This blog is three books in the process of being written, in the form of initial drafts of the sections, posted in the intended order, a project for which the overall name is Explorations. The three books are a continuation from Hidden Valleys: Haunted by the Future (Zero Books - 2015), and also from On Vanishing Land, an audio-essay made by myself and Mark Fisher (released by Hyperdub/Flatlines on 26th July, 2019 - https://hyperdub.net).
Explorations: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Explorations: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 50)
Xenography
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(the initial) the initial ( = deliberate existence
on the definitive terrain)
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the vicinity
the adjacency
the interestablishment (the ecumenon, the interiority)
I finished the first draft of The Corridor in the spring of 2012. A few weeks afterwards - it would have been late April or early May - there was a point when I started to follow a line of thought that would eventually lead to the book Hidden Valleys. I was thinking about experiences in a specific area of North Yorkshire - this area being Ryedale and the North York Moors, and in particular a town to the south of the area, Malton, along with another town, Helmsley, which is in a hill-surrounded corner to the northwest of Ryedale, a few miles from the start of the moorland.
It was a sunny afternoon, and there was sunlight coming into my room. I started to think about experiences in 1978 when I had been staying at a hotel called The Talbot, in Malton. Initially everything was being viewed from above in a very wide perspective: in the distance were the valleys and moorland ridges of the North York Moors, and in the foreground there was Malton, as if being viewed from a mid-air vantage to the south of the town beyond the river Derwent. The Talbot looks out in this direction: it is on the edge of the town-centre facing toward the countryside, at the top of a fifty foot rise in the ground on the north side of the river.
At some point in the spring of 1978 I read The Shining while I was staying at the Talbot Hotel (my mother was looking for a house, after a return from living in New Zealand, and we were staying in hotels). I had my own room, and I stayed up through the night reading the book, occasionally having to go along a hotel corridor to a toilet. I was 14: I loved the book (I hadn't realised that horror fiction could be like this), but reading it through the night in a hotel was an intense experience. Then, about a month later, when I was again staying at the Talbot, I had the dream which I recount in Hidden Valleys - a dream which didn't seem to connect up with any of my experiences at the time when it occurred. I dreamed about a small, very inspired, and ultra-advanced community of people who lived in a town high in the Andes thousands of years of years ago (the place was somewhere in the latitude area of Peru), which, one night, was completely destroyed because of the bursting of a dam which they had built further up the valley. There was something sublime about the lucidity and kindness and ingenuity of the people of that community, and the affect of the dream was partly this feeling, and partly the shocking sadness of their being destroyed. As I woke I had a phrase in my mind that had come from a narrator within the dream (the dream had been a bit like watching a documentary, although I did not remember any other phrases). The statement was "one night it rained and rained." It was an overwhelming feeling of sadness that came with this phrase.
Thinking about this in 2012 I felt suddenly that this had been a lens looking toward a way in which something valuable within the world of human beings had become an ultra-damaging force - a natural-world incursion had taken place under the cloak of darkness in which people had in some way been devastated by their own energy supply.
But it was then that the first jolt happened. I remembered the dream in Kyzyl, the previous summer, where I had been walking south over the Derwent, in Malton - a dream which had had its own, very unusual way of being about rain. (see Section 45).
And then I remembered that the house at the centre of events in The Corridor (See Sections 16, 26, 27, 43, 28) had straightforwardly been 'transplanted' from the house in a forest from the dreams in Leamington in the mid 1990s - the house which in the dream was five or six miles to the southwest of Malton, and was surrounded by a large forest which does not exist in actuality. I had written The Corridor over the course of four years, and the point where I had changed the location of this house (Malton becoming Melford, and many aspects of the terrain being the same, even though everything was covered in forest), was now four years in the past, and I had not given any thought, for a long time, to the initial location of the house within the dreams.
I finished the first draft of The Corridor in the spring of 2012. A few weeks afterwards - it would have been late April or early May - there was a point when I started to follow a line of thought that would eventually lead to the book Hidden Valleys. I was thinking about experiences in a specific area of North Yorkshire - this area being Ryedale and the North York Moors, and in particular a town to the south of the area, Malton, along with another town, Helmsley, which is in a hill-surrounded corner to the northwest of Ryedale, a few miles from the start of the moorland.
It was a sunny afternoon, and there was sunlight coming into my room. I started to think about experiences in 1978 when I had been staying at a hotel called The Talbot, in Malton. Initially everything was being viewed from above in a very wide perspective: in the distance were the valleys and moorland ridges of the North York Moors, and in the foreground there was Malton, as if being viewed from a mid-air vantage to the south of the town beyond the river Derwent. The Talbot looks out in this direction: it is on the edge of the town-centre facing toward the countryside, at the top of a fifty foot rise in the ground on the north side of the river.
At some point in the spring of 1978 I read The Shining while I was staying at the Talbot Hotel (my mother was looking for a house, after a return from living in New Zealand, and we were staying in hotels). I had my own room, and I stayed up through the night reading the book, occasionally having to go along a hotel corridor to a toilet. I was 14: I loved the book (I hadn't realised that horror fiction could be like this), but reading it through the night in a hotel was an intense experience. Then, about a month later, when I was again staying at the Talbot, I had the dream which I recount in Hidden Valleys - a dream which didn't seem to connect up with any of my experiences at the time when it occurred. I dreamed about a small, very inspired, and ultra-advanced community of people who lived in a town high in the Andes thousands of years of years ago (the place was somewhere in the latitude area of Peru), which, one night, was completely destroyed because of the bursting of a dam which they had built further up the valley. There was something sublime about the lucidity and kindness and ingenuity of the people of that community, and the affect of the dream was partly this feeling, and partly the shocking sadness of their being destroyed. As I woke I had a phrase in my mind that had come from a narrator within the dream (the dream had been a bit like watching a documentary, although I did not remember any other phrases). The statement was "one night it rained and rained." It was an overwhelming feeling of sadness that came with this phrase.
Thinking about this in 2012 I felt suddenly that this had been a lens looking toward a way in which something valuable within the world of human beings had become an ultra-damaging force - a natural-world incursion had taken place under the cloak of darkness in which people had in some way been devastated by their own energy supply.
But it was then that the first jolt happened. I remembered the dream in Kyzyl, the previous summer, where I had been walking south over the Derwent, in Malton - a dream which had had its own, very unusual way of being about rain. (see Section 45).
And then I remembered that the house at the centre of events in The Corridor (See Sections 16, 26, 27, 43, 28) had straightforwardly been 'transplanted' from the house in a forest from the dreams in Leamington in the mid 1990s - the house which in the dream was five or six miles to the southwest of Malton, and was surrounded by a large forest which does not exist in actuality. I had written The Corridor over the course of four years, and the point where I had changed the location of this house (Malton becoming Melford, and many aspects of the terrain being the same, even though everything was covered in forest), was now four years in the past, and I had not given any thought, for a long time, to the initial location of the house within the dreams.
It is clear that what is in question here is a threshold, together with a world of directions in which a life can travel. And it is also clear that there is a lot in common between the key terrain of Hidden Valleys, and the starting-point key terrain of Explorations. The two maps - of Coventry/Leamington/Harbury, and of Helmsley/Malton/the terrain beyond the Derwent - can be be overlaid, but ultimately these superimposed maps dissolve and everything becomes a space of formations of intent.
You can look south from the hill on which Malton has been built - and on one level there is a line of oneiric development. Initially, a few miles to the southwest, beyond the river, there is the forest from the dreams in Leamington, a forest which exists in the virtual but not the actual. And then there is what arrived in the Sierra de la Demanda in Spain. and now there is forest everywhere - all around the planet, where it is possible for it to grow. But what is crucial are the directions.
Ahead of you is a focus on the planet; ahead of you is becoming-active, waking the faculties, an embodied principle of exteriority, courageous exploration, and an embodied, audaciously expansive brightness, a brightness which can see intent and dreaming and feeling at wider levels than encounters with individuals in immediacy.
There is a light-diffused white sky to the south. There is the terrain around Harbury Lake; the forest in Tuva; the forests of northwest, Andean Patagonia. Behind you, over your shoulder to your right there is the Black Swan Hotel in Helmsley, and places of this kind; and also there is academia, represented by the University of Warwick - where all of these have a faint, recondite connection to the direction in the transcendental-empirical, a direction which can be called the Deep Hotel.
And then Malton and Leamington have faded far into the background. Harbury Lake is still in the foreground, and so is the forest in Tuva. But now you are standing looking north to the light-diffused sky, on a mountain in northwest Patagonia.
*
*
On a first level space is a question of the planet and of nomadisms. But nomadism concerns the definitive terrain, which consists of the planet together with individuals who are waking their faculties.
This leads to the fact that on a second and more fundamental level space is the transcendental-empirical. The transcendental-empirical is the world of the abstract, and is pre-eminently the world of energy and of intent, where the extension of intent beyond the worlds of humans and other animal beings is unknown. On this more fundamental level everything concerns wider realities (beyond those of suppressive, sedentary 'ordinary realities,') and concerns transformations and navigations.
A path is clearly visible, leading away into sunlit, eerie-sublime uplands. This path is the path of nomadism. On the initial level of space this path is different for each journeying, and consists on each occasion of endless turnings-sideways, exploratory drifts, sustained movements-forward, sudden deviations, pauses, returns, improvisatory leaps, and long phases of remaining in one place. On the second level the path does not deviate as it contours outwards by the fastest route, and the deviations are the results of failures to overcome our tendencies to be self-indulgent.
On the first level this is therefore the path of nomadism in a sense which is close to the usual sense of the term. On the second and more fundamental level it is the path of wider realities; the path of Love-and-Freedom.
*
In 1993 it was becoming clear to me that the Deleuze and Guattari of A Thousand Plateaus were 'onto something' - that they had found a way forward.
At the level of the 'western' world's zone of the interestablishment this was a time of increasing consolidation - of deepening re-empowerment. Whereas twenty five years before there had been a pervasive view that the establishment in some sense would soon be overcome, there was now the widespread view that this - capitalist - establishment was necessary as the best of bad options, and the equally widespread view that it was the basis and standard bearer for the only virtuous form of society: it had given itself a supposedly anti-prejudice veneer to make the depredations of pro-market deregulation more palatable, and by 1993 it was not only triumphalist, but had managed to re-construct late-twentieth century war as acceptable, overcoming the effects of the war in Vietnam.
However, I was not in fact paying much attention to this at the time: I had been triggered into looking in the escape-direction by the circumstances (the human world is always going up and down, and it is vital to avoid becoming fixated on the ongoing disaster, and its fluctuations). What was helping me to look in the direction of the escape-route was the combination of Deleuze and Guattari, the alternative, anti-establishment sub-cultures of the time (specifically, music-and-dance sub-cultures), and the equally anti-establishment materialism within the University of Warwick's philosophy department.
But of these three it was Deleuze and Guattari who would help me the most. They had indeed found a way forward, one that led to the path.
*
In our work together Mark Fisher and myself always concentrated on the question of places, in a sense that involved the terrain and functionings of the place being held, for the purposes of thought, alongside the worlds of stories and music which came from the place, or which took it as a location or subject. This strategy, as we employed it in our audio-essays londonunderlondon and On Vanishing Land, was always a way of moving toward the question of the outside of ordinary reality, a way of getting to the energy worlds of the real-abstract through places, and ultimately through space. It is not surprising therefore that when we arrived at a problem that related to time, and I started to work on this idea, the issue transformed itself into something that, once more, was a process of starting primarily from a place.
In November of 2011 I went to visit Mark in Felixstowe - staying at his house for the weekend - in order to work on sequencing and editing the music and voice-recordings for On Vanishing Land.
Late on the Saturday evening we watched the 1978 TV adaptation of Pinter's No Man's Land, and the next morning we watched the one hour TV horror drama, The Ice House, also from 1978. After this we had a conversation in which the exploratory idea emerged that there had maybe been something eerie about the year 1978. We were left with the term 'Eerie 78,' and the thought that we could perhaps work on a project with this name.
This idea was another way of arriving at an issue which Mark and I had been working on for years - the perception that at the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s there was a fundamental drop in intensity in the 'western' world, a multi-aspect collapse which was visible as such, but which was also marked by specific (largely temporary) forms of intensification and innovation within certain, generally quite minimally-impacting areas of cultural production. Evidently the change that occurred was one that involved both the shift to the neo-liberalism of post-Fordist economics, and the degeneration toward very pervasive 'postmodernist' modalities of cultural production, but we both felt that there was something fundamentally deeper involved in the shift.
I liked the idea of approaching this issue from the perspective of the point where the change had not yet occurred, or was only starting to happen. And for some time I had been working on a way of thinking about the 'eerie' that would change the concept so that its main form was partly directed toward intensely positive but anomalous aspects of the world (I felt that this shift was very much a 'bringing out' of something that was faintly in effect, already, within the concept). The idea of 'Eerie 78' was powerful partly because of the dark aspects of the world being seen in the two TV dramas, but also - most importantly - because the term eerie in this context was to a great extent about something definitively positive - the views toward the Future (no matter how obscured or distorted) that were easier to reach before the collapse. And evidently this was not about a change in a use of a term: what was striking about the second aspect was precisely that it concerned a way of thinking about the Future - existence at a higher level of intensity.
*
Arriving at the issue of my experiences in Malton/Ryedale/Helmsley was a process of arriving, once more, at the problem of places. And this problem, in turn, is inseparable from the problems of the planet, of haunt-ology, of space, and of the transcendentally unknown which is knowable (the issue of time is most fundamentally blocked by Hegelianism, and the issue of space is most fundamentally blocked by Kantianism).
If the problem of places is encountered with sufficient comprehensiveness then the process of thinking in detail about the local and the singular will very rapidly lead to the planetary and to the abstract. The fact that the dreams I had in Malton and Leamington happened in these specific places is something that remains as an element of the local, and yet the dreams themselves, in different ways, were either about somewhere else in a straightforward way (a small town in the equatorial Andes), or about a disguised 'somewhere else' that suggests not a place, but a modality of places. There is also a second way in which the abstract can become an aspect of responding to this problem, in that taking up these places as intensive terrains to be assessed is in fact a process of using lenses to see modalities of intent that are not crucially at the level of the local, though they are of course instantiated at this level.
In relation to the starting-point of Malton/Ryedale/Helmsley the account of the terrains in question is to be found in Hidden Valleys.
But in the context of this current writing the key initial point is that the dreams about the house in a forest near Malton took place in Leamington. And the next point is that there are no forests in the places where I dreamed about them. The modality of place is the town (as opposed to the city) and the powerful affect of 'house-in-forest-near-town' resolves itself into a kind of pragmatic problem, one which has multiple solutions, but where neither Malton nor Leamington have surrounding terrains which provide a solution.
Because of the very disturbing state of the planet in relation to forests there are many areas where there are almost no solutions to this problem (especially if the forest is large, and is on flattish ground, as opposed to it being remnant, steep-slope forest, left to prevent erosion). There is of course a very large number of solutions - however, the only place described in this book which would provide solutions is El Bolson in Patagonia.
The other way in which the problem of an individual place can lead to the abstract concerns what can be described as a process of seeing a differential at the level of intensity. Through taking a terrain around - and including - Malton and Helmsley it became possible to see, on the one hand, an openness and joy and adventurousness (fundamentally active, and with a charged, sublime serenity), and, on the other, a haven-domain of serenely reactive safety and kudos, in which the unknown is encountered on condition of safety and on condition of it being conductive toward prestige - toward benefits arriving from enshrined power.
But none of this is about going over the ground of the whole of Hidden Valleys. Over the years just before the arrival of the idea for this book a whole series of experiences took place which indicated that there was something to be explored in relation to Malton and Helmsley, and the area around them. Amongst these circumstances was a near-completion of a very wide circle of journeys and dreams. In Patagonia I had dreamed about Siberia, and in Siberia I had dreamed about Malton. But having completed Hidden Valleys there was only one place where the process could go next - it could only continue by returning to the starting-point, the place where I had had the dreams about the house near Malton.
*
It is now possible to ask, in relation to all of my experiences since 1993, what, in an impersonal sense, has been the tutelary?
The answer is in three parts, which delineate aspects that ultimately are not fully separable from each other.
The first aspect is journeys in semi-wildernesses and wildernesses; visits to countryside and scurfland terrains; and all movements along a gradient leading away from the maximally urban, in the form of cities.
The second aspect is dream, semi-trance, envisaging and story-creation experiences with a quality of joy and with a high degree of focus, with this focus involving attention being directed toward depth-level and wide-level aspects of the world.
