38.

Explorations



This blog is a three-part book 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 book is 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).


Part One: Zone Horizon   (1 - 18)

Part Two: The Second Sphere of Action   (19 - 30)

Part Three: Through the Forest, the River  (31 - 50) 





 




   In the summer of 2004 I did the walk which already has been mentioned in sections 34 and 35 - starting out by flying to Toulouse, and then hitchhiking to the foothills of a central area of the Pyrenees. While I was in the mountains I started working on the story The River, a small element of which had come to me earlier, in May. But now the story-world expanded into something much wider in scope than the initial idea, which had been more of a philosophical thought-experiment than a story. The setting was the mountains in which I was walking, though several thousand years in the past.

     Back in London, I wrote an incomplete draft. Afterwards I never returned to it, because I felt there were problems with it which I could not resolve. The following is the draft, with only very minimal editing.

The River

      Crazy how bad things were. But necessary to keep moving, he and Kesta, up the slope toward the narrow valley on the opposite side. He looked up at the ridge, and the delicate blue of the sky in a gap in the clouds above it. Crows were wheeling, letting out electric, high-pitched cries.

      Crazy how bad things were. And yet, from the only vital perspective things were relatively normal. They were still alive, their battered and exhausted bodies could recover, and the fundamental struggle was barely taking place. Crazy how normal things were.

        He remembered Mellick making a complex coloured diagram, and saying that all of the Kaphra methods for reaching wider levels of reality had to be supported by an immense amount of calm precision, and an immense amount of love. Without these, he added,  it would not be possible to tune one's life primarily to the movement toward freedom and trance-perception,  and to get away from reflexes along the lines of the initial dark default - control. And Kaphra had been destroyed by power-caste practitoners who had not fully made this transition. Therefore, the struggle to escape from these practitioners was very human. It was not the vital struggle at all.

       He found himself stopped, staring blankly at the grasses and rocks of a patch of ground in front of him. Kaphra had been destroyed. Almost everyone had been killed, and the Place of Departure was a blackened field of charred wood and bones.  It was not possible to think away the horror of the disaster.

      Kesta gave him one of her extraordinary smiles. He couldn't believe she could summon it up so freely.

       'You getting tired, wide eyes? Or are you day-dreaming about fucking me again?'

       'Neither'. He laughed. 'Or both. No, just getting lost in the past, and some grass and rocks.'

        'Dont become rocks just now, become something more fluid, like a horse'

        'I'll work on it," he said, he said, laughing. "'l'll work on it'. 

         He reached out to ruffle her hair, but then stopped the gesture half-way, returning his arm to his side. Kesta was facing him, and smiling abstractedly, but in a way which suggested she was smiling at something behind him. He almost looked round, but then at the same moment they started walking again.

         He focused on moving as economically as possible, and let himself spread out into the worlds of sound, colour and touch around him. The wind was westerly with broken clouds hiding the tops of the highest mountains. There was now a flock of crows a few miles behind them, and he listened carefully for any modulation of their cries which might indicate the presence of pursuers.

         It was as he was concentrating on finding the easiest route up a scree slope that he saw the tiny hexagonal lattice of yellow and violet dots at the centre of his visual field. It showed up most strongly in the shadows and crevices of the rocks.

         So it was possible he was going to visit during the night. It was true that his dream journeys did not always happen when he saw this coloured pattern, but whenever they took place he had seen it shortly before.

          It was more than six months since he had visited - since his last experience of being transported to the cliff-wall town high above the eerily beautiful valley.  He had no final view about the reality of these experiences, but they were consistent and intensely instructive, and his Kaphra training had taught him to accept their validity, without any dogmatic view about the kind of substantiality that was involved. The last time it had happened he had been told the visits would be harder to achieve, because in some way conditions on the planet had grown worse.

         They had reached the top of the pass. To the north there was an initially barren steep sided valley, that became thinly forested with pine further down.

         He told Kesta about the colour spots on his vision, and about what it might indicate. She looked excited, but concerned.

          'So, you can be dazed sometimes the day afterwards?' she asked after a moment, referring to a previous conversation.

           He nodded.

           'Well, I'll look after you!’ She grinned, and then became suddenly emphatic. 'You should find out everything you can. We need every kind of help.'

           They were looking back in the direction from which they had come. Near a small lake in the middle distance three chamois had been startled and were running up a slope.

           

                He had been returning from a specially chosen task – to live successfully as an outsider in another community – and had reached the southern hill lands that were farmed by Kaphra, and he had seen the goats unaccompanied by herders, and the untended crops in the valleys. He sensed something different and ominous in the behaviour of the birds and other wild creatures in the valley. At an empty stone hut he found a string hanging from the centre of the ceiling, with six pieces of obsidian attached to it, and a blood red flake of fire opal hanging at the end. Each stone had an unfamiliar sinister symbol carved into it. The language was the secret script of the power-priests of the Emberad coastal dominions, 400 miles to the south. He had only learned a little of this young and sinister script, but he knew with certainty that its purpose in such circumstances was to create dread, and that the symbols decreed that the inhabitants of Kaphra had offended against the Gods and against Reason.

               By the time Kesta arrived at the burned, and now terrifying ruins of the Place of Departure, he had begun to feel as if he was on the brink of insanity. He had camped each night in different places several miles away, going closer with immense care during the day, and had tried not to think about what would have happened to friends and teachers who had been captured. He had felt like a ghost, compelled to wander in circles around its own decaying body, or as if the whole world had become ghostly, and he was a solitary living thing that would soon have its life extinguished. His task was to wait, and take all necessary care, and prevent himself from spiraling into negativity and delirium, but he had felt increasingly less equal to it

                 Seeing Kesta, coming calmly toward him across an upland plain, had felt like sunlight after being trapped in a dungeon.

              

            

          Many hours later they started searching for a place to sleep on the lower slopes of a valley forested thickly with birch trees. They had gone down a long scree slope from the pass, into a high rocky valley winding northward, and after several miles they had weaved to the left  across another ridge into the deeper parallel valley whose small stream they had just crossed.

         ‘Maybe up there’, said Kesta, pointing to a wide outcrop or rocky shelf  that seemed likely to have flat spaces, under cliffs

            He sensed that Kesta had taken on the task of finding the best possible place to spend the night. Their was a look of warmly implacable concentration about her.

              Perfect, she said – it faces the sunrise, and its sheltered from the wind.

They had found a place to sleep in a tangled area of forest and rocks, underneath some steep cliffs.

        Kesta had been at the Place of Departure for three years when he arrived. He had come round a corner, and had seen her standing, back very straight, at the edge of a group watching some dancers. When they talked he was awed and inspired by her intense warmth, her wild energy, and her light, playful humour. Once, he was being given lessons in attaining trance states by Solenda, a woman with an immense laugh, and a great gift for total unpredictability, and he had mentioned Kesta.

         Kesta? she said, 'The leader of a flight'

          'You dont know what I mean, I know, but i'm not saying any more. She laughed, and added, 'only that it has nothing to do with commands - it has solely to do with love, energy, and having comprehensively wide affinities'.

           Kaphra was a Place of Departure because everyone, students and teachers alike (and students generally became teachers), eventually left Kaphra, and left it in an absolute sense. They travelled away to explore new regions and new depths of the world, and were not heard of again by those who remained.

     

     He was walking along a curved corridor in Kaphra. The walls were covered by flowingly geometrical designs, made out of tiny semi-precious stones. The corridor became a tunnel through rock, with coloured hangings blowing in a wind. Suddenly he knew - he was visiting. He had seen this place several times before.

    Ahead was the wide ledge outside the rock-hewn system of tunnels and rooms, and beyond this the intense blue of a late afternoon sky. A large sheet of violet coloured cloth flapped lazily against the wall. He listened to it, feeling as if he was using the sound to stabilise himself in some way. Then he walked out into the sun, looking at the pale, sandy grain of the rock beneath his feet. Off in the distance to his right he could see three figures, apparently standing and talking. He knew from experience that he should not initially attempt any contact - because he might wake up as a result - and he carried on walking to the edge of the cliff.

        A gentle wind was blowing against his face.

          He realised he was hearing strange humming and clicking sounds coming from three separate directions, Ahead and a little to the right, to the left behind his feet a foot away, and behind his right shoulder. Then he became aware that in each of these directions he was seeing into a coloured tunnel of lights and movements. He was seeing them simultaneously without moving his head.

