Explorations: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Explorations: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 50)
There was the main precursor-event, in Coventry, in 1993 (Sections 2, 4, 5 and 6). And then there was the process of becoming increasingly aware of transcendental south, and of starting to move - extremely slowly - in this direction, a process which began in 1995, as if I was swept into a current, shifting from rotating in a backwater to a deliberate, though exceptionally slow forward movement. The overall process here, from 1995 onwards, consisted of aspects transecting all levels of my life: it consisted of changes of location, journeys to new places, changes of ways of moving and breathing, and developments of different forms of writing - and very fundamentally (and inseparably from the last instance) it consisted of a series of dreams and trance-experiences, beginning in 1995.
The primary aim of this whole book is an account of the dynamic of this incremental forward-movement in the space of intensity (but in particular see sections 15, 18, 24, 25, 34, 37, and 38). And it needs to be said at this point that sustained attention has been directed toward the dreams and trance-experiences, because of their importance in themselves (what they show about the world), but also because of the importance of waking the faculty of dreaming, a faculty which all along is a modality of perception (again, see sections 15, 18, 24, 25, 34, 37 and 38).
However, there was a second series of dreams and trance-experiences, one which began only a few weeks after the first one (and an aspect of this additional series was involved toward the end of the precursor-event).
After an initial process of bringing some wider perspectives into focus, this section will be about that second series.
*
The primary aim of this whole book is an account of the dynamic of this incremental forward-movement in the space of intensity (but in particular see sections 15, 18, 24, 25, 34, 37, and 38). And it needs to be said at this point that sustained attention has been directed toward the dreams and trance-experiences, because of their importance in themselves (what they show about the world), but also because of the importance of waking the faculty of dreaming, a faculty which all along is a modality of perception (again, see sections 15, 18, 24, 25, 34, 37 and 38).
However, there was a second series of dreams and trance-experiences, one which began only a few weeks after the first one (and an aspect of this additional series was involved toward the end of the precursor-event).
After an initial process of bringing some wider perspectives into focus, this section will be about that second series.
*
There is a need which is now becoming more and more urgent,
all the time, across the entirety of the planet. This is the need within the
human world (though it is a need relating to the whole planet) for
micro-departures from the reactive, control-fixated values embodied by the
capitalist and state-governance domain of this world, a domain which is best described as the macrological expression of the 'interesestablishment,' or 'interiority'. (Section 1). These departures can be at the level of
practices, systems of practices, groups and individuals. They are of many
different kinds, a large number of which are the ones with which there is a high degree
of familiarity: they are embodiments of green-philosophy or planet-focused ideas,
expressed as choices about where you go, what you do, what you read, how you
travel, where you live, what you buy, etc. The departures involving escape-groups
are held together by the requirement for an effective group of individuals, who
work together on a single level as an escape-party, and therefore they are not
likely, in each case, to consist of more than a few individuals – a group of six or ten
or twenty people who have together set out to travel into wider spheres of
existence, away from the destructions and horror of ordinary reality.
The horizon here –
in setting out – is indeed a planetary horizon, and it is best to envisage it as
a daylight planetary horizon where this has the highest degree, on average, of
light (south in the northern hemisphere, north in the southern hemisphere).
Imagine a distant, forest-wilderness horizon, but with a primary focus on
the planet's atmosphere, so that your eyes are looking
at the whole expanse, but are centred on the sky, the sky just above the last line of
forested hills or mountains. And the fundamental point here is that this planetary
horizon is to be understood not only as the unknown, but also – as the unconscious.
This planetary unconscious is immanent (so long as it is both the case that we have been created within the planet, and live on it's surface, our faculties and energies form an element pertaining to the planet) and it is also a transcendental unconscious. The 'un' in unconscious does not denote some dead domain of drives and functionings, but refers instead to the fact that we are unconscious of the planetary space-of-encounters so long as our faculties are trapped at the level of the empirical, whereas if we are brought to the level of the transcendental (the transcendental-empirical, or next-level empirical), and, as such, wake our faculties of lucidity and dreaming, we start to become aware - in an ongoing process - of this spheroambient ur-zone which is going into effect within us.
*
From 1993 onwards (1993 is the year in which the main events recounted in this book commenced) I began to be aware of three fundamental facts, each of which can be accurately described as a necessity:
It is necessary to become part of a nomadism.
It is necessary to wake the faculties, starting with perception.
It is necessary to wake becomings, starting with becoming-planet, and becoming-woman. (re. becoming-woman, see sections 26, 27 and 28).
It can be seen that all three of these requirements intrinsically involve the planet, because in living and breathing on the surface of the planet perception is perception of the planet, and - in connection with the first requirement - because a nomadism exists in relation to the terrains of the planet, not in relation to a state.
But all three of these are encompassed by a fourth necessity, which includes the others, but also goes radically beyond them. This is the necessity to travel toward transcendental-south: toward an embodiment of an intent of love and freedom, and both toward wider realities and toward a serene, impersonal joy and delight in relation to exploration, and the adventure of existence. As has been seen, the three best coordinates for understanding this direction are brightness, the abstract - and the planet.
However, alongside this Futural direction, there is another direction which has aspects which in an indirect sense pertain to the Futural, Southward journey, in that encounters with these aspects can under specific conditions be valuable or even indispensable: however, this direction is emphatically not to the south of ordinary reality, but is substantially to one side. It is closer to south than the world of gravity and closed-minded righteousness of the interestablishment, but the feeling with this bordering-on-south direction is of a de-subjectified openness (and serenity) which nonetheless is intrinsically vitiated by a substantial degree of fixation on power, whether social, metaphysical, sexual, or psychological. The works of writers such as William Burroughs, Angela Carter and Mervyn Peake are to a great extent the result of engagement with this direction.
What is fundamentally required is the opening up of a view of the south-outside - or, to put this another way, the opening up of a perception of the energy-current that leads toward wider realities, away from the grim control-systems of the interestablishment. And the method in this current section will be to provide a clearer view by delineating a subtle border, both to include an aspect of southward journeys, and to attune understanding in a way that will not only deepen an engagement with the Futural, but will prevent confusion in relation to paths into the Outside.
*
February of 1996. Tess and I had been living for five months in Leamington. The feeling I have from this time is that I had been propelled forward - that there had been a sudden increase in openness. Everything forms a single block of brighter, more intense circumstances.
- I had shifted to concentrating on A Thousand Plateaus, a move from doing the initial work on Deleuze's earlier writings, in particular Difference and Repetition (my project was about the transcendental materialism of A Thousand Plateaus, so this shift was the necessary alteration of focus at this point).
- I was now doing seminar teaching on undergraduate philosophy courses at Warwick University, and as a result I was doing work on philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibniz.
- I had started to find new sources of inspiration: In the autumn term I had watched the films Picnic at Hanging Rock and Solaris, and the visionary exteriority of these films somehow melded in my mind with the exteriority of the house in The Waves (which I re-read at this time) and the forest in Patti Smith's song Horses. Inseparably the LSD experience of Tess and myself alternately speaking on the beat, and maintaining a shared abstract-oneiric space of trance (Section 24) was at a new level from equivalent experiences in Coventry - it was far more bright and planetary in its focus.
- I had left Coventry, and with it I had left behind a tendency for my imaginative horizon to be fixated on Gibson's matrix, Bladerunner replicants and Nick Land's capitalist acceleration toward the post-human (with this change I had started to leave behind a specific form of fixation on the line of time).
- Inseparably from the last point I was no longer living in an outlier of the sprawl of the cities of the West Midlands, but was living in a town. And the optic was of living in a town which was a zone moored in the middle of the countryside, with the countryside/island as another zone moored on the surface of the planet. The urban/technological sprawl had been replaced by the planet - which is to say it had been subsumed within it (Gibson had not gone, he was just no longer in the foreground). And after only a few weeks in Leamington (through watching Picnic at Hanging Rock, and thinking about the figure of Irma, who is left behind in the Departure of the story) the question of philosophy's relationship with tragedy had gone into startling effect, and this was in part the return of that very planetary thinker Shakespeare. Despite Coventry's pretensions on this subject, I had arrived in Shakespeare-country, a very planet-focused, slightly alien terrain, with an extraordinary view toward the transcendental.
- For both Tess and myself it had been crucial that Tess had started doing a Cognitive Science MA in Birmingham. She was now energised by this movement-forward, and for both of us there was an opening up into an increase of discipline. I now did far more work, took fewer psychotropics, and shifted toward using amphetamines for reading A Thousand Plateaus, rather than simply for indulgent episodes of 'partying through the night.'
