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)
In 1998, in starting to read Donner/Abelar/Castaneda alongside Deleuze/Guattari I was experiencing a deepening of the perspective of metamorphics, a perspective which is also a pragmatics.
Explorations: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Explorations: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 50)
In 1998, in starting to read Donner/Abelar/Castaneda alongside Deleuze/Guattari I was experiencing a deepening of the perspective of metamorphics, a perspective which is also a pragmatics.
Everything here becomes a question of getting away from the
line of time, and of facing the tremendum of Energy-and-Intent, within which is
found the world of the Future, drawing you towards it, with its aspects which
are perceptible, and with the serene glare around and beyond these aspects. Everything
becomes an impersonal bliss of travelling into the unknown. And everything
becomes a question of exteriority, of perception, of abstract perception, and
of groups.
Exteriority. Three initial aspects.
Each of us is a body surrounded by a world of bodies, with
the planet and the sun as the two most fundamental of these – a body that has
encounters with other bodies (encounters which at their limit can be described
in terms of love, and in terms of ‘becomings’), and a body which at depth is a
spheroambient world of perception.
(Perception is an aspect of the Future).
There is no difference between what is outside and inside:
the inside is a world of the outside. Kinds of energy formation express
themselves both as actualised forms, and as virtual-real forms. The filament of
the tremendum that is the cat runs through the planet and runs through us, and
it is the same filament, whether in its virtual-real or actual manifestations.
Simultaneously the control mind – with its system of reason-revelation – is
something that is not really us at all (it is not one of the loves, or
becomings that we Are – on the contrary it is what blocks these). The inside is the outside in more than one sense: in
part it is question of disentangling and straightening out, and in part it is a
question of removing what is damaging.
(Becomings are an aspect the Future)
Dreaming in its focused form is a perceptual hatch – it is
another opening onto the world around us. This relates to dreams in sleep,
reveries, dreams about the future, and the dreamings of what we call ‘fictions’
and ‘tales.’ And, in the same way, it is the most fundamental aspect of Thought
in its woken form that it is a perceptual opening through which the world
arrives. What is perceived by thought and dreaming is intent, becomings,
feeling, energy formations, atmospheres, faculties, modalities of dreaming,
value-systems, hidden predations, and the directions that exist within the
transcendental.
(Dreaming and Lucidity - two modalities of abstract
perception - are aspects of the Future)
(The system of reason-revelation is in total opposition to
this immanence-space of encounters in the natural world (with the planet as
pre-eminent encounter). Its machinery of supposed ‘profundity’ is, firstly, for each person to be inculcated with one
of the religious stories, which creates a block on the perceptual hatch of
dreaming, and imposes a faked outside, in the form of a realm of the
supernatural which lies beyond (and demotes) the encounters of the actual
exteriority. The world of the virtual-real is violently colonised, but as an
interiority which is constructed as having no real affinity with the world of
encounters, but only a supposed affinity with the posited supernatural world. The second aspect
of the machinery of supposed profundity is the domain of ‘truth,’ conceived as
a domain separate from that of encounters, and where the fixed truths of
mathematics and logic exert a powerful influence as a ‘model’. Thirdly, there
is a blocked-philosophy element to the ‘reason’ side of the system, which
consists of the view that the profundity all lies in the construction of the
world by human faculties, as opposed to it being within the natural world, which is seen as
an unknowable (a kind of hubristic, fear-induced species solipsism), and which does not see
that – as with what is called ‘science’ – the faculties of lucidity and
dreaming (etc.) are encounters with an unknown which is knowable, causing
awareness of the exteriority around us to cross thresholds, where new aspects
of the world are brought into focus).
Exteriority, again: Three primary aspects.
1. The planet is a zone of lightness (it spins/floats through
space, and its relation with its outside consists of a zone of relatively
greater lightness, in the form of the atmosphere). It is also the case both
that it is a zone of endless creation of new forms, and that the overall tendency of the created forms in their relationship to each other is for there
to be an absence of judgemental gravity.
Everything is now
in the horizon of the singular. And for someone who is walking in an outdoor
terrain in sunshine the situation in relation to the planet has the double complexity
of the encountered planetary world being only a tiny part of the planet (it is
a partial object), and of it also being suffused with a part of its own
exteriority, in the form of the sunlight. But despite the complexity it is
still possible to become spheroambiently aware of the singularity of the
planet, with its sublime lightness and openness.
This is the
beginning of a Spinozistic view of the planet, and it is a movement toward the
thought that when someone receives a serene impersonal feeling from a
wilderness the feeling is in itself an actual perception of the encountered
planetary expanse. Descriptions which come from this further perspective are
always – correctly – guarded with statements to the effect that each one of us
must discover the truth of this vantage by reaching it (not by listening to
arguments), but this fact must not be used to deafen us to the account.
‘Only if one loves this earth with unbending passion can one
release one’s sadness,’ don Juan said. ‘A warrior is always joyful because his
love is unalterable and his beloved, the earth, embraces him and bestows upon
him inconceivable gifts. The sadness belongs only to those who hate the very
thing that gives shelter to their beings.’
[…]
‘This lovely being, which is alive to its last recesses and
understands every feeling, soothed me, it cured me of my pains, and finally
when I had fully understood my love for it, it taught me freedom." [Tales of Power, Penguin, 1974]
In relation to the interiority, there is a valuable critical
approach that can be created from what appears in the middle part of the above
description: this is the idea that there is something extremely suspect about a
situation where an instance within or in connection with the human world is accepted as profoundly valuable and yet is hated or despised at
the same time. But putting aside both this aspect, and questions of the ‘further’
view of the planet, the value of the passage in this context is mainly to provide ideas for
exploration beyond the initial threshold. And the initial threshold concerns a
perception of lightness, openness and creativity where none of these aspects
have the dark gravity of the judgemental state of being.
2.. The beyond of the interiority is also women – which is to say that it is also,
specifically, the brightness of the
feminine. Florinda Donner shows how women have a fundamental openness to the
Outside, whereas men in comparison are blocked, and says that male practitioners of metamorphics are able to "align themselves with intent" because they have moved fundamentally away from 'masculinity.' And she describes the initial situation in this way:
"Women are able to open themselves directly to the source., or rather, the source reaches them directly [...] ...womens' connection to knowledge is expansive. On the other hand, mens' connection is quite restricted. Men are close to the concrete [...] and aim at the abstract [but almost always attempt to do this in the wrong way]. Women are close to the abstract and yet try to indulge themselves with the concrete." [Being-in-Dreaming, p.247, Harper Collins, 1991].
It is this difference which is involved in Deleuze and Guattari saying that the path of escape for everyone is
becoming-woman ("all becomings begin with and pass through becoming-woman. It is the key to all the other becomings." [A Thousand Plateaus, p.277, Athlone, 1988]). It is not in fact that there is no male brightness – instead it is
that we have very little knowledge of it, and the idea of the masculine has
almost no connection to it. What is being brought into the foreground is the process of becoming a singular world
of delight, of lucidity, and of freedom from judgmental gravity, and it very much appears
that Florinda Donner is right in saying that male practitioners of metamorphics
are in a specific sense ‘no longer males.’ (even though their love for women will – intrinsically – have been intensified in the deepest sense in the threshold-crossing).
There is the same situation here as there was with the
planet. Everyone benefits gigantically from the delight and nascent or actual
lucidity of the feminine side of the human world (even when it is ironically
traced and enacted without being fully lived, there is still an arrival of the
energy of the feminine), and yet at the same time it is treated as not really serious; as frivolous – a kind of
potentially-distracting supplement to the ‘rational’ domain of what really
matters. In this way the more fundamental aspects of reason (which relate to
existence within the horizon of singularities) are betrayed, along with the
higher faculty of intelligence that is lucidity - in this way the attempt to
set out toward Love-and-Freedom is blocked. But one must ask – how can one
despise what fundamentally energises and inspires us?
3. Lastly, the beyond of the interiority consists of the
abstract.
This on one level divides into two. Firstly, it is the abstract in the form of
that which is encountered by abstract perception in focusing in a ‘waking’ or
non-oneiric sense on the surrounding world (whether in a direct way, or
indirectly), where this pre-eminently consists of the seeing of intent.
Secondly, it is the abstract in the form of what is encountered through stories, through dreams about the future, and through dreams in sleep – and, in particular, instances of these kinds which embody
systems of outsights, or systems of effective seeing of aspects of the world.
In the first case
what is centrally perceived - in relation to the most easily effectuated form of the faculty - are forms of intent: that is, forms of affection, hostility,
love, delighted fascination, concupiscence, control-behaviour, disguised
domination. In the second case what is most characteristically perceived are complexes of intent in the form of transcendental
situations – worlds of transcendental circumstances which could be those
specifically pertaining to an individual or group, or could be those of, for
instance, of the human species (see section 19).
Here what is
demeaned are primarily the channels through which the abstract arrives (or, in
the case of abstract perception, the channel – perception – which demarcates
the space within which this faculty also operates). Dreaming is demeaned as not
at all serious in comparison with scientific/academic thought, and perception
is demeaned in that it is constructed as just a simple, necessary assistance for one domain of the real process
– thought – which takes place elsewhere, constructing accounts out of
‘observations’ which paradigmatically have no connection with forms or
complexes of intent.
What makes this intrinsic ‘discounting’ easy is the fact
that in most dreaming and perception there is no significant encounter taking
place (and in fact it it is almost always much worse than nothing that happening). Most dreams in sleep consist of fabrics of urgencies in
the form of the playing out of subjectified affects, and most dreamings in the
form of stories and fictions are wish-fulfilment fantasies, and other forms of
crude, and in fact poisonous ‘palliatives’ for a life of capitulation (to the principles of
ordinary reality). In a similar way, most perception is not really perception at
all, but is superimposition of previously encountered forms, and furthermore is
generally blocked by internal verbalisation processes.
It becomes clear
that in general people have very few dreams where the exteriority involved is
that of perception of the Outside, and that in most cases the exteriority is
that of an always-personalised, imposed theatre of subjectified states. And it
also becomes clear, firstly, that there is nothing to interpret here – because the
interiority-dreams are always just singular phantasmagorias of fear and other
bad affects (the control-mind, again) – and, secondly, that the only issue is a pragmatics of shifting toward being awake in dreaming states, so that you are focused and explorational in your
dreams, and so that it is possible to isolate and have encounters with
‘energy-generating,’ inspirational instances within their virtual-real
terrains.
Deleuze and
Guattari are very clear that some dreams are fundamentally different, and that
dreaming overall concerns the exteriority, as is shown when they praise Kleist:
“Even dreams (Homburg’s, Pentheselea’s) are externalised, by
a system of relays, and plug-ins […] Broken rings. This element of exteriority
– which dominates everything, which Kleist invents in literature…” (ATP p.356)
But it is left to Castaneda to give the overall account, and
to set out the pragmatics of awareness-that-you-are-dreaming and of dream-navigation.
The statement is made that most dreams are nonsense, using a playful but
emphatically precise vernacular (most dreams are “chicken-shit productions of
the human mind”). And everything else consists of strategies for waking up
within dreams, and then – subsequently – for isolating instances within dreams
in relation to which it is possible to have sustained, intensificatory
(energy-generating) encounters. Dreams, insofar as they are worthwhile, relate
to an exteriority in connection with which it is possible to perceive, have
encounters, and navigate – and the issues are nothing to do with the
‘personal’. Interpretation is implacably avoided, in favour of strategies for
action, and in favour of the view that valuable dreams consist of a form of perception (the rejection of ‘interpretosis’ is as
complete as it is in the work of Deleuze and Guattari).
The abstract
that is encountered in abstract perception consists of intent, and consists of situations of intent.
The encounter is as visceral as anything else we call perception (whether it
consists in seeing the intent of an individual, or of seeing the plight of the
human species), and it leaves only the problem of how to express what has been
perceived, and of the further existence of written constructs, which separated
from the seeing involved, will have a ‘life’ where they will only occasionally help
to re-effectuate the modality of encounter that is involved (with tales this
subsequent existence is now likely on average to be 'easier' than that of works consisting of philosophical abstractions, and to involve a greater degree of distribution within social fields).
With what faculty
are the outsights of Section 19 to be grasped? – what faculty was
involved in their elaboration in this form? The answer of course is that while
providing an effective account of the transcendental terrain of dreaming they also
are fundamental outsights of lucidity. Dreaming in many ways has more freedom
and power-to-express-the-abstract than does lucidity, but it remains the case
that the abstract-perceptions of dreaming are not finally separable from those of
lucidity, and that the terrain of these outsights – those with a profound relationship
in connection with dreaming – can be part of a space of encounter of lucidity, where the outsights involved exist alongside ones which have a smaller
intensificatory connection to dreaming (and which have a specific connection to lucidity).
We have arrived
therefore at a result in relation to abstract perception (and it will be noticed that the blocking modality known
as Kantianism is being emphatically left behind). The - visceral - outsights here are a case of a solution
to the problem "What is going on in the human world?” where this question has
the double sense of “What is it to go forward into the Future, toward
Love-and-Freedom?” and “What is the plight of human beings?”
Firstly, there is a second sphere of
action. A sphere which is much calmer and quieter than the first one, where the
planet comes to the foreground, and where women are also a much more
foregrounded, fundamental presence. In this sphere the damaging -
reality-blocking - insistences of internal language recede, fade away.
Secondly, there is a body without organs across or around the planet, comprising the human world, and the worlds of the planet's other animal beings, and with an unknown full extent beyond, which is experienced - beyond precise knowledge - as including in the fullest sense the whole planet. This body without organs variously consists of intent, feeling, love, lucidity, anticipations, memories, and domination-modalities (etc) and it very clearly includes, within the human world, an oneirosphere of dreamings. Within this oneirosphere are the religions, which are blocking modalities, in that, in insisting on one damaged story, and in rejecting the outside in favour of the interiority, they function to prevent the waking of the faculty of dreaming, along with the waking of the faculties of lucidity and intent. Also within this oneirosphere are "hero" tales and "romance" tales, which in the vast majority of cases are pre-eminently conducive toward forms of entrapment within ordinary reality.
Thirdly, at the fundamental level human beings are explorers of the transcendentally unknown, who, as a result of deleterious circumstances, have largely been trapped, going round and round in circles, like objects caught in an eddy, in a backwater of a river.
Fourthly, in the human world there is an ongoing disaster taking place, an ongoing disaster in relation to which it is necessary simply to walk away (and this includes walking away in the fullest sense from its empirical manifestations such as state wars), where this walk is an ultimate warrior-traveller task - done intrinsically in the name of love and freedom - that is evidently what is deeply needed for those around you; for yourself; for the whole embattled human world; and for the entire planet, with its species on the edge of extinction.
Fifthly, there is a current of impersonal intent that runs through the human world. It is a current of Love-and-Freedom, and it can also be seen as like a cairn-path across a very high range of mountains. Very little is known about this path, other than the fact that it is a functional, fundamental option (fundamental in that travelling it is a waking of who you are).
Seventhly, this place of
encounters is a tremendum of energy, intent and feeling which for each individual has an Immense - always-more-beyond-each-threshold - dimension
in the form of the transcendentally
unknown which is knowable, and another
dimension or attribute in the form of the transcendentally unknown whose
elements in each case can only be sensed-or-glimpsed, or faintly ‘figured’ in
thought as one kind of outline, but where the awareness of this dimension is
functional, or consistently valuable, even though the semi-known here can never
be brought into focus, or into full knowledge (beyond these, in turn, is
the unknowable).
Eighthly, energy and all issues of the body and embodiment are pragmatically primary, where this in one aspect concerns processes of seeing the nature of the world by means of perception and thought, and in another aspect is about the fundamental need on the part of an individual - for the purposes of travelling into wider realities - to maintain and heighten energy in every way that is possible.