Note: together, these first two aspects function to transmutate - or correct - the idea of the unconscious, so that it becomes an idea which relates primarily to the planet, in a specific sense which involves the planet as intensively and extensively wider than the human world, and as separate from the blocked, deluded systems of (non) thought that are endemic within the sphere of the human, even though these debilitating systems do not in any way define the human sphere.
The third aspect is a series of works which can be set out in an order which is primarily chronological in relation to their composition:
The Theban Trilogy, Sophocles
Tao Te Ching, Lao Tsu
The plays of Shakespeare, in particular: Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, As You Like It, Richard III.
Ethics, Baruch Spinoza
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
The Waves, Virginia Woolf
The King of Elfland's Daughter, Edward Dunsany
The novels of Ursula Le Guin, in particular City of Illusions, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, and The Word for World is Forest.
Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay
The books of Carlos Castaneda, in particular The Power of Silence, The Art of Dreaming, The Teachings of Don Juan, The Eagle's Gift, Tales of Power, The Wheel of Time, and Journey to Ixtlan.
"The Image of Thought," Chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze.
Surfacing, Margaret Atwood
Memoirs of a Survivor, Doris Lessing
"The Erl-King," Angela Carter
"The Story of the Telescope and the Abyss," Pierette Fleutiaux
Picnic at Hanging Rock (film), Peter Weir
Horses, Patti Smith
The novels of Octavia Butler, in particular Wild Seed and Dawn.
Shabono, Florinda Donner.
A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
Fanny and Alexander, Ingmar Bergman
Sapphire and Steel, P.J. Hammond
"The Visionary: The Life Story of Flicker of the Serpentine of Telina-na," Ursula Le Guin
The Witch's Dream, Florinda Donner
The Sorcerers' Crossing, Taisha Abelar
Being in Dreaming, Florinda Donner
Note 1. It is possible to give an account of what is in effect within these works, at different degrees of intensity, and different degrees of comprehensiveness - a principle or force of exteriority.
(The concept of immanence is not enough: immanence forms a horizon which continually challenges the dogmatic images of the world and of thought, but on its own it is inadequate for the overall purpose of escape from ordinary, deadened reality, and for the specific purpose of effectuating itself as a mode of abstract perception).
The Witch's Dream, Florinda Donner
The Sorcerers' Crossing, Taisha Abelar
Being in Dreaming, Florinda Donner
Note 1. It is possible to give an account of what is in effect within these works, at different degrees of intensity, and different degrees of comprehensiveness - a principle or force of exteriority.
(The concept of immanence is not enough: immanence forms a horizon which continually challenges the dogmatic images of the world and of thought, but on its own it is inadequate for the overall purpose of escape from ordinary, deadened reality, and for the specific purpose of effectuating itself as a mode of abstract perception).
Note 2. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari say "...we cannot speak sufficiently in the name of an outside." And they also say - "There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it was made." Insofar as the works concern exteriority, it is also the case that they were produced by exteriority.
*
In the first terrain, from Hidden Valleys, the map, seen the other way around from how it was presented earlier, has Malton and the Talbot Hotel at the top, to the south, and then it has Helmsley and the Black Swan Hotel toward the base of the map. Extended, below Helmsley, in turn, is the North York Moors.
There is some degree of similarity between this terrain and the terrain that has been central to the current work. At the bottom of this second map is Coventry and twenty miles away to the south is Leamington, at the top. To the top left of the map is Harbury Lake, six miles southeast of Leamington. (and, instead of the North York Moors, extended across the base of this second map is the Birmingham/Wolverhampton conurbation).
It can be asked at this point, what is the equivalent of the Black Swan Hotel / Helmsley in the new map? And here, despite the ancient buildings of Coventry, the answer is that it is a further point on the map, just above Coventry, in the form of that aspect of the University of Warwick which consists of this place being a 'haven-domain' in the specific sense of a zone of reactive but creative safety (it should immediately be added both that this aspect is found in all universities and is not constitutive of them, and that the equivalent in relation to the Black Swan and Helmsley is, of course, just an aspect - a modality which is largely in the form of an affinity or a deeply emplaced 'affordance,' one which pertains to the hotel and the town, but without in any way defining them).
It is the time between the autumn of 1995 and the summer of 1999. There is Coventry, and on its southern periphery there is the large campus of the University of Warwick. And beyond these in Leamington and the area around it there is a movement-forward - a going into effect of Exteriority. It will in fact end with a departure from the area, but this is a contingency, and what is most important is to see that it was a Departure from the beginning.
The different zones and forces need to be given some thought. There is the differential between city and town - which was not there in the map from Hidden Valleys. And the town appears in conjunction with zones that are not urban in any way (the micro-place here, Harbury Lake, again has no equivalent). Also, the movement-forward is, on one level, not at all separable from the world of the university that is below it on the map. However, this ultimately disguises something else - this is that although those swept up in such a movement-forward are likely to have the capacity, in principle, to lodge themselves in academia, the force of Exteriority is something intrinsically different from any of the forms of functioning which together make up the fully actualised modes of the institution-system of the universities.
It will be seen that the terrain dissolves into a world of forms of intent.
*
On the horizon, immanence, and escape-groups.
And making up the foreground is the nomadism that pertains to the definitive terrain, together - inseparably - with the principle or force of exteriority. As with what is on the horizon, these foreground aspects belong to the domain of the transcendental-empirical. But they - unlike immanence and escape-groups - are fully effective and discernible, in the sense that everything that is involved is discernible and straightforwardly available to be part of a pragmatics of Departure from ordinary, deadened reality. Functionings that appear very much as 'on the way to being' escape-group modalities are part of this pragmatics - specifically all forms of project-collaboration and reciprocally intensificatory alliance; and the same point can be made about the immanence-worlds of the human, as with the deeply powerful domain of the oneirosphere, and the relationships between humans and other worlds of animals. Nonetheless, immanence and escape-groups remain as hazy, enigmatic features of the horizon.
However, it is vital to point out that in departing from the dogmatic image of the world (Section 18) the non-immanence view of the world is left behind. And furthermore, the in-between that follows the overcoming of the dogmatic image must emphatically lean toward immanence, both because of strong indications, and because, for exploratory reasons (and for reasons connected with having to counteract the presuppositions of the image) it is necessary to create explanatory accounts of the world along the lines of immanence, in a process of discerning what is taking place, and simultaneously of envisaging what could be taking place (see 3, in Section 44, for an example of of one of these accounts). It is necessary to be maximally active in bringing the horizon into focus. And it can be added that a main aim of the whole of this three-book project (and particularly of this third book) is to set out a detailed account of this kind.
*
A return to the south view from the forest edge in Tuva. Having briefly considered the issue of place, what remains are the issue of women as alterity (which most fundamentally concerns women as explorers into the unknown), the issue of the atmosphere, and of forests, and the issue of the abstract.
*
The wilderness and semi-wilderness forests of the planet are currently being destroyed as part of a global process which has the concentration of human beings into cities as another aspect. Devastation of the environment and 'concentrationism' are two primary features of the current form of the ongoing disaster (the phase of this disaster that can accurately be called capitalism). The forests which have been shrinking more slowly are taiga forests, or are mountain forests which are not far below the treeline in low-precipitation areas (the Sayan forests are an island to the south of the Siberian taiga wildernesses), or, are forests growing on very steep mountain slopes. (this is not in the least to predict that these forests might soon be safe, instead it is simply to point that the economic pressures toward the destruction of lowland equatorial rainforest are greater than the pressures toward the destruction of taiga). Other areas where the rate of destruction has been slowed a little are those where conservationism has been assisted by the vested interests of tourism, though often what is taking place in fact is ring-fencing of what are likely eventually to be tiny national-park remnants (however, it cannot be said in advance what will happen in these areas - for instance with the Valdivian forests in Patagonia)
There is a slight countervailing tendency (one which affects different areas) for semi-wilderness terrains near heavily populated regions to have increasing populations of wild species, as human populations are condensed into the cities. In effect there are fewer and fewer people living in the countryside, and in mountainous areas there are fewer people living off the land, and hunting animals for food, with this decrease being alongside the fact that many of those who remain have a vested interest in conserving wildlife because they are involved in the tourist industry. Another - associated - tendency is the current decline in near-subsistence farming for wool, because of competition from synthetic fibres (there are relatively large upland areas of the countries to the east and southeast of Turkey which recently have stopped being farmed). (This decrease is contingent on the petrochemical industry's domination of fabric production, so it is connected to environment-damaging processes).
Concentrationism concerns cities, but in a different - though ultimately inseparable - sense there is also now a concentrationism in terms of activity in relation to industrialised-world communication systems. This problem is evidently new in its current form, but in fact simultaneously is ancient: the oldest and still implacably pervasive form is the inability of human beings to stop verbalised thought and enter into sustained perception of the - planetary - world around them; and the human world still very much has a fetishised relationship with writing, even though the situation is now not as dire in this respect as it was at the time when only the priest-caste could read. Concentrationism here is the opposite of being expansive: it is inspansive. It may open up a vast space (all of the different modalities of the internal voice of declaration-of-view, justification (etc.); the domain of a religious book claiming to be the book; the interactions and assessments of the internet) but at the same time it is a closing down of the Outside. This of course is evidently not to criticise language or the internet, but is to analyse forms of fixation - forms of fixated concentration of activity into specific, limited modalities.
All of this is to say that the ongoing disaster is at the level of the transcendental-empirical, and fundamentally involves blocking-modalities in relation to the faculties. It is vital to see that humans are being concentrated into the cities (where new inspansive developments are at their most pervasive and powerful), and to see that the planet's wilderness terrains are being devastated - but this is not enough on its own.
A question can arise: confronted by the concentrational and destructive forces of capitalism, isn't it necessary to walk away from the values and ways of living which are involved - to set out immediately by shifting to a form of existence where it is possible to be expansive while at the same time 'touching the ground lightly'? Necessary to shift, in fact, to a form of existence where you touch the ground lightly as part of a process of escaping into a wider world of perspectives and actions (from which it might be possible to reach a greater understanding of the plight of human beings).
(It can be seen that such a departure does not in any way preclude being in a city, even if it is likely in general to be best to leave cities behind as places to live).
*
Two terrains or vantages can now be be overlaid, and the virtual-real can then, in turn, be laid across them.
You are looking southward from Malton across the River Derwent. Ahead of you is a long ridge of the wolds, with here and there a few trees on the horizon. To your right, three miles away is the start of the narrow, winding valley through which the Derwent flows, a valley which often has has trees on its relatively steep slopes, particularly on the steepest slopes to the south. Behind you, eighteen miles away, is Helmsley.
You are also looking looking southward from Leamington, across a zone of its streets, and out beyond these to a horizon of fields and occasional tiny patches of woodland. Just behind you is the River Leam, and six miles to the southeast is Harbury Lake, with its extremely small areas of less agriculturally devastated terrain (a miniscule fringe of scurfland on which rare species have survived). Behind you, fifteen miles away is the centre of Coventry, and two miles nearer, and a little to the west of the city's periphery is Warwick University.
It is 1978. At the Talbot Hotel I have the dream about the community of people living high in the Andes thousands of years ago. The people are at the centre of this oneiric/virtual-real experience. The terrain is mountains, and a lake created by a dam. There are no forests in this dream.
It is 1997, and I am living in Leamington: I dream about people living in a house in an area of forest a few miles to the southwest of Malton. The forest is quite large, and extends across an area south of the steep-sided valley of the Derwent (because there are trees on the slopes of this valley, and because I did not know the area very well, at one point I checked an ordnance survey map - but the area in actuality has nothing at all which corresponds to this virtual-real forest, which extends across land that is relatively flat, although it is elevated above the river). The house is by a lake, and the feeling of the dream is that the people living in the house have in some sense crossed a threshold, which has taken them away from something oppressive or constrictive about ordinary reality.
In the summer 2005 I am in the Sierra de la Demanda in northern Spain. The idea comes to me of a story in which there is an emergent parallel world where the whole planet is forest, and where the overgrown ruins of human cities and towns are everywhere (as if the planet has been 'dreamed forward' hundreds of years, but almost entirely without humans), with only a few places left unchanged. Everything is seen from the vantage of Leamington, which in the parallel world is unaltered, and from the vantage of some of the seventy or eighty people who wake up in a sunlit, depopulated Leamington, surrounded by forest. The view of the forest which I see is from a road going south out of the town, as the last houses come to an end there is a hundred yards of road, and then a wall of forest.
In 2009 I start to write The Corridor, a novel which is intrinsically about groups (although this was just what happened in writing it - it simply followed from the initial ideas). And in starting to write it the novel's six protagonists initially arrived in the parallel world (five years after this emergent world came into being, within the story) at the house southwest of Malton, from the 1997 dream. This dream had stayed in my mind: after a few years of only thinking about it occasionally I had started to return to it as a setting for both stories and processes of envisaging. But now, I did not want the setting in the novel to be somewhere from my past, and after an initial process of oneiric tension, I succeeded in relocating it to an area of Suffolk which I did not know at all, eventually succeeding so well that for a while I forgot completely that the house had ever been anywhere else.
From the point of view of the two terrains, there is now a complex virtual-real. In its first form there is a house surrounded by forest to the southwest. And in the second form there is forest everywhere: it has spread around both towns and has gone not just to the horizon but all around the planet. And from this second point of view the house and the group to the southwest has been doubled and relocated. The people from the Corridor story are not the same group, and this other virtual-real zone is now primarily to the south, in Suffolk. The constant, however, around all of this, is the forest, which now encompasses the planet, and covers the horizons of the two initial terrains.
It appears as very much a line of oneiric thought, one that began in 1978, and picked up speed nearly two decades later. The line of thought is evidently to a great extent about forests.
However, if you go back to the beginning of the thought-process, in 1978, it becomes clear that although forests are central, what is even more fundamental to it is the idea of groups. And if you look at its final phase it becomes apparent that what is most fundamental of all (for the line of thought, and at all levels) is the locus and matrix of both the forests and the groups - the planet on which they exist.
In looking at the superimposed terrains an impression emerges that there is a threshold-line that runs across both of them. From the first of the two vantages there is the River Derwent: the house by the lake is on the opposite side of the river, and, as well, the dream in Tuva involved crossing this river, with the eerie, ultra-intense figure of the woman standing in the distance on the opposite bank (Section 45). And in the case of the second terrain the threshold-line is the wall of forest seen from the road on the southward edge of Leamington (and in connection to the forests of The Corridor it is worth remembering that in relation to the encountered figures who have escaped further from ordinary reality, relative to the protagonists, it is women who are very much in the foreground - and it is Miranda who says "I am human, but I am human-across-a-threshold").
Having opened up this space of differentiated forms of intent - or forms of being - it is now possible to look over your shoulder, perhaps with a degree of trepidation, at the strange composite zone that is Helmsley/Warwick University, together with what only appears in one of the two terrains, a city, in the form of Coventry; and it is possible to wonder, what are they? And most importantly of all it is possible to look southeast to the other feature which appears on only one of the terrain-maps at the level of actuality - a specific place which is beyond the urban, Harbury Lake. With Harbury Lake, if it is taken up at the level of forms of intent, what is it toward which we are looking?
(the question will come to mind about the connection between actuality and the other level involved, and all that can be said at this point is what has already been stated: the zones within the terrains appear very much to have have different degrees of affinity for the different forms of intent, without it being possible in any way to define them in terms of these forms - there is no intrinsic connection between universities and the Deep Hotel, or the 'adjacency,' as it can be called. There is just a higher degree of affinity for this specific modality).
At the level of forms of intent the map is shifting toward the impersonal - toward it being a mapping of a terrain of the abstract (the abstract-real). But it should be said that the line of oneiric thought being delineated is also profoundly impersonal: the overall impression is of a process which I did not perceive at the time, and which was like an impersonal current that was both beyond me and running through me, a current which it seems should be thought of in terms of energy and in terms of the planet.
The threshold-crossing on the map needs to be brought into focus, both so that it is shown to be intrinsic to the line of thought, and - far more importantly - so that it reaches the point of having validity as an idea, even if it can only in fact be verified, by each one of us, as a result of a process which is as much a pragmatics of intensification as it is a process of thinking. For both of these reasons it is now necessary to return to the starting-point - to 1978. But it is necessary to do this in relation to all of the issues involved: it is a question of looking more closely at the initial dream, and then at other events which took place in the months afterwards. The oneiric map must be given more detail before it can be transformed.
*
pathways of becomings, pathways of groups
There was something striking about the countryside horizon which the Talbot faces - fairly often I would get flashes of joy from looking at it. There were not many trees on the escarpment, and after while I knew that what was beyond the horizon was a heavily agriculturalised area of wide, low hills: a terrain of big fields with very little woodland - and yet I would still recurrently get the feeling of joy from looking at this horizon.