The impression here is of something very impersonal taking place. I had discovered a way of moving toward an understanding of the line of escape that exists within A Thousand Plateaus. My life was still in many ways an unfocused tumult, and what was happening was the very opposite of a short route toward academic success, but my circumstances were more serene and exhilarating, and they were more productive of outsights about the nature of the world.
*
The place where we were living was a top floor flat in the southern area which had once been the prestigious centre of the burgeoning Spa, but which was now quite run-down, given that the centre of the town had moved north in the early nineteenth century, and given that the ongoing post-Spa incorporation-of-industry phase of the town was centred in the south. The view from the living-room window was westward across roofs to the platforms of the railway station: to the southwest there was a horizon of trees, and between this horizon and the house the trains travelled on the viaduct that cut diagonally through this part of the town. The river Leam was three hundred yards to the right, hidden by buildings, and two miles beyond the railway station was the place where the Leam joined the Avon, and where the grand union canal crossed the new larger river on an aqueduct. The railway went toward Warwick and up toward Birmingham, and to the southeast it went into Warwickshire countryside, passing to the east of the Harbury Lake upland (I had not yet been to Harbury Lake, but it was now palpably the case that we were on the edge of the countryside, in that in most directions you could walk there in twenty minutes).
In the foreground, and a bit to the left, there was the overgrown support of a set of railway lines that had been removed. It was thirty feet high, twenty feet wide, and ten across - and its flat top was a small terrain of shrubs and small trees. This tiny eco-zone of dereliction was the result of the decline of the railways, but Leamington was a space of subtle forms of dereliction: not only were there patches of dilapidation and decay, but the deterioration related to the fact that it was a kind of palimpsest of failed, and partially failed projects: the new project (slightly up-market market town, and dormitory zone for Birmingham, Coventry and the University of Warwick) was in fact going very well, but it was still the case that it had a declining industrial zone, and was at depth a collapsed Spa-town project. The whole town was a zone of transit, a slightly dilapidated ongoing re-invention of itself, that had to be open to the outside to keep itself from collapse.
I was in the right place, but in a very impersonal sense of the word 'right'. Leamington and the area around it was to be the Zone, the bright locus of a dangerous struggle. If you took the wrong turn you would end up in the meat grinder; if you took the right turn you would end up at a doorway which led not into a room, but into an eerily sublime Elsewhere.
It was around 2am, and I was in the living room listening to a techno album. For some time I had had the idea that the mind can answer questions which are far more extraordinary than the ones which we normally imagine it can answer, and that the only problem is that we never ask it the questions. This thought - which had been there like a piece of furniture in my mind - was the good side of the starting-point that night, along with the music, which was possibly Autechre.
I had taken speed two hours before, and had just smoked a small amount of grass. A powerful combination which might easily - at that time - have been a wrong turn leading to a bad trip (the meat grinder, to give this Tarkovsky term a specific sense).
I decided to ask the question "What would a future city be like?"
There is very much a quality of a 'retrograde' step about this whole event, in that I had stepped aside from working on A Thousand Plateaus, and in that the question was governed by the line of time, and by a search for the spectacular / city-technological (it was not a problem I was trying to solve - I wanted a nomad group, and a freedom to explore the world; I did not require a city). However, although this was a partially retrograde movement (a movement to one side), it may even have been the case that I was taking a circuitous path which was necessary for travelling into the South of the outside of ordinary reality (where I was going would be best described as a kind of eerily serene side-zone, as opposed to an eerily sublime-serene Elsewhere).
I was sitting on the floor with my back to the sofa, and with the music coming from my right. I had reached an intense state of joy, and had a feeling of being unusually able to see into things so as to understand. My eyes may have been closed, but it also seems possible that they were open, certainly at the beginning of the experience: the music was the perceptual thread that maintained itself. In asking the question - 'What would a future city be like? - I was propelling myself into a semi-trance. And the issue that needs to be raised is that of where I was looking in asking this question. The ensuing experience was guided a little by the conscious but was primarily constructed by the unconscious - and in thinking about the strange wall of the unknown that we call the unconscious it is important to avoid being dogmatic about the nature of what takes place when we look in this direction.
The city was made out of curved, low expanses of a material that might have been stone. The curves of walls and of the edges of very wide terraces and roof-terraces were spread out across a large area, but for the most part they had a very low contour in relation to the ground - around sixty feet high on average. The curves looked like they had been designed in a wind-tunnel, and they were suggestive both of the sharp, fluid lines of the tops of snowdrifts, and simultaneously of military fortifications. It seemed that it was built partly underground, and it was by the sea, extended alongside a sandy beach. The material out of which it was constructed was white (it did not seem to be painted) and the impression was that it was spread out across an area that was perhaps two miles square, so that its scale was more that of a town, or of a very large Minoan palace. I do not remember seeing any windows or doors in the structure. The word 'palisades' comes to mind in thinking about it, but in a way where this term seems to refer to the curved expanses of the terraces and the walls (in fact, a palisade is an encircling defensive wall, normally made of wood). Through the first part of the experience I was standing with the city behind me: and it should be added that at the time I gave no attention to the fact that there were no windows or doors, and did not register any 'military' or 'defensive' aspect to the building.
I was standing looking down, from about fifty feet, at an area of sand. To my left was a tall narrow structure, separate from the city, which had a device at the top which in some way focused sunlight into a beam, and this beam was turning an area of sand (below me, and perhaps thirty feet across) into crystalline, fluidly geometrical, two dimensional patterns (in other words it was doing what lightning does in turning wet sand into fulgurites, only in a way which was continual and exceptionally complex, and which was a programmed or directly 'played' artistic act on the part of an inhabitant - or inhabitants - of the city). The movement of the changing patterns was connected to the techno music I was hearing - it was to some extent a dance in relation to it - but this not a foregrounded aspect of the experience.
I was aware at the time that the tower (narrow and perhaps a hundred feet high) and the sunlight-focusing device had a quality of having been straightforwardly imported into the experience from a sci-fi drawing that I had done when I was fifteen, which was of a planet which had descended into an ice-age: in this drawing there was a mountain-high tower at the far end of a frozen lake, and at the top of the tower there was a spheroid crystal which was sending a beam to melt the lake, with fishing boats setting out, in the foreground, onto the part of the lake whose frozen surface had been melted.
The initial - earlier - phase of the experience had been a very fast mid-air movement along the walls of the building: a kind of 'calm hurtling' alongside the white curves of its facade. The music was strongly present at this stage: it was as if focusing on the music was allowing me to reach what I was seeing - the gravity-free hurtling-forward as a kind of 'techno-sublime'.
Then there was point where I was looking at the patterns in the sand, which had two phases. At one point I was on the building looking at the patterns, and then it was as if my vantage was from directly above them. The viewpoint had gone from sideways to the city, to away from it and down, to then simply downward. I will add at this stage that there was nothing striking about the sea, or the sky, or the beach, and nor was there vegetation of any kind either on the beach or on the city.
The shifting patterns in the sand were fluidly geometrical, coloured (they tended to be sand-colours though sometimes with a neon or crystalline-translucent quality) - and were both geometrically striking and very beautiful. The pulse of the music was now connected to the changing of the patterns, but by this time I am not sure I was giving much direct attention to the music.
I understood the patterns as being artistic productions of the city, within the world of the trance experience. But although they were impressive, I felt they had a sort of 'thin' quality, as if they were only the outer layer of what I was trying to reach. By this time I had seen patterns of this kind on many occasions (see Sections 10 and 35), and the fact these were patterns with a whole world and mode of production associated with them - they belonged to a landscape and had not only an envisaged substance (liquid sand) but an artistic device envisaged as causing them - in some way did not make me feel more impressed.
And then everything 'slowed down' again, and I was standing down on the beach. There was no sign of the patterns. Ten feet away a woman was standing, looking at me.. She was a character - a young nurse - from an Alan Bleasdale series about a schizophrenic boy called Jake's Progress (a few weeks before I had watched a few episodes with Tess). The woman was attractive and was completely in the form of the character from the series: but from the outset it was clear that she was not the woman from the series, or the actress, but was instead a woman who had taken this form.
It was like the beach in Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, where Case meets the AI entity Neuromancer in the form of a young man. But everything happened very fast, with no thought about this other world of the virtual-real.
There was almost no gap between me seeing the woman, and her speaking to me. The allusive playfulness of what she said had a subtle, intense charge, given that the character she had adopted was from a series about schizophrenia.
She gave me a mischievous, sparkling smile, and said
"I bet you didn't think it would be me, did you?"