Ninthly, the only way of completely waking brightness is to wake a full awareness that you are a mortal, finite being, a being who
is going to die. It is only if you have an awareness of your death that it is possible to move along the path of Love-and-Freedom, the path that
leads into the wider, co-existing realities that are the Future.
*
Taisha Abelar places
the following dedication at the front of her book:
"With affection for all who journey into
the unknown."
This phrase gives the
horizon of metamorphics. It is
evidently also a fundamental statement of a system of values.
It can be asked “Is
it an isolated individual who travels, or is it a group?” The answer given by
Abelar is that the principle which has been found is that to undertake this journey
it is necessary to be part of a group. A group which could be five, or twenty
five people, but where the overall deliberate aim is travelling into the unknown
in the direction of Love-and-Freedom, and where the group is held together by
ties of affection - creative-alliance comradeship -, as opposed to ties of
extrinsic ‘duty.’ The values of affection and of the group are therefore
brought together with the value of the journey into the unknown.
It can be seen
that there is an irreproachable joy and courage here. Given that we are all
going to live only a short existence, and also given the energy and inspiration
provided to all around by the movement of escape from ordinary reality in the
direction of Love-and-Freedom, how could it not be good to follow this path?
When, toward the end of the winter of 1998, I first encountered this line of thought (and line of flight), in Castaneda's The Eagles' Gift it did not seem entirely new to me, in that A Thousand Plateaus is threaded with indications of the fundamental nature of 'packs' or non-tribe groups, even though these references remain somewhat oblique and tentative. What was extraordinary - nonetheless - about The Eagle's Gift was that it seemed very much that the value system involved had here become comprehensive, in the sense that it had at last gone into effect on all of the primary levels belonging to the transformations in question. In order to reach the abstract - and to travel into the unknown - you have to wake perception, intensify the body, and overcome forms of indulgent behaviour (to reach the abstract, you have to start from the body). But this process needs also to be taking place within an immediate social milieu which takes the form of an escape-group, or more than one, or of semi-effectuated escape-group alliances (as opposed to a milieu governed by the conformities of middle class values). Through the earlier books (which I had not yet read) the escape-group had been faintly and then more centrally a semi-defined aspect of the map or diagram being articulated (in a similar way, as there is the shift from the idea of the 'subject-group' in Anti-Oedipus to the more recurrent, and more focused idea of the group-multiplicity in A Thousand Plateaus). But now, a year after A Thousand Plateaus, in 1981, there is a detailed, structural (diagrammatic) account of this aspect of metamorphics.
In relation to my life in 1998 it is as if I can see two movements forward, and with the question of groups as an additional aspect of one of them.
Soon it was summer, a summer on the outside edge of the urban: the place where I was now living - having moved out of Coventry with the help of Tess - was to a great extent a fragment of the urban world that was surrounded on all sides by Warwickshire countryside. Leamington was twenty five miles from the edge of the gigantic West Midlands conurbation, and ten miles from Coventry, which itself is a kind of conurbation-outlier, separated, to the southeast, by only a few miles of country terrains. Living in Leamington and studying in Warwick (a university which is also on the border between the city and the countryside) I had placed myself at two removes from the nearby urban sprawl (the black country / Birmingham), which is to say that I had gone as far into the countryside as I could, under the circumstances.
And it is not that anything straightforwardly or obviously extraordinary happened that summer (the really extraordinary event had taken place a week before starting to read The Eagle's Gift, back in February (see Section 24)), and nor is it that the term countryside is an adequate one for talking about the shift of awareness and cognition in relation to the planet that was now starting to take place. It was more that in this summer I fully established one, specific connection to the countryside-world outside Leamington, and at the same time acquired a transformed awareness of the milieu that was immediately around me, in that what I was focused upon was a milieu that was primarily planetary (both earth and sky), and only very secondarily human. But the first aspect appears somehow as the crucial one, as if it is the gateway to the second: in Section 18 I describe the walk that summer to Harbury Lake, and this walk was the making of the new connection - to a singular place - both in a relatively ordinary sense (I walked, and therefore took time to see all the terrains on the way; and I found a way to the lake by a footpath, that precluded the danger of being stopped as a trespasser), and in the deeper sense that afterwards in living in Leamington I was living somewhere which was fundamentally outshone by another place nearby.
The dreamy, post-industrial scurf terrain around Harbury Lake (inhabited by a very large number of rare species) was a "zone" whose power to draw me outward was kept at full intensity by the fact that I almost always visited it in hot weather in summer. This place was a beginning: it was an effective catalyst, but it was also a powerful refrain. However, before long there would be other journeys - journeys into wildernesses which would take with them the new modality of awareness and cognition (in relation to the planet's sky and land) which Harbury Lake had helped me reach.
Alongside this was a movement that was in part based upon the fact that A Thousand Plateaus had turned me in the direction of the spatium of forms of intent, or of forms of selection/production (abstract machines). However, I was now being guided by effective responses to the deeper, and more vital side of the question "what is going on?" - the question "what is it to move forward?" or "how do we escape from the trap of ordinary reality?" In starting to read Castaneda's books (it would be several years before I discovered the existence of the books by Donner and Abelar) I began to embark on a more focused exploration of three primary lines of thought:
1. The question of the nature of the planet understood Spinozistically - the planet as it is reached-toward, in perception, cognition and envisaging, in a process where it is taken as the pre-eminent issue in overcoming the dogmatic image of the world (Section 18).
2. The question of the faculties: a question concerning dreaming, lucidity and intent, along with the other modalities-of-encounter - a question which concerns the faculties themselves; that which wakes them in processes based on sensory encounters; and, lastly, the profound (metamorphic) becomings which occur in the waking, and through the functioning of these faculties. This question is distantly or minimally proposed in "The Image of Thought" in Difference and Repetition (where Deleuze says he is not yet offering an account of the faculties), and to this it needs to be added that the most effective basis for asking it is in Tales of Power where a diagram is provided, involving "will," "seeing," "dreaming," "feeling," "reason," and "talking," along with two other faculties ("he then spilled some ashes on the ground [...] and drew a diagram with his fingers" (Tales of Power: Penguin, 1974, p.95)).
3. The question of what is blocking human beings from moving forward: that is, the issue of the "control mind," and therefore, firstly, of its component aspects (the system of reason-revelation, etc) and its depth-level dimension (control-locked sexuality/seeking-after-kudos), and, secondly, of its manifestation in the world of human societies (which is here being described by the terms "the trans-establishment" and "the interiority").
And then - also - there was the question of groups. Or of 'escape-groups.'
There are two initial points which must be made. The first is that I did not simply accept the truth of the narrative events described in the Castaneda texts: the books were clearly philosophical maps, and this aspect was what mattered (these texts were sequences of dialogues, and I was using the principle that has always been used in relation to Plato's dialogues - the degree to which Plato's accounts of conversations are fictions is not directly relevant for assessing the philosophy). But at the level of the narrative account my non-acceptance was my overall approach, and it also very much applied in relation to the accounts of groups. A fully-realised non-reactive value system was being put forward (fully-realised or comprehensive in the sense given above), but this only meant that at the level of the 'mythos' the value-system had been effectively articulated: it meant nothing about whether or not - going to the level of the 'ethos' - such a group had ever existed in any sustained, fully actualised way (at the level of the ethos everything concerns embodied values, and with a value-system of this kind its presence within a philosophical map evidently does not entail the existence of a corresponding, actualised system of embodied, 'lived' values).
The second point was that - for myself - there had been a shocking conjunction between reading The Eagle's Gift (a book about which I knew nothing) and my having experienced, only a week before, what was beyond doubt the most powerful, thought-provoking dream I had ever had - a dream in which I had been a member of a small group of people who were crossing a fundamental threshold of existence (see section 24). This needs, furthermore, to be placed alongside the fact I had also had several other striking dreams about groups in the previous two years (in all of these there was a group of people living in the countryside). It is true that - even for me - the cogency or 'import' of the conjunction was not something I could assess in any philosophical terms. The Eagle's Gift had probably been lying around un-read for a few weeks: perhaps my mind had worked out where the Deleuze/Guattari and Castaneda 'paths' were leading. And perhaps it was simply a coincidence.
The only discourse available on this subject is the biographical discourse of the emergence of ideas or themes (in other words, nothing can be concluded from the experience). It was an extraordinary emergence, and while the straightforwardly philosophical ideas in the Castaneda books were what took up most of my attention, the question of groups had been given a singular and powerful emphasis.
But there seemed to be no chance at all of exploring the idea at the primary practical level. The escape-group was the inconceivable in terms of its emergence, and in terms of the depth-level details of its existence, and in that it consisted of ties of affection it could be seen that going toward it might be about having friendships that were genuine movements-forward (alliances of exploration and creativity), but it was clear that this should be happening anyway in relation to friendships. As well, I sensed a basic, impersonal principle that, firstly, anyone who might be capable of being part of an escape-group (in whatever sense in which such groups might exist) would be intensely involved in other things, and would have a deeply-rooted tendency to feel perturbed by this direction of movement in the form of a direct possibility; and, secondly, that anyone who would leap at the chance would be someone who would not be capable of withstanding the pressures of the task. I felt it was likely that the escape-group was a crucial part of the Futural horizon - but I felt also that in each case it would probably only come into existence as a result of some collective phase of struggle-under-intense-pressure serendipity. So the only exploration that was straightforwardly possible was at the level of the virtual-real. At the level that is, of thought-experiments; of reviews of human social forms and stories; and of fictions. It can be seen that the first and last of these three are not really separable - primarily I had arrived at an idea that could be explored through creating stories, through fiction.
I had received an exceptionally positive jolt, an impact or energy-arrival whose power in part was gathered from everything that had happened over the preceding years, in that so many of my experiences fitted very closely with the views in the anomalous philosophical works I was now reading. It was a jolt which on one level was a double event in February 1998, and on another level was still arriving and intensifying, in that - caught up with writing about A Thousand Plateaus - it was several years before I had read all of the Castaneda books. But in a similar way to the way in which Harbury Lake was an initiator of a new mode of attention in relation to the planet the jolt had something singular at its centre - the conjunction in relation to groups.
And the wider conjunction in part was also very much a question of groups. For several years I had been in a milieu which had consisted of shifting semi-groups which were aimed in crucial ways at travelling into the unknown, and within which the CCRU had become a central and sustained group emergence. It was clear that I had been left with an idea - a problem, a theme - which was not just arriving from an external source: it was a problem that in some sense had been at work within my immediate social world for nearly a decade. The CCRU was now beginning to break up, and I was beginning to move toward a more minimal and more focused social existence (soon I would be living in a house in London with friends who mostly had been part of or associated with the CCRU), but the changes did not appear to invalidate the problem, but seemed rather to be instructive.
The CCRU was not a basis for a movement forward. I was by this time sensing that becoming-perception (stopping thinking, and entering into becoming with the world around you) was in every way central for escaping from the trap of ordinary reality, and the labyrinths of 'schizo-numerics' and of accellerationist engagements with technology were elements of a movement that chose the wrong direction of departure - one that led out of ordinary reality but in a direction which led to forms of collapse, and to other forms of entrapment.
It will therefore be clear that in stating I had discovered a 'theme' for fictions and thought-experiments the point being made relates primarily to pragmatic metaphysics and to micropolitics rather than to aesthetics. And this is even to do more than to point out that it is an unhealthy, unimaginative situation in literature when the focal-point or 'protagonist' is almost always the individual or the couple (the fundamental validity of the question "why, in a powerful, inspiring tale, can the protagonist not be a group?").
To start out in thought from alliances-for-the-purposes-of-exploration leads to a fully achieved radical philosophy (a metaphysical pragmatics of transformation, of escape), as opposed to one which remains trapped at the level of critique. It is to start from the idea of an embodied affirmation in that this affirmation is an alliance-movement (however minimal - even if it is only a temporary collaboration) into wider levels of action and thought, as opposed to the critique and prevalent passivity of a denouncement process that is a waiting for an overthrow; a revolution; a change to a more radical government. The last trap of the inter-establishment is for individuals to be trapped by trying to take it over - it is necessary instead to depart. And the movement of intensification and of waking of faculties is what everyone needs to be taking place around them - the human world becomes like a sphere with plasma lines surging from it, and all its individuals need the maximum of energy from these lines of movement-forward (and maybe at some point the intensity of the rhizome of molecular, micropolitical alliances could reach a point where the ongoing disaster might at last come to an end).
The line of connection between the critique radicalism and the micropolitics radicalism is that the first form of radicalism carries within it an inherent tendency to be faintly and fugitively aware of the Future, and its milieus always include figures whose - always non-dogmatic - dreamings of socialism or communism are very much a view (no matter now faint and occluded) in the direction of the southward Outside. The Marge Piercy of Woman on the Edge of Time is an example of this kind of figure. The line of connection is also directly pragmatic in that within the context of everything - for everyone - being about a movement into wider realities it is a question of also giving any spoken or actual support that is possible (that does not endanger the alliance-movement of departure) to the latest socialist movement. It is possible to imagine being lodged as an employee within a socialist campaign, but the crucial point here is that expectations remain lucidly gauged - a change of government is likely to mean almost nothing in the face of the ongoing capitalist disaster (as was seen with Syriza in Greece, or with Chavez in Venezuela): it is never possible to know when everything might change as a result of an intensification of the micropolitical rhizome, but this must not be allowed to shift into the belief that the latest push for a semi-socialist or Marxism-inspired government is what everything must be centred upon, because 'maybe somehow this time...' The socialist view that "a whole other way of living is possible" is to be supported: it is just that the view toward socialism is really the view toward metamorphics.
It will be noticed that the micropolitics of escape-groups is something very different from accelerationism. For accelerationism capitalism is to be speeded up, to bring it - supposedly - to an end. For metamorphics capitalism is another name for what at depth is a socio-economically instantiated world of reactivity or control-mind functionings (it is the latest form of the ongoing disaster) - and this 'interiority-world' must simply be left behind, as opposed to accelerating it.
My impression about this time is that I had set out, even though I was moving exceptionally slowly. The terrain around me was brighter, more explicitly planetary, and had a quieter, more serene quality. The situation improved in terms of friendship: it was at this time that I started working with Mark Fisher on the project which became the audio-essay londonunderlondon. And I had an awareness that I needed to concentrate my energy on alliances with people who longed to escape from ordinary reality, and who as a result were open to anomalous, eerie-sublime perspectives of all kinds, whatever their level of 'kudos' (such as, for instance, the perspective opened up by Sapphire and Steel). In this context it was not surprising that I was now working with someone who had been at the centre of the CCRU, in that this group had been implacably and very refreshingly dedicated to getting away from 'urbane,' secretly conventional ways of thinking (it's just it had not noticed that a concentration on number and dominatory power - in the form of capitalism - was another kind of entrapment of attention, belonging to the same system). But simultaneously my network of friends had opened up beyond people from Warwick University - at the same time as I started working with Mark Fisher I was lucky enough to get to know an extraordinary woman from Turkey, called Yildiz. And it should be added that Mark and I started watching Sapphire and Steel because a New Zealand woman who I had recently met very strongly recommended it, and brought a DVD of this series to my flat. I had a profound affection for the people who made up the milieu of ex-Warwick students, but by this time I was feeling that I only knew a very small number of people with whom an escape-alliance was possible, and in this quieter terrain (superimposed across London, and probably functioning to make existence within its hectic city-fabric tolerable) certain figures were strong, very valuable presences, such as Mark, and such as Yildiz.
My movement forward can be ascertained in terms of my ability to become perception, and, inseparably, my ability to reach the abstract by starting, as a default, from bodies (in particular, the planet). And in fact I was barely moving at all. The abstract is the ability to dream up the future; the ability to perceive intent; the capacity for philosophically expressed outsights, and - very crucially - the capacity to express outsights through narratives: and taking these lines of movement as a whole I was making very slow progress in the new terrain (for instance, I had written one story, arrived at by becoming perception in a scurf, semi-wild terrain, but after this 'paradigmatic' beginning the process had been largely left suspended).