I felt an affection for the Talbot - and for Malton - which was a depth-level feeling that was similar to - but not quite the same as - the feeling of affection that can be felt for a home. I remembered staying there when I was five years old: myself and my sister had played in the garden of the hotel with the manager's daughter, who was called Lynne, and who was also aged around five. I liked Lynne: at one point we had somehow managed to get up into the initial - five feet off the ground - branching of a beech tree which formed the other side of the 'frame' of the main external view of the southward horizon. I had stayed at the hotel again in the spring of 1971, when I had been eight: this later time was the first occasion I remember watching a colour television - Mount Etna was errupting, and the orange of the lava seen at night stayed in my mind (what was staying in my mind was not only the lava but the arrival of colour television, which at that point didn't exist in New Zealand).
And my affection for Malton was similar, but less noticeable: Malton was a bright, bustling place with a cheerful air of being sufficient for its circumstances, and it was on a hill that faced into the sunlight. But unlike Helmsley it had no quality of seclusion-serenity - no hidden-away-in-the-countryside quality of 'depth-charisma.' Instead it had a gritty, quotidian atmosphere: the atmosphere of a town with a livestock market and a manufacturing sector (it had a brewery and it had a small factory producing metal goods, etc.). The town had a down-to-earth, open-to-the-outside quality which did not have the English-dreaming cosyness-drug aspect of Helmsley: its charisma had depth in a different sense, and was also to a great extent a breadth-charisma that came from its connections to what was around it.
It is the spring of 1978. For me it has been a long time since my last summer, because I had left New Zealand in the October of 1977, and and I have therefore just had two winters in a row. There is a sixteen year old girl staying at the Talbot who is called Colleen (she is the sister of a woman who is the partner of the hotel's assistant manager). I am intensely attracted to her, but my attempts to talk with her are not very successful.
There were three events which took place at the Talbot at this time.
The dream about the community in the Andes.
Reading The Shining through the night.
Watching Once Upon a Time in the West.
Over the next few years these events then received additions in relation to the modalities which were finding expression through them. It was at around the same time, in the spring of 1978, that I started reading Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane trilogy, in a bookshop in Malton, but it was several months later that I continued and read the sequence and books; and watching Kurosawa's Dursu Uzala in 1980, in a house near Malton would have an impact that in a similar way would belong to the same overall space of ideas. (and another work which was woven into this process was Watership Down, which I had started reading in the same Malton bookshop in November of 1977).
All of these experiences together form a composite which has a pre-eminence within it of the three experiences in the spring of 1978. And here, in turn, there are three main issues, which also will go on to be central to what happened in the later phases of my life:
The first is the issue of groups.
The second is the issue of the social worlds studied by anthropology.
And the third issue concerns the fact that in the three or fours years which followed the experiences at the Talbot Hotel I began to have a faint but persistent feeling that in a radical sense there might be something more beyond the surface of ordinary reality (the more expansively and conventionally metaphysical aspect of this idea was primarily only explored, as a kind of unconsidered immanence metaphysics, in the form of creating fictional worlds, but another aspect of the idea, which involved the generally untouched potentials of the faculties of human beings, was explored in a way that was more deliberately an enquiry into the nature of the world).
In relation to the dream, the first point is that it is appropriate to call the community of people a group, as well as a community. The number of houses seemed to be around twenty or thirty - you could see all of them at once from a close vantage. And there were no details in the dream that would connect the group with the social systems of tribal worlds: what held everything together was that the adults of the community were at an exceptional level of existence in relation to lucidity, kindness, and inspired ways of living. They were at another level - they were over a threshold. There was no sense either of a wider ethnicity or of ritual modalities that would associate the community with known tribal worlds. Because of the scale and depth-level nature of the community in the dream, the term which seems in fact to be most appropriate of all is 'group.'
It can be seen, therefore, that in connection with the issue of anthropology the dream neatly side-stepped the elements of the anthropological image of the 'tribe.' Having had no contact with anthropology, a dream broke through which was from outside the box of the image which in part is emergent from this discipline, and in part is emergent from a combination of non-academic cultural views together with edited-down aspects of the worlds which anthropology studies.
In relation to the possibility of 'something more' this impression came from experiences such as this dream, together with other dreams, and it came from the combination of The Shining and the Stephen Donaldson trilogy. The most focused aspects of all of these elements came from The Shining, which both suggests the idea of profoundly anomalous occurrences - even along the lines in some sense of the ones in the book - being natural forces in some way, and simultaneously deepens the ideas of both dreams and human selves - in that Danny's dreams have validity as perceptions and predictions, and in that they appear to him through the persona of a more mature self. The effect of Donaldson was much more in the direction of the sublime - the book delerially and very faintly figures the escape-path and the second sphere of action - but this effect was nebulous, in the sense that it did not become thought to any extent. It briefly functioned at the level of deliberate oneiric production, in that in 1981 I started to write a novel which was heavily influenced by the trilogy, but then very soon (after an initial moment of inspiration when I wrote about fifteen pages) the project collapsed into an awareness that the story was too derivative, and too lacking in plot. In contrast, there was something about The Shining that was less nebulous, even though the stories that emerged out of thinking about its anomalous-and-yet-natural metaphysics would result in only a few lines of writing, and even though I was struck by Danny's double and tutelary dreams without generating a story from them (at least the transformed ideas of dreams and selves had an oneiric precision).
The last point to be made is that during these years I began to have an inchoate, fugitive awareness of a suppressed modality of the peripheral within the modern world, a modality consisting of a form of being and knowledge which commences from a concentration on perception and on the fluency and faculties of the body, together with it consisting of a heightened degree of focus at the level of intent. The primary modalities of the peripheral which have been embedded within the modern world are the artist, the mathematician, the scientist, the philosopher, the social theorist, the psychologist, the inventor, the entrepreneur and the religious leader. But this other form of the peripheral is separate from all of these, and while it is not intrinsically connected to any social form it has a close association with the worlds of non-state societies. It is what has been lost - what has been pervasively suppressed.
(The peripheral is always in some sense - and to different degrees in relation to these senses - a form of the divergent, which means that it can also be named the 'peripheral/divergent')
This form of the peripheral was semi-arriving - or faintly, fugitively arriving - in two separate ways, or along two separate channels. Firstly, there was the figure of the ultra-fluent practitioner of the arts of the body whose life fundamentally involved physical contestation (or readiness for it), where the contestation was at the level of survival-or-death: this in turn broke down into two figures, the hunter (as with the indigenous Siberian hunter Dursu Uzala) and the samural-level fighter (as with Harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West), and the Haruchai in Donaldson's initial trilogy). And secondly there was the figure of the anomalous individual who in some way was assisted by dreams and by trance states, where this was Danny in The Shining, and was also Fiver in Watership Down (alongside a quotation about 'spirit journeys' of shamans that is used as an epigram for one of the book's chapters), together to some extent with certain figures from the Donaldson books (the 'unfettered,' etc)).
All of these impacts were there-and-then-rapidly-gone: I did not begin to form a sustained process of envisaging and abstract perception out of an any of these elements, let alone out of the whole. The channels did allow much to get through in terms of an awareness of the suppressed modality - in each case what was seen was not only minimal in relation to degree of focus but was also only a partial view.
*
In relation to the first year at Coleg Harlech I am left with the impression of forces hovering - an impression of obscure forces/worlds that appear in my mind as if they were in some way to the west above the ocean, or, more brightly, were in the sky to the south. The channels were in many ways far more effective now, though they mostly opened up views toward other zones of the anomalous: I was studying Shakespeare (all through the three terms of this year) along with the Brontes, Lawrence and Malcolm Lowry - and well as this I was reading Yeats and Dylan Thomas. There was one point where six months of reading Shakespeare collided with reading Yeats (and reading about Yeats's life), and at this point I think I was briefly jolted to the point where I was capable of a kind of heightened abstract perception, that expressed itself to some extent through the writing of poems. But in the second year at the college a kind of control-modality was asserting itself within the development of a double concentration on the line of time - firstly, the micro-time of the problem of free-will and determinism, and secondly the macro-time of social development across the centuries. However, as long as what was deleterious within the process (it must be seen as to a great extent a fending-off) was part of a development within which it would eventually be jolted by new intense events it would not in fact be able to sustain itself. I had gone from seeing the natural as having been suffused with the anomalous all along (that is, this had happened in the earlier phase, from 1978 onwards, in which non-human anomalous forces were reconstructed as themselves natural) to working fixatedly on the idea of reconstructing the world of the abstract - a different space of the anomalous in the form of the world of intent, energy, dreams and faculties - as being a domain of blind cause and effect. (one modality naturalises to reach an awareness of the world as more than we normally realise, making matter profoundly anomalous, the other modality naturalises in order to push through a 'fend' in which the anomalous is collapsed into the dead matter which is deludedly constructed by the dogmatic image of thought). But as I long as I kept moving forward on other levels this process would eventually free itself, and metamorphose into a world of transcendental-empirical outsights, leaving the fixation on time behind. The process had begun with a heightened focus on the spatium of forces that is the world, and had then been diverted into a focus on time: but the detour in the end would not matter - what was important was that I had started to think.
*
In the two years after going to to live Leamington I had the sequence of dreams and semi-trance experiences (Sections 24, 25) which culminated in the exceptionally intense dream in February of 1998 (Section 24).
These experiences were almost entirely about groups. The groups in the dreams and semi-dreams had crossed a threshold of existence in the sense that their individuals had become travelers into the unknown, or they were trying to cross this threshold, or were succeeding in crossing it (the dream in 1998).
In going to Leamington Malton returned. And the dreams about the group living in the house in a forest near Malton were pivotal - there was a serene, sunlit, modern-world affect about this dream: a kind of quiet, impersonal practicality which was powerful in suggesting a way forward.
However, across all of the experiences, none of the groups had any connection to the worlds studied by anthropology. In three of the semi-trance experiences there were elements which came from the worlds of non-state societies (most notably in the case of the envisaged encounter with an indigenous Australian shaman), but none of these other experiences involved groups.
Here again, therefore, there was an implacable side-stepping of the conventional 'scene' of the tribe - the worlds of non-state societies were again involved, but this time the group had been entirely detached from the locations of this domain of societies, and what was included was the anomalous figure who is the primary form of the peripheral within these worlds.
From Malton to Leamington: the impression is of an impersonal process of oneiric thought being taken up again after a gap, as if it had been waiting for the right conditions; as if it had been waiting for the right configuration in terms of space, and for the waking of some degree of lucidity.
When I arrived in Malton in the autumn of 1977 (at the beginning of a six year phase during which Malton would emerge as the most central place in the continual re-locations that occurred during this time) I had been dedicatedly reading fiction for around seven years, and although I had read some anomalous tales and novels which had been written for adults (most of H.G.Wells' stories and novels, a few stories by Poe, A Christmas Carol, Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire) there is no doubt that at this time I was looking restlessly for new directions, a way forward in the oneirosphere.
In contrast, when I arrived in Leamington it was philosophy which had been at the centre of my life during the preceding years. It wasn't at all that I had given up on fiction: but for around ten years the fundamental process had been studying philosophy. And - again, in contrast - it was not the case that in this area I was looking for a new direction: instead it was more that I had an appointment with A Thousand Plateaus which I had to keep - and it definitely felt that the new atmosphere in some way helped me with keeping this appointment. What in fact happened was that the new works which I encountered at the beginning of this phase were fictions - Picnic at Hanging Rock, Solaris, The Waves - where these became elements within a wider process of thought.
*
By the end of 1997 a new way of seeing the world had arrived. It was not entirely in focus, but it was emphatically there. It had emerged primarily from studying A Thousand Plateaus and Spinoza's Ethics, but its emergence had also been assisted by my recent experiences, in particular those since I had arrived in Leamington. These were the main elements of this idea of the world, exemplified primarily through the case of the planet on which we live.
1.
In relation to a human individual there is not a difference in substance between the inside and the outside. Feeling is the depth-nature of everything, and at different levels both intent and awareness (capacity for memory) are fundamental aspects of the material world - or energy world - that is the cosmos.
2.
A fundamental force - or essence-force - runs through the planet and its individual beings: this force can be called Exteriority, the Other Force, Love-and-Freedom, intent, or deterritorialisation. But although this force is fundamental its effects for the planet and its individuals are, when taken as a whole, extremely minimal.
3.
There are deleterious energy formations and initially-embedded damaging modalities within the sphere of the planet and its individuals (all of these being extrinsic in the same way as diseases are extrinsic to a body, while being internal to it) which entail that the fundamental force is predominantly held back from a pervasive expression of its effects within a being (the cosmos is predatory to the maximum, which means that possessing the essence-force means nothing in itself in relation to whether or not it will shift to becoming pervasive in its effects).
4.
It is possible to act on these ideas - to explore them and validate them - by an overall becoming-active (with a primary emphasis on the body); by waking the faculties; by effectuating a capacity for becomings; and by shifting toward being part of a group consisting of alliances that are fundamentally about a love for the world, and about exploration, where travelling consists of movements into the transcendentally unknown. The process of waking the faculties must fundamentally start from perception, and must concentrate initially on the waking of this faculty, together with the faculties of intent, dreaming, lucidity, and feeling. Becomings involve the body as a whole and all of its faculties, and are processes of depth-level entering-into-composition with formations of being. For both men and women entering into composition with women is the key becoming, or initial becoming. Entering into composition with the planet is the fundamental becoming, or horizon becoming.
5.
5.
These practical modalities allow the exploration and validation of the account of the world. And they are themselves expressions of the force of Exteriority.
*
My impression that there was something more had now crossed a fundamental upward threshold, and an aspect of it had now transformed itself into awareness. The threshold-crossing was both at the level of philosophy and at the level of the experiences which had taken place over the preceding years. The change consisted of the beginnings of transcendental-empirical outsights in connection with the faculties and with the oneirosphere of virtual-real worlds that is a fundamental aspect of the human, and it involved an awareness both of the ongoing disaster (what lies behind the power of what we call 'tragedy') and of the escape-path leading away from ordinary reality. And my awareness of dreams had been heightened to a point where it was clear that dreaming is something far more extraordinary than is generally realised.
Either one of the two developments (the philosophy; the dream and semi-dream experiences) would have have been a large-scale change on its own, but together they were a momentous alteration, a threshold-crossing in the form of an intense concatenation.This is very effectively indicated by the oneiric-philosophical moment where I woke up from the dream in February and remembered the ultra-intense joy of what had just taken place, remembering in the same moment that the joy had been intrinsic to the experience of being an expanse of the world's energy-formations that was vastly beyond my usual confines, with the memory and remembered joy being expressed as I woke up by this song -
I wish I could be
the ocean
I wish I could be
the ocean
I wish I could be
the ocean
All the time.
*
Looking from Malton/Leamington there is now a forest, and there is an escape-group. It would be more true to say that there are several escape-groups. But for now the forest is just a small area of woodland to the southwest.
*
A week after the dream the additional event occurred. I started to read The Eagle's Gift, by Castaneda. I read to around the halfway point in this book, and then decided I should go back to the earlier books. By the end of the following summer I had read the first five of Castaneda's books, and had finished reading the book with which I had started, the sixth in the sequence.
In connection with the alteration which has just been described (the change in my way of seeing the world which led up to the dream about the group crossing a threshold) I was now left with a very striking impression. It felt as if I had just come to the definite conclusion that it would be worthwhile to go and visit an area of wilderness on the far side of the planet and that while getting ready for the journey I had found a note I had never read, written by a friend, which set out reasons for the journey which were immensely more extraordinary and compelling than the ones upon which I had already acted.
However, it can be asked, to what extent had I responded to the initial reasons for the journey? And not only that, but to what extent did I act in response to the new reasons? There was no doubt at all that the Castaneda books were the new, higher-level philosophy works for which I had not known I was looking. Their value as philosophical maps was immediately clear, despite the fact that on another level they described many things that were beyond my capacity to validate them, even partially. The crucial point here is that it is one thing for there to be a substantial change in the way in which you see the world, and it is another thing to embody this alteration. A change in the way in which you see the world can subside slowly back to a version of the original view (what was momentous about what had happened was that a crack had opened up into a gap through which I could easily pass, but that did not mean I would take up the option). The inertia that somehow prevents such changes could easily have blocked me, and in relation to the new philosophical maps the intellectual scruple about what I could not validate could easily have held me back (even though with the new cognitive system all the beyond-validation events were evidently possible, if not explicable).
My feeling is that it is very fortunate that I had just begun to act upon the love I had always had for semi-wilderness, wilderness and scurfland terrains. Here there was something crucial that I was embodying, rather than just thinking or talking about it. It would seem that it was out of a combination of circumstances - very much including this last one - that the embodied form of the alteration began to emerge.