        Ahead of him there was a chalky blue tunnel with flickering green and violet flecks in the walls. The tunnel was inhabited by impassively amused, clowning  beings with chalky-blue mask faces that were austerely and eerily unreadable. They came closer, and then hovered away as if looking through a window and then cavorting back into a space that expanded to infinity. Underneath his feet, behind him, he could see a short broad tunnel of electric whitish-yellow. There were tiny filaments of metal extending through this tunnel, which went out into a vast whitish-yellow space forming an intricate labyrinth of widely spaced tiny filaments. In this tunnel there were hovering blobs of changing colour that were covered with meshes of lines like the lines on dragonfly wings. Each one had an area on its surface like a patch of mirror, with a woman's face with delicate features reflected in it.   And the face changed its expression continuously in a way that was tied to the movement of another being alongside. Bright red went with anger, bright blue went with sadness, electric white violet went with joy. Behind him there was a dark tunnel with glass walls that went out into an immense night filled with slow sombre flashes of intense deep green, like emeralds speaking to each other. This tunnel was inhabited by beings that were like rippling fluid jewels, coloured bubbles that danced through bodily transformation, and somehow seemed to be expressing both a welcome and a warning to be careful, though the warning had the curious property of seeming like laughter.

             Suddenly he became aware that he was seeing out toward the stars in every direction. The three tunnels were still there but now were receding into tiny tubes and then returning again. He had a shocking intense recognition that he was seeing three other places in the cosmos. He opened his eyes. He was still on the rock shelf, with the light having grown more faint.

           The voice behind him said close your eyes again.

           This time there was a tunnel right in front of him with transparent walls. In it there were some of the jewel creatures. He was sucked suddenly forward.

            He was on what seemed to be a high plain, or a high area of grassy hill-land. He had a sense that the sea was not far away.

             The feeling of the place was something that also expressed itself at its surface in words of unbelievable joy and intense relief, tinged with excitement - 'we're doing it!', 'we've made it!'. He thought he had experienced joy before, but what he was feeling now had an astonishing intensity that was on an entirely new level, of an entirely new kind.

              He sensed that there was a house somewhere there, on another hill over the horizon, perhaps with a view of the sea in the distance.

             One of the zones of mutating colour suddenly moved round to the front of his field of vision. It was an intricate area of glittering ruby colour with a surface of floating glassy scales surrounded and washed over by lazy ripples. As he watched it changed without warning, and he found himself staring at Mellick, his old instructor. He was standing on the grass , ten feet away, a wind faintly moving the hair across his face.

               The man's eyes looked at his.

                'I am not Mellick. Mellick died in Kaphra. But a little of Mellick has survived, an echo in the form of my ability to talk to you with his form. Mellick came this far, and he came here in a deeper sense than you have achieved.  It is an impersonal fact that crossing a fundamental threshold is no guarantee of anything afterwards. For all of us there will be a last threshold. My speaking to you is an expression of love and sadness. And so far as it a warning it is also an expression of anger. It is important to remember the value of calm hostility'.

               The man who was not Mellick smiled broadly.

                For some reason he opened his eyes. He was staring at the huddled figure of Kesta, wrapped in her deep green blanket. It was early morning. The pine forest was filled with the cries of birds.

                  As they walked down to the river he glanced across at Kesta, as they were walking through the sunlight of a small clearing. There was something very intense, and slightly abstracted about the look she was giving to the terrain in front of her. And he noticed that her pupils were slightly enlarged. He felt sure suddenly that she had gone through her own experience in the night. She must have decided to ask her question at the same time as he was visiting. He would wait until she decided to talk about it. He decided he should focus on the terrain around them. Watching  would not save them from attack.

        For a moment he remembered Mellick’s strategy for getting him to experience space circumambiently.

      ‘You have wrap-around space with sound, he had said, you must learn to envisage visual space in the same way. He had given him a room, painted black, and told him he had to add the planets, in their then positions on their orbital ring, together with the brightest stars on the ceiling, walls and floor.

      ‘At any time you ought to be able to envisage the positions of all of the planets and stars, so that you could point to them, pointing through the earth, toward the sky, whichever’.

         But this only a beginning, he added,  as you move around, you need to pay more attention to the space shown by sound and touch. And the end of your task is to draw new extraordinary curved lines around your room, lines that only be seen in entirety by spherical vision, and then you must try to imagine how these lines would sound, if each was a string of tiny sources of sound. And finally you must visit your room in a dream’

            He had learned a lot as he painted his room. He had learned that the morning star – Shavana – could only be seen to east and west, because it was a planet with an orbit inside that of the earth. He had learned that the moon was travelling eastward across the stars, even though it was passing from east to west as the earth turned. But in the end, and most fundamentally, he had learned to pay vastly more attention to the other, non-visual ways in which the worlds around him made contact with his body.

                  They came to a narrow rock-slide, tumbled and steeply aslant, between low wooded slopes.  A small cloud had gone over the sun. He picked his way over the rocks, and waited for Kesta who had paused on the far side. There was a hushed quality to the pine-woods: he could hear the wind in the tree branches. Kesta crossed the slope with great care, making a blackbird whistle, which she fitted to her movements as she stepped from rock to rock.

               Just before Kesta reached the trees, he had an image, like a flash, of three figures, standing behind them, and further up the slope, and a sense of an immensely powerful, electrically disturbing hostility. The figures were angular and sinister, and made of a kind of grey energy, tinged with green. It was like seeing, and feeling, a colour that you hated suddenly wrap itself around you and become the world. And then the image was gone.

              Kesta shuddered.  She was alongside him. He saw her not look round.

               ‘Yes, they’re behind us’, she said, ‘But I’m not sure they’re coming after us. Let’s keep going forward’ She laughed. ‘And I think whistling is good’.

           The big lake was visible in the distance to their left, and below them was the river. And in front of the river, a low hill - and then he saw them, Meraska and Salvik. He and Kesta started to run.

       Kesta spun Merashka round, crying out wildly, her feet dancing on the grass. He hugged Salvik, and then he, Salvik and Kesta threw Merashka up in the air, and caught her. All the time Salvik sang a brilliantly modulating, wordless song, dropping into tiny, astonishing bursts of overtone singing. 

 

               He was struck, as always, by the depth and intensity of Merashka’s eyes. Her long fair hair glinted in the sunlight.

              ‘We thought you would come this way!’ she shouted, ‘we argued, and we dreamed it up, and we dreamed it up more, and then we came out in this direction in case you needed help! And from the pass we saw the crows, and we thought you were coming toward us!’             

His joy at seeing Merashka and Salvik was immense. They had both survived. They were the people he remembered, but more so: they were both at a higher level of intensity.

                

      It was the next morning, and they were on the opposite, northern bank, a hundred yards from the edge of the river. He had slept very deeply, and had eaten a very meagre breakfast, aware of Kesta's red eyes, and of her unmistakable quality of having something to tell them. It was somehow an aspect of her strength that no-one attempted to pre-empt her - there was a trust in her judgment about the right time to speak. 

     They were sitting on a sunlit patch of grass, shielded by gorse from the river, but with a clear view of the southward mountains. He and Meraska had just picked all the berries from a wild redcurrant-bush, and he had carefully wrapped them in a piece of cloth, tying the bundle with twine.

        

     "I took a tiny quantity of zsetrin last night," said Kesta. She paused, looking to her right, at the mountain-tops beyond to the south. He was aware that he, Merashka and Salvik had all settled themselves - waiting to hear what had happened.

  "I tried to see - what is happening"  Kesta continued. "And I tried to learn how we escape… I knew somehow that the second question was the true question, the vital question, but somehow it seemed right to put them in that order"

        "What is happening… There is a river flowing south toward an ocean.  And there is a cloud around human beings and somehow within them." Kesta paused.

             "We have been aware for a long time that human beings are somehow host to a system of damaging, reactive behaviours. We don’t know the wider nature of this system of reactive behaviours – is it the functioning of a predator, an energy parasite? – but we know what it is in itself, and we know we are pitted against it, that we must pass it by in order to escape. We also know that this is the true struggle - the domination practices of the power-priests are just an expression, or a symptom of the control-behaviors.

             I became a long tunnel of foreseeing. It don’t think I saw the future – I think that’s an illusion – but I went into a deep and wide anticipation, and everything became clearer as this happened. I saw a vast expansion of technologies, bodies of writing, systems of measurement, machines, constructions, systems of control and production… I saw vast tracts of land covered with spider’s webs of buildings, with people struggling with a web both all around them and within them. I saw bad maps with damaging delusory elements enshrined as books, and turned into traps for dreamers and visionaries. I saw a hypertrophying of of craft knowledge, and an atrophy of knowledge of love and freedom.