I had received an impersonal jolt (there was no sense of having been helped, but more a sense that at that time I had explored to the point where a kind of anomalous current of energy had gone momentarily into effect). But now I was about to receive another - one which on one level was of the same kind, although simultaneously an aspect of it was exceptionally different in terms of its tonality.
When, toward the end of the winter of 1998, I first encountered this line of thought (and line of flight), in Castaneda's The Eagles' Gift it did not seem entirely new to me, in that A Thousand Plateaus is threaded with indications of the fundamental nature of 'packs' or non-tribe groups, even though these references remain somewhat oblique and tentative. What was extraordinary - nonetheless - about The Eagle's Gift was that it seemed very much that the value system involved had here become comprehensive, in the sense that it had at last gone into effect on all of the primary levels belonging to the transformations in question. In order to reach the abstract - and to travel into the unknown - you have to wake perception, intensify the body, and overcome forms of indulgent behaviour (to reach the abstract, you have to start from the body). But this process needs also to be taking place within an immediate social milieu which takes the form of an escape-group, or more than one, or of semi-effectuated escape-group alliances (as opposed to a milieu governed by the conformities of middle class values). Through the earlier books (which I had not yet read) the escape-group had been faintly and then more centrally a semi-defined aspect of the map or diagram being articulated (in a similar way, as there is the shift from the idea of the 'subject-group' in Anti-Oedipus to the more recurrent, and more focused idea of the group-multiplicity in A Thousand Plateaus). But now, a year after A Thousand Plateaus, in 1981, there is a detailed, structural (diagrammatic) account of this aspect of metamorphics.
In relation to my life in 1998 it is as if I can see two movements forward, and with the question of groups as an additional aspect of one of them.
Soon it was summer, a summer on the outside edge of the urban: the place where I was now living - having moved out of Coventry with the help of Tess - was to a great extent a fragment of the urban world that was surrounded on all sides by Warwickshire countryside. Leamington was twenty five miles from the edge of the gigantic West Midlands conurbation, and ten miles from Coventry, which itself is a kind of conurbation-outlier, separated, to the southeast, by only a few miles of country terrains. Living in Leamington and studying in Warwick (a university which is also on the border between the city and the countryside) I had placed myself at two removes from the nearby urban sprawl (the black country / Birmingham), which is to say that I had gone as far into the countryside as I could, under the circumstances.
And it is not that anything straightforwardly or obviously extraordinary happened that summer (the really extraordinary event had taken place a week before starting to read The Eagle's Gift, back in February (see Section 24)), and nor is it that the term countryside is an adequate one for talking about the shift of awareness and cognition in relation to the planet that was now starting to take place. It was more that in this summer I fully established one, specific connection to the countryside-world outside Leamington, and at the same time acquired a transformed awareness of the milieu that was immediately around me, in that what I was focused upon was a milieu that was primarily planetary (both earth and sky), and only very secondarily human. But the first aspect appears somehow as the crucial one, as if it is the gateway to the second: in Section 18 I describe the walk that summer to Harbury Lake, and this walk was the making of the new connection - to a singular place - both in a relatively ordinary sense (I walked, and therefore took time to see all the terrains on the way; and I found a way to the lake by a footpath, that precluded the danger of being stopped as a trespasser), and in the deeper sense that afterwards in living in Leamington I was living somewhere which was fundamentally outshone by another place nearby.
The dreamy, post-industrial scurf terrain around Harbury Lake (inhabited by a very large number of rare species) was a "zone" whose power to draw me outward was kept at full intensity by the fact that I almost always visited it in hot weather in summer. This place was a beginning: it was an effective catalyst, but it was also a powerful refrain. However, before long there would be other journeys - journeys into wildernesses which would take with them the new modality of awareness and cognition (in relation to the planet's sky and land) which Harbury Lake had helped me reach.
Alongside this was a movement that was in part based upon the fact that A Thousand Plateaus had turned me in the direction of the spatium of forms of intent, or of forms of selection/production (abstract machines). However, I was now being guided by effective responses to the deeper, and more vital side of the question "what is going on?" - the question "what is it to move forward?" or "how do we escape from the trap of ordinary reality?" In starting to read Castaneda's books (it would be several years before I discovered the existence of the books by Donner and Abelar) I began to embark on a more focused exploration of three primary lines of thought:
1. The question of the nature of the planet understood Spinozistically - the planet as it is reached-toward, in perception, cognition and envisaging, in a process where it is taken as the pre-eminent issue in overcoming the dogmatic image of the world (Section 18).
2. The question of the faculties: a question concerning dreaming, lucidity and intent, along with the other modalities-of-encounter - a question which concerns the faculties themselves; that which wakes them in processes based on sensory encounters; and, lastly, the profound (metamorphic) becomings which occur in the waking, and through the functioning of these faculties. This question is distantly or minimally proposed in "The Image of Thought" in Difference and Repetition (where Deleuze says he is not yet offering an account of the faculties), and to this it needs to be added that the most effective basis for asking it is in Tales of Power where a diagram is provided, involving "will," "seeing," "dreaming," "feeling," "reason," and "talking," along with two other faculties ("he then spilled some ashes on the ground [...] and drew a diagram with his fingers" (Tales of Power: Penguin, 1974, p.95)).
3. The question of what is blocking human beings from moving forward: that is, the issue of the "control mind," and therefore, firstly, of its component aspects (the system of reason-revelation, etc) and its depth-level dimension (control-locked sexuality/seeking-after-kudos), and, secondly, of its manifestation in the world of human societies (which is here being described by the terms "the trans-establishment" and "the interiority").
And then - also - there was the question of groups. Or of 'escape-groups.'
There are two initial points which must be made. The first is that I did not simply accept the truth of the narrative events described in the Castaneda texts: the books were clearly philosophical maps, and this aspect was what mattered (these texts were sequences of dialogues, and I was using the principle that has always been used in relation to Plato's dialogues - the degree to which Plato's accounts of conversations are fictions is not directly relevant for assessing the philosophy). But at the level of the narrative account my non-acceptance was my overall approach, and it also very much applied in relation to the accounts of groups. A fully-realised non-reactive value system was being put forward (fully-realised or comprehensive in the sense given above), but this only meant that at the level of the 'mythos' the value-system had been effectively articulated: it meant nothing about whether or not - going to the level of the 'ethos' - such a group had ever existed in any sustained, fully actualised way (at the level of the ethos everything concerns embodied values, and with a value-system of this kind its presence within a philosophical map evidently does not entail the existence of a corresponding, actualised system of embodied, 'lived' values).
The second point was that - for myself - there had been a shocking conjunction between reading The Eagle's Gift (a book about which I knew nothing) and my having experienced, only a week before, what was beyond doubt the most powerful, thought-provoking dream I had ever had - a dream in which I had been a member of a small group of people who were crossing a fundamental threshold of existence (see section 24). This needs, furthermore, to be placed alongside the fact I had also had several other striking dreams about groups in the previous two years (in all of these there was a group of people living in the countryside). It is true that - even for me - the cogency or 'import' of the conjunction was not something I could assess in any philosophical terms. The Eagle's Gift had probably been lying around un-read for a few weeks: perhaps my mind had worked out where the Deleuze/Guattari and Castaneda 'paths' were leading. And perhaps it was simply a coincidence.
The only discourse available on this subject is the biographical discourse of the emergence of ideas or themes (in other words, nothing can be concluded from the experience). It was an extraordinary emergence, and while the straightforwardly philosophical ideas in the Castaneda books were what took up most of my attention, the question of groups had been given a singular and powerful emphasis.
But there seemed to be no chance at all of exploring the idea at the primary practical level. The escape-group was the inconceivable in terms of its emergence, and in terms of the depth-level details of its existence, and in that it consisted of ties of affection it could be seen that going toward it might be about having friendships that were genuine movements-forward (alliances of exploration and creativity), but it was clear that this should be happening anyway in relation to friendships. As well, I sensed a basic, impersonal principle that, firstly, anyone who might be capable of being part of an escape-group (in whatever sense in which such groups might exist) would be intensely involved in other things, and would have a deeply-rooted tendency to feel perturbed by this direction of movement in the form of a direct possibility; and, secondly, that anyone who would leap at the chance would be someone who would not be capable of withstanding the pressures of the task. I felt it was likely that the escape-group was a crucial part of the Futural horizon - but I felt also that in each case it would probably only come into existence as a result of some collective phase of struggle-under-intense-pressure serendipity. So the only exploration that was straightforwardly possible was at the level of the virtual-real. At the level that is, of thought-experiments; of reviews of human social forms and stories; and of fictions. It can be seen that the first and last of these three are not really separable - primarily I had arrived at an idea that could be explored through creating stories, through fiction.
I had received an exceptionally positive jolt, an impact or energy-arrival whose power in part was gathered from everything that had happened over the preceding years, in that so many of my experiences fitted very closely with the views in the anomalous philosophical works I was now reading. It was a jolt which on one level was a double event in February 1998, and on another level was still arriving and intensifying, in that - caught up with writing about A Thousand Plateaus - it was several years before I had read all of the Castaneda books. But in a similar way to the way in which Harbury Lake was an initiator of a new mode of attention in relation to the planet the jolt had something singular at its centre - the conjunction in relation to groups.
And the wider conjunction in part was also very much a question of groups. For several years I had been in a milieu which had consisted of shifting semi-groups which were aimed in crucial ways at travelling into the unknown, and within which the CCRU had become a central and sustained group emergence. It was clear that I had been left with an idea - a problem, a theme - which was not just arriving from an external source: it was a problem that in some sense had been at work within my immediate social world for nearly a decade. The CCRU was now beginning to break up, and I was beginning to move toward a more minimal and more focused social existence (soon I would be living in a house in London with friends who mostly had been part of or associated with the CCRU), but the changes did not appear to invalidate the problem, but seemed rather to be instructive.
The CCRU was not a basis for a movement forward. I was by this time sensing that becoming-perception (stopping thinking, and entering into becoming with the world around you) was in every way central for escaping from the trap of ordinary reality, and the labyrinths of 'schizo-numerics' and of accellerationist engagements with technology were elements of a movement that chose the wrong direction of departure - one that led out of ordinary reality but in a direction which led to forms of collapse, and to other forms of entrapment.
It will therefore be clear that in stating I had discovered a 'theme' for fictions and thought-experiments the point being made relates primarily to pragmatic metaphysics and to micropolitics rather than to aesthetics. And this is even to do more than to point out that it is an unhealthy, unimaginative situation in literature when the focal-point or 'protagonist' is almost always the individual or the couple (the fundamental validity of the question "why, in a powerful, inspiring tale, can the protagonist not be a group?").
To start out in thought from alliances-for-the-purposes-of-exploration leads to a fully achieved radical philosophy (a metaphysical pragmatics of transformation, of escape), as opposed to one which remains trapped at the level of critique. It is to start from the idea of an embodied affirmation in that this affirmation is an alliance-movement (however minimal - even if it is only a temporary collaboration) into wider levels of action and thought, as opposed to the critique and prevalent passivity of a denouncement process that is a waiting for an overthrow; a revolution; a change to a more radical government. The last trap of the inter-establishment is for individuals to be trapped by trying to take it over - it is necessary instead to depart. And the movement of intensification and of waking of faculties is what everyone needs to be taking place around them - the human world becomes like a sphere with plasma lines surging from it, and all its individuals need the maximum of energy from these lines of movement-forward (and maybe at some point the intensity of the rhizome of molecular, micropolitical alliances could reach a point where the ongoing disaster might at last come to an end).
The line of connection between the critique radicalism and the micropolitics radicalism is that the first form of radicalism carries within it an inherent tendency to be faintly and fugitively aware of the Future, and its milieus always include figures whose - always non-dogmatic - dreamings of socialism or communism are very much a view (no matter now faint and occluded) in the direction of the southward Outside. The Marge Piercy of Woman on the Edge of Time is an example of this kind of figure. The line of connection is also directly pragmatic in that within the context of everything - for everyone - being about a movement into wider realities it is a question of also giving any spoken or actual support that is possible (that does not endanger the alliance-movement of departure) to the latest socialist movement. It is possible to imagine being lodged as an employee within a socialist campaign, but the crucial point here is that expectations remain lucidly gauged - a change of government is likely to mean almost nothing in the face of the ongoing capitalist disaster (as was seen with Syriza in Greece, or with Chavez in Venezuela): it is never possible to know when everything might change as a result of an intensification of the micropolitical rhizome, but this must not be allowed to shift into the belief that the latest push for a semi-socialist or Marxism-inspired government is what everything must be centred upon, because 'maybe somehow this time...' The socialist view that "a whole other way of living is possible" is to be supported: it is just that the view toward socialism is really the view toward metamorphics.
It will be noticed that the micropolitics of escape-groups is something very different from accelerationism. For accelerationism capitalism is to be speeded up, to bring it - supposedly - to an end. For metamorphics capitalism is another name for what at depth is a socio-economically instantiated world of reactivity or control-mind functionings (it is the latest form of the ongoing disaster) - and this 'interiority-world' must simply be left behind, as opposed to accelerating it.
My impression about this time is that I had set out, even though I was moving exceptionally slowly. The terrain around me was brighter, more explicitly planetary, and had a quieter, more serene quality. The situation improved in terms of friendship: it was at this time that I started working with Mark Fisher on the project which became the audio-essay londonunderlondon. And I had an awareness that I needed to concentrate my energy on alliances with people who longed to escape from ordinary reality, and who as a result were open to anomalous, eerie-sublime perspectives of all kinds, whatever their level of 'kudos' (such as, for instance, the perspective opened up by Sapphire and Steel). In this context it was not surprising that I was now working with someone who had been at the centre of the CCRU, in that this group had been implacably and very refreshingly dedicated to getting away from 'urbane,' secretly conventional ways of thinking (it's just it had not noticed that a concentration on number and dominatory power - in the form of capitalism - was another kind of entrapment of attention, belonging to the same system). But simultaneously my network of friends had opened up beyond people from Warwick University - at the same time as I started working with Mark Fisher I was lucky enough to get to know an extraordinary woman from Turkey, called Yildiz. And it should be added that Mark and I started watching Sapphire and Steel because a New Zealand woman who I had recently met very strongly recommended it, and brought a DVD of this series to my flat. I had a profound affection for the people who made up the milieu of ex-Warwick students, but by this time I was feeling that I only knew a very small number of people with whom an escape-alliance was possible, and in this quieter terrain (superimposed across London, and probably functioning to make existence within its hectic city-fabric tolerable) certain figures were strong, very valuable presences, such as Mark, and such as Yildiz.
My movement forward can be ascertained in terms of my ability to become perception, and, inseparably, my ability to reach the abstract by starting, as a default, from bodies (in particular, the planet). And in fact I was barely moving at all. The abstract is the ability to dream up the future; the ability to perceive intent; the capacity for philosophically expressed outsights, and - very crucially - the capacity to express outsights through narratives: and taking these lines of movement as a whole I was making very slow progress in the new terrain (for instance, I had written one story, arrived at by becoming perception in a scurf, semi-wild terrain, but after this 'paradigmatic' beginning the process had been largely left suspended).
I had received an impersonal jolt (there was no sense of having been helped, but more a sense that at that time I had explored to the point where a kind of anomalous current of energy had gone momentarily into effect). But now I was about to receive another - one which on one level was of the same kind, although simultaneously an aspect of it was exceptionally different in terms of its tonality.
In October of 2003 I was one of a group of four friends who went to Harbury Lake in order to take
the Yanomami drug yopo. We arrived in
the late afternoon, when there was still some light: we pitched our tents on
some flat ground above the lake, and lit a fire.
The specific place was not collectively at the forefront of the plan in any significant way: we wanted to take the drug outdoors, and Harbury Lake (which two members of the group had never visited) was accepted as a good option.