The main thing that happened next was that I started to write stories - which is to say that the faculty of dreaming started to go into effect in a new channel. It was already in effect in the form of dreaming up new directions - futures - for groups and individuals, and in the form of dreams in sleep, but now, at last, it was in effect in relation to sustained processes of creating the virtual-real worlds that are called fictions, with all of their potential for arriving at and expressing outsights.
But this did not happen instantly. This was partly because I was caught up in doing academic philosophical work, and was simultaneously taking in a whole expanse of extraordinary new ideas. But it was also because I was not sufficiently interested in the recent faculty-of-dreaming experiences which I had from the outset seen as ideas for stories, while at the same time I was unthinkingly giving a high degree importance to the recent dreams-in-sleep, to the extent that - seeing them as I did as possible glimpses toward the deeper nature of the world - it did not occur to me at any point to use them as the basis for stories (in fact, there is way in which this never changed: it was just that around ten years later I found that the dreams had gone into effect within my writing - or that the outsights involved had impacted in a new way).
It seems that I had moments of focus where my actions were minimal but adequate expressions of Exteriority, and it also seems as if I was dragged very slowly over the threshold. At Harbury Lake in the summer of 1999 I had both arrived at a scurfland terrain, and in sitting looking at some rocks in the water, having the reverie that became "Ktarizon: Deep Water" (Section 18), I was at the end of an hour-long process - which had started during the walk to the lake - of trying to stop internal verbalising, and by this point I had arrived at a state of taking-in-the-world which was substantially less interrupted than was normally possible. But nonetheless it was a year later, during another visit to the lake that I took up the story and began the process of writing it.
This was the beginning, and it is noticeable that what was there at the outset was a story about a group, and also that the story begins with the arrival - for the group - of a woman who is an enigmatic stranger at a 'martial arts level of fitness.' It is also noticeable that the faint trace of the forests that would soon be almost everywhere in my stories was present in the form of the 'sea-jungle' or 'sea-forest.'
There is no doubt that the stories I wrote during these years were primarily about groups. On almost all levels the culmination of this process of writing was The Corridor, a novel which, in terms of the length of the work and the time employed writing it, was considerably larger in scale than all the other stories put together: and The Corridor is a book about groups - to be specific, about escape-groups. It is true that it is a book with six protagonists, but as a whole they form a kind of protagonist-group, caught up in a struggle which ultimately is about escaping from the attenuated, deadened expanses of ordinary reality. Beyond them are other escape-groups: Cass's group, Julie and Kelvin's group, the Ashton group, the group which is encountered by Ffion and Steven in Part Two. However, the other stories in almost all cases directly involve groups or have a group in some sense on the horizon ("The Island" is a limit case here, in that there is no actual group on the horizon, but instead there are the houses (traces, diagrams) of three different escape-groups, or modalities of escape-group). And "the far glade" (Section 7) - written in 2014, and quietly closing a loop by giving an account of a social formation that is like the one in the 1978 dream - ends with its protagonist having an unverifiable experience of being part of an escape-group.
But it is important to see that all of the six main characters in The Corridor are caught up in struggles in relation to which there is a depth-level sense in which they are on their own. And there is also another perspective on the cluster of tales which surround The Corridor which brings them into focus as being to a great extent about individuals who are following an escape-path without others around them who are involved in the same process. The opening and closing paragraphs of "The Bowl" end with "She was on her own." Groups may be either central to the stories or on their horizon, but although groups are held together by bonds of affection, and although it should be remembered that following an escape-path is always at the deepest level a joy, there is nothing within the overall account set out by the stories which is simplistic in relation to the ideas of groups and of movements-forward which have groups as an aspect of their horizon.
In relation to the non-state societies studied by anthropology there is the same quietly insistent presence of these social worlds which has been shown to be in effect within my faculty of dreaming since the dream in 1978. This applies whether you take The Corridor, or the whole group of stories, and the degree of impacting from these worlds has a quality of remaining constant. In The Corridor it is stated that several Yanomami groups escaped from ordinary reality - "the Disaster" - at the point when the parallel world of the Corridor came into existence. And the wider group of oneiric narratives includes "Yanomami Tale" (Section 23). The emphasis is always quantitatively minimal, and yet simultaneously at a high level of intensity. The point here in the end is no doubt that although the suppressed form of the peripheral-divergent is not intrinsically the preserve of the non-state societies in question, it is impossible to think about it without being aware of the ways in which tribal and nomadic societies are intrinsically more involved with - and are closer to - this modality of intent.
My impression of there being 'something more' had by this time crossed a threshold so that the ideas involved had to a very large extent resolved themselves into transcendental-empirical outsights - into knowledge (see Section 34). This had taken place because of a wider process that included the writing of the stories within it, but it is important to point out that, in particular, the experience of writing the The Corridor was one in which I kept realising that what I was doing was both like exploring and developing a complex hypothesis, and was like shaping and polishing a lens so that I could see with greater clarity.
The change can be exemplified in relation to the the escape-path, and through an initial process of contrast. Immanence and escape-groups remained on the horizon, as the sources of two primary axioms of an axiomatics of metaphysics/pragmatics: solid enough in every way to form these axioms (axioms which assist with leaving behind the dogmatic image of the world (section 18), and the other dogmatic images) the views involved were nonetheless not at the level of being outsights. However, the view of the escape-path was clear. I had been on it for years, and I could see it in the lives and works of others. It consisted of waking the faculties, starting primarily with perception, but also with dreaming and with navigation; it was an exploration and a becoming-active that was always orientated toward exteriority, but in a particular direction that can be described as love, and freedom and wider realities, and where the impacting of the view in this direction can be termed Exteriority. It was nomadism - a deterritorialised exploration and movement-forward in the form of existence on the definitive terrain; and it was the suppressed form of the peripheral-divergent.
*
With a few exceptions this has been an account of an oneiro-abstract progression in the years since 1978. (the main exception was the delineation of a new view of the world which emerged around 1997). This is to say that in describing a process of following the escape-path the account has been focused almost exclusively on the faculty of dreaming.
Opening the apperture a little, for a moment, it is important to see the way in which choice-making (navigation) was shifted - simultaneously with the threshold-crossing of the faculty of dreaming - so that, to take a key instance, choice-making began to be centrally orientated toward movements into scurfland, forest and wilderness terrains, and so that a willingness to innovate and improvise in relation to these terrains began to go into sustained effect. Going to Harbury Lake at least once a year was a refrain which went on year after year; working in London while living in its periphery of woodlands was a two-year-long improvisation; and going into mountains became simultaneously about finding forest wildernesses, and about finding places which would help with the process of waking the faculty of perception.
This wider perspective needs to be opened up because to talk about the escape-path without doing so could be misleading. However, there are issues involving the faculty of dreaming which still need to be explicated.
In relation to the specific account, it can be seen that there is a very high degree of continuity or 'consistent expression' in the years since 1978: the impression is very much that of a sustained going-into-effect of a material or planetary unconscious. There are the groups living in secluded or wilderness locations, there is the faint (but nonetheless powerful) element of the social worlds studied by anthropology; and after a threshold-crossing around 1996 there are new, very pronounced strands of continuity involving the groups and the terrains which surround them. Two of these are the emergence of an emphasis on women within the dreams, and the emergence within them of the idea of threshold-crossings at the level of overall existence/awareness. However, alongside these there is the implacably insistent emergence of forest terrains, from the forest near Malton, to the equatorial jungles of the Yanomami, and from the taiga forest of "Toward Tuva" to the forests of The Corridor.
It can be seen that there is continuity, but with an abrupt upward-movement or threshold-crossing in the middle. And the change does not just involve the expansion of the space of what is being brought into focus within the dreams, and/or its degree of focus - it also also involves the appearance of a new modality of dreaming, in the form of the dreaming-into-existence of story-worlds.
But now two questions are arriving in a single space of enquiry, from two very different directions.
The first of these concerns the need to complete the specific account of the development of the faculty of dreaming, from 1978, to 2014. And the question is - what about dreams-in-sleep in the phase from 1998 to 2014?
The second involves both the wider account of the escape-path and the specific issue of the faculty of dreaming, and goes back to the beginning of this three-book project. It was said at the outset (Section 1) that there are three main initial coordinates that are needed for understanding the south-outside (the direction in which the escape-path travels), and that these are the planet, women, and the abstract. And the question therefore is this - in what ways are the planet, women and the abstract in effect within the virtual-real worlds of the dreamings of the phase that ended in 2014 and began eight years earlier?
To give an overview, this is the sequence of the dreams which together are the zone of encounter here, from 1978 onwards, together with the places that were the locations of the dreams.
The dream when I was in Malton, in 1978.
The Andes, thousands of year ago, maybe
in the area that is now Peru
The dreams in Leamington, between 1996 and 1998
With two of them, an area of forest near Malton
(with the other two the location was indeterminate)
The dream in a forested area of Patagonia
fifteen miles from El Bolson, in 2008 (Section 38)
An area of forest in the south of Siberia
The dream in Kyzyl, Tuva, in 20011
Malton
The same issues can be addressed with the last two of these dreams as have been addressed with each phase of this account.
The first point is that the dream about the abandoned base in Siberia was very much about a group, although in a sense that is different from that which applies to the groups in the earlier dreams. The last of the Leamington dreams was about a group crossing a threshold, where I was a part of this group. In the 2008 dream the feeling was that the people I encountered were a long way past this threshold, and that far from being a member of the group I was being assisted as someone whose life and overall modality of intent was very far from focused - very far from impeccable (there was no sense at all in the dream of my having crossed any threshold, or of my being distinguished by any achievement: I was just there at the base having a concupiscent tendency toward women pointed out to me, along with a tendency to be neurotic and self-important, a modality of trying to be 'in control' in an area in relation to which I believed I had knowledge). In contrast, the group living in the house near Malton (in the earlier Leamington dreams) felt as if they were only just over the border of ordinary reality. I saw them from a distance, and knew about them, rather than interacting with them - and yet in these earlier dreams the group felt relatively near to me at the level of intensity. What was striking about the 2008 dream was that the people I met felt far ahead of me, and yet at the same time I got close to them, and interacted with them.
The dream in Kyzyl was not about a group. However, it remains the case that this dream took me back, in the virtual-real, to the place where I had dreamed about the community in the Andes, and to a place four miles away from the location of the house in the forest in the dreams in Leamington. There is a feeling here of the closing of a circuit, where what is involved is the idea of the escape-group. And looked at in this way it is possible to arrive at the impression that the steadily increasing emphasis on women (starting from 1978 where the group consisted indeterminately of men and women, with no emphasis on either gender) is in some way suggesting that women are the key to an escape-group. (an escape-group is a nomadism, and as such it consists of individuals who have woken their love for the planet, and the point that follows from this is that a love for the planet is a becoming - and Deleuze and Guattari state that becoming-woman is "the key to all the becomings").
There was nothing which related directly to non-state societies about the dream in 2008. The location of the dream was an area which only a hundred and fifty years ago would have been entirely a zone of shamanic social formations, but there was no connection to these worlds. This was partly because everything was explicitly taking place in the time when the dream was occurring: the abandoned military or space-programme base gave a location-in-time to the forest, and established (and then also erased) a connection to the Russian/Soviet state. Initially everything was about the forest - its trees and its birds (as I arrived at the base I knew that it was a place where birdwatchers occasionally visited). The forest in sunlight had an extraordinary quality of fresh air - where these two words need to be understood in a way that relates to something fundamentally more than air. And it wasn't that this was being seen as Russian forest, as opposed to indigenous shamanic forest - it was being seen as a forest in sunlight, in an approximate location on the planet. (it needs to be remembered that this is probably a good way of describing a shamanic/nonadic optic in relation to a terrain of forest).
But while there were no overt, or explicit connections to specific forms of non-state society (or to the idea of these societies as a whole) what took place within the dream seemed nonetheless to have connections, in a deeper sense, with these worlds. The experience of meeting the animals - which came closer toward me along the branches of trees, and where the experience was one of sharing our ways of being - was extremely moving and seems suggestive of the relationship with animals of totemic/shamanic societies. And the encounter with the human beings in the base not only had an aspect of being fundamentally tutelary in nature, but there was also a quality about this encounter of being in an abode of anomalous presences. When I arrived on the base there seemed to be no-one there, and in meeting the people there was a feeling of the place being 'haunted' but in an unusual sense. There was no doubt at all that the people I was meeting were alive, but there was an impression that their bodies might be anomalous projections from bodies which were elsewhere.
With the dream in 2011 everything is centred on the extreme, perturbing impact of seeing the woman in the distance, and on the term "a rain goddess." The idea of a rain goddess is evidently one that can be connected to state societies with a pantheon of deities, but the idea is also very much one that could be found within the non-state societies that form the primary zone of encounter of anthropology. Many non-state societies, for instance, have a belief in an 'Earth Goddess,' so that, along with other views that we might categorise in terms of shamanism or animism, there is a different way of thinking in relation to the planet in the system of views, where this way of thinking apparently might not fit so well with the categorising system (in that the idea of a goddess, in this sense, would in general fit more closely with a metaphysical system such as hinduism). And here it is necessary to do the 'unthinkable' and to take 'a rain goddess' as a term within a transcendental-materialist philosophy of immanence. Given that rain is something that fundamendentally distinguishes the Earth from the other planets and moons of the solar system (Europa and Mars apparently have liquid water, but they emphatically do not have rain) the idea is in fact a very effective way of seeing the Spinozistic planet (the planet understood as having a multi-attribute substance which is in the fullest sense the same as the substance of human beings), and one that has the great advantage of not naming this perspective after a male philosopher. And the second aspect of the term relates to this advantage of avoiding the male name for the planet when it is understood in terms of radical immanence: given that the term 'being' should be used for the planet, understood immanently, and even though the idea 'female' relates ultimately to issues involving travelling into the unknown, and the waking of the faculties, should not a being which creates new beings within its body be aligned with the idea of female rather than the idea of male?
This is an unusual technical term, to say the least: but it is interesting to notice, as a final point, that the range of the term that is opened up by the indefinite article is that of a 'science fiction' perspective, in that other rain goddesses, in this immanence-metaphysics, de-anthropomorphised sense, would be other planets which have rain (other planets where there is a hydro-cycle of evaporation of bodies of water, and of water falling as rain). The term is not going to be taken up into philosophy, but I make no apologies for elaborating it (and I should add that I don't feel as if "I" started the process that led to its elaboration). But having explored it for a moment it is worth considering the idea that the collapse of the thinking involved here is probably the beginning of religion.
*
Very different aspects of these two dreams were conductive toward the problem of places. This was particularly true of the dream in Kyzyl, although it was a while before this aspect of the dream impacted upon me. But the problem being named here, because it involves a pragmatics and an immanence-metaphysics of places, is in fact to a great extent about taking the idea of places to the point where the view becomes abstract, in the sense that the perspective becomes a view toward a co-existing form of existence that is at a higher level of intensity - toward a form of intent that is over a threshold separating it from ordinary, deadened reality. We have been set up to see a line of time, and a space which exists on the line of time. With a perception of places what is orthogonal to the line of chronic/chronological time is the direction of the Future.
*
In almost all ways the new - story-writing - development of my faculty of dreaming ventured furthest, in terms what was being expressed, in the writing of The Corridor. However, there is a way in which 'The Far Glade' is alongside it, in the sense that in this story I explore the idea of communities thousands of years ago which had crossed a threshold of lucidity - so that in this story I am making contact with the dream-in-sleep in 1978. If a circuit is being closed here then the impression is that this takes place in the dream in Kyzyl in 2011, and pre-eminently in the the writing of The Corridor and "The Far Glade" (though the other tales written at the same time as The Corridor, such as 'The Island', and 'The Bowl' are also very much part of this phase).
And across all the faculty of dreaming this phase shows a very marked emphasis on women, and figures of female alterity - where most of these figures are women who are travellers into the unknown, but where sometimes the alterity is of a different kind (Ket in The Corridor is encountered in the form of a woman, but is not originally human, and the woman in the dream in Kyzyl was experienced in the dream as not human). The emphasis is heightened as the phase reaches an end: it becomes a specific kind of centrality where the men are right alongside the women, but where the women now occupy most of the foreground. In Section Five of The Corridor, when there is the meal in the garden, the figures who are able to explain what has happened (or whose already-given explanations are involved in the conversation), are Cass, Shona, Louis, Miranda and Hazel, and of these only Louis is male. If you spread everything wider to everyone who has been encountered the list includes the woman who Kate encounters in Part One, Kelvin, Julie, Sara, Arden, Jess, Callum, Ket and Tarul, and here it is true that, taking the widened zone of individuals, the difference is not large: however, the issue is not quantitative, but relates to the transcendental-empirical depth and intensity of what is said, and here female figures comprise most of the foreground. It is also important that whereas most of Part One is from Steven's viewpoint, the majority of Part Five - and also the majority of Part Four - is from Ffion's viewpoint, and that the book ends with Ffion.