             But the key thing is that I saw how words, written and spoken, and systems of abstraction, are now becoming pre-eminent modes of reaction, central ways in which people are fixated, blocked, trapped. The words have gone deeper – there is an apparently reasonable voice of judgement, and of defence against judgement, that works within all of customary language, and that is the voice that cannot be stopped without immense effort when attempting to reach states of perception and true understanding. And when people take half a step toward freedom, they carry this voice, and they are confronted by whole worlds of ‘intrication’ – of pseudo-knowledge and unhelpful abstraction, which are liable to suck away their life if they devote themselves to them. Before what was pre-eminent in the world of the reactive was the lure of the subtle practices of social power, artistic power, craft power, sexual power, sorcery power…"        

      

              "We escape by travelling in the direction of love and freedom. This way of living, this way of travelling, is intent. It is a river. A river beneath everything, and running through everything. A river of intent: a river of deeper, higher energy, of inorganic worlds from which organic beings emerge. It is love, it is intent to break free, it is the dreamed futures of an escape, it is visiting, it is joy. It is not made of organic things, and because it is not organic things, it is the wild freedom that gives birth to everything.

          It is perceptions, and deeper perceptions of energy worlds, and visiting, and dreaming that we live for, and it is the wild joy of flight upwards to new levels of the world. We see that making a new place of departure is for us the direction of love and freedom. This is intent, and out of the energy-worlds of intent emerges the place of departure, the thing – the organic zone – like something new coalescing out of the river."

     For while there was a silence. Merashka stood up, and stretched, and then started to sway slightly, from side to side.

      "You have to will it," he added to Kesta's last phrase, smiling, ‘with your entirety, with your whole energy world’.

         "Otherwise," added Salvik, "it wouldn’t be intent, it wouldn’t be the river."

         Merashka danced slowly around them all, and then stopped and looked up at the sky to the south.

           "And who knows what’s out there?" she said.



*



     Taken as a whole this seems to be a much less ;achieved' story than Ktarizon: Deep Water (written three years before, and the only other story I had written at this point), though to a great extent because it attempts to do far more than the earlier piece (see Section 18). As a deliberate 'companion-work' to Ktarizon part of it's aim is to depict people who are closer to the Future (that is, who have crossed more thresholds of intensity) than the people 8000 years further into the chronological future, in the Ktarizon story, and, in the process, to dismantle the idea of 'progress.' However, the first of these intentions puts it under a pressure which is too much for it, and as a result it tends toward the badly unfocused and the didactic.

     Two other critical points should be made. The first is that the 'line of time' is in effect as a residual fixation in that it is not just a story set in the past, alongside another story set in the far future, but, as well there is a culmination in an 'anticipatory' state which immanently 'sees' several thousand years into the future, toward the present (it is correct to say that this is of the very nature of the project, but the feeling is that the critique involved in the anticipation is a clunky didactic device). The second point is that there is a two-dimensional 'evil-sinister-humans' aspect to the power-priests in the story, in the specific sense that these figures have not escaped the influence of Tolkien, with his 'ring-wraiths,' despite the fact that The Lord of the Rings was the very last thing I had in mind, and, moreover, despite the fact that I had a principled distaste for such aspects of Tolkien's work (I had already come to the conclusion that Tolkien was a kind of oneiric equivalent of Kant in philosophy).   

     Even at the time I was aware  of a kind of sunlit, eerie affect (as opposed, in every sense to the crude 'gothic') that I was looking for in writing stories, and as a result I felt dissatisfied with the power-priests, although I don't think I noticed any similarity in relation to Tolkien's work. In "Ktarizon: Deep Water" I came close to the virtual-real space of Ballard - with the compass - and deliberately included an element which could only refer to The Drowned World, though in a way which seemed not to vitiate the story. However, in writing "The River" I tried to encompass a very wide intensive/libidinal terrain and was unable to maintain a focus that would prevent unintended and conformist/dogmatic influence from the domain of fantasy literature. (Unintended influence on its own is less of an issue: ten years later I noticed that to a large extent I had taken the concept of 'visiting' (together with the word) from the 1976 John Farris novel The Fury, but given that the concept was not entirely the same, this would simply have required the word to be changed).

   

*


      In relation to the issues raised in the previous section, it is clear that there has been a generative connection between a journey into the outside (the beyond of the cities and towns, in the form of the mountains and forests of the Pyrenees) and the emergence of a story, though the depth and significance of this connection in fact remain very vague (an inspiring affect as a result of being in mountains in summer is not in itself something that can be quantified in terms of abstract-oneiric creation, and it is evidently possible to see the setting as a kind of trivial 'hook' on which the 'coat' of the story has been hung).

      What is also clear is that the story is a continuation of the process of exploring the idea of escape-groups by means of writing fiction. It is a continuation in that it includes far more thematic elements than Ktarizon (while in many ways being similar - in Ktarizon a group of five individuals is augmented by two new individuals, here two new individuals create a group of four).



*


    It is now necessary to go back a year. In early July  of 2003 I had just left a post as an A Level philosophy teacher at a sixth form college in central London (Westminster Kingsway), a job I had been doing for doing for two years. I had enjoyed this work, even though I found it tiring, but the fact I was getting £8000 a year on a 0.5 contract for which I was doing far doing far more than 2.5 days a week meant that financially it seemed unaceptable, and more importantly, I felt that I wanted to open up some space in which new, sustained forward-movements could take place. In many ways the job had worked out extremely well: it had been satisfying teaching the students (in particular the second-year classes); it had been valuable to return to some of the areas of philosophy involved, and during the two years I had finished my book Dimensions of Contact, and had edited Ktarizon: Deep Water. But although I did not know what I was going to do, I felt sure it was now time to move on.

   It would be right to say that during the previous three years in London I had been continually reaching out into the beyond of the city, either through planning trips to other countries and other parts of Britain, or through working with Mark Fisher on what would become londonunderlondon, a project which consisted of bringing together virtual-real worlds in which London was in some sense taken over or inundated by the outside. Through spending very little on food and accommodation I had managed go on group-trips to mountains north of Girona in Spain, and to Holland; and to go with two friends on a ten-day walk through, and eventually across, the western High Atlas Mountains in Morocco. But overall my feeling was that these outward-movements were not really 'going anywhere,' - were not building on themselves. It was londonunderlondon which was building on itself, but at this point even this was to some extent 'in abeyance' in that Mark had also been very busy as an A Level philosophy teacher (at Orpington College), and there had not been much time for the project. It was also true that the trips each year to Harbury Lake and Leamington had an unmistakable quality of an intensificatory movement, but it was as if it was now not easy to find any way of creating anything from this process, and I had no plan to return permanently  to the area.

         There was a sense in which the situation was about to get worse, initially at least. In deciding to leave the job (several months before) my idea had been that I would try to go travelling for a while, but because of the shortage of money this plan had to be scaled down to almost nothing, and shortly before leaving the college I signed myself up with a temping agency that specialised in work at not-for-profit organisations, so that on my return from what in the end would be a short holiday there would be a strategy available for paying the rent.

    There were commitments which meant that I could not leave until the end of the month, and by this time I had almost no money. I hitch-hiked to Dover, took a ferry to Calais, and then hitch-hiked southward through northern France. I had a tent, and my plan was to find an area of forest, and clear my head, by spending time trying to let go of thinking - trying to become perception.

     In relation to getting away for more than a few days the circumstances were not at all propitious. The weather was cloudy, with occasional rain-showers, I was without money, and because the 'leap' I had taken did not involve departing from the house in London, it did not even make sense to start looking for seasonal work in France. The impression given by what took place is that I had to leave for France, and that, having got there, it was straightforwardly necessary to come back.

   Somewhere in the Champagne/Ardenne region I found a way out of a motorway service station, and walked for around 10 miles, eventually pitching my tent near the top of a wooded hill. Before long I began to feel that the place was not a good one. I discovered that only a hundred yards away there was a large bird-hide construction, which I felt was probably used for hunting rather than bird-watching (and in any case it meant the area was far from secluded). The next morning I set off to walk further west, along a nearby path which was quite attractive. But, somewhat to my surprise, I began to feel grimly perturbed by the thought of continuing along the path, a feeling that was close to being dread. I turned round, and started on my way back. 

    I had been invited by a group of friends to go dancing at a club called Cargo in three days time, and I had turned down the invitation. I now decided I would go. I felt it would be good to do this, before getting on with the process of looking for work. It seemed my holiday-plan had been a failure, but at least I would be able to go dancing with my friends. 