It is important to give a detailed description of this figure who had appeared in front of me. She had an alluring, sexually-charged beauty, and from the outset she was showing an intellectual intensity, and a humorous, enigmatic aspect which radiated a very high degree of a state that it is best to describe as that of being 'in-control.'.But she simultaneously had a 'minimal' quality - a kind of 'thinness' to her intensity. The actress playing the character in Jake's Progress (which is quite a weak, 'un-achieved' series, despite it having some good aspects) was confronted with a very two dimensional part, playing opposite Robert Lindsay and Julie Walters in a bizarre comedy-and-tragedy story, and had kept her performance very minimal, no doubt because becoming more expansive would have shown up the cracks in the writing. But with this actress there was a depth and warmth behind her minimal performance, whereas with the woman on the beach, the thinness felt as if it was intrinsic to her, despite her exceptional level of focus.
The other point is that the woman not only had a sparkling quality of humour, but she also had - at the beginning at least - a faint quality of danger. I had only seen two episodes of Jake's Progress, and had not seen the way in which it failed to go anywhere with its striking starting-point: the series does not add anything to an understanding of schizophrenia (Jake is a kind of violence-orientated, two-dimensional equivalent of Danny in The Shining) but the slight charge of menace in the series was being invoked by the woman on the beach, along with its lightness.
And this formed a kind of composite with everything else - there was a plane of consistency, with the woman as guide who belonged herself to the plane. I had not in fact been aware of an eerie emptiness to the city (I had set out to envisage a city of the future, but where were the inhabitants?) I think the extreme busy-ness and dynamism of the music was in some way serendipitously speaking to me of an inhabited depth below what I was seeing (after all, the patterns I had been watching were the result of an inhabitant using a laser and sand as an artistic medium), so that there was the high-impact dynamism with no quality of an eerie emptiness.
But now there was an inhabitant, and her inchoate eerie aspect fitted with what was around her. Moreover, in implicitly posing the enigma of who she was from the beginning, she was initiating a process of being a guide to the potentials of the domain in which I had found myself - she was not a cynosure, drawing me towards her, because there was the slight quality of danger (and in any case it felt that her intensity was a little too minimal to do this), but on the other hand she was not at all a sinister refusal to communicate. Instead, she immediately set out to guide me.
I went up with her onto one of the terraces of the city, walking up a wide flight of steps from the beach. The terrace was very long and maybe forty feet wide, and beyond it there were steps leading to another terrace, with a tall area of the city beyond, which had a kind of very low tower, or raised observation space on top of it, as if the top of this part of the city was a room open on one side, with a parapet.
Everything became about the music, or, to be specific, about what was possible in dancing to the music. And it was not that the music I was hearing was supposed to have a source within the world of the trance-experience: it was more that, without me thinking about it, the music was supposed to be audible in both worlds.
Everything was taking place without any quality of "maybe what would happen next would be" - which is to say that it was an unceasing flow of experiences, though without me believing in what was happening (although it would not be quite true to say that I simply did not believe in it). And it was also true to say that everything had an implacably unresolvable, 'imponderable' affect, right through to the events at the very end, which were like a picture you could see in two entirely different ways, so that it could either appear as ridiculous, or, on the other hand, as an insight into the Mediterranean worlds of state-shamanism of three thousand years ago.
Myself and the woman started dancing to the music, and what the woman showed me was that in this world it was possible to dance through metamorphosis: the woman became a column of bright energy a bit higher than a human (as if she was like the plasma of the aurora borealis) and the intricate, fluid form of this column continually metamorphosed in time with, and as an expression of, the music. And a moment later I was doing the same thing: experiencing an ecstatic transformation that was reminiscent of both water and fire, although it perhaps most closely resembled air (the joyful changes of form were not gravity-bound like movements of water, and it had a light, serene quality that was only like fire in the same way as the aurora has a similarity to fire (the movement was immensely faster than that of the movement of the aurora, but it had no quality of boiling combustion).
The joy of dancing through change-of-form was intense, and what took the joy to an even higher level was that I was dancing with the woman who I had met on the beach, and seeing/feeling her changes of form as expressions of her femaleness or femininity, to the point where, some of the time, we were displaced into each other, in that I became her dancing, and she became me: and at these times my experience of feeling the nature of her spirit - by being it - was exceptionally beautiful.
The woman then took me into the building. The route that we took was to the top of the tower, and then down, arriving in a very wide room which was located at ground level, or perhaps a little higher. The transition had the quality of a very rapid 'flight' - it did not involve any experience, for instance, of walking down stairs, but nor was it an instantaneous transition, because there was the impression of the movement to the top of the building and then down.
The room was airy, and with an indirect light, as if sunlight was filtering through from a very bright day outside (but outside, although the sky had been clear, there had been no quality at all of very bright sunlight: the building was white, but somehow the sunlight had been 'faint,' and the city had not been a space of shadows cast by sunlight, or of prismatic light effects, etc.) - the place in which I had arrived had all of the aspects of a very large, pleasant space in an art gallery: it was perhaps one hundred and fifty feet across, on average, with a ceiling that was around twenty feet in height, and with walls that were irregularly curvilinear, so that the shape of the room was neither rectangular nor polygonal nor circular (the impression is that the walls were either gently undulating, or curved, and that the room had angles, but that none of them were 90 degrees). And the concluding point is this: to say that the room was lit by indirect light is indeed to say that it had no windows: I gave no attention to any of this at the time - but in the course of the experience I saw no windows on the outside of the building and no windows on the inside either.
The room was presented to me, by my guide, as a gallery of art-works, but in a sense which immediately meant something else (this was equivalent to her introduction of herself, where she implicitly indicated that she was not what she appeared to be on the surface). The gallery had artworks on the walls, and spread out, at intervals, across the floor, but what I was told, by the woman, was that these artworks were inhabitants of the city, who, she said, sometimes took pleasure in expressing themselves by being artworks (in the sense that they both composed them, and were them - a producer-product identity as Deleuze and Guattari would say).
There was something about her explanation which did not quite feel right, as if an aspect of the situation was being suppressed. The surface-impression was of the gallery having been there before I arrived, but in that case, if these were the inhabitants, then who, previously, had been the audience? And what kind of life was this, as an artwork? And it also felt as if a mutability and force-of-attention being directed upon me might be what was being suppressed: if the gallery had not been there before I arrived then this was a crowd of alien beings presenting themselves as a space of passivity ('ain't nobody here but us artworks').
These questions remained inchoate, and in the background: the gallery was an eerie space, and the explanation seemed inadequate, or partial, but I was exploring it, and I stayed in the mode of action and interaction, rather than that of restlessly demanding a more detailed explanation (no doubt the driving, dynamic quality of the music I was hearing was involved here, although at this point the tone of the experience was a kind of charged serenity, and I do not remember giving any direct attention to the music). Within its interiority-space limits the tone of the experience was calm and expansive. I had just experienced dancing-through-metamorphosis, and there was a dynamism involved in what was taking place - 'on to the next thing' was the modality of the experience.
Some of the artworks were static, and some were in motion, either as a surface with two-dimensional motion, or as a three-dimensional movement-in-one-place. But the artworks which were static gave a profound impression that in a sense involving sentience they were in motion at some molecular level. Paintings on the walls were singular worlds of coloured transmutation: statues were in some cases static abstract works, and in other cases were also abstract, but were in subtle, fluid motion, though staying 'rooted' in one place (none of the artworks were moving around from one location to another).
At one place, near the centre of the room, there was a circular pool. This was about ten feet across, with the fluid at almost the height of the floor. The fluid of the pool was still, and had a calm, enigmatic quality of being a reflection of a night sky. I knew that this pool was one of the artworks. I also knew that it was deep, perhaps twenty feet in depth.
My guide told me that it was possible to interact with this artwork by jumping into it. I was calm and unafraid, and what happened next had the quality of a fable. I went down into the pool, but then immediately was propelled up again, as if by an enormous elastic band within the water, emerging fully out of the pool, and then dropping down again into the water, going down a few feet below the surface. I was propelled upwards out of the water, and dropped down again into the pool, and the third time I was propelled into the air I was airborne, and was in the form of a horse with wings. The transition from the eerie night-depths of the water to being a being capable of flight was a powerful one, and to a genuine extent an enjoyable one, but there was a kind of imponderable 'naffness' about being a winged horse which I feel meant that the experience could now not last for much longer.
