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 relation to what I
can remember, my first experience of sublime
astonishment – or wonder – took place when I was five, and was staying in a hotel
in the centre of Swansea. It was called
the Dragon Hotel, and I was staying there with my mother and my sister.
My sister and myself
were staying in a room at the front of the hotel which was also on one of the
upper floors (the hotel had seven stories, and we were perhaps on the sixth floor); our mother was in a room on another
floor. The view from the room was across the centre of the city. Directly below
there was a five-street roundabout
connecting some of the city’s main streets, and in the middle of this there was
the circle of a below street-level
concourse for people using subways to
get across the roads.
It was dark outside,
and it was probably around 11am at night. Our mother had said goodnight to us,
and we were both supposed to be going to sleep (my sister was 8). But, almost inevitably,
once we were left alone, we were drawn to the window of the room. Another way
of saying this is that, having been granted the independence of being alone in
this extraordinary place, we were not going to waste it (and I don’t think we
abused the trust of our mother: it is good to give children independence
insofar as is possible in a very dangerous world, and I have no doubt that we
used our independence well on this occasion).
Once at the window
we were captivated and entranced by the view. There was no-one much around, and
it seems there were not many cars (I don’t specifically remember either people
or traffic). The view was of city lights, and of an area of roads and
concourses – directly beneath us - which was lit up by these lights. Part of
the intensity of the view was the plunge-perspective on the five-way crossroads,
with its lit-up circle in the middle (we were not used to staying in tall buildings)
but the primary aspect of the experience was a feeling of very intense wonder, a feeling which was not
momentary, but simply continued, minute after minute, for both my sister and
myself. My memory is straightforwardly of joy, of an experience of the
serene-sublime, and I also have the very clear memory that after quite some
time I had the first self-reflective thought which I can recall, a thought
which was expressed to my sister in the form of a question along the lines of "why
is this so wonderful?’’ – or, “why are we feeling this?”. A vital aspect of the
experience was that, although , it involved perception, and was consistent,
maintaining itself over time, it was not clear what the ‘object’ of the
experience was. You just had to look out the window, and the experience consistently
happened.
It is worth thinking about the fact that when
excited by something they are seeing children are recurrently in a position to
run towards it, and when they are not, they will often use the energy of the
excitement to run around, or shout, etc, with these movements being quite
likely to break the initial perception (to break the smooth arrival , or ‘in-flow’
of the encountered world). But this was the end of the day: my sister and
myself were both tired (which is to say that we were maximally open to a state
of being ‘entranced’ or ‘tranced’), and not only this, we were not going to
speak loudly, or cry out, because this might have drawn attention: therefore,
in the absence of letting go toward the trance that is sleep, we let go towards
perception. However, this is simply to detail the circumstances which made the
event possible – it does not touch its specificity.
There is a
painting by Magritte called “The Empire of the Lights” which shows a lit gas-light
seemingly at dusk: the gas-light is lighting up the side of a house which has a
light on in one of its rooms – visible as orange, through curtains - and none of
the light is reaching trees which are seen in silhouette on either side of the
house. The surrealist element of the painting is that it is not dusk at all:
the sky is a daytime sky (it is blue, with white clouds), and the house, tree
and gaslight are all visible as they would be at night.
I feel that my
sister and myself were experiencing the world of city lights, in a way that had
a similar serene quality to the serenity that can be conveyed by Magritte’s
painting. But we were also experiencing the world of the city as a terrain,
taken in itself as a striking, singular expanse, but in a way where the
emptiness was somehow warm and convivial, as if there was a sublime quality of
calm about the empty city, a calm which was filled with light (the light which –
as I would put it now - was pouring into the streets and making them easily navigable
was a gift that was continually being given, even though most of the time there
was no-one there to receive it). We were looking at a city (neither of us had
ever lived in a city, or spent much time in one), and because we were looking at the city’s centre, and
could see a lot, we were looking more directly at a city, as such, than one
would, if for instance you were at pavement-level watching some human activity in
a street - and we were also very much looking at the “empire of the lights.” And
because we were not at all thinking about the lights in causal terms (because
in fact primarily we were perceiving, not thinking) there was a strong sense in
which what we were experiencing was the impersonal, beautiful world of light
itself. The face of the quiet city was revealed by light, and in part was light.
But it is also
evidently the case that what we were seeing was the-city-at-night. The joy
of the view was partly the encounter with the night; with what the lights
radiated through, and existed within. Again, young children often do not do anything
which approaches looking at the night as such, and, when they do, it can
sometimes be the night experienced as a place in which dangerous things could
be lurking, hidden by darkness – so that it is likely to be shied away from,
without any continuity of perception being achieved. But from our vantage
behind a sheet of glass, in the centre of a city, it was possible on this
occasion to look out into a serene vastness in the form of the night. It is valuable to remember at this point that night is a time when it is safe
for creatures terrorised by humans to venture out, and is also the time when
the senses other than sight are called into intensified awareness (it summons
haptic vision). But for myself and my sister there was light encountered within
night darkness: there was night in the city, with its empire of lights: and
maybe our love was being given more to the night – to that specific zone or ‘night-face’
of the world, with its lights– than it was being given specifically to the 'empire.'
However, this was
very much a city experience (although
it is perhaps worth bearing in mind that it was an experience of the quietness
of a relatively small city: certainly when three years ago I unexpectedly had
the same feeling again I was looking out at night - from the fourth floor of a
block of flats –onto a street in Aosta in northern Italy, a place that is small for a city, with
a population of 34,000, in comparison with Swansea’s 250,000). Though the
experience was very impersonal and non-cognitive the view was of a city (I
think it is possible that it was a cloudy night, but, in any case, I don’t remember
anything about looking up toward the sky). And I think it is also worth
mentioning that this was a shared experience: my sister and myself had the same
experience of wonder, the same consistent, unceasing feeling of joy. The gender
and age differences were irrelevant: we just needed to be at the window, and to
let the world arrive.
This was not the
first time I had stayed at the hotel, but the second. And this other story is worth
telling in relation to the issue of cities, but also for other reasons.
There was a way in
which Swansea was my first city, or at the very least, was a city which was
more in the foreground than London at the point where my memories begin. My family (which was my mother, my sister and
myself) was living in Haverfordwest, a town in the far west of Wales, and a few
months before the event just described my sister was invited to stay with some
friends of my mother who had a farm ten miles from the town. Because my mother did not want me to feel left out - but
also because it would be valuable and enjoyable for her – she decided to take
me to Swansea for a few days, telling me, no doubt to make the plan as exciting
as possible, that we would be staying in a ‘skyscraper’ ( I have a memory,
which I feel could be some kind of composite of different memories, of being
told this in a car when it was raining, and of the word momentarily connecting
to the word windscreen-wiper, leading to an implausible but exciting image of a
sci-fi building which for some reason swept from side to side, pivoting on its
base). But, once the word’s excitement had been toned down in the direction of
the actual, it remained the case, it seemed, that I was going to stay in a very
tall building. And, because I was five – and possibly I was four at this point –
the hotel when I reached it did not disappoint me. It was far wider than it was
tall, and it was only seven stories high, so it was anything but the paradigm
for learning the use of the word that my mother had used to describe it. But it was substantially taller than anywhere
I remembered staying, and it had a lift. Given also that it was quite a
striking, beautiful place (and that it was only six years since it had opened, so everything was new) the building was just able to ‘cut it’ as the source of intense excitement that
it seemed was in some way indicated by the word 'skscraper.' The Dragon Hotel as a child’s
icon of the grandeur of the modern world.
There were a
few features of the hotel which, in fact, were a little unusual. Firstly, in a large window of the
first floor lounge of the hotel (a window in the middle of the building’s front
façade) there was a large etched figure of a dragon. And secondly, the building
gave enough of an impression of a labyrinth for it to be extremely exciting for
a five-year old. It had three wings, one stretching straight back, and another
two, one on each side of the main one.
It was to be many
years later that I would realise that the hotel existed because most of the
centre of Swansea had had to be rebuilt after a 3 day blitz in 1941, and that
the availability of space had probably allowed the designer to get past the
lure of the cost-effectiveness of a simple block (perhaps with an underground
car park), so that this architect had been able to spread the hotel out into space in a
way where two large triangular notches went into it (one was a car park for
guests, and I think the other was a goods entrance). It went out expansively
along three axes, and even avoided being entirely composed of right angles, in
that two of the wings of the hotel extended diagonally.
The only specific
event I remember from my first visit to the hotel will perhaps have a quality of
bathos. And yet, because it was a first event in a series – a series of occasions
on which in some way I was ‘taken out of myself’ in Swansea – it seems to be
worth recounting. On one of the evenings at the hotel my mother and myself had
a curry dish, served together with side dishes in small metal bowls. As a five
year old I didn’t pay much attention to food, and in general my main tendency
in connection with eating was to be deeply suspicious – and often revolted by –
anything new that I tried (a terrible, reactive state of affairs…). But on this
occasion the reactive barrier did not function – or perhaps was bypassed by the
quality of the curry – and I loved the meal: it was very enjoyable in itself,
and on top of this it was exciting because it was a meal from a distant country.
*
It was not long
after these two visits to Swansea that we emigrated to New Zealand, with my mother legally changing all of our names (she had decided to get completely away from her ex-husband, rather than just divorcing him) This was in
1968, a few weeks after my sixth birthday. The next experience I had of the wide-horizon
sublime – an experience of being blown away by a view of the world (as opposed
to being entranced by a human individual, or by a world of the virtual-real ) - was
the time, described in Section 32, when I was on a horse on a sunny afternoon in summer, high up in the Port Hills, and was looking out
toward the Southern Alps.
My sister, who was now called Heidi, was
there with me, but she had not managed to get onto one of the horses.
They were on an area of flattish ground, and without a steep slope it was hard
for us to get onto them. Heidi had now had stopped trying, and was sitting facing the view:
in earshot, but not very near. The conditions had therefore been met again, but very differently. I
couldn’t do anything other than out look out toward the mountains and the sun:
I was on the horse and was not going to get off it, and I was not going to
attempt to convey what I felt by shouting excitedly at my sister, who as I remember was also enjoying the day and the view, but was too far away. So I
simply went along with the calm silence of the horses and looked out toward the Canterbury Plains, and the vast westward horizon of mountains, the highest of
which were snow-capped alps.
This was a far
more planetary view than the one down into the night streets of Swansea, and
it was also immensely more beautiful. It can also be pointed out that over the
whole of my life since I left New Zealand it is this view which has appeared in
dreams, again and again, and always as a sublime experience. In relation to the
other view, I have had countless dreams where I have been in hotels - which very recurrently have the curious
property of not having windows in their rooms -, but I have never had a dream
where I was seeing from out of the hotel at a city at night (leaving me with the strange impression that at night
I have been recurrently living within an oneiric city which in some way I have
not been able to see from above). The view from the Dragon Hotel was genuinely an experience
of the sublime, but it seems as if it had something within it which
allowed for a turning away that in some sense took the energy in the wrong
direction, whereas the experience in New
Zealand was fundamentally of the south-outside, and appears as a result to remain
constant as the sublime within dreams, rather than somehow suffering a
displacement; a retreat into something almost entirely extrinsic
(in the case of the Swansea experience this was the safety and luxury of the
hotel, which in fact were only tangential to the experience).
It would have
been about two years after the event in the Port Hills that I had another kind
of sublime experience. I was sitting, reading, on the floor of the big bookshop
in the centre of Christchurch – Whitcoulls – and I looked up to see a girl of
my own age (around 12) who had stopped to re-tie her sandal. I was by a
stand of books that was alongside the main thoroughfare of the shop, and the girl was evidently just passing through. She had shoulder-length, light-brown
hair, an attractive thoughtful face with the sparkle of intelligence and warmth
in her eyes, and she had the lithe, bright quality of people who are intensely
alive and healthy – she was utterly beautiful. I was in love - and in a moment
she would be gone. I don’t know if I attempted to say anything: I’m sure I
tried to think of something. And then she was gone.
*
In order to understand more about the transcendental circumstances of human beings it is now necessary to go deeper into all of the aspects of what has just been described (from the start of the section), and to do this by exploring other, closely connected events.
The last three years before I left New Zealand culminated in the year when my sister and myself were living there on our own (see Section 33). This year, in turn, culminated in the six months when, aged 14, I was working full-time in a shop.
The last three years before I left New Zealand culminated in the year when my sister and myself were living there on our own (see Section 33). This year, in turn, culminated in the six months when, aged 14, I was working full-time in a shop.
It is necessary to
give an account of these three years which includes the planetary aspect of
what was taking place, and it is also necessary both to include some apparently
quite ‘minor’ events, and to recount three stories which I ‘daydreamed’ (and in
one case partly wrote). Several of the initial events and one of the stories, when taken together, form an initial group where
everything individually could seem to be relatively insignificant, and yet it
remains the case that, in various ways, everything here concerns death, or the idea
of death.
It was during these
years that there that were the deaths of our pet mice. When this phase started our lives were ‘centred’ on the house and
garden and the surrounding hills, and because we were not at school and did not
have friends what we had within this world had a heightened importance. But
then we started listening to the radio – and I started trying to write songs -
and to a great extent the centre was shifted to the city (where the radio
station was) and to to the other cities where it seemed the songs we were
hearing were being written. But my affection for the mice did not disappear: I
was loyal to them, and I looked after them, as ever (better, I expect, given I
was getting older). And when, one by one, each of the mice died, I dug a grave
in the garden, and went off to the local quarry and searched for a piece of the
heavy slate-like rock that was as close to a square as possible, and I placed
this as a gravestone over the top of the grave.
But one day,
toward the end of this time, I went to the vet’s surgery with a mouse which had
a large tumour, so that the vet could bring its life to an end, and on the way
home a story came to me. It seems possible that this was the last mouse to die,
and I am certain that the event occurred either just before or just after I got
the job in the shop (it was definitely several months after the point where our
mother went back to Britain, and after the point where and got a job herself). I had seen a dog at the surgery – I think it was a labrador – and the idea of the death of the mouse
transposed itself in my mind, and a story arrived, if ‘story’is the word for
it, given it had no obvious plot. It was simply the idea of two puppies – a
female and a male - who grew up playing together in a human family, and who
were perhaps separated from one another for a while, for some reason, and who
in the end lived together back at the same house – only by this time the female
dog had acquired an illness. Everything in my mind – without me thinking about
it – was taking place in the house and garden where we lived: and the final
part of the story was that the now terminally ill female dog gets up inside the
house and runs out with her brother to play one last time on the lawn, and then
she dies.
I knew I had
touched a nerve in myself, because I could not stop crying. I did not think the
story was a good one (I did not think about writing it down), and yet there was
something there. I saw that the story
was maudlin – a ‘tear-jerker’ – and I also saw that on one level it was about
my sister and myself. I was weeping, and yet on one level there was something 'superficial' involved: although I would not have put it
into these words at the time, it was as if I could sense that the inadequacy of my situation was that my only
two answers to death were ritual and sentimentality. But despite this
awareness, I would not have been at all satisfied with the idea that my reaction
was simply the result of me only having the relationship with my sister, or that it was connected to the long sequence of ‘minor’ deaths. I was happy; the world was full of astonishing potentials; and although it was true that I only had my sister in terms of immediate relationships the feeling involved did not seem remotely connected to the fear of being alone.
What was there in
the story was idea of expressing or shining your intensity – allowing your brightness to find expression. This is what the female dog does at the
end of the story. To a certain extent (despite the sentimentality of the story) my crying was a response to seeing the difference between brightness and a state where
brightness is somehow suppressed. And the real illness in question was evidently not the disease which attacks the dog. It was something else: it was the control-illness that prevents us from being the Love-and-Freedom that we are.
There was another
‘minor’ event at this time – one which also concerned death, but in a very
different way. One evening, after work, I was watching an episode of a
dramatization of the life of Charles Dickens which ended with a sequence where
Dickens went to the USA and met Edgar Allen Poe. However, this became a
dramatization of Poe’s story T"he Facts in the Case of Monsieur Valdemar." There
was a seamless shift from costumed
biographical drama to gothic tale. On a winter evening Poe and Dickens go to a
house where a man at the point of death was put into a hypnotic trance several
months previously, and after saying one or two extraordinary things, the man
starts screaming out that he should be released from the trance, and when this
happens, and he has died, the covers are pulled back to reveal a corpse in an
advanced state of decay.
There was a
second-hand bookshop next to where I worked, and the next day I was browsing,
during my lunch break, and I saw a copy of Poe’s stories. I had already guessed
that the producers of the series had taken a Poe story (I didn’t think it was a
depiction of a biographical event), and somewhat to my surprise, my memory of
the name ‘Valdemar’ took me straight to the story, and there was enough time
left in my break for me to read it.