     The journey back took a long time, although perhaps partly because I was prepared to do a lot of walking. After about sixty miles I was dropped off at a junction where it turned out to not be easy to get a lift, and I walked for about twenty five miles to get to another one. Afterwards things did not get much better. At the end of the journey I had spent two nights in my tent near the road (one night in France, and another night somewhere near Caterham, not far from the M25) and had had to walk fifteen miles to get to the centre of London, where I took a bus to Stoke Newington. No-one was at the house when I got there, there was a sunny, serene atmosphere: it was around four o'clock in the afternoon, on the day of the planned trip to the club. A small amount of money had arrived in my bank account, so it was possible to go out. I noticed I was in a very good mood, no doubt as a result of having been away, and as a result of all the exercise. I picked up a copy of a book I had not read, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and read a passage I found interesting. Things seemed a lot better than they had three days before, as if somehow I had been involved in clawing my way back to a state of serendipity.



    Around twelve hours later I was in a flat in Brixton (half a mile south of the centre). There were about six people in the living room - most of the friends, I think, who had been at the dance-event at Cargo (the occasion had been a birthday). Light was just starting to appear in the sky. Earlier, along with most - or maybe all - of the other members of the group, I had taken speed, but I had probably not taken any since around 1am. However, we had now all smoked some grass, and for me the combination of speed with marijuana had always been an exceptionally powerful one, and even though the grass was now in conjunction only with the tail-end of the speed its effect for me was that of taking a Very intensely - but smoothly - impacting psychotropic (warning: this combination can very definitely produce bad trips, dependent on individual responses). A friend (whose birthday it was) suggested that we walk to a Brixton techno club called the 414 which apparently had an all-night license. I was very glad that he wanted to do this, and on this occasion I think my wanting to continue the 'night' was not self-indulgence. Taking drugs under leisure circumstances is generally self-indulgence on one level or another (and, as stated before, I am certain that by far the best path to wider realities involves never taking drugs at all). But I had already smoked the grass, and the night had been an extraordinary one in terms of dancing, so it seemed better to try to get to some new intensive 'place' by means of the state I had reached, rather than just sitting talking

    I had never particularly liked Cargo, especially not as a dance-venue. Before this visit to the club I had been there three or four times (because people met up there), but although the music had sometimes been alright the atmosphere had always felt a bit suave and urbane, in a way which made it seem to be an exceptionally distant relative of inspired dance clubs I had known, such as the Q-Club in Birmingham (this is not really to compare like-with-like of course: the Q-Club generally closed at 6am, and usually Cargo closed at 1am). But this evening the music had been very good, and I had reached a point - with the aid of the speed - where I realised, that if I wanted, I could dance like any of the people on the floor, and where dance had become a very effortless (high muscle-movement-economy), spontaneous and joyful process, involving a highly focused awareness of where the music would 'go' next (I was used to this last, anticipatory state, but the ease, creativity and ability to communicate with others through dance was - and still remains - completely singular in my experience of dancing).

   When we got into the 414 (I was surprised that it was in fact open) we went to what I think was a basement area: it was a dark, hyper-charged space of people dancing to techno. The atmosphere was the rare, ecstatic feeling that is in effect when a whole group of people get swept away into dancing, and when people are all moving very fast - recurrently with feet off the floor at each step - but with a smoothness of movement that allows the dancing to continue, hour after hour.

   I probably danced for around an hour. I remember at one point a woman gave me an affirming smile from the opposite side of the - quite small - dance-floor. My feeling is that sometimes very little is needed to receive a stratospheric boost from women (which makes it all the more disturbing that when men get close to women there is a sense in which they recurrently start to want everything from them). The woman's smile seemed to be about the joy of dancing, but I felt, rightly or wrongly, that it was also in some sense about more than this. When I looked over a bit later the woman had gone, otherwise I feel sure that eventually I would have gone over towards her.

    Instead, I went and sat down, cross-legged, with my back to a wall, in an area about twenty feet back from the dance-floor, where other people were sitting. 

    When I closed my eyes I rapidly discovered I was seeing a space of people dancing to music, but where the space was substantially different from the one in front of me. It would be correct in a sense to call this process 'envisaging,' but it very much had the nature of a semi-trance experience, in that I didn't have to think about it: it was just what I was 'seeing.'

    The space was a bright, geometrical cavern, in a very precise sense of the word geometrical. It was perhaps sixty feet across, from right to left, and was in the form of a quarter of a sphere, with the curved part of the sphere being the roof (sloping down behind) and with a radius-section forming the wall in front. However, it would be wrong to give the impression that this form of the space was the starting-point, or its main aspect. At the very beginning what I was seeing was a wall in front of me on which the music I was hearing was expressing itself as very bright, multi-coloured, mutating patterns. This wall of patterns  remained as the form of the space came into focus, so that the wall then had the form of a wide, vertical half-circle, in front of which people were dancing to the music (maybe thirty or forty people). The patterns were exceptionally beautiful, and had the unmistakable quality of being expressions of the music into spatiality and colour and movement and yet, although they were beautiful in this way, there was an unthinking awareness, that I had experienced on many other occasions, that they were not nearly as important as the sonorous worlds of the music, along with the same kind of awareness, with this specific experience, that they were also not nearly as important as the other things that I was seeing, and the feelings that went with them.

     It will be noticed that "Ariadne's thread" was the music, in that the music was the exact constant in terms in of what I had been seeing with my eyes open, and what I was now seeing with my eyes closed (the fact that in the club, twenty feet away, there were people dancing was an inexact constant). But in general, as I have said before (in Hidden Valleys) it is best of all to take up the idea - despite what Deleuze says - that Ariadne's thread is Ariadne.

    I was seeing the people around me, and myself, as consisting of a kind of transparent-to-opaque substance that had a distinctive grey-bright opalescent quality that was reminiscent in its luminosity to water, or transparent gel, but which felt more as if I was seeing and experiencing a very 'solid' composed form of plasma-field (as with the plasma of the aurora borealis, or indeed, of lightning - but with a very different aspect from either of these). The bodies were slightly wider than ordinary human bodies, and were amorphous, in that they had no features other than head, torso, arms and legs. Everyone was dancing, and the feeling was that in some sense I was seeing people more deeply than under normal circumstances.

     As for myself, I was in the form of a woman - a woman who was also dancing, along with everyone else, facing the wall of coloured patterns. I was aware immediately that there was a specificity to this woman - she was a being with her own character, an exceptionally real, depth-level world of attitudes and ways of thinking and feeling. I knew that she was an academic, and was a very strong, lucid person, with a whole horizon of outsights about the wider nature of the world. It struck me that it was as if she was my twin sister, from whom I had been separated at birth, and who was much more successful and focused than I was. And rapidly I came to feel that the best way of thinking about her was that she was a female version of myself.

    There was nothing concupiscent, or sexually indulgent about what was taking place. The woman was very sensual, and there was a striking, and very intense joy that came from dancing in the form of a woman, but this joy was not at all connected to being a female in front of other people in a public space: it was about the dancing, and a specific sensuality and joy-in-movement that was intrinsic to it. And it was not even the case that the experience was solely that of being the translucent-opaque substance, in that I could also see myself in an ordinary way (the woman was on the tall side of middle height, was fairly slim, had long brownish-fair hair, worn down her back, and was wearing a knee length green dress). But this ordinary perspective on the physical (a perspective which did not occur in relation to the people with whom I was dancing) did not distract in the direction of the experience becoming erotic. It was if there was sexuality there, but down so deep that it was suffused into everything - into the whole sensuality of the dancing.

     But all of this to a great extent feels as if it was just the payment of an admission fee - or as if it was just the process of opening a door.

      I found that the experience had become that of lying on my side in hot sunlight, on an area of flattish rock that I knew was in the middle of a desert. I could feel sand under my left cheek where my face was pressed against the rock. When I opened my eyes I was looking at an expanse of reddish rock, and I knew, in a dream-like way, that I was in a desert somewhere in Australia.

    There was something so striking about this that I was jolted back to the previous stage of the experience. But a moment later I had returned to feeling the desert sunlight, and to feeling the grains of sand against my cheek. After I while I had the experience of levering myself up to a sitting-position, and then of standing up. There was an extraordinary serenity to everything (there was no breeze) and the place I was 'seeing' had the unusual feature of being a bowl or shallow depression in an area of rock (I was in the middle of it) which was about a hundred yards across, and was just deep enough to prevent any view beyond it, even when I was standing up, so that all I could see was an area of red rock, and an immense blue sky (a blue sky which in its immensity simultaneously 'started' from a very near horizon).

    I had been in a very similar situation once before, in 1997, when I had the semi-trance experience which also unexpectedly took me to Australia (Section 25), although this time there was a far greater intensity and focus to everything (including the tactile detail of feeling the sand with my skin). I am fairly sure I did not think about the earlier event, but in looking around me at the place in which 'I found myself' it may be that the sense of there being a moment to be grasped - an opportunity to be taken - was given a way forward by the experience in Leamington, even if this way forward was now to be modulated by a virtual-real world which I had not encountered in 1997. On what faculties do we call under these semi-trance circumstances? What kind of waking of faculties do we try to elicit? 