This event was a part of the high-point of my experiences of being a member of 'drugs-group' explorations (although it should be added that the immensely positive, southward-escape experiences that formed the other 'side' of the high-point almost all took place within the other milieu-zone - the one that included Yildiz). Very soon this phase would be over, leaving only a phase where I briefly went back to doing what I had done on the night in November of 1993 (Sections 4, 5 and 6): that is, taking psychotropics to explore on my own.
(The drugs-group unfortunately has no intrinsic tendency to become the escape-group, despite the genuine courage that is involved in taking powerful psychotropics. This even applies in cases where there is a tendency to be the opposite of 'urbane' in crucial respects, as with taking drugs outdoors, and as with the taking of hallucinogens such as LSD, mushrooms, yopo, DMT, or datura. The physical exhaustion, and deflation that can occur afterwards (with its tendency to lead to addiction) is part of what precludes a transmutation toward the escape-group, but, more than anything else, what prevents a close relationship between the two kinds of group is the fact that, despite courage being necessary, a desire to take drugs is very far from being the same as a determination to reach, in a pervasive sense, the outside of ordinary reality. A desire to attain a sustained, non-neurotic pleasure (which in a sense will be visionary, but will be too diffuse to help you when sober) and a love for outbreaks of perceptual imagination (seeing coloured patterns etc.) are, to take two main instances, very central to the intent involved in many cases with using drugs, but even when they are alllied to the desire to reach a new understanding of the world this does not yet consititute a determination to let go and reach a pervasive transformation of experience, so that something more than intellectual and affective tittilation is taking place. The tendency for incessant speech is profoundly indicative here: it is not enough to take psychotropics, it is necessary to stop thinking and perceive, and it is an inbuilt ability for this additional - very non-urbane - action that is recurrently lacking with the micro-milieus that are drugs-groups).
The idea of
taking yopo had arrived in part
because I had met a woman who was teaching anthropology at a college where I
had just started working as a temp in the photocopying room, and she had given me a photocopy of a chapter from Lizot’s book The Circle of Fires, where Lizot describes a Yanomami initiation
ritual – at which he was present - involving the use of the hallucinogens in
the seeds of the tree anadenanthera peregrina.
I was very struck by this account, and at around the same time as I read it a
friend had noticed that yopo seeds were available by mail order from a company
which sold legal psychotropics.
The group of people sitting at a fire by the lake - one woman, and three men - was to a great extent a temporary, or contingent combination of individuals, held together in that it consisted of people who had all been part of the Warwick philosophy milieu. I had not previously done anything at this level of intensity with this specific group. We were Warwick Philosophy Department, exploring a direction opened up by the peoples - the Yanomami, as 'westerners' call them - of a jungle terrain on the border between Venezuela and Brazil.
And it should be added that this exploration did not directly employ ideas or perspectives taken from Castaneda. The anthropological-philosophical optic of A Thousand Plateaus formed the additional horizon, along with Warwickshire and the Yanomami jungle uplands (arrived at through the work of a French anthropologist). Although I had now read all of Castaneda's works my studies of western philosophy and of Deleuze/Guattari were in fact probably now at their most intense point. I had just spent two years teaching A-Level philosophy, getting a valuable additional engagement with figures such as David Hume, and I had also spent a large amount of the previous three years writing a philosophy book, called Dimensions of Contact, which primarily drew upon ideas from Spinoza's Ethics, and from Deleuze/Guattari.
It was a cloudy night.The flat ground where we were sitting was at the eastern edge of the wide shelf of scurf land - always about twenty feet wide - that extends for half a mile in a semi-circle around the low quarry-cliffs of the lake. The blue lias is just beneath the surface, and is often exposed at the cliff edge - while there was daylight it had been possible to demonstrate how almost any flake of the very soft rock has amonnite fossils within it. We were back from the edge of the lake (a fifteen foot slope going up behind us to the original ground-level), sitting on ancient sea-bed covered in a tiny layer of topsoil and rabbit-cropped grass.
My impression is firstly that the relatively complex process of preparing the yopo had gone well, and that the right quantity had been worked out. Secondly it is that this success probably needed to be met with an exceptionally high level of focus and of serene circumstances, a level which had not in fact been reached. The yopo would be like a whirlwind of oneiric moments, where I would keep forgetting what I had just momentarily seen.
Two very different glimpses remained, from different stages of the experience, neither of them very remarkable in any obvious way. The most extraordinary event would be much later, around twenty four hours after the effects of the substance were apparently over (the first - DMT - phase of the drug is around ten minutes in duration, and there is a second phase which lasts around two hours). A third impression is that my friends helped me up over a barrier, and that after a gap in which nothing seemed to be happening, I was suddenly swept away.
I inhaled the yopo, and the effect was immediate. For a moment I retched, but I was aware that I was not all concerned about this, but was only concerned about the fact that it seemed I was unable to say anything to reassure my friends that I was alright. I was experiencing no pain or even discomfort: on the contrary, I had been instantly thrown into a fascinating, enjoyable state of non-ordinary reality: but with the initial feature that it seemed to be impossible for me to speak.
Over the previous 10 years I had had a large amount of experience with states of awareness induced by psychtropics. I had taken datura on several occasions; I had taken psylocybe mushrooms; I had taken salvia; I had taken LSD, and sometimes LSD with amphetamines. And in the course of a specific, instructive experience in 1995 I had acquired an attitude, or form of intent which seemingly precluded any onset of the fear that could lead to a bad trip during the height of the substance-induced experience, and this form of intent did not fail me with the yopo. But there are other forms (and directions-of-approach) of extreme perturbation, and the full dose of yopo I had taken had set me up for an encounter with two of these (which is not to say that I had made a mistake, given my circumstances at this time, which involved precisely a need for a perturbation).
The first form of disturbance arrived at the very beginning: I was calmly and 'warmly' fascinated by what was happening, but this equanimity existed alongside the fact that the experience was of everything 'spinning,' or, more accurately, of there being a continuous strobing of very fast oneiric moments, and very fast perceptual moments, with almost no ability to form any plane of perceptual, oneiric or cognitive consistency. The Yanomami response to this effect seems to be to orientate the shaman-initiate with a 'thread' consisting of an on-the-beat, back-and-forth exchange with a shaman, where each of the two individuals is a part of a semi-shared oneiric space held together by improvised utterance of alternating lines (short phrases, around 8 or 10 words long) of an equally improvised imagistic/metaphysical narrative or description (Tess and myself had hit upon this technique on one occasion when we had taken LSD and amphetamines (Section 24)). I did not have anything like this to help me, and I was about to experience two different aspects of the need for it in the case of yopo, in that the flickering, high-intensity disturbance of consistency was initially accompanied by an apparent inability to speak, and then afterwards was alongside a tendency to speak 'profusely'.
But it was not true that there were no sustained views at all in the first ten minutes of the experience. Almost immediately, in the parts of the 'strobing' which were perception (which seemed to come round every few seconds after many other rapid shifts, rather than simply alternating) I was aware that I was seeing something on the opposite side of the fire. It was suspended perhaps two feet above the ground, and was an object or body that appeared to be made entirely of a softly intense, electric-fuschia light. It had a complex, constant form, consisting of waxy, or shell-like three-dimensional protrusions, with these delicate "flanges" coming from a central part that was perhaps on average a third of the width of the whole across its shortest axis. It was perhaps six feet wide and three and a half feet high, and the complexities of the conchoidal flanges had a subtle, graceful quality which was aformally highly consistent, but did not seem to involve any form of regular symmetry in relation to the whole. It was a multiply flange-winged, waxy-perfect form, made of soft, fuschia light, whose smooth, curved surfaces had a smoothness that had a quality of being even more smooth than.the substance of sea-shells (in terms of its shape the only object it very faintly resembled was a wide, complex flint nodule, but it was immensely more delicate in form). In the midst of the strobing, it was constant, and it was not just that it continued to be there: its form was completely unchanging (it was not flickering or altering, and was experienced as being the same across the moments when I was 'perceiving' it).
It was a striking 'presence' on the opposite side of the fire (everyone was sitting in an arc on the near side), but it had a minimal or neutral quality. I experienced it as an unknown energy-form (as if I was seeing some form of plasma - like the expanses of the aurora borealis - for the first time, although it should be added that the degree of brightness was greater than that of the aurora). It therefore primarily was more attractive than it was eerie - and yet, at the same time, it was eerie, because of its location: the place in which it had 'appeared' was where someone would have been sitting if they were completing the ring of people around the fire, only it was a little further back. It was because of this - rather than on the basis of me seeing a 'tracking' of our movements, or on the basis of it having something that looked like eyes - that it produced a feeling that I could be being watched by it.
The memory of this experience does not seem to cover more half a minute, but I do not remember the sequence of 'strobe-moments' ending: I have no memory of a change to seeing the view in front of me without this additional element. Instead I was swept away into further experiences.
The second 'glimpse' was of a very different kind: it was simultaneously more oneiric, and more straightforwardly abstract. By this time (it was perhaps half an hour later), the overall experience was not so much one of strobing, but of being swept away into long, ultra-intense dream-sequences, and of sometimes coming round, and trying, unsuccessfully to hold onto what had just happened.
On this occasion I succeeded. I had just had an experience where I had been dancing in bright sunlight with my friend Yildiz, in what seemed to be a wide glade of a forest, but where we were dancing alongside the outer surface of an expanse of greyness that cut the world in two, so that within it there was nothing but murky, semi-visible monochrome, whereas where we were dancing was a sunlit expanse of colour and clearly visible forms. The zone of greyness was tilted backward, away from us, as it went out of sight into the sky, and extended out of sight to left and right, but on a straight line. The tilting away helped to give it its definite quality of being a natural phenomenon: it was reminiscent of a shadow, although it is perhaps more true to say that it was reminiscent of a shadow seen as a three-dimensional expanse (which is what a shadow is, at the widest level) as opposed to a two-dimensional pattern.
What Yildiz and I knew, within this dream experience, was that we were "dancing at the beginning of time." Time was the murky, monochrome expanse, which was infinitesimally moving forward, and for both of us it was an inexpressible joy to be dancing, and to be aware that we were outside of the terrible bleakness of time.
But although time seemed natural, it seemed natural in the same way as a parasitic growth on a tree seems natural. What we were seeing was a kind of grim contingency, an 'accident,' along the lines of an illness. Time here was evidently a fixation of attention on regular periodicity, linearity, and structural, formal transformation, as opposed to time being seen as like thought - as opposed to attention being profoundly focused on intent, energy-formations, creation and metamorphic emergence; on dreaming, improvisation, dance...
There was nothing concupiscent or amorous about the dancing - it had no quality of a courtship ritual, even though it was an extraordinary shared joy. I think this was because Yildiz was in a relationship with one of my friends, and the intent of our rapport genuinely precluded the amorous, but I also feel it was overdetermined. Our attention was focused on dancing and at the same time was focused on something beyond us, in the form of the outside of a human entrapment, and in the form of the disaster of this entrapment itself. It was as if on one level we were thousands of years in the past, witnessing the beginning of the disaster, while simultaneously we were experiencing the joy of a form of improvised, unaffected movement that was simply one way of maintaining ourselves outside of the bleakness of a chronically fixated form of awareness. What was happening and what we were perceiving was not really about us at all.
When I arrived back at my house in London it was around 11pm the next evening. I had returned from the yopo trance-state about two hours after it began; there had been conversations for several hours (one other member of the group had taken the drug, and the other two had decided they were not going to try it), and I had had some sleep. I was perhaps in a slightly heightened state at the levels of perception and thought, but it would be true to say that by the time I got home I had been in an ordinary, non-trance state of awareness for many hours.
The house (which was in South Tottenham) was the latest of a series of shared houses in which I had lived in London, in all of which almost everyone had either been at Warwick University, or was in a relationship with someone who had been there. And by this time it had become clear to me that this new house was not working very well.
The problem was that in the milieu of people who been at Warwick there was a strand of people with whom the relationships had a subtle lack of openness toward the unknown (this was not just for me: Mark Fisher had commented on it, and in part had been responding to it in going off to live on his own in Bromley). This is not at all an issue of criticism of individuals, but instead concerns the 'between' of relationships, where what is involved is two individuals and the affinity - or lack of it - that runs between them. All that can be said is that there were some relationships within the milieu which for me (and for others, such as Mark) were not working, and in the specific sense that they had a deadening, disheartening effect.These may sound like relatively insignificant circumstances: but where you live and your connections with other people are in the deepest sense fundamental.
Without realising it, I had found a way of forcing the issue. In taking yopo at Harbury Lake I had gone to the outside in multiple ways; to the outside of the city and the urbane; to the outside of ordinary-reality forms of awareness; to the outside of the space of knowledge-practices of the western world. In returning to my house it seems that I had a door still open within me to an impersonal force of extreme perturbation. And as a result the issue of outside and inside was about to become shockingly visceral, and all-pervasive in its impact.
Alone in my room in the house, what happened was the arrival of the fear - the Horror. (see Section 6). An unassuagable terror that was without an object in any ordinary sense, and which heated up my body to the point where it felt as if my heart was going to explode. I tried having a bath, but this had no impact at all - the terror only increased. My pulse was racing, and I implacably sensed a danger. It was if something had to be heightened in this situation, and it would either be me or what was wrong with me, and if it was what was wrong with me my life in one way or another was about to be over (this was the Intolerable, and the Intolerable is fully physiological in its impact). But it would be wrong to imagine that I was thinking this through: I was wise enough to be alternating, on the one hand, between attempts to calm myself by perceiving-and-not-thinking, and on the other hand, when these failed, attempts to work out what to do next.
The fear was not without an object (again, see Section 6). The object was my life as it was arranged at this time. Back in my room I was aware that the idea of going out for a walk was not calming me in advance: it was not enough, and the failure of this virtual-real element (the plan to go for a walk) to stop the process of heating-up was terrifying in itself, and was decisive.
My life was a burning building. It was clear that I had to do more than go for a walk. I had to walk out of my life as it was constituted at that time.
Still feeling as if my heart was on the edge of collapse, I put some things in a small backpack, took what money I had (almost none), and then I left the house, with an absolute intent that I was not coming back.
I went in the direction of the centre of town, though indeterminately it was somewhere beyond this that I was walking towards. I had no plan, other than to get away from the terror. I would say, however, that in that I was walking in any direction, I was in fact walking toward the house - in Croydon - of an ex-girlfriend, a woman with whom I had had a relationship for several months during the previous year - and a woman who had no connections at all to the post-Warwick milieu (it can be said that heterosexual men are very predictable, but it should also be said that they don't really understand the depth-level nature of their attempts to move towards women).
I walked for around 3 miles, and as I walked the fear subsided - and the relief of it disappearing led to a state of serene joy, in which I grasped what was really taking place. I had been dislodged from my life - and in fact the issue of where, for now, I was living, was an empirical detail. It was necessary to return to the house, but at the same time it was impossible to return to how my life had been until then.
And this really was a change (otherwise the event would merely be a comedy of drug-taking). In a process that was both an opening up of new directions and projects, and a viscerally focused leaving behind, from this point onwards I transformed my life (a few months later I was living in a different house, and the entire space of my connections with the world had undergone a metamorphosis).
At the very beginning what had taken place was not straightforwardly visible - it had taken place at the level of intent. And it would be right to say that the movement-forward over the next few months was - on one level - an intensification of aspects of my life which had already existed, only now I was fully claiming the opportunities that had been in front of me. I now began to concentrate my attention on creative-alliance friendships (relationships with a brightness inseparable from an openness toward the unknown), which in some cases were new, and had come about through my job at a college in the centre of town: and without having to think about it, I did this without weaving the relationships back into the now-temporary 'central' zone of my life. And in particular I started working with Mark Fisher on the primary phase of the composition of the audio-essay londonunderlondon, a project which in fact rapidly drew in other friends, as 'voices' (actors, or text-readers), creating a new centre - a different kind of centre.