This whole event
was like a perturbing, but quite interesting sound – like a note being struck
from an unexpected direction. I wasn’t particularly interested (I did not buy
the book – and nor did I even read any of the other stories) but it was still
clear that I had found something that had value. However, I had detected a
tendency to be morbid and ‘sensationalist,’ and although it seems unlikely I
was aware of the metaphysically conventional aspect of what I had encountered
(Kubrick says that ‘horror’ stories all along are optimistic – because they
believe in life after death), this sensationalist affect was enough to allow me
to put Poe to one side, therefore of course also putting aside what was
valuable (an awareness of death, and also, separately, an awareness of directions in the
Outside). I did not drift in the direction of an aestheticising of death
through horror, and of a ‘fending off’ through a surepticious introduction of
religion. Along with ritual, and sentimentality my third response to death was
simply to ignore it – and this all fitted together, in that the ritual and the
sentimentality were for others (my point of identification in the story about
the dogs was with the dog who survives).
Another story
which came to me at this time was a daydream about being caught up in some
extreme adventure which meant that I had to move at speed through the streets
of a city, and of discovering that a girl was doing exactly the same thing on a
parallel street to my own - only the girl was caught up in a different, though
equally intense adventure. It was a conjunction of two individuals travelling
in the same direction, where our resources were eventually brought together,
but in a forward motion which still had two separate aims. It was a love story,
but it to some extent intrinsically involved travelling into the unknown (the
nature of what was taking place was that there was a definite uncertainty
about the outcome), and it also, as a love story, avoided the fixation-danger
of the defining moment being a girl and a boy standing looking at each other. I
never got any further than the starting-point, and therefore the the defining
moment was a girl and a boy running side by side, looking ahead, not at each
other.
The interesting
thing about this story was that the feeling involved in it never struck me as
sentimental – instead it had a faint, sublime quality of it being an expression
of an ultimate dream or longing. The faintness came from the fact that it was
‘degree zero’ of such a story, with no continuation – it stopped immediately it
had begun, and I did not know how to continue it, or even how to make the
initial idea work, in relation to the circumstances of the two characters.
The impetus toward
putting it aside as an idea came both from its extreme incompleteness and also
from my knowledge that it was derivative. It arrived one evening as I was
cycling across Christchurch, but despite this ‘independent’ origin I knew that
its source was an event of this kind which takes place in C.S.Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy.
*
I started the full
time job in a large general stores and takeaway food outlet (in a suburb of the
city) in the January or February of 1977. And although I worked quite hard (it
was a busy place), this was more than just a job. There was a girl called
Astrid who was also working there, and I was intensely attracted to her. We got
on well; she was vivacious, intelligent and pretty. However, she was eighteen, and
engaged, so I began to sense the full potential of one aspect of existence (as
with the girl in the bookshop), but in a way where I was safe from the
insecurity that would have been the result of this relationship. And because
she was much older than me, and in a relationship, I was defended from a
feeling of rejection.
I was fortunate:
there was a strong sense in which I had re-centred myself on the city in order
to meet girls like Astrid. The songs on the radio were love-songs: and it was
toward girls like Astrid that I was moving in becoming focused on love. And now
I could spend some time with her, and without succumbing to angst. Astrid filed
my dreams and sexual fantasies, but she was too obviously unattainable for me
to collapse into an agonised state of ‘if only.’
At this point,
therefore, I began to be distantly aware that, for me, in relation to sexuality
there was nothing more blissfully and erotically sublime and hypercharged than
the idea of making love with a woman with whom I was in love, and who was in
love with me (Astrid being friendly toward me meant that it was possible to
imagine her being in love with me). Everything now – having arrived in this ‘place’
– had a quality of making sense. For the
two years before I had been a world of fantasies of playfully cajoling girls
out of their clothes, and, in particular, the conclusion of these fantasies,
had a lust or concupiscence that afterwards left a feeling of a subtle ‘wrongness.’
(as if I had manipulated the girl into a succumbing which in some way was not
quite healthy). And now with Astrid the fantasies also took the form of
cajoling her out of her clothes, but the feeling of being in love took everything
to a new level so that the overall span of the fantasy was all blissful, and so that the feeling of ‘wrongness’ in the very final moment was transcended,
or, at the very most, was rendered vanishingly minimal.
*
But now it is
evident that everything must be reconstructed in terms of becomings. Living up
in the hills, aged 11, there had been a becoming-planet, a becoming-atmosphere,
a becoming-terrain, and there had been my affection for the horses, for my
sister, for my mother, for our dog, and for some pet mice. But now there was a
becoming-music, there was a becoming with the human world, and, far more than
anything else, there was a becoming with women.
Four aspects of the male form of becoming-woman
can be separated here, and it will immediately be seen that at the outset this
is a re-description, though a re-description which places everything within a
new horizon. The first aspect is the overall state of being in love with a woman: here the woman
with whom you are in love is within you – you are continually or recurrently dreaming
about her, and thinking about her. And much more than that, in perceptual
encounters the woman is directly arriving in a blissful stream of arrival, and
you are entering into composition with the singularity of motions and becomings
that is her brightness – love as a dance of becomings.
The second aspect
is the fact that, in relation to sexuality, within an individual in love with a
woman there are two people at the level of the virtual-real, there is the
individual as lover of the woman and there is the woman as she is envisaged – that is, there is also the virtual-real woman who is imagined feeling and desiring in
relation to the sexual act, and who can be envisaged reaching a state of wild,
feminine abandon. When existing within
the state of being ‘in love’ this sexual aspect of becoming-woman is likely generally
to remain in a conventional form, but beyond this situation it can very easily
undergo a polarity reversal, so that the individual who is the subject of the becoming-woman
expresses this becoming by envisaging being the wild abandon – rather than
inducing it – in a becoming sexually feminine that can take a lot of different virtual-real
forms. But if the man is not libidinally
or sensually attracted to men, this exploration of abandon will in fact
pre-eminently take the form of a kind of male ‘lesbianism’ – where the becoming
woman as sexual being is not a movement toward men, but is in fact an element of an even deeper movement toward women.
The
third aspect consists of relationships which in some primary sense are not
amorous/romantic. Here the closeness can be very intense, almost so intense
that it is invisible, but it has a quotidian, everyday quality which as a form
of affection has nothing suggestive of the sublime longing of the amourous.
Here my relationships with my mother and my sister are valuable examples. With
my mother everything was pre-eminently a quiet, intense affection. With my
sister there was a very real, extraordinary closeness ( I remember one
experience when we were playing a game of football in the yard, when I was
around 11, when I had a very momentary experience of being her) but it had no quality of amorous longing about. My
sister and I played ‘doctors and nurses’ a few times when I was 12 to 13, when my sister brought this to an end. And the issue here is not really that I was
capable of letting this direction go, so that we could behave as if nothing had
happened: it was more that the real erotic intensity involved in these
experiences did not include the sublime, amorous quality of being ‘in love,’
even in a minimal form.
The fourth aspect is the world of relationships
which exist only at the level of the virtual-real. This in turn subdivides into
different forms, but the form which is perhaps most important is that of
relationships with female virtual-real beings where sexuality in some way is present
but is far off in the background, or is nascent, as yet unwoken. For a man who loves women this sexuality is
likely to be woken, but it is still possible for these relationships to exist. And
what is vital here is of course that the becoming-woman at last is in a form
which is not fixated on sexuality – the female individual here is a being who
has fascinations, inspirations, interests; a being who is the joy of exploring
the world, and of travelling into new spaces and experiences.
Perhaps the best
example of this kind of virtual-real female figure in my life in 1977 was Kate
Ruggles from Eve Garnett’s One End Street
books. In these books Kate is aged somewhere between 10 and 12, and her primary
features are a love of a particular place within the English countryside, and a
love of books. Everything in the books start off in a gritty, quotidian social-realist
way: Kate comes from a large, struggling working class family in an
unattractive town in England, but then, because her, and one of her brothers
get measles, she is sent off for convalescence (at the start of the second book) in a village called Upper Cassington. In
the first book (which beat The Hobbit
to the Carnegie medal in 1937) Kate is just one many characters, but by the
third book, written in 1962, she has become the protagonist, and she and the
three books have acquired two fundamental lines of flight. The first is the
line of flight from urban poverty into the countryside, and the second id the
line of flight of becoming, in some sense, a scholar in relation to books and
to literature in particular, and of winning a place in the local grammar
school. The end of the third book is Kate achieving the escape to the grammar
school.
I loved the
descriptions of the countryside in these books, and I liked Kate very much. I
liked her love of Upper Cassington, and I identified with her ambition of going
off to grammar school, and then university, in order to study literature. But I
probably did not have sexual fantasies about her – her longings were centred on
the two lines of flight which have been described. Other heroines were generally
not like this, even when they were in books for children. Despite her being in
some ways a brilliant character Meg in A
Wrinkle in Time seemed to have no ambition other than saving her father and
her brother, and having a relationship with her love-interest, Calvin. In 1977
I had read both Jane Eyre and South Riding, and I am certain that I had engaged
in fantasies of having sex with both Jane and Sarah Burton, but then this is
hardly surprising given that within these stories the process of getting educated in both cases
concludes with a process of becoming fixated on a man living in a big house in
the countryside. It is true that I was now capable of having a sexual fantasy
about a female character with almost no assistance from the book’s author:
however, nonetheless, I think that my virtual-real relationship with Kate Ruggles quietly consisted
of a warm, non-sexual identification with her. And it will be noticed that my
life at this time was a bit of a mess in terms of plans for the future: I
wanted to be a writer and to write songs and play guitar (a few months before
leaving New Zealand I bought a guitar, and started trying to learn to play),
but there were no signs of everything falling into place, and just possibly
there were other directions I needed to explore, rather than, for instance,
attempting to make a living by writing science fiction stories. I have an image
of a female self smiling at me, and then starting to pack her bags for
university.
*
Place yourself
by the Summit Road at the top of the Port Hills, in 1977, and look west across
the plain to a slightly hazy, midsummer expanse of greenish foothills and high
mountains. Christchurch is spread out beneath you – a city which has only existed for a
hundred and twenty years. Feel the pull of secret astonishingly beautiful places
in the mountains, some of them in the forests on the far, westward slopes. Feel
the sublime, dreamy, planetary beauty of the day. You are on a volcanic-crater
vantage, sticking out into the sea, but where the sea is not visible. You are
not seeing a country at all – you are seeing an astonishing, mesmerizingly enigmatic
expanse of the planet.
This was the
threshold I did not reach - or did not cross - in 1977, lured instead by the city,
and songs, and distracted by all the virtual-real terrains from books set primarily in
England, terrains which seemed to indicate that the sublime was more likely to be encountered in the countryside of Britain than in that of New Zealand. And, more importantly than anything else my zones of the human world had not told me that I should learn to stop thinking and perceive, but instead had filled my mind, for instance, with elements like the basics of metereology, so that my encounter with the atmosphere could be mediated and blocked-off by constructs concerning 'the weather.'
At some point in 1977, when I was still in
New Zealand, I attempted to write down a story.
It was a science fiction tale, and I did not get far with it. It is the
future, and a man goes into a tall
research building in Christchurch to see an associate who has a machine of some
kind – a machine which functions in some way in relation to the dimension of
time. The machine malfunctions, and the man is thrown through both space and
time.He is in the 1920s, and he is in a field near a tiny lane in the
English countryside. I stopped writing at this point: it was clear that the
inspiration was Upper Cassington. In a way I liked the atmosphere created by
the fusion of Wells with Garnett, but I had no idea where to go with the story.
For about a year I
had been inhabiting a transversal in relation to conventional family
circumstances (there had been no authority figures). But the job of course was in
itself a deadening influence, and even if I had decided to try to move back toward
getting an education the path was blocked, because I very definitely did not
want to go to school, which was the only available option, aged 14 (I didn’t
even consider this possibility – school was something I had escaped). And to a
certain extent I was also becoming more
isolated, rather than less, because Heidi now had a boyfriend, and as this relationship deepened I was left more on my own. I gave my notice at the shop, and I decided to
get a flight to Britain to persuade our mother to sign a power of attorney
document that would allow the house to be sold (this was what was supposed to
be happening, but everything was in stasis while my mother contested her father’s
will, and nominally looked for a place to live). This could be seen as an act
of jealousy (an attempt to bring my sister back toward me), and there may well
be an element of truth in this, but I don’t remember feeling any malice toward my sister’s boyfriend, and Heidi approved of the plan (she did not need to
return to Britain if the house was sold, and we both felt at that point that
the situation needed to be resolved). But maybe very deep down we both knew what
was happening: that our mother would never sign the power of attorney agreement
(she didn’t) – and that I was simply heading off to occupy a different transversal
(travelling around England and Wales with my mother, from hotel to hotel).
Astrid was married. I
hadn’t come close to having any sort of response to death. And I (or my control mind) had found a personalised way of fending off an encounter with the planet. I sent a telegram giving
my arrival time in Heathrow (my mother was nearly at the end of a few months in
a rented cottage, so there was somewhere to send it). I said goodbye to Heidi
at Christchurch airport, and as the plane took off I could see her on the airport building's roof, waving.
*
*
*
My return to
Swansea had no connection to my mother’s visits to the city. My solution to the
problem of getting to university had been to leave Yorkshire and go to an adult
education college in North Wales called Coleg Harlech (at this college you
could receive a bursary for a two year residential course). I was now in
Swansea because I had dropped out of Oxford, and a friend from Coleg Harlech – who
came from Aberdare - was at Swansea University, and this friend had helped me
to find accommodation in the city (earlier I had lived for three months in
Cardiff, and Swansea just felt like a second attempt to find a place to live, under difficult circumstances). And it
can be added that the impression given by the events is definitely of a
coincidence. I did not go to Coleg
Harlech because of my connections with Wales (which in any case were with the
south and southwest). I went there because my girlfriend at that time had found
a newspaper advertisement for the college: it was one of only five residential
adult education colleges in Britain (I did not know about the others at this
point), and it was not unusual that I went there, in that many of its students came
from the north of England.
On arrival in
Swansea my life had taken a very intense knock. Even though I had only been at Oxford for two terms and three weeks (I had dropped out because I had felt I was falling short of what I wanted to achieve), I had received three terms of grant money, and it was not going to be easy to get a local authority to give me this money again. And, perhaps more importantly, my confidence had been profoundly shaken. Fear of the the end-of-year exam had evidently been involved in the decision to leave Oxford. It was true that my lack of academic preparation had made it tough to cope with the high-speed eight week term, but it was not easy to see the decision to leave as anything other than a result of fear and lack of self-discipline.
It was also the case that I was not going to receive any assistance from my mother: her money had come from her father's business, and this money was now running out - she was about to spend almost all of it on a small house in Sutherland, in the far north of Scotland. And I was entirely happy about this - it would be far better to solve the problem without having to diminish my mother's resources. Back in May, when I had arrived in Cardiff, I had got a job in a restaurant kitchen, but this time, with the new university term starting, I couldn't take the idea of becoming a wage-slave again, and I decided to sign on for unemployment benefit, and housing benefit.
One evening, in October, I was with a group of students in
a pub in an area called Uplands, which is a mile to the northeast of the
university campus – the area is on a gently sloping part of the hill that runs
east to west in Swansea (a quarter of a mile
further up the hill is the street where Dylan Thomas was born, and where he lived until he was 23 – Cwmdonkin
Drive).
All of the students
I was with at the pub were people who I had just met, but I had been getting on
very well with them, as if we had known each other for a long time – the
conversations I am sure had been in the areas of politics, literature and
philosophy. And for me the conversations were a space in which a feeling of relief was being taken over by something
more active. It seemed that somehow I was finding a way forward – I had a room,
and I was now studying philosophy, as well as literature, so surely in one way
or another I would get across thresholds of thought and expression, even if it
was a long time before I returned to university (and even if this return never
happened).
At some point
Dylan Thomas was brought into the conversation, and his poem In My Craft or
Sullen Art had been mentioned: between us I think we managed to quote almost
all of it, or perhaps the whole of it:
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, theirs arms
Round the griefs of the ages
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.
But then something else happened. A song was played on the jukebox: Melanie Safka's 1970 cover of Ruby Tuesday, by The Rolling Stones. I had heard this recording a few times before (I did not know the original), but these occasions had probably all been in New Zealand, and it was only now that the full intensity of the song arrived:
Don’t ask her why she leaves to be so free
She’s gonna tell you it’s the only way to be
She just can't be chained
To a life where nothing's gained
And nothing's lost
But such a cost.
[...]
There's no time to lose I heard her say
You gotta catch your dreams before they run away
Dying all the time
Lose your dreams and you might lose your mind
Is life unkind?
Goodbye Ruby Tuesday
Who is gonna hang a name on you?
And when you change with every new day
Still I'm gonna miss you.
I feel that something of the still, serene quality of Thomas's poem had stayed with me as I left the pub, but primarily I had been swept away into hearing Melanie's wild, rock-and-roll Ruby Tuesday chorus, and then the slow, gentle thoughtfulness of the verse, followed again by the surging, full-power drum-fill, and the high-speed chorus.