Setting out to fly with my wings - a kind of intensely muscular experience which only made sense because gravity was not in effect in any normal way within the world of the experience - I was immediately outside of the city, and was rapidly several hundred feet above it. I saw that beyond the tower the city went up - as a continuous building - onto a higher ground until it reached a ravine which ran roughly parallel to the sea, and which was several hundred feet deep. On the opposite side of this ravine there was jungle-like green vegetation, although with an amorphous quality which was not the same as that of trees. My guide, who was still with me (although it was as if she was alongside me - I don't remember her physical form at this point), told me that this vegetation was dangerous. I flew down a bit closer, and an amorphous vegetal protrusion suddenly extended itself extremely fast toward me, with a toothed, circular mouth at the end of the protrusion. It telescoped outward thirty feet in a second, and I flew upwards out of its path. The woman told me it was carnivorous vegetation and that the gorge protected the city: she also said that the inhabitants of the city had to keep cutting it back so it would not become a threat.
I was very high above the city now, perhaps a thousand feet, and there was a feeling that the world of the city was elsewhere in the cosmos, or - and this was the strongest feeling - that this world existed within some other dimension of the planet.
Everything became distant - I knew the experience was coming to an end. And then the woman said -
"You can come back and visit us any time you want."
Then I was opening my eyes in the living room, in the flat in Leamington, the music still playing. It is hard to know, but the whole experience had probably only taken fifteen minutes.
The event has the quality of a joke: I had set out to envisage a future city, and had ended up becoming a pegasus, in a world where the city had more resemblance to a Minoan palace than to any modern city (I should add that I knew nothing at all about Minoan palaces at this time). And yet, at the same time as it feeling like a joke, the experience feels like a valid answer to the question. Because of the desubjectified affect of the inhabitants of the city the impression is very much that in a specific way this was a world at a higher level of intensity in relation to ordinary reality, so that it would be correct to say that to some extent the place within the experience was Futural. It was a Futural world, but perhaps it was at only the very first degree of the Futural, given the high degree of emphasis on control (fortifications; a defended windowless interiority).
Despite its degree of consistency, and despite its wit and validity as an answer to the initial question, this event did not go to the forefront of my mind in relation to anomalous experiences. There were other experiences which were taking place at this time which I was aware had a greater depth and warmth and importance in relation to their lucidity, even if they tended to be less focused: and within a year I started to have experiences with the same degree of consistency, but which were at a substantially higher level of intensity (see Sections 24 and 25). There was something slightly 'cool' or 'thin' about the de-subjectified affect within the experience, and this meant that I did not find it it at all compelling, when put alongside other events which I could sense were views toward transcendental south.
But it remained, nonetheless, as an enigma, in part because there were some striking aspects to its consistency as an answer to the re-framed question. One of these was the fact that there was a persistent feeling, from the point where I encountered the woman on the beach, that the beings I was encountering were not human, but instead were entities of some other kind - this feeling merely culminated in the concluding impression that I was seeing somewhere else in the cosmos, or was seeing into a different dimension. In a very impersonal sense which had nothing to do with ghosts of dead people the place felt 'haunted.' (it was only the driving joy of the techno music which kept the disturbing aspect of this affect in the background). Another aspect of the consistency was the way in which - beyond the windowless walls of the city - there were primarily only very undifferentiated expanses (clear sky, flat beach, and sea), with the only exception being sentient beings which were a source of fear, in the form of carnivorous plants. However, the experience was equally enigmatic through the startling way in which it 'answered' my question.
There was no obvious 'teller,' of the joke, and no obvious source of the re-framing of the question which had broken it away from the line of time. Taking the basis of the experience in its own terms ('you don't know what questions the mind can answer, until you ask them') it was evidently the case that a good way of thinking about it was that the question had been answered by a part of my mind that was not straightforwardly the conscious part (perhaps a nascent futural self, for instance, as with Tony, in relation to Danny in The Shining). But this begins to transform the idea of the unconscious, in that we don't normally see the unconscious as a teller of jokes, and as a source of philosophical views which take questions to a new intellectual level. It might be seen as consisting of powerful intentional forces, but when we look toward the wall of the unconscious we tend to expect drives and resultant fixations, not wit and intellectual subtlety ("ain't nobody here but us unconscious drives").
However, I did not produce any account of the experience which simply explained it away in terms of a complex mental interiority. I certainly did not in any sense adopt the contrasted view that an encounter had taken place with forces beyond me. Instead I was aware of a somewhat striking - although slightly 'thin' - alterity which belonged to the experience, and I left the question posed by this alterity open, rather than shutting it down with a dogmatic response.
The largely undifferentiated expanses beyond the city and the blocked-off object of fear (the vegetation) together seem to be diagnostic. The direction in which we are looking (whatever it is that is there) has a serenity on the part of some of its aspects, in that these aspects are desubjectified, but despite this, and although it has a breadth in relation to its terrain, it is emphatically not the sublime, which in this context is preeminently to say that it is not the planetary sublime.
*
The next two events in this series took place around the same time - with the second of them ocurring four months later, during the third of the three "Virtual Futures" conferences that were held at Warwick University between 1994 and 1996. And it will be valuable to place everything momentarily in the context of these conferences, and of one of the texts which was most central to them, A Thousand Plateaus.
In 1993 there had been a setting in place of circumstances that included something which in a very unusual, positive sense was a 'trap.' The new situation had a feature within it which was like a switch, which, if pressed, would cause me to be shifted forward a minimal but important distance - in an impersonally positive transition that was impersonal in its positivity in part in that it would reduce rather than increase my chances of having any conventional form of success as a philosopher. The circumstances consisted of studying Deleuze and Guattari's transcendental materialism by approaching from Difference and Repetition, and of doing this while taking a full part in the milieu of the radical wing of Warwick's philosophy department. The switch was reading A Thousand Plateaus with a combination of some degree of discipline, and some degree of openness to the anomalous.
What I would be heading towards would be perceiving the world (and in particular the planet on which we live) along Spinozistic lines, and recognising the unconscious as most specifically being planetary (so that a grim, personal interiority is replaced by an exteriority, and so that all primary questions of dreamings and fictions becoming questions of focusing faculties of perception). But given the diffuse and recurrently very unfocused nature of A Thousand Plateaus this process was not going to take place overnight, and - without some inordinately unusual intervention - it was not going to take place in two or three years. With hindsight, if I had been the supervisor of this project in 1995 I might have said "you've taken on board enough already - write a thesis about Deleuze's account of the 'image of thought,' otherwise you will not have enough time." But I was safe from the dubious effects of this career-focused wisdom. This was 1995, the year of the second Virtual Futures conference, and for both Nick Land and myself the idea of studying Difference and Repetition instead of A Thousand Plateaus would have seemed a bit like the idea of cutting off your feet.
The 1995 Virtual Futures conference was a 'furthest-point' of an attempt to make contact with the resources of A Thousand Plateaus. It is worth pointing out that Manuel DeLanda (who spoke at all three of the conferences) gave a paper that year which was based on the chapter "The Geology of Morals" (the title was "The Geology of Morals: A Neo-Materialist Interpretation."). And Nick Land's ability to perceive the transcendental by means of reading A Thousand Plateaus (in his case, largely in the modality of critique) was at its most effective at this time, even though he was now also beginning a simultaneous collapse into accelerationist delusions and a fixation on mathematics.
I liked DeLanda's work, but its overall modality was empirical rather than transcendental-empirical (which is to say that there was no movement toward showing a wider level of reality, beyond and energetically working upon the level of ordinary reality). Nick Land, on the other hand, had an awareness of the transcendental that was displayed in his socio-libidinal critique, but was becoming embroiled in a particular mode of entrapment in relation to numerics and in relation to the line of time. Land's trajectory was not really apparent at this time, but it was clear that A Thousand Plateaus was a valuable direction in which to travel, whatever was to be said about accelerationism (it was at the 1995 conference that Land started to talk about a threshold-crossing into the post-human in 2012). I feel that, as Tess and I moved to Leamington toward the end of that summer, there was a deep level at which I knew that philosophically I was now increasingly on my own. But nonetheless it was fundamentally clear that the thing to do was to stay with the primary project of the whole milieu (a milieu which extended beyond the University of Warwick). That is, the thing to do was to take up the lens of A Thousand Plateaus, and focus it.