But although on one level this was a silent change, and one that had a natural quality of a 'mere' development of what had already existed, there was also a charged dynamic of planning the movement-away, and the overall process was on one level objectified. Mark agreed emphatically with my analysis of the situation, from the viewpoint that he had already done the same thing himself, in moving to Bromley (he also felt that he was involved at that time in a continuation of this process, in relation to other elements within his life).
At the college a tutor told me she had a flat that she wanted to let. I immediately took the opportunity (aware that I would not have acted in this way a few months before), and the flat became the base for the last stages of the making of londonunderlondon. And at the same time I decided that for my summer holiday I would walk across the Pyrenees from north to south (I bought an outbound flight to Toulouse, and a return flight from Barcelona).
Although I remained friendly, and made what gestures I could, given circumstances and time-constraints, there was a central zone of my life in which I had now become a kind of ghost. I had re-grouped my life to a situation where there was in fact no group (and there had been no group previously), but where there were creative-alliance relationships (many of which - strikingly - were new, although five or six of the friendships had already existed, as with Mark, and as with Yildiz).
I was a ghost in my old life, and the new life involved friendships, but also involved the solitude of living on my own and walking on my own across mountains, together with it being a space attuned yearningly toward the inconceivable - the group. But I had moved onto a kind of plateau, or upland, a place below the mountain-pass. And to describe what had happened in a fully positive way, the movement which had occurred was one in which I had very definitely gone toward the planet, toward women, and toward the abstract.
*
I was now beginning to look toward the abstract by writing stories about people who had travelled into the Future (the world encountered at a higher level of intensity than the deadened encounter of ordinary reality). And the idea here was both that the Future has always been alongside us, and that there is a high likelihood that beyond around three thousand years ago the opening to the Future was easier to navigate. This second idea was in effect in a story I started writing in June 2004, though the project is better exemplified in a story I wrote later - "The Far Glade" (Section 8). But although this idea is crucially important, as a breaking open of an awareness of the human world as an ongoing and probably deepening disaster (and therefore as a means of seeing the dogma of progress for what it it is), the fundamental idea is that the Future is alongside us, and that we can set out to travel into it. And here it doesn't matter if the story is set thousands of years in the future (Section 18), in the present, or in the distant past: it is the same direction which is being pointed out (the vital issue in going into the past is always the escape into the the Future).
But it seems as if the question of an even wider spectrum of modalities of writing had quietly been made unavoidable at this time (the time after the events in October 2003), and always in the context of a breaking open of the abstract in relation to the Future: as if, alongside the virtual-real worlds of stories, there was a need to reach for a highly condensed modality that drew upon silence (the silence created by a line-break) as well as on the charged, concentrated abstract terms. At some point in the spring of 2004 I had the idea for the story that runs through londonunderlondon, and which comes into the foreground in its concluding phase. The story is primarily conveyed by two women who recount anomalous events which occurred at a three-day warehouse party, and one of them also describes how she saw some graffiti on a wall inside the warehouse:
when space breaks open
time turns sideways
And later in the same week in October 2003 (after the events at Harbury Lake, and after the events which followed them) I wrote this poem, feeling somewhat surprised, given that I had written almost no poetry in the previous 15 years:
Dylan
*
In relation to the effects of the change that is in question, most of the envisaged connections are hard or impossible to discern when taken on their own, and it would also be right to say that many developments had already started, and that there was in fact a high degree of continuity. And yet, at the same there was a straightforward change: on the far side of the before-after divide I had embodied the principle that the issues of where you live and of those people with whom you spend a lot of time are fundamental, and are issues in relation to which you cannot compromise, beyond whatever compromises are forced upon you (paid work is likely to involve such compromises). And this inevitably meant that there was now more space within which what was new could develop.
By this time I had already met - very minimally - three very extraordinary women who would go on to have an immense impact on my life, as friends and creative allies - all of them either directly or indirectly through starting to work at a college in Holborn/Covent Garden (one of them was working at a shop a few streets away). And in the next year I would meet two very remarkable women through circumstances that were not obviously connected to my work (but which were not connected to the old milieu either), and a sixth woman at the college, who would have the most momentous effect of all - giving me the impression when we started a couple-relationship (three years later), that in some sense the entire river-bed of my life had been moved (an impression which was correct).
I can see that at this time I had become much more courageous and focused in trying to get to know women to whom I was attracted or with whom I had developed a good rapport of some kind. And it is definitely the case that to some extent I was detached from a fixation on a specific outcome if I was drawn toward a woman. It was now possible, if I was starting to fall in love, to accept completely that a woman was committed to another relationship, and to attempt to have a friendship (this of course is barely an achievement, in that it also entirely serves the purposes of any fixated desire, merely making the fixation calmer, and more capable of patience). But more than this, it was possible to feel the direction of a friendship-alliance for escaping into the Future (an aim more sublime than a relationship that conforms to - is trapped within - ordinary reality), even when I received an impression there was no chance of my feeling being reciprocated. For all my tendency to be indulgent and amorously captivated, there was nonetheless a transcendental horizon across the top of everything, and an awareness of this horizon made it possible for friendships to develop.
It could be thought that this entire process bears witness primarily (or even overwhelmingly) to amorous fixation and sexual desire. But, in fact (despite the amount of indulgence that was involved, on one level), it seems to be definitive of my situation at that time that I needed to move toward women: I needed to do this no matter what, but, it was necessary in particular because I had been living for a long time in an all-too-male philosophy-department milieu. There are almost always far more men than women in these milieus (because of the male cult of reason-without-lucidity - and of reason fixated on crude, formal zones - that haunts these departments), and, moreover, my overall tendency was to be a "dreamer" more than a "creator of circumstances" (everybody is both, but people have an initial tendency to be one rather than the other) and female dreamers are even less likely to be found in philosophy departments, because they are more capable (as dreamers in relation to the future) of perceiving that something is wrong. This is also because female dreamers are dreamers par excellence - which affects them whether or not they have started to wake this aspect of themselves -, in the same way as female creators of circumstances have this other attribute par excellence (men tend to be at a lower level, but tend to be slightly better with their less good aspect). Four of the women who I met were dreamers in this sense, and their company could not have been more convivial and inspiring for me (this was in relation to that time - later I would come to realise that I had moved forward to the point where it was more necessary for me to be learning from female creators of circumstances).
It seems that I had changed (I was less afraid of initiating something, and less upset by rejection) but this change is not directly attributable. What can be said, however, is that there was more space in my life, and that it was no accident that I was not simply allowing the same kinds of people to come into this space.
And the increase in available time was also relevant in connection with londonunderlondon (putting to one side the question of the quality of what was achieved across the whole span of this piece: it was a large project, with a lot of difficulties in terms of a full realisation). The first form of the idea had already emerged out of conversations between Mark and myself, but now there was more time for it to cross a further threshold, and to reach the point of being recorded. And here the crucial lines of the new relationships in my life become apparent, both at the level of inspirations - for instance, going to a series of illegal warehouse raves with a woman who I had just met, in December - and at the level of three of my new friends recording voice parts for the piece. A process of being swept forward was taking place, assisted across all of its aspects by my having re-formed my life.
What is perhaps least attributable to the change is the decision to do the walk across the Pyrenees. And yet, there is a deep consistency: over the previous three years I had twice walked across a range of mountains with friends, and this had left me aware of the power of wilderness places to help you to stop internal verbalising and reach the World, and simultaneously had left me with a feeling that this kind of specific intensive voyage would be easier in solitude. The new overall direction in which I had set out was most fundamentally about clearing the space for waking myself (therefore for waking my loves as well as my faculties - so not at all a selfish or introspective process), and with the just adequate money from my job (I hitchhiked from Toulouse to the foothills of the mountains) I was not going to miss the chance to wake myself by being in a mountain wilderness.
*
My writing was now moving toward a more planetary focus, and one in which the direction of the Future was the explicit horizon of action, and the group was the primary actor. Within a very short time after October 2003 I had written two stories in which there was 'an escape-group' (the story for londonunderlondon, and another story, called "The River"). And in relation to the Dylan Thomas poem (which on a primary level is very much about the fluctuations of the proximity of the Future) the line of thought was followed, afterwards, in relation to the abstract, and in relation to a new process of testing out the material of writing across a wide span of its potentials. Without thinking about it, I started to experiment both with sound and with the silences and spaces of line-breaks, and simultaneously I started to explore the possibilities of an extreme condensing of elements (an attempt to say 'everything' through just a tiny zone of words), with this exploration involving both poetry and stories. These are two experiments from this time:
Summer
Sunlight
Searing
Serene
Streams
Sparkling
Seducing
Stone
Sussurous
Silence
Spirits
Sideways
Southwards
Slowly
Serendipity
Spirals
High Oak, The Southern Line
It was a hot day in the middle of summer, and I had accidentally changed onto the Southern Line, at Green Park, while trying to get to Victoria Station. The violet-coloured line on the tube map indicated that the next stop south was Maze Hithe. A few days before, I had been told that, having reached the Kovak threshold of trance states, I could expect to have experiences of slipping sideways into parallel worlds. However, having just come back from three years living in Papua New Guinea, I was more open to the idea that a new line had been constructed while I was away. I read the names of the stops to the south, stretching further south than the Victoria line - Maze Hithe, High Oak, Kelvingdean, Wassland Reach, Delta Heights.
The hill looked out southward to more hills, some forested, some grass-covered. On the next hill was a largish house, amongst trees and small fields. I could see people in the garden, and occasionally I could faintly hear laughter, and people calling out to each other.
However, it was the sky that took my attention.
In the white-blue sky to the south was - a vertical delta. The fluid curves of filaments of light - like soft, motionless lightning – were fanned out intricately from a central intense band that came up from the horizon. In turn the outspread zone of light-streams reached an immense space of sky, which was at the same level of brightness as the delta of filaments below it. This vertical ocean of light stretched up toward infinity.
As I looked I came to see – or to feel and see at the same time – that the whole space around me and in front of me consisted of the rivers of energy or light that somehow became visible above the horizon.
The rivers consisted of something both less substantial and more intense than what is normally conceived of as energy. I knew, and saw, that the joy and delight and sensuality of individual people was inseparable from the vastest, most magical shared dreams of the future, and from the wider, deeper worlds of reality contacted and created in the process of realising such dreams. Two dimensions of one immensity.
I could sense an unbelievable joy, possible, already in existence, somewhere in the future.
I was beginning to wake up. A scuttering of strange images, a forested ridge of the Carpathian mountains, the plane trees outside Holborn tube station.
And a voice somewhere was saying in an intense, light-hearted tone –
“You’re falling awake!”
*:
The story "The River" is set in the distant past - around four thousand years ago. The two central characters are a man - a 'narrator-figure,' although the story is written in the third person - and a woman called Kesta who becomes the primary figure in its concluding section. They both come from an 'escape-group' town in a mountain valley (a community which consists of people who are practitioners of metamorphics), and at the start of the story this town has just been destroyed by a nearby hostile state - at the end there is a meeting with two other survivors: the penultimate section ends "And now there were four of them." Everything takes place in the Pyrenees (though they are not named as such): I had the initial idea a few weeks before my journey to these mountains, and the rest of the story arrived while I was there, with the terrain through which I was walking becoming the place within which the events occur. At the end Kesta has a trance experience where she 'sees' the deepening of the ongoing human disaster:
"We have been aware for a long time that human beings are somehow host to a system of damaging, reactive behaviours. We don't know the wider nature of this system of reactive behaviours - is it the functioning of a predator, an energy parasite? - but we know what it does, and we know we are pitted against it, that we must pass by it in order to escape. [...]
I became a long tunnel of foreseeing. I don't think I saw the future - I think that's an illusion - but I went into a deep and wide anticipation, and everything became clearer as this happened. I saw a vast expansion of technologies, bodies of writing, systems of measurement, machines, constructions, systems of control and production... I saw vast tracts of land covered with spider's webs of buildings, with people struggling with a web both all around them and within them. I saw bad maps with with damaging, delusory elements enshrined in books, and turned into traps for dreamers and visionaries. I saw a hypertrophying of craft knowledge, and an atrophy of knowledge of love and freedom."
It seems important that when I set out to imagine someone speaking from a higher-than-ordinary-reality level of metaphysics and pragmatics the figure who was speaking was a woman. There also seems to be a valuable displacement in the fact that the figure is not even indirectly from a state society (the anomalous town is alongside a social fabric consisting of tribal communities). Kesta is a voice in the past, but at depth she is a voice from the Future, and in the Future the 'ascendancy' of the male has been completely erased, and the state society does not exist as a Futural element (though nor do tribes, and people of course can escape into the Future from state societies, in the same way as they can escape from tribal societies).
And in relation to time it also feels as if I was completing a process, before moving on toward something more fundamental. "The River" is the counterpart to londondunderlondon: in the warehouse in the londonunderlondon story a woman looks out at dawn and has an experience of seeing early morning countryside in 'pre-Roman' times:
"Sleeping horses. And a woman in a blue dress, looking back at me."
The group of people sitting at a fire by the lake - one woman, and three men - was to a great extent a temporary, or contingent combination of individuals, held together in that it consisted of people who had all been part of the Warwick philosophy milieu. I had not previously done anything at this level of intensity with this specific group. We were Warwick Philosophy Department, exploring a direction opened up by the peoples - the Yanomami, as 'westerners' call them - of a jungle terrain on the border between Venezuela and Brazil.
And it should be added that this exploration did not directly employ ideas or perspectives taken from Castaneda. The anthropological-philosophical optic of A Thousand Plateaus formed the additional horizon, along with Warwickshire and the Yanomami jungle uplands (arrived at through the work of a French anthropologist). Although I had now read all of Castaneda's works my studies of western philosophy and of Deleuze/Guattari were in fact probably now at their most intense point. I had just spent two years teaching A-Level philosophy, getting a valuable additional engagement with figures such as David Hume, and I had also spent a large amount of the previous three years writing a philosophy book, called Dimensions of Contact, which primarily drew upon ideas from Spinoza's Ethics, and from Deleuze/Guattari.
It was a cloudy night.The flat ground where we were sitting was at the eastern edge of the wide shelf of scurf land - always about twenty feet wide - that extends for half a mile in a semi-circle around the low quarry-cliffs of the lake. The blue lias is just beneath the surface, and is often exposed at the cliff edge - while there was daylight it had been possible to demonstrate how almost any flake of the very soft rock has amonnite fossils within it. We were back from the edge of the lake (a fifteen foot slope going up behind us to the original ground-level), sitting on ancient sea-bed covered in a tiny layer of topsoil and rabbit-cropped grass.
My impression is firstly that the relatively complex process of preparing the yopo had gone well, and that the right quantity had been worked out. Secondly it is that this success probably needed to be met with an exceptionally high level of focus and of serene circumstances, a level which had not in fact been reached. The yopo would be like a whirlwind of oneiric moments, where I would keep forgetting what I had just momentarily seen.
Two very different glimpses remained, from different stages of the experience, neither of them very remarkable in any obvious way. The most extraordinary event would be much later, around twenty four hours after the effects of the substance were apparently over (the first - DMT - phase of the drug is around ten minutes in duration, and there is a second phase which lasts around two hours). A third impression is that my friends helped me up over a barrier, and that after a gap in which nothing seemed to be happening, I was suddenly swept away.
I inhaled the yopo, and the effect was immediate. For a moment I retched, but I was aware that I was not all concerned about this, but was only concerned about the fact that it seemed I was unable to say anything to reassure my friends that I was alright. I was experiencing no pain or even discomfort: on the contrary, I had been instantly thrown into a fascinating, enjoyable state of non-ordinary reality: but with the initial feature that it seemed to be impossible for me to speak.