In "The Far Glade" the protagonist is a woman - Kalessa - who in a very deliberate and extraordinary way is a traveller into the unknown. And the person who she meets who speaks from an understanding of a wider reality is the woman Dara. This story takes the figure of the female traveller into the unknown, and explores the world of this idea in ways which involve becoming-planet, and becoming-planetary-atmosphere, and which involve the raising up of the idea of space, so that it becomes the haptic space encountered by a spheroambient perception - a spheroambience which can become a libidinally ultra-charged, sublimely sensual bliss.
There are many issues here, and they are of many different kinds - with some of these issues in fact seeming almost extrinsic to the main problem. In the dream in 2008 the dream included the point where I was warned that in my contact with women I needed to avoid my choice-making being taken over by my sexuality. And it is worth thinking about the fact that the woman in the dream in Kyzyl was wearing a dress (it was dark green and came down to her knees) and that what I experienced was a situation where a woman-in-a-dress who I would normally have experienced as atttractive was unable to impact upon me in this way because I was unnerved/shocked by the sight of the woman to an extent that was on the edge of terror, even though I did not see her as in any way malevolent. In thinking about this strange disjunct of what I would normally have experienced and what I actually experienced it is easy to end up confronting a tendency on the part of heterosexual males in relation to clothing that is symbolically located within the space of the idea of femininity. It is evidently perturbing to have a default response of feeling attracted - and affectionate - toward women on the basis of the clothes they are wearing.
However, the main issues go beyond this one - they relate to becoming-planet, and to becoming-woman (for women as well as men). Here everything starts from the question of love, both in the very impersonal sense of our love for the planet and its terrains, and in a sense that involves our relationships - processes of entering into composition - with other human beings (and here the relationship can be one of friendship, comradeship or admiration, as with the relationships - most of the time - between the women in The Corridor). The Corridor is an exploration of processes of entering into composition with the planet; it is an exploration of, in particular, female travellers into the unknown in a wide sense (but also of their male counterparts); and it is an exploration of male processes of becoming-woman. All three of the male protagonists in the novel are in love with a woman, but - in a way that should be seen as inseparable from this - they are also in a becoming-woman which is both their love for the woman, and a process of being recurrently swept away into very real and very libidinally charged experiences of being a woman.
*
Enough has now been done to show the escape-route in relation to the waking of the faculties. The account has focused on the faculty of dreaming, but there has also been
a detailing of an alteration in the faculty of choice-making, or navigation, in relation to travelling within (and living within) non-urban, scurfland and wilderness terrains.
What the map at the start of this section calls 'the initial' is evidently a form of intent, and so is what the map calls 'the vicinity' (in different ways the same is also true of the other points marked on the map). But at this point it can be asked - why does the map retain any relationship to places? The map (diagram) intrinsically has a relation to kinds of place (as opposed to specific places) and it also has a kind of exemplifying, but extrinsic connection to a set of individual zones: the vicinity in this extrinsic sense is Leamington (but also Malton); the initial, when it is marked in brackets to the left, is Harbury Lake; the interestablishment is Coventry/Birmingham etc. It can be seen that the question being asked relates to the entire project of Explorations, and of its precursor Hidden Valleys. Why not straightforwardly a map/diagram showing forms of intent, with no connection to kinds of place?
The answer is that in escaping from ordinary, deadened reality the places where you are living and the places/terrains you visit, and through which you travel, will recurrently be fundamental aspects of the escape. This is because the escape-route - the path toward love, freedom and wider realities - is also accurately describable as the going-into-effect of Exteriority, and a fundamental aspect of Exteriority is a focusing of attention on countryside, wilderness and scurfland terrains. Places therefore become crucial in connection with the extent of their relationship with the outside of the urban.
This, of course, does not on any level entail that an escape toward the initial is impossible while living in a city, or that an individual will be propelled out of ordinary reality by living in a wilderness. The escape-route can be travelled in very diverse circumstances, and conversely, it should be remembered that the form of intent that relates to the term 'the interestablishment' (or 'the interiority') can function very effectively in a wilderness.
What, for nomadism (for metamorphics), would be a generic pragmatics of places?
The following are a few ideas that, if nothing else, will give the idea of what such a pragmatics would be:
Find a town with a high degree of openness to the outside, and which is close to areas of semi-wilderness, scurfland or wilderness, whether these consist of forest, mountains, or desert. Either find somewhere to live in the town, or - ideally - somewhere a few miles away in the hinterland adjoining the town. If you live in the town find 'lines of flight' in the form of places where it is possible to stay (for a few hours, or a few days, depending on what is possible/safe) in the adjoining terrains.
Don't isolate yourself into a remote house in the countryside in the modality of a retreat from ordinary existence. The improvisatory freedom of a pervasive becoming-active does not arrive through acquiring freedom from the demands of work-life modalities, and nor does isolation in combination with an awareness of the need to wake perception, and the other crucial faculties, such as dreaming and navigation (even though an embodied determination to wake these faculties is fundamental). Becoming-active arrives through a very intense, always potentially jolting activity, in which moments and modalities of being 'in the zone' gradually increase, and start to communicate with each other, as - in this instance - the skill of working into the gaps in work-existence is developed.
In looking for a place to live, it is important to see that the degree of openness relates to the scale of the town and the presence of markets at its centre, but also - and fundamentally - relates to the degree of openness to dreams and ideas within the population of the town (this does not involve some plan to change the town, but instead concerns the issue of a milieu of relative openness, and specifically involves the avoidance of places with a prevalence of overt or disguised reactive views).
Keep in mind that stories and music (and philosophy, and all artworks) associated with the area are not ultimately separable from it, and that - even if this seems unlikely to be crucial - these elements need to be part of a decision-making process about living in a terrain. The place and its dreams (whether the dreams are the unfettered dreams of transcendental-empirical awareness, or the blocked dreams of religion and territorialism) need to be perceived as a zone of consistency: they need to be brought together as parts of the zone of consistency that is being encountered.
And the following is an attempt at a pragmatics of what, for now, can still be called 'hauntology'.
Start with a terrain which seems to offer opportunities for thought; and start with a terrain which is a composite and/or an immanent whole which consists of place and of dreamings (where this term relates, in part, to stories, film, philosophy, music and all artworks). In relation to composites, as well as works produced by artists and thinkers, the dreamings can be dreams in sleep, and can be events in the form of encounters with stories/artworks etc.
Lay out everything on a plane of consistency so that topographical, geological and infrastructural aspects are placed together with dreamings: simultaneously explore both the terrain and the virtual-real terrains of the dreamings (to place a dreaming immanently within a terrain is not to ignore its own, virtual-real terrain). Follow whatever lines begin to emerge in doing this (the local will generally not stay local for long at this point: A Midsummer Night's Dream has a connection to Warwickshire but its primary connections are with an indeterminate, southern zone of Britain and with classical Greece).
Include the wider forces that are in effect within the area, such as the atmosphere, and the sea, if the area is alongside an ocean; and such as capitalism and the functionings of human state-territories.
To be specific, in relation to wider forces at the level of forms of intent (taking this as a term which is understood as relating indeterminately to one zone of consistency, so that it does not just relate to human activity), include the following: firstly, Exteriority; secondly, the highly innovative-and-charged, and yet suppressive (deceptively control-locked) productions of the adjacency, whether these productions are most easily described as religious, philosophical or artistic (the domain here is that of the initial creation of the religions and of their direct and indirect/allusive paratexts, and extends through figures such as Plato and Kant to the blocked aspects of limit, near-escape figures such as Angela Carter and William Burroughs); thirdly, the inter-establishment, understood as the functioning of suppressive modalities at the level of capitalism, the functioning of the territorial worlds of the states, the functioning of the religions, the functioning of a blocked/trapped modality of reason, the functioning of dogmatic images of the world and of human lives, and the functioning of the system of subjectified, reactive moods.
These three are the forces by which we are pre-eminently haunted, and only straightforwardly in a positive sense in relation to Exteriority (the adjacency can be a valuable detour, but it can only be a detour, otherwise it becomes a collapse). They are the forces which are mapped by hauntology, and in the case of Exteriority the mapping is not just a bringing-into-focus, but is intrinsically an effectuation of this force.
Note 1. Hauntology - or Xenography - can take the form of a fiction, a philosophical work, a biographical or autobiographical account, or any combination of these approaches. Taken on its own The Corridor is as much a work of hauntology as Hidden Valleys or On Vanishing Land (it is noticeable that The Corridor names Xenography, and also finds a name for the adjacency - the Deep Hotel). Validity is the crucial term here, a term which relates to lucidity - the perception of forms of intent, and the grasping of dreamings in terms of outsights. And the validity of a work of hauntology in the form of a fiction is not likely to be less than that of one in the form of a philosophical work: if anything, the opposite.
Note 2. Terrains and dreamings in some sense are immanent wholes in The Corridor, in that the fundamental underlying idea is that the parallel-emergence-world of the Corridor exists in some way as a dreaming on the part of the planet. But it is also the case that from the outset, and from the first lengthy dream that is described in the novel (Ffion's dream; Steven's dream, about Mongolia, and about the red door in the house) dreams in sleep are placed within a zone of consistency in the specific sense that they are shown as having the capacity to be perceptions of depth-level aspects of the world (that is, within the world of The Corridor, these particular dreams are perceptions in this sense).
Note 3. It can be seen why 'On Vanishing Land' concludes with Picnic at Hanging Rock. Lindsay's novel and Weir's adaptation together provide the way of staying immanent in relation to the deeper and wider levels of the world, in that they open up a view toward Exteriority. In giving an account of the world of forces that are immanent to us, and surround us, at the level of forms of intent, it is fundamental in every way that Exteriority is included in this account. There are many - often very surprising - lines to be followed in producing a hauntological account, but amongst these the one which has a fundamental importance is that of the escape-path.
*
Given that the map at the start of this section is a map of formations of intent, why does it maintain a connection to a terrain in relation to Harbury Lake? Where it appears in brackets, to the left, 'the initial' does have this connection (although in fact there is more to the left-right or 'east-west' axis of the diagram than this). In that the map is generic why is there this trace of the specific?
The answer is that the formation of intent that is 'the initial' is a modality which is primarily in connection with Exteriority, and a fundamental way in which Exteriority impacts on individuals is though visits to scurfland, semi-wilderness and wilderness terrains: what this entails is that the pathways of formations of intent must not be understood in terms of developments in 'the head' (in terms of 'resolve,' 'intention' etc.) but must be understood in terms of a transformation of the connection between the individual and the planet that is actualised at the level of journeys to places - because of this it is important that the map includes a reminder in the form of the reference to Harbury Lake.
The extraordinary and yet inconspicuous scurf-zone of Harbury Lake was a crucial filament within the thread that I followed in setting out to depart from the grim, deadened expanses of ordinary reality. It is for this reason that my series of visits to this terrain is faintly imprinted on the map.
But as has been indicated already, there is more to the east-west axis. To the east, is the place of reason; to the west, is the place of a collapsed modality of knowledge of Exteriority.
In Section 24 this difference was indicated by Ballard (the east) and Burroughs (the west). But the fundamental difference here is between entrapment within a fixation on time and formal / semi-formal systematicity (the east - the modality which has taken over the human world in the course of the last 3000 years) and a reactive entrapment within a form of attention that is excessively focused on areas of the transcendental-empirical other than Exteriority (the west - the collapsed form of the modality of attention that is means of departure from ordinary reality). The best way of thinking about this is to concentrate initially on knowledge of Exteriority (south) and on the disaster that is the place of reason (which in fact is a deterioration from 3000 years ago, because of its blindness to the transcendental-empirical). A full movement into the place of reason is a definitive collapse, and a full movement into the place of knowledge of Exteriority is a definitive southward departure, which, because this departure is a waking of the faculties, includes reason within itself.
Insofar as in 1998 I was beginning to move forward it was still A Thousand Plateaus that was a key guide for me, and the concentration on time has still not entirely been overcome in this text (so this means that 'the initial' being placed to the east on the map has a further meaning, and one which in fact is generic). But this deflection will be adjusted if you continue to move forward: in focusing primarily on Exteriority while also scanning in the other directions there is so much of the anomalous impacting upon you that the place of knowledge of exteriority will rapidly start to dissolve the residual effects of the place of reason.
*
My impression that there was something more had now crossed a fundamental upward threshold, and an aspect of it had now transformed itself into awareness. The threshold-crossing was both at the level of philosophy and at the level of the experiences which had taken place over the preceding years. The change consisted of the beginnings of transcendental-empirical outsights in connection with the faculties and with the oneirosphere of virtual-real worlds that is a fundamental aspect of the human, and it involved an awareness both of the ongoing disaster (what lies behind the power of what we call 'tragedy') and of the escape-path leading away from ordinary reality. And my awareness of dreams had been heightened to a point where it was clear that dreaming is something far more extraordinary than is generally realised.
Either one of the two developments (the philosophy; the dream and semi-dream experiences) would have have been a large-scale change on its own, but together they were a momentous alteration, a threshold-crossing in the form of an intense concatenation.This is very effectively indicated by the oneiric-philosophical moment where I woke up from the dream in February and remembered the ultra-intense joy of what had just taken place, remembering in the same moment that the joy had been intrinsic to the experience of being an expanse of the world's energy-formations that was vastly beyond my usual confines, with the memory and remembered joy being expressed as I woke up by this song -
I wish I could be
the ocean
I wish I could be
the ocean
I wish I could be
the ocean
All the time.
*
Looking from Malton/Leamington there is now a forest, and there is an escape-group. It would be more true to say that there are several escape-groups. But for now the forest is just a small area of woodland to the southwest.
*
A week after the dream the additional event occurred. I started to read The Eagle's Gift, by Castaneda. I read to around the halfway point in this book, and then decided I should go back to the earlier books. By the end of the following summer I had read the first five of Castaneda's books, and had finished reading the book with which I had started, the sixth in the sequence.
In connection with the alteration which has just been described (the change in my way of seeing the world which led up to the dream about the group crossing a threshold) I was now left with a very striking impression. It felt as if I had just come to the definite conclusion that it would be worthwhile to go and visit an area of wilderness on the far side of the planet and that while getting ready for the journey I had found a note I had never read, written by a friend, which set out reasons for the journey which were immensely more extraordinary and compelling than the ones upon which I had already acted.
However, it can be asked, to what extent had I responded to the initial reasons for the journey? And not only that, but to what extent did I act in response to the new reasons? There was no doubt at all that the Castaneda books were the new, higher-level philosophy works for which I had not known I was looking. Their value as philosophical maps was immediately clear, despite the fact that on another level they described many things that were beyond my capacity to validate them, even partially. The crucial point here is that it is one thing for there to be a substantial change in the way in which you see the world, and it is another thing to embody this alteration. A change in the way in which you see the world can subside slowly back to a version of the original view (what was momentous about what had happened was that a crack had opened up into a gap through which I could easily pass, but that did not mean I would take up the option). The inertia that somehow prevents such changes could easily have blocked me, and in relation to the new philosophical maps the intellectual scruple about what I could not validate could easily have held me back (even though with the new cognitive system all the beyond-validation events were evidently possible, if not explicable).
My feeling is that it is very fortunate that I had just begun to act upon the love I had always had for semi-wilderness, wilderness and scurfland terrains. Here there was something crucial that I was embodying, rather than just thinking or talking about it. It would seem that it was out of a combination of circumstances - very much including this last one - that the embodied form of the alteration began to emerge.
The main thing that happened next was that I started to write stories - which is to say that the faculty of dreaming started to go into effect in a new channel. It was already in effect in the form of dreaming up new directions - futures - for groups and individuals, and in the form of dreams in sleep, but now, at last, it was in effect in relation to sustained processes of creating the virtual-real worlds that are called fictions, with all of their potential for arriving at and expressing outsights.
But this did not happen instantly. This was partly because I was caught up in doing academic philosophical work, and was simultaneously taking in a whole expanse of extraordinary new ideas. But it was also because I was not sufficiently interested in the recent faculty-of-dreaming experiences which I had from the outset seen as ideas for stories, while at the same time I was unthinkingly giving a high degree importance to the recent dreams-in-sleep, to the extent that - seeing them as I did as possible glimpses toward the deeper nature of the world - it did not occur to me at any point to use them as the basis for stories (in fact, there is way in which this never changed: it was just that around ten years later I found that the dreams had gone into effect within my writing - or that the outsights involved had impacted in a new way).