I had drunk very little, because after money for food there was not much left for anything else, and I was now about to walk four miles to get home. I started to walk southwest down the hill, and the slightly broken clouds in this direction were lit up by the lights of the city, and also by moonlight. And swept up into the song in my head, I discovered that as I was looking at the sky I experienced an extraordinary feeling of joy - a serene rapture that was like the feeling of the most sublime, powerful story you you have ever read or heard: a story about travelling into the unknown, and about the beauty of the world and the way in which this beauty is also suffused with the eerie. The joy seemed to contain such stories, as if each time you looked at the sky, one of them was on the edge of coming into focus.The joy was coming from the song, and most of all it was coming from having the song in my head at the point where I was looking at the light in the sky to the southwest.
I wondered how long it would last. And it did not last long: the full height of the experience was probably only five minutes. But while it lasted, I had 'returned.' I did not think about it in these terms at the time, but I had returned to the place - and again it was night, and in some powerful, serene sense the light was 'singing,' and I was in Swansea.
*
The centre of Swansea is built on an area of flat ground which extends between the sea and the initially quite steep escarpment of the hill which to the west becomes the terrain of Uplands. The bay on which the city is built curves round to the west and ends in a low promontory five miles away, with two small islands extending from this headland into the ocean. To the east the bay in fact curves onward for twenty miles, with no pronounced end-point, although there is an impression of a headland, because there is a large hill (high enough for it to have been left largely as moorland) which rises up two miles to the east of the city, though without extending into the bay to form a promontory. It is a feature of the city that it has been constructed in a terrain which has two large, roughly flat-topped hills, one of which has been covered with houses across its sides and summit (the level area directly above Swansea's centre is called Townhill), and the other of which is substantially higher and has been left undeveloped.
Immediately to the east of the main streets is the river Tawe - the Welsh name for Swansea is Abertawe, which means 'by the mouth of the Tawe.' This river goes northward into one of the two kinds of hinterland which abut upon the city. To the east and north everything is rural upland and coastland which is also threaded with heavy industry and post-industrial zones, with some of the high-investment development being very large in scale, such as Port Talbot steel works, a colossal descendent of the iron works in Ystalyfera at the top of the Tawe valley, closed in the 1880s. To the west, on the other hand, there is the long and wide expanse of the Gower peninsula (which begins at the headland of the bay). This is a very different hinterland, consisting of a raised-up terrain of fields and of wide areas of heathland, surrounded by very striking bays and wide beaches (it has wild horses which live on the higher and steeper ground, and on the estuary to the north of the peninsula).
As well as having these different zones around it, the city also has the attribute of facing to the south: the hill is tilted into the line of the sun, and because the ocean is to the south (and the large hill to the east is sufficiently far away) even down on the flat ground the city is in a good place in relation to light. Such a location does not assist much at the level of the plane of organisation of capitalism (where everything generally relates to zones of production, big rivers, transport networks, and fertile plains) but on another level it perhaps makes quite a substantial difference. The two, very different hinterlands are fundamental for understanding Swansea, but perhaps its 'vantage' in relation to sunlight is also important.
In relation to my visits to it, my overall impression of the city is that it has always been an inspiring, heartening place: a place with an undefinable quality of 'brightness.' This quality expresses itself in memory through my day-time recollections always being of the city in sunlight. However the quality involved is more than this - it is as if Swansea has always had the to tendency sweep me forward.
When I was in Swansea at the age of 15 I felt an intense pleasure at returning to it. I loved its big modern avenue (St Helen's Rd), and I loved the way in which it was friendly and quietly beautiful but without affectation. I'm sure I was not was not focusing on this at the time, but it had none of the kitsch of a seaside resort, because it was by the sea but was not a resort, and it had none of the self-importance of a big city like London, with its tourist paraphernalia. It was an attractive city, but in an inconspicuous way: at one point I tried to walk to the sea, but found myself trying to get past a dock-basin, eventually arriving at a dead-end, but even this was something I found enjoyable (an approach to the ocean in the form a labyrinth in the end was much more interesting than one which took the form of a line of sea-resort attractions, designed to take away all of your money).
My sources of comparison at this earlier stage were cities and towns in New Zealand and Britain, and of the cities I knew there were none that had an effect on me like Swansea (only Auckland in New Zealand came close). It is true that I was immensely impressed by York - and I loved this city - but there was something about it which was less heartening, and in some subtle sense more involuted, less connected to the outside. Aged 15, when I visited Swansea I became 'expansive'. It was a good time for what happened to occur, but serendipity is grasping your luck, and in Swansea I seemed to have the energy to do this. I saw Kate Bush singing Wuthering Heights on TV, and this led to me leaving behind a phase when I had been cut-off from the energy of what was taking place in pop-rock (and given my degree of isolation this energy-current was very important). I bought a small portable radio in a shop on the high street, connecting myself up suddenly to Kate Bush and Blondie, and to Gerry Raferty's Baker Street, flowing pensively beneath the two-dimensional (and yet somehow very enjoyable) helium-cheerfulness of ELO's Mr Blue Sky, (and then afterwards connecting me to further expanses of the slightly eerie, before-the-collapse world of 1978 pop-rock). And in a shop nextdoor to the one where I bought the radio I read an introduction to a Stephen King novel, by the author, in which King wrote about how to become a writer. And the fact I was impressed by this mini-essay was no doubt involved in what happened a few days later - in a hotel in Yorkshire I bought a copy of The Shining from a display of books at reception, and then read the book through the night. The direction of the gothic - transcendental north - was evidently the very opposite of where I needed to go, but the southward direction of the Outside shimmered faintly within the virtual-real world of this novel, and was indicated as the way forward (kindness; the valuably anomalous; courage in the face of the unknown; a Futural self), and in any case I needed to be jolted out of the collapse-machinery of ordinary reality.
*
The centre of Swansea is built on an area of flat ground which extends between the sea and the initially quite steep escarpment of the hill which to the west becomes the terrain of Uplands. The bay on which the city is built curves round to the west and ends in a low promontory five miles away, with two small islands extending from this headland into the ocean. To the east the bay in fact curves onward for twenty miles, with no pronounced end-point, although there is an impression of a headland, because there is a large hill (high enough for it to have been left largely as moorland) which rises up two miles to the east of the city, though without extending into the bay to form a promontory. It is a feature of the city that it has been constructed in a terrain which has two large, roughly flat-topped hills, one of which has been covered with houses across its sides and summit (the level area directly above Swansea's centre is called Townhill), and the other of which is substantially higher and has been left undeveloped.
Immediately to the east of the main streets is the river Tawe - the Welsh name for Swansea is Abertawe, which means 'by the mouth of the Tawe.' This river goes northward into one of the two kinds of hinterland which abut upon the city. To the east and north everything is rural upland and coastland which is also threaded with heavy industry and post-industrial zones, with some of the high-investment development being very large in scale, such as Port Talbot steel works, a colossal descendent of the iron works in Ystalyfera at the top of the Tawe valley, closed in the 1880s. To the west, on the other hand, there is the long and wide expanse of the Gower peninsula (which begins at the headland of the bay). This is a very different hinterland, consisting of a raised-up terrain of fields and of wide areas of heathland, surrounded by very striking bays and wide beaches (it has wild horses which live on the higher and steeper ground, and on the estuary to the north of the peninsula).
As well as having these different zones around it, the city also has the attribute of facing to the south: the hill is tilted into the line of the sun, and because the ocean is to the south (and the large hill to the east is sufficiently far away) even down on the flat ground the city is in a good place in relation to light. Such a location does not assist much at the level of the plane of organisation of capitalism (where everything generally relates to zones of production, big rivers, transport networks, and fertile plains) but on another level it perhaps makes quite a substantial difference. The two, very different hinterlands are fundamental for understanding Swansea, but perhaps its 'vantage' in relation to sunlight is also important.
In relation to my visits to it, my overall impression of the city is that it has always been an inspiring, heartening place: a place with an undefinable quality of 'brightness.' This quality expresses itself in memory through my day-time recollections always being of the city in sunlight. However the quality involved is more than this - it is as if Swansea has always had the to tendency sweep me forward.
When I was in Swansea at the age of 15 I felt an intense pleasure at returning to it. I loved its big modern avenue (St Helen's Rd), and I loved the way in which it was friendly and quietly beautiful but without affectation. I'm sure I was not was not focusing on this at the time, but it had none of the kitsch of a seaside resort, because it was by the sea but was not a resort, and it had none of the self-importance of a big city like London, with its tourist paraphernalia. It was an attractive city, but in an inconspicuous way: at one point I tried to walk to the sea, but found myself trying to get past a dock-basin, eventually arriving at a dead-end, but even this was something I found enjoyable (an approach to the ocean in the form a labyrinth in the end was much more interesting than one which took the form of a line of sea-resort attractions, designed to take away all of your money).
My sources of comparison at this earlier stage were cities and towns in New Zealand and Britain, and of the cities I knew there were none that had an effect on me like Swansea (only Auckland in New Zealand came close). It is true that I was immensely impressed by York - and I loved this city - but there was something about it which was less heartening, and in some subtle sense more involuted, less connected to the outside. Aged 15, when I visited Swansea I became 'expansive'. It was a good time for what happened to occur, but serendipity is grasping your luck, and in Swansea I seemed to have the energy to do this. I saw Kate Bush singing Wuthering Heights on TV, and this led to me leaving behind a phase when I had been cut-off from the energy of what was taking place in pop-rock (and given my degree of isolation this energy-current was very important). I bought a small portable radio in a shop on the high street, connecting myself up suddenly to Kate Bush and Blondie, and to Gerry Raferty's Baker Street, flowing pensively beneath the two-dimensional (and yet somehow very enjoyable) helium-cheerfulness of ELO's Mr Blue Sky, (and then afterwards connecting me to further expanses of the slightly eerie, before-the-collapse world of 1978 pop-rock). And in a shop nextdoor to the one where I bought the radio I read an introduction to a Stephen King novel, by the author, in which King wrote about how to become a writer. And the fact I was impressed by this mini-essay was no doubt involved in what happened a few days later - in a hotel in Yorkshire I bought a copy of The Shining from a display of books at reception, and then read the book through the night. The direction of the gothic - transcendental north - was evidently the very opposite of where I needed to go, but the southward direction of the Outside shimmered faintly within the virtual-real world of this novel, and was indicated as the way forward (kindness; the valuably anomalous; courage in the face of the unknown; a Futural self), and in any case I needed to be jolted out of the collapse-machinery of ordinary reality.
What opened the doorway to the very temporary but very intense heightened state in 1987 was the poem In My Craft or Sullen Art and, in particular, the song Ruby Tuesday. It can be pointed out that the
time-differential across which these two works are stretched includes the
threshold-crossing where modernism starts to express itself pre-eminently
through popular music (with Bob Dylan signing Dylan Thomas’s name across the
new world of abstract-oneiric production), a threshold-crossing which was
fundamentally the start of a temporary shift toward a greater proximity of the Future. This provides some context, in turn, for the fact that, despite the perfection of Thomas’s poem, something more
intense and valuable is finding expression within Melanie’s version of Ruby
Tuesday: the song, despite its imperfections, is in fact a very powerful world of
thought, standing up as it does for both freedom and the faculty of dreaming
(“you have to catch your dreams before they run away/Dying every day/Lose your
dreams and you might lose your mind”).
Melanie sings the
song very emphatically in the modality of love – a love, which in this context,
is a love for the world and for freedom, and is a love for the woman about whom
she is singing (but where this shows no signs of an amorous fixation). This is
in contrast to the version by the Stones, where the song is delivered with an
insouciance (or lack of love) which in fact hints at what it seems happened in
relation to the real Ruby Tuesday. Keith Richards evidently had a moment of lucidity
where the song came to him, but at the primary level of the actual (as opposed
to the actualising of the song) what
took place was that he got the father of his girlfriend, Linda Keith, to take out a court
injunction which in effect prevented her from doing drugs with Jimi Hendrix (this to a great extent is as far as the 60s get – within the
rock-and-roll ethos men want women to be free in terms of living a wild and sexual
existence, but the moment women express their freedom by wanting to end the
relationship and live this life with another man, the entire stance instantly
collapses, because it was always a self-serving ‘pose’, as opposed to a
functional ethos).
However, there is
also a sadness in Melanie’s version: there is something not quite right – it is
as if there needs to be more love – and an absence of self-indulgence – before the
‘narrator’ in the song can take the leap (this is not in the least a criticism of Linda Keith, the song with Melanie has left behind the original starting-point in the actual). In fact, with both Ruby Tuesday and
In My Craft there is a stasis that
contrasts with a very intense movement. In Thomas’s poem the stasis is in the
lovers who hear with ‘their most secret heart’ but in the end do not ‘heed’
Thomas’s work (and also perhaps to an extent in the speaker of the poem), and
the movement is Thomas’s perception of the world, the lovers, and the griefs of
the ages, together with his communication with those who love, through his
creation of poetry. In Melanie’s Ruby Tuesday the movement is the ongoing
transformation on the part of Ruby, and the stasis is the narrator who affirms
the woman about whom she is singing, but does not indicate that she will follow
her. In the Dylan Thomas poem the lovers in fact on one level have their arms round the
griefs of the ages, and the movement is a sometimes ‘sullen art’ in the form of an only localised freedom (an ability to see into the heart of things, and to express
this seeing as poetry – poetry that has almost no effect in terms of releasing
people from that which they are 'embracing,' or with which they are damagingly entangled). In contrast, in Melanie’s recording,
the feeling is that Melanie has the necessary love to ensure that the leap of freedom
is a leap toward metamorphics (toward Love-and-Freedom) rather than simply a
leap towards transformations guided by self-indulgence.
And in 1987 a
vital aspect of the song was that it left me with an empathic relationship with two female figures, where
everything explicit in the song was entirely in the horizon of freedom (with
love, however, in effect through tonality of voice), as opposed to the
conventional-reality horizon of couple-relationships, and of romances constructed
as being permanent, when such 'settling-down-into-each-other' relationships will generally be extremely short as romances (the song in fact suggests that freedom might even be a more fundamental value than many kinds of amorous or romantic relationship). However,
there was a subtlety about this: there was an identification with Ruby Tuesday
but there was an even greater identification with the song's narrator as a woman who could potentially also take flight, a woman who you felt
was still not really moving forward, but about whom you also felt that she might be
capable of a genuine, successful moving-forward, where Ruby’s departure toward
freedom might not have had the necessary modality of intent. And the narrator was
not yearning after a man, she was yearning after the ongoing metamorphoses of
freedom, and the actualisation of her dreams (and, in fact, she was expressing love for a woman, and therefore was herself involved in a becoming-woman). Becoming-woman in fact is at its
most powerful in relation to women who are yearning after the south of the
outside (which is also to say that women become even more attractive to the
person who experiences this form of the becoming). In identifying with Melanie/the narrator and Ruby Tuesday there was a becoming-woman which had freed itself from a specific modality of fixation, and was looking instead toward Love-and-Freedom.
After this experience my life in Swansea went forward on a course that was not in any way closely related to what had taken place, and yet the event seems to have run on in my thoughts through the next few months, and it feels as if it set a kind of tonality for what happened next, a tonality or dynamic of the profound experienced at night, and of travelling uncompromisingly toward freedom. ,
I had already realised that I should be studying philosophy as well as literature. This is because it had become clear that good fiction and poetry provide accounts or maps of the world (and so were inseparable from philosophy), and also because when I was at Coleg Harlech I had acquired a specific philosophical problem in the form of the issue of free-will and determinism, and had been persistently thinking about it over the previous two years (this problem is one of a small number of gigantic sticking-points of philosophical reason - in a sense they are metaphysical neuroses, but they can also settle down, as modalities of blocking-off of the outside - where these sticking-points are all connected in different ways with issues of time, causality, and the construction of experience). The immensely valuable aspects of this problem were that it concerned intent, or will, and set out the challenge - even if mechanistic determinism was being opposed - of placing everything on a single plane of nature; and the problem with it, of course, was the fixation on the line of time.
In relation to getting back to university the solution that I found was exceptionally simple and direct, and I am still very surprised that such a solution was possible. I started attending a series of first year lectures about philosophy and literature that were being given by a tutor called Ieuan Williams: I had been going to an extra-mural class he was teaching, and he had suggested I could attend the lectures. And at the same time I started going to a first year course on formal logic, telling the tutor at the beginning about the fact that Ieuan Williams had given me permission to be at the other course, and, to my surprise, getting immediate permission to study formal logic as well. I attended every class of these courses, for a year, and I had a complete year of formal logic marked by the tutor. I was always unsure about whether the logic lecturer had taken in what I had said at the beginning, but tutors generally have a tendency to be very positive toward students who are enthusiastic, and attend all the classes, and in logic the work is not too hard to mark. In any case, I am of course immensely grateful to this tutor, and even more so to Ieuan Williams, who had not only started the whole process, but also told me at one point that the philosophy and literature degree at Warwick seemed to be worth considering (there was no equivalent degree at Swansea). As the autumn went on I was aware that there was an intense, uncompromising quality about this solution, and I was very conscious that I must do everything to 'hold the line' by behaving as impeccably as possible. I did a very large amount of reading in the unversity library, and at one point I gave a paper for the undergraduate philosophy society. I managed to keep getting unemployment benefit (at this stage there were still around three million jobless people, so it was not very hard to do this). My strategy for getting back to university was to not leave it, and to prepare myself so that I would not get into trouble if I eventually managed to be officially studying philosophy and literature, rather than being a kind of accepted 'stowaway.'