Over the previous 10 years I had had a large amount of experience with states of awareness induced by psychtropics. I had taken datura on several occasions; I had taken psylocybe mushrooms; I had taken salvia; I had taken LSD, and sometimes LSD with amphetamines. And in the course of a specific, instructive experience in 1995 I had acquired an attitude, or form of intent which seemingly precluded any onset of the fear that could lead to a bad trip during the height of the substance-induced experience, and this form of intent did not fail me with the yopo. But there are other forms (and directions-of-approach) of extreme perturbation, and the full dose of yopo I had taken had set me up for an encounter with two of these (which is not to say that I had made a mistake, given my circumstances at this time, which involved precisely a need for a perturbation).
The first form of disturbance arrived at the very beginning: I was calmly and 'warmly' fascinated by what was happening, but this equanimity existed alongside the fact that the experience was of everything 'spinning,' or, more accurately, of there being a continuous strobing of very fast oneiric moments, and very fast perceptual moments, with almost no ability to form any plane of perceptual, oneiric or cognitive consistency. The Yanomami response to this effect seems to be to orientate the shaman-initiate with a 'thread' consisting of an on-the-beat, back-and-forth exchange with a shaman, where each of the two individuals is a part of a semi-shared oneiric space held together by improvised utterance of alternating lines (short phrases, around 8 or 10 words long) of an equally improvised imagistic/metaphysical narrative or description (Tess and myself had hit upon this technique on one occasion when we had taken LSD and amphetamines (Section 24)). I did not have anything like this to help me, and I was about to experience two different aspects of the need for it in the case of yopo, in that the flickering, high-intensity disturbance of consistency was initially accompanied by an apparent inability to speak, and then afterwards was alongside a tendency to speak 'profusely'.
But it was not true that there were no sustained views at all in the first ten minutes of the experience. Almost immediately, in the parts of the 'strobing' which were perception (which seemed to come round every few seconds after many other rapid shifts, rather than simply alternating) I was aware that I was seeing something on the opposite side of the fire. It was suspended perhaps two feet above the ground, and was an object or body that appeared to be made entirely of a softly intense, electric-fuschia light. It had a complex, constant form, consisting of waxy, or shell-like three-dimensional protrusions, with these delicate "flanges" coming from a central part that was perhaps on average a third of the width of the whole across its shortest axis. It was perhaps six feet wide and three and a half feet high, and the complexities of the conchoidal flanges had a subtle, graceful quality which was aformally highly consistent, but did not seem to involve any form of regular symmetry in relation to the whole. It was a multiply flange-winged, waxy-perfect form, made of soft, fuschia light, whose smooth, curved surfaces had a smoothness that had a quality of being even more smooth than.the substance of sea-shells (in terms of its shape the only object it very faintly resembled was a wide, complex flint nodule, but it was immensely more delicate in form). In the midst of the strobing, it was constant, and it was not just that it continued to be there: its form was completely unchanging (it was not flickering or altering, and was experienced as being the same across the moments when I was 'perceiving' it).
It was a striking 'presence' on the opposite side of the fire (everyone was sitting in an arc on the near side), but it had a minimal or neutral quality. I experienced it as an unknown energy-form (as if I was seeing some form of plasma - like the expanses of the aurora borealis - for the first time, although it should be added that the degree of brightness was greater than that of the aurora). It therefore primarily was more attractive than it was eerie - and yet, at the same time, it was eerie, because of its location: the place in which it had 'appeared' was where someone would have been sitting if they were completing the ring of people around the fire, only it was a little further back. It was because of this - rather than on the basis of me seeing a 'tracking' of our movements, or on the basis of it having something that looked like eyes - that it produced a feeling that I could be being watched by it.
The memory of this experience does not seem to cover more half a minute, but I do not remember the sequence of 'strobe-moments' ending: I have no memory of a change to seeing the view in front of me without this additional element. Instead I was swept away into further experiences.
The second 'glimpse' was of a very different kind: it was simultaneously more oneiric, and more straightforwardly abstract. By this time (it was perhaps half an hour later), the overall experience was not so much one of strobing, but of being swept away into long, ultra-intense dream-sequences, and of sometimes coming round, and trying, unsuccessfully to hold onto what had just happened.
On this occasion I succeeded. I had just had an experience where I had been dancing in bright sunlight with my friend Yildiz, in what seemed to be a wide glade of a forest, but where we were dancing alongside the outer surface of an expanse of greyness that cut the world in two, so that within it there was nothing but murky, semi-visible monochrome, whereas where we were dancing was a sunlit expanse of colour and clearly visible forms. The zone of greyness was tilted backward, away from us, as it went out of sight into the sky, and extended out of sight to left and right, but on a straight line. The tilting away helped to give it its definite quality of being a natural phenomenon: it was reminiscent of a shadow, although it is perhaps more true to say that it was reminiscent of a shadow seen as a three-dimensional expanse (which is what a shadow is, at the widest level) as opposed to a two-dimensional pattern.
What Yildiz and I knew, within this dream experience, was that we were "dancing at the beginning of time." Time was the murky, monochrome expanse, which was infinitesimally moving forward, and for both of us it was an inexpressible joy to be dancing, and to be aware that we were outside of the terrible bleakness of time.
But although time seemed natural, it seemed natural in the same way as a parasitic growth on a tree seems natural. What we were seeing was a kind of grim contingency, an 'accident,' along the lines of an illness. Time here was evidently a fixation of attention on regular periodicity, linearity, and structural, formal transformation, as opposed to time being seen as like thought - as opposed to attention being profoundly focused on intent, energy-formations, creation and metamorphic emergence; on dreaming, improvisation, dance...
There was nothing concupiscent or amorous about the dancing - it had no quality of a courtship ritual, even though it was an extraordinary shared joy. I think this was because Yildiz was in a relationship with one of my friends, and the intent of our rapport genuinely precluded the amorous, but I also feel it was overdetermined. Our attention was focused on dancing and at the same time was focused on something beyond us, in the form of the outside of a human entrapment, and in the form of the disaster of this entrapment itself. It was as if on one level we were thousands of years in the past, witnessing the beginning of the disaster, while simultaneously we were experiencing the joy of a form of improvised, unaffected movement that was simply one way of maintaining ourselves outside of the bleakness of a chronically fixated form of awareness. What was happening and what we were perceiving was not really about us at all.
When I arrived back at my house in London it was around 11pm the next evening. I had returned from the yopo trance-state about two hours after it began; there had been conversations for several hours (one other member of the group had taken the drug, and the other two had decided they were not going to try it), and I had had some sleep. I was perhaps in a slightly heightened state at the levels of perception and thought, but it would be true to say that by the time I got home I had been in an ordinary, non-trance state of awareness for many hours.
The house (which was in South Tottenham) was the latest of a series of shared houses in which I had lived in London, in all of which almost everyone had either been at Warwick University, or was in a relationship with someone who had been there. And by this time it had become clear to me that this new house was not working very well.
The problem was that in the milieu of people who been at Warwick there was a strand of people with whom the relationships had a subtle lack of openness toward the unknown (this was not just for me: Mark Fisher had commented on it, and in part had been responding to it in going off to live on his own in Bromley). This is not at all an issue of criticism of individuals, but instead concerns the 'between' of relationships, where what is involved is two individuals and the affinity - or lack of it - that runs between them. All that can be said is that there were some relationships within the milieu which for me (and for others, such as Mark) were not working, and in the specific sense that they had a deadening, disheartening effect.These may sound like relatively insignificant circumstances: but where you live and your connections with other people are in the deepest sense fundamental.
Without realising it, I had found a way of forcing the issue. In taking yopo at Harbury Lake I had gone to the outside in multiple ways; to the outside of the city and the urbane; to the outside of ordinary-reality forms of awareness; to the outside of the space of knowledge-practices of the western world. In returning to my house it seems that I had a door still open within me to an impersonal force of extreme perturbation. And as a result the issue of outside and inside was about to become shockingly visceral, and all-pervasive in its impact.
Alone in my room in the house, what happened was the arrival of the fear - the Horror. (see Section 6). An unassuagable terror that was without an object in any ordinary sense, and which heated up my body to the point where it felt as if my heart was going to explode. I tried having a bath, but this had no impact at all - the terror only increased. My pulse was racing, and I implacably sensed a danger. It was if something had to be heightened in this situation, and it would either be me or what was wrong with me, and if it was what was wrong with me my life in one way or another was about to be over (this was the Intolerable, and the Intolerable is fully physiological in its impact). But it would be wrong to imagine that I was thinking this through: I was wise enough to be alternating, on the one hand, between attempts to calm myself by perceiving-and-not-thinking, and on the other hand, when these failed, attempts to work out what to do next.
The fear was not without an object (again, see Section 6). The object was my life as it was arranged at this time. Back in my room I was aware that the idea of going out for a walk was not calming me in advance: it was not enough, and the failure of this virtual-real element (the plan to go for a walk) to stop the process of heating-up was terrifying in itself, and was decisive.
My life was a burning building. It was clear that I had to do more than go for a walk. I had to walk out of my life as it was constituted at that time.
Still feeling as if my heart was on the edge of collapse, I put some things in a small backpack, took what money I had (almost none), and then I left the house, with an absolute intent that I was not coming back.
I went in the direction of the centre of town, though indeterminately it was somewhere beyond this that I was walking towards. I had no plan, other than to get away from the terror. I would say, however, that in that I was walking in any direction, I was in fact walking toward the house - in Croydon - of an ex-girlfriend, a woman with whom I had had a relationship for several months during the previous year - and a woman who had no connections at all to the post-Warwick milieu (it can be said that heterosexual men are very predictable, but it should also be said that they don't really understand the depth-level nature of their attempts to move towards women).
I walked for around 3 miles, and as I walked the fear subsided - and the relief of it disappearing led to a state of serene joy, in which I grasped what was really taking place. I had been dislodged from my life - and in fact the issue of where, for now, I was living, was an empirical detail. It was necessary to return to the house, but at the same time it was impossible to return to how my life had been until then.
And this really was a change (otherwise the event would merely be a comedy of drug-taking). In a process that was both an opening up of new directions and projects, and a viscerally focused leaving behind, from this point onwards I transformed my life (a few months later I was living in a different house, and the entire space of my connections with the world had undergone a metamorphosis).
At the very beginning what had taken place was not straightforwardly visible - it had taken place at the level of intent. And it would be right to say that the movement-forward over the next few months was - on one level - an intensification of aspects of my life which had already existed, only now I was fully claiming the opportunities that had been in front of me. I now began to concentrate my attention on creative-alliance friendships (relationships with a brightness inseparable from an openness toward the unknown), which in some cases were new, and had come about through my job at a college in the centre of town: and without having to think about it, I did this without weaving the relationships back into the now-temporary 'central' zone of my life. And in particular I started working with Mark Fisher on the primary phase of the composition of the audio-essay londonunderlondon, a project which in fact rapidly drew in other friends, as 'voices' (actors, or text-readers), creating a new centre - a different kind of centre.
But although on one level this was a silent change, and one that had a natural quality of a 'mere' development of what had already existed, there was also a charged dynamic of planning the movement-away, and the overall process was on one level objectified. Mark agreed emphatically with my analysis of the situation, from the viewpoint that he had already done the same thing himself, in moving to Bromley (he also felt that he was involved at that time in a continuation of this process, in relation to other elements within his life).
At the college a tutor told me she had a flat that she wanted to let. I immediately took the opportunity (aware that I would not have acted in this way a few months before), and the flat became the base for the last stages of the making of londonunderlondon. And at the same time I decided that for my summer holiday I would walk across the Pyrenees from north to south (I bought an outbound flight to Toulouse, and a return flight from Barcelona).
Although I remained friendly, and made what gestures I could, given circumstances and time-constraints, there was a central zone of my life in which I had now become a kind of ghost. I had re-grouped my life to a situation where there was in fact no group (and there had been no group previously), but where there were creative-alliance relationships (many of which - strikingly - were new, although five or six of the friendships had already existed, as with Mark, and as with Yildiz).
I was a ghost in my old life, and the new life involved friendships, but also involved the solitude of living on my own and walking on my own across mountains, together with it being a space attuned yearningly toward the inconceivable - the group. But I had moved onto a kind of plateau, or upland, a place below the mountain-pass. And to describe what had happened in a fully positive way, the movement which had occurred was one in which I had very definitely gone toward the planet, toward women, and toward the abstract.
*
I was now beginning to look toward the abstract by writing stories about people who had travelled into the Future (the world encountered at a higher level of intensity than the deadened encounter of ordinary reality). And the idea here was both that the Future has always been alongside us, and that there is a high likelihood that beyond around three thousand years ago the opening to the Future was easier to navigate. This second idea was in effect in a story I started writing in June 2004, though the project is better exemplified in a story I wrote later - "The Far Glade" (Section 8). But although this idea is crucially important, as a breaking open of an awareness of the human world as an ongoing and probably deepening disaster (and therefore as a means of seeing the dogma of progress for what it it is), the fundamental idea is that the Future is alongside us, and that we can set out to travel into it. And here it doesn't matter if the story is set thousands of years in the future (Section 18), in the present, or in the distant past: it is the same direction which is being pointed out (the vital issue in going into the past is always the escape into the the Future).
But it seems as if the question of an even wider spectrum of modalities of writing had quietly been made unavoidable at this time (the time after the events in October 2003), and always in the context of a breaking open of the abstract in relation to the Future: as if, alongside the virtual-real worlds of stories, there was a need to reach for a highly condensed modality that drew upon silence (the silence created by a line-break) as well as on the charged, concentrated abstract terms. At some point in the spring of 2004 I had the idea for the story that runs through londonunderlondon, and which comes into the foreground in its concluding phase. The story is primarily conveyed by two women who recount anomalous events which occurred at a three-day warehouse party, and one of them also describes how she saw some graffiti on a wall inside the warehouse:
when space breaks open
time turns sideways
And later in the same week in October 2003 (after the events at Harbury Lake, and after the events which followed them) I wrote this poem, feeling somewhat surprised, given that I had written almost no poetry in the previous 15 years:
Dylan
And
in the wild and wind-locked spring of a white-broken, wide-broken time
Where
an Auden-faced world had run dry and pious into the bleached sand of war
And
no voice could be heard from outward lands
When
the ministry of pragmatism and duty-to-serve had sucked most dreams
Into
the cold veins of a machine of combat and control
Then
from the shoulder of the wind came a young Ballard from the Yangtse’s mouth
From
the cold of a St Louis storm came Burroughs, snatching the air from Eliot’s
feet
From
a wide starlit library came Deleuze, hearing the last despairing cries of Woolf
and Nietzsche
And
the gleam-coloured, dream-coloured ocean
Of
Spinoza’s cosmos-song
Then
also and first, in that bleak spring, came Dylan, sensing and singing the
vastness
Came
Dylan
In
the light of time’s white vertical delta
Drinking
his life through alcohol and broken love
And
the flame placed firm to stand
Dropping silent in the dark
*
In relation to the effects of the change that is in question, most of the envisaged connections are hard or impossible to discern when taken on their own, and it would also be right to say that many developments had already started, and that there was in fact a high degree of continuity. And yet, at the same there was a straightforward change: on the far side of the before-after divide I had embodied the principle that the issues of where you live and of those people with whom you spend a lot of time are fundamental, and are issues in relation to which you cannot compromise, beyond whatever compromises are forced upon you (paid work is likely to involve such compromises). And this inevitably meant that there was now more space within which what was new could develop.
By this time I had already met - very minimally - three very extraordinary women who would go on to have an immense impact on my life, as friends and creative allies - all of them either directly or indirectly through starting to work at a college in Holborn/Covent Garden (one of them was working at a shop a few streets away). And in the next year I would meet two very remarkable women through circumstances that were not obviously connected to my work (but which were not connected to the old milieu either), and a sixth woman at the college, who would have the most momentous effect of all - giving me the impression when we started a couple-relationship (three years later), that in some sense the entire river-bed of my life had been moved (an impression which was correct).