Earlier, as a third-year undergraduate, A Thousand Plateaus had been an unknown, enigmatic terrain alongside Anti-Oedipus. And it should be added that at this time I had no certainty that the work of Deleuze and Guattari was the area in which I wanted to do philosophical research, despite the intensity of Nick Land's enthusiasm - during this phase - for Anti-Oedipus. But I was also reading other work by Deleuze, and in particular what stood out was his essay Nomad Thought (from 1972), in the end primarily because of the Futural figure of the nomad, a figure which was being drawn simultaneously from philosophy and anthropology, and which, as Futural was as old as the human species. And then, connectedly, when I started to read A Thousand Plateaus, around 1992, it became clear that this was the way forward - an exit-route from suppressed and suppressive modalities of philosophy. But from the beginning it was also apparent that this was an exceptionally challenging, and not very cohesive work (the fact that it was many works as much as one was being indicated from the outset by it rejecting the idea of 'chapters' as a term for its sections). And without really thinking about it, in doing my MA I did not write about A Thousand Plateaus, (or about Deleuze) but instead I worked on 19th century philosophers (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche) and on French contemporaries of Deleuze and Guattari: Irigaray, the Lyotard of Libidinal Economy, and Derrida. Furthermore, in embarking on my work for the Ph.D, I concentrated on earlier work by Deleuze, in order to create a basis for understanding A Thousand Plateaus. As I became less conservative at the level of my wider existence, shifting towards an exploration of experiences created by psychotropics (a process which was often at this stage very unfocused, and recurrently simply indulgent, in that in this latter modality it was simply 'partying' within the Warwick philosophy-department milieu) I simultaneously adopted a very sober approach to my project, concentrating on the more conventionally academic texts that Deleuze had written in the 1960s - in particular Difference and Repetition, but also texts such as Bergsonism, Expressionism and Philosophy, and The Logic of Sense. As I have indicated, it was only in 1995 that I started to work exclusively on A Thousand Plateaus, and at this point I also shifted to a far more disciplined form of existence.
By the time of the third Virtual Futures conference (May 1996) I had been in this new phase for nearly a year, and my confidence was high. It was extremely exhilarating to be working on A Thousand Plateaus, and at this point, as the new perspectives were being broken open it was not yet fully clearly that it was going to be formidably difficult to write anything that was an expression of what was coming into focus (my confidence had also been assisted by the fact that I had been working during this year as a seminar teacher for the philosophy department). I had been living in Leamington for the whole of the new phase, and there was a subtle feeling of a good break having taken place, which concerned more than just my location (I don't think I saw at all that I had departed from Nick Land's way of thinking, but this is definitely what had happened) together with a striking impression of everything being very serene, but in a slightly sunlit-derelict modality that was reminiscent of Tarkovsky's "zone" (the place and the circumstances felt serene, but, in a way that was connected to some deep-level forward-movement that was taking place, there was always the knowledge that as an element inseparable from the serenity you could always take a wrong turn, and find yourself in the meat grinder).
During this year there had been an ongoing emergence of a system of three fundamental units of thought: nomadism, nomad-groups, and the planet as locus and basis of nomadism. Nomadism here concerns intensive journeys as much as it concerns journeys in space; nomad-groups are escape-groups understood in relation to a terrain of potentials and places, where the principle of movement is that of choosing, at each point, and to all extents possible, the direction of intensification - of Love-and-Freedom, of wider realities; and the planet is the Zone of nomadism, in the sense that the nomad does not in any sense belong to a state, and as well as simultaneously being the immediate Spinozistic World-or-Body within which the nomadism takes place, the planet is also here understood as that which is Fundamentally wider than the human technosphere (machines, buildings, tools, weapons, systems of speech and writing, mathematics, forms of production and distribution etc.) and which also includes this sphere within it. And these new ideas were not at all arriving exclusively from studying A Thousand Plateaus: just as much as this they were emergent from dreams, from semi-trance experiences, and from lines of thought followed through watching films, listening to songs and reading stories. It was in this way that at the time I went to Leamington I left behind 'the cities' (see Section 35) - which is to say that I moved toward a pre-eminent focus on the planet, instead of primarily being focused on the technosphere. And it must be stated now that looked at from this wider perspective the technosphere appears as what it is - a sphere which is predominantly a deleterious, haunted domain of the transestablishment (the interiority), a sphere, that is, which to a very large extent consists of a disturbing workshop of unhealthy, suppressive functionings.
(as has already been indicated, the primary textual sources for this new perspective were: Peter Weir and Joan Lindsay's film Picnic at Hanging Rock; Virginia Woolf's The Waves; Tarkovsky's Solaris; Patti Smith's album Horses; and A Thousand Plateaus, with its "Nomadology" section. and its sustained engagement with the terrains of nomadism).
*
Lastly - before recounting the second event in the series, it is necessary to describe one other occurrence.
It was early January - just before the start of the spring term - and it was one of a large number of occasions during this year when I stayed up through the night reading A Thousand Plateaus while on speed, having experiences of seeing the world from the viewpoint of the book, and writing notes (occasionally it was a combination of speed with a small quantity of some other psychoactive substance). The shift away from 'partying' had largely taken place - but the use of psychotropics was still part of my life, and given that in the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari say "We had hallucinatory experiences," as part of their description of how they wrote it, I did not feel that I was out of alignment with the book in recurrently reading it in this way.
I decided to read "Of the Refrain."
This piece of writing - this 'plateau' - concentrates on the questions of territories and departures from territories, and most specifically on an elaboration of an account of the world which sees everything along the lines of music (so that, for instance, a bird's recurring movements through its territory are refrains, as well as the songs which it sings). Taken as a whole there is in fact an exceptionally strange quality about it, something which I would begin to realise in the course of the experience I am about to recount. You can see it in two ways: if you concentrate on everything apart from the opening and the conclusion it can seem like a calm, ultra-intricate expanse in which studies of bird and animal behaviours have been transposed into a general account of all forms of existence, where this account takes territory, departures from territory and refrains as its main elements. However, if you maintain a focus on the beginning and the end it has a very different aspect: from this perspective it appears both fragmented, and deeply perturbed, as if the text is haunted by negative instances - which is to say that it is as if the text quietly carries the unknown within itself, but as an object of fear. Everything here is in the emphasis, and in the pattern of what is included and not included: the feeling is that in some sense a cheerfully inadequate, somewhat delusional construct is being brought together on a floor which has fear just below it.
The opening phrase is "A child, in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath." This concerns the first of three modalities, which could be described as warding off chaos, territory (the 'circle,' the home), and transmutation of territory / departure. And the account of the third modality starts with a powerfully evocative description of a relationship with the unknown, the Outside:
"Finally, one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets someone in, calls someone, or else goes out oneself, launches forth. One opens the circle not on the side where the old forces of chaos press against it but in another region [...]"
Forty pages later, this bold dispelling of the fear is then deepened by a re-perceiving of the cosmos as consisting of refrains - as something of the same kind as music - and yet in the concluding two pages there is an unsettled, unconfident inclusion of references to struggles and disasters which seem to undermine the helpfulness of this aestheticising approach.
As I started to read (Tess had gone to bed, and it was probably around 1am) I had picked up no indications that this experience was heading towards a very sharp-edged encounter with the issues of historical and cosmological time, and, to be precise about what would happen, no indications that it would in fact become a bad trip that, unlike my three previous bad trips (see Section 10, re. the first of these), would centrally involve an engagement with a philosophical problem.
I read the introductory section without focusing on it closely, and then as the experience 'took flight' I had arrived in the long central part of the plateau, and here everything for many pages is concentrated on questions of the material/spatial basis of territories and of the actions which constitute them, and the involvement of time for this analysis, although fundamental, is not one which includes historical or cosmological perspectives. Everything in these pages appeared as an exceptionally valuable account of 'structures' of existence: it is clear that we need to depart from territories when they have become constricting patterns of reactive habits; that we need to bring new, improvisatory territories together as ongoing metamorphic assemblages (there is no need to live in a tent - it is just a question of whether the territory supports the journey in intensity); that we need to understand the wider human territories within which we live, and which inscribe their words, attitudes and projects/dreams upon our intensive bodies. It was a joy consisting of descriptions of the behaviours of bower birds and wrens and chaffinches, and of the emergence of new concepts such as the 'natal' (a part of the territory which is outside the primary terrain and is 'originary' - this could to some extent be demonstrated by saying that in the oneiric territory of Shakespeare the ancient Greece of Sophocles is the natal), and even if, in fact, the writing is very fragmented and exploratory I was not at all aware of this - and I have no doubt that processes of understanding were taking place, even if sometimes these were less important than they seemed,or were as yet unfocused.
To a great extent I read this central section of "Of the Refrain" in relation to spatiality, maybe partly because the dominant and surface-level aspects of the concept of territory concern territory in connection with boundaries and terrain (a territory as marked on a map, for instance), but maybe also because I felt that the territory-encompassing spatium of the planet was what was fundamental here, and as such should be both horizon, and primary element of the conclusion, as opposed to the conclusion being, in fact, an analysis of developments in western classical music in the 19th and 20th centuries. However, there was another way in which I was reading the section in the key of spatiality, and this was more anomalous.