It was therefore a strange, intense autumn. There was a joy about it all (I loved the library, and I loved the whole campus, with its park all around and threaded through it, and its view across the Bristol channel to Devon) but there was a feeling of fragility, and of a kind of deepening of everything which increased as the nights grew longer.
And on top of the other issues I was studying, I had acquired two problems in connection with human relationships. The first was, why do relationships start with the individuals being in love, and with them having intense sex, and then burn down, or burn out? And the other was, do couples consistently sacrifice the most extraordinary - and therefore jealousy-inducing - friendships in order to maintain the couple? And there was also a third problem: this was the issue of whether women are almost always swept from birth onwards into a gender role that is far more a feminine-existence fabrication and trap than is generally recognised (there was evidently also the equivalent problem in connection with men, but somehow the situation in relation to women seemed much more subtle and perturbing).
An idea for a story came to me - perhaps by this time it was late November. The story was about a man who was recurrently visited by a woman from the future. The woman taught the man about how to live at a higher level of intensity; about how to wake his abilities and faculties. The woman was immensely attractive, though in a martial arts mode of lucid, fluent femininity, but there was no chance of her being the man's lover because she was simply at a fundamentally higher level than him. She was his teacher, and she was his friend. And a feature of the society from which she came was that the previously existing womens' names had all been abandoned as damaging components of a system of submissive femininity. The name of this woman was Barik - a name she had created herself. I loved Barik. I could see her very clearly, and I remember feeling a kind of 'click' where for a moment I felt that in some sense I was the man in the story, and then feeling that my intent was very much that I wanted to be visited by this woman.
*
After this experience my life in Swansea went forward on a course that was not in any way closely related to what had taken place, and yet the event seems to have run on in my thoughts through the next few months, and it feels as if it set a kind of tonality for what happened next, a tonality or dynamic of the profound experienced at night, and of travelling uncompromisingly toward freedom. ,
I had already realised that I should be studying philosophy as well as literature. This is because it had become clear that good fiction and poetry provide accounts or maps of the world (and so were inseparable from philosophy), and also because when I was at Coleg Harlech I had acquired a specific philosophical problem in the form of the issue of free-will and determinism, and had been persistently thinking about it over the previous two years (this problem is one of a small number of gigantic sticking-points of philosophical reason - in a sense they are metaphysical neuroses, but they can also settle down, as modalities of blocking-off of the outside - where these sticking-points are all connected in different ways with issues of time, causality, and the construction of experience). The immensely valuable aspects of this problem were that it concerned intent, or will, and set out the challenge - even if mechanistic determinism was being opposed - of placing everything on a single plane of nature; and the problem with it, of course, was the fixation on the line of time.
In relation to getting back to university the solution that I found was exceptionally simple and direct, and I am still very surprised that such a solution was possible. I started attending a series of first year lectures about philosophy and literature that were being given by a tutor called Ieuan Williams: I had been going to an extra-mural class he was teaching, and he had suggested I could attend the lectures. And at the same time I started going to a first year course on formal logic, telling the tutor at the beginning about the fact that Ieuan Williams had given me permission to be at the other course, and, to my surprise, getting immediate permission to study formal logic as well. I attended every class of these courses, for a year, and I had a complete year of formal logic marked by the tutor. I was always unsure about whether the logic lecturer had taken in what I had said at the beginning, but tutors generally have a tendency to be very positive toward students who are enthusiastic, and attend all the classes, and in logic the work is not too hard to mark. In any case, I am of course immensely grateful to this tutor, and even more so to Ieuan Williams, who had not only started the whole process, but also told me at one point that the philosophy and literature degree at Warwick seemed to be worth considering (there was no equivalent degree at Swansea). As the autumn went on I was aware that there was an intense, uncompromising quality about this solution, and I was very conscious that I must do everything to 'hold the line' by behaving as impeccably as possible. I did a very large amount of reading in the unversity library, and at one point I gave a paper for the undergraduate philosophy society. I managed to keep getting unemployment benefit (at this stage there were still around three million jobless people, so it was not very hard to do this). My strategy for getting back to university was to not leave it, and to prepare myself so that I would not get into trouble if I eventually managed to be officially studying philosophy and literature, rather than being a kind of accepted 'stowaway.'
It was therefore a strange, intense autumn. There was a joy about it all (I loved the library, and I loved the whole campus, with its park all around and threaded through it, and its view across the Bristol channel to Devon) but there was a feeling of fragility, and of a kind of deepening of everything which increased as the nights grew longer.
And on top of the other issues I was studying, I had acquired two problems in connection with human relationships. The first was, why do relationships start with the individuals being in love, and with them having intense sex, and then burn down, or burn out? And the other was, do couples consistently sacrifice the most extraordinary - and therefore jealousy-inducing - friendships in order to maintain the couple? And there was also a third problem: this was the issue of whether women are almost always swept from birth onwards into a gender role that is far more a feminine-existence fabrication and trap than is generally recognised (there was evidently also the equivalent problem in connection with men, but somehow the situation in relation to women seemed much more subtle and perturbing).
An idea for a story came to me - perhaps by this time it was late November. The story was about a man who was recurrently visited by a woman from the future. The woman taught the man about how to live at a higher level of intensity; about how to wake his abilities and faculties. The woman was immensely attractive, though in a martial arts mode of lucid, fluent femininity, but there was no chance of her being the man's lover because she was simply at a fundamentally higher level than him. She was his teacher, and she was his friend. And a feature of the society from which she came was that the previously existing womens' names had all been abandoned as damaging components of a system of submissive femininity. The name of this woman was Barik - a name she had created herself. I loved Barik. I could see her very clearly, and I remember feeling a kind of 'click' where for a moment I felt that in some sense I was the man in the story, and then feeling that my intent was very much that I wanted to be visited by this woman.
*
It was January. Somehow – after a great deal of difficulty – I had managed to get a room in a very good house on Bryn Rd, a street near to
the university, and just down the hill from Uplands. I feel that by this time
my existence had become a kind of gap
– a gap filled with a search for philosophical directions, and, more than
anything else, with a longing for a relationship with a woman with whom I could
fall in love. I was becoming something that was like the night in the park by
the university, with its trees and houses and ocean: a kind of charged, calm
emptiness, but the nature of the emptiness was that it was a listening for
music in the distance, music in some sense from the future.
*
I started a
relationship with a woman called Sarah, who was in the second year of a sociology degree. Sarah was very kind, and had a warm, bright sense of humour, and
before long we were living together. She moved into a room opposite mine in the
house on Bryn Road – for the first time I was part of a ‘couple.’ This was a good,
strong relationship, and we would be together for five years. (see Sections 14 and 15).
Sarah was studying for a social anthropology module, and I started reading about
Levi-Strauss’s anthropological theories. It can be seen that I was now being
taken very far away from the insights of Ruby Tuesday, even though Richards’s song was
from the same time as structuralism. And all around me the philosophy milieu in
which I was working was also not in any way a direct continuation of the great
writers of modernism and proto-modernism (Shakespeare being the crucial
proto-modernist). The teachers of Swansea philosophy department were almost all
Wittgensteinians, with the only real variations being within this one
philosophical approach. There were “left Wittgenstenians” who were also
in some sense Marxists or socialists, and there were “right Wittgensteinians,” who were either Christians or were simply advocates
of neo-liberal capitalism. The night-profundity journey of the autumn was now
in part being transformed into a bizarre ‘daylight-view.’ I was beginning to
see an Alice-in-Wonderland world of recurrently mis-guided critique (which was without any associated substantive
philosophy, so that this void could be filled by anything from Christianity to Stalinism), and of science-inspired theories about non-western social formations (tribal societies) which seemed to be anything but
effective as maps of what was important about these forms of existence.
I was of course
aligned with the left Wittgensteinians in terms of their Marxist/Socialist
ideas: the daylight-perspective was also a – very valuable – foregrounding and
intensification of my view of the grim behemoth of capitalism, grinding
disturbingly onward. But although I respected Wittgenstein, he was not in the
least providing lucid views of the outside of ordinary reality - the views that were
always on the edge of coming into focus within the literature-continuum stretching from Shakespeare to rock-pop modernism.
The previous summer I had met up in Cardiff with Niall Jinks, the original
bass player from Scritti Politti, and a committed Marxist/socialist. He had recommended I read Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy. And at some point in the spring – this
was the spring of 1988 – I was in a large second-hand bookshop in Swansea, and
I found a copy of The Nietzsche Reader,
on sale for 50p. Nietzsche’s writings were of course the way forward, because they are full of very valuable outsights, and also
because they would lead to Deleuze – and in particular, to A Thousand Plateaus – and then, in turn, to the place where metamorphics
is not only at last in full effect, but where it is being embodied and
dreamed-forward by women, as well as by men.
(My feeling about this time is that I had taken part in the creation of something which was exceptionally stable (partly because it included a lot of the outside within it), and which in another of its dimensions was crackling with instability. Only this other dimension concerned aspects of a life which are almost never brought into awareness. Everything was going very well, and I was in an extremely good, affectionate relationship, and yet somewhere a window pane was rattling - there was a knocking from a direction in which there seemed to be nothing but the lights of the city and the stillness of night air. As Nietzsche would say, "night is deeper than day can comprehend.")
*
Earlier, in New
Zealand, I had been drawn down from out of the hills, hoping to write stories
and songs, and dreaming of female companionship. It had not been easy to find a
way forward, and in a sense I had returned to the hills, moving along their
slopes, as it were, looking for an opportunity to go down again into the
cities, an opportunity which in fact concerned getting through them, rather
than staying within them. Eventually I took a route down which involved a
starting-point in the form of Coleg Harlech, as if I had found a hill which
protruded into the plain. It seems pertinent that when I lived for a month in
Cambridge, between the two years at Harlech, a song came to me (see section 25) -
Down the far hills of sunrise
Down the bitter hills of change
I have come to cross the wasteland
I have come to lose my way.
As the process started (when I went to Coleg Harlech) my
attempts to write stories largely came to end, and although this was replaced at Harlech by the project of writing poems, I was aware when I was in Oxford and
Swansea that the quality of the poetry substantially declined, and it also
began to decrease – rapidly – in terms of quantity. Certain aspects of this
change were contingencies, in that other people might have had very different
experiences in terms of writing. What was taking place was the result of the
fact that for me, as it happened, the cities were deeply bound up with the
worlds of relatively conventional zones of western philosophy, and these zones
are recurrently inimical to the writing of stories and poems. There are ways in which the contested zone that is customary metaphysics can in fact be used for creating stories - as with the stories of Borges - but conventional philosophy's obsessions with time and with formal and semi-formal systems are generally not at all helpful for waking the faculties of lucidity and dreaming.
I was lucky enough
to meet two very extraordinary women – Sarah, and then Tess – who in different
ways helped me immeasurably. On a
different level, it is not possible to know whether Niall Jinks’s recommendation had any impact on
me. All that can be said is that as I moved into the parts of the cities that
were closer to the opposite side (where everything at last would become
planetary again, but more so) the path in terms of the virtual-real was pop-rock
modernism (for instance, Patti Smith’s Horses)
and was Nietzsche, and then Deleuze. However, back on what is in fact the primary level, it was Sarah who helped
me to reach a point where I was near the edge of the city-labyrinth, and it was
Tess who helped me to escape.
In the January or
February of my second year at Warwick University (1990-1991) there was a philosophy conference,
and a friend from Swansea’s philosophy department came over to attend. During
conversations at this conference my friend heard about Nick Land’s
philosophical views (which at that time were being assisted by readings of
Bataille, as well as of Deleuze and Nietzsche) and suggested there could be a
philosophical meeting between Nick and Colwyn Williamson, who was the most
prominent of Swansea’s “left-Wittgensteinians.” The idea was that there would be a small Warwick/Swansea event about ‘the body’ in relation to philosophy, involving
Nick and Colwyn giving papers, with Colwyn speaking about an essay where
Wittgenstein considers the question of whether it makes sense to say that he ‘has’
a hand (given that this would suppose a separation between the person-possessor
and the hand), and Nick giving a paper drawing upon Bataille’s ‘base
materialism’ or ‘libidinal materialism’ (he was writing a book about Bataille
at this time, and the paper he gave was called “Fluent Bodies” and was a version
of one of the book’s chapters).
It would be correct
to say that Nick and Colwyn were respectively the most radical members of their
philosophy departments. But there was almost nothing in common between them. What
was shared (and even this is not
quite what it seems) was the view that the human world as it is currently
constituted is a disaster, and that this in part needs to be discussed in ways
set out by the analyses of Marx, but in terms of other philosophical approaches
they were almost as far apart as it was possible to be (Deleuze/Nietzsche/Bataille
on the one hand, and Wittgenstein on the other), and not only that, their
pragmatic aims were exceptionally different. For Colywn capitalism
was a social formation which should in some sense be fought, and whose
contradictions would eventually allow it be overcome. For Nick capitalism was
something that should be accelerated because there was something so profoundly
wrong with the human world that only the heating-up of capitalism – in which
humans would in some way undergo a kind of molecular transformation – could
bring about an end to the human system of reactive forces (his book on Bataille
is called The Thirst for Annihilation, George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism). I had no affiliation to this specific position
(which in any case was an emergent view at this time, only in fact being
signaled by the title of the book, which was all I knew of it, given that the
book had not even been completed). But what I did know was that for the
previous two years I had been recurrently breathing the fresh air of a
philosophy milieu that primarily studied the world and human existence, as opposed to there being a primary engagement with concepts and language, and I also knew that within this milieu Nick was at the centre
of the process of breaking open outsights about intent and matter (a process in the Spinozist, study-of-substance tradition). So, as this plan for an encounter
between Williamson and Land came into focus I was very much aware of the
astonishing gap there was between them, and simultaneously was aware that,
whatever might perhaps be wrong with Nick’s views, the philosophers with which
he was in alliance made Wittgenstein’s approach look deeply attenuated and perhaps
even reactionary.
But what was
striking about this plan was not just that in advance you could sense a kind of poignantly shocking
failure of communication that would be involved. It was also (and inseparably)
that it felt very emphatically that support should be given at this time to
Williamson, because he had just become part of the famous “Swansea Three:” three tutors who had been unjustly removed from the
philosophy department for exposing a plagiarism scandal,
and who were now giving their courses in a pub near the university, and in a
makeshift hut on the campus (the two Wittgenstein camps in effect tore
themselves apart, but, having held their ground in the face of the wrath of the head of the department, Colwyn and the other two tutors were re-instated a year
later as as a result of an independent enquiry led by an arbiter from outside the
university).
In April a group of six people from Warwick philosophy department (Nick and five students) set out in a mini-bus to go to Swansea. The event was
going to be at a pub called The Rhyddings, which was where Colwyn and another
member of ‘the three’ had been teaching (this pub was a quarter of a mile down
the hill from the Uplands Tavern, and about the same distance further up the
same hill from the house where I had lived for two years, on Bryn Road).
We parked the minibus near to the pub. It was a cloudy day, but I think there was enough light left for a view of the sea, and perhaps there was also a glimpse of the green expanse of Singleton Park, by the university. It was good to be back in Swansea, but having arrived in the pub I was rapidly experiencing a distance or differential of an extraordinary kind. I felt an immense affection for the Swansea philosophy milieu - because it had helped me to return to university, and because rhizomatically it was of course a place of all kinds of philosophical thought - but at the same time the dominant Wittgensteinianism was a kind of grey attenuation of thought which it was not very pleasant to encounter. Given that I was studying philosophy and literature this differential was in a sense between, on the one hand, Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Nietzsche and Deleuze, and on the other, Wittgenstein and other figures from 'state philosophy' (a neutralised,deadened modality of philosophy). Colywn's paper about Wittgenstein's article ended (my memory is that this paper was intelligent, and in some ways witty, but at depth was profoundly dull and inconsequential). And then the full, remarkable surrealism of the evening exploded, opening up another differential - one which is perhaps best described as the distance between the first of the other zones and another which is just to the side of it, in the form of an ultracharged, calmly 'raging' critique of the idea of a separate dimension of 'mind' or 'the spirit,' where this invokes both the immanence-and-flows of matter, and a complex 'zero' (a zero relating to the acceptance that all things die, and that everything is immanently interfused, and very emphatically relating to the advocacy of an implacable negation of establishment values). (this detached, semi-delerial state of hyper-critique is, in effect, Bataille/Artaud transmutated as Landianism). I wasn't at all surprised by what happened next (because I knew the philosophical work that Nick was doing), but it nonetheless made the differential more starkly perceptible than it had been before.