I can see that at this time I had become much more courageous and focused in trying to get to know women to whom I was attracted or with whom I had developed a good rapport of some kind. And it is definitely the case that to some extent I was detached from a fixation on a specific outcome if I was drawn toward a woman. It was now possible, if I was starting to fall in love, to accept completely that a woman was committed to another relationship, and to attempt to have a friendship (this of course is barely an achievement, in that it also entirely serves the purposes of any fixated desire, merely making the fixation calmer, and more capable of patience). But more than this, it was possible to feel the direction of a friendship-alliance for escaping into the Future (an aim more sublime than a relationship that conforms to - is trapped within - ordinary reality), even when I received an impression there was no chance of my feeling being reciprocated. For all my tendency to be indulgent and amorously captivated, there was nonetheless a transcendental horizon across the top of everything, and an awareness of this horizon made it possible for friendships to develop.
It could be thought that this entire process bears witness primarily (or even overwhelmingly) to amorous fixation and sexual desire. But, in fact (despite the amount of indulgence that was involved, on one level), it seems to be definitive of my situation at that time that I needed to move toward women: I needed to do this no matter what, but, it was necessary in particular because I had been living for a long time in an all-too-male philosophy-department milieu. There are almost always far more men than women in these milieus (because of the male cult of reason-without-lucidity - and of reason fixated on crude, formal zones - that haunts these departments), and, moreover, my overall tendency was to be a "dreamer" more than a "creator of circumstances" (everybody is both, but people have an initial tendency to be one rather than the other) and female dreamers are even less likely to be found in philosophy departments, because they are more capable (as dreamers in relation to the future) of perceiving that something is wrong. This is also because female dreamers are dreamers par excellence - which affects them whether or not they have started to wake this aspect of themselves -, in the same way as female creators of circumstances have this other attribute par excellence (men tend to be at a lower level, but tend to be slightly better with their less good aspect). Four of the women who I met were dreamers in this sense, and their company could not have been more convivial and inspiring for me (this was in relation to that time - later I would come to realise that I had moved forward to the point where it was more necessary for me to be learning from female creators of circumstances).
It seems that I had changed (I was less afraid of initiating something, and less upset by rejection) but this change is not directly attributable. What can be said, however, is that there was more space in my life, and that it was no accident that I was not simply allowing the same kinds of people to come into this space.
And the increase in available time was also relevant in connection with londonunderlondon (putting to one side the question of the quality of what was achieved across the whole span of this piece: it was a large project, with a lot of difficulties in terms of a full realisation). The first form of the idea had already emerged out of conversations between Mark and myself, but now there was more time for it to cross a further threshold, and to reach the point of being recorded. And here the crucial lines of the new relationships in my life become apparent, both at the level of inspirations - for instance, going to a series of illegal warehouse raves with a woman who I had just met, in December - and at the level of three of my new friends recording voice parts for the piece. A process of being swept forward was taking place, assisted across all of its aspects by my having re-formed my life.
What is perhaps least attributable to the change is the decision to do the walk across the Pyrenees. And yet, there is a deep consistency: over the previous three years I had twice walked across a range of mountains with friends, and this had left me aware of the power of wilderness places to help you to stop internal verbalising and reach the World, and simultaneously had left me with a feeling that this kind of specific intensive voyage would be easier in solitude. The new overall direction in which I had set out was most fundamentally about clearing the space for waking myself (therefore for waking my loves as well as my faculties - so not at all a selfish or introspective process), and with the just adequate money from my job (I hitchhiked from Toulouse to the foothills of the mountains) I was not going to miss the chance to wake myself by being in a mountain wilderness.
*
My writing was now moving toward a more planetary focus, and one in which the direction of the Future was the explicit horizon of action, and the group was the primary actor. Within a very short time after October 2003 I had written two stories in which there was 'an escape-group' (the story for londonunderlondon, and another story, called "The River"). And in relation to the Dylan Thomas poem (which on a primary level is very much about the fluctuations of the proximity of the Future) the line of thought was followed, afterwards, in relation to the abstract, and in relation to a new process of testing out the material of writing across a wide span of its potentials. Without thinking about it, I started to experiment both with sound and with the silences and spaces of line-breaks, and simultaneously I started to explore the possibilities of an extreme condensing of elements (an attempt to say 'everything' through just a tiny zone of words), with this exploration involving both poetry and stories. These are two experiments from this time:
Summer
Sunlight
Searing
Serene
Streams
Sparkling
Seducing
Stone
Sussurous
Silence
Spirits
Sideways
Southwards
Slowly
Serendipity
Spirals
High Oak, The Southern Line
It was a hot day in the middle of summer, and I had accidentally changed onto the Southern Line, at Green Park, while trying to get to Victoria Station. The violet-coloured line on the tube map indicated that the next stop south was Maze Hithe. A few days before, I had been told that, having reached the Kovak threshold of trance states, I could expect to have experiences of slipping sideways into parallel worlds. However, having just come back from three years living in Papua New Guinea, I was more open to the idea that a new line had been constructed while I was away. I read the names of the stops to the south, stretching further south than the Victoria line - Maze Hithe, High Oak, Kelvingdean, Wassland Reach, Delta Heights.
I decided to get off at High Oak, because it seemed likely to be near my
destination in south London. When the lift doors opened, I was confronted by
bright sunshine, and a bare empty lobby, with a few leaves on the floor. As I
walked to the exit I realised I was dreaming. However, I kept enough focus to
keep walking and keep looking around me, rather than risk waking through
introspection or through a state of wonder fixated on a single object. Outside
there were trees and a grassy slope leading to the top of a hill. I walked up
the slope through a long glade of oak, sweet chestnut and silver birch.
The hill looked out southward to more hills, some forested, some grass-covered. On the next hill was a largish house, amongst trees and small fields. I could see people in the garden, and occasionally I could faintly hear laughter, and people calling out to each other.
However, it was the sky that took my attention.
In the white-blue sky to the south was - a vertical delta. The fluid curves of filaments of light - like soft, motionless lightning – were fanned out intricately from a central intense band that came up from the horizon. In turn the outspread zone of light-streams reached an immense space of sky, which was at the same level of brightness as the delta of filaments below it. This vertical ocean of light stretched up toward infinity.
As I looked I came to see – or to feel and see at the same time – that the whole space around me and in front of me consisted of the rivers of energy or light that somehow became visible above the horizon.
The rivers consisted of something both less substantial and more intense than what is normally conceived of as energy. I knew, and saw, that the joy and delight and sensuality of individual people was inseparable from the vastest, most magical shared dreams of the future, and from the wider, deeper worlds of reality contacted and created in the process of realising such dreams. Two dimensions of one immensity.
I could sense an unbelievable joy, possible, already in existence, somewhere in the future.
I was beginning to wake up. A scuttering of strange images, a forested ridge of the Carpathian mountains, the plane trees outside Holborn tube station.
And a voice somewhere was saying in an intense, light-hearted tone –
“You’re falling awake!”
The story "The River" is set in the distant past - around four thousand years ago. The two central characters are a man - a 'narrator-figure,' although the story is written in the third person - and a woman called Kesta who becomes the primary figure in its concluding section. They both come from an 'escape-group' town in a mountain valley (a community which consists of people who are practitioners of metamorphics), and at the start of the story this town has just been destroyed by a nearby hostile state - at the end there is a meeting with two other survivors: the penultimate section ends "And now there were four of them." Everything takes place in the Pyrenees (though they are not named as such): I had the initial idea a few weeks before my journey to these mountains, and the rest of the story arrived while I was there, with the terrain through which I was walking becoming the place within which the events occur. At the end Kesta has a trance experience where she 'sees' the deepening of the ongoing human disaster:
"We have been aware for a long time that human beings are somehow host to a system of damaging, reactive behaviours. We don't know the wider nature of this system of reactive behaviours - is it the functioning of a predator, an energy parasite? - but we know what it does, and we know we are pitted against it, that we must pass by it in order to escape. [...]
I became a long tunnel of foreseeing. I don't think I saw the future - I think that's an illusion - but I went into a deep and wide anticipation, and everything became clearer as this happened. I saw a vast expansion of technologies, bodies of writing, systems of measurement, machines, constructions, systems of control and production... I saw vast tracts of land covered with spider's webs of buildings, with people struggling with a web both all around them and within them. I saw bad maps with with damaging, delusory elements enshrined in books, and turned into traps for dreamers and visionaries. I saw a hypertrophying of craft knowledge, and an atrophy of knowledge of love and freedom."
It seems important that when I set out to imagine someone speaking from a higher-than-ordinary-reality level of metaphysics and pragmatics the figure who was speaking was a woman. There also seems to be a valuable displacement in the fact that the figure is not even indirectly from a state society (the anomalous town is alongside a social fabric consisting of tribal communities). Kesta is a voice in the past, but at depth she is a voice from the Future, and in the Future the 'ascendancy' of the male has been completely erased, and the state society does not exist as a Futural element (though nor do tribes, and people of course can escape into the Future from state societies, in the same way as they can escape from tribal societies).
And in relation to time it also feels as if I was completing a process, before moving on toward something more fundamental. "The River" is the counterpart to londondunderlondon: in the warehouse in the londonunderlondon story a woman looks out at dawn and has an experience of seeing early morning countryside in 'pre-Roman' times:
"Sleeping horses. And a woman in a blue dress, looking back at me."
In the two stories, respectively, the future is seen from the past, and the past is seen from the future (and it should be added that the Future in londonunderlondon is the group who are improvising an hours-long singing-and-overtoning 'event' within the warehouse party - "they seemed like situationists, or something" - and who in doing this in some way produce anomalous perceptions on the part of people at the rave). I had in some sense reached women as deliberate travellers into wider realities, and I had fundamentally gone past the idea of state societies as having a more focused perception of the world in comparison with tribal worlds.
But now I needed to go further. Which is to say that I not only needed to go further toward women: I needed to reach space in a way where I had left behind the focus on chronological time.
It seems relevant to point out that my relationship with space was about to change on a different level from that of writing stories. After crossing the Pyrenees I hitchhiked to Barcelona, and, arriving in the city with almost no money, I spent a night in my tent at the top of a hill in the centre of the city (the hill is about half a mile away from Parc Guell). The sheer joy of this experience (the views both at night and in the morning made me realise that I would not have swapped that location for a night in any hotel) caused me to re-think what was possible in terms of living in a city
As has been stated already, the one change that can be clearly traced back to October 2003 is the shift in relation to the question of those people with whom you live, and those people with whom you spend time. And having experienced living on my own in London and having an exceptionally small available income as a result, in the summer of 2005 I realised that something else was possible. I spent most of the next two years living in a tent (taking it down and bringing everything with me each morning) in different woodland areas on the periphery of London, having realised that these woodlands could be where I slept, and that everything else could be taken care of by cafes in the centre of town (where I could write in the evening) and - crucially - by virtue of the fact that I worked at a college which had kitchens and showers. It wasn't at all that I was against living with other people - it was more that I was in a sustained process of 'moving on' from aspects of the previous milieu, and I wasn't going to return to living with others until the circumstances were right, and while looking for these circumstances it seemed sensible to avoid paying rent.
I think it is right to say that I was following an overall strategy of exploring potentials. As well as being prepared to experiment with different ways of living, I had been reading very widely (as opposed to becoming locked to any particular zone of writing), and in making an audio-essay / radio fiction Mark and myself were not following a model that came from the philosophical and artistic areas with which we had been intellectually involved. londonundelondon was broadcast by Resonance FM in April 2005 - and over the previous two years I had discovered, for instance, that it could be very valuable to look at the world through the lens of Sapphire and Steel, even though, in advance, it might seem to be unlikely that work of this kind could be threaded with lucidity.
In August of 2005 I was back in Spain. This time I flew to Oviedo, in the northwest, and I went walking in the Asturias mountains, eventually staying for three days in a very beautiful area of forest, near the top of a mountain. However, for a second time, the return flight was from Barcelona, and with a week of the holiday left I travelled south and then east by coach, and then decided to do a walk across a range of mountains near Burgos, called the Sierra de la Demanda.
Toward the end of the second day in this sierra I was near the top of one its highest peaks (a broad mountain with sides that were not particularly steep), and although there was cloud on its summit I took the decision to walk to the top - almost as if I was trying to make something happen. I knew that it was a north wind, and that the air was quite cool for August, but it was still disturbing to see wet snow beginning to fall, shortly after I had reached the top, and was looking for a way down the other side. As I had guessed, it was possible to walk down on this further slope, but it was steep, rocky terrain without a path that I could find, and the really worrying development was that a strong wind had started to blow, at the same time as it was getting dark. I reached a place where there were a few trees, and, terrified that I would lose the tent in the gale, after a great deal of difficulty I managed, in darkness, to put the tent up alongside a tree in a place where there was only a three foot by six foot strip of flattish ground. Once the tent was attached to the tree, and I was in it with the backpack, everything was fine, and I even cooked myself a meal inside the tent. But I had had a shock. Given that I did not know the way off the mountain, if I had lost the tent, the combination of wet snow, darkness and windchill could in one way or another have been fatal, irrespective of it being August.
It was the next day that I had idea which eventually would become the novel The Corridor. This was the idea of twenty or thirty people in Warwickshire who one day wake up in their separate houses (they mostly do not know each other), and find that they are enigmatically surrounded by a forested, derelict England (it seems as if at least a hundred years must have gone by, but in fact the world is a "parallel emergence" - another part of the present, alongside the ordinary world). It feels as if the shock had helped me. Instead of the anomalous being related to time (seeing into the past, seeing into the future), here it was space that was anomalous, in that it had been doubled, with the additional world being a way of thinking about the second sphere of action. This project both involved a fundamental foregrounding of women (three of the six protagonists are women, and of the other figures in the novel the two who are by far the most pivotal are women - Cass, and Miranda), and a foregrounding of the planet, in that the Corridor is 'another dream' on the part of the planet, and also in that the story opens up connections that go right across the planet: in different ways the story includes Spain, Mongolia, Australia, and the jungles of the Yanomami.
A kind of transformational line or path has been traced from October 2003, and by this point - the Sierra de la Demanda, 2005 - there is no longer a discernible line: there is Spain, there is the world, and it is evidently not possible to say whether the fact that I was living without a house was making any difference. All that can be said is that I am left with the impression that I was already in a current before 2003, but that after yopo at Harbury Lake the current was sweeping me forward at a faster rate. And here there was all along a second coincidence. It seemed that in taking yopo I had been going independently in a direction that was unconnected to the worlds involved in the philosophical maps I had read and found valuable (unlike when I later went to Mongolia, and there was a known connection through Deleuze's writing about nomads). An anthropologist had given me a photocopy of a chapter of a book about the Yanomami, and there was even a more personal connection, because of the experience Tess and I had had while on LSD - and also because as an undergraduate I had taken part in collecting signatures for a petition aimed at helping the Yanomami in their struggle against the destruction of their forests. But by the time I was working out the story of The Corridor, around 2009, I had known for two years that there had been an indirect but very striking connection, all along. By 2009 I had discovered the books of Florinda Donner and Taisha Abelar, and had read, and been profoundly inspired by Donner's book Shabono (in terms of another set of connections, it can be said that I left 1980 - 1982, in the form of A Thousand Plateaus, only to get straight back there with The Eagle's Gift, and that in departing from a focus on Castaneda I rapidly found myself back again, first of all with Sapphire and Steel, and then, much more importantly, with Shabono). But the discovery that my interest in the Yanomami had alongside it Florinda Donner's book about them did not make me think that there had been some kind of action at a distance, or that there had been the functioning of an unconscious knowledge (this second possibility is in fact a fairly normal account - I could have read or heard something). Instead I was left once more with the feeling that I was in something like a river, and that the issue in this case was that the worlds of the Yanomami were an intense, important zone within this current.