It seems that I had moments of focus where my actions were minimal but adequate expressions of Exteriority, and it also seems as if I was dragged very slowly over the threshold. At Harbury Lake in the summer of 1999 I had both arrived at a scurfland terrain, and in sitting looking at some rocks in the water, having the reverie that became "Ktarizon: Deep Water" (Section 18), I was at the end of an hour-long process - which had started during the walk to the lake - of trying to stop internal verbalising, and by this point I had arrived at a state of taking-in-the-world which was substantially less interrupted than was normally possible. But nonetheless it was a year later, during another visit to the lake that I took up the story and began the process of writing it.
This was the beginning, and it is noticeable that what was there at the outset was a story about a group, and also that the story begins with the arrival - for the group - of a woman who is an enigmatic stranger at a 'martial arts level of fitness.' It is also noticeable that the faint trace of the forests that would soon be almost everywhere in my stories was present in the form of the 'sea-jungle' or 'sea-forest.'
There is no doubt that the stories I wrote during these years were primarily about groups. On almost all levels the culmination of this process of writing was The Corridor, a novel which, in terms of the length of the work and the time employed writing it, was considerably larger in scale than all the other stories put together: and The Corridor is a book about groups - to be specific, about escape-groups. It is true that it is a book with six protagonists, but as a whole they form a kind of protagonist-group, caught up in a struggle which ultimately is about escaping from the attenuated, deadened expanses of ordinary reality. Beyond them are other escape-groups: Cass's group, Julie and Kelvin's group, the Ashton group, the group which is encountered by Ffion and Steven in Part Two. However, the other stories in almost all cases directly involve groups or have a group in some sense on the horizon ("The Island" is a limit case here, in that there is no actual group on the horizon, but instead there are the houses (traces, diagrams) of three different escape-groups, or modalities of escape-group). And "the far glade" (Section 7) - written in 2014, and quietly closing a loop by giving an account of a social formation that is like the one in the 1978 dream - ends with its protagonist having an unverifiable experience of being part of an escape-group.
But it is important to see that all of the six main characters in The Corridor are caught up in struggles in relation to which there is a depth-level sense in which they are on their own. And there is also another perspective on the cluster of tales which surround The Corridor which brings them into focus as being to a great extent about individuals who are following an escape-path without others around them who are involved in the same process. The opening and closing paragraphs of "The Bowl" end with "She was on her own." Groups may be either central to the stories or on their horizon, but although groups are held together by bonds of affection, and although it should be remembered that following an escape-path is always at the deepest level a joy, there is nothing within the overall account set out by the stories which is simplistic in relation to the ideas of groups and of movements-forward which have groups as an aspect of their horizon.
In relation to the non-state societies studied by anthropology there is the same quietly insistent presence of these social worlds which has been shown to be in effect within my faculty of dreaming since the dream in 1978. This applies whether you take The Corridor, or the whole group of stories, and the degree of impacting from these worlds has a quality of remaining constant. In The Corridor it is stated that several Yanomami groups escaped from ordinary reality - "the Disaster" - at the point when the parallel world of the Corridor came into existence. And the wider group of oneiric narratives includes "Yanomami Tale" (Section 23). The emphasis is always quantitatively minimal, and yet simultaneously at a high level of intensity. The point here in the end is no doubt that although the suppressed form of the peripheral-divergent is not intrinsically the preserve of the non-state societies in question, it is impossible to think about it without being aware of the ways in which tribal and nomadic societies are intrinsically more involved with - and are closer to - this modality of intent.
My impression of there being 'something more' had by this time crossed a threshold so that the ideas involved had to a very large extent resolved themselves into transcendental-empirical outsights - into knowledge (see Section 34). This had taken place because of a wider process that included the writing of the stories within it, but it is important to point out that, in particular, the experience of writing the The Corridor was one in which I kept realising that what I was doing was both like exploring and developing a complex hypothesis, and was like shaping and polishing a lens so that I could see with greater clarity.
The change can be exemplified in relation to the the escape-path, and through an initial process of contrast. Immanence and escape-groups remained on the horizon, as the sources of two primary axioms of an axiomatics of metaphysics/pragmatics: solid enough in every way to form these axioms (axioms which assist with leaving behind the dogmatic image of the world (section 18), and the other dogmatic images) the views involved were nonetheless not at the level of being outsights. However, the view of the escape-path was clear. I had been on it for years, and I could see it in the lives and works of others. It consisted of waking the faculties, starting primarily with perception, but also with dreaming and with navigation; it was an exploration and a becoming-active that was always orientated toward exteriority, but in a particular direction that can be described as love, and freedom and wider realities, and where the impacting of the view in this direction can be termed Exteriority. It was nomadism - a deterritorialised exploration and movement-forward in the form of existence on the definitive terrain; and it was the suppressed form of the peripheral-divergent.
*
With a few exceptions this has been an account of an oneiro-abstract progression in the years since 1978. (the main exception was the delineation of a new view of the world which emerged around 1997). This is to say that in describing a process of following the escape-path the account has been focused almost exclusively on the faculty of dreaming.
Opening the apperture a little, for a moment, it is important to see the way in which choice-making (navigation) was shifted - simultaneously with the threshold-crossing of the faculty of dreaming - so that, to take a key instance, choice-making began to be centrally orientated toward movements into scurfland, forest and wilderness terrains, and so that a willingness to innovate and improvise in relation to these terrains began to go into sustained effect. Going to Harbury Lake at least once a year was a refrain which went on year after year; working in London while living in its periphery of woodlands was a two-year-long improvisation; and going into mountains became simultaneously about finding forest wildernesses, and about finding places which would help with the process of waking the faculty of perception.
This wider perspective needs to be opened up because to talk about the escape-path without doing so could be misleading. However, there are issues involving the faculty of dreaming which still need to be explicated.
In relation to the specific account, it can be seen that there is a very high degree of continuity or 'consistent expression' in the years since 1978: the impression is very much that of a sustained going-into-effect of a material or planetary unconscious. There are the groups living in secluded or wilderness locations, there is the faint (but nonetheless powerful) element of the social worlds studied by anthropology; and after a threshold-crossing around 1996 there are new, very pronounced strands of continuity involving the groups and the terrains which surround them. Two of these are the emergence of an emphasis on women within the dreams, and the emergence within them of the idea of threshold-crossings at the level of overall existence/awareness. However, alongside these there is the implacably insistent emergence of forest terrains, from the forest near Malton, to the equatorial jungles of the Yanomami, and from the taiga forest of "Toward Tuva" to the forests of The Corridor.
It can be seen that there is continuity, but with an abrupt upward-movement or threshold-crossing in the middle. And the change does not just involve the expansion of the space of what is being brought into focus within the dreams, and/or its degree of focus - it also also involves the appearance of a new modality of dreaming, in the form of the dreaming-into-existence of story-worlds.
But now two questions are arriving in a single space of enquiry, from two very different directions.
The first of these concerns the need to complete the specific account of the development of the faculty of dreaming, from 1978, to 2014. And the question is - what about dreams-in-sleep in the phase from 1998 to 2014?
The second involves both the wider account of the escape-path and the specific issue of the faculty of dreaming, and goes back to the beginning of this three-book project. It was said at the outset (Section 1) that there are three main initial coordinates that are needed for understanding the south-outside (the direction in which the escape-path travels), and that these are the planet, women, and the abstract. And the question therefore is this - in what ways are the planet, women and the abstract in effect within the virtual-real worlds of the dreamings of the phase that ended in 2014 and began eight years earlier?
To give an overview, this is the sequence of the dreams which together are the zone of encounter here, from 1978 onwards, together with the places that were the locations of the dreams.
The dream when I was in Malton, in 1978.
The Andes, thousands of year ago, maybe
in the area that is now Peru
The dreams in Leamington, between 1996 and 1998
With two of them, an area of forest near Malton
(with the other two the location was indeterminate)
The dream in a forested area of Patagonia
fifteen miles from El Bolson, in 2008 (Section 38)
An area of forest in the south of Siberia
The dream in Kyzyl, Tuva, in 20011
Malton
The same issues can be addressed with the last two of these dreams as have been addressed with each phase of this account.
The first point is that the dream about the abandoned base in Siberia was very much about a group, although in a sense that is different from that which applies to the groups in the earlier dreams. The last of the Leamington dreams was about a group crossing a threshold, where I was a part of this group. In the 2008 dream the feeling was that the people I encountered were a long way past this threshold, and that far from being a member of the group I was being assisted as someone whose life and overall modality of intent was very far from focused - very far from impeccable (there was no sense at all in the dream of my having crossed any threshold, or of my being distinguished by any achievement: I was just there at the base having a concupiscent tendency toward women pointed out to me, along with a tendency to be neurotic and self-important, a modality of trying to be 'in control' in an area in relation to which I believed I had knowledge). In contrast, the group living in the house near Malton (in the earlier Leamington dreams) felt as if they were only just over the border of ordinary reality. I saw them from a distance, and knew about them, rather than interacting with them - and yet in these earlier dreams the group felt relatively near to me at the level of intensity. What was striking about the 2008 dream was that the people I met felt far ahead of me, and yet at the same time I got close to them, and interacted with them.
The dream in Kyzyl was not about a group. However, it remains the case that this dream took me back, in the virtual-real, to the place where I had dreamed about the community in the Andes, and to a place four miles away from the location of the house in the forest in the dreams in Leamington. There is a feeling here of the closing of a circuit, where what is involved is the idea of the escape-group. And looked at in this way it is possible to arrive at the impression that the steadily increasing emphasis on women (starting from 1978 where the group consisted indeterminately of men and women, with no emphasis on either gender) is in some way suggesting that women are the key to an escape-group. (an escape-group is a nomadism, and as such it consists of individuals who have woken their love for the planet, and the point that follows from this is that a love for the planet is a becoming - and Deleuze and Guattari state that becoming-woman is "the key to all the becomings").
There was nothing which related directly to non-state societies about the dream in 2008. The location of the dream was an area which only a hundred and fifty years ago would have been entirely a zone of shamanic social formations, but there was no connection to these worlds. This was partly because everything was explicitly taking place in the time when the dream was occurring: the abandoned military or space-programme base gave a location-in-time to the forest, and established (and then also erased) a connection to the Russian/Soviet state. Initially everything was about the forest - its trees and its birds (as I arrived at the base I knew that it was a place where birdwatchers occasionally visited). The forest in sunlight had an extraordinary quality of fresh air - where these two words need to be understood in a way that relates to something fundamentally more than air. And it wasn't that this was being seen as Russian forest, as opposed to indigenous shamanic forest - it was being seen as a forest in sunlight, in an approximate location on the planet. (it needs to be remembered that this is probably a good way of describing a shamanic/nonadic optic in relation to a terrain of forest).
But while there were no overt, or explicit connections to specific forms of non-state society (or to the idea of these societies as a whole) what took place within the dream seemed nonetheless to have connections, in a deeper sense, with these worlds. The experience of meeting the animals - which came closer toward me along the branches of trees, and where the experience was one of sharing our ways of being - was extremely moving and seems suggestive of the relationship with animals of totemic/shamanic societies. And the encounter with the human beings in the base not only had an aspect of being fundamentally tutelary in nature, but there was also a quality about this encounter of being in an abode of anomalous presences. When I arrived on the base there seemed to be no-one there, and in meeting the people there was a feeling of the place being 'haunted' but in an unusual sense. There was no doubt at all that the people I was meeting were alive, but there was an impression that their bodies might be anomalous projections from bodies which were elsewhere.
With the dream in 2011 everything is centred on the extreme, perturbing impact of seeing the woman in the distance, and on the term "a rain goddess." The idea of a rain goddess is evidently one that can be connected to state societies with a pantheon of deities, but the idea is also very much one that could be found within the non-state societies that form the primary zone of encounter of anthropology. Many non-state societies, for instance, have a belief in an 'Earth Goddess,' so that, along with other views that we might categorise in terms of shamanism or animism, there is a different way of thinking in relation to the planet in the system of views, where this way of thinking apparently might not fit so well with the categorising system (in that the idea of a goddess, in this sense, would in general fit more closely with a metaphysical system such as hinduism). And here it is necessary to do the 'unthinkable' and to take 'a rain goddess' as a term within a transcendental-materialist philosophy of immanence. Given that rain is something that fundamendentally distinguishes the Earth from the other planets and moons of the solar system (Europa and Mars apparently have liquid water, but they emphatically do not have rain) the idea is in fact a very effective way of seeing the Spinozistic planet (the planet understood as having a multi-attribute substance which is in the fullest sense the same as the substance of human beings), and one that has the great advantage of not naming this perspective after a male philosopher. And the second aspect of the term relates to this advantage of avoiding the male name for the planet when it is understood in terms of radical immanence: given that the term 'being' should be used for the planet, understood immanently, and even though the idea 'female' relates ultimately to issues involving travelling into the unknown, and the waking of the faculties, should not a being which creates new beings within its body be aligned with the idea of female rather than the idea of male?
This is an unusual technical term, to say the least: but it is interesting to notice, as a final point, that the range of the term that is opened up by the indefinite article is that of a 'science fiction' perspective, in that other rain goddesses, in this immanence-metaphysics, de-anthropomorphised sense, would be other planets which have rain (other planets where there is a hydro-cycle of evaporation of bodies of water, and of water falling as rain). The term is not going to be taken up into philosophy, but I make no apologies for elaborating it (and I should add that I don't feel as if "I" started the process that led to its elaboration). But having explored it for a moment it is worth considering the idea that the collapse of the thinking involved here is probably the beginning of religion.
*
Very different aspects of these two dreams were conductive toward the problem of places. This was particularly true of the dream in Kyzyl, although it was a while before this aspect of the dream impacted upon me. But the problem being named here, because it involves a pragmatics and an immanence-metaphysics of places, is in fact to a great extent about taking the idea of places to the point where the view becomes abstract, in the sense that the perspective becomes a view toward a co-existing form of existence that is at a higher level of intensity - toward a form of intent that is over a threshold separating it from ordinary, deadened reality. We have been set up to see a line of time, and a space which exists on the line of time. With a perception of places what is orthogonal to the line of chronic/chronological time is the direction of the Future.
*
In almost all ways the new - story-writing - development of my faculty of dreaming ventured furthest, in terms what was being expressed, in the writing of The Corridor. However, there is a way in which 'The Far Glade' is alongside it, in the sense that in this story I explore the idea of communities thousands of years ago which had crossed a threshold of lucidity - so that in this story I am making contact with the dream-in-sleep in 1978. If a circuit is being closed here then the impression is that this takes place in the dream in Kyzyl in 2011, and pre-eminently in the the writing of The Corridor and "The Far Glade" (though the other tales written at the same time as The Corridor, such as 'The Island', and 'The Bowl' are also very much part of this phase).
And across all the faculty of dreaming this phase shows a very marked emphasis on women, and figures of female alterity - where most of these figures are women who are travellers into the unknown, but where sometimes the alterity is of a different kind (Ket in The Corridor is encountered in the form of a woman, but is not originally human, and the woman in the dream in Kyzyl was experienced in the dream as not human). The emphasis is heightened as the phase reaches an end: it becomes a specific kind of centrality where the men are right alongside the women, but where the women now occupy most of the foreground. In Section Five of The Corridor, when there is the meal in the garden, the figures who are able to explain what has happened (or whose already-given explanations are involved in the conversation), are Cass, Shona, Louis, Miranda and Hazel, and of these only Louis is male. If you spread everything wider to everyone who has been encountered the list includes the woman who Kate encounters in Part One, Kelvin, Julie, Sara, Arden, Jess, Callum, Ket and Tarul, and here it is true that, taking the widened zone of individuals, the difference is not large: however, the issue is not quantitative, but relates to the transcendental-empirical depth and intensity of what is said, and here female figures comprise most of the foreground. It is also important that whereas most of Part One is from Steven's viewpoint, the majority of Part Five - and also the majority of Part Four - is from Ffion's viewpoint, and that the book ends with Ffion.
In "The Far Glade" the protagonist is a woman - Kalessa - who in a very deliberate and extraordinary way is a traveller into the unknown. And the person who she meets who speaks from an understanding of a wider reality is the woman Dara. This story takes the figure of the female traveller into the unknown, and explores the world of this idea in ways which involve becoming-planet, and becoming-planetary-atmosphere, and which involve the raising up of the idea of space, so that it becomes the haptic space encountered by a spheroambient perception - a spheroambience which can become a libidinally ultra-charged, sublimely sensual bliss.