(The 'conference-in-a-pub' was taking place in an area that was not really separate from the others, but given that in a noisy environment voices don't get far it was probably only the twenty five or thirty members of the audience who heard the papers. But this audience was mostly made up of people whose engagement with philosophy was unlikely to include Bataille: it was a brightly lit, sober space of people who had just been listening to Colywn Williamson talking about Wittgenstein, and who in different ways had enjoyed Colwyn's paper. Afterwards Nick said to me "it wasn't quite the swaying crowd of intoxicated people that I had in mind when you told me about the idea." Nick was joking in saying this, but it probably still revealed that he had erred slightly toward the optimistic. This is the ending of the piece, and although it is more extreme than most of what had gone before, it still provides an impression of the whole).
They want us to fear death so much, but we can inhabit it like vermin, it can be our space, in our violent openness to the sacred death will protect us against their exterminations, driven insane by zero we can knot ourselves into the underworld, communicate through it, cook their heavenly city in our plague.
We can scamper in and out of the maze in a way they cannot understand
during the first weekend of June
at half-past one on Sunday morning
deep in the crypt of the night
together with a fellow voyager in madness
i crossed the line into death
which is called Hell because the police control heaven
***
Melting shells drunk on our inexistence
torched in the flame of the sacred
we trudged through the burnt and blackened swamps of the shallows
testing the edge of the estuary
dripping brimstone from our boots
an immense ocean of annihilation stretched out before us
***
There has been a revolution in hell
Satan hangs gibbeted and rots
wreathed in the howls of anarchy
out there beyond the stars
the cold wind of zero rages without interdiction
Afterwards there was a good-natured, but slightly strained discussion about materialism, and about the question of "the subject" that is assumed by the "I" in the statement "I have a hand." (and of course there would have been consensus that it would it would make sense to say that "I" in this context indicates a being which in part is the hand). However, there was inevitably very little in the discussion which connected to the fact that Nick's paper had been aimed at breaking open a view toward the body without organs, as opposed to the body with organs, and very little about the fact that the starting point in relation to matter had been to refuse to treat it as a direction of the 'inert,' instead treating it as in some way a zone of recurrent 'fluency.' (but in a modality of communication primarily involving intent as opposed to language).The following is the beginning of the piece as it appears in the book, but it is definitely representative of Nick's approach in the earlier phases of the paper:
"To revert to a naive question, what 'is' matter? Is it possible that we could receive a message that could respond to this interrogation?"
But even if the discussion was limited, it was not quite the case that no affinity was shown. Once it was all over, one of the undergraduates said he had enjoyed Nick's paper, and he invited everyone over to his house on the Gower peninsula.
Outside the pub it was now raining. My friend from Swansea philosophy department said he did not feel like going over to the peninsula. The 'riffs' giving a background tonality to the moment were from the dark, challenging edge of the pop-rock ethos of freedom. Instead of "she just can't be chained" and "not for the proud man apart" there were other half-remembered refrains that seemed all in some way to be about an immense ocean, an ocean that I know I did not really perceive as being an ocean of annihilation (it was something more extraordinary than annihilation).
The mini-bus was being driven by a philosophy MA student called Joan Broadhurst (at this time she was in the process of editing an edition of the Warwick Journal of Philosophy which was called Deleuze and the Transcendental Unconscious). Joan followed the car of the man who had invited us to his house. After travelling for about five miles, we arrived at a house which was about a mile beyond the start of "the Gower" (as it is called), and which was on a narrow lane on the southern side of the peninsula.
In terms of its overall tonality, the group in the mini-bus was a light-hearted collection of individuals who in different ways - and to different degrees - had been swept away into a process of getting beyond ordinary reality. There were two women and four men. One of the women was from the USA, and so was one of the men - everyone else was from Britain. There were no close relationships in the group, and with the exception of Nick, I think that the recent experiences of most of its individuals had probably been relatively conventional: for instance, this was likely to be true in relation to psychotropic substances - there probably had not been much experience of halucinogens.
However, the night was not in going in the direction of us taking LSD, or any other substance that would customarily be regarded as a halucinogen. The reason why an overall account of the the group has been included is that what happened next has always seemed to be an exemplary moment of group behaviour.
We got into the house (which I think was shared by by several students) and sat down in the living room. Our host offered us some punch from a party which had taken place the night before, but after a short while there was a feeling that if we had been at the house for the party it might have been a good thing to be there, but that as it was, the intensity of the evening was dropping.
We had been told that the house was near the sea, and that you just had to walk downhill through a wood to get to a bay. Somebody suggested that we could walk down through the wood to the sea. And to my astonishment (given that it was raining outside) everyone enthusiastically agreed. Our host - who was tired from the party the night before - said he would not come with us, but said we just had to climb over the wire fence at the back of the garden and keep walking.
As everyone got over the fence in the darkness and in the rain (which was 'steady' rather than a downpour) I remember feeling very glad that I was in a group that was prepared to do this. For myself, this was exactly what I would have wanted to do, but it seemed extremely surprising that everyone there was wholeheartedly committed to the plan. But I knew that the act in some way was a direct continuation of the evening: instead of shrinking back from 'the elements' (matter) we were going out into them. The members of the group had been caught up into the joy of a kind of wild freedom in relation to conventional behaviour, but it was more specific than this: instead of shrinking back from 'the elements' (matter) we were going out into them, and the conclusion of Nick's paper had been about a journey to the sea. At some level we were going toward the ocean as a way of trying to perceive beyond the surface of matter.
For a while what took place were the kinds of things that might have been expected. Half way down the slope we had to get over another fence, which was not easy. At one point we blundered into what was someone's garden, and were confronted with an an angry figure coming toward us with a torch (Peter, the student from the U.S.A. called out "we're from the University of Warwick" which struck me as both extremely funny and simultaneously as perfect for defusing the situation).
Eventually we came out of the wood onto a lane which was sloping to the right, and which led almost immediately to a small bay. The tide was out, and we walked to the edge of the sea, with a line of cliffs two hundred yards to our left. We stood at the point where the waves were fanning out onto the sand, and looked out at the ocean. And this might have become the point where the exhileration of what we were doing began to fade (we had reached the empirical ocean, but with the rain still falling this wasnt a time for standing and perceiving).
But we were lucky. We noticed there was a dark patch in the cliffs, and wondered if it was a cave. And - somewhat to my surprise - this dark area did turn out to be a tall, shallow cave which gave shelter from the rain, and had places where it was possible for everyone to sit. Nick rolled a joint, and smoking the grass rapidly added to the boost which had come from getting out of the rain.
It can be asked at this point, what was this ocean at the level of the virtual-real within the group? In a sense it was primarily matter - it was the face of matter we had chosen to look at (we were looking downwards and outwards, as opposed to upwards; as opposed to looking toward the face of matter which is the sky - and we were looking toward fluidity). But it was also the case that it was matter being grasped both as chaotic, creative matrix - a kind of haunted emptiness which as such was also in some way a world of intent - and simultaneously was being grasped as containing worlds which were at a fundamentally higher level than that of ordinary reality. At this time I had just read Bataille quoting a passage by Nietzsche in which he muses about the currents of intent which run through the human world, and says "must there not be an ocean into which all these rivers run?" And this idea of an as-yet-unreached, but already-existing higher level of matter was what Nick Land was working towards through the idea of 'the matrix' (alongside Bataille he had been reading William Gibson, and Gibson had by now already become the name for the main direction in which he was moving).
This was therefore a cybergothic ocean, and not just in the flailing, nihiist sense opened up by the phrase 'ocean of annihilation' (this phrase emerges from an advocacy of critique and from an only minimally-focused attempt to understand Deleuze's idea of the body without organs). Most fundamentally it was cybergothic in that it was immanently futural, was inclusive of technology (there was a continuum of nature, with technology as an aspect of matter), and was profoundly haunted by anomalous forces.
To explain what is specifically meant here by the anomalous - or what is in question in this context - it is necessary to point out that that Nick had opened a doorway through fiction, and to point out that the fictions with which he engaged most intensely were always either gothic or inclusive of anomalous, non-human entities. This is obviously the case with Lovecraft's stories, but it is also the case with the Neuromancer trilogy, with its 'loa' who populate cyberspace, and with its central figure, Neuromancer/Wintermute.
As has been pointed out already, Nick had been pulled to one side, in relation to the direction of the Future (the direction of the outside in which he was looking was far too gothic), but the opening of the doorway (a doorway leading out of ordinary reality) was an achievement which was more than just his own direction of departure. For instance, a few months earlier Joan Broadhurst and myself had considered the idea of a philosophical conference about Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. Peake's work is in fact an important issue in the immediate context, but in terms of directions in the outside this moment of taking up his work as a lens for seeing the world seems in retrospect to be an attempt to plot a direction closer to the southward outside, and simultaneously seems like a forensic indication of Nick's failed process of navigation (although Peake's direction is a little nearer to transcendental-south there are very few writers who are better examples of entrapment in a beyond-ordinary-reality location (in every case it is different, but such locations always involve an excessive focus on power, or control)).
At this time I had probably only smoked grass on seven or eight occasions. I dont remember feeling perturbed by the onset of the drug (I should add that marijuana itself also has a marked tendency to take you to places other than transcendental south, in contrast with psilocybe mushrooms, whose overall tendency is far more southward), but I know that I was rapidly aware that my perceptions and thinking were in some sense heightened.
And as we walked back up the lane from the beach, I looked over at Nick, who was walking up the hill, slightly hunched over, and I saw him as a Mervyn Peake illustration of a ghoul, an illustration that I perceived as being a Gormenghast image. There in fact are no ghouls in the Gormenghast trilogy, but this was how I saw Nick. There was a lightness and even an affection about the illustration - but the picture was of a ghoul. And given that Nick's joy as a philosopher was excessively bound up with the thought of destruction (the destruction of subjectified, reactive human existence, and the destruction of capitalism by the acceleration of capitalism) to the exclusion of the directions in which he needed to be looking, there is no doubt that this was a moment of seeing. And the subtlety is striking: Mervyn Peake's plight was the same as Nick's, although Peake's direction of departure was slightly further south; and there is also the forensic precision of the ghoul coming directly from an early Lovecraft story (which I had read a few months before), where the central character, Randolph Carter, has a friend who has departed into another dimension of the world, and has become a ghoul (and it should be added that in the story Carter's friend seems to be happy with his new form).
In taking the road (instead of going back through the woods) we were on a route that none of us knew. It was still raining, and the thought of being lost in the dark and the rain was worrying. After half a mile we arrived at a T junction and turned left. And then we arrived at another left turn, and - given that we still did not recognise anything - we were left concerned that we might be about to go in a circle. I realised that we had not passed a left-turn on the initial road from the beach, and that therefore we would be either going towards the van, or would be exploring a dead-end, in order to rule it out. After a discussion (some people wanted to take the other direction), we took the left turn, and in a few hundred yards we saw the minibus, parked outside the house we had briefly visited.
We all piled into the vehicle, and Joan - who had not drunk and had not smoked any of the grass - decided she would drive half the distance, and then get some sleep in the car park of a motorway service station. I was sitting behind the passenger seat, and watched the initial phase of the journey, as Joan went down the hill toward the Mumbles. But given that I was extremely stoned, and everything I was seeing was defamiliarised, it didnt seem to make sense to attempt to be a navigator for the journey (and having arrived on the main road along the sea-front to Swansea the task was simply to follow signs to the motorway).
I was elated that I had apparently helped in the process of getting back to the van. But the only reason to mention this - no doubt somewhat pathetic - satisfaction is that this state (along with being tired) probably helped to smooth away any last 'edgy' or perturbed quality on the part of the effect of the grass. My attention had been focused downwards, and had been taken a tiny bit more toward the gothic side of the unknown than would normally have been the case, but I was now calmly in flight, functioning without neurosis.
There had been two jolts. There had been the fear of being lost on a wet night, and there had been the marijuana (there had also been a kind of jolt earlier, in that Nick's paper had very definitely been an attempt to knock a hole into ordinary reality). And I was also in Swansea, at night - and, if nothing else, night in Swansea was a 'place' which had some intense depths in relation to my memories.
A quotation from a fantasy novel came into my mind, and I attributed it incorrectly to Mervyn Peake, and as a result of the mis-attribution I ended up with an image of Countess Gertrude and her 'retinue' of white cats. I was half-aware that the train of thought I had followed had in a sense gone wrong, but I did not attempt to go back: at least the place at whch I had arrived was interesting. I now had the enigmatic image of Gertrude and her cats in my mind, with no specific quotation involved, but the following can be quoted to give a sense of this multi-species 'figure' within the world of Gormenghast -
"half asleep and half aware: with the awareness of anger, the detachment of trance. A furlong of white cats trails after her. A bullfinch has a nest in her red hair. She is the Countess Gertrude of huge clay."
I was not following a line of thought, and I let go of the image.
My eyes were closed, and I found that I was seeing something that looked a little like a circuit board. It seemed to be made out of metal or a metallic-looking plastic, and the rectilinear patterns that were cut into its surface formed shapes that were like the circuitries on a computer's motherboard. The object had a metallic precision which was faintly reminiscent of jewelery, but at the same time there was a 'throwaway,' unimpressive quality about its lines which made it look a bit like a child's plastic labryinth game, in which a metal ball is rolled around through the maze. However, what was impressive about the object was that it remained constant. For a few seconds it was simply there, so that I could look at it in detail.
For me this experience was striking partly because I had never until that moment experienced the drug-induced phenomenon that is referred to as 'visuals' (a phenomenon which is separate from hallucinations, because you do not believe the object is there, and which also tends to be two-dimensional and in some sense 'geometrical'). But the experience did not stop at this. As the minibus went past, in turn, the two places where the earlier experiences had occurred (when I had been twenty five, and when I had been five, at the Dragon Hotel) what was taking place deepened twice over, with movement being added to the visual aspect, and with the simultaneous appearance of sound.
At the level of sight I was suddenly seeing four, symetrical shapes made out of radiating coloured lines (arranged regularly in a square array), each one different from the others - although they were all effectively circular - and each one rotating around its central point. There was a bright, techno-futural intricacy about this visual array which was breathtaking (I felt I had never seen anything like it).
And at the same time I was hearing a song, a song which in tonality was very emphatically the opposite of futural, although somehow there was a lightness - or a quality of playfulness - about this other tonality. The song was being sung by several male voices, and both musically and in style of chant-singing delivery it had the form of a kind of swirling medieval plainsong. It was a refrain on every level, in that it repeated a phrase four times, and then started again, but although the first and second repetitions of the phrase were almost exact musical repetitions, the third went high melodically, and the fourth was different again, emphasising the sounds differently, drawing them out into across more time, and ending the whole sequence on a rising note that changed the emphasis of the concluding word, and the sound of its second syllable. Without music or musical notation it is very hard to give an impression of the song, but these were its words, transcribed in a way which shows the emphasis in the final line:
in through the darkness
in through the darkness
in through the darkness
in through the dark ness
There was an intrinsic though indeterminate sense of a place or world (a domain that seemed also to be inseparable from a state of being) which would be reached in going "in through the darkness." This place was primarily located laterally, and a little bit downward, and at one point this place seemed to be to the northeast or east (in the direction of the big hill above Swansea, on its eastern side) but at another point it also had a quality of being below me, as if - and this is the image that came to my mind at the time - the monks of Candy Island to the west were occupying an ethereal terrain beneath the planet which extended eastward beneath Swansea, and from there were inviting me to enter their world.
What was taking place gave an intense impression of intelligence, but a fundamental aspect of what was striking about this impression was that the intelligence did not feel like my own. And this was not even primarily because I had never had an ability to visualise four rotating Mandelbrot mandalas in high-resolution detail (or anything similar): it was mostly because of the distinctly eerie cogency and artistic effectiveness of the musical side of the experience. The entire musical and abstract signature of the refrain seemed to have no connection at all to my own ways of feeling and thinking, at any level, from the quotidian to the 'heightened.'
It should be added that there was distinctive feeling of 'thin-ness' about the voices who were singing, a feeling of a sophistication and subtlety that in fact all along was lacking in intensity or vitality - as if the voices came from a denuded or trapped existence that it is possible to imagine might pertain recurrently within the social worlds of monastic religious orders (and this thin-ness was in some way finding expression in the close-harmony and medieval plainsong of the music).
And yet, although the thin-ness itself was an irreducible quality of the voices I was hearing, the feeling in relation to the monastic plainsong was that this was pure humour, and had nothing at all to do with the 'place' which I was being enjoined to go towards by the song. I didn't take the image of the monks of Candy Island seriously, and the monastic tonality of the message just seemed to be joie de vivre.
This 'lightness' (together with the music - the refrain) was a main aspect of the cognition involved. But the most intense aspect of the intelligence was not just in the singular subtlety of the statement made in each line of the refrain, but was also in the obvious cogency of this statement on some of its primary levels. Firstly, whatever else was being stated (and the final, anomalous aspect of the statement was being assisted by spatial visualisation in terms of the 'place' toward which I was being beckoned, within the idea of the experience), it was through the sensory darkness of having my eyes closed that the entire experience was occuring (and it needs to be said that the geometrical patterns were coloured lines moving on a black background), and secondly, what was happening was taking place at night, in the same way as the two previous experiences in Swansea had taken place at night. It would seem that in some sense, as Tao Te Ching says, what is necessary is "knowing the white, and nurturing the black." (though it must added that what in the end is always fundamental if you are travelling "through the darkness" toward Love-and-Freedom is to travel out through the darkness...).
