublime mysteriousness of the world – you will be able to look toward the Future, toward the south of the transcendental.

     Although, as when Puck refers to Hecate,  Shakespeare is happy to in include goddesses in powerful ways within his mythos (in order to bring the female back into focus in looking toward the sublime), he is careful to show the domain of goddesses and gods as in fact a kind of surface appearance of a world of inorganic beings - spirits, or 'daimons,' to use the word from Antony and Cleopatra - which are straightforwardly part of nature, in that they can fall prey to natural-world substances (the drug in A Midsummer Night's Dream) and about whom it could definitely not be said that they are immortal beings. Ariel feeds on nectar ('where the bee sucks, there suck I'), and there is no suggestion he is immortal, and in the same way there no hint of a transcendence above the natural world on the part of Puck and the other fairy entities in A Midsummer Night's Dream - on the contrary, given that if Titania can be intoxicated by a drug, the indication is that one of these entities could also be killed by a poison. The idea of immortal beings is evidently on one level the beginning of the problem, and in The Tempest Shakespeare dramatises this gap between an appearance and a suggested deeper level by having the spirits put on a play where they take the roles of goddesses.

    These plays therefore figure a sixth aspect of the transcendental terrain of dreaming - the domain of the anomalous, with respect to intent and awareness. There is not much that can be said here in terms of this domain, apart from the fact that within it there is the current of Love-and-Freedom; there are our immanent Futural selves; and there are the instances of the system of blocking, de-intensicatory modalities which human individual can detach from their existence, where these are instances of what can be called the 'control mind' (Spinoza would describe it as a system of passions or passivities). But in any case, Shakespeare only needs to point in this direction (it is up to each one of us to set out and explore) and to do this in a way where all forms of brightness are placed alongside the dramatisations of the anomalous. The brightness of being in love, the brightness of being free to dream and think in ways that are beyond the gravity of judgement, the brightness of becoming-woman (as with Anthony, who seems to be most distrurbing of all to Rome because of his becoming-woman with Cleopatra, and as with men on the Shakespearean stage playing the roles of women who are in love); the brightness of dance; the brightness of groups of people partying in midsummer forests; the brightness of laughter, and of outsights expressed through humour.

     In relation to the first and fifth aspects (see Section 19) Shakespeare does all that is possible. The second sphere of action is brought into focus across the totality of the plays through the presence of the eerie-sublime outlands, and through a subtle, exceptionally powerful presence of the female within these worlds. It is not just that Ariel is as much female as male, and that Miranda is a fundamental presence in The Tempest, it is that the presence of the feminine is made emphatic through the spirits becoming Juno, Ceres and Isis. And in the same way, although the fairy queen has been subjected to Oberon's joke in A Midsummer Night's Dream, as the play is closing suddenly Puck dispels a conventional picture of male dominance, in that the forest's fairy entities are described by him as being in some sense 'followers' of the goddess Hecate. And the impersonal force that is Love-and-Freedom - taken on its own - is both embodied through the dreamings that are the plays, and figured in a minimal but effective way through tiny glimpses of the first parts of the path that leads away toward the South. Shakespeare cannot do more than this (because otherwise he would have been attacked for being a heretic). Prospero is a practitioner of Love-and-Freedom - he is a practioner of metamorphics - and although it has to be the case to satisfy hostile audience members that he destroys his books at the end, the view of the southward outside has been opened up. And Prospero has a daughter - with an extraordinary name - who as the daughter of a sorcerer has a profound becoming which, if liberated, would make her a sorceress. Shakespeare cannot do any more than this, and is evidently aware that what he has done is already dangerous enough ("if we shadows have offended" says Prospero - and the actor who plays him - in starting the prologue that forms the last few lines of The Tempest).

     What extraordinary women did Shakespeare meet in the midsummer forests and uplands of Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire? What proto-sorceresses, or sorceresses, what deliberate, or semi-deliberate female practitioners of Love-and-Freedom? All that can be said is that one of these women was probably called Anne Hathaway. Anne was 8 years older than Shakespeare, and if you imagine them, at some point in their relationship, meeting up in a glade in a forest it is best to leave entirely open what they might, on any particular occasion be doing as an expression of being in love. Anything from consuming halucinogenic substances to the swapping of gender roles is thoroughly possible (after all, A Midsummer Night's Dream is a story about a mind-altering plant substance in a forest, and Cleopatra at one point refers to her having dressed Antony in her clothes). In saying that Shakespeare kept returning to Stratford it would perhaps be better to start by saying that he kept returning to Anne. We don't really know anything about the personal lives of either of these individuals, but as Castaneda says, practitioners of metamorphics 'touch the ground lightly,' so given the high-profile circumstances not knowing anything about either of them makes Shakespeare's continual returning to Anne feel like an indication of a hidden world of intensity. Go figure, as they say.


*

    

   It is when Shakespeare starts to give expression to the third and fourth aspects of dreaming's transcendental terrain that he does the work which firmly places his plays at the centre of the oneirosphere's systems of foregrounded virtual-real worlds. It will be apparent that the conjoined facts that there is an ongoing disaster taking place in the human world (oneiric axiom 3) and that on a deep human individuals are predominantly trapped, going round and round in circles (oneiric axiom 4), are between them an indication of the aspect of the world that is called 'tragedy.' In writing his tragedies Shakespeare quietly - but very powerfully - points out the overall ongoing disaster ("something's rotten in the state of Denmark"), and he very incisively reveals the ways in which individuals are immanently trapped, by showing how, under certain circumstances, an internalised entrapment-element (something that is not really the individual, but at the same time allows you to say that in a sense they are complicit in the entrapment) goes into effect so intensely that it brings about their destruction - a process that is the final phase of the entrapment. In doing this he takes up the abstract machine of Sophocles and takes it much further: and because the human world gets on very well with a little individually-focused and oneirically expressed critique Shakespeare's work becomes a perennial and planet-wide success. 

     It is immensely valuable to perceive these entrapment-elements (as has recurrently been said, with Lord and Lady Macbeth it is desire for power and social pre-eminence; with Othello it is jealousy; with Lear it is lack of insight and self-importance, etc), but it is most valuable of all to see these as fundamental, and yet, simultaneously, to see them as functioning alongside aspects of the entrapment which pertain to the surrounding social field (a system of blocks, or of pressures leveled against those trying to escape). It is easy to accuse Hamlet of hesitation, but it is not an easy thing to accuse a king of murder when you have no acceptable evidence (and what might happen to his mother in the process of a a successful accusation?). And the initial problem for both Antony and Cleopatra is initially an implacable social problem, no matter how much their self-indulgence and fear of a cataclysmic struggle might then be central to the unfolding of events: Antony is married already, and the Roman world will not accept a shift in the centre-of-gravity of the empire from Rome to Egypt. In a sense, the problem can be stated like this: if they are really in love with each other, their only choice is to disappear into the desert, and set up a life elsewhere, with new identities. They are not going to do this, and although this is indeed the result of fear and self-importance, the social pressures of this situation (Egypt is looking to Cleopatra as its only hope in trying to escape from becoming a crushed, colonial corner of the Roman empire) mean that this is not a situation that can be analysed only in terms of 'tragic flaws.' Harold Pinter writes that when he was half-way through reading The Go-Between he suddenly found himself 'in floods of tears,' unable to stop crying, and says 'it was very eerie.' And the same is true of Marion Maudsley and Ted Burgess as is true of Cleopatra and Antony: their only solution, if they really love each other, would be to go decisively against a gigantic wall of social pressure (there is a fundamental class taboo involved, and Marion's whole family is depending on her in its plan to cross a crucial social threshold). 

    


    In terms of the initial success of the work, it was very much the right time for Shakespeare to dream the world more intensely into focus, and to point out the escape-path from ordinary reality by going back into the classical world. People were not looking for a grand religious story, because everything was too fraught and disturbing at the level of religion, and there was a Renaissance consensus that going back toward the insights of the ancient Greeks and Romans was proving to be a valuable process. A century of tudor Arthurianism (Henry VIII's older brother had been called Arthur, and the Elizabethan world had drawn substantially on the mythos to validate itself in its struggle with Rome) was now looking very discredited, and the gigantic drama of the papal states struggling in the Mediterranean with the Ottoman empire was not one that provided any straightforward point of identification, given that any Catholic confederation capable of overthrowing the Ottomans would also be capable of overthrowing protestant England. Under these circumstances the ongoing disaster was a little more visible than normal, and there was a strong instinct that everything valuable from the classical past needed to be brought into efffect immediately, given that something special was going to be needed to cope with the new social situation (from the point of view of the establishment, the 'something special' that was found was of course mercantile, or pre-industrial capitalism). Shakespeare inconspicuously leaves behind religion in escaping toward transcendental-south (toward Love-and-Freedom) and the time is right for him both to avoid referring to religion, and to draw on the virtual-real worlds of the ancient past, in a process that both heightens an awareness of the human disaster, and, more importantly, shows the path of escape.



*


    "I know a bank where the wild thyme blows"


    Shakespeare is trying to take us toward the Now, and toward the Now of the planet on which we live. The fact that the wood outside of Athens is really in England does not in the least undermine the planetary perspective. At one point Puck says he is about to travel around the earth ("I'll put a girdle round about the earth / in forty minutes") and Titania talks about having been in India, with a woman who she describes as "a votress of my order" (it will be noticed that here there is an implicit drawing-into-effect - for the purposes of seeing the eerie-sublime nature of the world - of the goddesses and gods of the extant social worlds of India, along with those of ancient Greece and Rome). It is necessary in this process to leave behind the illusory profundities of the line of time, and Shakespeare is surgical in his precision. In going back 3000 years to the Trojan war, instead of using Troy to provide a locally glorifying myth about England, he concludes Troilus and Cressida with the phrase "I bequeath you my diseases," and he not only avoids any futural prophetic mode about oncoming glory for Britain or England, he has the Fool in King Lear playfully dismiss the modality of "Merlin prophecies" by uttering some mock-prophetic nonsense and then attributing this nonsense to Merlin.
   
     Shakespeare simultaneously leaves behind the fake profundity of the westward "Holy Grail" direction within space. He is responding to the fact that religions continually give what is wrong with people what it wants to hear, saying "everything is under control, you are being looked after, and will have a life after your death, and it's all about the interiority, and not about the body," while providing stories that glorify the local social field, as with the Arthurian grail mythos. Shakespeare has a Welsh grandmother, and comes from a valley that in a strong sense 'looks toward' Wales, but he knows that this mystification of Wales and of the western regions of England is going nowhere healthy, and therefore he ensures that there are no doorways from his work into Arthurianism, and when he has characters travel to a mysterious island in the Atlantic they are from Italy, not from Britain, and the island is not Avalon, but is the island in The Tempest.

     These plays are pervasively about love, but in the context of tragedy - that is, in the attention-focusing context of the human disaster, and of death. Along with a massive critique of social power ("a dog's obeyed in office") Shakespeare demonstrates how love as it is ordinarily understood  - without the individual having woken lucidity, and indeed without them having genuinely woken love - is not nearly enough to set people free. It is necessary to leave behind jealousy, self-importance and amorous, compulsive concupiscence, and for this it is necessary to remember the fact that we are all going to die, and most importantly, it is necessary to travel toward the natural-world, planetary Now of becomings, of being in love, of laughter, of Southward exploration, and of everything that is delight and dance.




*

   
    
    It is 1820. Leamington has become a spa town (the "Pump Rooms" opened in 1814), though most of the Georgian buildings on the north of the river have yet to be constructed, and it is still called Leamington Priors. To the northwest the gigantic 'black country' coal seam is now being extensively mined. This development is closely connected to the invention, a century before, of a coke smelter for producing iron, together with the refinement of techniques for turning coal into coke: the result is a momentous shift from charcoal-burning to coal-mining (momentous from the point of the view of the industrial revolution), but the change does not mean the forests are no longer being destroyed. The emergence of a very large city, and of a 'west-midlands' urban-network (which will eventually join up into a sprawling connurbation) entails the destruction of trees for many new reasons. Now very little remains of the relatively large areas of woodland that still remained at the start of the 17th century.

     Shortly after Shakespeare there is a collapse from the tendency to perceive nature as the transcendentally unknown (a world of the unknown which suggests modalities and immanent expanses of intent which in some sense are on the same level as that of humans), and simultaneously there is the emergence of new kinds of obsession with time. The two developments are closely connected. Nature for this view is an expanse of the empirical unknown, where what is beyond human beings is simply 'stuff'' which blindly obeys physical laws (laws which over time are discerned by human intelligence), with the whole material assemblage being perceived as like clockwork set in motion, millennia in the past, by a transcendent deity. 

   The sunlit late-Tudor plateau came to an en end, and shortly afterwards the most extreme phase of the medieval 'little ice age' began, corresponding with the phase of low sunspot activity called the 'Maunder Minimum.' And at the same time there was a steady expansion of Britain's global mercantile network and of colonisation of North America, so that the Royal Society's work was to to a great extent fuelled by the need to find ways of getting water out of mines; ways of improving navigation, etc.

     British people at this earlier time developed a pronounced tendency to be partisans of science and of scientific method, with Newton as the iconic figure of this intellectual allegiance. This is a profoundly conservative, self-aggrandising development, in that the focus on nature is a focus on regular systems that are regular through having a central point around which the other elements of the system revolve, and because it is taken up as part of a territorial process of justification: moral rectitude is now being established through the claim that the British are discoverers of the laws of nature, together with the view that their righteousness is established by the fact that they are now taking control of large areas of the planet (all of the horror of empire, and of an empiricism that implacably refuses to look toward the transcendental). There is an appearance here of being radical, because an older form of conservatism is being left behind (the Cambridge Platonists attempt to put up resistance, though the attempt does not last long, despite the fact Platonism is not at all being destroyed by the change). But the radicalism is an illusion: philosophy in this movement is pushed back into a minimal role, leaving a kind of lobotomised state in which primarily there is science, with a little poetry alongside it, for decoration.

    However, over in Holland, Spinoza is a breakthrough that goes in entirely the opposite direction. Spinoza, like Shakespeare, knows that what is vital is to get people out into space - if they get out into space then they can only also encounter time, because space in this sense - of the intensive spatium - consists of space-time, and can only really be compared to either thought, or dreaming. This is the time of the Now, but there will also be as much chronological time, and as much going-into-effect of the virtual-real worlds of the past as is valuable, together - most importantly of all - with the Futural processes of dreaming up / anticipating new circumstances, through encountering modalities of existence that are at a higher level of intensity than ordinary-reality modalities. For Spinoza the planet is a world of substance that is the same as the substance of a human individual, which means that the emergence, for instance, of a new species, is the same as the emergence of an idea in a human mind: the planet is a matrix of creation. This is a long way from Newton.

    (In this context, the two fundamental secrets are these. Firstly, it is necessary to see the world around you as a planetary expanse which is also a locus of the unknown. Secondly, it is necessary to maintain a focus on bodies, and to maintain this focus in a way which includes an awareness of intent, along with all the other intensive and extensive aspects of bodies. In relation to human bodies this second secret evidently concerns the loves - or becomings - of bodies, along with their feelings, dreams, faculties, perceptions, anticipations and memories; and in relation to the planet it concerns terrains, atmospheres, forces, species, populations and all of the intent-worlds of the beings that exist on (that is, within) the world of the planet. In relation to the first secret the only point to be made at this stage is that if you consistently see yourself as surrounded by a planetary expanse of the unknown you will rapidly find that you have arrived in the second sphere of action.)

     By 1820 there is something that could be described as a flood or 'plague' of time. And the situation is about to get even more extreme. Already there is the social-transformation time of the industrial revolution and the 'enlightenment,' and of the projection-worlds of revolution-inspired radicalism. Along with these there is the volitional time of philosophical arguments about the absence or existence of free-will. But now the time of natural history is being broken open - a chronological depth-world millions of years in extent - and simultaneously the social-transformation time of revolutionary or incremental 'progress' is being given a philosophical form through Hegel leaving behind bodies for a delusory confabulation concerning 'mind' or 'spirit' unfolding itself toward its ideal form - that is, the early 19th century Prussian state (Hegelianism really is that ridiculous: its just that the fact the delusion can continually be re-created in new forms means that - confronted with the details of the current manifestation - it is hard to see it for the justify-anything nebulousness that it is, all along). The 18th century re-casting of the relationship between reason and revelation has been a momentous one, although everything at the deepest level remains the same, because it is precisely a conjoined system of reason and revelation, which can simply re-construct itself into new forms. Reason has successfully critiqued all of the arguments for the existence of God, and at the same time the forms of prognostication (predictions about the future) of both conventional religion and astrology have been severely undermined - but in the process reason and religion have between them constructed the concept of 'faith' so that the two discourses can function effectively as mutually-affirming parts of one social machine, and Hegel has tied everything tightly together so that the - in fact, deluded - functioning of reason involved in analysing the development of spirit is ultimately inseparable from theology, creating a new discursive bridge between the two sides of the system. At the level of the productions of science reason now has a heightened engagement with the areas which trap it, and prevent it from waking and connecting itself to lucidity (these areas being time, and regular or formal systems), and at the level of philosophy there has not just been a construction of a new form of socio-machinic and discursive connection with religion, there has even been the creation of a whole new form of prognostication, to replace astrology and religious predictions (that is, the prognostication of - "this social development is a part of a dialectical movement of the spirit that will inevitably lead to X").

     Shelley has just been in Oxford. While he was there he wrote "The Necessity of Atheism," and he also wrote a collection of poems using the persona of a woman, Margaret Nicholson, who in 1786 had assaulted the king (the poems were presented as having been written by her). In 1813 he had continued the process of using female personae in a central role by writing Queen Mab, a poem in which the anomalous, 'fairy' entity of the title arrives on earth, and interprets the dreams of a woman called Ianthe. By this time he has been removed from Oxford because of him being an advocate of atheism, but the story of what happens to Shelley is not at all a story about upholding a position of critique in relation to religion: instead it concerns a positive movement toward the view of the world expressed in the work of Shakespeare and Spinoza - a view that concerns not 'romanticism' but nature as an eerie-sublime, planetary locus of encounters, and of unknown (but not unknowable), anomalous forces.