   Immediately an idea came to me, which was that I should envisage an encounter with "Mescalito," the tutelary entity who is described in Castaneda's books The Teachings of Don Juan, and A Separate Reality, but where this idea was to an extent indeterminate, in that it was also that of attempting to have an actual encounter with Mescalito, if such a being existed. (but putting entirely aside the question of the ontological level of Mescalito, it needs to be seen that in going to Australia the 'track' I was on went straight toward the 'tutelary' in that in 1997, before reading Castaneda, the semi-trance experience had been of 'meeting' - and being taught by - an Aborigine shaman called Sealskin).

     Without any pause in the experience I found that I was seeing the figure of Mescalito, as described by Castaneda. The figure was standing six feet away, looking at me, although without having eyes in an ordinary sense of eyes. The figure was tall, and had a green, peyote-like body, and a head which was like an inverted strawberry, though it also had the quality of being the bud of a flower. However, the 'look' from the figure came from eyes that were made of the same transparent-to-opaque substance which all the human bodies had been - had consisted of - in the earlier phase of the experience, where these eyes were seen as beneath the surface of the head, and were seen as parts of the head's depth-level substance. The eyes had a silvery, deep-pools quality, and were more round than oval - but the vital thing about them was the look, the gaze: and this look had an intense quality of knowledge.

    I don't think I was surprised by the fact that I was seeing this figure, and I know that I did not start thinking that it definitively had existence (after all I had just decided to have the experience of seeing it), but I was very definitely struck by the intensity of what was now taking place.

     I asked the question, "How do I take part in the formation of a group whose aim is to travel toward love, freedom and wider realities?"

     The experience was then of Mescalito holding out his hand. On his hand there was a silvery expanse, and immediately I was seeing a very slow, outward spiral, or outward, spiraling flow. I was looking in a horizontal direction into the circular 'face' or cross-section of this outward, calm vortex. The slow, smooth pace seemed to be vital, and I knew that the spiral movement of escape consisted of a group of people, and of elements and circumstances around them.

    A moment later I was back to being the transparent-to-opaque substance, and I was moving very slowly and patiently along what seemed to be a wide avenue of trees on the edge of a city (the feeling was of houses being there, but all I saw was the trees). It seemed to be twilight, and there was no-one around: the direction in which I was moving was away from the city. However, what was perhaps most striking was that my form did not seem to be human, but seemed to resemble a horse (it was as if the amorphousness of the plasma-like substance had become more even further from a close relationship to a body, so the nature of its form on the ordinary level was not perceptible). What was clear was that I was moving slowly and calmly forward, with a quality of being 'loaded up' with things which were being carried on my back, as if I was a pack-horse. Despite the amorphousness of my form it was definitely the case that the main part of my body was horizontal, and that I was walking on four limbs, like a horse. 

    That was the end of the experience. I opened my eyes in the club, feeling that the 'event' had reached its conclusion.


   Afterwards, what had taken place became simply a striking, enigmatic occurrence, though one which was under the cloud of the idea that in some way it had just been 'traced' from a description of an experience in The Teachings of Don Juan. The main impact of it was that it left me with the impression that my summer holiday had ended well - a feeling that somehow everything had been 'turned round' at the last moment.

    In the months that followed there was an overall improvement in my circumstances, though in a way which emerged from decisions which had already been taken and from unrelated developments. After a few weeks of temping jobs at three different organisations I was sent by the agency, in early September, to work in the photocopying room of the City Lit college, a job where I was placed - almost entirely unsupervised - into a room with a computer, and where it was possible for me to get on with my own work in the gaps in processes of doing photocopying jobs, and of helping tutors who were doing their own work at the copiers. It was true that I was working from 12 to 8pm, but I took no work home with me from the job, and in relative terms it was a job which could be described as not exhausting. And at about the same time I went to visit Mark Fisher, at his flat in Bromley, and he told me that, as a result of his blogging, he had been interviewed by the experimental music station Resonance FM, and that the woman who had interviewed him had suggested he might want to do something for one of their 90 minutes 'clear spots,' in which people could broadcast compositions, mixes, spoken-word pieces etc. This seemed an exceptionally good invitation, in that, unknown to the interviewer, Mark and I had been working for around two years on londonunderlondon, with the aim of getting it broadcast on one of the Resonance FM 90 minute slots. We now decided that we should increase the pace in relation to the project - and my new work situation made this relatively easy.

    The event which did strike me as having a lasting impact was the time, in November, when I took the yanomami drug yopo, at Harbury Lake. (Section 34). The decision, after this, to focus and tighten up my life, seemed to be an ongoing event, expressing itself in choices which appeared to be a little less constricted by conventional patterns of existence.

     But in the middle of the walk in the Pyrenees (two days before starting to work on the story at the start of this section) I was moving up a slope as smoothly and quickly as possible because a thunderstorm was coming and I wanted to find a place to shelter, and at this point I remembered the experience a year before in Brixton.

    

    
*     


    Writing "The River," while in the Pyrenees, would end up feeling like a half-way place, a place on the way to where I needed to be. There was a brightness to the process of dreaming it into existence which is worth thinking about. In the course of the first half of the previous year I had befriended two women, Samia Iredale and Rebecca Bunting, both of whom in a few weeks time would record acting parts for londonunderlondon. Their 'presence' with me on the walk was heartening, and helped me in creating the female characters in the story. I was only getting started in terms of learning to think in the modality of story-writing, but there was a becoming-woman involved in this process which I think is fundamental to the way in which I was finding a way forward. What was in effect was an expansive joy that had the quality of an intoxication, and yet in a way where I was sober. The story is unfocused, produces a sense of excessive melancholy in relation to the community that has been lost, and is over-didactic, and yet the figure of Kesta is a beginning. The initial idea, which had arrived at 5 in the morning, at the end of a party, had been simply of a shaman-figure - thousands of years in the past - who has the ability to go into 'anticipation states' in relation to the far future. This very minimal, and time-fixated idea had now become an element in a much wider world of anomalous elements, and had become Kesta.

    A week later, when I arrived in Barcelona, there was 36 hours to wait before my return flight. Behaving as if I was still in the mountains I walked to the top of a hill which is about a mile and a half north of Parc Guell (and which is slightly higher), an area which turned out to be a scurf zone of bushes, grass, and agave cactus, with what seemed to be a water tower at the highest point. To my astonishment I found that it was possible to pitch my tent there, and spend the night. The view of the city under the stars was extraordinary, and the view in the morning, with the sea in the distance, and a blue sky, was even more impressive. Somehow the roof of the city had been left for me as a place where I could pitch my tent. 


  *


     Another year later, in August of 2005, I was again in Spain and the evening before I had received the extreme jolt of my tent nearly blowing away during a snowstorm at the top of a mountain, at the point where the last of the daylight had gone. In a small area of forest, by a stream, the idea of The Corridor arrived.


     In starting to write The Corridor I was working in relation to an idea of an anomalous dimension which in a fundamental sense was space. And, inseparably, in embarking on this process I had at last effectuated a sustained, pervasive process of thought-by-means-of-fiction.

   The primary idea of the book is that of an emergent parallel world which is forested and almost entirely derelict, a world which gives the impression it is five hundred years in the future while actually being part of the present - and a world which also has a small number of places which are unchanged. (Space here is both that of the parallel world, and is also that of the co-existence and interaction of the different worlds in the story). The idea of the parallel emergence was there from the outset. The initial idea was of forty or fifty people waking up in their different houses in Leamington, and discovering that the town was empty, and surrounded by forest. What changed over the first two years of trying to write in relation to this idea was not the overall idea - which was a kind of 'mythos' - but the narrative entry-point into the world. In the first few weeks I worked with the initial narrative trajectory, but then, after about two months I switched to a narrative which was from the point of view of people who lived in and around London and who were investigating the disappearance of two, largely-unconnected groups of friends (which is to say that I switched to an external viewpoint on the parallel world, creating a space of enigmatic disappearance which temporarily aligned the narrative project - in a distant way, it is true - to the world of Picnic at Hanging Rock). And then, in 2009 I arrived at the idea of a group of six people who find themselves in the Corridor (as the parallel world is called) around three years after the parallel emergence took place, where the events take place largely in the Corridor version of a rural (now entirely forested) area of Suffolk. The events of this narrative take place over around five days, and it took me around four years to write it (and including editing, it took eight years).