The crucial point is that primarily everything was about taking up the ideas of territory and departure from territory as a lens for seeing the world - primarily everything was about outsights. But at the same time (and inseparably) I was seeing all of the formations and modalities being described as exceptionally vivid coloured diagrams. These diagrams were recurrently in motion, but their main aspects were two-dimensional (sometimes three-dimensional) spatiality in the form of shapes made of lines, and colour, in the form of bright, almost neon-type colours - green, red, violet, yellow and blue are the colours I remember. At the time I was struck by the fact that these patterns were diagrammatic, as opposed to being geometrical, like the intricate visual arrays I had by this time seen on a large number of occasions (and I was also aware that the only semi-equivalent thing I had seen were visual arrays whose form and transformations seemed to be expressions of music I was hearing). However, despite these diagrams being impressive, and despite them having an unusual, electrically vibrant quality, I did not see them as in any way the vital thing that was taking place - they seemed more like a surface phantasmagoria whose value might be that of a series of diagram sketches that could help subsequently with communicating what was being understood.
The engagement with questions of territory was the situation during the long, first phase of the experience. But where I was headed towards was the philosophical problem of time.
Philosophers have a marked tendency to produce delusory and fixatory constructs in relation to time (Hegel's construct of time is a primary example of one which is delusory). In the case of the event being recounted there were three of these constructs which were in effect, to different degrees.
Firstly, and in a very minimal sense, there was a connection to Nietzsche's idea of eternal return, an idea which emphatically was fixatory for Nietzsche - in the sense that he personally struggled with it, only giving it a straightforward affirmation (as Deleuze points out) as an element of a selective test.
The second was Nick Land's idea of acceleration of the human world towards a threshold beyond which the human as currently constituted would no longer exist: his prediction at the 1995 Virtual Futures conference had been that this 'singularity' would occur in 2012 (the writer David Porush had good-heartedly met this with a cabballistically informed warning about numerically-focused philosophy, and, without any malice, had said 'we'll hoist a drink to you in 2012!').
The third was the idea of the refrain (a construct which it can be said is only fixatory if you allow it to be, but the main point is that it is an engagement with the cosmos which pre-eminently is locked to the line of time). (The refrain construct is a way of backing toward the energosphere while concentrating on time, whereas what is fundamentally important, and perhaps necessary, is to arrive at the energosphere by concentrating on space).
By the time I reached the end of the chapter I was encountering a confidence about the 'musical' account of the immanent Outside of ordinary reality, in the sense that there were references to 'the Cosmos refrain." But this was of course being qualified by references to the cosmos as a world of forces without any transcendent 'singer' of this refrain (the refrain appears here as a kind of wildly but consistently modulating interactive total of all the zones of consistency which are its parts). And Nietzsche by this time was in effect both in relation to the continuously referenced idea of the child, as 'third metamorphosis' (the state of maximal openness to the Outside), and in relation to the eternal return as an idea which is taken up by the child:
"Let us recall Nietzsche's idea of the eternal return as a little ditty, a refrain, but which captures the mute and unthinkable forces of the Cosmos."
Nothing is being said about the 'wide-level' of cosmological and historical time, and the fact that the Futural dimension of metamorphosis is informing the writing is fundamental in its importance, and yet everything remains primarily locked to the apperture of time, almost to the point of nebulous obsessiveness: "For the cosmos itself is a refrain, and the ear also (everything that has been taken for a labyrinth is in fact a refrain)." The bizarre result is that the Futural is kept apart from space, and it was these two which crucially needed to be brought together (evidently space is space-time, but because of the human fixation on time it is necessary to start from space, bodies and the waking of perception and the other faculties, as opposed to starting from time).
However, the end in many ways seems less assured than the beginning, in which the three modalities of territory and departure from territory are described in their relation to the Unknown, and where these disparate modalities are enigmatically called 'the refrain' (the term is not in itself very helpful, but the fact it is enigmatic on another level helps to hold open an awareness of the extraordinary nature of these recurrently co-existing modalities). By the end of the plateau there are explicit unanswered questions everywhere concerning fascism and madness, and there is a background awkwardness being created by using 19th and 20th century painting and art to resolve the issues that have been raised earlier, together with an an only partly explicit tension about whether music is being inappropriately 'raised up' above other art forms (only partly explicit in the sense that painting is considered, but not plays, films and stories in general). And it is at this point (three pages from the end) that the idea of the refrain condenses into a different form, one which for its figural basis has a rarely encountered musical instrument which is played with the hands, but turned in a way that is similar to a hurdy-gurdy - the glass harmonica - , and which overall is basically a Bergsonian zone of duration which is simultaneously a zone of immanent interaction.
"So just what is a refrain? Glass harmonica: the refrain is a prism, a crystal of space-time."
A lot of this was not really coming into focus at the time, partly because my attention had been concentrated on the long, 'central' part of the plateau, but also because I was not yet really working with the piece as a whole. Inseparably, it would also be correct to say that I had been swept away - or hijacked - by forces which beyond doubt were illuminating, but which were not illuminating in the way that would have been most helpful.
To change the model from territory to the one created by Tarkovsky (with the help of the Strugatsky brothers), my overall situation in Leamington was the following: I was in a Zone which had windows with different views toward transcendental south, and a doorway that allowed you to venture out in this direction (at this point I had only found the windows) and with the windows and the doorway the way of getting to them was different every time. And the same was also true of another feature of this Zone, in relation to journeys which I emphatically did not want to undertake: each time you arrived accidentally at the meat grinder you arrived there on a route which was completely different from the routes which had previously led you there.
If I had thought about it, I might have guessed that the experience could perhaps at the very end become a difficult one, but I would not have thought it would become a bad trip (speed is not a hallucinogen, and I was not mixing it with anything else). However, I had only had about three hours sleep the night before, and myself and Tess had been up taking LSD through the night before that. But if I had come to the conclusion that there was a risk, I would not have done anything different, and I think this would have been the right decision. In the very strongest sense I do not recommend the path of using psychotropics, but if you are going to take this path, it is probably best to do it with courage as well as with care, otherwise you might never get to the end of it. A bad trip is a visceral form of panic, and panic is not a subjectified emotion: it is something which profoundly jolts, and in this seismic jolting new perspectives emerge (although it might take a lot of subsequent sobriety for you to get to the stage where you can benefit from these). At the end of "The Geology of Morals" Deleuze and Guattari say "Panic is creation."
But nonetheless I will say this again - don't take this path. It would be immeasurably better to take the route of going on your own into a genuine wilderness, or of spending weeks on your own in an isolated house in semi-wilderness or countryside (although, sadly, for women in particular it needs to be added that it would be better for this route if you had reached the level of a black-belt in a martial art first - if you take a direction which involves the possibility of transcendental fear it is necessary first to have protected yourself against empirical dangers).
It was now around five in the morning. I had reached the end of "Of the Refrain," and had started to read it again, only now the issue of wide-scale time had come to the forefront, both because of the axis of historical time in relation to the history of music in the chapter's conclusion, and because of the reference to Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence.
I reached the point on the third page where Deleuze and Guattari say that all transformations have a rhythm, and where they add to this "Drying up, death, intrusion have rhythm." And the question arrived, as a result of my applying this thought to historical time - what if the history of the last few thousand years of human development had all along, at the most fundamental level, been the history of a de-intensification? What if - went this thought - there was some kind of dead 'iron hand' of entropy at work, so that what human beings see as negentropy were to be entropy all along? (after all, for instance, human lives overall are enriched by their terrains, and we are destroying the species which populate these terrains).
It was this idea of an obscured dead-hand-of-entropy which led to the bad trip (although no doubt it would be more true to say that the sudden, intense ramification of the idea was in fact the bad trip in its initial moment). And it was not the case that the envisaged world of the idea was the direct source of the dark affect which arrived: it was that the failure to fend off the the thought of the hidden entropy (that is, the failure to invalidate it) triggered the visceral horror-without-ideational-content which it seems is the fundamental aspect of a bad trip. But what followed was nonetheless not at all without a cognitive aspect, in that I had a very strong conviction that unless I did invalidate it, or at least find a lucid, pragmatic attitude toward it, the already existing horror would be tipped over into the fully Intolerable - as if, in fact, I was now thinking in order to save my life.
Nietzsche might have said that the force weighing upon me was the 'spirit of gravity,' in that in part what I was struggling with was the idea of a force which entailed that everything, at depth, was 'falling.' But there are ways in which it may be more valuable to say that Castaneda points out, in Tales of Power' that there can be an extremely dangerous event which he calls ' a sudden irruption of the nagual,' an irruption which he says can sometimes kill the person who experiences it (here, the idea is that the suddenness of the incursion allows for a misadventure - in some sense an additional event - whereas under the right circumstances being swept up into the nagual is a process of slipping valuably away into an ocean that lies beyond ordinary reality, and runs through it).