    People at this time are scientifically exploring the planet: not only travelling into its wildernesses, but also going down into its depths, depths which in many cases are newly exposed, because of mines being a fundamental component of the industrial revolution. In 1820 William Smith - the blacksmith's son from Oxfordshire - has just worked out 'the principle of faunal succession,' and - momentously - has just realised that the rock in England is compacted ancient sea-beds, tilted slightly, and lifted above sea-level, in a process needing a much greater span of time than people had generally given to the existence of the earth. And the suddenly-changing palaeontological bands he has discovered are not only 'shadows' of now-extinct creatures which were born in water and air (as opposed to their shadows, which emerge within mineral deposits): their abrupt shifts - the sudden emergence of new forms - are a first glimpse of the transcendental as seen through the fossil record. That is, they are a first glimpse of the planet and its encapsulated species as a collective matrix of creation.

    Shelley has now completed Prometheus Unbound, in which the planet is a mother-entity, which gives birth to entities of all kinds, including gods (a fundamental reversal, in that the Earth, creates gods, rather than being created by God). Here, in this poem, Shelley reaches the planet as locus of the unknown. There is still is a great weight of time pressing upon it (thousands of years of Prometheus's punishment, leading up to the overthrow of Jupiter), but it remains the case that the work very emphatically figures the second sphere of action.

   Following in the footsteps of A Midsummer Night's Dream (see reference above), the poem goes not just to Ancient Greece, but far further to the east. It takes place in the "Indian Caucasus," a place which is best thought of as the Himalayas. This breadth of the terrain of the poem (in that the gods are those of Ancient Greece it is spread between Greece and India) is part of what holds the poem in the spatial, but the spatiality also comes through a double movement into the intensive "depths" - a simultaneously outward and downward movement into the depths both of the planet and of human beings: at one point the voice of the Earth says

                               Ere Babylon was dust
The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden,
That apparition, sole of men, he saw,
For know there are two worlds of life and death:
One which thou beholdest; but the other
Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit 
The shadows of all forms that think and live
Till death unite them and they part no more [...]   (lines 191 - 199)

    Here there is a Spinozistic view toward the planet as a matrix of creation - at exactly the same time as another view of the same kind is being opened up by William Smith, with his discovery of the palaeontological bands of the fossil record, with their abrupt transitions. But simultaneously Shelley is refusing to create a cosmos picture where everything - in a new sense - is a theatre of the known. The world of Prometheus Unbound sees human beings as complex in a new way, in that within this world humans have a 'shadow,' a self which exists as part of their totality, but which in general they only encounter at the point of death, at which time the totality dies, both primary self and shadow (the suggestion is that we generally do not encounter this self, because it is the side of us that takes over in deep sleep).

   Shelley is indicating that we need to see the planet in terms of intent (rather than as brute matter), such that we see the creativity of the planet as on the same level as the creativity of humans in relation to the emergence of ideas. And simultaneously he is indicating that we need to see ourselves as profoundly unknown in terms of own worlds of intent. In terms of the Darwinist model - which will appear only three decades later - none of this in the least precludes a role for natural selection, any more than, for instance, an account of the development of ideas in a human mind precludes a role for the functioning of neurological mechanisms, but it opens up a view which keeps the emergences of the two worlds - planet and human minds - on absolutely the same level. And so that humans are not now seen as simply worlds of known natural forces, Prometheus Unbound reaches powerfully into the intensive space of human individuals - having opened up the view toward the intensive space of the planet - and points out that in fundamental ways we do not know ourselves (alongside the question "in what ways are we shadowed?" the poem also places the questions "to what extent do dreams guide us?" and "to what extent are dreams another, deeper form of perception?").

     The poem makes visible the second sphere of action not only because the Earth is pre-eminently female within it (and to this it should be added that in the final few lines 'eternity' is described as "mother of many acts and hours") but also because of the central role of the goddess Asia and her sister Panthea. It is the journey - through wilderness spaces and into the underworld - of these sisters which 'makes the difference.' It is they who bring about the revolution in which tryanny - domination - is overthrown. It is also important to see that the eventually dethroned Jupiter is male, and that the 'spirit entities' who guide Asia and Panthea are like Ariel in the Tempest - they speak with a sensual brightness, and although they are not determinable as male or female, there is a very strong suggestion of a central feminine aspect. 

    And the final element of the poem's radicalism is that it argues for non-violence. The way forward is - go further out into the world and explore; follow your inspirations (go in the direction of Love-and-Freedom); ask questions in relation to the existence of domination, or the control-mind: and in this way perhaps eventually a strength will emerge  - strength is explicitly equated at one point with wisdom - which will be capable of changing the socially embedded violence, but without throwing violence at violence (it is important to notice that the shadow of Jupiter is turned against him, so that at the deep level domination is overcome by itself, the will of domination is dismantled). (The 'graphic novel' encounter between Demogorgon and Jupiter is only understood if it is seen that Jupiter's shadow is on the side of Demogorgon, and that Demogorgon does nothing: the strength here is one that consists of wisdom, not of physical assault, and the choice provided - given as an expression of love - is either to muster strength and wake up, or to fail the test, and collapse into an insane, self-immolatory rage). We must all set out to leave wars behind: there is a view here of the path that leads away into the south of the outside.




     However, despite the achievement being immense, it remains the case that Prometheus Unbound in certain ways is a kind of spectacular dead end. A demonstration that it was not possible to go further along a certain line which is connected to Shakespeare's plays, but which all along was a kind of collapse away from them. A first problem is that the world of the Greek gods and goddesses is used to a great extent as a - rather melodramatic - symbolic field, whereas Shakespeare either powerfully touches in an element from this world within a radically new virtual-real world (the goddess Hecate in A Midsummer Night's Dream), or suggests that these gods and goddesses are all along ways in which anomalous instances or entities have been mis-perceived by human beings (The Tempest). A second problem is that Shelley's poem is not a play, despite it having aspects in common with plays, and the effect produced by re-creating Shakespeare's blank verse forms (the poetry of figures such as Prospero; the poetry of Ariel, the poetry of the witches in Macbeth etc) is one of it being a kind of feverish expanse of intense speeches, with no lightness to change the tempo, and no dramatic tension in the exchanges. In particular it needs to be said that the modes of language have been traced - very successfully - off another art-form, but end up appearing as superficial, because they have been detached from their original basis, as opposed to them having emerged immanently from a new form (the multi-voice dramatic poem). 

     After this, it is all over for Greek-pantheon epics, and it is simultaneously clear that if language is to be heightened into poetry or poetic prose it will have do this in ways that do not simply peel off an aspect of Shakespeare and re-apply it, without there being the depth to support it. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche draws on the world of the Greek gods to delineate two aspects of lived existence (Dionysus and Apollo), but when he moves into writing fiction he goes to ancient Persia for the human figure of Zarathustra, and the woman from Greece who he connects with this fiction, in Ecce Homo, is not a goddess, but is Ariadne. And a marked tendency will appear for new, major breakthroughs in the oneirosphere to take the form of prose, or heightened prose. 

     In a final phase - before such epics start to disappear completely - Matthew Arnold writes Balder Dead, about the Norse pantheon, but he keeps to a blank verse which, although somewhat influenced by Shakespeare, does not produce the impression of an awkward tracing (not that this poem is at anything like the same level as Prometheus Unbound). And when Elizabeth Barrett writes her two brilliant poems about Pan, the figure of Pan is an isolated being, with no reference to a Greek or Roman pantheon, and the poems have singular rhythms - they have a music of their own. Shelley's achievement is that he both profoundly inspires the next generation (which will include women poets such as Barrett and Christina Rosetti), and simultaneously shows that new directions will have to be taken.



*


  In Britain the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s were an extremely deep phase of low intensity: they were a time during which a major conservative retrenchment occurred, and during which new forms of blocked, reactionary thinking flourished (and in some cases these reactionary modalities were in effect within movements that were supposed to be forward-looking and radical). 

     A whole new conservative phase had been instigated with the first of the Corn Laws in 1815, in that these laws favoured the landed aristocracy, so that, although economic production increased over these decades this occurred under conditions of a right-wing ascendancy (the high cost of bread created by the laws led to Chartist demonstrations and uprisings, but the conservative establishment simply crusaded against these developments - sometimes violently - and there was enough background economic success for the more reactionary tendencies to retain a complete grip on society, despite the occasional flare-ups of Chartist activism.

    The first phase of radical, nature-focused poetry in 19th century Britain came to an abrupt end in the early 1820s. Shelley, Byron and Keats all die between 1821 and 1824. Coleridge is still alive, but has stopped writing, and has become an Anglican theologian; Wordsworth lives until 1850, but is producing nothing (his creative work during this time is the polishing of a poem - The Prelude - for which he did most of the writing in the 1790s). And the works of Shelley and Byron exacerbate the new reactionary tendencies: the figure of a visionary poet who is explicitly an atheist is evidently not acceptable for the right.

    The phase of low-intensity is marked by economic collapses and recessions: the stock market meltdown of 1825 involved the collapse of 70 banks and the near-failure of the Bank of England (which at that time was owned by investors, rather than being straightforwardly an organ of the state). Recessions followed this, and there was another major stock market collapse in 1847. The combination of capitalist ructions combined with the ongoing industrial revolution was one which fostered right-wing views, and created bizarre alliances of people who, for very different reasons, thought that everyone should return to a hallucinated medieval golden age (and at the same time the hegemonic justifications of violent colonial domination overseas are part of a generalised social force-field of 'macho' tendencies). In Oxford, between 1833 and 1841 John Newman writes a series of tracts which are aimed at bringing Anglicanism back toward Catholicism, a process which culminates in him becoming a Catholic. And Ruskin - another figure associated with Oxford - sets out, as an aesthetic progressive, to support Turner, but in the process he develops a theory that after Raphael art became 'mannered,' a theory which is soon connected up with Ruskin's anti mass-production paragonising of gothic architecture. The view that things were getting worse as a result of capitalism is of course a view toward the actual ongoing disaster of the human world: what was problematic was the idea that something weak or affected had got loose into paintings during the renaissance. This idea, coupled with a - justifiable - celebration of the guild-fostered creativity of the gothic stonemason was part of what fostered a strange outbreak of both ultra-conservative thought and ultra-conservative architecture. At one point in the early 1850s Willliam Morris considers joining an order of Anglican 'contemplatives' (monks, in effect).  And the gothic buildings of the mid-nineteenth century are a phase that was so extreme in its traditionalist tendency that it almost immediately was being subverted.

    In the domain of novels there is a kind of rip-tide of realism - a realism whose tendency is itself slowly moving from a slightly satirical form to a much more ponderous mode. Anomalous dreamings tend to be a very minimal counterpart to this, in that they take the form of moral or didactic tales. A Christmas Carol (1843) is an extremely fine tale of this kind, but Dickens cannot get far, despite the powerfully inventive 'time-travel' aspects of the story, given his conventional starting point. 

    At the start of the 1840s the conservative clampdown has been going on for two decades, and Tennyson's resuscitation of Arthurian medievialism ("The Lady of Shallot" is from 1833) is now adding a sentimental, 'chivalric' tinge to the traditionalism. But everything is about to change. In exceptionally diverse ways a whole generation of writers is about to 'dream the world again.' The approaching shift is not quite as dramatic as it sounds, in this initial aspect (in fact, the change will be the start of a phase whose culmination is 90 years in the future) but even at the outset it is a momentous alteration.



    It is 1853. Henry Jephson's "salt-water" cure has become famous, and Leamington Priors has become a palladian expanse of white-painted, wealth-suffused streets, having changed its name, in 1838, to Royal Leamington Spa. In 1841 the 22 year old John Ruskin had spent six weeks 'taking the cure' in the town, and during this visit he wrote his only work of fiction, the fairy-tale novel The King of the Golden River - a moralising story set in the Austrian alps (it was an immense success in Victorian England, and it is still the most translated of his works). On the estate of the Newdigate family, a major new coalmine has just been created. It is called "Griff 4" - the shaft was sunk in 1851, and more than a century later it will be the last of many mines on this estate to be closed. The mining of the Warwickshire coalfield is now increasing at a very fast rate: the field runs much deeper than the one in the 'black country' and it is only now that techniques have been developed for pumping water out of the shafts. The prominent Oxford geologist and theologian William Buckland (a friend of John Ruskin) is near the end of his life, having become, in 1824, the first person to give a full account of a dinosaur, the bones of which had been discovered in the village of Stonesfield in Oxfordshire.

    Mary Ann Evans has just spent two years as editor of the left-wing journal The Westminster Review. She had left Coventry in 1849, and had lived for several months in Geneva, on the top floor of a house owned by some friends (she writes that she felt she was "in a downy nest in a good old tree"). She is a radical, will write some exceptionally brilliant novels, and she is an atheist. Six years before this she had translated David Strauss's The Life of Jesus, a book which took Jesus as a historical figure, and denied that he was a divine being, and a year from now she will publish her translation of Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity, in which Feuerbach argues that the idea of God is a chimera created by human beings. Mary Ann Evans's atheism gives a first sense to 'dream the world again,' in that she dreams virtual-real worlds into existence with no force-field of religion functioning in the background, and then places them into a milieu which over time will come to know about her metaphysical views.

    Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre had been published six year before. These two novels are minimal but immensely powerful examples of re-dreaming the world in the deeper sense of dreaming up a view of it which includes a transcendental horizon, no matter how faint and implicit this horizon might be. Charlotte and Emily Bronte had grown up reading Shelley and Byron, and what characterises their writing - in different ways - is firstly a planetary, elemental-forces aspect (which always includes a suggestion that, in an eerie-sublime sense, there could be much more going on beneath the surface of things than might be thought); and secondly is a re-effectuation or transmutation of the virtual-real terrains associated with Byron (and Shelley), partly in the form of a working-through of the problem of what role a 'Byronic' man might have in a woman's life. The two novels shimmer elusively with the transcendental: it is as if a haunting, enigmatic light keeps appearing from behind clouds. The suggestion is of course that nature in a fundamental sense could wake you if you give enough attention to it (and the problem is that the responses to the idea of having a relationship with a Byronic man - "it's likely to lead to tragedy" and "it will work if he is crippled and remorseful" - are lucid and dramatic, but simultaneously have taken the focus away from the transcendental). 
   


     From the vantage of the low hill to the northwest of Leamington there is a slight summer heat-haze blurring the views of the trees on the horizon to the south. Twenty miles to the north is Nuneaton, where Mary Ann Evans lived for the first twenty years of her life. Around the same distance to the east is Rugby, the place where Matthew Arnold grew up and went to school, and it is the place whose school (run by Arnold's father) has also just had Lewis Carroll as a pupil, as well as the poet  Arthur Hugh Clough.

     None of the elements of this account really reveal the intensity of what will eventually emerge from out of the new phase. Not the works which have a transcendental awareness in effect within them (either faintly as with Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, or with passages from Mathew Arnold's poetry, or more intensely - and problematically - in works such as Thus Spoke Zarathustra), and not the astonishing scope and depth of the dreaming-it-again empirical awareness of Middlemarch. 

    George Eliot's novel is in fact best understood as a momentous beginning of a process that will end sixty years later with Virginia Woolf's The Waves (this is the point at which a precise empirical awareness fully transmutates into a precise transcendental awareness, an event which goes goes far beyond what was achieved by Nietzsche). And yet, nonetheless, this is a genuinely extraordinary time at the level of the oneirosphere: it is the time of a new breakthrough - one which in fact is taking place all across Europe and North America, but which has an important eruption point in Oxford and the area around it (the breakthrough also creates a fault-line in the oneirosphere in Warwickshire). In relation to this phase what is primarily important, on a planetary level, is Virginia Woolf, but it is also valuable to perceive the singular Oxford abstract-oneiric event - which can perhaps be done most effectively by starting out from a conjoined focus on Oxfordshire geology and the poetry of Matthew Arnold. However before following Arnold to Oxford - that is, before setting out across the tangled and ruptured 'upland' of the new phase, toward The Waves - it is necessary to make a few additional points that come from a wider perspective. And in the same way as the 'local' focus has started with a terrain, the wider one will start from a geographical zone, taken in its relation to the oneirosphere.



*



     The initial - 'geo-oneiric' - point is that European modernism struggles with the alps. They are a more-than-normally powerful zone in relation to a heightening of a planetary focus, and in relation to the degree of inducement to stop thinking and perceive. But people are generally not able to stop thinking for very long, and the sublime inrush of these worlds provides an energy which often just feeds and intensifies some subtle reactive stance. This is in relation to the terrain itself: it is simultaneously the case that at the level of the human world they are threaded with religious conservatism, and are also threaded with an apparent humanist alternative, which at depth is generally not an alternative at all (it is just a particularly well-developed instantiation of the reason 'wing' of the system of reason-and-revelation). The human aspect in fact is overall no worse than the fabric of ordinary-reality elsewhere in Europe (in 19th century Britain for instance there was far more methodist protestantism and less humanism, which meant that the 'alternative' positions were recurrently much more metaphysically blocked), but its difference can be part of a process of confusion. European modernism in a deep sense tries to reach or genuinely encounter the alps, and tries 'to get over them' in a sense that relates to what is problematic about their indirect impact.

    A further point is, firstly, that a deeply pervasive aspect of modernism is an awareness that a form of existence that was very extraordinary and anomalous has been in effect in the distant past, beyond the establishment of the current religion, and, secondly, that a fully developed modernism is an awareness that a higher level of human existence was in effect during these distant phases. In this sense Tao Te Ching is a modernist text, in that it looks back into the distant past, and says "ancient masters of way, they were deep beyond knowing" (it is also modernist because of its advocacy of becoming-woman, and because it manifests a freedom of composition, in that it is constructed out of 'micro-plateaus,' with a consistent plane of development, but with no conventional form of organisation).

   However, at a further level of depth it is clear that - no matter how minimally and scattered out it is as tiny isolated social formations - the higher level of existence has in reality never gone away, but is all along the faint archipelago of the Future that is glimpsed in part by looking lucidly toward - and beyond - the other non-Western forms of closed-down ordinary reality that are studied by anthropology. 

  It will soon be clear why the alps have become an aspect of the account being given in this section. And in relation to anthropology it is evident that in studying Feuerbach and Strauss Mary Ann Evans is engaging with thinkers who are treating the Christian story as an anthropological construct - that is, as a myth to be studied alongside other myths. This is only the beginning (it is just a critique, rather than a waking of lucidity). A further step in the process (which in a sense will just be the end of the beginning) will be the publication, in 1890, of James Frazer's The Golden Bough.