*

     A main idea in this section and the preceding one has been that after 1998 I was progressively swept up into a process which was both an intensification in relation to dreamings, and an intensification in relation to movements into the outside, where journeys into scurfland, countryside and wilderness spaces are one kind of instance of movement into the outside (and where these journeys can be actual or virtual-real, something which entails that in some cases the dreamings and the movements into the outside are not separable from each other). What was being indicated by this idea will now be more clear, and it will also be clear that there are many other senses of journeys into the outside involved here, as with movements into the beyond of ordinary affect, perception and envisaging, and as with the becomings which have been described: the becoming-atmosphere (section 37) and the becoming-woman and becoming-horse in the Brixton semi-trance experience. For a while the process went relatively slowly, and then it 'took flight,' increasing substantially in its intensity.

    


     The other point which has been signaled in advance is that the movement forward had a tendency to centre itself (or relate back to) a 'displaced centre' in the form of the town of Leamington - a central-point whose function seemed always to be that of pointing beyond itself. In relation to 'The River' this does not really seem to hold to any significant extent: it is true that it is an exploration of the idea of the escape-group (as with 'Ktarizon: Deep Water'), and that the issue of the escape-group came into focus for me when I was in Leamington, but this is not really a 'substantive' connection. And with the experience in Brixton the parallel in terms of semi-trance experiences going in the direction of Australia is again at best tangential. However, with The Corridor the situation is very straightforward. Leamington was the initial place of the whole virtual-real world, and again appears as a displaced centre: at the beginning it is everything, and then (without me giving any thought at all to this process) it is very rapidly effaced - placed far off to one side - so that what has taken place there has no direct role in the eventual narrative. The original event is not discarded within the world of the story (see Section 28) - Leamington is the largest unchanged place that is known about by the story's individuals (who, however, have not had chance to find out much about the areas immediately around them, and who only have knowledge about certain areas of the wider expanse of the Corridor form of the planet, as with the knowledge about South America (Sections 27, 28)), but it plays no part in the plot, and is simply described in passing, toward the end of the book. It is also the case that for the people who have been there (Cass's group; Kelvin) it has been a place they have visited on the way to somewhere else. 



    *


    It can be seen, of course, that at depth the issue here has almost nothing to do with Leamington, and also that the defining of spatial journeys into the outside in terms of wildernesses and scurf-terrains misses the crucial element or horizon. Evidently what is at issue here is the planet.


*


   It will also be becoming apparent that there was another form of intensification which was increasingly in effect in the years after 1998. This other (immanently inter-related) modality of forward movement was the intensification of my relationship with women: a heightening which was simultaneously about love relationships and - inseparably - about another aspect of what Deleuze and Guattari call 'becoming-woman' (it needs to be seen immediately that when a man is in love with a woman he is intrinsically in a profound becoming-woman - this is perhaps the primary repressed aspect of the human world).


    In writing the story 'The River' the becoming-woman was there in the form of the character Kesta. There is still a male first-person narrator, but Kesta is a beginning, and by the end it is her voice which is central in the story.

    In the experience in Brixton the becoming-woman took a direct form (and one which, importantly, gave the impression of being a 'component of passage,' a necessary metamorphosis for the purposes of crossing a threshold). But what this experience shares with Kesta (and the other female characters in 'The River' ) is that it has no aspect of being sexually indulgent. (it is this which gives the becoming its power). In becoming the woman who I saw as a female version of myself I experienced an intense joy and an intense sensuality, but this was the joy and sensuality of dancing: there was no indulgence at all in relation to sexuality (it can be added both that dancing is another fundamental repressed element of the human world, and that the domains of implied awareness that came with this persona being an academic probably helped me - through taking up my attention - in avoiding a shift in focus toward the indulgently erotic).




   With The Corridor the becoming-woman was exceptionally intense, and was at both at the level of the virtual-real and the level of the actual.

   In 2007 I embarked on a relationship with the woman, Maysa, who has now been my partner for many years. Falling in love with Maysa was in the fullest sense fundamental in arriving at the world of the eventual Corridor novel, in that the deep-level closeness to a woman was vital in writing a novel in which three of the six protagonists are women. And simultaneously the new circumstances in which I found myself had a focus and stability which were also extremely important.

    Also, there was a phase - not long after the start of the relationship - which had an extraordinary level of intensity. For ten weeks I was in the forested north of the part of the Patagonian Andes which is in Argentina, and during this time it was both the case that I was intensely in love, and that I had been swept away into an unprecedentedly inspiring and thought-provoking series of journeys. The whole process was an act which on one level belonged to the relationship, in that the area was one which Maysa loved (she had been there twice, once as a young child, and once when she was around twenty years old). This ten weeks in northern Patagonia was crucial for the gestation of The Corridor (Patagonia is mentioned in the novel (Section 27), but the influence is not really indicated by this fact). While I was there I started to write within-the-Corridor stories (as opposed to externally located stories which were primarily about disappearances) where these stories were set in the Corridor version of northwest Patagonia. And by the time I left the area I was in love with it to the extent that I felt in some way I belonged to it, rather than belonging to Britain, and I feel that an affective displacement of this kind is very valuable in writing a book which aims to be planetary in its focus.

    In relation to the virtual-real, in writing The Corridor an encounter with women - with the female - was in effect to a very large extent, and on multiple levels. There were three female protagonists, out of six, and as the novel progresses Ffion comes to the forefront; two out of the three anomalous humans who are encountered are female (and of these three it is a woman who is the most important, in that she impacts substantially on the story); women overall out-number men in the Corridor, in relation to the individuals who are encountered and described; and it is both the case that three out of the four beings from the Deep Hotel are female, and that two other non-human anomalous beings (the familiast, and the 'thin man') show themselves to be capable of also taking a female form. However, the book also explicitly sets out (through narrative events, but also through abstractions) an account of sexuality which has becoming-woman as a fundamental aspect. (see Sections 26, 27, 28).




     The process of writing The Corridor continued until around 2011. And the current process of writing - Explorations - is now beginning to touch its end-point in terms of its 'span' of recent chronological time, in that on this level the book you are reading is primarily about the years between 1993 and 2011. 

    It has now been possible - in the course of this section and the previous one - to give an indication of why it is that three coordinates for understanding the idea of the south-outside are the planet, women and the abstract (Section 1). And the 'south-outside' is another name for the Future, in the same way as it is another name for Love-and-Freedom, and for the path, or 'way forward'  that is the sixth aspect of the transcendental, as set out in Section 34. On an empirical and impersonally personal level this book is to a large extent about a doorway to the Future that 'appeared' in the years between 1995 and 1998, but on the level of the transcendental-empirical it is about a route to the Future that is always there. And something is now being done to show what it is to travel toward transcendental south, in terms of explicating the three coordinates given in the book's opening section. The triple intensificatory movement that has just been described involved dreamings, the attribute of brightness, and the planet. And dreamings are a crucial aspect or dimension of the abstract. 

    However, although dreamings, taken on their own, are enough to show an outline of the 'intensive-current' which is in question (and to indicate why it is that the statement in Section 1 was made) there are other aspects of the abstract which should also form part of the account. Most of all what is insufficiently-included is the dimension of intent (it will be noticed that it has not in fact been completely absent, as shown by the issue of changes in the overall modality of choice-making).


     In fact, in several ways there is now a lot more to be done in relation to the account of the sixth aspect of the transcendental-empirical, and in relation to other, closely connected issues. But the way of moving forward will continue to be the process of circling around a displaced centre in the form of the town of Leamington, a process which began at the start of Section 37. 




    The years between 2004 and 2008 were a very good time in relation to taking unusual decisions concerning where to live and where and how to travel (this was partly because I did not need to be living in any specific place). However, initially I had no awareness at all of the extent of was possible. Because my contract was 'term-time only' my job at the City Lit gave me eleven weeks of holiday, but, given the work was already low-paid,' having the extra time meant there was even less money for doing anything with the time: this was the problem - how more of the money could be made available for the eleven weeks. 

    In 2004 when I returned from Barcelona I kept remembering spending the night on the hill in the centre of Barcelona, and kept recalling the feeling that I would not have exchanged that place for a night in the best hotel in the city. It seemed that this 'counter-intuitive' outcome was something that should be considered in relation to the problem of where to live in London, a thought which seemed worthwhile, even though it almost immediately led to an incredulous perspective, a feeling of 'surely that's not possible'. But over the next few months I thought about it carefully, and realised there were aspects of my situation which meant the plan would work. The City Lit had kitchens and showers, and because of its central location if you set off each evening with a backpack-and-tent it would be very easy to vary where you went, if you were 'living' in woodland areas on the edge of the city (that is, if you became a commuter who happened to be living nomadically in a tent). When my contract was coming to an end in the summer of 2005 I decided I did not want to continue with renting a flat.