There are many issues here, and they are of many different kinds - with some of these issues in fact seeming almost extrinsic to the main problem. In the dream in 2008 the dream included the point where I was warned that in my contact with women I needed to avoid my choice-making being taken over by my sexuality. And it is worth thinking about the fact that the woman in the dream in Kyzyl was wearing a dress (it was dark green and came down to her knees) and that what I experienced was a situation where a woman-in-a-dress who I would normally have experienced as atttractive was unable to impact upon me in this way because I was unnerved/shocked by the sight of the woman to an extent that was on the edge of terror, even though I did not see her as in any way malevolent. In thinking about this strange disjunct of what I would normally have experienced and what I actually experienced it is easy to end up confronting a tendency on the part of heterosexual males in relation to clothing that is symbolically located within the space of the idea of femininity. It is evidently perturbing to have a default response of feeling attracted - and affectionate - toward women on the basis of the clothes they are wearing.
However, the main issues go beyond this one - they relate to becoming-planet, and to becoming-woman (for women as well as men). Here everything starts from the question of love, both in the very impersonal sense of our love for the planet and its terrains, and in a sense that involves our relationships - processes of entering into composition - with other human beings (and here the relationship can be one of friendship, comradeship or admiration, as with the relationships - most of the time - between the women in The Corridor). The Corridor is an exploration of processes of entering into composition with the planet; it is an exploration of, in particular, female travellers into the unknown in a wide sense (but also of their male counterparts); and it is an exploration of male processes of becoming-woman. All three of the male protagonists in the novel are in love with a woman, but - in a way that should be seen as inseparable from this - they are also in a becoming-woman which is both their love for the woman, and a process of being recurrently swept away into very real and very libidinally charged experiences of being a woman.
*
Enough has now been done to show the escape-route in relation to the waking of the faculties. The account has focused on the faculty of dreaming, but there has also been
a detailing of an alteration in the faculty of choice-making, or navigation, in relation to travelling within (and living within) non-urban, scurfland and wilderness terrains.
What the map at the start of this section calls 'the initial' is evidently a form of intent, and so is what the map calls 'the vicinity' (in different ways the same is also true of the other points marked on the map). But at this point it can be asked - why does the map retain any relationship to places? The map (diagram) intrinsically has a relation to kinds of place (as opposed to specific places) and it also has a kind of exemplifying, but extrinsic connection to a set of individual zones: the vicinity in this extrinsic sense is Leamington (but also Malton); the initial, when it is marked in brackets to the left, is Harbury Lake; the interestablishment is Coventry/Birmingham etc. It can be seen that the question being asked relates to the entire project of Explorations, and of its precursor Hidden Valleys. Why not straightforwardly a map/diagram showing forms of intent, with no connection to kinds of place?
The answer is that in escaping from ordinary, deadened reality the places where you are living and the places/terrains you visit, and through which you travel, will recurrently be fundamental aspects of the escape. This is because the escape-route - the path toward love, freedom and wider realities - is also accurately describable as the going-into-effect of Exteriority, and a fundamental aspect of Exteriority is a focusing of attention on countryside, wilderness and scurfland terrains. Places therefore become crucial in connection with the extent of their relationship with the outside of the urban.
This, of course, does not on any level entail that an escape toward the initial is impossible while living in a city, or that an individual will be propelled out of ordinary reality by living in a wilderness. The escape-route can be travelled in very diverse circumstances, and conversely, it should be remembered that the form of intent that relates to the term 'the interestablishment' (or 'the interiority') can function very effectively in a wilderness.
What, for nomadism (for metamorphics), would be a generic pragmatics of places?
The following are a few ideas that, if nothing else, will give the idea of what such a pragmatics would be:
Find a town with a high degree of openness to the outside, and which is close to areas of semi-wilderness, scurfland or wilderness, whether these consist of forest, mountains, or desert. Either find somewhere to live in the town, or - ideally - somewhere a few miles away in the hinterland adjoining the town. If you live in the town find 'lines of flight' in the form of places where it is possible to stay (for a few hours, or a few days, depending on what is possible/safe) in the adjoining terrains.
Don't isolate yourself into a remote house in the countryside in the modality of a retreat from ordinary existence. The improvisatory freedom of a pervasive becoming-active does not arrive through acquiring freedom from the demands of work-life modalities, and nor does isolation in combination with an awareness of the need to wake perception, and the other crucial faculties, such as dreaming and navigation (even though an embodied determination to wake these faculties is fundamental). Becoming-active arrives through a very intense, always potentially jolting activity, in which moments and modalities of being 'in the zone' gradually increase, and start to communicate with each other, as - in this instance - the skill of working into the gaps in work-existence is developed.
In looking for a place to live, it is important to see that the degree of openness relates to the scale of the town and the presence of markets at its centre, but also - and fundamentally - relates to the degree of openness to dreams and ideas within the population of the town (this does not involve some plan to change the town, but instead concerns the issue of a milieu of relative openness, and specifically involves the avoidance of places with a prevalence of overt or disguised reactive views).
Keep in mind that stories and music (and philosophy, and all artworks) associated with the area are not ultimately separable from it, and that - even if this seems unlikely to be crucial - these elements need to be part of a decision-making process about living in a terrain. The place and its dreams (whether the dreams are the unfettered dreams of transcendental-empirical awareness, or the blocked dreams of religion and territorialism) need to be perceived as a zone of consistency: they need to be brought together as parts of the zone of consistency that is being encountered.
And the following is an attempt at a pragmatics of what, for now, can still be called 'hauntology'.
Start with a terrain which seems to offer opportunities for thought; and start with a terrain which is a composite and/or an immanent whole which consists of place and of dreamings (where this term relates, in part, to stories, film, philosophy, music and all artworks). In relation to composites, as well as works produced by artists and thinkers, the dreamings can be dreams in sleep, and can be events in the form of encounters with stories/artworks etc.
Lay out everything on a plane of consistency so that topographical, geological and infrastructural aspects are placed together with dreamings: simultaneously explore both the terrain and the virtual-real terrains of the dreamings (to place a dreaming immanently within a terrain is not to ignore its own, virtual-real terrain). Follow whatever lines begin to emerge in doing this (the local will generally not stay local for long at this point: A Midsummer Night's Dream has a connection to Warwickshire but its primary connections are with an indeterminate, southern zone of Britain and with classical Greece).
Include the wider forces that are in effect within the area, such as the atmosphere, and the sea, if the area is alongside an ocean; and such as capitalism and the functionings of human state-territories.
To be specific, in relation to wider forces at the level of forms of intent (taking this as a term which is understood as relating indeterminately to one zone of consistency, so that it does not just relate to human activity), include the following: firstly, Exteriority; secondly, the highly innovative-and-charged, and yet suppressive (deceptively control-locked) productions of the adjacency, whether these productions are most easily described as religious, philosophical or artistic (the domain here is that of the initial creation of the religions and of their direct and indirect/allusive paratexts, and extends through figures such as Plato and Kant to the blocked aspects of limit, near-escape figures such as Angela Carter and William Burroughs); thirdly, the inter-establishment, understood as the functioning of suppressive modalities at the level of capitalism, the functioning of the territorial worlds of the states, the functioning of the religions, the functioning of a blocked/trapped modality of reason, the functioning of dogmatic images of the world and of human lives, and the functioning of the system of subjectified, reactive moods.
These three are the forces by which we are pre-eminently haunted, and only straightforwardly in a positive sense in relation to Exteriority (the adjacency can be a valuable detour, but it can only be a detour, otherwise it becomes a collapse). They are the forces which are mapped by hauntology, and in the case of Exteriority the mapping is not just a bringing-into-focus, but is intrinsically an effectuation of this force.
Note 1. Hauntology - or Xenography - can take the form of a fiction, a philosophical work, a biographical or autobiographical account, or any combination of these approaches. Taken on its own The Corridor is as much a work of hauntology as Hidden Valleys or On Vanishing Land (it is noticeable that The Corridor names Xenography, and also finds a name for the adjacency - the Deep Hotel). Validity is the crucial term here, a term which relates to lucidity - the perception of forms of intent, and the grasping of dreamings in terms of outsights. And the validity of a work of hauntology in the form of a fiction is not likely to be less than that of one in the form of a philosophical work: if anything, the opposite.
Note 2. Terrains and dreamings in some sense are immanent wholes in The Corridor, in that the fundamental underlying idea is that the parallel-emergence-world of the Corridor exists in some way as a dreaming on the part of the planet. But it is also the case that from the outset, and from the first lengthy dream that is described in the novel (Ffion's dream; Steven's dream, about Mongolia, and about the red door in the house) dreams in sleep are placed within a zone of consistency in the specific sense that they are shown as having the capacity to be perceptions of depth-level aspects of the world (that is, within the world of The Corridor, these particular dreams are perceptions in this sense).
Note 3. It can be seen why 'On Vanishing Land' concludes with Picnic at Hanging Rock. Lindsay's novel and Weir's adaptation together provide the way of staying immanent in relation to the deeper and wider levels of the world, in that they open up a view toward Exteriority. In giving an account of the world of forces that are immanent to us, and surround us, at the level of forms of intent, it is fundamental in every way that Exteriority is included in this account. There are many - often very surprising - lines to be followed in producing a hauntological account, but amongst these the one which has a fundamental importance is that of the escape-path.
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Given that the map at the start of this section is a map of formations of intent, why does it maintain a connection to a terrain in relation to Harbury Lake? Where it appears in brackets, to the left, 'the initial' does have this connection (although in fact there is more to the left-right or 'east-west' axis of the diagram than this). In that the map is generic why is there this trace of the specific?
The answer is that the formation of intent that is 'the initial' is a modality which is primarily in connection with Exteriority, and a fundamental way in which Exteriority impacts on individuals is though visits to scurfland, semi-wilderness and wilderness terrains: what this entails is that the pathways of formations of intent must not be understood in terms of developments in 'the head' (in terms of 'resolve,' 'intention' etc.) but must be understood in terms of a transformation of the connection between the individual and the planet that is actualised at the level of journeys to places - because of this it is important that the map includes a reminder in the form of the reference to Harbury Lake.
The extraordinary and yet inconspicuous scurf-zone of Harbury Lake was a crucial filament within the thread that I followed in setting out to depart from the grim, deadened expanses of ordinary reality. It is for this reason that my series of visits to this terrain is faintly imprinted on the map.
But as has been indicated already, there is more to the east-west axis. To the east, is the place of reason; to the west, is the place of a collapsed modality of knowledge of Exteriority.
In Section 24 this difference was indicated by Ballard (the east) and Burroughs (the west). But the fundamental difference here is between entrapment within a fixation on time and formal / semi-formal systematicity (the east - the modality which has taken over the human world in the course of the last 3000 years) and a reactive entrapment within a form of attention that is excessively focused on areas of the transcendental-empirical other than Exteriority (the west - the collapsed form of the modality of attention that is means of departure from ordinary reality). The best way of thinking about this is to concentrate initially on knowledge of Exteriority (south) and on the disaster that is the place of reason (which in fact is a deterioration from 3000 years ago, because of its blindness to the transcendental-empirical). A full movement into the place of reason is a definitive collapse, and a full movement into the place of knowledge of Exteriority is a definitive southward departure, which, because this departure is a waking of the faculties, includes reason within itself.
Insofar as in 1998 I was beginning to move forward it was still A Thousand Plateaus that was a key guide for me, and the concentration on time has still not entirely been overcome in this text (so this means that 'the initial' being placed to the east on the map has a further meaning, and one which in fact is generic). But this deflection will be adjusted if you continue to move forward: in focusing primarily on Exteriority while also scanning in the other directions there is so much of the anomalous impacting upon you that the place of knowledge of exteriority will rapidly start to dissolve the residual effects of the place of reason.
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This section has worked across a time-span from the spring of 1978 to the writing of The Far Glade in 2015.
In 1978 reading The Shining, together with quote from The Masque of the Red Death at the beginning, produced a view toward the 'gothic' direction of the transcendental-empirical, jolting me. Not long afterwards I had the dream about the community destroyed by the flood from its own dam.
Castaneda's books state that several thousand years ago there was was a downward threshold-crossing in the human world that was brought about by humans attempting to understand the basis for what they knew, and this ancient-world downward threshold-crossing is described elsewhere in the books as a result of a movement toward a direction adjacent to the direction of ongoing journeys into wider realities, where the knowledge that was acquired was genuine knowledge but turned out to be problematic in its impact.
The crucial point is that there seems to have been a collapse away from the place of knowledge of exteriority, toward the place of reason.
The figure in the dream in Tuva comes into focus as an attack on the tendency of my entering-into-composition-with-women to be obfuscated by concupiscence (she was wearing a dress but there was no opportunity for a sensual charge to arrive from this fact), but more importantly the abstract account here is that, for whatever reason, the amount of rain (knowledge) turned out to be too much in the world of the earlier dream. The figure of the Keeper in The Far Glade is an attempt to think about this arrival of too much knowledge - where it is excessive because the specific modality of the knowledge traps attention on the place of reason. What all along is needed is the place of knowledge of exteriority, where this includes reason within it - rather than a collapse away from the knowledge arrived at through the other faculties, and into a simultaneously denuded and hypertrophied functioning of reason. At some point in the past there was too much rain.
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The second sphere of action is a formation of intent-and-energy. It is a modality of intent and of attention, but its effectiveness is simultaneously also based beyond the beings who find themselves in it, which in part is to say that it is not a 'subjective' formation. On one side there is a corporeal domain of intent and on the other there is the world of the planet - and of the exteriority of the planet - where these continually inspire, hearten, produce new thoughts, draw forward, fascinate. To give a liminal example, in the late 18th century geology started to follow the lines, and explore the singular points, of the mantle of the earth - a process in which attention and itinerant scholars were drawn along lines which in turn were expressed as accounts and drawn as maps - William Smith, with Wegener only a hundred years in the future. The world of the lines, light, enveloping layers, lightning, singularities: this is the zone to which we go again and again - and it is the world we are encountering in the second sphere of action. And this world which we encounter - which pours into us - is recognised as vital to the highest degree, and as not to be seen as on a lower, separate level from human beings. Atmosphere, plasma, sunlight, starlight, geosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere. It is here from which both science and philosophy start, and it is constructivism which sees how this world is bound up with human formations of intent, as a fundamental driving force for these formations. Biosphere, oneirosphere, verosphere, volosphere. Constructivism is the departure from subject and object: in constructivism concepts emerge which have the intensity of having left behind the supplementary dimension in the direction of seeing the sublime, enigmatic nature of zones of existence; here constructs are created which express the lines of the world.
Intrinsic to the second sphere of action is the ability to see affects, and to see intent - and in particular love-and-freedom intent, where 'love-and-freedom intent' is another name for the escape-path. Animals are suddenly more in the foreground because they are also worlds of intent, and the planet is what is fundamentally in the foreground. Everything is very quiet: there are immense sunlit and starlit expanses. Everything is its own worlds of energy/intent, and, inseparably, around and between everything, are affects. Everything is silent, and yet it speaks the figurality of the transcendental-empirical. In a relatively arid valley to the east of Piltriqitron you walk up onto the mountain, aware that beyond it are the tree-clad slopes and the three rivers of the valley of El Bolson.
There are three women walking up the slope: one is a scientist who, for this moment, has put aside her equations in order to perceive the world the equations were attempting to express. Another is a philosopher who has put aside her concepts in favour of perception. The third woman is a writer of tales which are also prose-poetry, and she has put aside the worlds of the virtual-real and of words. They share a planetary silence, broken by the call of a bird of prey. If they walk far enough up this slope they will go beyond being inspired and illuminated and will undergo a metamorphosis they have all been trying to reach.
There is the individual, and there is the planet in its exteriority (where this is pre-eminently the sun and the galaxy, but also the moon and the other planets).
Both of these are energy formations. The individual is a domain of intent, and the planet, at the very least, has a world of domains of intent within it.
The individual is understood in terms of becomings, actions, faculties, affects and intent.
Both the individual and the planet are worlds of the unknown, but to a very great extent this consists of the unknown which is knowable.
The planet in its exteriority - as an energy formation suffused with the outside and expressive of the outside - is what wakes the faculties of the individual. Taken as a whole it wakes the faculties because it is inspiring, fascinating, heartening, enigmatic, thought-provoking - and taken in relation to the included human world it wakes the faculties most fundamentally in that this world is a domain of formations of intent. The planet-in-its-exteriority is therefore a transcendental-empirical zone or formation (the term transcendental concerns that which wakes the faculties). For the individuals involved in this analysis the planet is the zone. It is the Zone.
Something that is crucial is that the individual is understood in terms of all experience of what it is to be a space - is therefore understood as a domain of feeling and dreaming and intent (etc) rather than just as a domain of extension and of organisation/systematicity: and what is equally crucial is that the depth-domain of these dimensions, as well as it being an aspect of the included-within-the-planet human world, is seen as potentially, in some sense, extending across all of the planet (this is a prevention of the functioning of the dogmatic image of the world, which is a block on the encounter with the transcendental-empirical).