    The circumstances of the European zone of the trans-establishment are now extremely different from those during the time of Shakespeare. It remains the case that the English religious myth-system is constructed on weak foundations, as is shown by leaders of the Oxford movement defecting to Catholicism (the trans-establishment consists, on the one hand, of nations, empires and corporations, and, on the other, of established religions, with the two being profoundly linked, but with zones of effectuation which do correspond, and which consist in part of 'heretic', 'infidel' or 'recusant' populations dispersed into regions deploying another religion). The English establishment  in the mid-nineteenth century is not to any great extent concerned with this shaky mytholigical foundation, and nor is it threatened by the existence of the Ottoman empire (there is no longer a threat of invasion from Catholic Spain, and the Turkish empire is now receding, rather than threatening to take over the entirety of the mediterranean). The primary justification-mode of this establishment is now that righteousness is being demonstrated by extent of empire and extent of scientific truth (the situation is much the same in other countries in Europe, although in Germany the production of supposed (Hegelian and Kantian) philosophical truth is far more at the forefront. 

           But during this phase it will begin - momentously - to dawn on the European trans-establishment that the real struggle is not the local squabbles between Protestantism and Catholicism, and between Islam and Christianity, but is the struggle between zones of the trans-establishment on the east of Eurasia which have maintained the ultra-ancient, female-orientated religions deeply embedded within them, and the religiously matricidal zones to the west. In particular it will start to become clear that the ultra-intense zone of the Eurasian trans-establishment has all along been China (where reason is in alliance with a religious domain which includes an extremely widespread belief in Goddesses, such as Xiwangmu, "the eternal venerable mother").

       The fact that the ultra-ancient religions of China (and also of India) have not been involved across Eurasia in feverish and ultimately violent proselytising is evdently a sign of strength, not of weakness (in China this has been to a great extent because these religions very rapidly had a Taoist domain alongside them, which was also female-orientated, and which functioned to draw people away from a supposedly 'revelation-inspired' modality that could have created a systematised, dogmatic (and violent) condensation of religious elements into a 'there is really only one divine story' system of beliefs). And just as disturbingly for the European bloc of the trans-establisment this abstract-oneiric strength has alongside it a strength at the level of the social formations so great that it has in fact all along been the prime driver of events in Eurasia. India, China and Mongolia (the country with which China has been in an intense conflictive becoming, and which as the other side of the same process has been involved in a becoming with China) have together been sending wave after wave of profoundly influential incursions westward across the continent. Silk has come out of China, creating the Silk Road; whole populations have moved westward thousand of years ago out of the north of India: inventions such as gunpowder have arrived from China; the Mongolians (whose army at this stage very much included the Chinese, because they had taken over China) conquered all of the middle east and parts of Europe; the Roma people had migrated from India and quietly settled themselves extra-nationally in the terrains of the west; the moghul imperial dynasty in India was Mongolian; and - perhaps most tellingly of all - the Turkish people were part of a wider Mongolian continuum of peoples who lived to the north of the Himalayas, who then travelled west in a process that was made possible by - and was not entirely separable from - the Mongolian invasion. The waves of migration and influence had all along been coming primarily from the east, to the extent that looking from Europe towards China, India and Mongolia (and also Japan) was a process of beginning to understand a story which until then had been told with most of its main elements missing, making it incomprehensible,

     This was a dawning of understanding for those who were prepared to open up to what had been taking place. But for most people there was no understanding at all - just a violent empire-building ambition and xenophobia, or a determination to convert the 'heathens' to the true religion.

      The depth-level here is that in terms of the more than four thousand year-old European/Mediterranean traditions the European cultures are matricidal in relation to religion, and deeply anti-planetary. Perhaps the most spectacular geographical configuration in Europe is the Nile delta (it is worth thinking about the fact that forty million people now live in this region) and by far the deepest accessible religious tradition is that of Ancient Egypt. The Nile delta has now been forgotten in favour of cities to the east, and as part of the same process the ancient traditions of goddesses have been violently severed. In the north of Europe the idea of the 'south mediterranean' does not exist (there is just the coast of Africa), and the Nile delta is not seen as part of Europe; and at the same time the goddesses of this ancient zone of the deep tradition are not 'dreamed' as part of the European heritage (the Greek and Roman pantheons are accepted - though not as objects of worship - in a process that appears to display an openness, but which in fact is a symptom of the fundamental rejection: we are set up to see the Greek dreamings as 'ours' but the Egyptian ones as alien, non-European). The cutting-away of the older traditions is inseparable from the emergence of a group of patriarchal, and feverishly assertive one-God religions, and these religions have gone into alliance with a fixated faculty of reason (in the trans-establishment the system of reason and revelation is a constant, it just takes different forms).

   In Europe in the second half of the 19th century the most 'expansive' and territorially successful inheritors of this change are the countries to the north and west of the Mediterranean. Which is to say that truly horrific, exceptionally brutal processes of empire-building are taking place (the degree of the brutality is known: the radical writers of this time refer to it, as when H.G.Wells says, in relation to The War of the Worlds, that we would have no moral position from which to attack the Martians, given the English have just massacred the entire indigenous population of Tasmania). The juggernaut of this colonial horror is primarily a process of empire-building, but it is also intrinsically an act of metaphysical destruction, in that waves of missionaries accompany incursions of soldiers, and kill off the dreamings of the indigenous populations. 

     Almost all of Africa is 'carved up' amongst the European powers at this time. North and South America have already been taken over, apart from in the equatorial jungles. Australia and New Zealand have been invaded and colonised. India became explicitly a colony in 1858. But at the start of the second half of the 19th century there is a developed country which is not responding in the expected way to the technique - under these circumstances - of setting up trading bridgeheads and then taking over militarily afterwards.

     What happens next is obscured by the First World War; by the way in which resort to the sale of opium gives the impression that everything is functioning normally, and by the fact that it is another far-eastern country - not China - that delivers the killer blow.

     According to the superiority-myth of the European establishment no non-Western country could stand up over time to one of the European powers, let alone defeat it. The anomalous thing about China was therefore that it was standing up very effectively to all of the European empire-powers, to the extent that the normal narrative could only be sustained by selling them opium, by force.

     China did not want to buy most of what the European colonists had to sell, which was in iteslf a shocking fact. And the use of military might to force China into accepting opium-selling European bridgeheads led implacably toward the anti-foreigner "Boxer" rebellion (1899 - 1901), and toward what was in reality the first "world" military engagement, although this was in fact primarily a battle between the Chinese rebels and the 20,000 western troops of the "Eight Nation Alliance" (Germany, USA, Britain, Russia, France, Japan, Austro-Hungary and Italy) which was sent to rescue diplomats beseiged in an embassy compound in Beijing, as opposed to being a war between this alliance and the Chinese state.

    At the end of the Boxer rebellion China had not in the least been defeated as a state (it lost no territory, or rights of self-determination, and merely had to sign a financially punitive treaty). Also, an initial expedition had been defeated, and around 2500 Alliance soldiers had been killed. This overall outcome was what had happened when eight combined powers had gone up against a small faction within China, a result which was even more disturbing from the point of view of Europe's myth of superiority given that a member of the alliance had been Japan. 

    Which leads to the fact that four years later Russia went to war with Japan, and was comprehensively defeated. There were many battles in which the Russians were routed, but they culminated in the point where a Russian fleet sailed all around the planet, and was engaged in the Tsushima Straits, at which point it was annihilated - the Russians lost eight battleships, a large number of smaller vessels, and 5000 men, whereas the Japanese lost just three torpedo boats, and 115 men.

    The hideous mega-machine of European imperialism had at last crashed. And it was not a contingency. It had in fact impacted against part of a zone which was not only colossal in terms of its social scale, but which in fundamental ways was at a higher level of development. The technological gap was being rapidly narrowed, and at this point it was clear for individual countries that if Russia could be defeated by Japan, then a rapidly technologically advancing China was an adversary that could not for a moment be considered as a country to be colonised. 

    It was over. People in China rejoiced at Japan's success. And over in Europe an angry cluster of warring elites began to turn their attention southwards toward the Baltic States and the Ottoman Empire, leading to an unprecedented trans-establishment upheaval which would in fact lead to the Ottoman Empire's total obliteration. For many decades the Turkish Empire had been grotesquely characterised with the name 'the sick man of Europe'. The old anti-Turkish crusader-libido was involved in this characterisation, but at the outset of the new phase in the 1850s this libido was present, but with no intentions on the part of the trans-establishment to attack. But in 1906, after Europe had smashed against the far east, the Ottoman Empire was suddenly starkly visible as one of the last remaining zones that could be easily taken over as part of the rush toward colonial domination. It was clear that whoever was in charge of the Balkans would be in the best position to engineer the collapse of the Turkish empire to the south, which would bring, for the victor, the crusader kudos of control, a thousand years later, over the disputed "Holy Lands" territories, together with control over a swathe of the southern middle east, and perhaps a part of North Africa (in the event Ottoman-controlled Libya fell to Italy in 1913, in the first war in which planes were used for dropping bombs).


     During these decades the British zone of the trans-establishment was too far away from its inception (the beginning of protestantism) and was too successful and expansive for it to need serious, enduring mythographic productions. It only needed ephemeral religious and nationalist paratexts and equally ephemeral patriotic adventure tales. It had - all along - a vulnerability in terms of the dominant, enshrined religion, but the mythographic narrative included Shakespeare's works within it, and even if the paratexts and myths of Anglo-Protestantism were a bit weak, Shakespeare was just increasing in global status over the years.

     But Shakespeare of course writes from the perspective of the Outside - from the perspective of Love-and-Freedom. A perspective which has nothing at all to do with the blocked dreamings of the religions.


*


   In 1850s Britain a writer with any degree of lucidity - and any substantial ability to let go and dream - was in a very strange position in relation to the dominant views of the time in connection with the country's empire. If a writer had followed Shelley and Spinoza to the point of leaving behind the blocked, suppressive systems of religion there was no longer any justification for colonial invasions, in that it was clear that the idea of civilising supposed 'heathens' with Christianity was without foundation. It is not surprising that when Mathew Arnold concludes Dover Beach - a poem whose vantage is that of someone who has left behind religion - his vision of the world is that of an immense disaster, rather than that of a glorious creation of a British global empire:

...we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of trouble and flight.
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

However, although this glimpse of a transcendental feature of the world - the ongoing human disaster (see Section 19) - is important, to say the least, it is not the main reason for drawing upon Arnold's writing. What is fundamental is that for a few years Arnold to some extent writes in a way where he has opened himself up, on the one hand, both to the planetary outside, and the outside of the conventional social reality of his time, and, on the other hand, to a circumambient unknown, an unknown that is not that of empirical studies. It is true that he does this in poetic language that is often weak, and which is in fact the last gasp of a certain kind of classically-influenced poetry. And yet, nonetheless, the poems are recurrently a space of visionary glimpses. His answer to the horror of his time is to do what everyone needed him to do - that is, to go off into the south of the Outside. In particular in this context this means leaving behind the current, disastrous state of the human world for expanses of the planet (and for social formations of a different kind), and leaving behind the dominant constructs and figments of the plague of time (progress, imminent social revolution, salvation in the next life etc.) for compelling spaces of immediacy. 



      Arnold's first attempt, in "The Forsaken Merman," is a creation of an opposition between the sea and the land, where the sea is without religious dogma, and the land is the domain of a locked-down state of fixation on Christianity (around a century later Jimi Hendrix will take up this idea in "1983, a Merman I should turn to be"). But the point where everything genuinely starts to move forward is where Arnold goes east, and toward the domain of those who are in some sense nomadic. This on one level concerns Sohrab and Rustum, a poem set in the 'steppe' terrains east of the Aral sea, where the people in the poem are at least in part nomadic (and where the powerful description of the course of the river which concludes the poem is an indication of travelling as a vital and sublime aspect of existence). But at the deepest level this in fact concerns the Oxfordshire countryside, in which, as Arnold has noticed, the east has been living nomadically for centuries, in the form of the journeys and encampments of the Roma people.
  
     The Scholar Gipsy is published in 1853, and takes as its starting-point a brief, supposedly factual account from 1661, a part of which forms the preface: it is about an impoverished scholar at Oxford University, who, without money to continue his studies, decides to go off to live with a group of gypsies in order to learn from them a secret, powerful knowledge: 

     ...let me read the oft-read tale again,
     The story of that Oxford scholar poor
     Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain,
      Who, tired of knocking at Preferment's door,
      One summer morn forsook
       His friends, and went to learn the Gipsy lore
       And roam'd the world with that wild brotherhood [...]

    It can be seen that this is the first "hippie" fantasy ("tune in, turn on, drop out"), only with the subtle difference that instead of going to India, you go and join the nomads from India who are roaming the English countryside. But although there is a kind of mythos here it in fact only tangentially involves the Roma - which will of course will be a good thing, because Arnold would have known very little about them - and is really much more about non-urban, 'planetary' terrains as views toward the transcendental. The east - the Romany people - is the spark that starts it all, but the fantasy mythos of the poem (that is also taken up again by the 1867 poem Thyrsis) is a chance to attack what is called "this strange disease of modern life," leading to the  'mythic' idea or dream that the scholar gypsy is still alive. And, most importantly, the planet (the scholar gypsy "roamed the world") and the specific zone that is the Oxfordshire countryside together become the locus of transcendental visions, in particular visions of the path or current of Love-and-Freedom, figured initially by the Scholar Gipsy's life-trajectory, and later by the 'fluid' part of the planet that we call the sky.
    
    The creation of this virtual-real world (with its anomalous component in the form of an extreme longevity) culminates with Thyrsis, a poem which is an elegy for Arthur Hugh Clough. As well as ending with the figure of the Scholar Gipsy, this poem culminates philosophically with a point where the image of a lone distant tree on the horizon (a specific view in the hills near Oxford which it seems was intensely and 'oneirically' evocative for Arnold) leads to the "Shelley/Spinoza" perception that the planet is best understood as female, and as a body without organs which has memories of its past creations. The west here is here turned upwards and downwards toward the planet, and is turned back southeast -

     [...] Eve lets down her veil
     The white fog creeps from bush to bush about
     The west unflushes, the high stars grow bright
     And in the scattered farms the lights come out.
     I cannot reach the Signal-Tree tonight [...]

     Hear it, O Thyrsis, still our Tree is there! -
      Ah vain! These English fields, this upland dim,
      These branches pale with mist engarlanded,
      That lone, sky-pointing tree, are not for him.
      To a boon southern country he is fled,
      And now in happier air, 
      Wandering with the great mother's train divine 
      (and purer or more subtle soul than thee
       I trow, the mighty Mother doth not see!)
       Within a folding of the Appennine [...]

In the same way as it is the end for epics drawing on the Graeco-Roman pantheon after Shelley, it is over for ornately and densely classicist poetry after Thyrsis. But it is not at all a bad final phase - a view of the world breaks through here where the feeling is that dreaming might be a better way of characterising the zones of the planet than 'matter' (Poe has just written the Spinozist-materialist lines "all that we see and seem / is a dream, a dream within a dream"):

     This winter eve is warm
    Humid the air; leafless yet soft as spring,
    The tender purple spray on copse and briers;
    And that sweet City with her dreaming spires [...]      

    [...]

    Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on,
    Soon will the musk carnations break and swell
     Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon
     Sweet-William with its homely cottage smell,
     And stocks in fragrant blow; 
     Roses that down the alleys shine afar,
     And open, jasmine-muffled lattices
     And groups under the dreaming garden-trees,
    And the full moon, and the white evening-star.




     However, despite the effectiveness of these abstract-oneiric lenses - in particular if they are used with sufficient attention - it remains the case that a primary reason for engaging with Arnold's poems is very much that they should be seen as helping to generate other, more important developments. To be precise, they form threads in a wider nexus, which from a certain perspective is centred on Oxford, and from another perspective is apparent as in fact a part of a much wider nexus, which is spread from Germany to the USA, and of course has several centres, or crucial zones of activity.


     
   There is now a profound oneiric differential in effect in Oxfordshire. Along with the Oxfordshire of the newly - and momentously - discovered Megalosaurus there is now also the Oxfordshire of Arnold's views toward the Outside (and these include a very powerful 'invocation' of Shakespeare, so there is an explicit as well as a necessary spatial link in the oneirosphere to Shakespeare's Warwickshire). Oxford is historically already a major zone of trans-establishment oneiric production, because of Geoffrey of Monmouth, but now there are two extremely different and powerful radical perspectives, one of which (that of Mathew Arnold) is closely connected to Shelley's breakthrough, and Shelley is also associated with Oxford. On top of everything else, it is also the case both that Oxford has just become the main centre of extreme and revisionist English traditionalism, in the form of the Oxford Movement, and, in total contrast, has just had a wave of sympathy for the European revolutions of 1848, a republicanism which in part was expressed through the revolution-inspired poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough. As Britain emerges from decades of conservatism, this is a kind of 'perfect' abstract-oneiric storm. If the lightning is going to strike, it will strike here.

    As the 50s progress the 'natural history' form of radicalism expresses itself in the form of the construction of the Oxford Natural History Museum (started in 1855), with the tension between traditionalism and new scientific thought leading to the building taking the form of a surreal gothic-revival 'cathedral' that will showcase finds which are disproving conventional religious perspectives concerning the history of the earth, etc. At the same time Arnold is publishing poems which take up the perspectives of Spinoza and Shelley:

    ...rigorous teachers seized my youth
    And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire
    Showed me the high white star of Truth
    There bade me gaze, and there aspire

                       [Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse - 1855]

And as part of the same process he is setting out to see the terrains of the planet as always fundamentally the transcendentally unknown (it is valuable to remember that nature for Spinoza has infinite attributes).

     A further development that needs to be mentioned is the writing, by George Macdonald of Phantastes (published in 1858). This ground-breaking fantasy novel is relevant from all perspectives, but it is particularly relevant in that the Oxford-based Charles Dodgson was a friend of Macdonald's, often visiting him in London. And it should be added that Macdonald is maintaining a Scottish philosophical tradition, and had an intense engagement with some of the German philosophy of the late 18th century, and the early 19th century (it would be right to say that Hume as one of the main figures of the enlightenment is followed by Macdonald as one of the main figures of post-enlightenment, 'romantic' thought).