     By the time I went to Argentina I had been living in a tent for the majority of the previous two and a half years. In total I had spent eighteen months living in this way, and I had found it both enjoyable and productive of valuable new perspectives (the gaps in the process were short-term arrangements where friends wanted someone to pay for their room in a shared house while they were away, and were times when I was houseminding/catsitting for City Lit tutors). I had gone through the whole of the previous winter without any problems at all, which was exhilarating in that this had seemed as if it might be the flaw in the plan, and not only had it all been an inspiring experience, but at the same time I had solved the problem of money. I had gone on two long holidays in Mongolia, and - having arranged a three month sabbatical from January to March - I had now been able to afford the return flight to Argentina, with enough money left for food.

    When I arrived in the northwest of Argentinian Patagonia I had a feeling of being in a place which was very extraordinary, and this feeling only intensified over the next ten weeks. I based myself in a small, attractive town, and in places that I found in the surrounding forested mountains: returning to the town for a few days, going off for a week or ten days, and then returning again, so that I got to know a town as well as wilderness and semi-wilderness terrains that could be reached from there.

    This was a 'furthest-point' in a long spiral curve, but if leaving this area was the start of an arc of return, it simultaneously has always felt as if the visit to it was the appearance of a new displaced centre around which the development of a further spiral has always seemed possible (a displaced centre which already - from the time of the visit - has been a new, and singular point of focus in the virtual-real).

    It is worth thinking about the area as a furthest-point. It can be pointed out, for instance, that since 1995-1997 I had been going increasingly in the 'direction' of forests, where this movement simultaneously involved the actual and the virtual-real. The process had started with the dreams in Leamington and the 1996 visit to Greece (Section 24), where what was in common between the two experiences was forests: and it had continued, on the one hand, with journeys to mountain forests in Romania, Spain and Mongolia, and, on the other hand, with a series of story-worlds that began with the sea-jungle in Ktarizon: Deep Water and had just expanded into the mythos of The Corridor, where the emergent parallel dimension is the planet covered in forest. (and the fact that going in this direction was to a great extent not deliberate does not make it less interesting - on the contrary, it is interesting primarily because it was not deliberate).

     In the town where I was now recurrently staying (to which I kept returning) you could turn in a circle in the central streets and there was an unbroken band of forests on the surrounding mountains and hills. And the forests themselves to a great extent were wilderness terrains which in comparison with European mountain forests were very unaffected by human beings. I had not come to the area specifically because of the forests - I had come there because Maysa had told me about it, and because with its Andean mountains, wild terrains and lakes I felt it was a place I should visit. But once I was there the forests came increasingly into the foreground. When I arrived the Corridor mythos had actualised itself as a story about disappearances, a story in which dreams (about sunlit, forested dereliction) gave an ambiguous indication of the emergent world into which whole groups of people had disappeared, but where nothing was certain. But now I began to get new ideas for stories: for instance the idea of someone meeting a group of people living in a small, newly constructed house in a forest at the top of a remote Andean valley, who discovers afterwards that he had been in a parallel world, with the discovery starting from the point where he looks from a distance toward the house, and realises there is nothing there but forest. I still did not have the idea that would become the novel, but I was exploring the new space: I had started with Leamington, then had pulled back simultaneously onto the outside of the parallel emergence, and toward London. And now I had returned to exploring Corridor terrains, and the terrains were on the opposite hemisphere of the planet, so that two 'leaps' had been taken - the first one being a departure from the ordinary-reality of what is called 'the Disaster' within the mythos, and the second being a departure from Europe and its neighbouring zones.

     Somewhat separately, it is also the case that the visit itself - as opposed to the place - was a furthest-point in relation to a line of unusual decision-making which I had been following. I had the money to be there - and to be there for that length of time - because I had been living in the woodlands of London for a year and a half. And part of the reason for mentioning this fact is that it connects up with something that took place on the trip in relation to virtual-real worlds, and writing. it is as if the unconventional choice-making and the exhilaration of the arrival in Patagonia (together with the thought of having three months away from work) gave a momentum that created a new development. I decided that during the three months of the holiday I would write a very short story every day, alternating each day - in a three day cycle - between the stream-of-consciousness perspectives of a woman, a cat, and a specific male character, who was different from myself (and it should be added that the figures or characters in all three of these sequences of stories would inform or impact upon The Corridor). I had not done anything like this before, and I was in a sense surprised that I succeeded in doing it (I had notebooks with me, and I wrote a 'micro-tale' in a notebook every day). However, although I found it a valuable and inspiring process (and although I liked a lot of the stories) the process might easily have faded largely 'out of sight' in my memory, if it wasn't for the fact that near the end of the holiday an event took place which made it seem as if it had been far more like a genuine process of trying to wake faculties (and of trying to leave behind the constrained, subjectified self) than a process of writing stories from different perspectives.

    I feel it was a good time for this experiment to occur. I was in love with Maysa, and this state was valuable in terms of avoiding any indulgently erotic directions in taking up the perspective of a woman. The love relationship assisted the other becoming-woman that was involved in the writing (and recurrently the two were inseparable in that Maysa was the inspiration in effect in the story), and this is to say that, as with the experience in the Brixton techno club the dreamings stayed largely away from the crudely erotic or the pornographic.

    The relationship between myself and Maysa was strong, and was of course not being put under pressure by an excessive proximity (we were regularly in touch, however, through phone-calls and emails). At the beginning of the holiday I had a tendency to be worried about the relationship, and at this point when I went to a particularly striking place - a lake whose shore was mostly wilderness forests without paths - my insecure state was weighing on me. However, when I returned to this place nine weeks later I was in a much better state. It was on one of the nights when I was at this lake the second time that I had a dream which I describe in Hidden Valleys:


     "I dreamed I was in a long-abandoned soviet base somewhere deep in Siberian forest. I had the clear knowledge that the place was very far from any human habitation (I felt this as an exceptionally positive thing, and there was a phrase in my mind like "two days walk from anywhere in any direction"). The first view of the base was from the outside, from a track arriving from the west. It was daylight, in summer. After that, I was in an area inside it, which had some smallish buildings on one side, including an attached fifty foot high wooden tower, which I knew in the dream  had been used over the years of dereliction by people observing birds. Fifty feet diagonally opposite these buildings across an area of grass there is a line of things that I think could be small missile silos (although in the dream the feeling of the original purpose of the base is indeterminate between military and space-exploration). Behind them is thick forest, and alongside on the right, and immediately opposite the buildings, there is a wall of encroaching trees.

   I found myself at the top of the observation tower, a rectangular space with a wooden floor. Looking at objects left on this floor (maybe a box of matches is one of them) the idea arrives in the dream that there are people living on the base.

    At some point in the dream (I could never place the event in the sequence of other occurrences) I go over to the wall of trees. And animals of different kinds start coming along branches toward me - tree-animals, perhaps like raccoons, also a lynx-sized cat... It is a moment of profoundly moving depth-level communication. I am being greeted and welcomed, and at the same time I am greeting and welcoming them. I am intensely grateful for their opening up of contact, given all that has happened between humans and other animals - and I am welcoming them to myself. Everything is at the level of feeling and intent - we communicate by sharing our states of being.

    In a part of the dream that apparently in some sense continues from my being on the top of the tower, I am suddenly aware that I am floating in mid-air in a room at ground level below the tower, and I am being shown how to literally be beyond gravity by a group of three very beautiful women who are also in mid-air in the room, and who are part of a small group of people who are living in the base during the summer.

    A moment later I am with two men, in another room, alongside the first one. At the very beginning of this part of the dream the men tell me that the women are not here now, when I am in a more-awake state, because when women with whom I could fall in love are present my choices are continually inflected by sexual desire. They point out this fact to me as something that I need to change.

   The two men are sitting on the far side of a table. One of them reads an astonishingly brilliant, abstract-oneiric prose poetry passage from a book he is holding. I ask to hear something again, that I have not quite grasped. When the man responds he reads out something completely different, but equally brilliant. I insist on seeing the book, and discover that what I am reading is also astonishing, but that the passage is different again from either of the passages that the man "read out." The friendly laughter of the men makes me aware that I am being shown the direction of spontaneity and lucid improvisation, and that I am being told that I am neurotic.

     At the end of the dream I am suddenly outside a train station in London - very familiar to me from commuting - and I am distressed because I have accidentally got my girlfriend pregnant at a time when an escape is taking place on the part of a group of friends, with the pregnancy understood by me as something that would be deleterious to the escape.

    And then suddenly - and this is the very end of the dream - I am stroking a female cat that is looking at me as I stroke it, and that is reaching sexual ecstasy. As the cat reaches orgasm - it vanishes. 