*
In relation to Mark Fisher, I am left with the haunting memory of our conversations, around 2004/2005, about what we called 'intensive traps' (as opposed to extensive, or ordinarily physical traps), where we drew the initial idea of these traps from Sapphire and Steel. I remember that I drew on everything available - in my own experience, and in my reading - to attempt to advance this line of thought to the point where the issues were in focus, very much aware at the time that for Mark, as he said himself, periods of clinical depression were a key example. The space of these conversations became very wide, drawing upon the idea of the 'meatgrinder' in Stalker, and on ideas from Castaneda's books. I recall how I said that the nature of one kind of intensive trap was perhaps that you could suddenly 'wake up' from out of it, and see that the last few years of your life had been taken from you - and I remember that Mark very emphatically agreed with this.
The impression I have is that Mark moved away from an 'attractor' in the form of Landianism, or CCRU accelerationism - the fatal flaw of which was that while it went into the Outside, it did not go toward transcendental south - and that he then progressively fell onto a much less recondite atttractor, in the form of a kind of 'tunnel' of radical social critique, which as critique, did not provide enough outsights for seeing and travelling toward the south-outside. There is no question about the validity of his work in this respect: the problem was that it was primarily focused on the horror of the interestablishment, rather than on the second sphere of action, the forms of intent and becomings of metamorphics, and the overall direction of Love-and-Freedom. Mark had courage, and he had gained a vast amount of energy through the openness that a thinker has if they have this attribute, but while Mark's readers could benefit from his courage, he himself was vulnerable to this energy being turned against him by something within him which he could only have overcome by fundamentally going forward.
At a certain point it seems there is perhaps no longer any choice but to go forward: focusing on the wider and deeper realities ahead, and occasionally looking back in the other directions so as to see the energy-instances which exist there, and so as to understand better how to overcome their effects. And maybe in 2004/2005, when in talking about intensive traps I was in a real sense giving Mark warnings, what he really needed instead of warnings, along with a view to the South, was some kind of valuable shock, some kind of valuable perturbation.
*
This section has not been a description of an initial process of the formation of a group. A couple-relationship has formed, and I have friends - but beyond these, as ever, there is the almost inconceivable, the escape-group.
At one level everything in this section - and in this book as a whole - is about reaching space, in a becoming-perception which leaves behind the fixation on the line of time (and which in the end takes us to the second sphere of action, as well as taking us to time perceived as like thought or dreaming), and it is about reaching a space which consists ultimately of the 'valleys' of existence at higher and higher levels of intensity.
There are questions which remain about specific, named terrains, and of singular places (areas, towns, cities, forests), and there are questions superficially involving the line of time which are really about the Future (the incursion-event of 1980-82, and the creation of a zone of Futurally focused sub-cultures that started in the early 90s and which by around 2006/2006 was subsiding).
And there are also questions about writing stories as a way of bringing into focus elements of wider and deeper realities (not as a substitute for philosophy, but as another process alongside it; the faculty of dreaming, alongside the faculty of lucidity). It is clear that this section to some extent culminates with the The Corridor. But in this context it should be asked, where in a wider sense have we arrived? Part of the answer is given in the Afterword that I wrote in 2013 (quoted below), but there are two other aspects, which take the form of further questions.
Firstly, what can be said about valuable perturbations: for instance, perturbations involving the danger or idea of death? (but also, other kinds of kinds of shock which somehow turn out to be valuable, such as extreme embarrassment, or an intense surprise, or sadness).
Secondly, what can be said about the anomalous forces that seem to populate intensity? What can be said about the control mind?: and, in connection with The Corridor, what can be said about the basis for writing about anomalous beings such as Miranda, and the inhabitants of the Deep Hotel?
*
In August of 2005 I was back in Spain. This time I flew to Oviedo, in the northwest, and I went walking in the Asturias mountains, eventually staying for three days in a very beautiful area of forest, near the top of a mountain. However, for a second time, the return flight was from Barcelona, and with a week of the holiday left I travelled south and then east by coach, and then decided to do a walk across a range of mountains near Burgos, called the Sierra de la Demanda.
Toward the end of the second day in this sierra I was near the top of one its highest peaks (a broad mountain with sides that were not particularly steep), and although there was cloud on its summit I took the decision to walk to the top - almost as if I was trying to make something happen. I knew that it was a north wind, and that the air was quite cool for August, but it was still disturbing to see wet snow beginning to fall, shortly after I had reached the top, and was looking for a way down the other side. As I had guessed, it was possible to walk down on this further slope, but it was steep, rocky terrain without a path that I could find, and the really worrying development was that a strong wind had started to blow, at the same time as it was getting dark. I reached a place where there were a few trees, and, terrified that I would lose the tent in the gale, after a great deal of difficulty I managed, in darkness, to put the tent up alongside a tree in a place where there was only a three foot by six foot strip of flattish ground. Once the tent was attached to the tree, and I was in it with the backpack, everything was fine, and I even cooked myself a meal inside the tent. But I had had a shock. Given that I did not know the way off the mountain, if I had lost the tent, the combination of wet snow, darkness and windchill could in one way or another have been fatal, irrespective of it being August.
It was the next day that I had idea which eventually would become the novel The Corridor. This was the idea of twenty or thirty people in Warwickshire who one day wake up in their separate houses (they mostly do not know each other), and find that they are enigmatically surrounded by a forested, derelict England (it seems as if at least a hundred years must have gone by, but in fact the world is a "parallel emergence" - another part of the present, alongside the ordinary world). It feels as if the shock had helped me. Instead of the anomalous being related to time (seeing into the past, seeing into the future), here it was space that was anomalous, in that it had been doubled, with the additional world being a way of thinking about the second sphere of action. This project both involved a fundamental foregrounding of women (three of the six protagonists are women, and of the other figures in the novel the two who are by far the most pivotal are women - Cass, and Miranda), and a foregrounding of the planet, in that the Corridor is 'another dream' on the part of the planet, and also in that the story opens up connections that go right across the planet: in different ways the story includes Spain, Mongolia, Australia, and the jungles of the Yanomami.
A kind of transformational line or path has been traced from October 2003, and by this point - the Sierra de la Demanda, 2005 - there is no longer a discernible line: there is Spain, there is the world, and it is evidently not possible to say whether the fact that I was living without a house was making any difference. All that can be said is that I am left with the impression that I was already in a current before 2003, but that after yopo at Harbury Lake the current was sweeping me forward at a faster rate. And here there was all along a second coincidence. It seemed that in taking yopo I had been going independently in a direction that was unconnected to the worlds involved in the philosophical maps I had read and found valuable (unlike when I later went to Mongolia, and there was a known connection through Deleuze's writing about nomads). An anthropologist had given me a photocopy of a chapter of a book about the Yanomami, and there was even a more personal connection, because of the experience Tess and I had had while on LSD - and also because as an undergraduate I had taken part in collecting signatures for a petition aimed at helping the Yanomami in their struggle against the destruction of their forests. But by the time I was working out the story of The Corridor, around 2009, I had known for two years that there had been an indirect but very striking connection, all along. By 2009 I had discovered the books of Florinda Donner and Taisha Abelar, and had read, and been profoundly inspired by Donner's book Shabono (in terms of another set of connections, it can be said that I left 1980 - 1982, in the form of A Thousand Plateaus, only to get straight back there with The Eagle's Gift, and that in departing from a focus on Castaneda I rapidly found myself back again, first of all with Sapphire and Steel, and then, much more importantly, with Shabono). But the discovery that my interest in the Yanomami had alongside it Florinda Donner's book about them did not make me think that there had been some kind of action at a distance, or that there had been the functioning of an unconscious knowledge (this second possibility is in fact a fairly normal account - I could have read or heard something). Instead I was left once more with the feeling that I was in something like a river, and that the issue in this case was that the worlds of the Yanomami were an intense, important zone within this current.
*
In relation to Mark Fisher, I am left with the haunting memory of our conversations, around 2004/2005, about what we called 'intensive traps' (as opposed to extensive, or ordinarily physical traps), where we drew the initial idea of these traps from Sapphire and Steel. I remember that I drew on everything available - in my own experience, and in my reading - to attempt to advance this line of thought to the point where the issues were in focus, very much aware at the time that for Mark, as he said himself, periods of clinical depression were a key example. The space of these conversations became very wide, drawing upon the idea of the 'meatgrinder' in Stalker, and on ideas from Castaneda's books. I recall how I said that the nature of one kind of intensive trap was perhaps that you could suddenly 'wake up' from out of it, and see that the last few years of your life had been taken from you - and I remember that Mark very emphatically agreed with this.
The impression I have is that Mark moved away from an 'attractor' in the form of Landianism, or CCRU accelerationism - the fatal flaw of which was that while it went into the Outside, it did not go toward transcendental south - and that he then progressively fell onto a much less recondite atttractor, in the form of a kind of 'tunnel' of radical social critique, which as critique, did not provide enough outsights for seeing and travelling toward the south-outside. There is no question about the validity of his work in this respect: the problem was that it was primarily focused on the horror of the interestablishment, rather than on the second sphere of action, the forms of intent and becomings of metamorphics, and the overall direction of Love-and-Freedom. Mark had courage, and he had gained a vast amount of energy through the openness that a thinker has if they have this attribute, but while Mark's readers could benefit from his courage, he himself was vulnerable to this energy being turned against him by something within him which he could only have overcome by fundamentally going forward.
At a certain point it seems there is perhaps no longer any choice but to go forward: focusing on the wider and deeper realities ahead, and occasionally looking back in the other directions so as to see the energy-instances which exist there, and so as to understand better how to overcome their effects. And maybe in 2004/2005, when in talking about intensive traps I was in a real sense giving Mark warnings, what he really needed instead of warnings, along with a view to the South, was some kind of valuable shock, some kind of valuable perturbation.
*
This section has not been a description of an initial process of the formation of a group. A couple-relationship has formed, and I have friends - but beyond these, as ever, there is the almost inconceivable, the escape-group.
At one level everything in this section - and in this book as a whole - is about reaching space, in a becoming-perception which leaves behind the fixation on the line of time (and which in the end takes us to the second sphere of action, as well as taking us to time perceived as like thought or dreaming), and it is about reaching a space which consists ultimately of the 'valleys' of existence at higher and higher levels of intensity.
There are questions which remain about specific, named terrains, and of singular places (areas, towns, cities, forests), and there are questions superficially involving the line of time which are really about the Future (the incursion-event of 1980-82, and the creation of a zone of Futurally focused sub-cultures that started in the early 90s and which by around 2006/2006 was subsiding).
And there are also questions about writing stories as a way of bringing into focus elements of wider and deeper realities (not as a substitute for philosophy, but as another process alongside it; the faculty of dreaming, alongside the faculty of lucidity). It is clear that this section to some extent culminates with the The Corridor. But in this context it should be asked, where in a wider sense have we arrived? Part of the answer is given in the Afterword that I wrote in 2013 (quoted below), but there are two other aspects, which take the form of further questions.
Firstly, what can be said about valuable perturbations: for instance, perturbations involving the danger or idea of death? (but also, other kinds of kinds of shock which somehow turn out to be valuable, such as extreme embarrassment, or an intense surprise, or sadness).
Secondly, what can be said about the anomalous forces that seem to populate intensity? What can be said about the control mind?: and, in connection with The Corridor, what can be said about the basis for writing about anomalous beings such as Miranda, and the inhabitants of the Deep Hotel?
*
Afterword to The Corridor
In fundamental ways
what is described in The Corridor is
true.
The general human
world is evidently an ongoing disaster both for other creatures on the planet
and for human beings. The damaging,
attenuated systems of existence on the part of this ordinary-reality world are
as much cognitive as they are made up of itineraries of actions and projects,
as much religious as they about production and distribution of goods, as much sexual
as they are technical, classificatory and linguistic, as much familial as they
institutionally and militarily antagonistic, and as much made up of
control-obsessed territories as they are made up of learned, conventional
emotions.
A process of looking
closely at this intrinsically disastrous world of systems leads to the
following basis for a fundamental guideline: it is not possible in any way for
people or groups of friends to make adjustments to the general human world in
order to transform it so it is no longer an ongoing disaster.
The guideline is
the idea that it is necessary to depart, to whatever extent and degree is
possible at each stage, toward the wider realities of forms of existence and
practicality that are expressions of lucidity, love and freedom.
The intrinsic ‘other side’ of these forms
of existence is the selection of actions that to the maximum extent do not
damage the planet (your modes of existence are fundamentally not an expression
of either love or lucidity if they damage the planet). And thinking clearly
about the planet involves the perception that not damaging the planet includes
the idea of not damaging humans, given that humans in the strongest sense are
elements of the planet. The globalism of the perspective is a necessary breadth
of engagement serving as a starting point, and it is a corrective default,
taking you away from a skewed, attenuated view (fixation on humans).
Another, more
abstract globalism is the total openness to all systems of thought, all systems
of practises and evaluations, and all ‘dreamings’ (oneiric-abstract worlds)
whether in the form of fictions, myths, religions, or histories. There needs to
be an openness, for instance to the extraordinary knowledge that has been
preserved in the still-existing tribal cultures (this is not a valorising or
romanticising of these societies, it is instead a practise of genuine openness
to them, as opposed to paying lip-service to this attitude). Here, the
unprejudiced exploration in question is truly multiple, and not just because it
is a trans-temporal globalism - it also involves the whole span of human
history and of the history of animals plants and anorganic systems such as the
atmosphere, or crystallisation, and it involves the whole sphere of all
existing social formations, and of all the creatures, plants and anorganic
aspects of the planet (not to mention the planet as a whole).
Freedom and
lucidity here involve courage in the face of the unknown. The planet - and every
being within it – is an immense unknown world, and this is not in some dull technical
sense in relation to exact details of chemical components, etc.: we have no reason to think we in any way grasp the fundamental nature of the world
around us. The most lucid perspective on
ourselves in relation to the planet and the cosmos is that each one of us is a
dream within a dream – a dream that is the planet - which in turn is a dream
within the dreaming that is the cosmos. This is the ‘outsight’ which is very
brilliantly opened up by the philosopher Spinoza.
But it is
necessary for each one of us to set out to focus our lucidity and to embody
freedom in relation to freedom of thought, and to reach the point where we can
affirm for ourselves that there is immensely more to the world than is
generally perceived, and to see that we have all started out from only a first,
denuded valley in an endless series of valleys of existence, each more
extraordinary than the last.
The world of The Corridor is a world of departures that in most cases go far
beyond anything that has so far been discussed. It is true that the escape to
the Corridor is the same as a departure to the next valley of existence, beyond
the ordinary-reality of the human disaster. But the threshold-crossings of the
book go a great distance beyond this point, and they also run fundamentally deeper
than what has so far been ‘invoked’ even in relation to the transition to the
Corridor. The additional depth comes from the fact that here the two primary
immediate dimensions of the events are perception
and the oneiric. And these dimensions
are also fundamental in the departures to ‘the Elsewhere’, and to other dimensions
beyond the Corridor. I can only say – in
talking about the validity of what is described in the book - that my own
‘anomalous’ experiences have given me sustained
views of dimensions of existence which appear to be genuine correlates of the
ones described in the book.
Such experiences come from many sources: from
dancing, from learning to stop internal verbalising, from creating new personas
for yourself, from walking through wilderness forests and mountains, and also
from psychoactive substances. But their primary source is the process of
travelling in the direction that has been pointed out by the guideline given
above.
And travelling in
this direction is not just about a lucidity that values sobriety, and a freedom
that leaves behind dogma and fear.
You can suddenly
find yourself in an astonishingly beautiful world, a world which has only a
very few human beings. In this world
there is a far greater intensity and subtlety and presence of the planet, and of its non-human beings. It can be seen
as a forest or a jungle, and initially it can be seen as a desert. A few years
ago these words came into my mind, as a result of having just started to be
very deeply in love:
The country of lovers is a wilderness
You can walk for days and meet no-one.
And lastly, not long after the ‘arrival’ of
those words the woman with whom I was in love – and I still am – had a dream
where she heard this phrase:
Staying is the time-chain of the road.
* * *