     But the next thing that happens is something of a very different kind. In 1860, the Oxford evolution debate takes place in the newly completed Museum of Natural History, an event which has a profound impact, because the report is that a bishop has mocked a Darwinian - Thomas Huxley - in personal terms (talking sardonically about his grandmother being descended from a monkey) and there is no social consensus about who has had the last laugh. The result is that this event becomes a powerful indicator of the fact that a split has now been created in the western zones of the trans-establishment (one that will only be overcome by a retreat on the part of religious institutions from publically taking up positions in relation to contentious scientific views, and by a shift to allegorical readings of the bible). The English in particular have of course backed themselves into a corner here, in that they have enshrined the production of scientific truths within their grand narrative (far more than the production of philosophical truths) and so they are set up to want to celebrate Darwin's achievement. As a result the clash between a bishop and a Darwinian was always going to create immense shockwaves.

    However, the fact that there is suddenly this source of tension in the trans-establishment does not provide the basis of a full account of what is taking place. What had really been happening over the preceding decades was that a faint view was being opened up - through a combination of a Spinozism and the fossil record - of the planet as a zone of creation, where the creation is of the same kind as the emergence of ideas in a human mind. Here it would be correct to say both that a new species is like an idea, and also that individuals (for instance, an individual human being) are simultaneously like ideas, and that at a species-level they are like instantiations of a species-idea. For this view there is an openness to the thought that the emergence of a new form in a species (for instance, eyes) might in some sense be a modification dreamed into existence (intended) by the species, but the species, while it lives within the planet, is in any case directly immanent to it, in that it is one of the planet's elements. And the fundamental issue is that this view on every level refuses to accept the superiority of individual human minds (with their creations in the form of ideas) in opposition to the creation of new species, and new faculties of species. 

     Survival of the fittest is of course an aspect of what takes place on the planet: it is just that for the transcendental-empirical perspective there is no domination by negative explanatory concepts which maintain the view that matter is a blindly, accidentally creative force (the dogmatic image of the world). The evolutionary theory is that matter accidentally produces mutant forms (first negative concept) and certain forms are sustained in existence because the other accidents were less fit for survival and were destroyed (second and third negative concepts).  

    So, when it first appears Darwinism is - non-intrinsically, at the theoretical level - a process of bringing into awareness the millions of years of planetary species emergences and modifications, and, at depth, is a covering-over of the processes of creation with a secondary aspect of the development of species. What is therefore really taking place is a shift in the system of reason and revelation, where for certain explanatory purposes reason has now become the dominant force. But the shift is doing the crucial work of an ongoing reaction - it is maintaining the dogmatic image of the world, in relation to which matter is a blind, destructive, and only accidentally creative force.



    Going back again to the years just before the evolution debate, it should now be said that Macdonald's Phantastes is also highly problematic as a lens for seeing the world. On the positive side, the novel is straightforwardly the full emergence of the 'strange tale' within the sphere of English literature, in that it involves an ordinary, quotidian world and a second, profoundly anomalous world which is not in a space that can be located in relation to the first one, and which could even, in principle, be superimposed across it. Inseparably, this second world is a very charged - though also powerfully distorted - figuring of the second sphere of action: the central character is drawn into a  world of forests and desert terrains, and from the outset those anomalous human beings he meets who are in some sense at a fundamentally higher level of existence are all female (one of these may be some other kind of being, in human form). However, despite this breakthrough, it remains the case that the novel is trapped within a theological, moralising framework, and one which in fact to a large extent constructs women not as explorers into wider realities (they are never seen in this way) but as 'angelic' forces who draw men spiritually upward, and, in general, as nurturers and healers. It is an anti-enlightenment religious paratext, in that it contends that humans have a life after death, and contends, following Novalis and Goethe, that individuals are drawn toward the divine by a mediating being who is highly likely to be female, and who also could be the lover of the individual.

    There is no point in going much further here into the labyrinth of the religious or moralising aspects of the text (for instance, it is both a strength and a weakness that the book has a very intense, implied engagement with sexuality, given the form which this engagement takes). Along with the fact that women are not seen as explorers of the transcendentally unknown (unlike the male protagonist, Anodos), there is the fundamental fact that the text does not start from the body and its becomings, in order to reach the abstract, but instead recurrently starts from a self-development focus which in subtle ways is dominated by the negative. The primary becoming becoming available to Anodos is a becoming 'spiritually-developed,' where the love involved is love seen primarily as absence of selfishness, and as assistance in the face of vicissitudes, rather than it being understood, in relation to its widest and deepest forms, as a blissful dance of sometimes fully reciprocal becomings. Secondly, there is also a becoming servant, in that toward the end of the book there is a Hegelian vignette-episode where Anodos becomes a servant in a process whose outcome - without him intending this - is his attaining a kind of spiritual mastery which takes him to a level above his master (notice the fixation on relations of power involved in this, as opposed to relations of alliance, or friendship). It is only when at the very end he has a vision of being dead (he dies within the second world) that he has an experience of becoming a plant, and then a cloud - and he of course does not experience a becoming woman, or a becoming animal, because this would be to go too far, for a work overcoded by religion. 

    This now largely unknown novel is a link to something that had just happened (the structure of the journeys into the past, present and future of A Christmas Carol is re-created within it as one episode, but with a female figure presiding over the journeys, and with no other similarities other than the structure). And it having the form of a strange tale (it also has an embedded, 'partial strange tale' within it, involving a world seen in a mirror that is not the same as the world of the room in which the mirror is located), taken together with its very intense, implied engagement with sexuality, and its part medieval and part fairy-tale 'other' world, has had a large influence on what has taken place since, in the world of anomalous tales, and 'fantasy' novels. 



     The process of dreaming the world again is reaching full intensity, and recurrently there is a double foregrounding of the female, and of non-urban expanses which are threaded with the anomalous, or with an insistent suggestion of the anomalous. Poe's story Eleonora has been an early example, in 1859 there is Christina Rosetti's astonishing poem Goblin Market, and Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are both also examples. Furthermore, it is a time when women writers come to the forefront (George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett), and when anomalous elements sometimes appear in the work of women, without the simultaneous foregrounding of the female within the virtual-real worlds involved (it would be right to say that Elizabeth Barrett initiates around 80 years of stories about the god Pan, a micro-tradition stretching from Machen to Dunsany, and from Saki to Kenneth Graeme).



      What happens next is the emergence of a specific form of surrealism, and is the creation of an explicit, subtle view of zones within the oneirosphere, and of the nature of the connection between the oneirosphere and what is alongside it - all of which is masquerading as simply a pair of stories for children. Charles Dodgson is, in effect, a philosopher as well as a mathematician and logician (for instance he wrote an influential paper in philosophy of logic), and it is his tendency to try to think about the domains of sense that exist 'above' or 'alongside' formal systems, together with his tendency to assess axioms for their degree of effectiveness or appropriateness, which should always remembered in thinking about this new development, along with - evidently - the bizarre situation in which he found himself in early 1860s Oxford. 

     Oxford was now a multiply-fractured world of Darwinism, extreme neo-conservatism, romanticism and radical politics, and it had a neo-Gothic museum full of fresh Oxfordshire dinosaur finds, placed together with grim relics from the first phase of colonial expansion, such as the stuffed body of a dodo. It was also the case both that Oxford was full of 'high tables' populated by preposterous, extremely opinionated academics (mad hatter's tea parties), and that Dodgson had in a strong sense been forced to join the religious wing of the establishment, because being ordained was a condition of his getting his academic post (he both needed the job, and was under immense pressure from his father to take it - so his only available compromise was to be ordained as a deacon, but subsequently to turn down becoming a full Anglican priest, on the grounds of having a stammer), and this meant that the path of a direct philosophical questioning of the presuppositions of social and religious existence was not something that was going to be available. This is, to say the least, an extraordinary situation for him, in that, if you read his pre-Alice writings it is very clear that he has set out on an implacable intellectual project of being laughingly and incisively in opposition to 'moralising,' and that he has no interest at all in becoming a clergyman.

     However, Dodgson ends up by making an advantage out of the constraint. Other writers of the time (Poe, Rosetti, Macdonald) place the female into a horizon of the unknown, but make everything about the amorous, the sexual and the sensual. If Dodgson had ended up with a job of a different kind he could, for instance, have started from his overall encounters with adult women and men, and set out to explore the hidden libidinal and religious presuppositions of social reality. He could, as part of this process, have written anomalous tales which related to the 'amorous' as an aspect of human lives.  As it is, he meets Alice, and whatever is the degree of unhealthy affect in his relationship with her, his way forward is the rectitude of channeling everything into a story where the entire dynamic concerns a young female who is exploring the unknown in a light-hearted spirit of curiosity and intellectual independence. And this process is so firmly kept at the level of detached, non-sensual explorations (of spaces, circumstances, sense/nonsense language etc) that there is no taint of unhealthy, concupiscent affect.

      And with this as his primary modus operandi the young Charles Dodgson goes off and finds a remarkably effective, indirect way of having a look at the human domain of sense, dreamings and purposes. To be precise, he breaks his way into the cluttered attic of the oneirosphere, and then not only looks at what he finds there, but crucially, reconstructs it into new forms which reflect what is taking place in the main rooms of the house. The dreamings and semantic fields he takes up are the seemingly low-intensity, generally unregarded 'minor' and derided objects of human thought and human virtual-real worlds. They are nursery rhymes, heraldic beasts, the surface 'royalty' designations of cards and chess, ephemeral social figures such as 'mad hatters,' the talking animals of Aesop onwards (a tradition going back to a hundred years before Plato), an extinct animal (the dodo), moralising verse, and medieval tales about quests to kill monsters. However, the vital process is that Dodgson - Caroll -  takes groups of these elements and makes events which faintly, but powerful show something else. There is no 'moral' in a conventional sense to The Walrus and the Carpenter, but something very dark is being shown - elliptically - about hollow protestations of sympathy combined intrinsically with destruction of that toward which the sympathy is being shown (the case of the attidude of English colonialism to the massacre of the indigenous people of Tasmania is a directly relevant example). And in this context it should be pointed out that the structure of the 'ridiculousness' of the Caucus race is that everybody can run in either direction and for any distance, and that it is forgotten that the original purpose was to get dry after being in the pool of tears. The force of this scenario is not at all exhausted by the meaning of 'caucus' that relates to elections, but instead inevitably involves a powerful, darkly surrealist hint in relation to the 'caucasian race'; (the term had been popular in racist, and highly successful social 'analysis' for around eighty years), concerning the fact that at this time the different caucasian societies were involved in a chaotic race to take over the rest of the planet, where the original motivation of greed and domination was in some sense entirely forgotten by those taking part.


     However, this is what is done in relation to specific constructs within the virtual-real worlds. In terms of importance, along with this aspect, and the fact of the central character being a female explorer of the radically unknown, the other central achievement is the conclusion of the whole sequence, which is a transcendental-materialist refusal to keep the term dreaming as applicable to only one side of the 'dream / ordinary reality' distinction (the last phrase of the second book is the question "Life, what is it, but a dream?"), and - most importantly of all - the setting out of the specific idea that the oneirosphere and ordinary human reality are not at all in a relation where ordinary reality controls the oneirosphere. Alice's concluding question is, to paraphrase slightly, "is the Red King a part of my dream, or am I a part of his?" Carroll has arrived, in the quietest possible way, at an extremely valuable perspective. All over the world people are born, for instance, into religions, which, as such, are virtual-real worlds (zones of the oneirosphere), and which, in extreme cases, can cause people to say things like "off with his head!" And the question becomes, when someone is swept into becoming an adherent of one these religions - is this person dreaming the religion, or are they being controlled by something that exists within the oneirosphere?
    . 

*


   It is August, 1871. Move forward now, past Leamington, and over the Fosse way to the far side of a small strip of woodland that is a few miles south of Harbury. There is a Romani encampment a few hundred feet to the left - further along the wide verge of the track that runs east-west in front of you. There are three caravans, and a tethered, grazing pony, its tail swishing. Beneath you - forming the bedrock just beneath the soil - is a band of blue lias rock, full of ammonite fossils, and further down again are seams of coal, so deep that they are beyond the point where profitable extraction is possible (in 1918 Coventry Colliery will 'chase' the tilted seam to the depth of 2100 feet, but the coal here is even further down). There are intricately dappled high clouds in patches across the sky, like the clouds in David Inshaw's The Badminton Game. A mile away to the south a group of four or five men can be seen working in a field. The horizon in this direction is the faintly visible line of the Burton Dassett hills, which are on the edge of Oxfordshire.

    A lot is about to change on the island which is being observed from this relatively unusual vantage. There will be gigantic improvements for women, and for people born into working class populations - but at the same time this will be darkly offset be a greater and greater locking-down onto the line of time and systematicity, and a greater and greater movement away from space and from the chances therefore of the emergence of lucidity, and of an embodied planetary perspective.

    However, there is no rural idyll here. The large number of people who live in this world (for now, very soon they will mostly be shifted to the cities) are locked down by exigencies of survival and by a complex web of suppressive, heavily enforced conventions and oneiric-abstract systems (the web which George Eliot has just brilliantly analysed in Coventry simply takes a slightly different form here). And the Romani people are eking out a tough, nomadic life, faced recurrently with extreme and sometimes violent prejudice.

    George Eliot has spoken up powerfully through her novels for the futural 'beyond' of the unjust structures of her time in relation to gender and class. As a novelist and as an individual (rather than as a social campaigner) she has attempted to show a way forward out of the web. It is of course the case that, although she stands up for something which is a movement forward, the achievement of the goals will just be a part of a new, more subtle form of the web - but nonetheless, this is a titanic achievement. She dreams the world again, and by powerful implication she dreams inspired, vital transformation - it is just that, tragically, she is dreaming everything forward along the line of chronic futural time, not along the line of the Future, and in this chronic-chronological direction there is always a deepening of the web.

     It is the wider (and spheroambient) planetary world that has largely been forgotten. One of the problems with the English is without realising it they are often living in the world of Middlemarch - often in the 'big city' world for which Dorothea and Will leave at the end of the novel, but that in most ways makes things worse, rather than better). The planetary Outside is not really in effect in Middlemarch, and it is important to remember that as people acquire more and more discourses about the planet they do not necessarily acquire an embodied, increased awareness of the singular planetary terrains they are encountering, with their movements of air, their weeds growing in the pavement, their skies, their flights of birds (on the contrary, very often the opposite happens).  

    And it should also be noticed that the same situation applies with discourses about 'other' social formations - people do not necessarily become more open to the socially, unspecifiably 'other' that is around them, because of having a set of discourses about other social modalities. This is very obviously the case with negative discourses such as Edward Tylor's influential 1871 book, Primitive Cultures (which is immediately read by the young James Frazer) in which human social formations are divided - with an 'evolutionary' theoretical structure - into savages, barbarians, and civilized men. But it is still true with supposedly positive or neutral accounts - to say the least on the subject, discourses of the other do not in any way necessarily give you an embodied awareness and openness in relation to the socially anomalous that is encountered in spaces beyond those of theorising.



    In front of you, there are poppies growing on the edge of a harvested field, beyond the track. You can also see the distinctive, violet-lilac of corncockles, a flower that is now effectively extinct in the wild in Britain, because of the use of herbicides. Another plant population that will very soon be gone from the area will be the junipers growing in the vicinity of the tiny hamlet of Juniper Hill, just over the border into Oxfordshire.

   In five years time Flora Thompson will be born in Juniper Hill, and her book Lark Rise to Candleford will very powerfully make a stand for the planetary outside, even though people inevitably will 'consume' it along territorial lines as simply about the loveliness of the Oxfordshire countryside. The book will of course simultaneously be about the two great movements of positive social transformation that have just been mentioned - improvements for women and for people from the working classes. And its author will embody a triumph along these lines, in that - without any middle class or upper class higher-level education - she achieves the kind of precise, insightful and exceptionally beautiful prose that is rarely achieved by anyone. In terms of the sheer quality of her writing she is an often forgotten direct equivalent of D.H.Lawrence, another working class writer who will reach the very highest level, and who will also throw the focus of attention onto the planetary expanses beyond the self-obsessed communities of human beings.     


    We move forward now, forty miles south by southwest, to the village of Kelmscott. And it is perhaps best to see this place - which is a few miles up the Thames from Oxford - in ways that go a little against the 'grain' of what might come to mind. The time is evidently one of major changes in relation to the 'chronic' future. In this village where William Morris will set the 'future fiction' novel News from Nowhere there is now news arriving of striking technological developments - the first telegraph line to India started operating the year before, in 1870, and in 1872 Australia will be connected to the network. Also, the White Horse of Uffington is just a few miles away, beyond the river, and this immensely evocative geoglyph is always best understood as a message from the Future (its powerful expressionist lines are not equaled even by Matisse, at the point where western visual art begins to be substantially aware of the Future as it has appeared in art traditions other than that of the preceding centuries in Europe).

    William Morris studied at Oxford in the 1850s, where, although he was from the vicinity of London, he was a part of a group of students from Birmingham who would regularly meet to read out Shakespeare's plays. The love of Shakespeare's work is the same as that of Matthew Arnold, and in fact - for much wider reasons - Morris's life becomes like a continuation and expansion of the project which Arnold begins (Arnold himself largely drops away from writing poetry after the 1860s). 

      Having originally gone to live in Bexleyheath (around 10 miles away from Darwin's house) he returned to Oxfordshire in 1871, renting a property called Kelmscott Manor. He does this at a turning-point, where he has just become famous, but instead of settling down to continue along the lines opened up by his success, he uses Kelmscott Manor as a primary base for new projects as a socialist campaigner and organiser, and as a creator of radically new forms of writing. 

      The work for which he has just become famous is a new development in the tradition started ultra-powerfully and minimalistically (in relation to obvious critique) by Shakespeare, and then explicitly taken up by Shelley. That is, the tradition of finding ways of leaving behind the suppressions of religious dreamings, in a movement toward Love-and-Freedom which to some extent draws on the classical world of gods and goddesses, as a valuable alternative view on the world. The new work is the epic poem The Earthly Paradise, published in the years 1868-70: it involves (on a first level) the creation of another imaginary island - an island in a far ocean where the goddesses and gods of ancient Greece are still worshipped, and which is discovered by a group of medieval explorers who had failed in a search for a fabled place where there is an elixir of immortality (a place named "the earthly paradise"). This, in turn, is to a great extent a framing narrative for a series of 24 tales that alternate between classical tales told by the inhabitants of the island, and medieval tales told by the newcomers. The poem was a great success, and afterwards Morris's books were almost always sold under the banner of "by the author of The Earthly Paradise" (it is also worth noticing that when Morris died he was regarded principally as a poet).