    I wake up, in the tent, in Patagonia."     

                                                                     [pp. 64-66, Hidden Valleys: Zero Books, 2015]



     A first point in relation to this experience concerns an absence - it concerns a question of different paths toward the south-outside, and of a point where a circuitous path becomes one which is far more direct. If this event belonged to a 'furthest-zone' it is important to see that it did not involve the ingestion of a pychotropic substance, and to see that psychotropic substances were not involved at all in the trip to Patagonia. It is also the case that the four-year process of writing The Corridor was one which involved no element of taking drugs. And to this should be added the fact that although psychotropics were involved in the experience in Brixton and in the arrival of the initial idea for the story which starts this section, they were not involved in the main process of dreaming up The River, or in the process of writing it. Everything in fact was now beginning to move forward. In a sense, the movement was already in effect in relation to dreams in sleep, in that the dreams which are in question almost all took place in a state of sobriety. But, in any case, what is important here is to avoid giving the wrong impression about dreamings in the sense of the virtual-real worlds of written narratives and fictions. Here, as well as the fact that the taking of drugs is a circuitous path it also needs to be said that they are only temporarily valuable, that they are generally not involved in primary breakthrough moments in relation to dreamings, and that they are likely to almost never be valuable in processes of writing.

     A second issue is that of the experience belonging to the furthest-point (of a spiral movement). And this to a certain extent will for now have to stand as an enigma (one that will be resolved in a subsequent section). However, there is an obvious line of continuity in relation to the dreams in Leamington: in the dream in Patagonia there was an escape-group living in a forest, as with the earlier dreams. It can be objected that the connections here are primarily with the groups described by Castaneda, but this objection is somewhat lacking in force: the people in the dream did not remind of the figures in Castaneda's books, in that they had their own characters or ways of being; and there was also a specificity in relation to the terrain that left no impression of the dream being some kind of 'tracing' of elements from the books in question: it was Siberian forest, and it was an abandoned base that had originally belonged to the military, or to the Russian space programme. 


     Lastly, the years culminating in the trip to Argentina give an indication of the heightening of the three immanently-related processes that are now in question: dreamings, movements into the outside, and modalities of entering into becoming with women. And it should be pointed out at this stage that the experience within the dream where I was with the three women was not modulated or inflected by male lust: instead it took the form of sharing in an intense, sensual and very feminine brightness - a perceptual and sensual bliss-and-delight which was in the form of femininity, and which as such was simultaneously a warrior state of love and lucidity, and of adventurousness in relation to the unknown. This stage of the dream was just a moment, so momentary that its main phase was of being somewhere else a moment later, remembering what had just happened. But, shifting from the literal to the figural, it is important to see that brightness, bliss and delight are all names for what is beyond gravity. Femininity and masculinity are difficult concepts to use: but it remains the case that there is a tendency for the female side of the human world to hold the key to transcendental departures to a greater extent than the male side. And ultimately what is at stake here is that the freedom of an embodied metamorphics (where the ideas of male and female break down and are supplanted by ideas based on becomings) depends on a process of entering into becoming with brightness. The three coordinates for understanding what is meant by the Futural are the planet, the abstract, and brightness. And in thinking about women in relation to brightness - and in thinking about the process of moving toward what can be called the male-female and the female-female, where these terms have multiple, diverse senses - what most of all needs to come to mind are women whose existence is that of the courageous explorer of the zones and spheres of reality.


    

                                                                         
                                                                     

Note

At some point in 2002 or 2003 I had a dream which can be placed together both with the dream in Patagonia, and the dream recounted in the previous section, in which I jumped from a conveyor belt, and saw newspapers scattered everywhere, and had the experience of smelling burning lives (the three dreams took place in the course of around five or six years).

In the dream I was in a terrain which had the remains of an ancient civilisation - a civilisation whose artefacts, while being impressive, seemed somewhat sinister, and which also had an indeterminate alien quality, as if it was not quite the case that they were straightforwardly human artefacts. 

At the start of the dream I was crossing a wide high, slope that I knew would eventually lead to a view down into an extremely valley in very high mountains. To my right there were several squat, three-sided 'obelisk' or 'pyramid' structures. They were made of stone, were around ten feet high, and although they were three-sided in horizontal cross-section, their lines were curvilinear, so that they curved inward toward the apex. However, the front facet, which in each case faced the path, had a quality of being sheared-off, so that it was an isosceles triangular facet, whose long sides were curved, but which was all on one plane. Into this plane inscriptions had been cut into the stone. Each symbol was made of several elements, and the elements were all gouges with a regular form, but cut at different angles: the gouges were indentations that started narrow and shallow and then went deeper forming a circuloid indentation that created a slight pocket at the end (in which, to illustrate the shape, water would collect). They were like semi-three-dimensional upside-down commas with a tail that had no curve and which tapered smoothly to its shallow tip. They were in clusters of three or four, which were the symbols, and seemed in fact, to stay with the comma comparison, to be at angles, as well as the one which seemed most prevalent, where the circular, indented 'pocket' was at the base.

   In the dream although there was a resemblance to grave markers was part of the experience the inscribed structures had the disturbing quality of in some way being themselves entities, so that they were experienced as having a faint, semi-alive or alien awareness. As if they were in themselves undead, and were neither ghosts nor grave markers. This feeling was very much centred on the gouge-inscriptions, although the inscriptions could of course not be separated from the stone into which they had been cut.

   This slope of inscribed, triangular cross-section structures was experienced as a marker indicating a crossing into the terrain of the ancient civilisation.

   After this, the dream shifted, and I was near the top of a thirty or forty-storey tower that I knew within the dream belonged to the civilisation (even though, while made of stone, it had the form of a modern skyscraper), and that I knew was built on the flat valley floor that had been ahead and far down in the previous part of the dream, and that despite it being very high, its top part was a long way below the tops of the steep mountainsides of the valley - as if it only reached a fifth of the way. It seemed I had climbed up stairs within the structure, which inside had a quality of being chaotically derelict.

     I was around two or three stories from the summit, but the upper part of the multi-level structure was a space of continual minor collapses: it felt precarious in that parts of the structure kept internally collapsing, and the whole upper area seemed to be creaking under immense strain. This did not seem to be because of external forces, such as the wind, and nor did it seem that the foundations were in danger: instead it seemed that the upper part, which seemed to be made of both masonry and wood or metal support beams, was continually falling apart. To be there seemed to be very precarious, but there was no sense that the whole tower might collapse. Instead there was a feeling both of precariousness and of claustrophobia, as if the tower was a perturbing interior space, and also as if I had taken the wrong direction in trying to climb to the top of it. And it should also be added that by the end of the dream the surrounding parts of the structure seemed quotidian and modern so that the quality of it being ancient and alien had faded.

 What is it for someone to disconnect the forcefield of ordinary reality that is the primary aspect of the human world? What is it for someone to 'stop the world'?

In all three of the dreams there was a space of anomalous dereliction: but in the last dream - the one about the abandoned base - there was a higher level of focus. To stop the flow of ordinary reality is to find yourself on the planet, with the animals alongside you as well as human beings, and for the world of the nation states and capitalism to have profoundly receded, and to have changed its aspect so that it looks like dereliction, and most of all looks like a disturbing hypertrophy or disfunctionality which in no way deserves the respect it accords itself and claims as its right. The domain of capitalism-and-the-nation-states shrinks down so that it is only an element within the terrain, and at the same time it becomes visible as a tangled, profoundly deadly mess, that is filamented around the planet. And the key thing is that it does not have probity: it is not that everything is basically alright, but a few key steerage-decisions need to be altered. It is not alright at all - in that it has the form of a disease. The whole domain is continually destroying species and environments, and intrinsically embroils people in - and conducts people toward - life-crushing forms of existence. And in terms of its accounts of the world, the institutions which produce these accounts continuously award themselves with a prestige which is unearned, either because they are irrelevant in relation to the fundamental issues, or do not have the validity which is ascribed to them. 

   However, the problem ultimately is a question of different forms of gravity-inflected, reactive socius, and the situation was not different in, for instance, social worlds whose writing was cuneiform or heiroglyphs, and nor is it fundamentally different in tribal societies.

   There are reasons to believe that - taken overall - the world of writing makes it even harder to go in the direction of stopping the flow of words, but the crucial thing in the end is to stop the flow of words and perceive. And beyond perception, as the next step (and the step which concerns what it is to have stopped the world), is abstract perception. What is most vital of all is to learn how to see intent (in individuals, dreams, stories, social formations, groups), and to learn how to see flows or currents of heartening affect within the world.

                                                                       * * *