The Zone is the unknown, but to a very great extent it consists of the transcendentally unknown which is knowable. Forming the horizon - at the level of the totality of the cosmos - is the transcendentally unknown which is unknowable. But this has receded. Kantianism was a pernicious modality of thought - a mind trap.
Instead of there being a subject and an object there are two energy formations, with a fundamental reversal of importance. As opposed to there being the subject (a supplementary dimension - a reactive delerium consisting of the fending off of the world of energy formations) together with the object, there is the individual and the Zone, and the Zone wakes the faculties of the individual.
The Zone is a space of forces. But it is a sublime and eerie space of forces which includes everything that has been kept locked within the supplementary dimension. It is a space of feelings and dreams about the future, and of loves and faculties, as much as it is a space of photosynthesis, combustion,electricity, reproduction, gravity, condensation, predatory consumption, plate tectonics. And the Zone is the starting-point and ongoing locus not just for philosophy, but for science.
The view here is orthogonal to the trapped-philosophy view of appearances-for-the-subject, but it it brings with it all of the knowledge of what it is to be a multi-faculty body/energy formation (the individual) and includes within the orthogonal view everything that relates to feeling, intent, dreamings and lucidity, and therefore it is fundamentally both views but with a concentration on the orthogonal view, and a grasping of the view from the multi-faculty body which concentrates on outsights, and the potential for outsights (as opposed to a concentration on 'appearing').
Kant's project is a tidying up of ordinary reality, and is profoundly reactive. He focuses on faculties, but sees only the faculties that he needs to set up a legislature and produce a cognitive machine of interiority along the same lines as the interiority of Buddhism, and then reconstitute a basis for western religion with the regulative ideas. What Kant initially includes determines what he gets at the end: and what he creates is a very denuded, reactive domain.
It is crucial that Shakespeare is given an aesthetic but not an epistemological 'place' in the form of Kant patting him on the head as a 'genius'. Hume may have woken him, but he will not allow Shakespeare to prevent him from returning to sleep.
Tragedy is what the human world comes back to again and again, but at the same time not nearly enough. It is a point where we become half-aware of the intellectual and libidinal depth-level of the unperceived ongoing disaster. However, much more important than this is the awareness of the escape-path - the force within the world that is love-and-freedom intent. Shakespeare's pointing out of the second direction is more diffuse - but it is also exceptionally powerful, and is what is fundamental. But these outsights are what are blocked by Kant.
Within the Zone everything consists of forces, but to a great extent forces are different from those to which we customarily apply the term. To take contrasted cases, the virtual-real and simultaneously actual world of dreamings is a force, and so is the virtual-real and simultaneously actual world of the component formation of reason that is called mathematics. We must look at these forces, and think about the extent to which mathematics is used to fend off an awareness of the Zone, of the transcendental-empirical, and to what extent the outsights embodied within dreamings are being fended off by reactivity - by the components of the restricted, suppressive combinant of faculties that is ordinary reality.
The virtual-real and simultaneously actual world of lucidity is also fended off - constructed in ways that vary from rationalism to religious heresy. But what is vital is that dreaming and lucidity go into effect together as elements of the Futural philosophy - and escape-path - of love-and-freedom intent.
The Zone is a world of singularities, immanence-domains or inclusions-domains, becomings, joys, impositions. It is a world of processes of waking and intensification, and of processes of imposition, suppression. There is love-and-freedom intent; there are the twin libidinal addictions of submission-control and action-control; there are all the processes in which trapped deintensifying lives are romanticised as something other than what they are; there are all the subjectified moods and identifications; there are processes of the waking of faculties; there are intensificatory encounters; there are processes which conduct toward a pervasive becoming-active. All of this is what is seen by lucidity: the outsights of lucidity are perceptions of the world. This is why the second sphere of action is not just a modality of attention, of intent: to be in the second sphere of action is to knowingly and deliberately be in the world perceived by lucidity, but most fundamentally the second sphere of action is this world grasped by transcendental-empirical perception. And the Zone is the name that is given to this world in referring simultaneously to everything that is radically unknown, and what is necessary for arriving at and deepening a perception of the world of the second sphere of action is an absolute suspension of the dogmatic image of the world, so that the unknown is at its full, challenging depth.
The effective, impositional tonality of righteousness, of gravity, is used by those who in social terms are in a position of strength, but who are in the wrong.
The effective, impositional allure of ordinary reality is not so much used as ambient - its images are used to sell things, but at a deeper level what is always being sold is ordinary reality. It is the woman and man running joyfully on the beach. It is the cityscape view from an office after a promotion. It is the laughter and bonhomie of friends in a bar or a pub or a cafe. It is the wedding ceremony. It is the awards ceremony. It is morning sunlight at a university or a research facility. These go and on - you choose your own set, in terms of emphasis, but the depth-level libidinal structure can be indicated by the libidinal force of a question with this form - how could the dreaming spires and the woman and man laughing on the beach not be an impeccable direction?
It is possible to hear a charged, intense silence.
The effective, impositional tonality of gravity is used within politics, within religion, within the family, within the workplace, and within academia, including the domain of science.
Politics, religion and science can be taken as key instances in this context.
Everything concerns the nature of the intent in any specific formation or modality, or (and this relates in particular to politics and science) in relation to any specific sub-domain, micro-domain or aspect. It concerns whether the intent involves a disguised reactivity, so that it functions to sedate, to suppress, to separate people from what they can do, to create a deleterious fixation whose flipside is a lack of openness to the Zone, and a closing down of the process of becoming-active and of waking the faculties.
The religions, as such (putting to one side the issue of the non-religious lines of flight that exist within them), are a domain of very subtle forms of disguised reactivity - a fending off of the Zone. And for all the immensely important work that is done within science, and within areas of of the sphere of politics that are predominantly analysable in terms of a wide sense of micropolitics, the charged, intense silence comes from the fact that there is a fundamental beyond of these modalities - the Zone, the place of the escape-path.
And it also comes from the fact that everywhere species are dying, forests are being destroyed, eco-systems are being devastated, and human lives are being suppressed and crushed through being trapped within the forms of life of capitalism.
Out of this silence might appear the figures of animals. A wild boar in a beech forest in the Carpathians, a fox in a derelict building by a city railway line, an arctic tern, an Amur tiger. As they turn toward you, you should not see them as victims of human actions, but as offering assistance, an assistance which you will reciprocate.
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In focusing on formations of the human world, and on the world within which humans navigate, lucidity concentrates on intent and on affects. And there are three issues which are fundamental - in that they are indicative of the nature of the formation. The first of these is animals, and the attitude toward them within the formation. The second is the planet (and the issues here are inseparable from the issues of bodies and of energy, and of the domains of the cosmos), where the question is to what extent the non-human and non-animal terrain of the planet is seen not as a passive object of human action, but is recognised as an energy formation - zone of matter - which is profoundly unknown, and which is sublime in that in a fundamental sense it is inspiring, heartening, energising and thought-provoking (and where ultimately the human world and the worlds of the animals are seen as included domains within it, even though, simultaneously, individuals and groups can depart from it). The first aspect of the third issue is the intent-modality that can be called brightness, where brightness is an awareness of, and a taking joy from, the worlds of immediacy, together inseparably with an adventurousness, a fundamentally holistic modality of cognition, a delight and openness, an impersonal serenity, and an audacious love of exploring the world. However, this issue needs to be opened up toward its second aspect, which arrives through the fact that there is an affect of brightness - a sublime-serene joy, an impersonal delight - that comes both from encounters with the terrains of the planet (the planet as such, but preeminently the planet-in-its-exteriority, and the planet's wilderness and scurfland terrains), and from encounters with human individuals and works which exemplify the intent-modality. Together the affect of brightness and the intent-modality are fundamental, they are what lucidity works with, in conjunction with the faculty of feeling, in assessing directions-of-travel. The affect of brightness is the opposite of gravity, and it is to a great extent through an awareness of this affect (and through an awareness focused toward what creates this affect) that navigation takes place, in relation not just to the human world but to the worlds in which the human world exists.
Ultimately what matters here is evidently not critique - it is the existence of a modality which can be accurately characterised in terms of love, freedom, and the escape from ordinary, deadened reality.
In relation to the beyond-the-human expanses of the Zone, it is clear that, even when the worlds of animals are also not included, these expanses or terrains have a power to wake the faculties and heighten becoming-active.
It is in these two domains of the Zone that there is the the unknown which is knowable. This only seems to be unrelated to Kant's account because, in trying to tidy up the household of ordinary reality, Kant was definitively not asking the right questions.
The concluding points are, firstly, that the most fundamental aspect of the liberatory modality of intent is that it involves following the principle of exteriority, and, secondly, that the most important aspects of this principle are a concentration on perception, a concentration on beyond-the-human terrains, and a concentration on the faculties of dreaming, feeling, choice-making and lucidity.
Toward a Natural History of Dreamings, Toward Metamorphics
The Zone is the planet - the planet-in-its-exteriority. The Zone is the transcendental-empirical terrain in which we exist. It is the transcendental-empirical terrain of all the faculties, but under certain circumstances there can be a valuable clicking-into-place in focusing on the fact that it is the transcendental-empirical terrain of dreaming.
The planetary white void is all around you, above you, beneath you. The oneirosphere within the human world is spread all around the planet. Intent is visible in human formations, human individuals, human interactions, in animals, in human dreamings. Affect is visible, and the directions from which affect arrives. Beyond this there is the unknown, the white void.
Dreamings have four key forms, the first of which is disastrous. Blocked, deleterious dreamings, open but unfocused dreamings, open dreamings that are threaded with outsights, open dreamings that are threaded with outsights and include a pragmatics of Departure from ordinary, deadened reality.
What are key features of this last form of dreaming?
A concentration of attention on the planet - a concentration which is simultaneously a displacement of attention from human technology and human modalities of organisation.
A concentration on a modality of existence that can be called brightness, which consists of a centrality of attention on perceptual immediacy and on intent; of an adventurous, courageous delight in exploration; and of a displacement away from the gravity of ideas of good and evil, from the gravity of personal and species self importance, and from the gravity of the conceptual.
A concentration on the abstract, as opposed to abstraction.
The abstract is an aspect of the corporeal: in describing the abstract everything always concerns either the encounter-modalities (as with faculties) or the intra-space (as with the oneiric real) of the corporeal. And ultimately the descriptions always relate to both of these dimensions of the corporeal.
The abstract is therefore entirely different from abstraction, despite the fact that abstraction, properly analysed, is a micro-element within it. To describe the abstract is to produce abstraction, but the source is the abstract.
When the corporeal is thought about across time, and in relation to all its affects, modalities and aims it becomes apparent that terms such as existence and form of existence are appropriate, but everything still concerns the corporeal.
The primary domains of the abstract are: the overall modalities and the sub-modalities of intent, the faculties (including perception, and the faculty of feeling or of affects), and the oneiric-real.
The faculty of lucidity is fundamental because it is the perception of the abstract - it is the initial or primary faculty of outsights.
The faculty of dreaming is even more fundamental because in also breaking open outsights it has a far higher degree of effectiveness in relation to making-perceptible and delineating transformational, liberatory modalities of intent.
Dreamings here are therefore coming to the foreground both in relation to the faculty of dreaming and in relation to the dimension of the abstract that is the oneiric-real.
And in looking at the dreamings of the last 4000 years it can be seen both that they predominantly are blocked, and that there is the need for new liberatory dreamings.
In being planetary, liberatory dreamings have no connection with the dreamings of nation states. And in stepping sideways from technology and human macrological systems of organisation they have only indirect or tangential connections with the dreamings of science, and of the customary domains of knowledge and the conceptual.
They also avoid all tendencies to be structured along the lines of the emergence-dynamic of the love-couple, with its often deeply-occulted ur-gravity, or along the lines of the trajectory of established high-kudos success or victory, whether this success is in discovery/exploration/invention, or is in defeating an enemy, or is in relation to any other ordinary-reality domain of enterprise.
And in focusing toward the human as the unknown, when these dreamings look toward death they either straightforwardly indicate that we are finite beings who will die, or indicate that if a threshold-crossing is possible - one that involves staying alive for longer in some way, but with a transformed energy-substrate - this threshold-crossing is only possible through a sustained, pervasively disciplined process of intensification, of waking the body and its faculties.
A concluding point is that on the transcendental-empirical terrain the emergence of new dreamings recurrently has a profoundly enigmatic aspect.
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Hinterlands, the correct setting up of the problem of human beings and their relationship to the world around them (subtract established oneiric, conceptual and technologial/societal systems)
The knowledge toward which poetry tends. There is another, more profound and more encompassing form of knowledge.
Intent within the human world is knowable. It is also knowable that the planetary sublime exists, as always potentially valuable affect.
The sphere of the transcendentally unknown should be constructed as the expanses of the natural world that surround, subtend, and of course include human beings, and this sphere is decisive, in particular when we open up toward it (and to not open to it is to live a life dominated by the control modalities, which must be seen themselves as a recurrently decisive instance of the unknown but knowable). Human beings are creatures with control delusions, and out there, power hovers.
More encompassing dreamings, which reveal intent, and reveal blocked, delusional dreamings, and which reveal the planetary and beyond-the-planetary sublime, which jolts and wakes and inspires, while also breaking open the awareness of these expanses, and their included formations, as the transcendentally unknown.
The exploratory probes within dreamings, where these probes have the form of an anomalous instance that in some sense at least have a straightforward correlate or referent (Prospero with his staff and book relate to the knowledge toward which poetry tends), and the central function of these probes as anomalous elements which break open the awareness of the unknown, as element which is necessary for the full jolt of the planetary sublime. (although such an element does not at all need to be fictional, it can be the anomalous with full validity).
A more encompassing dreaming in the form of an art-mythos (Shakespeare as example).
A more encompassing dreaming in form of a system of outsights, and a pragmatics. A more profound and more encompassing seeing of the world - a fully effectuated dreaming, a metamorphics. The knowledge toward which poetry tends.
Shakespeare's hinterlands, with their forests and wild flowers, had a substantial impact on the poetry of the romantics, and his anomalous elements (and also his hinterlands) have had an impact on fantasy writing. Within the zone of highest-level film ('filmic literature'), his anomalous elements have also had an impact on Fanny and Alexander (Shakespeare's ghosts, the figure of Prospero).
Isak is in some ways an improvement on Prospero, but in fact there has been almost no forward movement anywhere, and both the romantic poetry and the fantasy novels for the most part fall very far short of Shakespeare. Ultimately, even Fanny and Alexander is a re-effectuation which as a whole does not go further, partly because it depends on reference to Shakespeare for its power, making it a partial paratext, rather than a full departure.The knowledge towards which poetry tends is elsewhere. Wherever else it is, in terms of its effectuation in books this knowledge emerged two and a half thousand years ago in China, and started to emerge fifteen years before Fanny and Alexander, in the milieu of anthropology, not in the milieu of art.
A metamorphics - and its fully effectuated dreaming - is an instance of the Sayan modaility of existence and thought. Its emergence and the phases of its embodiment in Departures are not the result of a process of development in the art domain of the - blocked and divided - Arkadian modality, or of a process of development in its philosophical/scientific domain (even if it carries many traces of the milieu within which it appeared). There will be conjunctions that are more than conjunctions between the Sayan and the Arkadian modailities, But this is because what is fundamental are the problems, and although problems are set up differently there is enough in common for wider circumstances to be involved in the different forms of the problems going into effect at the same time.
Within the domain or 'wing' of the Arkadian modality that consists of dreamings the chains or emergences have no inbuilt tendency to be upward processes of development. Most of what has happened since Shakespeare has been a decline. The Waves is an exception, but apart from its power and brilliance - its level in relation to outsights - The Waves has very little in common with Shakespeare. Which conducts toward the second point which is that chains here concern similar spaces of problems, and similar elements and modalities, but generally with no simple, clear line of causality.
The last point is that on the side of the Sayan modality the emergences are not developments building on the domain of Arkadian dreamings or or on the domain of Arkadian philosophy/science/anthropology etc. The attractor space of the Sayan modality is a very different domain. They might have traces of the milieu of anthropology but this is because of the Sayan knowledge to which certain tribal and nomadic societies are slightly closer, and they might quote poetry but this is because of the knowledge toward which poetry tends - again, Sayan knowledge.
The limit case here is Donner's Shabono. It is not written as part of a process of building upon forest books such as The Beginning Place, or the initial Mythago Wood story (Robert Holdstock) or The Word for World is Forest. And although it can be said that it carries the trace of works such as The Circle of Fires, it is more that books such as Lizot's are struggling on the edge of a threshold which Donner's book has crossed from the same direction.
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