     This might seem to contradict what was said about it being over for Greek-pantheon poetry after Shelley. But Morris does not create a new overarching world in which the anomalous figures of the ancient world appear, as with Prometheus Unbound: instead he creates a compendium of re-told tales, which goes alongside the gigantically popular re-tellings of mythological tales by the classicist Thomas Bulfinch (the full collection was published, as Bulfinch's Mythology, after his death in 1867). And the fact that Morris's success along these lines was very great, but ephemeral, supports the initial view. The radicalism of the project (a poetic, classicist leaving-behind of Christianity indicated by the title itself, in that the title becomes a name for the island which the explorers discover, as opposed to the one they were seeking) is not enough to support the poem over a long period, without there also being a more innovative poetic or narrative departure within it. 

     But The Earthly Paradise is not at all the reason for drawing Morris into this account. And nor is it the case that News from Nowhere (1890) is the most important innovation in what happens afterwards. It is true that this novel is one of the first pieces of future fiction (and therefore a first time-travel story, coming out five years before The Time Machine). But as future fiction (alongside very great examples such as Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time) although it is a pushing into the more extreme directions opened up by the socio-futural unknown (the only fundamental unknown invoked for Dorothea Brooke and Will Ladislaw in Middlemarch) it is nonetheless a movement along the chronos-chronological line of time.

     But Morris does not stop even here. In the end he keeps exploring to the point where he gets away from the plague of fixation on time, in the form of the emergence of a virtual-real world which gives a powerful glimpse toward the transcendental. The Oxford abstract-oneiric 'nexus'' does not just go into effect as the emergence of a form of surrealism, and a second and enduringly popular breakthrough in relation to the strange tale (the Alice books). It also sees the creation of works that will be the primary source for the second phase of 'fantasy' writing, and of one work, in particular, that goes completely beyond what was achieved by Macdonald in Phantastes.

     The breakthrough is that in The Well at World's End (1995) there is a female traveller into the transcendentally unknown. Ursula and Ralph arrive as a double exploration at the ultra-remote headland where the well is located. On the morning when they are about to drink from the well, it is Ursula who wakes first, and who then wakes Ralph. She is not a subsidiary to Ralph's project - it is a joint quest. And this anomalous, far-distant heathland and headland is somewhere whose combined aspects can give a feeling of the 'click' where it is suddenly clear that what is around you is the planet with its animals and plants, and where along with the sublime, empty (largely without an emphasis of humans) expanses of the planetary there is also a profound foregrounding of the female. 



* 


     There is evidently a sense in which - nonetheless - William Morris has not travelled a large distance into the transcendental. And the same will be true of the next two writers of fiction whose works will be briefly taken up as lenses for seeing the Outside, despite - in both cases - there being an impression that is recurrently produced by their work that an extreme rupture and movement-forward must be taking place.

     (cut to an image of Ursula and Birkin in Women in Love, in the prow of a ship, in darkness, leaving England to go to the Alps).


    1895. The year of The Time Machine, as well as The Well at World's End, and five years after the publication of The Golden Bough. Cross the Thames, and in going on into the Wiltshire Downs take up a vantage which somehow allows a more planetary view. To the southeast, beyond the channel, is France. Further away, and to the south, is Spain, beyond the Asturias mountains, and beyond the long, gigantic wall of the Pyrenees. Further in the other direction, beyond most of France, there is the even higher and larger mountain-range of the Alps. And further still there is a very large extension of the Atlantic, stretching many hundreds of miles into Afro-Eurasia, with the spectacular feature of an immense delta belonging to a river that extends 4200 miles into the African zone of the continent.

     Ahead of us, superimposed to a large extent across this specific landscape, is a very extraordinary abstract-oneiric terrain (though we have not arrived there yet). There at the end of the eighty year phase of higher intensity it is an inconspicuous bright expanse from which the Future is very clearly visible.



*


    James Fraser's The Golden Bough is a point where modernism goes deep into the academic world. But its importance lies in its overall nature (and in what precisely it includes) rather than its theoretical aspects. Fraser's starting-point is the same as someone giving sustained thought for the first time to the oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece, where women (female "seers") went into trances to communicate wisdom using language in complex, enigmatic ways. He was aware that very anomalous practices and ways of being suffused the ancient past, and that equivalents were still to be found everywhere in existing tribal societies. His fascinated awareness is expressed by the whole project, even though he overcodes everything with an evolutionary structure where the anomalous is constructed as primitive - to be superseded by religion, which in turn will be superceded by science. 

    At the level of critique of religion, the theoretical account is the one just stated, but what gives the critical power to the project is that in exploring the oneirosphere Fraser treats the Christian story as just one cultural artefact along with all of the stories of other societies. This has a huge impact at the time (the extent to which Fraser was influential is now largely forgotten). But in the end it is just a moment of critique, and another theoretical failure of the project (along with making the tribal into the 'primitive') simply helps the book to fade out of sight: Fraser concocts an anthropological figment that one story - involving the death of a sacred king - is in some sense fundamental and pervasive across all magical and religious societies. 

    George Eliot has evidently perceived, in writing about the Reverend Casaubon in Middlemarch, that the search for "the key to all the mythologies" (this is Casaubon's project) is part of the fabric of her time. And though Fraser, unlike Casaubon, works with gigantic dedication, the comparison is a fair one, in terms of the theoretical aspect of The Golden Bough in relation to religious stories (and there is even an indirect connection in terms of the Anglican church, in that Fraser's research largely depended on the reported stories sent to him by missionaries).

    What George Eliot does not see is that the real intellectual 'dark spider' of her time is not the figure represented by Casaubon, but is a simple but deeply pernicious aspect of Hegelianism (Feuerbach is still Hegelian in the crucial respect). And therefore when the idea of the key to all the mythologies finds a champion, it does not matter that his model of human development is supposed to be in opposition to that of Hegel, because of course, in the sense in question it is not distinguishable - a grand march of progress is taking place, which is taking people further and further away from the unenlightened worlds of 'primitive' societies.

*

    At the outset of the new century colonialism is an insane, destructive force, rampaging across the planet. Capitalism is drawing millions of people across the globe into crushing, desolate lives that are even more denuded and attenuated than the ones which they had been living before. And the conditions are falling into place for a horrific war that in turn will set up the conditions for a further war that will be even more devastating. 

   D.H. Lawrence starts to percieve that there is an ongoing disaster taking place (and that there are no reasons to believe that the overall situation is getting better); and he he starts to sense that it is necessary to give attention more to space than time, and to give attention fundamentally to the zones of the natural world beyond the component of nature known as humanity. It is not that his writing embodies a pessimism: it is that it embodies the view that the main (but in the end, contingent) currents of the time are going in the wrong direction, and that Escape is possible - on small levels and large ones - only by turning attention in the fullest and deepest sense toward the planet and the World in which the planet exists.

    Lawrence tends in fact to succumb to a kind of feverish 'prophetic' mode (which, as such, is not at all an escape from the fixation on time), and overall he is far too much in the thrall of a kind of angry it-should-be-destroyed-now maleness, a testosterone-metaphysics  that is not necessarily in abeyance when he writes from the perspective of a female character. But it is nonetheless the case that his books are threaded with a longing for the south of the Outside, beyond the horror of ordinary reality. The concluding paragraph of The Rainbow has all of these aspects -


   And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world's corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.


  However, whatever may be problematic, there is a fundamental openness here to the outside of the human world, and in a way where there is a refusal to see creation beyond human creativity as of a different, inferior kind. It is not just that Lawrence sees animals as on the same level as human beings (which is why the animal poems are so impressive), it is that he does not see the formations of the 'material world' through the lens of the dogmatic image. Which is to say of course, as Deleuze points out in an essay ("To Have Done with the Judgements of God"), that Lawrence is a Spinozist. There is a current of creation that runs through the planet, and there is a current of creation that runs through human beings, and it is the same current: 


     If humanity ran into a cul de sac, and expended itself, the timeless creative mystery would bring forth some other being, finer, more wonderful, some other more lovely race, to carry on the embodiment of creation.  [...] It could bring forth miracles, create utter new races and new species, in its own hour, new forms of consciousness, new forms of body, new units of being. To be man was as nothing compared to the possibilities of the creative mystery. To have one's pulse beating direct from the mystery, this was perfection, unutterable satisfaction. Human or inhuman mattered nothing. The perfect pulse throbbed with indescribable being, miraculous unborn species. [Women in Love, final chapter]


    Lawrence has an awareness that concentrating attention on the zones and terrains of nature will lead to the abstract, and that it is the zones and terrains of nature beyond the urban expanses of capitalism that do this most powerfully, and are most effective in beginning to wake this ability in the first place. This is why The Rainbow ends with Ursula's encounter with the horses and with her seeing the rainbow, and why Women in Love ends with the Alps.


    
    But which Alps is this?

   The answer is that it is the Alps of the impersonal, which is of course a fundamental starting-point. Very high mountains are in a genuine sense the sublime, but there evidently is no reason to think they are looking after you. And even if you view them as a facet of the planet, and if you keep in mind a Spinozistic idea of the Earth (so that its substance is seen as no different from yours) it is vital to remember that human beings are not just like cells of this body, but furthermore from a certain perspective we are like a disease, in that we are killing off its species.

   However, this is also the midwinter alps of snow – of something which is spectacular and pervasive, but which in many ways is destructive (a bit like capitalism). Snow crystals, taken in relation to water vapour, are heavy, brittle, and damaging, but with a kind of glamour.  It as if a - disguised - element of the story here is a bit like a highly intellectual graphic novel, that could be called Birkin versus the Industrialist. The picture is that Gerald has attuned himself to a frequency of the world which has too much in common with snow and ice, and that surrounded by  midwinter alpine wildernesses, and thwarted on other levels of his life, he simply goes off into the snow, and eventually falls down, and falls asleep in it.

   There is a feeling here that to a certain extent the Alps have been left behind, and that an aspect of them has been lifted away and used as a slightly melodramatic element of an oneiric critique of capitalism.

   It is possible to be left wondering at this point about what zones of the abstract might have been brought into focus when Frieda and David walked across them in the summer of 1912. Perhaps they argued all the time – but it seems unlikely given that it was not long after they had met. If anything was wrong it was probably that Frieda was distressed about being cut off from her children.

      Lawrence’s life is in fact far more extraordinary than what takes place in any of his novels. The young working class English intellectual with a German aristocrat who has left her children and her husband, where the two of them are making their way across the Alps, two years before the First World War (Lawrence had very recently been arrested and briefly imprisoned as a possible spy, in Germany) – all of this is not just a highly unbelievable plot, but even now it would be a challenging read for people, given that Frieda has had to separate herself from her three children, and presumably knows she will be being vilified to them as an immoral woman.

    But insofar as Lawrence would have been in becoming with Frieda (and would have been learning from her), and was in a recurrently sparsely populated, wilderness terrain, it seems likely that a world of the abstract-real he would have reached – at some degree of focus - would have been the second sphere of action. No doubt they talked most of the time, maybe Lawrence spoke so much that he managed to fend it off, but again, it seems that this would not be the whole story. Certainly, there is a new brightness and courage in The Rainbow and Women in Love: it is as if all of the two novels shimmer with anticipations of the final outcome (Ursula and Birkin having escaped into the south of the Outside) but as if Lawrence himself – writing in the midst of the First World War - can’t fully access a state which is nonetheless driving his writing.

   Weave a circle round him thrice

   It is clear that Lawrence was woven round with accusations of pornography, intellectual and artistic derision, and accusations, during and after the war, of being sympathetic to Germany. And the impression given is that he never really recovered. Given that he had a tendency toward an all-too-male way of thinking, it is as if he had the one chance to let go toward women, and as if his male side was coaxed by antagonism and turmoil into reasserting itself. 



*



    Nietzsche's Alps had been those of a nomadic recluse; but they were also the Alps of a Spinozist (there is a playful seriousness about him saying that mountain lakes are like eyes), and - unfortunately - they were the Alps of a singular form of fixation on the line of time.

     The problem with Thus Spoke Zarathustra is not simply the combination of the 'prophetic' mode with the obsession in connection with the idea of the eternal recurrence. To a great extent the difficulty is that Zarathustra has no human alliances (no friends, comrades, creative associates, lovers). It is a strength of the book that he has alliances with animals (individual animals are the other zones of the planet which are very obviously bodies without organs - it is clear that they are the abstract - and in reaching the Outside they are exceptionally important). But instead of Zarathustra having friends he has disciples: the structure is that of Zarathustra uttering teachings, and is never a structure of speech between those who are in an alliance of shared exploration, shared creation of circumstances. And the withdrawals from the human world (Zarathustra going back to his cave in the mountains) in this context have a quality of a reaction, as opposed to them being movements outward. It is perhaps worth noticing that Carlos Castaneda states both that explorer-travellers set out to journey away from ordinary reality, and that in itself this journey does not at all entail a withdrawal from the human world.

    This is all inseparable from the fact that the book is very fixated upon critique. It is true that a new, heightened form of writing is created - a world of conceptual personae, which is intensely charged with outsights. But at the level of the form of the sentences to an extent it is not new at all, because it is a modified form of certain kinds of writing in ancient religious texts, toward which it has a relationship of critique. And when the "higher men" come to visit Zarathustra at the end of the book, it is not just that they are all potential disciples (in that they are potential disciples Zarathustra is even further from having friends at the end of the book than he is at the beginning), it is that each one is explicitly a critique of a human mode of being. There is therefore recurrently a kind of feverishness about Thus Spoke Zarathustra - a feverishness of isolation, oneiric critique, and withdrawal.



    However, the book is more than this. The story behind it seems to be that Nietzsche has gone off into the mountains in Switzerland (he is officially stateless, but he has just been working in Basle) while to some extent in love with both Lou von Salome and Cosima Wagner. And these loves appear to have been in effect to a point where he has crossed over to somewhere else. But whatever the precise circumstances leading up to it, the crossing-over has taken place.

     Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a planetary book, full of expanses of mountains, and of sky ("O sky above me! O pure deep sky! [...] do you not have the sister-soul to my insight?" ("Before Sunrise")). And these expanses are in the strongest sense suffused with the female. Nietzsche does not include in the narrative the question of love-alliances or friendship-alliances with women (let alone the question of being taught by women) but the female instead simply displaces itself across almost everything. The conceptual persona of 'Life' is a woman (she playfully talks with Zarathustra in a crucial concluding section); Zarathustra sees his 'soul' (the part of his body without organs which is directly involved in creativity) as female; and wisdom is also characterised as a woman. Furthermore, Zarathustra sees 'eternity' as female.

    The language here is singularly libidinally charged, but there is no doubt about the becoming-woman. The view is that it is necessary to have the courage to dream or create the future, and that to say this is to say that it is necessary to be 'pregnant' ("pregnant with lightning flashes which affirm Yes") -


   O my soul, now you stand superabundant and heavy [...]
  
    oppressed and weighed down with your happiness, expectant from abundance and yet bashful because of your expectancy.

    O my soul, now there is nowhere a soul more loving and encompassing and spacious! Where could future and past be closer together than with you!

   [...] ...Your fullness looks out over raging seas and searches and waits; the longing of over-fullness gazes out of the smiling heaven of your eyes!

   [...] But if you will not weep [...] you will have to sing, O my soul!

    [...]  to sing with an impetuous song, until all seas grow still to listen to your longing,
   
   until, over still, longing seas, the boat glides, the golden marvel around whose gold all good, bad, marvelous things leap:

    and many great and small beasts also, and everything that has light marvelous feet that can run upon violet paths,

    towards the golden marvel, the boat of free will, and to its master: he, however is the vintager who waits with diamond-studded vine-knife,

    your great redeemer, O my soul, the nameless one for whom only future songs will find a name! And truly your breath is already fragrant with future songs,

   already you glow and dream...   (Of the Great Longing, Penguin, 1969, pp. 239-240)



   It is not at all necessary to speculate about what exactly has been taking place between Nietzsche's female aspect and this male virtual-real entity or 'element.' All that matters is the mountains-and-sky expanses of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and the foregrounding of the female in the book. And the whole process in question reaches a quieter and much more powerful culmination in the "Of Noontide" section where Zarathustra has just encountered his 'shadow.' 

     The connection with the story included in Prometheus Unbound has been made, and Zarathustra has met his shadow, who is the part of him who is not an expression of Love-and-Freedom, in that he is a restless, iconoclastic modality which coldly tries to affirm "Nothing is true, everything is permitted" but cannot even really affirm this, because maybe something is true. Zarathustra wants nothing to do with him, and leaves, and shortly after this, at midday, he lies down and falls asleep. The 'letting go' that happens next, as Zarathustra wakes up, only acquires its force if it is remembered that eternity has been characterised as female -



   What has happened to me? Listen! Has time flown away? [...]

  Has the world not just become perfect? [...]   

    But who are you then, O my soul? ( And at this point he started, for a ray of sun had glanced down from the sky onto his face.).

   O sky above me (he said sighing, and sat upright), are you watching me? Are you listening to my strange soul?

   When will you drink this drop of dew that has fallen upon all earthly things - when will you drink this strange soul

   - when, well of eternity! serene and terrible noontide abyss! when will you drink my soul back into yourself?  [pp. 288-289]



    This passage simply brings together the two worlds that have been chraracterised as female (eternity and Zarathustra's 'soul'), and breaks open the idea that the self who speaks is in denial all along about being a part of the soul - a part of the body without organs, which is indeed a zone of creation. If eternity is best understood as fundamentally more female than male, and if Zarathustra's whole body without organs is a drop from this ocean, then maybe Zarathustra is also more female than male, in a sense that goes beyond the aspect of his body without organs he has been calling his soul.