The whole experience lasted for around forty five minutes. New geometrical arrays kept appearing: after the first few minutes the four-fold division of my visual field came to an end, but the moving, coloured patterns became more intricate rather than less. The song, however, was a constant - it was a refrain, and it simply refrained itself.
At no stage did I believe that an actual process of being 'beckoned' was taking place. And nor did I seriously entertain this idea either at the time, or in the weeks and months afterwards. It was a strikingly anomalous mental event - and this characterisation seemed to be as far as one could go in accurately assessing it.
It was true that there was a context for the experience. I had already discovered that if I stopped thinking and listened to the engines of planes and coaches I was likely to hear music. On a coach in New Zealand I had once had a 'total recall' experience of hearing the record "Fox on the Run," and on a plane I had on one occasion had an experience of hearing what seemed to be sections from a Mozart symphony (I had not listened to much classical music, and I never became clear about what exactly it was that I had heard). The deep base of large engines seemed to be a kind of doorway for my auditory imagination. But the experience on the mini-bus was on another level again - it still stood out as an anomaly.
After travelling for around fifty miles we stopped at a service station. I bought some food, using a checque. I had always had a tendency to produce a signature which looked different from the one on my card, producing a scrawl that would occasionally be questioned by the person checking it. On this occasion I found that I was able to create a signature of exactly the same kind as the one on the card. And after this it turned out that the nervous tendency in writing my name had completely gone: which is to say that after the Swansea trip I could always calmly let go and produce a flowing version of my signature.This change continually pointed back to its source - it was a kind of reminder that had been left with me.
Overall, it would be right be right to say that the memory of the experience became the thought that in some way a channel of communication had perhaps been opened up, where this channel was maybe in some way a channel toward nascent abilities of envisaging and action which were more creative and less neurotic than their accustomed equivalents in ordinary experience, but where it could not be completely ruled out that it involved actual encounters with anomalous beings that were outside of me.
*
The mini-bus leaves the service station, heading toward Coventry. It is 1991. There are two points that must be made in relation to this trip to Swansea, before moving on to wider issues.
The first is that it would be right to say that the group on this trip - or philosophy journey - did extremely well in relation to openness to non-conventional actions, and, most of all, in relation to openness to the unknown. And it would also be right to say that it did equally well in terms of maintaining an element of sobriety. Joan's achievement in staying un-intoxicated meant that everything was able at each point to flow forward, so that what took place did not simply reach a bleak 'crunch-point' of excess.
The second point is that Nick Land did crucial work in focusing attention in the direction of the transcendentally unknown, and is that this specific openness - and encouragement toward this openness - was constitutive of his work and general 'way of being' at Warwick, meaning that it was possible for me to treat the anomalous event which had occurred with a relaxed, un-disturbed attitude, and one which was open to all possibilities. Whatever were the problems with the specific directions in which Nick moved in going into the outside (and, connectedly, whatever were the problems with his fixated, cheerfully 'ghoulish' focus on a kind of hyper-charged critique) at least Nick was a practitioner of a fundamentally non-neurotic strategy of openness to the unknown. The possibility, for instance, that contact might have been made with a disturbingly sophisticated domain of anomalous entities (with a questionable intent in relation to their fellow beings - humans) would not have been met with either disbelief or anxiety. On the contrary it would have been met with a kind of feral delight - as a sign that there was perhaps an increased chance of escaping from the horror of ordinary human existence.
This meant that I was being assisted at Warwick in an initial training in metamorphics. In modernism the system of reason-and-revelation gives people fear of insanity as a primary modality, but then also - if the situation becomes sufficiently intense - goes into effect as fear of 'evil' forces, or of 'demonic' beings. The healthy consensus in the main Warwick philosophy-milieu at this time was not just that the metaphysics of the second aspect of this system was all control-motivated nonsense (a blocked metaphysics which controls people through fear), it was also that in relation to mental events the perturbingly anomalous was something that should be encountered not with anxiety but with fascination, and with relief that something at last was happening.
There are many distinctions which must now be made. Not least, the distinction between the different kinds of 'something' which can happen (it will be noticed that the affect of the earlier experiences described in this section is not the same as the high-subtlety 'thinness' of the concluding Swansea experience).
However, the drawing out of distinctions must initially be centred on the question that is best posed by the phrase 'visions-at-night.' Whatever else had taken place, in 1991 in Swansea I had been jolted back to a way of being which for a few months in 1987 had become the primary tonality of my life.
The basis of this issue is the planet, and, it is the rhythms of our life on the planet - in particular, the recurrent rhythm between a greater impacting during the day of the concerns of ordinary-reality, and a difference and diminishment that occurs in the fabric of ordinary reality during waking hours at night (this is not yet to speak about what takes place during sleep). And here the main point is that it can be exceptionally valuable to spend time in a state that can be called 'inhabiting the night,' though, in a way where the value is that of a phase which leads beyond it, to a lucidity in relation to the planet and our rhythms, a lucidity which both brings night back together with day, and leaves us in a form of existence where at most times it is likely to be better to be in the worlds of wakefulness during the day, and in the worlds of sleep during the night.
The first specific quality of the night (and this is true even of the urban or city night) is that it directs people toward the unknown. Human beings suffer a kind of endemic fear of the night which is always at a certain level a metaphysical fear, but if you start to enjoy the night as one modality of the planet the fear can simply vanish, leaving only a sense of the transcendental unknown (that which made the fear possible in the first place). The second quality is that the night directs people toward the 'haptic' - toward a listening and feeling into the surrounding world through senses other than sight. This waking of 'haptic vision' is a movement toward a perception of the spheroambient world that is the planet, and therefore, as such, is a waking of of attention in the direction of the transcendental. And it carries with it a certain necessary aspect of charged alertness, because it starts from (and carries with it) the state of night-attention that is bound up with fear of the empirical unknown. For instance, in a dark night-time expanse you focus more with the other senses, and you listen into what you hear and feel to catch the intent of what you are encountering.
Something which is not directly specific to the night - but which is also crucial here - is the fact that the recurrent human rhythm of being awake through the day leaves people more inclined to let go toward the World at night. It would be right to say that this is because tiredness deprives neurosis of the energy it needs to function, but a better way of putting this is that tiredness takes people a step closer to what gets called 'trance,' and this greater openness to a heightened state can combine with night's power to initiate a haptic awareness of the world around us. There is a genuine awareness here of the fundamental need to let go and perceive - and it is this which explains, in part, why people can want to prolong the night, and how they can behave in a way which is radically outside their ways of thinking during the day (and even sometimes in opposition to these ways of thinking). The letting go is connected to an awareness of the transcendental, and is also connected to an awareness that ordinary reality is a blocking-off of the transcendental (however faint and fugitive these two forms of awareness might be).
All of this can then take the transmutated form of prolonging the night through the use of psyschotropic substances. But even though such developments can be very effective, it remains the case that all of this remains a phase on the way toward waking Love-and-Freedom. And it is not even the case that the question of indulgent behaviour is ultimately the most important issue here. What is truly fundamental is that night comes to be seen as another sublime aspect of the planet alongside day (and therefore not as intrinsically fearful), and that day comes to be seen clearly not just as sublime - the same as night - but also as a locus of the transcendental unknown. We need to be serenely at home in the night, and there needs to be a charged quality of the unknown about the day.
Indulgent behaviour can then be combated not simply because it is indulgence, but because it is getting in the way of the escape toward the Future, and perceiving the Future gives the energy necessary for overcoming the indulgence.
Most of the time the urge to prolong the night through the use of psychotropics involves very little awareness of the transcendental, or involves a fugitive intense awareness that is rapidly followed by a collapse. These two cases apply almost all of the time to the use of alcohol. (it will be noticed that on the occasion described in Swansea in 1987 I drank very little, and then stopped drinking, assisted by having almost no money at the time). The situation with stimulants such as speed, and with hallucinogens such as LSD (and with these in combination with each other) is very different, and whole structures for inhabiting the night can be created out of these elements. These structures are places where views toward the outside (and sometimes the south-outside, if good navigation and good luck are sufficiently in effect) can be very much constitutive of what takes place within them (though it should be added immediately that, of all the options in this context, it would almost certainly be best to take psylocybin mushrooms at night, and leave the house, or not be in a house in the first place).
And yet, such structures are intrinsically domains of indulgent behaviour. The phase of inhabiting the night is valuable, but only if it is a phase, and what emphatically is best of all is simply to by-pass the world of these structures.
For me, the process of moving on from this phase began with walks through the night countryside on lanes that stretch from Coventry to Leamington, where I discovered the joy of walking at night - where I discovered, that is, the joy of the encounter with the night-aspect of the planet (and this aspect intrinsically involves a more focused encounter with the entirety of the outside of the planet, as opposed to there just being a focused encounter with the sun, and perhaps the moon). But inseparably it began with being in a place - Leamington - which was out in the countryside in comparison with Coventry, and which I loved in its daytime aspect (the brightness of the white walls of the buildings was involved in this).
The last phase of me living in the cities was the phase of inhabiting the night, a phase which in fact continued into the first year in Leamington. But although I had many intensely valuable experiences during this time (a phase which in a strong sense began with the starting point of this book, in 1993) it was fundamentally necessary to break free. For most of the final two and a half years I was living with Tess (and our shared 'visions-at-night' experiences were in almost all ways the most valuable of all), and it was a mutual impetus of departure from this structure of existence which brought about the beginnings of a change, at which point my dreams began to show a pronounced wakening, in the sense that a hauntingly and sublimely powerful story about a group escaping from ordinary reality began to appear in them.
And then, having to some extent integrated day and night as both worlds of the transcendental unknown, and having gone a lot closer toward sobriety, it was in the middle of the day at Harbury Lake that the faculty of dreaming really went into full effect. The 'chancy,' very unfocused dreaming that had been natural to me as a child now at last came back to me as a faculty of dreaming-up worlds and stories (and new, heightened, Futural forms of existence). For many years it had been gone in almost any form, but now it was back, and was focused - focused along philosophical and micropolitical lines.
It had been crucial both to stop being afraid of the night (to perceive the night as another aspect or 'face' of the planet), and for the transcendentally unknown to become visible through the world of the day. But the method I had used for doing this had been so intense that it seems to have led to a radical counterbalance, so that (despite the advantages of a sober encounter with the night) the primary shifts were now taking place during the day. I had gone toward the countryside (to reach the planet), and overall, to reach the Futural-Outside I had gone not just toward the countryside, but toward the middle of the day, and toward sunlight.
And yet the story cannot be concluded here. This is because far more has been involved in this section than the question of the faculty of dreaming. The faculties of lucidity and of feeling have also been at the forefront, in connection with specific states of sublime astonishment, and along with these there has been the question of responses to death, together with the question of encounters with 'the anomalous.'
The state of sublime astonishment I experienced at the Dragon Hotel was finally taken over an upward threshold - so that it became much more intense, and much more clear - when in September of 2000 I was sitting, at night, on a hill looking out across Leamington, having taken psylocybe mushrooms (the sublime in the form of the planet visible through the night and the lights of Leamington, as opposed to the night and the lights of Swansea). The joy and heightened perception of this moment was at another level, in comparison with the earlier experience, although it is only now that it has become clear that the Leamington experience was of the same kind as what had happened when I was five (and I only really began to think about the Dragon Hotel experience when, three years ago, I was staying with my girlfriend in a block of flats in a suburb of Aosta in northern Italy, and I looked out at night from the balcony at a road and a roundabout, lit up by streetlights).
But there are two other 'points of conclusion,' along with Leamington in the late summer of 2000. The first is the event that was recounted at the end of Section 34. In 2005, after an experience of danger the day before, in broad daylight in a forest in the Sierra de la Demanda mountains the idea of The Corridor arrived, which is to say that a whole 'mythos' started to arrive (a mythos which is constructed primarily along the lines of transcendental reality, and which is fundamentally micropolitical, in that it is all about groups, rather than individuals). Whatever the aesthetic value of this virtual-real world might be, the faculty of dreaming was very definitely moving forward again. And furthermore, this was taking place in the countryside (in fact this was a semi-wilderness), in daylight, and in a state of sobriety. (the event in 2000 stands out as an exception in relation to these experiences, a reminder both of the profundity of the night, and of the fact that if any psychotropic is to be chosen for reaching the sublime in this way it is probably best to choose psylocybin). The concluding point here is that a better response to death was beginning to appear, in comparison with ritual and sentimentality (this response is to stop regarding death as something which only happens to others, and to start turning on all the lights of your life, the way you would if you knew you were fighting on the very edge of your death).
The second event is what happened when for the first time I set out to walk on my own through a semi-wilderness - specifically to walk from north to south through the Pyrenees.
It was the summer of 2004, and I had been walking for three days, having just crossed a pass that was the border between France and Spain. However, the main bulk of the chain of mountains was still in front of me, and in starting to go up the opposite slope from the pass I had no path to follow, and I had no large-scale map (the only large-scale map I had with me started 10 miles further south: up until then I had been using a map of the whole of the Pyrenees, together with a well-marked path).
Having struggled up a slope to a point where I realised I could not continue (it was a scree slope which became cliffs further up), I returned into the steep forest below. It was still only the middle of the day, but arriving at an area of grass, I decided to rest, and taking off my backpack I lay down on the grass. I was feeling disappointed by the failure in trying to find a way up the mountain, but the place was very beautiful, and I think that as I fell asleep I was absorbing its atmosphere.
I dreamed that I was seeing Swansea as if I was arriving from the east, by train (although somehow I had a view ahead). I was five miles away, alongside the sea (this is not in fact where the railway-line runs) and in some way the view of Swansea gave me a feeling of a mild but genuine positivity. (this dream has turned out since to be have been a 'precursor,' of a whole sequence of dreams in which there has been an anomalous, seemingly invisible city constructed on the land and out beneath the ocean, where this anomalous city is in the place from which I was viewing Swansea in the initial dream, that is, in a scurf terrain five miles away).
Then the dream changed, and I was dreaming that I was seeing the place where I was sleeping, and in the sky to the south (and a little to the southeast) there was a kind of white sky-doorway (just above the mountain horizon), as if this was the beginning of a horizontal, translucent passageway, with the feeling of this being the start of a short, bright passageway. And with this dream-image there was a female presence who had the quality of leaning in from a more intense dimension of existence. I had the impression that I knew this woman: the impression was emphatically that she was an ordinary human being, but at a higher level than that of ordinary reality, and was that I knew her, even though I could not 'place' her, so that I could remember who she was. Overall, the experience was of an intense, bright joy that came from my awareness of the female presence, and from the view of the path within the sky.
What happened immediately afterwards cannot be regarded as that remarkable. I decided to cross the mountains at the place where I had seen the 'sky-path,' and I found that this took me easily to a narrow quartz-covered mountain-top, from which I was able to climb down into a high, spectacularly beautiful valley, with two small lakes in it (and from the vantage of the quartz-mountain I could see that the initial route was indeed one that I could not have taken). What is primarily important, however, is that two directions in the anomalous were opened up within the dream experience that has just been described. Nothing can be proved here (it is up to each one of us to prove for themselves the nature of our situation in connection with the transcendental) - but the feeling is that in 1991 a low-intensity but very sophisticated channel had been opened up, pulling me in some sense in a downward and lateral direction that was not sublime and planetary like the view, when I was five, from the Dragon Hotel. And only in 2004 did everything get separated out again, so that the 1991 anomalous direction was fundamentally shown as not in itself transcendental-south, and so that the direction of Love-and-Freedom was made visible - a direction which had now focused itself upward, and consisted of the sky (but as part of the planet, because the path went laterally through it), of the anomalous in the form of a woman who had gone over an upward-threshold, and of the abstract, both in that the sky within the dream was not straightforwardly matter, and in that the higher intensity involved in the threshold-crossing fundamentally consisted of a state of intent.
* * *
We parked the minibus near to the pub. It was a cloudy day, but I think there was enough light left for a view of the sea, and perhaps there was also a glimpse of the green expanse of Singleton Park, by the university. It was good to be back in Swansea, but having arrived in the pub I was rapidly experiencing a distance or differential of an extraordinary kind. I felt an immense affection for the Swansea philosophy milieu - because it had helped me to return to university, and because rhizomatically it was of course a place of all kinds of philosophical thought - but at the same time the dominant Wittgensteinianism was a kind of grey attenuation of thought which it was not very pleasant to encounter. Given that I was studying philosophy and literature this differential was in a sense between, on the one hand, Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Nietzsche and Deleuze, and on the other, Wittgenstein and other figures from 'state philosophy' (a neutralised,deadened modality of philosophy). Colywn's paper about Wittgenstein's article ended (my memory is that this paper was intelligent, and in some ways witty, but at depth was profoundly dull and inconsequential). And then the full, remarkable surrealism of the evening exploded, opening up another differential - one which is perhaps best described as the distance between the first of the other zones and another which is just to the side of it, in the form of an ultracharged, calmly 'raging' critique of the idea of a separate dimension of 'mind' or 'the spirit,' where this invokes both the immanence-and-flows of matter, and a complex 'zero' (a zero relating to the acceptance that all things die, and that everything is immanently interfused, and very emphatically relating to the advocacy of an implacable negation of establishment values). (this detached, semi-delerial state of hyper-critique is, in effect, Bataille/Artaud transmutated as Landianism). I wasn't at all surprised by what happened next (because I knew the philosophical work that Nick was doing), but it nonetheless made the differential more starkly perceptible than it had been before.