I think in fact it was an illusion that I was going to solve the problem by thinking. The atmosphere of the experience was that something fundamentally hideous and tragedy-producing was on the edge of being seen, along the lines of the knowledge that would be involved in what is called the "wisdom of Silenus" - but although thinking was part of the process the source of the horror, as I have indicated, was something separate from the envisaged principles of de-intensification with which I was cognitively engaged: there was no knock-out conceptual blow that I could strike (the engine of what was happening was on a different level). And yet - the combat at the level of thought was one in which I was not being decisively defeated, so its fabric of partial successes perhaps under the circumstances (which soon involved another strategy) had a value in terms of being active in relation to a crisis.
I went for a walk, and I have no doubt that this activity was what was most important (I feel that without this action and the continual perceptual stimulus of new encountered spaces the thought-process could easily have wound itself up into a catalytic element within a far more distressed, hyper-tense metabolic state (the only thing I would add to this is, if this were ever to happen to you, take with you two bottles of water, one to drink, and, more importantly, one to pour over your head). I walked for around a mile and a half in a circuit through the town. My return to the flat woke Tess, and because I discovered that the experience was still taking place, and that I had to keep walking, the two of us went out, and set out walking toward Warwick (the centre of the town of Warwick is three miles from the centre of Leamington). On a path running by the River Leam, around dawn, the bodily feeling arrived that the experience was coming to an end - I felt the experience going away, like some kind of grim tide receding. There had been no instrumental cognitive victory over the entropic idea involved in the bad trip (although afterwards I was happy with the way I had found of invalidating it): I had maintained a fight in terms of remaining active, but on another level it had been a comprehensive defeat, in the sense that the experience only came to an end when the effect of the last intake of speed subsided.
Five months later. It was the night of the 3rd of May, 1996 The third Virtual Futures was taking place, and after the papers during the day there had been an electronic music dance-night at the student union - a rave which was part of the conference. A large proportion of the alternative-culture milieu of the Warwick philosophy department had partied until 1am, together with like-minded visitors from other parts of the island, and in a few cases from other parts of the world. Tess and I had just done a lot of dancing. We had taken LSD at around 10am, and the experience of dancing had been an extraordinary lucid joy - a joy that was about fluid, improvisatory movement, and that was simultaneously about understanding everything within the horizon of light and energy and formations of intent. Something which for both of us had been an element of this delight and perception-of-the-world had been screens above the dance-floor which for a long time had been showing camera-directed-upwards footage of sea-snakes swimming fluently through very bright, sunlit water.
Afterwards, as we worked out how we would get to a party taking place in Leamington, the feeling was one of a very intense exhilaration (for one thing, there was the feeling that this was how conferences were meant to be). Looking more widely for a moment, the idea I had at that time was that everything was going extremely well. The relationship between Tess and myself had reached a very good 'upland' phase, after it having followed a recurrently difficult path - to a great extent because of my insecurity, and lack of experience with intense relationships - particularly during the year when we had been living in Coventry. Only a few weeks after this we would go on the spur-of-the-moment trip to northern Greece (probably the high-point of the relationship) and at that moment during the Virtual Futures conference we had just been dancing together, and were 'in flight' in terms of the rapport between us. And I also do not think that I was wrong in terms of my studies (and my work as a teacher at the university), and even in terms of the anomalous route that I was taking in respects that went beyond what was already anomalous about A Thousand Plateaus. It is important to point out that in the four or five days after the bad trip I have just recounted I had an indefinite but intense impression that in fact I had been strengthened and moved forward by the experience. Along with fact that new, valuable ideas and intriguing dream experiences kept 'breaking through' during this time, there was also a subsequent increase in my confidence in relation to taking drugs, rather than the opposite (for instance, in the earlier experience described in this section - which occurred a few weeks later - I took speed and grass simultaneously without any fear being involved in the decision).
It would in fact be correct to say (and this is what I sensed at the time) that I was slowly being swept away by a current of joy and of increasing understanding - or, to state it another way, that I was being drawn forward by a profoundly impersonal force of Love-and-Freedom. What I did not have any awareness of at the time was the impersonal aspect of the process. The particular pattern of what I happened to be wanting was not going to be catered for by the force of impersonal intent that was in effect: it was not at all the case that my specific wants were now being looked after (the force in a sense had the implacable quality of intense sunlight, and it was up to me to work out how I was going to work with it). To take the crucial cases, it was definitely the case that this force was going to heighten me both at the level of the ability to have love-relationships and at the level of outsights about the nature of the world, but this did not mean in any way that my relationship with Tess would be assisted, or that I would be boosted in a career as an academic. I was going to be moved forward, but the details of the movement were in no sense 'assured' by the impersonal energy-current that was involved - the details were up to my own nature, and in crucial ways would be decided by the extent to which I could stop being indulgent.
The party was at a house on a small road called Charlotte Street, about half a mile away from the street where Tess and I were living. I did not remember having been on the street before, although it was adjacent to places I had been on several occasions (the house was either owned or being rented by a very poised, independent-minded woman who I had only met once before: she was an ex-student from Warwick university). Most of the people at the party had been at the conference. The lights were down, and there was dance music playing, but people were mostly sitting cross-legged on the floor of the living room and hallway, talking and smoking joints.
I sat down in a small circle of people, opposite Manuel DeLanda (who earlier that day had spoken at the conference). I wanted to talk to him about his ideas in their relation to the work of Deleuze and Guattari. I made a comment about an aspect of the paper he had given, and a detailed philosophical conversation began. DeLanda was enthusiastic in his responses - he seemed genuinely pleased to talk about the ideas involved.
DeLanda being at the Virtual Futures conference was a meeting between radical philosophical milieus on opposite sides of the Atlantic (he is from Mexico, though he had been living in New York for twenty years), but these milieus seemed to be parts of one process. The impression I had was that for DeLanda the student party was a direct continuation of experiences that had just been taking place in New York.
The conversation went toward the question of how DeLanda's idea of 'non-organic life' connected up with the idea of the body without organs, particularly in relation to the virtual-real domain of oneiric and trance experiences. And what was striking, at the point where we started talking about specific experiences, was the way in which DeLanda, like Nick Land, was extremely open to anomalous materialist views - views which avoided thinking in terms of a private, personal unconscious, but instead tended toward seeing everything in the domains involved in terms of exteriority. DeLanda had left behind Lacanianism a long time before this, and although his work tended to be more empirical than transcendental-empirical he was very much aware of the spaces of anomalous human experiences which psychoanalysis overcodes with its familialism and interiority.
Somewhat tentatively, I mentioned the case of DMT experiences of encountering anomalous 'entities' (tiny aliens, elf-like creatures etc). I was tentative because I had no opinions on the subject myself and at this time had not taken DMT - and also because of the fear of ridicule. To my surprise DeLanda was entirely open to the idea that these irruptions of the unconscious were all along faintly/distortedly perceived incursions on the part of unknown sentient beings. We then elaborated the obvious idea that these semi-perceptions of the radically or transcendentally unknown took different forms over the millennia, with sci-fi aliens simply being the latest form.
All of this is very simple, and piecing things together in this way has the quality of a hypothesis that is waiting to happen - if you are prepared to look in this direction. It is the step from 'non-organic life' to the idea of 'inorganic beings.' The perspective here (when laid out in detail) is that the planet as a whole is the fundamental or primary aspect of what - ultra-misleadingly - has been called the unconscious, but in a way where the planet is being conceived as a body without organs which contains other beings within itself - beings which are energy-formations, but which are inorganic.
(The whole picture here of course is that there is the planet as the primary element; there are unknown inorganic forces within it (perhaps in some cases like viruses within an organism); there is the perception and generally nascent lucidity and dreaming perception of the bodies without organs - and organism-bodies - of human individuals; and then there is the control mind, which is dedicated to never thinking along these lines, and which is also the primary force at work in ordinary, anxiety-filled dreams).
DeLanda and I did no more, of course, than agree that it was right to have an open mind about the idea of DMT experiences being real encounters with other beings. There was no more to be said, beyond the elaboration of the idea of the semi-perceptions changing with the changes of the human world. We talked about the rarity of DMT, even within alternative sub-cultures, and DeLanda told me about a milieu of New York parties at which a person who had DMT would very occasionally appear.
This was the whole of the conversation. I think it would have gone on for longer, but I was about to be - ripped away.
(and an anticipatory point that needs to be made is this: if the faculty of feeling is a faculty of inchoate perception then what is the range of ways in which the functioning of this faculty might be involved in relation to encounters with the transcendentally unknown?).