    And simultaneously Zarathustra has here escaped from the fixation on the line of time. The second sphere of action is a foregrounding of the spheroambient spatial world of the planet, and although subtle powerful currents of intent (Futural glimpses; inspirations about actions which will be movements toward the Future) are very much a part of it these have an entirely different nature in comparison with what Zarathustra is leaving behind. The infinite conceptual multiplication of the planet in the form of the eternal return is not in itself planetary: taken as something to be affirmed in itself it is a pathological product of the fixation on the line of time. It upholds (or maintains by new means) the dogmatic image of the world, through the specific idea of blind matter crunching its way through aformal systemic permutations, with this pathological product potentially setting up an anguish-machine in the form of the question about whether such a cosmos could be affirmed. The only possible thing of value that remains is the proposed 'selective modality,' or test for decision-making (analysed in detail by Deleuze in Nietzsche and Philosophy) where you only do those things which you could affirm being done an infinite number of times. But what is crucial here is that the second sphere of action has a view toward the Future (which is to say that it includes a clearer awareness of the current of Love-and-Freedom), but it is very much free of fixations on the chronic/chronological line of time, even when the fixation involves the line having been curved round into a circle. 


    *


     The Alps of Tolkien were - or became - the Alps of a resurgent oneiric domain of 'good' and 'evil.' He went walking in Switzerland in 1911, and on his own account they were the inspiration for his 'Misty Mountains,' deep beneath the highest of which is a chthonic domain of evil, in which a 'Balrog' lives. The sunlit, in some sense 'inspirational' slopes and summits of mountains as good, and what lies deep beneath them as evil - this is a vertical cross-section that obviously is a Christian account, in the end simply because hell is in some sense 'located' beneath the surface of the Earth (the line used to be different, with the Elysian Fields forming a part of the underworld). And the only additional point that must now be made is that this vertical and qualitative line has had a fresh lease of life - in a transmutated guise - in the form of the vertical line of the collapsed modernism of psychoanalysis. Evidently there is no simple story that can be told about influence from what was wrong in Nietzsche's philosophy on the thinking of Freud and Jung (let alone of course about some seemingly implausible influence from the Alps) but it is worth thinking about the structure that starts from the unconscious and goes 'up' to the superego. The 'line' here is not intrinsically vertical, apart from the fact that the unconscious is a way of thinking about matter, and while we are on the planet the main part of the primary zone of 'matter' we are encountering is beneath us... Instead of 'evil' there is now one of the elements of the dogmatic image: the blind propensities of matter, the surgings of accidentally creative forces - perhaps, depending on the viewpoint, with these blind currents being creative through having been installed and honed by an initial mutation and subsequent natural selection. Nietzsche does not help here with the term 'will to power,' which is better re-stated and demoted as the intent to wake all of who you are (and can become) in order to go further toward Love-and-Freedom ('will to power' all too easily slips into being the thought of a hidden drive toward domination). But, whatever tendencies he may have transmitted to Freud and Jung, Nietzsche in fact at a crucial level refuses to associate the human body fundamentally with 'matter,' saying in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that the body is 'the great intelligence' and the mind is the 'small intelligence.' And this has nothing to do with the thought of the psychoanalytic 'unconscious:' a body is what we are. A human body is a world of intent and perception, and in fact, of all of the faculties: what we are is a body shaped awareness, a body shaped intent-zone of creativity, sensation and action. And Nietzsche - as a Spinozist - is also trying to hold open the thought that we simultaneously are failing to encounter the other 'below' (the below that refers in the end to the whole of the planet, below us and above us) because we are blocked by an unsuspected dogmatic image of the world.



*


    Lastly, the connection between the Alps and withdrawal from the world had also been made by Matthew Arnold, and by de Senancour, about whose 1804 alpine-recluse novel - Obermann - Arnold writes in three poems. There is a lot of melancholy in this nexus, and a kind of passivity where the only options are a kind of hectic sadness about the fact the human world as a whole is not advancing toward joy and lucidity (hectic through not having become a recluse) or a kind of serene sadness up in the mountains. In Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, he describes his visit to a Carthusian monastery in the alps and says he is "wandering between two worlds, one dead / the other powerless to be born." But Arnold then states that in the generally chaotic, disheartening, and 'frivolous' milieu that is the absence of the new world he feels more affinity with the monks who still believe in the world that has died. Arnold of course does not become a recluse, but he expresses an urge to retreat from the human world which is worth a little further thought. 

     For instance, it may well be the case that somewhere on the edge of a semi-wilderness or wilderness is an exceptionally good location to create a base (a few scattered houses, perhaps), for those setting out to travel into the unknown, but there are also very good reasons to think that it is valuable, on multiple levels to maintain a recurrent, close contact with the human world of that area (and more widely), perhaps in part by living near to a town. And furthermore, it seems that what is capable of travelling substantial distances into the south of the outside is in fact a group, and a group is a micro-society, as opposed to a population of monks, or an individual. It is a small number of people held together by deep comradeship-alliances, or friendship-alliances (alliances of affection, and perhaps allliances, in some cases, of love-relationships).


*


    We should return for a moment to the long-distance view from the beginning of the Wiltshire downs, and from 1895.  But this time we should pull back from being able to see as far as the Mediterranean and the delta of the Nile. 

    Thomas Hardy's home area is to the southwest, and the area to the south and east simultaneously contains the most forested counties in all of England (Surrey, Hampshire, Sussex and Kent) and the largest city. This differential has probably already been having some kind of impact (in terms of people's degree of oneiric-abstract wakefulness), and will no doubt in some sense continue to do so, even though the effects of such differentials are not at all easy to trace (all that is obvious is that the forest of Arden has gone, and these largely unnamed but quite extensive areas of woodland remain). Shelley was from Horsham in Sussex, and H.G.Wells has just spent a large part of his childhood on a Sussex estate, before moving to Bromley in Kent, and then to London. Virginia Woolf's home outside of London will be not far from Lewes, in East Sussex. Lord Dunsany has not only spent a lot of his childhood in Shoreham, in Kent, but this will be where he lives during most of his life. Darwin, as we have seen, also lived in Kent, not far in fact from Shoreham, and also not far from Bromley - and a few miles from Bromley was the place where William Morris lived for several years. Again, both Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling will settle in Kent.  


*


     Despite any appearance to the contrary (given the other writers who have just been mentioned) we have at last arrived at Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves. It is maybe best to go back to the vantage of Warwickshire, with the long view southeast across Europe to Africa forming the hazy background to an expanse of terrains that now includes Suffolk, over to the east.



*



     The whole of The Waves is enveloped within the second sphere of action. Another way of putting this is to say that the second sphere of action is the primary aspect of its horizon.

    In terms of its characters – that is, in terms of what exists alongside and within the terrain of the horizon - the book starts with six individuals when they are children, and it goes on to follow their lives, and to follow them as they all exist not far away from a threshold which is connected with them  being an almost-group which never quite becomes a group. This is from near the end of the book, and is a memory of a final time when the six of them meet:

“We saw for a moment laid out among us the body of the complete being whom we have failed to be, but at the same time, cannot forget.” [Penguin, 1992, p. 213]

The book is exceptionally precise in this focus, in that the mothers, fathers, wives and husbands of the six people are not characters in it. It is also exceptionally precise in relation to the second sphere of action.

   The book in fact starts two pages before it introduces the characters, with a description of a serene area of countryside by the sea, where there is almost no-one around, and where there is a garden and a large house. There are birds in the garden, and beyond it is the beach, with the waves of the sea breaking upon it. This place is never given a definite location in the novel, although the house where the characters are together when they are children is either similar, or the same; and for one or two pages its quietly sublime expanses (through the phases of daylight, starting at dawn) preface every section of the book, with a final one-sentence description concluding the last chapter.

   The opening  chapter acquires a particular importance because, in that they are in a place which is not really distinguishable from the place in the chapter-prefaces, the six children at this point are to an extent inhabiting the terrain that for the rest of the book will be the horizon. In this chapter refrains are begun which are recurrent glimpses of the ‘place’ toward which – in different ways – the characters are all drawn, depending on the degree to which their energies have not been absorbed by the preoccupations of quotidian reality.

    The first six micro-sections (which together take up only half a page) establish the singularity of the six characters, in that each one, as a young child, is seen perceiving a different aspect of the world (is seen in a ‘visionary’ relationship with it). To mention three of these ‘ur-perceptions’ Susan is aware of an area of yellow that spreads away “until it meets a  purple stripe;’” Rhoda is aware of sounds that appear to be the birds singing; and Louis hears the sound of something stamping “a great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps.” Then, two pages later, after a series of short continuations of (and divergences from) these ur-perceptions the first long paragraph is this one:

    ‘Now they have all gone,’ said Louis. ‘I am alone. They have gone into the house for breakfast, and I am left standing by the wall among the flowers. It is very early, before lessons. Flower after flower is specked on the depths of green. The petals are harlequins. Stalks rise from the black hollows beneath. The flowers swim like fish made of light upon the dark, green waters. I hold a stalk in my hand. My roots go down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs. Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing. I am a boy in grey flannels with a belt fastened by a brass snake up here. Down there my eyes are the lidless eyes of a stone figure in a desert by the Nile. I see women passing with red pitchers to the river; I see camels swaying and men in turbans. I hear tramplings, tremblings, stirrings round me.’

Once Louis ‘arrives’ in Egypt the women are the first figures he sees. And it is both the case that the image of women getting water from the Nile is one of the most recurrent refrains in the book, and that afterwards it is only the women who appear in the instances of the refrain - the ‘men in turbans’ have gone (this is in turn connected to references in the book to Antony and Cleopatra, in which it is the female protagonist who is identified with Egypt).

   However, the foregrounding of the female in relation to the second sphere of action evidently consists of more than this. It is there – in a subtle, and powerful way – on the first page, and afterwards the initial evocation continues, and has emphatically placed alongside it the other aspect that is needed. This is a quotation from the middle of the first ‘preface’ (the novel gives emphasis to these sections by placing them in italics) –

Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk and left the glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that raised the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.

     This extended, seemingly ‘flowery’ simile is doing more work than meets the eye. Hidden quietly behind its elaborateness (there is no arm) is the fact that the ‘agency’ which all along is being described is the Earth, in that what causes the sun to ‘rise’ is the planet’s rotation. There is no arm, but there is a correlate of the arm – and of the whole woman – and that correlate is the planet on which we live. The female has therefore arrived (even if only attributively) in an intensely emphasised and yet inconspicuous form (“it’s only a simile”),just a few lines from the beginning of the first section of the novel. 

  And in the opening chapter - which, as has been pointed out, takes place somewhere that is not finally separable from the house in the prefaces - the human figures who the children see and encounter are almost entirely women. The six children are three girls and three boys (Rhoda, Susan, Jinny, Bernard, Neville and Louis), but the world in which they find themselves is a minimally populated expanse of countryside, garden and house, which insofar as it is populated, is a place of women, with only very exceptions. The people with whom they continually interact are Miss Hudson, Miss Curry and Mrs Constable. These are the human figures who are at the forefront of the childrens' experiences, and beyond these there is Florrie, who Susan sees kissing a man called Ernest in the garden. The references to the first three figures constitute the only human refrain, and then, as well, there are the women by the Nile (who will proceed on their own afterwards, in six references spread all across the novel) and the regal figure who appears - whose name connects to Egypt - is Queen Alexandria. Jinny thinks:  

    I shall have a mistress in a school on the East Coast who sits under a portrait of Queen Alexandria. That is where I am going, and Susan and Jinny.  [p.16]

And in relation to Susan and Bernard's visit to Elvedon the same emphasis is in effect in terms of social 'prestige' - and in terms of there being only one figure described who is inside the house, and therefore at the centre of this 'other' place:

    Put your foot on this brick. Look over the wall. That is Elvedon. The lady sits between the two long windows, writing.

There is also the intensity and detail of the interactions with the women (Bernard is 'woken' in terms of his awareness of himself as a body by Mrs Constable pouring water over him, when he is washing), an intensity and detail which has no equivalent at all in terms of the male figures mentioned - Ernest, who is there in one sentence, and with whom none of the children interact; and the stable boy and gardeners at Elvedon, who are equally 'fleeting' presences. 

    And most importantly of all it is women who are foregrounded in the serene, eerie-sublime world of the prefaces: the final preface becomes expansive in that it explicitly spreads the terrain of the description outward toward the whole planet (at the same time as describing the transformation from day to night) in a process that does not definitively include the male, and includes the female with its penultimate note. This is its concluding paragraph:

    As if there were waves of darkness in the air, darkness moved on, covering houses, hills, trees, as waves of water wash round the sides of some sunken ship. Darkness washed down streets, eddying round single figures, engulfing them; blotting out couples clasped in the showery darkness of elm trees in full summer foliage. Darkness rolled its waves along grassy rides and over the wrinkled skin of the turf, enveloping the solitary thorn tree and the empty snail shells at its foot. Mounting higher, darkness blew along the bare upland slopes, and met the fretted and abraded pinnacles of the mountain where the snow lodges for ever on the hard rock even when the valleys are full of running streams and yellow vine leaves, and girls, sitting on verandahs, look up at the snow, shading their faces with their fans. Them, too, darkness covered.  [p182]

All of this, while appearing to be only a very quiet 'suggestiveness' (the inconspicuous power of the precisely and firmly implicit) is all along an implacable figuring of the second sphere of action. 

*

    There are outsights that need now to be arrived at in relation to the East within this novel, and to the 'Southeast,' in the form of Egypt. And, most importantly of all, in relation to the issue of human groups. And in the process what has been in question in connection with the initial perspective will be brought into a sharper focus.

    
     It is in the crucial final chapter that the issue of humans groups is made explicit, although always through the lens of the group within the novel. Bernard is recollecting his life to a stranger who he has met in a restaurant (this process of recollecting is the single event of the last chapter), and the question of the group becomes an undemonstrative, very powerful refrain:


Our friends, how seldom visited, how little known - it is true; and yet, when I meet an unknown person, and try to break off, here at this table, what I call "my life", it is not one life that I look back upon; I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am - Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs. [p.212].

There is a note of 'poignant disaster' or of 'tragedy' being struck here, but the tragedy involved has as its primary focus a group, as opposed to an individual. In the passage already quoted (which is ten lines after the one above) the phrase "complete human being" relates indissociably to a being in the form of a group, as well as to its individuals: "We saw for a moment laid out among us the body of the complete human being whom we have failed to be, but at the same time cannot forget." The tragedy is that in some sense a group has failed to wake.

    As the refrain continues, in the course of the next few pages, it quietly heightens the extent to which it expresses a subtle, impersonal form of closeness - the extent to which it breaks open a view toward a nexus of lucid becomings:

    
     For this is not one life; nor do I always know if I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny or Rhoda - so strange is the contact one with another. [p. 216}

    And now I ask "Who am I?" I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know.  [...] I cannot find any obstacle separating us. There is no division between me and them.   [p.222]


    An aspect of this group-identification which is evidently important (and which will also lead forward to an overview) is bound up with the fact that at the level of becomings which cross the divide between female and male it would not be nearly as effective if one of the women were recollecting the events in the 'life' of the group of friends. This is because a becoming male is a fundamental aspect of ordinary reality (it is insisted that women move further and further away from lucidity, and in particular lucidity insofar as it informs spontaneous, unaffected delight), whereas, as Deleuze and Guattari are aware, it is a become-female that is the quiet stuff of all genuine revolutions. And what is in question here is not Bernard learning how to be female in order to be female sexually with a man (or with a woman). Instead the group-revolutionary way forward in this respect concerns the fact that in an impersonal, non-possessive way Bernard loves these three women - and therefore in a sense is quietly in love with them - , but where, because of the closeness and lack of possessiveness, it is momentously correct to say that he is them, in that he loves them. And what is momentous is that this identification is the beginning of a learning of lucidity, an overall learning of brightness (delight; lack of judgementalness; an ability to take transcendental 'leaps'), and an acquiring of an awareness of the ability of women to dream up new, Futural circumstances. 

     In the end it is women who are experts at giving birth to the future. Rhoda is in fact very faintly aware of her ability, despite being by far the least confident of the six friends: confronted by the horror of ordinary reality, which will brutally attack her for her views pertaining to the ongoing disaster, she can half-perceive the Future, and senses her capacity to dream up and actualise a Futural situation for the nearly-group of which she is a part. But lacking in any confidence she can only see what she is envisaging as like a 'bubble,' so that when she can no longer 'see' there can be only an impression of something with no practical value (whereas the virtual-real is at least as real as the actual - it creates the Future - and it is also, in any case, subsequently effectuated as the actual). This is the passage where Rhoda sees the direction of the group-escape:

   Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and escape forever from the here and now. pp. [171-172].


   The Future is here seen recurrently in terms of the sea, and in terms of immersion in a world of forces and beings where there is no longer an experience of being separate from what is around you. There is a point during what may be the last meeting of the six friends (in the gardens of Hampton Court) when it seems all of them experience a state of being suffused by - and spread out into - the ocean of the world around them. "..."That immersion" thinks Bernard afterwards "how sweet, how deep!" After it has just started Rhoda thinks "the still mood, the disembodied mood is on us," and as the - entirely inconclusive - anomalous state continues it is described both in terms of an illumination in the form of a lucid perception of their lives taken as a whole, and in terms of a blaze of light that makes the outsights possible. Bernard sees all six of them as a single, but multi-sided formation, but then it is if he both yearns for the anomalous, and is scared of its ability to sweep him away, and he allows what he is seeing to become diffuse, so it disappears  -


...a six sided flower; made of six lives.

'A mysterious illumination' said Louis, 'visible against those yew trees.'

'Built up with much pain, many strokes,' said Jinny.

'Marriage, death, travel, friendship,' said Bernard; '[...] a many-sided substance, cut out of this dark; a many-faceted flower. Let us stop for a moment; let us behold what we have made. Let it blaze against the yew trees. One life. There. It is over. Gone out.'


Earlier, on the previous occasion in the book when the six of them meet as adults Rhoda sees the sea off in the distance, beyond them. This last time they reach it and are immersed in it, but although it leaves a memory of bliss - in Bernard, at least - the primary elements they encounter in the ocean are simply each other ("there are figures coming towards us... They still wear the ambiguous draperies of the flowing tide in which they have been immersed."). It is as if they have all received an initial and fugitive answer to a question, but as if none them - with the possible exception of Rhoda - know that they have asked it. 