(The 'conference-in-a-pub' was taking place in an area that was not really separate from the others, but given that in a noisy environment voices don't get far it was probably only the twenty five or thirty members of the audience who heard the papers. But this audience was mostly made up of people whose engagement with philosophy was unlikely to include Bataille: it was a brightly lit, sober space of people who had just been listening to Colywn Williamson talking about Wittgenstein, and who in different ways had enjoyed Colwyn's paper. Afterwards Nick said to me "it wasn't quite the swaying crowd of intoxicated people that I had in mind when you told me about the idea." Nick was joking in saying this, but it probably still revealed that he had erred slightly toward the optimistic. This is the ending of the piece, and although it is more extreme than most of what had gone before, it still provides an impression of the whole).
They want us to fear death so much, but we can inhabit it like vermin, it can be our space, in our violent openness to the sacred death will protect us against their exterminations, driven insane by zero we can knot ourselves into the underworld, communicate through it, cook their heavenly city in our plague.
We can scamper in and out of the maze in a way they cannot understand
during the first weekend of June
at half-past one on Sunday morning
deep in the crypt of the night
together with a fellow voyager in madness
i crossed the line into death
which is called Hell because the police control heaven
***
Melting shells drunk on our inexistence
torched in the flame of the sacred
we trudged through the burnt and blackened swamps of the shallows
testing the edge of the estuary
dripping brimstone from our boots
an immense ocean of annihilation stretched out before us
***
There has been a revolution in hell
Satan hangs gibbeted and rots
wreathed in the howls of anarchy
out there beyond the stars
the cold wind of zero rages without interdiction
Afterwards there was a good-natured, but slightly strained discussion about materialism, and about the question of "the subject" that is assumed by the "I" in the statement "I have a hand." (and of course there would have been consensus that it would it would make sense to say that "I" in this context indicates a being which in part is the hand). However, there was inevitably very little in the discussion which connected to the fact that Nick's paper had been aimed at breaking open a view toward the body without organs, as opposed to the body with organs, and very little about the fact that the starting point in relation to matter had been to refuse to treat it as a direction of the 'inert,' instead treating it as in some way a zone of recurrent 'fluency.' (but in a modality of communication primarily involving intent as opposed to language).The following is the beginning of the piece as it appears in the book, but it is definitely representative of Nick's approach in the earlier phases of the paper:
"To revert to a naive question, what 'is' matter? Is it possible that we could receive a message that could respond to this interrogation?"
But even if the discussion was limited, it was not quite the case that no affinity was shown. Once it was all over, one of the undergraduates said he had enjoyed Nick's paper, and he invited everyone over to his house on the Gower peninsula.
Outside the pub it was now raining. My friend from Swansea philosophy department said he did not feel like going over to the peninsula. The 'riffs' giving a background tonality to the moment were from the dark, challenging edge of the pop-rock ethos of freedom. Instead of "she just can't be chained" and "not for the proud man apart" there were other half-remembered refrains that seemed all in some way to be about an immense ocean, an ocean that I know I did not really perceive as being an ocean of annihilation (it was something more extraordinary than annihilation).
The mini-bus was being driven by a philosophy MA student called Joan Broadhurst (at this time she was in the process of editing an edition of the Warwick Journal of Philosophy which was called Deleuze and the Transcendental Unconscious). Joan followed the car of the man who had invited us to his house. After travelling for about five miles, we arrived at a house which was about a mile beyond the start of "the Gower" (as it is called), and which was on a narrow lane on the southern side of the peninsula.
In terms of its overall tonality, the group in the mini-bus was a light-hearted collection of individuals who in different ways - and to different degrees - had been swept away into a process of getting beyond ordinary reality. There were two women and four men. One of the women was from the USA, and so was one of the men - everyone else was from Britain. There were no close relationships in the group, and with the exception of Nick, I think that the recent experiences of most of its individuals had probably been relatively conventional: for instance, this was likely to be true in relation to psychotropic substances - there probably had not been much experience of halucinogens.
However, the night was not in going in the direction of us taking LSD, or any other substance that would customarily be regarded as a halucinogen. The reason why an overall account of the the group has been included is that what happened next has always seemed to be an exemplary moment of group behaviour.
We got into the house (which I think was shared by by several students) and sat down in the living room. Our host offered us some punch from a party which had taken place the night before, but after a short while there was a feeling that if we had been at the house for the party it might have been a good thing to be there, but that as it was, the intensity of the evening was dropping.
We had been told that the house was near the sea, and that you just had to walk downhill through a wood to get to a bay. Somebody suggested that we could walk down through the wood to the sea. And to my astonishment (given that it was raining outside) everyone enthusiastically agreed. Our host - who was tired from the party the night before - said he would not come with us, but said we just had to climb over the wire fence at the back of the garden and keep walking.
As everyone got over the fence in the darkness and in the rain (which was 'steady' rather than a downpour) I remember feeling very glad that I was in a group that was prepared to do this. For myself, this was exactly what I would have wanted to do, but it seemed extremely surprising that everyone there was wholeheartedly committed to the plan. But I knew that the act in some way was a direct continuation of the evening: instead of shrinking back from 'the elements' (matter) we were going out into them. The members of the group had been caught up into the joy of a kind of wild freedom in relation to conventional behaviour, but it was more specific than this: instead of shrinking back from 'the elements' (matter) we were going out into them, and the conclusion of Nick's paper had been about a journey to the sea. At some level we were going toward the ocean as a way of trying to perceive beyond the surface of matter.
For a while what took place were the kinds of things that might have been expected. Half way down the slope we had to get over another fence, which was not easy. At one point we blundered into what was someone's garden, and were confronted with an an angry figure coming toward us with a torch (Peter, the student from the U.S.A. called out "we're from the University of Warwick" which struck me as both extremely funny and simultaneously as perfect for defusing the situation).
Eventually we came out of the wood onto a lane which was sloping to the right, and which led almost immediately to a small bay. The tide was out, and we walked to the edge of the sea, with a line of cliffs two hundred yards to our left. We stood at the point where the waves were fanning out onto the sand, and looked out at the ocean. And this might have become the point where the exhileration of what we were doing began to fade (we had reached the empirical ocean, but with the rain still falling this wasnt a time for standing and perceiving).
But we were lucky. We noticed there was a dark patch in the cliffs, and wondered if it was a cave. And - somewhat to my surprise - this dark area did turn out to be a tall, shallow cave which gave shelter from the rain, and had places where it was possible for everyone to sit. Nick rolled a joint, and smoking the grass rapidly added to the boost which had come from getting out of the rain.
It can be asked at this point, what was this ocean at the level of the virtual-real within the group? In a sense it was primarily matter - it was the face of matter we had chosen to look at (we were looking downwards and outwards, as opposed to upwards; as opposed to looking toward the face of matter which is the sky - and we were looking toward fluidity). But it was also the case that it was matter being grasped both as chaotic, creative matrix - a kind of haunted emptiness which as such was also in some way a world of intent - and simultaneously was being grasped as containing worlds which were at a fundamentally higher level than that of ordinary reality. At this time I had just read Bataille quoting a passage by Nietzsche in which he muses about the currents of intent which run through the human world, and says "must there not be an ocean into which all these rivers run?" And this idea of an as-yet-unreached, but already-existing higher level of matter was what Nick Land was working towards through the idea of 'the matrix' (alongside Bataille he had been reading William Gibson, and Gibson had by now already become the name for the main direction in which he was moving).
This was therefore a cybergothic ocean, and not just in the flailing, nihiist sense opened up by the phrase 'ocean of annihilation' (this phrase emerges from an advocacy of critique and from an only minimally-focused attempt to understand Deleuze's idea of the body without organs). Most fundamentally it was cybergothic in that it was immanently futural, was inclusive of technology (there was a continuum of nature, with technology as an aspect of matter), and was profoundly haunted by anomalous forces.
To explain what is specifically meant here by the anomalous - or what is in question in this context - it is necessary to point out that that Nick had opened a doorway through fiction, and to point out that the fictions with which he engaged most intensely were always either gothic or inclusive of anomalous, non-human entities. This is obviously the case with Lovecraft's stories, but it is also the case with the Neuromancer trilogy, with its 'loa' who populate cyberspace, and with its central figure, Neuromancer/Wintermute.
As has been pointed out already, Nick had been pulled to one side, in relation to the direction of the Future (the direction of the outside in which he was looking was far too gothic), but the opening of the doorway (a doorway leading out of ordinary reality) was an achievement which was more than just his own direction of departure. For instance, a few months earlier Joan Broadhurst and myself had considered the idea of a philosophical conference about Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. Peake's work is in fact an important issue in the immediate context, but in terms of directions in the outside this moment of taking up his work as a lens for seeing the world seems in retrospect to be an attempt to plot a direction closer to the southward outside, and simultaneously seems like a forensic indication of Nick's failed process of navigation (although Peake's direction is a little nearer to transcendental-south there are very few writers who are better examples of entrapment in a beyond-ordinary-reality location (in every case it is different, but such locations always involve an excessive focus on power, or control)).
At this time I had probably only smoked grass on seven or eight occasions. I dont remember feeling perturbed by the onset of the drug (I should add that marijuana itself also has a marked tendency to take you to places other than transcendental south, in contrast with psilocybe mushrooms, whose overall tendency is far more southward), but I know that I was rapidly aware that my perceptions and thinking were in some sense heightened.
And as we walked back up the lane from the beach, I looked over at Nick, who was walking up the hill, slightly hunched over, and I saw him as a Mervyn Peake illustration of a ghoul, an illustration that I perceived as being a Gormenghast image. There in fact are no ghouls in the Gormenghast trilogy, but this was how I saw Nick. There was a lightness and even an affection about the illustration - but the picture was of a ghoul. And given that Nick's joy as a philosopher was excessively bound up with the thought of destruction (the destruction of subjectified, reactive human existence, and the destruction of capitalism by the acceleration of capitalism) to the exclusion of the directions in which he needed to be looking, there is no doubt that this was a moment of seeing. And the subtlety is striking: Mervyn Peake's plight was the same as Nick's, although Peake's direction of departure was slightly further south; and there is also the forensic precision of the ghoul coming directly from an early Lovecraft story (which I had read a few months before), where the central character, Randolph Carter, has a friend who has departed into another dimension of the world, and has become a ghoul (and it should be added that in the story Carter's friend seems to be happy with his new form).
In taking the road (instead of going back through the woods) we were on a route that none of us knew. It was still raining, and the thought of being lost in the dark and the rain was worrying. After half a mile we arrived at a T junction and turned left. And then we arrived at another left turn, and - given that we still did not recognise anything - we were left concerned that we might be about to go in a circle. I realised that we had not passed a left-turn on the initial road from the beach, and that therefore we would be either going towards the van, or would be exploring a dead-end, in order to rule it out. After a discussion (some people wanted to take the other direction), we took the left turn, and in a few hundred yards we saw the minibus, parked outside the house we had briefly visited.
We all piled into the vehicle, and Joan - who had not drunk and had not smoked any of the grass - decided she would drive half the distance, and then get some sleep in the car park of a motorway service station. I was sitting behind the passenger seat, and watched the initial phase of the journey, as Joan went down the hill toward the Mumbles. But given that I was extremely stoned, and everything I was seeing was defamiliarised, it didnt seem to make sense to attempt to be a navigator for the journey (and having arrived on the main road along the sea-front to Swansea the task was simply to follow signs to the motorway).
I was elated that I had apparently helped in the process of getting back to the van. But the only reason to mention this - no doubt somewhat pathetic - satisfaction is that this state (along with being tired) probably helped to smooth away any last 'edgy' or perturbed quality on the part of the effect of the grass. My attention had been focused downwards, and had been taken a tiny bit more toward the gothic side of the unknown than would normally have been the case, but I was now calmly in flight, functioning without neurosis.
There had been two jolts. There had been the fear of being lost on a wet night, and there had been the marijuana (there had also been a kind of jolt earlier, in that Nick's paper had very definitely been an attempt to knock a hole into ordinary reality). And I was also in Swansea, at night - and, if nothing else, night in Swansea was a 'place' which had some intense depths in relation to my memories.
A quotation from a fantasy novel came into my mind, and I attributed it incorrectly to Mervyn Peake, and as a result of the mis-attribution I ended up with an image of Countess Gertrude and her 'retinue' of white cats. I was half-aware that the train of thought I had followed had in a sense gone wrong, but I did not attempt to go back: at least the place at whch I had arrived was interesting. I now had the enigmatic image of Gertrude and her cats in my mind, with no specific quotation involved, but the following can be quoted to give a sense of this multi-species 'figure' within the world of Gormenghast -
"half asleep and half aware: with the awareness of anger, the detachment of trance. A furlong of white cats trails after her. A bullfinch has a nest in her red hair. She is the Countess Gertrude of huge clay."
I was not following a line of thought, and I let go of the image.
My eyes were closed, and I found that I was seeing something that looked a little like a circuit board. It seemed to be made out of metal or a metallic-looking plastic, and the rectilinear patterns that were cut into its surface formed shapes that were like the circuitries on a computer's motherboard. The object had a metallic precision which was faintly reminiscent of jewelery, but at the same time there was a 'throwaway,' unimpressive quality about its lines which made it look a bit like a child's plastic labryinth game, in which a metal ball is rolled around through the maze. However, what was impressive about the object was that it remained constant. For a few seconds it was simply there, so that I could look at it in detail.
For me this experience was striking partly because I had never until that moment experienced the drug-induced phenomenon that is referred to as 'visuals' (a phenomenon which is separate from hallucinations, because you do not believe the object is there, and which also tends to be two-dimensional and in some sense 'geometrical'). But the experience did not stop at this. As the minibus went past, in turn, the two places where the earlier experiences had occurred (when I had been twenty five, and when I had been five, at the Dragon Hotel) what was taking place deepened twice over, with movement being added to the visual aspect, and with the simultaneous appearance of sound.
At the level of sight I was suddenly seeing four, symetrical shapes made out of radiating coloured lines (arranged regularly in a square array), each one different from the others - although they were all effectively circular - and each one rotating around its central point. There was a bright, techno-futural intricacy about this visual array which was breathtaking (I felt I had never seen anything like it).
And at the same time I was hearing a song, a song which in tonality was very emphatically the opposite of futural, although somehow there was a lightness - or a quality of playfulness - about this other tonality. The song was being sung by several male voices, and both musically and in style of chant-singing delivery it had the form of a kind of swirling medieval plainsong. It was a refrain on every level, in that it repeated a phrase four times, and then started again, but although the first and second repetitions of the phrase were almost exact musical repetitions, the third went high melodically, and the fourth was different again, emphasising the sounds differently, drawing them out into across more time, and ending the whole sequence on a rising note that changed the emphasis of the concluding word, and the sound of its second syllable. Without music or musical notation it is very hard to give an impression of the song, but these were its words, transcribed in a way which shows the emphasis in the final line:
in through the darkness
in through the darkness
in through the darkness
in through the dark ness
There was an intrinsic though indeterminate sense of a place or world (a domain that seemed also to be inseparable from a state of being) which would be reached in going "in through the darkness." This place was primarily located laterally, and a little bit downward, and at one point this place seemed to be to the northeast or east (in the direction of the big hill above Swansea, on its eastern side) but at another point it also had a quality of being below me, as if - and this is the image that came to my mind at the time - the monks of Candy Island to the west were occupying an ethereal terrain beneath the planet which extended eastward beneath Swansea, and from there were inviting me to enter their world.
What was taking place gave an intense impression of intelligence, but a fundamental aspect of what was striking about this impression was that the intelligence did not feel like my own. And this was not even primarily because I had never had an ability to visualise four rotating Mandelbrot mandalas in high-resolution detail (or anything similar): it was mostly because of the distinctly eerie cogency and artistic effectiveness of the musical side of the experience. The entire musical and abstract signature of the refrain seemed to have no connection at all to my own ways of feeling and thinking, at any level, from the quotidian to the 'heightened.'
It should be added that there was distinctive feeling of 'thin-ness' about the voices who were singing, a feeling of a sophistication and subtlety that in fact all along was lacking in intensity or vitality - as if the voices came from a denuded or trapped existence that it is possible to imagine might pertain recurrently within the social worlds of monastic religious orders (and this thin-ness was in some way finding expression in the close-harmony and medieval plainsong of the music).