It would be possible to describe what happened next in terms of it being poignant, or indeed in terms of it being an example of a kind of comedy of the anomalous. There is no doubt that it was good for me to be having an intellectual exchange with someone who was working in the same philosophical domain: I was steadily diverging from my Ph.D supervisor's mode of thought (and in fact Nick Land would soon have left the department), and therefore although there was a very radical, courageous modality of philosophy that was present within my milieu I was actually quite isolated, in that I had no closely-affined support for my work. But it was as if by this time a genuine philosophical encounter was likely to be part of a tumultuous current that was taking me away from the conventional spaces of the academic world, rather than it being something that in ordinary terms would assist my career.
Toward the start of the conversation I had taken some tokes on a joint that was going around. There is a way in which this could be seen as a mistake, but even this is unclear, partly in that what I had done had probably been a generator of the good discussion which had just taken place.
The route to a bad trip had been different on the four occasions I had experienced one, and marijuana had not been an obvious catalyst with any of these experiences (and on three out of the four occasions it was not involved at all). But I had noticed that an aspect of it could sometimes surface which could take you a short distance in the direction of a bad trip, and on that night in Leamington I had taken LSD several hours before, and LSD had been directly involved with three out of the four experiences (and with the fourth I had taken it two days before, so it may still have been marginally in effect). So I did have a reason to be careful in relation to mixing grass with LSD, even when the effects of the LSD were fading. And yet - as I have indicated, the ingestion of the marijuana was probably part of what allowed the conversation to take place.
It was like the floor quietly giving way beneath me - without any warning I was experiencing the visceral, indescribable feeling of horror-without-an-object. I could hide this feeling, but it was impossible to do nothing in response: I excused myself, saying I needed to get some water (and instead of the conversation having been cut short. it seems possible it had run its course, and had done something that would turn out to be valuable).
I drank some water in the kitchen, and then I went over to Tess, who was with a group of friends on the other side of the room in which DeLanda was sitting. I told her that I needed to go for a walk, because I was not feeling well. I did not ask her to come with me, because she was enjoying the party. She came with me to the door of the house, and I explained that it was a bad trip. Outside it was still dark, but because it was May there would soon be light in the sky. Tess said she thought she should come with me, but I said I would be fine, and I left.
Perhaps because somehow I knew that there was in fact an escape-route available I did not set out to go on a walk: instead I walked the half-mile back to the flat. The other possibility is that I was intending to walk when I began, and that I then discovered that this time some other strategy would be necessary.
Out in the street the situation rapidly became very alarming, with a quality of nightmarish ratcheting-up that was exceptionally disturbing, given that I had already taken the only kind of 'evasive action' of which I was aware. The bad trip had not started out as cognitive in any way, but it did now acquire a cognitive aspect. I discovered that no matter what I looked at or thought about it immediately led me - by some line of association - to the thought of something negative (some bleak or sad aspect of the world - a different starting-point and a different negative thought each time). Whether I started from perception or from thought the starting-point always took me instantly to something which was negative in its affective impact on me.
When I arrived in the flat, I sat down cross-legged on the living-room floor, facing the window. I attempted to slow down my breathing, but for a few minutes the process of immediate, associative leaps toward negativity continued, with an accompanying feeling of mounting dread. And then I started thinking about what had happened earlier in the evening.
I remembered the video images, above the Student Union dance-floor, of a sea-snake swimming through sunlit water. There was a brightness, and a kind of fluent, serene ingenuousness about the thought of the sea-snake propelling itself in its sunlit ocean element which was striking and in a genuine sense beautiful - I became the sea-snake. I adopted the perspective of that fluent, forward motion and ingenuous action.
And it was over. Even though I was still very high on a combination of LSD and grass the bad trip had disappeared: and more than this, I was suddenly in a state of serene, impersonal bliss that seemed to be more intense than anything similar that I had experienced - as if the abyss of the bad-trip had turned itself inside-out and had taken me from the depths of distress to a kind of stratospheric serenity.
I was sitting in the room where, four months previously, I had had the experience of dancing with the woman from the enigmatic city-by-the-sea. I did not give any thought to this, and nor did I give any thought to the exact details of the transition: it seemed at the time that I had overcome the process of involuntary negative associations by finding something so positive that no negative association arrived. (I now think, in fact, that this was not really what happened, but that a primary aspect of the transition was that I stopped thinking, and entered into a becoming, as when I entered into a becoming with the woman in the earlier experience).
For the first time I had succeeded in overcoming a bad trip, rather than just waiting for it end. But as I sat there in the living room I was grasping something that went wider and deeper than this: I had a kind of bodily certainty that I had just crossed a threshold that was in some sense an objective feature of human existence, and that, with similar difficulties, people had been crossing this threshold throughout human history. This certainty had a bodily quality in that it seemed much more like seeing than thought, and in that I appeared in some way to be perceiving with all of myself, in a similar way to the way in which you perceive the aspects of a room with different senses, including the sense of touch in relation to your contact with the floor.
This feeling of a bodily knowledge (which only a few hours later would have gone) would not be interesting if it was not for the fact that something did subsequently appear to have changed. In the course of my experiences of taking halucinogens over the ensuing years I never had another bad trip at the height of a drug experience, and it always felt as if at some level deeper than thought I had learned something which meant that under these circumstances I was no longer vulnerable to bad trips (there are other more recondite forms of Fear, but at the height of a trip there seemed to have been a change, no matter how ultra-intense the experience). Moreover, it was in the years after this event that I noticed a new tendency to be without any fear in relation to experiences such as walking at night in dark, uninhabited areas of countryside (I had never been very likely to become afraid in this way, but now I began to feel as if I had a circuit-breaker which prevented any fear from getting started).
Taken on their own, there is nothing in any way conclusive about these long-term changes in relation to the event in question. And the day afterwards, cut off from any sense of having knowledge about the event (as having been an instance of a crossing of an objective threshold) I was down to just a fact and a kind of double hunch: the fact was that a bad trip had been turned around, and the hunch was the impression that in some sense I was a bit stronger as a result of what had happened, and that it was possible I would be safer from bad trips in the future. But very soon it was just one more anomalous occurrence, although one that, on the rare occasions when I thought about it, retained a quality of being 'auspicious' in relation to drug experiences.
The next day I was at a presentation given by CCRU at the Virtual Futures conference. The venue was a large non-auditorium space without any raised area for the speakers/members of CCRU, who started out - and largely remained - sitting on the floor in the centre of the room, which was very crowded. After an introduction by one of the conference organisers there was an extremely long silence (perhaps five minutes) while the largely hidden-from-sight CCRU members (Anna Greenspan, Nick Land, Mark Fisher, and probably others) were involved in what was some kind of planned decision-making process, to determine in what direction they would take the presentation. Eventually Anna Greenspan stood up and gave a talk, and I think both Nick and Mark also spoke.
In all of this - that is, including the talks - there was a quality of disarray, of a lack of direction. Important philosophical and socio-historical points were being made, but it was as if in relation to fundamental aspects of the world there was a lack of focus, or sometimes a diversion of attention to areas that would not in themselves provide a way forward. And yet - although the content of the presentation was problematic, an aspect of what was happening which was genuinely Futural was the fact that the presentation was by a group. It was irreducibly inspiring that the CCRU was an alternative-culture philosophy group. Something had happened - something had partly broken free.
I evidently did not know at the time that this would be the last of that sequence of Virtual Futures conferences, or that the ultra-radical, alternative-culture milieu of Warwick Philosophy department was about to disappear. Summer was starting, and it was going to be an extremely good summer - one which would substantially assist a kind of partly-focused planetary widening of my philosophical horizons which had been taking place through the preceding year. I felt that I had found a route forward: this was A Thousand Plateaus, a book which of course included the idea of micropolitics, an area of the abstract within which the idea of the escape-group (group-deterritorialisation) was for me an emergence at this time, without me being aware that it was not explicitly outlined by Deleuze and Guattari.
And something else to which as yet I had given no attention was the fact that in the "Micropolitics and Segmentarity" section of A Thousand Plateaus there is a lengthy exposition of a series of four threshold-crossings which are described by Carlos Castaneda, an author whose books have a lot to say about anomalous energy-formations that supposedly are to be found in a direction to one side of the direction in which people ultimately need to escape. It is possible that in fact I was more on a path being indicated by A Thousand Plateaus than I realised. I rapidly stopped thinking about what had happened after the party during the Virtual Futures conference, and I certainly did not connect it in my mind with the Micropolitics plateau. But it seems perhaps to be worth pointing out that in The Teachings of Don Juan the sequence of threshold-crossings is described as a series of struggles against obstructing-forces (such as the second and third obstacles, Clarity and Power) and that the book states that the obstructing-force which must initially be overcome is Fear.
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