*

    It is necessary to return to the serene, empty expanses of the chapter prefaces, and to respond to the question, 'where is this book, in relation to the oneirosphere?' This is the opening section of the second chapter (which noticeably weaves the house with what is outside it).


The sun rose higher. Blue waves, green waves swept a quick fan over the beach, circling the spike of sea-holly, and leaving shallow pools of light here and there on the sand. A faint black rim was left behind them. The rocks which had been misty and soft hardened and were marked with red clefts.

Sharp stripes of shadow lay on the grass, and the dew dancing on the tips of the flowers and leaves made the garden like a mosaic of single sparks not yet formed into one whole. The birds, whose breasts were specked canary and rose now sang a strain or two together, wildly, like skaters rollicking arm-in-arm, and were suddenly silent, breaking asunder.

The sun laid broader blades upon the house. The light  touched something green in the window corner and made it a lump of emerald, a cave of pure green like stoneless fruit. It sharpened the edges of chairs and tables and stitched white table-cloths with fine gold wires. As the light increased a bud here and there split asunder and shook out flowers, green veined and quivering, as if the effort of opening had set them rocking, and pealing a faint carillon as they beat their clappers against their white walls. Everything became softly amorphous, as if the china of the plate flowed and the steel of the knife were liquid. Meanwhile the concussion of the waves fell with muffled thuds, like logs falling, on the shore. 


   The whole of The Waves is a high, sunlit extension of the upland that had begun in the 1850s.This upland had apparently reached a precipitous end 15 years before, but somehow, despite the monstrous abyss of the First World War, there had been a ten year continuation afterwards. The modernists were heartened by the Russian and Mexican revolutions. The pacifists felt that the war had shown that the wars of states in general were an abomination (not knowing that the war had been so violent it would soon lead to another war which would create a 'proof' that pacifism was wrong). And in 1920, as artistic movements began to surge forward again, the title of Lawrence's book "Look! We Have Come Through!" would have seemed prescient. 

    The last, beyond-the-rupture zone of the upland does not continue long (the stock market crash was in 1929, and by this time fascism is rapidly increasing its impact across Europe), but at the very end the land rises steeply and becomes the recondite, bright expanses of The Waves. From here it is possible to see the house in the middle of a desert valley that is described by both Florinda Donner and Taisha Abelar - the house and surrounding terrain which are evoked by these two women writers in an impersonal, inconspicuously sublime way that in earlier literature is only reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's novel. 

     And from here the view of the virtual-real depth world of the past has two primary features. It looks back toward Shakespeare, with Shelley standing out in the middle distance of this perspective. And simultaneously it looks back - and southeastwards - towards the ancient world of Italy and Greece, and - very much in particular - toward the world of ancient Egypt. Egypt appears first in the book, and it is only with Egypt that there is an ongoing oneiric refrain (the image of the women getting water from the Nile), and the pre-eminent feature of the horizon of the English into-the-past-perspective also connects to the land of the Nile delta, because of a reference to Cleopatra - in a boat on this river - in Antony and Cleopatra.

    Shakespeare is not a 'model' that is used for generating all or part of The Waves. Which implies no rejection at all: it is just that Shakespeare is important for his lucidity, and for his oneiric power and breadth-of-vision, and these attributes are not in any way bound to the dramatic and poetic modes he employed. Virginia Woolf starts again - and creates an entirely new form of prose-poetry and of drama (and new, exceptionally  powerful expressions of lucidity and oneiric seeing) but in a way where there is no contradiction in connection with the importance of the writer from Warwickshire. The Waves in many ways is at a level beyond Shakespeare (perhaps most significantly in that it is a tragedy, but the protagonist of the tragedy is a group), but the earlier exponent of lucidity is there on the horizon of The Waves for the reasons already mentioned, but also because this is the correct emphasis (it cuts out any explicit presence of Malory, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Arthurianism) and both because an aspect of Shakespeare's work is an awareness of something that began to be destroyed when - at the second attempt - the Roman Empire comprehensively defeated Cleopatra. Virginia Woolf is in fact very precise across three works about the literature-in-England horizon: she is interested in the house of Owain ap Tudur (because it momentously culminates in the reign of Elizabeth), rather than being interested in Arthur. The Waves barely references anything in English literature before Shakespeare and Hampton Court; Orlando's life begins in the reign of Elizabeth; and in relation to the past A Room of One's Own grounds its account of women in literature in going back to tudor times to talk about the fact that an equally talented sister of Shakespeare would have had no chance of an equivalent career.

     And the presence of Egypt in the book is connected to the eastward direction that is established from the beginning as crucial, but in the end it is connected to a movement which goes both wider and deeper. The east is important in itself (it is the direction of India, China, Mongolia...), but is also important here as a counter-balance to the English mystic west - the references to the east (which include Elvedon, which connects up in a subtle way to India) reverse the polarity so that sublime brightness and the beyond-Europe Outside is felt in this direction, but, this achieved, the attention of the book spreads out not just to Asia, but to the southeast in the form of Egypt, and ultimately to Africa. For those living in Europe The Waves situates everyone where they have been along: in a tiny zone of the continent of Afro-Eurasia. And not only that, it quietly points out that Europeans have not only severed themselves oneirically from Africa, but they have somehow also ended up being severed from the main part of their ancient, deeply female-oriented metaphysics.

    It is not that The Waves is trying to get back to the goddesses of the Egyptian pantheon. On the contrary, the whole project of the book is to leave behind not only gods and goddesses, but also the conventional 'spirit-beings' that can be used playfully as lenses for seeing the transcendental - as with Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Instead, the issue is that the book has an awareness of the planetary singular point of the Nile (the starting-point around which an extremely large displacement zone of 'sacred' monuments and cities was created) and connects this singular point emphatically with women. Louis's non-personal 'memory' of the past - or awareness of it, with a quality of memory - goes back again and again to the women by the Nile:

   Sealed and blind, with earth stopping my ears, I have yet heard rumours of wars; and the nightingale: have felt the hurrying of man flocking hither and thither in quest of civilization like flocks of birds migrating seeking the summer. I have seen women carrying red pitchers to the banks of the Nile. [p.71].

   Every day I unbury - I dig up. I find relics of myself in the sand that women made thousands of years ago, when I heard songs by the Nile and the chained beast stamping. [p.95]

     ...women going with attache cases down the Strand as they went once with pitchers to the Nile. [p127]


     The precision of this lies in the fact that "thousands of years ago" is the time when it was customary for figures of women to be lenses for seeing the transcendental, and, most important of all, for seeing the direction of Love-and-Freedom. This is the fundamental modality that has been lost, in particular in the Mediterranean zone and its subsequent colonisation areas (though - to clarify - it needs to be noticed that even Hinduism is a religion, in that it both has a prohibition on simply starting again with new stories and new lenses, and has a male over-coding of women as either mothers/nurturers or as practitioners of war - as opposed to being journeyers into the unknown).

   But although all this takes place in a way which avoids any taking up of old lenses, whether religious or folk-supernatural, Virginia Woolf nonetheless includes the anomalous, though by means of faint, recurring indications or suggestions. This makes The Waves part of the abstract-oneiric world of metamorphics, even in this last (and probably least important) respect, in that there are suggestions of energy-instances which are in effect within the human world, but which cannot in any ordinary sense be called human (with metamorphics, there is always at the very least the instance that is the control-mind, whatever this modality of energy might be). What The Waves does is the same as what is done by Shakespeare through the figure of Ariel in The Tempest.

    It is not just that Rhoda, at the culmination of the first chapter, has the experience that as she falls asleep she is being pursued ("I am turned; I am tumbled; I am stretched, among these long lights, these long waves, these endless paths, with people pursuing, pursuing."). It is that when Rhoda climbs a hill in Spain from which she will be able to see Africa, at this crucial point the energy given by the situation is diverted into her fear of falling out of ordinary reality and into horror, and somehow in this process of encountering the unknown - on every level - there is an anomalous figure who is with her who has an attribute inconspicuously in common with depictions of non-human entities in Ancient Egypt:

   
    The mule stumbles up and on. The ridge of the hill rises like mist, but from the top I shall see Africa. Now the bed gives under me. The sheets spotted with yellow holes let me fall. The good woman with a face like a white horse at the end of the bed makes a valedictory movement and turns to go. [p.158]


There are other examples of the anomalous in the book, most noticeably the control-realm of Elvedon, which although described from the start in slightly subterranean, or 'underwater' terms, only becomes fully apparent as in some sense a view toward the anomalous - if only as a way of seeing the control-mind - when Bernard decades later describes his attitude to the world he and Susan encountered as children:


Down below, through the depths of the leaves, the gardeners swept the lawns with great brooms. The lady sat writing. Transfixed, stopped dead, I thought "I cannot interfere with a single stroke of those brooms. They sweep and they sweep. Nor with the fixity of that woman writing." [...] There they have remained all my life. It is as if one had woken in Stonehenge surrounded by a circle of great stones, these enemies, these presences. [p.185].



*


    The remaining issues concerning the anomalous (and concerning in particular the disturbing modality of 'control' as an element within the human world) will be arrived at through an account of a figure who is not (despite some appearances to the contrary) a part of the nearly-group, and also through an account of one of the last events in the story. 


    There is an individual in The Waves (a seventh character) who is contingently but firmly blocked off from even taking the first un-noticed, unfocused steps of a group journey into the unknown, even though this state of 'preclusion' is associated with a strength. This individual is Percival, whose strength is a facility for non-anxious, non-neurotic action (and who within the framework of the life which adopts him is a kind, generous individual, who has integrity) but whose inseparable weakness is that in a spirit of adventure he accepts the projects which appear in front of him, without questioning their fundamental validity. If the school-milieu around you would love you to excel at a sport, then why not? If the society around you gives you the possible adventure of being a major functionary or administrator in the British Empire in India, then why not accept the adventure? After the 1919 Amritsar massacre there were very good reasons for a negative response to this second question, but Percival (notice the Arthurian name) as the largely non-reflective man-of-action does indeed go off to India on the 'quest' of being a colonial administrator.

    The Waves is precise about Percival. He is not one of the characters who speak, and reflect on the world (that is, he is not one of the six from the opening chapter, and there is never anything from his stream-of-consciousness viewpoint). And in the final chapter when Bernard cannot distinguish his life fully from those of his friends Percival is not one of the friends about whom he is thinking.

     And yet, at the same time, it is vital not to give the wrong impression here. The book is very sympathetic to Percival, in that his strength is real, and is a fundamental strength ("it is not often that one has no anxiety" says Rhoda, and Percival clearly knows more about this state than any of the members of the almost-group): it is just that it is associated with his intent having been taken over to too high a degree by the system of projects of the interestablishment. In different ways the six main characters all have a genuine love for him, and, not only that, he functions to bring them together again: the point where they all meet at the centre of the book's trajectory is a meal in a restaurant where they are saying goodbye to Percival before he goes to India. This seventh character is in fact a kind of subsidiary tragedy in The Waves. The impression is that if there had been a woman with an equivalent ability for action, and who was a traveller into the unknown, then this woman could have woken Percival. As it is, the woman who is nearest to this is Susan, and Susan, being only a little more awake at the level of intent cannot wake Percival out of his collapsed state, and therefore there is no way forward (Percival is in love with Susan, and proposes to her, but she turns him down).

    In a book which never directly mentions the First World War Percival is inseparable from all the more or less good-hearted, spontaneous, courageous individuals (on all sides of the conflict) who went off to the war. But the disaster here is that, because intent has been taken over by the project-systems of the interestablishment (and therefore is fundamentally a form of capitulation) what is in small-scale issues a state of integrity is not integrity at all in relation to the overall life-direction.

    When the group is in the restaurant (and Percival is about to leave to be a functionary of the British Raj) Rhoda is triggered into seeing the outside of ordinary reality, and initially sees something which feels as if it is a figuring of the female-and-male potential of human beings (the abstract human), but after this everything becomes about the capitulatory role which exists within that potential, which is to be a celebrated leader of a tribe. But this power-position is a deadly one in the first place - collapsing the person into being a glorified component of control - let alone in the exceptionally intense cross currents of colonial India, where real integrity could lead to a profound, subtle state of perturbation. And in the end Rhoda and Louis, as the festivity of the meal goes on around them, foresee only death. It is Neville who starts the sequence, by looking toward Rhoda as someone who can understand the situation:


     'Let Rhoda speak... [...] She looks far away over our heads, beyond India.'

      'Yes, between your shoulders, over your heads, to a landscape,' said Rhoda, 'to a hollow where the many-backed steep hills come down like birds' wings folded. There, on the short, firm turf, are bushes, dark-leaved, and against their darkness I see a shape, white, but not of stone, moving, perhaps alive. But it is not you, it is not you, it is not you; not Percival, Susan, Jinny, Neville or Louis. When the white arm rests upon the knee it is a triangle; now it is upright - a column; now a fountain, falling. It makes no sign, it does not beckon, it does not see us. Behind it roars the sea. It is beyond our reach. Yet there I venture. There I go to replenish my emptiness, to stretch my nights and fill them fuller and fuller with dreams. And for a second even now, even here, I reach my object and say "Wander no more. All else is trial and make-believe. Here is the end."    [p. 104]


    [then, after Jinny has drawn Percival toward her, creating a current of intensity within the group, there is the following passage in which, in part, Louis and Rhoda seem to be seeing all five of the others]


   'Look Rhoda, said Louis, they have become nocturnal, rapt. Their eyes are like moths' wings moving so quickly that they do not seem to move at all.'

    'Horns and trumpets,' said Rhoda, 'ring out. Leaves unfold; the stags blare in the thicket. There is a dancing and a drumming [...]

[...]

    'The flames of the festival rise high,' said Rhoda. 'The great procession passes, flinging green boughs and flowering branches. Their horns spill blue smoke; their skins are dappled red and yellow in the torchlight. They throw violets. They deck the beloved with garlands and with laurel leaves, there on the ring of turf where the steep-backed hills come down.The procession passes. And while it passes, Louis, we are aware of downfalling, we forebode decay.The shadow slants. We who are conspirators, withdrawn together to lean over some cold urn, note how the purple flame flows downwards.'

   'Death is woven in with the violets,' said Louis. 'Death and again death.' [pp. 105-106]



    One of the last things Percival writes from India is "I am about to play quoits with a colonel, so no more." His death - he is killed as a result of falling from his horse - can be seen as a contingency - apart from the fact that this death would not have happened if he had not gone to India. Virginia Woolf writes as someone who is fundamentally against wars, and as someone who is outside the blocked, suppressive dreaming-system of her society's religion (it is important to see that this is the turbulent end-point of colonially mediated imposition of Christianity: all of the Americas have fallen, and all of Australasia and Oceania, together with the majority of Sub-Saharan Africa - the high tide is now pounding against Asia). The Waves very quietly shows the danger of unreflectively waiting at the court of the transestablishment (Arthur's court is merely a delerial idealisation of the British state, the wars of the British state, and of Christianity), and of accepting some 'quest' or project that is provided by it.

     Arthurianism is a religious-and-nationalist oneiric trap, as Shakespeare was well aware (he demonstrates his awareness by ignoring it in terms of source material, and by playfully mocking it in King Lear). And for the six friends in The Waves Percival is also fundamentally the wrong direction, in that, as it stands, his presence would simply tear them apart if they all came closer. As a largely unreflective man-of-action with an intent which to a great extent is not his own (that is, an intent which to a great extent is not that of Love-and-Freedom) his lack of self-discipline would simply lead to jealousy and collapse (Neville is obsessively in love with him, Jinny is drawn toward him, and Susan is oppressed by Jinny's attractiveness).

     And yet Percival brings them together, for a moment. That which - within him - is going in the right direction brings them together. They all need to learn to let go; to learn to be beyond anxiety; and to learn to accept the adventure when it appears (only it needs to be the adventure that will take them into the Future). 



    Rhoda makes the attempt by going to Spain -  and by going toward Africa. And it is worth thinking about the direction she takes. The Waves is careful in relation to it's geo-oneiric spaces: it not only avoids the Alps, but, much more importantly, it also completely avoids the west, in the form of the Americas. This protestant-and-catholic area of expansion had as yet not been transformed by any major abstract-oneiric breakthrough drawing on the ancient American worlds of outsights - the works of Donner and Abelar, together with those of Castaneda, are still decades away.

    As Woolf writes the Future is very definitely receding. And it will not return into greater proximity until around 1960. It is worth thinking about the fact that this later phase of higher intensity will be profoundly connected with musical beats which had their origins in Africa, and will - overall - be deeply inter-meshed with Africa in a large number of ways. This only acquires its full significance if it is seen that Africa for the 'western' world in 1930 was a kind of mythic dead-zone, in that it had not been taken up as a 'promised land' or 'place of destiny,' like the Americas, but was instead a deeply denigrated, disowned member of the Afro-Eurasian family. This situation is evidently insane, and fated to be short-lived - and Rhoda is simply responding to the depth-level connection, the existence of which is what makes the denial of Africa's familial relationship an insanity.


    But Rhoda is alone on her travels. She does not have any of her friends with her, and she has not overcome fear, which means that she is vulnerable to being pulled in disastrous directions when she reaches the Outside, with this fear also expressing itself as fantasies of escape through death from the danger of transcendental horror. And the world of Paul Simon's Marrakesh Express is a long way off (though, in any case, her exceptionally visionary temperament would have left her distant from the easy 'solutions' of the 1960-1982 counter-culture).  What follows is a view from the end of the upland of the earlier phase - a view, and a point where the view disappears:


The ridge of the hill rises like mist, but from the top I shall see Africa. [...] 

[...] We launch out now over the precipice. Beneath us lie the lights of the herring fleet. The cliffs vanish. Rippling small, rippling grey, innumerable waves spread beneath us. I touch nothing. I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling me over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.

   Yet that tree has bristling branches; that is the hard line of a cottage roof. Those bladder shapes painted red and yellow are faces. Putting my foot to the ground I step gingerly and press my hand against the hard door of a Spanish inn.

                                            [the end of the Spain sequence: half of the second-to-last paragraph, and all of the last - p.158]


*


   In The Waves people do not get far. And yet what is revealed by the distance which they do travel is fundamentally important.