And yet, although the thin-ness itself was an irreducible quality of the voices I was hearing, the feeling in relation to the monastic plainsong was that this was pure humour, and had nothing at all to do with the 'place' which I was being enjoined to go towards by the song. I didn't take the image of the monks of Candy Island seriously, and the monastic tonality of the message just seemed to be joie de vivre.
This 'lightness' (together with the music - the refrain) was a main aspect of the cognition involved. But the most intense aspect of the intelligence was not just in the singular subtlety of the statement made in each line of the refrain, but was also in the obvious cogency of this statement on some of its primary levels. Firstly, whatever else was being stated (and the final, anomalous aspect of the statement was being assisted by spatial visualisation in terms of the 'place' toward which I was being beckoned, within the idea of the experience), it was through the sensory darkness of having my eyes closed that the entire experience was occuring (and it needs to be said that the geometrical patterns were coloured lines moving on a black background), and secondly, what was happening was taking place at night, in the same way as the two previous experiences in Swansea had taken place at night. It would seem that in some sense, as Tao Te Ching says, what is necessary is "knowing the white, and nurturing the black." (though it must added that what in the end is always fundamental if you are travelling "through the darkness" toward Love-and-Freedom is to travel out through the darkness...).
The whole experience lasted for around forty five minutes. New geometrical arrays kept appearing: after the first few minutes the four-fold division of my visual field came to an end, but the moving, coloured patterns became more intricate rather than less. The song, however, was a constant - it was a refrain, and it simply refrained itself.
At no stage did I believe that an actual process of being 'beckoned' was taking place. And nor did I seriously entertain this idea either at the time, or in the weeks and months afterwards. It was a strikingly anomalous mental event - and this characterisation seemed to be as far as one could go in accurately assessing it.
It was true that there was a context for the experience. I had already discovered that if I stopped thinking and listened to the engines of planes and coaches I was likely to hear music. On a coach in New Zealand I had once had a 'total recall' experience of hearing the record "Fox on the Run," and on a plane I had on one occasion had an experience of hearing what seemed to be sections from a Mozart symphony (I had not listened to much classical music, and I never became clear about what exactly it was that I had heard). The deep base of large engines seemed to be a kind of doorway for my auditory imagination. But the experience on the mini-bus was on another level again - it still stood out as an anomaly.
After travelling for around fifty miles we stopped at a service station. I bought some food, using a checque. I had always had a tendency to produce a signature which looked different from the one on my card, producing a scrawl that would occasionally be questioned by the person checking it. On this occasion I found that I was able to create a signature of exactly the same kind as the one on the card. And after this it turned out that the nervous tendency in writing my name had completely gone: which is to say that after the Swansea trip I could always calmly let go and produce a flowing version of my signature.This change continually pointed back to its source - it was a kind of reminder that had been left with me.
Overall, it would be right be right to say that the memory of the experience became the thought that in some way a channel of communication had perhaps been opened up, where this channel was maybe in some way a channel toward nascent abilities of envisaging and action which were more creative and less neurotic than their accustomed equivalents in ordinary experience, but where it could not be completely ruled out that it involved actual encounters with anomalous beings that were outside of me.
*
The mini-bus leaves the service station, heading toward Coventry. It is 1991. There are two points that must be made in relation to this trip to Swansea, before moving on to wider issues.
The first is that it would be right to say that the group on this trip - or philosophy journey - did extremely well in relation to openness to non-conventional actions, and, most of all, in relation to openness to the unknown. And it would also be right to say that it did equally well in terms of maintaining an element of sobriety. Joan's achievement in staying un-intoxicated meant that everything was able at each point to flow forward, so that what took place did not simply reach a bleak 'crunch-point' of excess.
The second point is that Nick Land did crucial work in focusing attention in the direction of the transcendentally unknown, and is that this specific openness - and encouragement toward this openness - was constitutive of his work and general 'way of being' at Warwick, meaning that it was possible for me to treat the anomalous event which had occurred with a relaxed, un-disturbed attitude, and one which was open to all possibilities. Whatever were the problems with the specific directions in which Nick moved in going into the outside (and, connectedly, whatever were the problems with his fixated, cheerfully 'ghoulish' focus on a kind of hyper-charged critique) at least Nick was a practitioner of a fundamentally non-neurotic strategy of openness to the unknown. The possibility, for instance, that contact might have been made with a disturbingly sophisticated domain of anomalous entities (with a questionable intent in relation to their fellow beings - humans) would not have been met with either disbelief or anxiety. On the contrary it would have been met with a kind of feral delight - as a sign that there was perhaps an increased chance of escaping from the horror of ordinary human existence.
This meant that I was being assisted at Warwick in an initial training in metamorphics. In modernism the system of reason-and-revelation gives people fear of insanity as a primary modality, but then also - if the situation becomes sufficiently intense - goes into effect as fear of 'evil' forces, or of 'demonic' beings. The healthy consensus in the main Warwick philosophy-milieu at this time was not just that the metaphysics of the second aspect of this system was all control-motivated nonsense (a blocked metaphysics which controls people through fear), it was also that in relation to mental events the perturbingly anomalous was something that should be encountered not with anxiety but with fascination, and with relief that something at last was happening.
There are many distinctions which must now be made. Not least, the distinction between the different kinds of 'something' which can happen (it will be noticed that the affect of the earlier experiences described in this section is not the same as the high-subtlety 'thinness' of the concluding Swansea experience).
However, the drawing out of distinctions must initially be centred on the question that is best posed by the phrase 'visions-at-night.' Whatever else had taken place, in 1991 in Swansea I had been jolted back to a way of being which for a few months in 1987 had become the primary tonality of my life.
The basis of this issue is the planet, and, it is the rhythms of our life on the planet - in particular, the recurrent rhythm between a greater impacting during the day of the concerns of ordinary-reality, and a difference and diminishment that occurs in the fabric of ordinary reality during waking hours at night (this is not yet to speak about what takes place during sleep). And here the main point is that it can be exceptionally valuable to spend time in a state that can be called 'inhabiting the night,' though, in a way where the value is that of a phase which leads beyond it, to a lucidity in relation to the planet and our rhythms, a lucidity which both brings night back together with day, and leaves us in a form of existence where at most times it is likely to be better to be in the worlds of wakefulness during the day, and in the worlds of sleep during the night.
The first specific quality of the night (and this is true even of the urban or city night) is that it directs people toward the unknown. Human beings suffer a kind of endemic fear of the night which is always at a certain level a metaphysical fear, but if you start to enjoy the night as one modality of the planet the fear can simply vanish, leaving only a sense of the transcendental unknown (that which made the fear possible in the first place). The second quality is that the night directs people toward the 'haptic' - toward a listening and feeling into the surrounding world through senses other than sight. This waking of 'haptic vision' is a movement toward a perception of the spheroambient world that is the planet, and therefore, as such, is a waking of of attention in the direction of the transcendental. And it carries with it a certain necessary aspect of charged alertness, because it starts from (and carries with it) the state of night-attention that is bound up with fear of the empirical unknown. For instance, in a dark night-time expanse you focus more with the other senses, and you listen into what you hear and feel to catch the intent of what you are encountering.
Something which is not directly specific to the night - but which is also crucial here - is the fact that the recurrent human rhythm of being awake through the day leaves people more inclined to let go toward the World at night. It would be right to say that this is because tiredness deprives neurosis of the energy it needs to function, but a better way of putting this is that tiredness takes people a step closer to what gets called 'trance,' and this greater openness to a heightened state can combine with night's power to initiate a haptic awareness of the world around us. There is a genuine awareness here of the fundamental need to let go and perceive - and it is this which explains, in part, why people can want to prolong the night, and how they can behave in a way which is radically outside their ways of thinking during the day (and even sometimes in opposition to these ways of thinking). The letting go is connected to an awareness of the transcendental, and is also connected to an awareness that ordinary reality is a blocking-off of the transcendental (however faint and fugitive these two forms of awareness might be).
All of this can then take the transmutated form of prolonging the night through the use of psyschotropic substances. But even though such developments can be very effective, it remains the case that all of this remains a phase on the way toward waking Love-and-Freedom. And it is not even the case that the question of indulgent behaviour is ultimately the most important issue here. What is truly fundamental is that night comes to be seen as another sublime aspect of the planet alongside day (and therefore not as intrinsically fearful), and that day comes to be seen clearly not just as sublime - the same as night - but also as a locus of the transcendental unknown. We need to be serenely at home in the night, and there needs to be a charged quality of the unknown about the day.
Indulgent behaviour can then be combated not simply because it is indulgence, but because it is getting in the way of the escape toward the Future, and perceiving the Future gives the energy necessary for overcoming the indulgence.
Most of the time the urge to prolong the night through the use of psychotropics involves very little awareness of the transcendental, or involves a fugitive intense awareness that is rapidly followed by a collapse. These two cases apply almost all of the time to the use of alcohol. (it will be noticed that on the occasion described in Swansea in 1987 I drank very little, and then stopped drinking, assisted by having almost no money at the time). The situation with stimulants such as speed, and with hallucinogens such as LSD (and with these in combination with each other) is very different, and whole structures for inhabiting the night can be created out of these elements. These structures are places where views toward the outside (and sometimes the south-outside, if good navigation and good luck are sufficiently in effect) can be very much constitutive of what takes place within them (though it should be added immediately that, of all the options in this context, it would almost certainly be best to take psylocybin mushrooms at night, and leave the house, or not be in a house in the first place).
And yet, such structures are intrinsically domains of indulgent behaviour. The phase of inhabiting the night is valuable, but only if it is a phase, and what emphatically is best of all is simply to by-pass the world of these structures.
For me, the process of moving on from this phase began with walks through the night countryside on lanes that stretch from Coventry to Leamington, where I discovered the joy of walking at night - where I discovered, that is, the joy of the encounter with the night-aspect of the planet (and this aspect intrinsically involves a more focused encounter with the entirety of the outside of the planet, as opposed to there just being a focused encounter with the sun, and perhaps the moon). But inseparably it began with being in a place - Leamington - which was out in the countryside in comparison with Coventry, and which I loved in its daytime aspect (the brightness of the white walls of the buildings was involved in this).
The last phase of me living in the cities was the phase of inhabiting the night, a phase which in fact continued into the first year in Leamington. But although I had many intensely valuable experiences during this time (a phase which in a strong sense began with the starting point of this book, in 1993) it was fundamentally necessary to break free. For most of the final two and a half years I was living with Tess (and our shared 'visions-at-night' experiences were in almost all ways the most valuable of all), and it was a mutual impetus of departure from this structure of existence which brought about the beginnings of a change, at which point my dreams began to show a pronounced wakening, in the sense that a hauntingly and sublimely powerful story about a group escaping from ordinary reality began to appear in them.
And then, having to some extent integrated day and night as both worlds of the transcendental unknown, and having gone a lot closer toward sobriety, it was in the middle of the day at Harbury Lake that the faculty of dreaming really went into full effect. The 'chancy,' very unfocused dreaming that had been natural to me as a child now at last came back to me as a faculty of dreaming-up worlds and stories (and new, heightened, Futural forms of existence). For many years it had been gone in almost any form, but now it was back, and was focused - focused along philosophical and micropolitical lines.
It had been crucial both to stop being afraid of the night (to perceive the night as another aspect or 'face' of the planet), and for the transcendentally unknown to become visible through the world of the day. But the method I had used for doing this had been so intense that it seems to have led to a radical counterbalance, so that (despite the advantages of a sober encounter with the night) the primary shifts were now taking place during the day. I had gone toward the countryside (to reach the planet), and overall, to reach the Futural-Outside I had gone not just toward the countryside, but toward the middle of the day, and toward sunlight.
And yet the story cannot be concluded here. This is because far more has been involved in this section than the question of the faculty of dreaming. The faculties of lucidity and of feeling have also been at the forefront, in connection with specific states of sublime astonishment, and along with these there has been the question of responses to death, together with the question of encounters with 'the anomalous.'
The state of sublime astonishment I experienced at the Dragon Hotel was finally taken over an upward threshold - so that it became much more intense, and much more clear - when in September of 2000 I was sitting, at night, on a hill looking out across Leamington, having taken psylocybe mushrooms (the sublime in the form of the planet visible through the night and the lights of Leamington, as opposed to the night and the lights of Swansea). The joy and heightened perception of this moment was at another level, in comparison with the earlier experience, although it is only now that it has become clear that the Leamington experience was of the same kind as what had happened when I was five (and I only really began to think about the Dragon Hotel experience when, three years ago, I was staying with my girlfriend in a block of flats in a suburb of Aosta in northern Italy, and I looked out at night from the balcony at a road and a roundabout, lit up by streetlights).
But there are two other 'points of conclusion,' along with Leamington in the late summer of 2000. The first is the event that was recounted at the end of Section 34. In 2005, after an experience of danger the day before, in broad daylight in a forest in the Sierra de la Demanda mountains the idea of The Corridor arrived, which is to say that a whole 'mythos' started to arrive (a mythos which is constructed primarily along the lines of transcendental reality, and which is fundamentally micropolitical, in that it is all about groups, rather than individuals). Whatever the aesthetic value of this virtual-real world might be, the faculty of dreaming was very definitely moving forward again. And furthermore, this was taking place in the countryside (in fact this was a semi-wilderness), in daylight, and in a state of sobriety. (the event in 2000 stands out as an exception in relation to these experiences, a reminder both of the profundity of the night, and of the fact that if any psychotropic is to be chosen for reaching the sublime in this way it is probably best to choose psylocybin). The concluding point here is that a better response to death was beginning to appear, in comparison with ritual and sentimentality (this response is to stop regarding death as something which only happens to others, and to start turning on all the lights of your life, the way you would if you knew you were fighting on the very edge of your death).
The second event is what happened when for the first time I set out to walk on my own through a semi-wilderness - specifically to walk from north to south through the Pyrenees.
It was the summer of 2004, and I had been walking for three days, having just crossed a pass that was the border between France and Spain. However, the main bulk of the chain of mountains was still in front of me, and in starting to go up the opposite slope from the pass I had no path to follow, and I had no large-scale map (the only large-scale map I had with me started 10 miles further south: up until then I had been using a map of the whole of the Pyrenees, together with a well-marked path).
Having struggled up a slope to a point where I realised I could not continue (it was a scree slope which became cliffs further up), I returned into the steep forest below. It was still only the middle of the day, but arriving at an area of grass, I decided to rest, and taking off my backpack I lay down on the grass. I was feeling disappointed by the failure in trying to find a way up the mountain, but the place was very beautiful, and I think that as I fell asleep I was absorbing its atmosphere.
I dreamed that I was seeing Swansea as if I was arriving from the east, by train (although somehow I had a view ahead). I was five miles away, alongside the sea (this is not in fact where the railway-line runs) and in some way the view of Swansea gave me a feeling of a mild but genuine positivity. (this dream has turned out since to be have been a 'precursor,' of a whole sequence of dreams in which there has been an anomalous, seemingly invisible city constructed on the land and out beneath the ocean, where this anomalous city is in the place from which I was viewing Swansea in the initial dream, that is, in a scurf terrain five miles away).
Then the dream changed, and I was dreaming that I was seeing the place where I was sleeping, and in the sky to the south (and a little to the southeast) there was a kind of white sky-doorway (just above the mountain horizon), as if this was the beginning of a horizontal, translucent passageway, with the feeling of this being the start of a short, bright passageway. And with this dream-image there was a female presence who had the quality of leaning in from a more intense dimension of existence. I had the impression that I knew this woman: the impression was emphatically that she was an ordinary human being, but at a higher level than that of ordinary reality, and was that I knew her, even though I could not 'place' her, so that I could remember who she was. Overall, the experience was of an intense, bright joy that came from my awareness of the female presence, and from the view of the path within the sky.
What happened immediately afterwards cannot be regarded as that remarkable. I decided to cross the mountains at the place where I had seen the 'sky-path,' and I found that this took me easily to a narrow quartz-covered mountain-top, from which I was able to climb down into a high, spectacularly beautiful valley, with two small lakes in it (and from the vantage of the quartz-mountain I could see that the initial route was indeed one that I could not have taken). What is primarily important, however, is that two directions in the anomalous were opened up within the dream experience that has just been described. Nothing can be proved here (it is up to each one of us to prove for themselves the nature of our situation in connection with the transcendental) - but the feeling is that in 1991 a low-intensity but very sophisticated channel had been opened up, pulling me in some sense in a downward and lateral direction that was not sublime and planetary like the view, when I was five, from the Dragon Hotel. And only in 2004 did everything get separated out again, so that the 1991 anomalous direction was fundamentally shown as not in itself transcendental-south, and so that the direction of Love-and-Freedom was made visible - a direction which had now focused itself upward, and consisted of the sky (but as part of the planet, because the path went laterally through it), of the anomalous in the form of a woman who had gone over an upward-threshold, and of the abstract, both in that the sky within the dream was not straightforwardly matter, and in that the higher intensity involved in the threshold-crossing fundamentally consisted of a state of intent.
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