    In the concluding section of the book it is Bernard who is on his own. And Bernard has an experience of stopping a part of what is preventing  him from breaking free – the aspect of him which he is aware of as dysfunctional, and which he describes as his habit of ceaselessly ‘making phrases.’  In other words, his habit, in encountering aspects of the world, of instantly thinking of something that could be said about it. It is dysfunctional because it is an expression of fear, and prevents him from achieving a sustained perception and abstract perception of the world around him (in these respects human beings behave as if they are trying to hold everything together under immense pressure, whereas the real pressure is that they are creating an obsessive’s thread of - generally redundant - verbal ‘coherence’ out of the very beginnings of encounters which they never allow to take place).

    The strangeness of this moment of stopping the phrases is brought out by the intensity and detail of the ‘planetary’ terms that are used to describe it. Bernard is leaning on a gate, with a view of an area of countryside. And without thinking specifically of language he sees himself as a fabric of acreted habits: “A space was cleared in my mind. I saw through the thick leaves of habit.” And when he verbally addresses himself, questioning the overall nature of his life, he has removed the necessary energy for the ceaseless phrase-making (the habit he was not specifically thinking about) and the result is silence. And the description of the internal blocking-system is Bernard on the edge of a focused lucidity:

I addressed my self as one would speak to a companion with whom one is voyaging to the North Pole. [p.218]

The only thing that is not perceived is the reason why Bernard is voyaging to the North Pole is the presence of this phrase-making self.

    But what must immediately be said is that this self does just produce phrases: it is also the tyranny of moods. And this second aspect is what creates the trap for Bernard - the trap from which he does not escape (although a chink of light does break through). Bernard experiences the suspension of phrase-making as like an eclipse, and as being in fact the suspension of something he views as his 'desires' (he knows that it is more than just language that is involved). However, where for Virginia Woolf the 1927 eclipse of the sun had been a momentous, transformational event (in some sense a "disembodied intercourse with the sky"), Bernard's still-within-the-trap experience of the 'eclipse of the self' (where the eclipse of the North Pole self has not taken place) is a state of depression, of despondency. The phrase-making may have stopped, but because his fear-self has tricked him into thinking he has lost his loves (which is fundamentally what is in question in talking about desires) he experiences the world as a deadened place, and himself as a deadened being.


   " ...the earth was a waste of shadow. [...] A man without a self, I said. A heavy body leaning on a gate. A dead man. With dispassionate despair, with entire disillusionment, I surveyed the dust dance; my life, my friends' lives [...].  

  The heaviness of my despondency thrust open the gate I leant on and pushed me [...] through the colourless field, the empty field. [pp. 219-220]


   Bernard does not get beyond this illusory silence, a silence which in fact is still deafeningly loud with the voice of the North Pole self. The tyranny of moods consists of a whole system of 'subjectified' or 'reactive' emotions: everything which is not the bliss or delight of creativity, of spontaneity, of action which is directly an expression of Love-and-Freedom. And also everything which is not the feelings associated with the fascination and alertness of navigation through danger. It consists of anguish, fear, self-importance, self-pity, victory-happiness, relief-happiness, anxiety, remorseful self-loathing, rage, outrage and hatred: and it also consists of the mood whose name does not fully indicate that it is an emotion - depression.

   And yet Bernard's escape into a last form of the trap is still an escape to the edge - and despite being in the trap, something breaks through. No matter how distorted it is by Bernard's lens of childhood memories, in the last pages of The Waves there is a glimpse toward what has been the most important aspect of the book - the planetary and female direction in which we all need to travel:


    'But for a moment I had sat on the turf somewhere high above the sea and the sound of the woods, had seen the house, the garden, and the waves breaking. The old nurse who turns the pages of the picture-book had stopped and had said, "Look. This is the truth" '. [p.221]


*


    The faculty of feeling is a modality of intelligence that has nothing to do with the tyranny of moods. It is an inchoate perception whose intensity indicates a direction. 

    Imagine someone in their teens or early twenties. They have an exceptionally beautiful dream (in sleep) where they are with a woman with whom they are intensely in love, a woman who they do not know in their waking life, and the bliss of the dream reaches its high-point when they kiss, and it is clear the woman reciprocates the love. The extreme intensity of the feeling is here an indication of the direction to be taken, a spur toward focusing navigation - and, because the virtual-real is no less real than the actual, it is the depth-level aspect of a generative fragment of the Future.

   Again, imagine that a few years later the same individual has a dream about being a member of a group of individuals who are travelling together into the unknown, and the sheer bliss of this experience is off the scale of any previous experience of sublime feelings (and in a strongest sense includes something of the feeling of the first dream because of the love for the female explorer-travellers in the group). (see Section 24). Here again, the outer-edge intensity of the feeling is an indication of the direction to be taken. The faculty has been very clear on the subject - it is necessary to navigate toward the emergence of a group. There are no rules here, any more than there are rules for bringing about an intense love-relationship, but it is necessary by whatever means to prepare yourself so that you are impeccable enough to be a member of such a group (to have stripped away self-indulgence, self-importance, concupiscence etc.), and to explore the 'space' of such a group both through abstract-perception and through oneiric (thought-experiment) voyaging in the virtual real (Sections 7, 16, 26, 27, 28). The sublime feeling shows the direction (even if you cant grasp what form the group might take; it is an inspiration for a focused navigation) - and, again, it is a creative, transformation-generating fragment of the Future, which has appeared within ordinary reality.

    When you don't really understand anything, and when you could easily forget it all, because the Futural world falls outside of your experience in the actual (and therefore doesn't 'connect up'), feeling does its work as a faculty in keeping the issue of the Futural experience in front of you. When, in Greece in 1995, (Section 24) I had a sublime, blissful feeling as a result of looking at a semi-forested mountain ridge this emotion stood on its own - it wasn't even something I could describe as a longing to go the place I was seeing. It was sufficient unto itself - a bright, pre-possessing feeling with no negativity of 'if only' or 'I wish I could' about it. It was the serene-ecstatic feeling to which poetry and tales can take you. There was the mountain ridge with its trees, and there was the sublime feeling.

   It is a moment later that this becomes longing, both the specific longing, and then - generally later again - the far wider longing to go to other places of the same kind (longing is is also not a subjectified emotion - it is far more oneiric and active than the pained passivity of 'hope'). But in the initial moment feeling has done its work as a faculty: there is just a singular geographical feature in front of you, and there is no thinking at all involved: but the faculty of feeling has gone into effect, and pointed something out. Later, if you continue focusing in that direction at the level of abstract perception, lucidity can go into effect, and can start to discover the potentials of the direction. Walking through forested wildernesses; camping for days in them; discovering singular beautiful places; stopping internal verbalising through perceiving such worlds. After feeling comes lucidity and dreaming, and if their outsights directly inform intent then whole self-intensifying journeys can result (for instance, between 2005 and 2007 I worked in the centre of London but lived in a tent in different areas of woodland on the periphery of the city, therefore saving money. to travel to wildernesses in the summer). But the starting-point was the faculty of feeling.

   And it should be added that the same thing can happen with abstractions. If you encounter a book of abstractions which at some degree of lucidity is about intent, bodies, the planet, dreams, travelling into the unknown - if you are lucky enough to start reading such a book the sublime feeling it creates is almost certain to appear long before the majority of the outsights start to come fully into focus. In this case there are likely to be some outsights which are in focus immediately, but even if there are not, there is the blissful brightness of the feeling, a feeling not of power and judgement and self-glorification, but of Love-and-Freedom. 


*


   1960. The process of the concentration - or condensing - of the population into the cities and towns has been accelerating. Between 1851 and 1960 the number of agricultural workers in Britain fell from around 1.7 million to around 700,000 (by 2010 it will be less than 200,000). The mines are also starting to close. Although the deepest of all the Warwickshire mines has just been created (Daw Mill, near Nuneaton, sunk between 1956 and 1959) this in fact will soon be the only working mine in the county, and will be closed in 2013.

   There has been an extreme pushing-back against the revolution in poetry and tales that had been started, by Shelley, a hundred and fifty years before. Two figures at the forefront of this have been Tolkien and Auden, both of whom had grown up in – or near – the southern part of Birmingham, and had gone on from there to Oxford. In his poetry Shelley had moved along the escape-path from ordinary reality, and he had been explicit about the fact that this in a fundamental sense was a movement away from both wars and religion. With Shakespeare the local wing of the interestablishment had found him useful, and Shakespeare keeps the critique implicit to a very high degree. With Shelley, however, there could be a poetic counter-revolution against the whole phase in relation to which he was part of the beignning, most of which – but not all – would simply be the creation of new poetic and narrative worlds which re-adopted the elements Shelley had critiqued.

   In a 1955 poem by R.S. Thomas, the Anglican vicar-poet from North Wales, there is a direct poetic move against Shelley, which goes into the weak point of this writer, in that he can be viewed as a sensual hippie-romantic (it is as if R.S.Thomas can see the self-indulgent aspect of the 60s and 70s coming), but because of the poetic condensation of all the issues, the poem is implicitly an overall criticism of Shelley’s values:

    Shelley dreamed it. Now the dream decays.

    The props crumble: the familiar ways

    Are stale with tears trodden underfoot.

   The heart’s flower is withered at the root,

    Bury it then in history’s sterile dust.

   The slow years shall tame your tawny lust.

                                                        [first stanza of "Song at the Year's Turning"]

Shelley for R.S. Thomas  has dug underground in dreaming his values into existence,  and the dark place he has ‘mined’ is now collapsing.

   But the oneiric counter-revolution for the most part does not take the form of references to the breakthrough works (from the previous hundred and forty years) in which there are views toward the Future. And the full picture here in fact goes beyond the modalities represented by Tolkien and Auden, in that it also fundamentally includes the modality of Philip Larkin. This is because the real distinction is between transcendental awareness and traditionalist awareness: and there are two wings of tradition, religion and empiricism. When the oneiric-abstract closing-down in the 1930s, 40s and 50s takes place it happens twice: once for the dreamers, and once for the masters of circumstances, or ‘strategists.’

    Another way of putting it therefore is that the difference concerns transcendental awareness, and the blocked suppressive awareness that is intrinsically inflected by the system of reason-and-revelation. And the urbane, satisfied-by-being-in-England  ‘cleverness’ of Larkin is no less a blocking of the new openings toward the Outside than are the works of the later Auden or the works of Tolkien. Together, these three stand for the whole machine of reason and revelation, and it is irrelevant that Larkin is nominally not religious, not just because the system overall is working in different places and on different people, and requires no consistency in terms of its abstractions as a whole, but also because the cunning of Larkin’s integrity-which-is-not integrity produces exactly the kinds of poems which make him instantly recuperable. This is not only because he portrays himself, in poems like Church Going and An Arundel Tomb, as fascinated by churches, but also, for instance, because of the poem about the pit disaster – The Explosion - where there is a hinted intimation of immortality within the framework of a neutral  account of church services after the disaster (before which, on the way to the mine, one of the dead men has found a lark’s nest and taken it with him):

Wives saw men of the explosion

[…]

Gold as on a coin, or walking

Somehow from the sun toward them.

One showing the eggs unbroken.

 

    It is somewhat striking that it is so easy to symbolise the counter-revolution by drawing on three figures from the northern side of the Warwickshire oneric faultline - figures who in each case went on to study at Oxford. It is very much as if at this degree of proximity to Shakespeare there was a greater reactive tide running in those who became a part of the process of shutting-down. Also it is as if there was a greater tendency to be influenced by the breakthrough, and in the process aqcuire powerful elements which are then used in an entirely different, deleterious way, producing an allure for the created virtual-real worlds where the brightness involved has its actual source disguised. Tolkien is a dark master along these lines, producing an immense planetary world of the anomalous sublime, with tree-entities and a sorceress called Galadriel, and then carefully blocking everything off, so that the final picture is that (1) the world was created by God; (2) it is in a long melancholy decline; (3) the female tree-spirits - or "dryads" - have disappeared; (4) women are far in the background in terms of the main adventure, and again are primarily traditionalist objects of courtly love; (5) there is evil in the world as justification for taking part in state wars, and (6) the sorcerers and sorceresses are not humans, so no path for humans toward the anomalous is being indicated.

  Tolkien is a spectacular and insidious puncturing into modernism of the neo-gothic traditionalism of Cardinal Newman from a century and a half before (disguised to a tiny extent as pro-woman by having one woman who goes off to fight in a war, but who immediately settles down to be a wife – and who was never in any direct sense a traveller into the transcendental unknown). He is against the industrial revolution, like mid-nineteenth century medievalists: the rural population of the Shire don’t like machines more complicated than water-mills, and the gold-obsessed dwarves dig down into a planet which becomes more evil the further down you go, following the ‘mithril’ seam downward ‘into darkness,’ like – but also unlike - the miners of Warkickshire following their tilted coal-seam down to 2200 feet. But what is really at stake in this critique is not the Future, but is a nostalgic-melancholy world in which idealised upper class figures live out Catholic Christian lives (the idea is that they did this more so in the past, when the world was sublime – “sic transit gloria mundi’ – but for this distorted perspective the inheritors of these social forces are those people with whom people should now be aligned). To put it another way, this is very much not a critique of capitalism which opens a view toward the Futural terrains into which the miner's son D.H.Lawrence had set out to walk.

      The last stage – so far – in relation to Warwickshire and Oxfordshire (in relation to the geo-oneiric breakthrough that has been going on since Shakespeare) is the work of Philip Pullman, but the powerful - though simultaneously partially-blocked - movement back toward transcendental south of the His Dark Materials trilogy can only be a footnote here, primarily because, in this context, there is simply not enough time to give an account of it.

  

    It is obviously the case that the full story in question here is only minimally about Britain, and has only a  small connection to Warwickshire and the areas around it, despite it being valuable to look at the antecedents and subsequent events that can in some sense be connected to Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf. But in any case in the last stage of this oneiric-abstract journey the lines that can be followed come firmly into focus as lines that are spread across the whole planet (and the ceaseless move to the East since Shakespeare already is an inclusion of the rest of the outside, starting in particular with the ancient Greece of Sophocles). These lines are abstract-oneiric developments that began around 1850, and the following delineations are kept to a minimum of the works involved, so that the sequence of stories stands for the whole:

    The realist story with suggested or outright anomalous  elements:

Jane Eyre, The Rainbow, The Waves, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Fanny and Alexander.

   The strange tale:

Phantastes,  Alice in Wonderland, "The Door in the Wall," The Illearth War, "The Quiet Man," Vurt.

   The science fiction story:

 The Time Machine, The Left Hand of Darkness, Solaris, Sapphire and Steel.

   The high fantasy story:

 Phantastes, The Well at World’s End, The King of Elfland’s Daughter.

    The surrealist tale:

 Alice in Wonderland, The Castle,  No-Man's Land, Black Moon, Being John Malkovich

     
      The gothic tale:
  
     'The Masque of the Red Death,' Dracula,  'Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad,' The Erl King,'  The Shining

The story which is saturated in explicit philosophy / abstractions: 

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'The story of the Telescope and the Abyss,' 'The Geology of Morals' in A Thousand Plateaus.

    The story written in ‘raised’ or ‘poetic’ prose: 

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, parts of The Rainbow; The King of Elfland’s Daughter, The Waves.



     It is valuable to see the extent to which literature in the last century-and-a-half has pivoted around the nexus of subjects that is anthropology, philology and history - in particular anthropology (and also to see the way in which 1980 to 1982 was a crucial moment). The first issue is connected to facts such as A Thousand Plateaus being a work of historical anthropology as much as it is a work of philosophy, and Ursula Le Guin writing very much from within the milieu of anthropology (and Nietzsche starting out as a philologist). But the situation runs much deeper than this - everything in the above 'delineation' is in what is absent from it.

    Firstly, the line of development that becomes suppressed is high fantasy. Despite Dunsany having written novels which at the very least are at as high a level as the work of Poe these books have been largely forgotten (gothic always has the interestablishment on its side, because it fits with religion - it is 'a warning to the curious'). Dunsany drew upon the history of magic and religion that was at the forefront at his time, through the work of Fraser, but the interestablishment in the western world was shifting rapidly toward a pervasive dominance of empirical awareness, and by the end of World War II everything was about science fiction, together with a new - very male - form of fantasy novel that had regressed into the delusion of good and evil, and which dressed itself up with superficial elements of anthropology (a grand sweep of multiple cultures, the quality of scholarship through drawing on a large domain of actual cultures and stories, and Malinowski-like details of gift-giving economies, etc). (Brian Bates, writing The Way of Wyrd in 1982, finds a specific way out of this collapse by drawing on the anthropology of shamanism to get to an ancient Britain which has not been saturated in medievalism).

     However, what is fundamentally absent (because it is the new) is the appearance of metamorphics in the form of anthropological narratives. This starts in 1968, but reaches a momentous new level with the publication of Shabono in 1982, a book which is a work of metamorphics by a woman who will do more than anyone so far to break open the view toward the second sphere of action. The planetary focus is suddenly Amazonia-to-Mexico - everything has changed. But to prevent this from ending with a quality of Shakespeare to Shabono, it must be pointed out that one end-phase of a time of greater proximity of the Future was aware of another. The crucial, culminating example of an abstract machine in the last two pages of A Thousand Plateaus is Virginia Woolf's The Waves.

     *

   The way ahead is clear - the path leading into the Future. After many attempts to cross the obscure and yet bright terrain beyond the wall of the unknown you have realised that on the fundamental level you have succeeded. The last time, toward the end of the experience, you had a clear view of the expanse of white sky - a wall of sky that in some way is lightning - with its tonality of joy and adventure.

    And now it is clear that what is fundamental is inner silence, and is a becoming-active that is inseparably a waking of the faculties, starting from perception and dreaming. It is also clear that the grey network of ordinary reality - located most intensively within cities, but threaded everywhere - is an element within the planet as natural as mist, or viruses, or meteorites, and that in and of itself it is a disaster which is going to get worse rather than better. You know that departures along the path to the Future also help those who are trapped within the domains of ordinary reality. And it is also clear that what guides you forward is lucidity, and is simultaneously something that is fundamental within the world in which you now find yourself - the attribute of brightness (the faculty of feeling now works alongside the faculty of lucidity, so that recurrently you act without being able to see the full form of how the actions will work).

   Before you were in a liminal terrain, which was only partly beyond ordinary reality, and now you are in the second sphere of action.

    

                                                                        * * *